The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea.

• Author: Weber, Eugen

As a by-product of recent moves toward some sort of international government, the direct control of the elector over national policy is becoming weaker. The spokesmen of the nation, meeting in council with those of other nations, may be outvoted or otherwise committed to agreements involving the country against the wishes of the electors.

- Christabel Pankhurst, Pressing Problems of the Closing Age (London, 1924)

A Specter is haunting Europe: the specter of Europe united, of nations abolished, of the administration of things replacing the government of people. It certainly haunts John Laughland, and he has written a book about it that is intriguing, meandering, uneven, not always persuasive even if you agree with much of its argument, as I do, but well worth the detour nevertheless.

Faced with declining competitiveness, low growth, mass unemployment, sclerotic and often corrupt political structures, European countries are undertaking to reproduce their present systems at a supra-national level rather than reform them at home. States limping from self-inflicted wounds hope to walk taller and farther in seven-league Maastricht boots. Political inability to tackle reforms will be overcome by technocratic rules and Common Market protection. A European bloc will cushion the continent against world competition. Business suffocating from overregulation will find a second breath in a broader economic space where everyone will be burdened with similar disabilities. Was this what Churchill meant when, in his great 1946 speech at Zurich, he called for the building of "a kind of United States of Europe"?

The first step in that building process would be a partnership between France and Germany. European integration, the French thought, was the only safe way to contain Germany. European integration, the Germans thought, was the only honorable way for post-Nazi Germany to rejoin the comity of nations. The notion was hardly new. Churchill himself spoke of a re-creation. For supra-local groups - nobles, merchants, clerks, soldiers of fortune - Europe had always been the stage of their activities. Nation-states, really a nineteenth-century conception, competed with broader visions, new and old, but never eliminated them. Victor Hugo imagined a federal European republic. In 1894, a sensible scientist, the astronomer Camille Flammarion, surmised a United States of Europe in place by the twenty-fifth century. Others expected it sooner and, after the First World War had demonstrated what disunion could do, talk of European unity became common.

Some propounded customs unions, others pan-European union, while the French foreign minister, Aristide Briand, proposed "the establishment of a common market aiming to raise the level of human well-being on all the territories of the European community." Laughland does not cite Briand's memorandum of May 1, 1930, where this passage occurs, and he may be right not to do so, for governmental responses were discouraging. Only Yugoslavia and Bulgaria approved the initiative, which died stillborn. According to Laughland's sources in a rather foreshortened account, Briand was trying to keep in check a Germany that France alone could not control. Gustav Stressemann, who died in 1929, wanted to make up by diplomatic means the losses Germany had incurred shortly before. Self-interest is a sound motive for political action. But, pace Pankhurst, such action was not yet on the agenda of serious statesmen. When Richard yon...