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The United States and the Integration of Europe: Legacies of the Postwar Era

Edited by Francis H. Heller and John R. Gillingham
Reviewed by By David C. Hendrickson
September/October 1996
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Edited by Francis H. Heller and John R. Gillingham
St. Martin's Press
1996
410 pp.
$49.95

A useful but uneven collection of papers concerned with the relationship between American policy and European integration from 1945 to 1960. The editors' previous collection on a closely related subject (NATO: The Founding of the Atlantic Alliance and the Integration of Europe, published by St. Martin's in 1992) was an excellent piece of work; this volume, by contrast, falls short of that high standard. One of the lead essays in the volume, by Robert H. Farrell, is strangely dismissive of the importance of European unification for American policymakers in the Truman period and is much less satisfactory than John Charmley's parallel sketch of British attitudes. The volume also contains illuminating contributions dealing with trade, finance, and technology, including William J. Barber on the "creative ad hocery" that led to Europe's economic revival.

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