All four of these books are interesting additions to the corpus of historical research into European integration. Parr and Poggiolini's books are precise, document-based accounts of the trials and tribulations surrounding Britain's accession to the European Economic Community (EEC); Ludlow's book, which is based on an imposing quantity of archive research in six countries, is the most important work in English to date on the evolution of the European Community (EC) in the period that elapsed between Charles de Gaulle's veto of British entry and the Hague summit of December 1969, when the member states’ leaders ‘brought to an end a seven year struggle over its purpose, mode of operation and membership’ (p. 198). Gillingham's book reads like a 300-page op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, and is largely concerned with current events rather than history, but that does not mean that it has nothing of relevance for historians, as I hope to show at the end of this review.

According to theories of evolution, species evolve according to survival imperatives generated by their physical environments. Traits are selected and rejected based on their adaptability to the structures of the physical world in which these species live. Biological differences mirror differences in climate; the acutely developed senses of many species have adapted either for capturing prey or eluding predators, and so forth. So too in economic systems do we observe changes in human behaviour modes and policies that suggest adaptation. With respect to money, scholars continue to look for the most important adaptation mechanisms to explain the evolution of international monetary relations. What was once the preserve of strictly economic analysis has now become open ground for a wider array of social scientific analyses. In only a few short decades the study of monetary relations has developed into a more fully multi- and interdisciplinary enterprise. The four books reviewed here represent some of the latest attempts at constructing a broader social scientific explanation of monetary history. These valuable works complement one another in filling gaps in the literature on a complex and more diverse adaptation of monetary relations. Above all they stand as impressive political economies of monetary relations. Moure and Kettell concentrate on specific cases of monetary policy transformation in the interwar period, while Flandreau et al. and Obstfeld and Taylor cover a broader evolutionary timeline. The value of the contributions lies in several factors.

The social sciences have always faced a fundamental problem. Their central concern is to understand modernity, yet, as the product of modernity itself, they could never achieve the critical distance to do this. In recent decades some scholars have sought a way out in the notion of postmodernity, the idea that we have entered a new era from which ‘modernity’ can be judged from the outside. However, since a central component of the postmodernist paradigm is the suspension or at least the relativisation of both epistemological and normative frameworks, it deprives itself of the very analytical tools it would need for the task. For a while, following the end of the Cold War, a hyper-modernist view enjoyed some prominence, according to which, far from being transcended, modernity was culminating in the dominance of a single social, economic and political model represented by the victorious United States.

Exile is the experience of impotence. This, at least, would seem to be the lesson of the mid-twentieth century. The heterogeneous groups of Russian exiles scattered across Europe after the Bolshevik seizure of power and the opponents of Franco forced to flee from Spain in the 1930s all had plenty of time to brood on Karl Marx's dictum that exile was no more than ‘a school of scandal and of meanness’. If the causes they espoused were eventually in some limited sense vindicated, this victory owed almost nothing to their efforts, and few of the original exiles had the ambivalent pleasure of living long enough to witness the downfall of their opponents. More recently, the central European exiles who found refuge in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s followed a largely similar path: unable to shake Soviet communist rule in their erstwhile homelands, they were obliged to survive on the long-term exile's meagre diet of propaganda, ritual, rumour and intrigue.

These seven books reflect the great diversity and dynamism of contemporary scholarship on the Second World War. They encompass a broad range of genres, including analytical monographs, vivid and compelling memoirs, an edited conference collection and a work that makes hitherto classified archival material available to a wider audience. Together they demonstrate the vitality and breadth of recent Second World War scholarship, reflecting that the war remains a subject of significant scholarly and popular interest.

The historical connection between war and genocide is clear and apparent. Scholars of mass killing have repeatedly pointed out the linkages between the First World War and the Armenian genocide of 1915, between the Second World War and the Holocaust, between the 1993–4 war and the genocide in Rwanda, and between the war in Bosnia and the genocide in Srebrenica. Scholars of war, most often military historians, have been less ready to tie what they see as two distinct social phenomena – war and genocide – into the same bundle. This was especially the case, until recently, for the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and the subsequent mass murder of the Jews. The Wehrmacht, the German fighting forces, were seen to be implementing an enormously ambitious military campaign against the Soviet Union, which, in the end, they lost. Meanwhile, the Nazi security organs – the SS, the SD, and the Einsatzgruppen – carried out the ‘Final Solution’, inspired primarily by Hitler and the Nazi hierarchs.

Tina Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 256 pp., $22.95 (pb), ISBN 0472113607.

Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 192 pp., $24.50 (pb), ISBN 0231134541.

Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 397 pp., $24.95 (pb), ISBN 0674011031.

Heike Raphael-Hernandez, Blackening Europe. The Afro-American Presence (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 314 pp., £18.99 (pb), ISBN 0-415-94399X.

Iris Borowy and Wolf D. Gruner eds., Facing Illness in Troubled Times: Health in Europe in the Interwar Years 1918–1939 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 424 pp., €64.00 (hb), ISBN 363119486.

Horst H. Freyhofer The Nuremberg Medical Trial: The Holocaust and the Origin of the Nuremberg Medical Code, Studies in Modern European History 53 (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 209 pp., €30.00 (pb), ISBN 0820467979.

Ulrike Lindner Gesundheitspolitik in der Nachkriegszeit. Großbritannien und die Bundesrepublik Deutschland im Vergleich, Veröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts London 57 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004), 581 pp., €64.00 (hb), ISBN 3486200143.

Mark Gilbert, Surpassing Realism. The Politics of European Integration since 1945 (Landham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 276 pp., $26.95, ISBN 0742519147.

John Gillingham, European Integration 1950–2003: Superstate or New Market Economy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 588 pp., £47.50, ISBN 0521012627.

Gilles Grin, The Battle of the Single European Market. Achievements and Economics 1985–2000 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 375 pp., $144.50, ISBN 0710309384.

Wolf D. Gruner, and Wichard Woyke, Europa-Lexikon. Länder – Politik – Institutionen (Munich: Beck, 2004), 505 pp., €19.90, ISBN 3406494250.

STEVEN VAN HECKE and EMMANUEL GERARD, eds., Christian Democratic Parties in Europe since the End of the Cold War, KADOC Studies on Religion, Culture and Society 1 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004), 343 pp., €29.00, ISBN 9058673774.

Guido Müller, Europäische Gesellschaftsbeziehungen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Das Deutsch-Französische Studienkomitee und der Europäische Kulturbund (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2005), 525 pp., €54.80, ISBN 3486577360.

Anita Ziegerhofer, Botschafter Europas. Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi und die Paneuropa-Bewegung in den zwanziger und dreißiger Jahren (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Boehlau, 2004), 587 pp., €69.00, ISBN 3205772122.

Anita Ziegerhofer, Europäische Integrationsgeschichte unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des österreichischen Weges nach Brüssel (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2004), 235 pp., €19.00, ISBN 3706519046.

Robert Brennan, Ireland Standing Firm: My Wartime Mission in Washington and Eamon de Valera – A Memoir, ed. Richard H. Rupp (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2002), 182 pp., €20.00 (pb), ISBN 1900621681.

John P. Duggan, Herr Hempel at the German Legation in Dublin, 1937–1945 (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2003), 328 pp., €45.00 (hb), ISBN 0716527464.

Mark Hull, Irish Secrets: German Espionage in Wartime Ireland, 1939–1945 (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2003), 383 pp., €55.00 (hb), ISBN 0716527561.

MI5 and Ireland, 1939–1945: The Official History, ed. and introduced by Eunan O'Halpin (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2003), 130 pp., €55.00 (hb), ISBN 0716527545.

Scott Kieff, ed., Perspectives on Properties of the Human Genome (Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press, 2003), 538 pp., €126.00, ISBN 0120176505.

John Sulston and Georgina Ferry, The Common Thread. A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics, and the Human Genome (Washington: Joseph Henry Press, 2002), 310 pp., €12.30, ISBN 0309084091.

Kevin Davies, Cracking the Genome. Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 327 pp., €18.00, ISBN 0801871409.

Bronwyn Parry, Trading the Genome. Investigating the Commodification of BioInformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 319 pp., €37.50, ISBN 0231121741.

Magali Franceschi, Droit et marchandisation de la connaissance sur les gènes humains (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2004), 247 pp., €25.00, ISBN 2271062004.

Richard M. Stallman, Free Software, Free Society. Selected Essays (Boston, MA: GNU Press, 2002), 220 pp., €18.00, ISBN 1882114981.

Special Issue on Open Source Software Development, Research Policy 32 (2003), Elsevier Science.

Michael Mann Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 429 pp., £17.99 (pb), ISBN 052153856.

Robert O. Paxton The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 321 pp., £8.99 (pb), ISBN 0141014326.

Nancy Bermeo Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times. The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2003), 265 pp., £13.95 (pb), ISBN 0691089701.

Didier Musiedlack Mussolini (Paris: Presses de Sciences PO, 2005), 436 pp., €16.15, ISBN 2724608062.

Paul H. Lewis Latin Fascist Elites. The Mussolini, Franco and Salazar Regimes (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 209 pp., $85.95 (hb), ISBN 027597880X.

Richard W. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 192 pp., $24.50 (hb), ISBN 0231127960.

Henry Laurens, Orientales II. La IIIe République et l'Islam (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2004), 376 pp., €29.00, ISBN 2271062071.

William E. Watson, Tricolor and Crescent: France and the Islamic World (London: Praeger, 2003), 295 pp., £31.99 (hb), ISBN 0275974707.

But there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and knowledge that is part of an overall campaign of self affirmation. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of co-existence and enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control. It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened, and reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars.

Omer Bartov Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 248 pp., (pb), ISBN 0801486815.

Doris L. Bergen War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Lanham, MD, and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 280 pp., $17.95 (pb), ISBN 0847696316.

Inga Clendinnen Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 238 pp., $15 (pb), ISBN 0521012694.

Debórah Dwork ed., Voices & Views. A History of the Holocaust (New York: Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, 2002), 687 pp., $44.95 (pb), ISBN 0970060211.

Cornelia Hecht Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz 2003), 432 pp., €32.00 (hb), ISBN 3801241378.

Dan Stone Constructing the Holocaust: A Study in Historiography (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers, 2003), 308 pp., $49.50 (hb), ISBN 0853034907.

Sue Vice Representing the Holocaust (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers), 280 pp., £17.50 (pb), £42.50 (hb), ISBN 0853034966.

In response to the pull of prospective membership of the European Union (EU), the states, societies and economies of the Balkan countries are undergoing unprecedented change. Their transformation has been shaped by a double legacy of communism and ethnic conflict, distinguishing their efforts from the transitional experience of their counterparts in east central Europe. How do these legacies interact with the goal of becoming a part of the EU? Is political and economic liberalisation a sufficient foundation for the Europeanisation of the Balkan states? How can the extent of their post-communist and post-conflict transformation and European integration be gauged? To tackle these questions, the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), London, and the Institute for East European Studies at the Free University, Berlin, organised a two-day conference to examine the nature of transnational relations in the Balkans. With the financial support of Volkswagen Stiftung, the conference, entitled ‘Transnationalism in the Balkans: The Emergence, Nature and Impact of Cross-national Linkages on an Enarged and Enlarging Europe’, took place at the LSE in November 2004.