During the first half of the 1990s, I lived in Brussels and wrote about the European Union, among other subjects, for The Wall Street Journal. This was the heyday of European integration. Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand and Jacques Delors were in power, negotiating the Maastricht Treaty and organizing the common currency.

There was a lot of excitement among the civil servants who saw themselves as the architects of a new Europe. But there were some oddities.