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Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present. By BRENDAN SIMMS. New York: Basic Books, 2013. 540 pp. $35.00 (cloth).
This is very much a book in the style that is characteristic of Simms. It is bold, articulate, well written, and interesting, but also problematic and lacking in the caveats and qualifications that might be expected from a major academic such as Simms, a Cambridge professor of international relations. Simms's subject in his new book is power relationships in Europe since 1450 and, more particularly, from 1814. He argues for an essential consistency, and thus coherence, in these in his period. According to Simms, he demonstrates that the principal security issues faced by Europeans have remained remarkably constant over the centuries: the concepts, if not the language, of encirclement, buffers, balancing, failed states, and preemption; the dream of empire and the quest for security; the centrality of Germany as the "semiconductor" linking the various parts of the European balance; the balance between liberty and authority; the tensions between consultation and efficiency, and ideology and reason of state; and the connection between foreign and domestic policy, have, he claims, all preoccupied statesmen from the mid fifteenth century to the present. The German question is repeatedly presented by Simms as crucial, indeed central, to the fundamental issue of whether Europe would be united or dominated by a single force. Germany is also depicted as the cockpit of the...