Europe Adrift.

John Newhouse

Pantheon, $27.50, 339 pp.

The subtitle of John Newhouse's new book, "The Conflicting Demands of Unity, Nationalism, Economic Security, Political Stability, and Military Readiness Now Facing a Europe Seeking to Define Itself," brings to mind Millennium, a 1991 best-selling future forecast by Jacques Attali, the prolific French captain of industry cure cultural critic. Attali predicted that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the tides of history were now turning. With the approach of the new millennium, a new unified Europe would, along with Asia, play the leadership role in world events and the new global economy. America and Russia, crippled by intractable internal social and political conflict, would be pushed to the periphery of the new world stage.

Seven years later, it seems that Attali got it almost exactly wrong. The Asian miracle has revealed itself to be largely a mirage sustained by foreign capital. Now that these resources have vaporized, what is left is a treacherous financial and political sinkhole that will remain for some time to come. The crisis has dramatized beyond any doubt that Wall Street and Washington are and will likely remain the bedrock for the global political economy.

Meanwhile, the major European players, buoyed by the extraordinarily strong American economy into sufficiently small budget deficits, apparently will be able to meet the requirements for the European Monetary Union. The effort, however, has revealed deep underlying social, political, and economic divisions within and among the not-so-united states of Europe. Intense internal political conflicts await each and every effort to integrate and prime the sluggish and fractured European political economies. With images of rioting unemployed in France and protesting farmers and fox-hunters in England fresh in people's minds, few people today are venturing to suggest that Europe is about to replace America as the economic and financial engine of the world.

Will a unified European leadership nonetheless exert a determining influence on global political matters? This is not out of the question. But the track record is not encouraging. During the harrowing developments following the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991, when America attempted to take a back seat, European leadership revealed itself to be dangerously dysfunctional. In this year's confrontation with Saddam Hussein, France joined Russia in playing "good cop" to the Clinton administration's "bad cop." This seems to show a much more realistic and indeed, since de Gaulle, familiar role for French if not European diplomacy. As a whole, however, Europe failed to act in any coherent or unified fashion. While England strenuously backed America, much of Europe remained uncomfortably noncommittal, and France snapped at America's heels from a safe distance along with Russia. One wonders what kind of decision would be arrived at if Europe needed to speak with one voice.

It is far from a millennially triumphant Europe that John Newhouse depicts in Europe Adrift. His portrait is of a Europe increasingly unsure of itself as it negotiates the troubled seas of political deadlock, social disaffection, military angst, and a disconcertingly protracted economic stall. Newhouse works in the time-honored tradition of the clubby statecraft analysis that one would expect from a foreign-policy journalist for the New Yorker who is also a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, a consultant to the State Department, and a Beltway resident. He relies heavily on numerous private interviews with European diplomats and unnamed cognoscenti. One need only to recall, however, how embarrassingly flat-footed most of the pundits were caught with the fall of the Berlin Wall to find oneself somewhat skeptical about their oracular pronouncements here.

The novelty of Newhouse's analysis comes in his macro-political thesis of the decline of the traditional nation states and the rise of what he calls the "superregions" or "bananas." Essentially, there are two of these - one swoops from London, down through Brussels, brushing Amsterdam but well east of Paris, through Lyons and the Ruhr valley. This banana intersects with another one that bends from Barcelona along the French Riviera through southern Germany and northern Italy. National borders, as Jean Renoir reminded us in The Grand Illusion, are imaginary constructs that often veil more powerful distinctions and allegiances. History, argues Newhouse, is passing these outmoded fictions by replacing them with newer forms of collective identification, based on more pressing current-day passions and interests.

The energy that Newhouse sees driving the geographical realignments is principally economic. The superregions of Europe are defined precisely by their being the corridors of economic power and prosperity. Politicians and business leaders from these areas quite predictably chafe at their political and economic obligations to the central governments and poorer regions of their home countries. They fantasize about creating new regional entities with their robust neighboring economic partner regions. What neither they nor Newhouse bring up is that such realignments have a lot to do with the responsibility of national governments to provide social security benefits for people in regions that are not havens of prosperity. In other words, it's like gerrymandering districts by income in order to balance the budget.

The rise of the political clout of the superregions is undeniable. It would be naive, however, to think that it's simply a question of replacing one set of boundaries with another, or even one vision of government with another. The political emergence of these regions takes place within the ongoing left/right, electorate/business deadlock in Europe. The vast majority of the voters wholeheartedly approve of the governmental benefits and protections espoused by the political Left. The arguments put forth by business and the political Right that Europe is becoming economically uncompetitive because of "handouts" to the undeserving, however, also resonates in economies persistently dogged by 13 to 14 percent unemployment. No amount of redrawing borderlines is going to escape this bind.

This political impasse gives way to another, crucial feature of the European political scene that Newhouse underemphasizes, that of racist xenophobia. All of the countries of Europe have shown evidence of the sympathy among disturbingly large portions of the electorate with the politics of scapegoating. Foreigners - especially those from Africa, the Indian subcontinent, or Eastern Europe - are loaded up with the freight of domestic economic and political frustrations. The ritual logic is to send them out in to the desert somewhere. The far Right says out loud what apparently many other Europeans say under their breath: Raus Auslander! La France aux Francais! The momentum of Newhouse's superregions is caught up in this ominous dynamic. It is no surprise that many of the most egregious cases of violence against immigrants come from the south of France and Germany, at the meeting point of the super-region bananas.

Newhouse is right, nonetheless, that in the absence of the comfortable securities of the cold war, Europe is now having to face up to some its most difficult political problems. Not the least of these will be the negotiation of the different political traditions in different countries as the monetary union begins to bite into the political autonomy of the member nations. The ritual dance of strike-and-concession of French political life, for example, will have to find its translation in a new pan-European political language. Otherwise, Europe might well go bananas. European unification might prove to be another costly or even tragic Grand Illusion.

Jorge Pedraza is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Williams College.