Criticism is the oxygen of self-reflection for any writer, as time is a test of intellectual or political judgement. I will try to say something about each, in responding to this trio of assessments, all acute, of The New Old World. First, as to its form, about which Philippe Schmitter expresses a courteous puzzlement. How should the book be classified? Is it sufficiently coherent to admit of any proper classification? Concluding that it would perhaps be best to assign it to the category of theoretical works on European integration, he confesses incomprehension as to why, in that case, so much of the book should be taken up with studies of the recent histories of France, Germany, Italy, Cyprus and Turkey.footnote¹ He is certainly right that the movement of analysis in The New Old World, which runs from the supranational to the national and back to the supranational, is staccato rather than legato. The different levels of enquiry are juxtaposed, not integrated. In that, however, they could be said to reflect the disjuncture between the two arenas of European politics in the period under consideration, between which there was little lived connexion, a gap now closing. But Schmitter’s question can still be asked: why, in a work on the history of the eu, descend from the all-Union level to deal with developments within particular countries at all?

The answer lies in the political purposes of the book. Most of the literature on the eu, as noted in its foreword, is highly technical, enjoying little currency among non-specialists; in addition much of it is so ideologically uniform as to stifle, rather than arouse, any interest in the variety of political conflicts and cultures across Europe. The result, reinforced by a widespread conformism of media opinion, remains a surprising intellectual parochialism—a lack of any genuinely European public sphere. This will only be remedied when political curiosity can cross national borders in a natural to-and-fro of the kind that marked the continent’s republic of letters in the time of Montesquieu or Hume, even that of Curtius or Benda, not to speak of its revolutionary versions in Trotsky or Gramsci. The aim of writing about the core countries of the Union, and its Eastern Question, on the plane where politics retains vastly greater popular meaning than in the rarefied machinery of Brussels, was to offer some reminder, however diminished, of this tradition.

To national introversion has corresponded, over the same period, continental self-satisfaction. This was the second target of The New Old World. If in the case of the first, the critical intention was performative, in that of the second it could hardly be more demonstrative. The book is a systematic attack on the European narcissism that reached a crescendo in these years: the claim that the Union offers a ‘paragon’—in the formula of the late Tony Judt, echoed by so many other pillars of European wisdom—of social and political development to humanity at large. Since 2010, the lacerations of the Eurozone have left their own cruel commentary on these vanities. But have they, for all that, disappeared? That it would be premature to think so can be seen from an august example. Jürgen Habermas has just published another book about the eu, now following Ach, Europa (2008) with Zur Verfassung Europas (2011).footnote² Its centrepiece, an essay entitled ‘The Crisis of the European Union in the Light of a Constitutionalization of International Law’, is a remarkable illustration of the patterns of thought indicated. Some sixty pages in length, it contains around a hundred references. Three quarters of them are to German authors. Nearly half of these, in turn, are to three associates whom he thanks for assistance, or to himself. The residue is exclusively Anglo-American, dominated—a third of the entries—by a single British admirer, David Held of recent Gaddafi fame. No other European culture figures in this ingenuous exhibition of provincialism.

More arresting still is the theme of the essay. In 2008 Habermas had attacked the Lisbon Treaty for failing to make good the democratic deficit of the eu, or offer any moral-political horizon for it. The Treaty’s passage, he wrote, could only ‘cement the existing chasm between political elites and citizens’, without supplying any positive direction to Europe. Needed instead was a Europe-wide referendum to endow the Union with the social and fiscal harmonization, military capacity and—above all—directly elected Presidency that alone could save the continent from a future ‘settled along orthodox neo-liberal lines’. Noting how far from his traditional outlook was this enthusiasm for a democratic expression of popular will that he had never shown any sign of countenancing in his own country,footnote³ I commented that, once the Treaty was pushed through, Habermas would no doubt quietly pocket it after all.

The prediction was an underestimate. Not quietly pocketing, but extravagantly trumpeting the Treaty, Habermas has now discovered that, far from cementing any chasm between elites and citizens, it is no less than the charter of an unprecedented step forward in human liberty, its duplication of the foundations of European sovereignty in at once citizens and peoples—not states—of the Union, a luminous template for a parliament of the world to come. The Europe of Lisbon, leading the way in a ‘civilizing process’ that pacifies relations between states, confining the use of force to punishment of those who violate human rights, is blazing a trail from our indispensable, if still improvable, ‘international community’ of today to the ‘cosmopolitan community’ of tomorrow, a Union writ large embracing every last soul on earth.footnote⁴ In such raptures, the narcissism of recent decades, far from abating, has reached a new paroxysm. That the Treaty of Lisbon speaks not of the peoples but of the states of Europe; that it was rammed through to circumvent the popular will, expressed in three referenda; that the structure it enshrines is widely distrusted by those subject to it; and that so far from being a sanctuary of human rights, the Union it codifies has colluded with torture and occupation, without a murmur from its ornaments—all of this vanishes in a stupor of self-admiration.

No single mind can stand, as such, for an outlook. Now laden with as many European prizes as the ribbons of a Brezhnevite general, Habermas is no doubt in part the victim of his own eminence: enclosed, like Rawls before him, in a mental world populated overwhelmingly by admirers and followers, decreasingly able to engage with positions more than a few millimetres away from his own. Often hailed as a contemporary successor to Kant, he risks becoming a modern Leibniz, constructing with imperturbable euphemisms a theodicy in which even the evils of financial deregulation contribute to the blessings of cosmopolitan awakening,footnote⁵ while the West sweeps the path of democracy and human rights towards an ultimate Eden of pan-human legitimacy. To that extent Habermas represents a special case, in both his distinction and the corruption of it. But the habit of talking of Europe as a cynosure for the world, without showing much knowledge of the actual cultural or political life within it, has not gone away, and is unlikely to yield just to the tribulations of the common currency. It is against this that The New Old World is in good part directed. Schmitter would be entitled, if he cared, to move it to a lower shelf, marked Polemics.

Alain Supiot points to another and larger limitation of the book. Beyond the awkward fit, or lack of it, between supranational and national levels, is the absence of any sustained treatment of Eastern Europe. This is something of which I was particularly conscious in designing its structure, since two earlier works on Europe had been built around systematic comparison between Western and Eastern Europe. I would have liked, in however reduced a measure, to retain something of that balance in looking at the continent today. Reasons of space and of existing coverage made me feel it was preferable to concentrate on just one legacy of that earlier history: what has become of the Ottoman remains in Turkey and Cyprus, of which any critical awareness is rare in today’s eu. Supiot’s critique is a more far-reaching one, however, than of a shortage of equivalent discussion of the ex-Communist countries of Eastern Europe in The New Old World. It focuses on the structural consequences of enlargement to the East within the eu as a whole. Indicated at the outset of the book as a major transformation to come, the effects of expansion are not, as he rightly notes, given commensurate treatment thereafter. How decisive their contribution has been to the overall neo-liberal turn of the Union may be moot, but that enlargement has worked in this direction there can be little doubt. Where I would enter a caution is in eliding too swiftly the doctrinaire neo-liberalism adopted by ex-Communist East European elites with the exploitative pragmatism of the still-Communist rulers of China. However ruthless their treatment of labour, their handling of currency, land and capital markets, not to speak of state enterprises, remains distinct, like the economic growth they have posted to date.