| Review of: |
The Inevitable Alliance: Europe and the United States beyond Iraq by Vittorio Emanuele Parsi
Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke, UK, 2006
Pages: 216. $69.95 |
| Reviewed By: |
Matthew Evangelista |
| Reviewed in: |
International Studies Review |
| Date accepted online: |
10/04/2008 |
| Published in print: |
Volume 09, Issue 02, Pages 275-276 |
Toward a United, But Plural, West
Vittorio Emanuele Parsi is perhaps the best known scholar of international relations in Italy today. He is a professor at the Catholic University of Milan, a regular columnist on foreign policy for the Catholic newspaper Avvenire, and a frequent participant on television talk shows in which he engages Italy's leading politicians. His latest book, The Inevitable Alliance, deals with US-European relations in the wake of the Iraq invasion. The original Italian version, although published in 2003, was not simply an "instant book" on current politics. It reflected Parsi's thoughtful engagement with the philosophical and pragmatic issues that divide the United States from its main European allies and was guided by a subtle understanding of the alliance's history.
The Inevitable Alliance is composed of three chapters. The first one, "From the End of History to the End of the World," reviews the changes that distinguish the Cold War era from the more recent period. The second chapter, "Force, Law, and International Order," presents Parsi's own view of the problems facing the West, particularly terrorism and other challenges to security. He distinguishes his view from the positions of the "pacifist" Left and the Bush Administration. In contrast to the former, Parsi recognizes a need for military force. In contrast to the latter, he also values international law and institutions and recognizes-drawing on the work of John Ikenberry (2001) and others-that most of the architecture of the international order was established by the United States in the wake of World War II. The third chapter, "The Remains of the West," provides his prescription for Europe's future, especially with respect to its foreign policy and its orientation toward the United States, in light of his analysis in the previous chapter.
The Inevitable Alliance has several strengths. Although written in response to the crisis in alliance relations engendered by the US-led invasion of Iraq, the book is based on a broader analysis of the course of US-European relations that is not likely to become dated very soon. Parsi engages recent scholarly work on the NATO alliance-most notably Charles Kupchan's (2002) argument that a united Europe is bound to challenge the United States and that the future of NATO is in doubt and Robert Kagan's (2003) claim that "Europe is Venus, America is Mars." But Parsi also draws on more general theoretical work in the field of international relations, including Samuel Huntington's (1993) contributions, and introduces some of his own theoretical innovations. He strikes a good balance between theory and policy analysis. The theoretical underpinning keeps the book from reading like a compilation of recent newspaper articles, but it does so without making the book seem excessively academic.
One appeal of Parsi's book for a US or British audience is that it complements some of the analyses of US-European relations that have come from the European Left, such as Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire (2003) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (2000). Parsi's political orientation is center-right; he is close to the Catholic Church and the Catholic parties in Italy. Nevertheless, he is quite critical of the Vatican's position against the Iraq war and finds the newly found pacifism of European governments (including Russia) a bit hypocritical. He points out, for example, that these states have troops deployed all over the world, in places like Afghanistan, Chad, Ivory Coast, Chechnya, and so on. Parsi is not, however, uncritical of the United States in the way that Tony Blair, for example, has seemed. He recognized early that the US campaign to support an invasion of Iraq was based on misinformation and lies, and he is skeptical of other US policies, such as the expansion of the NATO alliance to the East (which, he argues, will lead to an expansion of the "democratic deficit" that already characterizes the European Union). Among many such insights, Parsi argues that Europe and the United States differ over two key questions: the limits of foreign policy ambitions (with NATO expansion and the "export of democracy" as cases in point) and the very notion of what constitutes a foreign policy problem (let alone an appropriate solution).
Parsi is ultimately hopeful about US-European relations. He believes that the future of the alliance depends on a greater coherence within Europe with respect to its foreign policy goals and capabilities. In the closing pages of The Inevitable Alliance, Parsi describes the relationship between Europe and the United States as an indispensable as well as inevitable alliance, and he makes a convincing case that it is so.
