- Article Information
- Category: Fall 2008
- Created on 02 September 2008
Reviewed by Michael Mosettig
With “change” being a hot topic this year both in the European Union and the United States, there are a plethora of books about the possibilities for the West to rethink our future and to understand our recent past. Many eminent thinkers have weighed in, as bookshelves in Washington and elsewhere are bulging these days with weighty tomes by big thinkers. This literary surge coincided with the Iraq war and started with the 2003 publication of Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power that sharply contrasted U.S. and European attitudes toward the use of military force. That book was followed (and the reflection broadened) by Fareed Zakkaria’s The Post-American World, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat and, more recently, Parag Khanna’s The Second World, just to name a few. All of these authors are laying out a vision of the world in the midst of tumultuous change and their theses try to highlight the role the United States will play in it.
- Article Information
- Category: Fall 2008
- Created on 02 September 2008
- Article Information
- Category: Summer/Fall 2007
- Created on 02 June 2007
Dangerous Nation
By Robert Kagan
Alfred A. Knopf Press, 2006, 544 pages
Reviewed by James Steinberg
Thucydides observed that “History is Philosophy teaching by examples.” Ever since his time, political theorists have studied history to seek enduring truths about the nature of man in society, and about the forces governing relations between nations. Invariably, the search for meaning in the past has shaped the preoccupations and controversies of the present. Each generation brings to the study of history its own dominant questions and concerns, and seeks support in dusty archives for positions that will inform and shape contemporary debates.
- Article Information
- Category: Summer/Fall 2007
- Created on 02 June 2007
The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939
By Antony Beevor
Penguin Books, 2006, 560 pages
Reviewed by Michael Mosettig
One message permeates this latest English-language account of the much-chronicled Spanish Civil War: that it was the rarest of wars because the losers wrote most of the history.
For more than 35 years from the victory of his Nationalist forces until the dictator’s death in 1975, Francisco Franco’s Spain lived a world apart from the political, economic, social, cultural and literary forces that shaped Western Europe after World War II – except for the ever-swelling numbers of pale northern Europeans getting themselves sunburned on Spain’s southern beaches. And it was during those years that Western memory embedded a narrative of the Spanish Civil War championing the opposition to Franco’s takeover and extolling the Republican cause that was aided by outsiders so passionately (and unavailingly) in the 1930s and afterwards.
- Article Information
- Category: Summer/Fall 2007
- Created on 02 June 2007
That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present
By Robert and Isabelle Tombs
Alfred A. Knopf Press, 2007, 816 pages
Reviewed by Avis Bohlen
The ancient rivalry between France and Britain is, as recent events remind us, the most enduring and influential relationship within Europe. Overshadowed during most of the cold war by the crucial Franco-German tie, the motor which drove European construction, the Anglo-French quarrel exploded with full force during the bitter run-up to Iraq in 2003. The enlargement of the European Union and the defeat of the Constitutional referendum in France in 2005 spelled the end, at least for now, of a certain idea of Europe which France supported and Britain opposed. At the heart of both debates are long-standing Franco-British differences about the relationship with the US and the future shape of Europe. But the bitterness and animosity of these debates are hard to explain without reference to the past.
More Articles...
© COPYRIGHT THE EUROPEAN INSTITUTE 2009
You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from our site and redistribute by email or post to the web.