This book offers a magisterial analysis of Europe's development since the end of the Cold War. A major work of modern history and political analysis, "The New-Old World" punctures both domestic and American myths about continental Europe. Surveying the post-Cold War trajectory of European power and the halting progress towards social and economic integration, Perry Anderson draws out the connections between the EU's eastward expansion, a foreign policy largely subservient to America's, and the popular rejection of the European Constitution. As a neoliberal economic project, pushed forward by a succession of centrist governments, the European Union cannot afford to allow its peoples a free choice that might dash elite schemes of a post-national democracy. Anderson explores Hayek's suggestion that protecting a market economy might require exactly this kind of inter-state structure, out of reach of popular opposition.
With landmark chapters on France, Germany, Italy and Turkey, and a wide-ranging survey of current theories of the Union, "The New-Old World" offers an iconoclastic portrait of a continent that is now being increasingly hailed as a moral and political exemplar for the world at large.