Twenty-five years on from the end of the Cold War and a decade after most of the former Soviet bloc states of Eastern Europe became full members of the European Union, European political economy and collective identity appear to be in crisis. The books of Anthony Giddens, Robert Miller (with Graham Day and many other contributors) and Robert Salais were written well before the events in Ukraine in 2014, but are highly relevant to understanding how the terms Europe and Eurasia are deployed in this conflict. They engage more directly with the financial meltdown of 2008, problems of the Eurozone, and other, related consequences of neoliberal economic policies in recent decades. Robert Salais and Anthony Giddens, two of the most distinguished social scientists in their respective countries, have not specialised in issues pertaining to Europe throughout their careers, but evidently feel moved to address them now by the gravity of the situation. Giddens takes his title from the Churchillian rhetoric of 1946 and Salais offers a sustained historical analysis of how lofty political ideals were repeatedly sabotaged from this moment on by false economic priorities, down to the disastrous implementation of the single currency. Questions of European commitment and belonging, central to these two authors at a rather general level, are addressed through individual case studies in the volume edited by Miller, which draws on quite different strands of sociology for its theoretical inspiration. All three books lead readers to reflect on what European values and identity might mean today, in highly unstable global conditions with populist forces on the rise almost everywhere. I shall return to these larger issues after briefly presenting each volume in turn.

Robert Salais is the founder of the économie des conventions school of non-orthodox economics. He draws upon his expertise in that field throughout this book, especially towards the end when he elaborates alternatives to the rigidities of the Eurozone. This has had highly deleterious impacts on investment and employment in many member states (especially those of the south but also, as has become more obvious since the book was published, in France itself). Salais argues that John Maynard Keynes’ concept of the bancor pointed in the right direction, but this was over-ruled at Bretton Woods. Mistake followed mistake in the decades which followed, beginning with the European Recovery Program of 1947 (Marshall Aid), implemented just after the foundation of the Société du Mont Pèlerin. The juxtapositions are deliberate, for Salais is concerned to trace how the rise of neoliberal economic ideology has subverted the implementation of more creative long-term policies to develop the real economy, grounded in the value of human labour and the environment. He documents in detail how the ground for the Treaty of Rome was prepared by the Spaak Report of 1956, how the collapse of Bretton Woods was followed in the 1970s by the first efforts to achieve European monetary union (via the ECU), and how these were overtaken in the 1980s by pressures to implement the single market, leading ineluctably to the financialization of the last generation. At every stage, the deepening of European political and social institutions was blocked by a false conception of economics, which equated competitiveness and development with the liberalization of markets, in particular capital markets.

Salais blends his economic analysis with literary flourishes and the narrative skills of an historian. Europe has been violated, as in the original Greek mythology. This continent aspires to be the highest form of human civilization, by implementing ancient ideals which acquired new form in the Enlightenment and were revived briefly in the form of the new welfare states, only to be betrayed thereafter. The remedy must be the pursuit of alternative economic policies on the basis of a reappropriation of European principles of democratic freedoms for equal citizens and peoples. This humanist imperative, which entails a strong commitment to “social Europe”, is elaborated with economic proposals which uphold the importance of market exchange, but also the need to tax capital and proscribe speculative flows; states and banks must channel investments responsibly and creditors must be placed under the same obligation as debtors. Politically, Salais argues that some form of federalism is indispensable, but at the same time democratic states must claw back some of the power that has been wrested from them by non-elected bankers and bureaucrats.

Anthony Giddens offers less history but compensates with a wider survey of contemporary issues. Like Salais, he is deeply committed to Europe. However, perhaps because he is writing primarily for a more sceptical British readership, he avoids elevated appeals to Greek mythology or Enlightenment philosophy. Rather, the EU is our “community of fate” for a host of pragmatic reasons. At times, Giddens overwhelms his readers with up to date graphs and statistical tables, leavening his analysis with topical journalism and telling anecdotes. His general position is that of a moderate, someone like ex-Chancellor Schröder of Germany or ex-Prime Minister Amato of Italy, both of whom provide endorsements for the book. Giddens wants to keep the Eurozone intact “if it is humanly possible”, because the consequences of losing even one or two smaller members would be potentially disastrous for the world economy. Yet he acknowledges that more flexibility is needed: austerity policies cannot cure and may indeed accentuate the problems generated by the single currency. He shares Robert Salais’s emphasis on creative social investment and dismisses the notion that modern societies can dismantle their evolved welfare institutions. On the other hand, he thinks that the European Social Model has been over-extended and must now be trimmed through more selectivity and incentives to work. He takes a strong position concerning Europe’s need to do more to integrate its immigrants, rejecting the common view that “multiculturalism has failed” (Chapter 4, “The Cosmopolitan Imperative”, is one of the best). I find him less convincing when amassing data about how Europe and the rest of the world are to meet energy needs without destroying the environment for future generations (Chapter 5). In all of these matters, as in most of its foreign policy interventions (Chapter 6), Giddens concedes that the actual performance of the EU has been at best muddled, and frequently counterproductive. The solution must be found in a major reform of all EU institutions, relieving Germany of its present burden of being obliged to exercise de facto power through the informal mechanisms which Giddens calls “EU2”. Giddens is a strong believer in representative democracy and, like Salais, he believes that the “only way forward” is some version of federalism. This is a brave stance in the current British climate.

The works summarised above are attempts by highly respected scholars to address European quandaries in the mode grand public and are priced accordingly. One hopes that they will be promptly translated into other European languages, to facilitate a truly pan-EU debate. By contrast, the volume edited by Robert Miller (with Graham Day) is a more conventional academic collection presenting the results of an international research project, Euroidentities, which Miller coordinated for the Seventh Framework Programme of the EU. It is unlikely to be purchased by many individual readers (except perhaps by the twenty-seven authors and the subjects whose biographies they present). The authors rely on highly personalised methods of interviewing to explore changing notions of Europe in a multitude of contexts: student educational mobility and non-white immigration, manual work and NGO activism, transnational markets for agricultural produce and those for marriage and “intimacy”. The quality of the chapters (and the English) is predictably uneven but such volumes are testimony to the emergence of a “European academic space” in the social sciences. In this book, the space extends from Belfast to Sofia, and from Tallinn to Naples.

While most authors probed the changing mobilities by carrying out biographical narrative interviews in their home countries, team leaders contribute syntheses and more general reflections. I was especially struck by the discussion of a “European mental space” by Fritz Schütze and Anja Schröder-Wildhagen in the volume’s final chapter. While they concede, I think with a tinge of regret, that there can be no question here of a collective “We Group”, the European mental space is “a social phenomenon existing at several constitutive levels of social reality” (p. 275). This space has shaped the biographies of significant numbers of non-elite, “non-Eurocratic” citizens. It is characterized by a “cooperative mind set” (p. 277), which leads such citizens to question traditional “primordial” notions of ethnic and national allegiance. Unfortunately, the authors argue cautiously, all these welcome trends have been called into question in recent years by economic and political crises, which can easily lead citizens to revert to older categories of exclusion based on nationality. Thus individuals in poor countries give up hope of emulating their professional counterparts in “other” richer societies, while in the wealthier countries (the authors led the empirical research in Germany) the conclusion can be “We don’t want to wait for them anymore; we don’t want to go on to support or even rescue them” (p. 278). At this point, the qualitative evidence gathered by the Euroidentities project links well with the more statistical data presented by Giddens and the macro-historical account provided by Salais.

All of these books make useful contributions to understanding the current challenges facing the European Union. Yet the title of each volume makes reference to Europe, the authors apparently considering these to be congruent. This is surely inadequate, as events in 2014 have demonstrated. None of the volumes under review makes any reference to Ukraine, though this country is one of Europe’s largest both in terms of territory and population. Only Giddens engages at all with Russia, and he does so mainly to cast doubts on Vladimir Putin’s credentials in terms of democracy and human rights. As in all mainstream media, Russia is considered here as a threat to Europe, not as an integral part of an evolved community which needs to be better incorporated into the institutions of the western half of the continent. The violence in eastern Ukraine in 2014 has accentuated this trend to isolate Moscow. There have been echoes of Cold War discourses in the truculent rhetoric of the NATO Secretary General and many EU politicians. Russia is demonized as “not Europe” and close attention is paid to Eurasianism, a cluster of conservative-nationalist ideas which developed strongly in the late socialist period. This ideology is nowadays perceived to be providing cultural-historical justification for the new Eurasian Economic Commission. This is a rather modest customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, hardly a geopolitical threat. Nonetheless, some Western pundits have seized on the conflict in Ukraine to oppose this Eurasia to Europe. According to this binary, Putin’s Eurasia is the heir to Soviet totalitarianism and Oriental despotism before it, while Europe remains an unsullied ideal.

It would be easy to dismiss these discourses of a renewed polarity between East and West as a distraction from the urgent business of addressing North-South cleavages within the Eurozone and reforming EU institutions generally. Quarrels within Western Eurasia are a sideshow when one considers the global shift of power to China, where more centralized power holders are able for the time being to hold their substantially larger population together. Seen from Beijing, Western Eurasia today looks bitterly divided and increasingly marginal. Nonetheless, the concept of Europe has not lost its evocative mystique and material potency. By upholding Europe as the frame within which all problems must be addressed, defining this Europe pragmatically with reference to the EU, and simultaneously more abstractly with allusions to a “mental space” and myths of freedom and equality, scholars run the risk of replicating all the problems of the nation-state at another level. Why should Europe be our community of fate, as argued by Giddens? This is the question posed by the United Kingdom Independence Party and the Front National, but Anthony Giddens does not provide a satisfying answer. The grounds for excluding Russia from the Schicksalgemeinschaft are increasingly flimsy when populists in London and Paris emulate the populist in the Kremlin.

To defend the values of Giddens’ “third way”, and still more emphatically in the case of the values of the économie solidaire favoured by Robert Salais, it would surely make more sense to build bridges not only to Moscow but to many other locations all over Asia whose populations, whether or not they experienced some version of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist socialism in the recent past, can look back on long histories of dealing with social inequalities and keeping markets in their place. Whereas the prevalence of a “cooperative mind set” looks rather doubtful in a US in thrall to the Tea Party faction, it is hardly specific to Western Europe; it has similar deep roots across the landmass of Eurasia. The European Union is undoubtedly contributing to the promotion of a European consciousness, among academics and many others through its Framework Programmes and other initiatives. But the goal of a “We Group” of Europeans, the implicit preference of all of these social scientists, regardless of where exactly they draw the boundaries, makes no more sense than “We Eurasians”. In the interests of “We Humans”, the emphasis on the uniqueness of Europe needs toning down; it is a major part of the problem, not the solution.