POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW: 2006 VOL 4, 311–395
Book Reviews
Political Theory
Redesigning Distribution: Basic Income
and Stakeholder Grants as Cornerstones
for an Egalitarian Capitalism by Bruce
Ackerman, Anne Alstott and Philippe Van
Parijs (eds). London: Verso, 2006. 228pp.,
£17.99, ISBN 1 84467 517 3
This collection is intended as an example of
political theory with an empirical focus, considering as it does two related proposals for achieving
‘a more egalitarian capitalism’. Specifically, the
collection addresses the relative merits and
demerits of two much-debated schemes: the
Stakeholder Grant (SG) and the Basic Income
(BI). An SG, on the version defended by
Ackerman and Alstott, would award individuals
reaching adulthood a one-off capital sum to invest
or spend as they see fit. A BI, as defended by Van
Parijs, would award individuals an unconditional,
non-work-related income for life. The collection
comprises a brief description and justification by
each scheme’s advocates, a series of critical
(though generally supportive) essays and a
response by each camp.
While each defends their scheme vigorously,
the normative commitments and political goals
on both sides are broadly held in common. The
authors share a concern with the inegalitarianism
of current distributions of wealth and income,
with the limited opportunities afforded to the
poor in market societies, and with how individual decisions about careers, voluntary and
caring work and the decision simply not to work
are influenced by economic conditions which
are in themselves of limited justice. Much of the
debate herein therefore focuses on questions of
practicability, and the effects of implementing
one scheme rather than another. On the surface
of it, the two schemes are similar (especially since
one could either invest an SG thereby to secure
a constant return equivalent to a BI, or mortgage
one’s BI to generate an SG equivalent). Van
Parijs pulls no punches in ruling this latter
option out of court, however, and this refusal
marks out a genuine difference of perspective.
The real problem of ‘stake-blowing’ – the possibility that individuals receiving an SG might
squander it in ill-considered ways – makes BI,
Van Parijs asserts, preferable. This claim opens a
controversial set of issues concerning paternalism, discussed ably by Stuart White in his illuminating chapter. Other chapters concentrate on
the priority of SG or BI vis-à-vis erstwhile commitments to the welfare state, and the effects of
both schemes on democratic citizenship, as well
as on poverty and class-based exploitation.
Finally, some of the more empirically-minded
chapters attempt to track the likely expense, and
effectiveness, of both schemes. Overall, the collection represents a valuable attempt to think
through some of the practical implications of a
normative commitment to economic freedom
and security for all.
Chris Armstrong
(University of Southampton)
Living Political Ideas by Geoff Andrews
and Michael Saward (eds). Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2005. 161pp.,
£14.99, ISBN 0 7486 1972 0
Political theory is perpetually plagued with the
issue of reconciling theory with practice. Just
how do theorists balance often abstract intangible debates about concepts and meaning with
practical issues surrounding the way we live our
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312
lives? In this edited collection by Andrews and
Saward, the authors add their own contributions
to this debate by ‘show[ing] that theories, ideology and ideas “live” ’ (p. 1), highlighting the
centrality of ideas to politics by juxtaposing
theoretical perspectives with practical examples.
This book is part of a five-book series developed by The Open University, ‘designed for students and others who have not studied politics
before, and can stand alone as a short introduction to key areas of debate within political
science’ (p. vii). Because of this, the five chapters
follow a distinct thematic structure common
to the series and each topic fits into a specific
conceptual framework. In summary, these are
legitimacy (power and structure); national selfdetermination (centre and periphery); dissent
(participation and dissent); justice (equality and
difference); and using theory (evidence and
argument).
While each chapter presents a discrete argument about its particular topic, making it difficult
to form any overall conclusions, several factors do
relate the chapters to each other. The first is the
emphasis on explaining and evaluating the theory
with reference to key thinkers in the field. The
second is the overall theme of the book, ‘living
political ideas’, which develops the theories presented by showing them in the context of contemporary or ‘living’ examples.Thirdly, there is an
overall distinction made between ideology and
theory that is initiated in the introduction and
then developed in successive chapters. This culminates in Smith’s chapter 5 discussion of
theory as a ‘toolbox’ that can clarify meanings,
and political ideologies as a ‘workbench’ on
which the tools of political theory can help
explain the nature of ideology (p. 150). This
makes a crucial comparison and link between
theory and practice showing not only how they
are related but also how they can be distinguished
from one another. Overall, this book is an easyto-read collection of chapters covering a diverse
range of topics. It is an introductory-type text,
complete with summaries at the end of each
section, that provides basic facts about theories
and theorists, making this a valuable read for students who may be new to political theory but
POLITICAL THEOR Y
also teachers looking for a concise way to present
some complex concepts.
Melanie Beacroft
(University of Canberra)
Metapolitics by Alain Badiou. London: Verso,
2005. 159pp., £18.00, ISBN 1 84467 035 X
In this book Badiou articulates an approach to
thinking about politics that steadfastly rejects the
claims of political philosophy, at least as it is
usually understood in the normative mainstream
of the Anglo-American academy. As the bluntly
titled first chapter puts it, Badiou is ‘Against Political Philosophy’, by which he means that he is
against the idea that philosophy can provide the
tools for transforming opinionated discussion into
justifiable norms that ought to govern our understanding of political actions and the legitimacy or
not of political institutions. Although the targets
of Badiou’s polemic against political philosophy
are not drawn from the mainstream of AngloAmerican debates, one can, without too much
difficulty, read his work as a tirade against the
contemporary dominance of notions of conversation and communication within this tradition.
The ideas of Rawlsian ‘reflective equilibrium’ or
‘overlapping consensus’, Habermas’s ‘communicative ethics’, communitarian ‘webs of articulation’ or Rorty’s evocation of a ‘conversation of
mankind’ are all well within the scope of Badiou’s
critique. According to Badiou, privileging conceptions of communication, discussion and debate
reduces philosophical thinking about politics to
the mere management of opinion and, moreover,
the end result of such approaches will be to create
‘prescriptions which sustain the parliamentary
state’ (p. 24). This result, for Badiou, reveals that
the rhetoric of pluralism which sustains these discourses of political philosophy never pertains to
the real plurality of politics, a plurality that he
locates within the intrinsic multiplicity of the
political event. The presupposition of consensus
that drives normative theorising about politics, for
Badiou, amounts to the erasure of the immanent
singularity of every genuine political event.
The idea that all genuine political events are
singular derives from Badiou’s major ontological
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
BOOK REVIEWS
treatise, Being and Event (London: Continuum,
forthcoming). In this work he argues that philosophy does not produce truths itself; rather,
philosophy is conditioned by four truth procedures of which politics is one (love, science and
art being the others). In this light, philosophy
constitutes itself ‘as an experimentation of a new
concept of truth’ (Metapolitics, p. xxxii), but an
experimentation that is internally multiple as it is
governed by the four truth procedures. A
genuine political event, therefore, is one that produces a new truth which philosophy must have
as both its inspiration (to begin thinking at all)
and as its target (to grasp the truth that is produced). Political philosophy tries to create truth
(in the name of a consensus of opinion) whereas
metapolitics has as its subject not opinion but the
truth produced in a political event and its ‘consequences’. In this context, Metapolitics is to politics what other works of Badiou are to love (‘La
scène du deux’, in Badiou et al., De L’amour,
Paris: Flammarion, 1999), science (Court traité
d’ontologie transitoire, Paris: Seuil, 1998) and art
(Handbook of Inaesthetics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
Badiou’s philosophy of political truths leads
him to scathing attacks on the manipulation of
opinion that he sees at the heart of French, British
and particularly American domestic and international policies. But it is readers interested in the
tradition of ‘radical’ political thought coming out
of post-Second World War France that will find
the most immediate points of contact.The current
surge of interest in the work of Jacques Ranciere,
for example, is tackled by Badiou in two important essays that highlight significant points of
contact between the two thinkers but which also
reveal Badiou’s concerns that Ranciere’s approach
to the singularity of politics relies upon phantoms
and illusions that reveal a deeper inconsistency
about the nature of the relationship between philosophy and politics (Ranciere is criticised for
separating these two domains rather than analysing their connection in a radical way). Althusser’s
theoretical Marxism is similarly invoked both as a
source for Badiou’s own ideas and yet one from
which he wishes to maintain a critical distance.
The lesser known (in Anglo-American circles)
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Sylvain Lazarus, in particular his book The Anthropology of the Name (Paris: Seuil, 1996) is the topic
of the second essay and it is clear that Lazarus is
one of the few thinkers with whom Badiou feels
a real affinity. Lazarus is applauded by Badiou for
projecting how we may think about politics
(without falling into the traps of a philosophy of
political life) by rendering the political itself
‘unnameable’.
On its own, this book can be read as an outlandish and naïvely provocative series of polemics,
written as it is without the usual apparatuses of
detailed argument and discussion. But, taken as
part of a much larger project, it expresses a sustained and rigorous critique of the complacent
presuppositions of political philosophy in the normative tradition.
Iain MacKenzie
(University of Kent)
Natural Justice by Ken Binmore. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005. 224pp., £17.99,
ISBN 0 19 517811 4
Professor Kenneth Binmore’s Natural Justice is
a most curious book by an accomplished
economist. It is a book full of controversial claims
about justice while lacking in much, if any, scholarly support in the effort of trying ‘to get on with
telling my story with as few apologies as possible’
(p. 2). This story is essentially ‘a sustained line of
speculation on the evolutionary origins of ...
human fairness norms’ behind our ‘notions of
justice’ (p. 2), a story largely indebted to
Binmore’s controversial interpretation of Hume.
However, the problem is that he says that ‘[m]y
claims aren’t proved, but illustrated with
examples’: the book may well fail to convince
those who question its many question-begging
assumptions and, indeed, anyone looking for
greater substantiated proof of his claims.
While I entirely disagree with Binmore that
Kant fails to provide ‘any genuine defense’ of his
moral philosophy (p. vii) or that ‘Plato was a
fascist’ (p. viii), the most startling worries of all
with scholarship are his alleged embracing of
Humean philosophy while adhering to a social
contractarian model (pp. 3–5).This was something
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Hume quite forcefully (and famously) rejected in
his ‘On the Original Contract’. Binmore gives no
acknowledgement of this work or its compelling
criticisms. This is a curiosity for someone who
often argues Hume’s acceptance of a claim as
adequate evidence.
Hume once wrote that what convinces us in
our study or lecture hall often loses its persuasive
power over us once we go outside into the world.
Binmore may have provided us with a coherent
picture, but it is not convincing, perhaps in part
because he fails to provide a genuine defence of
his arguments. Perhaps game theory assumptions
‘demonstrate’ that we cannot provide ‘an absolute
justification for the fairness norms ... in our
society’, but this is hardly convincing to those not
sold on game theory as an appropriate method of
moral theorising.
Thom Brooks
(University of Newcastle)
Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a
Global Legal Community by Hauke
Brunkhorst. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2005.
262pp., £27.95, ISBN 0 262 02582 5
In the first two sections, the author defines
modern solidarity, elucidates its political lineage
and considers the tasks it discharges in modern
societies. Brunkhorst makes three central claims:
(1) That solidarity is coterminous with a radical
conception of democracy, i.e. the simultaneous affirmation of political and socioeconomic rights (p. xxiii, pp. 73–6)
(2) That solidarity is a radically modern
concept. The emergence of a functionally
differentiated society results in the double
integrative challenges of domination and
social exclusion (chapter 4), which call for
the simultaneous achievement of (a) the differentiation of autonomous individuals and
(b) the identity between author and subject
of legal norms. Modern social integration
simply cannot be assured by functional
systems, but requires citizens to engage in
communicative action and mutually to
acknowledge their political and socioeconomic rights; thus the strive for solidarity
(3) That the modern concept of solidarity has
been forged with materials derived from
Roman law, classic republican thought and
Jewish and Christian theology, duly emancipated from their communitarian and theological context by the French revolution,
which unleashed their social-transformative
potential by coupling them to modern positive law (p. 51, p. 53).
The third section dwells on the new challenges
posed by international integration. Internationalisation creates the conditions under which the
universalistic drive for democracy can be realised
beyond the nation state (p. 108). But, while we are
subject to international law, supranational democracy has not been established yet; given that international may trump national law, this raises serious
doubts about the democratic legitimacy of all
laws. Even the affirmation of international human
rights is ambiguous, as it tends to be one-sided and
to undermine the fulfilment of national duties of
solidarity (p. 149).This gives rise to new variants of
the modern integration challenges, i.e. fundamentalism (p. 115) and social unrest (p. 118). Brunkhorst affirms that the solution is the establishment
of a functional equivalent of the national democratic state at the international level (p.135),resulting from political mobilisation and the progressive
strengthening of weak publics. Brunkhorst considers that the European Union is a source of
inspiration, given that its law has been positively
constitutionalised, and such constitutional norms
render possible radical reformism, even if a political constitutional moment is still missing (p. 175).
The book is bound to be regarded as one of
the major contributions to the analysis of law
and democracy from a discourse-theoretical
perspective. It is only to be regretted that the
author has not considered in more detail the relationship between democratic legitimacy and the
different layers of the principle of legality, and
more specifically, the normative underpinnings of
the ‘division of labour’ between constitution, statutes and statutory instruments.
Agustín José Menéndez
(Universidad de León)
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
BOOK REVIEWS
Social and Political Thought of Mahatma
Gandhi by Bidyut Chakrabarty. Abingdon:
Routledge, 2006. 234pp., £60.00, ISBN 0 415
36096 X
Almost 60 years after his death, the political
thoughts and activities of Mahatma Gandhi continue to provide a rich source of research and
discussion material for those interested in alternative ideological traditions. The sheer volume of
work written never ceases to astound (whether
biographical, philosophical or relating to his role
in the Indian freedom struggle and to which the
bibliographical notes and select bibliography here
testify), assisted in no small way by Gandhi himself
who was a prolific writer, particularly championing his ideas through his newspaper Harijan.
However, such extensive articulation has not been
without its problems as ‘the language [in which
his ideas were articulated] is so simple that it is
notoriously open to diverse interpretations’ (p. 1)
along with the general impression of an overwhelmingly complex philosophy.
This book attempts to address Gandhi’s social
and political views in a unique way as it is ‘a
contextualized study of the Mahatma with reference to those carefully selected themes central to
his social and political thoughts’ (p. 29). It is
divided into five core chapters which look at:
Gandhi’s ideas of swaraj (self-rule), by selectively
reviewing the literature that focuses on the pillars
of his social and political thought; the praxis of
ahimsa (non-violence); major trends in critiques of
Gandhi by leading personalities (Roy,Tagore and
Ambedkar); and his writings in Harijan. Finally,
actual excerpts from Harijan are reproduced to
illustrate the distinctive features of Gandhi’s social
and political thoughts.This is particularly important as Gandhi remarkably ‘interpreted and
re-interpreted his ideas sometimes in response to
the critiques and sometimes in response to the
circumstances’ (p. 131).
This book is number 43 in a series titled ‘Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought’. It
ably guides the reader through Gandhi’s social
and political views in a clear and concise manner
and usefully provides an explanatory glossary of
the various terms used throughout Gandhi’s
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work. It clearly illustrates that Gandhi’s philosophy is neither a political nor a social one but a
complex mix of the two. He was primarily a
political activist ‘whose writings emerged mainly
during the process of social, economic and political actions’ (p. 167). It is a book that would be of
use to postgraduate students, seasoned researchers
and practitioners alike.
Sandra Buchanan
(University of Ulster)
Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the
Newest Social Movements by Richard J. F.
Day. London: Pluto Press, 2005. 254pp., £16.99,
ISBN 0 7453 2112 7
Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony – as the
complete material and ideological domination of
a population within the state – has had a significant impact upon scholarly literature on ‘civil
society’ and new social movements (NSMs).
Indeed, as Richard Day asserts, a ‘genealogy of
hegemony’ shows that mainstream analysis in this
area has long relied upon an image of ‘total’ (i.e.
state-wide) reform or revolution. This genealogy
reveals our subjection within what Day calls ‘the
hegemony of hegemony’, in which ‘the possibilities of social change without the state form have
been marginalised by the dominance of (post-)
marxist and (neo)liberal models of social change’
(p. 15). Day argues that many NSMs in fact follow
quite a different ‘political logic’, one that can be
viewed in terms of localised affinity groups and
direct actions rather than total reform or the proverbial revolutionary shift. Moving easily from the
anti-WTO protests in Seattle and the LETS
barter system to alternative media outlets and the
Zapatistas, Day argues that ‘these movements/
networks/tactics do not seek totalising effects on
any axis at all. Instead, they set out to block, resist,
and render redundant both corporate and state
powers in local, national, and transnational contexts’ (p. 45). Day buttresses this claim with a
wealth of supporting evidence, and it is clear he
has experience with and access to many of the
relevant actors and actions. Indeed, his reading of
the various causes is broadly sympathetic, and his
tone indicates an assumption that his audience
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shares in a general will to dismantle the dominant
structures of global capitalism, racism, sexism, etc.
While this attitude will no doubt alienate a
portion of his audience, this should not detract
from the value of this work. Day’s ‘genealogy of
hegemony’ exposes and challenges the assumption
that social change, if it is to happen, is an all-ornothing affair. In this, Gramsci is Dead stands as a
bold and quite convincing statement, one that
offers exceptional insight into contemporary
political activism.
Shane Mulligan
(Concordia University)
Just War Theory: A Reappraisal by Mark
Evans (ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2005. 238pp., £16.99, ISBN 0 7486 2075 3
Determining if a war is just, indeed if war can ever
be just, has a long historical lineage. In the shadow
of 9/11 and the interventions that have followed,
supporters of the ‘war on terror’ have put much
rhetorical effort into asserting the just nature of
their cause. Just War Theory: A Reappraisal is therefore a timely work that engages with many
important issues of the day. The editor, Mark
Evans, seeks to test the relevance of the tenets of
just war theory in contemporary international
relations and has collected a series of articles from
notable academics engaged in issues related to the
ethics of warfare. The book is subdivided into
sections dealing with specific aspects of just war
theory, namely ‘Just Cause’, ‘Justice in the
Conduct of War’ and ‘Justice and the End of War’.
The authors here clearly adhere to the notion
that warfare can and should be waged in a just
manner, and believe in evaluating the conduct of
states on the basis of morality. The theoretical
framework throughout is broadly that of cosmopolitanism and the notion of global civil society,
described, perhaps wishfully, by Evans as ‘hardly
the most controversial of presuppositions’ (p. 75).
In many respects the most salient aspect of this
volume is its ability to dissect the moral rhetoric
increasingly espoused by the Bush administration.
Crawford provides a very nuanced critique of the
legitimacy of pre-emptive force suggesting that
preventative would better describe the action of
the Bush administration. The need to legitimise
preventative action requires the construction of an
environment of immanent threat which she suggests will ‘create a state of nature more thoroughly
than has ever existed’ (p. 47). Lang, using the
interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq as illustrations, suggests that punitive war is neither legal,
nor approximate to just war theory.
This is a volume which adopts an unashamedly
moral approach that some, particularly realists, will
find both hopelessly idealistic and essentially
irrelevant. Orend’s examination of whether it
is legitimate to act outside the confines of just
war theory’s rules of engagement when facing
supreme emergencies will seem self-evident, concluding as it does with the approval for states ‘to
do terrible things in order to survive’ (p. 151).
However, those who adhere to the realist conception of international relations, and who consider
those who engage in philosophical musings on
the morality of warfare to be, as Evans acknowledges, ‘naïvely and unrealistically pretend[ing] to
be able to control a phenomenon that in fact
always resists morality’s demands’ (p. 208), must
acknowledge that in an era when international
relations is dominated by the interventions in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and morality is increasingly
called upon to justify interventionism, a
re-examination of the original tenets of just war
theory is highly relevant. If just war is to be more
than simply a rhetorical device employed to
legitimise aggression then this exploration of its
applicability to current policy is welcome and
necessary.
Aidan Hehir
(University of Sheffield)
Pluralism and Liberal Democracy by
Richard E. Flathman. Baltimore MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2005. 232pp., $40.00,
ISBN 0 8018 8215 X
Pluralism is now one of the most widely used
words in the liberal vocabulary, yet what a pluralist
commitment involves, and what form of liberalism it implies, remain controversial issues. These
are the topics considered by Richard Flathman in
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
BOOK REVIEWS
a searching study of the relation between pluralism and liberal democracy.
Flathman deliberately defines pluralism so
broadly that almost everyone becomes a subscriber, willy-nilly. Pluralism is, he writes, ‘the
recognition of a multiplicity of persons and
groups that, on the one hand, are identifiably
related to one another and, on the other, can be
usefully distinguished from other individuals and
groups’ (p. 1).Although this broad definition takes
in thinkers who would reject both the terms
pluralist and liberal as descriptions of their position, it permits Flathman to maintain that William
James, Hannah Arendt, Stuart Hampshire and
Michael Oakeshott, despite their extremely different philosophical positions, all ‘augment’ pluralist theory in one way or another (p. 6).The bulk
of the book explores the ways in which Flathman
believes they do so.
Flathman has especial sympathy for James,
much of whose thought he regards as being in
the service of ‘the most radical of pluralities, that
is, a plurality of robust and highly differentiated
individualities’ (p. 3). Arendt draws attention to
another fundamental pluralism, which is the
‘plurality of [every] self ’ (p. 74). A particularly
valuable chapter on Hampshire analyses the
limits of pluralism set for Hampshire by a
combination of procedural justice, political
participation, institutions such as the family
and friendship, and a reflective and benevolent
character. Flathman’s inclusion of Oakeshott,
however, suggests that a price has to be paid for
the flexibility created by his comprehensive
concept of pluralism. Although Oakeshott’s
identification of autonomous modes of experience is indeed a form of pluralism, the trouble is
that it has no ethical implications and can therefore hardly be hailed as a contribution to liberal
political theory.
Flathman’s chief problem is to draw together
the different concepts of pluralism he finds in the
four thinkers in a coherent liberal synthesis.As he
himself confesses, ‘Lame as it may be, the only
generalization that can be drawn is that no pluralism can dispense entirely with considerations
that they foreground’ (p. 180). Although his conclusion is modest, Flathman nevertheless offers a
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deeply pondered analysis of what he believes each
of the four thinkers on whom he concentrates has
contributed to pluralist theory.
Noel O’Sullivan
(University of Hull)
Empowered Participation: Reinventing
Urban Democracy by Archon Fung.
Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
306pp., $42.00, ISBN 0 691 11535 4
In Empowered Participation,Archon Fung makes an
indispensable contribution to deliberative democratic theory, by rigorously analyzing Chicago’s
devolution of education and policing policymaking powers to neighborhood-level deliberative fora. He calls this devolution ‘accountable
autonomy’, and argues that it ‘can spur robust
citizen participation and deliberation that contributes to the fairness and effectiveness of governance outcomes’ (p. 26). Beyond simply providing
another welcome empirical case study in deliberation, Fung’s analysis of the Chicago plan also
provides two important innovations: it outlines
an ideal procedure for deliberation aimed not at
constitutional principles (Rawls), social norms
(Habermas) or moral conflict (Gutmann and
Thompson) but at pragmatic policy and administrative problems (pp. 56–60); and it examines
deliberation under the very non-ideal conditions
of inner-city poverty and social conflict (chapters
5 and 6).
In doing so, Fung is able to address five
critiques of deliberative theory: rational-choice
skeptics, who assume that people are too selfinterested to deliberate fairly; strong-egalitarians
who fear that deliberation amid inequality will
only further harm the already disadvantaged;
social-capital theorists who believe effective
deliberation presupposes strong civic associations,
which are often absent in impoverished innercity neighborhoods; cultural difference theorists
who worry that deliberation favors culturally
dominant groups, such as middle-class white
males; and critics who see modern societies as
too complex for participation by ordinary citizens. Instead, Fung finds participants willing to
tame self-interest when confronted with norms
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of deliberative fairness; civic associations developing as a result of participation in deliberative
fora; and citizens able to assist professionals in
solving complex policy problems by providing
local knowledge and innovative proposals.
Most intriguing are Fung’s findings with
respect to inequality and cultural difference.While
wealthier and culturally advantaged groups do
dominate when deliberation is unstructured and
haphazard, proactive facilitators can mitigate this
problem in three ways: by structuring deliberation
to enable dominated participants to express their
concerns; by mobilizing members of underrepresented communities to participate more
often; and by equalizing power differentials
among participants by highlighting the needs of
the less advantaged (pp. 217–9). Fung is at pains to
emphasize that the quality and fairness of deliberation are not subject to the circumstantial emergence of a good discussion facilitator; rather than
the idiosyncratic actions of ‘maverick leadership’,
such discussion leaders abide by the rules set up by
the deliberative reforms in the first place (p. 195).
However, the fact that deliberation suffered in the
absence of such facilitators, along with the fact
that not all deliberative fora enjoyed quality facilitation, reveals that methods for identifying and
installing quality facilitators are essential to the
success of participatory deliberation under nonideal circumstances.This leads to a broader, theoretical question: does deliberative theory require a
normative model of effective and democratically
legitimate discussion leadership, one that retains
the egalitarian spirit of democratic deliberation
while acknowledging the indispensable role of
facilitators?
Michael Rabinder James
(Bucknell University)
Jürgen Habermas, Democracy and the
Public Sphere by Luke Goode. London: Pluto
Press, 2005. 165pp., £14.99, ISBN 0 7453 2088 0
Habermas’s concept of the public sphere has been
of great significance since he first introduced it
more than 40 years ago in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In the intervening years
it has been much attacked and sometimes even
dismissed as passé but its importance persists, not
least in the current debates about democracy and
citizenship. Understanding the concept remains
essential to students of social and political theory,
but there are also obstacles to a clear overview of
the topic and its current role. Of these the most
important is that during the course of his long and
prolific career Habermas has modified and developed the concept in a number of ways, sometimes
as a side effect of other concerns, so that a good
deal of work needs to be done before a proper
critical engagement can be made. Luke Goode has
sought to address this need and has written a
careful, sympathetic and reliable guide which
both analyses the original concept – and the ways
in which Habermas has developed and refined it
– and also seeks to place it in the context of
Habermas’s work as a whole. But the book is
more than a mere exposition, useful as that alone
would be. Goode engages critically with Habermas, reviewing some major criticisms of the
public sphere, and also suggesting ways of developing the concept in new directions. His discussions of reflexive democracy, and of the writings
of Giddens and Rice in particular, are illuminating
and thought provoking, but he is especially interesting when discussing the implications of the
new media technologies – about which Habermas himself has been famously dismissive. Goode
refers to his own critical developments of the
concept of the public sphere in these areas as
being no more than tentative steps but in fact they
open up fruitful areas of discussion in their own
right. If I have one relatively minor caveat it is
that, despite being part of a series of introductory
texts on major European thinkers, this is not a
book to recommend to average first-year undergraduates – the complexity of the argument is
mirrored in the style, and readers would benefit
from some previous knowledge of social theory.
For more advanced undergraduates, though, and
for scholars of communication, democracy and
citizenship, in particular, who are seeking a clear
and critical overview of the Habermasian public
sphere, this is a valuable and timely book.
David Sullivan
(University of Wales, Bangor)
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Time of Transitions by Jürgen Habermas
(trans. and ed. by Ciaran Cronin and Max
Pensky). Cambridge: Polity, 2006. xv + 188pp.,
£14.99, ISBN 0 7456 3011 1
Time of Transitions consists of essays by and interviews with Jürgen Habermas from 1998 to 2001.
As the title suggests, the essays and interviews deal
with transitions: the transition from pre-modern
to modern societies (the place of religion in contemporary society and in Habermas’s work); the
transition we usually refer to as ‘globalisation’; the
transition of the European Union (Habermas’s
argument for the institutionalisation of a legal and
political regime at a ‘post-national’ level in order
to stem the influence of economic globalisation);
and the transitions that pertain to Germany: the
post-Second World War development, the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the 1998 Red-Green victory
in the German parliamentary elections, the
funding scandal surrounding Kohl and the CDU,
the Germans’ memory of the Holocaust and the
reception of American pragmatism in Germany.
Finally, the volume contains an article on the
relationship between constitutionalism and
democracy, clarifying aspects of Habermas’s discourse theory of law and democracy from Between
Facts and Norms.
Big parts of the book are available in English
elsewhere. Many of the pieces are written for
specific occasions and, as such, they will not be of
much interest today, especially to an Englishspeaking audience. Other pieces are of more
lasting interest, including that on the military
intervention in Kosovo, those on the European
Union and the piece on constitutional
democracy.
Lasse Thomassen
(University of Limerick)
The Impact of the French Revolution:Texts
from Britain in the 1790s by Iain HampsherMonk (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005. 353pp., £40.00, £18.99, ISBN 0 521
57005 0, ISBN 0 521 57911 2
The Impact of the French Revolution: Texts from
Britain in the 1790s, edited by Iain Hampsher© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
Monk, is a well-edited and comprehensive collection of political writings by British authors which
appeared in response to the revolutionary events
and ideas in France in the late eighteenth century.
This volume brings together texts composed
by, among others, Edmund Burke, Mary
Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, William Godwin and
Thomas Spence. A thorough introduction to
this anthology sets the historical, political and
ideational context within which these texts
originated. Each text is preceded by a biographical note on the author and an editorial note on
the text, as well as suggestions for further reading.
This makes the texts accessible to a contemporary
reader in spite of the possible terminological or
discursive complexities of the original writings.
The texts are accompanied by reprints of popular
cartoons from that period, which indicate how
particular texts and ideas were received in British
society.
The primary readership of this book is likely to
include undergraduate and postgraduate students,
who will find Hampsher-Monk’s edition to be a
highly informative guide to one of the most fascinating periods in the history of British political
thought. It will also be of interest to tutors and
researchers dealing with the issues of Britain’s
intellectual history, the development of modern
political thought and the intellectual impact of
the French revolution on European conceptual
history.
An obvious advantage of this edition is its comprehensive approach in the presentation of individual texts, as well as the dialogical dynamic that
it introduces between the texts. The texts are
structured chronologically, most of them being
provoked by Burke’s critique of French ideas,
which was itself inspired by the progressive view
of Richard Price and the radical intellectual
milieus of the Revolution Society or the London
Corresponding Society. The dialogical aspect of
this anthology allows the reader to study the discursive interconnectedness and mutual referentiality of the texts. This book gives the reader an
opportunity to gain an overall perspective into the
broad political spectrum of opinions represented
in Britain at that time and to appreciate the inspirational powers of the claims for political equality,
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liberty and fraternity in the Enlightenment era.
Not least, this anthology provides an insight into
the conceptual history of those political notions
which remain central in today’s politics, such as
natural rights, the private/public dichotomy, citizenship, legitimisation of social institutions, secularism, class politics, and so on.
Magdalena Zolkos
(University of Alberta)
In Defence of Multinational Citizenship by
Siobhán Harty and Michael Murphy.
Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005. 208pp.,
£17.99, ISBN 0 7083 1852 5
In Defence of Multinational Citizenship explicitly
defines its scope as a possible alternative political
solution to the question of self-government. The
authors question the established understandings of
state stability which have rested on the belief that
there can only be one legitimate political authority in a given territory with a single nationality
and a single citizenship regime.
The justification of multinational citizenship is
anchored on a twofold assumption: first, it is held
that loyalty to territorial identity trumps any nonterritorial one; and second, it is argued that the
emergence of new loci of rule-making at the
supra-state level simply reconfigures the distribution of power in the international system in such
a way that the state is one among several important actors that exercise influence in the
decision-making process.
The multinational model of citizenship and
self-determination is characterised by the domestic redistribution of state sovereignty to satisfy
demands for democratic reform at the sub-state
level. This process can be combined with
democratised systems of regional or global multilevel governance where sovereignty is shared
among sub-state, state and supra-state actors to
help meet the normative and empirical challenges
of cross-border interdependence. There are five
dimensions of multinational citizenship, namely
democracy and equality, recognition, identity,
trust and security and finally territory. These are
applied to the cases of Belgium, Canada and
Spain, demonstrating that justice is achieved only
when all five dimensions are working together.
The volume is clearly written with an insightful and engaging discussion on several aspects of
self-government and citizenship. It is a contribution to the literature that seeks a post-sovereign
basis for citizenship and self-determination in the
twenty-first century. However, the benefit of
putting forward a model of multinational citizenship would have been greater had the authors not
focused only on case studies from Europe and
North America, especially when they allude to a
possible relation between secession and development (p. 16).
Overall, the book is a useful and a thoughtprovoking suggestion in the fields of citizenship
theory, globalisation, nationalism and international relations theory. It is essential reading for
anyone studying the structure and organisation of
contemporary societies either at a theoretical or
practical level.
Costas Laoutides
(University of Wales)
A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David
Harvey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
247pp., £14.99, ISBN 0 19 928326 5
David Harvey’s new book charts the history of
neoliberalism from the 1970s and looks at its
transforming impact on state powers such as privatisation, finance and the market order from a
Marxist-geographical perspective. For Harvey, the
years 1978–80 marked a ‘revolutionary’ turning
point in the economic structure of both national
economies and the global economic order. He
sees neoliberalism’s hegemony, in various guises,
sweeping across the globe in countries such as
Britain, the United States, New Zealand and
Sweden to Chile, South Africa and China. Harvey
argues that neoliberalism in these countries has
infiltrated think tanks, universities, the media and
business corporations as well as the key institutions of the state. Furthermore, it has manifested
itself at the global level regulating international
finance and trade through institutions such as the
WTO and IMF. Harvey goes on to emphasise the
‘creative destruction’ that has been wrought by
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neoliberalism on old institutional frameworks, the
division of labour, technology, social relations and
the provision of welfare.
Harvey tends to overlook the complexity of
neoliberalism as both a discourse and a political
movement and rather simplistically equates it with
the hegemonic forces of globalisation, and the
‘market-liberalising’ activities of international
financial institutions such as the World Bank and
the IMF. Neoliberalism is more refined than he
gives it credit for. Such reductionist accounts
underplay its internal complexity, in particular its
commitment to a sophisticated Hayekian constitutional order governed by the rule of law, which
is simply not present in the global economic
arena. Moreover, Harvey’s book, which he states is
a ‘history’, pays very little attention to the origins
of neoliberalism as an anti-collectivist movement
in the immediate years after the Second World
War, in particular its intellectual genesis in the
Mont Pelerin Society in 1947. These criticisms
aside, the book presents a detailed spatial analysis
of the ‘condition of neoliberalism’ and makes a
valuable contribution to existing Marxist critiques. It will be of interest to advanced undergraduate students, postgraduates and academics.
Rachel Turner
(University of Sheffield)
New Media Campaigns and the Managed
Citizen by Philip N. Howard. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006. 264pp.,
£14.99, ISBN 0 521 61227 6
In this important book, Philip Howard looks at
the use of the internet and of digital retrieval
systems in contemporary political campaigning:
what he calls the ‘hypermedia campaign’. He contends that not only have new technologies altered
the means of communicating politics, but ‘the
new system of producing political campaigns has
immense implications for the meaning of citizenship and the basis of representation’ (p. 75).
Howard’s book is divided into five neatly conceived chapters. It begins by explaining something of the software codes, the emergence of a
new form of political strategy and the formation
of an industrial complex. Beginning in chapter
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two, and referring to what he calls ‘the digital
leviathan’, Howard then explores what he sees as
the surrender of the production of ideas into the
hands of those competent in the dominant
technologies. What then follows is a compelling
exploration of how technology has come to be
used to survey and pass judgement upon the electorate, giving rise to such practices as ‘redlining’
out those seen to be beyond persuasion.The form
of democracy that emerges is said to be based on
a ‘thin citizenship’, where large sectors of the
polity are left to make do with a form of conditional enfranchisement in which their political
intelligence is regulated from the centre. Howard’s
examples of these trends are furnished throughout
by quotes from industry insiders. Pleasingly, these
are sufficiently self-reflexive to add something
more to the analysis than mere witness statements.
One misgiving I have about Howard’s
approach is the determination of his focus on the
United States.While it is true that the majority of
innovations on this use of new media have come
from there, the influence of these developments
has spread worldwide – with the Labour party in
the UK using digital retrieval techniques pioneered by the Democrats to execute rebuttal
tactics – and Howard’s thoughts on the cultural
transferability of the hypermedia campaign would
have been worth reading. Also, it is worth our
bearing in mind that practices such as redlining
are honed versions of older political practices,
around the targeting of marginal constituencies
and states with subsequent abandonment of both
safe and hopeless electoral regions. But these are
more points of conversation than they are substantial criticisms. I, for one, am extremely grateful
to Howard for writing this excellent book, and
I will be recommending it to students and
colleagues.
Michael Higgins
(University of Sunderland)
What is Politics? A Short Introduction by Jef
Huysmans. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2005. 81pp., £7.99, ISBN 0 7486 1966 6
This book is the end product of the author’s
work in critical and alternative modes of political
322
analysis. Jef Huysmans, a well-known constructivist, structures an innovative textbook that presents
the nature of modern political affairs in a challenging fashion. By simply focusing on a case
study dealing with migration and by posing five
central questions – each addressed under a separate heading – he organises the underlying argument: that the study of the political can be
broadened. In other words, he tests politics in the
context of migration to reach a conclusion as to
what politics is/could be. While he suggests
broadening the agenda of politics, the author does
not compel his reader to move immediately away
from the established definitions and institutions of
politics. Given this acknowledgement, however,
Huysmans endeavours to highlight the areas
whereby a bare concentration on traditional institutions and a top-down allocation of values can
lead to missing crucial points.The poverty of such
means in studying a wide range of newly emerging issues and their global implications, i.e. migration, becomes evident when he demonstrates the
flourishing conduct of politics via alternative
methods of participation. His criteria qualify politics as ‘a contest of power and values’ and ‘the
contest bears upon values and policies that apply
to a wider community’ (p. 43).Therefore, he provokes readers to dwell on how politics and its
shifting modes of significance, space and membership can be publicly constructed and vary across a
large spectrum. In the concluding two chapters (4
and 5), Huysmans aims at stressing the novel areas
of confrontation between the state and people.
The selected case of migration here provides
readers with perfect examples of such state–
society tensions. He covers intersecting spheres
between authority and ‘authoritees’ as new sites of
contestation; hence, politics. With particular reference to ‘queuing’ and the social utilisation of
‘free vouchers’, ‘passports’, ‘border controls’,
‘visas’, ‘special registration systems’ and ‘forms’,
Huysmans assures readers that everyday life
becomes both a starting and ending process of
political inclusion, exclusion, participation and
contestation. All in all, this book forges a new
interpretation of teaching ‘new’ politics.The caseled approach strengthens Huymans’ overall argument empirically rather than hindering it. The
POLITICAL THEOR Y
outcome is a clear, concise and humorous (when
needed) account of ‘what is politics?’ instead of
‘what is politics?’. Whether or not the general
reader guided by the dominant establishment of
political studies is ready for such a change in
teaching mentality is beyond the scope of the
present review. Nevertheless, What is Politics? is
not only recommended to current and prospective students of politics but also to those who
want to revise their stances and re-educate
themselves.
Gökhan Yücel
(Oxford University)
Modernization, Cultural Change and
Democracy: The Human Development
Sequence by Ronald Inglehart and Christian
Welzel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005. 333pp., £40.00, £16.99, ISBN 0 521
84695 1, ISBN 0 521 60971 2
This book offers a revised theory of modernisation seen as a process of human development that
demonstrates a close relationship between socioeconomic development, value changes and democratic institutions. Drawing on empirical data
from the World Value Surveys, which have been
conducted for twenty years worldwide, the
authors prove that the main factor in the above
sequence of change is the development of
self-expression values such as freedom of choice,
individualism and tolerance, driven by economic
conditions, which are responsible for the rise of
effective democracy, gender equality and elite
integrity.The three components of the modernisation process play an important role in developing society’s human potential understood in
terms of the expansion of human autonomy, free
choice and political freedom, as well as democratic values and institutions.
One of the most important parts of the authors’
argument concerns the link between the development of self-expression values and democracy.
The findings of the World Value Surveys prove
that people who, because of socio-economic
development, value civic and political liberties,
demand democratic political institutions, which
means that self-expression values are conducive to
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successful democratisation. Consequently, there is
empirical evidence that supports the cultural
approach to democratisation which, contrary to
the institutional approach, puts emphasis on cultural change and the rise of values that push for
democratic institutions as necessary for the emergence of a flourishing democracy. Moreover,
effective democracy arises not because of ‘Westernisation’ or ‘Americanisation’, but solely from
favourable socio-economic conditions and values
rooted in a society.
The authors focus on positive aspects of the
modernisation process and avoid engaging in a
discussion of the negative aspects of individualism
associated with self-expression values, such as the
erosion of democratic communities and sources of
authority that have been noticed by political theorists, especially communitarians. Instead Inglehart
and Welzel present arguments for a humanistic
reading of the modernisation sequence, focusing
on the civic dimension of self-expression values
that ‘create civic social capital because they direct
its use toward antidiscriminatory,humanistic goals’
(p. 295).The decline of traditional values, however,
brings not only positive effects associated with
effective democracy, but also negative effects, i.e. a
growing divorce rate and the erosion of family and
authority, as well as ethical problems such as the
question of euthanasia which cannot be solved
simply in terms of freedom of choice.
The book is a major contribution to the
research on value changes and democratisation
and will be of much interest to both students and
researchers who study human development and
democratic change.
Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves
(Jagiellonian University)
News Narratives and News Framing:
Constructing Political Reality by Karen
Johnson-Cartee. Lanham MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2005. 359pp., £26.95, ISBN 0 7425
3663 7
Professor Johnson-Cartee’s book is part of
Rowman & Littlefield’s ‘Communication, Media
and Politics’ series.The series explores the role of
communication within US politics through a
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broad, cross-disciplinary lens.Taking a social constructionist perspective, the present volume discusses the ways in which news is put together and
shaped by the media, and how this influences
political, social and economic realities.
The first two chapters map the field and firmly
establish the book’s ideas by discussing social constructionism, the increasingly powerful role of the
media and the relationship between public opinion
and the public policy process.The focus then shifts
towards reporting practices and the various aspects
that impact on a social construction of news.
Journalistic traditions, roles and philosophies that
influence the writing and reporting of news are the
focus of chapter 3, while chapter 4 draws attention
to various rituals and mythologies that guide the
selection of news. Moving away from the details of
journalistic culture to the broader links between
journalism and politics, the next two chapters
discuss the concept of ‘news as narrative’ (chapter
5) and the various groups of people involved in the
social construction of news (chapter 6). The last
two chapters focus on news framing, with standardisation the topic of chapter 7, and personalised
and confrontational framing that of chapter 8.
The book comes with an extensive list of references, as well as a case study of the events and
media coverage that surrounded the 1986 ‘cocaine
summer’ (p. 302) as an appendix. The latter not
only illustrates but also draws together various
aspects mentioned throughout the book. As a
textbook, the book could do with further editing
to simplify navigation and quick consultation:
both contents and index are rather short and a list
of diagrams/boxes is missing altogether.Additionally, most of the lists provided throughout the text
would benefit from further tabularisation.
While the focus is firmly on the American
news system, public policy process and conceptualisation of public opinion – there is only occasional mention of other news systems, such as the
British or the German, in order to put that of the
United States in context – the discussed principles
are often of a general nature and merit general
consideration in a globalised media world. Aimed
at political science students, the book in general
provides an easily accessible and well-written
introduction to the topic and benefits from
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Professor Johnson-Cartee’s extensive experience
as a political consultant.
Tobias Jung
(University of St Andrews)
Marxism and Social Theory by Jonathan
Joseph. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
171pp., £18.99, ISBN 1 4039 1564 4
This book provides a concise overview of Marxist
social theory. Joseph makes clear at the beginning
that he aims to introduce, summarise and critically
assess the contributions of the main Marxist
schools. He also declares that this is a study from
within the Marxist framework. Consistent with
Marxism’s purpose of challenging the social
world and its associated ideas in order to realise
necessary change, he takes a critical approach to
theories within that framework.
The early chapters introduce readers to Marx
and Engels; the classical Marxists including
Kautsky, Plekhanov, Luxemburg, Lenin and
Trotsky; the praxis Marxism of Gramsci, Lukács,
Korsch and Sartre; the structuralism of Althusser,
Balibar and Poulantzas; and the critical theory of
Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Habermas. He
moves on in a chapter entitled ‘Applications’ to
examine critically Marxist contributions to
debates regarding feminism, nationalism, history
and economy and society.
Joseph’s penultimate chapter assesses attempts
from post-modernist deconstruction, postMarxist discourse analysis and critical realist
philosophy to salvage and build upon what is of
value in Marxism. Joseph is impressed by critical
realism, which distinguishes between our knowledge of the world and the world that exists independently of that knowledge. He adopts ‘a critical
realist form of structural Marxism’ (p. 128). For
him, there are structures at work, but those structures are reproduced by human activity. In the
right circumstances, if false conceptions can be
identified, human activity can transform those
structures, thus removing the source of the false
conceptions. In a conclusion that summarises the
positions discussed in the book, he once again
applauds critical realism.
To cover such a range of writings and applications in 156 pages is an ambitious project that
Joseph accomplishes impressively. The chapters
on Marx and Engels and major Marxist schools
will serve as excellent introductions for newcomers to Marxism. However, the brief discussions on the founders and schools may not
be sufficiently substantial and detailed to enable
many newcomers to benefit fully from the
later chapter on applications. The ‘Applications’
chapter will, nevertheless, be a useful source for
those who have already studied the writings of
the major schools.
A longer book would have enabled Joseph to
divide ‘Applications’ into individual chapters.
Each such chapter might have eased those with
little prior experience of reading Marxist debates
into the more difficult material.As this interesting
and informative book stands, the early and later
chapters will be valuable for students at different
levels.
Peter Lamb
(Keele University)
Social Theory: A Reader by Jonathan Joseph
(ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2005. 293pp., £19.99, ISBN 0 7486 1949 6
Among so many similar collections of classic writings that are available nowadays, this reader on
social theory could be most useful for undergraduate students in political science, sociology
and media studies and would even fit perfectly for
courses in cultural studies since it explains many
notions related to power and hegemony. Each of
the six parts bring forward five essential essays
from an author: Marx, Gramsci, Durkheim,
Weber, the Frankfurt School (Part V) and finally
Michel Foucault (PartVI).All contributions are, of
course, fundamental and timely, especially for
political scientists: from ‘The Fetishism of the
Commodity’ (Marx), Gramsci’s notes about the
relations of force and hegemony in ‘The Modern
Prince’ to Durkheim’s reflections on the abnormal forces taken from ‘The Division of Labour in
Society’. Part V on the Frankfurt school includes
two texts by Adorno and Horkheimer, plus Marcuse’s discussion on ‘The New Forms of Control’
and a few pages from Habermas’s ‘Theory of
Communicative Action’. Even Foucault’s discus© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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sion on ‘Method’ (taken from his History of
Sexuality) is centred on power (p. 261).
I will not dare to comment on these familiar
texts written by founders of social sciences (who
am I?); I would rather focus on three lesserknown contributions. An article from 1977 by
Bob Jessop gives an analysis of what came after
Marx in the understanding of the capitalist state.
Ending Part IV on rationalism, Derek Sayer’s
piece is taken from his book Capitalism and
Modernity (1990); it is a useful update that compares Marx and Weber’s respective theories on
economic life, bureaucracy and alienation. The
final piece from 1995 draws on Foucault and
focuses on the making of history. Excerpts are
not too long, often less than ten pages, and
Jonathan Joseph’s introductions to each of the six
parts are always good mappings. My only complaint about the editing process is that I would
have liked to find the exact moment when each
text was written; this crucial information is not
indicated anywhere in this book, and we only
have here in the bibliography some recent references to new translations for these older books
by Marx (1987) and Foucault (2001). None of
the references has the accurate original publishing year, which should usually be stated in brackets. It seems as if these writings of Durkheim,
Weber and Foucault are almost brand new. I, too,
wish these major authors were still alive and
active.
generates empirically testable deductive and nondeductive theories of how bureaucratic agencies
function to guide research inquiries’ (p. 293).The
book uses strict logical and empirical analyses
ranging from computer simulation methods to
verbal conceptualizations on the role of administrative agencies.
It begins with an overview of the previous
theories and ends with a road map for the scientific study of bureaucracies. For the scholars who
contributed to this volume, former theories have
explained many important dimensions of the
operation of bureaucratic organizations. However,
they did not analyze administrative agencies as
their focal point.They could not develop a separate and complete theory for administrative
agencies. The book searches for answers to challenging questions regarding public bureaucracies
via the terms delay, discretion, autonomy, coercion, adaptation, etc. Furthermore, empirical
studies on consensual rule making, control of
bureaucracy, state manipulation of programs via
administrative powers, lack of clarity of ends and
the implications for structure take their place in
the book.
Altogether the book presents a sound methodological stance and a good starting point that gives
priority to public bureaucracies, with mathematical formulations addressed to mathematicsoriented specialists of public administration,
political science and economics.
Yves Laberge
(Institut québécois des hautes études internationales,
Québec City)
Hasan Engin Şener
(Middle East Technical University)
Politics, Policy and Organizations: Frontiers
in the Scientific Study of Bureaucracy by
George A. Krause and Kenneth J. Meier
(eds). Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan
Press, 2005. 352pp., £14.00, ISBN 0 472 03114 7
As its name suggests, this edited book attempts to
develop the scientific study of bureaucracy by
means of bureaucentric and neo-organizational
theory. By new organizations, the authors mean ‘a
study of public bureaucracy focused on administrative organizations, whether at the macro(organizational) or microlevel (individual) that
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Making Things Public: Atmospheres of
Democracy by Bruno Latour and Peter
Weibel (eds). Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2005.
1,071pp., £32.95, ISBN 0 262 12279 0
One thousand odd pages, five hundred plus
illustrations, over a hundred contributions and
contributors, a multitude of themes and issues
covered ... This book catalogue and the art
exhibition it accompanies are a huge collective
undertaking in regenerating democracy. Yet,
the individual contributions are small scale, pragmatic and experimental, focused on democracy
in action, not abstract political evaluation. The
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purpose is to enact and elaborate numerous
devices of political assembly and representation
that might demonstrate something new about
democracy. This takes us beyond formal political
institutions to some rather unlikely sites: laboratories, churches, supermarkets, medical establishments, financial institutions and catwalks. All of
these and more are offered as potential places to
reassemble the ever-elusive figure of the ‘public’.
The notion ‘Thing’, introduced by Bruno
Latour
(philosopher-cum-ethnographer
of
science), is one theme that unifies the otherwise
diverse contributions. The etymology of ‘Thing’
in English and other languages refers not only to
independent and inanimate objects, but also to a
type of assembly (the latter meaning persists in the
use of Storting for Norway’s national assembly).
Latour exploits this dual meaning to draw parallels between political, scientific and artistic
re-presentation (with the ‘re-’ of re-presentation
underscored in each case). Standard accounts of
political representation pose the question: who is
to be concerned? But crucial too is how to represent the issues and ‘matters of concern’ around
which the public assemble and about which they
agree and disagree: what is to be considered?
Usually we think of a political assembly as an
arena where people deliberate and make decisions
(subjects), not one where the ‘facts’ of the matter
are also publicly represented and demonstrated
(objects). Latour’s plea to get ‘back to Things’ is a
call to bring analogous practices of political, scientific and artistic representation under the same
assembly roof.
Making Things Public proposes not only to
analyse the connections between politics, science
and art, but to make and demonstrate new public
assemblies. Innovative examples include Steve
Dietz’s participatory web-based project, ‘Fair
Assembly’ (pp. 910–6), and Andrew Barry and
Lucy Kimbell’s experiment with badges as political indicators or ‘Pindices’ (pp. 872–6), illustrated
on the catalogue’s frontispiece. While the catalogue gives a sense of these experiments, it is not
the same as having experienced and participated
in the exhibition. Absentees (like me) are left
wondering: What did the experiments demonstrate? How did they compare? How did they
POLITICAL THEOR Y
relate to one another? Given that this catalogue
was intended as an adjunct to an exhibition, we
cannot expect answers to these questions. But we
might hope that the attendees and participants
will return to reflect on the issues raised by this
unusual and ambitious project.
Giles Moss
(Oxford University)
Julia Kristeva: Live Theory by John Lechte
and Maria Margaroni. London: Continuum,
2005. 182pp., £45.00, £12.99, ISBN 0 8264
6356 8, ISBN 0 8264 6355 X
Julia Kristeva: Live Theory is another fine contribution to Continuum’s ‘Live Theory’ series, a series
geared towards (re)presenting the key themes of
theorists of contemporary culture. As the title
suggests this particular volume has as its focus the
oeuvre of cultural theorist Julia Kristeva. The
authors, John Lechte and Maria Margaroni, both
Kristevan scholars, point to the relevance of
Kristeva’s psychoanalytically inflected work to
wide-ranging issues, many of which are deeply
political. Lechte and Margaroni build on concepts
germane to Kristeva’s earlier – central – works,
for the most part Revolution in Poetic Language, to
‘understand [and establish, no doubt] the new
directions in her thought’ (p. 1), which blend
together the psychoanalytical with the social and
the political.What is at issue is the central role of
a broad psychoanalytic framing in the space of
politics, particularly the necessity of the psychoanalytical in bracketing the context of the ethicopolitical. Apart from introducing the reader to
Kristeva’s better known ideas and concepts, the
book also sheds light on new ideas that emerge in
Kristeva’s later works on ethics, revolt and the
society of the spectacle.
On reading this book I could say this: Lechte
and Margaroni succeed in challenging the popular
view that the only route into a theorist’s work is
through the theorist her/himself. This is because
the volume they offer does an excellent job of
simplifying – and consolidating – to a considerable extent many of Kristeva’s often obscure and
convoluted ideas. I found particularly sharp,
cogent and rewarding John Lechte’s interview
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with Julia Kristeva, which constitutes the final
chapter of the book.Therein, Kristeva’s theoretical ruminations take on more down-to-earth,
practice-oriented forms as she does justice to the
broad theme of social transformation in a more
complex world. Yet, while written in robust,
engaging language, the book is at times repetitive.
This weakness is however compensated for by
carefully spun discussions that succeed for the
most part in bridging the thoughts of both
authors. The resultant effect, nevertheless, is a
remarkably exhilarating book, greater than the
sum of its parts, producing an intense conversational space that will easily draw in the perceptive
specialist reader but unfortunately will not be easy
for the uninitiated. While I applaud the overall
initiative, I fear that much of this book, contrary
to its stated introductory objectives, will not be
fitting for students new to Kristevan scholarship.
Akinbola E. Akinwumi
(University of Ibadan)
New Institutionalism: Theory and Analysis
by André Lecours (ed.). Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2005. 363pp., £42.00, £20.00,
ISBN 0 8020 3900 6, ISBN 0 8020 4881 1
It appears that new institutionalism is getting kind
of old. As this collection edited by André Lecours
shows, new institutionalism is no longer a challenge to the mainstream from the margins. The
essays in this book differ from each other in terms
of sub-field and empirical focus, but save for a
couple of them, they all follow new institutionalist
research agendas. The collection shows that from
public policy to international relations, most of
the assumptions of new institutionalism have been
widely internalised into the various sub-fields of
political science. It seems that in the last two
decades new institutionalism has moved to
become the big heterogeneous centre. Perhaps it
is time to drop the adjective ‘new’. The Young
Turks have become establishment.
André Lecours has done a good job in bringing
together authors from different sub-fields in order
to show how prevalent institutionalist approaches
have become.The empirical focus of the volume
is quite diverse, ranging from the US-Canada
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Migratory Birds Convention and institutional
veto points to the Anti-Defection Law in India
and its impact on the party system.What seems to
unite the essays is a focus on political context as a
filter between the various analytic traditions on
the one hand, and outcomes on the other. In
addition to the traditional institutionalist emphasis
on continuity, many of the essays in the volume
try to explore how institutionalist perspectives
deal with change. Another common element is
that these essays are all written by political scientists trained or based in Canada. In fact, the
volume is an outgrowth of a special edition of the
Canadian French-language journal Politique et
sociétés on new institutionalism that was also
edited by André Lecours.While most essays seem
to share a lowest common denominator on how
institutions constrain political options, there are
some dissenting voices. In his contribution to the
volume, Hudson Meadwell states that the definition of institutions has been stretched to an extent
that it has become unreasonably broad; and as a
result, ‘it is not clear what institutionalism means’
(p. 84).
Due to its broad scope, the volume would have
perhaps benefited from a concluding chapter
where certain recurrent patterns in the cases
examined and common theoretical questions in
the individual chapters were revisited. However,
even without such a chapter mapping out a
common framework, students of institutionalism
are bound to find essays in this volume that are of
interest to them.
Jan Erk
(University of Leiden)
Political Concepts: A Reader and Guide by
Iain MacKenzie (ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2005. 679pp., £24.99, ISBN
0 7486 1678 0
The teacher of political theory is nowadays not
short of introductions, anthologies, readers and
handbooks with which to introduce students to
the subject. MacKenzie’s reader and guide is distinguished by its contemporary focus, its unusually broad coverage and by its format where each
contributor offers a short introductory essay fol-
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lowed by two excerpts from classic – though all
fairly contemporary – books. The twenty concepts include not just the usual suspects of rights,
justice, freedom and so on, but also human nature,
power, difference, discourse and the body politic,
themes beyond the narrow preoccupations of
most contemporary liberal theorists. In general,
this is a compendious, sensible, well-organised
volume which gives undergraduate readers a bit
of help in getting to grips with some of the
central texts in contemporary political thought.
Each chapter ends with some questions for
discussion which could be used to organise a
seminar. There are a few odd choices, however.
Stephen de Wijze provides an admirably clear
exposition of equality, but surely there are better
readings than Kurt Vonnegut? (Perhaps I’m being
dull. Others might find this refreshing.) The
obligatory excerpt from Kymlicka comes under
the rights chapter, not the one on multiculturalism. And, surely, few undergraduates will
make much of Deleuze and Guattari’s cryptic
thoughts on ideology, even with Robert Porter’s
introduction. My main criticism, however, is that
while some of the contributors provide potted
summaries of the readings they have chosen,
others have elected to write a more general introduction to their concept (and only some of them
have suggested further reading). Nathan Widder
gives an excellent introduction to ‘difference’, for
example, but says very little to introduce the quite
difficult extracts from Laclau and Connolly which
succeed it. By contrast, David Stevens nicely summarises the extracts from Rawls and Cohen he
has chosen to illuminate the idea of justice, but
says little about the idea of social justice as such.
Some firmer editing might have made for a more
coherent volume.
Jonathan Seglow
(Royal Holloway, University of London)
The Defender of the Peace by Marsilius of
Padua (ed. and trans. by Annabel Brett).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
569pp., £17.99, ISBN 0 521 78911 7
In the 50 years since Alan Gewirth published his
English translation of Marsiglio (Marsilius in
Latin) of Padua’s major treatise, Defensor pacis, its
innovative and stimulating ideas have become
familiar to a large audience of scholars and students who lacked Latin. Yet the availability of
Gewirth’s translation of the Defensor, which has
remained continuously in print since 1956, represents a somewhat mixed blessing. As a translator, Gewirth had a penchant for supplying
language for which there was no direct equivalent in the Latin and an inclination to smooth
out Marsiglio’s rough edges at the expense of
textual fidelity. Thus, we must be grateful to
Annabel Brett for undertaking the extraordinary
effort of producing a fresh English rendering of
the Defensor.
Brett strives for historical accuracy in her translation in ways that sometimes escaped Gewirth’s
notice. For instance, the Latin vulgaris is Englished
as ‘plebian’ (p. 23), not ‘common mass’ (as in
Gewirth), and regnum becomes ‘realm’, not the
anachronistic ‘state’ (p. xlix). Brett proposes a vigorous historical case for the potentially controversial choice of translating terminology associated
with princips as ‘prince’ rather than ‘ruler’ (hence,
‘principate’, not ‘government’, and ‘princely part’,
not ‘ruling part’) (pp. xliii–xliv). I congratulate
Brett on capturing Marsiglio’s distinction
between conferens and commodum (‘advantage’ and
‘convenience’ or ‘benefit’, respectively), which
Gewirth entirely missed, although I believe she is
incorrect to say that ‘commodum has a less technical
sense’ (p. xliii). In fact, commodum is used with
precision in the Defensor (and in Marsiglio’s later
Defensor minor) to denote a standard of individual
self-interest, contrasted with public conferens.
I also wonder about Brett’s decision to base her
translation on the Latin text of Previté-Orton
(1928), rather than Scholz (1932), since the latter
is generally regarded by Marsiglio scholars to be
the superior edition. Although she occasionally
corrects Previté-Orton in light of Scholz, the
choice of edition itself requires justification.
Brett’s introduction to the translation is
even-handed and balanced, especially so given
Marsiglio’s highly controversial reputation. I note,
however, that some biographical details mentioned by Brett, in particular his activities after
completing the Defensor in 1324, repeat scholarly
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conventions now refuted by archival evidence
examined in current scholarship with which she
ought to be familiar (mistakes which I also confess
to have perpetuated until recently).
Brett’s version of the Defensor sufficiently
improves on Gewirth’s that it promises to become
the standard English translation for the foreseeable
future.
Cary J. Nederman
(Texas A&M University)
The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx
and Fascism by Mark Neocleous. Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 2005. 152pp., £17.99,
ISBN 0 7083 1903 3
In this innovative book Neocleous focuses on
references to the dead, the undead and monsters
such as vampires in political theories, rhetoric and
propaganda. He is largely concerned with metaphors, especially those that portray entire classes or
racial groups as monstrous. Monstrosity represents
something non-human and feared that cannot be
categorised. A further theme concerns ideas
regarding relationships between the living and the
dead in ideologies and political theories. Neocleous discusses the usage of metaphors by Edmund
Burke, Karl Marx and various fascists to cover up,
reveal or accentuate phenomena and processes.
Burke portrayed the danger of the working class,
sweeping aside centuries of tradition, in terms of a
monster.The Nazis depicted Jews as vampires who
drew the wealth out of society. Marx used the
vampire metaphor to uncover the exploitative
nature of capitalism, which sucks the life out of its
victims. Neocleous makes the interesting point
that, for Marx, capital is dead labour that is in effect
undead, reappearing as an alien that dominates the
living.The book is not exclusively concerned with
metaphors. It also focuses on the belief of some
fascists in what they preached regarding the dead
and undead, Burke’s reverence for the dead and
Marx’s apparent concern for the redemption of
those who died in the class struggle.
Neocleous concedes that there is much speculation in this book, which aims to be provocative
and to generate debate. It seems to be written for
readers with at least a basic understanding of the
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political thought of Burke and Marx, and of fascist
ideology. Neocleous examines the text and intellectual context of a number of Burke’s works. He
illustrates the value of some of Burke’s less widely
read writings in shedding light upon the use of
the monster metaphor to express his fear of the
multitude in Reflections on the Revolution in France.
The chapter on Marx analyses many of his works,
paying particularly close attention to Capital, once
again exploring the intellectual context. The
chapter on fascism is more speculative and less
focused than those on Burke and Marx. Neocleous examines a range of fascist books, propaganda,
songs, etc., and does not provide the close analysis
of important political philosophical texts that give
the earlier chapters their main strength. This is
unavoidable given the weak philosophical basis of
fascism. Neocleous will, nevertheless, succeed in
provoking debate among the readers of each
chapter of this book.
Peter Lamb
(Keele University)
Spatial Models of Parliamentary Voting by
Keith T. Poole. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 230pp., £15.99, ISBN 0 521
61747 2
Spatial voting theory is a familiar and wellestablished research programme in political
science, yet many readers will be more familiar
with its output than the design and programming
of models. Poole’s book explicitly sets out how to
estimate and design a spatial model for parliamentary voting. This is done with the purpose of
ensuring that those who make the models understand the theory and that users of the theory have
a grasp of how the models are built.Those readers
who are using this book to design spatial models
will no doubt be unfazed by the mathematical
difficulty of it, while those who are interested in
using spatial theory without necessarily modelling
will need to be capable of at least following the
workings.
The book starts with a brief overview of spatial
theory, before examining in detail several different
methods devised by the author and others over
recent years. There is a clear, non-mathematical
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explanation at the outset before the technical
detail is elaborated upon in each chapter, always
relating the developments back to Congressional
politics, mainly the 1964 Civil Rights Act. There
is also a useful section on the practicalities of
building a model, which gives advice on problems
often encountered in these models, before going
on to some empirical tests of the theory, looking
at Congressmen’s voting behaviours.
For a reader planning to build a spatial model,
this book would be invaluable. As a guide to the
‘engineering side’ of spatial modelling it is clear,
useful and well written. For those who are reading
spatial theory without an intention to model it,this
book is highly technical,and heavily mathematical.
The key argument,that theorists and programmers
need to understand each other’s tasks is a plausible
one as far as those modelling are concerned,
although it may be a touch overstated for other
researchers.This book achieves its aim of explaining how to build a spatial model and will be
essential reading for those engaged in that, while
still being readable and related well to real politics.
Robert McIlveen
(University of Sheffield)
Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for
Non-perfectionist Politics by Douglas B.
Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl. University Park PA: Penn State University Press, 2005.
358pp., $25.00, ISBN 0 271 02701 0
This book further elaborates some of the arguments that Den Uyl and Rasmussen already
developed in Liberty and Nature (1991) and Liberalism Defended (1997), i.e. to present an Aristotelian defence of liberalism. Echoing Rawls’ Political
Liberalism (1993), they try to answer one of political philosophy’s central problems. Liberalism’s
problem, as they call it, asks how we can establish
a political and legal order in which individuals
have the opportunity to flourish in different ways.
In contrast to Rawls, however, they defend a comprehensive conception of liberalism that defends
Lockean negative natural rights and is grounded
in a classical teleological eudaemonistic approach
to ethics. Their main claim is that the liberal
solution to Rawls’ problem can only make sense
if it is supported by an individualist perfectionist
ethics. Our basic individual rights to liberty, life
and property should be seen as securing the possibility of human flourishing.
The book consists of three parts. In the first part
Den Uyl and Rasmussen argue that the current
crisis of liberalism is primarily caused by the fact
that both proponents and opponents treat liberalism as an ethical philosophy or doctrine. Liberalism, however, is not an equinormative system.The
norms it proposes are not intended to guide our
individual conduct in moral activity, but are metanorms. They establish the conditions under
which moral action can take place. Liberalism’s
problem should, therefore, have a metanormative
solution. In the second part, they give a more
detailed account of the neo-Aristotelian ethics
that undergirds their libertarian conception of
liberalism and compare it to natural law theory
and the liberal theorising of Gray and Raz. They
argue that an ethics that sees human flourishing as
the ultimate moral standard need not require a
perfectionist politics. In the last part, they defend
liberalism against communitarian and conservative
critics, and objections of a more analytic nature.
The book gives a very interesting and wellarticulated defence of liberalism.The authors convincingly argue that liberalism’s problem is by its
very nature not a moral one. Less convincing,
however, is their claim that the metanormative
solution to this problem can only consist of the
basic, negative natural rights to life, liberty and
self-ownership. A more elaborated confrontation
with liberal egalitarianism or the capability
approach of Sen and Nussbaum is needed to
explain why universal generic goods or minimal
material and social resources do not suffice as a
basis for a metanormative principle.
Ronald Tinnevelt
(University of Leuven)
Beyond Hegemony: Towards a New Philosophy of Political Legitimacy by Darrow
Schecter. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2005. 200pp., £55.00, ISBN 0 7190 6088 5
Darrow Schecter’s study Beyond Hegemony can
hardly be more ambitious in its goals. Schecter
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seeks to provide the groundwork for an entirely
‘new philosophy of political legitimacy’. Arguing
from a ‘libertarian socialist’ (p. 11) viewpoint, for
Schecter the very principles of a critically appropriated idealism – reason and law – point to a
form of law that is neither restricted to reified
divisions isolating legality from political conflict
and social exploitation, nor to being the instrumental means to stability and order. Instead, the
idealist inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of humanity, experience and knowledge,
which in fact Kant links to Marx, itself points to
the realisation of universal reason and freedom as
ends in themselves. By unfolding a dialectical critique of self-limiting theoretical discourses of
(liberal) legality on one hand and (democratichumanist) legitimacy on the other, the author
philosophically explores the ‘paradoxes of liberaldemocratic legitimacy’ (Seyla Benhabib) on
various levels. For Schecter, then, law is legitimate
only on condition that there is an uncoerced
relation between citizens, namely the ‘freedom to
overcome what one is and what one needs by
producing new forms of non-instrumental objectivity’ (p. 175). In his search for new conceptual
foundations of non-oppressive societal and epistemological alternatives, presumably breaking
with the limits of liberal democracy and authoritarian socialism, Schecter employs Adorno’s
concept of ‘mediated non-identity’ and mimetic
rationality.
However, while he honours Kant’s reluctant
anti-metaphysical idealism, Schecter tends to
lump together and partially misconceive quite
diverse and competing concepts of contemporary political theory, from deliberative democracy to post-modernism. Neither do I find
convincing his model of a ‘libertarian socialist
revolution of legality’ that may create ‘legitimate
law’, namely ‘the liberation of production from
commodification and the emancipation of legitimacy from instrumental reason’ (p. 171). The
conceptual and material distinctions between
totalitarian, authoritarian-socialist and liberaldemocratic rule are insufficiently illuminated.
New developments such as evolving international human rights regimes and norms are
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larly in the first two chapters, Schecter develops
relevant critiques of dominant concepts of liberal
legality and democratic legitimacy. He points to
their inherent dichotomies and partially arbitrary
regulatory boundaries. Reiterating critical
theory’s enlightened materialism, and linking it
with legal theorising reminiscent of Franz
Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, Schecter
addresses unresolved tensions within liberal
democratic thought and rule. Despite its shortcomings, this makes reading the book a worthwhile endeavour for political philosophers and
critical theorists alike.
Lars Rensmann
(Free University of Berlin)
Knowledge Monopolies:The Academisation
of Society by Alan Shipman and Marten
Shipman. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2006.
118pp., £8.95, ISBN 1 84540 028 3
The focus of Alan and Marten Shipman’s book is
the apparent paradox that although society at
large has witnessed progressive levels of education
and knowledge, developments within academia
have led to an increasing intellectual gulf between
academia and the wider public, as well as within
academia itself. The authors point out that, as a
result, obfuscation rather than clarification
of reality’s defining characteristics can be
observed.This, for example, is evident in academic
writing and equationing. The authors claim that
much of it became unintelligible to well-educated
lay audiences long ago and is ‘now incomprehensible even to other academics in apparently related
fields’ (p. 61).
Over the course of eight chapters, the authors
explore the changing role of universities from
‘moribund, outmoded’ institutions (p. 5) to socialthought-dominating establishments (chapter 1);
the objectification and dissemination of knowledge which, along with specialisation and peer
reviews, can be seen as having served as ways of
obtaining almost unconditional authority (chapters 2 and 3); the role and use of models in
mediating between theory and reality (chapter 4);
the academisation of the social sciences and their
encroachment on all areas of life (chapters 5 and
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6); the entering of knowledge into ‘the industrial
production system’ (p. 95) along with pressures for
external regulations (chapter 7); and, finally,
potential ways to address some of the problems
arising out of society’s academisation so as to
re-establish a dialogue between academia’s interest in serving society and society’s support for it
(chapter 8).
While the book deals with an interesting topic
and raises important questions about academia’s
role in modern society, the authors’ style of
writing is often simplistic in its portrayal and
discussion of academic reality, and borders on the
polemic: ‘Just as priestly and military rulers have
in the past only answered to clerical or martial
courts, academics reserve the right to be judged
solely by their peers’ (p. 33). This perception is
reinforced by the choice of various evocative
populistic metaphors, such as naming academics
the ‘New Priesthood’ (p. 30), or yet another application of the well-trodden McDonaldisationanalogy when the authors refer to ‘McAdemised
universities’ (p. 110). Despite these reservations,
the book makes for an interesting read in that it
forces the reader to reflect further on academic
life and the role academia should play within
modern society.
Tobias Jung
(University of St Andrews)
The Authoritarian Dynamic by Karen
Stenner. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005. 370pp., £45.00, £19.99, ISBN 0 521
82743 4, ISBN 0 521 53478 X
The literature on authoritarianism gains some
new dimensions, which will probably be influential in many related academic circles. By
re-fleshing Adorno’s concept of ‘authoritarian
personality’, Stenner traces the roots of intolerance. The author initially introduces a general
notion of a predisposition to intolerance of difference. She observes the empirical regularities in
human behaviour, and avers that racial, political
and moral intolerance, though studied in isolation,
are ‘kindred spirits’ (p. 13).They are all functionally
similar elements concerned with minimising difference and preserving a normative order.
The author uses a rather simple model called
‘the authoritarian dynamic’, which depends on
the interaction of just two explanatory variables:
authoritarian predisposition and varying conditions of normative threat. Instead of some static
conceptions and universal personality types,
Stenner proposes a dynamic model. Manifestations of authoritarianism are explained in relation
to the conditions that threaten the oneness and
sameness. Intolerance of racial diversity, political
dissent and moral deviance are all basically driven
by authoritarianism, galvanised by the impulse to
enhance unity and conformity and manifested
under conditions of normative threat. Although
reductionist, the model provides effective tools to
analyse the contemporary authoritarian trend in
the modern world.
Stenner is most compelling in her observation
that authoritarian behaviour is indifferent to cultural context. She challenges the humanist optimism about democracy, which is assumed to
transform a society into perfect liberal democratic
citizens. Rather than conceptualising intolerance
in socio-cultural terms, she states that intolerance
can spring up in both tolerant and intolerant
cultures alike. In this sense, authoritarianism is not
just a matter for the non-democratic ‘underdeveloped’ world, but it potentially exists everywhere
and normative threats function as the catalyst for
the activation of authoritarian predispositions.
Stenner envisages that ‘authoritarianism is not a
thing of the past, it is very much a thing of the
future’ (p. 137).
The Authoritarian Dynamic indubitably represents a genuine contribution to the endemic
problem of structuring a theoretical account of
authoritarianism.Although Stenner’s functionalist
approach underscores the irrational and contingent aspect of authoritarian behaviour, her excellent use of extensive data sets enables her to
conclude an empirically valid theory. Academic
readers in political science, psychology and sociology should not miss this book. They will be
richly rewarded.
Hakki Tas
(Bilkent University)
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What Should the Left Propose? by Roberto
Mangabeira Unger. London: Verso, 2005.
179pp., £15.00, ISBN 1 84467 048 1
The book focuses on delivering an alternative
project to be adopted by the left.The introduction
begins with an account of four areas in which the
left is disoriented: a missing alternative, a missing
idea world, a missing agent of change and a
missing crisis. Unger provides a suggestive
account of the left’s aims: firstly, an alternative
project for the left must be to tackle the
‘dirigisme’ which is inadequate to address concerns of social disconnection and personal
belittlement. Secondly, it must rethink and enlarge
the narrow stock of institutional concepts and
propose a new structural alternative. He suggests
the necessity of democratising the market
economy (via a commitment to forms of early
and lifelong education and broadening access to
productive resources) and the experimental logic
of the market, to renew and to recombine the
arrangements and mechanisms that constitute the
institutional setting of production and exchange.
Thirdly, it must look for an agent, whose interests
and aspirations it can claim to represent. Finally, it
must devise a programme of political and economic institutional changes that does not rely
upon crisis and calamity.
Notwithstanding his success in initiating a
much-needed reflection on the programme that
the left should advocate, he neglects to consider
satisfactorily the agents of change and the mechanisms and arrangements necessary for a highenergy democracy. As the working class and the
nation state cannot any longer be identified as the
agent of change, he argues that the petit bourgeoisie, despised by the left, must become the
social basis of the political movement. He rejects
the ideal that the working class represents the
privileged agent of change; however, he does not
overcome the obstacle of classism, which fixes the
meaning of agents on class. He does not offer a
political programme that could successfully confront the emergence of a plurality of subjects,
whose forms and constitutions cannot be understood if we apply the category of class. Secondly,
the call for high-energy democracy defends a
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compromise between representative and participatory democracy, which should ensure a high
level of popular engagement in politics. He leaves
unanswered how a high level of political participation can function effectively with institutions
designed to quicken the pace of politics (p. 79),
how programmatic plebiscites (p. 81) can promote
the experience of effective agency and what the
formula is for changing contemporary practices
and institutions.
Falbo Marina
(University of Bristol)
The Market for Virtue: The Potential and
Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility
by David Vogel. Washington DC: Brookings
Institution Press, 2005. 222pp., £17.99, ISBN
0 8157 9076 7
David Vogel suggests that a widely-made business
case for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
is flawed. The pressure of consumers does not
tend to ensure that virtue benefits its business
practitioners.The view that it does is empirically
unsubstantiated, and here relevant detail is given.
It is also dependent upon implausible assumptions
about the effectiveness, informedness and coherence of consumer choice.
Some companies do take the laudable step of
issuing non-financial reports (focusing upon
environmental impact, working conditions and
human rights in the countries they source from).
However, such reports are too dense to be readily
accessible; they are too much like advertising; and
not audited at all or at least not in accordance
with any single set of standards which might
enable analysts (and after them consumers) to
make plausible comparisons.
Here, it might be objected thatVogel is focusing
upon teething problems. Non-financial accounting procedures may well improve and auditing
may be made more uniform so that consumers and
potential employees may become more informed.
(Some of these things may happen.) To this objection, Vogel has two rather good replies. Firstly,
responsible firms try to spread good practice (e.g.
through agreements on standards for the reduction
of carbon emissions). But, when they do so they
POLITICAL THEOR Y
334
are removing any competitive edge their own
virtue might give them over competitors. If corporate practice was transparent then promoting
such industry-wide measures would simply make
bad business sense. Secondly, it is not the case that
all firms are equally dependent upon pursuing a
good public image.ForVogel,the market for virtue
is a niche market.Virtue makes business sense but
only for those firms that have made it part of their
corporate image and for those firms that are highly
visible and therefore liable to suffer when targeted
by activists.‘Most firms, however, fall into neither
category.’ (p. 15)
What the market cannot enforce by its own
pressures remains to be done by government
regulation.Vogel ultimately claims that corporate
responsibility should be redefined in terms of
support for the latter.While he makes a good case
for such regulation, his redefinition of corporate
responsibility does not obviously follow. Localised
examples of ethically preferred practices may
remain necessary to show that it can be done.
They can be a driving force for change. And,
without such localised examples of corporate
virtue, regulation may be deemed impractical
because nobody works that way.
Tony Milligan
(University of Glasgow)
Is There a Duty to Obey the Law? For and
Against by Christopher Heath Wellman and
A. John Simmons. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005. 200pp., £12.99, ISBN
0 521 53784 3
Is There a Duty to Obey the Law? is the latest book
in the series ‘For and Against’, which is described
as offering ‘a new and exciting approach to the
investigation of complex philosophical ideas [in
which] two philosophical essays explore a topic of
intense public interest from opposing points of
view’. In fact, this approach is neither particularly
new, nor alas guaranteed to be exciting; and in this
case at least it is not clear that the topic is one of
intense public interest. Both authors agree that
most people in the West probably do believe that
we have a general duty to obey the law. Whereas
Christopher Heath Wellman is in qualified agree-
ment with them about this, although for reasons
that are unlikely to be widely shared, A. John
Simmons thinks that people who believe this for
whatever reasons are mostly mistaken.
Wellman develops a bold and original version of
an argument in favour of each of us having a
natural duty to obey the just laws of a broadly
legitimate regime. His central contention is that
the duty to obey the law can be justified in terms
of each of us bearing ‘a fair share of the communal
samaritan chore of rescuing all of us from the perils
of the state of nature’ (p. 89).This argument draws
an analogy between our natural duty of rescue
(samaritanism) – the duty we have to rescue those
in serious peril when we can do so at no great cost
– and our duty to obey the law.Very simply, the
argument runs roughly as follows: the state offers
the most effective way to save us from the risks we
would face in a putative state of nature; because
securing us against such risks involves complex
issues of co-ordination a state must be able to
employ legitimate coercion if it is to be effective;
in so far as the state performs this function we are
under a general duty to do our fair share to
support it; and the most appropriate form of
support is obedience to the law. However, political
obligations extend only so far as the benefits the
state brings really are essential and justified by the
samaritan argument; cannot be delivered more
effectively in a less coercive way; and do not make
unreasonable demands on citizens. The general
duty to obey the law does not extend to illegitimate regimes or unjust laws, and even in the case
of the just laws of a legitimate government the
obligation may sometimes be rightly overridden.
Nor does it extend to many routine things that
actual states typically do,‘even things that they can
do well. For each potential state function we
should ask whether the goods secured are important enough to justify the non-consensual
coercion that inevitably accompanies political
coordination’ (p. 73). On Wellman’s account,
therefore, although a general duty to obey the law
can be justified, that duty is heavily circumscribed.
A. J. Simmons is best known as one of the most
tenacious defenders of ‘philosophical anarchism’.
In his essay, he rehearses many of his by now fairly
familiar arguments against the various theories
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that seek to justify political obligation, paying
particular attention to natural duty theories. As
there are many very different approaches to justifying the general duty to obey the law, it is understandable that Simmons does not limit himself to
dealing with Wellman’s argument. However, it is
only after 86 pages of his 103-page essay that he
actually gets round to a serious consideration of it.
Although perfectly polite about Wellman’s effort,
Simmons disposes of it in only a few pages. He
rightly observes that it is far from clear that ‘legal
obedience constitutes an appropriately easy or
low-cost sort of rescue of our fellow citizens’, as in
the standard samaritan rescue cases (p. 181). He
also points to a number of other disanalogies
between a duty to obey the law and the duty to
rescue of the samaritan argument, mostly revolving around the latter being concerned with local
and occasional events that are not at all similar to
the duty to bear one’s share in an ongoing collective project. Moreover, even if one is not persuaded by all of Simmons’ objections, it is still hard
to see why, on Wellman’s argument, individuals
have a duty specifically to obey the law of the state
of which they are members rather than of just any
state that offers them protection.
As someone with a long-term interest in political obligation, I should probably be more welcoming of this book. Unfortunately, though, in
my view it is doubtful whether it will do much to
stimulate further interest in political obligation.
For all its ingenuity, Wellman’s argument is ultimately unconvincing, and Simmons, for all the
trenchancy of his position, adds little to what he
has said before. And, neither the authors nor
readers are particularly well served by the format:
there is comparatively little direct engagement
between the authors, and a degree of mismatch in
that Wellman pursues one, highly individual, line
of argument, although he does so in an engaging
and accessible style, whereas Simmons casts his net
much more widely, although his writing is denser
and more demanding.These differences may also
make the book difficult for an undergraduate
audience to use effectively.
John Horton
(Keele University)
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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The Just State: Rethinking Self-government
by Richard Dien Winfield. NewYork: Humanity Books, 2005. 432pp., $49.00, ISBN 1 59102
317 3
Richard Winfield’s The Just State is the latest
volume in a series of fascinating books. Hegel’s
The Philosophy of Right has often been criticised for
its curious relationship with metaphysics. Over the
years, Winfield has effectively rewritten The Philosophy of Right in a number of books – not least
Overcoming Foundations (Columbia University
Press,1989),The Just Family (SUNY,1998),Laws in
Civil Society (University Press of Kansas, 1995) and
many others. His The Just State tackles areas Hegel
covers in his analysis of the state in The Philosophy
of Right’s famous section ‘Sittlichkeit’. Winfield
jettisons Hegel’s metaphysics, while fleshing out
the connections far better from idea to idea.
That said, Winfield’s account is truly his own:
not only does he reject much of Hegel’s methodology, but he adopts several views at odds with
what Hegel supports. Thus, while Winfield is in
one sense rewriting Hegel’s system as it applies to
political philosophy, he is equally writing an
entirely novel and original contribution. His
ability to create this vision in the ambitious systematic picture he provides is truly incredible and
exciting to uncover. As Hegel’s vision differed in
important respects from the Prussia of his times,
many readers may be interested in the surprising
differences between Winfield’s state and existing
states, not least America. He argues for a different
Kelsan-inspired view of judicial review, a unique
view of the legislature, and federalism.
If there is one worry to raise, perhaps it is his
reliance on non-foundationalism. Winfield has
written about this at length before, particularly in
his Overcoming Foundations. However, in The Just
State, readers unfamiliar with his earlier work may
find his arguments in favour of jettisoning a
foundationalist view and adopting his nonfoundationalism unconvincing as much of the discussion transpires a bit too quickly to reach the
heart of the claims on political philosophy for
which Winfield is aiming.
Winfield’s The Just State is a highly interesting
tour de force that completes his rewriting of Hegel’s
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336
The Philosophy of Right. It is generally highly
accessible, original and engaging. I recommend it
to anyone interested in Hegel’s political philosophy or anyone interested in issues of sovereignty
more generally.
Thom Brooks
(University of Newcastle)
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Britain and Ireland
Speaking for Patients and Carers: Health
Consumer Groups and the Policy Process by
Rob Baggott, Judith Allsop and Kathryn
Jones. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
368pp., £19.99, ISBN 0 3339 6829 8
This book examines an important and internationally under-studied component of health
policy: the role of consumer groups. It is the sort
of thing political studies in the UK desperately
needs: a rigorous qualitative study of a major issue.
Drawing on around 70 interviews and a survey, it
examines how consumer groups form, their different types, their strategies and their interactions
with political institutions and the media. The
information it contains about how to design,
organise and report a serious qualitative study of
political processes makes it a valuable example for
those new to qualitative research in politics.
Much of the resulting book amounts to a good
users’ guide to the Westminster-Whitehall political system. Interviewees and authors are especially
interesting when they reflect on the choice and
effectiveness of lobbying and media strategies, and
the dynamics of group formation and strategies
are illuminated by the cases here.
The key finding is cheering, manna for the
pluralist heaven: consumer groups are at least
partially integrated into policy-making as a result
of their membership, credibility, legitimacy and
information (they are insiders, if not as much as
professionals). But there is nothing to assure the
reader of their legitimacy as a voice of the
patient. Pluralist politics and policy-making in
Whitehall might not mean real integration of
patient voices into health services (which, for all
we know, already happens on the doctor-patient
level – something consumer groups are unlikely
to say).
The book is completely insensitive to devolution – flagged on page 1 when it says, obscurely,
that it studies groups ‘on the national level’.What
that turns out to mean is a study of groups (territorial level unspecified) that do business in SW1.
Those groups’ interactions with the devolved
political systems, and the ecologies of groups
outside England, remain to be studied and we can
only hope that the omission inspires research on
the model of this important book.
Scott Greer
(University of Michigan)
The Political Philosophy of New Labour by
Matt Beech. London: I. B. Tauris, 2005. 272pp.,
£47.50, ISBN 1 84511 041 2
Matt Beech has produced a lively, accessible and
combative account of the political philosophy of
New Labour. He argues that New Labour
should be seen as being rooted firmly in the
British social democratic tradition, committed to
notions of equality and community that are
similar to earlier generations of social democrats
and holding a positive conception of liberty,
which distinguishes New Labour from the New
Right. The book is divided into two broad sections – the first covering the intellectual history
of the Labour party from its nineteenth-century
origins through to the advent of New Labour.
The second section provides a philosophical discussion of New Labour’s conception of liberty,
equality and community and democracy. The
historical analysis is done thoroughly and benefits from a number of elite interviews with key
opinion formers and critics of New Labour.
The discussion of liberty is also done well and
clearly establishes that New Labour holds to a
positive conception of freedom, against radical
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left critics who have asserted that New Labour is
no more than a continuation of the New Right.
On community, a convincing account of the
similarities between the Edwardian socialist
notion of community and New Labour’s is given.
However, more could have been said on the possible influence of dependency theories and the
‘reciprocity principle’. The author also states that
New Labour has been decentralist in terms of
governance but neglects the strongly centralising
instinct of some aspects of the government.
My main difficulty however lies with Beech’s
treatment of equality. Beech argues that New
Labour hold in fact a similar position on equality
to previous social democrats since nobody has
ever argued for complete equality of outcome
but rather only that priority in public spending
should be given to the poor. This is problematic
since traditional social democrats maintained that
the aim of giving priority to the poor was to raise
their absolute and their relative position and to
redress unfair market outcomes – what New
Labour’s position is on these vital issues is not
discussed here, which is in my view where New
Labour is most clearly outside of the British social
democratic tradition.
Overall then the book is an important contribution and should be taken seriously for at least
raising the issue of New Labour’s philosophical
position.
Kevin Hickson
(University of Liverpool)
Britain, the Six-day War and its Aftermath
by Frank Brenchley. London: I. B.Tauris, 2005.
184pp., £45.00, ISBN 1 85043 406 9
Frank Brenchley’s book does not really have any
grandiose aims or objectives. Rather modestly, he
simply states that he wants to study the process of
British foreign policy-making, an issue which is
often overlooked by academics. As the Assistant
Under-Secretary of State for Middle Eastern
Affairs in the Foreign Office during the Arab–
Israel war of 1967 and its aftermath, Brenchley
aims here to use his considerable personal knowledge of the issue, combined with a detailed and
rigorous review of the existing documentary
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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sources available, to give a unique and very
insightful account of the run-up to the Six Day
War and the political fallout in the principally
affected countries, especially Britain.
This book certainly fleshes out the existing
accounts of this conflict, which tend to be both
partisan and patchy. Brenchley’s study is extremely
detailed,providing information and evidence from
Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Britain and the United States
primarily. Due to the complexity of the conflict
and its discussion at the United Nations, he also
briefly considers the views and activities of Sudan,
France, USSR, Sweden, Brazil and Argentina as
well as some of the internal decision-making processes at the UN. This is a truly excellent book,
jam-packed with detail. Due to its very specific
nature, it is a snapshot into the complex relationship between Israel and its neighbours, with issues
such as the calls of the Palestinians for a homeland
largely overlooked. However, the book does not
claim to consider these issues and should not be
criticised for maintaining its focus.
This book is an interesting mix between an
academic work and a personal account and it
does both well and without detracting from the
academic worth of the publication. It covers a
very specific period in Middle Eastern history and
considers it in great depth and detail. It is an
excellent read for undergraduates and academics
alike, although its complexity might be a little
overwhelming for inexperienced undergraduates.
Victoria Honeyman
(University of Leeds)
The Nations of Britain by Christopher G. A.
Bryant. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
316pp., £21.99, ISBN 0 19 874287 8
Christopher Bryant’s analysis of ‘Britain’ is a
worthy attempt to address a series of questions that
do not fit easily within one volume.Addressing the
question of Britain or Great Britain from political
and sociological directions, the book provides a
wide range of statistical data alongside discussion
of the major literatures around English, Scottish
andWelsh nationalism.The first chapter deals with
theoretical issues of identification with nations/
nation states, making substantial use of Colley’s
338
Forging the Nation. Scotland andWales are discussed
in separate chapters, as is England, and the book
also includes, somewhat eccentrically, a separate
chapter entitled ‘The English Regions: Who
Cares?’, looking at the recent attempts to establish
regional assemblies in England and the existence
of ‘cultural differences’ within England. In conclusion, a single chapter,‘Britain: Relating to Others’
discusses both Britain’s relationship to the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, the Commonwealth and the European Union.The conclusion
speculates about future developments, drawing on
Quebec and Catalonia, and re-examines Colley’s
concept of ‘forging the nation’.
This is an interesting book, containing a good
mixture of up-to-date statistical data and covering
all of the literature in each of the respective
chapters. Completing it, however, I was left feeling
somewhat dissatisfied. The target audience of the
book is not clear. In structure and in much of
the basic discussion it reads like an undergraduate textbook-style publication, but it is laden
throughout with somewhat eccentric personal
observations. A number of examples: ‘it is hard to
deny that a reconstruction of some sort is necessary if Britain is to endure’ (p. 12); ‘The idea of
identifying with British economic success, so long
far-fetched, is less far-fetched than it used to be’
(p. 44); ‘Cymru-Wales is a version of Wales in
which women seek visible participation as never
before’ (p. 145); ‘In 2004 in the first North-East
referendum only 22.1 per cent voted in favour
of an assembly with very few powers ... In the
second in ... well who knows?’ (p. 235). Observations such as this are virtually impossible to
substantiate (there are many reasons why a second
north-east referendum might never happen, for
instance) and detract from the sound discussion
underlying them.
More dissatisfaction is derived from chapter 7 –
although space is always limited, I do not think
shoving both parts of Ireland, and Europe and the
Commonwealth into a single chapter makes any
sense.The discussion of each of them is necessarily
truncated, and Northern Irish British readers
in particular would be unhappy to see their experience of the British state squeezed in this
way (particularly containing odd statements like
BR ITAIN AND IRELAND
‘Northern Ireland ... has demanded attention but
in its sectarianism and its violence it only confirms that it is unBritish’ [sic]). The map at the
beginning of the first chapter, oddly, omits
the island of Ireland entirely while referring to the
‘Monmouthshire question’. Likewise, Britain in
Europe demands signposts to a huge range of
discussions, and only a few are forthcoming.
That said, this is a useful introduction to a
broader range of debates. It is particularly useful to
see a discussion of Scottish and Welsh identity in
the broader context of British identity and statehood. Also, it is probably the first time that
London, Cornwall and the north-east of England
have gained the degree of attention that they merit
from any book discussing territorial and cultural
identity within Britain, and this is an advance well
worth making.The four types of England – AngloBritish England, Little England, English England
and Cosmopolitan England – are similarly an
excellent starting point for debate, and it is good to
see these versions of English identity played up
within the overall discussion of Britain and the
British state, despite the (accurate) argument that
many white English continue to conflate England,
Britain and the UK. Readers familiar with devolution, state structures and national/regional identity will find little here with which they are
unfamiliar (except a good quantity of up-to-date
details from the press and public life).
Mark Sandford
(University College London)
Fightback! Labour’s Traditional Right in the
1970s and 1980s by Dianne Hayter. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. 211pp.,
£14.99, ISBN 0 7190 7271 9
Fightback! examines the efforts by the traditional
right of the British Labour party to ‘rescue’ the
party from the trade union-dominated left in
the 1970s and 1980s.The story is one of ‘moderate trade unionists and parliamentarians winning
control of the NEC and gradually implementing
reforms which helped make the party electable’
(p. 7). Hayter pays special attention to the various
interest groupings with a stake in the party vis-àvis the context of a continuous electoral battering
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from Labour’s Conservative opponents.The book
provides a detailed analysis of the twists and turns
involved in leading an embattled party back out
of the political wilderness and on to the electoral
battlefield (p. 183). Perhaps for the first time we
catch a glimpse of the important role played by
key actors who were subsequently rewarded with
public office in successive New Labour governments under Tony Blair.The book’s chronological
review chapters will appeal to labour movement
scholars who wish to gain a sound empirical
understanding of the roots and trajectory of New
Labour’s political project.
Overall this is an excellent book. Lucid and
concise, it unpacks several fascinating episodes
which give the reader a much soberer impression
of the transformation of Labour from within.
Much of the empirical evidence has been plucked
from the transcriptions of dozens of interviews
with key actors and the result is a methodical
analysis of the topic under study.The fact that the
book is extremely accessible and engrossing may
also have something to do with the fact that it is
written from the perspective of someone who was
actively involved in efforts to turn Labour’s fortunes around. However, Hayter’s thick interpretation of behind-the-scenes manoeuvres should
not detract from what is a fairly objective critique
of the British Labour party during a significant
phase in its ideological and political evolution.
Aaron Edwards
(Queen’s University Belfast)
Political Institutions in the United Kingdom
by David Judge. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005. 323pp., £20.99, ISBN 0 19 924426 X
Politics and Power in the UK by Richard
Heffernan and Grahame Thompson (eds).
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.
176pp., £15.99, ISBN 0 7486 1970 4
The central aim of these two books is to examine
the core institutions and processes of the British
political system, and to account for the variety of
changes that have taken place in this regard under
the New Labour governments from 1997. Aimed
primarily at an undergraduate audience (although
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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the text by Judge is notably more advanced), they
provide a clear, accessible and useful overview of
these issues.
The key theme of Political Institutions in the
United Kingdom, by David Judge, concerns the
debate ‘about institutional configurations and
interactions at the centre of UK government’ (p.
146). In particular, the chief task is to account for
the changing nature of Britain’s institutional landscape over the last nine years.Adopting a historical
institutionalist perspective, the main argument
is that these changes have developed, in a ‘pathdependent’ manner, from within a distinct set
of political structures that are underpinned by a
series of enduring ‘norms, values and meanings
prescribing legitimate government’ (p. 26). These
derive from the ‘Westminster model’, which
forms the dominant discourse for determining
‘appropriate’ political behaviour in Britain. For
Judge, therefore, the constraints imposed by the
Westminster model mean that: ‘institutional
development in the UK in the 21st Century is
constrained by a path determined by the preexisting configuration of the parliamentary state’
(p. 260).
Following a wide-ranging review of the
institutionalist literature, the book proceeds to a
highly detailed empirical account of continuity
and change in a broad variety of institutions and
processes. These include the central mechanisms
of parliament (the Commons and the Lords), the
monarchy, the party system, the judiciary and the
civil service, as well as the respective territorial
institutions of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland
and England. The rise of multi-layered governance and the implications of the ongoing processes of ‘agencification’ and ‘marketisation’ are
also discussed.
While New Labour’s reforms are generally
perceived as a radical departure from the British
political norm, this analysis also draws out a series
of deeper continuities, both with the reforms
introduced by the Conservative governments
from 1979 to 1997, as well as with the underlying
principles of the Westminster model. As Judge
puts it, ‘the norms, values and meanings of the
Westminster model still inform the institutional
interactions of state institutions ... and still pre-
340
scribe the relationship between formal political
institutions and citizens’ (pp. 278–9).
Pitched, as its author admits, at a slightly
unusual midway level between ‘beginner’ and
‘advanced’ texts on British politics, this book succeeds, on the whole, in providing a lucid, interesting and engaging examination of Britain’s
political institutions. Just two (relatively minor)
criticisms stand out. Firstly, I felt that the initial
treatment of the institutionalist literature could
have been conducted more critically, and in a
manner more conducive to further theoretical
development. Instead, this initial foray is limited to
a descriptive account of the common themes and
features within the literature, which are subsequently taken as constitutive of a ‘general’ institutionalist approach. Secondly, while the theoretical
and empirical components of the book are well
connected, the analytical narrative sometimes has
a tendency to be overly dense, and this can make
the argument difficult to follow. These points
aside, however, David Judge offers an informative,
authoritative and important analysis of the changing nature of Britain’s core political institutions
under New Labour.
On the same theme, but on a more basic level,
is Politics and Power in the UK, edited by Richard
Heffernan and Grahame Thompson.The key aim
of this book is to examine the related issues of
continuity and change, structures of power and
state–society linkages in contemporary Britain.
Set within the overarching theme of the role
played by political institutions in shaping and
distributing power in Britain, the book consists
of five main chapters from a variety of authors.
Respectively, these cover: the machinery of
central government; centre–periphery relations;
participation and dissent; policy networks and
interest representation; and constitutional reform.
In contrast to Political Institutions in the United
Kingdom, this book also deals with these issues
in a largely non-theoretical manner. Seeking
to provide an explanatory outline of the subject
rather than make a distinct argument of its own,
the narrative is delivered in largely pragmatic
terms, utilising frequent comparative examples
from other political systems to illustrate the points
being made.
BR ITAIN AND IRELAND
Designed as an introductory text for an undergraduate audience, Politics and Power in the UK is
not without its good points. The book is clearly
written, is well organised (replete with running
summaries throughout) and does cover many of
the basic concepts and themes involved in the
study of the British political system. However,
in my view, the book also suffers from two main
deficiencies. The first of these is that there is no
real examination of the concept of ‘power’ itself.
For a text purporting to introduce its readers to
the issues of ‘politics and power’ in Britain, such
an omission is clearly problematic. At the very
least, I would have expected some reference to the
long-running ‘faces of power’ debate highlighted
by Stephen Lukes many years ago.
The second, and most serious, problem,
however, concerns the level and scope of the
subject matter itself.While the relatively small size
of the book in comparison to most of the largescale introductory texts on British politics may
have the advantage of offering students a less
daunting read, and while the style and content
of the book are both appropriately pitched for its
target audience, I could not help but wonder if
this book really added much to what is already
an overcrowded (and indeed still burgeoning)
marketplace for introductory texts in this area.
In sum, taken together these two books provide
a useful outline of continuity and change in Britain’s core political institutions and processes since
1997. However, while Political Institutions in the
United Kingdom can be taken as a ‘stand-alone’ text
that will be of interest and value to both scholars
and students alike, Politics and Power in the UK will
perhaps be of most use to undergraduate students
of British politics, and as a complementary
resource to be used alongside other broader introductory texts.
Steven Kettell
(University of Warwick)
Parliament in British Politics by Philip
Norton. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
289pp., £18.99, ISBN 1 4039 0667 X
This new offering from Professor the Lord
Norton of Louth is billed by the publishers as
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replacing his earlier work, Does Parliament Matter?
(1993) to reflect the changed constitutional landscape of the United Kingdom, particularly devolution to Scotland and Wales, the incorporation of
the Human Rights Act into British law, further
European integration and recent reforms to
parliament. It does precisely that in chapter 7, but
Norton has a broader purpose.
Early on, he tells us that ‘Legislatures cannot be
assessed solely in terms of their capacity to make
law’ (pp. 8–9). By adapting Packenham’s (1970)
functions of legislatures, the author takes us
beyond the pluralist view of parliament, preferring instead an institutional approach. As a result,
Norton is able to focus not only on parliament’s
traditional role in constraining the executive,
but also on the neglected area of parliament’s
relationship with the citizen. Parliament, he
declares, has adapted its role ‘from the coercive to
the persuasive’ (p. 12), from determining the
outcome of public policy to giving voice to the
demands of the citizen.
This theme is expanded in Part II of the book,
where Norton explores the tensions inherent in
Britain’s representative system of government, the
responsiveness of MPs to their constituents, how
various interest groups seek to lobby parliament
and how parliament has attempted in recent years
to connect with the wider public.
Throughout, the text is laced with information from parliamentary websites and information offices, as well as drawing extensively from
the works of key academics in the field and,
notably, from a rich array of pertinent comments
from the memoirs of former senior ministers.
The book is written in a crisp, unfussy writing
style, which has been honed over the years to
near perfection.
For any student, or for that matter, any academic struggling to grapple with an apparently
obscure area of parliamentary procedure, this text
provides a clear explanation at every turn. In
particular, chapter 4, ‘Policy-making: The Early
Stages’, is a gem, shedding light on the neglected
nooks and crannies of parliament, such as the
valuable work of parliamentary counsel (p. 68)
and the recent expansion of pre-legislative scrutiny (pp. 75–7). And, the best thing about this
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341
book is that it informs the reader equally as well
about the House of Lords as about the House of
Commons, something that few books in the field
can match. In short, this excellent book confirms
Lord Norton’s status as Britain’s leading academic
on parliament and its procedures.
Mark Stuart
(University of Nottingham)
The Struggle for Labour’s Soul: Understanding Labour’s Political Thought since
1945 by Raymond Plant, Matt Beech and
Kevin Hickson (eds). Abingdon: Routledge,
2005. 300pp., £22.99, ISBN 0 415 31284 1.
This is a first-rate discussion of the post-war intellectual history of the Labour party. The first and
third sections are composed of essays on the
various positions within the party (Old Left,
New Left, Centre, Old Right and New Labour)
and shorter commentaries on them from those
involved. The second section deals with crosscutting issues facing the party (including the
ends–means division, equality and globalisation).
The essays which compose the book are of a
universally high quality and the list of contributors is impressive.
One minor gripe comes from the ambiguity of
referring to New Labour as ‘New Right’ (p. 3) or
‘the new right wing of the Labour Party’ (p. 89) in
the introduction and throughout Matt Beech’s
chapter (instead of, say, ‘the new, right wing of
the Labour party’).This seems to imply closeness
between New Labour and the wider New Right
(of Hayek et al.) without making any argument
to this effect. (In fact, Beech argues the opposite,
that New Labour is defined by a version of
egalitarianism.)
The omnipresence of Tony Crosland throughout the book confirms his place as the thinker par
excellence of the post-war party, but it also reveals
two sides to Crosland’s thought. First, there is the
socialist Crosland, an egalitarian, whose revisionism is predicated on the inevitable gradualism of
Keynesianism, and whose thought seems obsolete
in an era of globalisation. Second, there is the
liberal Crosland, a British precursor to John
Rawls, who examined the relationship between
342
equality and freedom, and ditched much of
Labour’s statist baggage. As this book shows,
the fight over Crosland’s legacy remains central to
contemporary debate.
The book is accessible enough for anyone
interested in the ideas behind Labour after 1945,
and will be of use to students at all levels, as well
as academics, who will be particularly interested
in the specific takes given by those involved.
Simon Griffiths
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
British Foreign Policy under New Labour,
1997–2005 by Paul D. Williams. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. xiii + 263pp., £50.00,
ISBN 1 4039 1321 8.
During his acceptance speech outside Downing
Street on 2 May 1997, after New Labour swept to
power on the back of a huge landslide victory,
Blair told British and world audiences that his
would be a government ‘that gives this country
strength and confidence in leadership both at
home and abroad, particularly in respect of
Europe’. Hope, optimism, innovation, creativity
and dynamism were just some of the characteristics that both supporters and critics of New
Labour alike felt Blair personally, and his government in general, could bring to the governance of
Britain after eighteen years of Conservative rule
that climaxed, if that is an appropriate word, in
the scandal-ridden Major years. Eight years on
and the public, political and scholarly inquest into
Blair’s first two administrations has begun in
earnest. Sparked in particular by the controversial
decision to join UK forces with the US-led coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003, but also brought
on by a wider feeling that New Labour had lost
direction both domestically and internationally,
the amount of ink being spilled on Blair’s governance of Britain is accumulating rapidly. In
articles such as William Wallace’s 2005 ‘The Collapse of British Foreign Policy’ we get a strong
flavour of what leading commentators have begun
to conclude about the New Labour project: high
ambitions and lofty rhetoric undermined by
short-term quick-fix policies which add up to far
less than the sum of their parts.
BR ITAIN AND IRELAND
Paul Williams is the latest scholar to explore
New Labour’s foreign policy in this critical,
engaging, albeit slightly ‘securitised’ version of
foreign policy during Blair’s first two terms in
office. He does so in a clear fashion that explores
British foreign policy 1997–2005 through an
appropriate and well thought-through structure.
The first part of the book explores the underlying
commitments Labour had in foreign policy terms
on taking office in terms both of its traditional
Labour heritage and of the shifts Blair and his
Cabinet sought to bring about on taking office,
especially ethically. The second part examines
three fundamental relationships: with the US,
with
Europe/EU
and
with
Africa/
Commonwealth.The third and by some distance
the longest part analyses five ‘issues’: global economic policies, defence policy, international
development, humanitarian intervention and
Iraq/Middle East.Williams suggests that when we
come to tot up the balance sheet on New Labour’s
foreign policy we need to come to terms with the
government’s record on its commitments to multilateralism, Atlanticism, neoliberalism and implementing an ‘ethical’ foreign policy. On the
evidence he presents,Williams is fairly well in line
with much contemporary opinion in arguing that
Blair’s governments promised a lot but, like too
many of their predecessors, have had considerable
difficulty in putting policy statements into political practice. This represents a failing both on the
part of the New Labour project but also is an
indication that in the arena of foreign policy some
‘familiar’ constraints will always be in operation
that serve to limit the ability of the government of
a medium-sized island off the east coast of mainland Europe to exert real and lasting power and
influence on the global stage.
I found this a worthwhile read, but have two
criticisms. First of all, I got the impression,
rightly or wrongly, that Williams is happier
talking about the defence and security aspects of
foreign policy than other, what we might call
‘softer’, elements. That is not to say the chapters
on international political economy and so on are
not well researched or written, just that if you
take the hard, realist war/conflict/security/
defence elements out of this book you would see
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how much it relies on them for its length and
analytical ballast.This seems to be the product of
two things: on the one hand Williams’ own
research interests and on the other the post-9/11
securitisation of pretty much every foreign
policy-related issue, and the feeling that Blair’s
foreign policy has misleadingly come to be
judged on the basis of his military exploits
abroad. Linked to this, my second criticism is that
when judging Blair’s legacy in his first two
terms, surely his policy towards ‘Europe’, namely
the euro, the (now defunct) European Constitution and Britain’s EU partners, should be centre
stage, given that Blair set his stall out to repair
what he sees as years of misplaced British aloofness from Europe.Well before his election speech
Blair was asking to be judged in foreign policy
terms with reference to the changes he could
make to British European policy; America –
Williams’ ‘Atlanticism’ benchmark – barely featured.The author’s consideration of the EU here,
however, is totally dominated by analysis of
Blair’s approach to European defence and security, with nothing significant on the wider
context of British–European relations.To give an
example of how both of my criticisms are manifested in the book: in the section exploring the
‘wider impact’ of the invasion of Iraq, Williams
covers its impact on the ‘war on terrorism’, the
Middle East peace process and transatlantic relations. Of course they are all important, but what
about the damage it did to London’s relations
with Paris and Bonn, to name just two obvious
ones, and the prospect of Blair achieving his
stated ambitions for Britain in Europe?
In sum,Williams has provided a useful addition
to the emerging literature on New Labour’s
foreign policy. It is critical, well structured and
argumentative and deserves to be read by both
students and scholars alike, being particularly
strong on the defence and security aspects of
British foreign policy in this period. If you want
to read about the wretched failings of New
Labour’s European policy, however, you will need
to look elsewhere.
Oliver Daddow
(Loughborough University)
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
Contesting Rurality: Politics in the British
Countryside by Michael Woods. Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2005. 220pp., £49.95, ISBN 0 7546
3025 0.
Contesting Rurality is a response to the emerging
interest in rural issues among scholars, politicians
and policy-makers, and evaluates the evolving
governance and politics of rural Britain. Two
chapters have a strong focus on Somerset; they
were undertaken initially for the author’s PhD.
Examples from Somerset are used primarily to
examine the changing balance of local power in
the countryside and evaluate the nature of contemporary rural elites. The rest of the book considers wider rural questions. The first and final
chapters discuss broad themes and concepts
relating to the social, institutional and economic
restructuring of rural Britain.The key argument is
that there is not a ‘rural politics’ but a ‘politics
of the rural’ in which the prime focus is on the
definition and representation of rurality. Other
chapters consider national politics and rural representation; the Countryside Alliance and rural
protest; and agricultural politics.
Woods has supplied a useful addition to the
literature. The information on Somerset’s local
governance is especially welcome because most
scholarship on British local government focuses
on urban topics.The study also generates notable
insights into other issues such as rural electoral
politics, the decline of conservatism and the
Countryside Alliance. Parts of this book have an
appeal beyond the research community and
should interest undergraduates and a more general
readership.
The author also makes a valiant attempt to
create a coherent whole out of his components.
His theoretical and conceptual framework is
strong enough to ensure some success; however
the reader is still left with the feeling of disparate
elements marshalled into one volume to please
the publisher. There is a sense of two or three
books trying to escape from these covers and
that these issues would have benefited from more
extensive treatment. Perhaps the conclusions
from the Somerset study could have been supplemented through analysis of another county?
NOR TH AMER ICA
344
Nevertheless, this is a good book and would make
a valuable addition to any library. It will have a
permanent place in mine.
Michael Cole
(University of Plymouth)
We welcome short reviews of books in all
areas of politics and international relations.
For guidelines on submitting reviews, and
to see an up-to-date listing of books available for review, please visit http://www.
politicalstudiesreview.org/.
North America
Social Security: History and Politics from
the New Deal to the Privatization Debate by
Daniel Béland. Lawrence KS: University Press
of Kansas, 2005. 264pp., $29.99, ISBN 0 7006
1404 4
This book does two important things and
deserves to be read by two different audiences.
One thing it does is what it says in the title: give
us a solid history and analysis of the United States’
Social Security programme and its politics. We
lacked an up-to-date political history of the programme, and it is helpful that this one speaks to
social science debates. It makes a special point of
attempting to evaluate the importance of racism
and sexism in Social Security’s politics, finding
that racism does not explain much, while sexism
is still only a complement to explanations focused
on economic interests and institutional politics.
It would be nice, though, if it were to take more
account of broader trends in American welfare
politics (its parallels with J. Oberlander’s The
Political Life of Medicare are striking).
The other thing the book does is what it hints in
the subtitle: expand our understanding of the
interaction of history and politics. This is why it
should receive attention beyond those interested in
the United States and pensions. Béland’s framework is a synthesis of three schools of thought with
very different origins: historical institutionalism
(from comparative politics), frame analysis (from
sociology) and multiple-streams analysis (from
policy studies). He weaves them together into a
much more coherent explanation of policy development and change over time than any
one theory can supply alone.A synthesis such as his
remedies their flaws and accentuates their strengths
– historical institutionalism is coupled with theories that explain change; frame analysis is tied to
concrete institutions and discrete policy ideas; and
multiple-streams analysis is furnished with a rich
institutional and framing background to explain
the origins of the ideas and interests. The idea is
excellent and Béland’s particular execution of it
sturdy, data friendly and generalisable.
Scott L. Greer
(University of Michigan)
A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision
for Human Rights by Elizabeth Borgwardt.
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
437pp., £22.95, ISBN 0 674 01874 5.
This beautifully written book sheds new light on
the founding moments of post-war international
society. Borgwardt argues that the new multilateral
order that emerged,comprising the BrettonWoods
system of economic governance,the UN system of
collective security and the Nuremberg charter that
foreshadowed the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, had their origins in American
New Deal thinking.Too often, Borgwardt argues,
historians read the present into the past, believing
that the new institutions were core parts of the new
Cold War. Instead, Borgwardt shows that in their
proper context the genesis of these institutions lies
in two sets of considerations, both tied to the New
Deal. First, there was the commitment to fundamental freedoms most famously expressed by
Roosevelt’s ‘four freedoms’ and Cordell Hull’s
pithier‘freedom from fear and want’.Second,there
was the basically Keynesian view that freedom
from fear and want was best achieved by government intervention and technical managerialism. A
New Deal for the World charts the progress of these
norms, which Borgwardt argues amounted to an
internationalisation of New Deal ideas. It shows
that, on the one hand, the zeitgeist of 1945 and
experience of war turned many formerly ardent
isolationists, such as Senator Vandenberg, into
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advocates of the new multilateralism by convincing them that, left unchecked, troubles overseas
became troubles at home and that the United
States must have been fighting for more than
simply a return to the status quo. On the other
hand, however, New Deal ideas could only be
internationalised through a process of domestic
and international negotiation. Borgwardt traces
this process, showing that the emergence of consensus involved compromises on every corner. For
example, while the Atlantic Charter had proclaimed every person’s right to self-determination,
by 1945 that had been circumscribed by strategic
arguments that the US maintain militarised colonies in the Pacific and British and French arguments against decolonisation. Despite these
compromises, the basic ideas continued to wield
power: the Atlantic Charter became a rallying call,
triggering the irresistible process of decolonisation; Nuremberg gave way to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which set benchmarks
used by millions to lobby for subsequent change.
This volume is written in a conversational style
and does not present its core argument and evidence in an overtly systematic fashion.While that
might annoy some purists, it does mean that more
people might read this excellent and important
book. And that would be very welcome.
Alex Bellamy
(University of Queensland)
Making Sense of Political Ideology: The
Power of Language in Democracy by
Bernard L. Brock, Mark E. Huglen, James F.
Klumpp and Sharon Howell. Lanham MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. 149pp., £14.99,
ISBN 0 7425 3671 8
Can we understand and improve politics through
an analysis of political rhetoric? Brock et al.
believe we can. By using and amplifying Kenneth
Burke’s methodology for analyzing political
rhetoric, they seek to describe America’s politics,
identify the origins of America’s current political
problems and predict its political future.
The authors take from Burke a framework
that maps rhetorical utterances on to ideological
positions by connecting interpretive concepts
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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with the orientations of those positions to the
status quo. For example they argue that radicals,
because they favor changing the status quo by
intensifying the historical ‘drift’ of change that
informs contemporary policies, emphasize concepts that describe the ‘agency’ by which change
occurs. The authors use this method to describe
the contours of political conflict in America and
to situate the ideological characteristics of a
variety of politicians, including Bill Clinton,
George W. Bush and John McCain.
They also urgently call for the joining of rhetoric with ideology to clarify policy orientations
and allow citizens to agree on a political agenda.
They blame current failures consistently to create
such a fusion for the fragmentation and endemic
conflict of contemporary American politics.
Combining rhetoric with ideology would
enhance democratic control, provide the foundations for agreement and allow political leaders to
solicit a true mandate for governing, they argue.
Brock et al. predict that the shift in the dominant
paradigm from science to ‘poetic humanism’ will
continue to tear apart popular understandings of
key political concepts. Coupled with an inevitable
cyclical change away from conservatism, this conceptual destruction will probably usher in a leftof-center policy ‘drift’ in America because, they
imply, leftist ideologies are better situated to
respond creatively to such change.
The book is written in a lively and accessible
style and is suitable for advanced undergraduates
and above. However, it is more suggestive than
convincing. It largely ignores the pertinent political science literature on political communications,
elections and related topics. I also believe Hayden
White’s Metahistory better conceptualizes the rhetorical organization of shared narratives than does
the authors’ interpretation of Burke’s functional
approach. More fundamentally, its central argument – that joining rhetoric with ideology will
allow Americans to overcome fragmentation –
underestimates other important political factors,
including the tendency of American political
structures to foment conflict and political division.
David J. Lorenzo
(Jamestown College)
346
Red over Blue: The 2004 Elections and
American Politics by James W. Ceasar and
Andrew E. Busch. Lanham MD and Oxford:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. 201pp., $19.95,
ISBN 0 7425 3497 9.
In 1976 Gerald Pomper revived the genre of US
election reviews which the Brookings Institution
had abandoned after 1964. Although the Pomper
series has now ended the field remains crowded
and this fourth contribution from Ceasar and
Busch is a serious competitor.
The book’s title echoes the polarised electoral
geography of the 2000 contest which divided the
‘50-50 nation’. But four years on, as the authors
demonstrate in their opening chapter, Republicans now have the electoral advantage, extending through presidential, congressional and state
elections. They also suggest that the electoral
geography was less polarised in 2004, as Bush’s
largest gains came in the states where he was
weakest four years earlier.The chapter on the Bush
presidency traces both his performance and popularity. Inevitably 9/11 is seen as a watershed
although the authors struggle to convince that the
impact on the president’s popularity endured to
be of electoral significance in 2004. As they recognise, ‘once the rally effect from September 11th
had finally run its course in mid-2003 he was
largely back where he was on 10 September 2001’
(p.62).The chapter on the Democrats’ nominating
contest sees the speed of Kerry’s victory
as unhelpful to his electoral prospects. He had won
the nomination unscathed and still largely
unknown, allowing the Bush campaign to expose
his shortcomings as soon as he had clinched the
nomination. This argument is an interesting
contrast to the view that a prolonged nominating
contest leaves a party damaged for the general
election. In discussing the general election the
authors might have devoted more attention to
what, for political scientists, were its curiosities: the
lack of a convention ‘bounce’ for the Kerry campaign and why, despite his strength on most indicators used in electoral forecasting, Bush won by a
narrow margin.The chapter on the congressional
and state elections, covering hundreds of contests,
understandably struggles to do more than describe
NOR TH AMER ICA
the results. The final chapter provides an end-ofterm report on the operation of election process,
and an assessment of the parties’ future prospects.
This book would be a useful addition to libraries for undergraduate use. The style is accessible
and the authors are strong on description and
analysis. Added illumination and historical value
would have come from more statistical data.There
is no record of the states’ popular or electoral
college votes or results for the presidential primaries and caucuses, for example.
Dean McSweeney
(University of the West of England)
The Politics of Attention: How Government
Prioritizes Problems by Bryan D. Jones and
Frank R. Baumgartner. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. 304pp., $25.00,
ISBN 0 226 40653 9.
Bryan D. Jones and Frank R. Baumgartner’s The
Politics of Attention probes into how the American
political system processes information in producing public policies. In politics, it is important to
understand how information is used and prioritized because information has a profound influence on the political process. Responding to new
information, a political system produces various
policy outcomes. In the process of adjusting to the
new information, a political system can also transform itself. Despite the importance of information, the subject of information processing has
often been treated incompletely in the literature.
Cognitively, human and institutional processing
capacity is limited. Policy-makers are typically
deluged with information; they cope with this
‘information-rich environment’ through ‘disproportionate information processing’. In other
words, policy-makers cannot and thus do not
respond proportionately to the strengths of
incoming informational signals. Rather, they are
selective in how they distribute their attention.
Moreover, there are many institutional ‘frictions’
that resist change; an example is the requirement
of concurrent majority support in both Houses to
pass legislation. As a result, informationprocessing in politics is inevitably ‘inefficient’ and
‘disproportionate’.
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These inefficiencies, however, are not
pathologies. They are necessary characteristics
that help guarantee reaction, error correction
and democratic responsiveness. Indeed, Jones and
Baumgartner conclude that this particular form
of inefficiency is fundamental to the quality of
American institutions, and should be encouraged.
In integrating the literature on agenda setting
and institutional analysis, Baumgartner and Jones
challenge students of public policy to rethink traditional concepts of governance and democracy.
Their argument is based on stochastic analyses
they conducted of the massive and comprehensive
indices of the federal government. Their innovative methodological approach makes it possible to
observe general trends across many cases, which
would not have been possible with the more
popular methods of regression analysis or detailed
case studies of policy-making processes. Their
work convincingly describes how the allocation of
attention affects policy change.
While this book represents a solid and inspiring
scholarly achievement, it also leaves many questions unanswered. How, for example, can we
draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable ‘inefficiencies’? How can we encourage ‘necessary’ inefficiencies without putting the whole
political system into gridlock? How does the
responsiveness of institutions lead to action by
individual actors? Both the richness of this book
and the questions it leaves unanswered are likely
to stimulate further discussion and debate related
to American democracy.
Kyong Min Son
(University of Maryland)
On the Cutting Edge of Globalization:
An Inquiry into American Elites by James
N. Rosenau, David C. Earnest, Yale H.
Ferguson and Ole R. Holsti. Lanham MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. 201pp., £21.99,
ISBN 0 7425 3976 8.
This slim but densely packed volume presents the
results of a two-stage survey of US elite opinion
towards globalisation, broadly conceptualised economically, socially and ideologically. The analysis
is based on two samples, drawn from sources such
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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as Who’s Who in America, collecting 900 responses
in 1999 and 830 in 2003, the second following
anti-globalisation protests and the destruction of
the World Trade Centre.
The study conceives the reach of globalisation
determined by the activities of those at the ‘cutting
edge’, an elite subgroup.Via factor analysis of the
15 items of an ‘involvement index’ they identify
such a subgroup, 187 and 167 respondents within
their respective samples.The remainder of the text
comprises a systematic exploration of differences
in opinion between these ‘cutting-edgers’ and
‘other leaders’ in 1999 and 2003. Some light relief
is provided at the start and end of each chapter
with an imagined discussion of the results with
two such global leaders, neighbouring passengers
on a long-haul flight, but overly caricatured for
great effect.
From the detailed review of 173+ items, the
authors find that the ‘cutting-edgers’, those more
deeply involved in global processes, are more
enthusiastic about globalisation in its various
manifestations but do not display a distinctive
global mindset, as the researchers expected. Local,
parochial, affiliations persist and their reactions to
world events are indistinguishable from elite-wide
patterns. Further, the study uncovers other significant elite subgroups such as Republican partisanship and favourable disposition towards globalisation and corporate viability among business
leaders.While the opinions of occupational groups
were found to be less distinctive than the cuttingedge/other dichotomy, this appears to arise from
the particularly broad definition of globalisation
employed;a more nuanced analysis of occupational
and sectoral differences would be welcome.
The monograph aims to mobilise further
research and it would be straightforward to align
student research with this project. The questionnaires are appended and a link provided to access
the original data online, although not operational
for this review. The authors plan a third stage
‘post-Iraq’ and cite potential cross-country comparisons from Belgium and Turkey, developments
that would help dilute the pervasive ethnocentrism in this study.
In sum, this project is yet to fulfil the expectations it raises. While this arises in part from the
EUROPE
348
underpinning conceptual framework, the detail of
opinion targeted presents potential for unprecedented access to the thinking of global elites,once
a cross-national research programme is established.
Bruce Cronin
(University of Greenwich)
We welcome short reviews of books in all
areas of politics and international relations.
For guidelines on submitting reviews, and
to see an up-to-date listing of books available for review, please visit http://www.
politicalstudiesreview.org/.
Europe
Globalisation and EU Policy-making: The
Neo-liberal Transformation of Telecommunications and Electricity by Ian Bartle.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
240pp., £55.00, ISBN 0 7190 66425
States of Liberalization: Redefining the
Public Sector in Integrated Europe by
Mitchell P. Smith. Alban NY: SUNY, 2005.
246pp., $21.95, ISBN 0 7194 6544 6
There is, broadly, an inverse relation between the
importance of an EU policy and the likelihood
that we have studied it much in the last ten
years. EU policies in areas such as state regulation, financial services, trade and utility liberalisation are reshaping Europe’s public and private
sectors but receive far less attention in the literature on EU politics than other policy areas
such as social dialogue or the Open Method of
Co-ordination, not all of which matter much.
That is one reason why we should applaud
these two new books. They discuss substantively
important, high-stakes issues – and thereby show
us how EU politics really does, and does not,
matter. For Bartle, this means telecommunications and electricity. For Smith, this means
public procurement, competition policy, postal
services and the clash between EU competition
policy and Germany’s public law banks. How
and why did liberalisation of these important
sectors happen, and to what extent was liberalisation really Europeanisation?
Smith’s book is one of the most illuminating –
and clearly written – recent books on EU policymaking and especially stands out as one of the best
among works on the relationship between the EU
and the public sector. His key argument is simple:
while the EU institutions on their own can do a
great deal to push liberalisation, their real impact
depends on the willingness of private actors to
enter a market and political arena, force implementation and fight for markets. This variable
Smith calls ‘participation expansion’; it means the
extent to which Europeanisation leads new
players to enter a domestic market and political
arena. Tremendous legal destabilisation need not
mean major change if nobody wants to take
political or economic advantage of it.
Bartle’s analysis, of two more liberalised sectors,
supports this argument. His concern is to identify
the relative impact of globalisation, neoliberalism
and Europeanisation – given the dominance of
neoliberal ideas and deregulation around the
world, he is correct that there is no a priori reason
to give the EU credit for policies also seen in
dozens of other countries. His study finds that
while much EU policy-making can be impelled
by EU institutions themselves (principally the
Court), the various factors that get called ‘globalisation’ – principally economic competition –
matter more.Telecommunications, naturally more
internationally competitive than electricity, consequently faces liberalising pressure, and liberalises
much sooner.
We see this in the fascinating history of
government–firm interaction in the telecommunications industry – once the UK had liberalised,
continental incumbents such as Telefonica and
Deutsche Telekom found that the regulatory
regimes that once protected them now just
reduced their competitiveness, and began to press
for liberalisation (pp. 89–92); this is reminiscent
of the defection of Smith’s German banks from
the existing order when participation expansion
forced them to develop new strategies. In both
cases what matters is the impact of events on
domestic politics and markets. By contrast, elec© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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tricity and public procurement liberalise, and
change, slowly, for they are not boosted by new
competitive entrants (this is slow globalisation
for Bartle and slow participation expansion for
Smith).
So, politically, both tell the same story. Europeanisation works as well as people on the ground
want it to work, and participation expansion,
whether driven by policy or by globalisation,
determines the speed and scope. Market making is
much harder than we think, the public sector
sturdier than it sometimes seems, and the politics
of Europeanisation, when it matters, goes a long
way beyond the politics of the EU institutions.
Scott L. Greer
(University of Michigan)
Europe and the Recognition of New States
in Yugoslavia by Richard Caplan. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005. 229pp.,
£45.00, ISBN 0 521 82176 2.
In 1991 the European Community was confronted with the dissolution of the Soviet Union
and Yugoslavia. In December 1991 the EC
adopted declarations on the recognition of new
states in Eastern Europe and the USSR and
Yugoslavia. Richard Caplan, who teaches international relations at the University of Oxford,
examines the case of the EC’s response to the
events taking place in Yugoslavia. Following an
introduction, he analyses the content of the recognition policy, discussing both strategic and
political considerations leading to recognition
and the crucial role of Germany in this process.
Then, he offers a brief examination of historic
practice regarding recognition of states, followed
by a discussion of the relationship between international law, international relations and recognition. In chapter 4, Caplan examines the strategic
consequences of the EC recognition of the new
states in Yugoslavia. He discusses the circumstances, interests, political events and consequences including armed conflict for each
republic seeking recognition: Slovenia, Croatia,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, and finally, the special
cases of Macedonia and Kosovo. He concludes
that the ‘role that EC recognition played in the
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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wars of Yugoslav dissolution has been poorly
understood. Broadly speaking, the claims with
respect to its negative impact on the violent conflict have been greatly overstated’ (p. 144). It
played no significant role in the case of Slovenia
and Croatia. In Bosnia and Herzegovina there
was an interrelationship between recognition and
the intensification of hostilities. In Macedonia
and Kosovo, delayed recognition and nonrecognition did little to improve the strategic
climate; to ‘some degree it made the climate
worse’ (p. 144). Then he examines political conditionality as an instrument of conflict management in a wider international context, stressing
that although conditional recognition is a onetime measure (p. 178) it nevertheless ‘provides
diplomats with valuable political capital’ (p. 179).
Finally, he offers reflections over the impact and
significance of the EC’s conditional recognition
of new states.
Caplan presents and argues his analysis in a
thorough and conclusive way, combining the
Yugoslav cases with general aspects. This is an
important contribution to the understanding of a
crucial dimension in Europe’s most recent history
and the EC’s response to the break-up of Yugoslavia and eventually the creation of new states,
placing this experience in a wider international
context as well.Thus, Caplan’s valuable book can
be recommended to everyone interested in the
instrument of conditional recognition and the
case of the new states in Yugoslavia.
Jorgen Kuhl
(University of Southern Denmark)
European Union Studies by Michelle Cini
and Angela K Bourne (eds). Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 296pp., £17.99, ISBN
0 333 99763 8.
This edited book sets out to review the state of
the art in European Union studies over the past
ten to fifteen years. It is made up of twelve individual essays that generally offer an overview of
existing literature and recent developments in
their field. However, this is not a European Union
studies textbook. Indeed, the editors have explicitly set out to explore the ‘advances’ in the field
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and acknowledge that this may mean seminal
works are not given the attention some would feel
they deserve. This fact though provides the book
with its innovative edge as each essay attempts to
push the boundaries of its part of the discipline.
Chapters 2–5 review the concepts and methods
that have emerged to underpin recent research
on the EU, such as rational institutionalism and
liberal intergovernmentalism, constructivism and
sociological institutionalism, Europeanisation
and multi-level governance and policy networks.
Chapters 6–9 build upon the early methodological pieces to reflect important empirical developments in EU studies such as enlargement, the EU’s
global role, European identity and European
legitimacy. Although explicitly stating their preference for political approaches to the study of the
EU, the editors include essays with a more interdisciplinary flavour to conclude the book. Two
chapters highlight the contribution to EU studies
played by political economy and history,before the
final two chapters explore the debate surrounding
the breaking down of methodological and interdisciplinary barriers in the study of the EU.
The editors are to be praised for the way they
managed to avoid the all-too-common issue with
edited books – the lack of a consistent thread
running throughout the book. Individually, the
well written and researched essays offer a major
reason to acquire this book. However, the way
they have been brought together by the editors
adds considerable value to the enterprise. If the
editors were thinking of a second edition in
the future a general conclusion might be worth
considering.They raised many points in the introduction that would have been interesting if
they had the space to expand upon them in a
conclusion.
The aim of the editors was to provide a book
that ‘stands back from the literature to identify
trends and to define the boundaries of this research
field’ (p. 2). They have succeeded in their tasks
admirably and therefore this book is to be recommended highly to advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and academics working on the EU.
Simon Lightfoot
(University of Leeds)
Universities and the Europe of Knowledge:
Ideas, Institutions and Policy Entrepreneurship in European Union Higher Education
Policy, 1955–2005 by Anne Corbett. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 268pp., £50.00,
ISBN 1 4039 3245 X.
Anne Corbett has written an important contribution to the understanding of European policymaking in general and of European integration
in higher education in particular. By combining
approaches from sociological institutionalism and
ideas on policy entrepreneurship, she attempts to
explain the development of a European (higher)
education policy in the period 1955–87. The
main claim is that if we want to increase our
understanding of policy change within Europe,
we need to take careful account of individual
policy entrepreneurs. The book is divided into
four parts. In the first part, Corbett presents the
analytical framework she uses to analyse European policy change.The second and main part of
the book offers a historical account of the developments between 1955 and 1987. This narrative
is organised around three key events: the 1972
decision to establish the European University
Institute, the 1976 Action Programme in the
field of education and the 1987 ERASMUS
decision.The third section provides an analysis of
the processes that led to these events. Here she
identifies the main (European-level) policy
entrepreneurs and attempts to explain ‘how and
why some of these individuals acted as they did’
(p. 151).The final part, the epilogue, discusses the
current developments related to the Bologna
Process.
Corbett succeeds in supporting her claim. In
an eloquent narrative – in which her history as a
journalist is evident – she unravels the way in
which specific individuals have played decisive
roles in creating and exploiting policy domains.
She does so by indicating how these actions are a
product of both individual characteristics and of
the way these individuals seized the opportunities
that arose. Even though this might not fully
explain the outcomes in European policy
changes, the approach is original and provides
new insights. There are two minor points of cri© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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tique, maybe more aimed at the editor/publisher
than at the author. The book has too many editorial mistakes and also several factual errors.This
is unfortunate, especially because the book is otherwise very well written. Secondly, the publisher
probably has tried to expand its target group by
referring to the period 1955–2005. This is rather
misleading since the book is about 1955–87. Only
in the epilogue does the author reflect on current
developments and here the relation with the rest
of the book is unclear. That said, Corbett’s
account of the 1955–87 period provides a solid
background for understanding current events
related to the Bologna Process.
Eric Beerkens
(University of Sydney)
Germany’s Foreign Policy towards Poland
and the Czech Republic: Ostpolitik
Revisited by Karl Cordell and Stefan Wolff.
Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. 183pp., £65.00,
ISBN 0 415 36974 6.
In their new book, Karl Cordell, principal lecturer at the University of Plymouth, and Stefan
Wolff, professor at the University of Bath,
examine the foreign policy of Germany towards
Poland and the Czech Republic. They are
aiming at a ‘comprehensive comparative analysis
of German Ostpolitik vis-à-vis Poland and the
Czech Republic by examining societal and
international norms and their impact on foreign
policy making in Germany, as well as the significance of relevant norms in Poland and the
Czech Republic for the outcome of Ostpolitik’
(p. 14). Their approach is based on both foreign
policy analysis and constructivist international
relations theory (p. 6, pp. 9–13). Starting out
with a conceptual introduction to the German
question and German foreign policy, the book
offers a summary of the historical background
and an overview of the bilateral relations
between Germany and Poland/Czech Republic
since 1989. The German political parties and
their concept of the Ostpolitik are presented as
well. The ‘ethnic’ factor of the issue is examined
thoroughly, focusing on the impact of the
organisations of German expellees on bilateral
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
relations and the role of the ethnic German
minority populations. The results are synthesised
and discussed within a comparative perspective,
pointing out both similarities and differences
between the Polish and Czech cases (pp. 134–6).
Finally, the book discusses possible future developments (pp. 155–65).
The book is well written with a clear line of
argument.The analysis and points offered are well
argued as well. However, the strong focus on the
German expellees’ organisations somewhat overshadows other aspects. Thus, the analysis
only vaguely touches upon the economic factor
of foreign relations (p. 135, p. 165), although the
impact of German investments in industry and
the consumer market (retail trade etc.) in Poland
and the Czech Republic is of significance to relations between the countries as well. Even more,
the micro-level of foreign policy, cross-border
co-operation, is not addressed at all. This is surprising considering the importance of the border
issue in the past. Along the German–Polish and
German–Czech borders eight so-called Euroregions have been established since 1990, one of
them even trilateral. The significance and impact
of these instruments of micro-level foreign policy
with substantial financial support from the European Union would have been relevant to include
in the analysis as well.
Nevertheless, Cordell and Wolff have published
a useful study, which contributes to understanding
the special relationship between Germany and its
Eastern neighbours.
Jorgen Kuhl
(University of Southern Denmark)
Soft or Hard Borders? Managing the
Divide in an Enlarged Europe by Joan
DeBardeleben. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.
204pp., £49.95, ISBN 0 7546 4338 7.
This book includes contributions from leading
Canadian and European experts and examines the
impact of European Union enlargement on the
geopolitical situation and border management in
Europe, as well as the effects of society and politics
in Russia and the Ukraine.
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The contributors address the emerging question of enlargement from two perspectives. First,
they examine how the European Union will
manage the relationship with its most powerful
neighbour, Russia. Will the European Union
favour increased economic trade with Russia or
will it focus on stemming the flow of Russian
citizens into the European labour markets?
Second, the authors also deal with the concrete
problems of border management such as the military, economic and labour issues; moreover, they
address what institutions and policies the European Union will have to adopt to manage these
cross-border issues.
As DeBardeleben asserts, ‘the judgements can
not yet be made on the nature of the EU’s external borders with the post-communist countries
of southern and eastern Europe. However, what
is clear is that the EU’s determination to forge a
new model of neighbourly relations rests on its
willingness to depart from traditional concepts
and old paradigms’ (p. 16).
It is indeed too early to tell how the European
Union will tackle the issues of border management, but the relevance of this book is that it
anticipates a number of future challenges for the
EU and its eastern neighbours.
Paolo Morisi
(Manhattan Community College)
Making the European Polity: Reflexive
Integration in the EU by Erik Oddvar
Eriksen (ed). Abingdon: Routledge, 2005.
304pp., £65.00, ISBN 0 415 36301 2.
In the aftermath of the 2004 enlargement and
the drama surrounding the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty in referenda in France and the
Netherlands in 2005, academic scholarship on
the European Union has re-engaged with the
nature and scope of the reorganisation of political power precipitated by the European integration process. This volume contributes to that
debate in presenting the EU as a post-national
arena of law and governance where the supranational legal context of decision-making decisively
impacts on the content of domestic politics in
the member states. It explores the modes of
reflexive deliberation through which both the
high politics of constitutionalisation and low
politics of functional sectoral integration are
mediated. Deliberation here is understood as a
Habermasian process of collective decisionmaking where rational argument is pursued in a
context of network governance and substantive
reciprocity. In this sense the reflexive approach
contributes to an increasingly variegated normative scholarship on the EU, which emphasises the
role of norms, ideas and values in shaping the
integration process.
The book is divided into two distinct parts. Part
I introduces the main analytical themes of reflexive integration and applies them to different
dimensions of the integration process. Part II
focuses on specific policy areas such as employment, taxation and foreign policy.The main argument which runs through the volume is that the
deepening of the integration process has triggered
a move away from functional integration and
helped transform the EU into a polity capable of
collective action. While the EU is not yet a fully
fledged rights-based polity it is much more than
the narrow market regime frequently depicted by
realists and intergovernmentalists. Even though it
lacks a core hierarchical authority it manifests a
clear ability to act in specific treaty-defined areas.
The most valuable contribution the book makes,
however, is in helping to define Europe’s emerging liberal cosmopolitan order. Eriksen demonstrates that the process of communicative
rationality and reflexive constitutional deliberation is essentially a healthy one which allows for a
flexible evolution of inter-state and transnational
governance. In developing a distinct image of the
new Europe, Eriksen and his colleagues make an
invaluable contribution to current thinking about
EU-related institutional and normative socialisation and collective identity formation.The appeal
of the book thus goes beyond the disciplinary
gates of European Union studies and will prove
indispensable to scholars of constitutionalism,
democratisation, discourse analysis and international norms.
John O’Brennan
(University of Limerick)
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
BOOK REVIEWS
The Boundaries of Welfare: European Integration and the New Spatial Politics of
Social Protection by Maurizio Ferrera.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 320pp.,
£19.99, ISBN 0 19 92846 7 9
This is one of the most important books published in years in the fields of territorial politics,
EU studies and the study of the welfare state in
Europe. It is important because it synthesises the
developments in territorial and EU politics that
are undermining the basic structure of the welfare
state as we understand it.
The propositions can be stated simply:
the welfare state (principally social insurance)
was, from its birth to the 1970s, a key component of membership in a state, with access to
services and taxes demarcating populations.
Europeanisation and pluralisation have reduced
the ability of states to link territory and membership this way; freedom of movement and
trade has come to mean freedom to be a
‘denizen’, participating in the welfare state of
another country. At the same time regional governments are continuing to gain importance in
policy areas with substantial territorial footprints
such as health and social inclusion. They are
making politics more complex and developing
divergent models. These dynamics, and the complexity and territorial variation they produce, are
changing the way welfare states can and do
work.
The Boundaries of Welfare should change the
agenda of European welfare studies. It should do
that by shifting discussions of welfare away from
the familiar ground of retrenchment, ‘new politics’ and models. Instead, work is required that
can identify the territorial structure of welfare
politics in different countries, synthesise work on
the EU and territorial politics in order to identify patterns and directions of change and
examine the way newly important factors such as
intergovernmental co-ordination work. Doing
that will be difficult, for the same reason that this
is such a good book – it requires crossing the
sub-fields of territorial politics, EU politics,
nationalism, welfare states and public policy. Ferrera’s informative book shows the challenge and
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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353
value of getting out of those ruts – and the
importance of doing so.
Scott L. Greer
(University of Michigan)
Mission Italy: On the Front Lines of the
Cold War by Richard N. Gardner. Lanham
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. 349pp.,
£19.99, ISBN 0 7425 3998 9.
Richard Gardner was the United States Ambassador to Italy from 1977 to 1981.This book represents his vindication of the Carter administration’s
approach to Italian domestic politics, at a time
when terrorism was rampant, the economy had
stalled, corruption was endemic and the popularity of the Communist party (PCI) was on the
increase.
In this context, the possible participation of
the PCI in government was the most pressing
question for the Carter administration,yet the new
president was determined to follow a new course.
There would be no interference in domestic politics through covert operations of the type pursued
by previous administrations, consisting in clandestine support for the extreme right, channelling
funds to Christian Democracy and establishing
close links with dubious characters, such as Gardner’s predecessor, John Volpe, had enjoyed with
Bishop Paul Marcinkus. Gardner was openly critical of this‘diplomatic’strategy and fairly sceptical as
to its outcomes, since it had generated widespread
resentment towards his country.By contrast,Carter
had authorised him‘to open up a dialogue with the
PCI’ (pp. 307–8).The new approach found favour
with many Christian Democratic leaders whose
attitude towards collaborating with the Communists, as it transpires from his vivid account of his
encounters with Andreotti, Cossiga, Moro and
others, was fairly relaxed regarding any possible
threat to democracy.
Gardner is concerned with refuting accusations
of softness towards the Communists, made by
Republicans after Reagan’s victory (pp. 290–1).
The author emphasises the Carter administration’s dismissal of the PCI’s supposedly democratic credentials and uncompromising opposition
to its participation in government. As it was, in
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1978 the Communist party entered the parliamentary majority without joining the government. The final vindication of the new strategy
came in 1979, when the Communists lost votes in
the general elections and ended their collaboration with the DC.
This is an engaging and highly readable book
which throws light upon US foreign policy
during the Carter administration. Less useful is
the analysis of Italian politics, as this is seen
through the lens of an observer who has his own
axe to grind. In one area in particular, concerning
the so-called Italian mysteries of those years,
including the kidnapping and murder of Aldo
Moro and the P2 Masonic Lodge, one might
have expected the author to be able to offer new
insights, yet he does not have much to say except
to deny any possible involvement by the CIA.
Perhaps he is being reticent or perhaps this is too
much to expect from the memoirs of an Ambassador whose aversion to covert operations and
whose avoidance of controversial figures would
not have placed him in a position to provide a
first-hand account of the shady political and
financial underworld which gained such prominence in 1970s Italy.
Anna Bull
(University of Bath)
Regulation through Agencies in the EU:
A New Paradigm of European Governance
by Damien Geradin, Rodolphe Munoz and
Nicolas Petit (eds). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar,
2005. 280pp., £69.95, ISBN 1 84542 267 8
Since the European Union (EU) has been
charged with a democratic deficit, many scholars
have studied new models of governance which
could make it more accountable and effective.
One of those models, proposed by Majone in
his recognised work Regulating Europe, considers
regulatory agencies the best way to achieve these
objectives, since European decisions are highly
technical and regulate specific industrial and
economic areas.
Gerardin, Muñoz and Petit’s book continues
the study of this model of governance, structuring
all contributions on a simple and clear outline that
begins by expounding the rationales for setting up
agencies (Part I); explains the design of agencies in
the EU (Part II) and the challenges raised by them
(Part III); and finally studies EU agencies from a
comparative perspective (Part IV). It must be
noted that Wouters andVerhoeven’s contribution,
despite its quality, does not fit this schema well,
because they analyse the influence of international agencies on the European Union, and not
European agencies themselves.
Setting this detail aside, it is easy to find in the
book two different approaches to the problem of
European agencies: a theoretical and an empirical
one.These two approaches could have been used
to complement each other, as frequently happens
in political studies methodology, if there were not
a remarkable difference between them: while the
more theoretical contributions try to explain
how European Regulatory Agencies (ERA)
might work at the EU level (Paul Magnette), in an
accountable and transparent way (Deirdre Curtin,
Ellen Vos) or, in short, by observing good governance principles (Michelle Everson), the empirical ones analyse how independent National
Regulatory Authorities (NRA) are (Mark
Thatcher) and, since competition must be introduced in regulatory systems (Phedon Nicolaïdes),
how networks comprising several NRAs can
work and co-ordinate with the European Commission (Pierre Larouche, Nicolas Petit). In short,
the more the contributions are focused at the
European level, the more theoretical they are,
because, as Colin Scott concludes in his contribution, independent ERAs are highly hypothetical (p. 82).
In sum, for those scholars interested in agencies and EU governance this is compulsory
reading which tries to solve the three main
problems all European Agencies must face
(Damien Geradin): firstly, how powers are delegated to them, since they must respect EU
institutional balance; secondly, how they are classified, in order to avoid ad hoc bodies from now
on; and finally, how they can respect good governance principles.
Fernando Losada Fraga
(Universidad de Léon)
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
BOOK REVIEWS
New Modes of Governance: Developing
an Integrated Policy Approach to Science,
Technology, Risk and the Environment by
Catherine Lyall and Joyce Tait (eds). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. xi + 196pp., £52.50, ISBN
0 7546 4164 3.
In New Modes of Governance, Catherine Lyall
and Joyce Tait (both from the University of
Edinburgh) gather ten unpublished essays that
question the present and future ways to approach
the governance of new technologies and innovations in the life sciences, referring to recent European case studies (mostly in the UK). In their
introduction, the co-editors acknowledge the fact
that ‘the increasingly rapid pace of technological
innovation and the increasing size and power of
multinational companies are leading to globalisation of production and trading systems accompanied by pressures for further trade liberalisation’
(p. 8).
In the first part, we understand that governance
is changing, because ‘new and emerging science
and technology may equally require rather different support mechanisms, different evaluation
criteria and different tools for intervention’
(p. 46). But the conclusion is that predictions are
uneasy: ‘mechanistic extrapolations will not
succeed’ (p. 64). Part II brings more ethical issues,
acknowledging the fact that ‘the strong relationship between scientific and commercial performance in biotechnology implies that it is
important to consider the whole innovation
process and take a systemic perspective’ (p. 74). A
crucial chapter (the sixth, by Frank Rennie) on
rural policy in Scotland questions how the idea of
sustainable development can be integrated into
everyday public service, knowing that nowadays
more ‘people from the cities’ (consumers, environmentalists, politicians) want to have control
over how farms are managed in ecological terms.
In chapter 10, Lyall and Tait analyse the impact of
globalisation on new policy approaches, being
aware of ‘the continuing need for consistency and
continuity in regulatory systems and the greater
global inter-connectedness so that there is less
freedom for national governments to develop
their own approaches’ (p. 186).
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Oddly, I do not write such enthusiastic comments very often, but New Modes of Governance
has unusual qualities compared to other academic
books. Most of the authors highlight fairly both
sides of situations, i.e. the opportunities and
dangers of scientific innovations they observed,
reminding us how complex these problems can be
(notably in chapter 9, about the 1999 EU moratorium on genetically modified crops). Most of
all, the book is very well written and clearly
organised; it contains numerous definitions and
brings interdisciplinary perspectives. Lyall and Tait
confirm once again the relevance of social scientists studying the impact of science on society.
Their timely book should provide state-of-the-art
notions and inform us rigorously about some
current issues in sustainable development, risk
studies, sociology of science, policy-making and
governance.
Yves Laberge
(Institut québécois des hautes études internationales,
Québec City)
Remaking Governance: Peoples, Politics
and the Public Sphere by Janet Newman
(ed.). Bristol: The Policy Press, 2005. 225pp.,
£55.00, £23.99, ISBN 1 86134 640 9, ISBN
1 86134 639 5.
Remaking Governance tries to analyse the ‘European social’ from a wider perspective with reference to various examples such as the European
Constitution, the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), transition countries, gender
issues, citizenship, partnership and representation,
etc.This edited book attempts to reconstruct our
understanding of governance without falling into
the trap of a ‘thin conception of the social’.
According to the book, the problem with the
current comprehension of ‘social’ is its limited
openness to contestation and its instrumental
character that sees people as something to be
governed.What is needed is ‘to offer a conception
of the social as richer, more complex, more differentiated and more contested’ (p. 211). As part
of reconstructing the European social, the book
deals with problems of defining European identity
on the basis of history, race, culture and boundary
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due to their inadequate explanatory and highly
fragmentary capacities. According to the book, in
order to overcome such problems, pluralism and
diversity should be incorporated into ‘Europeanness’. This explains the discursive basis of the
social in terms of active participation and citizenship that is supported in Remaking Governance.
Another problem is that economised and instrumental European social policy gives priority to
the economy. So, Remaking Governance is a search
for the ‘social’ in social policy. It also underlines
the role of the nation states and national governments in contrast to the ‘hollowing out of the
state’ theses of governance literature. This edited
book successfully presents an enhanced view of
the term social to rethink governance.
Hasan Engin Sener
(Middle East Technical University)
Becoming Europeans? Attitudes, Behaviour,
and Socialization in the European Parliament by Roger Scully. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 184pp., £40.00, ISBN 0 19
928432 6.
These days it is quite common to find references
in newspaper stories as well as scholarly articles to
the tendency of European Union (EU) officials
to ‘go native’ once they enter the Eurocentric
world of the Brussels institutions.The perception
that EU officials of all stripes (elected and
non-elected, political and bureaucratic) have a
tendency to be transformed by the Brussels
experience is widespread, but as Roger Scully
points out, neither theoretically justified nor
empirically substantiated. In this recent book
Scully works to remedy this situation at least
partially through an examination of the European
Parliament (EP) and the impact of socialization on
its elected members (MEPs).
The organization of the book is straightforward and moves from a brief explanation of
the actual question to be investigated and its
importance (chapters 1–2) to an overview of the
socialization literature both within and outside of
the field of political science (chapter 3).While all
of this is useful, it is not until the fourth chapter,
‘Understanding Institutional Socialization’, that
the most valuable contributions of the book are
presented. In this chapter Scully examines the
question of socialization within the EP from a
rationalist perspective (broadly defined) by focusing on both the mechanisms of socialization and
the motivations of MEPs. In particular, he highlights the strength of the ties that continue to
link MEPs to the domestic level (partisan and
public) and the likely impact of these links on
the preferences of MEPs in terms of their behaviour within the EP (especially when there is a
conflict between a member’s national and EP
parties). Scully also questions the mechanisms of
socialization and the frequent implicit assumption that MEPs are simply empty vessels that
will be transformed into progressively more prointegration actors as they experience the supranational sphere through their participation in
the EP. His application of the basic concepts of
the socialization literature to the actual incentive
structure and activities of MEPs leads him to
predict very little pro-integration ‘socialization’
of MEPs.
In fact, this is precisely what he finds in his
empirical analysis in which he investigates MEP
attitudes based on survey responses (chapter 5)
and MEP behaviour through an analysis of rollcall votes (chapter 6). Although there are significant weaknesses in each of the various empirical
tests employed (which the author himself duly
notes), the uniformity of the results increases our
confidence in the findings of the empirical analyses and the overall conclusion of the book. In line
with the theory outlined in chapter four, there
appears to be very little pro-integration socialization within the EP. Although there may be a
slightly higher level of pro-integration sentiment
among MEPs, this appears to be more a result
of a selection bias than any change that MEPs
undergo as a result of experience within the EP.
This conclusion is well explained by the rationalist interpretation of the socialization literature,
given the continued contacts between MEPs and
their national political parties and publics as well
as the power that these have over the future political success of the MEPs (at the EU or national
level). What Scully does not explain, however,
is why the perception of institutional socialization
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
BOOK REVIEWS
or MEPs ‘going native’ is so widespread given
that none of the empirical evidence supports its
existence. However, this is perhaps the subject of
another book.
Amie Kreppel
(University of Florida, Gainsville)
Nation and Gender in Contemporary
Europe by Vera Tolz and Stephenie Booth
(eds). Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2005. 190pp., £55.00, ISBN 0 7190 6856 8.
How do visions of the nation impact on gender?
Why do political transitions tend to reinforce
neo-traditional views of national identities and
gender relations? How significant are the differences between the discourses of gender and
nation across Europe? What is the impact of the
European Union enlargement on gender regimes
in Europe? These are the questions that motivate
this timely collection, which explores the links
between gender, nation building and European
democratisation in the context of EU enlargement from interdisciplinary perspectives.
The contributions, which are largely singlecountry case studies, explore these themes in
relation to particular European contexts, showing
how national narratives impact differently on
gender relations. For instance, Ludi shows how
Swiss republicanism contributed to the disenfranchisement of Swiss women until 1971, while
Allwood describes how the logic of French
republicanism was used in the parity debates to
argue for increased women’s representation,
indicating that while visions of the nation shape
gender relations, they do not always do so in
predictable ways.
The various case studies reveal the extent to
which there are notable differences in the ways
that discourses of nation and gender are negotiated across Europe. Notably, various contributors
highlight the renewed appeal to traditional gender
discourses in today’s post-communist Eastern and
East Central European countries, and understand
this as a response to the crisis of national identity
that accompanies periods of political transition,
leading elites to seek legitimacy in concepts that
offer a means of distinguishing the new regime
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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357
from the prior Soviet one.This contrasts with the
trend among West European countries towards
egalitarian gender regimes.
However, the European Union brings supranational influences to bear on the practices
and laws of individual member states, which are
generally perceived to improve the situation
of women, as argued by Cherie Booth in the
appendix to the collection (though Sylvia Walby
notes in her chapter that the reverse is true in the
Nordic countries, where women have been
anxious that EU membership will have a negative
impact on their national gender equality regime).
The gender regime being ushered in by the EU
focuses on public gender equality, focusing, as
Cristina Chiva notes, on women’s participation in
the paid labour force and their representation in
governmental institutions.Walby suggests that this
regime is not necessarily ‘better’ than others, and
entails its own forms of gender disadvantage.The
question raised by this collection is whether
the particular form of gender regime promoted
by the EU can allow for diverse negotiations of
nation and gender among its member states, and –
if not – how this is to be squared with its commitment to diversity.
Judith Squires
(University of Bristol)
Law and Governance in Postnational
Europe: Compliance Beyond the Nationstate by Michael Zürn and Christian Joerges.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
297pp., £45.00, ISBN 0 521 84135 6
Employing an interdisciplinary point of view –
both political science and law arguments can be
found in it – this volume amis to find an analytical answer to a simple question: is law beyond
the nation state possible? The authors focus their
attention on the compliance with law as a way
of revealing the potential of constitutional orders
in general, and apply this finding to looking for
the conditions required for the existence of law
beyond the nation state.
In order to do that, they compare to what
degree the law of three different levels of governance (nation state, EU and WTO) is observed.
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Empirical analysis extends from constitutive or
market-making politics (ban on state aids) to
regulative or market-correcting politics (trade in
foodstuffs) or (re-)distributive or market-breaking
politics (redistribution of financial resources
between territorially defined political units).
Results of the analysis are surprising inasmuch as
they show EU law as being observed the most,
destroying all preconceptions about nation states
providing a better environment for compliance
with law.
Referring to the first case study (prohibition
of state aids) we might point out that it is not
well defined to what degree nation-state noncompliance depends on EU compliance. The
book also lacks reference to a non-federal nation
state in order to find out if within it the degree of
non-compliance is the same (German is the main
nation-state law studied, despite some references
to Dutch positions on the redistribution debate in
the EU).
These details do not reduce the value of the
book. On the contrary, we must highlight that
Zürn,Wolf, Neyer and Joerges’ discourse is always
clear and coherent, which makes this volume a
very good attempt to explain post-national and
especially EU law compliance.
Fernando Losada
(Universidad de Léon)
We welcome short reviews of books in all
areas of politics and international relations.
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Asia
Asian States: Beyond the Developmental
Perspective by Richard Boyd and Tak-Wing
Ngo (eds). Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. 224pp.,
£70.00, ISBN 0 415 34612 6
This volume seeks to analyse Asian states (rather
than the Asian state) in a manner that goes beyond
their roles in economic development.The editors
argue that whereas the developmental state (DS)
theory focuses on economic bureaucracies and
their administration of a particular growth paradigm, a genuine theory of the state needs to
examine how that paradigm fits into broader
political processes.The editors intend the volume
to contribute to a ‘long-term project on the
political economy of Asia in comparative and historical perspective’ (p. xiii).
The initial chapters consider the utility of the
DS theory. Bob Jessop, for instance, focuses on
the specific regime of accumulation overseen in
the region, and suggests that the DS be
re-conceptualised as a ‘Listian Workfare National
State’. Geoffrey Underhill and Xioake Zhang
meanwhile conceptualise economic development
in East Asia in terms of a ‘state-market condominium’, whereby the state integrates market
agents into state projects.The next three chapters
suggest that Asian states are somewhat weaker
than the conventional wisdom suggests. John O.
Haley, for instance, claims that the Japanese state
has little power to discipline the market,
and instead relies on its capacity to cajole
co-operation from business. Tak-Wing Ngo
argues that the Taiwanese state is riven by dissent
and empire building. Maria Edin claims that the
local state in China is a follower rather than a
leader, questioning its developmental capacity.
The final chapters highlight the inherently political nature of Asian states. Hagen Koo finds that it
was politics rather than economics which dictated
the South Korea state’s approach to labour, and
that this approach contributed to the radicalisation of some sectors of the workforce. Stephan
Haggard argues that welfare projects arose in parallel to development, and indeed that they were
intended to head off political challenges to the
national project. Richard Robison, Garry Rodan
and Kevin Hewison argue that moves towards a
‘regulatory’ (neoliberal) state are not uniform, and
depend in large part upon the social structures to
which each state is attached.
Overall the editors meet their goal of fleshing
out Asian states. While recognising that this
volume represents only a starting point for a larger
project, a concluding chapter might have offered
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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359
an opportunity to compare the main contours of
the Asian DS with other, less well-explored varieties of the DS. Nonetheless this is a highly commendable collection.
David Hundt
(University of Queensland)
Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military by
Husain Haqqani. Washington DC: Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, 2005.
395pp., $17.95, ISBN 0 87003 214 3
Husain Haqqani is well placed to have written a
book on relations between the mosque and the
military in Pakistan. A former adviser to several
Pakistani prime ministers, he is now a visiting
scholar at the Carnegie Institute for International
Peace. Haqqani’s scope covers over 60 years, from
the motivations behind the partition in 1947 and
the problems facing the newly created state, to
challenges faced in the wake of 9/11 and the war
on terror (although this is only briefly touched
upon). Most lay observers’ perceptions of
Pakistan would identify both religious movements and the military as two of the most
important elements of political life in the
country. But, as Haqqani discusses, their importance in Pakistan’s political life was contingent
on the weakness of Pakistan at partition. In particular the weakness of political institutions and
parties, in addition to the threat posed by India,
increased the importance of the army. Haqqani
reminds us that most Islamic parties opposed the
creation of Pakistan, because the leaders of Pakistan were not seeking to create an Islamic state,
but a homeland for Muslims, a rather different
thing. This is a useful reminder, because it is not
sufficient to attribute Pakistan’s chequered
democratic history to the fact that the majority
of its population is Muslim. In general Islamic
political parties have not performed well electorally; the 2002 election of the MMA in NWFP
was an aberration rather than the norm.
Haqqani’s narrative (all too often interspersed
with long, unedited quotations) argues that the
military has used Islamic movements to bolster
their power and central position in Pakistani politics, even when those military leaders (like Ayub
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
Khan and Pervez Musharraf) have been personally
secular. But, Haqqani all too often asserts a connection without demonstrating what benefit the
military derives from its patronage of Islamic
leaders, other than a vague promotion of Islamic
unity. As he himself notes, this Islamic identity
failed to unify the country successfully – seen by
the secession of Bangladesh. The military and
Islamic politics certainly combined forcefully
under Zia ul Huq. But Zia’s policies were supported by America – a consistently interested
party in Pakistani politics. Indeed, this is the real
message that emerges from the book: that the
Pakistani military has been supported by America,
determined to have an ally in the region, and that
the military-mullah alliance has consistently
undermined secular and democratic forces. But,
given the electoral weakness of the MMA (who
secured only 11 per cent of the vote even in
2002), one is again left with the conclusion that
it is the military, with or without the support of
Islamic parties, that controls Pakistan, and looks
likely to do so for the foreseeable future.
Katharine Adeney
(University of Sheffield)
Women, Television and Everyday Life in
Korea: Journeys of Hope by Youna Kim.
Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. 236pp., £65.00,
ISBN 0 415 36903 7
In this interesting book, Youna Kim investigates
the impact of television on the everyday lives and
identities of South Korean women. In the first
part, ‘General Issues’, after a review of Western
and Korean literature in the field of audience
studies, Kim sketches the historical development
of the socio-economic position of South Korean
women and discusses the book’s methodological
and theoretical assumptions. Then, Kim presents
the outcomes of the interviews with 42 women,
a sample arranged by age (women in their 50s, 30s
and 20s) and socio-economic position.As a result,
the second (‘Working-class Women’) and third
(‘Middle-class Women’) parts reconstruct the attitude towards television of different generations of
women, and its impact on the formation and
transformation of their identities. In the fourth
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part, ‘Journeys of Hope’, some general conclusions are presented. The main one is that ‘the
practice of reflexivity is a defining characteristic
of the experience of television, and television
culture today comes to be a critical condition for
reflexivity’, as this work demonstrates that Korean
women,‘regardless of their age and class position,
engage in a process of self-analysis in their contact
with television’ (p. 195). Another remarkable
finding is the quite limited role of class in shaping
the interviewees’ attitude towards television, since
‘class is still significant as a means of social differentiation among the older generation of women
in their 50s, whereas the significance of class
has declined among the younger generation of
women in their 20s with common reflexive orientations towards the global, the modern and the
new’ (p. 200).This change is partly due to the high
level of their education, but mainly to the ‘collective ideology of “one family nation” in terms of
language, lineage, race, ethnicity, culture and so
on, thereby imposing cross-class social unity, not
social segregation’ (p. 201).
Flavia Monceri
(Università del Molise)
The Indonesian Presidency: The Shift from
Personal to Constitutional Rule by Angus
McIntyre. Boulder CO: Rowman & Littlefield,
2005. 301pp., £27.00, ISBN 0 7425 3827 3
This book represents the fruit of nearly 40 years of
research on Indonesia and it is the first one on this
topic. In fact the title is slightly misleading. It is
not so much devoted to the institution of the
presidency in Indonesia as to the first five presidents who ruled the country between 1949 and
2004, although it does conclude with reflections
on the changing role of the institution of the
presidency.As the subtitle implies, McIntyre identifies a gradually increasing institutionalisation of
presidential rule and a decline in personal rule.
It is ambitious not merely in the time under
review. The author seeks to go beyond institutions with psychological portraits of individual
presidents. He uses his own prolonged study of
psychology to peer behind the masks.This means
that it is imaginative and full of insights.
The main foci of the book are the founding
president of the republic, Sukarno, and his eldest
daughter, Megawati Sukarnoputri, who was
president between 2001 and 2004. McIntyre
vividly brings to life the colourful personality of
Sukarno, desperate to surround himself with
activities and admiring crowds. The picture of
Megawati is insightful, but less engaging, in part
because she is more composed, less spontaneous,
than her father. McIntyre makes a persuasive
case for this being a strength in her earlier
political career as she had to cope with the
suspicion of the New Order regime, and he
emphasises the determination, even heroism, that
led her to confront Soeharto in the mid-1990s,
but he fails to present a more human picture of
her as president.
This book is not yet the definitive study of the
Indonesian presidency. Partly, this is because the
institutional dimensions of presidential rule are
sometimes neglected for the sake of a focus on
character. Partly too it is because the coverage
is uneven. Two recent presidents – Habibie and
Abdurrahman Wahid – only figure as twodimensional characters, with no chapters of their
own. More disappointingly, only one fairly brief
chapter is devoted to President Soeharto, who
ruled between 1966 and 1998, although he does
reappear quite often in the chapters on Sukarno
and Megawati. But, the picture is far from a full
portrait as Soeharto’s personality and role evolved
over his 32 years in power. Nevertheless, this is
certainly an important book with which the
definitive study of the Indonesian presidency will
have to engage.
Peter Ferdinand
(University of Warwick)
Jihad, Hindutva and the Taliban: South Asia
at the Crossroads by Iftikhar H. Malik.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 298pp.,
£11.99, ISBN 0 19 597790 4
The work traces the challenges to pluralism in
contemporary South Asia. The author sees these
arising from religio-political creeds that seek to
homogenise complex societies in order to
strengthen them in the face of a perceived threat
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
BOOK REVIEWS
from the West.While these ideologies are couched
in traditional symbols and values, they are ‘inherently modern’ (p. 16). Intolerant of ‘difference’,
these creeds are antithetical to the interests of
ethno-religious minorities. The book adopts a
comparative analysis of these trends across the
South Asian region. A common, ‘region-wide
malady’ (p. 275) is uncovered in which exclusionary religious understandings are deployed to serve
narrow nationalist interests.‘The de-Indianisation
of Pakistan and Bangladesh is as dangerous’,
Iftikhar Malik maintains,‘as is the de-Islamisation
of India’ (p. 275).
The work is most authoritative when it deals
with Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is a particularly useful analysis of the
various interpretations of Jihad that enables a
more profound understanding than is accorded
in media presentations. The author also provides
a nuanced assessment of the dilemmas surrounding civil society and democratic governance in
Pakistan. The treatment of the challenge to
Indian secularism of the Hindutva discourse is
adequate, but lacks a similar depth and authority.
Frustratingly, there are references on a number of
occasions to the threats to pluralism in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, but these are not
developed. What the reader is really presented
with, despite claims to the contrary, is a study of
the subcontinent and Afghanistan. The other
main drawback is that the comparative dimension is pursued primarily at an empirical, rather
than theoretical level. How can we conceptualise
the contemporaneous rise of Hindutva and
political Islam? What are the sociological roots of
these movements? What are their relationships to
globalisation and to the discourses of modernisation and orientalism? The text provides answers
to these questions, but the reader has to quarry
for them.
Nevertheless, this is a study which deals with
crucial issues not only for South Asia, but for the
wider world. The opening years of the twentyfirst century have revealed the dangers of majoritarianism in a variety of political settings. The
greater celebration of pluralism which Iftikhar
Malik calls for along with the strengthening of
civil society is a matter of profound significance.
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
361
This work also usefully points to the need for a
comparative dimension to the understanding of a
complex, troubled, but increasingly significant
region.
Ian Talbot
(University of Southampton)
Democracy without Competition in Japan:
Opposition Failure in a One-Party Dominant State by Ethan Scheiner. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005. 267pp.,
£40.00, £15.99, ISBN 0 521 84692 7, ISBN
0 521 60969 0
Judged by the volume of publications and course
titles, government is more often studied than
opposition. The making of high-stakes decisions
and budgetary allocations is more written about
than the challenge of presenting coherent and
compelling partisan counter-attacks. This is a
shame, for the mounting of an effective opposition is a significant achievement on the road to
accountable government and involved citizen
debate.This deficiency merits attention from both
academics and political practitioners. Ethan
Scheiner’s Democracy without Competition in Japan
is a welcome break from this pattern as it focuses
upon the limits of opposition forces and the
factors that constrain them in a particular national
setting.
Students of Japanese politics are well aware of
the weak record of opposition party forces in the
post-war era. Why is it that these opposition
efforts have seldom been able to break out despite
periods of economic malaise or ruling party
scandals? Why has the opposition to the Liberal
Democratic party been so weak? These are the
central research questions taken up in this new
work. Many previous conventional explanations
have stressed electoral arrangements and/or the
Japanese political culture. What is offered by
Scheiner is an alternative explanation stressing a
broader set of considerations.
Scheiner emphasizes three co-existing elements of Japanese society as contributing to the
limits of opposition parties. They are (a) deeprooted clientelism; (b) governmental financial
centralization; and (c) institutional supports and
ASIA
362
protections for the practice of clientelist relations.
The existence of clientelist practices and their
institutional supports has been widely discussed in
the literature on Japanese politics. What Scheiner
argues is that they need to be understood in
concert with matters of public finance if we are to
understand the structural restraints placed before
efforts at opposition organization.
This book is a serious work of comparative
government aimed at a scholarly audience.
Chapter 4, for example, offers a wide-ranging set
of comparisons with reference to the United
States, Brazil, Italy and other countries.The book
is a study of the weakness of opposition and an
argument to move beyond simple blaming of
opposition campaigners and assertions of cultural
uniqueness. Scheiner has offered a serious academic contribution. His comments deserve attention from Japan specialists as well as those of us
who are intrigued by the role and character of
electoral and partisan opposition.
Hugh Mellon
(University of Western Ontario)
Korean Attitudes toward the United States:
Changing Dynamics by David I. Steinberg
(ed.). Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2005. 366pp.,
$29.95, ISBN 0 7656 1436 7
The volume collects the papers presented to a
conference held at Georgetown University in
2003, to which some more papers have been
added with the overall purpose to ‘elucidate the
complexities, present influence, and potential
of anti-American sentiment’ (p. xi). Besides
Steinberg’s introduction and conclusion, the
nineteen contributions are organised in four
sections: ‘Global, Regional, and Comparative
Perspectives’; ‘Structural and Strategic Phenomena’; ‘Alliance Perspectives’; and ‘Civil Society
Perspectives’. As a whole, the volume succeeds,
inter alia, in providing the reader with a very useful
picture of contemporary relationships between
South Korea and the wider world. As Steinberg
points out, a single definition of anti-American
sentiment in Korea cannot be given, and this leads
to the reasonable conclusion that the very term
anti-Americanism is mistaken and that although
we can use such a term, ‘it is shorthand for a less
comprehensive set of attitudes than linguistically
would be the case’, since ‘as a sentiment, it is real
and pervasive; as a holistic posture, it exists only at
the periphery of South Korean society’ (p. 330).
On the Korean side the roots of anti-American
sentiment can be found in ‘the rise of Korean
nationalism and pride in Korea’s accomplishments, Korean vulnerability, and a set of cultural
differences that affect the relationship’ (p. 336).
On the American side, ‘past and residual racial
prejudices, arrogance, policy differences in trade
and investment, the importance of Japan to US
interests in the region, unipolarity, but most
importantly policy toward North Korea’ (pp.
336–7) should also be considered, to understand
the issue better and find effective strategies. The
general conclusion is that ‘more sensitivity and
knowledge is needed on the part of both administrations and peoples’ (p. 339), while the leadership of both nations should play an active role in
supporting this communicative process.
Flavia Monceri
(Università del Molise)
Liberal Rights and Political Culture: Envisioning Democracy in China by Zhenghuan
Zhou. New York: Routledge, 2005. 275pp.,
£50.00, ISBN 0 415 97184 5
This book addresses the issue of how far the
Western liberal notion of rights is applicable in a
non-Western setting. By seeking a practical way
of applying liberal rights in the Chinese context it
contributes to the debate on the promotion of
human rights outside the West.
Zhou commences his study by elaborating in
chapter 2 on his use of the concept of political
culture, which he defines as a ‘shared way of
relating’ (p. 6). The next two chapters trace the
evolutionary path of liberal rights in the Western
tradition and evoke the underlying role of individualism in shaping the Western discourse on
political culture and rights. In chapter 5 Zhou
identifies Confucianism as a dominant ethical and
political doctrine determining Chinese political
culture and concludes his volume by restating the
argument that the political culture of individual© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
BOOK REVIEWS
363
ism is lacking in the Chinese context where the
‘quasi-familistic’ mode (p. 170) based on social
connections or guanxi dominates. Additionally, he
suggests a model of ‘embedded rights’ (pp. 215–6)
for applying the concept of human rights in a
Chinese context.
On a critical note, a number of deficiencies of
this study can be discerned. Firstly, Zhou claims
to follow the combined method of interpretation
and empiricism and adheres to the historysensitive understanding of political culture. Yet,
the individualist political culture of the West is
predominately analysed through engaging with
Western historical and contemporary theories of
rights, but without references to empirical
studies of this question in contemporary Western
societies. Despite Zhou’s acknowledgement of
problems within the generic concept of the
West, he does not consider how political culture
within diverse societies in the West might differ,
nor does he account for historical shifts. Secondly, the book provides a much more detailed
analysis of individualism as a founding principle
in Western political culture and its concept of
rights. Zhou’s analysis of Chinese political tradition is somewhat limited and lacks sufficient
elaboration. In contrast to the book’s four chapters on liberal rights and the Western political
culture of individualism, the analysis of the
Chinese case is limited to two, one of which is
the conclusion. Lastly, the study disregards a significant body of Western communitarian writings which form an alternative to the dominant
liberal tradition. The study refers to socialist and
Marxist approaches as those that adhere to a distinct understanding of rights to the liberal school
of thought, but overlooks the communitarian
tradition which might echo the values cherished
in Confucian culture.
Despite these limitations, the book is rich in its
review of the Western and Chinese political cultures, and can serve as a reference point for those
who study or research across the disciplines of
political theory, comparative politics and Chinese
studies.
Elena Barabantseva
(University of Manchester)
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
We welcome short reviews of books in all
areas of politics and international relations.
For guidelines on submitting reviews, and
to see an up-to-date listing of books available for review, please visit http://www.
politicalstudiesreview.org/.
Other Areas
Israeli Democracy at the Crossroads by
Raphael Cohen-Almagor (ed.). Abingdon:
Routledge, 2005. 288pp., £65.00, ISBN 0 415
35023 9
Israeli Institutions at the Crossroads by
Raphael Cohen-Almagor (ed.). Abingdon:
Routledge, 2005. 204pp., £65.00, ISBN 0 415
36360 8
There is an old joke that public speakers on the
Middle East like to use to break the ice with their
audience: that for decades they have been able to
start every lecture with the phrase: ‘We are now
facing a crisis in the Middle East’.As for the Middle
East, so for Israel’s democracy and institutions.
These books contain a series of articles, by
different authors, on aspects of Israel that for the
most part have not been covered as broadly or
recently in the English language.While this makes
the volumes all the more welcome, the necessarily
concise nature of the contributions means that the
coverage is mostly in general terms, often with
little recourse for reading up on the specifics
elsewhere.
The Institutions book has been split between
those topics dealt with as ‘Themes’ (government
instability, citizenship education, military in politics, the need for a constitution) by non-involved
academics, and ‘Institutions’ that are written about
by those directly involved. This latter section
would be better split into ‘Structures’ (government, press council, Knesset) and ‘Offices’ (president, attorney-general, state comptroller) as they
differ in their treatment. The former critically
analyse the development of the institution the
authors serve or have served, the problems they
face and give recommendations for improvement;
364
the latter are interesting for their discussion of the
powers they held/hold, but seem less rigorous in
supporting their conclusions. Former President
Yitzhak Navon is notably quiet about the changes
that have taken place in the presidency in the 23
years since his departure and so his argument that
his successors do not need more powers is not
persuasive.
The resulting impression of the ‘Institutions’
section is more favourable towards the service of
technocrats than of politicians who are often,
rightly, excoriated for their actions. In the
‘Themes’ section, David Nachmias and Ori Arbel
Ganz, demonstrating why Israeli governments
have become less able to govern, remind us that
bureaucrats have also been guilty of wrong-doing.
Many, it is noted, were political appointments.
Yoram Peri, in his contribution, shows how the
army has been involved in making decisions
rather than purely in implementing them, thus
blurring the line between the civilian and
military. He appears to take a pragmatic rather
than critical view of this. Especially noteworthy is
former Supreme Court Chief Justice Meir
Shamgar’s article discussing Israel’s need for a
more comprehensive constitution, and how it
came about that the country does not have one.
This article is central to both books: many other
chapters either touch upon areas identified by
Shamgar or are dedicated to one of them.
Indeed, Democracy follows two dimensions, the
first of which reads like a corollary to Shamgar’s
article, dealing with areas, such as health and
women’s rights, which may require greater constitutional protection. The contributors, as the
editor acknowledges, write from a liberal perspective and – partly as a result – many argue a need for
greater rights or protections.The authors’ liberalism gives rise to a non-religious (as opposed to
anti-religious) approach to the issues.Thus, in the
second dimension, which examines Israel’s status
as a ‘Jewish and democratic state’,Aviezer Ravitsky
discusses the spectrum from a Halakhic (Jewish
law) state to a separation of synagogue and state.
This section also includes an analysis of the
status of Israeli Arabs, vis-à-vis the Israeli state and
vis-à-vis Palestinians from the territories. Despite
the political, economic and even cultural differ-
OTHER AREAS
ences between them, recent history has meant that
the green line differentiating them ‘has never been
so vulnerable and shaky as it is now’ (p. 203). Other
subjects include Israel’s reactions to terrorism and
what ‘Zionism’ means in today’s context, ending
with the question, ‘how can we reconcile the
success of Zionism with the “collateral damage”
which appears quite inherent in it’ (p. 250).
Although referring to Palestinian refugees,it could
just as aptly be applied to inequalities in some of
the other elements that the book covers.
Both books are of value to anyone with an
interest in the specifics of Israel and its democracy,
rather than any vested interest in the peace
process. The schisms within the second book,
especially, are often obscured in non-Hebrew
publications by the more prominent cleavages in
Israeli society.
Robert Spain
(currently unaffiliated)
Statehood and Security: Georgia after the
Rose Revolution by Bruno Coppieters and
Robert Legvold (eds). Cambridge MA: MIT
Press, 2005. 406pp., £15.95, ISBN 0 262 53276 X
Statehood and Security engages with the multitude
of problems facing Georgia after independence
from the Soviet Union. Like much of the former
Soviet Union, Georgia has been faced with
nation-building and state-building processes that
at times have significantly diverged. The editors
have collected a series of papers on the domestic
and regional insecurities facing Georgia. This
edited collection is important for our understanding of Georgia and the larger Caucuses region
since there has been a paucity of scholarly literature on these subjects. The book has three aims.
First, it struggles to disentangle the many different
problems facing Georgia with a concentration
on their domestic and international influences.
Second, the contributors attempt to highlight
why Georgia deserves our attention as scholars
and policy-makers. Finally, the book aims to set
out an agenda as to what should be done to ease
the insecurities facing Georgia. This agenda is
largely based on a deconstruction of the position
taken by Russia vis-à-vis Tbilisi as well as
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Moscow’s role in the breakaway areas of Abkhazia
and South Ossetia. Furthermore, the agenda is
based on more engagement with the West to not
only include material contributions but also rhetorical support.
The contributions to the edited collection add
a great deal to our understanding of the challenges
that face Georgia. As is to be expected, the book
chapters overlap to a large extent. Many of the
chapters offer specific aspects of Georgia’s security challenges. For example, David Darchiashvili
discusses the process of military reforms in postSoviet Georgia, which has had a significant
impact on the development of insecurities. Much
of the discussion in the book is centred on
Georgian–Russian relations. Oksana Antonenko
gives an exhaustive account of this relationship
and its impact on events in Abkhazia.The role of
the West is also examined in Damien Helly and
Giorgi Gogia’s chapter. They chart the growing
relationship between the EU and NATO, as well
as its member states, and Georgia. The most
intriguing aspect of this relationship is the prospects for co-operation following Georgia’s Rose
Revolution in 2003. Overall, the edited collection
offers readers an in-depth account of developments in Georgia since independence. With this
in mind, far less attention is given to the period
after the rise to power of Mikhail Saakashvili,
despite the book title. Nevertheless, the effort is
worthwhile and deserves a close read by scholars
of post-Soviet politics and security.
David J. Galbreath
(University of Aberdeen)
Israel/Palestine by Alan Dowty. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2005. 246pp., £15.99, ISBN 0 7456
3202 5
The author, a highly experienced professor of
Middle East politics, while trying his best to
appear impartial in his latest book, cannot really
hide his sympathy for the Jewish state and people,
understandable in a man who has spent years
teaching in Israel as well as in North America.The
author manages to deal with large amounts of
historical material, while at the same time inserting incisive political analysis to make this book a
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veritable joy for the average Middle East academic
connoisseur. His analysis of the Oslo process in
particular, as well as the post-Oslo mess, is to be
commended for its clarity and incisiveness that are
calculated to make the story very clear to both the
‘somewhat aware’ as well as the ‘largely ignorant’
audience. He devotes considerable space to providing a historical analysis of the Jewish people
and their quest for a state, while his corresponding
study of the rise and spread of Islam is markedly
less enthusiastic. Dowty’s frequent use of the term
‘Eretz Yisrael’ again is very revealing, particularly
in the present context, as the significance of the
term is being progressively eroded. The author
correctly defines the conflict as ‘the claim of two
peoples for the same piece of land’ (p. 4). And,
again, he defines an important and often tragically
ignored aspect of Middle East politics when he
states that ‘the lack of attention to one’s own
impact on the politics, society, and public attitudes
of the other side seems to be a fixed attribute of
Middle East conflicts. Perhaps the “winner” in the
Arab–Israeli conflict will be the first party to
realize how much power it has to influence the
internal dynamics of the other side and to use this
power effectively’ (p. 200). He has not managed to
end the book very realistically (perhaps understandable given the highly intractable nature of
the conflict), opining that there is a need ‘to focus
on reducing the conflict to its core causally as
well, stripping away the layers of accumulated
anger and alienation so that a resolution of the
basic issues can be achieved’ (p. 216). The author
talks about reducing the conflict to its core area of
‘Filastin/EretzYisrael’ as the best guarantee for the
success of the state of Israel in its ‘war’ with the
Palestinians. This is more easily said than done.
Samuel Jacob Kuruvilla
(University of Exeter)
The Third Wave of Democratization in
Latin America: Advances and Setbacks by
Frances Hagopian and Scott P. Mainwaring
(eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005. 413pp., £45.00, £18.99, ISBN 0 521
82461 3, ISBN 0 521 61320 5
This book is an excellent contribution to the
debate on democracy in Latin America. It offers a
366
comprehensive overview of political and economic processes after the third wave of democratisation which started in the region in 1978.
The book has three main objectives. First,
the editors and contributors attempt to analyse
the advances and setbacks of processes of
democratisation.They aim to discover the reasons
that explain the unprecedented durability of the
third wave of democratisation.They argue that by
2004 only two countries, Haiti and Cuba, were
still openly authoritarian regimes and that thus
the trend has proved to be more than a ‘mere
swing of a pendulum’ (p. 2).The second objective
is to explain why some countries have achieved
advances in democratisation and others have
experienced setbacks. The third objective is
to contribute to the comparative literature on
democratic performance.
The first chapter presents the theoretical analysis of the volume. Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán
analyse the reasons behind the ‘unprecedented
burst of democratisation between 1978 and 1992’
(p. 4). They also study why there were so many
difficulties in achieving further advances in
democratisation after 1992. It is an excellent
chapter that brings new ideas to the debate on
democracy in the region. In explaining the emergence of democracy, Mainwaring and PérezLiñán consider the influence of the regional
political environment as much as decreasing
political polarisation. They also claim that the
changing attitudes of the main political parties –
from the left as well as from the right – towards
democracy are key to understanding the emergence of democracy. The book shows that attitudes towards democracy and the existence of a
favourable international and regional political
environment ‘have made a decisive difference
in whether competitive regimes survive or
breakdown’ (p. 7).
Following the theoretical chapter, there are
nine case studies. Argentina, Brazil and Mexico
are considered as advances in democratisation
although their authoritarian legacies were strong.
Bolivia, El Salvador and Guatemala are considered
as weak competitive regimes, and Colombia,
Peru and Venezuela are examples of setbacks in
democratisation post-1978.
OTHER AREAS
This book is a highly useful contribution to
the debate. The editors and authors have produced an excellent volume which can be used by
academics and students to the extent that the
book offers deep, comprehensive and clear analysis of recent political events in the region. One of
the main conclusions, which surely will engender
some interesting debate, is that democracy’s performance does not ‘predict the ability of democratic and semidemocratic governments to
endure’ (p. 8).
Laura Tedesco
(Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
The Palestinian National Movement:
Politics of Contention, 1967–2005 by Amal
Jamal. Bloomington IN: Indiana University
Press, 2005. 229pp., $50.00, $22.95, ISBN 0 253
34590 1, ISBN 0 253 21773 3
This study focuses on Palestine’s elite from 1967
to 2005. Jamal argues that Palestinian elites have
remained divided and highly differentiated,
factors that have led to the development of a
political regime based on clientelism.
The divides that Jamal refers to are: (1) between
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) elite
who were in exile but became ‘returnees’ after the
establishment of the Palestinian Authority and
the local elite that came into their positions under
Israeli occupation; and (2) between secularnational and religious-Islamist elites. His main
thesis is that the balance of power among
Palestinian elites has not changed historically.
Some factors contribute to such balance: the
efforts by the leadership of the PLO/Fatah and
returnees to control moves by local elites to
assume authority, and Israeli intervention in Palestinian politics. He does note, however, that
during the 1990s, the local elite were able to shift
the balance of power towards themselves even if
they were not able to transform it. Jamal further
argues that differentiation and disunity among the
elite could eventually lead to greater pluralization,
pushing the Palestinian area either towards civil
war or democratization.
The dynamics of elite relationships among and
within the different elite groups described espe© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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367
cially in the last part of the book (first and
second intifada) would benefit from further
analysis. A more serious disaggregation is needed
of the relationships that exist within the older
generation of returnees and between them and
the young Fatah; and the coalitions and divides
found within and among the young Fatah, the
Palestinian Authority official security and the
young Islamists. In addition, leftist elites and
activists should not be neglected, despite their
fading influence.
Jamal’s classifications obscure important, if
subtle connections among elites and between
elites and other social groups. For example, it is
important not to overlook historical moments of
co-operation among Palestinian elites that, while
not continuous, at least kept them from embarking on a civil war.While elites may split on certain
issues, they also may unite over others. In addition, Jamal obscures the dynamics of relationship
between elites and non-elites in Palestinian
politics. In the second intifada, we have witnessed
how politics has also been shaped by the intermixing of military elites and subordinates across
factions.
This historically and institutionally contextualized study provides good reference materials for
those interested in the dynamics of Palestinian
elites. Yet, more extensive interviews with elites
and activists are needed as is a more nuanced
understanding of relationships among societal
actors.
Ghada Almadbouh
(University of Maryland)
The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad
and Modern Syria by David Lesch. New
Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2005. xiv + 288,
£18.95, ISBN 0 300 10991 1
This book is a political biography of Bashar
al-Asad on the model of Patrick Seale’s study of
his father, Hafiz. Similar to Seale, the author had
exceptional access to the Syrian president and
situates this first-hand information in the Syrian
domestic and foreign contexts through use of
secondary sources. In my view, the main contribution of the book is the author’s assessment of
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the president’s background, style, views and strategies of reform.
Lesch considers the puzzle of Bashar’s succession; despite all the evidence that he was being
groomed by Hafiz for the succession, Bashar
denies that his father ever spoke of the matter.
How did it happen then? As I read Lesch’s evidence, the ruling elite approached Bashar, having
apparently agreed that his succession alone would
avoid a power struggle and particularly one on
sectarian lines since Bashar was the sole figure
who could be trusted by the Alawis while being
acceptable to the wider population. The regime
could be sure he would not be another Sadat,
betraying his predecessor’s legacy.
Lesch throws considerable light on the man
and his style of rule. Growing up the son of the
president, Bashar was unassuming and polite,
never abusing his status for personal gain. Lesch
writes that as a man he does not have a commanding presence, but has his father’s cool nerve,
and is sincere and well-intentioned. Bashar is
well aware of the pathologies of the regime – the
‘chaos’ that results when there is little accountability. But, he sees the answer, not in competitive politics, but in information technology, a
freer press, administrative reform and merit
recruitment. Bashar admits he is very cautious,
proceeding in small steps to avoid instability or
mistakes. He has a strong sense of responsibility
but spends most of his time dealing with problems and complaints and admits he has accomplished little substantial reform. Lesch is probably
right that Bashar is, nevertheless, the best hope
Syria has for reform.
Lesch also has many sensible things to say
about Syrian foreign policy and how US hostility to Syria sours the climate for internal
reform. He does not believe Bashar ordered the
killing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq
al-Hariri, which would be out of character, and
he doubts Syria wants to destabilise Iraq, risking
a fragmentation scenario in which the
Kurds would break off and stimulate separatism
among Syrian Kurds.
Ray Hinnebusch
(University of St Andrews)
368
Structuring Conflict in the Arab World:
Incumbents, Opponents and Institutions
by Ellen Lust-Okar. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005. 279pp., £45.00, ISBN
0 521 83818 5
The author, an assistant professor at Yale, has
attempted what is basically the first book in her
academic career, an offshoot of her doctoral
dissertation. The book is unique in the way the
author has used the concept of ‘Structures of
Contestation’ (SoC), to show and compare how
the different ruling authorities in Egypt, Jordan
and Morocco managed to moderate and ‘play off’
or ‘remote-control’ political opposition against
their respective regimes.The author has taken into
consideration broadly similar time frames in the
three countries, corresponding to the regimes of
Presidents Nasr, Sadat and Mubarak in Egypt,
King Hussein in Jordan and King Hasan II in
Morocco. A fairly detailed study of the political
parties in these three countries has been done,
tracing the impact that various governmental
strategies and ‘elitist’ policies have had on oppositional politics within the three countries. In
doing so, the author has based her argument on
so-called ‘unified’ and ‘divided’ SoCs. She has classified Morocco and Jordan under Kings Hassan II
and Hussein respectively as initially ‘unified’ SoCs,
before changing in the 1970s with Hassan in
Morocco adopting a ‘divided’ SoC. Egypt under
Nasr has been classified as a ‘unified’ SoC, changing later into a ‘divided’ SoC, a few years into
Sadat’s acquisition of power. ‘Unified’ SoCs
mainly correspond to single-party states while
‘divided’ SoCs are present mainly in multi-party
states.The author’s conclusion is a bit short, given
the obvious path-breaking originality of this
book. She has obviously left much space for future
research, as indicated at the end of the book. Her
use of modelling has been kept to a minimum, no
doubt to ensure that this book remains equally
accessible to European social science researchers,
not too comfortable with a dose of ‘North American’ statistical analysis. One of the conclusions that
this book serves to project on its readership is that
a reason for the so-called ‘radical political fatigue’
that much of the Arab Middle Eastern populace
OTHER AREAS
(with the possible recent exclusion of Lebanon)
seems to have with its leaders can be traced to the
many ‘devious’ ways that the kings and presidents
mentioned above stifle and render impotent
political opposition in their home countries.
Samuel Jacob Kuruvilla
(University of Exeter)
The Saudi Enigma: A History by Pascal
Ménoret. London: Zed Books, 2005. 257pp.,
£14.95, ISBN 1 84277 605 3
Pascal Ménoret’s main aim is to deconstruct and
demystify the prevailing understanding of the
kingdom of Saudi Arabia.The author presents the
modus operandi of the Saudi society: its economical
and political contexts both in historical and contemporary terms. The main thread of thought
underlines the need to read and understand the
Saudi economical and social life from within the
country as opposed to the outer orientalist
perception.
In the first three chapters, Ménoret undercuts
the conventional beliefs of Saudi Arabia: namely,
Bedouin origins, puritan Islam and seclusion.The
well-researched historical information about the
al-Saud ruling family and the creation of the
country are valuable in proving the above falsities.
The second section focuses on the modern Saudi
state. The chapters put the current global role of
the country in a well-defined and logical
framework.The last part deals with specific problems facing Saudi civil society and its rulers today.
The chapter dealing with women’s emancipation
shows the alternative view from Saudi Arabia –
whereby through their religion, Saudi women are
redefining their roles and achieving what they
have formerly been deprived of by the rules of the
country. The analysis of Islamic feminism leans
towards the pivotal concept of the book: the aspiring ability of Saudi society to reform from within
without the need for external pressure, which de
facto alienates society. A more pertinent issue that
is also tackled with much insight concerns youth,
who form the majority of the population.This is
analysed in light of education (relating to bringing
the curriculum on a par with market needs) and
economic structural reforms.
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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This well-translated book is an essential guide
to anyone who wants to study Saudi Arabia. Its
multi-pronged analytical approach covers a wide
range of interrelated issues.The reader should gain
an alternative understanding of a country that
fuels, through its oil exports and reserves, much of
Western economies today.
The one issue that stands out in contrast to the
specifically analysed data and the author’s firsthand accounts and understanding of the country
is the blatantly mistaken depiction of the political
map of Saudi Arabia that precedes the book’s
foreword.The map erroneously indicates that the
kingdom borders Israel.This map forms an essential reference to the reader; hence, to the unaware
reader this geographical error may be slightly
confusing. Luckily this is just a minor infraction in
what altogether is a refreshing piece of work on
the kingdom.
Béatrice Maalouf
(University of Public Administration
& International Relations, Prague)
Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa by
Daniel Posner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 360pp., £17.99, ISBN 0 521
54179 4
The book seeks to explore how notions of identity
and ethnicity can be understood in Africa and
elsewhere. The author develops a sophisticated
theory of the development and evolution of ethnic
identities, using Zambia as a case study. Posner’s
book explicitly seeks to develop a theory that can
be used to explain and also predict when ethnicity
will be utilised for political purposes. It is intended
to have a wider conclusion than that relating just to
Zambia. This is the potential problem with the
book that will be discussed below.
It should be said that the work on Zambia is well
written and well researched. Posner goes through
the Zambian material in depth and draws out his
argument.He explains,using the historical context
of the country, why Zambia’s politics and divisions
tend to be defined by ethnicity and language.The
colonial experience as Northern Rhodesia is discussed in this regard.After laying the groundwork,
Posner then outlines how the shift from Kaunda’s
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369
one-party state to a multi-party system, initially
under Chiluba, influenced the coalition building
that dominates Zambian politics today. He demonstrates that tribal identities played the key role in
mobilisation under the one-party system but that
language-group identities came to the fore in the
post-Kaunda period. Having done this, the rest of
the book seeks to test Posner’s theoretical model
and discusses competing explanations.This is first
used to analyse Zambia but is then tested for
behaviour beyond Zambia.
The Zambian material is good. However, it
must be said that Posner’s findings on ethnicity
and identity in Zambia and how these are instrumentalised by ethnic entrepreneurs is fairly standard stuff for Africanists and not least those who
have worked on Zambia. Thus, while the information and ideas about Zambia and identity politics cannot really be faulted, this is not revelatory
material. It is solid stuff and could be profitably
used in teaching about ethnic politics, using
Zambia as a case study.
However, Posner’s book has wider ambitions
and I feel that this is where he is on shakier
ground. The work makes great use of both institutional theories and rational choice models.This
reflects the current hegemony of these methodologies in current American political science.The
universalistic claims of this academy are well
known, particularly by those working in what
used to be called ‘area studies’. It should be said
that Posner does integrate into his work insights
gleaned from anthropological and sociological
work. But the model he adopts makes some basic
claims that are questionable.The idea that all types
of identities might be equally utilised or open to
discussion is problematic. This makes the rational
choice assumption that we are all individuals,
seemingly not considering the communities and
societies we are all embedded in. Is this really true
of anyone, except anchorites?
The second concern with Posner’s hypothesis
is that it is questionable whether some identities
can be equally shaken off and others adopted.
While it is true that in Zambia politicians are very
adept at playing this game – as Posner himself
convincingly shows – this has more to do with the
specificities of Zambia’s political history and
OTHER AREAS
370
current conjuncture. The salience of identity
adopted at any time is quite complicated and
embedded in Zambia’s very own political
experience. I am just not convinced that a rational
choice model that can be applied to any given
situation or country is realisable. Indeed, the
worth of this book lies in the detailed work that
the author has conducted on Zambia, rather than
on the theoretical model he has crafted. I would
say that Posner’s knowledge and understanding of
Zambia is great and his work on that country in
this book is very illuminating and worthy.
However, the grander theoretical claims are
perhaps more questionable. Having said that,
it is still a good read and will be useful for any
graduate class on African politics.
Ian Taylor
(University of St Andrews)
Democracy in Latin America: Political
Change in Comparative Perspective by Peter
H. Smith. New York: Oxford University Press,
2005. 380pp., £14.99, ISBN 0 19 515759 1
This book focuses on the quality of democracy in
Latin America.The main questions it explores are
simple, clear and very timely:‘What is the quality
of today’s democracies? How democratic are they
in practice? Are they likely to endure?’ (p. 7).The
book utilises the concept of illiberal democracy
suggested by Fareed Zakaria in 1997. Peter H.
Smith attempts to provide a multifaceted picture
of democracy and thus considers: the definition of
the term; the history of democracy in the region;
the class structure; the maturity of institutions; the
performance of institutions and political actors;
and ideologies.
From a historical point of view, the first part of
the book analyses electoral cycles and transitions
to democracy between 1900 and 2000. It also
considers the role of the armed forces and the
international context, looking specifically at the
United States. The issues of elections and presidentialism are key in the second part. After this
historical introduction, the book offers an analysis
of the quality of democracy. It studies the relation
between democracy and economic growth, the
politics of social equity, state capacity and policy
performance. It also provides an analysis of the
working of the rule of law and people’s perceptions of democracy.
The book provides a general study of democracy in Latin America. Departing from the
concept of illiberal democracy, it is aimed at
undergraduate and postgraduate students of Latin
American politics and provides a general analysis
of the state of democracy in the region. It is an
ideal textbook, which combines clear theoretical
analysis with empirical examples from most of the
countries of Latin America. Smith goes into depth
on specific themes, which are nicely explained in
boxes throughout the text. Most of these boxes are
empirical examples that come to support the analytical context of the book. Very timely, Smith
provides examples from the presidency of Hugo
Chávez inVenezuela and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
in Brazil.
This is a book which can be highly recommended for undergraduate and postgraduate students on Latin America. It is clear and well
written. It main conclusion is that illiberal
democracy is the dominant regime in the region.
In the conclusion, Smith provides alternative scenarios for the future of democracy in the region.
Laura Tedesco
(Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Political Culture and Post-Communism
by Stephen Whitefield. Houndmills and New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. xvi + 223pp.,
£50.00, ISBN 1 4039 4520 9
Stephen Whitefield’s book results from an
international conference held in June 2005 at the
University of Oxford marking the retirement of
Professor Archie Brown.The book gives evidence
of ‘an intellectual commitment to Russia (and
other states of the former Soviet Union), and
to the discipline of political science broadly
conceived’. It is composed of eight essays by wellknown experts on post-communist Russia, some
of whom had been Brown’s students: Stephen
Whitefield, Alexander Lukin, Pavel Lukin,
Richard Sakwa, Charles King, Mary McAuley,
Stephen Welch and Jeffrey W. Hahn; the conclusion is written by Archie Brown.The contributors
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
BOOK REVIEWS
examine the relationship between political culture
and the development of Russian politics addressing history, violence, reform of the judiciary, state
identity, political adaptation and internal changes
after 1990. The book’s main argument is that
political leaders play a major role in defining the
political culture of the state. The overthrow of
authoritarian regimes in the countries of the
former Soviet Union, due to the pressure of
popular demonstrations, provides concrete
examples of the impact of political culture and
political institutions.
The book is aimed at a specialised audience. It
contains eleven tables detailing data on popular
support for democratic elections and economic
issues in Russia. It includes a detailed bibliography placing Archie Brown’s major publications
within English- and Russian-language literature.
The book offers an engaging examination of
post-communism showing that political culture
has played a major role in the political trajectory of the former Soviet bloc, particularly
Russia.
Lucian N. Leustean
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
We welcome short reviews of books in all
areas of politics and international relations.
For guidelines on submitting reviews, and
to see an up-to-date listing of books available for review, please visit http://www.
politicalstudiesreview.org/.
International Relations and
International Political Economy
Global Civil Society 2004/5 by Helmut
Anheier, Marlies Glasius and Mary Kaldor
(eds). London: Sage, 2004. 392pp., £22.99, ISBN
1 4129 0307 6
Do you want to know how many NGO meetings
took place in Sri Lanka, or how many internet
users exist in Malawi? What about the number of
refugees entering Argentina, or the number of
transnational corporations active in Russia? These
are among the interesting and informative records
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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371
kept by the yearbook on Global Civil Society
2004/5, a compendium of the work of civic
organisations published annually on behalf of a
number of centres involved in their study. By
tracing the reach of ‘global’ civil society (non-state
organisations that operate across borders) and providing a partial but critical review of what these
activities mean, the Yearbook has secured a welldeserved niche that rests primarily on its attractive
design and programmatic appeal.
And who can quibble with its underlying ethos
of trying to understand the work of non-state
organisations? To its credit, the editors and contributors to the Yearbook resist the temptation to
label any and all civil society activity democratic
or emancipatory. Hilary Wainwright, for example,
is alive to the problematic democratic credentials
of many NGOs and their claim to speak on behalf
of the demos, and Kenneth Anderson and David
Reiff, in a lively and critical opening chapter,
catalogue the many reasons why we should be
sceptical of the power of civil society in a post9/11 world. Nevertheless, it is hard to avoid
asking whether the programmatic appeal of being
open to ‘global’ civil society overwhelms the
structural and operative logic weighing against
its inevitable consolidation – of how nationalism,
racism, ethnocentrism and other anti-globalist
mental orthodoxies complicate the transition
towards a post-Westphalian political order. In the
end, of course, no single volume can please readers
who bring numerous axes of engagement; it is a
testament to the editors that they succeed as well
as they have done thus far.
Randall Germain
(Carleton Unversity)
Rethinking the Economics of War: The
Intersection of Need, Creed, and Greed by
Cynthia J. Arnson and I. William Zartman
(eds). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University
Press, 2005. 300pp., $22.95, ISBN 0 8018 8298 2
The ‘greed versus grievance’ debate has been a
central theme in the analysis of civil wars for
almost a decade. This book continues the trend
away from the isolation of economic and political
factors in causal analysis, and towards their
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INTER NATIONAL RELATIONS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
complex interplay, with particular attention to the
importance of deprivation and discrimination as
the primary causes of intra-state conflict.
The different case studies revolve around a
model termed ‘need, creed and greed’.The model
represents a continuum, wherein ‘grievances
ranging from political repression to economic
deprivation (“need”), generalized belief and identity feelings (“creed”) ... and personal or factional
ambitions of private gain (“greed”), combine to
produce conflicts with multiple, overlapping collective as well as private motives’ (p. 11). As suggested by this continuum, Collier’s provocative
thesis about the role of greed as a cause of conflict
– as opposed to his later focus on how resources
facilitate and prolong violence – finds little
support.Among the case studies examined,including Angola, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of
Congo, Afghanistan, Colombia, Lebanon and
Peru, none begins as a ‘greed-based rebellion’.
A notable theme is the way economic agendas
impede conflict resolution. The enrichment of
powerful players comes to depend on continued
violence in ways that impede the transition to
peace. What emerges from so many supposed
‘resolutions’ in these conflicts is an unstable order
skewed towards the interest of various factions that
continually threatens to break down into renewed
violence. A complementary chapter on policy
interventions in civil wars suggests how outsiders
have attempted to target economic agendas and
how these instruments could be improved.
The end result is a reasonably comprehensive
and well-executed examination of the multiple
dimensions – political, economic, ideational and
historical – that come together to spark intra-state
violence and impede its resolution.
Lee J. M. Seymour
(Northwestern University/Sciences Po)
From Traditional to Group Hegemony: The
G7, the Liberal Economic Order and the
Core-Periphery Gap by Alison Bailin.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. 194pp., £49.95, ISBN
0 7546 1979 6
Alison Bailin’s book represents another contribution to the ‘G8 Global Governance Series’ and is,
in a certain sense, a modified version of the
author’s doctoral thesis of 1997. She develops an
interesting systemic theory of global economic
stability based on the connection between the
hegemonic stability theory and world-systems
theory for explaining the management of global
economy since the early 1970s.
Based on that theory the author explains that
the G7 took the place of the United States as the
hegemon of the international economic system.
According to this vision, the group sustained the
liberal economic order, mainly in financial crisis,
and also created a set of rules that governs economic transactions.The central claim, however, is
that this set of rules is biased towards the members
of the group, which contributes to the growing
gap between the rich core and the impoverished
periphery.
This argument of the book has two problems.
The first one is the fact that it downplays the
challenge of China for the management of global
economy, although the author acknowledges its
emergence in the global economy.The argument
also downplays the role of private authority in
creating and settling international crises, something odd considering the role of financial institutions in modern capitalism.
The second is that the author indicates the
protectionism of developed countries towards
products of interest of developing countries as
one of the reasons for the persistent gap between
the ‘core’ and the ‘periphery’, but does not highlight that developing countries never undertook
serious efforts to reciprocate with market access in
exchange for more benefits from the system.The
ISI inward-looking policies adopted by them
were not an imposition of the core countries of
G7. They decided to implement those policies
that were highly deleterious for the development
of their economies on their own.
Despite these two problems this book is a
welcome contribution to the debate on the role of
international economic institutions in the
stability of international order and on the main
features of the international distribution of wealth.
Rogério de Souza Farias
(Universidade de Brasília)
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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Toward a Political Economy of Culture:
Capitalism and Communication in the
Twenty-first Century by Andrew Calabrese
and Colin Sparks. Lanham MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2004. 375pp., £24.95, ISBN 0 7425
2684 4
This fine collection of nineteen chapters is fundamental to understanding how culture, markets
and entertainment in general are becoming more
and more guided by economic logic and decisions
made by just a few corporations. In other words,
the dynamics of capitalism that also rule the
media institutions have consequences in the way
media and culture, that is movies, news and meanings, are shaped, produced and distributed. In the
United States, cultural industries are controlled by
a fierce competitive model that has implications,
even, for the contents of productions, which have
to be more appealing and therefore more
standardized.
The chapter on the ‘Westminster School’ gives
a theoretical background for many contributions
here, stating the influence of British scholars such
as Nicholas Garnham and John Keane in the
study of media policy and the public sphere. In
the 1970s, that group launched a journal which
became one of the most respected in that field:
Media, Culture, and Society.
Among the best chapters, Janet Wasko’s piece
on the Hollywood film industry (adapted from
her recent book, How Hollywood Works) is a strong
critique of a system that is not based on talent or
art, but controlled by a few conglomerates, suffering from ‘escalating costs, inefficient and unstable
management, and luxurious habits and lifestyles’
(Wasko, p. 146). John Peters’ chapter gives an
accurate account of the ideology of the current
media markets, as does Robert McChesney’s
piece. Issues related to broadcasting, audiences,
media access, control and ownership, state regulation, new media and globalization are also raised
and discussed.
This valuable book should be read by academics and graduate students in political economy,
media studies, sociology of culture and film
studies. Furthermore, librarians and graduate students should watch carefully the forthcoming
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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373
titles in this series entitled ‘Critical Media Studies:
Institutions, Politics, and Culture’.
Yves Laberge
(Institut québécois des hautes études internationales,
Québec City)
The Humanitarians: The International
Committee of the Red Cross by David P.
Forsythe. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005. 356pp., £45.00, £17.99, ISBN 0 521
84822 8, ISBN 0 521 61281 0
The International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) is an important but much misunderstood
actor in world politics. That most commentators
tend to assume it to be an infallible guardian angel
or (more normally) a marginal global social
worker no doubt derives from a combination of
ignorance and the organisation’s inherent
paradoxes – such as the fact that it is a cosmopolitan organisation with an entirely Swiss management committee. This important new book
should act as a palliative and is essential reading for
anyone interested in world politics. Forsythe
combines well-informed history with a judicious
assessment of the ICRC’s role in contemporary
politics to demonstrate that, although not without
its problems (not least its continued attachment to
Swiss nationalism, its reluctance to embrace professionalism prior to the 1970s and its tendency
towards secrecy), the ICRC continues to make a
vitally important contribution to protecting some
of the world’s most vulnerable people – all for an
annual cost similar to that of the 2004 US presidential campaign.The book’s central argument is
that in the past the ICRC was not as independent,
impartial, neutral or effective as often pictured but
that since its abject failure in the Biafran crisis in
the early 1970s, the organisation has professionalised itself. Moreover, it has made at least eight
critical contributions to improving the lives of the
victims of war, not least the provision of assistance
to the victims of war and the development of
international humanitarian law (IHL). Finally,
since the end of the Cold War, the ICRC has
significantly expanded its work beyond the
victims of war to include the victims of natural
disasters and poverty.
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INTER NATIONAL RELATIONS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
The book is divided into three sections. The
first provides a brief but comprehensive overview
of the organisation’s history, including a compelling chapter on the ICRC’s role in the war on
terror. The second analyses the organisation’s
principles and policies, management structure
and contribution to IHL. A series of annexes at
the end provides useful diagrams to support the
argument. Although the organisation’s history
has been told in more detail elsewhere, this is the
most compelling book to combine history with
analysis. It is judicious, timely and well
researched.
Alex Bellamy
(University of Queensland)
Globalization and Law: Trade, Rights, War
by Adam Gearey. Lanham MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2005. 151pp., £14.99, ISBN 0 7425
3803 6
Gearey argues that the doctrine of law today is
both a part of and response to ‘the agonistics of
the global’ (p. 108), by which he means that it has
become globalised within the institutions of
global governance while remaining a ‘hybrid’ discourse operating uncertainly within the nexus of
political, economic and ideological contention. In
this sense, the logic of the law is undergoing a
profound transformation. This involves not so
much rejecting sovereignty, the nation state and
rights but rather re-inscribing their meaning
within an unsettled global space. Linking emergent forms of law to globalisation allows Gearey
to situate them as expressions of power within a
world communicative system. Rules of law, as
with economic and public policy, are ‘encoded’ in
light of background contexts and assumptions,
most crucially in terms of power relations which
organise and perpetuate global positions of privilege and subordination. All of this points to globalising law’s tenuous status as an instrument for
the reproduction of inequality and a resource for
redefining the place of community, responsibility
and emancipation.
Gearey’s argument is guided by several case
studies. A consideration of post-independence
Nigeria provides an opportunity to reflect on the
inadequacies of a formal conception of sovereignty and the foundation of the post-colonial
order upon inequitable patterns of trade, production and distribution entrenched during
colonialism. The expansion of international economic law, through a combination of hard and
soft law, underwrites the regulation of relations
between states yet does so through the creation of
exceptions (such as conditionality and ‘developing’ nation status) to the rules of world trade.The
aporia or permanent ideological crisis haunting
development law arises from the inherently political nature of the meaning and process of ‘development’, which then leads to the problematic of
‘military humanism’ as international law recomposes itself around contested notions of the
‘humanity’ it ostensibly represents.
The author’s description of the troubled
correspondence between law and globalisation
is critical yet lucid, making the topic accessible
within a relatively modest space. The book is
evidently aimed mainly at an undergraduate and
general readership, and such readership ought to
find this book provocative and informative. Scholars more familiar with the debates presented here
however may be disappointed that some of the
book’s most intriguing claims – such as Gearey’s
allusion to the potentials inherent in the complex
formulations of justice and solidarity ‘to come’,
and his call to rethink the subject of ‘humanity’ –
are not treated in entirely adequate depth.
Patrick Hayden
(University of St Andrews)
Trading Down: Africa,Value Chains and the
Global Economy by Peter Gibbon and
Stefano Ponte. Philadelphia PA: Temple University Press, 2005. 272pp. $21.95, ISBN 1 59213
368 1
Trading Down presents us with a rigorous international political economy of African trading
relations.The book is immensely rich in empirical
material and avoids sweeping judgements in
favour of more complex and cautious analysis.
The narrative is couched largely in value-neutral
language, avoiding highly normative statements
that often come with analyses of Africa’s
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economies.The diversity of African experiences –
both across countries and commodities – is highlighted throughout. Bearing all of this in mind, it
is all the more significant that the authors conclude that African economies are being substantially disadvantaged by new forms of liberalised
value-chain governance.
In essence, the book demonstrates how the rise
of increasingly concentrated markets of international buyers impose market conditions and
standards that set more onerous conditions for
suppliers and capture more of the value of a
commodity chain ‘downstream’. The emergence
of a set of ‘first tier suppliers’, who take on many
of the standards and protocols set by buyers, are
usually non-African. As a result of economic
conditionalities of liberalisation, African export
markets are now largely defined by a plurality of
private producers, subject to intense competition;
these producers have less corporate influence over
the terms of export as a result of the retreat of the
parastatal organisation of export.
These developments are understood within a
structural and historical context in which African
economies have been largely integrated into
global markets as primary commodity exporters.
Global Value Chain Analysis provides a valuable
tool to understand how this structural context
has persisted into the age of ‘globalisation’ and
neoliberalism of the WTO. The most salient
result of the analysis is thus: ratcheting up
increasingly ‘free’ market conditions of trade is
likely to consign African exporters to an increasingly disadvantaged position precisely by virtue
of their strong articulation to global forms of
global trade governance.
The book’s early chapters provide an excellent
overview of African IPE – badly needed as most
IPE literature customarily neglects Africa as a
world region. This is not a book for ‘Africanists’;
it is a book of great value to anyone interested in
the nature of contemporary global capitalism and
especially interested in the ways in which it
affects those societies most historically disadvantaged by it.
Graham Harrison
(University of Sheffield)
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3)
Reinventing
Accountability:
Making
Democracy Work for Human Development
by Anne Marie Goetz and Rob Jenkins.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 249pp.,
£54.00, ISBN 1 4039 0624 6
Reinventing Accountability sets out to assess trends
towards accountability seeking in societies
throughout the world which are not co-ordinated,
but ‘emerging from a wide variety of spontaneous
initiatives’ (p. 196).The two main reasons for reassessment of accountability are (a) the legacy of
institutional failure; and (b) the proliferation of
new actors (state and non-state actors).
The authors make several interlinked arguments built upon the fundamental premise of
what they call the evolving ‘new accountability
agenda’. It represents an expansion of the
generally understood definition of democratic
accountability and development of a new set of
standards of accountability – emphasising the
increasing demands of societies on individuals
and institutions who hold power. Illustrated
through case studies, it shows a shift in accountability standards whereby citizens, through varied
efforts, are judging and attempting, in many
cases, to force a higher standard of accountability
than actors are willing or able to meet. They
make a compelling argument with regard to the
influence of global interdependence on expectations and standards of accountability.The systematic malfunctions within key institutions have
been attributed to imperfections inherent within
democratic systems vis-à-vis ‘capture’ by elite
interests. This, in turn, has caused a ‘political
backlash’ (p. 180) due to weaknesses inherent in
the new accountability agenda.Their analysis of a
‘political backlash’ provides an interesting assessment not only of the weaknesses inherent in
their ‘new accountability agenda’, but, more generally, demonstrates reactions to current citizen
initiatives in the area of social justice – holding
state and non-state actors at various levels
accountable.
Goetz and Jenkins have provided an interesting investigation of how accountability is being
reinvented within a world of interdependence
and layers of actors with their own agendas.
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INTER NATIONAL RELATIONS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
Those interested in democratic accountability
and governance will find the book thought provoking in both its theoretical arguments and
illustrative case studies.
Dale Mineshima-Lowe
(University of Limerick)
International Migration and Security:
Opportunities and Challenges by Elspeth
Guild and Joanne van Selm (eds). Abingdon:
Routledge, 2005. 280pp., £75.00, ISBN 0 415
32654 0
Guild and van Selm have edited a fascinating
book. It appeals through the many aspects of the
relation between immigrants, immigration and
the receiving society that it covers. It weaves a rich
and colourful tapestry of concepts and issues that
will be hard to find in another single book. The
chapters are organised in four parts. The first
focuses on political and legal security. Chapters
look at regional security; the contribution of
legal disputes concerning migration to spreading
human rights inWestern legal systems; the relation
between human rights protection of immigrants
and the more general development of human
rights protection; the political and technological
rendition of foreigners and immigrants into internal dangers in the fight against terrorism; and the
conditions for an electoral impact of immigrants.
Part II deals with cultural and identity security.
Chapters cover the legal expression of national
identity and citizenship and their impact on
immigrant identity; racism; the endorsement of an
official language as a tool of integration; and
migrant literature. Part III shifts attention to personal and economic security. Chapters explore the
relation between immigration and the reconstruction of the welfare state; the possible impact
of immigrants on health; and homeownership,
food and immigrant production of tourist attractions as means of integration. The book concludes, most interestingly, with a critical
reflection, that comes close to an auto-critique, on
how debating migration along the all-toocommon question of whether it is a risk or an
asset – a cost or a benefit – implies a questioning
of the trustworthiness of migrants.
One question that the reader is left with and
that is reinforced by the concluding chapter is
how the fascinating variety of aspects of migration that the authors cover relates to questions of
security. It is not always clear why one would
group all these issues under the heading ‘security’. Neither does the concept of security seem
to be a useful analytical instrument for all of
these cases. On the more positive side one could
argue that the implicit assumption that these
issues do have some bearing on notions of security encourages readers to reflect on why that is.
The concluding chapter and its reflection on
trust indeed starts to open the book a little bit
towards this question.
However, this comment is more an issue
because of the title and the way the editors have
grouped the different chapters than because of the
content of the chapters. For reasons of the breadth
of issues the book covers and the detail and
quality of the analyses in many of the chapters this
book should be high on the reading list of those
interested in migration.
Jef Huysmans
(The Open University)
United Nations Law and the Security
Council by Max Hilaire. Aldershot: Ashgate,
2005. 333pp., £55.00, ISBN 0 7546 4489 8
In United Nations Law and the Security Council,
Max Hilaire provides description and analysis of
the role and activities of the United Nations
Security Council, acting pursuant to its powers
under the United Nations Charter. Professor
Hilaire divides his treatment into chapters categorising types of Security Council actions, from
peacekeeping and peacemaking in small-scale
regional conflicts to the management of interstate conflicts, to the use of Chapter VII nonmilitary enforcement measures. The bulk of the
treatment consists of detailed historical descriptions of Security Council-authorised actions, and
evaluations of the success or failure of the actions
based upon political and other principled criteria.
However, this focus on historical description
and political analysis rather belies the title of the
book, which would seem to focus on the law of
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the United Nations. After some of the historical
descriptions, a brief legal analysis is given.
However, these sections serve only to raise legal
issues presented in the case and to offer only the
most conclusory legal analysis. Additionally, some
of the statements of law are quite dubious. For
example, the author’s claim on page 5 that ‘[d]ecisions of the Security Council adopted under
Chapter VII are binding and cannot be legally
challenged’ does no justice to the wealth of
writing on the subject of the limits of Security
Council authority under the law of the Charter
(see e.g. work by Bernd Martenczuk, Mathew
Happold and David Schweigman). Also, his claim
on page 15 that during the Cold War the Security
Council ‘had to find ways of circumventing the
threat of the veto by first granting the General
Assembly authority to act in emergency situations
under the Uniting for Peace Resolution’ quite
completely misrepresents the meaning and legal
import of that resolution, which was a General
Assembly resolution and not an action by the
Security Council at all. In sum, the legal content
of this book adds little to existing literature.
As a political science book it can also be criticised for lacking any theoretical component, or
sustained argument in its treatment. It is primarily
a descriptive work, with little analysis, and that
fairly simplistic.This is not of course to say that a
descriptive text is not of value. This book will
serve very usefully as a reference text for undergraduates and for general research into the facts
and circumstances of the events described. In this
way, this fairly comprehensive review of important Security Council activities since the establishment of the United Nations is a welcome
resource. However, its value as a scholarly work is
unfortunately minimal.
Daniel Joyner
(University of Warwick)
Building Trust: Overcoming Suspicion in
International Conflict by Aaron M.
Hoffman. Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2005.
213pp., $55, ISBN 0 7914 6635 3
Aaron Hoffman’s book analyzes two conceptions
of international trust, presents three theories
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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of how it is achieved and analyzes them in
the context of four cases of international
co-operation. The two conceptions are ‘predictive’ and ‘fiduciary’.The predictive understanding
thinks of trust as an expectation that the other side
will co-operate, whereas in the fiduciary view,
trust is a belief that the other side is morally
upright and will not harm one’s interests if
granted discretion over issues of concern. The
three theories are focused on learning, identity
and institutions. The learning theory holds that
trust is built up gradually through co-operation
over increasingly important issues. The identity
theory holds that people trust those with shared
identities and not members of the out group.The
institutional theory, Hoffman’s own, argues that
trust is built when institutions are framed to give
the parties effective voice and protection from
domestic political rivals. The four empirical cases
are the creation of the United States, that of the
European Union, and Israeli co-operation with
Jordan and the Palestinian Authority over water.
Hoffman finds that the design of the US Constitution enabled trusting relations despite the fact
that the states failed to co-operate under the
Articles of Confederation, and that the Single
European Act facilitated trusting relations in
Europe.
The strength of the book is the innovative
effort to import the fiduciary approach to international relations. Relations of trust are often
imbued with moral overtones and a common
understanding of trust does emphasize granting
discretion over one’s interests to the trustee.
Hoffman is to be commended for taking this
conception to the international relations realm,
where morality is often thought to be weak or
absent, and states are notoriously jealous of their
sovereign discretion, and seeing how far it runs.
The downside is that it may not run very far.
Hoffman sets the bar for trust very high for international relations; the US Constitution is coded as
exhibiting low trust and the Articles of Confederation none at all. The book therefore says less
about how real suspicion – between the US and
North Korea, say – can be overcome than about
how imperfect unions can be made more perfect.
Institutional design is of central importance for
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that question, and Hoffman’s analysis is quite
useful on this score. In this respect, the book
makes an essential contribution to the growing
literature on trust in international relations.
Andrew H. Kydd
(University of Pennsylvania)
Australian and US Military Cooperation:
Fighting Common Enemies by Christopher
Hubbard. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. 175pp.,
£45.00, ISBN 0 7546 4242 9
Christopher Hubbard’s book exploring the
origins, development and challenges of
Australia–US military co-operation (specifically
the ANZUS alliance) could hardly be more
topical, given the current Australian government’s
invocation of the ANZUS treaty for the first time
following 11 September 2001, and its acknowledgement that participation in the 2003 Iraq conflict was necessary to preserve the US alliance.
The book is divided into three sections. The
first deals with the lead-up to the 1951 agreement
(which has been viewed by Australia as entailing a
commitment by the US to the defence of
Australia) and outlines different ways of making
sense of the alliance’s development and longevity.
The second provides examples of the alliance ‘in
action’, while the final section deals with the
future of the alliance itself.
While Hubbard’s account of the alliance as
historically shifting in focus and influenced by a
range of internal and external factors is ultimately
convincing, he can perhaps be accused of trying to
do a little too much in the book, prioritising
coverage over depth. While this is evident in
his prohibitively brief discussions of theoretical
approaches to foreign policy formation (pp. 63–6)
and intervention in East Timor (pp. 109–11), it is
most evident in his discussion of the role of shared
history and identity (pp. 38–41), which is both
short and superficial.This discussion tends towards
introducing stereotypes of national character
rather than engaging with narratives of history,
culture and identity that have sustained both
Australia’s connection with the United States itself
and its view of the region as a source of threat.The
opportunity here to explore in more depth why
successive Australian governments have viewed
the region and the world as sufficiently dangerous
to necessitate continued participation in America’s
wars has arguably been missed.
The book should nevertheless be read as a
good overview of the evolution of the alliance
itself, particularly from an Australian perspective.
The discussion of Australia’s little-known flirtation with becoming a nuclear power in the
1960s, and the associated dilemma for Australia
of reconciling this with the terms of the US
alliance and the development of the 1968 NonProliferation Treaty, is particularly insightful in
illuminating the role of competing foreign and
security policy priorities and styles. Certainly,
given the emphasis placed on the maintenance of
the alliance for Australian security by the current
conservative government, and the US commitment to unilateralism and pre-emption, this issue
is unlikely to become any less important in the
near future.
Matt McDonald
(University of Birmingham)
War and State Formation in Ancient China
and Early Modern Europe by Victoria
Tin-Bor Hui. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 294pp., £40.00, £16.99, ISBN 0
521 81972 5, ISBN 0 521 52576 4
It is rare to encounter an analysis as attentive to
detail and method, yet broad in the scope of its
implications as that by Victoria Tin-Bor Hui. Her
book embarks on a macro-historical study of
world politics and provides a sophisticated comparative history of the Chinese and European state
systems. Hui claims that ancient China and early
modern Europe shared striking similarities in
many crucial respects. In particular, she establishes
convincingly that China developed the art of war
and the signs of territorial sovereignty at least two
millennia before the emergence of similar
Western practices.
Despite the temporal, geographic and cultural
distance between her case studies, Hui’s analysis
persuades that an examination of the differences
and similarities between the state systems of
ancient China and early modern Europe provides
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a practical approach to the study of international
affairs and world history.Above all, Hui’s dynamic
theory of world politics promises to be a convincing method for conducting similar comparisons
between other initially dissimilar experiences. Her
theory has recourse to a compelling account of
inter-state as well as state–society relations and
views those exchanges as processes of strategic
interaction between domination seekers and
targets of domination. Such emphasis on strategic
interactions allows Hui to elaborate how policies
and instrumental mechanisms are transcendent
across time and space, while outcomes remain
attuned to historically contingent conditions.
Such perspicacious analysis is not short of its
controversies – for instance, Hui’s contention of
the relative character of state sovereignty or her
conjecture of the problematic nature of the insistence that the fates of the Western and nonWestern worlds are interlinked.Yet, it is not least
because of these provocations that many scholars
and researchers working in the fields of history
and international relations will find Hui’s investigation more than just an interesting read. It is the
kind of book that is bound to trigger debate and
it invites (if not beckons) its readers to pursue
further the ideas discussed on its pages.
Emilian Kavalski
(University of Alberta)
Globalization, Poverty and Inequality by
Raphael Kaplinsky. Cambridge: Polity, 2005.
280pp., £55.00, £16.99, ISBN 0 7456 3553 9,
ISBN 0 7456 3554 7
This book is a significant contribution to literature on globalisation and to the theory of global
value chains. Clearly written and data rich, it
presents compelling evidence that globalisation
itself – by intensifying competition between lowwage producers – is perpetuating poverty and
amplifying global inequality. Kaplinsky draws on
his experience as an entrepreneur and development economist to inform a lively and detailed
exposition of the working of global value chains,
exploring how and indeed whether low-wage
producers can improve their position and achieve
sustainable incomes.
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He notes two significant facts: manufactured
products, mostly European, US and Japanese consumer goods, account for 80 per cent of the
merchandise exports of all low-wage economies;
and the sale of these goods is, in every rich nation,
dominated by a small number of retail giants such
as Wal-Mart,Tesco and Carrefour.Thus, low-wage
producers face a ‘fierce oligopsony, with a small
number of large buyers locked in intense competition’ (p. 177).
Examining a data set containing 10,000 manufactured products, Kaplinsky finds that prices of
low-wage manufactured exports are falling across
the board.‘The production link in most, if not all,
value chains is becoming progressively more
subject to global competition’ (p. 141).The result:
declining shares for those without means ‘to
escape the pressures of competition’ (p. 85)
through copyrights or preferential access to technologies, markets or scarce resources.‘Merely participating in the global economy ... [can] be a
source of poverty and inequality’.
Kaplinsky criticises neoliberalism’s predictions,
yet he shares many of its premises. His theoretical
approach, in which profit is conflated with rent
and value with price, and the absence of discussion of how rents are distributed within production links, e.g. between capital and labour, pushes
production into the background and exploitation
behind a screen.Yet, value-chain analysis can only
realise its promise by breaking with neoliberal
precepts and developing a theory of value of its
own.
Kaplinsky believes that the current phase of
globalisation ‘is likely to run out of steam as a
result of its own internal contradictions’ (p. 257),
proposing to replace it with a ‘new policy agenda’
in which low-income countries would be allowed
‘some form of selective disengagement ... from
the global economy’ (p. 247). He wants ‘a tilted
playing field, but one which is inclined in their
direction’ (p. 249).
Unfortunately for such proposals, the prosperity of rich nations depends on the tilt staying
exactly where it is.
John Smith
(University of Sheffield)
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The Romani Voice in World Politics: The
United Nations and Non-state Actors by
Ilona Klimova-Alexander. Aldershot: Ashgate,
2005. 212pp., £52.50, ISBN 0 7546 4173 2
Klimova-Alexander explores the significance of
three decades of attempts to represent the
Romani people at the global level and what this
says about the role and position of non-state
actors in world politics. She finds that Romani
activism at the international level is primarily the
work of a few dedicated individuals. Interestingly,
their activism has affected some policies concerning Romani but has had little substantive impact
on United Nations (UN) resolutions and activities; the UN, on the other hand, has shaped the
Romani activists’ agenda, discourse and organizational structure.
The author adopts a qualitative approach to
research, using thick description and historical
detail to create an in-depth case study of transnational Romani activism. She introduces the
history of Romani activism, and then traces the
interaction of Romani international organizations with the UN and vice versa. She uses
descriptive rather than causal inference to establish links between Romani activism and changes
in the UN’s dealings with the Romani, citing
the difficulty of isolating any one factor that
could explain a change in policy at the UN or in
a movement.
Although Klimova-Alexander does not find
much substantial global Romani activism, she
does find that intergovernmental organizations
can control non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) by conferring consultative status on
them. Interacting with the UN system has made
the informal Romani organization become more
hierarchical, altered its discourse from a focus on
status to rights and changed its agenda to fit with
various UN bodies. Klimova-Alexander’s analysis
of the Romani movement’s lack of influence on
the UN is among the most interesting aspects of
the book: she uses transnational and social movements theory to point out how the movement
must change and act to achieve its goals.
While the book is well organized, slight problems with grammar and sentence construction
mar an otherwise professional piece of work.
Klimova-Alexander’s case study of the Romani
activists contributes to political science by examining a neglected case of political activism, by
testing claims in the transnational and social
movements literature and by providing policymakers with the information they lack to make
informed decisions concerning Romani activists.
This book will be of interest to scholars of indigenous activism, international organizations and
the growing influence of NGOs, and those interested in different possibilities for collective representation in world politics.
June Samuel Swinski
(University of Maryland)
Globalisation, Policy Transfer and Policy
Research Institutes by Stella Ladi.
Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2005. 203pp.,
£55.00, ISBN 1 84376 899 2
The impact of non-governmental players has
been given scant attention in the policy transfer
literature. This book addresses that gap and provides a detailed exploration of their role and
influence in this process within a European
context. Using participant observations, interviews and documentary analysis as her main
sources, Stella Ladi explores three case studies
through a multi-level structure and agency
framework of analysis. The theoretical framework, which is developed at the beginning of the
book and rooted in a critical realist perspective,
combines macro, meso and micro levels of analysis by considering the influence and role of
Europeanisation, globalisation, policy transfer and
policy research institutes.
The interesting set of case studies used in the
book covers both different European countries
and different areas of policy transfer. The first
case looks at the transfer of policy ideas by
examining the role of the Dutch International
Dialogues Foundation in transferring youth
employment programmes from the Netherlands
to other European and Arab-Mediterranean
countries. The second case analyses the role of
the German policy research institute Understandingbus in the transfer of the Ecotrans envi© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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381
ronmental policy programme. The final case
deals with the transfer of policy institutions: it
focuses on the role of Paremvassi, a Greek policy
research institute, in the transfer of the Ombudsman institution to Greece. Each case is given a
chapter discussing the underlying discourse, the
structures and agents involved and their relationship, as well as the specific area of transfer. After
the cases have been explored in their own right,
a further chapter compares the different emerging facets of the involvement of policy research
institutes in the policy transfer process.
This well-written, easily accessible and clearlystructured book is a welcome addition to the
policy transfer literature and can be recommended to anybody interested in this field. Not
only does it make an important empirical contribution to our understanding of the policy transfer
arena but it also provides a useful analytical
framework that warrants further exploration
and development.
Tobias Jung
(University of St Andrews)
Political Issues in the World Today by Don
MacIver (ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. 262pp., £12.99, ISBN 0 7190
6705 7
As a contribution to the ‘Politics Today’ series, this
book aims to introduce readers to the salient
political issues of the post-Cold War era. It also
seeks to identify the long-term trends behind the
scenes of the issues that are now prominent in
political discourse and the media. MacIver is concerned to emphasise the lengthy processes of
change that have helped bring about the contemporary global political environment.As he stresses,
this global context must be grasped if the contemporary political issues are to be properly
understood.
Having discussed the global context in some
detail in his introduction, MacIver usefully divides
the chapters into three parts: ‘Challenges to the
State’; ‘Ethical and Normative Issues’; and ‘Practical Policy Issues’.A book such as this, covering a
wide range of diverse issues, certainly requires this
sort of organisation, which enables readers to
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focus upon issues of concern. Although not
explicitly aimed at any particular readership, it will
be of greatest benefit to undergraduates either on
general ‘Introduction to Politics’-type modules or
searching the library for introductory chapters to
ease them into more specialised modules. With
clear chapter titles such as ‘Democratisation’,
‘Environment’, ‘Human Rights’, ‘International
Morality’,‘Ethnic Conflict’ and ‘Gender’, students
will quickly find what they need.
The book succeeds in clarifying the processes
of change which have helped characterise a range
of issues that interlink with one another in the
world today.What would, however, strengthen the
book further would be introductory pages to each
of the parts, in which MacIver might have provided a commentary. This would help demonstrate more clearly the way in which the changes
and trends he discusses in his introduction have
contributed to a global system in which none of
the issues can be fully understood in isolation.
Alternatively, MacIver might have knitted the
book together by commenting upon each chapter
in his introduction. The introduction offers an
informative account of the processes of change
that have brought about the contemporary global
era. MacIver might have added a few pages
guiding the reader through the book, indicating
the way in which each issue has been shaped or
reshaped by the processes of change he details.
References and a bibliography, which this otherwise impressive introduction lacks (but which the
other chapters do have), would also have helped
transform it into a stronger first chapter with
which to set the scene for what follows. Nevertheless, this book is a very impressive introduction
to contemporary political issues.
Peter Lamb
(Keele University)
The New Accountability: Environmental
Responsibility across Borders by Michael
Mason. London: Earthscan, 2005. 205pp.,
£19.99, ISBN 1 84407 067 0
Michael Mason concludes this detailed and perceptive study of transnational environmental
accountability with the observation that the
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INTER NATIONAL RELATIONS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
‘threat or use of force across borders to prevent
severe, systematic environmental damage may well
become more likely’ (p. 177). He argues that we
must move beyond the limitations of state sovereignty to consider broader transnational notions
of harm prevention, and our ‘responsibility to
protect’.
Theoretically it is convincingly pluralistic,
drawing upon the early twentieth-century philosopher John Dewey, German sociologist Ulrich
Beck and cosmopolitan IR theorist Andrew
Linklater. Methodologically, Mason utilises
both close technical and legal analysis and
questionnaires. Schematically, the book begins by
setting out the notion of accountability as usually
defined in liberal political thought, which comprises both answerability and redress, before
observing both how reactive and state-centric this
formulation is. He draws upon Dewey’s notion of
‘affected publics’ to broaden the question of
liberal democratic accountability beyond the sovereign nation-state context, and sets out to chart
the emergence of ‘new accountability’ norms that
would prevent harm, include all relevant actors
and consider all affected publics impartially. He
tracks these norms in various contexts, including
NGO activism (chapter 2); multilateral environmental agreements (chapter 3); the WTO (chapter
4); the marine oil pollution regime (chapter 5);
and corporate environmentalism (chapter 6).
One difficulty with making states or industries
more accountable is identifying clear causal linkages between the polluter and the environmental
damage – this is Beck’s ‘organised irresponsibility’
(pp. 20–1). As Mason recognises, it is deep-seated
and systemic risk sources that present the greatest
threats, and it is in these cases where finding
someone who can be legally held accountable is
least likely. Such systemic risks render the category of guiltless ‘affected publics’ problematic.
His optimism that such problems can be overcome, like his rather literal reading of Habermas
and the possibility of public ‘free, uncoerced communication’ (p. 24) could be complicated by a
closer engagement with the post-structuralists he
merely flirts with (p. 23).
Yet overall Mason compellingly demonstrates
the emergence of new norms of accountability
for cross-border ecological harm in several
arenas. While his framework of accountability is
both ambitious and optimistic, and unlikely to
prove equal to the full complexities of the ecological risks our societies face, his empirical
charting of the state of current responsibilities for
environmental damage is both convincing and
fascinating.
Carl Death
(University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
Nuclear First Strike: Consequences of a
Broken Taboo by George H. Quester.
Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2006. 159pp., $22.95, ISBN 0 8018 8285 0
This provocative and timely work examines
various scenarios in which the deployment of
nuclear weapons could occur, the probable consequences of such an escalation, the likely world
reactions and the plausible policy ramifications.
The book is a revision and an expansion of an
exploratory study undertaken for the US government on three most probable nuclear events: (1)
escalation between India and Pakistan; (2) a capricious attack by North Korea; and (3) a terrorist
attack on the United States. Other lesser likely
events are also mentioned. Rather than projecting
the physical damage that would result from the
nuclear attacks, the author offers an exploration of
the political, psychological and social aftermath of
such nuclear conflicts. The 159-page book is
divided into six chapters with an index. These
chapters and focus are: (1) ‘Considering the Consequences of Nuclear Weapons Use’ – optimism
prevails over pessimism; (2) ‘Some Scenarios of
Nuclear Escalation’ – seven functional categories
are elaborated upon; (3) ‘Likely World Reactions’
– speculation since there is no experience in such
matters; (4) ‘Likely American Popular Reactions’ –
probable responses defined in seven categories of
scenarios; (5) ‘Appropriate United States Policy
Responses’ – seven probabilities based on United
States pre-eminence; and (6) ‘Some Final Observations’ – for example double standards, the concerns of the exception proving the rule and
proliferation with moderation. Many books avoid
discussing the possibility that a nuclear war could
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383
occur, the aftermath and the consequences for
emotional reasons, for fear of generating a selfconfirming hypothesis or simply because of the
general nuclear taboo that is sustained through
customary international law. Innovatively this
author, George Quester, a professor at the University of Maryland, does not avoid this topic and
undertakes careful thinking of possible nuclear
deployment scenarios and consequences. He
suggests that this may result in the world
avoiding using nuclear weapons until the year
2045. This is a probable conclusion given that
nuclear weapons were last used 60 years ago to
end a world war. The devastation shocked the
world to a point where 100 years of nuclear
concord is likely. This innovative argument and
approach is supported with substantial notes. In
this insight the author provides a starting point for
further informed and focused reflection and
preparation. In reading this book, written for
undergraduates but containing a wealth of data
for specialists, we can imagine the next four
decades with a moderate degree of nuclear proliferation and no nuclear use.
Glen Segell
(Institute of Security Policy)
Oil: Politics, Poverty and the Planet by Toby
Shelley. London: Zed Books, 2005. 220pp.,
£9.99, ISBN 1 84277 521 9
Toby Shelley’s Oil: Politics, Poverty and the Planet
successfully captures the complex and increasingly
important role oil plays in international political
economy. Based on well-documented analysis, the
book highlights vital political, economic and
social issues inherent in the global energy sector,
especially issues relating to the production and
distribution of oil and how they affect domestic
inequality and international conflicts.
Oil has been a powerful weapon in the geostrategy of great powers. ‘(S)cramble for control
of oil wealth proves to be a major spur to conflict
within countries and a source of tension between
countries’ (p. 2), the author contends. US foreign
policy is ‘often held hostage to oil interests’ (p.
103).‘Where Moscow was condemned for selling
oil and arms cheap to buy political allegiance,
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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China is alleged to be doing bilateral deals to
obtain oil and natural gas’ (p. 115), the author
observes. Indeed, Chinese influence has been
expanding in politically volatile regions by striking oil deals with countries like Saudi Arabia,
Iran, Sudan, Nigeria, Algeria, Gabon and
Venezuela. For many developing nations including those in Latin America where ‘petronationalism’ is on the rise, oil is often considered
‘a medium of struggle to establish a degree of
economic independence from the former colonial powers and US hegemony’ (p. 127).
Throughout the book, the author underscores
the fact that many of today’s political, economic
and environmental crises have been created and
perpetuated by our oil and natural gas-based
economies.The author also reminds the reader of
severe environmental damages caused by fossil
fuels before engaging in a thoughtful discussion
on ‘alternatives’ to oil, energy security and environmental protection.
The book raises a number of critical issues in
contemporary international political economy. In
less than 200 pages, the author skillfully manages
to discuss these issues, analyze their significance,
predict how they will evolve, propose ways to
enhance energy security and offer food for
thought to major powers such as the United
States and China to avoid potential clashes over
oil in the future. The tables and notes in the
book are also very helpful for understanding
global oil production and distribution and related
issues. Concise, timely, and easy to read, this book
serves as a great reference for students of international political economy and any reader who is
interested in oil and natural gas, geopolitics,
development, environment and international
security.
Zhiqun Zhu
(University of Bridgeport)
Allies in War: Britain and America against
the Axis Powers by Mark A. Stoler. London:
Hodder Education, 2005. 292pp., £25.00, ISBN
0 340 72026 3
Mark Stoler has written an excellent book on the
relationship between the Unites States and Britain
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during the Second World War. Allies in War makes
an important contribution to the diplomatic and
military history of the Second World War, by
focusing on the Churchill–Roosevelt ‘special
relationship’. Stoler examines all of the major
foreign policy and military decisions made by the
allies and concludes that ‘never before had two
nations fused their military high commands and
forces to such an extent and so successfully, or so
collaborated in economic mobilization, the
sharing of intelligence secrets’ (p. 228).
Despite this unique relationship, Stoler’s main
contention is that the allies disagreed on many
military and diplomatic matters and some of their
major formal agreements masked real behind-thescene differences. This argument challenges the
commonly held view that the British and the
American governments during the Second World
War concurred on the major policy issues and that
their diplomatic summits were characterised by a
high degree of consensus. For Stoler, the policy
differences among the allies were swept under the
rug during the 1940–3 period when the Axis
powers’ offensives were in full swing. But after
1943, American industrial and military might
expanded greatly, allowing the United States to
thoroughly dominate the alliance and impose its
policy choices over a recalcitrant and feeble
Britain. Stoler details the numerous policy conflicts between Britain and the United States ‘over
military operations in the Mediterranean and the
Balkans, decolonization, and post-war trade policies’ (p. 228). In most policy areas after 1943, the
American government made the most relevant
decisions on behalf of the Anglo-American
alliance.
This book will be of primary interest to international relations and military history scholars
since it furnishes a comprehensive case study
analysis of the British-American effort during
the war. It is not only well written but also
extremely detailed in the presentation of the
positions of the two governments during critical
junctures of the war.
Paolo Morisi
(Manhattan Community College)
The Global Resurgence of Religion and the
Transformation of International Relations:
The Struggle for the Soul of the Twentyfirst Century by Scott M. Thomas. NewYork:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 300pp., £18.99, ISBN
1 4039 6157 3
In The Global Resurgence of Religion and the
Transformation of International Relations, Scott
Thomas argues that the salience of a consideration
of religion for an understanding of international
relations is becoming increasingly clear. Examples
such as those cited by Thomas – the Islamist
revolution in Iran, Solidarity in Poland and the fall
of communism, and September 11th – attest to
this. International relations theory does embrace
room for discussion of non-state actors in both
domestic and transnational politics, as Thomas
notes, and he observes that the English school of
Martin Wight and Hedley Bull and the social
constructivist approach are more sensitive than
realism, neo-realism or class analysis to the influence of culture and religion, in that the English
school and social constructivism devote greater
attention to the cultural context which conditions
how institutions actually operate and evolve.
Thomas demonstrates ways in which, in his view,
even international relations theory in these two
modes may enhance their appreciation of culture
and religion by applying concepts of narrative,
tradition and identity drawn from the work of the
philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.
Few would dispute that international relations
will have to consider phenomena such as Islamic
revivalism. Where Thomas is distinctive is in the
degree to which he notes the relevance for policymakers and scholars of the cultural and religious
contexts which, in his view, support and condition
even superficially secular processes and structures.
Like MacIntyre,Thomas observes that, in a pluralist world, debate is always taking place not only
between traditions but, as well, within traditions.
Thomas is able to avoid the facile temptation of
viewing the influence of religion through the lens
of some sort of ‘clash of civilizations’. It would be
genuinely interesting to see some studies of international politics or foreign policy in the mode
suggested by Thomas. There may be some reluc© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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BOOK REVIEWS
tance on the part of scholars due to the fact that
such work would require scholars to master some
subject areas not conventionally studied by students of international politics. It may turn out to
be worth the effort.This is recommended reading
for scholars, policy-makers, graduate students and
advanced undergraduates.
James G. Mellon
(Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre)
The New World Disorder by Tzvetan
Todorov. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. 88pp.,
£40.00, £12.99, ISBN 0 7456 3368 4, ISBN 0
7456 3369 2
This is a small book with some big ideas. It
contains two sets of arguments: the first devoted
to the war in Iraq and its international implications; and the second focusing on how Europe
might respond to ‘American neo-imperialism’ (p.
vii). According to Todorov, the war in Iraq was
driven by two primary concerns: security and
liberty.Todorov finds these two concerns running
throughout Bush’s justifications for war, pointing
especially to Bush’s claim that American security
and ‘America’s beliefs in liberty’ lead in the same
direction (p. 11). Todorov argues that there is
nothing inherently inconsistent in the argument
that security and liberty might lead in the same
direction but that inconsistency has arisen in
practice.The US has often placed its own security
ahead of liberty – supporting military dictatorships in Latin America and, more recently, supporting well-known abusers of human rights such
as Uzbekistan and Pakistan. For Todorov, these
exceptions are explained by reference to the idea
that liberty abroad does not necessarily enhance
American security, a point which the recent election of Hamas in Palestine demonstrates only too
well.At heart, the problem lies in the fact that the
means of pursuing security and liberty are
incommensurate. This problem is exacerbated by
the American predilection towards a single conception of the good, a position in sharp contrast
to the plurality that genuine liberty brings. The
second part of the book focuses on the European
response to the war in Iraq.Why, given that most
Europeans do not subscribe to the American
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385
world view, was there a demonstrable divide
between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Europe on the question of
Iraq? Todorov finds the answer in security. East
Europeans continue to fear Russian recidivism
and feel more comfortable trusting the US rather
than France with their future security. To overcome this problem, Todorov argues that the EU
needs to improve its military capacity and become
a ‘tranquil power’ able to defend its members
against potential future aggressors.
This is a thought-provoking work, and the first
part in particular raises important questions about
the war on terror and offers a new way of thinking about the relationship between security and
liberty. There are notable empirical errors (the
Yugoslav wars of succession began in 1995, and
the Kosovo intervention was led by the US army,
both p. 52) but these are not central to the power
of the overall argument.
Alex Bellamy
(University of Queensland)
Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy
Change by David A. Welch. Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005. 275pp., £22.95,
ISBN 0 691 12340 3
David Welch sets out to discover under what
conditions we should expect foreign policy
change. He offers three hypotheses: (1) change
should be less frequent in highly bureaucratic
states with democratic regimes than in less
bureaucratic states with autocratic regimes; (2)
change will be most likely when policy fails either
repeatedly or catastrophically, or when leaders
become convinced that policy failure is imminent; and (3) leaders are more likely to pay the
costs of foreign policy change to avoid losses than
to realize gains of equivalent magnitude.
Welch tests these hypotheses against a series of
comparative case studies. Four pertain to international conflicts: Argentina’s decision to go to war
over the Falklands/Malvinas; Japan’s decision not
to go to war with Russia over the Northern
Territories; President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965
decision to commit massive American force in
Vietnam; and President Richard Nixon’s 1973
decision to withdraw from Vietnam. Welch also
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INTER NATIONAL RELATIONS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
explores three trade-related cases: Canada’s
aborted free trade agreements with the United
States in 1911 and 1948 and its decision to
embrace free trade in 1988.
Welch shows that his third hypothesis holds up
best in these cases. He thus proposes a ‘lossaversion’ theory of foreign policy change, based
on prospect theory. Leaders, for Welch, are not
motivated to change policy in order to realize
marginal gains, as rational choice theory would
predict, but rather to avert losses. Hence, decisions
to alter the course of foreign policy are seen as
‘painful choices’ – the title of the book.
Welch’s theory is robust; in only one of his
cases – the Northern Territories – is there insufficient evidence to either confirm or undermine
his theory, as this is an example of a change that
did not happen.
In offering a general theory to explain foreign
policy change,Welch makes an important contribution to the literature. However, he leaves certain
factors that are germane to foreign policy change
unaddressed, such as the role of personalities.
Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Mikhail
Gorbachev, Anwar Sadat and Ariel Sharon are
examples of leaders whose personalities played a
significant role in the dramatic changes over
which they presided. Welch’s statement that
‘people everywhere process information in more
or less the same way’ (p. 7) is misguided. Rather, as
Alexander George has argued, there is a critical
need for actor-specific behavioural models.
Even if it is narrow in scope,Welch’s theory is
original and merits further testing against other
cases of foreign policy change. Political scientists
and foreign policy practitioners alike would
benefit from reading this lucidly written book.
Guy Ziv
(University of Maryland)
Federalism and the Market: Intergovernmental Conflict and Economic Reform in
the Developing World by Erik Wibbels.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
xii + 276pp., £50.00, ISBN 0 521 84381 2
This is a book of two halves. One is a general
disquisition on the relationship between federal-
ism and market-oriented economic reform in
developing countries.Wibbels relates this to arguments developed by Riker about the application
of rational choice frameworks to the study of
federal systems and by Weingast about whether
federal systems are ‘market preserving’ or ‘market
distorting’, though he also nods to the work of
Stepan. Using economic and quantitative data on
a macro level, Wibbels finds that federal systems
were much less effective than unitary ones at
adopting economic reforms implementing the
‘Washington consensus’ in the 1990s.This discussion does not question the desirability of those
reforms, or consider that federal systems may seek
to achieve ends other than implementing this
particular programme, such as delivering,
establishing or preserving particular forms of
democracy, handling territorial conflict or even
maintaining the existence of a state (although he
does raise these issues in the conclusion). Moreover, characteristic of the rational choice
approach, it makes many unexamined assumptions about the behaviour of actors in federal
systems.
The second part is a more detailed study of
economic reform in Argentina and how this was
affected by federal–state relations. This draws on
more direct evidence including some interviewing, and in this part the author uncovers quite
how complex federal systems actually are. He
explains how, in the course of implementing economic reform in order to control spiralling
public-sector deficits,Argentina centralised financial power, while adding to the policy responsibilities of the states. States therefore became
increasingly (hugely) dependent on transfers from
the central government. It also explores the real
working of intergovernmental relations, rather
than assuming that there is a straight correlation
between governments of the same political party
and intergovernmental concord. However, having
found the macro conclusions and assumptions on
which much of the argument was based to be
erroneous through this more detailed approach,
Wibbels does not recast that initial framework.
While the book is likely to be of interest to
scholars of Latin American politics, political
economy and comparative federalism, the lack of
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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BOOK REVIEWS
success in relating the two parts of the book to
each other means that each of those groups will
find large chunks indigestible or of limited
interest. The publishers have also let through a
significant number of editorial mistakes.
Alan Trench
(University College London)
Escalation and Negotiation in International
Conflicts by I. William Zartman and Guy
Olivier Faure (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005. 334pp., £17.99, ISBN 0
521 67261 9
This edited collection of essays, located firmly in
the intellectual realm of conflict management
approaches, investigates an interesting and underresearched area relating to the problems raised by
the escalation of conflict. It is a focused and wellorganised volume aimed at researchers and
postgraduates. It brings together an impressive
array of researchers, from a selection of disciplines,
and focuses on the question of how conflict escalation and negotiations in a conflict may be
linked. Utilising a standard set of concepts associated with conflict management and negotiation
therein, it offers a set of insights into escalation,
which is presented as the key conflict dynamic (p.
4). This represents an important insight and one
on which the entire collection of essays is based.
It dictates that conflict fluctuates between escalation and de-escalation, dependent upon its key
proponents, resources and other structural factors.
Different chapters focus on how crises, windows
of opportunity, hurting stalemates and ripe
moments in the context of the undulations
of tension in a conflict define the relationship
between negotiation and escalation. Underlying
the analysis is the assertion that escalation is a tool
by which parties manipulate each other, perhaps
even including third parties. Indeed, the editors
argue that escalation occurs because parties want
to win, bring about negotiations, cover previous
investments, gain support, seize an advantage,‘feel
like a king’ and punish (p. 9).
The study’s aim is to offer insights for academics
and practitioners, itself a difficult task, and one in
which I feel it does not succeed fully, mainly
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387
because its academic diversity is constrained by a
set of positivist assumptions about both the discipline and conflict.This means that there are some
significant limitations on what this study can offer,
given the ‘new wars’ of the contemporary context,
the fact that most of the war endings
that preoccupy researchers in the current context
are located beyond the ken of European and
American scholars, and especially those who see
conflict as a basic contestation of power.This being
said, this volume certainly offers some interesting
avenues for researchers to pursue (perhaps bearing
my previous point in mind).Although the relationship between negotiation and escalation/deescalation of conflict is well known, the nuances
uncovered by this exploration add an important
dimension to the study of conflict management.
Oliver Richmond
(University of St Andrews)
We welcome short reviews of books in all
areas of politics and international relations.
For guidelines on submitting reviews, and
to see an up-to-date listing of books available for review, please visit http://www.
politicalstudiesreview.org/.
Comparative
Economic Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy by Daron Acemoglu and
James A. Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006, 416pp., £25.00, ISBN 0
521 85526 8
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson are both
highly respected academics – the former is the
2005 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal,
a prize awarded annually by the American
Economic Association to the most outstanding
economist working in the United States under
the age of 40, while the latter is a professor
of government at Harvard. This book is, therefore, something of a disappointment, displaying
the shortcomings of approaching a complex issue
(why only some states successfully democratise)
388
through a set of relatively simple abstractions
drawn from microeconomics and game theory.
The authors employ a conventional economistic methodological individualism, seeing attitudes
and interests as determined by incentives. These
interests engender conflict between individuals
and groups that results in redistributions of political power in the form of institutional change.
Democratisation stems from concessions wrought
from political elites by groups in civil society.
Because these citizen groups are unlikely to be
put off by short-term gains and promises that
elites can renege on, they tend to lobby for more
institutionalised gains in the shape of formalised
democracy. Democracy is most likely to succeed
when degrees of social unrest cannot be defused
by limited concessions and promises, and the costs
of democracy for an elite are relatively slight.
The authors, to their credit, acknowledge the
extent to which they rely on Occam’s razor.
Although the book employs advanced mathematical techniques, the narrowness of its
research design leads to problems familiar with
approaches that sacrifice complexity for parsimony – there is a lot of detail, or perhaps
anomalies, which cannot be accounted for:
reform attempts that hurry revolutions along
rather than slow them down, the role of ideology
and charismatic leadership in shaping preferences
and interests and the formative role played by
militaries around the world in stymieing processes of democratisation. This is not just a question of auxiliary variables that can be factored in
at a later date – it is a necessary consequence of
research that systematically omits the twists,
quirks and lurches of history itself.
In general, this book is most useful in establishing a framework for further research into
some currently under-examined issues, such as
the opportunity and challenges presented for
democratisation by globalisation. But, overall, it
does not compare favourably with its nominal
progenitor: Barrington Moore’s magisterial Social
Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Since Moore’s opus, US
political science has become increasingly dominated by formal analysis, the result of which,
to some extent at least, has been a restricted intel-
COMPARATIVE
lectual imagination in which mathematical
prowess tends to trump breadth of vision. This
book marks clearly this sea change in attitude and
approach – it is rigorous and robust but perhaps
lacking a wider sense of academic exploration and
engagement.
George Lawson
(Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Democracy under Construction: Patterns
from Four Continents by Ursula J. van Beek
(ed.). Bloomfield Hills MI: Barbara Budrich
Publishers, 2005. 496pp., £33.90, ISBN 3 938094
23 0
This weighty volume is the first publication of
the Transformation Research Initiative (TRI)
located at the University of Stellenbosch in
South Africa.The TRI team includes Dirk BergSchlosser, Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Radek
Markowski, and this book fully lives up to the
distinguished reputation of these academics. The
volume sets out to ‘bridge comparative and
interdisciplinary approaches in cross-regional
analyses centred on specific aspects of democratic
consolidation in South Africa, Poland, (East)
Germany, South Korea and Chile’ (p. 23). In a
nutshell, the authors seek to find if there are
universal factors and patterns shaping the ‘third
wave’ democratic transition and consolidation
process. The book is divided into four main thematic sections, concentrating on three selected
arenas of democratic activity (based on Juan Linz
and Alfred Stepan, 1996) – political society, economic society and civil society – plus an additional ‘historic memory’ arena. Each section
begins with a thorough theoretical outline before
moving on to empirical study of the five comparative cases.
This structure does provoke two obvious
comments. First, it is a pity that the authors do
not explicitly consider the ‘rule of law’ and
‘public administration’ (the other two arenas of
democratic activity in the Linz and Stepan
model) in any considerable depth. While they
are occasionally mentioned in the text, their
great relevance to transition and consolidation
could have merited separate sections (although
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389
this would have considerably lengthened what is
already a hefty volume). Second, the authors do
not explain why they have no post-Soviet, as
opposed to post-communist, cases. Any one of
the three Baltic states would make an interesting
additional variable of a successful transition.
Having said this, however, the authors themselves admit that their choice of cases and theoretical approach is contestable, and bound to
provoke debate.
The text is undermined by sloppy typesetting
and incorrect numbering in the list of contents
(e.g. chapter 9). Nevertheless, the book is admirably clearly written, theoretically astute and
offers interesting insights into well-established
paradigms as well as original, empirically based,
observations. The author’s conclusion that levels
of modernization, and pacted transitions followed
by liberalizing and globalizing policies, were
common to all the successful transitions is interesting not for its originality, but for the intellectual
and empirical rigour with which the authors
came to these conclusions. Thus, the book is an
extremely valuable and innovative addition to the
ever-growing regime transition and consolidation
literature.
Daunis Auers
(University of Latvia)
Democratizing Global Media: One World,
Many Struggles by Robert A. Hackett and
Yuezhi Zhao (eds). Lanham MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2005. xiv + 328pp., £27.00, ISBN
0 7425 3643 2
Not a book for beginners, Democratizing Global
Media: One World, Many Struggles is a collection
of fourteen essays about the impact of globalisation on the media and democracy in selected
countries. From the start, the co-editors insist on
the link they want to highlight between the media
and the processes of democratisation that can be
observed in various contexts. Here, we get fifteen
authors (some scholars, a few reporters) dealing
mostly with the effects of the growing media
diversification in a specific region, especially
where there is a lack of democratic communication in the public sphere, e.g. Iraq, China, Latin
America and Africa.
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In his foreword, Majid Tehranian acknowledges
that ‘the traditional public sphere of discourse,
primarily based on print technology and elite
public-opinion formation, is being supplemented
with a new electronic version’ (p. ix). In other
words, totalitarian regimes now face other voices
and new networks of dissidence, for instance with
the internet. In chapter 1, the co-editors bring
a historical account of the main issues related
to media and globalisation since the Second
World War, recalling moments such as the ‘New
World Information and Communication Order’
(NWICO) debate in the early 1980s, the
UNESCO crisis that followed and the phenomena of media concentration (p. 4).
I appreciated the excellent writing style of
some authors, such as Professor Colin Sparks, who
brings a clear insight and instructive elements
while studying the media and political transformation in Eastern Europe; he also gives a good
mapping of theoretical interpretations of ‘civil
society as contested concept’ (chapter 2). As such,
his fine contribution is not just a mere piece on
the media in ex-communist countries in Central
Europe and it will be relevant even for those
academics who do not focus on that continent.
Part III is mostly about social movements, with
one of the most original contributions here,
chapter 13 on ‘Peace Journalism’, following Johan
Galtung’s useful scheme on war journalism; it
raises timely questions about objectivity and ideologies in conflicts such as the ongoing Iraqi war,
where (according to that demonstration) journalists would be either ‘war/violence oriented’,
‘propaganda oriented’, ‘elite-oriented’ or
‘victory-oriented’ (p. 272).The last chapter (14) is
dedicated to activism, advocacy networks,
communication for change and ethical issues (the
promotion of ‘communication rights’, p. 303).
An uneven collection, Democratizing Global
Media will surely instruct many students in media
studies, international relations, political geography
and peace studies, and should be suitable for
scholars studying those selected regions.
Yves Laberge
(Institut québécois des hautes études internationales,
Québec City)
390
Protecting Human Rights: A Comparative
Study by Todd Landman. Washington DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2005. 231pp.,
$29.95, ISBN 1 58901 063 9
This stimulating book is concerned with the gap
between principle and practice in the realm of
international human rights. Since 1945 there has
been a continuous proliferation of international
treaties on human rights, yet in practice the record
of rights protection is much more compromised.
Countries ratify international treaties on civil
rights or against racial discrimination, to the
applause of lawyers, yet all too often governments
proceed to ignore these legal treaties in their
political behaviour, reinforcing the realist view on
international relations. Are the lawyers too naïve?
Are the realists too harsh? Landman breaks new
grounds by using systematic empirical methodology to answer the question. Whereas previous
works have concentrated their analysis on
one country or region, Landman uses a global
quantitative analysis, alongside theories from
comparative politics, law and international
relations.
Reviewing data on treaty ratification and
human rights violations from 193 countries over a
25-year period, Landman shows that treaties do
have an effect and change the way governments
behave. However, this effect is limited, and it is also
a function of larger socio-political processes. Measuring other variables,Landman found that it is not
simply law, but also democratisation, economic
growth and greater international interdependence
(measured by membership in international organisations) which affect states’ compliance with
human rights norms.Landman develops a complex
argument: on the one hand, one should be ‘cautiously optimistic’ (p. 166) about the benefits of
human rights law, thus refuting the pure realist
thesis.However,the relation between international
legal norms and behaviour in practice is not simple
and direct, but rather mediated by other factors.
Based on convincing empirical evidence,Landman
argues that the pursuit of international law is not
hopeless, yet it has to be complemented by efforts
to promote democracy, economic development
and governmental co-operation.
COMPARATIVE
While the statistical data collection in this book
is impressive and constitutes an important contribution to the field, it inevitably has a few
shortcomings.The measurement and codification
of rights violations can be subject to different
interpretations, and Landman’s data is biased
towards civil and political rights, leaving social and
economic rights mostly out of the analysis. His
choice of ‘control factors’ can also be questioned;
it could have been interesting, for example, to
measure the effect of inequality – not just wealth
– on states’ human rights records. Nevertheless,
this is an important and truly interdisciplinary
work, that will interest – and challenge – scholars
and practitioners from various fields.
Ron Dudai
(School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London)
State Feminism and Political Representation by Joni Lovenduski (ed.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005. 315pp.,
£19.99, ISBN 0 521 61764 2
The Gender Question in Globalization by
Tine Davids and Francien van Driel (eds).
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. 246pp., £50.00, ISBN
0 7546 3923 1
These are both excellent books, which deal in
broad terms with gender and politics. They are
both edited volumes based on careful collaborative work around a well-specified theme or question and in each case they are building on or
extending more recent theoretical developments
in their respective fields. Beyond these resemblances, however, the books are obviously very
different. One, despite its gender focus, falls pretty
squarely into the mainstream political science tradition, both in subject matter and approach. The
other is avowedly interdisciplinary, locating itself
primarily in the field of development studies, and
adopts a broadly constructivist approach.
State Feminism is one of several books to result
from a ten-year collaboration focused on the comparative politics and impact of state feminism. In
the present volume the central questions, set out
clearly in the opening chapter, concern the role
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that women’s policy agencies (WPAs) have played
in debates and decisions about political representation. There are case studies covering ten European countries and the United States. For each
country the contributing author has been asked
to examine three debates about political representation, not necessarily all with obvious gender
implications. Authors have adhered to an agreed
framework, which includes providing an assessment both of the women’s movement and of the
policy environment in terms of specified criteria
and an analysis of the ways in which the debate
was framed.The concluding chapter systematically
reviews these chapters’ findings to arrive at provisional answers to the initial questions. Although
‘insider’ WPAs could be very helpful in gendering
representation issues, they are not essential: rather,
key factors seem to be women’s movement cohesion and the importance it attaches to the issue
of women’s political representation. ‘Quasi’
WPAs within political parties have however often
been significant players.A further interesting finding is that success has often been associated with
the existence of a strong counter-movement.
This volume has been put together with
extreme care and contains much fascinating new
material.All the chapters are of high quality. It will
be a major reference work for people working in
this broad field. I have only minor criticisms or
reservations. The central question itself may not
be the most revealing – would one really expect
WPAs to play a crucial role in this area? Authors
differed in what they counted as success – the
‘half-full’ versus ‘half-empty’ paradigm. The conclusion, for my tastes, put too much weight on
numbers, that is on counting how many of the
debates selected for study had particular characteristics or outcomes, given the inevitable arbitrariness of their selection. At the same time, the
research design and concern with rigour meant
that perhaps opportunities were lost for more
impressionistic, comparative observations.
The Gender Question is similarly the end result
of a long collaborative process going back to a
workshop in Nijmegen in 1997. It is organised
not so much around questions as a theme. The
authors, all based in the Netherlands, want to
explore, with specific reference to gender, the
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391
relationship between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’.
Resisting the rather simplified interpretations
of globalisation as universalising (Fukuyama?) or
provoking difference (Huntington) they want to
introduce additional possibilities of ‘hybridity’
or ‘creolisation’, and more generally to emphasise
the unpredictability and variety of potential
outcomes. In the same vein, they are critical of a
tendency in the relevant literature to perceive
women as victims of processes of globalisation,
thereby understating possibilities of agency. Again
there are eleven case-study chapters, eight of them
set in particular developing countries. In addition
one chapter considers the process by which
the iconic feminist work, Our Bodies Ourselves, has
been ‘translated’ into a succession of languages and
contexts; another considers the experience of
single mothers from Suriname, the Antilles and
Morocco, in the Netherlands; and a third looks at
women’s experience in ‘Irangeles’ or the Iranian
community in Los Angeles.
This volume is again quite carefully put
together, with the editors revisiting the central
theme in a concluding chapter. Case-study
authors however have more freedom than in State
Feminism to develop the main theme as they
wish.This contributes to a somewhat livelier tone
though it may also mean greater variation in
quality. Taken together the case studies certainly
illustrate and expand on the book’s central themes
in a diverting and creative range of ways: for
instance we read how, as secretaries in the public
sector, women in Peru have sought to invoke
‘globalising’ discourses of professionalism – going
on training courses – to counteract the inevitable
‘local’ sexualisation of their role. Or we learn how
within the conservative PAN party in Mexico
women have used the discourse of motherhood
to justify taking on more prominent political
positions. But, as the last example indicates, such
strategies are often double-edged, invoking
restrictions as well as new opportunities. And in
other cases – the reinvention of the dowry system
in India, the plight of young single women
workers in Morocco’s export zone if they become
pregnant – the interaction of global and local
seems to leave minimal scope for emancipatory
agency.
COMPARATIVE
392
Each of these books is a valuable contribution
to the field and at the same time illustrates the
strengths and weaknesses of its chosen approach.
State Feminism is a little dry but extremely systematic in setting up its central questions and is
rigorous in seeking to answer them. The Gender
Question is more fun to read and throws up all
sorts of interesting new questions but the generality of the terms in which the analysis is cast – the
global and the local – together with the lack of a
specific research question limits the kinds of conclusions that can be drawn from it.
Vicky Randall
(University of Essex)
The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth
Century by Manus I. Midlarsky. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005. 463pp.,
£45.00, £16.99, ISBN 0 521 81545 2, ISBN
0 521 89469 7
How do patterns of massacre and state-sponsored
terror become transformed into genocide? Why
does genocide persist, some 2,500 years after the
Melian genocide famously recounted by Thucydides? It is these two questions that this impressive
volume attempts to answer through a theoretically
informed comparative analysis of the three great
genocides of the twentieth century: the Armenian
genocide, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. Midlarsky also includes the Cambodian
‘politicide’as a test case to draw out key differences
between it and the three genocides and cases
where the enabling conditions for genocide were
apparent but where genocide failed to materialise.
Midlarsky identifies important similarities and
differences across the cases and makes significant headway towards developing a generalisable
theory of genocide. The key similarities are that
genocides take place in time of war, the perpetrators of genocide have usually endured a recent
history of loss, often the wars they are participating
in are not going well and the targeted group must
be vulnerable. Differences include the position of
the Cambodian politicide within the communist
world, the scale of killing and the degree of loss
required to cause genocide.With these insights in
mind, Midlarsky concludes by turning his mind to
the question of prevention. Given that two of the
three twentieth-century genocides were committed by great powers, Midlarsky doubts that a global
‘anti-genocide’ army or the new ICC will have a
deterrent effect. For Midlarsky, if the perpetrators’
feeling of threat and sense of recent loss are the
main drivers of genocide, the best way to prevention is through measures to address these two
elements.
This is a comprehensive, well-researched and
insightful book. Critics might question the
theoretical framework of some of Midlarsky’s
counterfactuals – such as the hotly contested
claim that the Versailles settlement was critical to
the rise of fascism in Germany – both almost
inevitable consequences of taking such a broad
scope. Nevertheless, this volume significantly
advances our understanding of genocide.
Alex Bellamy
(University of Queensland)
Foundations of Comparative Politics by
Kenneth Newton and Jan W. van Deth.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
374pp., £45.00, £19.99, ISBN 0 521 82931 3,
ISBN 0 521 53620 0
This textbook of comparative politics covers a
whole range of fundamental concepts and topics
of comparative democratic government. It is
structured in four parts, covering the state, institutions, citizen behaviour and policies. Each one
of the seventeen chapters has a clear theme and
can be used as part of the core reading for one
teaching week. Within each chapter, there are
additional compact ‘briefings’, ‘controversies’ and
fact files that highlight single facts, sub-themes or
questions. At the end of each chapter, there are
also projects for students to review the chapter
content and guidance to further reading and web
resources.
The book is accompanied by a website with
useful additional material. It provides the course
instructor with multiple choice tests that can be
used to assess student reading in a time-saving
manner. Moreover, the website contains the briefings, controversies and fact files to download as
PowerPoint presentations (to use in lectures for
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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example).The chapters are written in a clear and
accessible style that does not slip into the banal
tone of some other textbooks. Newton and van
Deth provide numerous tables and graphs with
‘real’ empirical material. These can be used as
stimulus material in group discussions and help
the students to understand what kind of evidence
is used in political science research.
The book leaves out all non-democratic forms
of government and provides a limited account of
processes of democratisation. But, the authors
clearly state these limitations at the beginning.
Instead, the book does not have any regional focus
and uses evidence and examples from democracies in all geographic areas. For instance, to
explain the importance of political cleavages for
voting, the authors use Chile as an illustration
rather than the over-used European countries. By
taking this global view towards democratic government, Newton and van Deth emphasise the
universal applicability of fundamental concepts of
liberal democracy.
I think this book is ideal for teaching and
represents a better alternative than many textbooks in comparative politics. I strongly recommend its usage, either for second or even firstyear students. My only minor criticism concerns
the title phrasing. The title is too general and a
bit misleading because ‘foundations of comparative politics’ could easily stand for a methods
book.
Achim Goerres
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
Federalism and the Welfare State: New
World and European Experiences by
Herbert Obinger, Stephan Leibfried and
Francis G. Castles (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 363pp., £19.99,
ISBN 0 521 61184 9
In the comparative welfare state literature, federalism has been essentially considered as an
impediment to expansion.Theoretically, this thesis
is rooted in either public choice approaches –
which stress the role of decentralisation as a device
for disciplining the Leviathan – or in neo-institutionalist frameworks – which stress how the
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393
dispersion of power offers multiple veto points to
social and political interests inimical to welfare
state development. Empirically, the thesis rests primarily on macro-quantitative analyses, in which
the variable ‘federalist institutional structure’ has
been found to be associated – ceteris paribus – with
low social spending.
This important new volume, edited by
Herbert Obinger, Stephan Leibfried and Francis
Castles, addresses the relationship between federalism and the welfare state from a fresh and
innovative perspective.The authors start with the
‘impediment hypothesis’, but recognise at the
same time that ‘the impacts of federalism on
welfare state development are multiple, time
dependent, and contingent on a number of contextual parameters, including, most conspicuously, the design of federal institutions and the
power resources of social and political actors’ (p.
2). Moreover, in analysing the impacts of federalism, the authors distinguish between the
period of welfare state consolidation and ‘golden
expansion’ from the more recent period of
welfare state retrenchment or recalibration. Their
finding is that federalism did act as an impediment to growth in the former period, but is
serving as an impediment to retrenchment in
the second period, characterised by a ‘new politics’ of welfare. Thus, in general terms they conclude that federalism exercises an institutional
‘ratchet effect’.
The volume contains a very interesting introduction, followed by six empirical chapters on
Australia (by Castles and Uhr), Canada (by
Banting), the US (by Finegold), Austria (by
Obinger), Germany (by Manow) and Switzerland
(by Obinger, Armingeon, Bonoli and Bertozzi).
The conclusion provides an excellent synthesis of
the findings and a stimulating discussion of future
perspectives, also at the EU level. The volume is
destined to affirm itself as a landmark for several
academic debates (welfare state, federalism, centerperiphery relations and historical institutionalism)
as well as a required reading for graduate courses
in these fields.
Maurizio Ferrera
(University of Milan)
394
Mass Media and Political Communication
in New Democracies by Katrin Voltmer
(ed.). Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. 262pp.,
£65.00, ISBN 0 415 33779 8
The book forms part of the ‘Studies in European
Political Science’ series. The series is published
by Routledge in association with the European
Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) and
aims to compile high-quality edited volumes on
topics at the leading edge of current interests in
political science and related fields. The present
volume, edited by Katrin Voltmer, evolved from
an ECPR workshop and explores the role and
influence of the media in the consolidation of
emerging democracies, as well as the underlying
reasons for its success or failure therein. As she
points out, this is an area of investigation that has
been widely neglected within democratisation in
the past.
The theoretical perspective advocated throughout the book is one of dynamic interactionism,
whereby political actors, the media and citizens
are all involved in producing, receiving and interpreting political messages and are dependent on
one another: a change in one part of this triangle
results in new conditions for the other two,
which, in turn, will adapt their communication
strategies in light of the new circumstances. This
tripartite structure is reflected in the organisation
of the book’s main body: the first part examines
the media and journalistic practices in new
democracies; the second part focuses on political
actors and their communication strategies; the
third part focuses on the responses to political
messages, their interpretations and effects.
The authors in each of the book’s sections
provide a wealth of interesting cases.These range
from an analysis of the press’s supporting role in
the establishment of democracy in post-Franco
Spain to an exploration of political journalism
during the 2002 Ukrainian election campaign. Of
special interest was Silvio Waisbord’s exploration
of journalistic practice in Latin America and its
observable nonconformism towards a model
of journalistic objectivity. Mirroring sentiments
put forward in some of the other chapters, his
findings challenge the applicability of traditional
COMPARATIVE
journalistic theory that has become established
within Western discourse.
While many questions remain about the
media’s role in the democratisation process, the
writings in this volume draw a gripping picture
of the media’s changing role within it, from ‘an
instrument of autocratic power to an independent
voice’ (p. 2).
Tobias Jung
(University of St Andrews)
The Total Survey Error Approach: A Guide
to the New Science of Survey Research by
Herbert F. Weisberg. Chicago IL: University
of Chicago Press, 2005. 389pp., £20.50, ISBN
0 226 89128 3
Rather than driving the practice of survey
research, the science of survey methodology has at
most acted as a brake on practitioners, preventing
them from heading off too far in the wrong
direction.As an accessible and thorough review of
findings in survey methodology, this book is well
able to apply such a brake. Each stage of the survey
process, and each important survey design decision, is considered in some detail, and hefty literatures are neatly synthesised. Standout chapters
include those on interviewing (chapter 4) and on
item non-response (chapter 7), the latter featuring
an impressively lucid explanation of the complex
topic of imputation.Ultimately,then,a book that is
presented as a guide to the science rather than the
practice of survey research is probably of more use
to practitioners than many of the existing handbooks, which skate over important controversies.
Indeed, the book is rather less convincing as the
statement of a scientific paradigm.The notion that
surveys (like any tool of measurement) are subject
to error of various kinds is well established –
certainly since Groves’ (1989) Survey Errors and
Survey Costs – and cannot without hyperbole be
described as a ‘new science’. Judging by the title of
this book, the author would like to go further, and
to suggest that these different types of error can be
aggregated into some total. But how? Weisberg
goes no further than putting them all into the same
conceptual diagram (figure 2.1). Certainly there is
no suggestion that ‘total survey error’ can be mea© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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395
sured. Indeed, even on a conceptual level there are
problems with aggregation. Survey ‘constraints’
such as ethics resist efforts to fit them into a survey
error framework. And, since the error approach
hinges on the assumption that there is at least a
hypothetical true score that designers should strive
towards measuring, there are problems in attitude
question design where social psychologists have
cast doubt on the idea of ‘true attitudes’. In short,
the different kinds of error arising in survey measurement defy aggregation.That leaves one wondering whether the phrase ‘total survey error’
means anything beyond a re-emphasis that there
are different kinds of such error.
Robert Johns
(University of Strathclyde)
Autonomy, Self-Governance and Conflict
Resolution: Innovative Approaches to Institutional Design in Divided Societies by
Marc Weller and Stefan Wolff (eds). Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. 276pp., £70.00, ISBN
0 415 33986 3
In their new edited volume on autonomy,
self-governance and conflict resolution in the
modern world, the director of the European
Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg/
Germany and lecturer at the University of Cambridge, Marc Weller, and Stefan Wolff, professor at
the University of Bath, bring together a number
of leading and competent experts to examine
and analyse both more theoretical aspects and a
variety of case studies on autonomy. In their
introduction, the editors offer a general conceptualisation of self-determination and autonomy,
defining terms and distinctions. Then, Wolfgang
F. Danspeckgruber discusses whether selfgovernance plus parallel regional integration
might be a possible solution to claims of selfdetermination. He concludes that this concept
can be a model for ‘offering a community most
of the sought-after freedoms, while also assisting
other neighboring communities and avoiding the
difficult path of redrawing international boundaries’ (p. 42). The following chapters are devoted
to case studies, illustrating and illuminating both
different and distinct approaches and present-day
© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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experiences with autonomy. The cases focus
on post-Yugoslavia (Marc Weller), Crimea (Bill
Bowring), insular autonomy in the Nordic
region with a special emphasis on the Aland case
(Elisabeth Nauclér), Western Europe (Brussels,
Northern Ireland and South Tyrol by Stefan
Wolff), Sudan (Marc Weller), indigenous people
and autonomy in Latin America (Willem Assis),
regional autonomy and the state in Indonesia
(Mark Turner) and an analysis of the regional
ethnic autonomy system in China (Erik Friberg).
All chapters are well written with a clear focus
and substantiated analysis, which is supported by
both figures and tables.
Surprisingly, the Russian experience on ethnic
self-government, both territorial and nonterritorial autonomy, is not addressed at all in this
volume. Thus, an analysis of the actual impact of
the Russian law on national cultural autonomy,
adopted in 1996, might have added yet another
relevant case to the general analysis and valuable
examples from Europe, Africa and Asia included.
Further, a case study on the regulations for
the Sami communities in Norway, Sweden and
Finland would have offered another interesting
present-day dimension.
The volume is recommendable and very
useful both as a textbook and as a reader for
those scholars and practitioners interested in
issues related to autonomy and self-governance.
The relevance of these issues is convincingly
stressed by the editors in their concluding
remarks: ‘introducing genuine and generous
autonomy and self-government structures can
mean the difference between prolonged and
violent ethnic conflict and peaceful interethnic
coexistence’ (p. 270).
Jorgen Kuhl
(University of Southern Denmark)
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