Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy from 1453 to the Present, by Brendan Simms

Abstract

Summarising more than 550 years of European history in 690 pages is no mean feat, but ultimately Brendan Simms’s book fails to convince. The author approaches Europe’s history through the lens of international relations. After a short prologue on medieval Europe, the author sets off the history proper with the advent of modern times. The first 200 years of the span are dealt with in forty pages; half of the book is devoted to the twentieth century. Simms aims to reveal a range of constants in international relations: European powers are often driven by a fear of encirclement, while aiming to uphold a balance of power in Europe. We are reminded that foreign policy enjoyed a primacy within politics for most of the past half-millennium and that the western European states uncoupled themselves from this only in the 1960s. The primacy of foreign policy for a state’s survival or flourishing had a profound impact on most other political domains. Different constitutional systems developed and evolved to cope with international competition: Britain’s parliamentary tradition is one example, Prussia’s autocracy another. Each system strove in its own way for flexibility and efficiency, especially with regard to financial politics, itself developed largely for the funding of war. The struggle for supremacy in Europe has always been a zero-sum game, and the author shows how many local and far-away phenomena of the past half-millennium (e.g. slavery in the Americas) can be explained through that lens. Along the way, one stumbles upon some surprising details. The reviewers learned that in eighteenth-century Russia ‘Westernisation’ and ‘Europe’ stood for more efficiently organised despotism (p. 119), that London bankers financed Napoleon (p. 159), and that the Weimar Republic was more centralised and thus potentially more powerful than both the Second Reich and today’s Federal Republic (pp. 323, 402). The book’s strongest moment comes towards the end, with its analysis of ongoing geopolitical challenges, notably Russia’s new imperial ambitions and the challenges faced by the European Union.