The drama of twenty-five years of unprecedented economic growth moved ‘politics’, in the classic sense, to the sidelines. Even the remarkable project of European integration resolved itself into an endless process of bartering over milk quotas and national rebates. The catastrophe of the Third Reich had not brought about the extinction of Germany, but what it had done was to draw the curtain on the classic era of European politics. Sixty years later, what else there might be to politics in Europe beyond the tiresome squabbles of discontented affluence remains an open question.
