Inevitably readers will be drawn to Simms's fascinating picture of the origins of the European Union. His view is that even the European Coal and Steel Community out of which the EU eventually emerged was a product of big power rivalries within Europe, this time the fear of Soviet domination and, though to a lesser extent, of a German revival: "the core of the project, however, was always common defence." Germany's potential for making war had to be brought under control. This created a vicious circle, with the Soviet Union becoming ever more obsessed about West German "revanchism", and more and more insistent on supporting its horrible acolytes in the "German Democratic Republic". Here, as elsewhere in the book, we find a thoughtful and stimulating reassessment of a series of events we thought we understood well enough. And what of the current crisis in the EU? Should it be seen as another attempt to create an unwieldy empire encompassing nations, somewhat akin to the Habsburg empire that embraced Spain, the Low Countries, Italy and the Holy Roman Empire (and a lot more besides)? For Simms the fundamental issue is whether a "single force" can unite Europe. Of course, it does depend on what one means by "unite", but it also depends on what one might mean by "force", and the Greeks, and still more the Greek Cypriots, have reason to worry that they have been forced into doing things that are not in their interests because the club rulebook is to all intents controlled by the Germans.
What is different nowadays to the heyday of the Holy Roman Empire is that the nation state has come into being. We have seen its dark side in persecutions of minorities, the suppression of languages and cultures, even the ethnic cleansing of peoples. The heady combination of peoples and cultures of past times, that saw a German-speaking majority in Budapest and where Vilnius was the "Jerusalem of the North" for the Ashkenazi Jews, has vanished amid terrifying bloodshed. Newly-born or reborn countries such as Estonia and Slovenia glory for a few years in their new national currency and then are sucked into the eurozone. The tension between a national identity and what passes for a European identity is not as great as it could be, because no one apart from the inhabitants of Belgium and Luxembourg has much of an idea what this European identity really involves, let alone the much-vaunted "European project". The Holy Roman Empire lasted for 1,006 years, if we take its starting-point as the coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas Day, 800. In that whole period it did not create a "Holy Roman identity". Nor was there a "Holy Roman project". Maybe the Habsburgs knew best.
