A New Europe for the Old? by Stephen R. s> Graubard (review)

Abstract

380 SEER, 8o, 2, 2002 'clash of civilizations' favourably and argues for Russia to be allowed to develop on its 'own unique path' (p. 242). It is noticeable that Alfeev is the only contributor to make a sustained critique of Western foreign policy towardsRussia, or to make a great deal of that perennial of Russian political debate, the 'Russianidea'. The relative one-sidedness of the views expressed weakens the book. The lackof an editorialvoice is anotherproblem. It is one thing to let people speak forthemselves;that enables us to get an impressionof theirmindset. However, it is another matter to let us read theirthoughtswithout context; this makes it difficulttojudge the degree to which opinions and aspirationsare realistic.A simpleexample of thisis in the interviewwith Sergeev, the tradeunionist,who arguesthat Russia'stradewith the Westis not a level playingfieldbecause the Westfearscompetition fromRussia'scheap labourand high technology. Well, Russian labour may be relatively cheap, but Russian industry is not for the most part advanced technologically relativeto the West and otherpartsof the world. Such statementsare, however, leftto standas facts;a footnote here and in several other places in the book would have been useful correctives and demonstrated that Russian views are sometimes as erroneous as those of any other people. As a result of this problem and the book's one-sidedness, thisismore of a collection to dip into forvignettes likeArkadiiZlochevskii's story about being the only business to advertise in Pravda during the August I99I coup, or Plyusnin's comparison of Russian's incomes with those of Thoreau during his solitary stay in the woods at Walden -than it is a comprehensiveguide to Russian thoughtsabout the future. Department ofGovernment andSociety NEIL ROBINSON University ofLimerick Graubard, Stephen R. (ed.).A fNew Europefor theOld?Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick,NJ, and London, I998. XiV + 276 pp. Notes. $24.95. THIs collection of twelve articlesfirstappearing in Daedalus in summer 1997 seeks, according to the Preface, 'to ask whether the grand narratives that circulated so widely in the West in the half century after I945 remain valid' (p. xiii). One has to say in all honesty that most of them have nothing to do with this grandiose theme. The fact that the editor does not attempt to trace links through the contributions or indeed refer to them, before a final unrevealing nod to 'an enquiry that began with the simple proposition that the world, for all its homogeneity, remains a very diverse place whose differencesand intricaciesmerit close study' (p. xiv), suggestsawarenessthat this emperor has, methodologically, no clothes. Though several individual articlesare interesting,togetherthey are something of a ragbag. Some opening generalities on European history by Martin Malia are followed by fivepieces on EasternEurope, the firstthree on (arguably)Balkan lands which Malia does not mention and would seem implicitly to exclude from his European schema. Tim Judah and Marcus Tanner offerstimulating surveys of Serb and Croat mentalities respectively, concentrating on pretwentieth centurythemes. Both show a mild tendency to empathize with their REVIEWS 38I subjects, so that Bosnia's medieval inhabitants become Catholics toutcourt, while a reference to Njegos's TheMountain Wreath in the context of Milosevic's exploitation of myths in the Serb national psyche might mention this poem's genocidal theme. The scorn Tim Judah heaps on the 'falsedichotomy' (p. 23) between ancient hatreds and the guilt of Serb aggressorswill be appreciated by Balkanists but, to be fair to bemused onlookers of recent events from outside, his own material and his nuanced conclusion show how such generalizations could come about. Tom Gallagher on Romanians and a Balkanidentityis less historicalin emphasis, soon turningto the questionas to whether Iliescu's electoral defeat in I996 offered escape from the negative features of the stereotype; a wider perspective might mention lorga on this Balkantheme. Differences in approachrecurin Roman Szporluk'silluminating historical survey of the Polish rather than Russian preponderance in the emergence of a Ukrainian identity, Anatoly Khazanov's analysis of ethnic nationalism in the current Russian Federation and Barbara Ischinger's account of East German universities'adaptationto German unification.The last thirdof the volume begins with two substantialpieces on French,German and British attitudes to EU integration (Vivien Schmidt) and debates on European citizenship, in which Dominique Schnapper argues, more unabashedly than...