EU- The New Old World (Perry Anderson) by Andy Beckett

Perry Anderson's stated subject is the past, present and future of the European Union; but his restless chapters keep roaming beyond this already vast territory to trace out a broader history of Europe, taking in everything from architecture under Mussolini to the decline of the Ottoman empire.

His account of the EU has little time for the standard depiction, almost as common on the left as on the right, of it as a bland, bureaucratic conspiracy. Instead Anderson provocatively describes the organisation's creation as "the last great world-historical achievement of the bourgeoisie", an unprecedented piece of international cooperation to which radicals and idealists made a substantial contribution. He cites the involvement of Altiero Spinelli, a former member of the Italian Communist party interned by Mussolini on the island of Ventotene, who during his captivity secretly co-wrote a manifesto calling for a united Europe to replace the old one of competing nation states. The document was written in 1941, with the second world war raging, and had to be smuggled off the island. Anderson notes the path its co-author subsequently followed: "Forty years later, Spinelli ended his career . . . a member of the European commission and father of the European parliament, whose principal building in Brussels bears his name."

Anderson is much less approving of how the EU has generally developed since. But his criticisms are typically counterintuitive and original: "Today's EU, with its pinched spending (just over 1% of GDP), minuscule bureaucracy (around 16,000 officials, excluding translators), absence of independent taxation, and lack of any means of administrative enforcement, could in many ways be regarded as . . . a minimal state, beyond the most drastic imaginings of classical liberalism." The EU is too pro-business, expansionist territorially and yet too vague and diffident in its underlying mission and, above all, too pro-American. During the war on terror, Anderson continues scathingly, EU countries have "surrendered" to the demands of the United States: "Ireland furnished Shannon [airport] to the CIA for so many flights that locals dubbed it Guantánamo Express . . . Italy helped a large CIA team to kidnap . . . Poland . . . [had] torture-chambers constructed for 'high value detainees' – facilities unknown in the time of [the Soviet-backed] Jaruzelski's martial law."

In such passages Anderson's unusual combination of mandarin foreign affairs knowledge and leftist sympathies gives the book a fierceness and a revelatory quality comparable to the best political works of Noam Chomsky.

For more: The New Old World by Perry Anderson | Book review | Books | The Guardian