Yes, Lee s system enabled him to remain in power for 31 years, and he did use the civil not criminal courts to harry his opponents. But Lee, more importantly, also relied on elements of democratic contestation to ensure that meritocracy triumphed over patronage.

Nevertheless, fiscal rules and common banking supervision are still regarded in many quarters as an illegitimate encroachment on member states sovereignty. After all, the European Union has avoided becoming a focus of heated contestation precisely because it never got much of a share of what Europeans produced (its budget, at just over 1 of the EU s GDP, has barely changed in relative terms for the past 40 years).