Book Review: The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe by David Marquand

• Author: Glyn Morgan
• Date: 01 August 2013
• Published date: 01 August 2013
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591713485378
• Subject Matter: Books in Review

680 Political Theory 41(4)

The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe, David Marquand.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. 204 pp. $24.95.

Reviewed by: Glyn Morgan, Maxwell School, Syracuse University

DOI: 10.1177/0090591713485378

One wonders what David Runciman saw in this book, when he blurbed that

the author “succeeds admirably in showing where Europe might be headed.”

There are, to be sure, admirable aspects of this book. But when one cuts

through the elegant prose, the lightly worn erudition, and the sober assess-

ment of Europe’s current problems, it’s clear that the author has no idea

where Europe is headed. There’s nothing wrong in that. Futurology has

always been a mug’s game that political theorists have done well not to play.

Despite its misleading subtitle, David Marquand’s new book is not really

about the future of Europe, but about the present. Like everyone else writing

about Europe these days, Marquand wants to explain how Europe got itself

into such a mess.

Marquand’s argument can be summarized very quickly.

Verdun and Auschwitz are the twin catastrophes that animated the postwar

European project. The construction of the European Union (EU) was a splen-

did success until about 2005, when problems set in. Ultimately, these prob-

lems stem from four great ambiguities that its founding fathers failed to

resolve: ethnocultural nationalism, national sovereignty, territorial boundar-

ies, and democratic politics. Marquand urges Europeans to confront these

ambiguities by way of an open and searching public debate. To facilitate this

debate, Marquand recommends a directly elected EU president, a stronger

EU parliament, and greater scope for plebiscites.

Marquand is absolutely correct to highlight these four ambiguities. He is

unquestionably correct, when he says that “a fudge” at the start of the project

helped build consensus, but that this “fudge” now holds Europe back (p. 52).

Unfortunately, Marquand neglects to mention a fifth ambiguity, which in

many respects is the most important of the lot: welfare capitalism. Europe’s

political architects never came to terms with the preconditions of a successful

form of welfare capitalism. They never confronted Friedrich von Hayek’s

argument that a multinational federation would lack the solidarity to sustain

a cross-national redistributive welfare state. In his brief discussion of the EU,

John Rawls drew exactly the same conclusion. But whereas Hayek advocated

a multinational federation to thwart a redistributive welfare state; Rawls

advocated a Europe of nation-states. Only in a nation-state, so Rawls argued,

would a redistributive welfare state be feasible.1