The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe
by David Marquand
Princeton University Press
The European Union promised business without borders, not a debt crisis. While many European taxpayers question the value of union membership, British academic David Marquand provides a timely template for their debate in The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe.
The union began as a peace ideal with the six-nation European Coal and Steel Community in 1952, says Marquand, a former Labour backbencher, European Commission official and now principal of Mansfield College, Oxford.
The concept thrived in the post-war boom and led to the formation of the EU at the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and the launch of the Euro, nine years later. The EU now has a population of 500 million and a gross domestic product of US$16 trillion, but it has grown 'like a lanky schoolboy who has outgrown his strength' with 27 members, and is doomed to irrelevance unless it modifies its governance and global role, says Marquand.
He points to the intricacy of the EU bureaucracy with the authority of a Brussels insider, and, with the brevity of a former Guardian leader writer, describes the push-and-pull of power between the EU administration and member states. An estimated '80 per cent' of Irish national legislation in 2008 and 'about half' of Britain's laws affecting business, charities and voluntary sector 'stems from union bodies', he explains.
But the slump of 2007-10 exposed 'a design flaw in the Eurozone', he writes. Irish former EU commissioner Peter Sutherland says its system of governance is 'intellectually and politically schizophrenic', Marquand says.
