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.