------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------  
Published by EH.NET (July 2006)  
  
Gilles Grin, _The Battle of the Single European Market: Achievements   
and Economic Thought, 1945-2000_. London: Kegan Paul, 2003. xvi + 375   
pp. $144.50 (cloth), ISBN: 0-7103-0938-4.  
  
Reviewed for EH.NET by John Gillingham, Department of History,   
University of Missouri -- St. Louis.  
  
  
This dissertation from the Graduate Institute of Geneva is long on   
explanation and short on interpretation, yet well worth the slog.   
Gilles Grins relates a familiar story. He examines in exhausting   
detail the early history of integration, explains (beginning with   
Jacob Viner) how economists have developed and debated the theory of   
customs unions, tracks the genesis and uneven growth of the internal   
market from 1985 to 2000, and tackles the outstanding unanswered   
question overhanging it -- whether, in the end, the effort has been   
worthwhile. While the author's lengthy exposition of economic theory   
is accurate, fair and often illuminating, the appreciative reader   
must also share Grin's special taste for the EU's jargonesque   
administrative terminology, convoluted bureaucratic procedures, and   
institutionalized thinking. The book would have been more solid, not   
to mention readable, if the author had managed to cut through such   
stuff. He did not, but instead remained captive of his subject. This   
lengthy book does not, as a result, shed new light on the central   
question it raises. It is, however, a valuable quarry from which can   
be mined raw material, whose value, however, future writers will have   
to establish.  
  
  
John Gillingham is the author of _Design for a New Europe_ (2006),   
_European Integration, 1950-2003_ (2003) and _Coal, Steel and the   
Rebirth of Europe, 1945 1955_ (1991).  
  
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Published by EH.Net (July 2006). All EH.Net reviews are archived at   
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