He would like a loose free-trade zone instead of what he sees as a nascent superstate.
And if some do truly relish the prospect of a superstate, then this agreement lets them taste it.
If the European Union develops into a Federal Superstate, then Britain will simply be a province of that superstate.
How can the EU claim to be a political model for the 21st-century superstate when it remains so backward-looking on this key point?
EU, with the inner union developing into something much more akin to the superstate that Eurosceptics fear would swallow up their own countries.
But unlike the American version, this superstate would not be a system of checks and balances but one where effective power would reside overwhelmingly in Brussels.
That will remain true so long as we stay a confederation of nation states and not the European superstate some would seek to create.
One concerned the future shape of the Union, and whether an inner core of countries could race ahead to ever-tighter integration, perhaps even presaging a federal superstate.
The idea, repeated so often, that the euro zone needs to either break up into multiple currencies or form some sort of superstate has no basis in reality.
The Austro-Hungarian empire was bedevilled by the constant demands of competing nationalities within the superstate, a problem that these days the European Union faces as it toys with federalism.
The crucial question now is whether European governments should put their drive towards ever closer union on hold, or whether they should keep moving in the direction of a federal superstate.
Did the voters of old Europe turn against the grand political design for the EU, as manifested in the now-rejected constitution, because they recoiled from being governed by a superstate out of Brussels?
Europe are with us on the big stuff: they are Atlanticists, they oppose a federal superstate, and they more or less believe in free markets (just don't ask our Polish friends about farm subsidies).
Setting out its remit, the declaration from the EU summit at Laeken last December said Europe's citizens wanted "more results" and not "a European superstate or European institutions inveigling their way into every nook and cranny of life".
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