Under the Sign of the Interim

Perry Anderson

• The European Rescue of the Nation-State by Alan Milward
  Routledge, 506 pp, £17.99, May 1994, ISBN 0 415 11133 1
• The Frontier of National Sovereignty: History and Theory 1945-1992 by Alan Milward
  Routledge, 248 pp, £14.99, September 1994, ISBN 0 415 11784 4
• Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence by François Duchêne
  Norton, 278 pp, $35.00, January 1995, ISBN 0 393 03497 6

Mathematically, the European Union today represents the largest single unit in the world economy. It has a nominal GNP of about six trillion dollars, compared with five trillion for the US and three trillion for Japan. Its total population, now over 360 million, approaches that of the United States and Japan combined. Yet in political terms such magnitudes continue to be virtual reality. Beside Washington or Tokyo, Brussels remains a cipher. The Union is not equivalent to either the United States or Japan, since it is not a sovereign state. But what kind of formation is it? Most Europeans themselves are at a loss for an answer. The Union remains a more or less unfathomable mystery to all but a handful of those who, to their bemusement, have recently become its citizens. Arcane to ordinary voters, it is covered by a film of mist even in the mirror of scholars.