The New Old World

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Anderson comes from a prosperous Anglo-Irish family and went to Eton, as his many enemies on the right and the left rarely tire of pointing out, and has an impregnable smoothness and confidence on the page. He writes mostly about high politics: He writes for grown-ups with patience — the chapters here are long and intricate; the book comes without an explanatory subtitle — but he is never dry or dull.

The New Old World by Perry Anderson

His account of the EU has little time for the standard depiction, almost as common on the left as on the right, of it as a bland, bureaucratic conspiracy. Instead Anderson provocatively describes the organisation's creation as "the last great world-historical achievement of the bourgeoisie", an unprecedented piece of international cooperation to which radicals and idealists made a substantial contribution.

He cites the involvement of Altiero Spinelli, a former member of the Italian Communist party interned by Mussolini on the island of Ventotene, who during his captivity secretly co-wrote a manifesto calling for a united Europe to replace the old one of competing nation states. The document was written in , with the second world war raging, and had to be smuggled off the island.

Anderson notes the path its co-author subsequently followed: Anderson is much less approving of how the EU has generally developed since.

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But his criticisms are typically counterintuitive and original: During the war on terror, Anderson continues scathingly, EU countries have "surrendered" to the demands of the United States: Italy helped a large CIA team to kidnap. In such passages Anderson's unusual combination of mandarin foreign affairs knowledge and leftist sympathies gives the book a fierceness and a revelatory quality comparable to the best political works of Noam Chomsky.

Yet Anderson deploys his anger sparingly. Most of the time he is content to coolly analyse and synthesise, tracking the rise and fall of the EU's principal actors and guiding ideas, and quietly but often lethally critiquing other writers who have attempted to make sense of the whole sprawling edifice. Generally, he scorns the rosy picture of the modern EU put about by liberals and social democrats. This is not a great surprise: New Left Review writers, in the way of the radical left, have often reserved their sharpest barbs for the fainthearts and compromisers of the centre-left.

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Yet Anderson goes further, by praising rightwing thinkers on Europe, such as the American neoconservative Robert Kagan and the critic of multiculturalism Christopher Caldwell for being "lucid" and "hard-headed" about the EU's inconsistencies over immigration and transatlantic relations. I don't think Anderson is about to turn into a neocon — he is much too nuanced to accept their broad-brush ideas, and his residual leftism is probably too strong — but he shares with them a relish for depicting the world as it is, brutalities and all, which sometimes makes the reader wonder whether he is condemning the hard men or grudgingly impressed by them.

Perhaps the fact that such a leftwinger has sustained a thriving career in socialism-free America is not such a surprise after all. For the middle section of the book, he turns from the EU itself to the countries he considers its "core": France, Germany and Italy. Each is awarded an extended essay, including a glide through its postwar political history, a consideration of its intellectual life and culture, and an assessment of its prospects.

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The European Union today frightens some people, enthuses others, but seems simply to puzzle and bore most. Surely no institution in the world that is so important is so little thought about, let alone understood.

Thirty years ago, most people on the British left were fiercely hostile to European integration, seeing it as a vast capitalist plot. A decade later, this was replaced by widespread Europhilia — partly for the simple negative reason that almost any political structure seemed preferable to the archaic and over-mighty state structures of a UK ruled by Thatcher and Major.

Today little remains of those emotional extremes. Perry Anderson, in many eyes the sharpest critical mind in modern British socialist history, never shared in the wild swings between Eurodread and desire which consumed so many of his comrades.

The New Old World by Perry Anderson

Across many years, he and his colleagues at the New Left Review now celebrating its 50th anniversary did more than anyone else to make the Anglophone world better acquainted with the political thought and intellectual traditions of continental Europe, especially of course in their leftist and Marxist variants. Now just over 70 and dividing his time between London and Los Angeles, he has nonetheless always been a European intellectual — not least in his enviable command of multiple languages — rather than an Atlantic one. Yet there remained one odd semi-omission from this huge and multi-tracked intellectual endeavour.

In this they reflected a wider pattern of neglect.

It engages throughout with the idea of Europe as such, and about a quarter of it is directly about the European Union, the rival ways it has been understood, and its possible futures. The core of this is a long, brilliantly argued critical survey of multiple theories and histories of European integration.

Here, as with much of his other work, Anderson offers a guide to the relevant literature which is staggering in its range and the sharpness of its insights, though also of course intensely opinionated.

He rightly applauds Alan Milward as the finest historian of European integration, and a great exception to the previously noted British pattern of neglecting or scorning that theme. Praising people like Christopher Caldwell and Robert Kagan, for their supposed bold realism on issues like immigration and European-US relations, leads him to skate far too lightly over the xenophobia if not racism which suffuse their writings.