Grand dreams of European unity have dimmed in recent years, buffeted by resurgent nationalism. "Integration is like a bicycle," says Walter Hallstein, the former president of the European Economic Community and one of the fervid dreamers. "You either move on or you fall off." Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat, describes the present arrangement of economic partnership without political integration in lustier Italian metaphor. "There is not yet a united Europe. As law scholars would say, the marriage among European countries was not consummated."
British Author Anthony Sampson, who dissected his own country seven years ago, in Anatomy of Britain, has...