The museum was a politician's idea. On February 13, 2007, Hans-Gert Poettering rose to give his inaugural speech as President of the European Parliament. Most such speeches are forgotten by lunchtime. Poettering, a German Christian Democrat, used his to propose something that did not yet exist: a museum where Europeans of all generations could come to understand their own history, told in a way that crossed national borders rather than reinforcing them. The idea was easy to mock. Civitas, a British think tank, would later argue that any attempt to find a single narrative spanning twenty-seven member states could produce only a disingenuous paradox - a history of everywhere that was, in truth, a history of nowhere. The criticisms did not stop the project. By October 2008 a committee of experts was at work; a Polish historian, Wlodzimierz Borodziej, chaired the academic board; a curator named Taja Vovk van Gaal led the team that would actually build the exhibitions inside the European Parliament's Directorate-General for Communication.

What they needed was a building, and Leopold Park had one going spare. The Eastman Dental Hospital had closed long before; through the 1980s the European institutions had used it as offices. The bones were extraordinary - an inaugural 1935 Art Deco building with engineering tricks that still impress, the La Fontaine murals intact in the former pediatric waiting room - but the interior would have to be reworked. The German firm JSWD Architects, working with the Belgian engineers TPF, won the contract for renovation and extension. A glass-walled rooftop addition was grafted onto the historic structure to add exhibition space without overwhelming the original Art Deco lines. Leopold Park itself, listed since 1976, surrounds the museum with a row of distinguished neighbors: the Pasteur Institute, the old Solvay School of Commerce, the Solvay Institutes of Sociology and Physiology. The European Parliament rises just across the park. The location is deliberate. The museum sits inside the European political quarter, but a short walk takes a visitor into a quiet wooded park among nineteenth-century scientific institutions - a reminder that European integration did not begin with the Treaty of Rome.

The permanent exhibition opened on May 6, 2017, after costs that had roughly doubled from their initial estimates - a fact that supplied British critics with ammunition through the entire age of austerity. What the money bought is genuinely strange. Four thousand square meters of exhibition space hold roughly 1,500 objects borrowed from more than 300 museums across Europe and beyond. A 1526 field surgery book by Hans von Gersdorff. Seals and signatures on the Belgian copy of the General Act of the 1885 Berlin Conference, where European powers partitioned Africa. Bombshells from the First World War that soldiers in the trenches converted into folk-art vases. The Treaty of Rome itself, opened to the page that founded the institutions that would, six decades later, found this museum. The Nobel Peace Prize medal and diploma awarded to the European Union in 2012 was the very first object the museum acquired. Visitors carry tablets that interpret the exhibits in twenty-four languages - the official tongues of the EU at the time the museum opened. The multilingual layer is the point. To stand in one room and read about the same object in Estonian, Maltese, Greek, and Portuguese is the closest a museum can get to physically enacting what it is talking about.

Almost no one is happy with the result, which the museum's defenders take as evidence that it is working. The Platform of European Memory and Conscience, an organization founded largely by Central and Eastern European institutions to document the crimes of communism, accused the museum of soft-pedaling the experience of the Eastern Bloc. The Acton Institute, an American think tank, accused it of erasing religion as a force in European history. British commentators saw federalist propaganda. Federalists saw national caution. Some historians wondered why anyone would attempt the project at all. The criticism is, in a sense, the exhibition's natural environment: a continent that has spent the past seventy-five years trying to integrate without obliterating its national stories was never going to produce a museum that could speak for all of them at once. The annual temporary exhibitions - Restless Youth on the 1968 generation, Fake for Real on the long history of forgery and deception, When Walls Talk on graffiti and political imagery, Throwaway on consumer culture - tend to draw less heat, because they choose narrower questions and answer them well.

A visitor walking through the Eastman Building today moves through layers most museums cannot offer. The murals on the old waiting-room walls show animals from La Fontaine - the fox and the crow, the wolf and the lamb - painted for children who came in afraid of the dentist. The Art Deco lobby still gestures toward 1935, toward a moment when an American philanthropist's money paid to fix the teeth of poor Brussels children. The exhibitions above tell the story of a continent that, in the years bracketing that gift, would tear itself apart twice and then try, painfully and incompletely, to build the institutions that funded this museum. The arrangement is unsubtle and, perhaps, deliberately so. Whether the House of European History succeeds in telling a single continental story is a question that will outlive every visitor in the building today. That it tries at all, in twenty-four languages, in a former dental clinic in a Belgian park - that is the European story already.