If, one idle day, you should happen drift into a meeting of Europeanists, choose an inconspicuous location and listen hard. You will not hear many instant replays: quick, telling summaries of today's European events. For those instant replays, you will still have to seek out journalists, but from your listening post, you will notice the Europeanists' specialty, the delayed political replay. In that routine, experts in European politics review statesmen's choices to see how they measure up. They ponder the alternatives to determine whether other choices would have turned out better or worse. The appeal of the political replay is that it guarantees a certain relevance of the Europeanists' reflections to issues that genuine powerholders really care about. Its profound disadvantage, however, is that the replay lends itself readily to formulations that have political resonance but lack analytical bite. Organizing Interests illustrates this disadvantage all too aptly. As members and guests of the Joint Committee on Western Europe of the [American] Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, the multiple authors of Organizing Interests certainly qualify as Europeanists. They include many of the best: Charles Maier, Jiirgen Kocka, Gudmund Heres, Are Selvik, Claus Offe, Gerald Feldman, John Keeler, Charles Sabel, Alessandro Pizzoro, Philippe Schmitter, Michele Salvati, and Juan Linz all perform under the watchful eye of Suzanne Berger. Almost all display a characteristic concern to review and evaluate the various ways that the people of Western European states have organized and represented interests, especially since about 1960. Michele Salvati, for example, deliberately compares Italy's policy responses to the autunno caldo of 1969 with the French policy responses to the demonstrations, strikes, and occupations of May-June 1968. The comparison comes out much to Italy's disadvantage, but Salvati ultimately concludes that the responses were largely foreordained by the two countries' political struc-
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Dec 1, 1986
John Bokina 
