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. Perry Anderson's stated subject is the past, present and future of the European Union; but his restless chapters keep roaming beyond this already vast territory to trace out a broader history of Europe, taking in everything from architecture under Mussolini to the decline of the Ottoman empire.
And yet, on the second page, he emphasises that there is one subject he will not be covering. "I do not regret the omission of Britain," he writes, "whose history since the fall of Thatcher has been of little moment." Thus, in a single elegantly dismissive sentence, 20 years of history the rise and fall of Blair, the great British boom and bust, the return of London as a world city that most observers would consider pretty central to the story of modern Europe are declared not worthy of the author's attention.
It is a characteristic Anderson judgment. For half a century, as an editor and writer at the influential New Left Review, as professor of history at the University of California and as one of the few left-associated academics still with a global following, he has summed up centuries and continents in books and essays that read like the loftiest end-of-term reports.
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: international organisations and treaties, the strengths and weaknesses of leaders, how power shifts and is wielded. 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.
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 1941, with the second world war raging, and had to be smuggled off the island. Anderson notes the path its co-author subsequently followed: "Forty years later, Spinelli ended his career . . . a member of the European commission and father of the European parliament, whose principal building in Brussels bears his name."
Anderson is much less approving of how the EU has generally developed since. But his criticisms are typically counterintuitive and original: "Today's EU, with its pinched spending (just over 1% of GDP), minuscule bureaucracy (around 16,000 officials, excluding translators), absence of independent taxation, and lack of any means of administrative enforcement, could in many ways be regarded as . . . a minimal state, beyond the most drastic imaginings of classical liberalism." The EU is too pro-business, expansionist territorially and yet too vague and diffident in its underlying mission and, above all, too pro-American. During the war on terror, Anderson continues scathingly, EU countries have "surrendered" to the demands of the United States: "Ireland furnished Shannon [airport] to the CIA for so many flights that locals dubbed it Guantánamo Express . . . Italy helped a large CIA team to kidnap . . . Poland . . . [had] torture-chambers constructed for 'high value detainees' facilities unknown in the time of [the Soviet-backed] Jaruzelski's martial law."
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.
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. These essays have momentum and clarity Anderson is good at both very short and very long sentences, and is averse to jargon which makes them weirdly addictive. Who knew that the long retreat of the French left could be made so compelling?
Sometimes Anderson gives flesh to his political characters with a novelist's eye: the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl has a "heavy bonhomous jaw and sharp feral eyes". And yet, at times his yardsticks for measuring a country the health of its journals of ideas, the quality of its art-house cinema, the seriousness or otherwise of its major newspapers can seem a little elitist and old-fashioned: as if he is some mid-20th-century man of letters, cosmopolitan and urbane but still a believer in a strict cultural and political canon. This book has been more than a decade in the making; but that does not fully explain why some key elements of contemporary European life, such as terrorism and the internet, scarcely feature. The absence of Britain also sometimes strains the book. Anderson portrays the recent Europe-wide financial crisis and bank bailouts as a sign of EU economic fragility, while avoiding mentioning the country in which both phenomena have arguably been most important and dramatic.
The book is much more interested in Charles De Gaulle than in Alistair Darling. For British readers, increasingly lacking serious news coverage of their European neighbours, Anderson's continental bias is mostly a valuable corrective. An extensive section on Turkey, Cyprus and the EU's eastward expansion reinforces the sense of the non-Anglo-Saxon world being expertly explained to rather under-informed pupils. The pivotal 20th-century Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, like De Gaulle, is treated with a degree of admiration that suggests Anderson likes tough, wily politicians, even if they have conservative leanings, just as he likes tough, conservative writers. Sometimes, he concludes, paraphrasing a view of Trotsky's, "Reaction [can] solve . . . tasks the revolution [has] failed to acquit."
Anderson sees today's EU in those terms: essentially a rightwing project but retaining radical potential. Until the European left revives and he is bleak about the chances of that the EU may be the realistic leftist's only practical vehicle. Its unfinished, messy quality, he writes, "might . . . [given] the unintended consequences that have tracked integration from the start . . . yield further, better surprises". And if the revolution never comes? I suspect Anderson's services will still be very much in demand.
Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies is published by Faber.
