Second paragraph of third chapter:

The Peloponnesian War was the first real world war in human history. It lasted 29 years and was fought on three continents, Europe, Africa and Asia, involving the biggest part of the then-known western world. The war was fought between two city-states, Athens and Sparta (Lacedaemon) and it was also the first civil war in history. All combatant parties were speaking Greek.

I knew Basil Coronakis from his work as founder of the eccentric Brussels newspaper New Europe, no longer what it once was; Basil himself died in 2021 at the age of 82, but he had given me this book in 2016, soon after publication. Unfortunately I then mislaid it, and only recently found it (literally) at the back of an inaccessible shelf.

Rather like Basil himself, the book eloquently and discursively describes what he thinks is wrong with the EU. Like a lot of us, he did not see Brexit coming, and this book published two months before the referendum assumes that the UK / France / Germany axis will continue to run the EU in perpetuity. He reckoned that the EU was deeply damaged by the Eastern enlargements of 2004 and after, but does not really explain why.

He goes into quite intense detail on some of the cases of maladministration and outright corruption that he uncovered as a journalist. His central point, that EU officials enjoy the comforts of a privileged lifestyle where their decisions affect hundreds of millions, and could perhaps be more helpful to those who question it, surely goes without saying.

I’m not as thoroughly convinced as Basil was that the EU is fatally wounded or unreformable, but I’ve come across enough troubling cases in my own work to feel that he had a good point about continued vigilance. I feel that this would be a useful read for supporters of the European project, to see the criticisms of a former insider and check against their own gut feelings. The second (2017) edition has no doubt been improved; you can get it here.