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  • Europe United: Power Politics and the Making of the European Community by Sebastian Rosato
  • Robert H. Lieshout
Sebastian Rosato , Europe United: Power Politics and the Making of the European Community. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. 265 pp. $35.00.

This book provides an account that "stands in stark contrast to conventional wisdom" (p. 10) and can be summarized in a few sentences. In a theoretical chapter Rosato develops an argument about when states decide to surrender sovereignty. They will do so only when they are confronted by an overwhelming opponent and stand a chance to resist if they combine their forces. This will involve the establishment of a central authority—will lead to integration—if the balance of power between the leading powers in this combination is more or less even. This hypothesis is subsequently "tested" [End Page 234] against the European unification process in the 1950s in three historical chapters on the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the European Defense Community (EDC), and the European Economic Community (EEC). The evidence presented by Rosato supports his theory and allows him to demonstrate, to his own satisfaction, that his theory performs better than its two rivals, Andrew Moravcsik's commercial explanation and Craig Parsons's ideational thesis. In the final chapter Rosato, apparently encouraged by the abundance of confirmations in the previous chapters, confidently predicts that, because the Soviet Union has disappeared, the European project is doomed. The Europeans "no longer have a compelling geostrategic reason either to pursue further integration or to preserve their existing community" (p. 245).

Rosato's book presents a perfect example of everything that can go wrong if history is not taken seriously and employed merely as a grab bag. The grab bag serves as a handy source for quotations that fit your theoretical predictions and as a useful repository for the ones that do not. Small wonder that Rosato time and again can conclude that "the evidence presented . . . lends powerful support to my argument" (p. 103). Rosato claims that his research has been an exercise in process tracing, but this reader is left with the impression that Rosato did not even bother to examine the actual negotiations between and within the countries involved. This leads to gross misrepresentations of what really happened, in particular regarding the active role played by the United States (pace Rosato, U.S. officials did push for integration), the extent to which France and West Germany were internally deeply divided over the three projects, and the extent to which the Soviet threat weighed in their considerations. For reasons of space I limit myself to a few examples, taken from each integration project.

With respect to the ECSC, according to Rosato the French and the West Germans agreed that pooling their coal and steel industries created a balancing coalition that could stand up to the Soviet Union and serve as a balance between themselves. Against the background of the U.S. security guarantee, it was therefore, after the launch of the Schuman Plan in May 1950, "only a matter of time before the two sides ironed out the details" (p. 3). Although I fully agree with Rosato that the ECSC was all about power politics, it was not about balancing against an overwhelming Soviet threat. The ECSC was about giving France control over West Germany's coal and steel industry for the foreseeable future. Notwithstanding the obvious importance of this objective for France's future power position, the French cabinet counted many opponents of Jean Monnet's supranational scheme—its launch took them more or less by surprise—and the enmity of the French Foreign Office ensured that Minister of Foreign Affairs Robert Schuman entrusted the actual negotiations not to his own diplomats but to Monnet and his staff at the Planning Commissariat. In West Germany, Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard and representatives of heavy industry and the labor unions were effective in opposing the project. Rosato seems not to have noticed that the negotiations on the ECSC were deadlocked from December 1950 until March 1951 and that France and West Germany were not able to break this deadlock on their own. It required active intervention by the United...

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