The builders of Europe, he argued, had acted as if they got the money right, the politics would take care of itself, approaching the EU solely as if it were a trading club, even though they were clearly in the business of creating a new political entity.
While this argument clearly held appeal to Eurosceptics, Siedentop saw the neo-liberal right, especially in Britain, as the worst offenders in making economics Europe’s all-powerful raison d’être. The result had been a debate of such poor quality that no one seemed to know what key terms, such as federalism, actually mean.
To the Germans, it means a decentralised system like theirs, where Berlin cannot dictate to regional governments, while citizens and media are protected by the constitution against an overbearing central government. In Britain, by contrast, it has come to mean the complete opposite – a vast overpowerful superstate.
Partly as a result of Britain’s failure to engage in the debate and its strident opposition to anything like the German federal model, the initiative had been taken by the French who set out to shape the EU on its own, centralised, techo-bureaucratic image, threatening the “diversity in Europe” rooted in the continent’s history and culture.
Far from disliking the idea of a federal Europe, Siedentop favoured it, albeit on the American model. “Federalism is the right goal for Europe,” he wrote. About how to get there he was rather more vague, other than proposing a European senate of national parliamentarians, so that national parliaments could have some real oversight of European law-making. It would, he conceded, need a change in the political culture of the member states that would take decades, not years.
“It’s incredibly moving, to see a free people governing itself, and that’s what you see in America, and what you don’t see in Europe,” he said. “I’m not sure how to get there from here, but I know we’ve got to start.”
Larry Alan Siedentop was born in Chicago, Illinois, on May 24 1936 to Russell and Dorothy Siedentop and attended Hope College, Michigan, before taking an MA at Harvard.
He came to Oxford in 1960 on a Marshall scholarship and took a DPhil at Magdalen College under Isaiah Berlin, with a thesis entitled “The Limits of Enlightenment” (1966) focusing on the philosophy of Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), and Maine de Biran (1766-1824).
From 1968, after three years as a research fellow at Nuffield College he spent most of his academic career as a fellow of Keble College and as a university lecturer in Political Thought.