It never was going to be this easy.

Europe's constitution has been rejected in France and the Netherlands.

There's an old story that if you put a crab in a bowl it will crawl out easily, but if you put two in, they'll remain because whenever one makes progress toward getting out the other will pull it back in. I don't know if that's true with crabs but it may be true for European nations.

Creating a single nation out of a bunch of separate ones is difficult. It took the U.S. three wars to do it and they had nowhere near the history of the various European state. This Union is composed of countries who have fought with each other throughout their histories, and their "government" right now just a bureaucracy. I'm not sure that Europeans are ready to trust each other enough to accept a truly common government.

Robert Samuelson's piece linked above is also based on the falling birthrates among these nations, which is certainly possible. It would be ironic if the West having defeated the Muslims at the gates of Vienna in the fifteenth century should end up submitting through assimilation.