Leaderless Europe

From its antecedents in the 1950s, successive incarnations of European integration were intended to be leaderless. It has succeeded only too well in demonstrating that much can be achieved without sustained leadership. The attachment to national sovereignty of both most of the elites and mass populations has meant that in their practice confederalism has been implicitly accepted for the foreseeable future.

Jack Hayward taught politics at the Universities of Sheffield, Keele, Hull, and Oxford, retiring in 1998 as Director of the Oxford Institute of European Studies and Professional Fellow of St. Antony's College. Since then he has been a part-time Research Professor of Politics at the University of Hull. He has also been a Visiting Professor to several French Universities, for one year each at Sorbonne Nouvelle and the Paris Institute of Political Studies, as well as for shorter periods at the Universities of Bordeaux, Grenoble, and Rennes.