The integration process seemed to have run its course in the 1970s. Although the conflict between the institutional ambitions of Brussels and the entrenched national interests of the mixed-economy welfare states was the source of the problems facing the EEC, a failure of intellectual imagination compounded difficulties. Fresh ideas were rare, vision of the right kind in short supply. It was a time not unlike the present. There were exceptions: thinkers who understood that the problems facing the Community – that it was both undemocratic politically and immobilized economically – could not be solved by technocratic institution building. Their thoughts, relevant today, should be required reading for every delegate at the Convention on the Future of Europe, which has embarked upon the task of drafting a federal constitution by 2004.

In his famous 1972 BBC Reith Lectures, Europe: Journey to an Unknown Destination, Andrew Shonfield, the first such discerning thinker, took a distinctly British approach to European community building, an elevated kind of muddling through by means of which a history of successful problem solving in areas outside the reach of the nation-state leads, over time, to a viable tradition of transnational governance. Shonfield's integration scenario hardly grips the imagination, but it depicts a more realistic and sensible course of development for European institutions than anything envisaged prior to it and perhaps since.