The New Old World Read Free

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

I. THE UNION

 

ORIGINS

1995
    Mathematically, the European Union today represents the largest single unit in the world economy. It has a nominal GNP of about $6 trillion, compared with $5 trillion for the US and $3 trillion for Japan. Its total population, now over 360 million, approaches that of the United States and Japan combined. Yet in political terms such magnitudes continue to be virtual reality. Beside Washington or Tokyo, Brussels remains a cipher. The Union is no equivalent to either the United States or Japan, since it is not a sovereign state. But what kind of formation is it? Most Europeans themselves are at a loss for an answer. The Union remains a more or less unfathomable mystery to all but a handful of those who, to their bemusement, have recently become its citizens. Well-nigh entirely arcane to ordinary voters, a film of mist obscures it even in the mirror of scholars.
1
    The nature of the European Union must have some relation to the origins of the Community which it now subsumes—although, in a typically alembicated juridical twist, does not supersede. Some political clarity about the genesis of its structure seems desirable as a starting-point for considering its future. This is a topic on which there is still no uncontroversial ground. The historical literature has from the outset tended to be unusually theoretical in bent—a clear sign that few familiar assumptions can be taken for granted. The dominant early scholarship held to the view that the forces underlying thepost-war integration of Western Europe should be sought in the growth of objective—not only economic, but also social and cultural—interdependencies between the states that made up the initial Coal and Steel Community and its sequels. The tenor of this first wave of interpretation was neo-functionalist, stressing the additive logic of institutional development: that is, the way modest functional changes tended to lead to complementary alterations along an extending path of often involuntary integration. Cross-national convergence of economic transactions, social exchanges and cultural practices had laid the basis for gradual advance towards a new political ideal—a supranational union of states. Ernst Haas, who thought the beginnings of this process relatively contingent, but its subsequent development path-determined, produced in the late fifties what is still perhaps the best theorization of this position in his
Uniting of Europe
.
    The second wave of interpretations, by contrast, has stressed the structural resilience of the nation-state, and seen the post-war integration of Western Europe not as a glide-path towards any supranational sovereignty, but on the contrary as the means of reinvigorating effective national power. This neo-realist theme comes in a number of different versions, not all of them concordant. Far the most powerful and distinctive is the work of Alan Milward. There is some irony in the fact that the country which has contributed least to European integration should have produced the historian who has illuminated it most. No other scholar within the Union approaches the combination of archival mastery and intellectual passion that Milward has brought to the question of its origins.
    His starting-point was at a productive tangent to it. Why, he asked,