EUROPEAN UNION: DENIS STAUNTONreviews The New Old WorldBy Perry Anderson, Verson, 592pp, £24.99

AFTER FOUR referendums in 10 years and the torrent of information and argument that attended each of them, how close have we come to understanding the European Union? Our periodic disputes about the mechanics of decision-making in Brussels may have left behind a residue of fluency in the arcane language of qualified majority voting and co-decision but the bigger European picture remains stubbornly obscure.

It’s not simply that few of us can predict with confidence where European integration is heading or where the Union’s final, physical borders will be set; the very character and purpose of the EU as a polity seems to have become more elusive even as it looms ever larger and more influential in the lives of its citizens.

"The Union remains a more or less unfathomable mystery to all but a handful of those who, to their bemusement, have . . . become its citizens. Well-nigh entirely arcane to ordinary voters, a film of mist obscures it even in the mirror of scholars," writes Perry Anderson in The New Old World, a masterly analysis of the history of the EU, its present condition and future prospects. For Anderson, part of the difficulty in considering Europe lies in the need to hold in a single focus the supranational plane of the European institutions and the national one on which most of the continent's political life continues to be played out.

One of the leading Marxist historians of the past century, Anderson brings to his task an intimidating knowledge of the political, social and cultural currents that have shaped today's Europe. As editor of the New Left Review, he introduced generations of English-speaking readers to the work of continental thinkers from Gramsci and Lukács to Benjamin and Althusser, and although he now teaches history and sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, he is still more closely in touch with the intellectual life of the continent than most of his peers on these islands.

Born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family, Anderson was educated at Eton and Oxford but spent much of his childhood in China, Ireland and California. He was radicalised by the two international crises of 1956, the Franco-British Suez debacle and the Soviet suppression of Hungary’s uprising, that gave birth to the New Left movement.

The New Left rejected both Stalinism and the "stolid and mundane" reformism of Labourism and in its first years, the New Left Reviewsaw itself as part of a broader, potential mass movement and New Left Clubs throughout Britain helped to organise the first Aldermaston March of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

When Anderson and his cohorts Mike Davis and Robin Blackburn took control of the journal in 1962, its focus became more international and theoretical, taking Sartre's Les Temps Modernesas its model. A map of the world in its Soho offices bore markings recording each place the journal wrote about and contributors were encouraged to study different, relatively minor languages.

Although Anderson himself speaks all the main European languages, he is self-effacing about his language skills, pointing out in a 2001 interview that his brother Benedict, also a historian, speaks many more, including Indonesian, Javanese and Tagalog.

The influence of the New Left Reviewincreased, particularly in universities, as the 1968 generation embraced the idea of revolution but by 2000, when the journal was relaunched in a new format, Anderson was urging the Left to acknowledge its own failure.

“The only starting point for a realistic left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat,” he wrote.

Unlike many on the Left, Anderson admires the European integration project, even if he regrets the way it has developed, particularly since the start of the neo-liberal ascendency in the 1980s.

“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 become,” he writes.

The New Old Worldis made up of essays published over more than a decade, looking at the origins of the EU, the theories surrounding it and prognoses for its future. At its centre are sweeping historical, political and cultural surveys of the three countries that have been at the heart of the Union from the beginning – France, Germany and Italy – and two at its eastern edge – Cyprus and Turkey.

For Anderson, today’s EU conforms neither to the socially responsible, supranational democracy envisaged by Jean Monnet nor the rival, inter-governmentalist vision of a limited pooling of powers by the member-states. Instead, the Union has become a kind of regulatory body that not only lacks proper democratic accountability but from which politics of any kind has been drained.

Seventy-five per cent of EU decisions are agreed at committees of civil servants from the member-states and officials from the Council of Ministers, on the basis of proposals from the European Commission. These meetings, which are held in private, discuss issues that were traditionally debated in national legislatures.

“In the conclaves of Brussels, these become the object of diplomatic negotiations . . . What the core structures of the EU effectively do is to convert the open agenda of parliaments into the closed world of chancelleries,” Anderson writes.

If Anderson is critical of the way the Union is run, he is withering about the “apparently illimitable narcissism” that contrasts Europe as “a humane continent of peace and progress” with the “increasingly violent, ominous Other” that is America. Such European triumphalism, he argues, ignores the extent to which the low-tax, welfare-cutting, privatising economic policies pursued by European governments with the backing of the Commission have elided many of the distinctions between the European and American social models.

Besides, he asks, how independent of the United States is the EU?

“The answer is cruel, as even a cursory glance at the record shows. In many ways, perhaps at no time since 1950 has it been less so.”

Here one discerns the most painful disappointment for Anderson, as he sees the Union preparing itself for the role of “a deputy empire” to the US, a “help-meet and counsel, taking the initiative in its own sphere, and following its senior in theatres beyond it”.

Anderson is justified in his outrage at the hypocrisy of European governments that colluded with the torture and rendition programme of the Bush administration presenting themselves as morally superior. He is too dismissive, however, of the defiance shown to Washington by Chirac and Schröder on the eve of the Iraq war and of the distinction between the approach most European governments take to Israel and Palestine and that of the US.

Anderson’s assertion that inter-ethnic relations are harsher in Europe than in the US is dubious and he is too scornful of those who wish to make the EU more accommodating for Muslim immigrants. He offers no prescriptions for a better European future but allows a glimmer of optimism in the observation that “the unintended consequences that have tracked integration from the start” could yield “further, possibly better, surprises”.

The New Old Worldwill make for uncomfortable reading in Brussels but as an important step towards creating what Anderson calls "a republic of letters" in the EU, this lively, immensely erudite work is essential reading for all who still believe in the possibility of democratic renewal within the European integration project.

Denis Staunton is the Foreign Editor of The Irish Times