The Delors Commission between 1985 and 1994 marked the zenith of this sort of integrationist zeal.
The integrationist camp - especially the founding countries in the Benelux, Germany and France - has lost.
Many in Brussels and among the more integrationist member states believe Britain secured an irritatingly favourable deal in June.
Then there is the group's doyen, Belgium's Baron Philippe de Schoothette, partly educated in Britain and a keen integrationist.
In the 1980s and 1990s, summits often ended with Britain fighting alone against an integrationist move favoured by the rest.
And Italy, usually regarded as slavishly pro-European, has also become less predictably integrationist under Silvio Berlusconi, its new prime minister.
France's integrationist approach relies on individuals clambering up the ladder by themselves.
That process is likely to end up with a less integrationist document.
Since then, the Foreign Office in particular has worried that staying out of integrationist projects is a cannier tactic than it is a strategy.
In the 1980s, when Jacques Delors as commission president was pursuing an integrationist vision, the answer seemed to be to go for ever closer union.
Because it recognises that young French Muslims are bumping against the limits of the integrationist model, the French government frets that they will fall prey to extremists.
Significantly their announcement came in the same week as the proposal by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder for other integrationist measures, including a beefed up European Parliament, an elected commission and tax harmonisation.
Britain's Conservative Party, hostile to the EU's draft constitution and membership of the single currency, sits in the European People's Party block, made up mainly of continental Christian Democratic parties that are much more integrationist than the Conservatives.
应用推荐