The Rebirth of Europe

In her book, The Rebirth of Europe, Elizabeth Pond provides a great overview of the many issues and underlying dynamics facing the European Union (EU) and Europe, presently. In ten chapters, she encapsulates history, European and American perceptions, domestic politics, European Monetary Union (EMU), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), as well as the European Strategic Defense Initiative (ESDI). Although she covers these and many other issues in-depth, she paints a rather optimistic future for both the EU and Europe without fully addressing the impact of certain salient underlying factors that she does touch on. These are domestic politics, nationalism, institutionalism, the modern social welfare state, as well as the trans-Atlantic defense capabilities gap.In Chapters 1-5, Pond covers the evolution of Europe and the EU from very early history through the creation of the EMU. In doing this, she touches on a wide range of issues. Of note is her discourse on how the perceptions of Europe's bloody and fragmented past impact on both the modern European and American psyches. Furthermore, her work is exceedingly well documented and thorough, especially Chapter 4, Post-Cold War NATO. Her writings on NATO enlargement and ESDI are very much in synchronization with the current literature on these "hot" topics from a macro view.Chapters 6-10 are also well done. They cover Central and Eastern Europe, the EMU, as well as ESDI and NATO in relation to current trans-Atlantic relations. However, the three-page Chapter 10, Epilogue, is rather weak for the concluding chapter of such a thoroughly encompassing and well-researched book. Additionally, it tends to contradict itself as Pond goes to great lengths summing up some of the significant pitfalls facing Europe and concludes with two very terse sentences: "Europe remains a work in-progress. So far, it seems condemned to succeed." Unfortunately, this is the problem with the entire book.In Chapter 1, Pond states, "intellectually it is less risky to be pessimistic than to be optimistic." Thus, she seems determined, despite the fact that she, herself, addresses significant pitfalls facing the EU, Europe, and the trans-Atlantic relationship, determined to be unabashedly optimistic instead of cautiously optimistic, or even somewhat pessimistic. First, she addresses nationalism, in the form of the modern day Flemish and Wallonian separatists' movements in Belgium. These movements are spawned in large part due to taxes. (Modern day Flanders' carries the lion's share of the tax burden for the whole of Belgium.) Thus, when Pond discusses EU institutional enlargement, the high unemployment rates prevalent in Europe today, the need for the EU or European countries to upgrade their military capacity, and the EU Central Bank's unresponsiveness to some of these problems, she neglects to intermesh these fiscal issues with salient political or fiscal solutions that the reader can understand. Fu