Europe's dark clouds

Jürgen Habermas's admirable normative commitment to a European public sphere has once again clouded his political judgment ( A solipsistic colossus , 12 June). He thought that opposition to the invasion of Iraq would bring a common political awareness and that the constitutional debate would educate us all about our common fate. These aspirations, alas, remain firmly in the textbooks. We increasingly face a Europe of neo-nationalism, xenophobia and beggar-my-neighbour deflationary economics. The European project is thoroughly stalled and actually in danger of going into reverse. In this context, Habermas's aspirations for "a cross-border awareness of a shared European identity" produced by a single currency is deluded and "deeper European unification" is surely not on the cards. He is certainly right to call for a new politics. But this will first need to be allied to a new realism about Europe's prospects. Professor Philip Schlesinger University of Glasgow