Europe Adrift.

Europe today has broken with the past more completely than at any time since the end of the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648," claims John Newhouse, one of this country's shrewdest observers of the old continent. But this break with the past has not produced a new set of policies for the future. Events, not governments, have taken charge.

In Newhouse's view, "Western Europe had a good Cold War.... The threat from the East obliged Western Europeans to huddle together and helped them to break bad habits." Now that threat is gone. The result is a unified Germany that has become the largest state but provides little leadership; a divided Britain that has marginalized itself in terms of influence in Europe; and a France that suffers from high unemployment and a mood of domestic malaise. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany, political leaders agreed at Maastricht to intensify European unity as a means of "Gulliverizing" Germany. But the device they chose, European Monetary Union (EMU), has only contributed to the problems. Efforts to meet the strict fiscal criteria established to allow EMU to come into force have helped to depress growth and increase unemployment. EMU has been an elite project without broad popular support, and now European voters blame it for efforts to curtail overly generous national welfare and pension plans. Newhouse rightly concludes that a device designed to unify Europe has proven to be divisive.

Newhouse is too practiced an observer not to warn that we have been through cycles of Europessimism and Euroweariness before -- as recently as a decade ago. And some retreat from the excessive Europhoria at the beginning of the 90s was inevitable. And he is too fair-minded not to point out when the glass is half full as well as half empty. For example, while Newhouse notes a decline in confidence in German institutions, and worries whether the high-cost, metal-bending German economy can adapt to new technologies and global markets, he also quotes Anne-Marie Le Gloannees' sanguine view that "Germany works very well. It is the most stable and democratic society in Europe." And while critical of EMU, he believes the progress already made by the EU probably won't he undone. In other words, the situation is dim but not desperate.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book is Newhouse's description of regionalism within Europe. Newhouse writes:

National cultures are being

squeezed between a broader

popular culture and briskly

reviving regional cultures.

National capitals in Europe are

losing control of their

economies to the parallel

processes of globalization and

internal regionalism. Much of

the investment in infrastructure

is being done at regional

and local levels, often on a

cooperative basis with

neighboring regions. In Germany,

federal spending is declining as

state and local spending rises.

Briefly, the nation-state is

being squeezed -- pressed to

transfer authority both upward

and downward.

Newhouse does not forecast the end of the nation-state nor the success of secession in Northern Italy or Catalonia. But he does see a political landscape being redrawn as countries and regions move, like iron filings, toward different magnets. National capitals remain important, but Brussels and local councils have both become more influential than in the past.

In the face of these uncertainties, including the problems of disorder in Russia, conflict in the Mediterranean, and change in Central Europe, the role of the United States remains critical in Europe. Rather than becoming obsolete as many observers predicted at the beginning of this decade, NATO has become a popular institution that provides a sense of stability. Ironically, a Europe adrift after the Cold War has increasingly come to value an American anchor. On this and many other dimensions, John Newhouse has provided an insightful and very readable account.