The worry that the political leaderships of Germany and France might no longer be able to agree on joint positions is deepening. Still, several decades of European integration have illustrated that without the Germans and the French taking joint steps the historic integration project stops in its tracks. When the European Community did take steps towards integra¬tion, it was usually because influential countries merged their ideas and added their political weight behind the implementation of those ideas – and these tended to be Germany and France.
