alternatehistory.com

I don't have any sources for this, but I was reading the other day that in 1989/90/91, with the fall of the USSR and Eastern European states becoming independent or free, the French then-President Mitterand proposed a confederal structure for the new Europe. The principle would be not to expand the present European Community any further, but to pursue deeper integration within what would become, with Maastricht, the EU; while the newly independent states in Eastern Europe would join a looser 'European Confederation' in partnership with the EU. The only former Soviet bloc nation that would join the EU would, presumably, be East Germany with German unification.

The plan failed in OTL, largely (it was suggested in what I was reading) because Mitterand invited Russia as well, as the Russians were both not ready to participate and the Eastern Europeans were unwilling to be in the same club with them. But is there any way it could have succeeded?
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