European International Relations and the 800-Pound Gorilla

Abstract

International Relations in Europe: Traditions, Perspectives, and Destinations. Edited by Knud Erik Jorgenson, Tonny Brems Knudsen. New York: Routledge, 2006. 304 pp., $120.00 (ISBN: 0-415-35983-X). Until recently, disciplinary history has not played a major role in the discourse of international relations. Most texts in the field restrict their treatment of the subject to brief overviews of early debates between idealism and realism, and, perhaps, the so-called behavioral revolution and the later post-positivist reaction. Even now, the relatively few book-length disciplinary histories that are available have an Anglo-US focus—most notably, Brian Schmidt's 1998 study of the “political discourse of anarchy,” and histories of the English School by Tim Dunne (1998) and Brunello Vigezzi (2005), although Jorg Friedrichs' (2004) study is a clear exception. This Anglo-US bias may reflect the Anglo-US dominance of the field, which is discussed by the contributors to Robert Crawford and Darryl Jarvis' (2001) recent review of the field and in an influential survey article by Ole Waever (1998). Indeed, some observers might argue that the paucity of material on disciplinary historiography accurately reflects its relative unimportance, and that Europeans should not feel too unhappy about being neglected. This is an assessment, however, with which Knud Erik Jorgenson and Tonny Brems Knudsen would clearly not agree. Jorgenson and Knudsen's International Relations in Europe: Traditions, Perspectives, and Destinations is self-consciously designed both to add to the literature on disciplinary history and to challenge its Anglophone biases by providing an up-to-date survey of international relations in Europe. The book consists of two unequal parts. Part I is devoted to seven surveys of the literature, each of which looks at a particular country or set of countries and is based on a set of common questions about traditions, perspectives, current debates, external influences, and so on. The chapters look at France and other French-speaking countries (Klaus-Gerd Giesen), Italy (Sonia Lucarelli and Roberto Menotti), Germany (Christoph Humrich), Spain (Caterina Garcia Segura), the Nordic countries (Jorg …