Book Reviews

Book reviews

International Relations theory

International systems in world history: remaking the study of International Relations. By Barry Buzan and Richard Little. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2000. 452pp. Index. £17.99.  0 19 878065 6. This is an outstandingly good book, which succeeds on many different levels. It is in one sense a further development of the authors’ 1993 book (written with Charles Jones) The logic of anarchy, in that it explicitly carries on where that one left off; in another sense it is a very well thought-out and detailed exposition of a sophisticated systemic, if not structural, account of international relations. It also contains clear and comprehensive summaries of existing historical and theoretical discussions of the development of the international political system. But for me it succeeds mainly because, in developing its post-Waltzian account of international systems, it finally puts the last nail in the coffin of the still incredibly influential Waltzian-style neo-realism. This nail gets hammered in as Buzan and Little, in their examination of international relations over 60,000 (yes, 60,000) years, explode two of the key components of his structural version of realism, namely that a functionally differentiated system must be hierarchical, not anarchical, and that the major source of change in international systems is structural, not unit-based. Neo-realism, they conclude, cannot claim to be a universal theory of International Relations, rather it is at best a structural account of the modern European state-system. The book is exceptionally well structured and well written. This is important because there are so many themes at work in the book that it would have been easy to have lost the reader. This it does not do, as will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the authors’ separate and joint writing careers. The book has five sections. The first summarizes the literature on international systems, world history and International Relations theory, and starts from the premise that existing international theory work on international systems is severely limited by focusing on only a very specific time period, namely that since 1648. This leads to an impoverishment both of the study of world history and of the conceptual basis of IR theory. The key chapters of this section outline the conceptual tool-kit of the book. This comprises three moves: first, they distinguish between the sectors of international systems (these come from Buzan’s work on security and are military–political, economic, social and environmental). Second, they discuss the five levels of analysis for investigating international systems (system, subsystem, unit, subunit and individual). Third, they suggest three sources of explanations for the nature of international systems: interaction capacity, process and structure. The next three sections of the book use this conceptual tool-kit to understand the functioning of three forms of international systems through history. The first section comprises two chapters on pre-international world history; the second has four chapters on the international systems of the ancient and classical worlds; the third has four chapters on the modern international system. In each section the same format is followed, with discussions of the nature of the units, interaction capacity, process and structure. These chapters are rich both historically and theoretically, and space simply does not allow me to do justice to them. Suffice it to say that they develop an

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intellectually powerful argument about the differences between the types of international system, and in so doing fatally undermine the Waltzian notion of structure. The final section comprises four chapters, looking at a possible future ‘post-modern’ (though in truth not very post-modern!) international system, at the lessons of world history for IR theory, at IR’s lessons for the study of world history, and a final chapter in which they outline a series of hypotheses relating the relationships between strong/weak states and strong/weak international systems. They end by noting that their ‘end’ is really a new beginning, and I for one hope that they follow up this theoretically intriguing idea of the relationship between strong and weak states and systems. There is so much in this book for so many types of scholars of International Relations. It offers a quite distinctly innovative account of the development of different types of international systems, and in doing so it advances a sophisticated form of neo-realism; this is a considerable achievement on its own, and I am certain that this book will be seen over time not only as one of the most intellectually impressive mergers of theory and history in the field, but also as a massive advance on US-style neo-realism. In truth I cannot see how Waltzian neo-realists can respond to this book, since it demonstrates on page after page just how misleading and limited is that version of systems theory. But the book does so much more: most notably it convincingly points to the overlap between neo-realism and social constructivism (since state identity matters to the functioning of international systems), with the authors’ own theoretical take on this being to see tremendous potential in the linking between neo-realism and the ‘English School’. That, of course, looks like being their way of developing the strong/weak state/system relationship. In summary, this is a really major book, and it is a great tribute to both authors that one can see so many themes in this book that have had their (often separate) origins in their earlier works. Do I agree with the argument? Well, not always, but that is frankly irrelevant here. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, not least because I became fascinated with the argument, and found myself nodding in admiration as the authors pulled off the feat of bringing all the elements together into a powerful and intellectually impressive discussion of the types of international system found in world history. This is one of the most important books published in the last decade and for intellectual sophistication it leaves neo-realism US-style standing but also drowning. Steve Smith, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales

International Relations, political theory and the problem of order: beyond International Relations theory? By N. J. Rengger. London, New York: Routledge. 2000. 232pp. Index. Pb.: £17.99. ISBN 0 415 09584 0. This is a puzzling book—a good book, but puzzling. Its core consists of five chapters that survey contemporary International Relations theory. The first three, under the general heading ‘Managing order?’, examine realism in all its forms, the English School and constructivism, and various liberal/liberal internationalist theories. The next two, ‘Ending order?’, focus on emanci- patory, critical theory and that body of late modern writing that is characteristically—but wrongly, as Rengger emphasizes—described as post-structuralist or post-modern. These five chapters make interesting reading; the material they cover has been pretty well ploughed over in recent years, but the author still manages to find something fresh to say about his subject. What is particularly impressive is the way in which he draws on a wide range of reading in order to make connections that are original and revealing. I consider myself reasonably up to speed on modern social theory and political philosophy, and yet Rengger refers to authors of whom I have not even heard, let alone read—I won’t say who they are for fear of the mocking laughter of my over- educated graduate students, but a quick perusal of the bibliography will give most people an idea of what I mean. Not everyone will agree with the line Rengger takes on his chosen authors, but I cannot believe that any IR theorist could read this without being stimulated and educated. Apart from the fact that someone who uses ‘Blumenbergian’ as an adjective is nominating himself for the George Steiner Prize for reader-friendliness (and, yes, I have read The legitimacy of the modern age), the one serious criticism I have is that, surprisingly, this book is so firmly rooted in

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the conventional discourses of IR theory. References may be drawn from a wide range of literature, but the agenda is set by those authors who have established themselves within the discourse of IR theory, and topics they have not discussed are largely ignored. Thus, for example, ‘globalization’ is discussed briefly via the work of David Held and Andrew Linklater, but not that of, inter alia and almost at random, Arjun Appadurai, Benjamin Barber, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, while new(ish) topics such as migration, borders and ‘de-bordering’, identity, refugees, asylum seekers and so on do not feature. And here is the puzzle—as the title indicates, this is not supposed to be a book about IR theory. The stated aim is to show that the problem of order is best approached from a different angle altogether, that the discipline of International Relations is misconceived, and that there is no such thing as ‘International Relations theory’ (always placed in scare-quotes). The quite substantial introduction is devoted to making this case and trying to establish the notion of ‘order’ and the discourses of political theory as alternatives to traditional IR (although, prefiguring the performative contradiction to be found later, Robert Keohane’s distinction between reflectivist and rationalist theory is used to make the case—a strange choice if the aim is to get away from the discipline of IR). As this, and the book as a whole, illustrates, it is very difficult to replace IR theory with political theory if you allow the former to set your agenda. In summary, this is a good book about contemporary IR theory that everyone in the field ought to read, but it is, perhaps, not quite the book the author wanted to write. Chris Brown, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Hedley Bull on international society. Edited by Kai Alderson and Andrew Hurrell. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 2000. 279pp. Index. £45.00. ISBN 0 333 68450 8. This volume brings together nine of the late Hedley Bull’s essays on international theory, ranging from the highly influential (‘Society and anarchy in international relations’) to the relatively obscure (‘The state’s positive role in world affairs’). The editors contribute three perceptive introductory chapters, assessing Bull’s notion of international society, his approach to the study of International Relations, and his intellectual legacy, which provide an excellent insight into his thought. Although a timely and welcome addition to the growing body of ‘English School’ literature, deserving of an affordable paperback edition, the collection nevertheless lacks a substantive piece of intellectual biography exploring the ideas that underpin his distinctive contribution to international theory. The renewed interest in the ‘English School’, of which Bull is usually considered a central figure, will assure this volume a broad readership. It is ironic, then, that the collection only serves to highlight the singular nature of Bull’s conception of international society. His notion of states’ ‘asocial sociability’ (p. vii) differs considerably from the understanding of international society offered by Martin Wight or Herbert Butterfield. For Wight, its roots lay in a common culture or civilization; for Butterfield, international society was the product of a shared set of political and ethical principles. In Bull’s account, however, society emerges as states perceive a common need to provide for what he called the ‘elementary conditions of social coexistence’ (p. 130). For Bull, international systems become societies through agreement on procedures, not norms. This may well illustrate, as Alderson and Hurrell argue, a ‘powerful functional or utilitarian strand’ (p. 6) manifest in Bull’s thought, but it also testifies to two other important influences, that of the positivist international lawyers, especially Lassa Oppenheim, and that of Bull’s erstwhile tutor at the University of Sydney, the philosopher John Anderson. Echoes of Andersonian philosophy are clearly audible throughout this volume, from Bull’s sceptical treatment of ethical systems grounded in abstraction or faith, including natural law, to his characterization of social institutions as ‘centres of communication’ between social groups with divergent values and interests. Indeed, at times, Bull’s conception of international society appears as an extension of Anderson’s own enquiries into social institutions, which emphasized, as Bull did, conflict, tension and complexity as qualities not detrimental to order, but sometimes necessary for its persistence.

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Inadvertently perhaps, this volume undermines the notion that the ‘English School’ presented a single, monolithic idea of international society. An atheist, a sceptic and a philosophical realist, Hedley Bull stood apart from many in the ‘School’. His conception of international society reflected these differences, and betrayed a range of ‘extra-disciplinary’ influences—not least that of Andersonian philosophy—which merit sustained examination, especially at a time when the international society approach is enjoying something of a renaissance. Ian Hall, University of St Andrews, Scotland

The interregnum: controversies in world politics 1989–1999. By Michael Cox, Tim Dunne and Ken Booth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999. 299pp. Index. Pb.: £15.99. ISBN 0 521 78509 x. This book is a collection of 13 essays, 11 from British-based authors, on a variety of contentious topics that have been debated since the end of the Cold War. The papers were commissioned as a special issue of the Review of International Studies. Those who know the work of the scholars concerned, and most are widely known, will find only a few surprises in what they have to say. However, it is useful to have these views placed together. Chris Brown tackles grand issues and in particular the arguments about the future of the world in the form of Fukayama’s end of history (about which he is surprisingly gentle) and Huntington’s clash of civilizations. It is an enjoyable piece. International Relations as a discipline attracts more than its share of pessimists. Colin Gray, Prince of the Pessimists, assures us that ‘War and strategy are eternal, albeit eternally changing as they adapt to new circumstances.’ He also tells us, all too convincingly, that taboos against weapons of mass destruction are not felt by those excluded states that might well be in a position to use them. It would seem to follow that the world will end because of them at some point in the future, though he does not dwell on this implication of his thought. Caroline Thomas’s paper is a little less pessimistic. However, its careful and clear description of the impoverished Third World is scarcely cheering. It is still not clear what is to be done. I found Linda Weiss’s piece on globalization particularly scholarly and interesting. It is an impressive piece. She is not as overawed by the concept of globalization as many are, and allows herself some unfashionable scepticism. I am not familiar with her book (The myth of the powerless state, 1998) but will be by the time this review is in print. The Buzan/Little team once again produce an elegant ‘Beyond Westphalian’ piece. It should be read along with Weiss’s paper that conveniently precedes it. Fred Halliday gives a vigorous and refreshing defence of modernism and the general virtues of the Enlightenment. It is a welcome antidote to both the traditional and post-modern versions of pessimism to which we are so much exposed. He is odd on the democratic peace, giving a rather simplistic definition of democracy and appearing uncharacteristically diffident about facing the democratic peace argument head on. (Colin Gray, more characteristically, is simply dismissive, saying that it does not matter even if it is true.) The editors, who provide a useful introduction, have done a service to the profession in getting together this edition. Of course, we would all have done it differently and included X and excluded Y, but they have got an interesting set of contributors. The exclusions would be harder than the inclusions. This is the second of the Review’s special issues. It was a good idea and, so far at least, has been excellently executed. Michael Nicholson, University of Sussex, UK

Women, culture and International Relations. Edited by Vivienne Jabri and Eleanor O’Gorman. London, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. 1999. 211pp. Index. £39.95. ISBN 1 55587 701 x. ‘Time’, Stephen Chan tells the reader in his essay in this collection, ‘Typologies toward an unchained medley: against the gentrification of discourse in International Relations’ (pp. 165–78), ‘is more problematic in International Relations’ (p. 172). That is, more problematic than ‘space’,

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about which, from strategic studies, ‘we know from simple maps who colonized what and what has since gained independence’ (ibid.). The neglect of ‘time’ in critical theory, Chan claims, is also a neglect of how ‘it takes time [for] hegemonic ideas’ to ‘colonize [and] expand into other geographical and intellectual spaces…over time occur resistances, incorporations, applications, syncretisms, repudiations and attempted repudiations, and contingent amalgamations’ (ibid.). I think I know what is meant here about multiple forms of ‘colonizations’, but, from a prosaic angle, it seems crushingly self-evident. Chan’s playful pun on ‘paradigms past’ does not relieve my bewildered sense that something important about time, critical theory and International Relations is being tackled, but what it is, I will have to work on. Chan is amusing about ‘the IR conference circuit’ and ‘the domestication of the new recruits’. I am, and (newly sensitized by Chan to ‘time’) have been, such a recruit from the conflict in the north of Ireland. However, unlike the ‘Indians of the forest’ he writes about, I have yet to ‘learn to wear the clothes [or] adopt the hegemonic theoretical styles’ of IR. There is an air of ‘returning volleys’ to IR about Chan’s work. It is not representative of the essays in this collection. Indeed, no one essay is ‘representative’ of the collection. There is a sense, throughout most of the essays, that the contributors are tackling, by naming and engaging, in new, or newly recognized, prob- lematics of ‘difference’ and ‘others’ or ‘othering’ in IR. Different angles are differently explored, depending on the author’s work on theory, gender development, war, feminisms and/or IR. All these differences are appropriate in a collection united by a preoccupation with ‘difference’. Eleanor O’Gorman, in ‘Writing women’s wars: Foucauldian strategies of engagement’ (pp. 91–116) claims that the revolutionary adaptations of Marxism ‘influenced anti-colonial liberation struggles in the second half of this century’ (p. 103). By implication, she claims that this led to ‘clarity of struggle’ (ibid.). Theories of power/resistance and subjectivity, however ‘[invoke] instead a complex interaction of the power, resistance, and subjectivity that require more historicized and located revelation of how people become subjects in revolution and how power is exercised through the creation of subjectivity (the oppressor and the oppressed). Such explorations involve an excavation and exhumation of revolutions that seek out the assumed and the unexplained’ (ibid.). Again, I find myself longing for clarity: ‘excavation’ and ‘exhumation’? Need what is being said be so convoluted? Besides, the seeming opposition set up between Marxist influences on anti-colonial struggles and the influences of latter day theorizing is unconvincing here. This is one example from many. There may be readers who gravitate to this kind of writing. I am not one of them. Sarah C. White’s ‘Gender and development: working with difference’ (pp. 117–36) is insightful, readable and ‘grounded’ in the practicalities of development strategies in relation to women in the South. White is wise: ‘Even where women do mobilize around a particular issue, this unity is always conditional. In a situation of class, community, or national conflict, unity on gender lines tends to break down’ (p. 131). The First World feminist search for womanly unity in the most inauspicious, if exotic, circumstances, is situated by White who admits and concludes that ‘the feminist project is both countercultural and culturally embedded…there must be different feminist projects in different cultural contexts’ (p. 133). The simplicity belies an experienced conviction. Throughout this collection, ‘difference’ and ‘others’ are seen as preoccupations of feminist IR work. Whenever I see ‘other’ used in IR writing I know that it is not ‘me’ that is spoken of. But, I also know that the place I come from, and the contested historical-political-assymetrical- gendered-spatial conflict within which I have lived most of my life, is closer to the ‘other’ than it is to most of the speaker-writers. This is the case in most of the contributions to this collection. The collection articulates a ‘second-generation agenda for feminist International Relations’ and, as such, it is a welcome contribution to current agenda-setting debates within IR. I hope the debates are taken up by others and reach beyond the confines of the conference circuit. Eilish Rooney, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland

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Religion and international relations. Edited by K. R. Dark. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 2000. 293pp. Index. £47.50. ISBN 0 333 71159 9. According to the editor, the contributors to this volume are concerned with the role of religion in world politics, the manner in which religious belief affects human decision-making, and the impact of religious change in the international sphere. How far these aims are achieved is, however, open to question. With the exceptions of the editor’s two contributions, and Christopher Wyatt’s brief chapter on Islamic militancy in the Middle East, the majority of the chapters address relatively narrow concerns, such as Harriet Harris’s account of Protestant Evangelicalism, or Nazila Ghanea’s treatment of the Bahá’ís sect in Iran. Here, and elsewhere in this collection, the focus remains firmly substate, and the issue of the interplay between religion and the international arena is addressed only tangentially. The editor’s own chapters are both thought-provoking and problematic in equal measure. His avowed intention is ‘to show that major religious changes are underway that will probably have profound implications for world politics’ (p. 50). Dark marshals a range of statistical evidence with a view to illustrating his case that religion ‘permeates’ even the ‘politics of nominally secular states’(ibid.). Yet, while providing a welcome call to IR specialists to take note of the profound religious changes currently taking place, Dark’s arguments often fail to convince. His method, which relies primarily upon statistical measures of religious affiliation, means that crucial questions, including those posed in the introduction, cannot be answered. Church attendance figures cannot reveal the manner in which faith shapes actors’ perceptions and actions in the political sphere. This task demands the examination of the discourse of international politics in the search for religious language, imagery and symbolism. Moreover, Dark seems content merely to point to the phenomenon without substantive analysis of its potential implications. The manner in which, for example, transnational religious belief might reorder the ethical priorities of contemporary international society, undermining state-centred ethics of responsibility—issues that surely lie at the core of this subject—are alluded to largely without discussion. The highlight of the collection is C. Ram-Prasad’s engaging analysis of the complex relationship between Hindu nationalism and recent Indian foreign policy. The chapter traces its development from the 1950s to the present, including a lengthy discussion of the motives behind India’s nuclear test in May 1998. Ram-Prasad subtly reveals the deep ambiguities inherent in Hindu nationalist attempts to reconcile a religious tradition whose ‘texts are inclusive of the teachings of all religions’ (p. 148), with a nationalist ideology which is necessarily exclusive. Though otherwise admirably produced, this volume’s idiosyncratic mode of notation, a combination of traditional and Harvard styles, proved both frustrating and time-consuming for this reader. This aside, Religion and international relations is a substantial, if not always wholly successful, contribution to the growing body of literature exploring the neglected issue of religious belief in contemporary international politics. Ian Hall, University of St Andrews, Scotland

Navigating modernity: postcolonialism, identity and International Relations. By Albert J. Paolini. Edited by Anthony Elliott and Anthony Moran. London, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. 1999. 227pp. Index. £38.95. ISBN 1 55587 875 x. For quite a while now a new generation of theorists has been refusing to climb aboard the traditional maritime craft of International Relations theory. Irrespective of the claims of old IR sea captains who brag of knowing the world as it ‘really is’, these theorists have declined the offer of safe passage to the well-worn destinations of national interest, sovereignty and state-logic. Instead they have chosen to chart new routes aboard new craft that they see as more likely to survive the increasingly choppy waters that constitute modern world politics. Heading off with a crew of post-colonial writers, contemporary social theorists and political geographers, Albert J. Paolini has sought to explore the lesser-known seas of African politics. Navigating modernity is thus

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Paolini’s log-book of discovery and equally his report back to the academy. A voyage to Africa might be novel were it not for the fact that history and politics have already rendered it otherwise. In light of our colonial past and our continually globalizing present we (Western academics and society) already ‘know’ an Africa. We know of a tribalized Africa to which Europeans brought a colonial political order, we know of an economic Africa whose mineral wealth corrupted any supposed independence, and we know of an Africa dogged by one emergency after another. It is this knowledge of Africa that pushes us to make and want to make large-scale geopolitical and geo-ethical decisions on behalf of an Africa that we have never really left. Paolini attempts to resist the attraction of such geopolitical theorizing by undermining such claims to knowledge and, more specifically, to a knowledge of Africa’s political subjects themselves. His text is instead littered with anecdotes and examples of the social predicaments, human complexities and the at times puzzlingly ambivalent reactions of Africans to their own modern history. This ‘politics of the everyday’, as Paolini calls it, reminds us that living subjects are what animate international relations, and to that extent it is also to these human subjects that we should look when trying to change the conditions of contemporary international politics. Although Paolini has provided some useful rigging in the form of conceptual tools, such as identity, subjectivity and culture, Navigating modernity remains firmly in the interpretative and theoretical class (room). Theoretical and textual knowledge will however never make up for experience. While the late Paolini must be applauded for constructing a sea-worthy craft, it still remains for future scholars to make further concrete journeys in a more sustained effort to communicate, and thus effect, the lived realities of African peoples. This book should be welcomed as a brave beginning for any such theoretically informed future engagement. Nicholas Higgins, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK

International Relations and the challenge of postmodernism: defending the discipline. By D. S. L. Jarvis. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. 2000. 280pp. Index. $34.95. ISBN 1 57003 305 6. There can be little doubt that post-modern approaches are making serious inroads into International Relations (IR) theory. As yet they may not constitute anything like Kuhnian ‘normal science’, but they have certainly made their mark, despite the dogged reluctance of the mainstream to take them seriously. Deep questions remain, however, as to the validity of this mark. This excellent book, by D. S. L. Jarvis, is an impressive and brave attempt to critically assess post-modern contributions to the discipline. Jarvis traces the development, importation and application of these positions and develops a series of typologies in the hope of aiding an assessment of them. The book was originally a PhD thesis and in some respects suffers as a result of this. First and foremost, Jarvis situates his analysis within a broader assessment of the so-called ‘third debate’ (p. ix). A ‘debate’ that Jarvis sees as predominantly marked by ‘statements of intransigence’ (ibid.), such that no real debate took place. This may be true in relation to post-modernism, but whatever the third debate was it was certainly more than post-modernism. Jarvis recognizes this of course, and includes a chapter on feminist IR (pp. 142–77). Ultimately, however, the feminists Jarvis is interested in are those of a post-modern persuasion, so the horizons are still very limited. This means that Jarvis is in danger of conflating post-positivism with post-modernism (p. 21) and in the process excluding a wide range of non-positivist positions that would also be opposed to post-modernism. These minor quibbles aside, and when taken as an assessment and critique of only a very small part of the ‘third debate’, this book is masterful in its execution. It is a valuable and timely contribution to contemporary IR theory and will be of immense benefit to the discipline, irrespective of whether one agrees with it or not. Jarvis identifies three forms of post-modernism: ‘technological postmodernism’, primarily concerned with objective changes in the spread of science and technology (p. 65); ‘critical postmodernism’, which seeks to expose foundationalist

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assumptions upon which knowledge claims are made (p. 66); and ‘subversive-deconstructive postmodernism’, which adopts an all-embracing negative critique of all knowledge claims and erects a ‘structure of resistance’ (p. 66). Through this typology he hopes to ‘make sense of postmodernism and, more generally to infer which of its many strands and perspectives might prove useful to International Relations’ (p. 52). Jarvis finds some utility in the first two forms but has very little sympathy with ‘subversive-deconstructive postmodernism’. The analysis of post-modernism is conducted mainly through a focused critique of one of its leading proponents in IR, Richard Ashley, whom Jarvis presents as a heroic figure advancing the post-modern cause. The strength of such an approach is that Jarvis is able to avoid charges of lack of engagement with the intricate details of Ashley’s oeuvre; the weakness is that many post- modernists might themselves reject many of Ashley’s assertions. Yet since Ashley is a major post- modern figure in the discipline I think such a tight focus wholly justified. The analysis is meticulous and the chapters on Ashley are a must-read for anyone at all interested in theoretical issues, whether post-modern or not. Particularly interesting are his claims that Ashley is a ‘despondent positivist’ (p. 140) and that his form of post-modernism is actually very un-post- modern when contrasted with some of the very rigorous analyses of many post-structuralists outside of IR and from whom Ashley purportedly draws inspiration (p. 135). Thus Ashley does not use post-modernism so much as exploit it. What undercuts the whole argument of the book is the claim that serious theoretical engagement with post-modernism was never possible (p. 138). If Jarvis genuinely believed this at the outset why attempt it? The answer to this question is hidden in the subtitle of the book, defending the discipline. Jarvis begins his book with Chris Brown’s comment vis-à-vis post- modernism: ‘Those that like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like—those that do not will not’ (p. ix). Undoubtedly this will epitomize the reaction to this book. Jarvis, however, is unhappy with this depressing state of affairs and ultimately his book is an attempt to construct arguments in relation to post-modernism that go beyond Brown’s pessimistic assessment in the hope of showing how the discipline can legitimately deflect the post-modern attack. Yet in the final analysis, and given the claim that serious theoretical engagement was never possible, it is difficult to see what Jarvis hoped to achieve. More than this, one has to wonder if a discipline that can enlist no resources for theory choice other than whether ‘one likes it or not’ is worth defending. Depressingly, this may well be what Ashley is trying to tell us. Colin Wight, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales

The state and identity construction in International Relations. Edited by Sarah Owen Vanderslius. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 2000. 207pp. Index. £45.00. ISBN 0 333 73291 x. Students of the nation-state in the contemporary era will want to turn to this volume if interested in how states participate in the complex enterprise of crafting collective and national identities. In a series of generally informative though disjointed accounts, most of the chapters, several previously published elsewhere, address this issue by examining the role of states in a variety of different settings and times. However, those interested in an overarching theoretical paradigm, or even a coherent exploration, of states and their roles in identity formation are bound to be disappointed. In most cases, they will encounter idiosyncratic, and sometimes even irrelevant, chapters that neither prologue nor epilogue succeeds in connecting. Part 1 in effect comprises an eclectic assortment of chapters on a variety of topics. Martin Shaw’s fundamental message in the first chapter is that nation-states continue to exist in the global era, but not as realists would like us to think. The unitary–militaristic view of the state adopted by realists, he notes, is flawed. Christopher Clapham follows by asserting that in fact statehood is not an absolute but a relative concept. In his view, there exist degrees of statehood. Moreover, internationally recognized states exhibit few state-like characteristics, while certain political entities, though not recognized as such, deserve to be called states. To prove this point, Clapham turns to sub-Saharan Africa.

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The next two chapters address the question of identity formation and states much more directly. Both adopt a historical perspective. Dominique Jacquin-Berdal insists that the development of an Eritrean sense of identity depended far more on the introduction of notions of nationhood by Italian colonialists than on the work of a latent state wishing to assert itself. Peter Shearman seconds this chapter with an account of how state and identity held together in the republics of the former Soviet empire. Part 2 opens with a thematically surprising chapter by Tim Dunne on how to interpret conflicting indigenous and European accounts of Australia’s colonization. There then follows an unexpected account, by Hari Singh, of the development and nature of regions in the global system. One finds it difficult to extrapolate the potential contributions of both of these chapters to the main objectives of the book. Part 2 closes with a more appropriate piece by Naomi J. Mobed on how national and even regional identity depends, in part, on a common discourse of danger and security. She considers the Gulf region and the activities of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). But here awkward language makes it impossible to grasp the full message. Several passages, such as ‘this chapter seeks to problematise the composition of ontological privilege—the ascendancy of philosophies that permeate the social consciousness—in the GCC’s collective security cultures’ (p. 159), serve to muddle, rather than elucidate, the main thesis. Neither the prologue nor the epilogue successfully manages to rescue the book by linking these different chapters with a common theme. Despite its interesting topic, most readers are thus unfortunately likely to find this book less than satisfactory. Francesco Duina, Bates College, Maine, USA

International ethics

Moral spaces: rethinking ethics and world politics. Edited by David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 1999. 268pp. Index. Pb.: £14.00. ISBN 0 8166 3276 6. David Campbell and Michael Shapiro have put together a pleasingly troublesome collection of essays. They have thrown down the gauntlet to those who claim to represent the moral domain in International Relations, a domain too often referred to as International Ethical theory. By proclaiming themselves ‘against theory’ the editors seek to oppose the normative theorizing of scholars like Brown, Linklater, Frost, Cochrane and Rengger, which postulates ethics as a topic needy of abstract principles and systematic thought. Moral spaces, in contrast, are those lived locations where responsibility, community, exile, refuge, suffering and otherness are found, and consequently, where the notion of ethics necessarily begins to take on a more experiential basis. All too often, alternative thinking on human and international morality has been dismissed in the discipline under the all-encompassing labels of post-modernism or post-structuralism. This collection of essays hopes to make such studied evasion more difficult. The ten chapters presented here (including the valuable introduction) provide serious and rigorous examples of the type of work possible when the spurious divides between the ‘empirical’ and the ‘theoretical’ are ignored. As a result we find ourselves ‘face to face’ with the ethical dilemmas of state-sanctioned killing (Patricia Molloy’s contribution), the politics of immigration (Bonnie Honig), refugee protocol (Michael Dillon), race representation (Kate Manzo) and market surveillance (Richard Maxwell). Campbell’s own chapter inquires further into the politics of such moments of ethical decision- making, employing the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida as a means to underline the duty and obligation to recognize ethics as a domain both within and above our traditional confines of the modern state. Shapiro too, in his chapter, engages with such thinkers as a means of unreading, unmapping and rewriting what we might consider as received accounts of our histories of encounter. More conventional political thinkers such as Rawls, Hegel, and Weber also find themselves the subject of scrutiny in the respective chapters of Daniel Warner and William E. Connolly.

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Both contributors attempt to redefine how our contemporary notions of community, justice and suffering can act to limit and predetermine the type of political subjects to whom we feel ethically bound to respond. While this brief review prevents greater elaboration on the philosophical sophistication at work within this collection, hopefully one point at least has become clear—that any claim to represent disciplinary thinking on ‘ethics and international relations’ must first face the challenge of contrary understandings of how and where the ethical in international relations is to be encountered. These essays offer an excellent opportunity to embrace just that challenge. Nicholas Higgins, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK

Ethics in international affairs: theories and cases. Edited by Andrew Valls. Oxford, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2000. 236pp. Index. £51.00.  0 8476 9156 x. The growth of international ethics proceeds apace. The last few years have seen a veritable torrent of books on various aspects of the ‘ethics of international relations’: the use of force, humanitarian intervention, international and global justice, refugees, citizenship, environmental questions; the list of topics is endless. The book under review has essays on several of these topics. After an introduction by the editor, and a general essay by David Welch reviewing the general question of whether morality ‘applies’ to international affairs, the book is divided into four sections. The first, entitled ‘Just War theory’, has essays by Nicholas Fotion on pacifism, realism and just war, Anthony Coates on the Gulf war and Frances Harbour on the use of non-lethal chemical weapons in Vietnam. The second, entitled ‘Terrorism and political violence’, has essays by Valls on the justification of terrorism, David George on the ethics of IRA terrorism and Neve Gordon and George Lopez on terrorism in the Middle East. The third section is entitled ‘Humani- tarian intervention’, and includes essays by Simon Caney on sovereignty and intervention, George Klay Kieh on humanitarian intervention in African civil wars and Emil Nagengast on the German and US interventions against Yugoslav sovereignty in the 1990s. The final part is entitled ‘Global justice’ and has an essay on global distributive justice by Peter Jones, an essay on the ethical responsibilities of multinational corporations by Gerard Elfstrom and one on the new international economic order (and why there isn’t one) by Jeffrey Casson. By and large, all of the essays in the book are good, though obviously I have my favourites (I would single out Welch, Harbour, Valls, Caney, Jones and Elfstrom). Few would doubt that the topics discussed are significant ones, both in the context of recent debates in the field and in terms of the evolution of contemporary world politics. Yet in this context, it is slightly odd that the range of topics is so limited. Aside from the final three essays on justice, all of the essays really deal with the ethics of the use of force. If one was going to do this then perhaps it would make more sense to concentrate on that in the main bulk of the text and then have another three essays on related topics. Equally, if one wished to cover a wider range of topics, then, as suggested above, there are plenty of possible candidates besides global justice. This is related to a second point. All of the essays share a family of broad approaches to ethics—variations on what we might call the traditional and/or analytic approach. There is no representative of other or alternative approaches to international ethics (such as that represented in David Campbell and Michael Shapiro’s recent collection Moral spaces, though to be fair the criticism can equally well be levelled at them) and that is a pity. Nonetheless, this is a welcome addition to a growing corpus and I would recommend it to all interested in these questions. Nicholas Rengger, University of St Andrews, Scotland

Civilizing world politics: society and community beyond the state. Edited by Mathias Albert, Lothar Brock and Klaus Dieter Wolf. Oxford, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2000. 276pp. Index. £54.00. isbn 0 8476 9802 5. Pb.: £23.95. isbn 0 8476 9803 3. It is always been the case that much work relevant to the student of world politics has been done outside the supposed ‘heartlands’ of the academic study of world politics, the US and the UK.

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That this has not always been recognized has as much to do with a passion for methodological homogeneity as Anglo-Saxon parochialism; thus as the former wanes the latter becomes more and more difficult to sustain. The book under review, the result, we are told, of a research effort undertaken by the World Society Research Group based at the Universities of Darmstadt and Frankfurt, is a good example of the breadth and variety of European work on world politics that is both consciously interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse. All of the contributors to the volume, with the exception of (the decidedly non-teutonic) Chris Brown and Georg Sörensen (based at, respectively, the LSE and the University of Aarhus), work in Germany. The book seeks to take a fresh look at the notion of world society, and does so by looking at both IR theory research and recent work in social theory. Without pretending that a completely coherent ‘school’ of thought emerges, the chapters by the German contributors develop a family of related approaches that emphasize the extent to which ‘world society’ is a meaningful term in the contemporary context, and is so even if (perhaps especially if ) you avoid what the editors refer to as the ‘ever more fuzzy notion’ of globalization, and these are nicely amplified by the rather different contributions of Brown and Sörensen. Inevitably, in a collection like this, individual readers will incline more to some arguments than to others. I especially liked the opening chapter, which sets out the agenda of the group extremely well, as well as the chapters by Albert and Brock, Weller, Wolf and Zurn which seem to me to develop this agenda in particularly fruitful ways. A bracing dose of scepticism (which I confess I largely share) is administered, as usual, by Chris Brown. But all of the chapters contain good work and the book as a whole is an admirable statement of a continuing and extremely interesting research project. Of course, this does not imply agreement with specific aspects of the interpretations offered. It simply means that here is a well-written book, one written, largely though not wholly, in English (how many English-speaking scholars could reciprocate?), dealing with fascinating questions in an intelligent and thoughtful manner. Roll on volume 2! Nicholas Rengger, University of St Andrews, Scotland

International law and organization

Democratic governance and international law. Edited by Gregory H. Fox and Brad R. Roth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000. 585 pp. Index. £65.00. ISBN 0 521 66095 5. Pb.: £22.95. ISBN 0 521 66796 8. The study of interaction in the society of states in the post-Cold War era appears to be marked by a cleavage formed by two contesting approaches. Paradoxically, both purport to be underpinned by the seminal events that ended the bipolarism of the previous era. In making sense of global association in this new phase, one of the approaches is defined by a conspicuous emphasis on elements such as identity, ethnicity, culture and civilization, which were artificially repressed in the crude ideological climate of the Cold War years, whereas the other, somewhat oblivious to the local and the particular invoked in the former, is liberal universalism with renewed vigour following the spectacular failure of communism. The present volume of essays carries the debate between the two veins of thought to the realm of international law, addressing the recently raised claim that international legal–normative considerations today are on the verge of a major transformation, whereby the traditional indifference in international society to domestic political processes is likely to be abandoned. The essays brought together in this volume offer the wide spectrum of perspectives on the theme. The contribution by Michael Reisman, first published in 1990, reflects liberal universalism in its strongest version. In his view, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which unequivocally endorses people’s right to political participation on the domestic level, forms, as such, a milestone development regarding the concept of sovereignty in modern international law. Accordingly, the Declaration, presently enjoying the status of customary international law, and thus generally binding on states, has revolutionized the traditional concept of sovereignty,

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‘dethroning’ the erstwhile sovereign once and for all. Consequently, sovereignty, postulated and protected in international law today, ‘is the people’s sovereignty rather than the sovereign’s sovereignty’ (p. 243). Advancing what is possibly the most controversial case in the debate, Reisman further argues that the sanctity of the people’s sovereignty in the face of tyranny in an individual state may serve to justify pro-democratic intervention ‘by an outside force,’ even unilaterally (p. 250). A milder version of this view is expressed by Thomas Franck, who maintains that the increasing involvement by international organizations in domestic electoral processes and the newly introduced requirements of democracy and human rights for admission to membership in some of the regional organizations are compelling indications of a shift in the international community in favour of an emerging right of democratic entitlement. A detached evaluation of the debate is pursued in the influential inaugural lecture by James Crawford, delivered in 1993, and reproduced in this volume. In a reprise penned for the present collection, Crawford continues his earlier, cautious approach, nevertheless pointing out some tell-tale signs that evoke the presence of an increasingly receptive attitude in international law towards principles of democracy. The collection also includes contributions by those who are either sceptical of the existence of a uniform state practice promoting the right to democratic governance or concerned that some such right may actually harm not only peace and security in international relations, but also the very essence of human rights. Finally, the approach stated at the outset of this review to be in an antipodean relationship with liberal universalism is represented in the volume in an essay by Susan Marks, who explores the problems of ‘liberal millenarianism’, and in a brief comment by Martti Koskenniemi, who questions the discourse on universal democracy as a possible ‘neo-colonialist strategy’ in disguise. Koskenniemi states: ‘The nation-state and its democratic forms may not be for export as pure form. They may equally well constitute a specific product of Western history, culture and, especially, economy’ (p. 439). The editors have achieved in this volume an impressive and timely collection that should intrigue anyone with interest in the theory of international law in conjunction with human rights and global politics. Necati Polat, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

How does law protect in war? Cases, documents and teaching materials on contemporary practice in international humanitarian law. Edited by Marco Sassòli and Antoine A. Bouvier. Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross. 1999. 1493pp. Index. 70 Swiss FF/$45.00. ISBN 2 88145 110 1. The subtitle provides a great deal of insight into the nature and content of what one will find between the covers of this mammoth book. Although excellent textbooks in international humanitarian law have been published recently, a coursebook with cases and material taken from actual practice has not yet been made available. The publication of this book thus bridges this gap. The work is aimed at relating law to practice, so that the present and next generation of public officials, members of the armed forces and the civilian population may understand what happens to those innocents caught in the midst of an armed conflict, as in Kosovo, Chechnya, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka, to mention just a few of the current hotbeds where belligerents are engaged in taking lives. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 contains a detailed outline of the salient themes and topics that comprise international humanitarian law. It explains the concept and purpose of the law, its recognition as a branch of public international law, its historical development, the sources of the law, the distinction between civilians and combatants, legal obligations towards the treatment of prisoners of war, and the protection of civilians, the sick, the wounded and the shipwrecked. There are specific chapters on the conduct of specific types of hostilities, and the law pertaining to non-international armed conflicts. Both general and specific problems that concern the implementation of international humanitarian law are addressed. The relationship between

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international humanitarian law and international human rights law is explored, and the role and contribution of the International Committee of the Red Cross is examined. Throughout this part, there are references to additional reading, cases and documents found in part 2. Part 2 comprises the main body of this book. Herein, the reader will find all the cases and documents arranged in chronological and geographical order: national and international tribunal judgements, United Nations Security Council resolutions, extracts from relevant documents and press releases. The editing is superb. A novel feature in relation to the cases is entitled ‘Discussion’, in which various questions are posed, each meant to raise issues for the reader to contemplate. Each case can then act as a basis for a discussion and an exchange of views over the relevant aspects of international humanitarian law involved. The reader is guided to the possible answers through references made to the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols. If there is any limitation to the use of the book, it is the absence of these latter aforementioned treaties in the volume, as the reader or the class will have to be provided with these materials from other sources, such as the ICRC website. Academics will especially welcome part 3, as it provides various options for those wishing to teach the subject. Using the material an instructor can either introduce the students to a single armed conflict, or to different problems that may occur during armed conflicts, over a 20-lesson course. Further helpful suggestions provide for teaching from one of two perspectives: either according to a specific topic or with regard to a specific conflict. In each instance, the reader is shepherded accordingly. Tables of abbreviations and cases, an index in relation to part 1, and a carefully constructed table of contents should prove very useful. There is also a general bibliography, and both suggested and further readings. In sum, an excellent and original approach to this important branch of public international law has been achieved in this work. Daniel C. Turack, Capital University Law School, Ohio, USA

The future of UN human rights treaty monitoring. Edited by Philip Alston and James Crawford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000. 563pp. Index. £55.00. ISBN 0 521 64195 0. Pb.: £19.95. ISBN 0 521 64574 3. As the introduction to this book notes, every state in the world has undertaken human rights obligations; thus ‘today’s challenge is to enhance the effectiveness of procedure and institutions established to promote the accountability of governments under the treaties’. For the uninitiated (non-specialists), this lengthy collection of detailed, often heavily-footnoted essays looks a daunting prospect, off-putting except to lawyers who delight in such displays. It is, however, worth the effort of grinding through the pieces to get to the puzzle of how to make human rights tick. There are 23 essays in total. Section A is organized around the work of six UN human rights treaty bodies (‘Committees’); section B deals with issues from a selection of national perspectives; section C compares the UN with regional systems, assessing prospects of mutual learning; section D examines common problems under the themes of ‘duplication, diversity, focus and the need for resources’; and finally section E, by one of the editors (Alston), is less a summary than a polemic against those (principally Bayefsky—not a contributor to the volume) who, according to Alston, advocate reform in the direction of casting recalcitrant and non-democratic governments into outer darkness. Many of the great and the good contribute to the total wisdom as knowledgeable observers or participants; it would be difficult to imagine a better collection of essays from ‘those who know’. Given the depth of insider knowledge, a vivid picture emerges of the problems of putting ideals into practice. Some are heavy, some light, but they add up. We have everything from the backlog of reports, shortage of interns and externs, states (notably the US) not paying their UN dues (Grant), ironic notes on whether the members of the human rights bodies are ‘independent’ and/or ‘experts’ (Leckie), on the ‘splendid isolation’ of the bodies (Clapham), on the all-woman Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (Scott), on the ‘constructive

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dialogue’ between states and UN experts that may hide real abuses under a diplomatic cloak (Leckie), etc. Proposed remedies for the faults range from a kind of super-body for UN human rights treaties (Clapham), and the promotion of diversity, to greater use of the internet, a UN lottery (for resources—Evatt), while at least one author (Gallagher) is less than enamoured of the great things that are done in Geneva. Steiner, in common law mode, wants Committees to ‘expound’, developing concepts in real cases. The book is essentially about implementation, not about norms to be implemented. The problem is envisaged as instrumental : if we can get the details right, clear the backlog, everything will be perfect. There is little interest in asking if the norms are the best that can be done, if they are ‘universal’ or just ‘global’. The volume nevertheless hints at a troubling, darker politics (especially Alston versus Bayefsky), and ethno-centrism and double standards in human rights (Grant), behind the implementation facade. The book is superb in delivering its promise of an in-depth examination of human rights monitoring. But we still need to address the darker issues, beyond the shortage of pencils in the Committee Room. Patrick Thornberry, University of Keele, UK

The United Nations and international politics. By Stephen Ryan. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 2000. 209pp. Index. £40.00. ISBN 0 333 62841 1. Pb.: £12.99. ISBN 0 333 62842 x. There has been, over the past ten years, a substantial increase in the number of books that analyse the role of the United Nations within the international system and that discuss the organization’s deficiencies in the pursuit of its objectives as spelled out in the Charter’s Preamble. The United Nations and international politics is a sweeping title for a slim book of fewer than 180 pages of text. The book, which has a broadly historical approach, focuses on the role of the UN in international governance and in resolving international problems from its inception until the end of the term of Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in late 1996. While it covers a huge amount of material and, in large parts, provides a helpful and valuable introduction for those new to the subject, it does not break any new ground. The book begins with the genesis of the UN, looks at its initial structure and its adaptation to the Cold War realities, and gives an account of the record in office of each Secretary General. In highlighting some of the factors that explain the continuing infirmities of the UN, Ryan points to the fundamental failure of the organization to evolve a viable mechanism, and, in line with mainstream research, he convincingly argues that for more than 40 years its involvement was never the decisive factor in crisis abatement. Given the wealth of scholarship on the subject of the UN’s rise and fall from grace in the last decade, it is disappointing that Ryan adheres to his largely descriptive approach in the chapters that deal with the UN in the post-Cold War era. To give the author credit, hardly any UN mission remains unmentioned, and all the major crises of recent years and the UN’s role therein—from the former Yugoslavia and Haiti to Somalia and Rwanda—are described in some detail. Regrettably, however, the discussion does not provide a penetrating analysis. As a result, there are too few ‘lessons learned’ in this book. It is no doubt interesting that UN resolutions have quadrupled, that the Security Council’s authorization of the use of force has more than doubled in the past decade as compared to the Cold War period, and that peacekeeping is now at the core of UN activities with more money spent and more troops deployed than ever before. However, these statistics alone say little about the success or failure of a mission or about the realities behind diplomacy. The fundamental question of whether the principle of collective security upon which the UN is based is viable deserves more attention and a more thorough examination. Similarly, the consideration of other important issues such as the controversial but highly relevant question of humanitarian intervention and the impact of Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 Agenda for peace would have added to the merits of the book. Victor Mauer, University of Bonn, Germany

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Contesting global governance: multilateral institutions and global social movements. By Robert O’Brien, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte and Marc Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000. 260pp. Index. £35.00. ISBN 0 521 77315 6. Pb.: £12.95. ISBN 0 521 77440 3. ‘Global governance’ is a useful, necessarily imprecise concept to describe the process through which internationally-accepted regulations and regimes evolve. National governments, representing states, continue to play a central role in this process. But the multilateral institutions within which they bargain are not (as American rational-choice theorists argue) simply sites for negotiation; they develop autonomous corporate ideologies, policy networks and transgovern- mental links. Transnational linkages among liberal democratic societies, organized through trade union federations, business lobbies and advocacy networks, play a significant but ambiguous third-party role: they may provide these international institutions with support in pursuing policies at variance with the positions of their member governments, but they may also mount campaigns against such institutions, effective both within national and transnational politics. This short volume is particularly useful because it links its broader conceptual framework with a limited number of extended case-studies: on the relationship between the World Bank and women’s movements, on the WTO and labour, on these two institutions and transnational environmental groups, and on the IMF and diverse campaigning social movements for socio- economic change. The authors argue that there is a transformation in the nature of global economic governance as a result of the encounter between multilateral economic institutions (MEIs) and global social movements (GSMs). ‘This transformation is labelled “complex multilateralism” in recognition of its move away from an exclusively state structure.’ (p. 3). But the encounter may take many different forms. The World Bank, as examined here, is far more open to social movements than the WTO; the IMF, secure in its self-image of rational economic management, is more resistant still. The women’s movement is structurally weaker than the environmental movement: far less well connected, funded or staffed. Divisions between the rich North and the poor South run through most transnational movements. Trade unions that represent Northern workers are viewed with particular suspicion by governments from the South, which have therefore resisted opening WTO negotiations to non-governmental influence. The United States remains structurally dominant: as a target for group pressure, and as a source of funding and activists for transnational movements. ‘In the case of the United States, the activity of GSMs seems only to underline its central role in world politics’ (p. 226). The conclusions drawn from these case-studies are cautious, and persuasive. ‘GSMs do have some influence in the conduct of world politics’, but ‘despite concerted effort in the recent past, GSMs would generally rank low in an MEI hierarchy of influence’ (pp. 224, 226). Business interests still predominate in lobbying MEIs, and in gaining access. The outlines of an emerging global civil society can be seen, but it faces large obstacles in terms of representativeness and legitimacy. The preface tells us that this book is the outcome of a British Economic and Social Research Council grant of £56, 700. It was money very well spent. William Wallace, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

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Foreign relations

Imposing economic sanctions: legal remedy or genocidal tool? By Geoff Simons. London: Pluto Press. 1999. 256pp. Index. £40.00. ISBN 0 7453 1395 7. Pb.: £12.99. ISBN 0 7453 1397 3. The sanctions paradox: economic statecraft and international relations. By Daniel W. Drezner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999. 342pp. Index. £40.00. ISBN 0 521 64332 5. Pb.: £14.95. ISBN 0 521 64415 1. The sanctions decade: assessing UN strategies in the 1990s. By David Cortwright and George A. Lopez. London, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. 2000. 273pp. Index. Pb.: £13.50. ISBN 1 55587 867 9. Before becoming increasingly preoccupied with the great impeachment debate and the aftermath of Monicagate, the United States Congress found itself engaged in an often-lively discussion surrounding the efficacy of economic sanctions. It quickly became apparent that the only real disagreement among those in Congress related to the degree to which they believed sanctions efforts failed. Through such proposed legislation as the March 1999 Sanctions Reform Act (which would effectively limit the scope and duration of US-initiated sanctions), it became abundantly clear that there was a growing consensus among governmental elites that the proliferation of sanctions had got out of hand. Yet elected officials are not the only individuals who have voiced their disapproval of such measures of economic coercion. Not surprisingly, such business and trade groups as the National Association of Manufacturers, the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Foreign Trade Council, and, most prominently, USA Engage (a coalition of over 600 companies) have launched a massive public relations campaign condemning economic sanctions as measures that create unnecessary global trade barriers and, in the process, harm US business interests. Scholars associated with such foreign policy think-tanks as the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Council on Foreign Relations have also recently released reports arguing that current US sanction policy is counter-productive, as such an approach has had little effect on the behaviour of targeted foreign governments. Finally, human rights activists have also jumped on the sanctions-bashing bandwagon, claiming that such economic coercion unjustly targets the civilian populations of sanctioned nations, thereby leading to massive humanitarian crises. Representative of this highly sceptical school of thought on economic sanctions is Geoff Simons’s latest book, Imposing economic sanctions: legal remedy or genocidal tool? In this impassioned— though often crossing the line into polemical—work, Simons wishes to show ‘the historical continuity of the economic-sanctions option as a powerful means of coercion’ (p. 4). By tracing the historical usages of sanctions from the time of ancient Rome to the present, Simons provides much-needed context for the current sanctions debate. To Simons, history illustrates that economic sanctions, rather than being employed to effect some type of change in the targeted nation’s behaviour, have been traditionally used to secure commercial interests in an effort to maintain some form of ‘global hegemony’ (p. 117). In this desperate quest to secure financial and/or political domination, economic coercion often becomes economic warfare, and the first casualties of such a skirmish are not the targeted regimes, but the innocent men, women and children who make up the civilian population of the sanctioned nation. This desire to maintain global hegemony, according to Simons, remains a critical component of current sanctions policy, and the author does an admirable job of illustrating how ‘powerful states can exploit the availability of the sanctions option to support undeclared aims of commercial and foreign policy’ (p. 4). Moreover, Simons’s work reminds us that sanctions can (and often do) harm the civilian populations of targeted nations, and that such humanitarian concerns must be dealt with by sanctions policy-makers.

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However, the author allows his focus on the details of specific cases to colour his judgement on the overall viability of all sanctions efforts. The selected cases of Libya, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Somalia and Iraq, among others, are presented solely as policy failures, successful only in protecting US interests and in harming innocent people. If sanctions are indeed this problematic, how should the United States deal with those nations whose behaviour violates international standards of conduct? One wishes that Simons had provided an answer to this question within his timely and valuable work. Yet not all scholars share this extremely pessimistic view of economic sanctions. Daniel Drezner, in his excellent first book The sanctions paradox: economic statecraft and international relations, argues that the viewpoint taken by such authors as Simons is too narrow to explain truly the dynamics of economic coercion. Drezner seeks to create a conflict expectations model that best explains the true impact of economic sanctions by taking into account the opportunity costs of deadlock and the expectation of future conflict among senders and targets. Through the creation of such a model, Drezner finds that conflict expectations have a ‘contradictory effect’ on economic sanctions. According to the author, while an adversarial relationship between two countries will make the initiation of economic coercion more likely, the target’s expectation of frequent conflict ‘will reduce the magnitude of its concessions’ (p. 27). Simply put, if a target country anticipates a future adversarial relationship—with or without the presence of sanctions— with the sender nation, then they have little incentive to respond to measures of economic coercion. On the other hand, the imposition of sanctions on an allied nation, while highly unlikely, can have a tremendous influence on the behaviour of that country. Such countries do not foresee future conflicts with the sender nation, and wish to do whatever is possible to maintain this positive relationship. Such a focus on the impact of sanctions on both adversaries and allies of the United States allows Drezner to move beyond the usual, limited subset of coercion cases often covered in works dealing with sanctions. To Drezner, ‘these writings have painted a distorted picture of economic sanctions’ (p. 6). Celebrated sanctions cases like Iraq are actually biased samples, as they falsely assume that sanctions are used only against adversaries of the United States. By introducing cases where sanctions have been effective in influencing the behaviour of allies of the United States, Drezner greatly adds to our understanding of the overall efficacy of sanctions. In a particularly engaging section of his work, Drezner uses the case of South Korea, an historical ally of the United States, to show how the threat of US sanctions led the country to reverse its decision to develop a nuclear weapons programme. In the aftermath of the nuclear tests of India and Pakistan, such findings show policy-makers how to deal effectively with ‘friendly’ states that violate international norms. While the conventional wisdom has held that we should offer such nations a carrot to bring them back into the fold, Drezner’s work shows us that proffering a stick may be much more effective. David Cortwright and George Lopez, in their latest work The sanctions decade: assessing UN strategies in the 1990s, build upon this belief that the traditional criteria for assessing the success of sanctions have been too narrow. To Cortwright and Lopez, the debate over such sanctions episodes as Iraq has ‘so dominated the discourse on sanctions that it has skewed public understanding of the real data of sanctions and the successful adaptations that have occurred in recent years’ (p. 220). In contrast to the conventional understanding of sanctions as merely an instrument of punishment, the authors seek to illustrate the role that sanctions can play within the bargaining process associated with carrot-and-stick diplomacy. Rather than seeing sanctions as successful only if they lead to complete capitulation by the targeted regime, the authors contend that sanctions can be judged as beneficial if they produce some positive impact on bargaining dynamics and produce at least partial compliance. Such a perspective leads the authors to reconsider the accepted wisdom on the sanctions regime in Iraq. Rather than seeing such an undertaking as a complete failure, Cortwright and Lopez contend that sanctions have led to some steps towards Iraqi compliance with US and UN objectives. The fact that sanctions have not been more successful is not due to some inherent shortcoming in this

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reliance on economic coercion. Rather, continuing political animosities between Iraq and the West have prevented the development of the bargaining dynamic necessary to induce further concessions. As they conclude: ‘The failings of the sanctions were not due to the limitations of the instrument itself but to the flaws in the overall US/UN policy toward Iraq’ (pp. 38–9). To those policy-makers wishing to do away with sanctions altogether, such a finding should cause them to rethink their position. Perhaps most importantly, the work of Cortwright and Lopez allows the reader to better understand what does, rather than what does not, lead to the implementation of a successful sanctions regime. As the authors show in their examination of the sanctions effort in Yugoslavia, the ratcheting down of economic pressure as an inducement for greater acquiescence can lead to significant concessions. Moreover, the presence of sanctions assistance missions (SAMs) in Yugoslavia helped to create a suitable environment in which such a bargaining process could take place. These SAMs, put into place by customs officers of numerous western European governments, the Western European Union and NATO, established patrol missions on the Danube and in the Adriatic and made sure that no goods made their way into the sanctioned nation. Such tools, according to the authors, are ‘[o]ne of the most significant developments in sanctions enforcement over the past decade’ (p. 219) and should become a critical aspect of all sanctions efforts. As the United States prepares to elect a new president, one hopes that both candidates take such useful findings and recommendations seriously. Michael H. Carriere, The University of Chicago, USA

From voting to violence: democratization and nationalist conflict. By Jack Snyder. London, New York: W. W. Norton. 2000. 382pp. Index. £21.00. ISBN 0 393 04881 0. Jack Snyder and Edward Mansfield have previously argued that although stable democracies may be more peaceful than other states, the risk of war increases as states become more democratic. The main thesis of this book is that democratization can increase the risk of conflict by unleashing particular types of belligerent nationalism. Snyder insists that belligerent nationalism does not stem from historical rivalries between ethnic groups, but emerges with the expansion of political participation itself. Where elites face demands for greater political participation, appealing to exclusionary nationalism directed against internal and external enemies may help elites to contain full democratization and to retain political power. Whereas full democracies with a free press and political organization may induce some restraints on the resort to force, partial democracies that lack many elements of full democracies provide a fertile ground for divisive nationalism. Whether nationalism leads to conflict, Snyder argues, depends both on whether elites see their interests as compatible with greater democracy and their opportunities to appeal to exclusionary nationalism. Elites with adaptable interests and strong political institutions prior to the expansion of participation foster an inclusive civic nationalism and democratic states that are cost-conscious in resorting to force. By contrast, non-adaptable elites and weak political institutions will give rise to forms of nationalism that promote conflict within and among societies. Snyder evaluates the relationship of types of nationalism to violent conflict through a series of case-studies. As an alternative to a policy seeking possibly premature democratization, he recommends fostering economic conditions and promoting political institutions conducive to civic nationalism to prevent nationalist conflict. The main contribution of this book lies in its outline of different varieties of nationalism and its theoretical discussion of when nationalism is more likely to be associated with violent conflict within and among states. Democratization, however, is primarily seen as relevant in shaping types of nationalism, and the book is less successful in illuminating how changes towards more democratic political institutions may influence the prospects for conflict. The effect of political institutions per se is hard to assess from the cases considered, as the term ‘democratization’ here appears to include popular protest and contestation even in the absence of institutional changes or any actual voting. Nor is it clear whether the relevant feature spurring belligerent nationalism is a

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recent change in political institutions or that political institutions are weak. Certainly not all democratizing states experience conflict, even though the conditions for civic nationalism that Snyder highlights are quite rare. Understanding linkages between political change and conflict may ultimately help us better understand how political institutions shape prospects for conflict and possible limits to a ‘democratic peace’. Snyder’s main interest may of course legitimately lie in linkages between nationalism and conflict, but since the effects of changes in political institutions are not considered explicitly in this book, we unfortunately learn less about the role democratization may play in shaping the prospects for violent conflict in the wake of the third wave than the title suggests. Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, University of Glasgow, Scotland

Interpreting China’s grand strategy: past, present and future. By Michael D. Swaine and Ashley J. Tellis. Washington DC, Santa Monica, CA: RAND. 2000. 283pp. $35.00. ISBN 0 8330 2815 4. Pb.: $20.00. ISBN 0 8330 2767 0. The Cold War is dead—long live the Cold War! Thus might a reader’s reaction be on finishing this book. Produced under the auspices of ‘Project Air Force’ of RAND, it was written on behalf of the United States Air Force as a study of China’s supposed ‘grand strategy’. In many ways, the book tells us far more about the thoughts of Washington’s military chiefs than about contemporary China. For this, we should be grateful and, I am afraid, worried. From the start, the work is framed within an exclusively neo-realist approach which takes the ‘facts’ and ‘realities’ at face value. The postured objectivist epistemology begins to grate. For instance, calling Deng’s turn towards market-based solutions for China’s development as ‘non- ideological’ is annoying and blatantly misleading. Equally, the reverential tone cast towards China’s imperial history and the full-scale treatment that this book gives to it (about a third—for a book supposedly dealing with contemporary problems) is decidedly gratuitous. While no one denies that history is important and that (perhaps) the burden of history is particularly felt in China, repeating the well-worn myths about China’s ‘continuous’ history and a supposed immutable Chinese grand strategy, going so far as to trace this back to the Shang Dynasty no less, is bizarre. Ironically, by doing so, the authors tacitly grant a carte blanche to China’s elites: after all, are they not just passive actors in an everlasting power play, stretching back centuries? It is far, far more complex than that and the authors would be well advised that Beijing, like all state administrations, uses and abuses history for all manner of reasons, and that history should be treated with extreme caution. Although, to be fair, the authors do advocate a policy of engagement, this is done in a manner which leaves no doubt that it springs from a deep suspicion of China and its leadership and is reactive to what the authors see as a ‘natural’ position of the Chinese—a push for aggrandisement. This belief that China will inexorably become assertive reflects the neo-realism underpinning this book, with reference to balance of power theories à la Kenneth Waltz nestling alongside discussions of Machiavelli’s politics of pre-emptive conquest (ruled out as ‘perhaps unethical in the modern age’, p. 235). This is all very well, but playing up China to be a hegemon on the rise, with reference to imperialist dynasties, is all a bit dubious. There is virtually no discussion of the real story of China, the ongoing restructuring and reconfiguring within the country, that could put paid to all of the ‘China on the warpath’ nightmares (and, it should be said, impact on the US’ massive annual defence budget). Indeed, cynics might say that what Swaine and Tellis have written is exactly what the top brass in the US Air Force want to hear. One can easily imagine this book, and others like it, being used to justify grotesque levels of spending on new weaponry. It is this factor that is most pernicious and makes this reviewer hostile to this book. Any treatment of China’s ‘grand strategy’ might well have first turned to the huge social, economic, and ecological problems (among myriad others) that the Chinese leadership faces. One would like to have seen an examination of the growing differences between coast and hinterland, east and west, and centre and provinces. By doing so, the picture of a monolithic China would be

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undermined and a more nuanced understanding of the contemporary processes enervating the country would be reached. Yes, military spending is up, but one would be surprised if it wasn’t. This does not mean that Beijing is furtively building up an armoury to take on the world. Arguing that China would ‘inevitably’ threaten US interests once it has grown in capabilities reflects not good analysis but rather a deep Americo-centrism that seemingly cannot cope with any country not doing as it is told. Do the authors really fear China as a threat, or rather, as a state that won’t simply knuckle under to Washington’s own ‘grand strategy’ for the Asia-Pacific? When a group of immature Chinese youths penned the notorious China can say no book, it was met with howls of protest (both inside and outside China) and was seen as an example of growing Chinese chauvinism. While this book obviously does not go to such lengths, one cannot but feel that a similarly nationalistic tract, rather than being downplayed, instead enjoys the blessing (and funding) of the United States Air Force. Ian Taylor, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa

Conflict, security and armed forces

Negotiating a complex world: an introduction to international negotiation. By Brigid Starkey, Mark A. Boyer and Jonathan Wilkenfeld. Oxford, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 1999. 150pp. Index. £43.00. ISBN 0 8476 9044 x. Pb.: £13.95. ISBN 0 8476 9045 8. Herding cats: multiparty mediation in a complex world. Edited by Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson and Pamela Aall. Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. 1999. 735pp. Index. $55.00. ISBN 1 878379 92 5. Pb.: $29.95. ISBN 1 878379 93 3. No single process so impacted on our understanding of conflict and its management as the end of the Cold War. Our collective failure to predict its termination, or to highlight the processes that could have brought it to an end, served as a timely reminder of the need to think more seriously and critically about processes of conflict management and the degree to which parties in conflict can use them constructively to stem the threat, or to reduce the intensity, of large-scale violence—internally or externally. A joint consideration of these two strikingly different yet both excellent books exemplifies the recent renaissance of sophisticated and up-to-date volumes on the two most important processes of conflict management: negotiation and mediation. At a time when the distinction between conflicts within states or between states has all but been conflated, these two books with their explicit emphasis on theory building and policy guidelines may truly help us in learning how to cooperate even in the midst of destructive conflict. Negotiating a complex world by Starkey, Boyer and Wilkenfeld is a welcome addition to the large and growing literature on negotiation. The authors have had a long association with the International Communication and Negotiation Simulations Project (ICONS) at the University of Maryland, and a strong desire to develop an approach to the study of negotiation that is based on simulation exercises, utilizing sophisticated network techniques. Their short book is both substantially rich and a valuable tool for students and policy-makers alike. The book’s focus is on negotiations in the international arena, but the authors wisely place negotiation within a broader framework where both traditional (e.g. power resources) and non- traditional (e.g. information technology) affect and change the process or outcome of negotiation. Key components of the framework include the setting, the negotiators, the stakes involved, the moves and decisions negotiators make, and the outcome they achieve. The choice of a negotiating strategy can be viewed as some kind of an ultimate contest. The authors use this game metaphor as an organizing device to study some recent negotiations such as the Kyoto 1997 climate change conference, and the 1997 negotiations between Iraq and coalition members to allow a multinational team of inspectors into Iraq. Each of the subsequent chapters deals with one of the components of the framework. The setting includes a discussion of the nature of the international system and how its polarity, or the

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number of actors involved, might affect negotiation. The chapter on players focuses on traditional negotiators as well as the myriad new actors from non-state and other entities—all of whom bring new issues and new styles of negotiation. The chapter on issues helps us to clarify how different issues affect negotiation, and the chapter on moves purports to help us to understand how and why negotiators use different strategies and tactics. The book succeeds in identifying the new negotiation landscape, with its new actors and their new issues. Although some parameters of negotiation have remained constant, the calculus of power and national security as the sole foundation for negotiation clearly belongs to a bygone era. This clearly written book with its useful bibliography and websites is a timely addition to the post-Cold War literature on negotiation. Just how far mediation has changed since the end of the Cold War is the subject of the second book under review. Herding cats is another fine addition to the growing list of publications from the United States Institute of Peace on the causes and management of international conflict. The gifted editorial team of Crocker, Hampson and Aall build on the success of their 1996 volume Managing global chaos by assembling here a cast of 22 distinguished international mediators and inviting them to reflect on their experiences. Practitioners’ comments on their experiences often amount to no more than descriptive accounts or justifications of action taken. Not so here. The editors incorporate the rich vein of evidence practitioners provide within the context of current academic research on mediation. They also identify lessons and recommendations distilled by practitioners. The book’s commitment to theory building and testing, its explicit emphasis on the interplay between concepts and practice, and its inventory of findings, ensure that the epithet seminal is for once quite justified. In their introduction the editors rightly note how the end of the Cold War allowed many non-traditional actors to take on new roles in mediation and conflict management. They also exhort all of us who work on mediation or who practise it to think about all the multiple mediation attempts that occur in the course of a conflict. These attempts may occur simultaneously or sequentially, they may be undertaken by individuals, states or organizations, but in truth few if any conflicts experience only one mediation. Hence the focus on multiparty mediation. Structurally, the book is divided into three sections that correspond to the temporal dimensions of a conflict; namely, prevention, settlement and implementation. Five chapters are devoted to an examination of mediation’s role in preventing conflict, ten chapters are devoted to the personal reflections of different mediators looking back over their role in trying to secure a settlement in the midst of conflict, and in the final six chapters practitioners look back on their record in implementing a structure where social and political divisions are minimized. Not surprisingly, mediation’s record is quite mixed. Some actors make better mediators, others are constrained by the nature of the conflict or their own lack of resources or experience. Whether we study Zaire, El Salvador, Oslo, Madrid, Bosnia, Angola or Ecuador–Peru, it is clear that some mediators can be associated with successful outcomes, others can testify only of failure. The editors weave all the reflections and insights into an admirably clear and coherent mosaic. They argue for contingent or sequential mediation where different mediators can try different strategies to promote peacemaking (e.g. unofficial mediation may precede official mediation), and they attempt to identify the structural conditions that may determine who mediates. They evaluate the strengths and limitations of multiparty mediation, and make a reasoned attempt at matching appropriate mediators to different disputes. The increasing complexity and pervasiveness of mediation in the post-Cold War environment means that there is much about this process that we do not know or that we prefer to ignore. This book challenges us to think seriously about how different mediators bring with them different resources and capabilities and how each may best be suited to different conflicts, or different phases of a conflict. Merely to understand this relationship would have been a bold intellectual act; to do so by promoting a genuine exchange between academics and practitioners constitutes a major advance in our understanding of mediation. This is a first-rate book that deserves to be widely read. Jacob Bercovitch, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

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Gestures of conciliation: factors contributing to successful olive branches. By Christopher Mitchell. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 2000. 333pp. Index. £47.50. ISBN 0 333 47433 3. Gestures of conciliation examines how adversaries in a protracted conflict explore the possibility of disengagement. The conceptual lessons are based upon the gestures Sadat made towards Israel in the 1970s, which ultimately led to the 1978 Egyptian–Israeli peace accord. The generic nature of these lessons will be of interest to observers of conflict resolution processes, irrespective of the topic in conflict, and to third parties looking to help resolve disputes. In asking seemingly simple questions, Mitchell successfully tackles the complexity that embodies any conflict and its management. The aim is to understand successful gestures of conciliation so as to orchestrate such gestures in other conflicts, or at the very least to increase the probability of successfully replicating a conciliatory gesture. Yet, what is a successful gesture of conciliation? In answering this question, Mitchell is careful to site his approach, which is measured and mature, in the real world. Thus, a measure of success is not the reaching of a peace treaty, but ensuring that the initiator’s intended message is received by the target, and that the target responds with their own conciliatory gesture. Though this may appear unambitious, it is an approach that acknowledges the difficulties the adversaries face on the ground. It is this acknowledgement of the adversaries’ difficulties that is the principal feature to commend Gestures of conciliation. Mitchell unpacks in detail the obstacles facing key decision- makers in commencing conciliation. For example, he outlines the opposition that Sadat faced in seeking conciliation with Israel from his adversary, his Arab allies and his constituencies within Egypt. The different strategies and tactics used to counter this opposition highlight the central role sincerity and marketing play in initiating conciliatory gestures. In unpacking the sequence of communication, Mitchell also draws upon other conflicts, such as the Vietnam war and the Northern Ireland conflict, to illustrate the concepts. The level of detail in annunciating all the steps in initiating conciliation strengthens overall the excellent substantive content of this book. However, there is always a danger that clarity can be sacrificed for detail. Gestures of conciliation, unfortunately, succumbs to this in places. For example, figure 3.1 clearly describes five issues that influence a conciliatory gesture—context of conciliation, nature of initiative, initiator characteristics, channels and target characteristics. However, the decision not to organize the book explicity around this description results in a degree of confusion that is unnecessary. Despite these hiccups, Gestures of conciliation is worth reading for a mature and rational discussion of how conciliatory gestures can be initiated, and also why they fail and extend conflicts unwittingly. It would be interesting to apply these lessons to another protracted conflict, for example Kashmir, and to examine whether conciliatory gestures have been made in the past and whether they can be made in the future. Undala Alam

Modern strategy. By Colin Gray. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1999. 412pp. Index. £40.00. ISBN 0 19 828030 0. Pb.: £17.99. ISBN 0 19 878251 9. Modern strategy is an introductory guide to the major issues in twentieth-century strategy, and a defence of a Clausewitzian approach to contemporary strategic issues. After rejecting the idea that we can discover a ‘key’ to understanding strategy, Colin Gray makes his central claim that ‘strategy has a complex nature and a function that is unchanging over the centuries’ (p. 2). His starting point is Clausewitz, who defined the unchanging essence of strategy. Although this will be unpopular in many quarters, Gray makes a compelling case for continuing to use Clausewitz as our guide to new problems in strategy. He is always sensitive to his critics, and gives careful consideration to the arguments of those, such as Ken Booth, who are deeply sceptical about the whole project of security studies. It is inevitably difficult to single out one section from a book that covers so much ground. Chapter 2 masterfully sets out the relationship between politics, ethics and strategy, effectively

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anticipating many criticisms. Gray’s ‘neo-classical realism’ does not neglect ethical issues, but it does situate them within a political and strategic framework. Chapter 7 provides a valuable sense of perspective on the claim that there is a ‘revolution in military affairs’. Although the argument here and throughout the book is that the essentials of strategy have not changed, Gray’s critique is considered and he always draws what is best from the theories that he rejects. Above all, he never loses sight of the context of strategic thought—‘military establishments are not debating societies’, he rightly reminds us (p. 313). If one minor quibble is to be raised, it is that in the concluding chapter Gray loses his way slightly by trying to defend his position in relation to contemporary writing in International Relations. He raises the question of the social construction of knowledge through a quotation from an introductory text by Chris Brown, and awkwardly tries to resolve this debate into the question of post-modernism. This seems quite unnecessary, but it is a very minor quibble in a very large book. It is a dazzlingly brilliant guide to a wide range of issues, and a forceful restatement of the Clausewitzian approach. Gray writes from the perspective of an insider in the western military establishment, but even its critics will be informed, entertained and provoked by this book. Michael Savage, University of St Andrews, Scotland

L’Alliance Atlantique et l’OTAN, 1949–1999: un demi-siècle de succès. Edited by Pierre Pascallon. Brussels: Emile Bruylant. 1999. 571pp. Pb.: BEF 3.600. ISBN 2 8027 1335 3. NATO—its role, record, rationale and prospects—has proven to be fertile ground for French- language study in the decade since the end of the Cold War. Little distinguishing in that, perhaps, except that not only has the quantity of available material multiplied, but its very nature has been transformed. There have been clear moves away from the polemical accounts of the post-1966 period (since France’s withdrawal from NATO’s integrated military command structures), generally in favour of more erudite works. This book constitutes the proceedings of a conference held at France’s Assemblée Nationale in March 1999. It comprises political, military and academic perspectives, and promises much in the way of a fusion between them, to convey a real sense of informed French thinking on the Alliance. Thirty-nine separate contributions seek to bridge the divide between politico-military and academic studies of the Alliance, and moreover to offer an unconventional argument, in comparison with certain French literature at least, of NATO’s ‘half-century of success’. Although positive in its overall assessment, various themes of concern do remain—continued US predominance in the Alliance, France’s ambiguous role, the limitations of the European pillar, and interestingly a distinct scepticism towards the recent British ‘conversion’ to the principles of European defence, as embodied in the government’s St Malo commitments. Among the contributions, a small number stand out for the power of their argument and/or the originality of their perspective. These include pieces by Xavier de Villepin (President of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Armed Forces Committee of the French Senate), who sets out current French concerns over the extension of NATO’s roles; François-Georges Dreyfus (Professor at the Sorbonne), who contrasts common assertions of a Franco-German axis in European defence with the limitations argued to be inherent in any notion of a Franco-German defence concept; François Heisbourg, regarding the contradiction between rhetorical designs for a common European defence, and current reluctance to commit sufficient resources to achieve it in reality; and retired General Henri Paris, who offers perhaps the only contribution to be overtly critical of the role played by the US. The value of this collection overall, however, derives perhaps less from individual contributions (although these are strong, in the main), than from the wide range of contributors and the wealth of experience, and for some, the stature, which they bring to bear. It is difficult to identify a weak link in the chain—the academic contributions are generally sound and well- founded, and political and military pieces are provided by those who have been, or remain, close

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to decision-making circles in Paris. In addition, the provision of extensive annexes (particularly official texts) is helpful, and goes perhaps some way to atoning for the lack of an index. However, the format of conference contributions—a majority of which are necessarily brief— prevents Pascallon’s collection from fulfilling some of its early promise. A small number of contributions are simply restated dogmas, and some that contain insightful lines of argument are underdeveloped. Although this is arguably inevitable, it is nonetheless unfortunate. It does not negate the utility of the book—if snapshots of current French thinking on NATO’s past and future are required, this book is well-placed to provide them; but those seeking a deeper analysis might be disappointed. Rachel Utley, University of York, UK

France, NATO and the limits of independence, 1981–97: the politics of ambivalence. By Anand Menon. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 2000. 258pp. Index. £45.00. ISBN 0 333 77352 7. In a recent speech on European defence, the US Permanent Representative on the North Atlantic Council offered a simple analogy to highlight the friction and mistrust that has dominated France’s relationship with the Alliance for the past four decades. Any American suggestion, said Ambassador Vershbow, that NATO and the EU talk about the terms of a marriage of equals was viewed in Paris with as much enthusiasm as receiving a ‘Love Bug’ message by e-mail. Notwithstanding the United States’ own inclination to take the lead, the French concept of security has centred on national independence, global influence, military autonomy and the construction of a European Europe. France, NATO and the limits of independence, the updated and extended version of Menon’s doctoral thesis, provides the first detailed assessment of French policies towards NATO under Mitterrand and Chirac, up to and including the Madrid summit of 1997. The book is a welcome and valuable addition to the literature on a relatively under- researched aspect of French foreign policy. As well as official statements and newspaper clippings, it draws on interviews with numerous French and NATO officials. In the first of three sections, Menon discusses de Gaulle’s often inconsistent, contradictory and profoundly ambiguous ‘policy of alliance without integration’ (p. 14), according to which national independence constituted an essential basis of the quest for a leading role in international politics, yet which ultimately failed to achieve its general objectives: the reform of the international system and NATO, and the building of a strong Europe. This policy, Menon suggests in section 2, remained largely unaltered under both Mitterrand—despite a certain rapprochement distancié—and Chirac. This was most visible in the diplomatic fiasco of 1996–7, when the French–American disagreement on the future of NATO’s Southern Command prevented the full participation of France in NATO’s integrated command structure. The study argues convincingly that while the policy of alliance without integration provided the country with some political and considerable military benefits during the Cold War, in the 1990s, national independence increasingly ‘became an end in itself as opposed simply to a springboard for the achievement of international influence’ (p. 87), and consequently led to isolation. It further identifies increasing discrepancies between stated intentions and actual policy, which in the final, highly-readable section is explained in terms of domestic constraints. While the book’s thesis that a systematic reform of the defence structures and the defence industry was hampered by vested interests and intra-executive squabbles, which in turn affected Alliance policy as a whole, is certainly accurate, the argument that the ‘policy of cultivated ambivalence towards NATO [was] imposed on rather than chosen by its leaders in the 1990s’ (p. 202), does need the disclaimer ‘on certain occasions’ (p. 148), and is best applied to the second and third cohabitations rather than to the early 1990s. For France, the EU has provided a possible alternative venue for European security cooperation. The book traces the several policy changes from the notion of a European pillar within NATO in the 1980s via attempts to create purely European structures to rival NATO in the early 1990s and back to the europeanization of NATO under the second cohabitation and the

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early Chirac presidency. As can be the case with books, there is the problem of the speed at which events have progressed since this study went to press. Menon tends to write about Chirac’s Septennat as though by 1997 it had already been a thing of the past. He concludes that ‘French schemes were…doomed to failure from the start’ (p. 137) and that ‘Paris gradually lost interest in an eventual incorporation of the WEU into the EU’ (p. 139). Given the sudden and unexpected re-emergence of European defence, powerfully symbolized by the Anglo-French Joint Declaration signed in St Malo in December 1998, these findings seem odd. This, however, should not detract from the fact that this is a meticulous, informative, lucidly argued, and thought- provoking book. It merits serious consideration and deserves a wide readership. Victor Mauer, University of Bonn, Germany

Winning ugly: NATO’s war to save Kosovo. By Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press. 343pp. Index. $26.95. ISBN 0 8157 1696 6. This is a substantial book weighing in at 343 pages with three appendices and almost 60 pages of footnotes. It is by far the most comprehensive analysis of the Kosovo war so far and probably one of the best we are likely to get. For this, even more than the Gulf conflict, was a television war whose conduct and purpose was openly and acrimoniously debated by the policy-makers who rarely found themselves in agreement. The fact that such a comprehensive account as this could be produced so soon after the conflict confirms the transparent political world in which we now live. This book belongs to the Brookings school—it is sober, thoughtful, though sometimes lacking in imagination. If the reader wants a more lively account (also based on extensive access to the decision-makers) he should go to Michael Ignatieff’s Virtual war. Daalder and O’Hanlon speculate in the end about what Kosovo says for the character of the ‘drive-by wars’ (to use a phrase by Ignatieff ) that the United States now fights, but they say little of interest about its nature. If the reader wants passionate advocacy (however misinformed) he would do well to read Noam Chomsky’s Military humanism. Chomsky and other critics will have little time for this account, which vindicates the policy-makers and represents Kosovo not as a ‘perfect failure’ or ‘virtual victory’ but a palpable success. It was—for all its success (and that the Alliance held together was, in retrospect, remarkable) a botched war—hence the title Winning ugly. The authors are correctly scathing of the air war school that still believes that Milosevic caved in under pressure from the air campaign alone, despite all the evidence to the contrary; and they are critical of those who are dismissive of the Powell Doctrine (of which we may hear more in the next Bush presidency)—the critics who think that wars can be won without the decisive application of violence. War, they tell us, cannot be fought by half measures and if, writes Klaus Naumann, the former chairman of NATO’s military committee, in an endorsement of the book, it is read by those who may have to run the next crisis, ‘it may help them to win smart the next time’. In the end, however, this account is largely written by Americans for an American audience. True, Kosovo was largely an American war (and Europe’s shortcomings are exposed in these pages in embarrassing detail). But the conflict did more than just chastize, or contain, a Balkan dictator whose actions threatened to destabilize further the most troublesome region of Europe. In crafting their support for war Europe’s leaders went to incredible lengths to define a European ‘civil space’—today’s word for an emerging civil society on whose behalf the European Union now claims to speak. For in talking of a ‘humane Europe’ and a ‘pan-European community of values’ (Schröder), and a ‘prosperous and democratic Europe’ (Chirac), Europe’s leaders invented the concept of a civil society in a uniquely European transnational context. And in describing the war as a Friedenspolitik (or peace policy) the Germans even invented a euphemism worthy of the Pentagon—though one less cynical and more deeply held. Kosovo was a landmark not only for the Alliance but for the European Union. It was a definitive moment in the process of European

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integration. This is a missing dimension of the book; that the Americans have not noticed it is in itself quite telling. Christopher Coker, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

New nukes: India, Pakistan and global nuclear disarmament. By Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik. Oxford: Signal Books. 2000. 312pp. Index. Pb.: £12.99. ISBN 1 902669 25 8. The nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in 1998 stood as clear evidence that the optimism and progress in the nuclear non-proliferation regime that had characterized the first half of the 1990s had faded away. Nuclear weapons were still perceived as desirable, bestowing prestige, political clout and stability. In India particularly, such tests were seen as a principled stance against the discriminatory nature of the Non-Proliferation Regime. Support for the South Asian nuclearization is, of course, not without many detractors. In New nukes, authors Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik assess the history and implications of Indian and Pakistani nuclear ambitions and, according to the back cover of the book, ‘map out a new approach to nuclear abolition’—an undertaking that is no small task. The book, which begins with a powerful introduction by Arundhati Roy (reprinted from a 1998 article in The Guardian) is, not surprisingly, a highly polemical work. It does not, to its credit, attempt to pretend otherwise, the authors stating in the preface their wish that the book contribute to the goal of ‘[eradicating] the nuclear scourge forever’ (p. xvii). Although subtitled India, Pakistan and global nuclear disarmament, the emphasis in the text lies much more heavily on India than on Pakistan. Perhaps the best piece of analysis in the text, however, is the chapter entitled ‘South Asia in the nuclear trap’, which consists of a well-argued assessment of the South Asian nuclear dilemma. The subject is, of course, a vast one and the book moves between the history of the situation, the economics of obtaining and maintaining a nuclear arsenal, Just War theory and the question of the utility of a realist approach and its flaws in relations to nuclear deterrence. Any attempt to take into account such a broad spectrum of issues perhaps necessarily suffers from the need to limit the discussion of each, and if the book has a flaw it lies in this inclination to overextend itself. The mapping out of a new approach to nuclear abolition is drawn together largely in the final chapter, in which the authors examine four possibilities: Nuclear Weapons-Free Zones; the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty; a no-first-use pledge; and the de-alerting of nuclear weapons. These are cited as ways in which disarmament may ultimately be pursued. New nukes ends as it begins, with a call to arms (so to speak) for the anti-nuclear movement, both within South Asia and worldwide. The strong opinions that the authors bring to their work are present throughout and occasionally intrusive. Nonetheless, New nukes is a timely and important contribution to the subject. Fiona Simpson, University of St Andrews, Scotland

Politics, democracy and social affairs

The Third Way and its critics. By Anthony Giddens. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2000. 189pp. Index. Pb.: £7.99. ISBN 0 7456 2450 2. The Third Way has become one of the most prominent contemporary political ideas—adopted by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, scorned by Oskar Lafontaine and Lionel Jospin, and the focus of enormous international interest and criticism. In this sequel to his earlier book which set out the main principles and approach of the Third Way, Tony Giddens summarizes the main criticisms advanced against it, and seeks to rebut them. One of the most common is that the Third Way is a vacuous concept, little more than a device to conceal a move to the right by left of centre parties. The Third Way is supposed to be a middle way between statist social democracy and neo-liberalism, but many have argued that this middle way has no

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discernible content, and is in fact indistinguishable from neo-liberalism. It is because of this that many European social democrats reject the Third Way of Clinton and Blair as an Anglo- American concoction, which, far from opening a new era of progressive politics, merely consolidates the neo-liberal consensus. Giddens argues persuasively against these criticisms, but he does so partly by taking up new ground, disengaging himself from the use of the term Third Way itself, which he says is not important, and specifically denying that Third Way politics is an attempt to occupy a middle ground between traditional social democracy and neo-liberalism. It is really a new form of social democracy, or modernizing social democracy as he calls it, concerned with revising social democratic doctrines to respond to the twin revolutions of globalization and the knowledge economy, and finding new ways to achieve the traditional social democratic objectives of social justice and solidarity. It is relevant to social democracy and left of centre thinking everywhere, not just in Britain and the United States. Giddens makes a powerful case for this approach, but in doing so inadvertently highlights why the Third Way is such an unsatisfactory term. By being so linked to the personal projects of Clinton and Blair the term detracts attention from what is really interesting about the Third Way—the emergence of new, diverse forms of progressive politics that have no single national source, and which take globalization seriously by seeing the need both to rethink the role of the nation-state and to explore the possibilities for a transnational public domain and public agency in the search for global solutions to contemporary problems. This book is an outline rather than a detailed exploration of the content of a modernizing social democracy, but no less useful for that. Giddens provides an overview of current social democratic thinking on a broad range of topics including equality, welfare, democracy, poverty and stakeholding, and argues that in all these areas the core of Third Way thinking is the attempt to find the best balance between the state, the market and civil society, rather than giving priority to just one of them. Andrew Gamble, University of Sheffield, UK

The new social democracy. Edited by Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright. Oxford: Blackwell. 1999. 185pp. Index. Pb.: £12.99. ISBN 0 631 21765 7. British politics in the global age: can social democracy survive? By Joel Krieger. Cambrige: Polity Press. 1999. 213pp. Index. £49.50. ISBN 0 7456 2025 6. Pb.: £14.99. ISBN 0 7456 2024 8. Until recently, ‘New Labour’ has scarcely been considered worthy of serious academic attention. Instead the market has been dominated by journalistic biographies of the major figures such as Jon Sopel’s Tony Blair: the moderniser (Michael Joseph, 1994), Paul Routledge’s Gordon Brown: the biography (Simon & Schuster, 1999) and John Kampfner’s Robin Cook: the biography (Orion, 1998). The most useful books to date are Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann’s useful study Safety first (Granta, 1997)— again written by journalists—and Philip Gould’s highly revealing book The unfinished revolution: how modernisers saved the Labour Party (Little, Brown, 1998). By contrast, academic contributions have been limited to thin edited volumes (see Brian Brivati and Tim Bale’s edited volume New Labour in power [Routledge, 1997]) or unrelentingly hostile critiques (see Colin Hay’s The political economy of New Labour: labouring under false pretences? [Manchester University Press, 1999]). The two books reviewed here elevate the study of ‘New Labour’ by treating it as a serious subject of study rather than as a mere human interest story or an object of derision. The first of these, Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright’s edited volume, The new social democracy, contains fifteen essays, most of which maintain an exceptionally high standard. In their introduction Gamble and Wright quickly establish the basic paradox: that while European social democracy has recently achieved considerable electoral success, many of its intellectuals appear to lack much faith in it as a project. The reasons for this are not hard to discover. Social democracy exists in a

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symbiotic relationship with capitalism. Its purpose, as Tony Crosland maintained in The future of socialism (Cape, 1956), was to tame—rather than to replace—capitalism. Given that European capitalism has demonstrated an impressive ability to rejuvenate itself, social democracy has had to adapt accordingly. Yet while advocates of capitalism appear comfortable with the new status quo, many intellectual social democrats have been left with a sense of rootlessness, a nagging self-doubt or the conviction that they have betrayed their principles. This theme is taken up by David Marquand, among others. While recognizing that social democrats have always been revisionists, he criticizes New Labour for its surrender to market logic, its unwillingness to intervene to remedy market failure and its dogmatic insistence that globalization renders any alternative unworkable. However, beyond offering a vague and muddy ‘pluralistic’ alternative, Marquand singularly fails to establish what other paths social democrats could follow. Moreover, Marquand’s argument is disputed in an outstanding chapter by Donald Sassoon, who demonstrates that ‘New Labour’ is largely in step with developments among sister parties in the rest of Europe. There is widespread agreement on the need for greater labour market flexibility, the need to bare down on inflation, discard ‘tax and spend’ policies, privatize industries and reform their welfare state. To be sure, there are differences between New Labour and other social democratic parties on European and international matters, and ‘New Labour’ does appear less favourable towards the trades unions. However, ‘on most other issues, the general direction is one of overall convergence’ (p. 23). If Marquand is correct and there is another path, then one needs to explain why there is agreement that it is a path best not taken. Elsewhere in the Gamble and Wright volume Paul Hirst poses the question ‘Has globalisation killed social democracy?’ He concludes that the ‘globalisation’ thesis is exaggerated and that ‘world market forces have by no means erased national economies’ (p. 86). He then examines whether the European Union can offer shelter from such forces. Colin Crouch’s chapter on ‘the parabola of working class politics’ sounds a sour note. He regards the failure to challenge capital as an asymptotic process whereby all the principal differences between the parties are erased. Not surprisingly therefore he holds out the hope that electoral reform will create opportunities for a party to espouse the old religion of socialism (p. 83). Joel Krieger’s volume represents the most impressive study of New Labour yet produced by a single author. Krieger’s very distance from the subject of study (he is a Professor at Wellesley College in the United States) provides him with an objective viewpoint wholly unpolluted by access to the hothouse atmosphere of Westminster. Like the contributors to The new social democracy, he examines how politics has been transformed by shifting patterns of production, the entry of women into the workforce, the erosion of the traditional working class and the rise of new identities, and then in his final chapter examines the challenges facing the New Labour government. This book is well written, well researched and contains a strong argument. It can be confidently recommended to those seeking a fair-minded, broadly sympathetic treatment of New Labour. Ten years or so ago a mini-industry on the subject of ‘Thatcherism’ flourished in our universities. By contrast ‘New Labour’ has received little serious attention. The publication of these two splendid volumes indicates that—at last—New Labour is receiving the critical attention it deserves. The books also indicate that social democrats can take much comfort from examining their own history. John Bartle, Department of Government, University of Essex, UK

Revolutions, nations, empires: conceptual limits and theoretical possibilities. By Alexander J. Motyl. Chichester, West Sussex, New York: Columbia University Press. 1999. 229pp. Index. £28.50. ISBN 0 231 11430 3. Pb.: £12.00. ISBN 0 231 11431 1. Despite the title, this is not a volume about how revolutions, nations and empires interact. Instead, Motyl seeks to ‘draw clear lines around these concepts’ so that they can be then incorporated ‘in our empirical and theoretical canvasses’ (p. xi). His volume thus focuses on the centrality of these concepts to theory and theory building.

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The first section is devoted to revolutions. Motyl attempts to define the concept of a ‘revolution’ and argues that it is a process of change, with its ‘semantic cousins’—rebellion, revolt, uprising, insurrection, reform, transition and transformation. Revolutions are events, processes and affect people. Revolutions are also usually ‘rapid, comprehensive, and fundamental change’ (p. 26) that can affect an entire range of structures and people. Those who promote such change are defined by Motyl as ‘revolutionaries’. Using such definitions, Motyl defines the US ‘revolution’ as less a revolution than a transition, and the events in postwar Germany and Japan as ‘redemocratization’. Revolutions, Motyl argues, must by definition involve a high degree of resource expenditure. If such resources are required for revolutions to take place, ‘authoritarian methods of resource extraction then appear to be unavoidable’ (pp. 32–3). Simultaneous democratization and marketization are therefore contradictory and one of them is likely to fall by the wayside. To prove his point, Motyl argues that when the Russian Federation launched an economic revolution in 1992, its democratic revolution inevitably suffered. Although Russia received the applause of the ‘big-bangists’ in the West, many of these same policy-makers and scholars would wholeheartedly reject similar policies in their own countries. Comparing Ukraine and Russia at the end of the 1990s, the former’s evolutionary transformation has been more successful than the latter’s revolutionary change in securing democratization and state-building. Russian reform was also influenced by its inheritance of an overblown Soviet bureaucratic machinery and security forces, of which current President Vladimir Putin is representative. Criticism of the speed of the reform process in former communist countries is, Motyl argues, misplaced. The trajectory of the reform process depends upon the degree to which the country suffered from the effects of the Soviet empire and totalitarianism. Revolutionary change was impossible, Motyl argues, for those who had been influenced by these two factors, because change had to take place in the absence of a state, civil society, the rule of law, democracy, the market and elites. Motyl approaches post-communist change from the viewpoint of the ‘theoretical unviability’ of revolution and a preference for sequencing which works ‘less badly’ than big-bangism. The second section looks at nationalism. To Motyl, nationalism is an ideology, and he is critical of those scholars who define nationalism as action or culture. Instead, he argues that nationalism can be located anywhere within the political spectrum from left to right. It also connects nations with the political (i.e. states). Nationalists support statehood and, when this has been achieved, usually call themselves patriots, democrats or other less negative terms. In the third section Motyl turns to empires. Empires require cores and controlled peripheries. Motyl criticizes the commonly held view that empires require imperialist, non-democratic cores. Instead, he argues that democracies can also run empires, such as the United States in Latin America, or Russia potentially in the CIS. In imperial arrangements ‘core elites rule, peripheral eites govern’ (p. 124). Empires can be formal with direct control (e.g. the former USSR) or informal, with indirect control exercized (e.g. the US in Nicaragua under the Samozas). As Motyl points out, ‘democratic elites have been perfectly capable of genocide, war, and gross interference’ (p. 148). Motyl believes that Russia potentially will attempt to recreate an informal empire modelled along the lines of US relations with Latin America or the USSR’s with central– eastern Europe in the Cold War. The success of this process depends less on Russian military power than on state capacity and economic autonomy. But, ultimately, ‘reimperialization will in all likelihood produce an imperial system suffering from extreme decay, one especially prone to both further disintegration and to collapse’ (p. 161). Motyl has written a richly argued critique of three concepts of political change that will endow future research and scholarly discussion with greater conceptual rigour. Taras Kuzio, University College London, UK

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The rise and decline of the state. By Martin van Creveld. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999. 421pp. Index. Pb.: £13.95. ISBN 0 521 65629 x. This is a sweeping survey of the role of the ‘abstract corporation’, the state, from its military origins in post-Reformation Europe through its high period from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, through the extension of the European state model across the rest of the globe, to the decline which van Creveld dates from the 1970s to the present day. As a military historian, the author emphasizes (like many others) the central role which the establishment of a monopoly of violence played in the early development of the state; but argues that while the state at its outset was primarily a war machine, the social and economic role of the state in the development of the modern world has been far broader than this. ‘War’, he reflects, ‘made its historical début long before the state; and, to all appearances, is destined to outlast it as well’ (p. 188). The broad range of the early chapters is exhilarating, taking the reader from pre-history through medieval Europe to the seventeenth-century theorists of state sovereignty and the revolutionary alliance between the nationalist idea and the state machinery. The conclusions, however, are much less secure. Van Creveld traces the disintegration of the state through the passing of mass-mobilized interstate war and its replacement by insurgent violence, through the retreat of the state in the developed democracies from ownership and the provisions of welfare, through the continuing impact of the technological revolution, and through ‘the withdrawal of faith’. One may doubt whether the problems of maintaining community, identity, legitimacy, order and prosperity can so easily be swept away by private satisfactions, global technologies and impersonal markets. William Wallace, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Immigration and the nation-state: the United States, Germany and Great Britain. By Christian Joppke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1999. 356pp. Index. Pb.: £16.99. ISBN 0 19 829540 5. Immigration and the nation-state is a contribution to a growing stream of studies comparing politics and policies on immigration and integration, from the perspective of the interrelationship between state, citizenship and nationhood. It comprises an original and interesting selection of case-studies that is well-informed and broad in scope. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 focuses on the question of immigration control, while the second part is dedicated to immigrant integration. Empirically, the primary focus is on official national policies and legislation, and the public debate. Theoretically, Joppke challenges two opposing views put forward in similar studies. The first is Rogers Brubaker’s Citizenship and nationhood in France and Germany (1992), which argues that the different citizenship regimes towards immigrants in these countries can be explained by their different understandings of nationhood. The second is Limits of citizenship (1994) by Yasemin Soysal, which treats nation-states as dependent variables in a process of a globalizing human rights regime that pushes states towards a post-national citizenship regime. Joppke proposes a third, middle view. Against Brubaker, he argues that Germany’s shift from an ethnic towards a civic-territorial model of citizenship shows that understandings of nationhood are not all-determining and fixed historical givens. Against Soysal, he argues more emphatically that the global human rights regime has had no significant impact on state sovereignty over immigration and citizenship. In as far as sovereignty is constrained, it is self-imposed rather than externally inflicted. Joppke thus concludes that ‘at least in the face of immigration, nation-states have proved remarkably resilient’ (p. 13). Joppke is certainly right in his rejection of obituaries of the nation-state. But he too tends to overstate his point. Concerning access to citizenship, supranational structures do have a significant impact on state sovereignty over citizenship rights. For example, European law compelled member states to grant non-citizen residents local voting rights. Concerning immigration control, Joppke’s insistence on the persistency of state sovereignty seems more appropriate. Indeed, there is no international ‘right to immigration’, and the implementation of the right to asylum is still

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very much a matter of state discretion. But Joppke sometimes mistakenly takes state sovereignty to imply effective, autonomous state power. The ‘external inflictment’ of globalization might not be legal and political, but rather economical. A global economy seems to require at least a minimal space for a global labour market. It is for example interesting that despite the current firm political rhetoric on immigration restriction in Europe, we also witness opposite developments, such as a regularization of illegal immigration in Southern countries, and a reopening of borders for wanted labour migration in Western countries. Of course, the significance of national sovereignty vis-à-vis globalization is always a matter of degree, and its evaluation therefore somewhat arbitrary. These remarks do therefore not prevent this reviewer from concluding that Joppke’s middle position is certainly more grounded than the two extremes he criticizes. Boris Slijper, Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Democracy and human rights. By David Beetham. Cambridge: Polity Press. 1999. 224pp. Index. £45.00. ISBN 0 7456 1108 7. Pb.: £17.99. ISBN 0 7456 2315 8. ‘Publishing a collection of one’s own essays…requires some indulgence from the reader’, warns David Beetham (p. vi). Our indulgence is richly rewarded in this volume. By bringing together a wide range of his essays the coherence and originality of Beetham’s approach becomes clear. The volume is divided into three sections. In the first part, Beetham develops his argument for viewing social rights as an essential component of democracy. The second section considers the relationship between democracy and human rights. The third part draws upon his own political activism in the project of auditing democracy on which he has been working with Kevin Boyle and Stuart Weir. If one theme can be drawn out of these essays, it is the attempt to overcome the conventional dichotomy between realist theories of democracy, which emphasize institutional forms, and normative theories, which begin from the ideals to be realized. Beetham argues that these are both necessary for democracy to function. The political consequence of these arguments is that democracy and human rights are part of the same package—there is no democracy without human rights, and no human rights without democracy. ‘What value is the freedom of expression to me if I lack the means to communicate with other citizens?’ asks Beetham rhetorically. ‘What value is there in the right to due process or the right to stand for elective office if legal protection and public office respectively are accessible only to the wealthy? It is considerations such as these that justify a social agenda for democracy, going beyond the juridical defence of civil and political rights, and even the standard anti- discrimination requirements needed to protect particular sections of the population’ (pp. 96–7). The argument is made both ways. Democracy and human rights are to be seen as mutually supporting parts of the same thing. At a time when democracy is recognized as a value with which everybody wants to be associated, this claim that democracy requires the recognition of a wide range of human rights standards is bound to be highly contentious. Not only does this suggest that regimes that deny these rights (including economic and social rights) are failing to be fully democratic, it also implies that many contested norms and values be placed beyond political debate, by institutionalizing them as part of ‘humanrightsdemocracy’. The historic distinction between a realm of formal political equality upheld by the state, and a civil society with, for example, economic inequality, is jettisoned in this argument. For Beetham, a commitment to human rights and democracy necessarily entails a commitment to provide the means for exercising them. This argument points towards a fundamental rethinking of how society should be organized, and of what rights and duties we owe each other within and beyond the state. Beetham sees this as an expansion of politics to include people who have been denied a voice in decision-making. Others may see it as a restriction of politics by institutionalizing contentious political claims as human rights. In either case, this book is a provocative contribution to many continuing debates that are central to contemporary politics. Michael Savage, University of St Andrews, Scotland

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The democratic invention. Edited by Marc F. Plattner and Joao Carlos Espada. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2000. 176pp. Index. Pb.: £12.00. ISBN 0 8018 6419 4. The late twentieth century has been a remarkable period of global democratic advancement. Samuel Huntington, one of the contributors to this collection, has called this the ‘third wave’ of democratic expansion, which found its origins in the 1974 revolution in Portugal. It is, therefore, appropriate that this book represents a set of lectures given at the initiative of Mario Soares, who was the person most responsible for Portugal’s successful transition to a stable liberal democracy. The twelve essays of this book are based upon a lecture series that was given in both Lisbon and Washington in the period from September 1997 to December 1998. For anyone interested in a short overview of the state of democracy as we enter the twenty- first century, this is an excellent place to start. The individual contributions are all of a high standard and include a highly respected group of academics, statesmen and practitioners, including the Dalai Lama, Bronislaw Geremek, Samuel Huntington, Seymour Martin Lipset and the late François Furet. The editors of this collection have also done an excellent job in giving an overall intellectual coherence to the disparate contributions and for provoking a wide and eclectic range of issues connected with the current state of democracy. What conclusions can be drawn from this study? The first is that, despite the enormous growth in democracy in the last twenty years, many of the contributors express a clear sense of unease and even pessimism about the global democratic future. Huntington highlights his much- publicized concerns about the receptivity of democracy in non-Western countries. Larry Diamond notes that not only has the third wave seemed to have petered out but that the quality of many of the new democracies remains far removed from the liberal ideal. Indeed, he makes an important distinction between electoral democracies and liberal democracies and argues that many transitional democracies have failed to develop into genuine liberal democracies. Mario Soares expresses his concern that the dynamic of globalization is undermining democracy through creating a new ‘wall of shame’, replacing the earlier Berlin wall, but this time dividing rich and poor. In a different vein, Gertrude Himmelfarb argues that in the United States, which provided so much of the inspiration for the democratic revolution, the state of the nation is under threat from the collapse of moral and spiritual values. These gloomy prognoses are, however, balanced by more hopeful indications. The Dalai Lama and Andrea Riccardi, the President of the Catholic lay community of Saint Egidio, note how the great religions are now broadly supportive of the democratic ideal. Alfred Stepan provides an excellent analysis of the differing forms of federalism and argues that great care has to be given to constructing federal constitutions that support multinational democracies. Robert Pastor describes how the international community, supported by many non-governmental organizations dedicated to promoting democracy, is now a more consistent supporter of further democratic transition. François Furet concludes the book with a revelatory account of the utopian mirage of the democratic impulse, which contributed to the destructive totalitarian messianism of the twentieth century. Perhaps the greatest hope for the future is that democracy is not now generally viewed as a path to utopia but as the best, if inevitably imperfect, way for humans to live together in conditions of relative freedom and equality. Roland Dannreuther, Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Switzerland

Ethnicity and cultural politics

Kosovo: how myths and truths started a war. By Julie A. Mertus. London, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1999. 378pp. Index. $55.00. ISBN 0 520 20962 1. Pb: $19.95. ISBN 0 520 21865 5. Julie Mertus’s study of the origins of the Kosovo war is unusual in two respects. First, the author did not have the benefit of hindsight. Much of the work was completed by the time the conflict in Kosovo flared up in March 1998, and the book was ready for publication when NATO’s

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bombing campaign against Yugoslavia got underway a year later—an event that receives a last- minute acknowledgement in the preface. Yet in spite of the fact that the research and a substantial part of the writing predate the outbreak of full-scale armed conflict and that the events described took place mostly in the 1980s, this volume conveys a pervasive feeling of an accelerating drift towards war. This work is also unusual in that it contains, side-by-side with the author’s analysis, extensive excerpts from the personal recollections of ordinary Kosovar Serbs and Albanians. These excerpts (accounting for nearly one-third of the volume) are taken from interviews conducted in the mid-1990s. Through the eyes of local inhabitants—presenting the ‘myths and truths’ surrounding Kosovo—Mertus explores four key developments that led to a dramatic deterioration in interethnic relations. That in turn made it possible for Slobodan Milosevic to abolish, in effect, Kosovo’s autonomy; and in the longer term it helped to prepare the ground for armed confrontation. The incidents under scrutiny are the 1981 Kosovar Albanian demonstrations in favour of Kosovo being granted the status of a full republic within Yugoslavia; the case of Djordje Martinovic, the Kosovar Serb who alleged in 1985 that he had been sexually abused by unknown ethnic Albanian assailants who were neither identified nor apprehended; the massacre at Paracin army barracks (1987) when Aziz Kelmendi, an apparently deranged Kosovar Albanian conscript, shot dead four of his Yugoslav fellow soldiers from other national backgrounds before reportedly committing suicide; and the alleged mass poisoning of Kosovar Albanian school children in 1990. The testimonies documented in this study show the clear divisions along ethnic lines of the way events are remembered. As far as the four incidents are concerned, Mertus avoids reaching a conclusion as to what actually happened—even to the extent that this can be established. Rather, her analysis is concerned with chronicling and explaining the impact of these incidents on the already worsening state of interethnic relations. As part of that undertaking, she provides an excellent account of the way politicians and the media under their control manipulated incidents so as to help them project crude caricatures of national stereotypes in a successful attempt to whip up radical nationalism. The author concludes the main section of this work with a thought-provoking essay on what NGOs can, and should, do in the fields of conflict prevention and conflict resolution. Based on her own extensive experience in Kosovo in the 1990s, she suggests that NGOs that deal with practical, everyday issues of health care, education and other matters, often make a more lasting contribution to bridging the ethnic divide than those that specifically address the issue of conflict resolution. With hundreds of NGOs now working in Kosovo at a time when ethnically motivated violence continues unabated, this might be an interesting conclusion to follow up. Gabriel Partos, BBC World Service, UK

Women and politics in Uganda. By Aili Mari Tripp. Oxford: James Currey. 2000. 277pp. Index. £40.00. ISBN 0 85255 833 3. Pb.: £16.95. ISBN 0 85255 839 2. Women and politics in Uganda is a rich and detailed study of the impact of gender on the political environment of Uganda. The product of considerable and extensive empirical research and fieldwork, its methodology is based on wide-ranging interviews and survey material that highlight the lives and life-chances of very different women. Although Tripp’s approach is that of a ‘feminist scholar’, concerned to give ‘voice to women in the course of writing about the women’s movement in Uganda’, she is aware of the ‘pitfalls and difficulties’ (p. xxii) of achieving an accurate representation. She takes as her intellectual framework the relationship and potential balance between state and society, arguing that the emphasis on state autonomy and state capacity needs to be rethought. Instead of viewing societal forces as subverting influences on the power and efficacy of the state, Tripp sees societal autonomy as critical in undermining patrimonial tendencies of governance. Often, in a number of countries, women’s organizations have been coopted by dominant political organizations that have compromised their function within civil society. A particularly

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interesting feature of this work is the revelation that ‘many women’s associations are explicit about their rejection of the politics of sectarianism’ (p. 133). Yet, women still assemble around religious movements, be they Christian or Muslim, although, as Tripp points out, women at national level are attempting to unite around common gender concerns. However, at times, conflicts can develop in local communities between patriarchal traditions and women’s demands. One such dispute occurred in Kitumba over the running of a health clinic, with the women insisting that they should control the clinic as opposed to the male elders. This issue penetrated the very core of community relations: ‘the women were constrained…by pre-existing cultural norms and patterns of authority that were biased towards wealthier male elders and against poor women’ (p. 158). When women intruded into so-called ‘men affairs’, harassment and violence occurred, as witnessed by the Kiyembe Women’s Cooperative who, when attempting to regain their stalls in the market place, were threatened with ‘sticks and bars’ (p. 172). Tripp demonstrated that as women sought to gain greater access to resources and appropriate some control over their lives, they were confronted by power struggles with men. Fortunately, she sees the women’s movement moving forwards during the 1980s and 1990s as it began to assert itself over a range of concerns. But the organization must be prepared for the long haul in a country that has not hitherto ‘regarded women’s claims to equality and political leadership as legitimate demands’ (p. 238). Women and politics in Uganda is a fascinating study and should be commended as a significant contribution to the study of gender relations and the politics of power. This work is essential reading, not only for those interested in the nuances of state and society within an African nation, but also for those concerned with the lives of the poor and disadvantaged. Heather Deegan, Middlesex University, UK

International and global political economy, economics and development

The end of globalization: a new and radical analysis of globalization and what it means for business. By Alan Rugman. London: Random House. 2000. 237pp. Index. £22.50. ISBN 0 7126 8475 1. Buzzwords come and go in politics and business. Some of these buzzwords, however, do not just define a moment, they shape it. Such a word is ‘globalization’. It is ubiquitous. Because of it, producers are exhorted to become flexible. For consumers, it has made available standardized products throughout the world. Strange then that many champions of it are now admitting that globalization makes far less difference than first assumed. Such is the disappointment that new positions are opening up on it. Although each has variations, three main positions are now evident: first, that the world’s economy is now globalized; second, that a globalization process is occurring but that a global economy is not yet achieved; third, that a global economy does not exist and will not occur. Alan Rugman takes up the last position. ‘Globalization’, he states bluntly, ‘is a myth.’ (p. 1). Instead, he argues, the world’s economy is triadic. These three regions are, at different times for the purposes of the argument, both narrow (the US, EU and Japan) and enlarged (as before plus their hinter- lands, for example, Canada and Mexico for the US). Most multinational enterprises (MNEs) and sectors, both manufacturing and services, are regionally organized and orientated in terms of production, sales, marketing and assets. Moreover, the home region remains the most important for any MNE, Rugman states. A large and very useful number of tables in chapters 7 and 8 offer aggregate data to ably substantiate this claim. Other chapters demonstrate that governance issues too are regional, not global. Attempts at global regulation, such as that provided by the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), have collapsed or reflect agreements made already between nation-states within the triad. ‘The reality of today’s complex system is that we are between markets and states’ (p. 81), Rugman suggests, with the key issue being investment not trade, for the former brings ‘deep integration’, the latter only ‘shallow integration’ (p. 83) to that system.

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Though the evidence presented is compelling, the omissions are also interesting. As with the proponents of globalization, Rugman favours ‘open economies’—that is liberalized and deregulated—dismissing opposition to such policies as misguided. Though having failed, a MAI is endorsed. However, this endorsement is curious given that Rugman argues that markets and firms in manufacturing, for example, are already highly competitive and that a MAI would make little difference to MNEs’ strategies (pp. 91–5). Nor is there discussion of the balance of power between the regions. The US seems to have a pivotal role; the MAI originates from the US and the roll-call of the top 500 MNEs is dominated by those from the US, for example, as Rugman notes. There is also some selectivity in the sector sample range. Clearly most MNEs are triadic in operation. However, Rugman acknowledges that consumer electronics is a sector that is globalized but it merits only passing reference. Including this sector in the analysis would have either affirmed its anomaly or raised its portentousness. Finally, even though most firms’ operations are triadic, not all of their operations are triadic; some are global. For example, marketing can be regional but finance and human resource management can be ‘more global’ (p. 196), raising the possibility that some MNEs have simultaneously divergent and convergent operations. This possibility is not examined, as intrafirm organization is omitted from the analysis, but it should warrant future examination. On the evidence presented, besides being compelling, Rugman’s argument has serious implications. ‘Once managers realise that there is no single market, that consumers are not all the same, then every production and distribution decision needs to be rethought’, he asserts (p. 161). That process requires managers to ‘think regional, act local; forget global’ (p. 18). The same might be said for policy-makers. This book has a topical and important message. For its description of how the world’s economy is currently configured, rather than how many in business and politics would like it to be configured, it deserves to be compulsory reading. Chris Warhurst, University of Strathclyde, Scotland

Globalization: a critical introduction. By Jan Aart Scholte. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 2000. 361pp. Index. Pb.: £14.99. ISBN 0 333 66022 6. Jan Aart Scholte’s book is a new contribution to the pullulating literature on globalization. He calls it a critical introduction, signifying that it is an attempt to clarify the concept, to assess its manifold manifestations, to consider its consequences, and to arrive at policy proposals. He defines globalization as ‘deterritorialization’ or the growth of ‘supraterritorial’ relations among people. This is not so much an explanation as the identification of a space in which globalization occurs, including the activities of production, finance, communications, security, ecology, democracy, civil society, gender and knowledge. The process is traced from the mid- nineteenth century, accelerating from the 1960s to the present. Scholte rejects any monocausal explanation such as the economic. He gives prominence to rationalism and the prevalence of a mind-set conducive to deterritorialization, while allowing that non-rational outlooks (in which he includes religious revivalism, ecocentrism and post- modernism) are part of the phenomenon. States survive but are encompassed in supraterritorial networks. Under prevailing neo-liberal policies, globalization has widened the gap between rich and poor; but this, he argues, could be remedied by reformist policies including re-regulation of economic processes at the global level that would create a ‘humane globalization’. This book bears comparison with Global transformations by Held and McGrew (Stanford University Press, 1999) in the sweep of its coverage, although the latter is almost twice the length and marks the origin of globalization with the spread of homo sapiens around the planet. One effect of seeing globalization as a phenomenon of infinite complexity that encompassed virtually every aspect of human life is to make it into a perspective on world history from the standpoint of the technologically and economically more evolved sites. The bias I see in this perspective is that the very complexity and interdependence of the system so depicted inclines towards a homeostatic view that allows for corrective tinkering with dsyfunctional tendencies but

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eliminates any more radical exploration of alternatives. This quite naturally leads Scholte, like Held et al. to envisage something like Blair and Schröder’s ‘Third Way’ of globalization with slightly reformed capitalism as the only real future option. Another strand in the globalization literature, which Scholte deals with less, focuses on resistance to globalization on the part of people detrimentally affected either in their personal and collective struggles for survival or in their sense of impending global tragedy. This arises among indigenous people and people in poor countries threatened with destruction of their habitat and sources of subsistence, workers in the richer countries displaced by the ‘delocalization’ of multinational corporate production, farmers and consumers defending the integrity of conventional food against the introduction of genetically modified food by multinational agribusiness, and ecologically sensitive people concerned with the degradation of the biosphere. The resistance literature signals the crisis points in the globalization process out of which change might come. Here change would arise from actual conflict, not, as in ‘Third Way’ thinking, from imaginative problem solving by intellectual planners. Complexity now has another meaning in various scientific fields, one of unpredictability in which small disruptions may have big consequences. Applied to politics, events like the blocking of the multilateral agreement on investment (MAI) and the ‘Battle of Seattle’ which disrupted the WTO meeting may indicate the kind of disruptive factors now alive in the world that challenge the inevitability of globalization and the reformist approach envisaged in this book. Robert W. Cox, York University, Toronto, Canada

Globalization and its critics: perspectives from political economy. Edited by Randall D. Germain. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 2000. 292pp. Index. Pb.: £19.50. ISBN 0 333 68212 2. This is a collection of ten essays on globalization, broadly defined, by a set of political scientists. The original versions of the papers were presented at a conference in June 1996 convened by the Political Economy Research Centre at the University of Sheffield. The editor states that in this book globalization ‘is viewed as defining social life rather than being one dimension within its broader perspectives’ (p. xiv). The contributors, indeed, discuss globalization as a complex phenomenon that is not necessarily leading to convergence and homogeneity but rather is diverse and variable in its effects on social life. They are interested in developing abstract arguments about the philosophical foundations of globalization. To do so they use the jargon and methodology of political science, for example in chapters by John MacLean, Randall Germain, Timothy Sinclair and Barry Jones, and of sociology, for example in a good chapter on culture by Nick Stevenson and one on technology by Michael Talalay. Another chapter on technology, by Ngai-Ling Sum is, unfortunately, written in ‘techno-babble’. I found three essays to be particularly interesting. In chapter 4, Philip Cerny discusses the ‘Competition state’ in an era of economic globalization. He finds that ‘political globalization’ results, which leads to major changes in the role of the state across economic, social and cultural dimensions. In chapter 6, Jonathan Perraton examines the markets versus hierarchies literature in a useful essay that discusses the recent development of business networks and strategic alliances. In chapter 5, Ronen Palan recognizes the importance of trade/regional blocks, or ‘hybrid political giants’ as he calls the EU, NAFTA and APEC. But even this paper reflects the abstract, theoretical, tone of the book, which offers little of practical relevance to the reader. Alan M. Rugman, Templeton College, University of Oxford, UK

Global futures: shaping globalization. Edited by Jan Nederveen Pieterse. London, New York: Zed Books. 2000. 250pp. Index. £49.95. ISBN 1 85649 801 8. Pb.: £15.95. ISBN 1 85649 802 6. ‘People need futures like they need air’, declares the editor in his rousing introduction to this rich volume. Modern visions of progress may be largely discredited, but we still need to anticipate what is to come. Moreover, we still want to shape our futures: with general visions, specific

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proposals, and implementation strategies. If neo-liberalism is on the way to joining socialism in bankruptcy, then we must urgently develop alternative ways to map tomorrows in an increasingly global world. With this inspiration, Jan Nederveen Pieterse has tapped a growing movement for global reform. He has assembled a circle of eminent social thinkers and asked them what the world of 2020 should look like. Global futures presents their visions. In a word, the respondents have in their different ways deconstructed ‘development’ and reconstructed global capitalism. The wide-ranging volume includes contributions from Richard Falk on humane global governance, Jan Pronk on refashioned development cooperation, Louis Emmerij on a global social contract, Hazel Henderson on a global love economy, Howard Wachtel on global taxes, Yoshikazu Sakamoto on civic states, Fantu Cheru on strengthening grass roots associations, Michael Watts on reworking development, Joan Martinez-Alier on environmental justice, Azza Karam on feminisms, Keith Griffin on cultural pluralism in globalization, Mike Featherstone on technologies and global citizenship, and Anthony King on cities. Several themes cut across—and unite—this diversity. The authors agree on the unsustain- ability of neo-liberalism, the need for global regulation, the challenge of interculturality in global management, and the problem of reconstructing democracy and citizenship in a world that is at once local, national, regional and global. As might be expected, some of the authors offer more specific, creative and compelling visions of 2020 than others. However, the chapters are consistently provocative, and as a collection of essays Global futures has no match in the existing literature. Also not surprisingly, given the magnitude of its ambition, the book has some gaps. As the editor acknowledges, issues of the military, the mass media, religion, and indigenous peoples are not addressed. In terms of regional perspectives, no voices are heard from mainland Asia, eastern Europe or Latin America. The gender balance of the contributors is also decidedly skewed. On the other hand, the book achieves a rare degree of inter- if not post-disciplinarity, combining art history, economics, geography, international relations, law, politics and sociology. Global futures also has the great merit of plausibility. The imaginings of 2020 presented between these covers are not only attractive, but also broadly practicable. On the other hand, the case for progressive global futures will not be self-evident to many readers, and the authors could perhaps have given more attention to convincing the sceptics, by more explicitly indicating how and why these reforms are viable. We remain with the challenges of implementation. Nederveen Pieterse directed his contributors to focus on visions and proposals rather than the intricacies of policy processes. However, a full account of reform would need also to assess systematically the political opportunities and obstacles ahead. In addition, we must devise means to ensure that the processes of redirecting globalization are more democratic than the politics of neo-liberalism have been. So there is follow-up work to do. In the meantime Global futures is vital reading for anyone concerned to attain human security, social justice and democracy in the twenty-first century. Jan Aart Scholte, University of Warwick, UK

Inequality, globalization and world politics. Edited by Andrew Hurrell and Ngaire Woods. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1999. 353pp. Index. £40.00. ISBN 0 19 829567 7. Pb.: £15.99. ISBN 0 19 829566 9. There are so many books on globalization that a new one should have something distinctive to say in order to justify its publication. This is especially true of edited collections—there have been dozens of these in the last year or so and most of very uneven or low quality. This edited volume more than justifies its existence and is of a consistently high standard. It focuses on an issue that has been relatively neglected in the globalization literature: the close connection between economic internationalization and the growth of inequality within and between nations. When the issue is dealt with it tends to be addressed in terms that either marginalize inequality or that seek to

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reduce globalization. Economic liberals see inequality as a temporary problem to be managed by appropriate transitional policies of poverty reduction. The liberalization of trade and of domestic economies will promote economic growth and rising incomes in developed and developing countries alike. Social spending in the interim needs to be concentrated on the poorest, with the aim of increasing their effective participation in the formal economy. Anti-globalization protesters favour an end to deregulation, and forms of intervention to change the relationship between North and South such as debt relief, improving the terms of trade for certain com- modities, introducing minimum environmental, labour and social standards, and increased aid. This book is helpful because it sees inequality as a continuing and structural problem and yet does not exhibit the hostility to growing international trade of many anti-globalization protesters. Interconnectedness is not a process that can be reversed. It is also valuable in putting open-ended analysis before instant policy solutions. It covers a wide range of disciplinary and issue areas in assessing inequality: international relations, international law and the issue of sovereignty, gender inequality and international human rights law, the effects of economic liberalization on inequality, the views of the institutions of global governance on how to manage social policy in an integrating world, the regionalization of economic activity, the environmental dimension of inequality, the security agenda, and justifications for challenging inequality at the international level. The contributors are recognized experts in their fields and in each area the treatment is based on a careful assessment of the evidence and an extensive critical review of the literature. The editors have done a good job of integrating the collection but have not attempted to impose a single reform agenda. The implications of the book are, however, clear. First, that the various inequalities are on such a scale that they will not disappear by normal economic process alone, indeed, those processes will exacerbate them. Second, that strategies for the governance of these major world problems, including poverty and environmental degradation, have to recognize that while the OECD countries have the material and organizational resources, this inequality cannot be avoided, but that the less developed countries need to be full participants in the relevant institutions if they are to be legitimate and thus effective. The book can be read by non-experts and is written without jargon. Paul Hirst, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

Politics and globalisation: knowledge, ethics and agency. Edited by Martin Shaw. London, New York: Routledge. 1999. 225pp. Index. £55.00. ISBN 0 415 20698 7. Politics and globalisation offers a collection of essays by current and former lecturers and researchers at the University of Sussex that reviews a range of issues associated with contemporary globalization. The character and extent of contemporary globalization is debated by Jan Aart Scholte and Michael Nicholson. The role and significance of state economies and of regional phenomena like the European Union are reviewed by Angus Cameron and Ronen Palan, and by Francis McGowan and Paul Taggart. Social movements and ‘civil society’ are considered by Neil Stammers and Zdeneck Kavan. The ethical issues raised, or highlighted, by globalization are discussed in depth by Christine van den Anker and Fiona Robinson. Martin Shaw himself proposes that a new political condition of ‘globality’, wider and more profound than the more mechanical notion of globalization, now characterizes the world system. Methodological discussions of contemporary globalization, of a quite differing character, are also offered by Stephanie Hoopes, from a ‘political science’ viewpoint, and by John Maclean, from his characteristically radical and scholarly perspective. Martin Shaw introduces Politics and globalisation with the admission that the set of essays is intended to reveal the intellectual differences among the contributors to the volume; an admission that is fully warranted by the diversity displayed in the constituent essays. Much of this diversity is, in Shaw’s view, the product of the differences in the disciplinary backgrounds of the contributors: the ‘political science’ experience of those from mainstream political studies contrasting with those

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whose recent experience has been within the more critical (and eclectic) sub-discipline of International Relations. However, the diversity of the views revealed in these essays reflects deeper, and more problematical, sources than those admitted by some of the contributors. The problem with contemporary globalization, of ‘globality’ or, indeed, of any other condition or development that is supposed to bear transformational implications for the world, is that such conditions and developments have been notoriously difficult to define and elusive of unambiguous empirical identification. It is for such reasons that Michael Nicholson’s chapter rehearses the wide range of doubts about the novelty or transformational character of the supposed sources (evidence) of globalization, Stephanie Hoopes contends that the future of globalization is far from predetermined and John Maclean, in his distinctively elaborate manner, challenges any easy assumptions about the automatically benign prospects for global social movements or ‘global civil society’. Such arguments counter the assertions of strong globalization theorists, like Jan Aart Scholte, that an essentially ad hoc list of contemporary conditions, from the number of television receivers to the annual levels of airline flights, demonstrates the deterritorialization of contemporary life that is, in his view, the essence of transformational globalization. They also challenge, more fundamentally, any assertions about the future based upon simple extrapolations from apparent contemporary trends. While it is impossible to define globalization satisfactorily without specify- ing unambiguous empirical indicators for its existence, expectations about future developments have to be based upon wider, and more complex, analytical foundations. R. J. Barry Jones, Department of Politics, University of Reading, UK

Globalization on trial: the human condition and the information civilization. By Farhang Rajaee. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press/Ottawa, ON: International Develop- ment Research Centre. 2000. 149pp. Index. Pb.: $16.95. ISBN 1 56549 111 4. The term ‘globalization’ is very much in vogue at the moment, but although deployed by journalists, diplomats and academics in an attempt to explain a diverse range of events, its meaning still remains vague and contested. Hence there is a pressing need for a clear and concise book that offers a summation of the academic arguments surrounding globalization and a critical assessment of their veracity. Farhang Rajaee has set out to provide such a book and ambitiously to defend globalization from its sterner critics. He is partially successful in the first of these aims but not in the second. The strongest part of Rajaee’s book is where he assesses the main approaches to globalization. By placing the emphasis on the conceptual and philosophic underpinnings of the current debate he goes some way to countering the overly economistic approach that dominates the debate. By calling for an interdisciplinary approach he widens his focus to include authors who have previously been overlooked. But it is when Rajaee moves on to develop his own analysis of globalization that the book tends to lose its clarity. Rajaee’s own argument has three main themes. For him the rise of globalization marks a radical departure in international relations. The cause of this dramatic transformation is a global change in the means of production. The industrial age has been superseded by the information civilization. In this new civilization, knowledge is the main commodity. As the use of the internet spreads across the world, information becomes available to anyone with a basic knowledge of computing. Rajaee believes this will lead to a greater pluralism as ‘information technology is much more value free than industry and modernity’. The immediate effect of this plurality of information is the emergence of new classes and groups with new loyalties. Sovereignty is no longer the overriding feature of international relations with the importance of geographic borders belonging to the previous Westphalian age. Third and most boldly, Rajaee argues that whereas the industrial age was philosophically dependent on a specifically ‘western narrative of modernity’, the information civilization allows for a plurality of views to flourish, a ‘multi- narrative’ of ‘one civilization—many civilizations’. Rajaee believes that non-Western norms and

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multicultural tolerance are set to replace a Eurocentric view of the world: ‘globalization has shaken the meta-narrative of modernity, allowing people to take diverse paths to the truth’. Rajaee’s optimistic prognosis is to be commended but the base it rests upon is open to wide- ranging criticism. To describe the coming of the information age as a watershed is to overlook the dynamics that drive it. Rajaee claims internet technology is ‘accessible to anyone visiting the nearest public library’, ignoring the fact that crushing social depravation bar the majority of the world’s population from sharing in the information civilization he promotes as universal. Second, the ‘value free’ information technology of which Rajaee speaks has been the tool through which the values of western consumerism and the liberal individualism of laissez-faire economics have been imposed on the rest of the world, an irony that seems to have escaped the author. Finally, Rajaee’s own conclusions, calling for a global polis based on non-governmental organizations and civil society, far from carrying the pluralistic originality that the author claims, look very much like the liberal internationalism dominant in current debates in international relations with their heritage going back to Kant and the thinkers of the eurocentric Enlightenment. Toby Dodge, Associate Fellow, Middle East Programme, Royal Institute of International Affairs, UK

The free trade adventure: the WTO, the Uruguay Round and globalism: a critique. By Graham Dunkley. London, New York: Zed Books. 2000. 338pp. £45.00. ISBN 1 85649 768 2. Pb.: £15.95. ISBN 1 85649 769 0. Trade policy long conducted in secret, away from popular scrutiny, has increasingly in the past decade become a more visible aspect of international economic relations. If the so-called Battle of Seattle brought the world trading system onto the breakfast table, and into the living rooms, of millions of people worldwide, it was but the latest instance in the higher public profile accorded to trade negotiations since the launch of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations in 1986. Graham Dunkley’s book is a response, and important contribution, to the debate on the future of the world trading system. In a lucid, thoughtful and at times provocative monograph Dunkley dissects the key arguments of the proponents of trade liberalization, re-examines alternative views, and proposes his own solutions to reconciling trade with social and political goals. First published by Melbourne University Press in 1997, The free trade adventure is now republished with a postscript. It is one of the key strengths of the text that the original analysis was sufficiently sophisticated and robust to withstand the passage of time. In other words, this book is not a superficial engagement with current affairs but rather presents a critical analysis of world trade and trade theories. At the heart of Dunkley’s analysis is a holistic approach to trade, and a consequent refusal to focus solely on economic issues. He rejects the conventional focus on economic efficiency in which politics is either neglected or considered as external to the central analysis. Instead his approach integrates economic, political, social and cultural factors. Moreover, he demonstrates that the intellectual rationale for free trade is itself part of the practice of trade policy. The first part of the book provides an historical account of the origins of the post-Second World War world trading system. It provides a succinct analysis of the origins and evolution of the GATT system. It assesses the shortcomings of GATT, the rise of regionalism, the launch of the Uruguay Round and provides a summary of the main Uruguay Round Agreements. The second part of the book develops a critique of the World Trade Organization and post-Uruguay Round world trading system. In this section Dunkley focuses on two issues. First, he explores the costs and benefits of the Uruguay Round Agreements and provides sufficient evidence to induce, at least, scepticism concerning the benefits of further trade liberalization. Second, he examines alternatives to free trade—managed trade, fair trade and self-reliance—and argues in support of a managed trade strategy that incorporates socially progressive and ecological goals. With its careful attention to the theoretical and empirical literature, emphasis on the normative dimension and the role of ideas in policy formation, and discussion of alternative strategies, this book should be required reading for all those with an interest in trade policy. It is an excellent corrective to the often simplistic arguments of proponents and opponents of trade liberalization. Marc Williams, University of New South Wales, Australia

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The return of depression economics. By Paul Krugman. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press. 1999. 176pp. Index. £16.99. ISBN 0 7139 9389 8. Pb.: (Penguin Books) £8.99. ISBN 0 14 028685 3. Barely three years have passed since Thailand devalued its currency in July 1997. In the intervening period, we have seen financial meltdown, recession, political turmoil and recovery across Asia, currency devaluations in Russia and Brazil, and marked stock market wobbles in America and Europe, especially with regard to so-called hi-tech stocks. Yet, like the calm following a storm, the first year of the new millennium has dawned as a tranquil sea with few storms on the horizon. In his most recent book, Paul Krugman usefully reminds us that such tranquillity can be deceptive. His basic point is simple: we forget the lessons of the past three years at our peril. Most important from his point of view is the worrying return of an intellectual orthodoxy which he identifies as ‘depression economics’, namely the belief that what occurs on the demand side of the economy (the actual amounts we spend, invest and consume) can be ignored in favour of a fixation with the supply side (the broad structure of the market that channels our spending, investing and consuming into certain kinds of activities). As he remarks in the introduction, ‘To visit Japan today is to understand how Keynes must have felt. What foolish things sober men say and do in the name of sound policy!’ The return of depression economics explores how we have come to view and understand the economic significance of the Asian financial crisis. Krugman sees it as the second part of a three- act play. Act 1 was Mexico and the tequila crisis. Here his argument is that we simply learned the wrong lessons from that experience; above all, we failed to understand just how lucky Washington and Mexico were in 1995. Act 2 was Asia, and the wrong lessons learned in Latin America were amplified here. Crucially, we have refused to acknowledge the reality that confidence in economies (and governments) runs along very different tracks for mature industrialized countries versus what Krugman calls Third World countries. It is this reality that, when combined with the perverse policy response of Asian governments to the crisis—raising interest rates and cutting expenditures, i.e. ‘depression economics’—resulted in economic meltdown. The confidence problem in Third World economies makes them extremely vulnerable to self- fulfilling panics, and it is this lesson which must be learned if we are to avoid a repeat of the past three years. But how do we make the world safe from self-fulfilling panics? Krugman’s preferred course of action is to return to Keynes’s focus on the demand side of the economy. It is only by increasing spending and lowering interest rates that we can avoid inflicting unnecessary suffering on people who through no fault of their own experience recession. Yet, this option still leaves the mechanisms of self-fulfilling panics in place. Like most of his professional counterparts, Krugman is reluctant to interfere with the free flow of capital beyond applying a version of the Tobin tax. The deeper questions revealed by the Asian crisis, however, demand precisely that we rethink the role of capital mobility in today’s world, and that we more honestly assess the distribution of costs and benefits that accompany it. The return of depression economics is a frightening prospect. Krugman’s book, by making us aware of this prospect, helps to resist such tortured thinking. At the same time, it would have been helpful if he had also acknowledged that the very mechanisms which made the Asian crisis possible are the same ones which nearly all economists covet in some form or fashion, and until we begin to question their more malevolent tendencies, our search for a stable, vibrant and fair wealth-producing system must continue. Randall Germain, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales

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Energy and environment

Blueprint for a sustainable economy. By David Pearce and Edward B. Barbier. London: Earthscan. 2000. 273pp. Index. Pb.: £12.95. ISBN 1 85383 513 3. Just over a decade ago, David Pearce, Anil Markandya and Ed Barbier published Blueprint for a green economy, a slim paperback volume setting out what was subsequently hailed as an agenda not only for a new type of economics but for a new relationship between the economy, government policy and the environment. The authors of that seminal volume have always been the first to note that much of the contents of what became known as Blueprint 1 (on account of the series of six further volumes it spawned) was already known within that ‘new’ discipline of environmental economics. But it was the dissemination and awareness–raising effect of the book that was its great impact; helping to define, rather than simply to influence, UK environmental policy over the past ten years. Now, at the start of a century that seems destined to witness the greatest environmental upheavals in human history, Pearce and Barbier have returned to the basic themes that underlie Blueprint 1 to produce a book which, in almost all respects, is better than the original. In comparison with its predecessor, the present volume covers a wider remit of material and in greater depth throughout. Updated discussions of methods for the monetary valuation of environmental preferences and the practical implementation of cost–benefit analysis (CBA) are presented, with the latter encompassing an excellent review of CBA practice in the UK to date. While Blueprint 1 does consider environmental accounting, the present volume greatly extends this with two chapters on the measurement of sustainable development. Similar extended treatment is given to the issue of addressing environmental problems. The present book also contains a variety of new topics ranging from vital real-world issues such as the relationship of business and the environment to the more academic question of whether ‘ecological economics’ constitutes a paradigm distinct from that of economics applied to the environment (Pearce and Barbier emphatically reject such a notion, arguing instead that ecological economics is instead a synthesis of approaches for addressing complex environment–economy interactions). The only omission from the contents of the original volume is any in-depth discussion of discounting; an omission that is surprising given Pearce’s important work in this area. One general and particularly pleasing aspect of the book is the way in which the project appraisal, microeconomic and developed world focus of Blueprint 1 has now been augmented with a broad sweep of policy appraisal, macroeconomic and developing world material. The entire discussion is supported throughout by a plethora of up-to-date examples gleaned from an extensive knowledge of both conventional publications and more inaccessible grey literature (a characteristic trait of the Blueprint series). Such qualities mean that the book provides the ideal introduction to environmental economics for the policy community, for those in other disciplines and for economics undergraduates first encountering the subject. The book is not without its faults (although these are relatively minor). Certain topics suffer somewhat from being spread across (often not consecutive) chapters, for example: valuation (chs 1 and 3); environmental Kuznets curves (chs 2 and 6); trade (chs 6 and 7); and ecological economics (chs 2 and 10 with identical quotes in both). Conversely other fascinating issues could fruitfully have been given more than a brief mention (e.g. non-anthropocentric, intrinsic values; transformation effects). Furthermore, the style slips on several occasions into a list format, although whether this is considered undesirable will depend upon the individual reader. However, all of these minor failings are both understandable, given the volume and complex interrelationship of material presented, and entirely excusable when compared to the overall exceptional quality of the book. At every point the writing style is clear, concise and eminently accessible. These are not qualities for which economics texts are renowned and the authors are to be congratulated on maintaining such high standards throughout. In returning to the themes and issues which underpinned Blueprint 1, Pearce and Barbier have produced a successor worthy of the acclaim that greeted their original volume. If this acclaim

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turns out to be relatively muted it will only be as a result of the greater awareness of environment–economy issues that their original volume engendered. Ian J. Bateman, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, UK

Science and politics in international environmental regimes: between integrity and involvement. By Steinar Andresen, Tora Skodvin, Arild Underdal and Jorgen Wettestad. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2000. 221pp. Index. £40.00. ISBN 0 7190 5806 6. International environmental issues are typically characterized by a complex relationship between science and politics. Without science it would be difficult to identify or evaluate environmental problems such as climate change or ozone depletion, let alone design policy solutions for them. Yet problems arise when science enters the political arena. Not least, policy cannot simply be derived from knowledge; research findings have to be interpreted by policy-makers to make them meaningful and practical. However, once scientific knowledge is exposed to the political fray it is vulnerable to manipulation by conflicting interests, whether corporate, consumer or environmentalist. How governments manage the tension between science and politics is critical to the way they respond to contemporary environmental challenges. This book is concerned with the process by which research-based scientific knowledge is utilized as an input for international environmental policy; specifically, it examines the role of institutional arrangements in organizing the science–politics dialogue. The authors use a research model which hypothesizes that the extent to which research findings are adopted by policy- makers (the dependent variable) will be influenced by the autonomy and integrity of a particular network of scientists, and the responsiveness and involvement of that scientific community in addressing the concerns of policy-makers (independent variables)—with the state of scientific knowledge, the political malignancy of a problem and its public saliency identified as control variables. This model is applied to five case-studies of environmental regimes: whaling; land- based marine pollution; the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution; ozone depletion; and climate change. The final chapter offers some comparative conclusions, supple- menting the qualitative analysis of the case-studies with some rudimentary quantitative pattern- tracing—although I did not find the latter approach offered much added value. Whether or not one agrees with the particular approach adopted here, the overall presentation, particularly the discussion of research questions, assumptions and methods in the opening chapter, provides a fine model from which any research student can read and learn. The main study generates some interesting conclusions. The two institutional dimensions— autonomy/integrity and responsiveness/involvement—have been largely insignificant in determining the degree of utilization of scientific knowledge; by contrast, the state of scientific knowledge has provided an important basis for making informed policy decisions. Governments rarely explicitly dispute a strong scientific consensus and usually make some kind of collective policy response. Indeed, governments have taken collective action without conclusive evidence about (the amount of) environmental damage, as in the whaling, climate change and marine pollution regimes. While science has generally provided warnings that have spurred governments to introduce protective measures, recent scientific evidence has actually weakened the case for a complete moratorium on commercial whaling. This book was clearly a long time in gestation. The case-studies stop in 1997, missing out important recent developments in whaling and climate change, and there is almost no reference to regime literature published since 1995. Consequently, I did not learn much new from the empirical material and I was surprised that the analysis did not engage explicitly with contemporary debates about epistemic communities. Nonetheless, this book is an essential addition to any reading list on international environmental politics. Neil Carter, University of York, UK

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Environmental change and security: a European perspective. Edited by Alexander Carius and Kurt M. Lietzmann. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. 1999. 322pp. Index. DM 129.00/ £44.50. ISBN 3 540 66179 4. Traditionally, scholars of international relations have interpreted the term ‘security’ in terms of the protection of the sovereign state against external (chiefly military) threats. During the Cold War the military threats to peace were, of course, potentially calamitous, but they were at least generally well understood, relatively discrete and amenable to conflict resolution mechanisms. As the Cold War subsided, attention turned to non-military threats such as environmental degradation, poverty and population change. The need for a new, expanded notion of security was given prominence by the 1987 UN report on sustainable development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland. Since then, the linked notions of environmental security and conflict have generated a substantial literature linking the natural and social sciences in a potentially highly interdisciplinary endeavour. This book, which is the product of an interdisciplinary conference of academics and policy- makers held in Germany in 1997, powerfully confirms that environmental factors do precipitate conflict, but warns that the chains of causation are often so complex that making even simple predictions and policy interventions is fraught with difficulty. This is because the impact of natural resource shortages on societies is rarely direct or unicausal. There are many diffuse, location specific human factors such as patterns of migration, poverty and population change that need to be factored into policy-making. The chapters are divided into five main parts. The first surveys the existing literature and identifies future research challenges. The second describes various approaches to characterizing and defining environmental security within different disciplines. Part 3 is devoted to exploring the methodological problems associated with modelling environmental threats to security. The two remaining parts discuss some of the institutional implications raised by the environmental security literature and recommend some concrete policy responses. The chapters themselves range from the highly specific to the panoramic, though even the most focused lack detailed case-study examples of environmental conflict. That the book fails to reach any clear conclusions about the driving forces of, or preferred policy responses to, environmental security concerns, probably reflects the relative immaturity of this particular field of research. However, two themes do resonate through many of the chapters in this rich and wide-ranging book. The first is that environmental security is not a faddish concern; environmental stresses do constitute a serious, though often indirect, threat to security both at the intra- and the interstate level, and should be treated as such. Moreover, they pose huge challenges for existing institutions such as NATO and the European Union, which were established to address the traditional security agenda. Many authors argue that the paucity of clear causal relationships between the main variables is a reason to expand research rather than to dismiss the whole literature as voguish and unspecific. Second, there is a desperate need for more qualitative, bottom-up assessments of environmental conflict to supplement the expanding corpus of larger scale, quantitative assessments. This means bringing together different disciplinary conceptions of security to supplement and enrich those normally employed within international relations. Environmental insecurity may manifest itself as interstate conflict, but its roots reach deep into the fabric of society and its social institutions. Andrew Jordan, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, UK

Endangered species, threatened convention: the past, present and future of CITES. Edited by Jon Hutton and Barnabas Dickson. London: Earthscan. 2000. 202pp. Index. Pb: £14.95. ISBN 1 85383 636 2. Racy title aside, this series of essays accurately captures the functional logic of the ‘wise use’ school of wildlife management and critiques the conservatism of the UN Convention on International

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Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES). The Convention itself is hardly threatened; there are more species subject to trade controls than ever before. This is, however, not necessarily a good sign. The book argues that, in the absence of effective mechanisms to address fundamental problems like habitat destruction, the international community has overcompensated by using CITES to strangle progressively the wildlife trade. Although a cheap way to gain green credentials, this approach may be misguided: if wildlife is denied a value in the marketplace, there is little opportunity cost in elimination of its habitat. Animals and plants must therefore pay their way. Several chapters demonstrate that CITES’ greatest successes come from harnessing these markets to generate income for species protection. For example, sustainable leather supplies from ranching crocodiles eliminated poaching from wild populations. Sport hunting quotas for leopards turned the animals from a livestock-eating liability into an asset. However, the various authors are less apt to dwell on how this pro-trade logic also led to some of CITES’ greatest embarrassments. In the 1980s, an institutionally entrenched dogma of a sustainable ivory trade aided widespread laundering of contraband and halved African elephant populations: when international trade was banned, poaching quickly declined. Thus, the book skirts around the obvious role that trade restrictions can play, when properly enforced, in providing heavily exploited species with breathing space to recover before limited trade can recommence. A good example is the South American vicuña—a sustainable use success story that is unaccountably missed out of the book. The vicuña also embodies a warning: when trade ‘liberalization’ went too far, poaching increased again. Similarly, Michael t’ Sas Rolfe’s contribution on the rhino over- looks the links between the United States’ unilateral decision to punish several consuming states for non-compliance with CITES’ enforcement provisions and the sudden stabilization of populations worldwide. Despite this general reservation, there are a number of valuable essays. Barnabas Dickson illustrates how the Convention’s formulation of the precautionary principle restricts innovative management. Timothy Swanson notes the significant gap between the international support that the Convention provides for species listed in Appendix I (commercial trade banned) and Appendix II (commercial trade allowed). His discussion of how to go beyond simply switching the Convention on and off to a more mediated ‘conditional exchange’ is an important template for future institutional developments. Jon Hutton compares EU and US attempts to establish that mediation while Simon Metcalfe looks at the role of communal property rights in such regimes. Robert Jenkins examines how the Convention’s Significant Trade Process may also help bridge these extremes. However, it is left to the reader to weld these contributions into a coherent whole. Alternatively, other contributions, such as Marshall Murphree’s essay on the Mahenye tribe’s experiences of community management in Zimbabwe, turn out to have very little to do with CITES. This disorganized approach, ironically, parallels CITES itself. Different actors satisfy their own immediate needs at the expense of the bigger picture. ‘To trade or not to trade’ an endangered species involves difficult trade-offs: if Southern Africa, for example, chooses to trade in ivory, the international community risks allowing laundering of contraband poached from less well- protected populations. Alternatively, if the region’s right to trade is rejected, it feels it is being denied the benefits of its comparatively high investment in elephant management and protection because of the failings of others. Hutton and Dickson’s book is hardly a decisive aid in navigating through such policy minefields, not least due to a marked absence of hard data and an over- reliance on Zimbabwean case-studies; however, it remains an interesting and provocative contribution to the continuing debate. Gavin Hayman, Associate Fellow, Energy and Environment Programme, Royal Institute of International Affairs, UK

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Intellectual property rights, trade and biodiversity. By Graham Dutfield. London: Earthscan. 2000. 238pp. Index. £35.00. ISBN 1 85383 692 3. Graham Dutfield is to be congratulated on this exposition of the issues around the ownership and control of plant genetic resources—the seeds, trees and plants that are the basis of agriculture and many medicines—in a globalizing market. The extension of patents to living organisms is perhaps one of the most contentious and complex issues in the debate about whether trade contributes to environmental sustainability or undermines it. Nowhere was this debate brought more forcefully to the public’s attention than at the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) third Ministerial meeting in Seattle in November last year. However, the interactions between globalization and sustainable social, economic and environmental development are not simple and the debate has become very polarized. Dutfield’s book is therefore a very welcome attempt to set out clearly and concisely the international agreements, issues and actors involved in the increased commodi- fication of knowledge about natural organisms and the sustainable use of those resources. He does this through chapters covering the agreements that relate to biodiversity conservation and trade, how they interact, the impacts of intellectual property rights (IPRs) on biodiversity conservation, the alternatives to IPRs and their feasibility, and the considerable number of international institutions involved in biodiversity related agreements. The issue of conflict or compatibility between the two main international agreements on biodiversity and trade, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the WTO Trade Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement, specifically article 27.3b that relates to living organisms, has been a key issue in the debate. The US and EU stance is that there is no conflict between the obligations of the TRIPs agreement to afford IPR protection to biodiversity-related products and the benefit-sharing and sustainable use objectives of the CBD. Many Southern governments and NGOs involved in the debate see the awarding of private property rights as benefiting Northern corporations and failing to recognize the community-held knowledge that is the basis of the use of the biodiversity in the first place. Dutfield gives a clear account of the complexities of the agreements, highlighting how article 27.3b of TRIPS does currently give countries some flexibility on what kind of IPR it must apply to biodiversity related products, but cautions that the continuing review of the agreement in the WTO could close down this option. Given the high cost of filing a patent, the legal costs involved in challenging patents through the legal system and the need to develop enforcement mechanisms, Dutfield questions if it is indeed in the interests of developing countries to extend patents to agricultural and medicinal plants. A number of case-studies, including one on Basmati rice and one on the native Indian neem tree, illustrate how Northern corporations are patenting the genetic resources of developing countries with little or no benefit for the country from which the resources originated. Overall, Dutfield makes a strong case for revising the thinking around the role of IPRs for biodiversity related products, while avoiding the polemics of the debate. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in, or confused by, the debate on patents on life. Laura Kelly, ACTIONAID, London, UK

Ecology, politics and violent conflict. Edited by Mohamed Suliman. London, New York: Zed Books. 1999. 298pp. Index. £45.00. ISBN 1 85649 601 5. Conflict is by no means easy to define. In one society the same degree of conflict may be observable or latent. Conflict may manifest itself in war or terrorism, or distrust and non- cooperation. Criminality can be violent or so integrated into culture as to be almost unobservable. So the notion of ‘violent conflict’ is itself culturally framed and historically determined, as well as set in the context of ecological stress and personal insecurity. This series of essays, primarily on Africa, but also containing important contributions on the Balkans and global environmental themes around the fight for common property resources, makes a valuable contribution to this debate. Scarcity and environmental degradation are

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themselves a product of unequal access to commonly shared resources, of ethnic and class divisions, of local military and social hegemonies, of the controlling of power-wielding ‘gatekeepers’, and of a chronic failure in both domestic and international justice systems. In the opening essay, Nick Hildyard points out that scarcity is less common among community-reciprocity regimes, where the products from nature are shared. In fact, even in such circumstances, fairness of treatment can by no means be guaranteed. But we will pass that by. Hildyard’s point is that globalizing markets and the spread of nominal democracies creates both scarcity and micro-level power imbalances, when the economically weak fall prey to the communally powerful. He claims that ‘the deliberate manufacture of scarcity now provides one of the principal means through which powerful state and private interests monopolise resources, control markets and suppress the democratic majority’. Land ownership reform is also a basis for conflict. In Latin America generally, over half of rural families own no land. Their tenure is exceedingly precarious, and their families are forced into a plethora of income sources, much of which is dangerous and violent in itself. Prostitution, drugs, agricultural labouring where there are no controls for personal risk and health, and homes in highly hazardous zones all contribute to movements of resistance and oppression. Again, this book stresses that such conflicts are not the product of ecological stress alone, or of environmental disruption generally. Such circumstances contribute to and widen the basis for conflict. But the roots of conflict exist, i.e. ‘deliberate manipulation of ethnic differences for self-interested political motives, or the contestation of ethnic differences by those, who, for one reason or another, are seeking to resist the imposition of oppressive cultural stereotypes’ (Hildyard, p. 13). This book contains a variety of important case-studies into the convoluted interrelationships between social inequality, democratic failure, unprotected judicial rights, inadequate property rights, and the sources of conflict over environmental mismanagement and critical stress. For students seeking a perspective on the controversial theme of environmental crisis and social injustice, this volume of essays provides a broader perspective than is usually advanced. There is a huge literature on relationships between environmental scarcity and social conflict. Where that literature tries to confine this relationship to a combination of stress and social disruption, it creates a very inadequate perspective. This book helps to redress the balance. Environmental stress is largely a product of conflict, not a creator of it. And the all-important resolution of scarcity requires political and judicial remedies, assisted by development agencies sensitive to sustainability rather than markets. Katrina Rogers leads a final, thoughtful, set of essays around the theme of cooperation. She points out that peace is as much a social construction as conflict, and that the conditions for avoiding conflict are still insufficiently understood or studied. Partly this is a methodological matter. It is always easier to analyse an ‘event’ than a ‘non-event’. So the fact that conflict was never allowed to become an ‘event’ is always a problematic issue for study and prescription. She does indicate how cooperation through competition and enterprise can be harnessed into forces for social good and political democracy by quoting studies that bring local livelihoods into the management of biodiversity, mining, forestry and agriculture. Much has to do with the role of participation in resource management, and the level of commitment of governing agencies and funders to the prospects of success where such inclusionary proceedings are attempted. Here is a way forward and development where poverty and inequality need to be incorporated into sustainability and local empowerment. All this is much easier said than done, especially when most of this helpful book explains why conflict is not so readily definable and its causes may lie deep in social memory, political manipulation and judicial inadequacy. Tim O’Riordan, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, UK

Nuclear entrapment: THORP and the politics of commitment. By William Walker. London: Institute for Public Policy Research. 1999. 162pp. Pb.: £10.95. ISBN 1 86030 097 9. THORP—the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant—is a controversial installation at British Nuclear Fuel’s (BNFL) Sellafield site; it takes in spent nuclear fuel and separates it into uranium,

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plutonium and nuclear waste. The plant was conceived in the 1970s and started operating in the mid-1990s. During that time there were gigantic changes to the world energy scene and to perceptions about the future of nuclear energy. The changes were seen by many as challenging the rationale of THORP. Yet, notwithstanding considerable opposition, lengthy public enquiries, parliamentary debates and judicial reviews, the project continued to go ahead virtually as originally planned, though somewhat delayed. Why? The book looks at this question by analysing the history of the scheme and of the relationships between UK government agencies and the many stakeholders. These, in addition to BNFL, which is in public ownership, included the UK nuclear power producers, the UK public and foreign governments and companies, especially Japan and Germany, who contracted to have spent fuel reprocessed. In addition there were also ‘interested parties’, such as the United States, which takes a stiff anti-reprocessing stance, and countries bordering the Irish and North Sea, which were concerned about radioactive pollution of the sea. The author has succeeded brilliantly in taking the reader through this maze and making the subject understandable to the ‘non-nuclear layman’. His main conclusions are that once firm contracts had been entered into with Japanese and German companies that were endorsed by their governments, the sheer difficulties and embarrassment of requesting renegotiation meant that the project was ‘entrapped’. In contradiction to what was originally said to the public, it was German and Japanese business rather than UK business that drove the project forward. As a result, alternative means of dealing with spent fuel were never seriously considered and the various enquiries concentrated on determining whether THORP should go ahead. There were no attempts to find an optimal solution for dealing with spent fuel. These factors and the fact that, owing to commercial sensitivity, much vital information was not made available to the various investigations, gave the applicants, BNFL, overwhelming advantages and made a charade of the concept of major decisions democratically reached. The author clearly feels that THORP will turn out to be a bad investment for the UK taxpayer and for the foreign organizations involved. Many people and some governments may well agree with that point of view, but there are others who do not, especially governments, such as those of France, Russia, Japan, China and India, who believe that nuclear energy in their country will expand and that reprocessing will become an important part of the nuclear industry. Believers in reprocessing may well feel that THORP could already be seen as a success. Because of a German law making reprocessing obligatory, only repealed in the 1990s, the contracts with BNFL and Cogema of France made construction of German nuclear power plants possible. It also helped Japan to keep to its long-term aim of improving its energy security through a major use of nuclear power. Regarding the UK, it has always been rumoured that BNFL entered into very favourable contracts with their foreign customers. If true, one could see why neither BNFL nor the government is wildly keen to renegotiate. Whatever the truth, the problems outlined by the author raise questions about the efficacy of the present system in the UK for deciding on major controversial schemes. He suggests that there is need for a system that is seen to be neutral to investigate such projects and to provide evidence to enquiries and parliamentary debates; it should also assess whether there could be a better alternative for the country. Furthermore, he proposes that to evade the dangers of entrapment, such a project should be under periodic public review to consider whether or not conditions have changed to the point where the project might no longer be in the national interest. Although such proposals seem rather utopian to this reviewer, they raise important issues that require debate. Capital-intensive and technological projects are risky. Who should set the boundary between the ‘precautionary principle’ and ‘justifiable risk’? Vide the debate about genetically modified crops. Can one really see any major construction project surviving constant public review? How should one define the border between the commercial need for secrecy and the public’s ‘right to know’? Too far in one direction could lead us to stagnation or worse; too far in the other may lead to severe environmental damage.

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This book raises these questions and more. Although dealing with a specialist issue in the field of nuclear energy, the book deserves far wider circulation—and so does the debate about its conclusions. Peter Beck, Associate Fellow, Energy and Environment Programme, Royal Institute of International Affairs, UK

International trade and the Basel Convention. By Jonathan Krueger. London: Earthscan/Royal Institute of International Affairs. 1999. 133pp. Pb.: £14.95. ISBN 1 85383 621 4. The interrelationship between trade liberalization and environmental protection is increasingly important on the international agenda. Jonathan Krueger’s book—an excellent addition to the Chatham House Trade and Environment series—is a major contribution to this debate. It provides a comprehensive, highly readable study on one of the most significant, controversial and to date least studied multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs): the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, which seeks to protect human health and the environment from the negative effects of hazardous wastes and to create a framework for their sound environmental management. Analysing the Basel Convention on its tenth anniversary, Jonathan Krueger addresses a set of issues: What are the Convention’s trade restrictive provisions? Why were they negotiated and how have they evolved? Have they proved effective in achieving their original aims, and how important have they been in achieving the overall objectives of the Convention? Are they compatible with international trade agreements? What are the special concerns of developing countries with respect to the Convention? As background to the debate, Krueger discusses the causes and degree of waste generation, North to South movements and toxic dumping. He gives the special circumstances at the time of negotiations, and presents the implementation procedure, institutional setting and supervisory mechanisms, before he goes on to present the controversial debate on the ‘Basel ban amendment’ (Decision 111/1). The Basel Convention, especially with regard to the ban, is at a crucial point of its development. The Basel regime interacts with the WTO system, especially with respect to wastes with an economic value and recyclable hazardous wastes. Krueger brilliantly examines possible conflicts and compatibility between the two regimes. Starting with the disagreements over the definitions of ‘hazardous’ and ‘waste’ in the Basel context and ‘products’ under WTO law, he points out— after a sound legal discussion—the possible incompatibility between the Basel ban and the multilateral trading system, and argues why a WTO challenge would be undesirable. Krueger concludes that the Basel regime has succeeded in eliminating some of the worst forms of toxic dumping, but also points out that more efforts could be made if the work of the Convention could move away from the almost exclusive focus on the ban. Finally, Jonathan Krueger runs through possible future scenarios for the Basel regime with the ban amendment entering and not entering into force, before he draws general lessons from the Basel experience, which are useful for the continuing debate on the relationship between trade liberalization and environmental protection. The book also has a short appendix, which contains ‘Categories of waste to be controlled under the Basel Convention’ (Annex 1 of the Convention) and a ‘List of hazardous waste characteristics’ (Annex 111 of the Convention). Other data is clearly illustrated throughout the book in figures and tables. Duncan Brack, Head of the Energy and Environment Programme at Chatham House, remarks in his preface to this book ‘I am sure that this volume will make a significant intellectual contribution to the widening debate on trade and the environment’. One cannot disagree. Wilm Scharlemann

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History

Joseph McCarthy: reexamining the life and legacy of America’s most hated senator. By Arthur Herman. New York: The Free Press. 2000. 404pp. Index. £17.99. ISBN 0 684 83625 4. It is the right time for a reappraisal of the role and relevance of the eponymous author of McCarthyism, that miasma of fear and dread that enveloped great tracts of American life in the early 1950s and which had a chilling effect on American liberties for some time beyond. The recently declassified Venona transcripts of decoded signals of Soviet agents and the wealth of material emanating from ex-Soviet intelligence agencies during the past decade now provide an opportunity to establish a more realistic picture of the extent of communist penetration of the American administrative machine. Now it can be said with certainty that there was indeed a serious security problem and that the Truman administration and perhaps at first the Eisenhower administration were rather slow and bureaucratic in dealing with it. More generally, in some (though not all) liberal circles, there had been a terrifying naivety about the nature of the threat. That said, the question arises of whether, in the light of more recent knowledge, Senator Joseph McCarthy was more right than wrong. With the aim of providing perspective Arthur Herman has no difficulty in establishing certain facts. First, communist penetration had occurred and had gone quite far. Second, Joseph McCarthy was not the first populist politician to exploit and exacerbate the panicky atmosphere that existed; there had already, for example, been Martin Dies. Third, with Herman Welker, William Jenner and ‘Molly’ Malone around, McCarthy was by no means the most obtuse or crass senator in the witch-hunting business. And fourth, the weapons used so ruthlessly by McCarthy to chastize and to break his liberal opponents were characteristically weapons whose use had previously been exploited by liberals. It was, indeed, as the author shows, rather preposterous for a liberal campaigning journalist such as Drew Pearson to reproach McCarthy for his resort to guilt by association. Herman had, therefore, a great opportunity to pronounce a proportionate historical verdict on the man who so brought America into disrepute by employing his undoubted charisma to create a reign of terror in branches of its government and beyond. But, although he has done some useful research and some of his judgements make sense, the tone of the book is unfortunate. It is not exactly that Herman whitewashes McCarthy. He says that he chose some poor targets, as well as making terrible mistakes over picking his staff, especially in the case of the two ‘Keystone cops’, Cohn and Schine. But the author is far too much concerned to lean against the liberal wind and to exaggerate every argument in mitigation of his subject’s behaviour to earn the reader’s trust as an impartial chronicler. However, that said, Herman describes quite well the high drama and low farce of McCarthy’s denouement as lord of misrule, when he attempted to strengthen the army by wrecking its morale. Through hectoring and bullyraging a much decorated general (and one who, in addition, came from McCarthy’s own state, illustrating how the latter could never play by the Senate’s unspoken rules), he provoked the enmity of the Pentagon, a much more formidable opponent than the Department of State. There followed a sequence of events at the end of which he was formally censured by the Senate itself. In that process no one behaved well. Senator McCarthy, with his celebrated ‘points of order’, of course did not. But the army secretary gave an invertebrate impression in the witness chair; McCarthy’s notorious counsel Roy Cohn, for once having to answer questions instead of asking them, repeatedly fell back on a failing memory (p. 273); the temporary chairman, Senator Mundt, was rightly described in the press as ‘a deflated mushroom’; the popular hero of the hour, Joseph Welch, the army’s counsel, would have strained the patience of a saint with his outrageous clowning around until he finally provoked McCarthy into making the attack on Welch’s youth- ful assistant that finished that senator with the public; and the white knight from Vermont who moved the eventual motion of censure, Senator Ralph Flanders, contrived to make a speech that was both anti-semitic and homophobic.

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After the Senate had voted to censure Joseph McCarthy, the senator continued issuing threats, but anyone who looked closely at his rapidly yellowing face could tell he was finished. Herman, having buried his anti-hero, tries to relate everything that has happened since, especially victory in the Cold War, to McCarthy’s career. That does not really work because, as he has already had to acknowledge in one hasty and grudging paragraph (pp. 143–4), members of the Eastern establishment against whom he rails created in the McCarthy years the means by which that victory was achieved. Keith Kyle

Mitterrand: une histoire de Français. Tome 1: Les risques de l’escalade. By Jean Lacouture. Paris: Seuil. 1999. 439pp. FF135.00. ISBN 2 02 030738 3. Mitterrand: une histoire de Français. Tome 2: Les vertiges du sommet. By Jean Lacouture. Paris: Seuil. 1999. 626pp. FF149.00. ISBN 2 02 0358167 6. François Mitterrand, a prominent politician during the French Fourth Republic and the longest serving president of the Fifth Republic, was widely regarded with a mixture of respect and suspicion on account of his reputation for manipulation and intrigue. The Florentine, François Mauriac called him, in a not unfriendly allusion to his machiavellian qualities. By the time he left the Elysée palace in 1995, nearly eighty years old, severely ill and surrounded by scandal, he had become the object of pity and, for not a few, disdain. Until now, most writers have chosen to dwell on the darker aspects of his life. It is therefore a relief to have Jean Lacouture’s thousand-page biography, the first serious attempt at a balanced account of his rise to power and half-century in politics. Born in 1916, the fifth child of a small manufacturer in the Charente, Mitterrand was recognizably a member of the Catholic provincial bourgeoisie. As a child he was sent to live with relatives on account of ill heath, then at the age of ten to a Catholic boarding-school in Angoulême. He did not rebel but thrived on each successive challenge. At college he read widely if eclectically the leading contemporary writers including Valéry, Claudel, Martin du Gard, Benda, Gide and Mauriac, whose work complemented the values of Le Sillon, the Catholic social movement to which he was introduced by his older brother. The significance of this is that it undercuts later claims that as a student he sided with the extreme right-wing Croix-de-Feu that embodied the outlook of the royalist reactionary Charles Maurras, or worse, with the criminal thugs of the Cagoule. It also goes far to remove the impression of a man without intellectual moorings, drifting into socialism late in life merely in order to further his career. Although usually remembered now as a semi-monarchical figure at the centre of his presidential court, Mitterrand’s early adulthood was nothing if not eventful. In May 1940 as an infantry sergeant he saw action on the Western front, was wounded, captured, led two escape attempts from prison camp deep in Germany, reached Metz on his second attempt, was recaptured, escaped again and in December 1941 regained French-controlled territory. In the spring of 1942 he joined Vichy’s office for returned war prisoners, but began working for the Resistance as early as December 1942. In July 1943 he made a daring public denunciation of collaboration in German-controlled Paris, then went underground to emerge in 1944 as leader of an effective Resistance organization. Having engaged in clandestine journalism, he became editor of a minor Paris daily while continuing to write, an activity in which he distinguished himself, authoring half a dozen books. He helped form a political party, the Union Démocratique Socialiste des Résistants, became deputé for the Nièvre, and in February 1947 joined the Ramadier government. At barely thirty, he was the youngest minister since the Second Empire. Subsequently he held a succession of ministerial posts including Overseas Territories, Interior and Justice, and would likely have become Prime Minister but for the crisis in 1958 that brought down the Fourth Republic. The result was to put parliamentarians like Mitterrand once again under the shadow of de Gaulle, who dominated the first ten years of the Fifth Republic. Mitterrand, however, became de Gaulle’s one serious challenger, standing against him for the

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presidency in 1965, and in 1971 he succeeded in re-founding the Socialist movement with the Communists effectively constrained to follow his lead, a feat comparable to almost anything de Gaulle accomplished. The elections of 1981, which brought Mitterrand and the Socialist–Communist coalition to power, evoked memories of 1924 and 1936, when the left had gained office intending to transform the country. Lacouture describes Mitterrand, newly installed in the Elysée, with no programme of his own, but convinced of the Socialists’ right to attempt a democratic revolution and supporting those ministers willing to apply radical policies. Unlike, say, Ramsay MacDonald or more recently Tony Blair, he steered the ship out of the harbour of liberal capitalism and held course into the storm as long as possible. Forced to change tack, he then pursued a stronger Europe, by reviving the Franco-German axis. As Lacouture points out, this was no whim either. Mitterrand had attended the founding European congress at The Hague in 1948, and indeed his interest in Franco-German rapprochement can be traced back to the writers he admired before the war, almost all of whom favoured rapprochement at least until 1933. On an official visit to Germany he caused consternation by seeking to meet the soldier–writer Ernst Jünger. To the Bundestag and privately with Helmut Köhl he spoke of the recent wars as a tragedy befalling their two peoples rather than as a conflict between them. He was the most germanophile of modern French statesmen, and if he is remembered for his initial opposition to German unification in 1990, this should not obscure his remarkably effective management of the Franco-German relations before and afterwards. Mitterrand the statesman was also a Gaullist, despite his evident impatience to emerge from the General’s shadow. He vigorously asserted France’s interests abroad, while joining the United States in the Gulf war and in the Balkans. As Lacouture points out, it is doubtful that he gained much from pursuing a global role, any more than did de Gaulle, but it prompted him to seek a stronger European Union and to drive through the Maastricht Treaty in face of an apprehensive French public. In the latter part of his second presidential term, Mitterrand became increasingly prone to attack by, among other things, openly associating with René Bousquet, the Vichy official responsible for the mass arrest of Jews in Paris, and with other individuals whose personal or financial affairs did not bear close scrutiny. This, however, coincided with his advancing illness, which preoccupied and enfeebled him. Notwithstanding this doleful ending, Lacouture makes a convincing case for placing Mitterrand in the first rank of modern French statesmen, below de Gaulle but rivalled only by Clemenceau in his range of accomplishments. He bequeathed Lionel Jospin a vigorous Socialist party, normalized the alternation of government, sustained French influence in Europe, and in doubling the share of the national budget for culture directed the pursuit of grandeur to what France does best. Lacouture has effectively used his direct access to much of the postwar French establishment including Mitterrand himself. Until the private Mitterrand archives are opened—to date a matter of utter obscurity—this elegantly written, provocative and eminently fair biography is unlikely to be surpassed. Robert Boyce, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

E. H. Carr: a critical appraisal. Edited by Michael Cox. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 2000. 316pp. Index. £45.00. ISBN 0 333 72066 0. ‘I reacted more and more sharply against the western ideology, but still from a point somehow within it’. So wrote Carr in his autobiographical sketch referring to his work in Riga during the early years of the Russian revolution. The phrase also captures Carr’s position in western scholarship throughout his career. Although he had impeccable establishment credentials (Cambridge in classics, the Foreign Office, and sometime editorial writer for The Times), he was by nature a dissident and ultimately was treated as such by those who embraced the orthodoxies of the moment. As an historian he learned to doubt affirmations of absolute truth. This made him unpopular in times when belief in the absolute evil of any enemy became a criterion of acceptability. Like Keynes, he was critical of the Versailles settlement. He saw capitalism as

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incapable of dealing with the social and economic problems of the interwar period. Like George Orwell, he was alienated by the Manichean mode of thought generated during the Second World War and perpetuated during the Cold War, the same mode of thought that has been revived recently in the war over Kosovo. Two towering intellects represent the contradictory polarities in British political thought during the mid- to late twentieth century: E. H. Carr and Isaiah Berlin. Berlin, coming from the eastern marches of the West, found his restatement of liberalism endorsed by an admiring British elite. Carr, coming from within the British intellectual milieu, challenged its too easy acceptance of moralistic cover for what he perceived as part misguided assumptions and part realpolitik. The one was ultimately embraced by establishment opinion, although not a seeker after plaudits. The other was widely shunned. Literary tributes to Berlin have been published since his death in 1988. Michael Cox’s book comes now as a fitting tribute to Carr, who died in 1982—fitting insofar as, in the spirit of Carr himself, it is a critical appraisal. Carr’s first book was a biography of Dostoevsky (1931). Subsequently, the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin characterized Dostoevsky’s novels as ‘polyphonic’, in that they represented the multicentredness of human life, a variety of interacting subjective perspectives on the world which in their aggregate create an intersubjective objectivity. Michael Cox’s book has this polyphonic quality. Fifteen individual perspectives yield a comprehensive impression of the complexity of Carr as a man and of his work. It is an impression against which to gauge the intellectual charges made against Carr. Carr’s ‘realism’ was critisized by Isaiah Berlin (and by others) as admiration and deference to power as such. That was too sweeping a judgement. Rather, he reflected critically upon the forces at work in any situation and also upon the historian’s or political observer’s perspective on that situation. Interests and purposes were the elements that went into judgement, excluding externally derived norms. I remember as an undergraduate in the mid-1940s my history professor recalling the argument between Lord Acton, the Catholic scholar, who chastized the Renaissance popes on grounds of absolute morality, and the Protestant Bishop Creighton, who was much more tolerant of them as acting in a manner understandable within their own time and place. It was in the light of this discovery that I began to read Carr. Antonio Gramsci said of Machiavelli that he did not write The Prince for the palazzo (the rulers already knew what he had to say) but rather for the piazza, for the common run of people who would be strengthened by a critical understanding of the powerful. Carr can be read in this sense. It is a sense particularly appropriate to present times when globalization has become the new absolute truth in ideology and a combination of state and corporate forces occupy the palazzo. Carr’s own enthusiasm and policy prescriptions, framed in the context of his own time, are no longer pertinent; but a retrieval of his critical historical mode of thinking would be invaluable in unmasking the prevalent ideological cover of the power positions in contemporary world politics and clearing the ground for an alternative vision of the future. Berlin, in his celebrated essay ‘Historical inevitability’, assimilated Carr to the thesis of historical determinism. Again, it was an unbalanced judgement. To assess it, one should go back to Vico, of whose work Berlin, following upon R. G. Collingwood, is a foremost exponent in the English language. Vico considered history to be the creation of people and therefore knowable by its creators. The historical method which Berlin extracted from Vico was ‘imaginative reconstruction’ (Vico’s fantasia) and for Collingwood it was ‘rethinking the thought of the past’. Both put the emphasis upon the subjects of history, individuals or groups, consistent with liberalism. But there was another aspect to Vico’s view of history to which Berlin gave less emphasis. This was on the cumulative consequences of human activity which, quite apart from the intentions of historical actors, form certain patterns that some have called historical structures which constrain or channel human activity. In this aspect of his thought, Vico may be regarded as the father of historical sociology, an approach which did not arouse much interest or sympathy from Berlin, or for that matter, from Collingwood. Carr’s work, however, showed more balance as between the two sides of Vico’s understanding of history.

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Carr’s study of the mind of Dostoevsky, his reconstruction of the thought and activities of Alexander Herzen and others in The romantic exiles (arguably his best book), and his fascination with the personality of Bakunin (the subject of his own favourite book), hardly lend themselves to validate the accusation of determinism or neglect of the individual as historical actor. On the other hand, his essay ‘Nationalism and after’ illustrated how concurrent changes in economic organization, in the form of states, in ideology and culture, and in the nature of interstate relations and imperialism made a sequence of historical structures that set the frameworks within which human activities took place. This was no iron-clad determinism; it was an effort to understand how practical limits confront the human subject. Many will acquiesce in these limits; but some will organize resistance to established order, conceive possibilities of change, and act to build new structures. Berlin’s liberalism rested comfortably in the embrace of the British establishment. He reformulated a political morality for the late twentieth century. He was too sophisticated to believe in absolute truth, recognizing how truth is conditioned by historical time and place. But he did argue for absolute conviction, a kind of moral existentialism. Carr was decidedly uncomfortable with the complacency of the society into which he was born. He was the constant critic of the bien pensant members of that society who, in his mind, were oblivious to the root problems of the time. He looked into Russia to understand how people in a different society confronted problems, some of which were the same as those confronting his own. Ultimately, he shared with Berlin a pluralist view of a world composed of distinctly different civilizations; but where Berlin had a more optimistic view of the moral potential of a common human nature, Carr was more cautious about acting upon assumptions of universal principle. Michael Cox’s book, in the polyphonic diversity of its perspectives, provides the elements with which to contemplate the complexity of Carr the man and Carr the historian. In a short review it is impossible to do justice to the various contributions. Invidious though it may be, I would signal the chapters by Linklater, Halliday and Germain as particularly perceptive of Carr’s scholarship; and I would thoroughly endorse Germain’s conclusion that Carr is a ‘theorist for our times’. This book can be a stimulus to reinvigorating a study of world problems that bridges the domestic and the foreign, connects economy, culture and politics, and critically assesses possibilities for change and desirable directions for change. Such an approach, in the spirit of Carr, would leave behind the positivistic and ahistorical ‘neo-realism’ that was hegemonic in international studies during the Cold War decades. Robert W. Cox, York University, Toronto, Canada

Europe

Democracy in Europe. By Larry Siedentop. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press. 2000. 254pp. Index. £18.99. ISBN 0 7139 9402 9. The originality of this book lies in the way it draws attention to the relevance of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political theory for the construction of a European federal polity. Siedentop offers sophisticated and elegant analyses of such issues as the contradiction between the discourse of civil society and the discourse of active citizenship, the problem of reconciling participation with the large scale of contemporary political organization, the profound importance of shared moral intuitions as a basis for democratic governance, and, above all, the link between the Christian emphasis on moral equality and the Western discovery of individual liberty. Siedentop’s basic argument is that contemporary Europe has lost touch with political and moral concerns. Public debate is dominated by economism. The European Union is being created by stealth propelled forward by a combination of free marketeers and French étatists alarmed by German reunification. Quite rightly, he warns of the danger of a moral and institutional vacuum opened up by the gap between European elites and their publics, which could lead to the emergence of extremist ideologies which we are already beginning to see in Austria or in the eastern Länder of Germany.

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This is a stimulating and graceful book with many instructive historical insights, ideas and concepts. One might question some of its more quirky positions—the uncritical portrayal of the American system, the (over)emphasis on the importance of Christian values (Siedentop does not explain why Eastern Christianity failed to develop an individualist ethic), or the preoccupation with the perfidious role of the French. But my main hesitation is that the book itself seems caught in the eighteenth century and, indeed in a largely Anglo-American world view, although of course French influences can also be found. I miss some of the current developments and ideas that should surely be taken into account when writing about the European project. I am thinking, for example, of the debate about post-industrialism and how information technology is both consequence and cause of a transformation in public communication, or of new concepts in social and political theory such as non-territorial forms of governance, dialogic or deliberative democracy, or the notion of a network state. But most importantly, I was surprised that, in a book that emphasizes civil society and active citizenship, I could not find a single reference to non-governmental organizations or social movements, and there was almost no discussion of European enlargement or the European role in the Balkans. Siedentop is rightly concerned about the absence of a transnational political class comparable to the medieval clergy. But perhaps the nearest equivalent to the medieval clergy are the transnational civic networks concerned with such issues as human rights, peace, the environment or gender, as well as those people engaged in European programmes in eastern and south-eastern Europe. There is a conception of Europe based on a new set of moral intuitions that can be traced back to the European resistance in the Second World War, through the 1968 revolutions, culmin- ating in the idea of a pan-European civil society which was one of the most salient themes of the 1989 revolutions. I would argue that this conception of Europe has had an important influence on the European project, along, of course, with the other factors described by Siedentop. Whether this conception of Europe is enough to offset the popular indifference to Europe and the impoverishment of public debate is, of course, open to question, but it does offer an alternative to the choice between an étatist federalism imposed from above or a return to nationalism. Mary Kaldor, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

The European Union and Turkey: an anchor/credibility dilemma. By Mehmet Ugur. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate. 1999. 252pp. Index. £39.95. ISBN 1 84014 443 2. In December 1999, after this book went to press, the European Union formally agreed to add Turkey to its list of current candidates for membership—though without agreeing any date for the opening of negotiations. The Turkish government has given this a cautious welcome, while insisting that Turkey’s ‘unique’ status as a unitary state cannot be compromised by any conditions the EU might wish to impose. It is a tribute to the quality of this volume that it provides a ready- made framework for interpreting this latest development: more than that, it shows how this hesitant exchange of half-promises fits into a pattern which has characterized Turkish–EU relations over several decades. Originally a PhD thesis, this book has a firm theoretical framework, built around the interaction between states and societies within both the EU and Turkey. Written by a Turk currently teaching in Britain, it is well informed—and creditably dispassionate—about both parties to the relationship. It traces the policy cycle through which Turkish elites seek to anchor the secular character and modernizing ambitions of their state through pursuing closer links with the EU, with EU governments recognizing the value of consolidating a market economy and democratic institutions within Turkey: the ‘anchor’ for change and security which both seek. But neither EU nor Turkish elites have been willing to follow through promises with the concessions needed to fulfil them. Domestic distractions and entrenched interests on both sides have intervened—over trade policy, free movement of labour, Cyprus and human rights. Turkish policy-makers would do well to absorb the conclusion, for example, that ‘Turkish policy on Cyprus has been non-credible’ (p. 197); European parliamentarians could usefully consider his

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criticisms of the grandstanding that often marks EU approaches to minority rights within Turkey. This reviewer would have liked to see rather more emphasis on the US role in the Turkish– EU relationship, acting as sponsor for Turkish hopes and lobbyist to EU governments; and also on the lack of attentiveness which both sides in this dialogue have exhibited towards each other. As a whole this book, however, provides the most sober—and most detailed—study yet available on the relationship. It concludes that ‘neither the EU nor Turkey have acted in line with the objective of convergence and integration which is codified in existing contracts’ and suggests that ‘both parties would be better off agreeing to a new contract which does not include integration and convergence as ultimate goals’ (p. 250). William Wallace, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Trimble. By Henry McDonald. London: Bloomsbury. 2000. 342pp. Index. £16.99. ISBN 0 7475 4452 2. One of the remarkable features of the Northern Ireland peace process has been the way in which key decisions and initiatives have been restricted to a relatively small political elite. People power has played its part too, primarily through the referendums endorsing the 1998 Good Friday Agreement held on either side of the Irish border. The buzzwords of inclusion, democratic validation, consultation and consent have also been used with great frequency. The fact remains, however, that a small coterie of prime ministers, political party leaders, paramilitary leaders—and one US president—have had enormous influence. Most of these key actors have been men. In this context, there is a genuine need for the serious study of political leadership, the interface between leaders and their parties, and the negotiating strategies employed by different political actors. These studies need to go beyond traditional political biography and connect with contemporary political processes, illuminating the role of the individual in the complex dynamics of peacemaking. Sadly, Henry McDonald’s biography of David Trimble, Northern Ireland’s on/off First Minister, asks few of the questions of interest to analysts of the peace process. There is no doubting that Trimble is deserving of scholarly attention. Quite simply, the peace process would have difficulty surviving if Trimble is ousted as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). Yet McDonald’s biography is unsatisfying, leaving the reader unclear about the subject and his motives. In what is a largely sympathetic account, McDonald provides a meandering chronology of Trimble’s childhood, inculcation into unionist activism and politics, slow ascent through the UUP, and his stewardship of the Party through the choppy waters of the peace process. The book is overlong. One gets the impression that each and every scrap of information McDonald came across in his hurried research has found its way into the final draft. Most of the interviews were carried out in a two-month period. The book would benefit from a sharper narrative style and at times the chronological order is difficult to follow. Mistakes jar the reader throughout the text, including the repeated misspelling of Terence O’Neil’s (sic) name. O’Neill was a former Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. Much of the book rests on speculation, particularly in relation to the precise influence of the eclectic group of advisers and hangers-on identified by McDonald as Trimble’s key advisers. I suspect the author is wide of the mark. Roger Mac Ginty, University of York, UK

The Federal Republic of Germany at fifty: the end of a century of turmoil. Edited by Peter H. Merkl. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 1999. £60.00. ISBN 0 333 72561 1. Pb.: £19.50. ISBN 0 333 77042 0. Although Merkl’s book deals with an familiar topic, it is worth looking at it again: the recovery and successive transformation of post-totalitarian Germany from the abject depths of disgrace in 1945 to one of the most stable democracies in the world. This edition, which is an updated version of an earlier book, provides a multifacetted picture of this exceptional development, analysing the remarkable story in 25 separate chapters. Each chapter focuses on specific aspects of

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Germany’s recovery, and most contributions could stand on their own. The 50-year perspective that all authors adhere to ensures a coherent edition that is more than a collection of individual essays. Current problems of united Germany are discussed in the context of the Federal Republic’s history. The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 concentrates on broader questions of German identity and the development of the democratic system. Merkl concludes that Germany has a new mission, ‘one of international peace and reconciliation’, and an identity imbued with Western- style, liberal democratic values (p. 23). Part 2 looks at new directions of German leadership, elections, political transformation and the changes in the German party system. The development of all the main parties is briefly examined in this section. Part 3 deals with German federalism, political culture and politics of the cities. Part 4 examines German economic policies, including the role of trade unions and the Bundesbank as well as the German media. The final section introduces the main areas and problems of German foreign policy, including the traditional German security interests, European integration and EMU, the Franco-German alliance and the new relations with central and eastern Europe. Merkl’s book is an easy read and a good first overview for students of German politics and contemporary history. Naturally, the quality of the chapters varies. Some are just too short to provide in-depth analyses. The book is written by established experts who are mostly working in US universities. Some of the issues and fears debated in the book are typical of scholars of the postwar/Cold War era. They are nowadays increasingly unfamiliar to a generation of European students who were raised in or with the democratic Federal Republic of Germany and who sometimes even have to be reminded of the existence of the GDR. The edition is therefore an excellent reminder as well as an eye-opener for some of its readers. It is best used as an appetizer for more thorough studies on each of the 25 aspects covered. Students would have benefited from better guidance on further reading and from a proper bibliography. Some authors include a list of related readings, but more consistency would have made this book much more student friendly. Nevertheless, it deserves a place on all introductory reading lists as one of the best general overviews of Germany’s history over the last 50 years. Hartmut Mayer, St Peter’s College, Oxford University, UK

Uneasy allies: British–German relations and European integration since 1945. Edited by Klaus Larres and Elizabeth Meehan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2000. £50.00. ISBN 0 19 829383 6. This volume seeks to address the complex and often contradictory evolution of British–German relations during the course of the second half of the twentieth century. The publication of the book is particularly well-timed given the emerging closeness between the two countries, as seen most vividly in the politics of the ‘Third Way’ and the defining role played by both Germany and Britain, who have acted in tandem in promoting the renewal of social democracy. As the editors argue, what is innovative about the book is that the relationship is considered within the broader frame of European integration which is taken as both the context and as a dynamic which has actively shaped the substance of the relationship. Second, it takes an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, which, as is stated, is missing in existing literature. The book is interesting in that it takes a fresh approach in its appraisal of the nature of relations between the countries, in that it points to areas of convergence which tend to be overlooked and overshadowed by an emphasis upon the adversarial and competitive elements of the relationship. In this sense the volume is important and highly successful in redressing the balance away from negative reporting. A first observation about the book is its uninspiring title, while the introduction is also, unfortunately, rather insubstantial and fails to entice the reader to continue. Fortunately, however, the individual chapters more than make up for this rather dry start. The volume is divided into three sections beginning with an assessment of relations during the Cold War

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between both Britain and the Federal Republic and Britain and the GDR. The first historical section of the book does not go beyond ‘setting the scene’ of post-1990 relations and does not, therefore, expand upon existing studies in the field. It is in the subsequent chapters that a contribution to understanding British–German relations is made. Both the second and third sections of the book take a thematic approach and consider the relationship in the framework of politics and security issues since 1990 and key aspects of economic and social policy, again since 1990. The highlights of the book are the chapters that deal with German unification, the deepening and widening of the EU and the political and security dimensions of the British–German relations. The chapters that address EU social policy and industrial and commercial cultures are also outstanding. Through the course of these chapters the reader is alerted to the specific national pre-dispositions and domestic constraints that exist in Germany and Britain that shape their policy styles towards European integration. This is important, especially in the German case, since it gives the reader a real sense of the domestic conditions that underpin and directly govern European policy. The fact that Germany’s federal system, form of coalition government and institutional pluralism render its approach to EU matters far smoother than that of the UK is often overlooked in Britain, which has led to serious misunderstandings and misrepresentations of German intentions within Europe. This book is certainly informative and covers the whole spectrum of issues that impact upon British–German relations. However, it does not really add up to more than the sum of its individual parts. The reader is left without a concluding chapter, which would have been a useful tool for revisiting the initial themes highlighted in the introduction in light of the findings of the individual chapters. The reader who is well-versed in British–German relations will not learn anything new from this volume. It is not a weighty contribution to the field, although it does to an extent identify and provide solid analysis on a range of crucial issues in European integration and British–German relations which are at present rising in importance. Kerry Longhurst, Institute for German Studies, University of Birmingham, UK

Österreichische Politik: Grundlagen, Strukturen, Trends. By Anton Pelinka and Sieglinde Rosenberger. Vienna: University of Vienna Press. 2000. 266pp. Index. ISBN 3 85114 513 5. Österreichs Kanzler: Von Leopold Figl bis Wolfgang Schüssel. By Peter Pelinka. Vienna: Verlag Carl Ueberreuter. 2000. 272pp. Index. DM 39.80. ISBN 3 8000 3758 3. Pope Paul VI once famously called Austria the ‘island of the blessed’. Yet, the seemingly quiet and trouble-free country of Mozart periodically makes the headlines of the international news for rather less commendable reasons. In 1986, the election of the former Wehrmacht officer Kurt Waldheim as President provoked an international outcry, which turned Austria into something of a pariah state until the end of his mandate and the election of Thomas Klestil in 1992. Last year, the 27.22 per cent gained by the extreme right-wing Freedom Party in the parliamentary elections and its subsequent participation to a coalition government with the People’s Party sent shock waves through the international community. Despite all this, Austria has been surprisingly understudied by English-speaking scholars, and these two books in German provide useful and necessary accounts, in different ways, of the dynamics of Austrian politics since the establishment of the second republic in 1945. Anton Pelinka and Sieglinde Rosenberger’s work is a textbook that aims to present a concise and clear introduction to the workings of Austrian democracy. Successive chapters about political institutions, parties, elections, trade unions, media, foreign policy and the role of the Church form a comprehensive, if necessarily cursory, picture of Austrian politics and society. The authors helpfully and successfully put Austrian politics into a comparative (European) perspective, even if it is paradoxically in many respects the ‘unique’ character of Austrian political

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structures that remains striking—and especially the corporatist and clientelist nature of the country, which has often been defined as the ‘last party state in Europe’. The Proporz—the traditional repartition of political and administrative jobs between the Social Democratic Party and the People’s Party, the two movements that have dominated Austria’s political landscape since 1945—is indeed a uniquely Austrian phenomenon. More than a manifestation of the Austrians’ attraction towards neo-nazism, the success of Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party could be said to be based on an extremely demagogic exploitation of the disaffection of the population with this system. After having remarked that Austria’s democracy is the result of the intervention of the allied powers that occupied the country after the Second World War until the signature of the state treaty in 1955 (p. 51), Pelinka and Rosenberger emphasize the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity at the heart of Austrian politics. Continuity, because the three main political forces (the Social Democratic Party, the People’s Party, and since the mid-1980s, the Freedom Party) have their historical roots in, respectively, the socialist, the Catholic/Christian social, and the deutschnational movements of the end of the Hapsburg empire and the interwar era. Discontinuity, because the fall of communism has fundamentally changed Austria’s role in Europe. The adhesion of the country to the European Union in 1995 was a pathbreaking event, and today’s heated debates about the validity of the state’s ‘permanent neutrality’ in the post-Cold War world are also an illustration of a major shift in Austria’s political culture. Peter Pelinka’s book is less wide-ranging in scope and deliberately analyses Austrian politics through the political biographies of the nine chancellors who have ruled Austria since 1945, from Leopold Figl to Wolfgang Schüssel. The validity of this approach could be questioned, since the figure of the Chancellor is markedly less significant in Austria than the President in the United States or the Prime Minister in the United Kingdom. Furthermore, given the fact that Austria has been ruled by coalition governments from 1945 to 1966 and from 1983 onwards, the Chancellor has often been no more than a ‘first among equals’. Yet, Pelinka convincingly demonstrates how each chancellor contributed to shape and create a viable Austrian national identity after the failure of the first republic and the trauma of the Anschluss. The book shows why the generations of politicians who had an experience of the Second World War saw consensus as a prerequisite to the success and prosperity of Austria (and hence contributed to promote a general amnesia as far as the responsibility and complicity of the country in the crimes of the Nazi era are concerned). Together, these two works indirectly shed light on the factors that made possible the rise of Haider and are highly recommended readings for all those who want to understand the politics of a country which has just reached a turning point in its political history. Magali Perrault, University of St Andrews, Scotland

The road to war in Serbia: trauma and catharsis. Edited by Nebojsa Popov. Budapest: Central European University Press. 2000. 711pp. Index. £38.00. ISBN 963 9116 55 6. Pb.: £17.95. ISBN 963 9116 56 4. This collection of papers by Serbian intellectuals was originally published in Serbian in Belgrade in 1996, not very long after the Dayton Accords were signed. It contains material from 25 contributors, on very diverse themes, but all united by a questing spirit for self-recognition and the struggle to understand what is going on under the Milosevic regime from within. Some of the contributors, such as Vesna Pesic, have since become familiar figures in the Serbian opposition, after having had a more local status before the Dayton period. Most of them are, or in some cases were, prominent teachers of liberal outlook in Belgrade University, in the faculties of History, Politics and Economics. As such the book is bound to be a useful guide to opposition and critical thinking at that juncture of relative optimism and freedom of thought in Serbia. In March 1996, the British Council was able to hold a conference on the Kosovo problem at the Sava Centre in Belgrade, with at least part of the proceedings televised, something that is totally unimaginable

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today. As such, although this is a valuable volume, it is open to question as to how far it is a useful guide to contemporary Serbia, rather than to the better world of five or more years ago. Chapters in this volume include ‘The Church and the “Serbian Question”’, by Radmila Radic, ‘The Ruling Party’ by Marija Obradovic, and ‘Kosovo in the collective memory’ by Olga Zirojevic. There are also several essays on the media and nationalism, and historical papers tracing the history of Yugoslavia from the 1970s to the climax of the Milosevic era. As in all collections of this kind, the quality varies, with some of the most absorbing contributions being on less- frequented paths, such as Marina Blagojevic on the Serb exodus from Kosovo during the 1970s and 1980s, Olivera Milosavljevic on science under the regime, and Alexander Nenadovic on the evolution of Politika newspaper. The best and most informative papers are the most specific, which are set alongside worthy but less penetrating comments on the international position of Serbia such as ‘The international community and the Yugoslav crisis’ by Vojin Dimitrijevic, which is not much more than a statement of the conventional liberal (and over-hopeful) wisdom of the time. Although this will be a very useful book for students of the Balkan crisis, it needs to be read critically, as some papers, such as those on Kosovo, offer a very partial view of reality indeed. Given the lapse of time between the English-language publication and the original Serbian edition, the book would have been very much strengthened by an up-to-date critical introduction. But it nevertheless remains a valuable collection of papers, especially for those who are newcomers to the subject. It is illuminating to see, even as long ago as 1995 when most of the papers seem to have been written, how far the contributors see a Milosevic-ruled Yugoslavia as a fundamentally disfunctional and doomed state, a perception that has yet to reach some actors in the international community even today. A prominent columnist in that British media stronghold of pro-Milosevic sentiment, The Times in London, wrote not long after the Kosovo war that Serbia was ‘a sort of democracy’. This book should help to remove those illusions, and the Central European University and the Soros Foundation have rendered students of the region a valuable service by facilitating an English-language publication. James Pettifer

Russia and the former Soviet Republics

Gorbachev’s glasnost: the Soviet media in the first phase of perestroika. By Joseph Gibbs. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press. 1999. 147pp. Index. $27.95. ISBN 0 89096 892 6. Glasnost is a word that surfaced regularly in Soviet discourse, even making an appearance in Leonid Brezhnev’s 1977 Soviet Constitution, but the term between 1985 and 1988, the years covered by Gibbs’s book, became identified with the breakthrough days of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Glasnost in this period reflected Gorbachev’s own hesitancies, convictions and compromises, all explored by Gibbs. The book examines the ambiguities of glasnost both as a concept and as a policy, torn between competing notions of ‘publicity’, ‘openness’ and, ever more strongly towards the end of the period, ‘freedom of speech’. Despite its brevity, the book is solidly researched and draws on a broad range of sources, including interviews with a few of the leading figures of the period. Given the political context of entrenched elites guarding the ideological holy grail of Marxism–Leninism, Gibbs gives due acknowledgement to the courage of the practitioners of glasnost, in particular the editor of Ogonëk, Vitalii Korotich, whom he interviewed. It had been Yegor Ligachev, who later became the archtypal ‘conservative’ bugbear to those who sought to deepen, if not to transcend, perestroika, who had strong-armed Korotich into taking over as editor of the then ‘right-wing’ (i.e. reactionary Soviet) magazine. To Ligachev’s great discomfort, Ogonëk under Korotich’s editorship became the mouthpiece of the ‘left’ democrats, pushing ever further against the bounds set by Ligachev’s ‘constructive glasnost’.

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Gibbs pulls no punches when examining the compromises of some of the exponents of glasnost. Gorbachev himself emerges, as in so much of the literature, as both innovative and limited, constrained not so much by the opposition of the apparat (although that was real enough) but by his own convictions. Unless we give due weight to Gorbachev’s own beliefs about the reformability and basic viability of the Soviet system, we are in danger of imposing on him false views. In the context, his recourse to glasnost was radical, but that very context shaped his approach to glasnost. This is best exemplified by the role played by Alexander Yakovlev, considered one of the main architects of the theory of communist reformism of the time, who is not revealed in the best light by Gibbs. Glasnost was used by the reformist wing of the party as an instrument in intraparty conflict. Gibbs does us a service in reminding us that the concept of glasnost in this period was always accompanied by the notion of discipline as these reformists sought to remain in control of the agenda of glasnost, fearing both its radicalization to the left and its stifling by the right. The straight and narrow path of Gorbachevian glasnost, however, soon ran out of room for manoeuvre, despite successive phases of radicalization. Although the book contains no surprises and on the whole covers well-trodden ground, it is nevertheless a useful addition to the literature. It is focused on what it seeks to do, and sticks closely to the chosen period and the trajectory of glasnost at this time, above all in the print media. The policy of glasnost allowed the reform wing of the Communist Party to enlist the support of the cultural intelligentsia in its attempts to modernize Soviet communism. However, already by 1988 there were signs, given that no other tangible public benefits were available (like a successful economic reform), that part of the intelligentsia wished to go beyond reform communism towards the transcendence of communism itself. Boris Yeltsin was able to put himself at the head of this movement, and after 1988 the very notion of glasnost, as a controlled liberalization of the public sphere, became anachronistic and increasingly politically redundant. It may have been useful for Gibbs to have pushed his study a bit further into this period to discuss the decline of glasnost as a policy just at the time when as a concept it triumphed. Richard Sakwa, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK

Russian peacekeeping strategies in the CIS: the cases of Moldova, Georgia and Tajikistan. By Dov Lynch. Basingstoke: Macmillan/London: Royal Institute of International Affairs. 2000. 265pp. Index. £45.00. ISBN 0 333 74475 6. This is a well-documented analysis of Russia’s peacekeeping operations in post-Soviet space, providing basic elements for a better understanding of a policy that has too often been reduced to easy clichés about ‘imperial behaviour’ or the ‘post-colonial syndrome’. As Lynch says, Russia’s operations, including in Russia itself, have been controversial, putting at loggerheads different political figures, structures and organizations. Its goals have changed during this last decade, with initial fears about the repercussion on Russia of instability on its borders giving way to a more sophisticated approach. The problem is that Russia still lacks a proper definition of the external security requirements to be enforced by peacekeeping operations, and of the national interests they are intended to defend. Part 1 of the book deals with Russian peacekeeping generally, the reasons for a lack of consensus about its purpose, its development in the past decade, and the differences among the chief actors. It includes an articulate analysis of Russia’s peculiar definition of a peacekeeping operation. Lynch then moves to three case-studies that he has carried out in Moldova, Georgia and Tajikistan. In each case, Russia’s peculiarity explains the mixture of political, diplomatic, military and, increasingly, economic pressures that it has applied to its goal of preventing disorder from spilling into Russia itself and of preserving Russia’s presence in regions where it has existed for centuries. Vitally, Lynch takes a step back into the past, recalling that troubles started in the regions concerned before the Soviet collapse in December 1991, when ‘independence’ looked like a ‘fringe’ dream.

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Contrary to most traditional peacekeeping forces, Russian peacekeepers were often troops already in place, who were simply given a new label. Only later was their composition modified, and their title changed symbolically to that of CIS peacekeeping forces. Here Lynch could usefully have given figures of the national (as opposed to ethnic) composition of these ‘Russian’ forces. This would have shown that they were often a left-over of Soviet times, followed by a limbo between independence in 1991 up to the formation of national armies, when many non- Russian ex-Soviet officers and soldiers found themselves, faute de mieux, ‘Russian’ troops. Lynch then turns to a situation in which Russia finds itself defensively trying to prevent other powers from intervening to settle conflicts in what it considers its natural zone of influence. In doing so, he includes an acute description of the ‘how’ and not just the ‘why’ of Russian reasoning, taking in socio-economic dimensions where so many analysts tend so see only Machiavellian geopolitical manoeuvres or purely ethnic considerations. If there is a flaw in this otherwise valuable book, it consists in the author’s hesitation to bring a firmer judgment on some of the situations he describes. Certainly, they are full of subtleties. However, too often in his conclusions, a ‘but’ is followed by another qualifying ‘but’. I would have liked to have heard Lynch’s own voice more clearly. Nina Bachkatov, Co-editor, ‘Inside Russia & the FSU’, European Press Agency, Brussels

Russian strategic modernization: past and future. By Nikolai Sokov. Oxford, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2000. 204pp. Index. $64.00. ISBN 0 8476 9466 6. Pb.: $24.95. ISBN 0 8476 9467 4. Sokov provides an invaluable background to current nuclear arms control questions, with or without the complication of national missile defence. Three of his five chapters deal with Soviet calculations and hardware development in the period preceding the breakup of the Union, when he served with the Foreign Ministry and advised the Soviet START delegation in Geneva. The last two deal with current and prospective developments. While there is much of interest in his insider’s account of what was happening on the Soviet side in the 1970s–1980s, followers of the current ‘defence/deterrence’ debate will instinctively turn to his wide-ranging analysis of the plans and options now being considered for the modernization of the Russian land- sea- and air-based nuclear ‘triad’. Here prime importance attaches to the performance capabilities of the Topol-M inter- continental ballistic missile (ICBM) first deployed in limited numbers for evaluation purposes in 1998 and now in series production at the Volgodonsk missile plant. The silo-based version is claimed to be nearly indestructible, and the mobile to have an unprecedented capacity for concealment. A powerful engine shortens the boost phase to 66 seconds, making it harder to intercept. Although information about ongoing modernization programmes is often contradictory, says Sokov, overall logic, including treaty limits, suggests that single-warhead silo- and road-based ICBMs will remain the most important component of the Russian nuclear triad. Fitting multiple warheads (MIRVs) is an option if the US should go ahead with a national missile defence system, but would be limited to putting three on some Topol-Ms. Plans for the submarine arm have been held up by problems with the development of a new submarine-launched missile (SLBM). They could be finally solved using a naval adaptation of the Topol-M. But in any case new Borey class submarines will carry fewer warheads than existing Typhoons. Ageing heavy bombers can be modernized as missile launching platforms, but this will not happen immediately. Everything depends on a sustained revival of the economy (and treaties), says Sokov. Whatever happens, Russia’s strategic arsenal will be limited. Even under the most favourable circumstances it is unlikely to exceed 2,000 warheads, with a further 2–300 if it is decided to put them on Topol-Ms. A likely figure is around 1,500 by the year 2010. About half will be on SLBMs, 3–500 on ICBMs, and the rest on heavy bombers, so long as these last.

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Spare on theory and hard on facts, Sokov’s smart paperback comes just in time to catch the argument over resource allocation being waged by ‘nuclearists’ and their opponents in the Russian General Staff and Defence Ministry. Andrew Wilson, Co-director, European Press Agency, Brussels

Ukraine: movement without change, change without movement. By Marta Dyczok. Reading, Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers. 2000. 184pp. Index. Pb.: £12.95. ISBN 9 05823026 0. Marta Dyczok’s volume is divided into eight chapters covering historical legacies, politics, economics, social and cultural issues, foreign policy and Ukrainian–Russian relations. At the outset the author states that ‘Ukraine has actually accomplished a good deal in a short time’ (p. xv) and she projects an overall optimistic view of developments in Ukraine. This is perhaps particularly surprising in the twin fields of democratization and the economy. Ukraine is presented as a country where democratization is in full swing, with free elections and a willingness on the part of the public to express views and to criticize the government. Although some democratic progress has indeed been made, one cannot ignore the decline in independent media, the corporatist nature of the state, the stifling of civil society and the undemocratic presidential elections and referendum in 1999–2000 (the latter two took place after the volume was completed). Dyczok accepts that whether Ukraine survives as a state depends on the economy, which has been mismanaged and misdeveloped. She stresses numerous positive economic accomplishments and argues that Ukraine’s ‘economic performance has been surprisingly positive given its starting point and the enormity of the task it undertook’ (p. 78). Throughout the 1990s the Ukrainian economy continued to decline and, in eight years of independence, reform was only seriously undertaken in less than two of these (late 1994–mid 1996). No reform programme was launched until late 1994, and it is therefore difficult to accept Dyczok’s view that the Ukrainian state started with ‘radical economic reform plans’ (p. 139). Western assistance was not provided to Ukraine prior to 1994 not only because of its reluctance to relinquish nuclear weapons, but also because of the lack of any reform programme. The author’s optimism about the Ukrainian economy will therefore be difficult for many readers to accept. A major strength of the book lies in its analysis of Ukraine’s relations with the outside world. It is replete with criticism of both the West and Russia in their unwillingness to accept an independent Ukraine. Dyczok skilfully surveys the reasons for this by investigating Western russophile historiography and Russia’s reluctance to accept Ukrainians as anything other than a regional branch of their own ethnic group. At the same time, she ignores different foreign policy orientations within the elites and regions (as exemplified by her acknowledgement of Ukraine’s unwillingness to choose between NATO and Russia) and argues that only the Communists are in favour of union with Russia. While it is the case that Ukraine’s elites see Russia as their main security threat, they have moved on from the Leonid Kravchuk era when the CIS was seen only as a ‘civilized divorce’. The book gives a good introduction into the variety of factors at work in contemporary Ukraine. In particular it is useful as an introductory textbook and guide to independent Ukraine, although greater space could have been devoted to culture, language and identity, three areas that lie at the heart of Ukraine’s post-Soviet transformation. Taras Kuzio, University College London, UK

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State and institution building in Ukraine. Edited by Taras Kuzio, Robert Kravchuk and Paul D’Anieri. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 1999. 364pp. Index. £40.00. ISBN 0 333 76524 9. Politics and society in Ukraine. By Paul D’Anieri, Robert Kravchuk and Taras Kuzio. Oxford, Boulder, CO: Westview. 1999. 344pp. Index. £53.00. ISBN 0 8133 3537 x. Pb.: £17.95. ISBN 0 81333538 8. One of the most difficult challenges facing Ukraine after nearly a decade of independence is the building of a new state with effectively functioning institutions that are capable of adopting and implementing policy. But Ukraine inherited only a quasi-state from the former USSR. The political community in Ukraine is still in the very early stages of development, a process which is made all the more difficult by the current socio-economic crises. Moreover, state-building appears to be tightly bound up in the process of economic and political reform. So in essence, how do the strength of the state and the nature of its institutions enable or impede the development and implementation of a successful strategy for reducing economic vulnerability? And how should Ukraine proceed with its ‘quadruple transition’ (democratization, marketization, state- and nation- building)? Under circumstances where dramatic political, economic, institutional and nation- building changes are under way, it can be argued that the risks are enormous that the four transitions will not be compatible with one another. These are some of the issues which Kuzio, Kravchuk, D’Anieri et al. grapple with in two recent publications: State and institution building in Ukraine and Politics and society in Ukraine. Fervent researchers and students of the post-Soviet transformation processes are encouraged to consult these books for a comprehensive and informative account of the institutional and societal challenges that Ukraine is currently facing. Geared more towards undergraduate students, Politics and society is brimming with illustrations including maps, tables, graphs and photographs. This book uses an ‘eclectic theoretical approach’, which is reflective of the varied backgrounds of the authors, and is one of the book’s great strengths. It provides a coherent overview of the political institutions and the political process in Ukraine since 1996. With the adoption of a new Constitution and currency, the authors argue that the fundamentals of an independent state are now in place. State and institution building, on the other hand, explores the implications of the lack of effective and decisive institutions in Ukraine. The authors point out that a functioning democratic state relies on a civil society, while a civil society relies on a functioning democracy. This book fills a gap in the scholarly literature which previously has focused attention upon the processes of nation-building and the role of nationalism in Ukraine’s political society by ‘bringing the state back in’. In other words, the authors explore and analyse the role of Ukraine’s institutions and the relationship between state and society. State and institution building focuses on the role of the state as the keystone institution in Ukraine’s post-Soviet transition. The authors argue that the state is absolutely crucial in promoting the development of institutions and national unity within pluralist societies through public education, communications, the rule of law, a single language and public administration, as well as a consolidated policy and economy. However, the problem in Ukraine and in the other post-Soviet states is how to move from a system in which power is monopolized to one in which power is divided (i.e. between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government). The authors rightly point out that in Ukraine the situation has evolved in such a way that power is divided, but the powers of the various organs are not defined. In any study of state-building, due attention must also be given to nation-building, which is why these two volumes complement each other so well. Both books discuss the passivity of Ukrainian society concerning state–society relations and the process of state-building. This passivity may allow the state to avoid some of the difficulties inherent in trying to form a state, nation, civil society, free market and democracy by permitting the state to delay work on some of these projects. Thus, if society cannot or will not force the state to become more effective, the important question is: can the state do it by itself?

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The authors describe Ukraine as having a weak society and a weak state, and in the conclusion of State and institution building, D’Anieri asks: in what ways does the system ease pressure on the state and in what does ways does it make the state’s job more difficult? How might this situation change? If a strong democracy depends on a strong civil society, but civil society depends on a strong state, how can either be created in a society which possesses neither? The authors are unable to conclude that the state has any meaningful influence over society. Rather, what appears to be the case in Ukraine is a state and society which are impervious to one another, each being relatively autonomous and immune from pressure but unable (or unwilling) to press its demands on the other. And in the end, the authors conclude that because the state is so ineffective and because society is divided, the prospects for economic reform must be regarded as slim. Jennifer D. P. Moroney, NATO Research Fellow

Belarus at the crossroads. Edited by Sherman W. Garnett and Robert Legvold. Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 2000. 199pp. Index. Pb.: $12.95. ISBN 0 87003 172 4. In this book Sherman Garnett and Robert Legvold leave no doubts about President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s authoritarian mismanagement of Belarus’s domestic reforms and foreign relations. Since mid-1994 Belarus has become firmly associated with Lukashenko, a charismatic leader who has ambitions in Russian politics but whose record in power in Minsk has failed to win him many invitations from Moscow. Garnett and Legvold believe the West finds him a ‘dubious interlocutor on most subjects’ (p. 183). Indeed, Washington and the EU say Lukashenko’s legitimacy as President of Belarus has expired; and they question the makeup of the Belarusian parliament and Constitutional Court. Russia has also regularly cold-shouldered its neighbour. The book explains well the background to the diplomatic freeze that set in following the June 1998 expulsion of 20 ambassadors and their staff from buildings in Minsk, when the West left Lukashenko to stew in his own juice. There never was much of a high point of Western engagement in Belarus. It celebrated Minsk’s commitment to nuclear non-proliferation in 1993, but international aid remained small and in many cases linked to no specific objectives. Threats to cut the nation off entirely sounded weak, and when cooperation ceased the West was left with little or no leverage. Although the book fails to touch on the EU or international financial bodies, it does discuss in depth US and Russian policy and, usefully, assesses the developments of the past few years through the prisms of Belarus’s border partners Lithuania, Ukraine and Poland. These nations fear having a retrograde neighbour. They also disagree on its outline merger with Russia. Moscow seems prepared to embrace military and security offers from Minsk, but there are growing dissimilarities in many other areas of proposed tie-ups. Russian economic planners are wary of committing budget sums to supporting a largely unreformed economy. Moreover, in his essay in the collection, Moscow political analyst Vyacheslav Nikonov writes that Lukashenko’s authoritarian image has itself become unacceptable to many in Moscow. The book’s contributors agree on several points. They argue that Western nations, particularly the US, have miscalculated their interests in Belarus; some of the authors see Minsk’s isolation as a waste of time, others warn that it is dangerous. Belarus occupies an important geo-strategic position and has struck military export relationships with nations such as Iraq, Sudan and China. Garnett and Legvold call on the major powers to end Belarusian security isolation; to encourage Belarus’s engagement with its neighbours; and to enlist Russia as an ally in promoting Belarusian reforms. Overall the book predicts reconciliation. Lukashenko’s popularity has slipped since his 1996 reorganization of parliament and of his own powers. Democracy may be in apparent retreat but Garnett and Legvold believe that Belarusian elites are uncomfortable with the growing gap between trends in their country and those in the rest of Europe. They argue that the incentives to make Belarus a part of contemporary European processes will increase, particularly if Russia sees its own future as tied to these processes. Alastair Wanklyn, Feature Story News, London

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The Euro-Asian World: a period of transition. Edited by Yelena Kalyuzhnova and Dov Lynch. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 2000. 219pp. Index. £45.00. ISBN 0 333 76068 9. This edited collection represents the output of members of the Centre of Euro-Asian studies at the University of Reading. The focus of this centre, which was formed in 1996, is on post- communist Euro-Asia extending from the frontier of the former GDR to Mongolia and the Russian Pacific coast and southward to Albania, Armenia and Turkmenistan. Apart from the geographical contiguity of these countries, the justification for the study of this collection of relatively heterogeneous states is that they share a common historical unity since by ‘1948 all were politically subservient to Stalin’s rule from Moscow’ (p. xv). The book is divided into two parts examining aspects of the security and economic transitions in the area. Certain individual chapters within the book are of a high quality and offer significant insights. Amy Myers Jaffe and Martha Brill Olcott provide a balanced and sober analysis of the geopolitics of Caspian energy which strips away some of the earlier euphoria over the untold wealth of the region and highlights the multiple social, economic and political problems of bringing the oil and gas reserves to international markets. Yelena Kalyuzhnova offers an interesting comparison between the economic reform strategies of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and suggests, rather controversially, that the gradualist approach adopted by President Karimov might ultimately have been more appropriate than the more free market reforms in Kazakhstan which, she argues, have succumbed to elite rent-seeking. There are also two insightful chapters on the reform process in the Czech Republic, by Ludek Rychetnik and Jan Frait respectively, which demonstrate how much further even one of the most advanced economies in the Euro-Asian region has to go before reaching the productivity levels of the advanced industrial democracies. Despite the individual excellence of many of the chapters, the collection as a whole lacks a coherent framework. There is a tension between the study of Central Asia and the Caucasus, which is the focus of most of the chapters in the book, and the rest of the Euro-Asian region. The two chapters on the Czech Republic provide the only specific assessment of other countries in the region and, as a consequence, appear disconnected and isolated from the rest of the text. In the economic section, there is an unresolved tension between those advocating a gradualist approach to economic reform and those arguing for a more complete process of liberalization. The security section, which focuses on various aspects of the ‘Great Game’, takes rather too sanguine a view of Russian policy towards the Caucasus and Central Asia, which means that much of the analysis has been overtaken by events. There is a failure to predict the second Chechen war or the rise of radical Islamist groups in Central Asia which have radically changed the regional security environment and Russia’s role as a security actor. The main problem with the book is that the individual chapters have clearly been written independently from each other and the editors have not been able to make a coherent whole out of these disparate contributions. Nevertheless, there are good and insightful individual chapters that will benefit those interested in this region. Roland Dannreuther, Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Switzerland

Middle East and North Africa

Righteous victims: a history of the Zionist–Arab Conflict 1881–1999. By Benny Morris. London: John Murray. 2000. 751pp. Index. £25.00. ISBN 0 7195 6222 8. This is a most impressive book. It is, as the author explains in his preface, largely a work of synthesis, based on a wide range of secondary sources, except for the period around 1948, of which Morris’s own research has already transformed the historical interpretation, and to a certain extent also the 1982–5 war in the Lebanon. But a first-rate survey of this vast subject with the superabundant material under firm control was precisely what was needed at this stage, and the challenge has been brilliantly met. It has been done by an Israeli scholar, who is conscious of the

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in-built imbalance created by the wealth of documentary evidence now available on the Zionist side compared with the comparative poverty of Arab sources. A comparable volume would certainly be most welcome from the Arab side. Benny Morris’s earlier work, especially The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, 1947–1949 and 1948 and after: Israel and the Palestinians, was concerned to overthrow the conventional Zionist version of the early years of the Israeli state. This was indeed a most necessary task, but the tone of the present book is different: more magisterial, less consciously part of a scholarly campaign. After a sketchy glance at Muslim–Jewish relations over the centuries, Morris begins his survey with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, which was followed by a wave of anti-semitic pogroms that provided the incentive for the first Zionist writings. He describes lucidly how the subsequent conflict in Palestine began in the years leading up to the First World War, the circumstances in which the Balfour Declaration was issued during the war, and the consequences that flowed from the promise of a Jewish homeland after it. But the bulk of the book covers the successive wars that immediately preceded and followed on from the creation of the state of Israel and the efforts to bring peace up until the election victory of Eliud Barak. Morris has a gift for the clear analysis of military campaigns and for explaining the dilemmas of commanders that is displayed consistently throughout. He is especially good on the often-neglected war of attrition (1968–70), the Yom Kippur war of 1973, the Lebanese wars and the Palestinian intifada. This last he describes as a stalemate ‘with the Palestinians unable to eject the Israelis from the [occupied] territories and the Israelis unable to stop the violence’ (p. 596). He is candid and detailed in his listing of the harsh measures used by the Israelis (not without provocation) in the West Bank and Gaza and also in Lebanon, and while he speaks of ‘routine abuse and torture of Arab suspects’ he is conscious of the ‘acute moral discomfort’ of many Israeli soldiers. Morris records that ‘No more than two hundred soldiers, almost all of them reservists, refused to serve in the territories and were jailed for twenty-one to thirty-five days’ (p. 601), without mentioning that he was one of them. The rather enigmatic title of Righteous victims is perhaps best explained by the book’s epigraph, taken from a poem by W. H. Auden: ‘I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return’. There are only trifling criticisms to be made. We could have been spared such paladins as Lord Horatio Kitchener, Lord George Curzon and Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild if the author had asked one of his many British admirers about the use of British titles (and in any case why was his British publisher asleep at the switch?). Kosygin was Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, never President (p. 427). Finally, it seems a trifle eccentric to sum up on the last page that the Zionist enterprise was ‘nothing short of miraculous’ when one has spent so much space demonstrating that it was nothing of the sort. Keith Kyle

Compromising Palestine: a guide to final status negotiations. By Aharon Klieman. Chichester, West Sussex, New York: Columbia University Press. 2000. 282pp. Index. £25.00. ISBN 0 231 117884. Pb.: £11.50. ISBN 0 231 11789 2. Klieman’s book may be read as an antidote to the earlier euphoria generated by the Oslo Accords in 1993 and an implicit critique of the Agreements, reached in a congenial, foreign environment isolated from the realities of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. For the conflict, he argues, is more than a quarrel over territorial rights; it is also a clash between two disparate views of history. The compromise that Klieman advocates and which forms the core of his thesis is territorial compromise, more specifically the voluntary agreement between the combatants to a partition, division or separation, whatever the preferred euphemism, of the disputed territory as the price for regional peace. Indeed the leitmotif of the book is what Kleiman calls his formula: ‘there is no peace without compromise; no compromise without territorial compromise; and compromise, by definition, obligates give and take on the part of both direct parties’ (p. 186).

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However, as Israelis debate with each other the niceties of the percentages of land to be ceded to their adversaries, based on post-1967 realities and commensurate always with perceived security needs and religious sentiments, the Palestinians work within a different timescale and a longer view of history. Palestinian arithmetic includes the huge loss of Palestinian land, some 77 per cent between 1921 and 1949, and a further loss in 1967 of 23 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza. To be asked to concede a further part of the Arab patrimony is therefore not only painful, but politically dangerous for any leader. If the partition of the territory and the separation of the two nations is a necessary if politically hazardous prerequisite for peace, it is in absolute terms impossible; geography and demographic factors are such that Israelis and Palestinians as they seek independence from each other must also cooperate if they are to survive in an area notable for its lack of natural resources. Living space and water fundamental in sustaining present populations and future growth are at a premium. Furthermore the scarcity of natural resources is compounded by the demands of a modern world economy where globalization and free trade are the dominant traits. In the face of natural and man-made imperatives Israelis and Palestinians, if they are to survive as viable states in the world system, will be obliged to cooperate in every sphere of activity but the political; to practise what the author calls ‘partition plus’—individual political sovereignty tempered by pragmatic cooperation and sharing if the well-being of both peoples and the peace of the region is to be attained. Kleiman has written an excellent book: lucid and comprehensive, it sets out in great detail the convoluted problems generated by the Oslo Accords and how specifically they could be resolved. The Accords were at best an enabling mechanism, an historically necessary exercise in ‘constructive ambiguity’ that now demands, after seven years, focused, explicit and painful decisions on the part of the leading actors. Kleiman freely admits that as an Israeli academic, despite being an obvious passionate advocate of a just and humane resolution, with impeccable liberal credentials, his judgement may be challenged for its bias and lack of objectivity. But in presenting the shifts in Israeli perception and opinion, in the wider public as well as among professional decision-makers, he points to the paucity of articulated arguments in the Palestinian public domain regarding the array of possibilities and alternatives available to the Palestinian decision-makers. This lack of public debate among ordinary Palestinians not only limits the arguments available to counter the freely available material on the Israeli side, but also conveniently supports what Kleiman sees as the limited repertoire of responses on the part of the Palestinian negotiators. Kleiman is an optimist. He believes that political solutions that by their very nature demand rational choices between least bad options must ultimately prevail. Politics in the Middle East, at this point in time and in the foreseeable future, challenge the wisdom and good sense so obvious in his book. David Capitanchik, University of Aberdeen, Scotland

The struggle for Lebanon: a modern history of Lebanese–Egyptian relations. By Nasser M. Kalawoun. London: I. B. Tauris. 2000. 224pp. Index. £39.50. ISBN 1 86064 423 6. Almost by tradition contemporary historical texts of the Middle East have tended to give primary focus to the relationship of the region with the rest of the outside world, and relatively little scholarship, particularly in the English language, has been dedicated to exploring and defining inter-Arab relationships. Yet, so much about the region can only be understood historically by first explaining the issues of state-to-state diplomacy in the Arab world at the height of grand interference from both superpowers as an extension of the Cold War theatre. Indeed, today such historical accounts have become almost pedestrian in their presentation, lacking as they do a truly fresh insight into the politics of the region at that time. Nasser Kalawoun, however, has undertaken a task that is both original in its intent and that achieves the objective of presenting a fresh perspective on superpower politics in the Cold War era. By exploring the dynamic of Lebanese–Egyptian relations from 1952–70 he encompasses

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some of the most momentous events in the Arab world in the twentieth century. The breadth of his survey allows us to ponder, from the Arab perspective, the import of pan-Arab idealism, and the implications of the very real attempt from 1958 to 1964 to create Arab unity between Egypt and Syria through the United Arab Republic, as well as other factors such as America’s intervention in Lebanon in 1958 and the threat or otherwise posed by Israel on Lebanon’s southern border. Indeed, this insight into Lebanese politics over two decades provides a perspective that remains as relevant today as it did thirty years ago. Internal tensions relating to the weak nature of the state, Muslim consciousness and its translation into support for political actors both inside and outside the Lebanese border, and Syria’s increasing hold and the ambiguity of Lebanese identity as expressed in regional terms, are all outlined by Kalawoun as significant constraints during the period covered in his text. Indeed, he argues that these factors promoted a sense of ‘fragility…intensified by the fact that the Lebanese regime did not adopt a clear ideology, save a token consensus on national unity between Muslim and Christian communities’ (p. xv). This lack of national consensus, as Kalawoun highlights throughout the book, made Lebanon increasingly vulnerable to Nasser’s aggrandizing ambitions for that part of the region. This was a policy which he pursued with some considerable success and one that in the present day continues to dog Lebanon in terms of the continued presence of Syria and, until relatively recently, Israel’s continued occupation of the country’s southern territories. Kalawoun’s contribution to the field of historical study of the Arab world from an inter-Arab perspective should be commended for the new insights it generates, as well as for the carefully drawn picture of the clash of ideologies from within and the problems generated by states that neither possess a national ideology nor an identity strong enough to hold the national project together or those, like Egypt, whose leaders possessed such ideals of nationalism that they were, in theory, enough to suffice for any other identity in the Arab world. Beverley Milton-Edwards, The Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland

Sub-Saharan Africa

Elite transition: from apartheid to neoliberalism in South Africa. By Patrick Bond. London: Pluto Press. 2000. 320pp. Index. £50.00. ISBN 0 7453 1024 9. Pb.: £15.99. ISBN 0 7453 1023 0. Patrick Bond’s latest work is an attempt to fill some gaps in the story of South Africa’s transition, which will be of interest to both local experts and those concerned with wider issues of international political economy. Elite transition sets out to construct a radical theoretical framework and to reveal some of the most telling details to help explain the new government’s deviation from its liberation mandate to embrace a particularly strict form of disciplinary neo- liberalism. In short, Bond’s strengths lie with the latter objective. In conceptual terms, Bond situates South Africa’s transition within the wider context of a world economy—which he suggests is increasingly characterized by a crisis of overaccumulation —where the rise of financial markets and the concomitant power of financiers has amplified a process of uneven development across the globe. While Bond makes a strong case for looking at South Africa’s transition through the lenses of Marxist political economy, there is little evidence of conceptual innovation. In addition, his framework is not helped by a rather narrow understanding of globalization as financial neo-imperialism and an over-reliance on the notion of ‘crisis’. On the details of South Africa’s transition Bond is far more convincing. In particular, his treatment of South Africa’s once prolific ‘scenario planning’ exercises; the ANC’s retreat from the mandate provided in the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP); the shocking state of the post-apartheid housing situation (arguably the book’s strongest chapter); and the pernicious influence of the World Bank and IMF advisory missions is clear, sophisticated and provides new anecdotal evidence. One of the book’s strengths is the way in which it highlights

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the alternative policies that were on offer but that were either turned down or ignored by the new government in favour of neo-liberal strategies. Here, Bond persuasively argues that the RDP constituted a suitably radical mandate for the ANC government that was realistic and feasible given the current configuration of domestic and international forces. The problem for Bond and other left-wing critics was that the RDP document was continually watered down and its more progressive clauses (such as over South Africa’s potential regional policy) ignored. In sum, Bond has written an engaging and important account that situates South Africa’s transition within the broader global processes unfolding during the 1990s. Although there remains a need for a more detailed theoretical framework capable of elucidating some of the profound questions of structure and agency that South Africa’s transition raises, Elite transition successfully highlights some telling events and processes that help us understand why the transition unfolded as it did, and, crucially, why it is not just South Africans who should be deeply concerned at this series of developments. Paul Williams, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales

Coming to terms: South Africa’s search for truth. By Martin Meredith. Oxford: PublicAffairs. 2000. 380pp. Index. £21.00. ISBN 1 891620 33 9. South Africa’s transition from apartheid to liberal democracy, although powered by popular mass mobilization, was very much an elite-driven affair. The historic compromise that was reached, which saw the white minority give up political authority but, to the chagrin of many, retain their economic power, was an example of elite pacting conducted above the heads of the majority of South Africa’s peoples. Another example of this elite compromise is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which Martin Meredith has most usefully examined in this important study. The TRC was predicated upon the belief that unless the terrible crimes of apartheid were addressed and publicly acknowledged, then nation-building and reconciliation would be impossible. This was essentially an elite view of affairs that took no cognisance of popular sentiment and a wish for accountability vis-à-vis the foot soldiers and (particularly) the leaders of apartheid. No evidence has emerged that any victims’ relatives were consulted before the TRC was launched. The TRC was thus formed not to exact retribution or to try perpetrators, but rather to ‘bring things into the open’ in an essentially cathartic exercise that was intended to lead to the truth and, most importantly, reconciliation. Meredith deals with a number of the most high-profile cases that came before the TRC. The evidence given regarding the crimes of Eugene de Kock, Craig Williamson, Jeffrey Benzien and Winnie Mandela is all faithfully drawn out and commented upon. Intensely written and compelling, Meredith’s book captures much of the drama of the TRC and its often unsatisfactory conclusions at the closing of hearings. On reading the book it becomes quite evident that on more than one occasion the true feelings of the victims’ relatives were brushed aside or ignored in the spirit of ‘reconciliation’ and an overtly religious aura (constructed by the Chair, Archbishop Tutu). More than once, one gets the feeling that perpetrators of often horrendous crimes were ‘let off the hook’ by a process which had its own agenda, one not necessarily shared by the victims’ families. This is quite tragic and goes to the heart of the deep controversy surrounding the TRC within South Africa. Certainly, many in the white community quite amazingly saw the TRC as a ‘witch hunt’ against them. The Cape-based newspaper Die Burger’s shameful denunciation of the Commission as die Lieg-en-biegkommisie (Lying and Confessing Commission) exemplified such ridicule. On the other hand, many within the black community saw the whole exercise as a whitewash and media sham. The fact that very few leading figures within the apartheid regime were actively called to account calls into question exactly who and what the TRC was for. Was it an attempt to clear the decks and begin anew, a redemptive theme beloved of Tutu, or was it rather an exercise designed for everyone but the victims? After all, when all was said and done, Botha, the head of state who

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oversaw the cross-border raids, who was in charge when apartheid troops rampaged through the townships, and who was ultimately responsible for the darkest and most violent days of white South Africa, was only fined the equivalent of one thousand pounds sterling (subsequently set aside on a technicality). Importantly, Meredith makes the oft-missed point that despite the generosity of spirit from black South Africa, the gulf between white and black in the troubled country remains huge at many different levels—financial, educational, social and, not least, psychological. Whether the TRC contributed to reconciliation within South Africa is a moot point. Although it did, as Meredith points out, uncover a whole raft of crimes committed during apartheid and help to solve the murders of many people, its effectiveness as an agent of reconciliation remains profoundly in doubt. This tortured compromise is perhaps fitting for the Commission, springing as it did from a compromise that has left the wounds of the past very much open and unresolved. Ian Taylor, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa

Asia and Pacific

India and Pakistan: the first fifty years. Edited by Selig S. Harrison, Paul H. Kreisberg and Dennis Kux. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999. 216 pp. Index. £32.50. ISBN 0 521 64185 3. Pb.: £10.95. ISBN 0 521 64585 9. The fiftieth anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan in 1997 prompted seasoned observers of the British Raj’s most important successor states in South Asia to reflect upon their fortunes. This collection of conference papers sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington DC is a contribution to that exercise. Most volumes of this kind tend, perhaps inevitably, to invite comparisons between India and Pakistan by highlighting their very different political and economic trajectories despite their common colonial heritage. However, the editors of this volume remind us that ‘the base from which each started and significant differences in political, economic, and social circumstances make direct comparisons difficult’ (p. 1). Their project is therefore ‘intentionally structured so that India and Pakistan are evaluated on their own terms’ (p. 2). The contributors have risen to the challenge by concentrating on the objectives set by each country in the political, economic, social and security domains, and showing how far these have been effectively achieved. Paul Brass tests India’s ambition to establish its credentials as the world’s largest functioning democracy by charting its success in holding systematic elections, widening the base of political participation and maintaining civilian control over the military. The foundations of a secular society are less certain owing in large part to the preference for a centralized state which is seen to be the best guarantor of secularism but is fundamentally ill-suited to resolve India’s endemic ethnic, linguistic, religious, and regional conflicts. National unity has proved even more intractable for Pakistan where its founders’ hopes of forging a nation through adherence to a common religion (Islam) are still a distant prospect, bestowing on it the dubious status of what Robert LaPorte calls ‘a nation still in the making’. Nowhere are the achievements of India and Pakistan more mixed than in the economic and social fields. The contributions by John Adams, Sonalde Desai and Katharine Sreedhar convincingly demonstrate that while India’s planned economy of the 1960s and 1970s substantially advanced the goal of self-reliance, levels of poverty remain unacceptably high. And while the programme of economic liberalization initiated in the early 1990s paved the way for India to reach the ‘Golden Growth Path of 6 to 8 per cent [of GNP] a year’ (p. 86), social inequalities stemming from caste, religion and gender remain deeply entrenched. According to Martin Weinbaum, Pakistan’s potential to join the ranks of ‘middle-income’ countries and to provide a decent standard of living for the majority of its people was eroded by a combination of economic mismanagement and the behaviour of elites ‘whose self-interest dictates a firm defence of a non-representative, unaccountable decision-making process’ (p. 89).

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Some of the most perceptive observations in this volume relate to foreign and security policy. In a lucid exposition, Thomas Thornton shows how Pakistan’s emergence in 1947 as an ‘insecurity state…on the defensive against a real and present threat [India]’ (p. 171), has inhibited the evolution of its foreign policy and prevented it from adapting to the realities of the post-Cold War era. Pakistan’s foreign policy in future, he argues, will be judged not by how it responds to external threats (least of all from India which, as a status quo power, has little or no interest in pursuing an aggressive policy towards Pakistan), but by ‘its ability to deal with domestic political and economic problems and the role it can play in the global economy’ (p. 186). Others, like Sumit Ganguly and Stephen Cohen, assess the implications of the reorientation of India’s foreign policy objectives from the peaceful non-alignment of the 1950s and 1960s to its current concern with nuclear self-reliance aimed at securing it an equitable global status. Overall, this volume is a useful guide for any student of Indo-Pakistan studies. Farzana Shaikh

Globalisation and the Asia-Pacific: contested territories. Edited by Kris Olds, Peter Dicken, Philip F. Kelly, Lily Kong and Henry Wai-chung Yeung. London, New York: Routledge. 1999. 293pp. Index. Pb.: £19.99. ISBN 0 415 19920 4. This is the second book published by the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at the University of Warwick. The Centre, directed by Professor Richard Higgott, has received £2.5 million from the Economic and Social Research Council. It states that it has an interdisciplinary agenda and it defines globalization as multidimensional. As this reviewer has argued, especially in my recent The end of globalization, such a broad definition leads to the agenda being diverted from hard analysis of the economic activities of multinational enterprises (the drivers of globalization, or in reality triad-based regionalization) towards more philosophical navel-gazing by sociologists, political scientists and geographers, among others. This book of 14 essays is no exception. It is based on papers presented at a conference in Singapore in 1997. The editors attempt to set the book against the economic background of the Asian financial crisis of 1997–8, but almost immediately conclude that ‘the Asian Miracle was never just about economics, and debates over its causes and consequences have always been interwoven with discussions of cultural identity, political reform, environmental impacts and human development’ (p. 10). This indeed becomes the agenda for the book and a carte blanche for critics of global capitalism, such as Dirlik, Jessop, Sassen, Mittelman, Schiller and Kong. No clear message emerges from the book despite the attempt of the Warwick team to address the pressing issues of globalization and economic development in the Asia-Pacific. The reason is that the disciplinary blinkers of the writers blinds them to look at the symptoms of globalization— its alleged convergence towards social and cultural homogenization and its threat to political regimes—rather that at the economic causes of globalization. The impact of globalization stems from the economic benefits of foreign direct investment (FDI) by multinational enterprises. Yet only three of the 14 essays address these topics: the excellent data-driven chapter by Dicken and Yeung on Asian firms investing abroad; the chapter by Thrift on business knowledge; and the chapter by Paderanga on FDI and the Philippine economy. Dicken and Yeung provide convincing aggregate trade and FDI data to show that Asian firms now operate intraregionally, rather than globally. While Japanese FDI flows in East and South-East Asia was 36 per cent of its total, Hong Kong had 94 per cent as intraregional, Singapore 57 per cent, Thailand 55 per cent, South Korea 43 per cent and Taiwan 39 per cent. Coming at the issue from a different perspective, Higgott, in a somewhat rambling essay, also eventually recognizes the strength of regionalization: ‘East Asia will be at the core of the new regionalism’ (p. 105). While these are useful papers, the majority of writers add little to our knowledge about either the process of globalization or the economics of the Asia-Pacific region. Alan M. Rugman, Templeton College, University of Oxford, UK

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Hong Kong’s embattled democracy: a societal analysis. By Alvin Y. So. London, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1999. 309pp. Index. £35.00. ISBN 0 8018 6145 4. Alvin Y. So’s Hong Kong’s embattled democracy is one of three books published in the past several years to analyse the long-term political development of Hong Kong. The other two are Lo Shiu- hing’s The politics of democratization in Hong Kong and Pang-kwong Li’s Hong Kong from Britain to China. While these books examine Hong Kong from a political science perspective, So adopts a political sociology approach to the study of Hong Kong’s political development over the last three decades. The result is a coherent, well-analysed and lucidly written work that could be described as the best systematic work, to my knowledge, on the politics of transition in Hong Kong. The book opens with a literature review of the perspectives and theories of the democratization project in Hong Kong, and is divided into three parts and eight chapters. The first part outlines the local and international background of the rise of the 1997 sovereignty issue and its impact on the birth of the democratic project. The second part deals with the election reforms of the Legco introduced by the British-Hong Kong government in tandem with the Sino-British negotiations and the drafting process of the Basic Law, which resulted in the ‘formation of a restricted democracy’. The third part begins with the Tiananmen massacre and its repercussions on Hong Kong’s political groups/parties. This part also analyses Chris Patten’s reform and the formation of a ‘contested democracy’. Chapter 9 recapitulates the arguments of the whole book and provides comparative, though brief, studies on the democratization of Taiwan and South Korea. Most political studies on Hong Kong have unfailingly focused on the study of voting behaviour. Survey is the only source of data collection. The positivism pervading the field is ubiquitous. Subsequently, there has not been a systematic conceptualization of the democratic transition for two decades. In the 1970s, there were two theories that depicted the state–society relationships in Hong Kong—namely Lau Siu-kai’s ‘utilitarianism familism’ and Ambrose King’s ‘administrative absorption of politics’. However, these two theories have long been outdated in the light of the electoral politics in Hong Kong. So’s approach approximates a theoretical framework that captures the evolution of the political reality in the past three decades. It will certainly be enlightening for students of Hong Kong politics. So argues that the democratization process then was shaped and determined by three social forces, namely London, Beijing and local social forces. To be precise, there were six key players in the processes: 1) London and the Hong Kong government; 2) Beijing and pro-Beijing forces; 3) big businesspeople; 4) corporate professionals; 5) service professionals; and 6) the grass roots population. So has been able to master the extremely complicated historical juncture that determined particular packages of democratization, such as the 1988 representative consultation period, the drafting of the Basic Law, and the Sino-British election negotiation under the reign of Chris Patten. By identifying the societal forces, he provides the reader with a macro-historical– structural picture of the democratization process in the past three decades. There are, however, some interpretative problems. In discussing the student movement in the early 1970s, the author neglects the anti-colonialism that was the predominant sentiment at the time. In addition, the analysis of the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China is too simplistic (pp. 156–7). The author argues ‘Thinking themselves better equipped to carry out reform than aging Party members, they pushed for the amnesty of political prisoners, democratic elections, a multiparty system, and protection of human rights’ (p. 156). In fact, the 1989 student movement was mainly protesting against inflation and anti-corruption, and was pushing for political reform initiated from the top leaders (represented by Hu Yaoban and Zhao Ziyang). They were certainly not advocating a ‘multiparty system’. The impact of the Tiananmen massacre on Hong Kong’s political development was tremendous. On the one hand, it revitalized the democracy movement and triggered the formation of political parties such as the Democratic Party, the Democratic Alliance of Building for Betterment of Hong Kong, and the Liberal Party. On the other hand, the Beijing government accused Hong

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Kong of becoming a ‘subversive base’ of the Chinese government and subsequently tightened the grip over the drafting of the Basic Law. The controversial Article 23 of the Basic Law was added, which compels the Hong Kong government after 1997 to enact laws to prohibit treason, secession, sedition and subversion. Ultimately, the Basic Law circumscribes Hong Kong’s democratic development. Despite some minor factual errors, this is an extremely useful book for both experts and laymen. It should be classified as a must-read for university Hong Kong politics courses. Yiu-chung Wong, Department of Politics and Sociology, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

North America

Misreading the public: the myth of a new isolationism. By Steven Kull and I. M. Destler. Washington DC: Brookings Institution. 1999. 312pp. Index. $44.95. ISBN 0 8157 1766 0. Pb.: $18.95. ISBN 0 8157 1765 2. In this book the authors argue that the impression of neo-isolationism taking grip on popular United States opinion is inaccurate. It thus logically follows that the cutting back on foreign involvement by the US cannot be legitimized by invoking domestic isolationism. The authors gathered views from an elite focus group drawn from government and non- governmental organizations, about what it thought the public’s stance was on US international engagement. They then contrasted the findings with actual public opinion. When differences emerged, the elite was given the opportunity to recast the questions for the public, but the differences persisted. On the wider question of why the political system itself has been unable to close this gap, the authors argue that accurate reading of public opinion is not a necessity for the elite as the political marketplace does not punish them for being out of line. Myths about public opinion are thus able to flourish. Public opinion rejects both disengagement and the role of dominant world leader for the US, and prefers multilateral action. It wants a broader definition of interests and more altruism. It supports the UN and wants the US to pay its dues. Even those who doggedly assert the existence of isolationism might be impressed by these findings. However, there is more room for argument about the following. On UN peacekeeping, the public’s response to engagement in specific situations varied ‘but support tends to be strong when the United States is seen as contributing its fair share to a multilateral operation, when the operation is seen as likely to succeed, and when the proposed action seems likely to ameliorate serious human suffering’ (p. 253). There are too many conditionals involved here for the authors’ case not to arouse scepticism among those naturally inclined to dismiss their argument. As with peacekeeping, weaknesses in the interpretation also arise with foreign aid and defence spending. The authors note that the public generally agrees with elite views that aid should be cut and that defence spending is about right. But, when told that the US spends far less on foreign aid and far more on defence than they thought, then the public want foreign aid to go up and defence spending to come down. The authors see this as further evidence of a gap. While this rendering of their argument is a gross oversimplification, a valid and negative point in relation to their interpretation nevertheless emerges. The elite could argue that retaining congressional seats and broad public support, or avoiding voluble criticisms, depends on crafting policy in accordance with what is, not what might be after enlightenment. There are two other more substantial points. The first of these regards the four reasons why the elite think that the opinion polls were wrong: i) whatever the public say, they favour disengagement; ii) effective public opinion, i.e. the most voluble, effective and influential, favours disengagement; iii) when the public has to make actual trade-offs, rather than just expressing opinions, between foreign and domestic spending, they will favour the latter; and iv) members of Congress understand their constituents better than polls. These points are either subjective in nature and are thus not easily refuted, or they invoke a form of false consciousness, as in i), which

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no amount of counter evidence can overturn. The authors do recognize this difficulty, but these problems need more discussion than they get. Whether foreign policy should rest on popular support, or whether it should be left to well- informed experts is a longstanding debate to which icons such as George Kennan (American diplomacy) and Walter Lippmann (Public opinion), have contributed. Yet, apart from citing recent polls, which contradict the received wisdom that public opinion is highly volatile in foreign affairs, there is little else offered by the authors. The claim that this deserves more attention is surely reinforced by the authors’ finding that opinion changed once it was made aware of actual foreign aid and defence expenditure. This could be used to argue that the better-informed elite are justified in second guessing what the less well-informed public really want, rather than accepting what they say in polls. Finally, the authors declare: ‘The objective in closing the gap between policymakers and the public on US foreign policy is not, of course, for policymakers to simply abandon their judgement and make policy according to the polls.’ (p. 263). One might be forgiven for thinking that this was the thrust of Kull and Destler’s argument. But that would be a hostage to fortune. If public opinion really did become isolationist, the authors, given their commitments, would pre- sumably want to find some normative reason for overriding it and insisting on internationalism. Their failure to clarify the role public opinion ought to play means that they overlook a central concern for democracy. This book would have been even more interesting than it is, if the authors had engaged with the tension that exists between popular opinion and normative issues. This book is not always an easy read. At times reports of anecdotal opinions are unnecessarily long and it is irritating that there is no bibliography. But, when all is said and done, it will provoke thought, disperse misperceptions about both US public opinion and foreign policy, and give intellectual pleasure to those who read it. These things cannot always be said about books that concentrate on analyses of public opinion. Alan P. Dobson, Department of Politics, University of Dundee, UK

Republic of denial: press, politics, and public life. By Michael Janeway. London, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1999. 216pp. Index. £20.00. ISBN 0 300 08123 5. Journalist turned academic Michael Janeway sets out in this essay to uncover and examine the interconnections between politics and journalism in the United States since the 1960s. He aims to place this ‘story’ within the context of the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate crisis of American confidence. He identifies this as a story ‘of social and cultural fragmentation, of public alienation from politics and government; and of erosion of optimism and belief in progress’ (p. 6). Janeway argues that the traditional linkage between national culture, political culture and press culture has been breaking down in what he calls a ‘contemporary democratic crisis’ (p. 150). He concludes, without optimism, that the public, politicians and journalists alike are unable or unwilling to confront this crisis, hence the US has become a Republic of denial. Janeway’s is an interesting thesis of great significance but unfortunately much of his essay sheds little new light on the matter. He does not provide a sufficiently comprehensive examination of the reasons for the crisis or the nature of its component parts. Indeed, the first few chapters are full of vague generalities and short sections and paragraphs that lack adequate depth of analysis. Worst of all is chapter 2 which provides a slip-shod historical overview of major political and social events of the 1960s written basically in note-form. Many of the right elements are identified to show how a ‘democratic crisis’ may have developed. What is missing is any systematic attempt to join the pieces together to explain what Janeway obscurely describes as ‘it’ (p. 41). Despite these shortcomings, Janeway’s book is not without its merits. It becomes much more accomplished when he considers changes in American journalism rather than larger societal or political change. He achieves much clarity and focus in chapter 5, for example, where he addresses the recent development of the traditional watchdog role of the press and the growing fixation on politicians’ personal character traits. He gives an intriguing account of press treatment of the

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personal indiscretions of John F. Kennedy, Gary Hart and Bill Clinton. He shows how the press experience with each politician in turn influenced the way they dealt with the next. In this analysis, Janeway offers some interesting insights into how and when the press should delve into the personal lives of politicians. Elsewhere, he analyses well how newspapers have adapted to modern changes on the business side of journalism such as computerization, the use of focus groups, marketing, and transformations in the advertising industry. Although he makes some good observations, on the whole Janeway’s book fails to deliver on its potential, largely because it relies too heavily on journalistic punditry rather than good scholarship. Personal opinion and anecdote too often take precedence over original research here. As Janeway suggests in his introduction, an insider’s view can be more revealing than a detached academic study. Unfortunately, Janeway’s falls short of the mark. Most disappointing is that the author rarely achieves the synthesis that he claims was his goal. We are left without a clear understanding of the important interconnections between the press and politics in the contemporary United States. Trevor B. McCrisken, University of Lancaster, UK

Latin America and Caribbean

The new right in Chile, 1973–97. By Marcelo Pollack. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 1999. 235 pp. Index. £45.00. ISBN 0 333 72473 9. The President and Congress in postauthoritarian Chile: institutional constraints to democratic consolidation. By Peter M. Siavelis. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. 2000. 245 pp. Index. Pb.: $18.95. ISBN 0 271 01948 4. Chile under Pinochet: recovering the truth. By Mark Ensalaco. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2000. 280 pp. Index. £33.50. ISBN 0 8122 3520 7. Future historians may come to regard 1998, the year when former dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London, as a watershed in Chilean politics. Since his return to Chile in March 2000, after 503 days spent under house arrest in the United Kingdom, the general has been preparing to defend himself against more than 150 criminal accusations for human rights violations. Last week he watched helplessly while the Supreme Court made his parliamentary immunity and his seat in the Senate vanish into thin air. Three years ago, only a dreamer would have imagined a scenario like this. It raises inevitable questions about the stability of Chilean political institutions, and about the capacity of the rightist political parties that backed Pinochet’s regime to the hilt to adapt to the new-found vigour of Chilean democracy. All the more timely the publication of these three studies, which approach these issues from very different directions. Marcelo Pollack’s book is an invaluable aide-mémoire on the history and ideological affinities of Chile’s two right-wing parties (the Independent Democratic Union and National Renovation), which have participated since 1990 in a somewhat uneasy alliance in opposition to the centre-left governing coalition. He gives us a useful analysis of the two very different components of Chile’s ‘new right’: the Chicago-trained economists who provided the inspiration for the military government’s innovative neo-liberal economic policy, and the Gremialistas, a corporatist, ultra-conservative and virulently anti-Marxist tendency that formed around Jaime Guzman, main author of the current Constitution. Together with Pinochet, ‘they constructed, developed and nurtured a unique and solid triangular relationship in which each used or supported the other to maximize their influence’ (p. 193). Pollack points out that the rightist parties which vociferously (and violently) opposed President Salvador Allende dissolved themselves after the 1973 military coup, preferring to participate as political advisers to the military rather than to maintain their organizational autonomy. The right did not re-emerge in party form until the mid-1980s, when growing opposition to the military government made rightist leaders aware of the need to re-establish parties if they were to compete

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with the Christian Democrats in future elections. Pollack stresses the Chilean right’s historical lack of a party political culture (in a country with long-standing party allegiances), its uneasiness with electoral politics, and indeed its shallow understanding of democracy itself. At a time when sectors of the contemporary right—especially its candidate for mayor of Santiago, Joaquin Lavin—are perfecting a non-confontational pragmatic approach (in marked contrast to the right’s earlier slavish hero-worship of Pinochet), this is a salutary reminder. Pollack points out that the struggle between liberal reformers and pro-military ideologues ‘has remained a constant in every electoral contest to date’. His analysis takes us only to 1997. While the reformist element definitely won out in the 1999–2000 elections, the right’s outrage at the recent Supreme Court decision to strip the former dictator of his immunity shows that the ideological reflexes that Pollack describes are easily reactivated (as he himself notes in a postscript on the Pinochet affair). Political scientist Peter Siavelis’s main interest is the long-term viability, or otherwise, of the political institutions bequeathed by the military government. He begins by noting a paradox. Chile’s Constitution, introduced by the military in 1980, gives the President unprecedented power, to the detriment of the legislature (having played an important role before the 1973 coup, Congress now has little power to shape the political agenda). Moreover, the congressional electoral system devised by Pinochet’s advisers drastically limits the representation of smaller parties. Reflecting its profound distrust of politics and politicians, the military created a top-heavy executive branch with powers to dictate the political agenda, and a party system streamlined into two opposing political blocs. Can this blueprint, Siavelis asks, provide the necessary flexibility and responsiveness to absorb the demands of a rapidly changing society? If the experience of the first two democratic administrations (of Presidents Patricio Aylwin and Eduardo Frei) is anything to go by, the answer would appear to be yes. The Chilean transition has been regarded internationally as a model of good sense, stability and measured progress. Yet Siavelis argues convincingly that the success of the Aylwin years was in large part due to Aylwin’s political skills and the efforts of his ideological opponents to transform themsleves into a loyal opposition, rather than to the boons of the political system itself. He notes increasing interparty frictions under Frei (Frei notoriously lacked the political grace of Aylwin) both within the governing Concertacion coalition and between it and the rightist opposition. The structure that served well in the early years of the transition may become a straitjacket when the honeymoon comes to an end and political actors start to assert themselves in earnest. In two long chapters, Siavelis seeks to show that Chile’s embrace of neo- liberalism and consensus politics has papered over deep-seated social and economic divisions, and that the emasculation of Congress together with the exclusion of smaller parties from it, bode increasing tensions in the future. Especially so if the economic miracle of the 1990s, which allowed many pending issues to be deferred, proves unsustainable. Siavelis, who did most of his research in 1993 before Aylwin handed over to Frei, has not yet been proved right, but it is still early days. Socialist President Ricardo Lagos, who took office in March this year, still presides over a Concertacion coalition govenment and relations with the centre-right opposition have on the whole been cordial—so far. The system’s shock absorbers seem to be working, if anything, better than they did under Frei. An example is the conflict between the Mapuches (Chile’s largest indigenous group) and forestry companies in the south, now relatively quiet after violent confrontations in the last months of the Frei government. Yet the refusal of the economy to turn the corner, and continuing high levels of unemployment, promise continuing strains in the future, providing more opportunities to test Siavelis’s hypothesis. Mark Ensalaco describes his Chile under Pinochet as a ‘case study of repression in an authoritarian regime: how the state was organized to repress, how the repression was carried out, who directed it, who suffered it’ (p. xi). It is also a history of the painstaking (and dangerous) process by which the truth about the human rights violations that occurred under Pinochet (while the Chicago boys were busy reinventing the economy) was eventually revealed. The early struggles of Chile’s pioneer human rights movement makes poignant reading. Ensalaco goes on to explore the central dilemma of negotiated transitions—how to balance justice and accountability with

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prudent political management. ‘If democracy is defined in terms of the rule of law as well as free and fair elections’, he notes, ‘democratic governments must make a good faith effort to do justice by the victims of a previous authoritarian regime, in order to complete the transition to democracy’ (p. xii). Ensalaco’s account is comprehensive and accurate, as well as being movingly told, and the outrage it expresses is greater for being understated. This book will be a useful companion volume to the numerous studies now appearing on the Pinochet case. While it contains little new material (a notable exception is the illuminating interviews with members of President Aylwin’s Truth Commission), it makes compelling reading. This kind of book, setting human rights cases into the context of a political narrative, has been a successful formula in Chile, but is difficult to find in English. Ensalaco’s story ends on a sad note, suggesting that the text was completed before Pinochet’s arrest and before the Chilean judiciary started to do its job: ‘As senator, Pinochet continues to have a voice in national politics. Sola Sierra continues to search for her husband, Waldo Pizarro, and the other disappeared from the drafty office of the Association of Families of the Detained–Disappeared. Her voice has been muted.’ Far from it. Sebastian Brett, Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, Santiago, Chile

Comparative peace processes in Latin America. Edited by Cynthia J. Arnson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1999. 493pp. Index. £30.00. ISBN 0 8047 3588 3. Pb.: £11.95. ISBN 0 8047 3589 1. This is an excellent collection of studies and short comments organized by the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC. It is an important contribution for understanding the peace processes of Latin America in the last two decades and the remaining conflicts that still persist in the region. Detailed studies by academics and analysts, and reflections by practitioners, combine to give a well-balanced view of the six case-studies included in the book. The collection is part of a burgeoning literature that analyses peace negotiations comparatively and articulates theoretical and practical conclusions from peace negotiations and agreements and the reconstruction of post-conflict societies. Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s offers a number of contrasting case-studies to analyse, explore and compare why and how peace negotiations led to the end of enduring conflicts. The six case-studies in this book—Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala in Central America, Mexico in North America and Peru and Colombia in South America—include abundant material for the editor to draw interesting and stimulating conclusions. The countries studied in the collection experienced insurgency and guerrilla wars for decades that did not end as a direct result of the end of the Cold War. Each one had its own internal logic and all but Peru attempted for several years to negotiate peace agreements with insurgent leaders and to incorporate their movements into the political mainstream. One fundamental conclusion of the studies is that there is a symbiotic relationship between conflict resolution and the processes of democratic transition and consolidation. As the case- studies have shown, prior democratization is indeed a pre-condition for peace negotiations. Even more, peace negotiations per se helped to further democratization. Most of the studies are of a very high quality. They offer a political analysis of the peace processes and their aftermath, raising fundamental questions concerning the implementation of the agreements, the role of international mediation—in this case by the United Nations and the Organization of American States—the ambitious blueprints for peace and reconciliation, the legitimacy of the leadership, the rights of indigenous groups and the need to take into consideration social and economic inequalities. It is in Central America that the successful case-studies of this collection are located, so far as ending the conflicts and reinforcing democracy are concerned. There, the main problem that remains is how to build up institutions and consolidate democracy amid very difficult economic and social conditions. On the other hand, Mexico is a special case. The rebellion led by the

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Zapatistas started on the very same day that the NAFTA agreement came into force, 1 January 1994, and no agreement has been reached so far. But, in contrast to the other cases, the armed conflict lasted for weeks, instead of years, and this was not a typical military confrontation. Perhaps the recently elected President Vicente Fox will be able to restart negotiations in good faith. Colombia remains the most complex and difficult case for peace negotiations. This is the longest lasting armed conflict in Latin America. It is also the first peace process; negotiations between the Colombian government and insurgents started in 1982. Since then, five insurgent groups or factions have been demobilized but the two largest (FARC and ELN) remain very active and well funded. In contrast to all other cases, Peru is the only country where the guerrilla movement was defeated by military means, after the capture in 1992 of the Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman Reynoso. No political negotiations took place with remaining insurgent groups and in Peru there is no correlation between peace and democratic consolidation. The intention underpinning this collection of studies is not to offer lessons but to reflect upon common themes experienced by peace agreements in Latin America. This is indeed a well- structured book, incorporating the analytical tools of political analysis and sharp observations by practitioners. The book is primarily concerned with the factors that make peace negotiations possible. But it also studies peace implementation and the consolidation of postwar societies. Here, truth, justice and reconciliation, reform of the security apparatus and the need to deal with social and economic inequalities are argued with convincing vigour. Paulo S. Wrobel, Inter-American Dialogue, Washington DC, USA

Crafting coalitions for reform: business preferences, political institutions, and neoliberal reform in Brazil. By Peter R. Kingstone. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. 1999. 284pp. Index. Pb.: £17.95. ISBN 0 271 01939 5. In Crafting coalitions for reform, Peter Kingstone seeks to answer what he characterizes as ‘one of the central empirical puzzles of neoliberal reform’, namely, what motivates business to support reforms, how it affects the sustainability of the process and the consequences for economic development. To solve this puzzle, Kingstone studies industrialists’ response to trade liberalization in Brazil during the last decade, focusing on three important sectors: paper and pulp, auto-parts and machinery. According to the author, Brazil is an interesting case-study since business has been mostly supportive of neo-liberal reforms, even in sectors previously protected from foreign competition. Relying mainly on confidential interviews with numerous business leaders in the three sectors mentioned above, the book introduces the hypotheses that industrialists’ support is mostly influenced by the government commitment to reform. Industrialists’ perception of government credibility is in turn evaluated by its ability to take forward the reforms through Brazil’s complex political system. In exploring business response to reforms, the author competently lays out the political economy under which neo-liberal reforms were implemented in Brazil. He constructs a concise chronological account of the series of adjustment packages introduced by successive governments. Kingstone also devotes a chapter to the history of the three sectors and attempts to assess sectoral location and relations with the state as variables influencing business support. The problem, however, is that too much emphasis is placed on describing the process and too little attention is given to analysis. The book ends up being overly descriptive, and thus serves mainly as a good source of reference. Partly to blame for the analytical shortcomings is the author’s failure to explore other aspects of neo-liberal reforms in Brazil. He focuses his argument exclusively on business support for trade liberalization, failing to mention their reaction to privatization or financial liberalization even though they have greatly affected business options and consequently their support for reforms. Another problem relates to his methodology. Most of the author’s argument is drawn from

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confidential interviews with key businesspeople. More empirical evidence, however, such as data on investment by different sectors, would help to sharpen his conclusions. It would also serve to discredit what some observers of Brazilian politics refer to as the existing gap between business rhetoric and action, which Kingstone himself characterizes as ad hoc, atheoretical, and unconnected to empirical research. Another crucial problem is the failure to include the impact of the Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR) on the different industrial sectors studied. The regional economic integration process between Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay changed quite significantly the market structure of at least one of the sectors studied, that of the auto-parts. Finally, the book suffers from its unfortunate timing. Since the study ends in 1997, at the onset of the Asian financial crisis, it does not include the effects of financial turmoil in Brazil, in particular the January 1999 devaluation of the real. In the face of the drastic changes in the economic and business environment that ensued, many of Kingstone’s observations on business relations with the government of President Cardoso turn out to be a matter of historical interest, in particular his lengthy discussion of Cardoso’s ability to hold the value of the currency. Rachel M. Menezes, Inter-American Dialogue, Washington DC, USA

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