| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Question of Self-Esteem: The United States and the Cold War Choices in France and Italy, 1944–1958. By Alessandro Brogi. (Westport: Praeger, 2002. xviii, 315 pp. $79.95, ISBN 0-275-97293-3.)
Time was that diplomatic historians wrangled about who was more to blame for the origins of the Cold War, the Soviet Union or the United States. The lesser European powers were only pawns in a global contest. Since then the focus has been more on how the European governments themselves manipulated the bipolar struggle for their own special advantages or parochial interests.	1
Alessandro Brogi, who teaches U.S. foreign relations and international history at Yale University, falls into the latter tradition but with a twist. He sees the French and Italian search for "prestige" or "grandeur" (p. 1 and passim) as the prime motivating factor. Ultimately the two countries found close relations with, and even subservience to, the United States better promoted their particular self-esteem.	2
While Brogi amply demonstrates his thesis, his study is equally rewarding as a traditional and thorough account of French and Italian foreign policies during this period, although he sometimes stretches the parallels. He has made extensive use of published and unpublished government documents, especially American, and is very well versed in the secondary literature in all three languages.	. . .

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