I think you're forgetting the context of the fall of the USSR and of the Warsaw Pact regimes, and German Reunification. What you call "starry-eyed" or "visionary" was far from it: it was an attempt by European leaders coming to the end of their careers and seeing the dangers ahead, to lock European nations (above all Germany) into a tight pact that would conserve what had been constructed. I don't believe Mitterand or Delors, for example, saw the rules laid down then as a final achievement, some wonderful system that would last. They hoped and expected there would be further development, because it was necessary, and because the European project had always managed to move forward like that in the past. But what then happened was that neoliberal economics/politics took over completely and in fact, if anything, forced whatever change there was in the opposite direction. Resulting, above all, in what they feared: Germany dominating Europe and using Central Europe as its economic backyard.

What development of Europe, twenty years ago, would have avoided that, in your view?