David Marquand: Europe’s Missing Union

David Marquand, the author of “The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe,” was a Labour member of the British Parliament and an official at the European Commission.

THE European Union was conceived in hope: hope that peaceful, law-based integration would exorcise the demons of the Continent’s past and embed democratic norms and institutions in its political culture. That hope has come closer to realization than anyone could reasonably have expected when the process started 60 years ago. The centuries-old struggle for mastery between France and Germany has come to an end. The fascist regimes that once ruled Portugal, Spain and Greece have disappeared, as have the Soviet puppet regimes that once ruled 10 nations in central and Eastern Europe.

But these achievements are now in danger. Thanks to the euro zone crisis — and the mixture of political sclerosis and financial turbulence that have accompanied it — we can no longer take for granted that the democratization of Europe is a done deed. In Portugal, Greece, Spain, Italy and Ireland voters have discovered that the bond markets have more power over their destinies than they have themselves. In Europe’s troubled periphery Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address has been amended: government may be of the people, but it is for the credit ratings agencies.

Behind this brute reality looms the perennial question of how compatible democracy and capitalism are — and how to resolve the inescapable tension between the two. These aren’t new questions, but they are more neuralgic in Europe today than at any time since 1945....