characteristic of nationhood. Political systems need to be held together by more than the glue of economics, they need to be socially constructed. The EU has acknowledged this problem. Whilst the elitist and bureaucratic path to integration in the 1950s and 1960s created the ‘new Europe’, the lack of popular involvement in the project failed to create ‘new Europeans’. The crisis of European integration in the 1970s contributed to the birth of the people’s Europe agenda in the mid-1980s.9 The failure of the people’s Europe agenda to establish itself resulted in widespread
