Peter Baldwin's The Narcissism of Minor Differences is an effort to correct what the author perceives as a widespread misunderstanding of the differences between Europe and the United States. The target here is the idea that Europe and the United States are fundamentally different kinds of places, one a socialist paradise (or wasteland, depending on one's political perspective) and the other a free-market heaven (or hell); one society peaceful, healthy, and socially liberal and the other hostile, impoverished, and socially puritanical. The book's argument boils down to two central claims. First, Europe is internally quite diverse, with no single country clearly representing a European “essence.” Second, the United States corresponds to European norms across a wide range of empirical indicators. Although Europe and the United States have their differences, the author claims, they are not nearly as great as onlookers—particularly American liberal critics of the United States—tend to believe. At best, Baldwin writes, the book is meant to jump-start a debate over the relative similarities and differences between the United States and Europe that has usually relied more on vague impressions than hard facts.

In support of this argument, the author has gathered an enormous amount of data. “This book is an essay in numbers” (p. 8), we read early on; an effort to “look dispassionately at the quantitative evidence, such as it is” (p. 9). Chapter after chapter is filled with information on a diverse set of topics: health care, welfare states, education, religion, the structure of the economy, the patterning of inequality, and so forth. The author uses mainstream data sources for the most part, including those from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the United Nations, but he mines these materials for some unusual indicators. Along with some familiar statistics, like unemployment and social expenditures and research and development, we also read about the number of pianos sold per 10,000 population, the number of 15-year-olds who regularly dine with their parents, and the percentage of survey respondents who claim to have had “Three in a Bed during Sex” (p. 120). As figure follows figure and comparison follows comparison, the book builds a kind of rhetorical momentum. The cumulative impact is powerful, and the sheer volume of information, along with the crispness and wittiness of the prose, helps to make the book as entertaining as it is informative.

Some portions of the book are more nuanced than others. The material on welfare states is especially good. This is unsurprising, given that the author wrote his excellent first book, The Politics of Social Solidarity (1990), on the topic. Over the course of two chapters—one dealing with health care, the other with “The Rest of the Welfare State”—Baldwin makes the case that the American welfare state is not out of sync with European norms. “Comparing American and European welfare states,” he concludes Chapter 4, “means identifying different styles of policy rather than a simple binary choice between absence and presence” (p. 73). Later, he revisits this topic through a review of the welfare states literature. Efforts to typologize welfare states in such a way as to demonstrate a distinct cleavage between Europe and the United States, the author reports, have broken down in favor of groupings that cross-cut the Atlantic divide. The material on civil society is less sophisticated by contrast although, in the author's defense, the indicators of civil society are more difficult to quantify, as is noted in Chapter 8.

One of the curiosities of The Narcissism of Minor Differences is that while it makes a powerful claim and mobilizes an impressive amount of data, the book does not really establish a consistent guideline for establishing similarities and differences between the United States and Europe. Most of the tables show the United States among a selection of European countries, sometimes in the middle, sometimes on the high end, sometimes on the low end. But there is no effort made to argue for some indicators being more important than others, or even for what it means to conform to a European norm. Only in one chapter does the author take up the question of whether an examination of these indicators over time would make any difference to the argument (the vast majority of the indicators used in the first dozen chapters being static). Would a time series reveal something that static data obscures or keeps hidden? It would not matter, he claims: “Just as one could, if one wanted, cook the books for a snapshot, the same could be done for a time series” (pp. 211–12). Indeed, but this begs the question. It is simply not as clear as it ought to be how to evaluate the mountain of evidence on offer. There are differences between Europe and the United States, he reassures his readers a number of times, “[b]ut why assume that variations across the Atlantic are of kind and not just degree?” (p. 246) Why indeed? And what differences really do matter? There is no clear answer. “Las Vegas is not Baden Baden” (p. 246), he writes, which will surprise no one who already believes it.

The lack of a clear metric notwithstanding, one omission is particularly prominent: politics. The first dozen chapters have very little to say about the differences between the political institutions of Europe and the United States. There is a brief discussion of citizens' perspective on government in the chapter on “Civil Society,” while a three-page chapter called “Nationalism” is curiously apolitical. Then, in the final five chapters, politics begins to creep into the discussion. In the last few pages of Chapter 13, which weighs in on the convergence/divergence debate, well known to scholars of globalization, the author takes note of the differences between political institutions only to ponder the possibility that they do not matter. “The question … is whether even political institutions ultimately separate Europe from other nations” (p. 213), he suggests. In a chapter called “The Post Facto State,” he ruminates on the relationship between state and civil society, distinguishing between America's “post facto state” and Europe's “pre facto state,” before reflecting on the possibility that the processes by which similar outcomes are generated may indeed differ quite widely. These final chapters contain less data than the first dozen, but they also contain some of the most provocative assertions and interesting analysis. “If the United States and Europe are perceived as different,” one of the last and most provocative of these assertions goes, “the reasons should be sought in political culture, not geopolitics” (p. 244). The final half dozen pages of the book deal with this theme, but it merits much more consideration.

Those quibbles aside, The Narcissism of Minor Differences is an immensely readable book. Baldwin is a good writer, and his creative mélange of data conveys a strong vision of Europe and the United States as close cousins, rather than estranged lovers. The book's mission, to reenergize a debate, is well worth taking up, and the author makes a worthy intervention in the discussion.