The Pro-European Reader

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A series of opinions from the well known - no evidence or analysis - Rated
This book may be useful for anyone seeking to springle an essay with quotes from notables. However, it contains little to no meaningful analysis, just bland platitudes from committed Europeans waffling about integration and a united future together etc.

It is very much a reader rather than a book and it's also quite out of date now (2008), written in ~ 2002. Look elsewhere if you are looking for a presentation of the case 'for' Europe.

Politics and Art - Rated
A collection of essays, like a collection of equine portraits, should convey the same basic message in a subtle and pleasing variety of forms. The Pro-European Reader, with its happy blend of landmark speeches, political works, academic analysis and social and cultural commentary, allows one to admire the European project through many eyes, in all its profundity and majestic spirit.

If you're a student like me, the Reader is going to be of great material value. A thousand undergraduate essays write themselves with this book, whether it's a question of recasting Margaret Thatcher as a visionary European, or exploring the cultural significance of Champions' League football. If you're looking for a killer quotation on post-war Europe, you'll find it pretty easily in here.

But there's also an artistic quality to the book. To read the words of Jean Monnet, Mikhail Gorbachev and Vaclav Havel, all responding to the same hope of a united and peaceful continent, well there's something genuinely moving about it, both in the words that are used and, perhaps more so, in the variety of paths by which the same shared ideal is reached. It takes a juxtaposition of texts such as you get here to make you appreciate, as much as its political significance, the cosmopolitan, emotional appeal of the European venture.

I give this book a very warm vote of approval.