‘Europe’ represents far more than this for Pagden. He sees the ‘concert of Europe’ or the balance of power that emerged from the Napoleonic wars as the basis of a new form of ‘trans-national constitutionalism’ which has sought to respect the national integrity of constituent members, but also to subordinate national interests to common values and norms, and in the process to create a continent-wide common market. Pagden traces the emergence of today’s Europe through the vicissitudes of the competition for imperial control over Africa, two world wars, and the long battles over the institutional structures of the European Union. His subtext is the historical inexorability of the pursuit of today’s Europe, even portraying colonialism in a rosy light because its ‘civilising mission’ somehow also civilised Europe – not very successfully, as World War I was to demonstrate.

Pagden, a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and History at the University of California, Los Angeles, is well known for his detailed but bold arguments, sometimes criticised as laborious and simplistic, as in Worlds at War: The 2,500 year struggle between East and West (2008) and The Enlightenment: And why it still matters (2013). He is thoroughly European, having held positions at pre-Brexit Oxford and Cambridge and at universities across Europe. (The acknowledgments in the book were written from a village on the Riviera.) It is an erudite but weighty tome, with fifty-five pages of notes and a twenty-eight-page bibliography. Pagden writes old-fashioned intellectual history, relying on a deep familiarity with the published views of key players rather than on wider contexts of social and economic change or evidence of popular attitudes. At times it does read like a compendium of statements from those advocating a European vision, thus reminding the reader of the days when historians compiled citations on boxes of index cards that could be sorted and inserted into relevant chapters.

The most engrossing pages of the book are those where Pagden leaves behind the most famous Europeanists, such as Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, to tell us of the largely forgotten men who prepared the way (they are all men). These are fascinating, sometimes quixotic, often racist, figures: among them the Swiss jurist Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Professor of Political Science at the University of Heidelberg; the Austrian-Japanese Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (the founding president of the Pan-European Union for forty-nine years); the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève; and the Professor of Public Law at the University of Edinburgh, James Lorimer.

In contrast, the key institutional players, such as Charles de Gaulle and even Konrad Adenauer, receive scant attention. Emmanuel Macron is far more to Pagden’s liking, both for seizing on Brexit as the prompt for a renewed commitment to European integration and for standing up to the right-wing nationalists in his own country. In contrast, the figure at the heart of recent European history, Angela Merkel, is abruptly dismissed with criticism of her generous refugee policy. Even so, she is one of only a handful of women to whom Pagden refers among the hundreds of Europeanists he cites.

For Pagden, the work reproduced on the cover of his book captures his idea of Europe ‘eloquently’: it is Corrado Giaquinto’s 1754 painting of the embrace of the female allegories of Justice and Peace, a sumptuous rococo homage to Ferdinand VI of Spain, el Prudente and el Justo. The two essential ideas underpinning Pagden’s own idea of Europe are the rule of law under constitutional government and the cooperative protection of competitive commercial networks. It is these deep-seated values and interests, he argues, which equip the European Union to survive its current challenges, from the surge of populist xenophobia to the Covid pandemic.

Ipso facto, those with alternative visions for the continent are excluded, notably those for whom Europe should have been a continent of international socialism or communism. Pagden dismisses communism simply as the ideology of the Bolsheviks, designed to wreck Europe in the name of internationalism. Marx receives less attention than Mussolini or Oswald Mosley. There is no reference to the ‘euro-communism’ of western Europe so influential between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the collapse of the Soviet Union twenty years later. Even democratic socialism bears the stain of Bolshevism for Pagden. There is no mention at all of Jean Jaurès, leader of the French PSU (Unified Socialist Party), part of the French Section of the Workers International (SFIO), who was assassinated on 31 July 1914 as he urged workers in France and Germany not to obey the siren calls of war but instead to take strike action. The next day France began mobilising its armies.

While left-wing views of a people’s Europe are irrelevant to Pagden’s history, he is more alert to the current challenge to the European project: the rise of right-wing populism and xenophobia. There are strong nationalist ‘identity’ movements in Spain, France, Finland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Belgium, and elsewhere; right-wing parties are in coalition governments in Italy, Austria, and the Netherlands or have even captured government on their own, as in Hungary and Poland. But Pagden is characteristically upbeat, confident that the European Union will survive this new challenge, despite the ‘masochism’ of European intellectuals and journalists. The brilliance and contentiousness of his final chapter on ‘The Once and Future Europe’ on its own makes his provocative book well worth reading.