Airstrip One

The Whig View of the EU - 2nd November 2002, 19.20

There are many Eurosceptics who take a Hegelian line that Europe will founder under its own contradictions: the lack of a democratic settlement and an institutional inability to set policies that promote reform at the expense of specific interests. They view the collapse of the European Union with a certain Whiggish inevitability in an inversion of the mindset of the 1980s that thought the Soviet Union was here to stay.

Michael Prowse of the FT writes, under the exaggerated headline of "A new superpower is emerging", that,

The danger of underestimating Europe's forward momentum is one of the few reliable historical lessons of the past 40 odd years.

Followed by more usual nonsense that we tend to read in powerhungry Europhiles:

My suspicion is that sceptics (on both sides of the Atlantic) underestimate the EU mainly because they find the idea of European unity so profoundly disturbing. The unease on Americans' part is understandable. At present, the US is the world's undisputed superpower. However implausible it may seem today, an enlarged EU is the political entity that is most likely to challenge US political dominance later this century. Everything points that way: Europe's history, its geographical size, its economic muscle and its depth of human talent. The one thing the EU still lacks is a constitution - a set of political rules - that will allow it to play its proper role in global affairs.

Of course, the article lacks one small but significant word: democracy or any discussion of its omission.