The Question of Europe, Edited by Peter Gowan and Perry Anderson, Verso, 414 pages, £15.00 Reviewed by Duncan Chapel "MONNET wrote 'We are starting a process of continuous reforms which can shape tomorrow's world more lastingly than the principles of revolution so widespread outside the west.' Who can deny the genius of this conception of political advance -as if the ambitions of Napoleon could be married to the methods of [Peter] Taaffe.
(Perry Anderson on the 'father of Euro-federalism' Jean Monnet)
Peter Gowan and Perry Anderson are two academics powertully intluenced by the work of the Fourth International in the 1970s and 1980s. They have edited an outstanding collection of essays explaining the political, economic and theoretical questions posed by the integration of Western Europe.
Four major themes are taken up in this keenly priced book. The first section looks at the idea that postwar curopean integration came from a wish to strengthen rather than erode the authority of national member siates.
This is the view of Alan Milward, whom Anderson correctly praises as the historian who has most illuminated European integration.
Milward explains how different needs coincide in the integration process, yet misrepresents these needs as being those of the working people, partly animated through the ideas of jean Monnet and other founding federalists, rather than of the ruling elites in western Europe and the USA. Discussion of Milward's invaluable contribution is balanced by Anderson and William Wallace, the heavy-weight academic authority on policy making.
Tha cocond certion accesses the Maastricht treaty and the Europe it is producing. Politically wide-ranging authors, including Conor Cruise O'Brien and German CDU foreign affairs spokesperson, Karl Lamers, look at the possible futures for Europe.
The links between economic development and welfare generation are discussed, and Peter Gowan powerfully argues that British approaches to integration have been continually subordinated to domestic political concerns.
The economics of monetary union are especially examined in the third section and placed in the context of German hegemony and slow expansion to the east.
Sam Aaronovitch and John Grah! attempt to outline a plan for the introduction of a single currency which avoids austerity and promotes growth. Other contributors highlight the reality of the single currency increasing insecurity and doctrinal devotion to deflation.
Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Attali and others contribute to the concluding section of the book, examining the possible futures for Europe. The possibility of a European constitution is debated and the development of a European identity IS discussed.
Both members of the New Left Review editorial board, Gowan and Anderson might be expected to proOur Europe or the bankers"? The workers must fight to decide duce a critique of European integration. This they do, but they also draw in the best representatives of pro-integration thought, including the single currency's animator -Tomasso Padoa-Schioppa.
Drawing together the full range of the sharpest writers on European integration, The Question of Europe provides a powerful guide to the lines of stress and movement within the integration process.
Choosing tactics for building a different Europe, a social Europe that goes beyond capitalism, is made easier by the careful analysis in this book.
THE MARCH against unemployment, job insecurity and social exclusion was one of many initiatives taken in the run up to the Amsterdam summit which posed alternative approaches to that taken by Europe's bosses and bankers. ropean economists, 66 of them from Britain, who fiercely attacked current plans for European monetary union and demanded that the summit should be fostering growth and jobs.
They argued: Integration. You may have been operating under the assumption that economists are in agreement about this EMU, and that all the adjustments might be very distressing from a social and political point of view but are nonetheless truly necessary from an economic point of view. On June 12, major European newspapers carried the story of 331Ei"This EMU is... not a good model for extensive European economic "This is not the case. There Is no solid, scientific foundation for the