FRIEDRICH A. HAYEK: THE MISSING AUSTRIAN GHOST AT SOUND OF EUROPE FEAST.

At this weekend's "Sound of Europe" event in Salzburg leading EU politicians will gather on the 250th anniversary of one of Austria's most famous nationals, Wolfgang Mozart, to discuss the future of Europe. The event is the first in a series designed to find a way out of the institutional deadlock the Union finds itself in since French and Dutch voters said No to the EU Constitution. Along with Mozart, the name of another famous Austrian, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, has been invoked to see if his theories could help the EU deal with its trauma, repression and denial. But it is the name of possibly the most relevant Austrian, that of economist and philosopher Friedrich A. Hayek, which will be conspicuously absent from the debate in Salzburg.

Hayek did his most important work in the 1930s and 1940s, against the backdrop of economic depression and war, warning that increasing state intervention in the economy could lead to enslavement because it would undermine the freedoms of businesses and economic actors. His work went out of favour but came back into fashion in the 1970s and 1980s when his theories were seized on as the intellectual justification for the free-market policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

But what is less known is that Hayek wrote with great foresight about the economic and political integration project that later became the European Union. His conclusions are of great relevance today. He argued that such a union, as it took in...