| Review of: | The Year of the Euro: the Cultural, Social and Political Import of Europe's Common Currency edited by R. Fishman, A. Messina |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | George G. Georgiadis |
| Reviewed in: | Journal of Common Market Studies |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 45, Issue 2, Pages 515-533 |
Book Reviews
The core question examined by the majority of scholars in this edited book concerns the social or political impact of the peaceful and consensual introduction of the common currency. The book's main contribution, it is argued, is to be found in its discussion of this impact on national and European identities (the 'identity hypothesis' henceforth). In addition to that theme, various chapters look at the impact in numerous other areas that extend from workers' rights, to the puzzle of the limited political gains of right-wing parties, to employment and social (welfare and labour) policy, to financial market relations, to the impact on European democracy itself. The methodologies employed in the various contributions are also wide-ranging, covering a good part of the quantitative-qualitative spectrum. With such a wide range of topics and high level of methodological plurality, inevitably, the book occasionally appears to suffer in terms of its depth of analysis and coherence.
Despite the prominence assigned to the identity hypothesis, corroborating (or falsifying) evidence is lacking. This lack of evidence may be due to the fact that identity formation and adaptation take time. In that case, searching for evidence so soon after the introduction of the common currency is surely premature, unless this book is intended as a prelude to a sequel. Even more fundamentally, the limited evidence in support of the identity hypothesis may be due to the fact that the causal link is weaker than assumed. After all, Berezin contrasts the easiness and speed with which European publics accepted the rise of the common currency (and the fall of the national ones) with the resilience of suppressed languages, another strong identity marker, and concludes that the common currency may not be consequential identitywise. On a similar line, Messina points out that the introduction of the euro was not among salient action areas in the views of euro area citizens - it came 11th among 15 available options in the 2002 Eurobarometer survey.
With respect to the remaining areas covered in the chapters of this book, to mention but a few, the chapter by Jenson and Pochet shows that the introduction of the euro did not impact as much as feared on employment and social policy and explains why this was the case. Messina's article explains why extreme right-wing parties did not manage to gain politically from the introduction of the euro. The background chapter on the process behind the design and introduction of euro banknotes (Heymans) is surely an essential piece of knowledge for any reader who cares about such things, even if the author does not address - but for a thin endnote - the challenge posed to the chapter's thesis by the reality of nationally customized coins.
To sum up, then, this book has shortcomings in terms of its scope and timing, yet offers a welcome distraction from the focus on the euro's economic impact, as well as a view into less familiar scholarly areas. It would be interesting to see a sequel asking the same questions with a narrower focus in a few years' time.