| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
There is much to admire in Sebastian Rosato's Europe United: Power Politics and the Making of the European Community.1 Its core argument exemplifies ambitious, theory-driven scholarship aimed at establishing a revisionist account of European integration in the 1950s, which it generalizes to a monocausally realist theory of regional integration. "The European Community," Rosato argues, "is best understood as an attempt by . . . France and Germany . . . to balance against the Soviet Union and one another."2 Since many have observed that early European integration was influenced by the geopolitical imperative of balancing against the Soviet Union and its Communist allies, this explanation is not intuitively implausible. With much realist writing having degenerated (in the "philosophy of science" sense) into a neoclassical form often indistinguishable from liberal theory, Rosato remains a real realist. At the same time, at his best, as in his discussion of the defeat of the European Defense Community (EDC), he shows himself to be a nuanced historian who recognizes the complex interaction of ideology and geopolitics in bringing about events. Europe United's explicit aim to predict the future means that it has important implications not just for scholars, but for contemporary decision makers and citizens. All this deserves praise.
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