The UK’s certain idea of Europe.
A USE maybe attainable. But the hurdles along the path towards it are innumerable, and as likely as not unknown. Not the least of these is that a USE would be at the very early stage of merging political cultures, which remain far apart. Only a futuristic vision of Europe would underestimate the likely effect of seeking to mingle Sicilian, north German and Jacobin political cultures. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair is one such Candide: “The case for Europe remains rooted”, former Prime Minister Blair declared in his Brexit speech at Bloomberg, “not in understanding the past but the future.” All over the globe, “to maintain strength and influence, to defend their interests adequately, nations of our size will cooperate based on proximity.” [1] This was the case that Prime Minister Harold MacMillan advanced to the House of Commons in 1961 in proposing to join the EEC. Through the “pooling” of sovereignty, British influence would be augmented on the world stage. [2]
As the great Anglo-Irish statesman, Edmund Burke reminds us, you govern by political consent.[3] This is the key ingredient of EU governance that is missing not just in the United Kingdom, but also in other member states, most notably in France, the fons et origo of the supra-national European project.[4]
The British position for a sustainable regime for Europe has been advanced by at least two Prime Ministers in recent years, and it contrasts strongly to the UK’s official embrace of supra-nationalism. Both of them place parliamentary democracy centre stage. In her Bruges speech of September 1988, Thatcher outlined a Europe based on “willing and active cooperation between independent sovereign states”, a more united Europe “which preserves the different traditions, parliamentary powers and sense of national pride in one’s own country; for these have been the source of Europe’s vitality through the centuries.” [5] A quarter of a century later, Cameron, in his Bloomberg speech of January 2013, [6] argued for an EU “of free member states …(whose)… national parliaments…are…and will remain, the true source of real democratic legitimacy and accountability in the European Union”.
Helmut Kohl, Germany’s Chancellor of Unity, has a rather different vision for Europe. The EU, he writes in his book, Sorge um Europa, [7] is first and foremost a peace project, which seeks to embed freedom, with democracy, respect of human rights, the rule of law, ensure social stability and prosperity, and a sense of responsibility for the rest of the world. The project’s aim must be a united, decentralized, democratic and effective Europe, where decisions are taken close to the immediate concerns of its citizens, and therefore on a federal basis. “No one, Kohl argues, wants concentration of powers in a centralized bureaucratic mammoth institution, which increasingly distances itself from the member states and citizens of Europe,..”. Equally, there can be no turning back of clocks to the chauvinism of the nineteenth century, against which, he argues, the EU is the best protection. That EU must be federal, and cannot be predicated on “the idea of a loose alliance of independent, sovereign states, without being capped by a political Europe. Such an idea is outdated and no solution. History, he argues with passion, teaches that our continent has suffered long enough under the rivalry of European nations”.
So much for the UK preference of a European alliance of democratic states. Kohl’s was the idea that prevailed in the Brussels, Paris and Berlin of January 2013, when Cameron made his Bloomberg proposals for a Europe of “free member states”. The only Europe on offer was a German version of Europe. As mentioned previously, following the 2010 Euro crisis, a consensus emerged that the only option was for deeper integration. There could be no going backwards to national currencies. That meant securing the future of the Euro; imposing fiscal virtue on all through the EU’s Fiscal Compact; moving to an EU federation;[8] and a programme that envisaged deeper financial, fiscal, and political union in the Euro area by 2017, and full union by 2025.[9]In October 2015, President Hollande and Chancellor Merkel both addressed the European Parliament in a show of solidarity for “more Europe”.[10] “If (you) don’t want a stronger Europe,” Hollande said in reference to the UK, “the only possible path is simply to leave Europe.”
The June 23 vote followed by Prime Minister May’s invoking of Article 50 in the Lisbon Treaty, launches the process whereby the UK leaves the EU. By the terms of the article, it is de facto no longer in the EU. It is in limbo, with the EU claiming that its law prevails for the duration of the two years, and the UK claiming that it is once again in charge of its own affairs.
What has been lost on the British and continental media is that the EU has lost the one member whose official position is pure supra-nationalist. The barrier to achieving the federal/supranational vision of Europe can no longer be identified as a foot-dragging UK. The barriers are now within the 27 remaining member states.
Two in particular. One is France, where the public is much more Eurosceptical than the UK. The Pew Research Center records that 63% of people interviewed in France hold Eurosceptical views, compared to the UK’s 48%, and an equal figure in Germany, Italy and not too different from once hyper-pro EU Spain. [11]
Why such hostility in France? I gave a lecture in INSEAD around April 1983, one month after President Mitterrand decided to align the franc on the DM. My message was from now on out French policy, performance and preferences are going to have to align on those of Modell Deutschland. For that to happen, the political culture of France-in short the way in which the role of the state, the functioning of markets, how people judged both-would have to align on that of Germany. The political culture of France, though, is composed of its deep Catholic inheritance; the echoes of the 1572 St.Bartholomew’s Massacre; the Jacobin ideas of Robespierre; Napoleon’s vision of a Europe united by hostile takeover; the Dreyfus affair; the war of 1914-18, and the defeat of 1940, and the humiliation of Vichy, etched deep in the heart of older people, many of whom are my oldest friends. French political culture may have evolved within the kaleidoscope of its own components, but it has not changed since 1983, despite the introduction of the Euro and the Lisbon Treaty.
The Pew Research results also show that Euroscepticism is alive and well in Germany. This may seem paradoxical in a country where people as politically different as Kohl and Schulz can both sing from the same, or from very similar hymn sheets. The European project is indeed a peace project. Kohl and his predecessor, Helmut Schmidt, are right to evoke the outbreak of 1914. Indeed , Christopher Clarke, the author of The Sleepwalkers, ends his book on the way that Europe went to war, by comparing the Europe of 2010, to that of 1914.[12] Little had changed, he observes. Such considerations no doubt feed the drive, under German leadership, towards “more Europe”.
But at the same time, it is worth recording, as I have argued, that the European depression of 2010 to 2017 has been politically driven. It is not a crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis in relations between the northern member states-Germany, The Netherlands, and Finland- and France and the Mediterranean countries. The first insist on no bail-out; the second reiterate their preference for a Transferunion. The upshot is a silent battle in the ECB TARGET2 mechanism, whereby surplus current account countries build up credits to current account deficit countries. If the ECB did not finesse the rules to keep the Euro show on the road, -creating thereby plenty of Angst among German economists and citizens that their taxes resources are at stake- the global financial markets may have long since adjudged that these credits would never be honoured in many months of Sundays.
For the fact of the matter is that in a federal Europe, with a large fiscal budget, and all the accoutrements of statehood, Germany, as the largest economy, would very likely be on the hook for payouts. And Germany would be in a minority, surrounded in eastern Europe by much poorer countries; in the south, by late developing countries, like Spain, Portugal and Greece and by France and Italy with inflationary traditions. It is very difficult to imagine the good burgers of Deutschland opting for a federal EU where they would be on tap for more taxes.
We are where we are because of the ascent of Germany, the weakness of France, and the fact that the UK public has balked at the gradual suffocation of Westminster, of the UK inherited constitution, and of UK liberties. There is also the belief, anchored in the minds of the projects supporters on the continent, that time is not on their side. Their belief is that any “turning back of the clock” to a Europe of nation states is tantamount to conjuring conflict back into the heart of Europe. Nation states are, modern day progressives believe-in contradiction to their ancestors of a century ago- sources of division, not vehicles of democracy, as Dahrendorf believed. They are to be surpassed and muffled, not given voice and substance.
Two Europes.
There are two fundamental visions for a European peace system: the multilateral once championed by the Attlee government after the war, and the supra-national one championed by Jean Monnet, paid lip service to by member state governments, partly enacted, and whole heartedly embraced by Europe’s most enthusiastic Europeans, our own British supra-nationalists. As Heath told Ken Clarke, he believed that the days of nation states were over. A very large proportion of the British people do not agree.
These two visions of Europe, the one a British version of de Gaulle’s l’Europe des patries, and the other a USE, have been present at least since the Hague conference of 1948. What both share is to ensure peace and prosperity among Europeans. Where their disagreements have become strained is over the means to do so. Which format is the more likely to deliver the ambition?
To answer, let us say that Europe holds four distinct, but related, features.
- The first feature is the shared cultural inheritance from Greece and Rome, the now distant roots of a sense of Europe as Christendom, [13] the rediscovery of the ancient world in the Renaissance, and the shattering of European unity when Luther, in October 1517, may have posted his ninety-five theses on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, followed by the first Brexit of Henry VIII in 1528, the religious wars of the following century, and the re-composition of a politically fragmented continent under the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Those were the centuries that gave rise to the extraordinary flourishing of European literature and music, which is now shared around the world, and that inspired the lives of such European leaders as Churchill, de Gaulle, Schmidt or Heath. As Ralph Dahrendorf wrote, when Europeans meet outside of Europe, they know instinctively they are from the same civilization.[14]
- Second, Europe is a mosaic of interdependent peoples and states sharing an overall common inheritance, and for the first time in centuries adhering to common precepts of legitimacy (the non-confessional state, constitutional government, rule of law, freedom of expression..), but in practice highly differentiated by language, religious sensitivities, historical myths-better described as living realities-as well as tax systems, economic activities and national political and economic structures. The states follow the precept of self-help to secure their own survival and prosperity, [15] but co-exist as sovereigns in a system of which they form an inescapable part. [16] The greater powers are distinguished from the rest by the resources at their command, the respect paid them, and by the fact that no conflict of significance in the system may be settled without them.[17] If any power aspires to dominance, the others tend to re-align to frustrate its ambitions.
As European influence spread across the globe, these principles and practices, adumbrated initially in the Treaty of Westphalia, have become central to international law and to the prevailing world order. A characteristic of this system is that the states seek to ensure a delicate balance between co-operation, and competition. Given the fragmentation of imperfectly integrated world markets into separate political units, commerce is beneficial between them, but could also prove threatening dependent on the terms of trade and on economic performance. Divergent performance has fed the rise and decline of powers in a constant rearrangement of their rank and status. [18]
- Third, diplomacy between the sovereign states is Europe’s politics. Historically, diplomacy meant the conduct of bilateral relations between sovereign states. The broad objective was to further the interests of the state, through negotiations where possible; by the building of alliances, or if all else failed by war. But failure to prevent the outbreak of war in August 1914, and again in September 1939, combined with the advent of mass politics in the early decades of the twentieth century, prompted Europeans to shift the emphasis of diplomacy to focus more on reconciling differences in domestic political arrangements. The substance of post-1945 relations among European states has been more about welfare, trade and non tariff barriers, and less about grand strategy. Following withdrawal from their overseas empires, that was left more than ever to the United States, as Europe’s prime protector. So deeply has the United States become integrated into the European diplomatic system, it is not exaggerated to say that the US is also Europe’s prime power.
There is a seeming paradox here. Geographically, the US is an island continent, apart from Europe. But it holds diplomatic relations with all European states, either on a bilateral basis or through the multiple international organizations which have been set up after the war to ensure the peace and to further prosperity. Equally, because all European states are recognized sovereigns on the global scene, international diplomacy between its member states and their diverse external partners remains an integral part of intra-European politics. One of the major frustrations of those pushing ahead to a fully fledged federal European entity is that given the constant reality of global diplomacy, non European powers are permanent participants in intra European politics. That may well constitute one of the factors informing the EU’s ambitions to grasp for an ever wider spectrum of competences, despite promises to ensure “subsidiarity” (bringing decisions close to citizens) and despite ever scarcer means to implement an ever wider pallet of policies. [19]
- Fourth, the prime motive for the reconstitution of a European diplomatic system after 1945 is to create a polity from which war is excluded. [20] There are at least two components of this diplomatic system. The first was put in place by the Attlee government as the prime European partner to the United States, and was predicated on the creation of multilateral organizations: the UN, the Council of Europe, GATT, the regeneration of the BIS, the OEEC, the North Atlantic Treaty followed by NATO in 1950. These institutions covered a variety of functional areas of significance to participating states, from human rights to trade, finance and security, but were all designed to better help states fulfill their multiple functions through international co-operation. They operated on a presumption of co-operation, and in particular on the accountability of member state governments to national parliaments.
In 1950, the French government came forward with a very different concept of regional integration with the proposal for a supranational coal and steel community (ECSC). The ECSC, inspired by jean Monnet, the indefatigable “inspirer”(in de Gaulle’s description) of European supranational integration, is the ancestor to the defunct EDC, Euratom, and the Rome Treaty, with its subsequent development through the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, and the Lisbon Treaty of 2009. The guiding idea here was that Europe’s problems were due to the existence of national states. Their existence, the argument ran and runs, tends to fragment the European market space; drive up costs through duplication; perpetuate intra European rivalries in a variety of ways; ensure that the rule of law is politicized; and perpetuate, it is argued, Europe’s continued dwarfing on the world stage. Unless we united, the message runs, we will be crushed by the emerging giants of the twenty first century, and dominated by Uncle Sam.
The guiding idea of this supra-national vision is that nationalism caused the wars of the first part of the century, and hence that nation states should be subsumed into a large entity, a USE. It is this model which is in crisis (not the model based on multilateral organisations of sovereign states).
Jean Monnet, the founding father of the EU, considered in the light of his experience from two world wars, that the crowds of democracy had to be kept at bay, tamed, and their enthusiasms channelled. That could best be done by élites from member states gathering in enclave to settle complex business in the European interest. The pre-1939 British Liberal élites were in entire agreement.[21]
There are a number of foundational flaws in this design. First, as more and more legislative powers accrue to EU institutions, member state powers have been hollowed out, without the EU gaining in legitimacy, while voters’ rights to sanction legislators have been seriously impaired.[22] Second, the collectivity of the EU grasps for an ever wider spectrum of competences, despite promises to ensure “subsidiarity” (bringing decisions close to citizens) and despite inadequate means to implement an ever wider pallet of policies. [23] Third, any means is good to advance the cause. No matter than the EU goes for monetary union first, and political union second—a complete reversal of America’s experience where the US came first and the single currency came a century and a half later. No matter that frontiers are opened wide, first, and then policing the frontier comes as an after thought. Fourth, and most important of all, most European citizens remain firmly national or even local/regional in their loyalties. As recorded in the Commission’s own publication, Eurobarometer, 2% of EU citizens view themselves as “Europeans” only, with a scant 6% regarding their European identity as more important than their national identity. [24]
As the late Peter Mair has pointed out, the EU does not do opposition. Member states do, though. Their constitutional democracies institutionalize public debate, often involving fierce differences in opinion, expressed in parliaments, in the media, through the regular drumbeat of electoral battlegrounds where opponents gather their armies to capture office, if not power, in the hope that they can implement their particular programmes and sanction them in the name of the national interest.
It is this gap between the turbulent democratic politics of member states, and the supranational/federal ambition to create a USE in an apolitical space, that has opened wide in the years following the financial crash of 2008, followed by the Greek drama of 2010, the European depression, mass immigration and the vote for Brexit on June 23 2016.
Two forces are at work here:
- the dynamic of globalization, taking protean shape from multinationals, to global terror and social media, exerts constant but differentiating impact on European societies;
- at the same time, there are the ever more urgent demands from within member states that their citizens should have a greater say in shaping public policies.
The UK is no exception to the workings of such pressures. However, what was specific to the vote of June 23 was the British public’s rediscovery of its own constitution. The High Court and Supreme Court judgements (November 2016; January 2017) confirmed that only an Act of Parliament, not decisions by the executive, could overturn the Act that took Britain into the EEC. As Lord Neuberger stated, “To proceed otherwise would be a breach of settled constitutional principles stretching back many centuries.”[25]
The forty-three years of British membership in the EU incubated a constitutional crisis. Entry according to the terms of 1972 European Communities Act helped to further centralise power in Whitehall, and to bypass parliament. But this was at odds with fundamental constitutional principles, and in turn undermined support both for the United Kingdom and for the EU. As Prime Minister May points out in her 12-point speech on Brexit,[26]
“… Parliamentary Sovereignty is the basis of our unwritten constitutional settlement. …. The public expect to be able to hold their governments to account very directly, and as a result supra-national institutions as strong as those created by the European Union sit very uneasily in relation to our political history and way of life.”
For Britain’s European partners, the vote of June 23 stands as a warning that the European project can only flourish if national democracy is placed at its heart. Many would say that it already is, and the result is incompatible domestic imperatives, in particular between France and Germany. The favoured exit from this debilitating condition for Europe as a whole is sen as progress towards a federal endgame. The problem is that there are a multiplicity of unknowns. In the UK, as in other member states, there is minimal support for this programme. Which is not to say that Macron-Merkel, in a wave of enthusiasm, could propel the continent along that path.
That is why the option of a European alliance of constitutional sovereign states, remains on the table whatever happens in the forthcoming negotiations on Brexit and on “more Europe”. It is inherent to the complex realities of Europe in a way that a federal endgame, or the present muddle-in-the-middle, is not.
It is of course possible to argue that staying in the present muddle is perfectly viable; Germany for the reasons adumbrated is likely to push for its own vision of a semi federal-like system atop the member states, of which Germany is the most powerful; meanwhile, the workings of the Commission, Parliament and Court of Justice, will de facto lead to a gradual extension of powers and influence. Sooner or later, the depression will end, and the European economy, more integrated than ever, will start humming again. A certain form of unity can be fashioned by setting up the UK as the scapegoat. The logic is that if the UK is shown to suffer by leaving, other member states will think twice before emulating it.
This of course begs a fundamental political question: by what right do you rule? The EU of the present muddle in the middle has difficulty answering this because it is created to be run by experts. But experts have talked nonsense, promised much, and delivered little. Saying that the member states are to blame is partly true; but it is also true that pooling all these different states into one EU is the heart of the project. The not unsurprising result is that, as that objective seems to be approached, all of Europe‘s multiple histories, complex interdependencies, diplomatic preferences and visions of how best to manage the continent’s affairs have been or are becoming aggregated in the EU’s internal affairs. Yet there is no European political culture; no powerful European institutions; no credible European voice in world affairs; no military cohesion to give the EU’s word clout on the world stage. The EU is a fierce Potemkin village. Fierce, that is, out of its weakness.
It may prove that June 23 was the best thing that ever happened to the project. The UK is once again able to affirm the legitimacy of its own, evolving institutions. Euroland has no hindrance but itself to completing the journey to a federal endgame. In this scenario, a confidant UK prospers as a close ally of a federal Euroland, with associated member states in various relationships to the EU core.
This is possible, but to get through to a federal formula would mean leaping over multiple hurdles, not least that of the German Constitutional Court as guardian of the democratic rights of German citizens; German citizens lack of a sense of solidarity with Greece or France; not to speak of the revolutionary changes that would be required for France to move beyond talking “Europe”, to actually being an enthusiastic province in a USE. At the USE”s heart and centre would be Germany. Worried backward glances to August 1914 still haunt its leaders.
That is why the coming negotiations between the aspiring Union of Europe and the still United Kingdom could readily degenerate into serious conflict. But they are also a major opportunity to restructure Europe in a sustainable and co-operative system.
This is very different from the evident propensity in some EU circles to stick it to the UK as a way of threatening other member states who have similar ideas of leaving. It is so easy to use the UK as a scapegoat. Goebbels used to do so with some success. He also argued that “the balance of power” was a cunning Anglo Saxon ploy to divide and rule. The echoes of his lies still rumble around Europe. The corollary is that the EU should play on UK divisions: prize northern Ireland into the arms of Dublin; give Spain sway over the final deal in return for Gibraltar; or wish Scotland independence. One does not have to be a genius to recognize that the EU is quite prepared to play on UK domestic differences, to the point of actively promoting what used to be called treason, while insisting that the EU27 stand as a block against the UK’s presumed tactics of divide and rule. Old prejudices run deep in Europe.
That would be to vindicate those of us who for some time have considered that perhaps Europe(s leaders, bread over seventy years of peace, are political dwarfs. My recommendation is that we do not wait for troubled times to take over, and in the course of events, provide the context for a race of supermen or superwomen to emerge. Better that our d-warfs put in stilts and do their best.
There best is to do their duty by their peoples. That means governing by consent. Heath presumed to risk not, and Cameron put the proposition to the test of referendum. He should have read John Locke’s Two Treatises, the bible of the Glorious Revolution which created the modern world: “there can be but one Supream Power, which is the Legislative to which all the rest are and must be subordinate, yet…there remains still in the people a Supream Power to remove or alter the Legislative”.[27]
These ideas were given their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence: “Men are naturally free…the Governments of the world…were made by the consent of the People…whenever the legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power(the People) are thereby absolved from any further obedience”.
This is the test that the European Union faces. It is not size, clout, punching its weight in the world, that counts. Without political consent, the mightiest construct is nothing. Maybe a European construct can be achieved. But it is likely to be achieved in tandem with the UK, not against it. And it is likely to be achieved only if the centuries’ old tradition of the United Kingdom becomes central to the thinking and action of the possible future European Union. Paradoxically, the UK and the EU are both in the same boat. The disunited Kingdom has to recover from the creeping constitutional crisis EU membership has promoted. The EU 27 have to remember that consent is the key to sustainability.
That can only be through ditching much of the present EU, downsizing, focusing, and above all rooting the legitimacy of a new Europe in the constitutional states of Europe. A European alliance of constitutional states is the only viable option against an aggravation of Realpolitik, the dominance of Germany, the fostering of inter-state conflicts and the muffling of constitutional democracy in the member states.
The great shadow overhanging Europe is the memory of 1914 and 1939. These are the ghosts at the European table. Their terrible history inhabits all of modern Europe. It is obviously foolish to say that it is “unimaginable” that war can return to Europe: of course it can. But it is also foolish to ignore that Europeans are only too aware of what war means, and of how much they benefit by their seventy year peace. Putting constitutional democracy at the heart of the European peace system is what statesmen should think about. What is patently obvious, as Dahrendorf implied, is that Mitterrand did not trust Germany’s constitutional democracy to be anything else than domineering. But he chose a path, monetary union, which ensured that Germany held all the cards.
Britain’s favoured Europe is a European alliance of constitutional states, with some of the features carried over from the EU, but slimmed down, and much more accommodating to its diversity. This vision is respectful of the European legacy, diverse, obstinate, not amenable to one-size-fits all policy. It requires Europe to have the confidence whenever a future Henry Kissinger asks “who should I ring up if I want to talk to Europe”. “Henry that’s your problem”.
We have some way to go before we can say that.. It does not mean persisting in trying to make Europe into what it is not. It does not mean, as Tony Blair proposes, that “the case for Europe remains rooted, not in understanding the past but the future.” Rather, the future European polity, to prosper, has to be sui generis, unlike any other. That is the true challenge facing the Merkel-Macron tandem.
[1] “Tony Blair’s Brexit speech, full transcript”, The Spectator, February 17, 2017.
[2] Miriam Camps, Britain and the European Community: 1955-1963, Princetion, Pricneton University Press, 1965(reprint). p.359.
[3] Connor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody, Minerva, London, 1992 ; more recently, Jesse Norman, Edmund Burke : Philosopher, Politician, Prophet, William Collins, London, 2013 .
[4] Bruce Stokes, Euroskepticism beyond Brexit: Significant opposition in key European countries to an ever closer EU , Pew Research Center, June 7, 2016.
[5] This thesis is exposed in Eric Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economics and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, Cambridge University Press, 2003. 3rd Edition.
[6] https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/eu-speech-at-bloomberg
[7] Helmut Kohl, Aus Sorge um Europa: Ein Appell, Droemer Verlag, 2014.
[8] José Manuel Durao Barroso, President of the European Commission, State of the Union Address, European Commission Press Release Database, September 12, 2012.
[9] https://ec.europa.eu/priorities/sites/beta-political/files/5-presidents-report_en.pdf
[10] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/20150929IPR94921/françois-hollande-and-angela-merkel-face-meps
[11] Bruce Stokes, “Euroskepticism beyond Brexit: Sigificant opposition in key European countries to an ever closer union”, Pew Research Center, June 7 2016.
[12] Christopher Clarke, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to War in 1914, London, Penguin Books, 2012.
[13] Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity, originally published in 1932, republished by the Catholic University of America Press, 2001. Tom Holland, Millenium: The end of the world and the forging of Christendom, Little Brown, 2008.
[14] On Power : International Power : A European Perspective, Foreign Affairs, October 1977.
[15] Kenneth Waltz, Waltz,: Theory of International Politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. 1979. p. 82
[16] Raymond Aron, Paix et Guerre entre les Nations. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.1962, p. 103
[17] Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. London: Macmillan. 1980, pp. 200-29
[18] Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Decline of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Conflict from 1500 to 2000, London, Fontana, 1989).
[19] On overstretch through overambition via total optimism, Giandomenico Majone, The Deeper Euro-Crisis or : The Collapse of the EU Culture of Total Optimism, EUI Working Papers, LAW 2015/10 Department of Law.
[20] “Why was the Common Market formed in the first place? Quite simply, in order to stop a third European war this century.” Edward Heath in the 1975 UK referendum. cited in Michael McManus, Edward Heath: A Singular Life, London, Elliott an Thompson, 2016. p175.
[21] See for instance Arthur Salter, a close colleague of Monnet, The United States of Europe and other papers, New York, London, Reynold and Hitchcock, Unwin, 1933.
[22] Peter Mair ,Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, London, Verso, 2013,
[23] See Giandomenico Majone, The Deeper Euro-Crisis or : The Collapse of the EU Culture of Total Optimism, EUI Working Papers, LAW 2015/10 Department of Law.
[24] European Commission, Standard Barometer, Spring 2015. Tables of Results. Public Opinion in the EU. TNS opinion and social. European citizenship. p. T115.
[25]http://www.businessinsider.de/brexit-uk-supreme-court-article-50-judgment-documents-in-full-2017-1?r=US&IR=T
[26] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/full-text-theresa-may-brexit-speech-global-britain-eu-european-union-latest-a7531361.html
[27] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett(Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 335,366-7, 370.
Writing about history, politics & economics 
Thanks, Bill. How are you?
LikeLike