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Visions of Europe: European Integration as Redemption from the Past and as a Monetary Transaction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2017

HAROLD JAMES
HAROLD JAMES*
Affiliation:
Professor Harold James, History Department, Princeton University, Princeton NJ 08544; hjames@princeton.edu
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Extract

Visions of Europe belong to a particular time. They carry with them the hallmark, the dominant patterns of thought, of their birth. But there also exist substantial continuities between three of these crucial moments: 1848, 1945 and 1989. At these times the process of building nation states also reached a peculiar moment of crisis – or a turning point. The idea of Europe, reformulated at these times of political collapse, existential angst and an explosion of the imagination, stands in an intricate relationship – Hegelians might like to call it a dialectic – with the conception of national cultures and national politics.

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Forum
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , May 2017 , pp. 209 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

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12 On this theme there is a voluminous literature. See Marsh, David, The Bundesbank: The Bank that Rules Europe (London: Heineman, 1992)Google Scholar; the conspiracy theory of continuity is pushed very heavily by de Villemarest, Pierre, de Villemarest, Danièle and Wolf, William D., Faits et chroniques interdits au public – Tome 1 (Slough: éd. Aquilon, 2003)Google Scholar and Faits et chroniques interdits au public - Tome 2 : les secrets de Bilderberg (Slough: éd. Aquilon, 2004), as well as the Dr. Rath Foundation Brussels: http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/brussels_eu/roots/index.html. The theme is also taken up in Laughland, John, The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea (London: Little Brown, 1997)Google Scholar and the work of the Paris-based Russian-financed Institute of Democracy and Cooperation: www.idc-europe.org. Stephen Gross's essay gives an important and balanced corrective to the hyper-conspiracy accounts.

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