This has not been an easy book to write. I am a convinced believer in the need for European integration and spent some 30 years as a European civil servant working “for the cause”. I still swim in EU waters; among other things, I have the great privilege of teaching young Europeans at the European Institute at the LSE and at the College of Europe in Bruges. I first became a believer in European integration, as a peace project, at school, through the First World War poetry of Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon and through theatrical works such as R. C. Sheriff’s Journey’s End and Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War. Later, after having grown up in the United Kingdom, I had the privilege and good fortune to live, work and study in Italy, France and Belgium, countries that, in their different ways, still had very vivid memories of the convulsions that tore apart the European continent (and more besides) twice in the twentieth century. Through my studies I rapidly understood that an integrated Europe also made convincing economic sense. A little later I realized, particularly through my work at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, that an integrated Europe made good geopolitical and strategic sense. Since then I have, through my various positions in the European Union’s institutions, had the privilege to witness from close up history in the making, from the single market to the single currency, from German unification to various enlargements, from a Community of 12, when I started in the Council of the European Union, to a Union of 28 when I left the European Economic and Social Committee some 30 years later.

With regard to la construction européenne, I sensed strongly the logic to what was being done, even if, with typical Anglo-Saxon prudence, I had misgivings about the speed of certain processes: but, after all, a single currency and a fiscal union are logical corollaries of a single market, and working together as a single trading bloc is the only logical response to global economic and demographic trends.