LITMIR.BIZ

      Europe, as it has become more integrated, has also become more difficult to write about. The Union that now stretches from Limerick to Nicosia has given the continent an encompassing institutional framework of famous complexity, over-arching the nations that compose it, that sets this part of the world off from any other. This structure is so novel, and in many respects so imposing, that the term ‘Europe’, as currently used, now often refers simply to the EU, as if the two were interchangeable. But, of course, they are not. The difference has less to do with the scattered pockets of the continent that have yet to join the Union than with the intractable sovereignty and diversity of the nation-states that have done so. The tension between the two planes of Europe, national and supranational, creates a peculiar analytic dilemma for any attempt to reconstruct the recent history of the region. The reason can be put like this. However unprecedented it may be historically, the EU is unquestionably a polity, with more or less uniform effects throughout its jurisdiction. Yet in the life of the states that belong to it, politics—at an incomparably higher level of intensity—continues to be overwhelmingly internal. To hold both levels steady within a single focus is a task that has so far defied all comers. Europe, in that sense, seems an impossible object. It is no surprise that the literature on it tends to divide into three disconnected kinds: specialized studies of the complex of institutions that comprise the EU; broad-brush histories or sociologies of the continent since the Second World War, in

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