Book excerpt: Paraphrasing Marx, one could say that a spectre is hunting Europe -the spectre of disintegration. The crisis of the Monetary Union, the pinnacle of European integration, seems to call into question the core assumption of more than half a century of Europe's integration history: the functionalist idea that economic integration would be self-sustaining and would ultimately lead to the emergence of a political community. This book presents evidence suggesting that the current crisis is not an accidental snag, but the collapse of the ideological architecture of Europe, showing that the disintegrating dynamics threatening the EU are structurally determined.