The Union of the early twenty-first century is not the Community of the fifties or sixties, but my admiration for its original architects remains undiminished. Their enterprise had no historical precedent, and its grandeur continues to haunt what it has since become.

Milward’s central argument is that the origins of the Community have little or nothing to do with either the technical imperatives of interdependence – which may even have been less significant at mid-century than fifty years earlier – or the ethereal visions of a handful of federalist worthies. They were rather a product of the common disaster of the Second World War, when every nation-state between the Pyrenees and the North Sea was shattered by defeat and occupation.

From the depths of impotence and discredit into which prewar institutions had fallen, a quite new kind of structure had to be built up after peace returned. The post-war states of Western Europe were laid, Milward contends, on a much wider social basis than their narrow and brittle predecessors, for the first time integrating farmers, workers and petty-bourgeois fully into the political nation with a set of measures for growth, employment and welfare. It was the unexpected success of these policies within each country that prompted a second kind of broadening, of cooperation between countries. Morally rehabilitated within their own borders, six nation-states on the continent found they could strengthen themselves yet further by sharing to common advantage certain elements of sovereignty.