The Myth of Integration

Abstract

In this chapter I want to concentrate on another particular sceptical critique. I want to suggest that the whole idea of European integration is a myth, a ‘cruel deceit’. The nationstates have never really intended that there should be anything more than a kind of asymptotic process of integration; the appearance that integration was getting closer and closer, but the reality that any ultimate integration would remain unrealised and unrealisable. There have always been limits to integration, limits which have varied from one nation-state to another. To develop this thesis I want to introduce yet another sceptical voice in European studies, that of Alan Milward. I shall develop his thesis in the second section of this chapter, but first I want to discuss some of the constitutional tensions which seem to pervade the new Europe. The expressions of confusion and dismay which so characterise current legal writing in the wake of the Maastricht Treaty, I shall suggest, can only be properly understood in the light of a sceptical thesis which properly stresses that the power in the new Union lies as much as ever, indeed even more so, with the nation-states.