ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses policies that could form the elements of a new phase
of integration. As indicated many times in this book, France and Germany
have been the motor of integration in the past, and remain the only two
countries that could again take up that role. The policies are not new. They
have been tried before, but in the early twenty-first century they have the
advantage of moving on from the tired agendas of the 1980s and 1990s.
They also have the merit of being about issues on which the public in Wes-
tern Europe, with the exception of Ireland and the UK, as indicated in the polls carried out by Eurobarometer in 2005, seemed happy to support a
higher degree of common action by the EU (Eurobarameter 64, June 2006,
p. 106). They are also about issues that are key to the European identity:
defence and social democracy.
