While Bruce Bawer is impressed with Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 he has some reasonable doubts about the objectivity in the work of New York University's well-known historian. There is much to be learned from Bawer's critique written for the Hudson Review and you would have to read it all to fully appreciate it, this quote is one of my favorites:

Judt expresses the hope that the European public will develop a “patriotism for Europe”; but given how the EU works, with key decisions made not by the European Parliament but by unelected technocrats, the “patriotism” he longs for would have to be founded not (like American patriotism) on a devotion to liberty but on a deference not unlike that of a serf toward his feudal lord. Judt even goes so far as to say that the disorganized, unpremeditated way in which the EU took form was a good thing because

very few lawyers or legislators in even the most pro-European states of the European “core” would have been willing to relinquish local legal supremacy had they been asked to do so at the outset. Similarly, if a clearly articulated “European project,” describing the goals and institutions of the Union as they later evolved, had ever been put to the separate voters of the states of western Europe it would surely have been rejected.

In other words, the undemocratic way in which Western Europeans’ democratic rights were gradually siphoned away from them is something to celebrate.

And there are more gems to be had in this lengthy review, so I recommend that you read the whole thing.