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British–German Relations since 1945
its decentralization and introduction of proportional representation
in regional and European elections could facilitate the future task of
British governments of enhancing their influence on the general
direction of the integration process and particular polices. Historians
will rightly caution against the rash assumption that a change in the
rules will promptly lead to an equally fundamental change in political
behaviour.
In his essay, Valur Ingimundarson explains the emergence of
American hegemony in the 1990s by pointing to policy differences
among European countries, including Britain and unified Germany.
While this view has some validity for military relations, despite the
partial rapprochement between �rance and Britain since the St Malo
summit in 1998 and signs of a similar European reaction to the recent
terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Ingimundarson’s
vision is unfortunately limited to this particular policy area. In other
respects, from the Kyoto protocol to the establishment of the international
court of justice, the policies of European Union member states
on issues other than trade have increasingly converged to an astonishing
extent. This is, in fact, partly the result of aggressive foreign
policy on the part of the US administration and Congress, especially
after the election of President Bush in 2000. While the author could
not possibly have taken these recent developments into account, they
none the less serve to illustrate how misleading a one-sided treatment
of military and security issues can be if more general conclusions
are drawn from their analysis.
As part of the third section, Jeremy Leaman provides an ‘old’
Labour account of economic policy-making under the impact of globalization
in Britain and Germany. This concludes by defending consensual
policy-making using abstract and meaningless neo-Marxist
vocabulary about an ongoing ‘crisis of accumulation’ and wild predictions
about the guaranteed rise of structural unemployment (p. 221).
The chapter is clearly written for a British audience and, understandably
perhaps, reflects the author’s utter personal depression in view
of the Americanization of the British economic and social system, and
the sheer arrogance of British policy-makers concerning the presumed
superiority of the new ‘British model’ over a supposedly
declining Germany. Unfortunately, Leaman raises none of the really
interesting questions about the institutional competition between different
socio-economic models at times of globalization, or the trans-
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