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If these stand as currently the most authoritative economic and social prognoses of the Union, what do the rival historical theories of integration as a political process have to say about the present, in the wake of the rejection of the European Constitution? Moravcsik, as might be expected, allows no doubts to cloud an unfailingly sunny vista. The Union has just completed its most successful decade ever, with an enlargement to the east that has cost little and required no significant modification of its already satisfactory institutions. These continue to deliver policies which, he can inform satisfied readers of Prospect, are ‘in nearly all cases, clean, transparent, effective and responsive to the demands of European citizens’.³⁹ What then of the Constitution? Little more than an unnecessary exercise in public relations, whose demise, far from representing a failure of the EU, actually demonstrates its stability and success.

But isn’t there any democratic deficit in the Union? None whatever—the very question arises from a confusion. The EU deals with issues best handled by experts, of little direct concern to voters: trade barriers, rules of competition, product regulations, legal adjudication, foreign assistance. Insulation of such areas from popular decision-making is not just practicable, it is desirable. Citizens understand this: they have little respect for their parties or parliaments, but hold their armies, courts and police in high regard. Those political issues people do care about, because they are directly affected by them—essentially, tax-rates and social services—are decided at national level, as they should be, where the Union, lacking any independent fiscal base or civil administration, does not impinge. In its own sphere, however, the EU needs to be shielded from demagogic interference by referenda or other hopeless attempts at direct democratic decision-making. ‘Forcing participation is likely to be counterproductive, because the popular response is condemned to be ignorant, irrelevant and ideological’.⁴⁰ In any case, the wish to democratize the Union is bound to fail, because ‘it runs counter to our consensual social scientific understanding of how advanced democracies actually work’⁴¹ (italics in original). For we should never forget that ‘political learning, mobilization, deliberation and participation are extremely expensive for rational citizens’.⁴² Fortunately, the masses realize this themselves, declining to pay the high costs in time and attention that interest in EU affairs would require. They would quickly turn against any effort to get them more involved: far from enhancing the legitimacy of the Union, schemes to democratize it would only render it less popular. Such features of the defunct Constitution as might be of some use can be quietly infiltrated through national parliaments without attracting undue public attention, for ‘the EU’s greatest tactical advantage is that is, in a word, so boring’.⁴³

As a casuistic for chloroforming any residual trace of popular will, these avowals have the merit of candour. But if the legitimacy of the Union does not lie in some inappropriate democracy, what is its raison d’être? Moravcsik’s answer—as we have seen above—is commendably straightforward: ‘The EU is overwhelmingly about the promotion of free markets. Its primary interest group support comes from multinational firms, not least US ones’.⁴⁴ Or, more bluntly still: ‘The EU is basically about business’.⁴⁵ So it should remain. The neo-liberal bias of the Union is ‘justified’, for no responsible analyst believes current national welfare systems in Europe are sustainable.⁴⁶ Nor can or should they be rearticulated at Union level. ‘Social Europe is a chimera’. In its perfect rationality, on the other hand, actually-existing Europe is the best of all international regimes.

Moravcsik’s Panglossian outlook is alien to Gillingham. Far from any triumphalism, the diagnosis of the current state of the Union offered by his Design for a New Europe (2006) tends towards an extreme alarmism. The repudiation of the Constitution at the polls is stark evidence of a crisis in the legitimacy of the EU, and one for which there is good reason. Since the era of Delors, bureaucratic corruption, prejudice and meddling have been hallmarks of the unaccountable Commission in Brussels, where only the internal market and competition portfolios have retained integrity. The Parliament in Strasbourg remains an impotent talking-shop. For much of the time the Council has been hi-jacked by absurd French projects such as a global positioning system in outer space to rival the comprehensive American one already in existence, not to speak of rotten deals to extend the life of a moribund Common Agricultural Policy. What credibility could such a retrograde and venal contraption enjoy? The essentially simple tasks of negative integration have been perverted into a machinery of such complexity and opacity that few citizens can make head or tail of it.

Worse, in its resistance to scientific advances in agriculture, the EU has sunk into actual obscurantism. The blockade by Brussels of GM crops—Monsanto, the world’s leading producer of them, is based in St Louis—represents a ne plus ultra of statist ignorance and incompetence. The same Canute-like attitude threatens to render the EU incapable of coping with the two greatest challenges it faces today: on the one hand, the momentous transformations under way as a new scientific revolution makes info-, nano- and bio-technology the cutting edge of industrial innovation; on the other, the entry of vast reserves of cheap labour into the world market, available for mass production of traditional goods at much lower prices than in the past. Lagging behind US in the first, Europe is already under pressure from China, tomorrow perhaps India or Brazil, in the second.

Less publicly discussed, it is the former that is more critical. Confronted with technological changes comparable to those of the Industrial Revolution, blurring ‘the very distinctions between plants and animals, the animate and inanimate, and even life and death’, the EU has been incapable of unleashing the market dynamism needed to compete with these.⁴⁷ What is to be done? Gillingham’s remedies are draconian. Certainly, the abolition of the CAP and liberalization of services are essential. But beyond such measures, whose necessity has so often been bruited without being acted on, more radical changes are required: nothing less than a true ‘bonfire of inanities’ that would wind up regional funds, ditch the euro, downsize the Commission, flog off the buildings in Brussels, and convert the Parliament into a small and harmless consultative body. Ideally stretching from Ireland to the Ukraine, a free-trade zone encumbered with no more rules or bureaucrats than EFTA of old, such a Europe would reclaim and extend democracy as the true final purpose of integration.

The exasperation of these proposals—half tongue in cheek?—has something of the spirit of the more uncompromising passages in Hayek. But in another sense, they depart from his legacy quite sharply. Hayek’s vision of ‘inter-state federalism’, as he called it, was expressly designed to safeguard the free workings of the market from democracy, against whose dangers he was always on his guard, preferring to envisage a ‘demarchy’ dispensing with the fetish of universal suffrage.⁴⁸ His reasoning was just that which would take shape in the European Central Bank—that the higher above national sovereignty regulation of the market could be raised, the more insulated it would be from electoral pressures for state intervention or redistribution from below. For his disciple to turn the argument round, as if the aim of integration, rightly conceived, were to promote democracy rather than protect us from it, is a whimsical move. But beyond further enlargement—Gillingham writes with special sympathy for the Ukraine, not the most popular candidate in Brussels—it remains a gesture without institutional specification.

Design for a New Europe abstains from any scheme that might be taxed with constructivism. What it offers is, in effect, a sweeping demolition plan—negative integration as gelignite under Commission, Parliament, Structural Funds and Monetary Union alike. The extremity of these proposals reflects the baffled note on which Gillingham’s large history of European integration concludes. For what his narrative cannot explain is why the forces liberated by regime change should suddenly fade at the end of the story—true liberals vanishing, leaving behind only governments without conviction in deadlock with oppositions without a future. The balance of social forces below the surface of political events is missing.

In their prescriptive upshots, the accounts of the EU offered by Moravcsik and Gillingham are polar opposites. One would keep everything as it is. The other would level much of it to the ground. Behind such divergences lie two contrasting outlooks, each devoted to the market, but differing completely in their conceptions of public life. The first conceives politics as if it were little more than a branch of economics, subject to the same kind of calculus of utilities and predictability of outcomes. The second, by contrast, seeks to insulate economics as far as possible from politics, as a system whose spontaneous workings can only be impaired, and risk being destroyed, by government intervention of any kind. Here consequences, in any important sense, are always unintended: to benign effect in the market, to ironic or malign effect, for the most part, in the state. One of J.G.A. Pocock’s most formidable essays, and his longest, is a historical reconstruction of ‘the varieties of Whiggism’. The varieties of liberalism have not been less. Curiously, in the galaxy of current versions, Europe might be described as a virtual object of predilection. Among these, ‘liberal inter-governmentalism’ and ‘classical liberalism’ are by no means the last word.