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This book is a new history of the making of the European Monetary System (EMS). It highlights two long-term processes in the monetary and economic negotiations in the decade leading up to the founding of the EMS in 1979. The first is a transnational learning process involving a powerful, networked European monetary elite that shaped a habit of cooperation among technocrats. The second stresses the importance of the European Council, which held regular meetings between heads of government beginning in 1974, giving European Economic Community legitimacy to monetary initiatives that had previously involved semisecret and bilateral negotiations. The interaction of these two features changed the EMS from a fairly trivial piece of administrative business to a tremendously important political agreement. The inception of the EMS was greeted as one of the landmark achievements of regional cooperation, a major leap forward in the creation of a unified Europe. Yet the book stresses that the EMS is much more than a success story of financial cooperation. The technical suggestions made by its architects reveal how state elites conceptualized the larger project of integration. And their monetary policy became a marker for the conception of European identity. The unveiling of the EMS, the book concludes, represented the convergence of material interests and symbolic, identity-based concerns.

The construction of the European Community (EC) has widely been understood as the product of either economic self-interest or dissatisfaction with the nation-state system. This book challenges these conventional explanations, arguing that the Community came into being because of balance of power concerns. France and the Federal Republic of Germany established the EC at the height of the Cold War as a means to balance against the Soviet Union and one another. More generally, the book argues that international institutions, whether military or economic, largely reflect the balance of power. In this view, states establish institutions in order to maintain or increase their share of world power, and the shape of those institutions reflects the wishes of their most powerful members. The book applies this balance of power theory of cooperation to several other cooperative ventures since 1789, including various alliances and trade pacts, the unifications of Italy and Germany, and the founding of the United States. It concludes by arguing that the demise of the Soviet Union has deprived the EC of its fundamental purpose. As a result, further moves toward political and military integration are improbable, and the economic community is likely to unravel to the point where it becomes a shadow of its former self.

The European Union is the world's most advanced international organization, presiding over a level of legal and economic integration unmatched in global politics. To explain this achievement, many observers point to its formal rules that entail strong obligations and delegate substantial power to supranational actors such as the European Commission. This legalistic view, the book contends, is misleading. More often than not, governments and bureaucrats informally depart from the formal rules and thereby contradict their very purpose. Behind the EU's front of formal rules lies a thick network of informal governance practices. If not the EU's rules, what accounts for the high level of economic integration among its members? How does the EU really work? In answering these questions, the book proposes a new way of thinking about international organizations. Informal governance affords governments the flexibility to resolve conflicts that adherence to EU rules may generate at the domestic level. By dispersing the costs that integration may impose on individual groups, it allows governments to keep domestic interests aligned in favor of European integration. The combination of formal rules and informal governance therefore sustains a level of cooperation that neither regime alone permits, and it reduces the EU's democratic deficit by including those interests into deliberations that are most immediately affected by its decisions. The book provides the first systematic analysis of the parallel development of the formal rules and informal norms that have governed the EU from the 1958 Treaty of Rome until today.

This book's author is one of Italy's premier analysts of political extremism. His investigation of the beliefs and mindsets of Europe's political fringe has largely focused on anarchist and far-left groups, but this book turns inquiry to the rapidly expanding neofascist movement. The author joined local groups of a neofascist organization he names Sacrifice in two neighboring cities with very different political cultures. This “insider” book, which features dialogues with various militia members, shows how fascists live day to day, how they understand their world, and how they build a parallel universe in which the correctness and probity of their attitudes are clear. The book describes the long, troubled process by which these two groups slowly accepted the author as an investigator-activist and later expelled him for his ideologically uncommitted stance and refusal to subject his observations to censorship. The author's activities as a fascist were often mundane: leafleting, distributing food parcels to the indigent, and attending public rallies. This book describes from within the masculine ethos of the militias, the groups' relations with local police and politicians, and the central role of violence and anticommunist actions in building a sense of fascist community.