Michael Loriaux poses the question “What is European Union about”? (p. 1), but seems unsure how to go about answering it. Initially, Loriaux promises an argument of “critical conceptualization” (p. 11) without explaining what that means. Three hundred pages later, his intention is to offer “an exercise in stimulating the political imagination” (p. 329). In the middle of page 259, Loriaux writes “the purpose of this book is to interrogate the language in which European Union is crafted and to destabilize that language.” How these various goals might answer Loriaux's opening question remains unclear.

Loriaux also has his own idiosyncratic organizational scheme. “Though the chapters are ordered chronologically” as a history of the Greater Rhineland from the Romans to the present, “the argument of the book … works ‘backwards’ from commonsense representation of space in the present to the point in the past at which that representation first appeared” (p. 22).

This combination of multiple goals and inverted organization makes tough going for readers, who will need to expend quite an effort to extract and organize for themselves the arguments at the center of this work, which I summarize below. First, national ontopologies (a term combining being and space, borrowed from Derrida) and their defining frontiers were “invented” (p. 15) as myths “that emerged as fictions from the minds of poets” (p. 323). In this process of invention, specific identifiable “speech acts, coups de force, acts of verbal violence ‘gave birth’ to the [European] ontopology that we use so casually today” (p. 15).

Second, the “original purpose” of the European Union (EU) was “the deconstruction of the Rhineland frontier,” by “interrogating myths of self and other” (p. 2). It was the “myth of nationhood” that the EU “seeks, nolens volens to deconstruct” (p. 23).

Third, this “deconstructive process demands clarification” (p. 23) because “the EU's geopolitical purpose is obfuscated by a discursive framework that either hides it or distracts from it” (p. 11). This has been so “from the beginning” of debate about an integrated Europe (p. 2) because the “linguistic framework of named spaces, named peoples, and the ‘naturalness’ of frontiers” (p. 2) “rejects the Greater Rhineland to the margins—the periphery—of legitimate natural space” (p. 11).

Fourth, “bringing to light the EU's ‘hidden mission’ [deconstructing the Rhineland frontier] would … open new worlds of political possibility” (p. 322). Moving beyond a vocabulary of nations—“Ossianic discourse” as Loriaux calls it—we can rediscover “a kind of urban-based, non-hierarchical, ‘hanseatic’ governance” (p. 320) that the author portrays throughout the work as an essential characteristic of the Greater Rhineland over most of its history. Drawing on this “suggestive history” (p. 328), the current EU could represent “European space as network, more or less detached from national space, plurilingual, and oriented toward cultural encounter” (p. 321).

Finally, “re-presenting” (p. 322) Europe as the type of space described above “makes available to us a more legitimating and mobilizing representation of the European project” (pp. 11, 318). This image of Europe could be offered as part of the “public debate” (p. 1), which has provoked deep concerns about perceptions of EU legitimacy.

Readers will need a strong faith in the power of language to accept the elements and linkages Loriaux proposes in this chain of reasoning. Certainly many readers will wonder if raising a public discussion around the question “is identity real?” (p. 325) is the best way for the EU to reconnect with the citizens of Europe.

On the other hand, Loriaux produces a number of penetrating observations about the EU's difficulties in legitimating itself. For example, he exposes the “abnormality in EU discourse” (p. 314) “in which it is true both that only past legacy can legitimate and that only the transcendence of past legacy can legitimate” (p. 322). He is also insightfully critical of EU attempts to create its own new ontopological identity by employing many of the same techniques that served nation-building and imperialism in the nineteenth century (p. 308).

Unfortunately, Loriaux's argument is embedded in a 300-page, linguistically oriented, interpretive recounting of Rhineland history designed to demonstrate that the Rhineland was consistently Europe's “core economy” and often home to “nonhierarchical” governance. Historians will find a lot to complain about in this generally superficial, selective re-narration of Rhineland history based on a thin sample of (usually older) secondary works. For example, Loriaux traces the impact of the French Revolution in the Rhineland in eight pages (pp. 179–87) with no reference to the large body of good work produced in the past twenty years. Many important, complex subjects receive similar treatments.

Even a book that is a “backward-gazing critique” of “the referential power of myths of place” rather than a work of “forward-flowing history” and therefore not concerned with “causality” (p. 118) should get basic information correct; Loriaux often does not. Unsupported assertions, factual errors, and simplistic sweeping generalizations recur throughout in number far too great to be listed here. For example, the Rhineland was never “one of the most dynamic regional economies of the western [Roman] empire,” as Loriaux claims (p. 24); both Germania Inferior and Germania Superior had per capita incomes among the lowest in the western empire, as Angus Maddison and others have shown. It is not true that “the Rhine Shipping Act of 1831 eliminated tolls along the river” (p. 215); the act confirmed toll collections at twelve stations from Strasbourg to the Dutch border. The claim “Caesar jettisoned Rome's customary frontier policy” (p. 36) shows little understanding of how Romans applied highly differentiated frontier policies along various borders of the Empire. Similarly sweeping claims regarding portions of EU history are equally problematic; one example is that “the EU has expanded to include most of ‘Europe’ because ‘peripheral’ states fear exclusion from Rhineland markets” (p. 318).

Readers who want to explore the EU's linguistic struggle to legitimate itself with reference to the European past will find this book intelligent and informative. Readers who want to learn something about Rhenish history are better served elsewhere.