There were two very extreme arguments about the EU put forward around the time of the referendum. The first from the Brexiteers was that, once the UK had left, loads of other Member States were going to say, oh, that’s a good idea, we’re going to leave as well. So, the EU would fall apart post-Brexit. The other extreme argument that was put forward, by more federalist-minded people, was as soon as those pesky Brits are out of the door, we could actually make the European Union a lot more efficient because without their veto, we can forge ahead and tighten integration and create that political union that the rest of us have wanted to do for ages.

In a sense, both those extremes have been proven to be wrong. There isn’t a queue at the door to follow us out, for a variety of reasons. If you look at the European Union, what you’ll see is a lot of the Member States are small States. Small States don’t tend to leave big clubs. A lot of Member States are in the euro. If you think Brexit was messy, try doing Brexit and leaving the euro at the same time. The final and most important thing is that the political glue that binds countries to European integration is far stronger in all of the 27 Member States than it ever was in the United Kingdom.

The European Union was an economic project that the UK decided to join for economic reasons. Our economy wasn’t working very well outside it, so we decided to join to make our economy work better; however, across the rest of the European Union, European integration is an economic project that people have embarked on for explicitly political reasons.

The original “Six” launched the Coal and Steel Community not because they thought coal and steel would make them rich, but because they thought pooling coal and steel would make war impossible. For the countries of southern Europe – Greece, Portugal, Spain – joining was a way of entrenching democracy. After a period of non-democratic rule, the countries of Eastern Europe joining the European Union was about returning home after that period of servitude to the Soviet Union. So, for all other Member States, this is about politics. There’s a strong narrative about political salvation tied up with European integration. There never was in the United Kingdom.

The EU faces three big structural problems. There is the problem of the eurozone and of economic inequality between Member States, some of whose economies perform better than others. The problem of immigration is going to keep coming back onto the agenda because there will be big waves of migration from North Africa to Europe and there is no agreed burden-sharing model as yet. The third issue is the values divide between an increasingly illiberal Eastern Europe and a liberal West.

Now, what two things do all those potential crises have in common? First, the UK wasn’t the problem, so removing the UK doesn’t solve it. Second, the UK was never blocking solutions to any of those crises. The structural problems haunting the European Union remain the same without the United Kingdom as they were when we were a Member State.

Looking forward very tentatively, there are two things I would say about the European Union. First, there are without doubt some things it can now do that would have been very hard, if not impossible, to do with the UK around the table. If you look at the recovery fund that was agreed on last year, a very ambitious large-scale fund to try and address the impact of the pandemic, I don’t think agreement on that would have been possible in the form it has taken had the UK been around the table. The EU enjoys a degree of flexibility now that it didn’t before.

There are still big differences between the frugal States and the Southern States, between the illiberal Eastern States and Western States. Those structural divisions amongst Member States will continue. I don’t see the future of European integration being strong progress towards more integration. The EU will continue to muddle through, much as it’s always done, and there won’t be a revolution in the way that it works now that the UK is no longer in it.

It’s very hard to see a way of addressing the values divide in the European Union because it’s rooted in domestic politics. Prime Minister Orbán has come to, and consolidated, power on the back of the things he’s done to Hungarian democracy. He’s not going to unroll those because President Macron is telling him to. The danger for the European Union is if those battles become too bitter, too bad-tempered, too personal, then they bleed into all discussions at the European level and make it very hard, if not impossible, for Member States to agree on anything.

If, for instance, you have another round of EU treaty reform, it’s very hard not to imagine the Polish and Hungarian governments extracting the promise to be left alone as part of any agreement on a broader programme of treaty reforms. It is a very sensitive topic because, ultimately, the EU has few levers to pull when it comes to trying to reshape the nature of national politics. Since ultimate political legitimacy lies with the parts, with the Member States, that becomes even more problematic.