to the charge that it had reproduced all the worst features of the nation-state on a sub-continental scale: there was always more than a little risk that the price to be paid for the recovery of Western Europe would be a certain Euro-centric provincialism. For all its growing wealth the world of the EEC was quite petty. In certain respects it was actually a lot smaller than the world that the French, or Dutch, had known when their nation-states opened on to people and places flung far across the seas. In the circumstances of the time this hardly mattered to most West Europeans, who in any case
...more
