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in the blue banner with gold stars. The Union of the early twenty-first century is not the Community of the fifties or sixties, but my admiration for its original architects remains undiminished. Their enterprise had no historical precedent, and its grandeur continues to haunt what it has since become.

      The European ideology that has grown up, around a changed reality, is another matter. The self-satisfaction of Europe’s elites, and their publicists, has become such that the Union is now widely presented as a paragon for the rest of the world, even as it becomes steadily less capable of winning the confidence of its citizens, and more and more openly flouts the popular will. How far this drift is irreversible no one can tell. For it to be checked, a number of illusions will have to be abandoned. Among them is the belief, on which much of the current ideology is founded, that within the Atlantic ecumene Europe embodies a higher set of values than the United States, and plays a more inspiring role in the world. This doctrine can be rejected, to the advantage of America, by dwelling on how much that is admirable they share, or to the detriment of Europe, how much that is objectionable. For Europeans, the second criticism is the more needed.² Not only their difference, but their autonomy, from America is less than they imagine. Nowhere are current relations between them illustrated so vividly as in the field of EU studies itself, to which the third essay here on the Union is devoted.

      By and large, this field forms a closed universe of often highly technical literature, with few outlets to any wider public sphere. In Europe, it has generated a vast industry of professional articles, research papers and consultancies, much of it financed by Brussels, which if it does not command the heights of the terrain, occupies an ever extending plain below them. The density of pan-European exchanges across it is without precedent, and these exchanges along with innumerable others—conferences, workshops, colloquia, lectures in adjacent disciplines, from history and economics to law and sociology—have created what should comprise the bases of an intellectual community capable of lively debate across national borders. Yet in practice, there is still remarkably little of that. In part, this has to do with the characteristic tares of the academy, when scholarship turns inwards only to a profession rather than also outwards to a broader culture. In larger measure, however, it is a reflection of the lack of any animating political divisions in this—in principle—eminently political field, occupied chiefly by political scientists. To speak of a pensée unique would be unfair: it is more like a pensée ouate, which hangs like a pall over too much of it. The media offer little, if any, counterbalance, columns and editorials hewing in general to a Euro-conformism more pronounced than that of chairs or think-tanks.

      One effect of such unanimism is to undermine the emergence of any real public sphere in Europe. Once all agree in advance on what is desirable and what is not—vide successive referenda—no impulse to curiosity about the life and thought of other nations is left. Why take any interest in what is said or written elsewhere, if it merely repeats, in all essentials, what is already available here? In this sense, it might well be thought that the echo-chambers of today’s Union are less genuinely European than much of the cultural life of the inter-war, or even pre–First World War period. There are not many equivalents today of the correspondence between Sorel and Croce, the collaboration between Larbaud and Joyce, the debate among Eliot, Curtius and Mannheim, the arguments of Ortega with Husserl; not to speak of the polemics within the Second and early Third Internationals. Intellectuals formed a much smaller, less institutionalized group in those days, with deeper roots in a common humanist culture. Democratization has dispersed this, while releasing a vastly larger number of talents into the arena. However, whatever its fruits elsewhere—they obviously are many—it has not so far led to much of a republic of letters in the European Union. The hope of this book is to contribute towards one.

      1. New Left Review I/75, September–October 1972, pp. 5–120, which subsequently appeared as a book under the same title (Harmondsworth 1973).

      2. For the former, see the statistical fireworks of Peter Baldwin, The Narcissism of Minor Differences: Why America and Europe are Alike, New York 2009, which sets out to confound anti-American prejudice across the Atlantic, by showing—with brio—that if West European societies are taken as a set, by most indicators American society falls at various points within the same range, and not infrequently outperforms its smugger counterparts. Such comparisons, of course, bypass the enormous difference between the American state and its European opposites—the US dwarfing any European country in military, political and ideological power, not to speak of an EU that lacks the attributes of a nation-state, let alone one the size of a continent.

I. THE UNION

      ORIGINS

      1995

      Mathematically, the European Union today represents the largest single unit in the world economy. It has a nominal GNP of about $6 trillion, compared with $5 trillion for the US and $3 trillion for Japan. Its total population, now over 360 million, approaches that of the United States and Japan combined. Yet in political terms such magnitudes continue to be virtual reality. Beside Washington or Tokyo, Brussels remains a cipher. The Union is no equivalent to either the United States or Japan, since it is not a sovereign state. But what kind of formation is it? Most Europeans themselves are at a loss for an answer. The Union remains a more or less unfathomable mystery to all but a handful of those who, to their bemusement, have recently become its citizens. Well-nigh entirely arcane to ordinary voters, a film of mist obscures it even in the mirror of scholars.

      1

      The nature of the European Union must have some relation to the origins of the Community which it now subsumes—although, in a typically alembicated juridical twist, does not supersede. Some political clarity about the genesis of its structure seems desirable as a starting-point for considering its future. This is a topic on which there is still no uncontroversial ground. The historical literature has from the outset tended to be unusually theoretical in bent—a clear sign that few familiar assumptions can be taken for granted. The dominant early scholarship held to the view that the forces underlying the post-war integration of Western Europe should be sought in the growth of objective—not only economic, but also social and cultural—interdependencies between the states that made up the initial Coal and Steel Community and its sequels. The tenor of this first wave of interpretation was neo-functionalist, stressing the additive logic of institutional development: that is, the way modest functional changes tended to lead to complementary alterations along an extending path of often involuntary integration. Cross-national convergence of economic transactions, social exchanges and cultural practices had laid the basis for gradual advance towards a new political ideal—a supranational union of states. Ernst Haas, who thought the beginnings of this process relatively contingent, but its subsequent development path-determined, produced in the late fifties what is still perhaps the best theorization of this position in his Uniting of Europe.

      The second wave of interpretations, by contrast, has stressed the structural resilience of the nation-state, and seen the post-war integration of Western Europe not as a glide-path towards any supranational sovereignty, but on the contrary as the means of reinvigorating effective national power. This neo-realist theme comes in a number of different versions, not all of them concordant. Far the most powerful and distinctive is the work of Alan Milward. There is some irony in the fact that the country which has contributed least to European integration should have produced the historian who has illuminated it most. No other scholar within the Union approaches the combination of archival mastery and intellectual passion that Milward has brought to the question of its origins.

      His starting-point was at a productive tangent to it. Why, he asked, did economic recovery in Europe after the Second World War not repeat the pattern that occurred after the First—an initial spurt due to physical restocking, followed by erratic fits and starts

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