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European integration appears to be stagnating. Indeed, a fall-back to neo-national protectionism seems likely. This article postulates that the principal institutional concept of the European Community was designed for the centralized management of a growing economy. Consequently, an oncoming age of scarcity may require a different concept of integration. When shrinking resources require greater selectivity in investment planning and the costs of redistributive policies can no longer be well financed, collective centralized problem solving may very well fail. Starting from general hypotheses about the demerits of centralization, some of the effects of centralization in the EEC are discussed. They seem to indicate that problems of market harmonization, industrial concentration, and sectoral as well as spatial disparity have become aggravated under conditions of greater scarcity. Finally, it is argued that a more successful politics of scarcity may require a federal multiplicity of non-centralized institutions for the organization and maintenance of a diversified socioeconomic system. A concluding remark contrasts the myth of European unity with the diversity of the European sociocultural heritage. Some twenty years ago, Ernst B. Haas speculated on the concept of European integration as a model for wider regional integration, even for the formation of a universal community. His conclusions were somewhat skeptical because he thought that the historical, political, and cultural preconditions that permitted integration in Europe were probably unique and could not be reproduced in other contexts. However, he did not seem to have any serious doubts as to the stability and further progress of integration in Europe itself (Haas, 1961).Fifteen years later, Haas (1976) found that the theoretical effort of conceptualizing European integration as a process of regional cooperation &dquo;leading to ... some new order for the region which takes its own institutional form&dquo; was becoming obsolete because the overall logic of a deliberate movement toward further integration was bound to fail under the turbulent spell of a novel degree of complexity and interdependence,

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