The advantages of sweet disorder

This is a distinguished addition to the select company of books that succeed in adding significantly to our understanding of Jean Monnet’s and Jacques Delors’ European project. Each author has adopted a different framework. Larry Siedentop, in Democracy in Europe, a self-conscious re-enactment of de Tocqueville, approached the EU’s problems of structure and democratic legitimacy through the prism of political philosophy. Hugo Young, in This Blessed Plot, an unrelievedly determinist account of what he saw as Britain’s and the Continent’s manifest common destiny, traced Britain’s uncertain march towards European federalism through the stories of individual participants. Christopher Booker and Richard North’s tour de force, The Great Deception, an indispensable counterpoint to Young, is a fascinating forensic history of the seen and unseen forces that have brought us to the present point.

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Matthew Lynn

Spain will regret its 100 per cent expat property tax

Thomas Kremer’s approach is to delve into the deepest historical roots of society and behaviour in Europe through a comparative analysis of cultures, in the broadest sense of the word.