journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

116
Book reviews – Comptes rendus – Buchbesprechungen
rary European affairs. Within the Socialist ranks, the main lines of division have an uncanny
habit of continuing to shape left-wing political life, thwarting efforts to speak with a single
voice: Economic and Monetary Union, German reunification, the Common Agricultural
Policy, harmonisation of social legislation and most essentially the choice between supranational
or intergovernmental solutions. This collection makes it overridingly clear that intrinsically
bound up in the intra- and inter-party divergences over European integration is the
search for the fundamental identity of socialism. This is as true in the nineties as it was in
the fifties.
Rachel Wilson
Institut des Hautes Etudes Européennes, Strasbourg
Antonio VARSORI (ed.). – Europe 1945-1990s: The End of an Era? London, Macmillan,
1995, 449 p. ISBN 0-312-12308-6. 47,50 £.
The thirty-one chapters in this collection, which originated in a Florence Conference in
1989, provide a rich repository of information and interpretation. A brief notice can address
only a handful of the issues raised.
The question mark in the title has provoked some debate among the contributors themselves.
Ennio Di Nolfo and Robert O’Neill, for instance, both query it on the convincing
grounds that whatever the future may hold, an era has come to an end. The reason that the
editor, Antonio Varsori, and Dilys M. Hill of the Mountbatten Centre of the University of
Southampton, in whose series the volume appears, adduce for the question mark, i.e. that “it
conveys that feeling of uncertainty about the future which characterises our everyday life”,
would seem to suggest that they should also regard the mid 1950s, when they insist that certainty
superseded uncertainty in international affairs, as the real end of an era. The issue may
seem pedantic, but it does point to a lacuna in even so ambitious a volume, the absence of
any systematic attempt to apply consistent criteria to the problem of periodisation. Some of
the rather erratic chronologies of the sectoral and chapter headings suggest a rich variety of
subjective concepts of periodisation among the contributors. There is nothing wrong in itself
with this, but it would have been instructive to have the issue debated systematically.
It is striking how appraisals of the recent past are influenced by assumptions about the
future. Vojtech Mastny sounds at times almost nostalgic for the “good” Cold War. It is
indeed possible that the years since 1989 will come to seem, and perhaps sooner rather than
later, a major missed opportunity, if Russia in particular, but perhaps some other Eastern
European states also, fail to achieve democratic stability. The arguments of John Keep,
Charles Maier, and Robert O’Neill in support of a generous Western approach have not
found much favour among policy makers. These may yet come to be condemned for myopia,
and would probably deserve the condemnation even if circumstances work out better
than can reasonably be feared. Nor does there seem to have been much response to O’Neill’s
challenging proposal for the establishment of an alliance for development in Europe, and for
a reconceptualisation of the appropriate education for young policy makers in Central and
Eastern Europe.
Several contributors assume that military power is no longer crucial, and must increasingly
yield pride of place to political and especially economic power. This seems to me to be
as doubtful as it is plausible. What is perhaps surprising is that the volume pays so little
attention to cultural influences, especially American cultural influence on Europe, which
became so pervasive during the Cold War era, for better or for worse. May be it would have
happened anyway, but the Cold War surely greatly accelerated it. The lacuna is all the more
striking given the impressive chapters by Vera Zamagni, Leopoldo Nuti, Pierre Melandri,