what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label European Union. Show all posts
Showing posts with label European Union. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 5, 2020

Does the European Union still warrant the support of “progressives”

Left wing circles in Britain such as Jeremy Corbyn have never deviated from the view that the EU is a bastion of capitalism. One week after the UK has ceased to be a member of the EU, I wanted to explore whether “progressives” can still argue, as did a Dutch friend recently, that-

“At this point the EU is the only world player that at least tries to set some norms to protect the environment, restore equality, maintain product safety, provide some protection against the abuse of power by governments within and beyond the EU zone”. 

It was some time ago that people started to suggest that the European Commission had been poisoned by neoliberalism. Danny Cohn-Bendit, for example, would jokingly call EC Chairman Barrosso and his colleagues “the Chicago boys” and the “neoliberal Taliban”
I have, therefore, been remiss in this blog in not giving more coverage to the extent to which corporate interests have infiltrated the operations of the European Commission. The last post on the subject seems to have been years ago when I referred to a 2010 study Bursting the Brussels Bubble – exposing the corporate lobbying at the heart of Europe
So I am delighted to be able to update that analysis by encouraging readers to look at Captured States – when EU governments are a channel for corporate interests (Corporate Europe Observatory 2019)

But at this point, I have to confess I got slightly distracted by the Netflix series The Crown each of whose episodes focuses on a specific incident – whether political or personal – and nicely captures how the “Establishment” tried to deal with it. 
Anyone wanting to get a sense of the Key Players and Events in Britain’s post-war period could do a lot worse than view its (so-far) 30 episodes.

Last night I watched the first 3 episodes of the latest series (number Three) – the first dealing with the rumours that Harold Wilson (who had, in October 1964, just won a narrow victory) was in fact a Soviet spy.
Some mystery had surrounded the sudden death of Wilson’s predecessor - Hugh Gaitskell – in 1963 and some in MI5 actually thought this was part of a Soviet plot to plant Wilson. The irony is that the Kremlin spy was not in fact to be found in Downing Street but rather in Buckingham Palace in the person of Sir Anthony Blunt who was the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. The tensions between the royal and political leaders are superbly caught in the performance of the two actors – particularly in the third episode which deals with the Aberfan disaster of 1966.

As someone who graduated just a few months before Labour finally won office in 1964 - ending 13 years of Conservative rule - these were stirring times.
Discussion about the country’s future role was at its height – and the mood for “modernisation” widely felt. 
The “European option” was being actively explored and I was by no means the only person who adopted a fairly utilitarian approach – asking basically whether it would benefit us or not.

I still have a vivid memory of Hugh Gaitskell’s voice coming from the radio in the family living room in 1962 as he delivered his powerful and emotional anti-European speech about such a step representing the end of a thousand-year history
The Labour party in those days had real “heavyweights” – and Peter Shore, Barbara Castle, Douglas Jay and Tony Benn were strong voices against the idea of European membership. But they were not strong enough to convince us younger modernisers although 20 years later their opinion did prevail and the official Labour policy, for a few years from 1983, was one of withdrawal from the EU. 

In future posts I hope to –
- Indicate how the EU cannot help but stifle democracy
- investigate the extent of influence of neoliberalism in Commission policies and how much freedom this still leaves left-wing governments
- Explore how anyone can hope to make sense of the overwhelming amount of text which has been written about the nature of the European Union – and where the Union might be heading
- ask why there is so little public and journalistic interest in the scale and purpose of European funding and its effects on both employment patterns and, in newer member countries, the integrity of its state bodies and public trust

Monday, January 28, 2019

The danger of being labelled

Richard North’s daily blogs have been indispensable reading for me recently – he penetrates the laziness of the British media reproduction of government and political press releases in a formidable manner. 
He co-authored the most persuasive of the alt EU history books, the 600 page The Great Deception – can the EU survive? (2004) – which was mostly ignored by the press and academics at the time. One blogger started his very fair and detailed review with the not unfair comment that it was
“an unusual book – part scholarly inquiry, part cheap polemic”
I read the book (in 2008 or so) although I can’t recall the impact it made. It’s one of the texts I might have expected Ambassador Sir Ivor Rogers to refer to if he had been in the mood for giving his readers some context for his commentary on how the UK got to where it is today…It certainly deserved a critique.....as far as I'm aware, noone critiqued Hitler's "Mein Kamp" at the time - and such myopia (with all due respect to the eminently decent Richard North) says a lot about the political nous of "serious" commentators.
Another blogger has recently discovered the book (the link on the title gives the entire text) and has been feeding installments (up to the 12th at the last count).

But, until now, I was baffled by how such a strong Brexiteer as North could write such frank and tough dissections of the government, political and media coverage of the Brexit “debate” as contained in his daily posts...
But this article explains why - that (unlike the other Brexiteers) Richard North actually had a detailed plan for exiting the EU which was totally ignored by the government. You can actually find it here – and it built on a 400 pages strategy called Flexcit which he and others had developed a year or so before the referendum…. 
The most significant thinker in the Brexit movement. Richard North, the advocate of “Flexcit”, warned that, as a sudden departure would wreck people’s lives, Britain would have to be like Norway and stay in the single market, “at least in the medium term”, as it dedicated many years, maybe more than a decade, to flexible negotiations about a future arrangement.

But, as the referendum campaign was getting underway in autumn 2015, the key Brexiteers decided that presenting voters with such analyses would be confusing and divisive – and that their campaign for withdrawal would focus only on the problems created by membership….Suddenly, Richard North – the architect of the only plan for Brexit - found himself marginalized.
You don’t need to be a detective to work out why the darkness fell. How could the Brexit campaign inspire nationalist passions, how could Fox, Lawson, Johnson, Farage and Banks inspire even themselves, if they were to say that the only rational way to leave the EU was to carry on paying money, accepting freedom of movement and receiving laws that Britain had no say in making, while an orderly retreat was organised? Who would vote for that? What would be the point of leaving at all? Better to promise everything while committing to nothing

North could be forgiven for feeling aggrieved by the book’s general neglect since the public seemed (just prior to the poll) to favour his gradualist approach. And another polemical treatment - European Integration 1950-2003 – superstate or new market economy? - by John Gillingham (2003) had received a much easier ride just a year earlier.
But, then, Gillingham is an established academic – even if a rather abrasive neoliberal as demonstrated by his more recent The EU – an obituary (2016)

Academics who write for the general public have been rarities – one thinks of JK Galbraith – and never popular amongst their fellows. They can these days (just about) get away with blunt presentations without attracting a label – although Niall Ferguson is an obvious example of an ideologue who positively panders to his fawning audiences - and whose reputation has suffered accordingly. My favourite, the political economist Mark Blyth, has so far – amazingly - been able to avoid being labelled as a leftist - one wonders for how long….
But non-academics who try to craft books have to be ultra-careful in their presentations to avoid the fate of being ignored or written off as crude polemicists! So far, journalists such as George Monbiot, Paul Mason and Owen Jones have managed to avoid this fate.

David Dorling is an interesting example of an academic who has ventured – so far successfully – into political territory with his books such as Injustice (2011) which identified 5 “social evils” – elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair and explored the myths which sustain them. The argument is that we are all guilty of these evils and of sustaining these myths. More recently he produced "A Better Politics" - a great and persuasive read. 
He has just issued a new book Rule Britannia – Brexit and the end of empire – which I am eagerly waiting for

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

British Exit? Sleepwalking again???

The Introduction to my book In Praise of Doubt – a blogger’s year reviews its 130 plus posts and suggests that the” Elephant in the Room” (ie the big issue which failed to be mentioned in my late posts of 2014 or those of 2015) was……..Brexit - ie  the possibility of British exit from the European Union and the knock-on effects on Europe……

My blog may have a clear policy of ignoring the chatter which passes for political commentary but I do not avoid big issues eg the nature of contemporary capitalism; the health of our democratic institutions; or the swings of public opinion…I did, after all, devote a lot of posts last year to the question of Scotland leaving the “united kingdom”
My failure to devote even a single post to what is the increasing possibility of British withdrawal from the EU was not a deliberate decision; rather a reflection of the absence of any SERIOUS discussion in British journals or publications about the issue….

As long as the referendum which the British PM had promised on the question of continued British membership of the European Union seemed to be in 2017 - and we were sitting in 2014 (when a Scottish breakaway was the threat) or 2015 (when so many other issues jostled for our attention), 2017 seemed so far away.

But here we are in 2016 and there is suddenly talk that the government might put the issue to a vote in the summer of this year!! And I don’t see any serious discussion of what’s involved. Or rather, I see a lot of press coverage of the Prime Minister’s tactical discussions with European partners as he attempts to negotiate a new package which would satisfy the majority of his party (and citizens) - who profess increased distaste for the European project (see this European Council for Foreign Relations briefing for graphs on how the support for Europe has trended in recent years).

But I am aware of very little which would be of any help to the citizen who actually wants a reasoned assessment of what withdrawal would actually mean – in economic or political terms. A couple of Labour MPs have written about it – Pat McFadden in a pamphlet What would Out look like? and Dennis McShane in a book Brexit – how Britain will leave Europe whose argument is rather sullied by his recent conviction for over-zealous expenses claims….

The European Union is its own worst enemy. Reform of such a sclerotic system of policies, institutions and above all power does indeed seem to be almost impossible. Behind the rigid institutions and policies lies the apparently invincible power of the permanent technocrats with their inflated salaries and protected status (I know because for almost a year I worked there!!)

And yet the idea of the UK’s withdrawal fills me with deep unease. 
I’ll try to explain why in future posts – while still trying to retain the respect i always try to grant the specific arguments I encounter…..

Thursday, November 13, 2014

European Hubris

It’s difficult these days to be objective about the European Union – the combination of the euro crisis, austerity and the immigration set off by the 2004 widening has given so many easy targets and scapegoats.
“The European Project” went from strength to strength (with a short breather until Delors became President in the 1980s) – until hubris set in at the start of the new millennium. The Euro was launched in 2002 with a great fanfare but, in less than a decade, has dragged the entire project into disrepute; the attempt to foist a new Convention on European Nations hit major hurdles very quickly with French and Dutch rejections of the draft in 2005. All the while, however, the European Court of Justice has been throbbing quietly in the basement, supplying the legality if not the legitimacy to the regulations drafted by the Commission with its supportive infrastructure of lobbyists and officials.

Intellectual coverage of this unique venture has been massive – with academia queuing up to receive generous European funding. Did you know, for example, that there were, at the last count, 409 Jean Monnet Professorial Chairs in European Universities – funded for the initial 3 years by the EU? Four Hundred and Nine!!

The natural scepticism of journalists has been kept in place by a combination of EC press releases; editorial control of newspapers whose owners are (to a man) pro-European; and by budgets which no longer permit detached scrutiny.
I told you it was difficult to be objective!

The UK, of course, is home to “the awkward squad” which has an innate resistance to overblown rhetoric and projects. Tom Gallagher’s latest book - Europe’s Path to Crisis – disintegration via monetary union - is a great read in that tradition eg the 2003 blockbuster “The Great Deception – can the European Union Survive?; the rather more philosophical The Tainted Source; and the incendiary 1995 book The Rotten Heart of Europe –the dirty war for Europe’s money by one of the guys behind the moves toward monetary integration (Bernard Connelly) whose detailed analysis was so explosive that he was not only sacked from the Commission but banned from further critical writing on the subject. Curiously for a book which was honoured with a Danish award for moral courage, Amazon cannot offer the book – not give any comment on it   

Tom Gallagher, whom I readily admit to being a friend, is no stranger to controversy - with a fascination for the undergrowth of political activity not only in the Balkans (an early specialism) but in the Celtic fringes of Portugal (1980s) and Scotland (most recently). Romania hardly qualifies in that category but has been a fruitful harvest for his ruthless probing - initially with Romania – theft of a nation, latterly with Romania and the European Union – how the weak vanquished the strong (2010)  

Possibly it was that second book which gave him the idea for this latest book which is very clearly not another technical study of the eurocrisis - but rather a very political analysis (with scrupulous references) which carries an unspoken question about hubris.    
His “Europe’s Path to Crisis” has inspired me to try to identify the more balanced of the critical writing on Europe - particularly those which can go beyond the critique and have an alternative agenda which might be worth exploring. To reach these (rare) sites, you have to wade through not only angry nationalist sites but also some which purport to be critical but which turn out to have European funding!
The best guide is probably this recent one from Cardiff University. I doubt, however, anyone has a realistic agenda which can satisfy both multinational interests and the frustration of European citizens.....
The recent appointment of Juncker as President of the Commission was hardly calculated to inspire confidence (not that this has ever seemed a consideration for the European political class) but recent revelations about the tax evasions which have been an integral part of the Luxembourg system over which Juncker presided for so many years so seem to be the last straw.

My surfing also threw up this interesting book on The sociology of Europe - and my mail, coincidentally, this New Pact for Europe - produced by a collection of worthy Foundations (including the Bertelsmann and Gulbenkian ones). 
Great rhetoric - but little reference to the hard economic, ecological and political realities I have been writing about in recent posts (the bibliography kills the report's credibility for me).

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Collapse of a Continent

I have mentioned Perry Anderson several times on this blog. Although his reputation is based on his work as an historian and political philosopher (“specialist in intellectual history” is how Wikipedia puts it), he has in the past 5 years or so focused his energies on penning detailed and gripping portraits of contemporary countries. I know of no other writer who has his encyclopedic grasp of cultural, political and historical aspects of a country (based on reading of original sources) combined with elegance of writing.
His detailed dissections of France, Germany, Italy, Turkey (and the EU) collected in the book The New Old World are simply the first thing anyone who wants to understand contemporary Europe should read.   
No less a writer than Chris Hitchens claimed in an article that Anderson was “the most profound essayist wielding a pen” - if "on the wrong side of history."

He is 75 years old – and an exceptional example of a generation which was genuinely multicultural (not in the current PC sense of the word). His grasp of several European languages, his interdisciplinary and prolific reading (he apparently devours books) means that he moves in an intellectual world now known to few people. And then he returns from that world to give us amazing insights.
The book review which is mentioned gives a quite exceptional overview and pays appropriate tribute to the man -
Ambitious interdisciplinary essay writing and  the ability to sustain a complex multidimensional argument beyond about ten pages, is dying, if not dead. Atypical in his career, footloose across continents, Anderson has never had to worry about his citation index or his impact factor. He is "old school" in the good sense: as reliable and perennially cool as a pair of old adidas.

This week’s London Review of Books offers another of his long essays which paints juicy portraits of the way the EU and Italy have dealt with the financial and political crisis overwhelming the continent. I have still not finished the article – but need to share the incisiveness of following excerpts    
Commonplace in a Union that presents itself as a moral tutor to the world, the pollution of power by money and fraud follows from the leaching of substance or involvement in democracy. Elites freed from either real division above, or significant accountability below, can afford to enrich themselves without distraction or retribution. Exposure ceases to matter very much, as impunity becomes the rule. Like bankers, leading politicians do not go to prison. Of the fauna above, only an elderly Greek has ever suffered that indignity. But corruption is not just a function of the decline of the political order. It is also, of course, a symptom of the economic regime that has taken hold of Europe since the 1980s. In a neoliberal universe, where markets are the gauge of value, money becomes, more straightforwardly than ever before, the measure of all things. If hospitals, schools and prisons can be privatised as enterprises for profit, why not political office too?.......................... 
By the summer 2011, emboldened by increasing flattery of himself in the media as the rock of the Republic, and with the encouragement of Berlin, Brussels and Frankfurt, the Italian President, Napolitano, had decided to dispose of Berlusconi. The key to removing him smoothly was finding a replacement to satisfy these decisive partners, and the business establishment in Italy. Happily, the ideal figure was to hand: Mario Monti, the former EU commissioner, member of the Bilderberg Group and Trilateral Commission, senior adviser to Goldman Sachs and now president of Bocconi University. Monti had for some time been looking forward to just the situation which now presented itself. ‘Italian governments can take tough decisions,’ he confided to the Economist in 2005, ‘only if two conditions are met: there must be both a visible emergency and strong pressure from outside.’ At the time, he lamented, ‘such a moment of truth is lacking.’ Now it had come. As early as June or July, in complete secrecy,
Napolitano readied Monti to take over the government. In the same period, he commissioned the head of Italy’s largest banking group, Corrado Passera, to produce a confidential economic plan for the country. Passera was a former aide to Berlusconi’s arch political enemy and business rival Carlo De Benedetti, owner of La Repubblica and L’Espresso, who was privy to Napolitano’s moves. In urgent italics, Passera’s 196-page document proposed shock therapy: €100 billion worth of privatisations, housing tax, capital levies, a hike in VAT. Napolitano, on the phone to Merkel and no doubt Draghi, now had the man and the plan to eject Berlusconi ready. Monti had never run for election, and though a seat in Parliament was not required for investiture as prime minister, it would help to have one.On 9 November, plucking him from Bocconi, Napolitano appointed Monti a senator for life, to the applause of the world’s financial press. Under threat of destruction by the bond markets should he resist, Berlusconi capitulated, and within a week Monti was sworn in as the country’s new ruler, at the head of an unelected cabinet of bankers, businessmen and technocrats.
 The operation that had installed him is an expressive illustration of what democratic procedures and the rule of law can mean in today’s Europe. It was entirely unconstitutional. The Italian president is supposed to be the impartial guardian of a parliamentary order, who does not interfere with its decisions save where they breach the constitution – as this one had signally failed to do. He is not empowered to conspire, behind the back of an elected premier, with individuals of his choice, not even in Parliament, to form a government to his liking.
The corruption of business, bureaucracy and politics in Italy was now compounded by corruption of the constitution. In 2011 the crisis gripping Italy and the Eurozone had been triggered by a massive wave of financial speculation and derivative manipulation on both sides of the Atlantic. No operator was more notorious for its part in these than the very company on whose payroll both Monti and Draghi had figured. Goldman Sachs, amply earning its sobriquet in America of the ‘vampire squid’, had seconded the falsification of Greek public accounts, and been charged with fraud by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, paying half a billion dollars to settle the case out of court. 

Sunday, June 24, 2012

European public space

I’m European in perhaps a rather perverse sense – that I love the differences between the countries which make it up. Given the scale of EU activities (let alone EC programmes – such as Erasmus) which bring together officials, academics, students across national boundaries, you would have thought there would have been a market for journals and books to help ease the cross-cultural dialogues taking place. But I’ve mentioned several times on this blog (for example herehereand herehow few titles there are (at least in the English language) dedicated to deepen mutual understanding of each other’s cultures and ways of doing things.
I referred in the last post some of the British books which try to do this. And it would be an interesting exercise for a national of each EU member state to make a similar list of material available in their respective language!! I would exclude from those lists the conventional country histories which are written by the various country specialists at Universities – largely on the ground that they are not written for the purpose I have mentioned.      
Of course, there are the pop books which reduce it all to tongue-in-cheek stereotypes – for example We, The Europeans - or the Xenophobe series. Some of this stuff can actually be quite insightful – for example, this good expose of the phrases we Brits use; what our European partners generally understand them; and what they really mean by them 
At the opposite extreme, are those who try to understand cultures using comparative sociology for example Geert Hofstede and Frans Trompenaars. Richard D Lewis’s When Cultures Collide – leading across Cultures  (1996) is perhaps the most readable treatment.

In my days, we had the magazine Encounter (Der Monat in Germany) which gave me stimulating articles by renowned French, German and Italian writers, for example, but was then discovered to have been funded by the CIA. Where its equivalent these days? Le Monde Diplomatique and Lettre International perhaps - except there is, sadly, no English version of the latter - and only a short version in English of the former (whose language is, in any event, a bit opaque) 
In 2004 Carl Fredrikkson wrote an article about the need for a proper European public space where ideas were exchanged across national boundaries and Jan-Werner Muller returned to the issue earlier this year with an important article entitled The Failure of European Intellectuals? in which he argued that
Up until the 1930s at least, there existed a genuine European Republic of Letters, in which writers and philosophers engaged with each other easily across national borders – and in which they also explained other national cultures to their readers. And, in a somewhat different vein, it continued, at least for a while, after the Second World War, when the imperative of reconciliation loomed large. Figures like Alfred Grosser and Joseph Rovan explained the French and the Germans to each other. These weren't just glorified apologists for national quirks, or mediators who would quietly disappear when rapprochement was complete: they had standing in their own right. But, effectively, they did perform the role of sophisticated culturaltranslators and political mediators.
And now? One might be forgiven for thinking that the more Europe integrates politically, legally and economically, the more provincial and inward-looking its individual nation-states become culturally. Easyjet and the Eurovision song contest are not a substitute for a Republic of Letters, where intellectuals have a genuine feel for at least two or three different European cultures. Of course, there are exceptions: Eurozine http://www.eurozine.com/ is one of the major websites where Europeans can learn about the debates taking place in other countries (and, not least, about how intellectuals in other countries perceive their neighbours).
There is no panacea, as far as creating a genuinely European public sphere is concerned. One can only hope that individuals will become more curious, more willing to see the rewards in the work of translation and mediation. It might seem all very humdrum – but it is actually an urgent task, not only, but especially at this critical juncture. To take an obvious example: Germans (and other "northerners") need to understand the history of the Greek civil war, the ways the Greek state was used to pacify a deeply polarized society, and the way European money served to create a middle class which helped parties stay in power, but also diminished the dangers of renewed social conflict (none of this is an excuse for corruption and a generally dysfunctional state – tout comprendre ce n'est pas tout pardonner).
Conversely, it would be helpful if observers outside Germany got a grip on the particular strand of liberal economics that has been animating policy-making in both Bonn and Berlin for a long time: that strange thing called Ordoliberalismus, whose representatives conceived of themselves as the real "neoliberals" – liberals who had learnt the lessons of the Great Depression and the rise of dictatorships in the twentieth-century, and who precisely did not want to equate liberalism with laissez-faire. For them, soi-disant neoliberals like Ludwig von Mises were simply "paleoliberals" who remained stuck in nineteenth-century orthodoxies about self-correcting markets. The German neoliberals, on the other hand, wanted a strong state able and willing not only to provide a framework for markets and society, but also to intervene in the former for the sake of ensuring competition and "discipline".
Again, an understanding of such ideas is not the same as accepting them (with Ordoliberalismus, in particular, there are good reasons to be suspicious of its illiberal, perhaps even authoritarian side). The point is that a more productive and sophisticated debate cannot ignore the profoundly different national starting points for thinking about politics (and economics, of course). In that sense, what I have called clarifiers and the mutual explicators of national traditions need to work together. 
Perry Anderson is one of the few Anglo-Saxons with such knowledge and skills. Muller himself is a great example

The painting is a recent one by a good Bulgarian friend of mine - Yassen Gollev     

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

what is Europe for?

The USE – United States of Europe – is back. For the eurozone, at least. Such "political union", surrendering fundamental powers to Brussels has always been several steps too far for the French to consider. But Berlin is signalling that if it is to carry the can for what it sees as the failures of others in this global crisis, there will need to be incremental but major integrationist moves towards a banking, fiscal, and ultimately political union in the eurozone.
It is a divisive and contested notion which Merkel did not always favour. In the heat of the crisis, however, she now appears to see no alternative. The next three weeks will bring frantic activity to this end as a quartet of senior EU fixers race from capital to capital sounding out the scope of the possible.Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European council, Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg
leader and longstanding head of the eurogroup of single currency countries, and José Manuel Barroso, chief of the European commission, are to deliver a eurozone integration plan to an EU summit on 28-29 June. All four are committed European federalists.

This is a rare blog (for me) about the European Union. It tries initially to “fix” the mainstream British attitude to what was once “The Common Market” but which, a couple of decades ago, underwent a name change and resurrected ambitions.
Unusually for a Brit, I try to be objective – since I have always been favourably disposed to things European. This was, actually, one of the reasons I felt unable to go forward in 1983 as a Labour candidate for my hometown to the British Parliament. Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown (in the same year) had any such dilemmas in fighting for election with a manifesto which threatened British withdrawal.
The blog is written in response not only to this news item - but also to a reread yesterday of the powerful overview of the European scene (and of its core academic writing) contained in Perry Anderson’s The New Old World. One of the many fascinating insights the book contains is that the intellectual framework for most of the tens of thousands of academics whose full-time professional occupation is European studies is…..American political science. Rather dryly, Anderson quotes (on page 80) Alfred Cobban’s definition of this branch of learning 50 years ago – a device “for avoiding that dangerous subject (politics) without achieving science”     
The fixation of the European political class on Federalism has been a constant source of puzzlement to even the most highly educated and pro-European Brits. Of course we understood the initial post-war drive to ensure there could be no more bloody conflicts between Europeans; we were reasonably convinced in the 1980s by the arguments about the potential a European system had to mitigate the power of the multinationals (although the sad reality has been that the multinationals have become a powerful but hidden part of the European constitution); and we recognised the powerful role which prospective EU membership had played in creating and grounding the legal, political and commercial institutions and processes of ex-communist countries.
But otherwise, we are not convinced by the relentless drive toward homogeneity; nor of the results from all the time and money spent on closed bureaucratic meetings and summits. Winston Churchill’s comment on the latter “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war” no longer packs the punch it once did. Brits are, of course, famous for being an awkward squad. In European circles we are always ready to puncture overblown rhetoric - although, sadly, New Labour brought its own brand of opaque Newspeak to negotiations.
De Gaulle’s dismissive image of the UK being “a nation of shop-keepers” and of bean counters is sustained by the overriding defence of the British political class of the privileges of the London financial elite; of the country’s 1990s rebate; and by its zealous compliance with European regulations. 
Other countries take a more relaxed attitude to their European obligations, appearing good Europeans at the negotiation stage but less so in their failure to implement. Membership of what became the European Union was always for us a matter of economic calculation rather than political commitment. 
And the calculations continue – alongside growing anxiety about the transfer of powers to a complex and opaque system of bargaining (amongst officials and lobbyists) and questionable judicial judgements in other countries. The previous generation of British politicians seemed to value democracy more than the present lot. After all they had fought a war for it! 
We have always been wary of the Eurocrats – and I was shocked during my (short) experience of working in Brussels in the mid 1990s by the privileges and their curious combination of indolence and arrogance. European structures are modelled on the French system which, in the post-war period, has been governed for the most part by civil servants – with citizens being reduced to the role of protestors.  
In the 1980s it was still possible to believe that the EU might build on the European social model (which owed nothing to the European Commission). Delors, after all, was still imbued with the values of most of the founders of the “European project” but, since then, the Commission officials and policies have become infected with neo-liberalism – a disease which most new member countries have also brought to the European political table since 2004. 
It has always been obvious that "the European project" had no place for the citizen - talk of the "democratic deficit" was so much eyewash (and the German push for greater powers for the European Parliament just a guilt reflex). 
But the scales have only now fallen from people's eyes as they saw the ease with which the European Union powers displaced the elected rulers of Italy and Greece..... 

Since writing this, I've come across an extensive overview of current British attitudes to the EU - which reveals the full scale of the British alienation from Europe.