Calvocoressi, Resilient Europe - A Study Of The Years 1870-2000

Abstract

Onetime Reader in International Relations at the University of Sussex, Peter Calvocoressi has written extensively on recent history, diplomacy, and international politics. This volume is an engaging, if sometimes polemical, interpretive essay that sets forth the advantages for Europe of proceeding with further development of the European Community to replace the older, divisive sovereign state system, itself a European invention. Calvocoressi considers the sovereign state an instrument of fragmentation, its regulation by shifting alliances over the centuries designed to preserve the independence of the several states by maintaining a balance and preventing domination by any one unit. In the European state system "the parts were more important than the whole."