Cousins and Strangers
America, Britain, and Europe in a New Century
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A frank and controversial assessment of the United States, Great Britain, and Europe, and the stakes for all three if the West breaks apart
Despite the efforts of President Woodrow Wilson, America washed its hands of Europe after the First World War. After the Second World War, it stayed involved, helping to preserve freedom in half of Europe, and creating an infrastructure of global governance that gave the world a remarkable half century of (for the most part) peace and prosperity.
In Cousins and Strangers, Chris Patten, one of Europe's most distinguished statesmen, scrutinizes the final years of the twentieth century and how the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 fundamentally changed the nature of this Western alliance. Today, the threat of terrorism, economic competition from Asia, and a seemingly unbridgeable cultural divide have strained the alliance to a moment of reckoning. Patten argues that America's status as the only superpower must be reined in, but he also warns Europe against too ardently challenging U.S. leadership. He questions whether Britain needs to choose between bolstering its "special relationship" with the United States and forging a greater role in a united Europe.
Drawing on more than three decades of experience in government and international diplomacy, Patten brilliantly investigates the three-way relationship among Britain, Europe, and America and how all three must adapt to cope with the economic and political challenges of the twenty-first century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On one of his excursions for the European Commission, as colleagues slumbered in a Beijing guesthouse, Patten realized he had been left alone with president Jiang Zemin and used the moment to discuss Shakespeare. Jiang, we are told, "nodded with interest" as he learned of the bard's sympathies for "political stability." Anecdotes like this, all of them well-delivered, give this book a delicacy which is absent from most political analyses. As a senior British Conservative and the last governor of Hong Kong, Patten has a repertoire that shines with insider details. Readers feel the tension of being there as Kim Jong Il ("bouffant hairstyle...built-up Cuban heels; shiny gabardine boiler suits") suddenly appears "through a door or from behind a wall hanging like a character in pantomime or a Feydeau farce"; and as a "fit-looking...sharp-witted, very cold-eyed" Vladimir Putin, tells lies for Yeltsin; or when John Bolton, "the Pavarotti of neconservatism," says-when urged towards a stick-and-carrot approach with Iran-"I don't do carrots." This book goes wide and deep on a range of political issues, often revisiting old debates with imaginative arguments and the kind of hard-won perspective which only a few political veterans attain. Patten wants a European China policy which is not based on "ill-judged commercial aspirations" and an American foreign policy written by people who have learned from Thucydides that you shouldn't bully much weaker foes. Well-informed and light on its feet, this is the most enjoyable, readable and engaging politics book in recent memory.
