European Integration: Re-orientations of History and Political Studies

Abstract

Europe United: Power Politics and the Making of the European Community. By Sebastian Rosato. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. 280 pp., $35.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-801-44935-2). Political Theory of the European Union. Edited by Jurgen Neyer, Antje Wiener. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 248 pp., $99.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-199-58730-8). From the late 1990s throughout the 2000s, the subdisciplinary study of EU integration regarding its foundations and early history could be generalized as settling into an equilibrium of supranational/federalist (Haas 1968;Schmitter 1969; Hallstrom 2003; Benson and Jordan 2011) vs liberal/institutional intergovernmentalist (Gilbert 2003; Moravcsik 1991, 1998, 2000a,b) vs ideational perspectives (Parsons 2000, 2002, 2006). With the onset of the 2008 financial crisis and the deteriorating state of affairs surrounding the European Union, uncertainties on the future of European integration have taken center stage and given way to prescient questions which seek to re-open integration studies. The inherent weaknesses of economic and monetary union, which were hailed in the 1990s as the crowning achievement of an integrated Europe, have come into question. More pointedly, the fundamental nature and usefulness of European institutions in binding European states into peaceful cooperation has been brought into question. With internal and external instabilities undermining a half century of integration, the need to re-examine the state of European integration, explore the relationships that Europe has shared with its external partners, and shed fresh light on where the Union is heading has never been greater. Europe United , by Sebastian Rosato, contains six chapters that analyze early European integration from the immediate postwar period up to the Treaty of Rome and formation of the European Economic Community (EEC). He analyzes the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), European Defense Community (EDC), and EEC. The author focuses his study on Britain, France, and West Germany, finding consistent external geopolitical and internal (West European) security concerns determined balancing behavior in the early postwar period. His theoretical framework closely approximates an external and internal balance of power rational, materialist perspective. Rosato focuses and substantiates his historical inquiry by highlighting three …