Start from the top. Over the past half century, the European Union, the largest economy in the world, has been a spectacular success. On a blood-soaked continent, it has buried the worst xenophobic nationalism of the past without destroying patriotism. Its institutions have won acceptance for binding disputes settlement that has enabled the transformation of sovereignty through sharing it in an unprecedented number of sensitive areas. It is a union of nation states that has created something less than a federation and more than an alliance.

All this has been the result of both vision and pragmatism, sometimes subordinating national decision- making to European institutions and rules (the so-called community method), sometimes working through intergovernmental agreement.

Vision provided the EU's original impulse with the historic reconciliation between France and Germany. The visit of Helmut Kohl and Fran?ois Mitterrand to the Verdun ossuary in 1984 dramatically exemplified the message that political integration would be achieved through generous-spirited diplomacy as well as economic means. But how much did that vision presume the blurring or even fading away completely of national boundaries and identities? Was ever closer political union a way of describing a federal or super state?