In Europe

ladders to the composition of chocolate bars and the methods for making goats’ cheese.
    Europe is no longer a network of separate nations but is gradually becoming one huge interwoven body of companies, cities and people, a new supercountry beside and above the traditional nation states. This situation definitely does not always work to our advantage, it sometimes creates huge problems, more than half of all Europeans are unhappy with it, but it is not something we can simply choose to ignore.
    Soon every European country will be able to arrest the subjects of all other European countries, the new pan-European arrest warrant will abolish national forms of legal protection, and meanwhile the values have been turned upside down: it will, after all, not be the best national systems of law that establish the European norm, but the weakest among them.
    The same thing is happening to democracy. For no matter how you look at it, in a country where hundreds of thousands of demonstrators take to the streets every time their leaders meet, there is something fundamentally wrong with the democratic system. The same applies to the EU. The new constitution drafted so laboriously in recent years may be an improvement for the EU itself; in comparison with the constitutions anddemocratic systems of many of its member states, however, it often amounts to nothing more than a return to the way things were before 1848, when the national parliaments still had to fight for most of their powers.
    Furthermore, there is no guarantee that this cautious, formal democracy will assume sufficient critical mass within Europe. The democratic tradition has been limited largely to the continent's north-western corner: Scandinavia, Belgium and the Netherlands, England and France. Right after the collapse of the great monarchies in 1917 and 1918, the rest of Europe also embraced the loveliest democratic constitutions with the most liberal basic rights, but that honeymoon did not last long. Political conflicts had a way of degenerating into civil wars, and the elite in many countries chose anti-communism first, and only afterwards democracy and the rule of law. In Hungary, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Greece and Rumania, power was quickly seized by generals and populist dictators, and this finally happened in powerful Germany as well. After the war, the communist parties imposed their authoritarian policies all over Central and Eastern Europe, while Southern Europe, with the exception of Italy, was run until the 1970s by ultra-right-wing dictatorships.
    In large parts of Europe, unlike in the United States, democracy is therefore a fairly recent phenomenon and hardly to be taken for granted. There is also the bureaucracy. In the United States, most of the obvious federal tasks – defence, foreign policy – rest immediately and clearly with the federal government, while the states have far-reaching autonomy on all other matters. California's environmental policy is very different from that in Texas, and there is no reason why the bread in Vermont should taste the same as that in Arkansas.
    In Europe, the exact opposite is the case. Here, in recent decades, a dangerously skewed development has taken place: a plethora of regulations has arisen regarding precisely such matters of detail, while cooperation on obviously communal issues – common defence policies, a unified foreign policy – is still, after all these years, in a pristine state at best. It is precisely the groundwork of a federal government – budgetary legislation, foreign policy and military organisation – that is still in the hands of the national states within the EU. Although the Union has access to a reasonably large budget, it pales by comparison with the combinedbudgets of the national states. There is work in progress on a quickly deployable European army corps, the old plan for a European Defence Community is being revived under the auspices of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), but the forging of national armies into a single military force with global aspirations is still, for the time being, unthinkable. This imbalance as well, clear for all to see, permanently chips away at the authority of the Union.
    The European project is a unique one in history. It is not an empire, it is not a federation, it is something all its own, just as new and unprecedented as the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands was in the seventeenth century. And it will require a