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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association 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) © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 313 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 POLITICAL THEOR Y 314 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 315 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 POLITICAL THEOR Y 316 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 317 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 POLITICAL THEOR Y 318 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) © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 319 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, POLITICAL THEOR Y 320 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 321 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 323 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 POLITICAL THEOR Y 324 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 325 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 326 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 327 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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- POLITICAL THEOR Y 328 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 329 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 POLITICAL THEOR Y 330 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 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 theoretically neglected. None the less, particu© 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 331 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 POLITICAL THEOR Y 332 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) © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 333 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 335 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 BR ITAIN AND IRELAND 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) 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/. 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 337 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 339 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 343 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 345 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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’. © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 347 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 349 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 EUROPE 350 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 351 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. EUROPE 352 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 EUROPE 354 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). © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 355 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 EUROPE 356 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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. ASIA 358 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. For guidelines on submitting reviews, and to see an up-to-date listing of books available for review, please visit http://www. politicalstudiesreview.org/. 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 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 ASIA 360 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 365 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 372 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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. 374 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 375 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. 376 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 377 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 378 INTER NATIONAL RELATIONS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 379 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. © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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) 380 INTER NATIONAL RELATIONS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 382 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 384 INTER NATIONAL RELATIONS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 386 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 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. © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 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 © 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) BOOK REVIEWS 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 Political Studies Review: 2006, 4(3) 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) 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/.