ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an inquiry into the promise and danger inherent in a new Europe with a united Germany in its center. In rural France and among the far Right and the far Left in France and Germany, Maastricht was rejected as a “sellout” to the “capitalists,” to unfeeling and unpatriotic politicians and bureaucrats in Brussels. American influence on Germany has been subtle and indirect, in the sense that human rights, mass consumption, and a degree of cultural optimism that was missing in Europe, permeated the various strata of European life since the Second World War. In Germany, the immediate postwar period, and possibly the war itself, spurred the industrial development of the western two-thirds of the nation, a field in which the Germans excelled for a number of reasons. Economic reform would replace hopeless Soviet stagnation, and nationalism and ethnicism would belong to the past as they did in Western Europe.
