An awful familiarity: Bukovsky sees developing before him an 'EUSSR'.

The last building blocks of the European Union are being set in place, and a weird unfathomable process it is too. A dozen of the 25 countries involved are to hold referendums to ratify the continent-wide constitution already approved by their leaders; the others are ramming the issue through by executive or legislative means. The majority of European governments, in other words, including the all-important German government, have found some way of avoiding the test of public opinion in order to consummate the federal empire now in full view. Public opinion nevertheless compelled President Jacques Chirac to concede a referendum to be held on May 29. Polls show that rejection by the French of the constitution is possible, maybe probable, precipitating who knows what kind of a crisis.

What's up? Why so much furtiveness? The most convincing answer comes in The Great Deception, a recent magisterial history of the EU, by Christopher Booker and Richard North. They show how decade after decade a small self-selected clique of politicians has worked single-mindedly to create a supranational Europe. In their own eyes, these politicians are visionaries, but they have always known that they could never carry voters with them, and therefore they had to conceal their goal: Deception was implicit, even structural to the project, according to Booker and North. The intention was to confront people with a fait accompli about which they could do nothing--and that is what today's constitution is designed to finalize irrevocably.

The Cold War years divided Europe into one half under Soviet rule, and the other under the protection of the United States. The consistent ambition of the Soviets, and the many Communist parties subservient to them, and fellow-traveling Socialists as well, was to weaken the American presence, and if possible, remove it altogether from the continent. One way or another, the EU has taken up where the Soviets left off, and is proving more successful: Look at the doubtful future of NATO, the growing European army, the relocation of American troops and bases out of Germany, Franco-German efforts to stymie the United States over Iraq, the lifting of the arms embargo on China, uncritical sponsorship of the PLO, and much else besides.

Vladimir Bukovsky now charges into the debate. Presently 62, he was one of the most public and courageous of Soviet dissidents, spending twelve years in Gulag and treated as a madman in one of the psychiatric units specialized in breaking people like him. Exchanged for a Chilean Communist in 1976, he settled in England, at Cambridge, where he is a biologist and political writer. To Build a Castle, his memoir of the Gulag ordeal, is a classic. (To be personal, when I met him in 1981 he predicted that in ten years the Soviet Union would collapse. Which proved exactly so.) He would have made a democratic prime minister of Russia.

In the brief period when it was possible, Bukovsky researched in the Soviet archives, publishing books such as Reckoning with Moscow about the inner truths of the Soviet system. Now with a Russian co-author, Pavel Stroilov, he has written a pamphlet, "EUSSR: The Soviet Roots of European Integration" (Sovereignty Publications, U.K.), and it is a fascinating gloss on the Booker-North thesis of the structural deception of the EU project.

Mikhail Gorbachev set up a foundation in Moscow to house the papers concerning his time in office, when the Communist party, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War too ended with a whimper and not the bang that had been generally expected. Studying these personal papers, Bukovsky and Stroilov are not surprised that the EU has taken up where the Soviet Union left off. On the contrary, they judge this to be the natural outcome of decades of socialism and fellow-traveling in Europe.

As befitted the despot in the Kremlin, Gorbachev was in the habit of receiving visitors from Western Europe, ministers and presidents in their own countries but all of them duly humble to be allowed to approach so close to absolute power. One and all, these visitors flattered Gorbachev. The Left everywhere, they agreed, was in crisis, because the experiment to build socialism had evidently failed and was in need of resuscitation.

"Progressive solutions in the social sphere must fit in the European framework," Alessandro Natta, the slippery general secretary of the Italian Communist party, told him in 1986. Gorbachev shared his ideas on how to proceed. One of his favorite slogans proclaimed a "Common European Home," and its grand purpose was to oust the United States from Europe and replace it with the Soviet Union. The task, as Gorbachev explained to Natta, was "to enrich the left movement, to get new allies." "The erosion of national frontiers--geographic, fiscal, economic," Natta replied, gave the Left "a chance of Success."

Perhaps a Communist had to speak in this vein. But what is one to make of Francisco Fernandez Ordonez, then Spanish foreign minister and a Socialist, when he tells Gorbachev in 1989, "The success of the ideas of socialism in the contemporary world community depends on the success of perestroika [Gorbachev's efforts to reform]"? The Germans were no better. That same year, former chancellor Willy Brandt assured Gorbachev that they were witnessing "a new quality of socialism in a very large part of the world." For good measure, he offered to do what he could to stifle democracy then rising in the Baltic republics.

But none are quite so creepy as the French visitors. In November 1988, President Mitterrand assured Gorbachev that "the construction of a 'Common European Home' is a great idea" and its realization would be his top priority. Bukovsky and Stroilov quote similar gobbets of appeasement and fellow-traveling from Valery Giscard d'Estaing, another French president and since then author of the EU constitution: "Nowadays Western Europe is experiencing a perestroika, changing its structure ... the USSR should be prepared to communicate with a large single state of Western Europe." Prominent French politicians and officials such as Chirac and Jacques Delors confirmed such thinking. The Socialist prime minister Pierre Mauroy cringed, "I am convinced that your democratic society will fit into the framework of the socialist movement developing in Europe."

Listening to this astonishing crew, no wonder Gorbachev fell victim to illusion. He must have come to believe that his Common European Home shared the values and political processes of the EU, and that similarities between the USSR and the EU were more than merely coincidental. Booker and North are right that the antecedents of the EU long predate Gorbachev, but Bukovsky and Stroilov are also right that the EU is a socialist construct, a statist collectivity comparable to the old USSR, complete with nomenklatura and an ideology aimed against the United States, on all of which the population at large has to be carefully protected from giving its true opinion.

Far-sightedly Bukovsky once predicted the demise of the Soviet Union. Seven of the 24 European commissioners today are former Communist apparatchiks, and in Bukovsky's warning, "it remains to be seen what kind of Gulag the EU will create." But the fate of all utopias is the same, he concludes, and "the EU will collapse very much like its prototype," even though "in doing so it will bury us all under the rubble." Still, he evidently hopes to activate public opinion in order to prevent the worst. Folly repeats itself but cannot crush the dissident spirit.