Mention Maastricht and eyes glaze over. That is, of course, unless discussion is punctuated by anecdotes about Brussels bureaucrats working feverishly to “harmonize” rules on everything from the size of condoms to the curvature of bananas. According to new legislation, “visually challenged” truck drivers in the European Union’s 15 member states will be required to take driving tests without their glasses-after all, glasses could always fall off while the driver is at the wheel. Never mind the immediate loss of several hundred jobs in a Europe feeling the crush of unemployment, from 11 percent in Germany to over 23 percent in Spain.
In The Rotten Heart of Europe: The Dirty War for Europe’s Money (Faber and Faber, $ 27.95, 427 pages), Bernard Connolly, a devout Thatcherite and highly regarded economist from Manchester, argues that far more is at stake in Europe’s grand federalist project than bureaucratic tedium and occasional instances of regulatory idiocy. Connolly wrote the book while he was head of monetary policy at the European Commission. In fact, its publication in Europe last year got him fired. And while the book has become something of a bible for Euroskeptics in Britain, Connolly has become persona non grata in much of continental Europe. We simply don’t want “madmen,” one Belgian official recently told a British paper, as the European Union prepared for Maastricht II, the year4ong inter-governmental conference that began at the end of March.
