Abstract

Any history of the European Union reiterates how the lesson of the war was the need for European unity, the another "lesson" of history is that political extremism of the inter-war period was the result of mass unemployment and untrammelled social inequality. Hence the 'class compromise' of the post-war decades: keynesian economics and the welfare state, which together ensured not just rising real incomes but crucially less inequality. christian democrats (and, in Britain one nation conservatives) now modernised their unitary conception of the national society to acknowledge popular interest representation. This compromise was ruptured by the Thatcher revolution. Yet until 1990s, this belief remained mostly an Anglo-Saxon eccentricity. Today however, for European business and political elites, what seems to really matter is the global market, certainly not European society.