François Duchêne, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994).
No one can seriously doubt the existence of a crisis in the affairs of the European Union. As the implications of the treaties on which it is based, including the Maastricht timetable for economic and monetary union, become ever more widely appreciated, and as the ordinary citizen in most member countries begins to participate in the debate over the future of the Union and its institutions (a debate hitherto largely confined to the United Kingdom), the glow of the European ideal begins to fade and the demand for precise definitions as to what it is all for becomes louder. We are all Euroskeptics now.
The only country seemingly unaware of this change in public attitudes is the United States of America. Washington continues to act on the assumption that a "United States of Europe" is the continent's inevitable destiny, and American ambassadors continue to proclaim in London, and no doubt elsewhere, that nothing must be allowed to frustrate this "manifest destiny," even at the expense of the solidarity of the English-speaking and Atlantic worlds.
Ever since I began studying this process nearly forty years ago, I have been puzzled by the uncritical acceptance in the United States of the view that only with common institutions exercising sovereign power could Europe flourish economically, and play a proper role in its own defense. For while it is understandable that the United States should welcome the apparent decision of the countries of Western and Southern Europe to end their age old strife--did not Americans twice have to intervene to redress the balance?--the assumption that, without the institutions of Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg, these countries would once again be preparing for armed conflict is on the face of it wholly implausible.
