This book examines the development of European states from the late 1950s up to the present. It opens in 1958, the year when the European Economic Community became operative, marking the start of a new focus on questions surrounding the drive for European integration.

L. H. Gann was Senior Fellow and Curator of the West European Collection at the Hoover Institution at the time of his death in 1997. He had taught and researched extensively in Oxford, England and in Berlin, Germany. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London. In 1995 he was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the German Federal Republic.
Peter Duignan is Lillick Curator and Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Hoover Institution, where he directed a program of European Studies. He has had Ford, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller fellowships, was Visiting Scholar at St Anthony's College, Oxford, and at Jesus College, Cambridge. He was elected a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton in 1988, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London.
The authors have written extensively on aspects of colonialism, European, Middle East, Hispanic and US-European relations. Their previous collaborations include The Rebirth of the West 1> (1992) and The United States and the New Europe 1945-1993 (1994).