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Elizabeth Pond:

Two US scholars lend clarity to the complexity of the EU story.

The historian who teaches a survey course in European integration to bewildered American undergrads must smuggle in enough political theory to show just how unique the European Union is. The political scientist who attempts the task must smuggle in enough history to show just how miraculous it was fifty years ago when Europeans, appalled by centuries of bloodshed, improvised an utterly new form of common governance to stabilize peace. And both must explain how the timid beginnings of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 blossomed into today's improbable European Union, a real polity that is already far more than a loose confederation, even if it will never become a federation.

Neither history nor political science-nor economics nor law, the other two disciplines that grapple with the EU phenomenon in American colleges-offers a fully satisfactory explanation of the European Union's startling evolution within its own framework. But two veteran professors in the field of European Community studies, George Mason University's Desmond Dinan, a professor of public policy, and Skidmore College's Roy H. Ginsberg, a professor of government, have gone far to resolve the dilemma.

As they wrote, the authors road-tested their books with two decades of students, with good results. Both are useful books, as this reviewer found in teaching introductory college courses on the European Union alternately as political science and as history. Dinan's history is written in essay style. Ginsberg's text is more deliberately pedagogic, with welcome concluding sections in each chapter on review, key concepts, study questions, and recommendations for further reading.

Dinan begins his story with the unprecedented destruction of World War II that so powerfully focused the minds of EC founders Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, and Konrad Adenauer, and their eager backers in Washington. Ginsberg begins by stressing to a potentially skeptical audience the importance of the European Union to Americans as well as to Europeans, and compares and contrasts today's Union with earlier attempts at integration going back to the Hanseatic League, medieval Christianity, and the Roman Empire.

Both textbooks are exemplary in providing the simple analytical building blocks-supranationalism, intergovernmentalism, acquis communautaire, acquis politique, multispeed Europe, outputs, comitology, and the like-and then showing how blurred these concepts become as political clashes and pragmatic compromises unpredictably mix bits of each approach.

The one quibble I would have-apart from the misspelling of the "Petersberg tasks" in Ginsberg-arises precisely at that blurry transition from simple to complex that is the hardest to teach. Students who have just conquered their initial confusion about analytical frameworks often feel they are sinking back into vagueness when they suddenly have to abandon their hard-won clarity and probe complexity.

In Dinan's history, the gap comes with what is generally perceived as the period of stagnation from the mid-1960s through the 1970s. When students encounter the renewed activism of the 1980s, they don't have a sense of the robust formal and informal networks that had been built up in the interim through the incessant phone calls, jetstops, and all-night summits. They can grasp the surprising role the European Court of Justice came to play in asserting the supremacy of European over national law, and enlisting the unexpected support of intermediate national courts in this interpretation. And they can perhaps catch something of the dynamics, in Albert Hirschman's seminal formulation, of "voice" vs. "exit" with members' dissatisfaction with their club leading either to exit from it or, since the forfeiture of benefits would have been too costly, to demanding more voice in running the club, and thus strengthening its internal governance. But first time around, these partial answers don't seem to hang together for students.

In Ginsberg's Demystification the gap comes in the huge leap-which is unavoidable in political science-from the historical beginnings to today's functioning of the European Union. It must be said, though, that Ginsberg-one of the first American political scientists to take seriously the Europan Community's timid steps toward a common foreign policy in the 1970s-does a yeoman's job in tracing that particular evolution.

Yet the conundrums do pile up for puzzled students. If the demon of intra-European war has finally been exorcised, if the French and Germans are reconciled, and if young Europeans now take for granted passport-free travel throughout the Schengen zone, then what urgent drive remains to keep Europe from spinning apart centrifugally and reverting to conflicting interests? Why, if the European Community was established to create a common market in 1957, did it need to be relaunched in the 1980s with the aim of creating a real common market by 1992? And why is there still not the full freedom of movement of financial flows that the original Rome Treaty proclaimed?

The paradoxes overwhelm the neophyte. There is no federal government to compel agreement; yet a process of consensus by talkfest somehow avoids the inertia of the lowest common denominator. One or two or three of the 27 member states are always in the middle of hard-fought elections; yet EU members do often manage to focus on their long-term common interests. Economist Alan Milward and political scientist Andrew Moravcsik have demonstrated the supremacy of intergovernmentalism over supranationalism; yet the European Union keeps expanding exponentially the voluntary bonds of acting together-and hugely complicates its decision-making by taking in ten quirky, ex-communist newcomers to democracy and the free market. Top American economists predicted disaster when a dozen sovereign European states submerged their own proud currencies in the common euro in the 1990s; yet the resulting euro is now rising higher and higher against the dollar.

Politically, right and left waged their fiercest battles in the 20th century over domestic economic policy; yet they now let Brussels write the bulk of their countries' economic regulations. And even shifting left and right member governments maintain the necessary consistency of European policy-pacta sunt servanda-that deprives them of their discretion.

The beginner in the virtual EU world asks: How can such a filigree institution ever be stable? How can an EU commissioner from Bulgaria, a new democracy that joined the European Union less than a year ago, credibly represent EU interests in dealing with China? And how on earth can tiny Slovenia, a member since 2004, succeed next January when it becomes the first of the ex-communist newcomers to take on the presidency of the European Union with its population of almost 500 million? That will be, one Western diplomat suggested to the Financial Times with some wonder, like having a bicycle taxi a 747.

Both Dinan and Ginsberg set out these questions admirably. Both also urge students to find answers (or at least refine the questions) in some of the classics of EU literature, including Dinan's edited book of essays, Origins and Evolution of the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); the indispensable Policy-Making in the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) by Helen and William Wallace, now updated with the collaboration of Mark Pollack; J. H. H. Weiler's 1991 "The Transformation of Europe," in the Yale Law Journal; and many others.

The bottom line is that the beginning student could hardly find better guides to the unique construction of the European Union than these introductory texts. The rueful corollary, however, is that professors will still have to earn their keep in sorting out, day by day, the multiple misunderstandings of students reading these books.

Desmond Dinan: Europe Recast: A History of European Union (Boulder: Lynne Rienner).

Roy H. Ginsberg: Demystifying the European Union: The Enduring Logic of Regional Integration (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield).

Elizabeth Pond is the founding editor of Transatlantic Internationale Politik. This book review was first published here by our partner Internationale Politik Global Edition.

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