ABSTRACT
Recent responses to the Eurozone crisis risk not only its disintegration but also a delegitimation of the postwar European project. The crisis is not only institutional but psychological, where debt' is equated with guilt. What is needed is lateral thinking and learning from the New Deal in the US that inspired the postwar Marshall Aid Program. Contrasts are made between the New Deal and the European responses to the financial and later Eurozone crises. Then, a link is made between New Deal social investment and democracy from which the European Union (EU) could learn in the present context of austerity programmes. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Stuart Mill inveighed against democracies that were limited to minority elites, such as in eighteenth century and early nineteenth century England, but both Rousseau and Mill realised that a majority could permanently exclude the rights of a minority. The most striking example for France, in Rousseau's time, was the Huguenots.
