"Oakeshott, whose technical theory afforded no space for the nation-state, since collective solidarity was not a principle of civil association, had – as might be expected – nothing to say about the problems of a supra-national one. Asked his view of Britain’s entry into the EEC in the early sixties, Noel Annan reports, he replied: 'I do not find it necessary to hold opinions on such matters.' Hayek, on the other hand, held firm and far-seeing ones. As early as 1939, he argued in his prophetic essay "The Economic Conditions of Inter-State Federalism" that transcendence of national sovereignty in a supra-national framework should be of natural advantage to a free economy, since the higher the plane on which its structural parameters were set – that is, the remoter from local faction and interest – the more insulated they would be from popular passion. In other words: the less immediately democratic the machinery of decision, the safer it was likely to be for the reproduction of capital. Of course, this was less a logical deduction than an empirical wager – that the task of constructing a supra-national popular sovereignty, capable of determining the social path of a supra-national economy, would prove impossible. That calculation has yet to be confounded, as the terms of union agreed at Maastricht – a central monetary authority for Europe, without any commensurate elected assembly – show."