Tensions in the European Union

Perry Anderson was an editor of the New Left Review in the days when there was a New Left, and a pro-European Marxist at a time when this seemed a contradiction in terms. Since then, the opinions of this characteristically English rebel have been softened by years passed in the sociology departments of American universities. He has learned to love the values of American liberal capitalism, albeit with large qualifications. Disappointed idealism has soured his former adulation of French intellectual elites. But some things have not changed. Anderson’s contempt for the English political and intellectual tradition is as sharp as ever, and peppers the pages of this book. The influence of the United Kingdom in Europe has taken a knock lately, but Anderson writes as if it had never really had any. This is engaging, but eccentric.

Even more eccentric is the structure of the book. Ostensibly an account of the history and ideology of the European Union, The New Old World is in fact a collection of essays and lectures written at different times over the past 15 years, most of which originally appeared in the London Review of Books. They have been only slightly revised for publication in book form.

This lends a certain incoherence to the volume. Some chapters were written before the single currency and enlargement of the Union to the east, and treat both of them as speculative projects. Others discuss them as problems resolved or insoluble. As for the financial crisis of 2008-9, by shifting opinion towards a more intensive style of economic regulation this seminal event may well prove to be a turning point in the European Union’s history.