Download - German Historical Institute London

KLAUS LARRES with ELIZABETH MEEHAN (eds), Uneasy Allies:
British–German Relations and European Integration since 1945 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), xvi + 344 pp. ISBN 0 19 829383 6.
£50.00
The history of bilateral relationships in Western Europe after 1945
can only sensibly be written within the context of European institutionalization
as a result of the integration process. Traditional ‘realist’
diplomatic accounts, which place exclusive emphasis on governments
and ‘national’ interests and which largely see international
relations as the outcome of power relationships dominated by security
issues are totally inadequate for the analysis of post-war (West)
European relations. Once inside European institutions from the
European Coal and Steel Community to the current European Union,
national governments have had to operate within an intricate web of
governmental and transnational relationships and to acknowledge
European responsibility for more and more policy areas which can
still be discussed, but not regulated at a bilateral level. If this is the
case even for the �ranco–German relationship, which was particularly
close and crucial for Western Europe and the integration process
at many junctures in post-war European history, it is all the more true
for the relationship between (West) Germany and Britain. After all,
Britain was comparatively marginal to post-war Western Europe
even after the first enlargement of the then European Communities
in 1973 to include Britain, Ireland, and Denmark. The editors of this
book, therefore, are right to place the bilateral relationship between
(West) Germany and Britain in the wider context of European integration.
It could, of course, be said that if almost all relations in Europe are
now of a multilateral character, and if European politics should be
treated more and more like domestic politics, as many comparativists
have increasingly argued in the theoretical debate about the integration
process, the discussion of bilateral relationships with a strong
contemporary focus, as in this book, is altogether superfluous. This
would be too drastic a view, however, especially given that so few
historians and political scientists have an adequate grasp of the integration
process and its theoretical explanations which goes beyond
the acknowledgement that the EU matters; or, in the case of contemporary
historians, have the linguistic ability to access the varied
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