- Why are there not more books like yours: books about the fundamental problem of European integration: the lack of democracy? “Two reasons. One has to do with intellectual change in the Western world in the last hundred years: the professionalising of intellectual life. The division of labour that has set in. That’s why I started the book with an account of the American constitutional convention in Philadelphia. There was an enormous advantage in having intelligent experienced, cultivated human beings talking about major issues and not worrying whether these were economic, political or philosophical questions. They had the confidence to move back and forth between them. In many ways we lost that confidence. Then there is something more recent, dating from the years after the Second World War. That is the success of economic integration in the West, the unprecedented prosperity. That has encouraged a point of view which may also in some curious way be a symptom of the influence of Marxism on liberalism. When you struggle against something, that leaves it’s mark on you. The mark Marxism left on the Europeans was the habit of subordinating constitutional argument to economic argument. That is what in the book is called economism. It has a very important place in the development of the EU. It was almost impost by the original circumstances during the post-war period, when the original aim was to increase the security of those joining the EC, but very quickly the least problematic and controversial way forward seemed to involve economic issues rather than any formal political project or anything like that. A constitutional approach at that time was unthinkable because of the prior status of Germany. The habit developed of moving incrementally and on the whole having no political agenda. That worked pretty well until the late 1980s, until the acceleration of integration took place. An acceleration which, I think, is above all due to the French reaction to German unification.” - But the acceleration started before that. “Yes, with the Single European Act, but still my hunch is things wouldn’t have moved so rapidly, and Mitterrand and Delors wouldn’t have pushed things so hard, had it not be for the German unification. Suddenly Europe was confronted with relatively short term projects. All projects since the 1950s had had long-term political implications, now suddenly with the Euro-project there were probably short-term political implications and it did look like an indirect form of state building. The peoples of Europe began to look a bit dazed in the 1990s by the speed of which changes were adopted, changes which looked like putting an end to the traditional constitutional orders of Europe and the nation states. What was exactly going to replace the European nation states remained and remains unclear.” - According to you the main danger of the integration process is that the national democracies are undermined by the undemocratic bureaucracy in Brussels. “Yes, I think healthy democratic systems depend upon a certain security of identity. It’s that security of identity which is to some extend being jeopardized across Western Europe and may be jeopardized more by the introduction of the Euro. These changes came pall mall and were and are perplexing. Example: the Euro-project. What is the political project under the surface? It looks very much like the creation of a European state. What form that state will take is unclear, but still it looks like a way of becoming a state. If you take the even more recent project of creating a European Rapid Reaction Force, it looks like an intergovernmental model. Which is it to be, what’s going on. That uncertainty is obviously not good for democracy.” - Is a democratic federal state with hundreds of millions of inhabitants possible? “In the long run yes, I think it is possible. But by long I mean generations. I am very open about that. On the other hand I think the end result would probably not be anything like American federalism. But a new political form: something more than a political confederation and less than a federation. Important steps can be taken. One step I urge in the book is the creation of a European Senate. I think almost the most worrying consequences of the changes in the last fifteen or more years has been that the national political classes in Europe have become disconnected from the European political project. In some ways you could argue that the original model for a European Parliament: as representatives of the national parliaments, was a better model. Because the European Parliament isn’t an obvious success. Reconnecting the national political classes with the European project has a very high priority, possibly the highest priority in Europe. The way to begin to do this is to have an Upper House with a very limited agenda and composed of leading members of national political classes who maintain there places in the national political systems but who regularly went to Brussels to consider this limited agenda which might well and probably should include giving the subsidiary principle teeth, that is acting on the presumption against centralisation. Such a body in my view ought to remain relatively small. The American Senate - in some ways the most powerful legislative body in the world - is very small compared to most European legislatures; it has hardly more than a hundred representatives. If senior leading European politicians met in that rather intimate way and regularly would concern themselves with a fixed list of issues, I think that would begin to bring together the national political systems and the European project again.” - Wouldn’t creating a senate make the institutional structure of the EU even more complex? “Complex is perhaps not the right word. It would add an institution. But that institution could streamline some processes and for instance it seems to me it could break the secrecy of the Council of Ministers and open a lot of Europeans decision-making to public view. Many people thought Nice was a complete failure. I thought there were some good things about Nice, above all the fact that there was open disagreement in the run-up and during the sections and public came aware of these disagreements. Too many European outcomes and decisions have been the result of late night meetings behind closed doors and eventually Europe was presented as a kind of fait accompli. Open disagreement is fundamental to a democratic political system and a democratic political culture. And there hasn’t been enough of it! Instead we’ve had this rather paternalist condescending, new utilitarian, elitist driven politics.” - Don’t you think some secrecy is needed to be able to have more integration? “Of course, but it’s got enough secrecy, it could do with a little less.” - What do you think about not more pragmatic practical solutions, like the further integration of national political parties into transnational parties? “I am very suspicious of premature unity. One can think of the former USSR as a kind of ostensibly democratic system, with elections and common platforms etc, but it was all a façade. I think there is some danger in the direct election of a European president or European wide European parties. Before they have real roots in peoples attitudes and concerns nationally it could turn Europe into a really bogus affaire.” - Wouldn’t is be a good idea to have MP’s in the European Parliament? “Maybe. But the size of the European Parliament seems to me to militate against creating - what I call for in the book – a kind of open political class across Europe, because I suspect the relations that develop in Brussels and Strasburg at the moment are pretty superficial. Ingenuity is needed and one pretty obvious channel ought to be national parliamentary committees reviewing Brussels. But the trouble is that these commission always turnout to be overloaded and they can hardly keep up with delegated legislation at the national level, let alone adequately deal with the volume of European legislation. Another step forward might be to bring home to Europeans how much of the social and economic regulations are now subject to come from Brussels, rather than from the nation-states. I think many Europeans haven’t a clue of the extend that is already the case. How it’s to be done is a very difficult matter, but it’s important to raise awareness among Europeans of the difficulties associated with the goal of harmonization. Harmonization is a word used, and reused, overused, misused. The French especially like to push for harmonization. Very often there is a correlation between harmonization and centralisation. One of the ways in which the democratic culture in Europe might begin to be vitalised is a Senate, which in conjunction with national legislatures might decide that something should be repatriated to nation states. Example: especially when you live in an old city as Oxford, I find the size of lorries which are authorized by the EU devastating for the environment. Of course you can argue the efficiency advantages of having a uniform lorries throughout the EU, but we can effort some kind of inefficiencies and I don’t see why, if Holland or England want to prohibit lorries above a certain size, they shouldn’t be able to do so? This is retrograded progress!” - Your main advice is: don’t take too big steps. “And be suspicious. One has to be frank about this: the commonly accepted goal of developing a Single Marked opens the door to anything. Almost anything can be justified in terms of promoting the Single Marked. This has been for decades, if not centuries a problem within American federalism: the interstate commerce clause in the Constitution has often be used to increase the power of the federal government against the states. It remains one of the battle grounds of American federalism to prevent that clause being used to justify almost unlimited centralisation. It is quite interesting how healthy American federalist instincts remain even in the atmosphere of crisis post September 11th. Bush and many of the Republicans have fought against a proposal which the democrats have supported for making output security a federal responsibility. There are good federalist reasons for not rushing ahead and creating a further sphere of federal responsibility. That’s the kind of vigilance which is required in a federal system if it’s to be anything like a genuine federal system. Curiously that is an argument that can be used against Euro-sceptics, not least British Euro-sceptics: the nation states of Europe haven’t been very good at combating sectionalism in the EU. This is were you need at least the beginnings of a normative, constitutional framework. I don’t think for a moment that it’s going to be possible or desirable to draw up a constitution for Europe in time for the next intergovernmental meeting or whatever, but a Senate with this special responsibility would begin to develop…” - That will be possible before there is a Constitution? “Yes.” - It takes generations for a real federal system to develop. What should we do in the meantime? “I do, up to a point, try to address that in the book, by looking at the informal cultural conditions which make possible the success of American federalism. First developing an open political class. A class dominated by lawyers, which has implications for what legal education should be like in Europe in the future and about access to the legal class. All that is very important, because it’s in the nature of anything approaching a federal system that there’ll be important conflicts of jurisdiction, and that’s why lawyers are likely to have to play an important part in the political class. Similarly a jurisprudence would develop gradually and that would be another common base. A third very important factor will be the success in founding or developing a consensus about what the role of the state would be. The French rather exaggerate the position at the moment. They see Britain as the victim of a kind of American near-liberalism, and hold up there own social market as an alternative. Those may be the poles, but there are many intermediate positions, there are many graduations n Europe. I don’t despair of Britain, recovering to some extend of near-liberalism, and also I think the French corporatism is going to come under serious threat not least from Brussels. One of the most interesting questions in the near future about the EU will be how the French will react as they suddenly begin to perceive the EU not as a weapon to be against a kind of Anglo-American liberalism, but as an instrument of Anglo-American liberalism. The signs are that Brussels is less a vehicle of French influence as it used to be. This could make the French feel uncomfortable. From beginning the French knew what they wanted – for very good reasons – but the French especially threw their weight around during the Delors-Mitterrand years. By and large, when it came to final decisions it was possible to morally blackmail the Germans. One example I cite in the book was that when Schröder came to power there was serious talk in Germany about getting a revision of the common agricultural policy and bringing down the extend of German subsidy of the EU, but the French reacted quickly and vigorously and the Germans desisted.” - Are there examples of a good working democracy with hundreds of millions of (heterogeneous) inhabitants? “Apart from the United States you mean.” - Well… do the US have a good working democratic system, if you compare it with the European democracies? “Of course by the standpoint of pure models no democratic system looks very impressive. On the other hand one has to identify a starting point. And consider this: it’s in the nature of things that self-government in a state of a continental scale with hundreds of millions of inhabitants is going to be a more difficult enterprise than self-government and democracy in nation-states of a much more limited size, even if they have populations of sixty or eighty million. The starting point is important and you can’t expect the same degree of success. For a nation on that scale with such a heterogeneous population to have remained self-governing for more than two hundred years is one of the most remarkable achievements in human history. Don’t underrate that! Of course you can point at terrible flaws in American democracy but think of the basic achievement.” - But if you take as a starting point the Dutch, British or even French democracy… “But when would you date Dutch democracy? It’s more recent in Holland than it is in the US, it is more recent in most of Europe than it is in the US. One counter-example is the UK, where there really has been representative government more or less unbroken for an awful long time.” - Let’s put it this way: Is it possible to have in a European (conf)federation that is more democratic than the US? After all, the representatives in Congress are not highly thought of by most American voters. “There is an argument that goes back to at least as far as Tocqueville in the early 19th century that in democratic societies politics doesn’t normally attract the ablest or the most sensitive people, because they can’t face the trails and tribulations of winning the support of the demos. That is a perennial problem I think. It has been rather masked in some European countries by the survival of an older governing class and by some people who see it almost as an hereditary duty or privilege that they take an active part in public life. But as that becomes steadily less important – it’s one of the great changes in Britain in the last twenty of thirty years, the problem of recruiting a competent political class becomes a very serious problem, not least because the temptations of making money become so strong.” - Do you think that political class in European countries will disappear gradually, even if there would be no more European integration? “I think and hope that that aristocratic residue in Europe will continue to make some difference between European politics and American politics. In the North-East of the US there is something of an older class, even though if it wasn’t aristocratic, at least it had a prestige which certainly in the 20th century helped to insulate federal American politics often from the worst forms of populism. My worry is about the decline of the Northeast in the US and the movement of people, influence and wealth South and West where the culture is rather different and a good deal more populist. I don’t see why Europe should run that populist so much, with this proviso that what gives forces today in a democratic system an opportunity is when you have elections that are so to speak shammed. That’s what worries me about premature direct election of European presidents of the Commission or the Commission itself, and probably even trying to constitute European parties to soon, because I think they could possibly become vehicles of something rather nasty.” - This political class is not linked to the nation state; it can also play a role at the European level. “I think so, it probably already has to some extend in the creation of the European Union. After all what was one of the defining features of the European aristocracy was that it wasn’t merely national in it’s focus and it kept alive something supranational into the 19th en 20th century. If you look at the diplomatic core in many European countries: they often consist disproportionally of people of old families.” - Still, is the kind of democracy we have at national level in Europe possible in one big European kind of state? “What you are pointing to is a very serious problem. As Europe develops towards something else and we don’t know what the outcome is going to be – let’s call it ‘quasi-federal’ – its got to adjust national political cultures, which have, with the exception of Germany I suppose, been shaped by unitary forms of state. Political cultures shaped by unitary forms of state are not necessarily the best preparation for understanding a working quasi federal system. I give you an example. It was very interesting last autumn, how shocked many Europeans were by the prospect of a president being elected who had a smaller popular vote than his opponent This seems frightfully undemocratic to many Europeans. The Americans didn’t worry about that much and that’s because one of the things you learn when you are live and work in a federal system, is that there are certain circumstances in which a territorial principle constrains a population principle. That’s just a question of changing a political culture. Some change of that sort is going to be necessary if Europe is going to develop a new political system.” - Don’t you think that a democratic state needs a feeling of togetherness? Is that possible when you have hundreds of millions of inhabitants? “Yes, that’s one of the extraordinary achievements if the US. Citizenship is only granted with at least a minimum of political education, there’s an test administered and so fort. European have taken that sort of things for granted, they haven’t worried about that much.” - Are the cultural differences in Europe not much bigger than in the US? “Well, that’s arguable. If you think of the number of Chinese immigrants on the West-coast. And for the first time in recent history there is a significant non-English (Spanish) speaking population in the southern and south-western states. I think one of the most interesting struggles and debates in the US has been about English as requirement for a working federal system and what the limits of cultural variety are. Those questions are going to loom larger on both sites of the Atlantic I think.” - What do you think: how much homogeneity is possible, for example concerning the language? “I am optimistic about that in Europe, because I think English is the second language in Europe. French civil society is perfectly aware of that and willing to accept. The French political class is much more hesitant, but I think that battle has been won.” - If you talk to members of the French political class do they – informally – agree with you about that? “It’s very interesting Chirac speaks quite good English, but he never does in front of a French audience. I think that will change.” - How long will that take? “My hunch is ten or twenty years. I don’t think that is a great problem. I’m quite optimistic about that. In a curious way it could become almost a more serious problem in the US, if the Spanish speaking population gowns – it has a very high birth-rate – and they don’t learn English.“ - Is it necessary to have just one religion to make a feeling of togetherness in a democratic state possible? “This is a very difficult area; one has to choose his words carefully. Yes and no. What I believe in firmly is pluralism. But pluralism as I understand it is a social and cultural framework founded on a ranch of individual rights. Therefore those individual rights and the duties that correspond to them set limits on the horizon. So it’s not a case of anything goes. There is a well intention, but deeply horribly muddled multiculturalist way of thinking which should be avoided if possible. Let me give you a local example. Prince Charles, with extremely good intentions I am convinced, has said more than once that he would like, when it comes to it, be a king of all faiths. Well, that makes me pretty uneasy. Not all faiths are acceptable, and some faiths are frankly incompatible with a liberal democratic system. One has to recognise that and the public has to be educated in that. Another frightfully difficult issue in the UK is whether or not it is right for the state to subsidise Muslim schools if – that’s a big if – they teach the subordination of women and practise it.” -But there are orthodox protestant schools in Holland which discriminate against women and homosexuals as well. “Yes… There is a slight difference between having certain criteria or tests for those who teach and what is taught. One has to bear that in mind, it’s not quite the case. But yes, that’s certainly an issue. But the greatest single enemy to liberal democracy and clear thinking is the idea that we have to be accepting anything, accepting all beliefs and all practices. That is a receipt of social disorder and the end of democracy.” - You say not all faiths are acceptable, can you be more specific? “Let’s take the traditional Hindu-beliefs which underpin the casts-society. A set of beliefs which identifies some human beings as untouchables seems to be untouchable: it’s got to be ruled out! In the UK there are lots of Hindus from the Indian subcontinent; their beliefs changes, not completely, but in important respects.” - According to you Europeans should be more aware of their common Christian heritage. Why is that so important? “I am a great believer in history, in historical understanding, historical knowledge. I think any society that is healthy and flourishing and where there is the sort of cohesion one wants has to have a kind of self-understanding. Historically it is the fact that Christianity is the religious background of Western civilization, of European civilization. People have not a very good understanding of the relationship between modern liberalism and the Christian tradition. In a way we’re victims of renaissance and 18th century historiography. For reasons which were very easy to understand and are entirely sympathetic, many European intellectuals during the renaissance and through the 18th century were defying themselves against the Church, because the Church had grown into a kind of monster. So they were anti-clericals above all. They wrote a version of Western history which brought a tremendous brake at the end of the Middle Ages with the birth of modernity. I think that’s a terrible mistake. If you look closely at the development of Europe from the fall of the Western Roman Empire there are very important continuities as well as discontinuities and one has to recognise two things about Christian religion which survive in modern liberalism. One is that it is universalist. It addresses all human beings and tells them they’re all brothers, or in modern language brothers and sisters. That remains the fundamental proposition in liberalism: equality and reciprocity count. It’s all there in the New Testament, and in Paul especially. Secondly, again history makes the contrast between the way Christianity spread - until the 4th century at least – in its earliest days and the way Islam spread. Christianity spread as it where privately, by persuasion. Until it became the official religion of the Empire, in the late 4th century and then you begin to have a state power and corruption and things get a good deal more complicated.” - But nevertheless: if you overlook the history of Christianity there’s much oppression. “Of course, but, again, one has to speak relatively and historically always. Some of the most courageous acts of history were I think were… Think of the contrast with faiths that spread to the worth! If you think of Europe in the 7th and 8th century the way missionaries set out from Ireland into Eastern France and Germany to convert the heathens: monks with a cross in front of hem. They weren’t in much position to coerce these tribes.” - But if you look at what happened in South America… “It’s appalling. But some of the catholic orders – the Jesuits of Nice – did their best to repress the violence of the Spanish and Portuguese. Its horrible, but then you get into state violence.” - Yes, but state violence and violence of the church… “They were not identical. They never were, it’s the distinctive thing about Western civilization, about Western Europe. Eastern Europe is another story. State and church were much harder to separate in Byzantium and this no doubt has had important consequences for orthodox world, Russian and Greek. Western Europe has not done that. Protestant as I am - in many ways, in my instincts and background – the papacy had this extraordinary role in standing up to new monarchies, new political powers and trying to draw a line in the sand and say: thus far and no further; id didn’t always succeed.” - The oppressive popes and bishops are the exceptions? “One has to think historically and comparatively. Oppression doesn’t have a constant meaning. Oppressing a population that is ninety percent illiterate is not the same thing as oppressing a population that is ninety percent literate. You have to deal with one in a very different way from the way you deal with the other. One always needs a context. What some of the questions you’ve put to me reveal is the extend to which we still operate with the rather simplistic ideas of renaissance and 18th century historiography, which presented the church chiefly as this monster which had t be beheaded. Well it did: it had become to successful in a way, it had become it’s role and many of the clergy were caught up in a social and politically system which ultimately, it seems to me, the beliefs of the church undermined. The moral intuitions which had been created often survived orthodox Christian belief, but by the 18th century those moral intuitions were leading European intellectuals to above all attack and criticize the church.” - Hasn’t the Church always been an institution opposed against modernity? “The catholic church more than the protestant churches of course, but it’s not surprising in France for instance where the Revolution had turned on the church an terrible things were done. You’re right: the reaction within the catholic church against modernity, which I think has played itself out, but slowly. But even then the principle that the papacy went on defending – and this is were protestant churches have not always been so fastidious, was the principle that ultimately the domain of the church and the sphere the church defends should not be subject to nation states. That churches shouldn’t be entirely national churches. Lutheranism is much more equivocal about that.” - Why the Christian heritage is more important than for example the common European heritage of the old Greeks and Romans? “I don’t want to be understood as saying it is more important, but most of what we got from Greece and Rome came through the church of Rome, was mediated by the church. Roman laws are incredibly important for the development of Europe. Not least because roman law helped to create canon law. The church used roman law models in creating canon law and as legal scholars have discovered relatively recently it was in the 11th and 12th century that the first clear unambiguous ascertains of the moderation of a right against the world appeared in canon law, in the jurisdiction of the church. That’s the sort of idea which would have astonished or rather horrified 18th century intellectuals who were determined to ‘écraser l‘affaire’. A lot of these anti-Christians are much more Christian then they realise. They take for granted lots of things which on the universal scale can not be taken for granted, they are specific to western culture. That is not unimportant.” -Does Christianity mark off Europe from the rest of the world? Nearly the whole American continent and many African countries (for example Congo, Uganda, Zambia) are Christian. “The reaction to September 11th suggests that there is some sense of a shared project throughout Western Europe, North and South America." - It’s not specific to Europe. “I think there is something that is specific to Europe: that has to do with Christian democracy in the post war period and what the French call the European model against the Anglo-American model. I think they have a point. There is an idea about responsibility of the state to its citizens which is less developed in the United States and perhaps to a some extend in the United Kingdom. It’s not just catholic versus protestant, because some of the most developed welfare states in Europe have been in the Nordic, protestant countries. So it isn’t just catholic Christian democracy.” - You’re a Christian yourself? “Residually, I don’t claim to be very practical.” - Because there is a chapter about Christianity in your book, which is not usual in books about European integration. “It’s above all an attempt to warn people that multiculturalism is a very flawed - well intentioned but flawed - program. We should distinguish between pluralism and multiculturalism. Multiculturalism could easily lead to the condition of North Africa through much of the middle ages and early modern period when you had places where there were large Jewish Christian Muslim populations living together with not too much friction, but they lived on the terms imposed by their conquerors. Then there is no framework of law of individual rights. There were good manners. That’s not to be confused.” - What are the consequences of what happened September 11th for the process of integration? The constitutional debate about the EU, which had only just started (Fischer)seems to have faded away. “It’s most unfortunately that there should be this crisis, just as one hoped a great debate was getting under way across Europe about its institutions in the future and in a way constitutional issues were coming to the fore. Crises always play into the hands of executive power. The worries that are central to the traditional constitutional thinking like the separation of powers, checks and balances, dispersing power, judicial checks on the executive, all of these things begin to look rather fiddling, because there’s a great risk that people do not take enough interest in such issues against this background. Already we see some rights being restricted.” - During the international crisis the EU once again proves to be in need for an American lead: they don’t work together in an effort to help. “It is very striking, the way the actors became the nation states almost immediately. Even NATO was in a sense not that important, despite invoking this clause for the first time about mutual aid. I think it is fair to say that the EU has been insignificant.” - The EU is still mainly an economic community. What’s wrong with that? “The long standing British view has always been that it should be essentially an economic association. But I think what makes it important to look at the European Union in more than economic terms is the amount of power that has already concentrated at Brussels. It is no longer just an association of mutual convenience, it’s more accurately to be described as an association of nation states with elements of a central government in Brussels. My concern is that given that that has happened there should be some adequate constitution or normative framework developed in due course and that the question of democratic accountability must not be overlooked or minimized. There are still different projects. The French certainly want it to be far more than just an economic association. They constantly talk about European defence and foreign policy. I think there are two problems about the French project, which is partly very original and idealistic and I don’t want to decry it. But one thing it leads the French into doing quite often is underestimating conflicts of interest within Europe and overestimating conflicts of interest between Europe and the US. That seems to be one flaw in French policy and attitudes. The other snag for the French model is enlargement. It is very hard now to see how the degree of integration the French aspire to will be compatible with a European Union of twenty-five members. I think what defines this moment in the history of the EU is that the French don’t know what they want suddenly and that has a lot to do with enlargement, which, although they can’t publicly oppose to it, is pretty well known that they are pretty are not very warm about enlargement because it does pose terrible problems for their model for Europe.” - Will the enlargement nevertheless take place? “I think it will, but it may turn out to be not quite what the applicant countries expect it to be. They may be admitted with strings attached with long periods of transition. It’s very hard to predict, especially since what happened on September 11th. I feel a bit sad about the applicant states. In some way they may feel let down. The truth is all the original members of the EU were carried away after the fall of the Iron Curtain and made commitments and held out prospects to the Eastern countries which they hadn’t thought through.” - Doesn’t make the entrance of he new applicant states further integration very difficult. “It certainly makes it far more difficult. There are different and delicate questions associated with all of this. For instance how many of the new members would in fact become client states of one or two of the leading existing member states. It certainly is on the cards that enlargement will increase the importance of Germany within the EU and no doubt this is causing the French some worry. And they have up to a point tried to put together a kind of Mediterranean pact, especially with Italy and Spain. We shouldn’t be too hang-up about the description of economic integration, but it seems to me the larger it is, the less degree of integration for the foreseeable future.” - Is the introduction of the Euro a landmark or is that overstated. Has it many political implications or can it be restricted mainly to the economic policies. “That is the 64 million dollar question – the use an American expression - I wish I knew the answer. I don’t think we can yet judge what the effects or political identity on national political cultures of the Euro will be. Again, it seems to me there’s a greater sort of tension possible, conflict between countries in the post September 11th situation, where on the whole populations are feeling perhaps more nationalistic ore identified with their nation states, not wanting to take so many risks, feeling they want to be protected and that could fit uneasily with the introduction of he Euro. I think it’s a fairly high risk politically.” - You think it’s too big a risk. “My general view is that into the late 1980s and 1990s Mitterrand and Delors with Kohls acquiescence pushed things to quickly. I am not so much against it but I am in favour of taking things slowly and building Europe slowly.” - The Euro is sometimes compared with the Gold Standard. Is that a mistake? “The people who make that comparison are usually those who are predicting that the Euro won’t last. I am not sure... Probably the Stability Pact will effectively be watered down and some of the what might be obstacles to the duration of the Euro will be managed.” - Is one of the reasons why you could write this book that you are still an outsider: an American? “Yes I think that is probably the case. Outsiders are in the habit of comparison. But I think genuine and convinced liberals are always convinced outsiders.” - Do you still consider yourself an American. “I feel mid-Atlantic. I feel as European as I feel American. The question doesn’t worry me very much.” ©Sylvester Hoogmoed, 2001 Larry - Siendetop - Democracy in Europe (Penguin books, 2001) Larry - Siedentop - Democracy in Europe (Columbia University Press, 2001) Free Hit Counter