"America’s constitution had flaws, but it proved astonishingly robust. Europe’s at the end of the twentieth century was fragile. It sought to govern not a mostly homogeneous set of commonwealth states, but countries with distinct personalities, cultures and vulnerabilities. Few were ready to submerge them in a continental whole, as fashioned by the champions of ever closer union in Brussels. The European Commission and Parliament had both become unwieldy. The former’s bureaucratic expansion into everything from building regulations to food sizing and bat control was ridiculed. The impending eurozone was a gamble. Lacking the safety valve of internal devaluation or other adjustments, it would involve a severe loss of sovereignty for its member governments. The European Parliament was a paper tiger, given over to lobbying for domestic projects. Election turnouts fell steadily from sixty-two per cent in 1979 to forty-three per cent in 2009."