Padraic Kenney

Book Review: The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings

historical development of European integration. Naturally, within the 500 densely written pages of the book, there are some ideas that deserve to be taken seriously. The attempt to relate developments in Brussels to the evolution of the wider global economy is sensible, for example, as is the attention paid intermittently to some of the smaller European players such as Belgium or Denmark. This reviewer also suspects that Gillingham will be shown to be correct in his instinct that the 1970s deserve a larger place in the integration ‘story’ than they are customarily given — although the reasons for this importance are not necessarily those identified in this book. Nevertheless, such merits are insufficient to compensate fully for the flaws outlined above. Overall, then, this book — and the manner in which it is being energetically promoted by a major publisher — reveal much about the current state of the Anglo-American debate on European integration. As a serious analysis of the historical development of the EC/EU, however, there is little to recommend Gillingham’s book. The gap in the market that the author claims to have filled remains wide open.

Mark Pittaway, The Workers’ State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary 1944–1958

mind’ could not exist (even within Freudian psychoanalytic theory which rejected the ideas of race). No exemplary ‘Nazi’ was possible; even Hess had to be seen as an individual. In addition, the pragmatic fact that such knowledge provided little or no predictive advantage did not stop the Allies from generating as well as making use of it. Indeed, multiple studies of the ‘Nazi Mind’, including studies of mass movements from Hermann Broch to Elias Canetti, and of anti-Semitism from Ernst Simmel to Theodor Adorno (et al.) were funded by the Allies and bodies like the Rockefeller Foundation in order to undermine the Axis war effort or to prevent such manifestations from reappearing after 1945. Ironically, these were rarely applied after 1945 to the real-existing fascist states such as Spain and Portugal that continued happily pursuing their racist state policies after the defeat of the Nazis. By then the Cold War had created another target less amenable to psychological analysis. The ability to examine individuals who were Nazis such as Hess or interned party officials or Nazi officers added little to the ability of Allied intelligence to undermine the confidence of the enemy. Indeed, the techniques that seemed most valuable were those well known from mass anti-civilian warfare as early as the American Civil War: terror and horror on the home front and the undermining of day-to-day existence. Even these were not always successful. Pick shows how the imagined ‘Nazi mind’ takes on a life of its own after the Second World War in a number of serious psychoanalytic thinkers such as Otto Kernberg as a sort of assumed model for a psychopathological character structure. Now not limited to the Nazis, this model draws perhaps unconsciously or at least unselfconsciously on the models generated by the work undertaken during the war. Pick’s book is first-rate history but also highlights the problems attendant in putting science in the thrall of politics, even for a noble cause. The idea, for example, that anti-Semitism was a form of psychopathology has its roots in the rise of clinical psychiatry in the late nineteenth century, and even has echoes today in claims that the drug Propranolol could reduce implicit racial bias among its users. However, at the same time in the early 1950s that Adorno et al. were publishing The Authoritarian Personality, Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism was arguing that such beliefs were essentially evil and not to be ‘cured’ by behavioural or even chemical means. Pick’s book is a strong object lesson about our own rootedness in the claims and politics of our age.