“The European Union: centralised, bureaucratic, unaccountable and corrupt, eroding our independence and dictating policies that we would never vote for in an election.” The charge is serious and the response is too frequently a laconic nod of compassionate understanding. Some academics share these concerns. According to Alesina and Wacziarg (1999), Europe has gone too far beyond an optimal degree of centralization on most issues. Its policy makers, regardless as to whether they are ministers, parliamentarians or commissioners, have a strong vested interest in this outcome (see Vaubel, 1994). For Siedentop (2000: 216–7), “the élites of Europe have fallen victims to the tyranny of economic language at the expense of political values such as the dispersal of power and democratic accountability.” European liberal democracy has become hostage to economic thinking and, since the mid 1980s, Europe has been inexorably propelled towards a model of unitary state with concentrated power and authority, betraying the intrinsic values of federalism and precipitating a crisis of democracy. While, curiously, for Gillingham (2003), the ill-fated, and failed, centralizing campaigns of the abhorred European bureaucrats, and their national supporters, are instead the product of a deep misunderstanding, and mistrust, of the market mechanism.

Some of these works are speculative, broad-brush analyses that fall well short of systematic empirical investigation. Others are comprehensive, but essentially atheoretical and, therefore, nonanalytical, fact-listing stories. None is value neutral, or attempts to separate, at least somewhat, the positive from the normative.