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As I finished the text for the first edition of this book in summer 1992, one former British
prime minister was appealing in New York before an audience of American business
leaders for Britain permanently to renounce any policies which might lead to a federal
Europe and was urging the United Kingdom and the United States to form a free trade
area. Another former British prime minister, at the same time, was urging the country at
once to enter into a commitment to form a federal union of western Europe. The
background against which the book was concluded was so reminiscent of British
arguments and views in the 1950s that it was tempting to think that nothing had changed.
Yet the twelve governments of the EEC had signed an agreement that the European
Community should have a single central bank and currency within ten years, providing
that several stringent conditions relating to inflation rates, public debt ratios, and the
convergence of exchange rates had been met, and also that for Britain the agreement was
reversible by parliament before the due date. That these conditions would actually be met
looked scarcely plausible.
Now, in 1999, as I revise this text, it looks likely that there will be a European
Monetary Union, although its durability is uncertain. Whether or when the United
Kingdom will join that Union is more uncertain. The policy of the main opposition party
is to renegotiate the Treaty of Rome so that only its commercial clauses will be binding.
Without Monetary Union the new political commitments entered into at Maastricht
would not justify the change of name from European Community to European Union
(EU). The dissent between the United Kingdom and the European Union remains the
same as that described in chapter 7. There are other dissidents. The common foreign,
defence, and immigration policies to which the Treaty of Maastricht is to lead the way are
to be achieved only by international cooperation, not by supranational organizations.
They escape any control by the European Commission, the Court of Justice, and the
Parliament. Yet the Treaty was nevertheless voted down in a national referendum in
Denmark and so many exceptions subsequently made for that country in order to make
sure that the additional protocols were accepted in a second referendum that Denmark’s
allegiance to the Treaty is even more qualified than the United Kingdom’s. The special
treatment for the United Kingdom was acclaimed nationalistically in the press as the
‘victory’ which the prime minister declared it to be. It should be noted that, apart from
the particular opposition of Denmark and the United Kingdom to some central aspects of
the Treaty, the other states could not agree amongst themselves to an extension of
majority voting in the Council of Ministers except on issues which the larger states
regarded as relatively unimportant. France opposed an increase in the powers of the
European Parliament more energetically than Britain. Should Monetary Union fail, the
Treaty of Maastricht will have strengthened the institutionalized interdependence of
western European states, but it will not be another step on the road to integration.
The United Kingdom has taken up the cause of a wider union embracing much of
eastern Europe as well as Scandinavia, which would not be founded on common
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economic and social policies other than relative freedom of trade and markets. Such a
union could take its place in that ‘one world system’ which was the goal of Britain’s
strategies in the 1950s. The long British struggle of 1955–60 to link the nascent European
Economic Community with a European Free Trade Area by the common practice of nondiscriminatory trade rules, but without the other common policies which created the need
for the European Economic Community no longer has so strong a foundation in national
domestic political consensus. As in other member-states support for the EU, with a strong
foundation of common policies as well as the rules of the common market, has grown.
Drowning the present European Union in a greater Europe with widely differing
economic arrangements between its member-states, bound in a looser institutional
framework, might well not command majority support in any of them, including the
United Kingdom.
When the successive worldwide strategies of the United Kingdom in the 1950s were
crossed by the creation and early success of the EEC the British initiatives to link the
common market institutionally with a wider free trade area, and later to join the EEC,
were strongly motivated by foreign policy considerations. The political foundation of
similar economic and social policies which determined the nature of the EEC was, as the
previous chapter argued, not lacking in the United Kingdom. In London however the
EEC was often misunderstood as an organization held together essentially by its political
objectives; that its political cohesiveness came from its economic basis was not
understood. That this economic basis gave it a European character, identifying the rescue
of the nation-state as a process founded on the development of the European states
themselves, was also not understood. No matter how well-disposed much opinion in
Germany might be to the wider free trade area, German governments were ultimately
going to bow to de Gaulle’s veto on British membership. Not to have done so would have
weakened their domestic electoral power base economically and would have detracted
from the European ideology which had stood CDU politicians in such good stead. This
does not mean that after 1957 there may not have been a consonance of foreign policy
objectives between French and German governments which the Treaties of Rome
confirmed and strengthened. But the ability to strengthen that consonance by adherence
to a common institutional framework of a new and solemn kind rested on the consonance
of domestic policy choices for the rescue of the nation-state.
The national strategies of the original six core member-states appear to have remained
in place and retained public support, although in France, as has been the case from 1950
and the Schuman proposals, that support often is but a narrow majority and the strategy is
always under question. For the later entrants strategies cover a wide spectrum, from
clinging to the EU with all its present rules as an instrument of development and
modernization to changing it into a looser commercial union and denying its selfproclaimed destiny as an ever-closer political union. The fundamental change in the
structure of nation-states and the character of their domestic economic and social policies
has, by dividing national electorates, made the EU a more divisive issue than were the
European Communities of the 1950s.
Does such a consonance now exist, and if not, will one return? Monetary Union will
not be durable without it. If between 1953 and 1968 inflation rates touched 4 per cent, if
unemployment in Britain or France climbed briefly to 400,000, governments became
anxious for the political consensus they had built. Now, there are more than 11 million
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unemployed in Britain, France, Germany and Italy, but governments are still re-elected.
Colonies of homeless beggars sleep in parks, under bridges and in the public transport
systems. In Britain and France income distribution now is made steadily more unequal
while in Italy the trend towards greater equality seems to have stopped. Welfare is, if as
yet only marginally, being made once more into a private concern. Industrial labour is a
shrinking part of the labour force everywhere. Organized labour shrinks even more and
trade union membership has fallen steeply in most countries as part of the total labour
force. Agriculture no longer employs enough voters to command the political support of
the post-war decades. Farmers carry less weight in shaping policy than the rentiers who
have been created by two generations of income and savings accumulation, so that rates
of inflation acceptable before 1953 are now regarded as utterly unacceptable and public
expenditure is seen as a danger to income.
If the motivation for the first common policies of the EEC has changed, or
disappeared, the political objective has also been radically altered. The Berlin Wall and
the DDR are no more. Germany is now of far greater size and weight in the Community
than France and even more so than the United Kingdom. Even before unification its
national product was on some measures more than 40 per cent greater than the British
and the value of its foreign commodity trade more than 50 per cent greater. One of the
Federal Republic’s main reasons for adhering to the Community has also gone; a united
Germany is free to shape its own policy in eastern Europe.
The historical evidence shows that the real argument has never been about whether it
is desirable that a supranational Europe should supersede the nation-state, but about
whether the state can find a political and economic base for survival. The surrenders of
national sovereignty after 1950 were one aspect of the successful reassertion of the
nation-state as the basic organizational entity of Europe. The Community was the
European rescue of the nation-state. Since all history is change, that rescue could only be
temporary and the process of economic development itself has eroded the political
consensus which sustained both nation and supranation after the war.
Whereas the general theories of integration propounded during the 1950s and 1960s
almost all predicted that integration would continue, because the nation-state would prove
increasingly unable to cope with the trend of modern economic development, in this book
the historical evidence has been used to derive a fundamentally different theory of
integration. This theory is open-ended; it does not forecast any particular outcome. It runs
as follows. European states were reborn as puny weaklings into the post-war world. They
developed particular bundles of domestic policies to satisfy a coalition of political
interests. To support those policies they had available an inherited international order
which had accepted to a varying degree the traditional system and principles of
interdependence. Some of the domestic policies which they chose could be advanced
through this inherited interdependent international economic order. Others could not and
required something different, integration, involving a limited surrender of areas of
national sovereignty. The close similarity between the sets of domestic policies chosen by
Western European countries meant that integration was a path which could be chosen
with reasonable hopes of success on several occasions. The choice between
interdependence and integration was made according to the capacity of either system of
international order to best advance and support domestic policy choices.
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For example, when Italian governments selected emigration as a priority policy
choice, an interdependent international order advanced such policies better than an
integrationist one; the Six narrowly restricted at first the free movement of labour within
their area, while Italians followed their historical pattern of worldwide migration. By the
time that integration did provide special advantages in welfare for migration within the
Community emigration was already becoming less of a priority policy choice for Italian
governments. Similarly, when countries such as Denmark, France or Norway wished to
pursue domestic policies which entailed large deficits in their foreign balances for several
years, they were able to construct in the EPU an accepted, manageable framework of
interdependence, which allowed them to borrow internationally on a much greater scale
than the IMF could allow. This was maintained even against strong British opposition by
countries like the Federal Republic whose foreign balances were in surplus. But when
Belgium wanted to advance its policy of a gradual, managed decline of its coal industry
integration was a better choice, because accepting in this case the full implications of
interdependence would have meant the speedy extinction of most of the industry. Most
strikingly, when faced with the inappropriateness of tariffs as well as of quotas to the
industrial and commercial policies they wished to advance, the Six were able to use an
integrationist framework to develop a new and altogether more appropriate form of
foreign commercial policy, and for them a very successful one. With much travail they
were eventually able to use the same framework to advance their policies of agricultural
income support.
It depends, however, entirely on the nature of national, domestic policy choices
whether the international framework which is needed to support them will be
integrationist or not. The theory developed here predicts therefore that anything may
happen in the future, unless another theory able to predict the future choice of domestic
policies could make it more specific. It allows for further stages of integration, even as
far as full political union; it allows for the present level of integration to be maintained
unchanged; and it allows for the abandonment of the integration that has taken place. The
outcome will be decided by the choice of domestic policies.
The historical evidence also suggests, however, that the last outcome is less likely than
the others. When states chose to advance policies by integration one of the advantages
that resided in that choice was the greater irreversibility of the commitment. To construct
a wholly new framework for foreign commercial policy would have been too risky an
undertaking without a commitment from the Federal Republic, which was as near as it
was possible to come in international relations to a permanent commitment that it would
continue to function as the key piece in that framework. There were other advantages in
integration too which could lead to its choice. It offered a central enforceable law in place
of that international law which has never been enforced and whose weakness is also a
prime weakness of most frameworks of interdependence. It also offered the possibility of
reducing the number of international actors within the framework. We have seen how this
possibility attracted the Netherlands to the idea of a Common Agricultural Policy; the
CAP functioned like a cartel from which Holland’s superior rival as an agricultural
exporter, Denmark, could be excluded. For the integration which has taken place to be
renounced might therefore require events of a cataclysmic order, because the costs of
renouncing it would be so high.
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To use either a framework of interdependence or an integrationist framework to
advance national policies requires a similarity of national policy choices between a
sufficient number of states. There is less latitude for policy differences within integration
than within interdependence. Since either is chosen in order to advance the national
interest, the likelihood is that within the European Union new common policies will only
emerge if the circumstances of the period 1945–68 can be repeated and most of its
member-states choose similar sets of domestic policies. And, to continue with the
extrapolation from the historical evidence, they are only likely to do that if such policies
sustain a fresh political consensus which itself will sustain the nation-state.
There has been a sea-change in national economic policies and the way in which the
European nation-state is managed since the early 1980s. After 1973 the relationship
between foreign trade and economic growth in Western Europe altered; the rate of
growth of trade between Community member states declined proportionately to the rate
of growth of their trade with the outside world. Worse from their point of view, they
began to lose their share of the Community market in many industrial products. If the
first trend could be construed by some as healthy, because it was an expansion of exports
to a wider area, the second could not. Whereas among the trends analysed in chapter 4
one was the growing competitiveness of Western Europe’s manufactures against
American goods and the gradual reduction of the share of the Western European market
taken by American industry, the trend between 1973 and 1982 was for Japanese and
American manufacturing to take a growing share of the Community market. This
appeared to be especially the case in the products of new electronic technologies, but also
in cars. German manufacturing, while losing none of its lead in capital goods technology,
remained fixed in the mould into which the patterns of supply and demand of Western
Europe’s high-growth years had set it. The manufacturing sectors of the other countries,
shaped as they had been around the same pattern dominated by Germany, were even less
able to respond to Japanese competition. In those high-technology sectors where
economies of scale and the gains in productivity associated with learning-by-doing were
supposed to be greatest, and which were supposed to have been especially encouraged by
the common market, European manufacturing was now falling behind. One result was
that non-tariff barriers, especially state subsidies and national monopolies over state and
local authority purchasing, began again to proliferate in intra-West-European trade. The
Community was commercially less integrated by 1981 than it had been in 1973. This was
seen as reducing the international competitiveness of each of its member-states.
The change in economic ideologies which came with the return of unemployment
accompanied by often high inflation rates led to experimentation with the privatization
and deregulation of the mixed economy. Although this change came with a different
timing in different member-states, it had at first a common objective, to return to the high
growth rates of national income of the years before 1974. The concern with stimulating
supply rather than demand led to the idea that a further liberalization of the Community
market could support certain of these new aspects of national economic policy and on this
one aspect a Community consensus did come to prevail. The shift in ideologies meant
that the Community policy of standardizing national regulations on each manufactured
product in order to minimize the number of surviving non-tariff barriers could be
abandoned for a different procedure. The European Council at Milan in March 1985 took
the decision to, in the Commission’s language, ‘complete the internal market’ by the
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Single European Act. The possibility of doing so by a much simpler method than before
lay to hand in earlier decisions of the Court of Justice, that there must be a mutual
recognition inside the Community of products manufactured in any one member-state.
The mutual acceptance by member-states that less regulation of the Community market
would improve their international competitiveness led them to use this principle to
remove regulations, rather than to continue on the previous basis of increasing their
number, and this was embodied in the Single European Act. The programme of market
‘completion’ by removing restrictive regulations was, theoretically, due to be completed
by December 1992. It is far from complete.
European economies made a particularly strong recovery in the economic upswing
after 1983. This was of course attributed in many countries, most vociferously in Britain,
to putting the new economic ideologies into practice. It appeared as though western
Europe was moving towards a new policy consensus. In this new consensus national
government was to have a much smaller role to play, although it was only in the late
1980s and only in some countries that the national budgets which had sustained demand
in the earlier period began to diminish as a share of GDP and they are everywhere still a
much larger share than they were in the 1950s. The smaller role for the machinery of
national government in the new consensus allowed a greater relative role for the
Community; the European Commission could appear as a more potent agent of
deregulation of markets precisely because its supranationality gave it a greater scope and
effectiveness. The clearest indication however that the reduced role of national
government did not mean any diminution of nationalism was that its admired champion
was Margaret Thatcher.
The Single European Act was imbued with nostalgia. While it was a serious attempt to
revive the concept of integration as an extra stimulus to national income growth, it relied
on the intellectual framework of the 1950s as a guide to what should be done in the new
circumstances. The concept of economic growth still remained the one possible ideology
that could span the widening gap in economic and political ideas between and within the
member-states. This was so even in the United Kingdom where the post-war consensus
was represented as a huge political error and the source of the country’s present troubles,
not surprisingly since it was to Britain that it had brought the least benefits at the time.
Reliance on the same basic idea that national income growth could best be stimulated by
eliminating the constraints which the narrow confines of European national markets
impose led to a revival of the federalist initiative based on the assumption that one market
must mean one money, one money mean one central bank, and one central bank mean
political union.
Europe has been there before. This was the American argument in ECA in 1950 when
some officials hoped that the European Payments Union would lead within two years to a
Western European central bank. The same argument was made at the end of the 1960s
when the Community adopted the Werner Report proclaiming the necessity of a common
currency. After the adoption of the Werner Report the gaps between the Community
currencies’ exchange rates with each other widened. It is true that throughout the 1980s
exchange rates between most Community currencies were kept within fixed margins by
various devices such as the European Monetary System. But these were almost as wide
for the strong currencies, and wider for the weaker ones, than the margins of fluctuation
which the British wanted to introduce in the 1950s when one of their motives was to
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break up the EPU and eliminate all possibility of a Community currency which might
rival sterling.
In 1988 the European Commission tried to bring the pressures of those business and
financial groups who believe they would benefit from Monetary Union to bear on central
bankers through the Committee for the Study of Economic and Monetary Union. It was a
measure of the way the political system in the 1980s had swung more towards
representing the interests of capital. The central bankers themselves wished to assert their
independence from the politicians who subjected them to so subordinate a role during the
heyday of the post-war political consensus, and there is now a much more powerful
political constituency arguing that this would be advantageous. An independent European
central bank, so ran the argument, could liberate monetary policy from the inflationary
importuning of national politicians trying to win elections. This had a strong appeal to the
much greater share of the population than in the 1950s living off inflexible sources of
income, especially the much greater proportion of aged and retired people.
The once-and-for-all gain from reducing the uncertainties caused by exchange rate
fluctuations and from the elimination of the transaction costs arising from having eleven
separate currencies in the Union is calculated to be no greater than the small static gains
to trade estimated in 1956 to result from the removal of tariffs by the Treaty of Rome. As
in the earlier case of commodity trade, it is on the unquantifiable dynamic forces which
would be released by the change to one money that the advocates of European Monetary
Union rely for the force of their argument. But which policies would best release these
dynamic forces, if they exist? It is perfectly possible in present political circumstances,
even in the western European country which has consistently had the lowest rates of
inflation, to have a tight monetary policy and a highly inflationary budget deficit if that is
what political priorities demand, as the history of Germany since 1989 shows.
In spite of the hopes that an anti-inflationary consensus across western Europe would
be strong enough to generate common anti-inflationary policies, it was not. The intergovernmental discussions on currency union would probably never have got as far as the
Maastricht negotiations in December 1991 had not the Soviet Union withdrawn its
protection from the German Democratic Republic. European Monetary Union, fading as
the basis for a political consensus, became for France the gage that Germany would
remain within the integrationist framework in which it had been earlier fixed. It was the
gaps in the Berlin Wall that led the Strasbourg European Council in December 1990 to
call for a treaty on Monetary Union. By that date Monetary Union had come to be seen
by France as the renewal of Germany’s commitment to, and control by, the ‘West’.
This recalls the central political condition which has been required in the past from
every act of integration. To succeed, every step in the creation of the Community had
always to be at the intersection of two tensions; the advancement of national policies had
to be combined with a guarantee that Germany would be more safely contained within
the framework. Only when both objectives could be simultaneously achieved were
countries ready to abandon elements of national sovereignty.
The advancement of national policies was easier within an integrationist framework
when the number of nations was small. Even when it is possible to find the crucial point
of intersection between the pursuit of national economic advantage and the retention of
Germany within a common political structure the complexity of the deals required is now
much greater. The difficulty was seen most clearly in the field of social policy in the
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Maastricht Treaty. Over most of the Community the element of the old consensus which
has survived most strongly is a commitment to social welfare. Even the poorest memberstates were ready at Maastricht to accept a general declaration about the need for
Europeanization of legislation on the length of the working week, on minimum wages
and on provision for maternity leave, a complex document which reasserted the
importance of labour to the political consensus. The argument for ‘harmonization’
(upwards) of wages and welfare made so vigorously by Belgium in 1950–2 and France in
1956–7 against Germany is now made by Germany against the others. The same
concessions as before were made, except by the United Kingdom. To howls of patriotic
fervour from the daily press a British prime minister successfully insisted on Britain’s
right to keep lower wages, lower social security benefits, and to continue to discriminate
legally against trade unions. If these truly constitute an advantage in intra-Union
competition, it may be only because the lower-paid are less able than the better rewarded
to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the EU for Joyce’s ‘silence, exile, and
cunning’.
It was not merely an intellectual exercise to derive a new theory of integration which
fits the historical facts. It will not be simply decided by accidental pragmatism whether
the European states do move to a further stage of integration or whether they content
themselves with further experiments in interdependence. The choice depends on the way
national political consensuses are reformulated. If the new economic and social policies
which began to take shape in western Europe in the mid-1980s establish a common
pattern, some of them may be better advanced within an integrationist framework
whereas strong differences in national policy choices will make the Maastricht
agreements a marginal comment on the flow of Europe’s history, like the 1953 proposals
for a European Political Community.
There has not been before a major international currency without a government
supporting it. Domestic politics in Europe will determine the Euro’s fate, not central
bankers. The conclusion is not just that political science need not relapse into pragmatism
but that there is an explanation of integration, albeit of little predictive power by itself,
which fits the historical facts and helps in understanding what choices can and should be
made over the next decade.
For the rescued and reconstructed European nation-state the ultimate basis for its
survival is the same as it always was, allegiance. The well-attested secondary allegiance
paid to Community institutions in member-states shows that the supranation, like the
nation, if it endures and provides a consistent and effective level of organization can
count on the loyalty of its ‘citizens’. Over the forty years of its existence the Community
has been a remarkably benign institution in comparison with the nation-state. It has no
police, no prisons, no soldiers. Its law intrudes only into a very small number of areas and
in many of those it is seen as an improvement on national law. Most of the attacks in the
name of ‘freedom’ on regulations from Brussels can be readily identified as a cover for
vested interests. The freedom to swim in a tide of sewage, like the freedom to dine at the
Ritz, is a somewhat abstract principle on which to ask people to condemn a political
organization. Even a free labour market within the Union threatens the social status of
only small numbers of people and is obviously not the threat from immigration which
they most fear.
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The expression, and perhaps even the sentiment, of prejudice against fellow
Community citizens is an increasingly unusual occurrence. For the citizens of memberstates to denounce each other in the language commonly used by one alleged nationality
in eastern Europe about another in general provokes only satirical ridicule. This makes a
humane contrast with forty years of communist nationalist government as it does with
western Europe’s earlier history. It is admittedly an alliance of sentiment between the rich
and mostly white. None the less, the sense of a common allegiance to something beyond
the nation has developed with the sense that the supranation may in certain respects open
channels for political action which would remain blocked within the nation itself. This,
and the weakening of prejudice, suggest that the present European Parliament could
function with the same democratic ease as national parliamentary assemblies, providing it
had something to do.
What little it has so far had to do has been defined by the instrumentality of the
Community as an integrationist solution to national problems. The evolution of the
Community’s political machinery has had little to do with European federalism or with
abstract demands for a European constitution as a desirable thing in itself, because the
programme of the European federalists was irrelevant to immediate political needs. Many
of them in any case, perhaps the majority, were opposed to the domestic policies of the
nation-states. Attempts to mobilize political support for surrenders of sovereignty by
evoking the idea of one federal democratic Europe were by no means always helpful to
integration. Opposition to the Community, as well as support for it, could be mobilized
around the same idea. The absolute defenders of national sovereignty, those for whom no
solution to the problem of governance is acceptable other than a national one, can easily
misrepresent the process of integration as the end of the nation. The truth is that
whenever the Community member-states had to implement their surrenders of
sovereignty they produced an arrangement which left almost all political power with the
nation-state. This was still the case after 1989 with the French proposals for a closer
political union. It is not through a federalizing of the state’s remaining powers that Paris
sees a guarantee of Germany’s fidelity to the present framework, nor through granting
greater powers to the European Parliament.
This is not surprising, when in the past to equip the European Communities with a
parliament which replicated national democracy would have been needlessly to curb the
states’ powers to manage what was a restricted political device to provide additional
support for policies already determined by national political parties. If parties have
organized themselves only in a superficial way in the European Parliament, that is
because no more has been needed. The political machinery of the Union resembles the
court of the eighteenth-century German Empire. There is a numerous and deferential
attendance around the President of the Commission. A hierarchical bureaucracy attends
to the myriad small facets of relationships with the surrounding greater powers, the
member-states, for every decision has to be finely attuned to the wishes of the real
political power to which the Union’s continued existence is useful. The struggles to
appoint to its offices are like those within the Imperial Diet.
The history of national parliaments suggests that important popular demands will only
focus on the European Parliament if the power of raising taxation is shifted to the Union
level; ‘No taxation without representation’ appears as the one political slogan to keep its
validity for more than two centuries. Until then it is within the nation that political parties
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have to fulfil their task of organizing a democratic consensus. It seems beside the point to
denounce the European Community for an undemocratic and bureaucratic pursuit of
policies which were themselves the choice of national democracies. If that however is
construed as evidence that the nation-states themselves are not truly democratic, or that in
internationalizing policies they are seeking to restrict the force of postwar democratic
pressures, there is little in the argument of this book to refute those conclusions. Indeed
there is much to suggest that the post-war role of more democratic political parties in
formulating the immediate post-war domestic policy choices on which consensus
depended was only a temporary phase and that these parties, especially since 1968, have
become increasingly part of the executive.
Federalism is only a bogeyman; denouncing it a way of avoiding the real issues.
National sovereignty is another bogeyman; preserving it is another way of avoiding the
real issues. Elevating national sovereignty into an absolute irreducible entity, giving to it
a mystical attribution, is to deny the historical record of the development of the European
state. The evidence is that in the recent past sovereignty has been only a legal and
administrative convenience, like the state itself. The argument that the Europeanization of
policy necessarily usurps national democratic control treats the abstract concept of
national sovereignty as though it were a real form of political machinery. The states will
make further surrenders of sovereignty if, but only if, they have to in the attempt to
survive.
Appealing though the idea of a united Europe is, the strength of the European
Community does not lie in that abstract appeal. It lies in the uncertainty of the nationstate’s destination. The European rescue of the nation-state, a positive and beneficent
experience for the majority of people, marked some limits of the state’s capacity to
satisfy by its own powers and within its own frontiers the demands of its citizens. Equally
positive national policy responses may demonstrate other limits to the state’s capacity. In
this sense, there may at any time emerge a force within the developed nation-state which
may propel it towards integration. But whether the states make that choice still depends
absolutely on the nature of domestic policy choices and thus on national politics. In
whose interests will the brutal power of the state continue to exist? Who will run it? And
for whom? It is the answers to these questions which will determine the future of the
European Union.
The European Rescue of the Nation State, Taylor & Francis Group, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=243322.
Created from kcl on 2021-11-28 22:23:09.