This book offers perhaps the most carefully researched analytical study to date of French policymaking in European integration covering most of the post–World War II period. It seeks to show how certain ideas about Europe have shaped the French pursuit of European institutions and, by extension, European outcomes themselves. Ideas, Craig Parsons argues, have provided a measurable “constant cause” fueling the process of European integration. This process, however, was far from linear, as competing ideas battled for dominance in policy discourse and action at all key junctures of integration.

Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with more than 60 key decision makers, Parsons delivers a thorough account of the battle among three key ideas about French interests in European institution building. He refers to these ideas as the traditional, confederal, and community models for Europe. In the immediate World War II period, the traditional model suggested reconstructing Europe around a dismembered Germany; more generally, the model stands for the institutional status quo and opposes deeper forms of integration. The confederal model favored broad intergovernmental cooperation in the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation and Council of Europe; such strategy would have allowed France and Britain to supervise Germany in broad continental institutions. The community model saw integration of French and German policies in supranational institutions as the best guarantee of France's future.

It is interesting that these competing ideas of France's relationship with Europe had no direct connection to the right–left cleavage that dominated French domestic politics. That is, positions on Europe cut across domestic coalition building, with similarly placed individuals frequently embracing opposing views. No single idea of Europe ever garnered spontaneously a clear majority in postwar France. This leads to one of Parsons' central claims: When electoral competitions, which were fought over issues unrelated to Europe, installed French leaders in power, these leaders—faced with domestic demands fragmented by crosscutting ideas—were free to pursue their own ideas of Europe. Geopolitical and economic factors are not irrelevant in accounting for economic integration, but, as Parsons insists, they do not offer a sufficiently well-specified analytical framework to explain the selection of one model of Europe over another and, therefore, fail to explain the course of institution building in Europe. In a sense, then, Europe's initial institutional deals owe a great deal to chance and accident. The author offers several revealing examples. For instance, the EEC plan became the object of international discussions only because French Foreign Minister Antoine Pinay ignored his government's instructions to reject it in 1955. And the Spaak Report became the basis for treaty negotiation only because a 1956 coalitional shift empowered certain individuals who happened to be pro-community leaders, most notably Guy Mollet, who stepped well beyond his own party, coalition, bureaucrats, and interest groups to pursue a new community deal.

Parsons claims that his ideas-based theory can account for both instances of success and failure in integration: Community, confederal, or traditional projects succeeded when their advocates obtained power on other cleavages for long enough to negotiate and ratify European deals, or failed when unrelated coalitional realignments deprived their advocates of policy control. The book illustrates the plausibility of this claim through a series of case studies of French policymaking leading up to five high points of integration, the European Coal and Steel Community, European Economic Community, European Monetary System, Single European Act, and Maastricht, as well as two setbacks, the European Defense Community failure and the EEC crisis of 1965–66. The empirical chapters are organized in two main parts; the first one (entitled “Choosing the Community Model”) covers the period from 1947, when the battle of ideas began to emerge, to 1967, when the consolidation of the EEC marked the first step in its resolution. Part Two (“From Community to Union”) covers the subsequent development of the community model.

Understanding how European institutional deals came about is one part of Parsons's analytical story. The other part, which he calls the institutional construction of interests, ponders the consequences of these deals. Here, he makes a valuable contribution to the literature on the role of ideas in constructing political coalitions in comparative politics and on social construction in international relations. This literature privileges structure over agency, consensus over conflict, and persuasion over political maneuvering. Parsons accepts the literature's central claim, namely, that the intersubjective construction of political relations defines actors' interests, but his analytical emphasis is on agency, conflict, and political dynamics. More specifically, he argues that leaders resorted to party and coalitional pressures, side payments, and issue linkage to get institutional deals approved. These deals, in turn, operate like cognitive constraints that structure expectations, constraining subsequent action. That is, when a set of ideas has been embedded in institutional relationships, actors formerly opposed to these ideas align or reconfigure their interests—not necessarily because they are persuaded by these ideas but because they are faced with a fait accompli that they come to accept as an unalterable part of the new institutional context.

The book is packed with stimulating thoughts on the relationship among ideas, institutions, power, and structural conditions. Some of the causal links among these factors are carefully elaborated. However, not all observations sit easily within his analytical framework, suggesting that there is scope for further theoretical work. For example, we learn that prior to 1947, French elites across the political spectrum shared a stable consensus on the traditional model. Presumably, this consensus was embedded in some institutional framework, conveying staying power to traditional ideas. This staying power, however, turned out to be weak, for a simply systemic shock, the outbreak of the Cold War, disrupted the consensus. Some French elites turned away from the traditional model and embraced confederal ideas, others community ideas. The author's process of “institutional construction of interests” is mostly about why some traditionalists and confederalists came to embrace community ideas. But what causal process explains the earlier convergence by some traditionalists to confederal ideas and others to community ideas? Is it compatible with Parsons's main story? Is it one of many possible causal pathways? In short, how general is his account?

Finally, while the book does a splendid job in elucidating the pattern of mobilization that explains the selection and ratification of particular strategies for Europe in France, it fails to systematically show how parallel mobilizations in other key ECC countries interacted with French processes to produce specific outcomes at the European level. French strategies, however important, do not simply translate more or less automatically into European institutional outcomes.

Overall, A Certain Idea of Europe is a lucid, provocative, and well-researched piece of work that makes a most valuable contribution to the study of European integration.