government, and included the provision that in the event of reunification a new constitution would have to be ratified by the German people. After the dissolution of the military government in 1991 the provinces of East Germany simply acceded to the Western state and its Grundgesetz , so the German constitution has never actually been ratified properly; moreover, a tradition has developed within German constitutional jurisprudence of supposing that certain fundamental moral principles are enshrined in constitutional law without the need for positive enactment. It is easy to see how a domestic structure of this kind renders the structures of the EU far less problematic for Germany than they are for the UK, or indeed for France, with its long history of popular constitutional legislation.

Britain, by virtue ofits desire to join what was then the Common Market, thus found itself forced unwittingly into the default shape of a modern state, with a constitution which lay beyond the power of the government to change. And as an almost instinctive recognition of this, the Wilson administration as we all know decided to use for the first time the default institution of constitutional legislation in a modern state, the referendum, in order to legitimate it. Though constitutional referendums had occasionally been proposed in the UK, notably to deal with Irish – and indeed Scottish – home rule, this was the first time that such a thing had seemed clearly necessary in Britain – about two hundred years after it seemed equally clearly necessary to the English settlers in