The New Old World [Hardcover]

Perry Anderson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 2009

A magisterial analysis of Europe's development since the end of the Cold War.

The New Old World looks at the history of the European Union, the core continental countries within it, and the issue of its further expansion into Asia. It opens with a consideration of the origins and outcomes of European integration since the Second World War, and how today's EU has been theorized across a range of contemporary disciplines. It then moves to more detailed accounts of political and cultural developments in the three principal states of the original Common Market—France, Germany and Italy. A third section explores the interrelated histories of Cyprus and Turkey that pose a leading geopolitical challenge to the Community. The book ends by tracing ideas of European unity from the Enlightenment to the present, and their bearing on the future of the Union. The New Old World offers a critical portrait of a continent now increasingly hailed as a moral and political example to the world at large.

Editorial Reviews

Review

As insightful, combative and invigorating as its illustrious predecessors. (Mark Mazower - The Nation )

This is a hugely ambitious and panoramic political book, of a sort rarely attempted in our era of quick leader biographies and reheated histories of the Second World War. (Andy Beckett - The Guardian )

He approaches the EU with the deepest skepticism, and finds much to justify the use of his blade. (John Lloyd - Financial Times )

Anderson is among the most insightful and policy-relevant analysts of modern Europe. (Andrew Moravcsik - Foreign Affairs )

One of the best political, historical and literary essayists of the age. (Times Literary Supplement )

About the Author

Perry Anderson is the author of, among other books, Spectrum, Lineages of the Absolutist State, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Considerations on Western Marxism, English Questions, The Origins of Postmodernity, and The New Old World. He teaches history at UCLA and is on the editorial board of New Left Review.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 561 pages
• Publisher: Verso; 1 edition (December 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 184467312X
• ISBN-13: 978-1844673124
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,063,007 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant study of the EU, but over-academic, May 4, 2010

By 

William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The New Old World (Hardcover)

Perry Anderson, Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, has produced a brilliant study of the EU, the organisation which poses the greatest threat to us in Britain today. He displays, as usual, his peerless acuity and huge range of reference.

This book includes superb surveys of France, Germany, Italy, Cyprus and Turkey, but not of Britain. Anderson explains grandly, "I do not regret the omission of Britain, whose history since the fall of Thatcher has been of little moment." (It was not a `fall' - we pushed her out.) He refers to `England' three pages later, then to Britain again, then to the UK, a slippage whose uncharacteristic uncertainty betrays his disdain for its object.

He shows that the EU had no democratic foundations. Jean Monnet, the `father of Europe', was an international financier, never elected to anything. Now the EU `more and more openly flouts the popular will'.

Anderson rightly cites last year's fall in EU election turnout, to 43 per cent, as evidence that the EU `wants even a modicum of popular credibility'. Yet he inconsistently writes of US elections that high abstention rates are `the surest sign of popular contentment with society as it is'.

Anderson observes sensibly of Le Pen's Front National, "Immigration is a minority phenomenon, virtually by definition, as war between the classes was not. In consequence, xenophobic responses to it, however ugly, have little power of political multiplication. Aron, who had witnessed the rise of Nazism in Germany and knew what he was talking about, understood this from the start, criticizing panicky over-estimations of the Front, In effect, from the mid-eighties onwards its electoral scores oscillated within a fixed range, never dropping much below a national average of 10 per cent and never rising above 15 per cent." There is no need to obsess about the far tinier BNP.

On the EU's economic policies, he quotes EU-enthusiast Andrew Moravcsik: "the EU is overwhelmingly about the promotion of free markets. Its primary interest group support comes from multinational firms, not least US ones." And, "The EU is basically about business." Its Constitution makes a `highly competitive' market `free of distortions' a legal obligation, wrecking a `social Europe'.

Inside monetary union, "The historic commitments ... to full employment and social services ... cease to have any further institutional purchase." Growth suffers too. Before the euro started in 1999, growth was 2.4 per cent a year, after, 2.1 per cent. Non-euro EU members grew faster than euro members. Eurozone income per head rose more slowly than in the previous decade, while productivity growth halved.

Anderson points out that British governments always sought a wider EU, wanting to use the `vast reserve armies of cheap labour in the East, exerting downward pressure on wage costs in the West'. He shows the EU's embrace of capitalism, its contempt for democracy and its failure to create either a European society or a common culture.

He ends the book with the feeblest of forecasts - "But it remains unlikely that time and contradiction have come to a halt." He is brilliant at tracing intellectuals' responses to problems, but not at engaging with the problems or proposing solutions.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Will the Real Europe Please Stand Up, May 24, 2010

By 

Mark Warren (Biebesheim Germany) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The New Old World (Hardcover)

This book was for me a disappointment - but may not be for you. That Anderson does not include the UK and accuses the EU of being too slavish to American dictates (the American policy with Israel being one) was spot on. But his political views (historians have political views too) are too close to those of that other Americanized Brit Christopher Hitchens for my liking. Being an Americanized lefty is not like being a European lefty. There is a massive difference.

I was born in the UK but have lived the past 27 years in Germany; seeing the fall of the wall (at first hand), and following the daily ups and downs of German politics, having my German grammar corrected by my son, laughing at German humor, yes the Germans have comedians and can be funny, Anderson's chapter on Germany reads like an academic disconnect. One of the problems with academics is that they can intellectualize the life out of a subject. Sure: the book is chocker-block with philosophers and thinkers who have contributed to European thinking, Habermas is quoted on almost every page in the Germany chapter, but one has to wonder whether Anderson gets the compassion side of the EU, born from the terrible destruction of the Second World War, this seems to be missing. And criticizing him on his own ground, I would say that, although he quotes many philosophers he fails to mention like so many Anglo-American thinkers, the important intellectual contribution postwar continental existentialism has made in forming the EU. Unfortunately existentialism is something that Anglo-Saxon thinkers have a hard time dealing with.

But what really did it for me is when Anderson celebrates Germanys new found military power he writes warmly of Germany: "dispatching its armed forces to the Balkans, to Afghanistan and to Congo, not in any selfish pursuit of its own interests, but for the common good, to protect others." So being a good naďve minion of Pax Americana is "...for the common good"? No, sorry: NATO is (now) nothing more than a tool for the American Empire. This is the difference between a European lefty and an American lefty.

As an afterthought the recent attack on the euro by George Soros and his thugs is further proof of the resentment some in America have towards Europe, in this particular case, the euro. This economic warfare is to ease the pressure on the dollar and pound which means it is not motivated by pure greed but has a political agenda. For Soros the mere existence of the euro (which he hates) is an insult to his manhood. Anderson's leaving out America and its power, is for me a further weakness of the book as it is how America views Europe that will influence Europe's future development. As I write, Europe for the first time in its history, is circling the wagons against American and British speculators.

But for the academically inclined, or "thinking" American, who wants to be informed, the book is worth every penny (sorry cent) and I would recommend it because it provides a lot of historical, intellectual and cultural information about Europe, almost too much. For many Americans, Europe (never mind the EU), is a closed book, the equivalent of the dark side of the Moon, or even seen as something created by dark evil forces or the Devil himself to destroy America and its God given mission. This book will help dispel that myth.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The End of (Intellectual) History, January 22, 2011

By 

BrightContralto - See all my reviews

This review is from: The New Old World (Hardcover)

I read Perry Anderson's book shortly before Tony Judt's Postwar, and so naturally held each up to the light cast by the other. While Judt's survey largely resists interrogating the intellectual penumbrae of the social developments he meticulously records (except in the epilogue), Anderson makes these very much his subject.

Anderson's is a useful approach to understanding the orgins of the European Union, which is broadly accepted as an idea imposed from 'above.' His chapter on France, where public intellectuals never went out of fashion, was a pleasure to read. His approach is less successful at explaining the political and economic history of Germany and Central and Eastern Europe - on these subjects Anderson's Marxist/anti-British outlook seems to intrude overly. That said, his account of Cyprus is compelling.

In addition to the sometimes intrusive and tiresome Marxist angle, the almost complete lack of reference to women in Anderson's book is bizarre. Sartre, for example, has seven references in the index; de Beauvoir one (a name-check). Judt similarly gives short shrift to the women's movement. Both writers dismiss female politicians with personal or sexual put-downs not bestowed upon their male counterparts.

Other than this failure to explore the contribution of half the population to the intellectual and social development of Europe since the second world war, the two books together offer a good introduction to the period. Judt's book is the more comprehensive but Anderson has a more entertaining style when he's in his element.