to be seen. All these pages, save the second part of the chapter on France, were written before the collapse of financial markets in the United States. Other than noting the onset of the crisis, I have not altered them to cover its effects so far or to come, but consider these in the reflections that conclude the book, which review more generally ideas of Europe, past and present.
England has, from the beginning, produced more Eurosceptics than any other country that has joined the EU. Although critical of the Union, this is not an outlook I share. In 1972 New Left Review, of which I was then editor, published a book-length essay by Tom Nairn, ‘The Left against Europe?’, as a special issue.1 At the time, not only the Labour Party in Britain, but the overwhelming majority of socialists to the left of it, were opposed to the UK’s entry into the EEC, which had just been voted through Parliament by a Conservative government. Nairn’s essay not only broke with this massed consensus, but remains even today, a quarter of a century later, the most powerful single argument ever made for support to European integration from the left—nothing comparable has ever emerged from the ranks of its official parties, Social-Democratic, Post-Communist, or Green, that now wrap themselves 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.
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
