Review: Growing Apart? America and Europe in the Twenty-First Century
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
| Author | David G. Haglund |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200906400421 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| International Journal | Autumn 2009 | 1153 |
| Reviews |
spending or Canada’s NATO commitments until the 1960s, suggesting that
Canadian-American disagreements in the early years of the Cold War
pertained to means, not ends.
By Teigrob’s logic, NATO’s founding and the UN effort in Korea were no
more multilateral than the 2003 coalition of the willing, because America’s
military preponderance ensured its political domination. Yet his sources note
(and he concedes the point once himself) that other powers extracted
substantial concessions from Washington in exchange for their support.
Even in Korea, allied objections to widening the war counterbalanced
domestic American pressures for escalation and made it difficult to
contemplate the use of nuclear weapons. The multilateral structures of the
Cold War constrained America’s freedom of action, though inequalities of
influence remained. When the second Bush administration assembled an
ad hoc
coalition to invade Iraq, relegating multilateral institutio ns to the
sidelines, it tacitly acknowledged the difference between the two. And in
doing so it underlined the exaggeration at the heart of Teigrob’s argument.
Jack Cunningham/University of Toronto
GROWING APART? AMERICA AND EUROPE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY
Jeffrey Kopstein and Sven Steinmo, editors
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xiv, 237pp, US$24.99
paper
ISBN 978-0-521-70491-5
How much do America and its friends and allies in Europe have in common?
And regardless of how that first question is to be answered, can it be said
that those trends that separate them—culturally, economically, even
militarily—are growing more pronounced? Are the two sides of the
transatlantic relationship showing evidence of divergence in this first decade
of the 21st century? In pursuit of answers to these and other questions of
relevance to US-European relations, editors Jeffrey Kopstein, of the
University of Toronto, and Sven Steinmo, of the European University
Institute in Florence, have assembled a top-notch team of scholars drawn
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