Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Europe’s Utopias of Peace: 1815, 1919, 1951, by Bo Stråth

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 133; Issue: 564 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/cey260

1477-4534

Dina Gusejnova,

European history and politics

The ambition of this book by Bo Stråth is to provide an historical aetiology of Europe’s political identity crisis. It is a pre-Brexit book, but it does cover some other recent tensions, drawing attention to the fraught relationship between nationalism, democracy and political economy in the European project from its inception in the decade following the Second World War to the present. Stråth understands ‘crisis’ in the spirit of Reinhart Koselleck, both as a decisive turning-point in the fate of a patient, and as the moment when a ‘human choice among alternatives’ has to be made (p. 418). As the book shows, such choices are made by statesmen and diplomats as well as secretaries and intellectuals, with a special focus on those involved in shaping public international law. Wartime and post-war experiences and expectations, the book argues, shaped successive ideas of European political order, which remain in a constant tension between utopianism and pragmatism.