The New Old World by Perry Anderson

More pointedly still, it would approximately double the membership of the European Union, from fifteen to some thirty states. A completely new configuration would be at stake.
    Historically, these three great changes have been interconnected. In reverse order, it was the collapse of Communism that allowed the reunification of Germany that precipitated the Treaty of Maastricht. The shock-wave moved from the east to the centre to the west of Europe. But causes and consequences remain distinct. The outcomes of these processes obey no single logic. More than this: to a greater extent than in any previous phase of European integration, the impact of each is quite uncertain. We confront a set of
ex ante
indeterminacies that, adopting a Kantian turn of phrase, might be called the three amphibologies of post-Maastricht politics. They pose much more dramatic dilemmas than is generally imagined.
    The Treaty itself offers the first. Its origins lie in the dynamism of Delors’s leadership of the Commission. After securing passage of the Single European Act in 1986, Delors persuaded the European Council two years later to set up a committee largely composed of central bankers, but chaired by himself, to report on a single currency. Its recommendations were formally accepted by the Council in the spring of 1989. But it was the sudden tottering of East Germany that spurred Mitterrand to conclude an agreement with Kohl at the Strasbourg summit in the autumn, putting the decisive weight of the Franco-German axis behind the project. Thatcher, of course, was implacably opposed.
    But she was comprehensively outmanoeuvred, not least by the continental regime she most disliked, which sat in Rome. The otherwise impregnable self-confidence of
The Downing Street Years
falters disarmingly whenever its heroine comes to Europe. The titles of the chapters speak for themselves. The ordinary triumphal run—‘Falklands: The Victory’—‘Disarming the Left’—‘Hat Trick’—‘Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life’—‘The World Turned Right Side Up’—is interrupted by a faintlywoeful note. We enter the world of ‘Jeux Sans Frontières’ and ‘Babel Express’, with its ‘un-British combination of high-flown rhetoric and pork-barrel politics’, where ‘heads of government would be left discussing matters that would boggle the mind of the City’s top accountants’, and ‘the intricacies of European Community policy really test one’s intellectual ability and capacity for clear thinking’. 25
    The uncharacteristic hint of humility is well founded. Thatcher appears to have been somewhat out of her depth, as a persistent tone of rueful bewilderment suggests. The leitmotif is: ‘Looking back, it is now possible to see’—but ‘I can only say it did not seem like that at the time’. 26 Many are the occasions that inspire this mortified hindsight. Exemplary in its comedy is the Milan summit of the European Council in 1985, which ensured the inclusion of qualified majority voting in the Single European Act. ‘Signor Craxi could not have been more sweetly reasonable’—‘I came away thinking how easy it had been to get my points across’ (
sic
). But lo and behold on the following day: ‘To my astonishment and anger, Signor Craxi suddenly called a vote and by a majority the council resolved to establish an IGC’. 27 Five years later, the precedent set at Milan proved fatal at Rome. This time it was Andreotti who laid the ambush into which Thatcher fell head over heels, at the European summit of October 1990. ‘As always with the Italians, it was difficult throughout to distinguish confusion from guile’, she haplessly writes, ‘But even I was unprepared for the way things went’. 28 Once more, a vote to convene an IGC was sprung on her at the last minute, this time on the even more