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Setting the pace has for some time been Andrew Moravcsik’s The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht (1998), widely hailed as the leading synthesis since Milward. Director of the European Union Program at Princeton, where his wife Anne-Marie Slaughter is author of her own prospect for A New World Order, Moravcsik is currently the most prominent US authority in the field, a tireless commentator on EU affairs in the columns of Newsweek and the pages of Prospect. The theoretical background of his work lies in the notion developed by, among others, Robert Keohane at Harvard—where Moravcsik was a younger associate—of an ‘international regime’, understood as a set of formal or informal principles, rules and procedures determining a common horizon of expectations, and so conduct, for inter-state relations. The particular problem addressed by Keohane’s major work After Hegemony (1984) was how high levels of cooperation could persist among the advanced capitalist states, once the paramountcy of the US that had been responsible for its post-war institutions—Bretton Woods, the IMF, GATT, NATO—passed away, as he thought it had in the early seventies.

The target of this conception was the dominant realist school of international relations theory in the USA, descended from Hans Morgenthau, which insisted on the ineliminably conflictual nature of relations between sovereign states in the world political arena. This standpoint, Keohane thought, could not make sense of the degree of pragmatic harmony between the leading states of the OECD after the collapse of Bretton Woods. Nor, however, could the alternative of neo-functionalist theory supply the answer: its stress on common ideals and economic ties was in Keohane’s words ‘naive about power and conflict’.⁴ He proposed instead a synthesis of realism and neo-functionalism that would leave both behind, by modelling as it were the tender-minded phenomenon of international cooperation with the tough-minded tool-kits of rational choice and game theory.

A decade later, Moravcsik started to apply this line of thinking to the European Community. This was a field, however, where the balance of intellectual forces—at any rate in North America—was the opposite of that which had confronted Keohane. Here it was the neo-functionalism developed by Haas and his pupils that enjoyed most influence, an approach that stressed the specificity of European integration as a process founded on functional economic interdependencies, but driven by federalist political ideals. For the neo-functionalists, this was a combination that was gradually leading to a sui generis structure of supranational character, undercutting national sovereignty in a way unlike any other inter-state arrangement of the post-war epoch.

Moravcsik’s manifesto of 1993, ‘Preferences and Power in the European Community: A Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach’, took aim directly at this construction.⁵ The right starting-point for understanding the process of integration, he asserted, was not what was specific to but what was standard in the EU. The Community had to be seen as another variant of a common pattern of international cooperation, requiring no analytical instruments to capture it beyond those already supplied by regime theory. In analyzing it, pride of place should be given neither to the role of the European Commission in Brussels, nor to the Court in Luxembourg, let alone the Parliament in Strasbourg, but rather to traditional bargaining between member-governments whose key deals set the terms—and limits—of European cooperation. The principal refinement needed to standard regime theory was simply the inclusion of the domestic politics of each state within the theory. ‘Governments’, Moravcsik explained, ‘evaluate alternative courses of action on the basis of a utility function’, shaped ‘in response to shifting pressure from domestic social groups, whose preferences are aggregated through political institutions’.

The correct way to look at European integration was thus as an exemplar of ‘liberal inter-governmentalism’—liberal in that it supposed private individuals and voluntary associations as the basic actors in politics, and assumed that increased traffic in goods and services across borders would spur ‘reciprocal market liberalization and policy coordination’.⁶ This was an approach governed by rational choice theory—essentially an extrapolation of the procedures of neo-classical economics to other domains of life—modelling the conduct of states on the behaviour of firms. ‘The essence of the EC as a body for reaching major decisions remains its transaction-cost reducing function’, contended Moravcsik.⁷ True, this was an international regime which, unusually, involved governments in pooling and delegating elements of sovereignty. But they did so ‘as a result of a cost-benefit analysis of the stream of future substantive decisions expected to follow from alternative institutional designs’,⁸ which led them to prefer the efficiency gains to be realized by arrangements particular to the EC. Since states make rational choices, it follows that they seldom err in their decisions. Governments bargaining for advantage with one another remain firmly in control of the outcomes. ‘Unintended consequences and miscalculations’ have at best—so Moravcsik—‘played a role at the margins, as they always do in social life’.⁹

The Choice for Europe seeks to illustrate this vision by treating the history of European integration as a sequence of five ‘grand bargains’ between governments, to each of which Moravcsik devotes detailed attention: the Treaty of Rome in the fifties; the creation of the Common Agricultural Policy and the Luxembourg compromise in the sixties; the European Monetary System in the seventies; the Single European Act of the eighties; and the Treaty of Maastricht in the nineties. The argument is single-minded. At no point, Moravcsik maintains, was European integration driven either by geo-political calculations—France’s need to contain Germany; Germany’s need to recover respectability—or by federal idealism—Monnet’s dreams of supranationalism; or by considerations of social welfare—as Milward had argued, showing a regrettably weak grasp of American social science.¹⁰ Throughout, the primary motivation in the construction of today’s Union has been just the commercial interests of the contracting partners. The result of their rational computations has been ‘the most successful of postwar international regimes’.

This thesis is hammered home with a mass of dense documentation, most of it revolving around Franco-German relations, with admiring glances at Britain. De Gaulle is cut down to size as little more than a disingenuous lobbyist for French farmers. Macmillan, on the other hand, is hailed as a clairvoyant statesman, whose (failed) bid to get the UK into the Community was ‘an extraordinary act of leadership’.¹¹ Indeed, from the first discussions of a common market at Messina onwards, ‘British diplomacy was far-sighted, efficient and well-informed—close to the ideal rational actor’.¹² But in the overall balance-sheet of successive bargains, Moravcsik’s narrative intimates, it was Germany that shaped the process of integration most. From Rome to Maastricht, it can gradually be deduced, Bonn was generally more formative than Paris. Italy’s part in the story is ignored. The tale is one virtually without missteps. Governments, Moravcsik assures us, not only foresaw the immediate consequences of their decisions, ‘they almost never misperceived the direction of future change’.¹³

The sheer bulk and self-confidence of The Choice for Europe has made of it, notwithstanding many an objection from historians, the central reference in a field dominated by political scientists of not dissimilar outlook. Its inadequacy to its object is, however, quite clear. For what Moravcsik’s construction is ab initio unable to explain is why the standard objectives of inter-capitalist state cooperation, as codified in regime theory, could not have been achieved after the war in Western Europe by free-trade agreements of a conventional kind, without creation of any complex of supranational institutions or derogations of national sovereignty. Why shouldn’t the EC have looked more like NAFTA? From a ‘liberal intergovernmentalist’ perspective, the European Commission, the Parliament and the Court of Justice enshrined in the Treaty of Rome can only appear gratuitous: unnecessary headaches down the road on which the six governments of the mid-fifties were so prudently and soberly steering.

What such a conception ignores, of course, is the critical fact that the institutional origins of the European Community were deliberately framed in dynamic, open-ended terms—that is, unlike other forms of international agreement, they were declared to be stepping-stones in view of an ultimate objective whose exact shape was left unspecified. In the famous formula which has haunted Eurosceptics ever since, the first words of the Treaty of Rome spoke of an ‘ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’. It is this teleological aspiration that set European integration categorically apart from the normal world of international agreements. No stable equilibrium was aimed at by the first Coal and Steel Community, or the Common Market that followed it. On the contrary, what they set in motion was an unstable process, potentially concatenating towards a long-term end. This structure was inconceivable without the shaping role of the federalist—not inter-governmentalist—vision of Jean Monnet and his contemporaries. The history of the EC is inexplicable without the impetus to instability genetically engineered into it from the start.

What then of the rationality of the subsequent process? The rhetoric of rational choice is often empty, since any decision—no matter how seemingly aberrant: let us say, at the limit, Jonestown itself—can be read off from some putative preference structure. In The Choice for Europe, the relevant parameters of choice are specific enough: commercial gains. The question is whether the model they imply can be got to match the real world. The nervous tics of the text itself suggest the answer. For its relentless insistence that every important agreement in the history of the Community was determined above all by—mostly sectoral—economic interests is counterpointed by continual saving clauses noting evidence to the contrary, the better to dispatch it off-stage again, as so many residuals.

Such admissions-denegations are scattered throughout the book in a compulsive refrain. They recur at every juncture: the Treaty of Rome, the EMS, British entry, the SEA, Maastricht. Treaty of Rome: ‘geopolitical ideas and security externalities were not entirely unimportant’. Macmillan’s bid for membership: ‘we cannot definitively exclude geopolitical prestige as a motivation’. German reactions to De Gaulle’s veto of the bid: ‘I do not rule out geopolitical motivations altogether’. Creation of EMS: ‘this is not to relegate European symbolism and geopolitical arguments to complete insignificance’. The Single European Act: ‘we should not exclude ideological considerations entirely’. German support for monetary union: ‘domestic deliberations and cleavages prevent us from dismissing federalist ideology entirely’. French quest for Maastricht: ‘we cannot dismiss the ideological explanation entirely’. Forty years of integration: ‘we should not neglect geopolitical interests and ideas altogether’. Typicality of EC for relations among industrial nations in general: ‘although we can reject objective geopolitical circumstances as the source of preferences, we cannot entirely dismiss the role of ideas. Yet until ideas are clearly measured [sic] and more precisely theorized, claims for the importance of ideology cannot be more than speculative’.¹⁴ In no case does any serious exploration of, or reflection on, what is gestured at follow. Invariably, the factors momentarily conceded and effectively deleted are either geo-political or ideological. What their repetition indicates is simply the extent to which the evidence cannot be stretched to garb the theoretical framework. Tears and holes start to appear as soon as the fabric is pulled.

Of all these, the most gaping is Moravcsik’s treatment of the role of De Gaulle in Community affairs. ‘Grain, not grandeur’, he declares, lay behind the General’s refusal to admit Britain to the EC in the sixties—essentially, nothing to do with shutting the gates against a Trojan horse from Washington, just a desire to bolster the price of French wheat. Historians have left little standing of the selective use of documents, loose quotation, and forcing of evidence employed to generate this result.¹⁵ Beyond such flexing of the record to bend the intentions of a particular, famously obdurate actor to a preconceived schema, however, is the general premise on which The Choice for Europe is built: the belief that political miscalculations and unintended consequences are typically confined—as Moravcsik puts it—to ‘the margins of social life’.

A less eccentric view would be that most of history is a web of unintended effects. The defining events of the past century, the two World Wars, are probably the most spectacular cases on record. Much of the inspiration for the building of the European Community, by contrast, came from the goal of avoiding their repetition in the Old World. But the edifice was entirely unprecedented, the architects never at one, the design ever more complex, the process extended far beyond the span of any government. How could it be otherwise than a minefield of misreckonings?

Among the most recent of these were the hopes invested in the SEA by Thatcher and Delors—opposite, but equally disappointed: the one furious that it paved the way towards a single currency, the other mortified that it proved a dead-end for a more social market. Or the beliefs of Kohl and Mitterrand that monetary union would quicken growth and lessen tensions between Germany and France. Once he reaches Maastricht, even Moravcsik forgets himself to the point of writing that ‘it is unclear whether the economic benefits truly outweighed the costs for any single country, or whether the expectations of the various governments were fully compatible’.¹⁶ So much for the unfailing rationality and foresight of the interested parties. As for the Stability Pact imposed by Germany to discipline laxer neighbours, it rebounded so quickly against the Federal Republic that Berlin was among the first to violate it. Such counter-finalities have punctuated integration ever since the Schuman Plan was announced in 1950.

Blindness to these is due not just to the dogmatics of rational choice, but to the curiously apolitical cast of The Choice for Europe, much of which reads like a swollen theoretical side-bar to the technocratic discourse of committees and functionaries in Brussels itself. Not, of course, that Moravcsik himself is in any way unpolitical—it would difficult to suspect a more mainstream New Democrat. His manifest aversion to De Gaulle is not simply as a figure too unmistakably resistant to the postulates of his theory, but also as a ruler whose ‘incoherent’ foreign policy, pursuing French independence in defiance of Atlantic solidarity, was fortunately doomed to failure. But such conventional American dislike of a threat to Washington is no spur to any serious analysis of the balance of different forces in France, or any other country, at the time. In Moravcsik’s optic, the domestic interests informing government policies boil down to little more than various producer lobbies, with virtually no attempt to reconstruct or even refer very much to the party systems and ideological landscapes of the period. Just how drained of politics the result becomes can be judged from—one example among many—his description of Thatcher’s regime as a ‘centrist coalition’,¹⁷ a notion she would have regarded as slanderous, and her opponents as risible.

The best antidote to such dehydration comes from another, younger American scholar, Craig Parsons at the University of Oregon. In a brilliantly executed study of France’s part in the history of integration, A Certain Idea of Europe, Parsons shows how far the political realities of the French role in the building of Europe were from the utility functions of assorted economic interest groups. After the Second World War French elites, confronted with the problem of avoiding a re-run of their failures after the First, had—Parsons argues—three options: traditional realist diplomacy, pragmatic inter-state cooperation led by France and Britain, and direct Franco-German integration within a supranational community. Each was informed by a distinct set of ideas that cross-cut Right/Left attachments along the non-Communist spectrum, and set the agenda for decisions. That ‘community’ approaches prevailed over either confederal or traditional lines of action was never due to pressure in favour of them from domestic lobbies, industrial or agrarian. Underdetermined economically, it was the outcome of a ‘historic battle of ideas’.¹⁸

But if a series of leaders—Schuman, Mollet, Giscard, eventually Mitterrand—had sufficient, if nearly always temporary, political leeway to impel integration without there being any organized demand for it, they equally never benefitted from it. Elected for other reasons, they fell from power for other reasons, in domestic contests unrelated to European issues. Indeed, every party responsible for a major advance towards European unity was punished at the polls, not thereby but thereafter: the MRP after the Coal and Steel Community (1951); the SFIO after the Treaty of Rome (1958); the UDF after the European Monetary System (1981); the PS after the SEA (1986) and again after Maastricht (1992). Yet each time the step forwards, once made, acted as an institutional constraint on subsequent leaders who had originally opposed it, but once in office were turned in favour of it—De Gaulle in 1958, Mitterrand in 1983, Chirac in 1986, Balladur in 1993, Chirac again in 1995. The ‘conversion mechanism’ was the accomplished fact, and the costs of trying to reverse it: not a spillover, but a ratchet effect.

While restoring quite unshakeably the driving role of political ideas in European integration, Parsons is careful not to overstate the success of federalism as its accelerator. Without the community commitment of successive French leaders, he remarks, ‘today’s Europe would look much like the rest of modern international politics’. But it does not fully represent them either, for although federalist directions prevailed at several crucial stages, they always had to contend with alternative—confederal or traditional—projects that slowed them down or boxed them in, making of the Union that eventually emerged a product of oscillations between the three.¹⁹ Coolly dismissing Moravcsik’s edifice as ‘embedding a poorly supported argument in a largely untested theory’, and eschewing all comparable hubris, A Certain Idea of Europe shows what a lucid political science immune to the fevers of rational choice can accomplish.

Of entirely different inspiration is the work of John Gillingham, a historian at St Louis whose European Integration 1950–2003 offers the first true narrative of the process of unification from the time of Schuman to that of Schröder, in a bravura performance that lights up the all too often leaden skies of the field like an aurora borealis. Resolved to ‘cast aside official language’—what he calls Brussels-Volapük—‘whenever possible and use standard terms and common measurements in order to demystify ideas, events and persons’,²⁰ Gillingham has written an unfailingly vivid and pithy—at times even, as he himself notes, too racy—account of the complex story of European unification, on a grand scale. Its registers run a gamut from theoretical analysis of underlying economic processes to the dynamics of political manoeuvre or surprises of diplomatic settlements, to pungent portraits of their dramatis personae, always with a keen curiosity for ideas—both those that moved leading actors historically, and those developed afterwards to situate them. Its span, not confined to the major states, is virtually continental.

The intellectual convictions governing the narrative come from Hayek, to some extent also the Freiburg School of Ordo-liberals around Walter Eucken and Wilhelm Röpke, mentors of Ludwig Erhard. Politically, this is a tradition on the intransigent right of the spectrum, and Gillingham makes no secret, with many a colourful expression, of his hostility to anything on the left of it. But as a paradigm for understanding the history of the Community, Austrian economics has obvious advantages over the neo-classical variant on which rational choice is based, since as Gillingham remarks, it envisages market systems as inherently unstable—dynamic processes of discovery in which information is always imperfect—rather than as a set of utility functions tending towards equilibrium. Unexpected or ironic outcomes are, necessarily, no strangers to it.

What is then the historical yield of a Hayekian vision of European unity? For Gillingham, two antithetical models of integration have coexisted from the start. Negative integration is the removal of all barriers to the free movement of factors of production within the Community, entrusting the unification of economic life to the natural workings of the market, conceived in Hayek’s terms as a spontaneous order. Positive integration is the attempt to orchestrate a set of uniform practices into being by state intervention. For a quarter of a century after the Second World War, the dominant social arrangements at national level, combining capital controls, fixed exchange rates and extensive welfare systems, represented an ‘embedded liberalism’,²¹ more or less throughout the West. Transposed to European level, the effect was an unstable amalgam of positive and negative integration, in which proponents of the former initially had the upper—though never a free—hand. From Monnet’s design of the Coal and Steel Community in 1950 through to the first years of Hallstein’s presidency of the Commission in the late fifties and early sixties, projectors of a social Europe, to be shaped in the spirit of French indicative planning and German bureaucratic legalism, held the initiative, until Hallstein over-reached himself in 1965, provoking De Gaulle to pull France out of the Council, and put an abrupt stop to further supranational schemes.

But if the empty chair crisis spelt the end of ‘chiliastic Monnetism’ in the EC, it was a much larger change that in due course shifted the balance of forces away from positive to negative integration. This was the ‘regime change’ that supervened across the advanced capitalist world after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early seventies. Here the term—not a euphemism for overthrowing foreign governments, Gillingham explains, but a notion taken from the work of Douglas Forsyth and Ton Notermans, an American historian of modern Italy and a Dutch political scientist based in Norway²²—signifies a set of system-wide policy constraints affecting all governments, no matter what their complexion. Just as the great deflation of the Slump years had over time imposed a new regime, governed by the goal of full employment, so the inflation that broke loose in the seventies would eventually create another one, dictated by the imperatives of monetary stability.

With this came the downfall of embedded liberalism, and a revival of the principles of a classical liberalism. Under the new regime, markets were freed from statist interference and international mobility restored to capital. Social expenditures were cut, unions weakened, and corporatist practices abandoned. This great change did not occur immediately—the seventies were a time of futile attempts to patch up corporatist arrangements—or automatically. It required powerful ideas and political will to give birth to an international consensus. Credit for these belongs to Thatcher’s rule in England, inspired by the lessons of Hayek and other critics of the preceding order. By the mid-eighties, the conditions had matured for European integration finally to swing over in the right direction, with the long overdue abolition of obstructions to an unimpeded single market within the Community. The sweeping deregulation package of the SEA, drafted by an emissary from London, was ‘at bottom . . . Mrs Thatcher’s baby’.²³ Negative integration, the only viable kind, was at last in the saddle.

Yet its triumph, too, would be qualified. At the head of the Commission, Delors worked tirelessly against the grain of liberalization, even when apparently yielding to it, hitching Structural Funds—that is, otiose regional subsidies—to the SEA, and manoeuvring towards monetary union. It is characteristic of Gillingham’s treatment of individuals that, though he judges Delors an arrant ‘constructivist’, incapable of understanding the virtues of a spontaneous order, whose legacy was mostly pernicious where it was not ineffectual, he has no difficulty acknowledging that he was ‘an undeniably great figure’, whose ‘exceptional energy, political talent and ideological commitment’ made him one of a kind, as Monnet had been.²⁴ In the end, by pressing European leaders on down the road from the SEA to Maastricht, Delors provoked the furious resistance of Thatcher, that led to her fall at home. But his own dreams of a social Europe were no more successful than hers of a truly liberal one. ‘Delors’s economic plans went down the drain. So, too, did Thatcher’s hopes that market reforms would sweep away the detritus of socialism and corporatism. Both leaders eventually parted the scene in anger, convinced the other had won’.²⁵

Thus although regime change was irreversible, and has given European integration not just a new lease on life, but for the first time a life that is real and not artificial, the nineties became a time of misguided schemes and largely frustrated energies. At national level, there was welcome progress with privatization nearly everywhere. The public sector has been reduced by nearly half across the OECD, and state intervention in the economy has contracted sharply. Welfare systems have proved less tractable, but Gillingham can record significant improvements in most countries and commend star performers overall: Finland, Spain, Estonia. But at European level, there was no compelling economic rationale for the introduction of a single currency—Hayek, after all, had advocated competing private issues—and no community-wide securities market had issued from it, which to acquire real depth would in any case need general privatization of pension funds. The CAP had not been dismantled, and even the historic feat of enlargement had been marred by mean-spirited provisions ensuring that new members ‘will have to buy a full-price ticket in order to see only half the show’.²⁶ The upshot is a continuing stand-off. Positive and negative integration still confront each other in the Union like cobra and mongoose.

What explains this unsatisfactory outcome? Retrograde opposition to liberalization from unions, public sector employees and the left is only to be expected. But however recalcitrant, these are groups bereft of ideas, without a future. Governments bear the main responsibility for not facing them down. Nearly all have indeed been agents of neo-liberalism, as their enemies charge. But the term is over-rated. Neo-liberalism has in general been less a principled conviction than a pragmatic tacking to regime change, whose practitioners have mostly been professed socialists—Thatcher’s government was the exception in openly proclaiming the virtues of capitalism. Ideologically speaking, therefore, since it adopts pro-market policies with stealth rather than candour, let alone ardour, ‘neoliberalism is a dull weapon’, incapable of delivering a quietus to the baleful alliance of unions and transfer-recipients who block change in the old Union.²⁷ The distressing fact is that since the departure of Thatcher, ‘there is no serious, organized political constituency for classical liberalism anywhere in Europe today, not even on the conservative political right’.²⁸ But without a return to it—the concluding judgement—the Union is at risk of discord and decline.

Framed by a strong economic theory, Gillingham’s book is nevertheless, in keeping with its subject, essentially a political history of European integration. For the European economies themselves, the commanding study comes from Barry Eichengreen, who teaches at Berkeley. In many ways, The European Economy since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond (2007) moves in close parallel to Gillingham’s work. In certain others, it reverses its signs. Eichengreen covers both Western and Eastern Europe throughout, but his periodization is identical. The economic history of the continent divides into two contrasting phases, the watershed between them lying in the early seventies. In the first phase, ‘extensive growth’ was achieved by making good wartime destruction of capital and diversion of manpower, and then drawing on a backlog of (principally American) technological advances and still abundant reserves of rural labour, to make up for lost time and converge towards US levels of productivity and income. In the second phase, ‘intensive growth’ was required, demanding riskier investments in faster and more abrupt forms of technological innovation. Eichengreen’s story is of the way Europe flourished during the former, then stumbled at the latter.

What made extensive success possible, he argues, was a set of institutional arrangements comprising a mixture of cooperative trade-unions, responsible employers’ associations, long-term bank credits to industry, and last but not least, governments taking active charge of the needs of growth, in some cases with elements of indicative planning. This ‘coordinated capitalism’ was a historically admirable model in its time. But once the limits of extensive growth were reached, it became a fetter on Europe’s ability to adapt to the imperatives of intensive growth. The new conditions demanded lower taxes, less job protection, greater income disparities, higher levels of general education and R&D, and—most important of all?—more venture capital for innovative start-ups, raised from readier-to-gamble financial markets rather than stick-in-the-mud banks. Rooted in attachments to the past, European resistance to these changes exacted a heavy price. Between 1945–1973 and 1973–2000, GDP growth per capita fell by over half.

As for the onset of the crisis that brought extensive growth to an end, though completion of industrial catch-up and running-out of rural labour also come into it, Eichengreen lays main emphasis on the breakdown of labour restraint in Europe in the late sixties and early seventies, as a new generation of workers with no memories of mass unemployment set off a wage explosion that led to a decade of inflation. But as an explanation of the deceleration of growth, this will hardly do, since without any comparable union militancy, the slow-down took hold in America as well. Elsewhere, the epochal change is attributed to the impact of discontinuous technological innovation and financial globalization. But these are never themselves causally grounded, remaining descriptions rather than historical explanations, in this much like regime change in Gillingham’s account.²⁹

Politically, of course, Eichengreen’s study is far more generally benevolent to Europe. His intellectual sympathies, more clearly on display in Globalizing Capital (1996), have lain not with Hayek, but Polanyi. The Hungarian was in nearly every way the antithesis of the Austrian, and the unstated difference is plain in The European Economy since 1945. The embedded liberalism of the post-war settlement that Gillingham treats as at best a provisional expedient, already laden with vices to come, becomes the notably effective and imaginative—unspontaneous—order of a coordinated capitalism, which only earns Eichengreen’s praise. His respect for what it represented persists to the end. Europe’s recent productivity record may not be so much worse than that of the US; if Americans earn more, Europeans are not necessarily worse off, since they enjoy more leisure and security, and are surrounded by less poverty and crime. The EU needs to adjust to intensive growth, but are not parts of it already showing the way? The Dutch and Irish, he suggests, have already got things more or less right, with neo-corporatist arrangements that combine fiscal discipline, wage moderation and hi-tech investment. Perhaps European capitalism may not have to renounce its habits of coordination after all, but merely slough off one set of them for another.

The suggestion, however, is half-hearted—more a wistful glance back than a confident look forwards. It is not just that in small countries like Holland or Ireland, external vulnerabilities have always favoured corporate solidarities not readily achievable elsewhere. Equally significant, what in each case Eichengreen singles out as the key to their success is essentially wage restraint. His general instruction to Europe for getting on board the train of intensive growth is the same. Labour must settle for less—flatter incomes, more wage dispersal, and less job security.³⁰ In other words, a standard neo-liberal package in just the ironically pejorative sense Gillingham gives the term.

The European Economy since 1945 ends by asking whether the EU could not adopt Anglo-Saxon-style financial markets—as it is now more or less sensibly doing—without following suit in its labour and product markets. That will depend, Eichengreen suggests, on whether further technical innovation in the next decades is incremental or radical. If it were the former, the European model would be open to reinvention; if the latter, international competition would probably force thoroughgoing Americanization. Formally, judgement is left suspended there. But substantively, there is no doubt which prospect is inscribed in the logic of the argument. Earlier, Eichengreen has already made clear that ‘comprehensive’ reform of the European model is required, and explained at length that enlargement of the EU provides it with an open-shop East to match the US South—obviously, to far larger potential dynamic effect than parish-pump concertation in Wassenaar or Dublin could ever furnish. So, too, he concedes that the probability is that technical innovation will continue to involve radical and discontinuous, rather than gentle or gradual, changes.³¹ Entailed, if never stated, is only one plausible outcome: that ultimately, the Old World is likely to be compacted into the shapes of the New.

From economics to sociology is a short step in the literature on the Union—no more than a stroll across the hall at Berkeley, to the office of Neil Fligstein, the author of the most ambitious study of the social underpinnings of European integration, misleadingly titled Euroclash.³² Taxing much discussion of the EU with too state-centred a focus, Fligstein sets his sights on a larger reality, ‘the creation of a European society’. This is not the same object as explored by scholars like Göran Therborn or Hartmut Kaelble, tracking social changes since the war in every domain of life across the continent.³³ Fligstein’s aim is to demonstrate, with a mass of carefully assembled statistical evidence, the emergence of something more specific: the sphere of social interactions created by, and tied to, European integration. What forms do these take? First and foremost, there is the market: the daily transactions of rising intra-European trade, and the increasing numbers of intra-European mergers and acquisitions, enabled—but also regulated—by the directives of Brussels, where business interests gather to press their cases and concerns, also in increasing numbers. ‘These figures tell a compelling story’, Fligstein writes, of how ‘trading, litigating, legislating and lobbying’—the ‘key indicators of European integration’—have grown over time.³⁴ Travel within Europe has steadily grown, to a point where by 1997 a quarter of the population of the pre-enlargement EU had been outside their native country in the past year. European-wide civic associations too—professional, scientific and non-governmental organizations—have multiplied. Culturally, two out of every three West Europeans can speak a second language; well over a million students have followed courses outside their homeland; degrees in higher education are gradually being harmonized.

But if a genuinely European society, distinct from the particular national communities that make up the EU, has crystallized, it is not shared equally by all inhabitants of the Union. Those who have materially benefitted most from integration, who interact socially most often across national borders, and who have the strongest sense of a collective European identity, form an upper-class minority, drawn from business, government, high-income professions and the academy. A larger middle class has only intermittent contact with life beyond local frontiers, while the lowest classes have little or none. Since these layers are the most exposed to the costs—however temporary—of economic integration, they are potential protesters against it. Undeniably, Europe has so far been—at any rate socially and culturally—a ‘class project’. A clash of interests could therefore break out over it, in conditions of economic crisis.³⁵

But though bannered in its title, the notion of a clash is purely virtual in Fligstein’s book, without any presence in it. In part this is because the lower classes, lacking any sense of a supranational identity, simply do not belong to the European society that is the focus of his work, and so fall outside its framework. But more fundamentally, it is because a force is at work within that society which transcends the possibility of any conflict of interests. For the upper classes that compose it do not just consist of the wealthy, with their often selfish attachment to their own good fortune, but also of a more selfless group, motivated by ideals—the educated. These, Fligstein suggests, are ‘the real moral engine of the EU’. For ‘at its core, one of the reasons that educated people support the European project is because the European values they espouse are identical with the Enlightenment values that have been a hallmark of educated people for over two hundred years. Indeed, if Europe stands for anything, it is the completion of the Enlightenment project of democracy, rule of law, respect for the differences of others, and the principles of rational discourse and science’.³⁶ With ethical guidelines as compelling as these, why should the Union fear division over mundane questions of relative advantage? As higher education spreads, more and more young people will study abroad, and ‘the best new jobs’ in a shifting economy will increasingly be ‘in services such as banking, real estate, and insurance’, or computer programming, requiring higher skills and paying higher salaries. Predictable sociological changes should of themselves create a more unified Europe, imbued more evenly with the values of the Enlightenment.

So glowing with enthusiasm for the forward-looking achievements of the Union is Fligstein that his work might have more aptly been entitled Eurodash. Again and again, he is ‘amazed’, as he recounts, at ‘the marvellous character of what has happened’. On page after page, the epithet ‘remarkable’ resounds like a compulsive refrain.³⁷ But triumphalism of vocabulary is not matched by coherence of construction. On the one hand, no more than ‘a very small number of people are deeply involved with other Europeans on a daily basis’, ‘only a tiny part of the population is directly involved’, while ‘the vast majority of Europeans still remain firmly tied to the nation’. On the other hand, those with ‘deep economic and social ties with their counterparts across Europe’ comprise 10 to 15 per cent of the inhabitants of the Union—that is: no less than 38 to 56 million people, or at the upper range more than the entire population of Britain or Italy, and not far short of that of France. As for those who are ‘partly European’, they compose another 40 to 50 per cent of the population—or getting on for 200 million.³⁸ The fantastical nature of these figures is the product of a switch of definitions. Whereas an emergent ‘European society’ is computed by intensity of actual social interactions, measured objectively, these inflated percentages are simply taken from opinion polls that asked people whether, notionally, they felt European or not. It goes without saying that the gap between the two is enormous. The reality answers to Fligstein’s first description, not his second. Those deeply involved, on a daily basis, with non-nationals form a very small minority of the citizens of the EU, one that has fallen since enlargement. To speak of them as a ‘society’, as if they composed a self-connecting whole, is a metaphor, not a truth.

That even this minority scarcely possesses much self-awareness of its existence is suggested by the appearance of Euroclash itself. American dominance of a field of work could hardly be more graphically expressed. In a bibliography of some 260 items, there is just one book in French, one in German. Even allowing for writing in English by Europeans—overwhelmingly from the cultures closest to the United States: Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands—the proportion of authors originating outside the Anglosphere is about one-seventh of the total. All central references to work on the Union in the body of the text itself are to American scholars. It would be wrong to impute this to parochialism. Fligstein has made use of what findings from the continent were material to his research. But here, as elsewhere, Europeans figure as under-labourers, whose work has been employed for a synthesis exceeding them.