Wolfgang Streeck in Dublin Review of Books:
Can Europe Survive? The Story of a Continent in a Fractured World, by David Marsh, Yale University Press, 515 pp, £25, ISBN: 978 0300273007.
This is a book that comes armed to the teeth. Its author, a former Financial Times European editor, has assembled thirty-six endorsements for a five-page overture, ten by central bankers, past and present, the rest by ambassadors and former ambassadors and all sorts of ‘global heads’ of whatever, senior fellows and advisers, the procession being led by Gordon Brown on the front cover (‘A privilege to read’) followed by, going by protocol, Lord David Owen. For good measure, a foreword is contributed by Joachim Nagel, president of Deutsche Bundesbank and, perhaps soon, of more.
David Marsh interviewed an astonishing 167 people, listed at the tail end of the book with their credentials described in loving detail, over two years from mid-2023 to mid-2025. Most of them, one is tempted to say, are from the Anglosphere but this is, after all, where things happen. Even larger is the share of those that are ‘from finance’ – private, semi-private, public, semi-public, national and international finance. Thirty are from Germany, none is from Russia; I will return to this later. Some were interviewed more than once, mostly at their place of residence but sometimes, if unavoidable, by video conference. Sociologists and political scientists, who in their humble ‘projects’ try to make sense of and extract something like ‘theory’ from a maximum of fifty ‘expert interviews’, can only express their admiration or abstain from doing so out of sheer envy.
Marsh’s people are the people who are supposed to be in the know, which, in the language of social science methodology, makes them informants rather than respondents, giving researchers a license to assume that what they tell them is what it is, which would render special efforts at sense-making expendable.
More here.
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