ABSTRACT
Calvin Coolidge, the US President in the 1920s, is famous for the dictum: The business of America is business. This is not true of the old continent, despite precedents such as Venice and Albion. The business of Europe is politics and war. Both are governed by risk and ambivalence. In the late 1980s, in one of her speeches on Europe, Margaret Thatcher poured scorn on the idea of an identikit European personality designed to suppress nationhood. Irrefutable evidence of the European Unions (EUs) democratic deficit is that the Commission is unelected, though up to perhaps 80 per cent of the laws passed at national level originate in Brussels. In Bavaria, the Christian Social Union (CSU) has seized the opportunity presented by the Constitutional Courts ruling to demand that major European Union decisions, evidently including the admission of new members, be put to referendums. Autocracy and the practice of nationalism correlate.
