Peter, a British reader writes to remind me of another reason that so much of the British establishment signed up for the EU – the Americans wanted them to. Throughout the Cold War years it was widely believed (not incorrectly) that a more united (western) Europe would be a better bulwark against the Soviets. The tragedy on Washington’s part was the failure to realize that after 1989-91 the strategic equation had changed. There was no Soviet threat and the EU itself was rapidly mutating into the far more malevolent and often explicitly anti-American entity that we see today. Despite that, the US continued to encourage a ‘united Europe’ until at least last year (For example, George Bush made a nauseating speech on the topic in, I think Berlin).

It was a classic failure of imagination on the State Department’s part roughly akin to the inability to realize (after the first Gulf War) that the assumptions that justified the need for a special relationship with ‘Saudi’ Arabia had ceased to exist.