John Lanchester reviews two major works on the European
common currency project:
“Who wanted a united
Europe? Who were the people who saw this process as both inevitable and
something to be schemed and strived for? The answer was the pan-European
political élite of people like Jean Monnet and his peers. There has never been
a popular appetite for the idea of Europe: it was always an élite project.
Monnet hadn’t ever stood for political office. “Ever closer union,” the phrase
in the foundational document of the E.U., the 1957 Treaty of Rome, is just
stated as a goal, without any explanation either of what it means or of why it
would be a good thing for most Europeans. It was an end in itself.”