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Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations After the Iraq War, edited by Daniel Levy, Max Pensky, and John Torpey. New York, NY: Verso, 2005. 231 pp. $23.00 paper. ISBN: 1844675203.
On February 15th, 2003, millions of Europeans in dozens of cities took to the streets to protest the impending U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Those protests have been called both the largest peace demonstrates ever mounted, as well as the birth of a pan-European public sphere.
Several months after the demonstrations, on May 31st, 2003, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas organized a similarly panEuropean series of essays in leading newspapers by a group of European (and one American) intellectuals. The most influential of these essays, written by Habermas himself and co-signed by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, appeared simultaneously in the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the French Libération, and sought to open a pan-European debate on a series of inter-related themes, including the character of the European project, the nature of a European identity, and the role of the European Union in a world dominated by the United States.
In Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe, Daniel Levy, Max Pensky and John Torpey collect the seminal contributions in a debate that did indeed turn out to be pan-European as well as vigorous. The book is organized in three parts. Following a brief but cogent introduction by the editors, the first section reproduces (in translation) the complete set of the original six essays that appeared on the 31st of May (by Habermas and Derrida, Umberto Eco, Adolf Muschg, Gianni Vattimo, Richard Rorty, and Fernando Savater). The second section of the book reprints the resulting...