Inventing Europe: The Rise of a New World Power

Edelgard E. Mahant is a political sciences professor at Laurentian
University.

Laxer’s new book addresses several audiences. At one level, it
introduces the educated Canadian public to the workings of the European
Community. Two chapters are devoted to a description of the Community
and its workings; three describe contemporary Britain, France, and
Germany, respectively; and a sixth gives a cursory introduction to the
politics of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. At another level, this
book speculates on the meaning of national identity (Chapter 4) and on
the future of the nation-state (Chapter 10).

This reviewer found the analytical bits more satisfying than the
descriptive parts. The last chapter consists of a stimulating analysis
of what Laxer calls the “post-national state,” a new political unit
of a supranational or confederal nature—like the European Community,
of course. It does indeed appear likely that Europe, which gave the
world liberalism and socialism, will once again be the birthplace of the
next stage of political organization (this is Laxer’s conclusion), but
the post-national state may not be the final form of that organization.
To find that form, we need to look beyond the state and its territorial
base to new forms, which combine elements of democratic control with
overlapping networks of economic institutions and ethnic communities.

The longer descriptive chapters of this book will not tell the
specialist much that is new, except perhaps for the occasional anecdote.
For the nonspecialist who wants to learn about the new Europe, the book
could have used a few graphs and tables. It is almost impossible to
describe how the institutions of the European Community relate to one
another without one of the many diagrams that the Community includes in
its own readily available publications. Most people would prefer to see
data such as population and population-density figures in a table or a
chart, rather than in running text. In these chapters, the quality of
the analysis varies widely, swinging from the journalistic (where the
anecdote is used to illustrate the trend) to the descriptive to the
academic.

The book suffers from a number of minor imperfections, some of which
may be due to the effort to keep it as up-to-date as a book can possibly
be. For a hardcover book, this one includes some very recent data.
However, a bit more time and effort—perhaps a prepublication reading
by an editor and another knowledgeable academic—might have led to some
improvement. The editor could have rewritten the many awkward sentences,
passive constructions, anthropomorphisms, and oddities of mechanical
style (e.g., the word “community,” when it refers to the European
Community, is consistently spelled with a lower-case c; this is
misleading, because the word “community” also has a generic
meaning). The academic could have identified a few of the facts the
author missed. Hamburg, not Groningen, is the Community’s wealthiest
region. In March 1989, the European Court struck down the German beer
purity laws, which German governments have used since the seventeenth
century to restrict imports of beer; yet Laxer mentions them as an
example of continuing protectionism.

This is an important new book on a topic to which Canadians have paid
too little attention. The fact that this is the second Canadian book on
Europe in two years (Storming the Fortress is the other) indicates that
some Canadians are at last becoming aware of this New Europe.