ABSTRACT
The idea of a ‘United States of Europe’ has gripped the imagination of scholars, intellectuals and practising politicians for well over a hundred years. Even in Britain, there is a flourishing federalist tradition that departs from the work of such Victorian historians as Edward Acton (Lang 2002) through to the ‘progressive’ intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s and the many intellectuals, both socialist and liberal, associated with ‘Federal Union’ (Mayne and Pinder 1990). Before and during the Second World War, British writers such as H. N. Brailsford, Kingsley Martin and G. D. H. Cole argued in favour of a socialist European federation as a way of mobilizing a democratic dynamic against the Nazis (Gilbert 1990). In 1940, the constitutional scholar Ivor Jennings wrote a pamphlet called A Federation for Western Europe: the elegance and brevity of the draft constitution included as an appendix to this book might have been a useful model for the somewhat more verbose delegates in the Laeken Convention (Jennings 1940). Jennings’s brief volume was one of dozens of pamphlets, reports and books published by the British federalist movement over the next decades. The most influential academic journal of European integration, the Journal of Common Market Studies, is an offshoot of this activity in favour of federalism: many of the contributors to its earliest editions (for instance, François Duchêne, Stanley Henig, Uwe Kitzinger, John Lambert, Richard Mayne, John Pinder and Roy Pryce) were convinced federalists with a long history of engagement in the life of Federal Union and its associated policy think-tank, the Federal Trust. There has never been a shortage in Britain of intellectuals who have been willing to assert (or hope) that ‘by 2050, surely . . . the nation state will everywhere have vanished’ (Thomas 1997: 59).
