The European Union is confronting its latest political crisis, and on Saturday the Financial Times reviewed four recent pro-E.U. books.[1]  --  According to the author of one of them, Stephen Wall, "there is only one known route to hysteria quicker than reading E.U. treaties:  negotiating them in the first place."  --  "Contrary to the overblown claims of some of its supporters, the E.U. is, in truth, largely a boring, technical institution," Thornhill wrote in praising Anand Menon's Europe: The State of the Union (Atlantic Books, 2008).  --  "The E.U.’s foreign policy is 'soft,' its institutions are remote, and its greatest crisis involved the boycotting of committee meetings.  Moreover, the Commission is an inherently weak institution heavily, and increasingly, reliant on its constituent member states."  --  Menon argues that "The [European] Commission is a complement to the nation state, not a challenge to it."  --  "The E.U.’s central achievement, Menon argues, has been the creation of the single market, now considerably bigger than the economy of the U.S."  --  Thornhill, editor of the European edition of the London daily, endorsed Philippe Riès's notion that the E.U. is presently suffering not from too little but from too much democracy:  "From its inception, the European Community was a fundamentally, and necessarily, undemocratic project which elevated long-term strategic interests above short-term populist pressures.  Franco-German reconciliation could only be achieved by ignoring the mutual hatred of its people.  The E.U. was built by visionary leaders, not followers, 'who had their eyes fixed on History’s horizon rather than on the last volatile opinion poll.'  --  Nowadays, he argues, E.U. leaders spend too much time pandering to ignorant voters.  The E.U. is sick from democracy and has suffered a 'lost decade' of integration as a result.  'The construction of a unified, peaceful, and prosperous Europe, the most formidable human adventure of the second half of the 20th century, is today gravely threatened by the triumph of this democracy of opinion, in which particular interests systematically impose themselves on the general interest.'  --  COMMENT:  Thornhill ignores the accelerating levels of inequality and the abdication of sovereign rights to corporations that have fueled populist opposition to the European Constitution and the recent treaty.  --  In 2005, Marko Kyprianou, the E.U. commissioner for health and consumer protection, warned:  "In many countries the gap in incomes between rich and poor has widened.  With growing inequalities in wealth have come growing inequalities in health.  And in turn, inequalities in population health contribute to widening disparities in wealth." ...