There are probably not too many academic books that draw from the sayings of Donald Rumsfeld as their inspiration, but this is one. While it is fair to say that he is probably not a great admirer, Ray Taras does use Rumsfeld's distinction between “old” and “new” Europe to explore the European Union's contemporary condition. The “new” refers to the 12 central and eastern European countries that joined in 2004 and 2007. Taras reflects on the health and state of EU institutions and explores core tensions at the heart of the EU project, particularly centered on enlargement and immigration. These are two excellent means of exploring the transformation of European states and considering the contemporary condition of statehood in the EU. To develop his argument, the author draws extensively from a rich range of sources in history, sociology, political science, and contemporary literature to provide an account of contemporary EU politics that is simultaneously challenging and engaging, intriguing and worrying.

The book is essentially a work of synthesis rather than an account based on original research, but it does make extensive and ambitious use of a range of primary and secondary sources as well as opinion data. In these terms, it has much to offer as a primer on EU politics. The ambitions of the book are, however, much more profound than an account of contemporary EU politics. Taras is more concerned to explore the pathologies of the EU project, to analyze the tensions, assess the weaknesses and inconsistencies, identify the core ailments and, where possible, identify remedies. The prognosis is ultimately quite gloomy. The EU still has a lot to do if it is to rise to the challenges of rapid enlargement (from 15 to 27 member states in a mere three-year period) and deal with immigration and the presence of immigrant minorities in EU member states. The current, rather feeble, notion of EU citizenship created by the Maastricht Treaty (1992) offers little in the way of a profound rethinking of ties and belonging, while national models that for so long prevailed as referents in debates about immigrant integration have lost some of their resonance.

Taras offers a potted history of recent debates about European integration up to and including the tortuous ratification process of the Lisbon Treaty (finally ratified in 2009, two years after it was negotiated). Chapters 1 through 5 analyze EU institutions, enlargement, immigration, and debates about the integration of migrants, particularly Muslims. These chapters demonstrate the growing centrality of immigration as a political issue and also a widespread public perception that policies have failed to secure the integration of the descendants of migrants. These chapters also show how the EU has gone from being a fairly bureaucratic project to one that now deals with salient and pressing social and political concerns, such as immigration and asylum. It is hard to pass these off as mere technical concerns. Much of the contemporary politicization of the EU, including the spread of Euroskepticism, has been centered on a confluence of hostility to deeper integration, coupled with hostility to immigration. These are the hallmarks of the radical and populist Right across the EU.

It is by now clear that European integration does profoundly challenge national immigration policies because a free-movement framework will soon be extended to cover nationals of all 27 member states, while measures to regulate the entry, movement, and residence of non-EU nationals have been rapidly developing since the end of the 1990s. Indeed, it is quite remarkable how and why the EU has now developed competence in these areas, which are so closely linked to traditional concepts of statehood and sovereignty.

Taras's core concern in his analysis of the EU's contemporary historical development is to reject institutionalist accounts and, instead, develop a constructivist interpretation of European integration. This account emphasizes the system of interpretation created by the EU, and argues that Europeanization entails the negotiation of differences and divergences within Europe in order to implement a shared social imaginary. This reference to negotiation and implementation does suggest that constructivist and institutional perspectives may not be as opposed one to the other as many scholars think, although Taras clearly seems to suggest that the balance of scholarship needs to be tipped more in the direction of the social and cultural foundations of EU integration.

In order to explore these foundations more directly, the book then focuses on narrations of Europe in the work of seven authors: Mircea Cărtărescu, Andreï Makine, Dubravka Ugrešić, Ismail Kadare, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Dorota Maslowska, and Michael Houellebecq. The first three authors draw from experiences of exile and a struggle with a cultural cosmopolitanism that they did not choose. The latter four provide carefully explored issues of belonging and identity. These narratives are interesting, and Taras does a service in discussing them.

Europe Old and New provides a highly engaging account, but for this reader at least, it appeared to miss a key aspect of contemporary EU politics that may not always fit within an “old” and “new” Europe trope. Taras is absolutely right to identify the salience of enlargement and immigration, but rather than the distinction between “old” and “new” Europe, we may be seeing a clash between alternative visions of Europe's future. On the one side are those still attached to the core objectives of the EU project, who want to see further extension of the EU's scope and remit. On the other are those labeled as Euroskeptics, who propound a state-centered vision of the EU's future that is not inconsistent with European integration but implies fairly rigid limits to its future development. This issue plays out across Europe old and new, and is a key aspect of the shift in debates about European integration from the technical to the public arena.