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Author: Craig Parsons
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501732080
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
The quasi-federal European Union stands out as the major exception in the thinly institutionalized world of international politics. Something has led Europeans—and only Europeans—beyond the nation-state to a fundamentally new political architecture. Craig Parsons argues in A Certain Idea of Europe that this "something" was a particular set of ideas generated in Western Europe after the Second World War. In Parsons's view, today's European Union reflects the ideological (and perhaps visionary) project of an elite minority. His book traces the progressive victory of this project in France, where the battle over European institutions erupted most divisively. Drawing on archival research and extensive interviews with French policymakers, the author carefully traces a fifty-year conflict between radically different European plans. Only through aggressive leadership did the advocates of a supranational "community" Europe succeed at building the EU and binding their opponents within it. Parsons puts the causal impact of ideas, and their binding effects through institutions, at the center of his book. In so doing he presents a strong logic of "social construction"—a sharp departure from other accounts of EU history that downplay the role of ideas and ideology.
Author: Craig Parsons
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501732080
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
The quasi-federal European Union stands out as the major exception in the thinly institutionalized world of international politics. Something has led Europeans—and only Europeans—beyond the nation-state to a fundamentally new political architecture. Craig Parsons argues in A Certain Idea of Europe that this "something" was a particular set of ideas generated in Western Europe after the Second World War. In Parsons's view, today's European Union reflects the ideological (and perhaps visionary) project of an elite minority. His book traces the progressive victory of this project in France, where the battle over European institutions erupted most divisively. Drawing on archival research and extensive interviews with French policymakers, the author carefully traces a fifty-year conflict between radically different European plans. Only through aggressive leadership did the advocates of a supranational "community" Europe succeed at building the EU and binding their opponents within it. Parsons puts the causal impact of ideas, and their binding effects through institutions, at the center of his book. In so doing he presents a strong logic of "social construction"—a sharp departure from other accounts of EU history that downplay the role of ideas and ideology.
Author: Mark Hewitson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857457276
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
The period between 1917 and 1957, starting with the birth of the USSR and the American intervention in the First World War and ending with the Treaty of Rome, is of the utmost importance for contextualizing and understanding the intellectual origins of the European Community. During this time of 'crisis,' many contemporaries, especially intellectuals, felt they faced a momentous decision which could bring about a radically different future. The understanding of what Europe was and what it should be was questioned in a profound way, forcing Europeans to react. The idea of a specifically European unity finally became, at least for some, a feasible project, not only to avoid another war but to avoid the destruction of the idea of European unity. This volume reassesses the relationship between ideas of Europe and the European project and reconsiders the impact of long and short-term political transformations on assumptions about the continent's scope, nature, role and significance.
Author: Vickie B. Sullivan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022648291X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
Montesquieu is famous as a tireless critic of despotism, which he associates overtly with Asia and the Middle East and not with the apparently more moderate Western models of governance found throughout Europe. However, Vickie B. Sullivan argues that a creaful reading of Montesquieu's enormously influential The Spirit of the Law reveals the surprising result that he recognizes that Europe itself is susceptible to despotic practices - and that the threat emanates not from the East but rather from certain despotic ideas that inform Western institutions and practices. Sullivan guides readers through Montesquieu's sometimes veiled yet sharply critical accounts of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Aristotle, and Plato, as well as various Christian thinkers have brough forth despotic ideas in the form, for example, of brutal Machiavellianism, of Hobbes's justifications for the rule of one, of Plato's reasoning that denied slaves the right of natural defense, and of the Christian teachings that equated heresy with treason. Such ideas, Montesquieu shows, inform such revered European institutions as the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. In this new reading of Montesquieu's masterwork, Sullivan corrects the misconception that it offers simple, objective observations, showing it to be instead a powerful critique of European politics that would become remarkably and regrettably prescient after Montesquieu's death, when despotism repeatedly emerged in Europe with virulent intensity. -- from dust jacket.
Author: George Steiner
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1468311808
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 32
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Book Description
The Idea of Europe finds George Steiner reckoning with Europe from a number of different angles. “Europe,†? he writes, “is the place where Goethe’s garden almost borders on Buchenwald, where the house of Corneille abuts on the market-place in which Joan of Arc was hideously done to death.†? It is, in other words, a continent rich with contradiction, whose many tensions—cultural, social, political, economic, and religious—have for centuries conspired to pull it apart, even as it has become more and more unified. But what lies ahead for a continent whose borders are growing and economic might is strengthening, even as its cultural identity recedes? A continent where, in Steiner’s words, “young Englishmen choose to rank David Beckham high above Shakespeare and Darwin in their list of national treasures†?? This is the trajectory that Steiner explores so brilliantly in The Idea of Europe.
Author: Angelo Santagostino
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 152755533X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 150
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Book Description
This book discusses the 2450 year-long journey of the evolution of human rights, beginning from their earliest manifestation through Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone (442 BCE). It then moves on to look at the relationship between human rights and the likes of Cicero and Jesus, Erasmus and the intellectuals of the Enlightenment, before considering the very roots of the idea of Europe, which goes back to the liberal and federalist thought of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book concludes with the Charter of the EU Fundamental Rights becoming legally binding for Member States in Lisbon in 2009. While inquiring into the origins of European shared values, it assesses their compatibility with a non-European culture and religion such as Islam.
Author: Anthony Pagden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521795524
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396
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Book Description
The creation of the European Union and the progressive integration of the European states has raised serious questions about the existence of a distinctive European identity. Do the British share much in common with the French, or the French with the Danes? Will a unified Europe remain an economic and political possibility with no greater cultural or affective foundations? If there is something that distinguishes all Europeans, what is it, and how is it being changed by recent events? This book addresses these questions in essays ranging from ancient Greece to the end of the twentieth century. Their authors come from different intellectual backgrounds and represent differing intellectual traditions. They discuss questions of politics, religion, commerce, law, language, literature and affectivity. Taken together, they provide a powerful insight into the historical origins of the idea of Europe and into the future of the European Union.
Author: Claire Berlinski
Publisher: Crown Forum
ISBN: 1400097703
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
A provocative study of the critical problems that are crippling Europe and causing an increasing anti-Americanism looks at the return of the ethnic hatred, class divisions, and war that previously wreaked havoc on Europe, as well as the rise of such new issues as declining birthrates, growing Islamic fundamentalism, and an unsustainable economic model. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.
Author: Peter Rietbergen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317606302
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 667
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Book Description
This third, revised and augmented edition of Peter Rietbergen’s highly acclaimed Europe: A Cultural History provides a major and original contribution to the study of Europe. From ancient Babylonian law codes to Pope Urban’s call to crusade in 1095, and from Michelangelo on Italian art in 1538 to Sting’s songs in the late twentieth century, the expressions of the culture that has developed in Europe are diverse and wide-ranging. This exceptional text expertly connects this variety, explaining them to the reader in a thorough and yet highly readable style. Presented chronologically, Europe: A Cultural History examines the many cultural building blocks of Europe, stressing their importance in the formation of the continent’s ever-changing cultural identities. Starting with the beginnings of agricultural society and ending with the mass culture of the early twenty-first century, the book uses literature, art, science, technology and music to examine Europe’s cultural history in terms of continuity and change. Rietbergen looks at how societies developed new ways of surviving, believing, consuming and communicating throughout the period. His book is distinctive in paying particular attention to the ways early Europe has been formed through the impact of a variety of cultures, from Celtic and German to Greek and Roman. The role of Christianity is stressed, but as a contested variable, as are the influences from, for example, Asia in the early modern period and from American culture and Islamic immigrants in more recent times. Since anxieties over Europe's future mount, this third edition text has been thoroughly revised for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Moreover, it now also includes a 'dossier' of some seventeen essay-like vignettes that highlight cultural phenomena said to be characteristic of Europe: social solidarity, capitalism, democracy and so forth. With a wide selection of illustrations, maps, excerpts of sources and even lyrics from contemporary songs to support the arguments, this book both serves the general reader as well as students of historical and cultural studies.
Author: Brendan Simms
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465065953
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 722
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Book Description
With "verve and panache," this magisterial history of Europe since 1453 shows how struggles over the heart of the continent have shaped the world we live in today (The Economist). Whoever controls the core of Europe controls the entire continent, and whoever controls Europe can dominate the world. Over the past five centuries, a rotating cast of kings, conquerors, presidents, and dictators have set their sights on the European heartland, desperate to seize this pivotal area or at least prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. From Charles V and Napoleon to Bismarck and Cromwell, from Hitler and Stalin to Roosevelt and Gorbachev, nearly all the key power players of modern history have staked their titanic visions on this vital swath of land. In Europe, prizewinning historian Brendan Simms presents an authoritative account of the past half-millennium of European history, demonstrating how the battle for mastery of the continent's center has shaped the modern world. A bold and compelling work by a renowned scholar, Europe integrates religion, politics, military strategy, and international relations to show how history -- and Western civilization itself -- was forged in the crucible of Europe.
Author: Shane Weller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108478107
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
This book offers a new critical history of the idea of Europe from classical antiquity to the present day.
