New Books in Western European Studies

Today we are talking with Philip Gounev (co-edited with Vincenzo Ruggiero) about his new book Corruption and Organized Crime in Europe (Taylor and Francis, 2012). He is the co-author of this book with Vincenzo Ruggiero, and they have a number of people who have made contributions to individual chapters. This is a great combination of two researcher’s skills. Prof Ruggiero is a major theorist on the topic of organized crime and Philip is a leading researcher into corruption in Europe. The issue of corruption is always ‘timely’. It may be that in a global financial crisis the consequences of corrupt practices have even greater impact. The authors focus on the connection between corruption and organized crime, especially how these two concepts interact in a market place. Organized criminals need security to ensure stable operations, and the public officials can provide that security through corrupt practices. I do a great deal of research into corruption and organized crime but I still learnt an enormous amount from this book. Any researchers in this area from the English speaking world will benefit from reading this book as about half of their references come from non-English speaking sources; thus this is an opportunity to see data and theories that you otherwise would not have the chance to read in English. I really enjoyed both reading this book and talking with Philip. I hope you enjoy the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Over 2.5 million Germans died as a result of World War I, or about 4% of the German population at the time. Somewhere between 7 and 9 million Germans died as a result of World War II, or between 8% to 11% of the German population at the time.* It’s hardly any wonder, then, that in the first half of the twentieth century the Germans were preoccupied with death and how to deal with it–it was all around them. Monica Black‘s impressive Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2011) explains how they did it. She focuses on remembrances of various sorts (funerals, monuments, eulogies, etc.) and the ways in which they were shaped by German tradition, transient ideology, and exigency. As Monica demonstrates, Germans themselves changed “German Way of Death” radically over this short period as they attempted to deal with a whole variety of competing pressures, values and interests. This is a fascinating book as it shows how the dead, though gone, are really (and particularly in the German case) still with us. *To put German losses in perspective, 117,000 Americans died in World War I (.13% of the population) and 418,000 Americans died in World War II (.37% of the population). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Two weeks from now the National Football League will hold its annual draft of college football players. For the league’s teams, the draft is the chance to re-stock their rosters with fresh young talent, basing their choices on reams of analytical reports and hours of dissected game films. The players, on the other hand, see the draft as the fulfillment of their lifelong dreams, the chance to slip the penury of amateur collegiate status and earn millions as a professional athlete. Like everything the NFL does, the draft is an epic, made-for-television spectacle, with fans cheering and jeering from the balcony of New York’s Radio City Music Hall, team executives arrayed on the floor like UN diplomats in crisis deliberations, the wise chorus of ESPN experts predicting each team’s selection and then decrying those teams that didn’t do as they had predicted, and the players themselves, dressed in tailor-made suits purchased with their expected millions, waiting for their names to be called. The whole proceeding is broadcast with an accompanying riot of statistics, scrolling text, and computer-generated graphics. Once upon a time, football was different. Historian Randy Roberts presents this earlier age of college football, in all its color and drama, in his newest book, A Team for America: The Army-Navy Game That Rallied a Nation (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). At the start of World War II, government and military leaders decided (after much debate) that college football had to keep going; it was good exercise for young men soon to leave for overseas service and good entertainment for the home front. And two teams that gained the most talented recruits and the most national attention during the war were the academies for prospective officers: Army and Navy. Randy’s book focuses on the Army team of coach Red Blaik, who came to West Point in 1941 to revive a losing program. By autumn 1944, through his own relentless preparation and innovations in strategy, and with the contributions of two of the greatest backs to play the game, Blaik had built one of the best teams in the country. In November of that year, troops overseas were stalled on the battlefield, and people at home were weary of rationing. They turned on their radios to listen to a football game, the biggest game of the year, played not by pro prospects looking ahead to their big payday, but by officer candidates who expected to go to war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “The Enlightenment” in which we read all the thinkers of, well, “The Enlightenment.” I came to understand that they were the “good guys” of Western history, at least for most folks. We also read, as a kind of coda, a bit about the “Counter-Enlightenment,” of which you may never have heard. The writers of the Counter-Enlightenment were, I learned, the “bad guys” of Western history, for they (apparently) didn’t like reason, truth, progress and all that. First among the black-hats was Joseph de Maistre. He believed the French Revolution was “satanic,” as were the ideas behind it. Or so I thought until I read Carolina Armenteros‘ excellent book The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854 (Cornell University Press, 2011). Turns out de Maistre was a good deal more subtle and thoughtful than the “received view” of him suggests, and Carolina does a marvelous job of making plain how and why. In this interview, Carolina explains not only the complexity of his thought, but also that he wasn’t really French, let alone a black-hat wearing reactionary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Few people are in a better position to assess different countries and cultures than those caught between them. So it is with Philip Oltermann: a German journalist who came to England while a teenager, and who has lived here and worked here ever since (even managing to marry an English girl). As you would expect from such a background, Philip’s Keeping Up With the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters (Faber and Faber, 2012) is full of closely observed insights about the linkages (and differences) between these two great European rivals. He takes us through familiar territory and introduces us to new ways of seeing, for instance, the way the two square up on the football pitch (with an examination of two of the great players for each country, Bertie Vogts and Kevin Keegan). He brings fresh material to old subjects, such as the apparent gulf between the two when it comes to comedy (the Germans indeed do, he argues, have a sense of humour – but he glories in how the English build humour into so many aspects of their life). And he also brings us (or me at least) into fresh territory – for instance in their approaches to philosophy. There’s a lot to recommend this book, but, above all, it is also extremely timely. The Europe of today is crisis ridden and divided, and the global financial crisis has – through its exposition of the rickety structure upon which the euro is built – called into question the whole nature of European integration. Germany, for so long the willing, uncomplaining engine of integration, has been thrust into an unaccustomed leading role in Europe, while the crisis has also forced Britain into a position where its Euroscepticism may be forced to declare itself beyond sniping from the sidelines. These are interesting times in Europe. The balance of Anglo-German relations will be one of the main determinants of how the continent reinvents itself once the immediate crisis (eventually) begins to subide. This book is a useful, well written and insightful contribution to this relationship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Alabama-Auburn. Maple Leafs-Canadiens. Boca Juniors-River Plate. Carlton-Collingwood.Fenerbahce-Galatasaray. Great rivalries are the catalysts of national sporting cultures. They are the high point of a season, fueling emotions as well as ticket sales and media hype. The most famous rivalries typically have bearing for league standings and championships. But many are also grounded in long-standing divisions between social classes or religious and ethnic communities. The case can be made that the most intense rivalry in all of sports is between Glasgow’s two football clubs: Celtic and Rangers. Known collectively as the “Old Firm,” the two clubs have dominated Scottish football for more than a century. The last time a team other than Celtic or Rangers won the Scottish league was 1985. But the rivalry is built on more than the competition for titles and trophies. Rangers were long associated with Scottish Protestantism, and the club refused for decades to sign a Catholic player. Celtic, on the other hand, was historically the club of Irish Catholic immigrants, and still today fans wave Irish tricolor flags at matches. As sportswriter Richard Wilson explains, the sectarian division that undergirds the Old Firm is waning, as secularization advances and intermarriage becomes more common. But the intensity surrounding the Old Firm derby has not lessened. In his book Inside the Divide: One City, Two Clubs, the Old Firm (Canongate, 2012), Richard presents the story of a single match in January 2010, as viewed from different participants: the players and managers, the police and the press, supporters of both clubs, and even the nurses who tend to the drunk and wounded after the game. The composite picture shows the anxiety and tension that precede the match, and then the energy and passion that erupt inside the grounds.Richard makes clear that the two hours or so at Ibrox or Celtic Park are exhilarating, exhausting, and breathlessly quick. The noise is overpowering, as supporters of both sides do battle in chants and song. On occasion, though, they will still slide into slurs against their opponents. Despite the policing and the anti-sectarian campaigns, the deep animosities still emerge, offering a reminder that in the Old Firm, as in all rivalries, fans are still tribal creatures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

My grandfather joined up when the Second World War broke out, but he was soon returned to civvy street as he was much more valuable employing his mechanic’s skills to fight the Nazis from a factory in Newcastle. He ended up making the parts of the spot lights that were used to guide anti-aircraft batteries (and my grandmother made parachutes, just over the River Tyne in Gateshead). Although this was not half as exciting to find out about as a young boy as discovering that he was in fact a Commando or part of the Long Range Desert Group, what my grandfather was part of was vital to the defeat of Nazism. In his excellent book, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2011), David Edgerton is all about this crucial non-military part of Britain’s war with Germany, and it sets about challenges perceptions almost from the front page. His argument is that Britain was actually far more able and well resourced than commonly thought. It entered the war as the richest per-capita nation in the world, a ‘world island’ interconnected with markets across the globe. It had industry and it had a formidable military. Even after France fell, Britain still had its empire to fall back on, and that is before the economic (and then military) assistance of the USA is taken into account. It had the luxury of fighting a war that it was comfortable with, through Bomber Command and in North Africa and the Mediterranean: not for Britain the mass bloodshed that characterized the Eastern Front. Even by the end of the war, an exhausted Britain was still in enviable shape, although – especially in comparison to the USA – it did not seem to be. The book is full of fascinating information, facts and arguments. I did not realize that (again, contrary to accepted opinion) British tanks were actually extremely highly rated, or that British units were extremely well equipped with armour. The bombing campaign was extremely well suited to statistical analysis. In 1939 the Admiralty was sent around a thousand letters a day from garden-shed inventors, each promising that his amateur tinkering had produced an invention that might win the war against the Germans. I also appreciated that this book explained to me exactly how my grandfather (and grandmother) had done so much to win the war, without having to fire a shot. It was not risk free: I remember my grandfather telling me how a bomb had scored a direct hit on the factory’s toilet, just after one of his colleagues had disappeared inside with his morning newspaper. But it was also vital, and I thoroughly recommend the book, especially to those who want to know a little bit more about how war was fought, beyond the simple matter of bullets and blood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

This week we’re continuing our focus on the Second World War, as our guest author, Jorg Muth, chats about his recent book Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940, and the Consequences for World War II (University of North Texas Press, 2011). Muth’s book, which has recently been selected for the U.S. Army Chief of Staff’s Professional Reading List, is a provocative analytical comparison of the respective cultures of officership in the US Army and the German armed forces in the first half of the twentieth century. In setting up his comparison, Muth pulls few punches in his critique of the flaws resident in both institutions. Yet while the American army managed to overcome these flaws, Muth notes that the Wehrmacht ultimately fell victim to its own hubris and ossified culture inherent in its origins. He continues to offer valuable insights as to how these institutional problems and successes continue to shape the culture of officership in the US Army today. I especially recommend reading Muth’s book in tandem with one of our earlier choices, Michael Matheny’s Carrying the War to the Enemy: American Operational Art to 1945; taken together, the two books present an interesting debate on the subject of American military culture in the Second World War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s. And yet, so often Piaf’s high-spirits are used against her and her life is made to fit the standard template of the tortured artist: early ambition, a meteoric rise to fame, a string of meaningless love affairs and substance abuse leading to an early death. In light of this tendency, Carolyn Burke‘s No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf (Knopf, 2011) serves as a much needed corrective, breathing life back into the chanteuse’s legacy. During her short life Piaf consistently demonstrated an extraordinary boldness- in her relationships, yes, but also in her singing, her spirituality, her artistic collaborations and her commitment to France during World War II. And the music! That voice! “Non Je Ne Regrette Rien” seems to pulse beneath the text of Burke’s book and, reading it, one cannot help but be steered back to Piaf’s records. Burke was undoubtedly conscious of this as it’s where she got her title. “That kid Piaf tears your guts out.” So said Maurice Chevalier after hearing the 19-year-old newcomer sing in a Parisian nightclub. Nearly 50 years after death, as No Regrets proves, she still does. *No Regrets will be available in paperback on April 1, 2012, from Chicago Review Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

I have always found something distinctly ‘un-British’ about the Mediterranean. I grew up thinking of the British empire – and British spirit – as being founded upon the open ocean: unconfined, stormy and there to be mastered. A route to the rest of the world and limitless opportunity. The Mediterranean, by contrast, always seemed a bit limp. It had no tides; its main purpose was as a tourist destination; it was (at least on its northern shore) very European in a way that Britain was not. It seemed as cramped as an Italian tourist beach in autumn. But I was very, very wrong. That is why reading Robert Holland‘s excellent book Blue Water Empire: the British in the Mediterranean since 1800 (Penguin, 2012) was such an eye opener to me. British history has been intimately bound up with the Med, and not just through the odd colonial oddity like Gibraltar or Malta, or through the search for a viable theatre in the Second World War. As Holland argues, it is the British that made the Med into something of a region, rather than a collection of regions. It was where Britain confronted Napoleon, and – many years later – where they found an outlet to take the war to Hitler. In between, and indeed after, it was a key area for British interests, and a place where British influence was great. You can see the results in modern day Palestine, in Greece, in Egypt. Holland is also particularly good at explaining the history of places such as Cyprus, Corfu, Malta and Gibraltar, where the British empire was a key factor in daily life and nation building. Near the end of the interview we also touch on the Mediterranean of today, and Robert Holland speaks movingly about the current economic crisis and its impact. He keenly regrets the inability of the states of the Mediterranean to see themselves as neighbours within a region, and the loss of a true pan-Mediterranean identity. I was wrong about Britain and its relationship to this crucial region, and that’s why I both enjoyed reading the book and talking to the author. I hope you enjoy listening just as much. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies