The arc of Europe's postwar history is turning toward tragedy. It isn't just that much of the continent has fallen into a new Great Depression, or that in some countries things will get worse before they get better. It's that the crisis is dividing Europe along the very lines the European project was intended to erase. Decades of cliches about European "solidarity" and "the European idea" are being held up to ridicule. The notion that Greeks, Spaniards, Britons, Germans, and Italians are instinctive partners whose commonalities transcend their cultural differences and historical enmities -- that "Europe" is a real community, not just a heavily worked-over blueprint in Brussels -- turns out to be disputable. There are three main reasons why it all did go wrong: French grandiosity, German shame, and a universal law of bureaucratic self-aggrandizement. Together these formed a European Union that was poorly adapted to the stresses the project was sure to encounter.