The World Today Series 2022-2023: Western Europe, by Wayne C. Thompson

As is customary when I am planning a long trip, I tend to want to read books that I think will help me in my travels to understand where I am going, and without having seen this book but having a general idea of its contents, I requested it from the library and even brought it with me on my recent travels through the Mediterranean in the hope that I might be able to read it. As it is, this book took far longer for me to read than I would have hoped, not least because the book is 450 large pages, but also because of the way that the book is basically mostly undigested reportage about the world from someone who could easily be some kind of world events editor at your usual progressive newspaper in the West. This book ended up being interesting in a way that I did not expect but also did not necessarily enjoy very much, but I wanted to read the whole book before judging it, so that I could give a fair judgment of the book as a whole. This is not a book that I can recommend, but it is a book whose logic I can understand, and I recognize why this book is being pushed so hard to students of International Relations, even if the book will likely not be very helpful to people in understanding Western European countries on their own terms.

This book is about 450 pages of nearly solid text with maps for each country and a few black and white photos, most of them showing soldiers or attractive coeds or politicians for the various countries talked about, organized in a regional manner throughout Western Europe. This book begins with a discussion of Western Europe today. After that, there is a look at the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland and Ireland. A discussion of the French Republic and then Monaco follows. This is then followed by an introduction to the Benelux countries and then a discussion of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The author turns his attention after that to the Alpine democracies of Switzerland and Liechtenstein. This is then followed by perhaps the most puzzling inclusions on the list, the Eastern Mediterranean nations of Greece and Cyprus. The author then examines the nations of the Italian peninsula: Italy, San Marino, the Vatican City, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and the island nation of Malta. This is followed by an introduction to the Iberian peninsula and then coverage of Spain, Portugal, and Andorra. the book then ends with websites and a bibliography. As might be expected, the larger nations like the UK, France, and Italy cover much more space than the couple of pages devoted to smaller countries like San Marino and Andorra.

While it cannot be denied that the subject matter of this book is interesting, this book was ultimately a disappointment for me. One of the reasons for this is that the book shortchanges discussions of history and geography and focuses to a detrimental degree on politics. Not only that, but the author’s political views are hostile towards religious people (especially Christians) and the author shows a clear political bias towards fashionably progressive social causes. Not only this, but the author, over the course of 40 editions of this book, has largely avoided editing material and simply adding new material with each passing year, making the book considerably bloated, especially when talking about larger countries. Even more troubling, the material added later is occasionally contradictory to older information–this was especially noticeable when early parts of the Spanish article praise King Carlos for his commitment to democracy but later ones criticize his spending on his mistress and his hunting in Africa which led to his abdication in favor of his son King Felipe. In the first few essays of the book the section on the Future of each country seemed to indicate that Covid would be an important aspect in every country’s future, which already seems obsolete, showing that the progressive focus on “the new thing” is not of lasting historical interest except to demonstrate the lack of prophetic skills of such people.