As the Preamble to the 1957 Treaty of Rome stated, the purpose of the then European Economic Community was to “lay the foundations of an ever-closer union” among Europeans. This phrase became interpreted as a call for a progressively tighter political merger of the member states, with the European Union as the latest embodiment of this purpose. The problem with this progressive vision, however, is twofold: first, it is never fully achieved as the final objective remains always on the horizon and, second, it is grounded in the belief that a common market can create a unified polity. 

In 1962, Barbara Tuchman published The Guns of August, a book about the negotiations among the Great Powers that led to the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. Her thesis was that bungled diplomacy caused the war. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and is said to have influenced President John F. Kennedy in his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis later that year.

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This week, a special “potluck” edition of GoodFellows has Hoover Institution senior fellows Niall Ferguson, H. R. McMaster, and John Cochrane serving up a spirited debate over the bureaucratic pandemic bungling and whether the social network TikTok is a data-mining threat to national security, plus thoughts on the addition of California senator Kamala Harris to the Democratic ticket.

History professor Norman M. Naimark ’66 M.A ’68 Ph.D. ’72 received the Norris and Carol Hundley Award — one of the most prestigious awards for books on historical subjects — on Friday for his 2019 book “Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty.”