David Glenn has an “interesting article”:http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i44/44a01201.htm today about Glyn Morgan’s new “book”:http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/8082.html on the justifications for EU integration. I’ve just started reading the book (it begins very nicely). Morgan sets out to discomfit both euro-skeptics and most euro-enthusiasts by making a straightforward argument for an European super-state rather than the sort of post-sovereign multilevel fudge preferred by many pro-EU types.

bq. Mr. Morgan invites his reader to imagine that foreign-based terrorists someday launch large-scale attacks in Europe, and that the United States cannot offer much help, because its own military is bogged down in China or Iraq or elsewhere. Without a unitary state and a unified military, he writes, “there would be little that European leaders could — other than fulminate about U.S. isolationism — do about it.” … “Europeans need to confront this brutal choice,” the British-born Mr. Morgan says. “Are they going to remain weak and dependent and maintain their decentralized government units, or are they going to try to become players in the world? And if they’re going to become players in the world, they need to centralize. I think presenting that brutal choice is profoundly annoying to both sides of the debate.”

Morgan will also be doing an “online colloquium”:http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2005/07/europe/ at the Chronicle on Thursday. I’ll be posting on this more when I finish the book.