The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914 by Yaman Kouli and Léonard Laborie (review)

Reviewed by:

• The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914 by Yaman Kouli and Léonard Laborie
• Vincent Lagendijk (bio)

The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914 By Yaman Kouli and Léonard Laborie. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Pp. xiii + 169.

When did European integration start? For a long time, the standard perspective was that this only took place after 1945, as a sort of Stunde Null. Initially, this viewpoint was dominated by political science perspectives that explained the rise of what would become the European Union through theories of functionalism, liberal intergovernmentalism, and multilevel governance.

The Politics and Policies of European Economic Integration, 1850–1914 combines an older existing strand of the literature—the role of technology in European integration pioneered by the Tensions of Europe network—with a relatively newer one: the economic integration of Europe as part of the globalization wave starting at the end of the nineteenth century. The book's introduction spells out a threefold mission: (1) measuring European economic integration, (2) discussing together four sectors that had been previously disconnected in historiography (namely, the postal services, patents, health and social policies, and plant protection), and (3) exposing the coproduction of national and international regimes.

The first aim is the subject of chapter 1. Building upon indexes pioneered by Kouli, it seeks to show how European economic integration took shape in terms of prices and markets. A set of European countries are discussed here, but not how they were selected. The second goal is integral to the book and is treated in chapters 3–6. Here, a set of rich case studies is presented, showing how national policies link up to, and sometimes give rise to, international initiatives. Even though these policies did not always lead to an institutionalization of specific European policies, Kouli and Laborie convincingly show how in various ways a form of coordination and harmonization took place—in their words, a coproduction of the national and international.

The book delivers in particular on the third objective—showing how the national and international meshed together. This is where the book contains the most insightful findings. This theme has been covered in parts of the literature on nationalism, internationalism, and the history of technology. The dependency of the nation-state and its policies on international coordination has been a major theme in the work of Alan Milward, for [End Page 392] example. Yet this connection between international and national policies has only to a limited extent been traced back to the end of the nineteenth century up until World War I. Here, the book with its rich cases shows how these forms of governance came about and how a lack of institutionalized international organization did not necessarily imply a void in international cooperation and coordination. This is an inviting line of further research for both the period covered by Kouli and Laborie and also for later decades in the twentieth century.

What is lacking in the book is a clear definition of what "Europe" is. The introduction argues that during this period no "collective European actors" existed and that it can be debated if European integration itself is the appropriate term for the political and policy outcomes of cooperation between European nations (p. 10). The authors do reflect on their operationalization of the scope of European cooperation. This was largely defined by their expertise, but also by the two largest continental countries, France and Germany, and the scope of cooperation of the sectors under scrutiny. While this makes (practical) sense, and the book certainly is wary of projecting post-1945 cooperation backward, both the chapters themselves and the conclusion in particular would profit from a deeper discussion of how a concept of Europe and a notion of Europeanness emerged—if at all—in the cases covered by the book. For a book on integration, there is, pun intended, a bit of a lack of integration. The chapters tie loosely together and are only brought together to a limited extent in the conclusion. This might also be due to the format of the publisher, which allows individual chapters to be sold as stand-alone products.

This book thus seems to...