The prologue by John Rex to Whose Europe? describes the essays as political sociology. The twelve authors examine different aspects of the discipline which Rex describes as ‘being transformed by structural and political events in the real world’. Divided into three sections—Barriers, Bridges and Processes—the essays analyse developments since the construction of the single European market with an emphasis on the implications of the citizenship provisions in the recent Amsterdam Treaty. However, they are not wholly concerned with politics per se. Sue Wright writes on the linguistic factor in European integration, and Stephen May and Charlotte Hoffman examine the linguistic dimension in the European microcosms of Wales and Catalonia respectively.

Where Are We Going? resembles nothing so much as fine vintage port. It makes an ideal post-prandial companion. Roll recalls in his memoirs (Crowded Hours, 1985), the family custom of lively conversation around the dinner table in Czernowitz in the company of distinguished amateur artists, academics and politicians; reading this book created the illusion of listening to the author in just that setting. His bent for lively speculation was further nurtured at the University of Birmingham economics faculty.

Roll explains in the preface that he ‘felt a sort of moral obligation’ to write about ‘how errors might be avoided, or at least mitigated in future, after writing Where Did We Go Wrong?’. He sets out the principal trends he discerns in Britain and the world, along with a tightly constructed argument about where he thinks they should lead us in the next twenty years. His approach to the new millennium is not merely that of a distinguished economist but that of someone evidently stimulated by the 1997 Labour victory, which ‘may well turn out to have been something of a seismic change in the composition of our political structure’.

He is confident that the House of Commons will eventually be elected by proportional representation and that, after its initial hesitation, our government will guide us into full participation in EMU. He is gently persuasive about the virtues of domestic works councils, the subject of the EU draft directive that the British government is currently vetoing. There are many more ideas and lapidary insights, not the least of which is his perspective on the evolution and limits of the United States as world power, formed over fifty years of intimate contact with US academics, politicians and diplomats.

It was not surprising to find that Roll’s main points were also those to which I attach importance. The coincidence confirmed the existence of a self-evident corpus of liberal, progressive ideas held in common by observant, reflective citizens in a political continuum stretching from Kenneth Clarke through John Monks to one’s own dinner-table companions.

It was difficult to know whether or not this continuum extended to the authors of Whose Europe?. This is because the unspoken, but clear, rationale for the collection is to boost the authors’ credit ratings in the academic credibility stakes. Such a narrow aim results in intellectual production using techniques which global economic historians are currently describing as ‘Smithian growth’, i.e. increased output based on productivity gains through intensive division of labour and specialisation. The essays were worthy, but strictly limited in their interest-value for the inquisitive civic consumer.

Political sociologists share two major limitations with other social scientists in writing material which can inform public understanding of major issues confronting politicians about our future.

The first is the inability to transcend the circumscribed boundaries of specialised discipline and scholastic epistemology, the commonplace of electronic and live classrooms and academic conferences. The essays in Whose Europe? spend far too much space delivering a potted and often distorted history and analysis of the EU, based on other academics’ and think tanks’ opinions. The standard, but complex and dense history of the EU by Alan Milward was cited only once in the collection, in Reiner Grundmann’s essay. And even he invested more space and intellectual energy in describing the superficial, sceptical gloss placed on the EU by Mark Leonard.

Second, social scientists rely on living, contemporary informants to carry on their research. This condition is unimportant when the informants are part of a ‘typical’, ‘ordinary’ statistical sample and can remain anonymous without distorting or limiting the analysis offered. But when they are movers and shakers, the social scientists dare not examine their informants’ motives, their actions and their consequences too clinically or transparently for fear of not being granted further interviews. The double bind is that in order to continue to research, the social scientist must disguise and euphemise her or his results.

The political sociologists writing in Whose Europe? hardly spoke about the current political stresses and strains inside the Council of Ministers which is the actual cockpit of the EU. They did not analyse the current tensions between the governments, prime ministers and chancellors. Above all, they did not address one of the central issues facing Europe: can Germany be genuinely rehabilitated as an independent actor inside the EU and in the world?

At a micro level, this omission was replicated in Hoffman’s abstention from informing the reader about the similarities between Catalan and Castilian Spanish as languages and the consequent complexity of addressing the question of whether or not diglossia was evolving. (Nor did she provide a definition of diglossia—a specialised linguistic term not easily accessible.) Both Hoffman and May left the reader under the mistaken impression that the situation between Catalan and Castilian was comparable to that between Welsh and English, which are not diglossic at all. But Hoffman and May might not be welcomed by the national politicians of Catalonia and Wales if they were fully frank and candid.

If academics want to influence the next twenty years, we must transcend disciplines by breaking bread and drinking vintage port together on a concerted, serious basis. The authors of Whose Europe? care deeply about Europe’s future. But their conclusions are opaque, without any hint of how they might be applied by the people inhabiting the real world of politics. Participating in civic forums to discuss and debate the issues facing the EU might not help one’s rating in the Research Assessment Exercise. It is, nevertheless, a prerequisite for the EU making progress towards a more democratic political culture.