ABSTRACT
The British debate about European economic integration displays many peculiarities. Prime amongst them, I suggest, is the following. Whilst the party political right in Britain has tended to opt into the debate about integration, albeit primarily as a means to opt out of the institutional arrangements established to guide the integration process, the party political left has increasingly opted into the institutional arrangements having previously opted out of the debate. I attempt to use this chapter, first, to explain the limited nature of left political mobilisation around the preferred form of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and, second, to show that the institutional apparatus established at Maastricht to guide the integration process further constrains the political space for viable left strategies.
