New Books in Western European Studies

Emmanuel Macron “has shown a genuine ability to strategize politically, determinedly and clear-sightedly [in] occupying the space of the bourgeois bloc. This is a space that France’s political crisis has left open for many years but that no one before him had been able to identify and represent effectively”.So say Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini in The Last Neoliberal: Macron and the Origins of France's Political Crisis (Verso Books, 2021).For three decades, the French centre-left has tried and failed to hang on to a working-class base with socialist platforms while, at the same time, appealing to the same demographic as its leadership: metropolitan, liberal and with an unbreakable core commitment to European intregration.In 2017, Macron abandoned this effort and went straight for the “bourgeois” core of 20-25% of the electorate with the aim of building out into the traditional right in time for the April 2022 election.Bruno Amable is a professor of economics at the University of Geneva and was previously a professor at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, an associate member of the Paris School of Economics, and research fellow with CEPREMAP.*The author's own book recommendation is Techno-féodalisme: Critique de l'économie numérique by Cédric Durand (Éditions Zones, 2020)Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

We are not short of books and commentary on the rise of the nativist right in Europe and the US but not all these movements are alike. Among the most intriguing aspects of the insurgency has been the contrasting attitudes to the role of women and gay rights in the nationalist movements in Spain and Italy compared to those in Germany, France and the US.The Dutch led the way. This style of New Right politics first appeared nearly 20 years ago in the Netherlands in the form of Pim Fortuyn - an openly gay Marxist convert to conservatism who made the then novel case that freedoms only recently won from one Abrahamic religion now needed protection from another.In The Rise of the Dutch New Right (Routledge, 2020), Merijn Oudenampsen makes the case that they are less original than they look; that Fortuyn, Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Thierry Baudet are “part of a larger and longer conservative wave” derived from British neoliberalism and American neoconservatism and that "the conservative interest in feminism and gay rights is largely a function of their opposition to Islam”. As the Netherlands goes to the polls on March 17, he considers what the future holds for the New Right.Merijn Oudenampsen is a sociologist and political scientist at the University of Amsterdam. He has previously published The Conservative Revolt (2018) and Socialism for Beginners (2019) in Dutch. This is his first book in English.*The author's own book recommendation is Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism by Melinda Cooper(Zone Books, 2017).Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In this lively discussion, Cas Mudde, a leading scholar on extremism and populism, dives into his book, shedding light on the fourth wave of radical right politics, exemplified by figures like Donald Trump and Jean-Marie Le Pen. He dissects the normalization of far-right ideologies in major democracies like India, the U.S., and Brazil, which poses challenges for liberal democracies. Mudde elaborates on the impact of recent events like Brexit, the need for effective public engagement, and the complexities of political identities in today’s shifting landscape.

Ranked sixth globally in the BAV Group’s 2020 “Best Countries” index and 11th in output per head, the Netherlands is renowned worldwide as a wealthy, stable, tolerant, and democratic success story.Yet, as American political scientist Robert Dahl told Dutch colleagues after the Netherlands’ complex social and political structure was explained to him: “Theoretically your country cannot exist”.As 13 million Dutch voters prepare to choose a new coalition government on March 17, Tom Louwerse discusses the new and essential fifth edition of Governance and Politics of the Netherlands (Red Globe Press, 2020) co-written with Rudy Andeweg and Galen Irwin.He explains the modern history that prompted Dahl’s remark, the post-1960s “amazing transformation” of the Netherlands from “religious and boring” to “progressive and permissive” nation, and the onset of a domestic culture war over the last two decades.Tom Louwerse is Associate Professor of Political Science at Leiden University, and formerly an Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin.*The author's own book recommendation is Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries by Arend Lijphart (Yale University Press, 1999)Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The only surviving contemporary texts that provide insight into the life of Saint Patrick were both written by the legendary patron saint of Ireland. By Patrick's own account, his life and ministry were controversial in his day, and the myths and legends that have surrounded this enigmatic Christian leader have continued to generate speculation and curiosity to the present day. Roy Flechner (University College Dublin) brings the the best available critical tools to the task of seeking to reconstruct Saint Patrick's life and mission in Saint Patrick Retold: The Legend and History of Ireland's Patron Saint (Princeton UP, 2019). What emerges is a vivid relief that fills in the gaps of what we can know about this characteristically guarded autobiographer from the best available scholarship of late Roman Britain. Flechner's account promises to serve as a standard text in the long tradition of Patrician scholarship for decades to come, and takes seriously Patrick's own accounts of the conflicts that surrounded his early disappearance from his native Britain and his sojourns on the emerald isle. Saint Patrick Retold won the Hagiography Society Book Prize in 2020, and is just releasing in paperback edition March of 2021.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Dr. Juan José Ponce Vázquez's new book, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580-1690 (Cambridge UP, 2020) tracks the importance of smuggling to the society, economy, and politics of the island of Hispaniola in this “long seventeenth century.” Smuggling, in his words, made people's lives on the island, an island that had suffered from imperial commercial neglect and a declining sugar industry. Concomitant with this endemic smuggling, local elites began asserting their authority over local and imperial institutions on the island, taking advantage of royal officials’ isolation from the Spanish metropole and their need for local alliances. These factors, Dr. Ponce Vásquez argues, allowed local elites to gain immense wealth and power, alter the course of European inter-imperial struggles, limit, redirect, and suppress the Spanish crown’s policies, and thus take control of the destinies of Hispaniola, other Spanish Caribbean territories, and the Spanish Empire in the region during this period.R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

John Heilbron, professor of history and vice-chancellor emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley, is one of our most distinguished - and prolific - historians of science. His latest book, The Ghost of Galileo In a Forgotten Painting from the English Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2021), records how, during a tour of an English country house, he stumbled across what might be the earliest visual reference to Galileo outside portraiture. Heilbron's quest to understand this reference has resulted in a long and extraordinary account of debates in early modern science, religion, and medicine. Heilbron explains that there are reasons why a jobbing artist, working in the royalist base of Oxford during the first English civil war, might include in a double portrait of a tutor and his melancholy pupil this reference to recent trends in cosmology. In this lavishly illustrated and copiously argued book, Heilbron sets new agendas for our understanding of the politics of royalism, the material contexts of portraiture, and the religious significance of science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The dramatic religious revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved a battle over social memory. On one side, the Reformation repudiated key aspects of medieval commemorative culture; on the other, traditional religion claimed that Protestantism was a religion without memory. Memory and the English Reformation (Cambridge UP, 2020) shows how religious memory was sometimes attacked and extinguished, while at other times rehabilitated in a modified guise. It investigates how new modes of memorialisation were embodied in texts, material objects, images, physical buildings, rituals, and bodily gestures. Attentive to the roles played by denial, amnesia, and fabrication, it also considers the retrospective processes by which the English Reformation became identified as an historic event. Examining dissident as well as official versions of this story, this richly illustrated, interdisciplinary collection traces how memory of the religious revolution evolved in the two centuries following the Henrician schism, and how the Reformation embedded itself in the early modern cultural imagination.Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

'The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time.' The words of Sir Edward Grey, looking out from the windows of the Foreign Office in early August 1914, are amongst the most famous in European history, and encapsulate the impending end of the nineteenth-century world.The man who spoke them was Britain's longest-ever serving Foreign Secretary (in a single span of office) and one of the great figures of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Statesman of Europe: A Life of Sir Edward Grey (Penguin, 2020) is a magnificent portrait of an age and describes the three decades before the First World War through the prism of his biography, which is based almost entirely on archival sources and presents a detailed account of the main domestic and international events, and of the main personalities of the era. In particular, it presents a fresh understanding of the approach to war in the years and months before its outbreak, and Grey's role in the unfolding of events. Thomas Otte, Professor of Diplomatic History at the University of East Anglia, one of the leading, if not the leading historian dealing with 19th and early 20th century Diplomatic and International politics has written a thoroughly splendid book which will provide both the academic and the lay educated reader with a mine of historical information and insights. By all means do read a book which has been named the New Statesman’s book of the Year for 2020 and which Martin Pugh in the TLS calls ‘a magisterial account that is unlikely to be bettered Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Erik S. Herron’s Normalizing Corruption: Failures of Accountability in Ukraine (University of Michigan Press, 2020) zeroes in on the mechanisms that sustain corruption and minimize accountability: aspects that play a crucial role in the effectiveness of democratic processes. This investigation is based on rigorous analyses of data that shed light on the specificities of the accountability system in Ukraine. In Ukraine, corrupt practices seem to overwhelm political and societal life. Corruption is a ubiquitous topos that is extensively commented on by both politicians and scholars. Many connect the pervasiveness of corruption in post-Communist states with the Soviet legacy. While recognizing Soviet influences on the formation of corrupt practices in Ukraine, Herron offers to compartmentalize corruptions, which may facilitate the development of actions and activities that can help minimize corruption. While focusing on the Ukrainian case, this book also includes sections that highlight the experiences of other former Soviet countries, including Georgia, Baltic states, and Russia. Normalizing Corruption: Failures of Accountability in Ukraine contributes to the study of the development of democratic practices in the states whose political history is closely connected with totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies