9781844677214-new-old-world-nip

The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

1 discussion

A magisterial analysis of Europe's development since the end of the Cold War.
The New Old World looks at the history of the European Union, the core continental countries within it, and the issue of its further expansion into Asia. It opens with a consideration of the origins and outcomes of European integration since the Second World War, and how today's EU has been theorized across a range of contemporary disciplines. It then moves to more detailed accounts of political and cultural developments in the three principal states of the original Common Market—France, Germany and Italy. A third section explores the interrelated histories of Cyprus and Turkey that pose a leading geopolitical challenge to the Community. The book ends by tracing ideas of European unity from the Enlightenment to the present, and their bearing on the future of the Union. The New Old World offers a critical portrait of a continent now increasingly hailed as a moral and political example to the world at large.

Paperback, 592 pages

ISBN: 9781844677214

November 2011

$26.95 / £14.99 / $33.50CAN

Other Editions

Reviews

  • He approaches the EU with the deepest skepticism, and finds much to justify the use of his blade.

    – John Lloyd, Financial Times

  • Anderson is among the most insightful and policy-relevant analysts of modern Europe.

    – Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs

  • One of the best political, historical and literary essayists of the age.

    – Times Literary Supplement

  • As insightful, combative and invigorating as its illustrious predecessors.

    – Mark Mazower, The Nation

  • This is a hugely ambitious and panoramic political book, of a sort rarely attempted in our era of quick leader biographies and reheated histories of the Second World War.

    – Andy Beckett, The Guardian

Blog

Perry Anderson – A Symposium on Europe

The January/February 2012 edition of the New Left Review is out now.

This issue includes a fascinating and intellectually rigorous debate on Europe and the European Union in the form of a three-part critical symposium on Perry Anderson's The New Old World, with essays on the book by Phillipe Schmitter, Alain Supiot, and Jan-Werner Muller. These are followed by a reply from Anderson and a stand-alone essay by Wolfgang Streeck. The stated aim of the symposium is to, "broaden the debate on the nature of the institutional tensions within the Union, and the historical background to them." As the introduction puts it,

The zone that only yesterday was congratulating itself on combining prosperity, civility and democracy in a synthesis no other region on earth could match, has become a danger to the global stability of capital, watched not with envy but with anxiety by its partners and rivals in the rule of the plant.

The issue also includes Alan Cafruny and Timothy Lehmann on the ideological, military and economic legacy of US involvement in Iraq, and Pierre Brocheux on the Vietnam of his childhood and the cultural and political changes the country has undergone since. There are fascinating contributions from Julian Stallabrass on the 'Hockney industry', Ismail Xavier on the documentary movement in Brazil, and Mario Tronti on the Italian operaismo of the 1960s.

Visit New Left Review to read the essays in full.

By Decca Muldowney / 12 March 2012 / post comment

Discussions

Begin a discussion about this book

  • A brilliant analysis, but no practical proposals.

    Perry Anderson has produced a brilliant study of the EU, the organisation which poses the greatest threat to us in Britain today. He displays, as usual, his peerless acuity and huge range of reference.

     

    This book includes superb surveys of France, Germany, Italy, Cyprus and Turkey, but not of Britain. Anderson explains grandly, “I do not regret the omission of Britain, whose history since the fall of Thatcher has been of little moment.” (It was not a ‘fall’ - we pushed her out.) He refers to ‘England’ three pages later, then to Britain again, then to the UK, a slippage whose uncharacteristic uncertainty betrays his disdain for its object.

     

    He shows that the EU had no democratic foundations. Jean Monnet, the ‘father of Europe’, was an international financier, never elected to anything. Now the EU ‘more and more openly flouts the popular will’.

     

    Anderson rightly cites the falls in EU election turnout as evidence that the EU ‘wants even a modicum of popular credibility’. Yet he inconsistently writes of US elections that high abstention rates are ‘the surest sign of popular contentment with society as it is’.

     

    Anderson observes sensibly of Le Pen’s Front National, “Immigration is a minority phenomenon, virtually by definition, as war between the classes was not. In consequence, xenophobic responses to it, however ugly, have little power of political multiplication. Aron, who had witnessed the rise of Nazism in Germany and knew what he was talking about, understood this from the start, criticizing panicky over-estimations of the Front. In effect, from the mid-eighties onwards its electoral scores oscillated within a fixed range, never dropping much below a national average of 10 per cent and never rising above 15 per cent.” There is no need to obsess about the far tinier BNP.

     

    On the EU’s economic policies, he quotes EU-enthusiast Andrew Moravcsik: “the EU is overwhelmingly about the promotion of free markets. Its primary interest group support comes from multinational firms, not least US ones.” And, “The EU is basically about business.” Its Constitution makes a ‘highly competitive’ market ‘free of distortions’ a legal obligation, wrecking a ‘social Europe’.

     

    Inside monetary union, “The historic commitments … to full employment and social services … cease to have any further institutional purchase.” Growth suffers too. Before the euro started in 1999, growth was 2.4 per cent a year, after, 2.1 per cent. Non-euro EU members grew faster than euro members. Eurozone income per head rose more slowly than in the previous decade, while productivity growth halved.

     

    Anderson points out that British governments always sought a wider EU, wanting to use the ‘vast reserve armies of cheap labour in the East, exerting downward pressure on wage costs in the West’. He shows the EU’s embrace of capitalism, its contempt for democracy and its failure to create either a European society or a common culture.

     

    He ends the book with the feeblest of forecasts – “But it remains unlikely that time and contradiction have come to a halt.” He is brilliant at tracing intellectuals’ responses to problems, but not at engaging with the problems or proposing solutions.

     

    0 responses

Other books by Perry Anderson