- Article Information
- Category: Summer/Fall 2007
- Created on 02 June 2007
L’ Europe n’est pas ce que vous Croyez [“Europe Is Not What You Think It Is”] Talks with Baudouin Bollaert
By Jacques Barrot
Foundation Robert Schuman, Albin Michel Press, 2007, 240 pages
Reviewed by Alexandra Chevalier
Jacques Barrot, a veteran center-right French politician who is vice-president of the European Commission and Commissioner of Transport, sets out in his new book to tackle criticisms and misconceptions about the “European project” that have spread among his fellow French citizens. These grass-roots uncertainties surfaced brutally in the French “no” to the draft European Constitution in 2005, the year after he took up his post in Brussels. Barrot, who had been Minister for Employment and Social Affairs and then parliamentary leader of the Union for a Popular Movement, the majority party supporting the presidential aspirations of Nicolas Sarkozy, clearly feels a didactic mission to clear up the often wrong picture of the EU among its citizens, starting in his own country. His concern about the gap with the facts is evident in his blunt title: “Europe is Not What You Think It Is.”
- Article Information
- Category: Spring 2007
- Created on 02 March 2007
Boeing versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business
By John Newhouse, Knopf, 272 pages
Reviewed by Robert Herzstein
“Politics is like baseball: You have to be smart enough to understand the game, but dumb enough to think it’s important.”
—Eugene McCarthy
In the large civil aircraft industry, too, you have to be a player, or a semi obsessive fan, to appreciate the day-today moves and posturing within the big airplane producers and the hundreds of companies and government entities that interact with them.
- Article Information
- Category: Spring 2007
- Created on 02 March 2007
Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America
By Josef Joffe, W. W. Norton, 256 pages
Reviewed by Joëlle Attinger
The anecdote is apocryphal but telling. A German high school student writes her local newspaper to complain about the growing number of belligerent black squirrels that are threatening the local species—“Americanization in the animal kingdom,” she claims angrily. Never mind that most American squirrels are gray and that there are still ample numbers of their German kin. If it’s negative, then it must be American.
- Article Information
- Category: Fall 2005
- Created on 02 September 2005
The Next Superpower?
The Rise of Europe and Its Challenge to the United States
By Rockwell A. Schnabel with Francis X. Rocca
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, September 2005
199 pages
Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Reality
By Olaf Gersemann
Cato Institute, Washington DC, 2004 (Paperback 2005)
260 pages
Reviewed by James Harding
An ambassador steeped in the fraught Transatlantic debate recently offered his reflections on George W. Bush’s Washington and the divided West. Sir Christopher Meyer, a former British ambassador to the United States, spiced his memoir with vivid, if veiled, observations of the private parts of not one, but two prime ministers. DC Confidential offered recollections of John Major in his underwear and of Tony Blair in corduroy trousers that “appeared glued to the groin.”
- Article Information
- Category: Winter/Spring 2005
- Created on 02 December 2004
Free World: America, Europe and the Surprising Future of the West
by Timothy Garton Ash
Random House,New York, 2004.
286 pages
Reviewed by Helle Dale
Is there still such a thing as the West? At the height of the disagreements over Iraq in 2002-2004, that question was posed over and over by visitors to America from Europe, whether they were journalists, students or officials. Some Americans, too, wondered whether we still hailed from the same planet, what with Europeans being from Venus and Americans from Mars, in the snappy phrase of U.S. foreign policy expert Robert Kagan. The war in Iraq became the overarching symbol of a host of other differences between Europeans and Americans, great and small - over issues ranging from the Kyoto Protocol to the death penalty, gun laws and religion - that had grown into full bloom
in the absence of a common enemy after the fall of the Soviet Union.
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