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European Integration in Social and Historical Perspective: 1850 to the Present

Edited by Jytte Klausen and Louise A. Tilly
Reviewed by By Stanley Hoffmann
May/June 1998
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Edited by Jytte Klausen and Louise A. Tilly
Rowman & Littlefield
1997
323 pp.
$64.00

The authors provide lucid perspectives often lacking in books on the travails of the EU. First, they are informed by a sense of history. Carl Strikwenda reminds us of the considerable integration achieved since World War I and the extent to which economic integration has depended on politics and peace. Christiane Lemke, Gerard Noiriel, and Michel Offerle show how the modern German and French states constructed their national concepts of citizenship, and Leslie Page Moch looks at foreign workers in pre- European Community Europe. Second, the authors examine the interplay between social groups, their representative institutions, and those of the state. They discuss industrial relations, the rise of the welfare state, and relations between markets and states in Eastern and Western Europe, along with migrant workers in present-day Europe and the struggle for women's rights. A short afterword by Eric J. Hobsbawm notes that European integration has been patchy, unsuccessful in defining a European identity, institutionally complicated, and geographically incomplete.

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