review of clausewitz’s timeless trinity: a framework for modern war, by colin m. fleming,...

Book reviews

International Affairs 90: 5 (2014) 1201–1251© 2014 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2014 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ox4 2dq, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

International Relations theory

Guide to the English School in international studies. Edited by Cornelia Navari and Daniel M. Green. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 2014. 246pp. Index. £65.00. isbn 978 1 118 62477 7.

The editors of this impressive volume of essays have done valuable service to International Relations scholarship. The English School has a long and distinguished academic pedigree. It has, over several decades, offered a distinctive theoretical contribution in contrast to the neo-Hobbesian ‘realist’ paradigm which dominated the discipline throughout the Cold War and, indeed, still exerts a powerful influence on both theory and practice.

What this volume offers is an account of the School’s origins together with a fine study of its major preoccupations over a period of 60 years. Some 17 contributions have been assembled; all, without exception, provide important insights into the key themes that have dominated English School debate. In the space of a short review one cannot do adequate justice to the merits of so wide-ranging a collection, the introduction to which by Daniel M. Green offers a helpful account of the evolution of the English School from its early beginnings under the auspices of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics. This complements a well-argued study by Hidemi Suganami on the ‘Historical development of the English School’. The School’s founders included Hedley Bull, Alan James, C. A. W. Manning, Adam Watson and Martin Wight, with the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield chairing meetings of the committee in the early years of its existence.

I recall, as an undergraduate in the 1950s, the sense of excitement generated by Wight’s lectures on the ‘Three Traditions’, Bull’s invigorating attack on conventional interna-tional theory and C. A. W. Manning’s idiosyncratic and thought-provoking undergrad-uate lectures, delivered over many years at the London School of Economics. Indeed, as Chairman of the Press Committee of the University of Leicester, I remember, too, the enthusiasm created by our publication of Wight’s two major works: International theory: the three traditions and Systems of states.

As Green rightly observes, in the British Committee’s discussions there emerged an ‘advanced empirical account of the patterns of IR across centuries of history together with an ethical and normative line of enquiry, mostly regarding the tensions between values of order and justice’ (p. 1). And these themes have remained an important part of the staple diet of English School theory, with impressive contributions from Barry Buzan, Richard Little, Andrew Hurrell and Cornelia Navari in this volume.

What is interesting about the English School is its capacity to attract successive genera-tions of scholars. Following the initial research and publication of the School’s founders, Green lists two further waves of scholarship including inter alia David Armstrong, Tim

Book reviews

International Affairs 90: 5, 2014Copyright © 2014 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2014 The Royal Institute of International Affairs.

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Dunne, Robert Jackson, James Mayall and Andrew Hurrell—all of whom ‘have continued working along themes within the paths set by the founders’ (p. 2). The third wave was prompted by the ‘relaunching of the School proposed by Barry Buzan at the 1999 British International Studies Association conference’. Members included William Bain, Molly Cochran, Edward Keene and John Williams, all of whom have impressive chapters in this collection. These range from Bain’s ‘The pluralist solidarist debate in the English School’, to Cochran’s ‘Normative theory in the English School’. Finally, Yongjin Zhang’s concluding chapter deals impressively with the ‘Global diffusion of the English School’. The insights he offers are fascinating, especially with reference to the School’s impact—as Green summa-rizes, an inspiration ‘for non-Western or “post-Western” IR theorising’ (p. 5).

The longevity and continuing relevance of English School scholarship and the cumula-tive impact of a wide range of literature testify to the School’s capacity to adapt to dramatic change in the arena of international relations and the effort to make sense of those changes and interpret them in a clear and precise language free of jargon.

Indeed, it might be argued that English School scholarship represents a critically impor-tant attempt to find a theoretical and normative compromise between the seemingly intrac-table demands and pressures of realist statecraft and the elusive promise of liberal progress in international affairs, hence the current emphasis on human rights, humanitarian interven-tion and the elaboration of rules and conventions to strengthen the structure and process of global governance.

Green’s conclusion on the scholarly virtues of the English School is apposite: ‘Perhaps more than any other analytical approach in IR, this endows it strongly with qualities of a school of thought, defined by its members, their writings, and by one’s membership. It is a true community of scholars in that sense, without (not yet, anyway) the prominent and often debilitating schisms that divide most approaches to IR’ (p. 2). Nor should we forget the intangible bonds of friendship forged across and within generations of scholars, and cemented by convivial gatherings at conferences at home and abroad. Long may that political tradition of thought endure, as exemplified by this well-structured and superbly edited collection.

J. E. Spence, King’s College London, UK

The triumph of democracy and the eclipse of the West. By Ewan Harrison and Sara McLaughlin Mitchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2014. 288pp. Index. £60.00. isbn 978 1 137 35386 3. Available as e-book.

This is an ambitious book that seeks, in the words of its authors, to address ‘questions about the fundamental dynamics in world politics since the end of the Cold War’ (p. 4).

There are many facets of the book that are slightly annoying, ranging from the fact that it is, in places, rather repetitious, to the insistence of the authors on stressing the importance and originality of their contribution. I would prefer that it be left up to the reader—or reviewers—to decide whether the book ‘ruffles feathers’ or ‘says the unsayable’ or ‘violates disciplinary taboos’ (p. 5).

Yet it would be churlish to focus on such relatively minor shortcomings. Turning to the argument itself, the ambitions of the authors become abundantly clear. Its starting points are the claims of Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington concerning the ‘end of history’ and a forthcoming ‘clash of civilizations’, respectively. The authors argue that the current wave of democratization—and particularly the events of the ‘Arab Spring’—serve to vindicate Fukuyama’s core claim that liberal democratic regimes are triumphing over



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their authoritarian counterparts. They also take issue directly with Huntington’s thesis that we will face a clash between different civilizations, arguing instead that the rise of ‘the rest’ in world politics has occurred not because they have set themselves up in opposition to the West but, conversely, because they have embraced the historically western institutions of capitalism and democracy. There will, then, be no clash of civilizations, but neither will we witness the ‘end of history’. As the community of democratic states expands, divisions leading to conflict will appear between them, particularly between the established democ-racies of the West and emerging democracies in the developing world.

The argument presented in the book is detailed and complex. It is grouped into six thematic chapters and a substantive conclusion. The first two chapters deal with the trans-national (connected with globalization) and international (stemming from the community of democratic states) influences that shaped the Arab Spring. The authors then go on to discuss what they refer to as the worldwide ‘crisis of authoritarianism’, underlining the enormous pressures on the world’s remaining authoritarian states, and in chapter five, the marked expansion in the number of democratic societies. Part three, comprised of three chapters, discusses the global implications of these trends, and the ‘clash of democratiza-tions’ that will result from the emergence of what they label a ‘post-western democratic global order’.

There are plenty of substantive claims made in the book with which many readers will disagree. The rather optimistic analysis of events in the Middle East, for instance, is easy to question given the reassertion of military rule in Egypt, the disintegration of Libya, the continued civil war in Syria and renewed violence in Gaza. Yet, as the authors point out, theirs is not an analysis that stands or falls on the basis of a couple of empirical counter- examples. What they purport to do is to sketch long-term trends, and they do this in a clear and provocative, if not always wholly convincing, way.

Herein lies the fundamental strength of the book. It deliberately sets out to answer the big questions about the evolving nature of world politics, and proposes answers that, at the very least, will make the reader think. I applaud the authors for their ambition, and would recommend this as a worthwhile read to anyone interested—as they should be—in the way our world will develop in the decades to come, and what this might mean for us.

Anand Menon, King’s College London, UK

Empires without imperialism: Anglo-American decline and the politics of deflec-tion. By Jeanne Morefield. New York: Oxford University Press. 2014. 304pp. Index. Pb.: £19.99. isbn 978 0 19938 725 0. Available as e-book.

The years since the end of the Cold War have witnessed a burgeoning body of scholarship on liberal imperialism and internationalism. The hegemony of western liberal–democratic values and the exercise of military power by democratic countries—as epitomized by a series of humanitarian interventions—helped motivate historians, political theorists and International Relations scholars to explore the nature of world order grounded in liberal principles. This post-Cold War scholarship has been further encouraged by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as intensified debates—in both academia and the media—over the role, legitimacy and limitations of the American liberal empire. While principally shaped by arguments about American exceptionalism, these debates often turn to the major liberal empire in modern history, the British empire, in order to draw lessons from its administering of occupied territories, to reflect on the relationship between empire and multilateral organizations or to trace a history of the foundations of a unified ‘Anglosphere’.

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Morefield’s book uniquely straddles the American and British-centric approaches. On the one hand, it contributes to post-Cold War scholarship on liberal imperialism by enhancing our understanding of early twentieth-century British Commonwealth ideolo-gies. It then brings these insights to bear on contemporary Anglo-American intellectual discourses on the uses of imperial power by the United States. In the process, Morefield highlights the similarities in rhetorical strategy between British liberal imperialists of the early twentieth century and hawkish Anglo-American intellectuals today. She argues that these two groups both produce narratives with the intention of deflecting attention from their country’s illiberal use of violence.

The book has three main objectives. First, it aims to dissect different types of deflective strategies which portray empires as archetypal liberal polities compelled to act imperially to confront and overthrow anti-liberal ‘others’. Second, in applying Edward Said’s ‘counter-memory’ method, the book seeks to critically expose what liberal imperialists, then and now, omit—or intentionally mask—when creating narratives about their polities’ history and character. Finally, the book intends to alert readers to contemporary foreign policy discourses that marginalize imperial violence, by encouraging ‘critical reflection about the nature and history of the “we” that imperializes’ (p. 28). Morefield thus promotes self-reflective deliberation among members of the British and American public, calling for a reappraisal of Anglo-American political identity (‘is this who we want to be?’).

The book achieves this goal. In each section, the author convincingly demonstrates how a pair of British and North American intellectuals disguise their empires’ illiberal reali-ties with comparable deflective tropes: Alfred Zimmern and Donald Kagan by projecting empires onto ‘liberal’ classical Athens (strategies of antiquity), Lionel Curtis and Niall Ferguson, who both construct metanarrative histories that bind their country’s past, present and future with timeless principles of liberalism (metanarrative strategies), and Jan Smuts and Michael Ignatieff, both international human rights theorists who consistently return to the theme of the imperial polity’s ‘true self ’ to make a case for benign imperialism (strate-gies of character). Morefield’s description of illiberal practice veiled by rhetoric is incisive. In the first section, she shows how Zimmern’s admiration of ancient Greek democracy misrepresents the Greek institution of slavery (p. 46). It becomes clear that likening Athens to British and American empires is Zimmern’s way of justifying paternalistic colonial governance. Kagan’s attempt to convince readers that Athens posed ‘no threat to Sparta’ (p. 79) is shown to be a rhetorical device, a way to insist that democracies, like the United States, ‘bear no responsibility’ for the conditions that invite war (p. 95). Morefield success-fully exposes subtle deflections and underlying rhetorical intentions, culminating in her concluding appeal for a critical reflection on political identity.

As a student of early twentieth-century international thought, I finally point to the book’s contributions to this field. Morefield’s analysis of Zimmern’s Greek world and her discussion of Edmund Burke’s influence on Zimmern (chapter 1) are important additions to scholarship on this classical internationalist—and supplement her previous work in Covenants without swords (Princeton University Press, 2005). Her analysis of Curtis’s idea of an epoch-spanning Teutonic racial chain linking modern England and ancient Greece (chapter 3) will fascinate scholars working on nineteenth- and twentieth-century race and racism. Third, her focus on the ‘actuating principle’ in Smuts’s evolutionary holism (chapter 5) will help readers better understand this enigmatic figure, marked out by his simultaneous advocacy of human rights and racial segregation.

Morefield offers an original, thought-provoking and century-spanning account of Anglo-American international thought. Her book deserves a wide readership among intel-



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lectual and international historians, political theorists and scholars of foreign policy, as well as anyone interested in contemporary international relations.

Tomohito Baji, University of Cambridge, UK

Bringing sociology to International Relations: world politics as differentiation theory. Edited by Mathias Albert, Barry Buzan and Michael Zürn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2013. 292pp. £55.00. isbn 978 1 10703 900 1.

The call for bringing sociology back into the analysis of International Relations (IR) is an important one. While it is not unusual for several disciplines to use sociological concepts, it is unusual in IR. It was not in the 1960s and 1970s when some of the most influential IR theorists used key concepts from sociology—Hedley Bull’s ‘international society’ or Karl W. Deutsch’s ‘communications’ and ‘community’ are cases in point.

The editors posit that those seeking to understand International Relations can benefit from a particular sociological theory—differentiation theory. In its broadest sense this theory refers to the form and structure of a large-scale social entity, traditionally ‘society’.Except for a by now old debate around Waltz, the term ‘differentiation’ is not part of the mainstream discussions in the discipline. One question runs across all the chapters in this book: what happens when differentiation theory, developed for the domestic level of politics, is deployed ‘to the larger and more complex subject of IR’? Differentiation theory is seen as a promising basis for substantive discussions and exchanges between sociological and IR approaches.

Differentiation theory is concerned with distinguishing and analysing the components that make up any social whole: it asks if ‘all the components [are] essentially the same, or are they distinguishable by status or function’ and so on. While this sounds rather generic, the book is not concerned with generic differentiation. It is centred on functional differentia-tion as developed by Niklas Luhmann. The editors identify three modes of differentiation based on Luhmann’s work—‘segmentary, stratificatory, and functional differentiation’. Thus even Zürn, who has developed his own theoretical work on legally stratified multi-level systems, was invited to look into his theses from this perspective.

Luhmann was a brilliant thinker, who deserves more international recognition. He has a strong, often devoted, following in his native Germany, and a probably equally strong rejection there because of his functionalism. I happen to think that it is healthy for most social scientists, including IR scholars, to get a good dosage of Luhmann’s thinking—his work is complex and systematic in ways that are rare today.

But I wish the editors would not use differentiation as a generic term, often insisting that all social science, especially sociology and anthropology, rests on differentiation. Indeed, most social science depends on differentiation, but not necessarily Luhmannian differentia-tion. And this does not mean that ipso facto differentiation becomes the source of all social (and political) theory. Much of contemporary theory gets shaped along other vectors. In this regard, then, I would argue that differentiation is akin to an infrastructural component in social theory: it is necessary but indeterminate. It is that indeterminacy that should have been addressed in the volume; after all, what unites the essays is Luhmann’s work. There are major critical IR theorists, such as Ruggie, who are not Luhmannians, but are concerned with differentiation.

Finally, functional differentiation is somewhat less productive as a mode of theorizing for the current period than it may have been in the twentieth century, when the complex categories it purports to examine—the state, the economy, the middle classes, International

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Relations—acquired their stability. It would be more fruitful, perhaps, to address how those major categories of meaning fail to capture some of what is going on today.

Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, USA

International organization, law and ethics

Sovereignty and the responsibility to protect: a new history. By Luke Glanville. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2014. 284pp. Index. £23.00. isbn 978 0 22607 692 8. Available as e-book.

It would be tempting but unfair to describe this impressive study as a history of humbug. Those who declare that their sovereignty carries with it an almost unlimited freedom of action no doubt mean what they are saying; while those who apparently acknowledge that responsibilities accompany sovereignty may frequently be speaking in good faith. The real injustice, however, would be to Dr Glanville. He has a more sophisticated thesis. Sovereignty, he argues, is too often represented as essentially absolute, or it would not be sovereignty, timeless and unchanging; but that is bad history, and a sign of conceptual confusion. It stems from a failure to ‘[conceive] sovereignty in terms of its historically contingent “rules”, which include the requirements for recognition and the rights and responsibilities that flow from recognition’. That in turn has encouraged the present confusion about the status of the ‘responsibility to protect’ oppressed populations from their rulers. Glanville’s marriage of history with conceptual analysis allows him to plot a convincing course from Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius, via the idea of popular sovereignty, the European treatment of ‘semi-civilized’ and ‘barbarian’ peoples, and the drafting of the UN Charter, to the 2011 armed intervention in Colonel Gadaffi’s Libya. (It is, though, arguable that his frequent appli-cation of the term ‘contested’ to the concept of sovereignty conceals widely differing cases.)

The Peace of Westphalia, bringing to an end the Thirty Years War in 1648, is the pivot on which his argument turns. What Glanville calls a ‘mythical definition of sovereignty’ has been constructed from that postwar settlement, mythical because neither before 1648, nor during the following three centuries, did European scholars—and rulers—deny that sover-eignty brought with it some responsibilities. But their extent, and whether and how they might be enforced, remains another question. There is still no straightforward, universally acknowledged answer. Building on the terms of the UN Charter, the UN General Assembly has for instance declared: ‘No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State’. This political position, initially championed after the Second World War by the Soviet Union, and attractive to former colonies smarting at their earlier subjection to European rule, has made it difficult to reach agreement among states about a ‘responsibility to protect’.

Nevertheless the UN World Summit Outcome of 2005 affirmed that states have a respon-sibility to protect their own peoples from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. That, Glanville argues, represented an old idea, as did the Outcome’s statement that the international community also has a locus. In 2009 the UN developed these themes, emphasizing the role of the Security Council as a last resort if military inter-vention should be contemplated. In an important section Glanville shows the significance, and historical antecedents, of Security Council Resolution 1973 of 2011 authorizing the use of ‘all necessary measures’ to protect Libya’s civilian population—despite the inevitable loose ends. Even so, some leading international lawyers, for instance Dapo Akande, have expressed reservations about the legal foundations of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (see

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http://www.ejiltalk.org/humanitarian-intervention-responsibility-to-protect-and-the-legality-of-military-action-in-syria/).

There are risks in proclaiming the existence of such a responsibility. Milton’s prayer for his co-religionists, ‘Avenge O Lord thy slaughtered saints, whose bones/Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold, … /Slain by the bloody Piemontese that rolled /Mother with infant down the rocks’, is echoed, in secular terms, by President Putin, who has lately explained that Russia will continue to protect ‘ethnic Russians in Ukraine ... who consider themselves part of the broad Russian world’. Those who stress such risks will presumably point to the chaotic condition into which Libya has fallen, and welcome the failure of Britain and America to take firm action when President Assad crossed their ‘red line’ in using chemical weapons against his opponents. But what matters, as Glanville’s account shows, is that at least sometimes the international community finds a way to protect the powerless, though the debate over this responsibility may soon lose much of its point for Britain, as its military capability shrinks year by year.

David Bentley, International Law Programme, Chatham House, UK

The endtimes of human rights. By Stephen Hopgood. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2013. 255pp. £17.50. isbn 978 0 80145 237 6. Available as e-book.

In his new book, Stephen Hopgood follows up his controversial analysis of Amnesty Inter-national (Keepers of the flame, Cornell University Press, 2006) with a more general funeral oration for the international human rights project. Hopgood declares he is writing ‘a polemic, not a history’. He aims to show that the quintessentially European mission of defining and imposing universal and liberal human rights law across the globe is breathing its last in ‘an era of rollback’.

Hopgood seeks to bury the western human rights profession after an inevitable death from hubris, cultural supremacism and over-reach. He makes a convincing undertaker but is a little too selective in the parts of the body he declares dead. Many parts of the human rights project that he does not examine are still very much alive.

As his title suggests, Hopgood’s treatment is an eschatological one. He is writing about the end of an era and a time of judgement when the spread of western human rights has obviously failed. And this time is now. After a brief period of hegemony in the shadow of the Holocaust and supported by American buy-in, the western vision of human rights is now largely defeated. Strong states, emerging powers, conservative religion and a new realism in US politics mean that liberal human rights and international enforcement through the International Criminal Court (ICC) and ideas of a responsibility to protect (R2P) are doomed.

Hopgood distinguishes between lower-case ‘human rights’ that sees routine and impor-tant popular struggles for rights and justice at a local level, and upper-case ‘Human Rights’ which he criticizes as the triumphalist ‘secular religion’ that came to replace God and Chris-tianity in European moral consciousness and politics. This new global ‘church’ functions as a ‘Human Rights imperium’. He has a good chapter on the International Committee of the Red Cross as the original international organization of the ‘humanist international’, another on the impact of the Holocaust on human rights, and a fascinating chapter on UN architecture.

In his limited analysis of the elite parts of the human rights project, Hopgood may well be right. His arguments are subtle, well researched and powerfully made. The new multipolar world with its re-emphasis on state sovereignty, which he calls ‘neo-Westphalia’,

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1208International Affairs 90: 5, 2014Copyright © 2014 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2014 The Royal Institute of International Affairs.

will mean ‘more politics, less morality and less Europe’. Here he must be right. The depen-dency of the ‘Human Rights’ empire on US power affords a nice dig: ‘the best hope for human rights may lie with shale gas’. Only a powerful US, secure in its own energy supply, will be prepared to put its weight behind human rights in global politics again. If not, China, Russia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Cambodia and many others will all easily ignore the project.

All true enough. However, in writing a polemic, Hopgood faces a major problem. To demolish one flawed metanarrative, he has to create another. His account of the elite ‘Human Rights’ project is a half-truth, and so is his eschatological prophecy. His treatment concentrates almost entirely on the rights and laws around conflict and mass atrocities, and so is focused on the laws of war, the ICC and R2P, with only a small discussion of family and gender rights. There is no analysis of wider social, economic and cultural rights that have done so much for public health, education, indigenous peoples, fair labour, free movement and economic justice. In short, Hopgood hardly examines human rights at all before pronouncing them dead and doomed. He would certainly find them very much alive if he allowed himself to examine the lower-case human rights of popular local protest, not least across China and South America.

So where is the value in Hopgood’s critique of elite-level human rights institutions and quasi norms in global politics? He is correct to point out that the western human rights establishment has been too zealous in its monism about some cultural and social values. Elite human rights agencies have also been too quick to trumpet new institutional develop-ments, like the ICC and R2P, as new global norms when they are obviously not. He is also right that human rights are up against it now as patterns of global power are changing. But this last trend is not new, and it is certainly not a sign of the end. Human rights have always been up against realist power, and always will be. People who work in human rights are not utopian. They work in constant struggle and routine failure.

Hopgood’s metanarrative about the western human rights imperium speaks to a small section of human rights activism, the bit he rightly compares to the ‘Louis Vuitton’ set that is all New York and Geneva. But even here things make more of a difference than his metanarrative allows.

As so often, I remain a bit bemused by the self-hating westerner that lurks within critical theory of various kinds, alongside the atheist conceit that to compare something to a religion is instantly to discredit it. Both these traits run through this book. They niggle me because I like living in a European democracy and I like being religious. Nevertheless, Hopgood’s book contains an important sense of human rights realism, and a powerful and accessible argument that will actually help the global human rights movement if its actors care to hear it.

Hugo Slim, Oxford University, UK

Conflict, security and defence

Men at war: what fiction tells us about conflict, from the Iliad to Catch-22. Christo-pher Coker. London: Hurst. 2014. 325pp. Index. £25.00. isbn 978 1 84904 289 5.

The author of this book enjoys an enviable reputation as a scholar with a formidably wide range of interests in the study of international relations. His writings on the subject of war—past, present and future—are highly original and full of profound insights. This particular volume examining the contribution of imaginative literature to our understanding of war is remarkable both in terms of scope and detailed substance. It will inevitably provoke disagreement about omissions from his selection of writers, but this is to be expected in a



book drawing—as it must—on the author’s personal and extensive reading habits. This is, after all, a personal account of the impact these texts made upon him over many years of study and reflection.

Christopher Coker’s aim in this book is to ‘grasp the essence of war as a cultural phenomenon through its existential codes’ (p. 9). Texts are grouped under five headings: warriors, heroes, villains, survivors and victors. Thus Homer and Virgil offer us the warrior examples of Achilles and Aeneas, protagonists in Stephen Crane’s The red badge of courage and Frederic Manning’s Her privates we are cited in the heroic category while Joseph Conrad and Norman Mailer are a potent source of villainy in the persons of Colonel Feraud in The duel and General Cummings in The naked and the dead. Survivors include Shakespeare’s Falstaff together with Yossarian in Catch-22 and Flashman, George MacDonald Fraser’s superb creation. Victors include Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Guy Crouchbank from Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of honour trilogy.

These are just some of the examples that Coker subjects to a keen and perceptive analysis, greatly enhancing our understanding of war in all its various manifestations. One such insight is the notion of ‘primary group cohesion, the extent to which a battle is often determined by whether the men hold together and retain their belief in each other’ (p. 79); to quote Stephen Crane, ‘that mysterious fraternity born of the smoke and danger of death’ (p. 80). Coker is demonstrably iconoclastic when he challenges the literary narrative that has dominated interpretations of the First World War: for him the ‘poetic memory of war is often wilfully misleading’ (p. 96). Much of what the poetry represents is not the total experience of the war, but a highly selective one: ‘truth for the soldier meant his own subjective experience, which was far from being entirely negative’ (p. 96).

Coker insists that his book ‘is not intended to be a work of literary criticism’ (p. 13), but he does himself some injustice here. True, he rightly eschews the arcane tone and substance of so much post-modern literary scholarship. But he does offer an interpretation of the texts he reviews and is not, for example, averse to quoting the writings of Harold Bloom, a formidable American critic. He also demonstrates polymathic skill in his use of the findings of, inter alia, social psychology, neuroscientific research and the philosophical works of Mary Midgley and Thomas Nagel.

Of course Coker has to limit his selection of authors, but on the whole he makes fasci-nating choices—some obvious ones, others surprising but nonetheless interesting and several perhaps unfamiliar to professional students of war. What does seem odd, however, is the absence of full-scale treatment of Tolstoy’s War and peace. True, there are several lauda-tory references to the latter scattered throughout the book; thus ‘War and peace remains the supreme war tale’ (p. 46). To be fair, there is one detailed comment on Pierre’s ‘moment of transcendence or awe’ during the battle of Borodino. But this leaves the reader thirsting for more of Coker’s insights into what is, by his own admission, ‘the greatest war novel’ (p. 87). Perhaps the sheer size and scope of the work was simply too immense for a short chapter in a book as wide-ranging as Coker’s which, incidentally, does include trenchant analysis of Tolstoy’s novella Hadji Murat (pp. 46–54). The other difficulty facing the critic in this context is Tolstoy’s combination of superb fiction with his explicit philosophical reflections on the nature of war. Both would certainly require discussion in depth.

Nonetheless, readers should not be discouraged by this particular gap in Coker’s argument. Indeed, he might be encouraged to write a full-scale study of War and peace, perhaps inviting a comparison with that other great Russian work, Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 which offers a graphic account of the ‘fog of war’ as it obscured the protagonist’s view in the opening campaign on the Eastern Front in 1914.

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Let me end by quoting Coker’s enigmatic but nonetheless startling conclusion: ‘war is hell but it is also much more. It may be unkind but it is also kind to some and the great many who read the novels that feature in this book’ (p. 301). I urge those not in that number to read this magisterial work. The intellectual benefit will be considerable.

J. E. Spence, King’s College London, UK

Nuclear weapons counterproliferation: a new grand bargain. By Jack I. Garvey. New York: Oxford University Press. 2013. 248pp. £55.00. isbn 978 0 19984 127 1.

A decade ago the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed Resolution 1540, a major contribution to global counterproliferation efforts in the wake of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 and subsequent anthrax attacks in the United States. The goal of the Resolution was to reduce the threat of a terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction. Jack Garvey, a Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco, provides a recom-mendation for further progress towards this goal in Nuclear weapons counterproliferation: a new grand bargain. Garvey offers a timely review of 1540 and of challenges in the contem-porary nuclear landscape; however, Counterproliferation will likely only appeal to specialist audiences, and fails to justify a controversial premise: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is derelict.

Despite a decade with 1540 and efforts by other nuclear regimes such as the NPT, nuclear risks remain unchecked and there are insufficient tools to address them, according to Garvey. This is largely due to the NPT, which is ‘failing to contain the evolution and exponential growth of nuclear risk’, resulting in a ‘profound sense of inadequacy’ and ‘pervasive desperation’ by its members. The NPT is overly focused on disarmament and any progress on other issues is held hostage, resulting in stagnation. Desirable as disarmament is, this is a long-term goal, whereas counterproliferation is a short-term necessity because of nuclear risks. The NPT, therefore, should not be ‘the sole foundation for the future of counterproliferation’. Garvey’s ‘new grand bargain’ would build on existing norms to establish a counterproliferation regime through the UN Security Council’s Charter VII authority.

Recent studies have highlighted the need for new thinking on nuclear risk. These risks are often greater than we perceive, largely due to classification issues regarding past incidents. But risk perception is also shifting due to the humanitarian impacts initiative, which highlights the consequences of a nuclear detonation and the challenges for any international response. Garvey’s approach largely focuses on counterproliferation with regard to terrorist organi-zations. Many of the lessons from state experiences with nuclear weapons, such as safety measures and misjudgement, could certainly apply to terrorist organizations as well.

Political will presents a major challenge to a ‘new grand bargain’, which Garvey acknowl-edges. Garvey dismisses the issue of political will because of the shared interest and past success of the Permanent 5 (P5) members of the UNSC in counterproliferation efforts, such as the G8 Global Partnership. However, the UNSC is notoriously subject to contextual political pressures, and ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Syria will likely influence the P5 dynamic, particularly tension between Russia and the West. In addition to these contextual challenges, however, Garvey’s premise that the NPT is in decline is controversial.

To be sure, the NPT does face a credibility challenge as the non-nuclear weapon states criticize the lack of progress towards disarmament. This frustration has manifested itself in the initiative on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons, for example. Nuclear weapon states, conversely, bemoan the seemingly imbalanced focus on disarmament



compared to the other two pillars of the treaty, non-proliferation and peaceful uses of nuclear technology.

The emergence of new initiatives speaks to the frustration with the NPT, but these are pursued in parallel with the NPT process itself. Garvey goes a step further in suggesting the NPT is beyond repair and failing. Initiatives based on this thinking threaten to precipitate the treaty’s decline and further undermine its credibility. The NPT remains the founda-tion of international arms control efforts. In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama spoke of the NPT: ‘I am committed to upholding this treaty. It is a centerpiece of my foreign policy.’ The treaty is not only of practical value in building cooperation on non-proliferation efforts, but is also as a hallmark of nuclear norms. Alternative efforts working towards the same principles are welcome, but not at the expense of the treaty itself.

Garvey’s discussion and recommendations for a ‘new grand bargain’ certainly encourage fresh thinking and approaches to the very real issue of nuclear risk, but the mechanics of going through the UNSC and the risks to the NPT make the feasibility and desirability of such a bargain questionable.

Heather Williams, International Security Department, Chatham House, UK

The fog of peace: the human face of conflict resolution. By Gabrielle Rifkind and Giandomenico Picco. London: I. B. Tauris. 2014. 256pp. £25.00. isbn 978 1 78076 897 7.

Gabrielle Rifkind and Giandomenico Picco combine their insights and personal experi-ences of conflict resolution and negotiations to bring us this original and interesting book on the human face of conflict resolution.

The Fog of peace is wide-ranging, incorporating topics that include negotiations, media-tion, future conflict, self-awareness and case-studies from Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon and Israel: some of the more intractable problems of the day. In scope and style it is rare to find a work that unites these topics with so much practical experience and personal context.

It is far easier to understand allies than to imagine the memories and identities that have formed enemies and rivals (p. 60). This is a common theme throughout. Influenced by the documentary The fog of war: eleven lessons from the life of Robert McNamara (2004), this book develops themes raised by McNamara, such as the importance of empathy and developing a capacity to understand the identities and memories that shape an adversary and its position. In so doing the authors make a strong contribution to a growing body of work in the social sciences on the role of empathy and emotion.

In this vein, Picco and Rifkind contend that rationality is an insufficient tool in conflict situations and they explore the emotions and motivations that lie behind violence and animosity, including the impact that trauma and victimhood can have on building trust in resolution efforts (p. 78).

Indeed, they challenge the limitations of conventional political theory in favour of a psychological approach, which emphasizes the importance of putting people, and an under-standing of human psychology, at the centre of conflict resolution. They write that ‘war is as much about psychological influences as about realpolitik and this in practice means recognizing how the past shapes the present, how trauma influences the way we see the world and how marginalization, humiliation and powerlessness negatively affect our ability to resolve conflict’ (p. 54).

As part of this, they emphasize the importance of narratives, both in terms of the role they play in constructing identities and telling a collective story, and in providing the lens

Book reviews


through which conflict and grievance and perceived. A fundamental part of transforming conflict is about changing these narratives and finding a way to move beyond the historical and popular rhetoric of a conflict, something seen too little of in political leadership.

Their work highlights the interplay of collective and individual identities in conflict situations, working independently and as part of broader movements bound by these narra-tives and by shared history and trauma.

With a focus on negotiations, the case-studies and lessons in effective negotiation draw on Picco’s first-hand experiences and testimony as a negotiator in places such as Lebanon and Iran, with 13 examples provided of successful negotiations with Iran to provide a broader context to current negotiations over Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Rifkind’s experience as a therapist who has been involved in discussions in the Middle East to build a dialogue between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and to understand the motivations on both sides, also lends itself to the case-studies.

The case-studies emphasize the possibility of a win–win outcome, achieved through mutual awareness of the other, creative solutions and an ability to move beyond the narrowness that negative emotions create to more imaginative and positive measures (p. 72). In this regard, the individual relationships between the negotiators and the attributes of a mediator, including trust, listening and an ability to take personal responsibility, are considered key.

Rifkind and Picco’s argument is accessible and compelling, weaving in practical experi-ence, politics, psychology, philosophy, religion and personal anecdotes. However, at times this accessibility is both a strength and a weakness. The book consciously, and the reviewer believes rightly, reaches out to an audience beyond those involved in the study and practice of conflict, security and warfare, yet at points the reader is left wanting more academic depth and detail of the events and ideas it conveys.

This interesting book seeks to challenge the short-term, conventional and crisis manage-ment approaches that the authors believe define current policy. They argue that in conflict situations ‘non-military options are insufficiently considered’ (p. 162) and at a policy and leadership level identify a lack of imagination and longer-term strategic vision, which might create the necessary conditions for change. In response, Picco and Rifkind explore creative ways to navigate the complex nature of conflict and offer lessons and advice on how policy and practice can be enhanced to meet the needs of contemporary conflict resolution.

Claire Yorke, King’s College London, UK

Clausewitz’s timeless trinity: a framework for modern war. By Colin M. Fleming. Farnham: Ashgate. 2013. 240pp. Index. £60.00. isbn 978 1 40944 287 5. Available as e-book.

Clausewitz’s trinity has become a key battleground in the struggle over the continuing relevance of the Prussian general’s 200-year-old theories. That is somewhat surprising. Before Martin van Creveld deployed the trinity as the linchpin in his all-out attack on Clausewitz’s work in the early 1990s, the intellectual construct had received little attention. Clausewitz had by then achieved an enviable position in modern strategic thought. His claim that war was a political instrument chimed with the prevailing liberal view that war, after the horrors of the world wars and the possibility of nuclear holocaust, was in dire need of shackling to clear and limited political aims. This conviction was powerfully reinforced by the quality of the translation Michael Howard and Peter Paret produced of On war in 1976 and by their extensive exegesis of the philosopher’s thinking. Van Creveld’s attack sowed renewed doubt as to the post-Cold War practical validity of the idea of political



instrumentality and control. Clausewitz’s theory, he claimed, was indissolubly linked to the state as exemplified in his trinity of government, people and military. With the state on the wane at the end of the twentieth century, ‘trinitarian war’ and Clausewitz were inevitably also on their way out.

Clausewitz’s defenders have pointed out that van Creveld’s version of the trinity was merely an illustration of another, ‘primary’ trinity composed of the interplay between reason, passion, and chance and probability. None of their counterattacks produced a book-length treatise—until now. The same publisher has seen fit to publish two books in a single year on the same topic: Thomas Waldman’s War, Clausewitz and the trinity (which I reviewed for The British Journal of Military History) and Colin Fleming’s Clausewitz’s timeless trinity. Whereas Waldman attempts a reading of the whole of On war through the lens of the primary trinity in order to flesh out its central importance, Fleming supplies a case-study of the Wars of Yugoslav Dissolution to illustrate Clausewitz’s continued relevance against his non-trinitarian new wars’ detractors. In addition, he argues that the trinity’s three poles should not be regarded as co-equal and that ‘policy remained the predominant element of the trinity’ (p. 3). Fleming thus claims to bring the trinity into line with Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is an instrument subordinate to policy.

The latter conclusion may not surprise many readers, but the discussion is nonethe-less valuable. ‘Friction’ and ‘fog of war’ are the best-known phenomena that impede war’s natural functioning. Many will also be aware of the importance Clausewitz attaches to moral factors and their effect on the ability to succeed in war. However, Fleming’s discussion of the trinity usefully draws attention to more fundamental issues which create resistance that cannot be smoothed over with technical gadgetry or blown away with overwhelming force. He demonstrates how ‘hostility’ and ‘chance and uncertainty’ impacted deeply on the political and strategic control and direction of the Yugoslav Wars. He succeeds well in showing the degree to which war and strategy are suffused with these elements which modify aims but do not invalidate the primacy of policy.

Whether this argument will fully convince supporters of the new wars paradigm is questionable, however. The Yugoslav case-study may once have seemed to exemplify non-state, non-political warfare (and indeed inspired Mary Kaldor’s famous 1999 treatise on ‘new wars’), but it is now generally accepted that the conflict was politically and militarily tightly controlled and if not a fully-fledged interstate conflict, it was certainly a war of state formation. The case-study thus does not provide the best test for invalidating the main critique of Clausewitz: the vanishing state and the loss of political rationales for war. Instead, critics could respond that it merely adds Yugoslavia as a postscript to trinitarian war.

Fleming’s reading of Clausewitz, and the trinity in particular, is marked by a certain carelessness and un-Clausewitzian lack of rigour. That is perhaps not wholly the author’s fault as it is common in Clausewitz scholarship that relies on the rather free English transla-tion of On war by Howard and Paret and little else. In Fleming’s case this means he ignores the case-studies Clausewitz himself undertook in the last years of his life when he devel-oped the idea of the trinity and found himself struggling to give proper shape and analytical rigour to the concept. These studies reveal a keen interest in the practical interplay between politics, policy and strategy, and an enduring belief that, despite great complexity, the odds in war were very much subject to calculation. This finds its very succinct reflection in the trinity under the rubric of ‘play of probabilities and chance’. Fleming misreads this rubric as ‘chance and uncertainty’. This skews his analysis in two important ways. First, his reading suggests less military control over war than Clausewitz believed could be achieved. Second, it implies that war is a more fickle political instrument than Clausewitz thought.

Book reviews


Clausewitz’s understanding of these probabilities and the process of calculation thus merits a thorough investigation. What that might moreover have thrown up is the possibility that Clausewitz’s understanding of war and how it works does not apply as straightforwardly to contemporary wars as many Clausewitzians think. The third element of the trinity, hostility, viewed in its proper association with ‘violence’, ‘blind natural instinct’ and ‘the people’, underscores this further. Where hostility resides and what fuels its intensity are crucial issues on which modern liberal thinking and Clausewitz likely diverge. It is disap-pointing that Fleming’s work remains silent on such deeper implications of the trinity. It may therefore not be enough to rest the argument that Clausewitz remains relevant merely on a claim that all wars are characterized—and their dynamic essentially defined—by hostility, chance and uncertainty, and policy. However much intuitive ‘phenomenological’ sense Fleming’s argument may make, the book perhaps brings less order and insight to the trinity than it merits and leaves the question of Clausewitz’s enduring relevance more open than intended.

Jan Willem Honig, King’s College London, UK

Governance, civil society and cultural politics

The national interest in question: foreign policy in multicultural societies. By Chris-topher Hill. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. 336pp. £55.00. isbn 978 0 19965 276 1.

Recent years have seen a resurgence in the prominence of the concept of the national interest in UK foreign policy. Yet serious academic discussion of the nature and utility of the contemporary national interest remains limited, and—excepting a recent special issue of International Affairs in May 2014 (90: 3) and a scant handful of other contributions—rooted in a series of now increasingly venerable literatures working primarily in the realist tradition.

This is a gap that Christopher Hill sets out to fill in The national interest in question. Hill’s premise for the book is twofold. First, his empirical observation that European states have become increasingly ethnoculturally diverse (or ‘multiculturalist’) in recent years, in ways that may challenge notions of the national interest and the practice of foreign policy. His second, theoretical, premise is that state–society dynamics have a key role to play in explaining foreign policy behaviour, in ways that are currently under-recognized or over-simplified in the foreign policy analysis literature. Hill aims to answer a series of specific questions concerning foreign policy behaviour in multiculturalist societies, including the ways in which ethnocultural diversity may affect the conduct of foreign policy itself, and the extent to which these factors may affect the concept and utility of the national interest in practice.

Hill’s analysis of these questions combines theoretical insights from a range of academic literatures with a detailed empirical analysis of key European states. These are grouped in three ideal types for the purpose of analysis and comparison: the ‘multiculturalist’ societies of the UK, Netherlands and Sweden; the ‘integrationist’ societies of France, Denmark and Greece; and what he calls the ‘parallel’ societies of Germany, Spain and Italy. Having estab-lished this typology, Hill goes on to examine key themes in contemporary European foreign policy, including questions of national identity and role definition; loyalty, security and democracy; the impact of military interventionism; and the role of the EU, across his cases.

His conclusions are illuminating, and point to a significant role for societal factors in determining the character and implications of foreign policy behaviour. He argues that the



multiculturalist nature of many European states means that the social basis for their foreign policies—and particularly their participation in war—may be less unified than in the past, and that this in turn leads to an increasing domestic politicization of foreign policy action. In this context, Hill is sceptical of the notion of a unified, hegemonic national interest, whether as an analytical descriptor of state behaviour or as a guide to action for foreign policy decision-makers. Instead, he sees government’s role as brokering various competing interests within society, for which there is not always a ‘common denominator’.

His conclusions on muticulturality are somewhat ambiguous, with no clear foreign policy patterns emerging across the three state types he identifies. Indeed, if the book has a weakness, it is that the narrative occasionally feels caught between two stools: on the one hand focusing on the particular problematic of ethnocultural diversity in European states, while on the other providing a much more wide-ranging discussion of the influence of societal (and other) factors on the changing foreign policies of European states and their notions of national interest. One is left wondering whether it is ethnocultural diversity per se that underpins the themes Hill identifies, or rather wider dynamics of social change and foreign policy practice; whether those be associated with the changing nature of European societies more generally or indeed the absence of a hegemonic threat narrative as provided by the East–West confrontation. What does seem to be the case is that ethnocultural diversity may exacerbate existing societal tensions caused by other more context-specific factors—such as a country’s active participation in the so-called ‘war on terror’—rather than necessarily cause them in and of itself.

That said, there is much about The national interest in question to like. The book provides one of the most thoughtful reflections on contemporary European foreign policy for a long time, and, in so doing, asserts the need for a clear (and long under-appreciated) considera-tion of state–society relations in foreign policy analysis. Hill’s final call, for a more open and wide-ranging debate about foreign policy issues across society, is well made, and chimes closely with his observations on the diffused and variegated notion of the contemporary national interest. The book will be of interest to undergraduate and post-graduate students of foreign policy analysis, contemporary European politics and multiculturalism, as well as to academics, practitioners and policy-makers working in these and cognate areas.

Timothy Edmunds, University of Bristol, UK

Women of the world: the rise of the female diplomat. By Helen McCarthy. London: Bloomsbury. 2014. 416pp. Index. £21.99. isbn 978 1 4088 4005 4. Available as e-book.

‘She is an adornment to the diplomatic profession.’ The lady upon whom an Edwardian permanent under-secretary of the Foreign Office bestowed this accolade was—needless to say—not a diplomat. Rather, her social graces and her cheerful and efficient support for her diplomatic spouse had won her the mandarin’s praise. The episode, not recounted in this book, captures very neatly the role women were expected to play in international politics until well into the twentieth century: they were there for decorative purposes only, and many fulfilled that role admirably and uncomplainingly.

That the female contribution to diplomacy could and ought to consist of more than passing round a gold plate laden with Ferrero Rocher chocolates at an embassy party had sometimes been asserted, but it was not put into practice. Indeed, it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that the gender bar was lifted. In Women of the world Helen McCarthy charts the slow and tortuous progress of women into Britain’s foreign service, sometimes assisted by male politicians and officials, more often resisted by the less enlightened of the

Book reviews


species. Here, as elsewhere, it was the two world wars that helped to break the mould. The manpower demands of the war effort opened up extracurricular opportunities for talented and determined women, though at the wars’ ends they often receded back into academic and other obscurity. It took two Whitehall commissions in 1934 and 1945–6 before women were allowed to enter the diplomatic profession, in 1951, on terms of equality with male candidates.

The work of the two committees, which came to starkly different conclusions, lies at the heart of Helen McCarthy’s well-written and often insightful book. Based on the minutes and memoranda of the committees, and supplemented by private papers and autobiograph-ical materials, McCarthy guides the reader through the maze of contradictory designs and advice that ultimately led to the profession being thrown open to all candidates, regardless of sex. This is interspersed with nicely drawn vignettes of some of those extraordinary women who played roles in the wartime diplomatic service, women such as Freya Stark or Nancy Lambton. The latter, later an eminent Persian scholar, had to wear academical dress on formal occasions—there were no diplomatic uniforms for women after all. But even after women were admitted to the profession, obstacles and glass ceilings remained, as Helen McCarthy shows on the basis of many interviews conducted with women diplomats. This oral history material is put to very good use here. Although her witnesses recalled only very few acts of outright discrimination at the hands of, mostly older, male colleagues, the marriage bar remained in place for some considerable time. And in more recent days, in 1995, at least one senior female diplomat, Dame Pauline (now Baroness) Neville-Jones may well have been blocked in her aspirations to the Paris Embassy by a male Whitehall cabal, though the evidence presented here is more suggestive than conclusive.

A historian of twentieth-century Britain at Queen Mary, University of London, as Helen McCarthy herself admits in the preface, is no historian of diplomacy, and occasion-ally her grasp of past international affairs is not all too secure. Not all the material assembled in her book will be entirely new to students of diplomacy. But she deserves great credit for having brought everything together in such an attractive and incisive manner. Given the nature of the subject, the book is perhaps a little Anglocentric. Princess Lieven, for instance, the early nineteenth-century socialite and Russia’s real ambassador to Britain, might well have merited inclusion here. Given the British focus, perhaps, some more prominent thought might have been given to the privileged social position of many of the early women pioneers in the profession. Nancy Lambton, for instance, was the grand-daughter of the Earl of Durham. No doubt, the exclusion of women and the often patron-izing tone adopted towards them until not so long ago grate on contemporary sensibilities; and it should not need emphasizing that their inclusion is right on principle and on merit. But the mocking tone Helen McCarthy frequently employs when discussing the opponents of women entering the diplomatic profession detracts from the broader message of her book. Were all opponents irredeemable misogynists because in their evidence to one of the Whitehall commissions they pointed to practical difficulties in posting women to certain missions abroad? A more balanced and nuanced tone would have benefited the subject. There is some repetition of material that could easily have been excised by a careful editor, as could the occasional grammatical slips. Nevertheless, this is a fine book that will be of interest to all students of diplomacy as well as gender historians.

T. G. Otte, University of East Anglia, UK



Racisms: from the crusades to the twentieth century. By Francisco Bethencourt. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2014. 464pp. Index. £27.95. isbn 978 0 69115 526 5. Available as e-book.

There is a growing consensus among historians of racism since the latter part of the twentieth century that racism needs to be isolated as a phenomenon in order to provide it with some kind of manageable structure and interpretative weight. This also involves a trend to approach the subject in a less emotionally charged but more analytical manner, covering multiple periods and regions. However, as Benjamin Isaac points out in Miriam Eliav-Feldon’s The origins of racism in the West (Cambridge, 2009), this is uniquely difficult to do on an emotional level. The question is how and where to draw the lines as to what the subject-matter actually is or can be. Francisco Bethencourt begins the process of framing by narrowing the focus to European history, while also incorporating other regions of the world which have significant historical cross-currents with Europe. Integrating existing methods in the field, he incorporates analysis of a wealth of primary sources and visual images. As suggested by its title, the scope of this study spans the past millennium, and this book can be ranked among the limited number of general histories of racism in the West.

Bethencourt accepts the mainstream approach wherein institutionalized racism—associated with ideologies connected with the development of scientific enquiry into a natural hierarchy of races since the eighteenth century—marks a particularly powerful and destructive chapter in the history of racism. However, he emphasizes the need for a nuanced approach to understanding the separation between nature and culture in the formation of racial perceptions. He critiques the idea that theories of races precede racism. While recognizing the importance of tracing the roots of ethnic prejudices since antiquity to their specific historical contexts (as in the work of Isaac), Bethencourt suggests that systematic discriminatory action is also a key component of racism. Nuances emerge not only on the level of interpretation and definition, but fresh insights emerge when historical data are organized in new ways. Ideas are an insufficient explanation for the devastating consequences of racism and its extremes of violence, whether slavery or genocide, and need to be combined with the study of social and political practices.

Historical ironies and contradictions challenge the structuring of material and analysis. The idea that theories of races precede racism is associated with approaches that organize historical data according to ideological development, emphasizing the need to distinguish between the modern age of science and the medieval age of religion, as well as between modern and medieval notions of social hierarchy.

With regard to this broad schematics of historical change, Bethencourt is wary of the fickleness of causation. Events, feelings and ideas do not necessarily lead to singular conse-quences, even as they narrow the field of future choices. Rationality is not merely scientific or economic, while specific modes of irrationality may not be fundamental to the human condition. Religious institutions contribute in significant ways to institutionalize racism: as Islam and Christianity compete for territorial dominance, as Christianity fights the enemies within during the medieval period and as it discovers new worlds in the transition to moder-nity. On the other hand, religious institutions create impetus for anti-slavery movements even as they institutionalize new ideas about the inferiority of non-Europeans. Meanwhile, concepts of natural descent and religious affiliation become blurred in the perception of ethnic identity in nationalistic projects, as in the case of the Armenians during the break-down of the Ottoman empire, or of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Political projects, prejudice

Book reviews


or discriminatory action do not individually determine the shape and power of racism, but create specific historical conjunctures.

Inspired by the connections made by Max Weber between racism, social power and the arbitrariness of racial classifications, Bethencourt traces the formation of classifications used by Europeans, while considering them within the broader chronologies of European and global history and comparing them briefly to non-European modes of classification. This method of structuring proves good at highlighting both continuities and change, while separating evolutionary change from discontinuities, which is important in presenting a non-essentialist vision of racism when its unstable manifestations hamper the easy sharing of insights across time and space. It also helps identify key events, as well as roughly how long it takes for a specific classification to form and remain relevant, and the timing of change. For example, nationalistic projects that reshuffle territorial boundaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries apply racial theories previously focused on the classifi-cation of global peoples onto Europeans, when identities are being reinvented in order to decide who to include and who to exclude.

This is a richly illustrated work—in terms of both historical material and visual images—that creates an interesting departure for further enquiry into a deeply challenging subject.

Shu Cao

International history

The US, the UN and the Korean war: communism in the Far East and the American struggle for hegemony in the Cold War. By Robert Barnes. London: I. B. Tauris. 2014. 372pp. Index. £59.50. isbn 978 1 78076 368 2.

Britain’s Korean war: Cold War diplomacy, strategy and security 1950–53. By Thomas Hennessey. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2013. 296pp. Index. £70.00. isbn 978 0 7190 8859 9.

Twenty-three years ago the present reviewer had the privilege of reviewing two books on Britain and the Korean War for this journal: volume 1 of the official history by General Sir Anthony Farrar Hockley (The British part in the Korean War, Stationery Office Books, 1990) who actually fought in the conflict; and a compact but excellent volume by Callum MacDonald in the series ‘Making contemporary Britain’ (Britain and the Korean War, Wiley-Blackwell, 1990), published under the auspices of the then recently established Institute of Contemporary British History (reviewed in International Affairs 57: 2). Although several relevant articles have been published in the intervening period, these two volumes, as far as I am aware, remained the only book-length treatments of the subject, which is rather surprising given the importance of the war and the status of the United Kingdom at the time.

Now, after this lengthy gap and like the proverbial London bus, two new books have come along at once, for although Britain does not figure in the title of Dr Barnes’s book, it is at the centre of his preoccupations, especially in its role as leader of the Common-wealth. Both he and Hennessey pay much attention to the role of the Commonwealth as an adjunct to British power and both emphasize the importance, in British eyes, of the role of newly independent India as a democratic Asian rival to the recently established communist People’s Republic of China. The main difference here is that Barnes devotes more space to the policies of individual Commonwealth countries and has used Canadian, Australian and Indian archives as well as those of the United Kingdom, which form the basis of Professor

International history


Hennessey’s account. (I should add that Barnes also uses American and United Nations archives.)

Another difference between the two authors is that Barnes’s approach is more analytical. Thus, his chapters begin with introductions setting out the military situation in Korea, the impact of evolving domestic politics upon the countries whose policies he is discussing and the overall international setting; these introductions are models of clarity and compression. Professor Hennessey, on the other hand, relies mainly upon his considerable narrative skills. The coverage of the two books is also slightly different. Barnes, for example, has a concluding chapter which takes the reader up to the failure of the negotiations on Korea at the Geneva Conference of 1954, whereas Hennessey ends with a fascinating chapter on the govern-ment’s ‘screening’ of released British POWs—aptly entitled ‘Manchurian candidates’—and an epilogue on the Bermuda Conference of December 1953.

Both authors discuss what most readers will want to know: the nature of the so-called ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States as measured by the extent to which Britain (and the Commonwealth) influenced American policy. Barnes writes, ‘This book has demonstrated that on numerous occasions throughout the four years [1950–54] … the Commonwealth was able to constrain US policy at the UN and play a vital role in preventing the escalation of the conflict’ (p. 244). Hennessey states, ‘This study argues that the British did have—albeit a limited—influence over American decision-making during the Korean War’ (pp. 3–4).

Contrast this with the conclusion of Callum MacDonald, which I approvingly cited in my 1991 review of his book: ‘There is no evidence that British pressure prevented the Americans from adopting any course which they might otherwise have taken in the Far East.’ Despite their erudition, Hennessey and Barnes have not caused me to change my mind on this matter, but readers must make up their own minds.

There are a number of issues upon which I would have welcomed more information in these books, the most important of which is whether the British government even knew of President Truman’s decision in April 1951 to temporarily move nuclear weapons to the Pacific for possible use in the event of a Chinese offensive in Korea. I would also have liked to see more, particularly from Hennessey, on the linkage between the Korean War and other policies of the British government which followed in its wake, notably the huge and ultimately unaffordable increase in Britain’s rearmament programme and West German rearmament.

None of this, however, diminishes the value and importance of both these volumes to the study of the Cold War, the British and Commonwealth role in it and, in Barnes’s case, that of the United Nations at a time when the United States could usually count upon dominating it.

Geoffrey Warner

British diplomacy and US hegemony in Cuba, 1898–1964. By Christopher Hull. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2013. 304pp. Index. £63.00. isbn 978 0 230 29544 5.

The limited historiography on Britain’s declining relationship with Latin America over the course of the twentieth century has understandably focused on the southern part of the continent, since it was the arena that provided the greatest diplomatic freedom of manoeuvre and relatively unfettered returns on trade and investment. Cuba, cursorily dismissed by most writers as a US protectorate before the 1959 revolution to the virtual exclusion of other powers, has featured only episodically in more general surveys of the

Book reviews


relationship; and London’s decision to challenge Washington in 1963–4 over the sale of Leyland buses to the island in defiance of the unilaterally imposed US embargo has been treated in almost all studies solely in the context of Cuban–US relations.

Christopher Hull, in a work based on extensive research in British archival records, argues persuasively that the Leyland deal—vigorously promoted by the Board of Trade over the objections of the Foreign Office at a time of widespread concern about the adverse balance of trade—in fact marked an ‘aberration’, both in terms of Britain’s overall stance towards the Cuban revolution and when set against a broader policy that for strategic reasons had consistently deferred to American interests in the western hemisphere since the late nineteenth century. British policy towards Cuba, as the author puts it, ‘operated within the margins of US acquiescence’, Anglo–Cuban relations being ‘not strictly bilateral from Britain’s point of view, but … rather an adjunct of Anglo–American relations’ (p. 208). Tellingly, London was able finally to secure a commercial treaty with Cuba in 1937 because Washington saw it as a contribution to Cuban economic stability. While ready perforce to operate within such constraints and to benefit from the shield of US hegemony which offered opportunity without responsibility, British officials were not loath to criticize US policy towards the island, although this was necessarily done sotto voce: for its ‘amateurish-ness’ (p. 85) during the 1933 revolution, ‘for failing to nurture a mature political tradition in a country under its influence’ (p. 133), while the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961 ‘confirmed for British policymakers that US policy was misguided, counterproductive and designed for internal consumption’ (p. 172).

The book is not just a study of the workings of the Anglo-American relationship in one of its multitudinous facets. Hull reveals much about the inexorable decline of Britain’s commercial position in Cuba, and Latin America more broadly, accelerated by the impact of two world wars; employing a vivid boxing analogy, he describes Britain’s position after 1918 as ‘reeling on the ropes’ and that after 1945 as ‘floundering on the canvas’ (p. 117). He analyses Britain’s position as an important secondary market for Cuban sugar and cigars and its pre-eminent (though not uncontested) role in the island’s insurance industry as well as controversial British ownership of United Railways (nationalized under Batista in 1953). The author additionally provides fascinating insights into some of the practical difficulties faced by British diplomats (all of whom are profiled) in this far from desirable posting.

One of the study’s limitations is a tacitly acknowledged over-dependence on official British records. The closure of Cuban archives to all but a few favoured outside researchers means that far too little is known about Cuban attitudes towards the British role in Cuba and about the attempt by Havana, especially after 1959, to play off one power against another. The Cuban perspective is gleaned where possible, then, from not wholly unbiased British sources, and from a smattering of Cuban press reports at critical junctures. While the author, by way of background, provides a useful summary of Britain’s not inconsider-able role in Cuba before 1898, he fails to offer anything by way of an epilogue on Anglo-Cuban relations after 1964. The US attempt in 1962 to restrict shipping links with Cuba that was firmly resisted by London and other US allies for its infringement of maritime rights bears a strong resemblance to the provisions of the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act, which was designed by the US Congress to accelerate the collapse of the Cuban regime following the loss of its superpower patron—and was equally resisted. As a nation reliant on trade, Britain—along with Canada, another US ally in an awkward triangular relationship with Cuba—later vigorously opposed the extraterritorial provisions of the 1996 Helms–Burton Act on the same grounds that commercial interests had insisted on their right to sell Leyland buses to Cuba in 1964. British acquiescence in US policies clearly did have its limits.

Europe


All told, this is a solid, well-written and cogently argued diplomatic history of an under-studied trilateral relationship; it sheds considerable new light on two particular dimensions of Britain’s slow descent from the zenith of global power.

Philip Chrimes

Europe

The uncertain legacy of crisis: European foreign policy faces the future. By Richard Youngs. Washington DC: Carnegie Europe. 2014. 170pp. Pb.: £13.95. isbn 978 0 87003 402 1. Available as e-book.

This is an impressive work of policy-focused scholarship and an important book. In 140 densely argued pages, supported by 20 pages of references, Richard Youngs offers a quasi-exhaustive assessment of the impact of the eurozone crisis on the European Union’s capacity to remain (or rather, to emerge as) a global actor. Structured around five key questions, the book essentially argues that the EU currently finds itself diplomatically and geo-strategi-cally adrift, having more or less abandoned its value-driven, conditionality-linked defence of liberal multilateralism, without succeeding in devising a new model of international action geared to defending its interests in a rapidly changing world. While serving up a lucid and forensic critique of the EU’s current hedging between largely discursive support for liberal norms and the pursuit of pragmatic short-term gain, Youngs nevertheless argues strongly for a wholesale strategic recalibration of EU foreign policy, and for a radical new approach to the continuing task of operationalizing cooperative internationalism.

The first key question is the extent to which the crisis is more than an economic challenge. As he does in each chapter, Youngs rehearses with exemplary objectivity both sides of the argument. He concludes that the crisis has changed the EU’s economic model, and has allowed Germany to emerge with potentially quasi-hegemonic power (although it remains unclear precisely how power within the Union will be reconfigured), but has not clearly paved the way for a great leap forward towards political union, or brought on disintegration. Indeed ‘muddling through’ seems to be the only course on offer: ‘slightly too much austerity for deficit states to feel comfortable and slightly too much financial transfer for surplus states to feel entirely at ease, but without enough discomfort for either group of states to be utterly unable to bear the costs’ (p. 29). The need for a new social contract is palpable and urgent but member states have done ‘pitifully little’ to think through the details.

The second question is whether the crisis has been a ‘boon or bane’ for the EU’s global influence. There is no question that the EU is now an ‘impoverished power’ (p. 32), with 90 per cent of IMF commitments being to EU member states, the Union having spent $7 trillion on bailouts, Turkey having replaced Spain as an aid donor and almost all countries slashing defence spending. Whereas it used to be regarded as a truism—to my mind errone-ously—that the EU exerted considerable power of attraction, the crisis has massively dented whatever remained of that asset. Much has also been made of the EU’s ‘strategic partnerships’, but in the post-crisis world it is increasingly the partners who are calling the shots, the EU being perceived as ‘the cap-in-hand, inferior member’ (p. 38). Moreover, the crisis has exacerbated disunion among the member states, exploding the much-touted ‘we-feeling’ theorized in 2003 by Habermas and Derrida, and leading not only to beggar-my-neighbour policies but also to the potential for structural fissures within the Union. While other analysts argue that the situation has the potential to strengthen the Union, whether through integrationist spill-over from a successful resolution of the eurozone crisis,

Book reviews


structural pressures to pool and share defence procurement, or other positive dynamics, Youngs suggests that such ‘Panglossian’ readings smack more of wishful thinking than of realism (a verdict I wholeheartedly share). But he remains convinced that ‘governments’ strategic choices can still influence the balance between negative and positive international spill-overs from the euro crisis’ (p. 50).

The third enquiry is into ‘geo-economic Europe’. In 1994, a study group organized by Chatham House brainstormed ‘British foreign policy for 2000’. The first thought-paper offered the provocative assertion that the UK had no discernible national interests and that the only function of overseas embassies should be to attract inward investment. That paper was confined to the dustbin. The EU in 2014 appears to have rediscovered it. Geo-economics—the proposition that ‘international economics is the central matter of global security’ (p. 52)—is here with a vengeance, marked by three main trends: protectionism, reciprocity rather than unconditional market opening and a preference for bilateral over multilateral trade agreements. Germany is the undisputed champion, boasting—proportionately—the largest current account surplus in the world. William Hague, mindful of that rubbished 1994 Chatham House paper, engineered within the Foreign Office a large Commercial and Economic Diplomacy Department. Mastery of this sport requires a clear vision of the real linkage between economic and political interests. Yet, as Youngs ruefully concludes, most European governments ‘still need to develop a fully comprehensive and political under-standing of what those interests rightfully entail’ (p. 72).

The fourth set of questions revolves around the EU’s shifting relationship with Asia. The cruel irony is that the EU arrogantly neglected its giant landmass neighbour until shortly before the euro crisis and now finds itself in the position of supplicant precisely as the boot is shifting to the other foot. Between them, China, India and Japan pledged over $130 billion to shore up the euro and European leaders queue up in Beijing for commercial and investment deals which involve less conditionality than IMF loans. This is not entirely a one-way street in that Asian powers still perceive relations with Europe as relativizing their dependency on the US. But the problem remains that of strategic vision. There has been some chatter about the EU ‘tilting to Asia’ alongside the US. But it remains little more than chatter. Youngs’s conclusion here again is that the EU has not even begun to figure out how it can leverage its remaining assets ‘to safeguard its own strategic interests and to prompt Asian powers in the direction of rules-based cooperative security’ (p. 95).

That challenge lies at the heart of the fifth key question: in a world of power transition, how can the EU understand the cards it holds and then, more significantly, how should it play them? In the US, there has, for a number of years, been a lively debate between those who see the international liberal order as retaining the capacity to absorb and co-opt the rising powers and those who foresee an entirely differently structured new world order. In Europe, that debate has been muted, although characterized at EU level by vacillation ‘between commitment to and doubt over the liberal world order’ (p. 102). The EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) is currently in disarray, while events in neighbouring Ukraine and North Africa have proved the much-touted Neighbourhood Policy to be badly flawed. The EU has hedged between half-hearted commitment to the liberal order and short-term ad hocery, a cocktail Youngs deplored as an ‘ambivalent mishmash of strategic logics’ (p. 121).

In a concluding chapter, Youngs charts a possible way forward. Intensive cooperation with the major democracies should strive to generate effective agenda setting. Transcending its former convictions that Europe represented a normative power, the new foreign policy should also focus on ‘post-hegemonic transatlanticism’, seeking to persuade the US to modify its own founding beliefs in American exceptionalism. In short, grand strategy

Europe


requires the Union to abandon both of its traditional diplomatic fixes, eschewing ‘both too much of the one-idea hedgehog and too much of the flitting fox’ (p. 139). The new top EU officials have their marching orders.

Jolyon Howorth, Yale University, USA

EU foreign policy and crisis management operations: power, purpose and domestic politics. By Benjamin Pohl. Abingdon: Routledge. 2014. 232pp. Index. £80.00. isbn 978 0 41571 2 668. Available as e-book.

Studying the European Union’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) has been a growth area in the past few years, not least among cohorts of PhD students up and down the country (and across the Union). And why not? Defence was a key component of the Lisbon Treaty, it regularly figures high up on the EU’s policy agenda, and its importance has recently even led to calls for the creation of a defence portfolio at commissioner level to integrate the political, procurement and deployment aspects of this policy area. In short, it is fertile ground for research. There are currently 16 CSDP missions deployed, both military and civilian, and another 14 that have been completed. These missions touch on the very core of the ‘sovereignty issue’ in the EU: is there a collective EU interest superseding the national interests of member states, upon which these missions are deployed, or do they result from the politics of compromise serving diverse domestic agendas? In short, CSDP brings together theory and practice, which makes it most attractive for academic research.

This book, a product of a doctoral dissertation, sets out to pursue ‘a systematic, theory-driven examination of what the EU has actually done’ (p. 3). The author believes that we can better understand the motivations for the CSDP by analysing its mission record than by sifting through the record of public declarations or institutional reform and evolution in the EU: we can learn more about the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the CSDP through evaluating its operations and not aspirations. As such, it is a solid piece of research, clearly structured, well signposted and internally coherent. The author identifies four ‘drivers’ (to use the jargon) of CSDP development to be tested by his case-studies of missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Chad. These ‘drivers’ are: balancing against US hegemony; pursuing the EU’s normative foreign policy agenda; fostering further EU integration by promoting a shared identity and meeting domestic political necessities within member states. There is also a chapter dedicated to analysing the motivations of three key players, France, Germany and the UK, in launching the four operations highlighted.

This is an extremely methodical work, which ticks all the boxes of doctoral research but sometimes has not made a smooth transition to a book manuscript. Too much time is devoted to explaining what the book is not going to do or include, rather than developing what it actually does. Traces of the PhD are also to be found in the rather tame reference to International Relations theory which is clearly included to meet the demands of the examiner and not to pique the interest and guide a more general reader, likewise the expla-nations of how interviews were conducted and the method behind case selection. Perhaps a tighter editorial hand would have made the transition from PhD to book more seamless.

But this should not be allowed to detract from what is a promising argument and useful set of conclusions. The author wants to convey the idea that contrary to much research on the CSDP, the primary motivation is not to be found in international systemic pressures forcing the EU go down certain routes. There was no external threat impelling the creation of the CSDP in the post-Cold War period, certainly not of the magnitude or focus of the Soviet Union, nor does the evidence emerging from the cases suggest that balancing the

Book reviews


power and influence of the US was a causal factor in the evolution of Europe’s defence capabilities. Perhaps, the author could have devoted some space to examining another commonly suggested external pressure which spurred on the creation of the CSDP and that is the fiasco of Europe’s engagement in the wars of Yugoslavia’s collapse in the 1990s. In turn, the author also argues that it is not ‘normative power Europe’ as such which the CSDP serves, but its purpose is to highlight concerns about the erosion of or threat to liberal values internationally: the EU’s defence policy is not about normative diffusion but about signalling the importance of certain values.

Essentially, the core of the argument and the conclusions are that the CSDP is driven internally and not by reactions to systemic pressures and external threats, and that the source of this internal driver is to be found within the set of preferences which member states bring to the table. These can be reactive to a changing external environment, are set in the context of a liberal agenda and may have integrationist side-effects, but are driven primarily by ‘domestic demands’. This is a plausible set of conclusions backed up by a solid empirical base. There could have been a deeper engagement with the geopolitical shifts in world politics and perhaps more importantly the lack of an EU strategic vision, and what they imply for the CSDP. But overall, this book will be a useful addition to the bibliog-raphies of students of the EU and its foreign and defence policies, and might make a few policy-makers sit up and question certain basic assumptions about what makes the CSDP tick.

Spyros Economides, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Unhappy union: how the euro crisis—and Europe—can be fixed. By John Peet and Anton la Guardia. London: Profile Books. 2014. 220pp. £15.00. isbn 978 1 78125 292 5. Available as e-book.

The euro crisis is not yet over and neither are the arguments about whether and how it can be solved. For David Marsh, for example, a viable solution to the crisis cannot be found, because it does not exist (Europe’s deadlock, Yale University Press, 2013). For the likes of Ulrich Beck, Jürgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens the solution is to be found in further integration. The authors of the present volume, John Peet and Anton la Guardia, appear to be arguing for both more unity and more diversity: ‘There will need to be much more Europe in some areas in return for much less in others’ (p. 172). They demand more unity through some form of debt mutualization, further empowerment of the European Central Bank (ECB), a fully fledged banking union and a stronger centre underpinned by ‘a euro zone rainy day fund’ (p. 169). Yet, contra federalist arguments, the authors also advocate renationalization of EU political processes. More democracy in Europe, in their view, is to be accomplished by strengthening the role of national parliaments at the expense of the European parliament, for example. In other words, Peet and Guardia are less pessimistic about the EU’s problems than Marsh, but far less optimistic about the political feasibility of the pro-federalist solutions than Beck, Habermas or Giddens.

Readers who have closely followed the euro crisis over the past four years, including its excellent coverage in the pages of The Economist magazine, will not find much new in this short book. For those looking for a lucid and well-informed introduction, the book has a lot to commend it. The authors—Peet, a Europe editor and a former Brussels correspondent, and la Guardia, a Charlemagne columnist for The Economist—are seasoned observers of EU politics with a keen eye for revealing anecdotes and a gift for sub-headings (‘Caned in Cannes’, ‘Europe à l’Hollandaise’). Amusing vignettes, at times, capture a complex

Europe


story. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, when he was still French finance minister, is said to have dismissed Gordon Brown’s desire to take part in the Eurogroup meetings by telling him ‘that the euro was like a marriage and that, in a marriage, one did not invite strangers into the bedroom (a precept that Strauss-Kahn has followed only erratically in his own life)’ (p. 24). Yet, to expand on the metaphor, if the marriage is as unhappy a union as the authors describe it here (referring to ‘a death trap of a currency union’, p. 155), why do the nations of Europe have to retain it whatever the costs?

While Peet and Guardia argue that the euro’s survival is vital for the survival of the European project as such, a number of scholars have recently reached exactly the opposite conclusion. Giandomenico Majone’s recent writings about the erosion of EU democracy spring to mind, conspicuously absent from the chapter on ‘Democracy and its discontents’. This is a pity, because his arguments are directly relevant to the key assertion of this book. In a similar vein, François Heisbourg argued in La fin du rêve européen (Stock, 2013) that in order to rebuild Europe on a more solid basis, the euro should indeed be abandoned (incidentally echoing my own argument published in an essay under the same title, ‘The end of the European dream’). Not so, argue the authors, endorsing instead Angela Merkel’s mantra from 2010, ‘if the euro fails, Europe fails’ (p. 5). Yet the book’s hero of euro rescue efforts is Mario Draghi, president of the ECB, not the recalcitrant German leadership.

The authors celebrate Draghi’s bluff to do ‘whatever it takes’ to rescue the euro, while acknowledging that it was profoundly problematic and might not even work. The ECB’s actions have been meeting with growing resistance in Germany, including from the all-powerful German Constitutional Court. What the authors fail to see, however, is the fact that their proposed solutions suffer from the same contradiction. They could only be implemented against the will of the people who they claim are in desperate need of them—the electorates in EU member states. The proposed solutions may well be desirable economically, but they will not work politically. And considering that the monetary union is a political project throughout, this creates a dilemma that is as simple to describe as it is impossible to solve: German political preferences are not suited for Europe’s peripheries (which alarmingly inlcude France and Italy), just as southern European economic prior-ities are not suited for Germany. The clash is inescapable. Europe cannot become both more democratic and better economically governed, because economic logic clashes with demands for democratic accountability. To sum up, Unhappy union is compelling in its diagnosis, but far less convincing in its prescriptions.

Stefan Auer, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR

Politics in contemporary Portugal: democracy evolving. By José M. Magone. Boulder, CO, and London: Lynne Rienner. 2013. 295pp. Index. £52.50. isbn 978 1 62637 025 8.

José Magone has provided a clearly written and often highly informative appraisal of Portugal, a neglected European country with a turbulent past. A notable feature of his book is the way he uses classic political science literature to shed light on the country’s core political features. He tries to sound cheerful, alluding to Portugal being on a journey to ‘substantive quality democracy’ (p. xi), but harsh realism keeps breaking through as he describes poorly performing state institutions in a country with low-intensity citizenship. After 30 years in the European Union, Portugal firmly clings to its role as a ‘semi-peripheral country’. Its marginalization has been reinforced by the 2011 ‘bail out’ which required Portugal, as a distressed member of the eurozone, to adhere to long-term deflationary

Book reviews


policies in order to try to balance its budget. Magone fails to ask whether membership of the eurozone was suitable for Portugal or else accentuated its underdevelopment. Nor does he explain the commitment of an elite attracted by the easy credit lines in the good years as well as career opportunities at European level but whose members have recoiled from any debate about the choices available to Portugal in an EU increasingly dominated by north European agendas, particularly Germany’s.

An assured account of the political world is provided: cartel parties (4–5 across the left-right spectrum) prevail, their overriding motivation being office-seeking. It is not surprising that, with few exceptions (one being the presidency), the key institutions of the state are weak. The ability and motivation of parliament to place a check on government and represent citizens’ concerns are feeble due not least to low-quality membership. The public administration also appears uninspiring. Poorly negotiated public–private partner-ships have led to huge losses for the state. Too often, the bureaucracy has been manipulated by the ruling parties and used as an employment source. Indeed, key senior jobs have been handed out to reward people who have been useful to a governing party.

Plenty of evidence is provided about an under-performing justice system. Magone even goes so far as to say that ‘there is a general perception by the majority of the population that the system is Kafkaesque and should be avoided if at all possible’ (p. 146). Alarmingly, the membership of the Constitutional Court is heavily influenced by the main parties; this even leads to families acquiring undue influence there. In 2014, too late for the author, the Court declared public sector pay cuts (which would have affected many in the elite) as unconstitutional, leading the government to raise revenue through tax increases in order to comply with EU austerity demands.

An illuminating chapter on civil society shows that a self-absorbed elite faces no counterweight from that quarter. In 2004, Portugal had the lowest level of voluntary participation among the EU’s then 25 members. A high level of social mistrust is to be found, which is true of southern Europe in general and in Portugal’s case may have been accentuated by a lengthy dictatorship. Even during a dramatic period of economic crisis, civil society has been too feeble to challenge fixers or ‘caciques’ at national and local level who dominate an inbred political world, as shown by the lack of alternative challenges in recent elections.

There are in fact few grounds for endorsing Magone’s curious claim that ‘over the next decade, a critical mass may emerge that will contribute to improvements in Portugal’s democ-racy. The national crisis has been an important catalyst in that respect’ (p. 41). The default position within the population appears to be alienation punctuated by occasional outbursts of mass indignation when the elite over-reaches itself. Many citizens prefer to rely on their own forms of conflict resolution rather than leave their fate to the justice system. Abstention rates from elections, at over 40 per cent, are similar to pre-crisis levels. Income disparities and poor education have engendered a sense of fatalism. Dropping his cheerfulness, the author refers to a ‘subject culture’ that is too weak to resist elite misrule. Corruption is not mentioned but allusions are made to the lack of transparency in allocating public funding.

EU structural funds were mainly spent on grandiose infrastructure projects rather than on innovation, research and development, where it was less easy to divert funds for other uses. The author states baldly that, due to EU tutelage, ‘Portugal is no longer an independent country’. But a superficial process of ‘Europeanization’ has so far had little impact in confronting structural defects that make Portugal ‘a stalled democracy’.

Tom Gallagher, University of Bradford, UK

Europe


Is the EU doomed? By Jan Zielonka. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2014. 120pp. Pb.: £9.99. isbn 978 0 74568 396 6. Available as e-book.

Zielonka’s provocative and engaging essay boldly predicts a bleak future for the European Union, despite its emergence from the eurozone crisis, and offers a vision of more flexible patterns of European integration. For Zielonka, the EU’s latest crisis was about more than the euro, Greece and sovereign debt; it was—and remains—a crisis of socio-economic cohesion, imagination and political trust to which the EU’s response has been character-ized by confusion, manipulation and incompetence. Unlike previous crises, the current crisis is one from which the EU will emerge not stronger, but significantly weakened. The EU will ‘probably survive, but only in a more modest form, deprived gradually of major legal powers and political prominence’ (p. viii). For following this latest crisis, the EU will enter a period of disintegration. Either leaders will lose control of unfolding financial and political events; they will try to address problems, but in doing so ultimately make matters worse; or they will seek national or extra-EU solutions, thus leading to the disintegration of the EU through ‘benign neglect’ (p. 23). Whichever scenario unfolds, the process of disintegration will be driven by the unfulfilled promises of economic, social and political benefits from integration with the EU’s lack of popular legitimacy as a key constraint on its ability to act.

Zielonka’s disintegration thesis will warm the hearts of many Eurosceptics and opponents of the EU. Many of them will also be heartened by Zielonka’s pessimism about the EU’s ability to reform itself; nation-states are simply no longer willing to delegate more powers to the EU and closer EU integration does not evoke the enthusiasm of citizens. Visions of a ‘United States of Europe’ or a ‘Bundesrepublik Europa’ are likely therefore to fail. Yet critics of the EU eager to see a return to a new Westphalian order, a Europe dominated by nation-states once again wielding full sovereign powers, will be disappointed with the vision Zielonka advances. While he may not hold much hope for the EU, Zielonka, a self-professed ‘European’, is convinced that Europe will remain a locus of integration, albeit integration no longer dominated by strong nation-states but increasingly involving subnational actors—regions and large cities—and non-governmental organizations. The result will be ‘a multiplication of various hybrid institutional arrangements, and increased plurality of political allegiances’ (p. 82), a world of ‘overlapping authorities, divided sover-eignty, differentiated institutional arrangements and multiple identities’ (p. 81). In other words, Europe will enter a period of ‘new medievalism’—a concept previously explored by Zielonka in Europe as empire (OUP, 2006, reviewed in International Affairs 82: 5)—in which plurality, heterogeneity and hybridity will be the norm. This will not spell the end of integration. For reasons of economic interdependence and political pragmatism integration will continue. But its mode will be transformed: it will involve multiple actors, be pursued on functional rather than territorial lines, and involve polycentric instead of hierarchical systems. Governance within the new integrative networks will be ‘flexible, plurilateral and diversified’ (p. 96). The current ‘monophony’ of EU-based integration with its ‘dogged pursuit of a European superstate’ (p. 100) will be replaced by a new ‘polyphony’ of ‘interac-tion, respect, differentiation and improvisation’ (p. 98).

Zielonka’s vision is certainly provocative, for some even enticing. It demonstrates a deep appreciation of the many challenges the EU continues to face as it emerges from the darkest days of the eurozone crisis. Zielonka is convinced that the EU’s days as the primary focus for and vehicle of European integration are numbered; the EU is destined to become ‘toothless and useless’ (p. 106). Others equally familiar with its history and struc-

Book reviews


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tures will be convinced that the EU will remain a relevant and prominent entity once again demonstrating its ability to adapt. There will certainly be those who see already in the EU’s approach to integration some of the differentiation, plurality and flexibility that Zielonka calls for. There will be those too who find the essay’s doom-laden assessment of the EU’s future simply too improbable a scenario to consider seriously. They may also question whether the essay gives due consideration to the extent to which the EU is regarded as part of the optimal response to the increasing power of multinationals and financial markets and the geopolitical realities of contemporary Europe. All the same, they should not ignore Zielonka’s warnings. The EU remains in crisis, contested and challenged. Zielonka’s analysis and vision should not be idly dismissed.

David Phinnemore, Queen’s University, Belfast, UK

Inside Greek terrorism. By George Kassimeris. London: Hurst. 2013. 244pp. Index. Pb.: £16.99. isbn 978 1 84904 283 3. Available as e-book.

It was the summer of 2002 and I, like many others, was glued to the Greek broadcast media and press, as the story of the rounding-up of the 17 November (17N) terrorist group unfolded on a daily basis; a rather macabre political soap opera. A terrorist group which had been operating almost unhindered for over a quarter of a century had finally been broken. A mishap in which a bomb exploded in the hands of one of the terrorists, Savvas Xiros, while he was in the process of planting it, led to his arrest, and subsequently to the rounding up of the rest of his gang. By September the organization was defunct and all its known members in prison awaiting trial. George Kassimeris in his earlier book, Europe’s last red terrorists: the revolutionary organisation 17 November (Hurst, 2000), did a tremendous job in tracing the origins and development of this organization. I went to this book to seek more information in the wake of the events of summer 2002 and was not let down. Even though it predated the rounding up of the 17N group, and was at times a dense read, it was extremely informa-tive and one of a kind; an extremely useful tool for making sense of events on the ground.

With this in mind I very much looked forward to reading his latest book on terrorism in Greece which suggested new material on 17N as well as introducing to a non-Greek audience other terrorist groups such as the Revolutionary Popular Struggle (ELA), the Revolutionary Struggle (RS) and the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF). This new material would be based not only on secondary sources but promised interviews with jailed terror-ists. In addition, the rise of terrorism in Greece since 1974 was to be put into a broader explanatory context of the use of political violence in that country.

According to Kassimeris, 17N should be viewed not in isolation as an outlier organiza-tion, but as the progenitor of other terrorist groups with revolutionary aspirations and as part of a longer radical tradition in Greek political life. In fact there are numerous tenden-tious links made throughout the book between these terrorist groups and a greater revolu-tionary tradition in Greek history. The author’s wish to place Greek terrorist movements into the analytical framework of political violence, and explain it ‘in a broader political and cultural perspective’, should be welcomed. But in this volume it is rather anaemic and, if anything, superficial. The Greek character, the author suggests, does not unquestion-ingly accept authority, and much political discourse is conducted on the basis of an anti- establishmentarian ethos. But it is not clear from the analysis here why this readily translates into a violent fanaticism which at its extreme has bred terrorist organizations, and can be equated with a revolutionary spirit evident in other periods of Greek history. If anything, this book does not go far enough in debunking the self-propagated myth of 17N as an

Russia and Eurasia


‘urban guerrilla’ group, or de-romanticizing the notion of its members as heroic revolu-tionaries, representing a deep-lying historic undercurrent in Greek politics and society.

Disappointed by the analysis of political context in the book—and the least said about the author’s treatment of the metapolitefsi (the period of transformation following the collapse of the junta in 1974) the better—I turned expectantly to his analysis of individual members of the organizations. Here the promise of interview material with certain individ-uals was quite exciting. But despite the understandable caveats of the author relating to legal constraints, need for caution and anonymity, and the wish of the interviewees not to be cited, I found little trace of this original material. I am sure it is there—and informs much of Kassimeris’s discussion of, for example, Dimitris Koufodinas, 17N’s operational leader and his unrepentant stance, or that of Tselentis and Kondylis, gang members who sought ‘repentance’ and ‘disengagement’—but it is obscured by rafts of secondary evidence and court room testimony. I found it fascinating that a researcher could have access, albeit limited and at times second hand, to convicted terrorists, and admire his resourcefulness and tenacity in gaining this access. But I felt rather let down by the lack of visibility of the result of these interviews and was left thirsting for much more.

In early 2014, Christodoulos Xiros, a key 17N member serving multiple life sentences, escaped custody after a period of prison leave. In mid-July 2014, Nikos Maziotis, the leader of the RS who had also escaped from prison, was recaptured after a highly visible chase and shoot-out in downtown Athens. Terrorism still persists in Greece, its proponents are active, and the general public follows their activities with interest. This book goes only so far in explaining the persistence of this phenomenon in an extremely fragile economic and political setting.

Spyros Economides, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Russia and Eurasia

Presidential decrees in Russia: a comparative perspective. By Thomas F. Remington. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2014. 188pp. Index. £55.00. isbn 978 1 10704 079 3.

Much is made of President Vladimir Putin’s undemocratic—even authoritarian—power in Russia. In Presidential decrees in Russia Thomas Remington, an American professor of government, makes a significant contribution to this discussion. Indeed, although the text is just 155 pages long, he uses the important niche question of Russian presidential decree power to reflect on Russian democracy and relations between president and parliament, to place Russian presidential power in a comparative international context and also to assess the decrees that Putin signed when he returned to the presidency in May 2012. Although these decrees are highly significant because they set out Putin’s strategic agenda, they have received precious little attention in the West.

Given the widespread view that Putin’s autocratic authority is extensive, Remington’s opening statements that he is ‘convinced that the Russian president’s decree powers are not inherently undemocratic’ (p. xii) and that it would be ‘unwise to exaggerate the differences’ between Russia, Brazil, the United States and other democracies where presidents wield prerogative powers are noteworthy (p. 133). Similarly, he also correctly argues that Putin’s success at manipulating the succession process in 2011–2012 has ‘overshadowed his failure to achieve his own policy goals’ (p. 1).

Remington begins the main argument with an extended reflection on the political science debates on presidential power, which provide the comparative basis for the rest

Book reviews


of the book. He explores dimensions of presidential power such as executive accounta-bility, policy-making powers and decree power, and particularly the question of the levels of cooperation necessary with the legislature and other elements of the political system. He also includes the defence of presidentialism as a desirable counterweight against such problems as popular passion, unstable majorities and political over-reach attributed to legis-lative assemblies. In so doing, he draws on a range of comparative examples including the US and Latin America, Charles de Gaulle’s presidency and Weimar Germany—the ‘nightmare case’ in which presidential prerogative powers contribute to democratic breakdown and the accession of a totalitarian regime (pp. 18, 45). Remington makes use of Neustadt’s argument that a president who resorts to the use of his presidential prerogative power rather than persuasion depletes his stock of political resources and notes the rare instances of successful unilateral action compared to the more common examples of presidential orders ignored or side-tracked (p. 37).

Chapter three continues this argument, while turning to discuss Russia. Even among the former Soviet states, Russia stands out for the unrestricted scope of decree power (pp. 48–9). The chapter then gives a historical overview of the major episodes when Russia adopted or modified constitutional decree powers from the tsarist era to Boris Yeltsin’s presidency.

Remington turns in chapter four to look at the post-Soviet period and the legislative process, particularly the significant changes wrought by the ratification of the new consti-tution in 1993. He examines the influences on presidential uses of power: constitutional rules, such as legislative constraints; space, the locations in the policy process of different actors; and time, the cycles and sequences in the political calendars that lend rhythm to policy-making.

He builds on this argument further in chapter five by examining the interaction between law-making and decree-making. The author includes a number of unusual—even recon-dite—case-studies during the Yeltsin and Putin eras where the president weighed the importance of acting quickly against effecting lasting change, and looks at the balance between presidential veto power and decree power. This results in an interesting discus-sion particularly of Putin’s out-manoeuvring of the opposition—still significant at the time—during the early years of his first term as president, framing decree power as part of an array of instruments used to move parliament to produce legislation acceptable to the president. Remington rightly emphasizes throughout the need for Russian presidents to seek the support of vested political and economic interests.

If Remington makes an interesting argument that Russia is a critical case for evaluating the use of presidential powers, the brevity of the book—in many ways an advantage—means that some points are less developed than they might have been. More could have been made of Dmitri Medvedev’s presidency, and the Weimar comparison to which Remington returns in chapter six would have benefited from a more rigorous and explicit perora-tion. Furthermore, the centrality of Putin’s May Decrees to the Russian policy agenda—and especially the debates about the failures to implement them, resulting in ever louder accusations of ‘sabotage’ and a shift in policy-making approaches, which would surely have enhanced the central argument—deserve more attention, even perhaps a dedicated chapter.

More on these latter questions would have rendered the book indispensable to a wider audience, including policy-makers. Nevertheless, this is to cavil at what is otherwise a very worthwhile contribution that will be useful to academics and students alike.

Andrew Monaghan, Russia and Eurasia Programme, Chatham House, UK

Russia and Eurasia


Revolutionary Russia, 1891–1991: a history. By Orlando Figes. New York: Metro-politan Books. 2014. 324 pp. Index. Pb.: £10.62. isbn 978 0 80509 131 1. Available as e-book.

As we get closer to the one hundredth anniversary of the fateful year 1917, we can expect an avalanche of books about the Russian revolutions, Bolshevism, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, etc. Historian Orlando Figes is superbly qualified to write a comprehensively rich analysis of a whole century of Russian revolutionary dreams.

There are few other historians so knowledgeable about the Russian cultural traditions and, no less important, about the role of terror in the dynamics of the Bolshevik experiment. In this relatively short book, Figes succeeds marvellously in offering a gripping synthesis of political, social and intellectual history. Readers interested in how the Bolsheviks, a messi-anic revolutionary sect, could come to power and establish the first successful totalitarian party-state will find this book utterly helpful. Figes writes elegantly, avoids any ponderous jargon and keeps the reader intrigued by this terrible story of illusions, delusions, massacres, persecutions, millennial ambitions, routinization, disenchantment and final breakdown.

Fundamentally, Figes’s book is about a group of individuals driven by the firm belief that history has bestowed upon them the glorious mission to emancipate mankind from the scourge of humiliation, exploitation and inequality. Lenin’s revolutionaries were, however, only one of the entranced phalanxes involved in the turbulence of tsarist Russia. The Mensheviks, for instance, were less infatuated with apocalyptical visions and proposed an evolutionary version of socialism, closer to western-style democratic socialism. Yet, precisely because of their lukewarm strategies, they failed to galvanize the masses the way Lenin, Trotsky and their comrades did. Their programme was tepid, Lenin’s was electric.

Figes writes superbly about Lenin’s crucial role in begetting the revolutionary party and advocating, often against his closest associates, the revolutionary cataclysm. In this picture, Lenin emerges as single-minded, uncompromisingly stubborn, very much like a character in Dostoevsky’s immortal novel The demons. No surprise that Lenin hated Dostoevsky. After Lenin’s demise, the struggle for his mantle turned fierce. The relatively obscure Stalin won against the flamboyant Trotsky first and foremost because he controlled the cadres. Self-centred, self-absorbed and brilliantly arrogant, Trotsky never managed to establish a mass base among the Communist Party’s rank and file. His revolutionary rhetoric sounded to them bombastically shrill. The morose Stalin represented bureaucratic equilibrium and provided prospects for fast social mobility.

The most important feature of the Leninist system, Figes correctly argues, in agreement with a whole Sovietological line, including Richard Pipes, Leonard Shapiro, Robert C. Tucker and Adam Ulam, was contempt for the law. In fact, one could say that socialist justice was an oxymoron. Figes quotes veteran Bolshevik leader Anastas Mikoyan who, in his last years, admitted that the USSR had been created and run by a group of gangsters (including himself ). This may sound tough for some revisionist historians, but it is the factual reality. It is important, however, to emphasize, and Figes does it masterfully, that these were not ordinary thugs, but ideologically driven gangsters. Ideology was the backbone of the Leninist system, which historian Martin Malia accurately described as ‘partocratic ideocracy’.

A major figure in Figes’s narrative is Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor and the demolisher of the generalissimo’s myth. Khrushchevism symbolized the desperate attempt by the ruling elite, the communist nomenklatura, to rescue the Leninist project from presumed Stalinist degeneration. Without embracing Trotsky’s indictment of Stalinism, Khrushchev sensed that there was something rotten in the excessive personalization of power. He decided to attack Stalin’s iconic status (what he called the cult of personality)

Book reviews


by reviving Lenin’s betrayed legacies. The essence of Khrushchevism was captured by the slogan: ‘Back to Lenin’. The 20th party congress was Khrushchev’s most glorious moment. His ‘Secret Speech’, with all its inconsistencies and silences, was an earth-shattering event within the world communist movement. Figes discusses extensively the impact of Khrush-chev’s revelation within the Soviet bloc. One corrective is needed: the Secret Speech was not officially published in Poland (as Figes states) or in any other East European country. It was via Poland that the dynamite-like text clandestinely, not officially, reached the West.

Figes is most provocative at the end of his remarkably insightful book. For him, the USSR was not doomed to expire as a result of an economic and social crisis. No collapse was structurally foreordained. The origins of the self-destruction, he argues, were the intellec-tual changes introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev and his reformist supporters. In other words, it was the intellectual revolution that generated a crisis which, at the end, led to complete systemic breakdown. Here, Figes comes close in his interpretation to Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski’s discussion of the ideological decay in Soviet-style regimes.

Mikhail Gorbachev, as Figes says, was a child of Khrushchevism, but, as his policies of openness (glasnost) advanced, he came closer to understanding the essential challenge: how to create rule of law within a system based on lawlessness. The more he tried to solve this insuperable contradiction, the more Gorbachev and his close adviser Aleksandr Yakovlev moved away from Bolshevism. In the end, the whole edifice crumbled down and left behind it a legacy of unprocessed guilt and unfinished, maybe quixotic, democratic hopes.

Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland (College Park), USA

State erosion: unlootable resources and unruly elites in Central Asia. By Lawrence P. Markowitz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2013. 216pp. £27.95. isbn 978 0 80145 187 4. Available as e-book.

This well-researched and intellectually ambitious book aims to achieve two goals. Empiri-cally, it seeks to explore and explain variation in state formation in two Central Asian states, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Theoretically, it casts new light on the sources of cohesion and fragmentation in weak states. The intellectual journey of this work exemplifies both the pleasures and some of the pitfalls of the tradition of rigorous, parsimonious political science to which it is committed.

The book opens with an interesting puzzle: why did Uzbekistan and Tajikistan evolve in such strikingly different ways from the shared origins of late Soviet reform and disinte-gration—the former fashioning formidably repressive security organs, the latter plunging into a civil war from which it emerged with only a weakly institutionalized state? Markow-itz’s explanation lies in local elites’ responses to different rent-seeking opportunities created by cash crops. He argues (contrary to conventional wisdom, but persuasively) that crops are as prone to the ‘resource curse’ as oil and minerals, but that they cannot be locally ‘looted’ without the cooperation of central government via patronage networks. Where cash crops (and thus economic rents) are relatively equally distributed across the country, as in Uzbek-istan, local elites will be co-opted by the regime in a mutually beneficial patronage system. But where they are unequally distributed, as in Tajikistan, local elites in resource-poor areas will have little incentive to cooperate with the regime (or vice versa), leading them to compete, mobilize local security structures, and so drive state fragmentation.

Markowitz deploys an impressive range of social science methods to build his approach. He has also gathered rich evidence (not merely data), engagingly recounted, from his intrepid fieldwork. As the argument moves from theory to application, first in Central Asia and then

Russia and Eurasia


beyond, the complexity and nuance of this material begin to chafe against the constraints of the model, giving rise to ambiguities. First, it becomes unclear whether what really matters in this account is local elite behaviour or the state security apparatus, whose role looms increas-ingly large as the argument unfolds. Second, this ambiguity cannot be wholly resolved by arguing that security organ strength is merely a function of local elite behaviour, for state cohesion was often achieved by the centralized coercion of local elites. At the same time, in a bold and novel interpretation, Markowitz depicts the 2005 Andijan crisis as a consequence of central government efforts to root out a highly autonomous, even ‘feudal’, local administra-tive–business network. In neither case, however, is ‘co-optation’ a compelling description of local–national elite relations. Third, it is not clear whether patronage structures are an independent or dependent variable in this account. Do they shape elite responses to rent-seeking opportunities, or do they arise as a way of organizing such opportunities?

The argument is further diluted by its extension to other parts of the world, for example to Belarus where neither cash crops nor local elite behaviour have played a role in explaining state cohesion. Like many parsimonious political science explanations, the book overreaches in seeking to maximize explanatory leverage from a minimum number of variables. Nonethe-less, Markowitz has made a stimulating contribution to the study of political economy in weak states which offers insights into variations in rent-seeking through the interaction of patronage politics with the spatial distribution of resources. This broader perspective, rather than the elaborate specific model, will be a lasting contribution to the literature.

Nigel Gould-Davies, Mahidol University International College, Thailand

Fear, weakness and power in the post-Soviet South Caucasus. By Kevork Oskanian. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 288pp. £68.00. isbn 978 1 13702 675 0. Available as e-book.

This monograph provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the causes of insecurity and conflict in the South Caucasus, a region burdened by seemingly intractable territo-rial disputes. Oskanian’s chosen conceptual framework is regional security complex theory (RSCT), first set out in Barry Buzan’s People, states and fear (University of North Carolina Press, 1983), as a means to understand groups of states whose security concerns are sufficiently interwoven ‘that their national securities cannot realistically be considered apart from one another’. The clearest articulation of RSCT is provided in Security: a new framework for analysis (Lynne Rienner, 1998) by Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, one of the foundational texts of the Copenhagen School. In line with their constructivist framework, the authors characterize regional security complexes as formations where the processes of ‘securitiza-tion’ (discursive practices which characterize a phenomenon as a threat) or ‘de-securitization’ by the states involved cannot be analysed or resolved apart from one another.

Oskanian’s study adds considerable theoretical depth to the regional security frame-work. He expands on three key variables which shape the formation of a regional security complex (RSC): patterns of securitization which generate amity/enmity between RSC ‘units’ (which for the purpose of this study are the three recognized states Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, and the de facto states of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh); the interaction with the RSC of ‘Great Powers’ (theorized in both material and subjective terms); and the role of state incoherence or weakness. While focusing primarily on the state level, this allows him to create a hybrid theoretical model combining both domestic and systemic factors into a continuous whole.

This framework is then operationalized in three detailed empirical chapters, looking at the security discourses and counter-discourses in each of the units of the RSC. Oskanian

Book reviews


concludes that the South Caucasus RSC is a ‘revisionist conflict formation’, populated by units that often do not recognize each other’s legitimacy, and in which the identities and values securitized by state-level actors are fundamentally incompatible. Thus, for example, neither Georgia nor Azerbaijan accepts the right to exist of the RSC’s de facto statelets, and both perceive their efforts to gain international recognition as an existential threat. Worse, many of these actors view armed conflict as a legitimate policy tool to advance and defend their identities. The Azerbaijani leadership, for example, has refused to rule out the use of force to reclaim Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding territories, while on the Armenian side the political elite remains dominated by individuals who rose to prominence as a result of the Karabakh war. Regional instability is compounded by the internal incoherence of the states, whose elites have instrumentalized security threats and territorial conflicts as a means to compensate for weak domestic legitimacy and a failure to deliver public goods.

Given the overlapping but fundamentally divergent material and ideological positions of the recognized and de facto states, there is a strong case for analysing the security prospects of the South Caucasus in regional terms. However, there are also limitations to this approach. The principal problem is that although the region’s territorial conflicts share commonalities, they are not co-determined, and could equally be examined in isola-tion. True, the security prospects of Armenia and Azerbaijan are inextricably entwined; however a resolution of the Georgia–Abkhaz conflict would have little bearing on the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.

There is also a risk that the hybridity of the theoretical framework means that neither the systemic nor domestic level is examined in sufficient depth. The author argues that while Great Power intervention and state weakness play a role in shaping the instrumental calculations of the actors involved, it is the patterns of securitization created by deeply embedded national discourses that are decisive in shaping regional security. If this is the case, the region’s security concerns are best understood at substate level, with a greater emphasis on the factors shaping internal political discourse. The author gives some attention to this, but the conclusion that the states of the South Caucasus have fundamentally conflicting identities, while hard to dispute, will not come as a surprise to scholars of the region. The book nevertheless represents a significant contribution to the literature on regional security complexes, and a bold attempt to theorize the security dynamics of the South Caucasus.

Alex Nice, Economist Intelligence Unit, UK

Middle East and North Africa

Libya: history and revolution. By Richard A. Lobban, Jr and Christopher H. Dalton. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. 2014. 221pp. Index. £30.00. isbn 978 1 44082 884 3.

This book offers a survey of Libyan history from earliest times to the present, together with an overview of the February 17 Revolution that overthrew the Gaddafi regime in October 2011. In so doing, the authors promise a ‘pioneering work’ (p. 149) which provides ‘a distinct vantage point’ (p. xiii) on Libya’s future. Unfortunately, the book fails to deliver fully on this promise. Richard A. Lobban, Jr and Christopher H. Dalton come from different backgrounds and their prior experience helps explain the strengths and weaknesses of their book. Lobban is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Anthropology at Rhode Island College. He has published widely on African issues, including several books on Sudan. Dalton is an active duty officer in the United States Marine Corps. Neither author claims recognized expertise on Libya.

Middle East and North Africa


A strength of the book is its treatment of military events, including the United States conflict with the Barbary States starting in the late eighteenth century, the Second World War in North Africa, and the NATO intervention in 2011. However, the extensive treat-ment of these subjects also raises questions of balance as twelve pages in only 180 pages of text are devoted to the Second World War alone.

A pronounced weakness of the book is its overall structure and presentation. The text is generally chronological in organization; however, topical subjects are scattered throughout in a sometimes disjointed fashion which will likely prove difficult to follow for the reader unfamiliar with Libyan history. The use of multiple subheads, sometimes as many as three to a page and often consisting of a single paragraph, adds to the confusion. This staccato-style format works well in books like the Historical dictionary of the Sudan (Rowman & Little-field, 2013), co-authored by Professor Lobban, but not here.

With a large amount of material available on Libyan history, the choice of source materials is puzzling as most of the sources cited are either general studies of the region or articles taken from the internet. There is no indication anywhere in the book that the authors consulted what students of Libyan history consider to be standard texts on pre-Gaddafi Libya. Anna Baldinetti (The origins of the Libyan nation: colonial legacy, exile and the emergence of a new nation-state, Routledge, 2010), Adrian Pelt (Libyan independence and the United Nations: a case of planned decolonization, Yale, 1970) and Majid Khadduri (Modern Libya: a study in political development, Johns Hopkins, 1963) are only three of the many examples that could be cited to support this point.

The failure to consult the available material on Libyan history presumably contributed to the many errors in fact and analysis found in the first half of the book, including the following examples. The authors suggest that the fighting in Libya during the Second World War impacted on an ‘impressionable Muammar Gaddafi’ (p. 9), but the Axis forces in North Africa surrendered in 1943 when Gaddafi was only one year old. They state that ‘the British occupied Libya’ (p. 56) in 1945 when the British Military Administration to administer Cyrenaica and Tripolitania was set up in 1942 and the French Military Admin-istration for Fezzan in early 1943. They suggest that King Idris was ‘an imposed king by a foreign monarchy [Great Britain]’ (p. 56) and refer to the ‘British installation of King Idris’ (p. 57) when a national constituent assembly, meeting for the first time in November 1950, authorized a federal system of government with a monarch as head of state. Finally, the authors state twice that Crown ‘Prince Hasan’ (pp. 57–8) was the son of King Idris when actually he was the nephew of the king who had no direct heirs.

In the introduction, the authors promise to explore in the final chapter what ‘a poten-tial post-Gaddafi Libya might be like’, ‘discussing, analyzing, and providing thoroughly researched potentialities for the “new” Libya’ (p. xii). Instead, the reader is treated to a month-by-month summary of political events in Libya from 2012 to October 2013, culled from media accounts. Here again, the authors have done their audience a disservice by failing to consult the numerous books on the February 17 Revolution and post-Gaddafi Libya published before this book went to print, for example: Ethan Chorin (Exit Gaddafi: the hidden history of the Libyan revolution, Saqi, 2012; reviewed in International Affairs 89: 1), Alison Pargeter (Libya: the rise and fall of Gaddafi, Yale, 2012; reviewed in International Affairs 88: 6), and Ronald Bruce St John (Libya: from colony to revolution, Oneworld, 2012; reviewed in International Affairs 89: 3). The book concludes with an appendix that provides useful information, especially on the NATO intervention in the February 17 Revolution.

In Libya: history and revolution, the authors address complex, controversial issues and while they occasionally add insight to previously published material, more often they do not. The

Book reviews


combination of factual errors, debatable interpretation and a presentation that is often hard for the non-expert to follow makes it difficult to recommend the book to the general reader or the undergraduate student. At the same time, it offers little in the way of fresh analysis or new information to Libyan specialists familiar with the published literature on the country.

Ronald Bruce St John

Sub-Saharan Africa

Civic agency in Africa: arts of resistance in the 21st century. Edited by Ebenezer Obadare and Wendy Willems. Woodbridge: James Currey. 2014. 256pp. Index. £45.00. isbn 978 1 84701 086 5.

The foreword to Civic agency in Africa is provided by Professor Patrick Chabal, who suggests that ‘the search for meaning in today’s African politics involves a dual exercise: an under-standing of the nature of power and an exploration of the ways and byways of resistance to power’ (p. xii). This book, he advises, ‘contributes not just to a better understanding of the nature of resistance in Africa, but also to an explanation of why agency is not that straight-forward to conceptualise’ (p. xviii). The foreword is interesting, provocative and thoughtful, and it is a great sadness that its author died on 16 January 2014, a month before this book appeared in print. African studies has lost one of its most consistently enlightening and original thinkers in recent decades, and this book at least testifies to the continued vitality of research on everyday practices of power and resistance, and theoretically informed inter-pretations of sui generis African culture, informality and lived experiences.

Civic agency in Africa is excellent in many ways; both as a set of individual essays examining cases ranging from South African comedians through Kenyan hawkers and Cameroonian tricksters to Rwandan peasants, and as a collection espousing a broader project of expanding ‘the thematic, agential, cultural and intellectual possibilities as far as thinking about civil society, agency and resistance in Africa is concerned’ (p. 9). This broader project is set out very well in the introduction by Ebenezer Obadare and Wendy Willems, in a contribu-tion which raises some big questions and discusses intellectual influences including Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe and James Scott. Not all the chapters that follow share their emphasis on destabilizing binaries such as power/resistance and state/civil society, but all provide something interesting for scholars of African politics, culture and resistance, whether empirical or theoretical or both.

The highlights include Ilda Lindell and Markus Ihalainen’s account of attempts to ‘clean-up’ informal traders in Nairobi and the various responses and forms of resistance by Kenya’s hawkers. This chapter stresses the power relations among the informal traders and the difficulty of distinguishing between state and society, an ambiguity and ambivalence which also comes through strongly in Basile Ndjio’s fascinating account of tricksters, con men and hustlers in Nigeria and Cameroon. Susan Thomson’s chapter on peasant post-1994 politics in Rwanda nicely combines in-depth interviews and life histories with theoretical reflections on Scott’s Weapons of the weak (Yale University Press, 1987) to explain why there seems to be little overt resistance to the state, going beyond accounts of rural ‘docility’ and lack of political consciousness. Grace Musila’s chapter on stand-up comedy in South Africa has the advantage of working with some very funny material (Loyiso Gola and Trevor Noah steal the show) but the chapter also weaves in fascinating theoretical and political questions about the ambivalence of humour in dealing with taboos of race and sexual violence.

Sub-Saharan Africa


Many of the other chapters also deal with aesthetic and cultural forms of resistance. Daniel Hammett’s chapter on Zapiro and President Zuma engages with the content, context and reception of the infamous ‘Rape of Justice’ cartoons, and Innocentia Mhlam-bi’s chapter discusses political commentary and comedy in South Africa. The music of Fela Kuti is dissected by Jendele Hungbo, and Dorothea Schulz argues that listening to local radio in Mali produces a sense of cultural belonging. Bettina von Lieres compares one well-known case—South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign—with a less well-known case of a federation of local associations in Angola.

The editors do a good job in framing this diversity, and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni also provides some broader reflections on global coloniality and genealogies of African resist-ance. But there is less sustained interrogation of the concept of agency than the title and foreword suggest, and the editors’ commitment to destabilizing binaries of power and resistance is unevenly shared. Mhlambi, for example, concludes by regretting that South African citizens have failed to demonstrate a united front in opposition to their government and implies that depoliticizing comedians are partly to blame (p. 144). The volume might have achieved a more substantial intervention into the field by focusing more precisely on a particular concept or debates, rising to Chabal’s challenge to ‘begin to read African politics from a universal and not merely Western perspective’ (p. xviii). James Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’ is returned to sporadically and could provide an over-arching concept; Michel Foucault’s ‘counter-conducts’ is not mentioned but could be an interesting focus given repeated references to his work. A strong editorial line of argument or shared conceptual vocabulary would help produce a more striking theoretical intervention that goes beyond mapping African resistances in a range of sui generis cases. This might risk losing some of the rich diversity of this work, however, which would be a shame. Overall, the book is a great success in the more limited aim of providing a ‘broader understanding of the way in which Africans engage, resist, transform and co-opt the state’ (p. xx).

Carl Death, University of Manchester, UK

Routledge handbook of Africa’s international relations. Edited by Tim Murithi. London: Routledge. 2014. 443pp. Index. £150.00. isbn 978 1 85743 633 4. Available as e-book.

The Routledge handbook of Africa’s international relations has 40 chapters covering most current aspects of Africa’s international politics, including theories and historical evolution, institu-tional developments, issues and policies, global governance and international partnerships. Editor Tim Murithi argues that uniting the contributors is their interest in how the revival of a ‘pan-African’ spirit may inform the continent’s relations with the rest of the world (p. 1). This idea, which functions as the ‘thesis’ of the essay collection, is broadly endorsed but also interrogated in the book. Although its essays are often rich in theory and analysis, the handbook overall doesn’t convince on the crucial point that nationalisms and sovereignties can be overcome, which is the essential precondition to full-fledged pan-Africanism.

Pan-Africanism is explored in Murithi’s introduction and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s chapter from part one. Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues that pan-Africanism is about black race consciousness, self-determination, development, the unity of African peoples and achieve-ment for the continent of a more dignified and equal niche in the international system (p. 21). Murithi and Ndlovu-Gatsheni both observe that competitive power politics and state self-interest continue to deter emergence of a coherent collective stance. African leaders must learn to transcend ‘narrow nationalisms’ that privilege fragile and individual state

Book reviews


sovereignties, Ndlovu-Gatsheni says, and instead maximize the value of cross-continental ties (pp. 5, 28). Although Africans in the past have lacked political will, Murithi argues that this is changing. The African Union’s role is the best illustration of this trend (pp. 1–2).

Africa’s Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), discussed by Solomon Dersso, is a key pan-African institutional development under the umbrella of the African Union. APSA’s emergence at the turn of the century saw Africa’s regional organizations assume an established and systemic role in the maintenance of international peace and security on the continent (pp. 51–2). Dersso notes that APSA is an expression of African self-determination: it reflects the African Union’s political principle of African solutions to African security problems. African states take the lead in the analysis of security challenges facing Africa and in implementing solutions. However, Dersso argues, APSA’s components lack autonomy and are largely reactive. Broad-based political commitment is wanting: APSA is still an elite project (p. 59). This is of course pertinent to the book’s ‘thesis’—the emergence of a pan-African approach to international politics. There are institutional developments, but the barrier to a unified continental approach on security appears to remain high. APSA is not yet a shining example of pan-African drive and dynamism.

Problems with pan-Africanism also arise in relation to issues and policy, as can be seen in the chapter on international trade policy. According to Emezat H. Mengesha, Africa does not have a unified trade policy, though he does not rule out one developing if present trends continue. Recent economic partnership agreements (frameworks for conduct of regional trade, e.g. with Europe) signed by Africa have not been encouraging. These have been bad deals for many African states, which lose tax revenue through trade liberalization and cannot fully utilize the opening up of foreign markets. Africans need an improved bilateral approach to international trade that meets their development needs. Bitter experi-ence has encouraged African states to step up efforts in multilateral arenas. For example, African states are engaging in coalition-building and other strategies to enhance leverage and negotiate better deals at the World Trade Organization (pp. 125–26, 130–31).

Moving to global governance, the chapter on the responsibility to protect (R2P) provides a glimpse of Africa’s experience. According to Adam Branch, African and western politi-cians have found R2P to be useful because it is ambiguous and malleable. Branch argues that R2P does not bring anything new to Africa’s relations with the West (p. 187). Western powers exploit the concept’s indeterminacy to justify intervention or non-intervention. R2P has been integrated into the African Union, but real impact there has been limited. If there is a pan-African political impact resulting from R2P, it is that R2P makes it easier for the West to meddle in or ignore Africa’s civil wars (pp. 187, 193–4).

The book’s fifth and final part examines Africa’s international partnerships, including chapters on China, the European Union, the BRIC countries and Iran. The Iran chapter is interesting because one would assume that the global South would be a natural ally and counterweight for Africa against the West and, increasingly, China. Jason Warner and Carol Jean Gallo clearly argue that Africa’s international politics, as seen through the prism of Iran–Africa relations, are more complicated than this. Iran coats its overtures in rhetoric about the Third World, global South and regional security, and in anti-Western criticism, in an attempt to mask its superior power. Warner and Gallo conclude that there are better allies for Africa than Iran, a global pariah and an unreliable friend (pp. 397–8, 404).

In conclusion, this is a strong and up-to-date book on Africa’s international politics. Students and scholars will find it an accessible reference. Murithi should be commended for his inclusion of authors from inside and outside Africa. The perhaps inevitable price of the broad coverage is that the historical dimension is not closely examined; the book will be of

Sub-Saharan Africa


only passing interest for scholars of Africa’s international politics during, for example, the Cold War, the world wars and the interwar period.

The essay collection is nicely tied together by a core argument. It is that a reviving pan-African spirit reflecting Africa’s dynamism and diversity may be transforming the continent’s relations with the world. This spirit is most evident in the African Union. It is an interesting and exciting proposition, but many of the authors collected here do not offer much hope on the pan-African front. Turning the pages, one does not get the impression that African states will distance themselves any time soon from their ‘narrow nationalisms’ and sovereign self-interests. One is left wondering if they will ever give the African Union the authority to speak and act for the continent on the world stage.

Grant Dawson, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China

Colonialism and violence in Zimbabwe: a history of suffering. By Heike I. Schmidt. Woodbridge, UK: James Currey. 2013. 303pp. Index. £55.00. isbn 978 1 84701 051 3.

The Honde Valley is a tiny finger of land that sits on the eastern border of Zimbabwe, snuggling up to Mozambique. It is one of the most beautiful parts of the country—some would argue of Africa. Heike Schmidt describes seeing it for the first time from the ‘Honde View’, ‘where the escarpment drops vertically by almost a thousand metres … [offering] a combination of the dramatic difference between the sub-tropical and settled valley in contrast to the fir-treed national park, together with an amazing scent—which later turned out to be coffee and tea blossoms—rising up with the hot breeze from the valley bottom to the cool crisp mountain air’ (p. 14). There and then she decided that she wanted to learn and write about it.

The result is an admirable collection of accounts of the history of conflict and suffering that have been an almost constant feature of life for the Valley’s inhabitants as long as anyone can remember. Drawing on extensive interviews and archival research, Schmidt describes the frontier life of the Valley’s inhabitants in the 1800s, through the ‘pioneer colonialists’ of the early twentieth century, and the resistance to their attempts to establish tea produc-tion, to the enchroachment of two civil wars, one in Mozambique between government FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front) and rebel RENAMO (Mozambican National Resistance) soldiers, who spilled over into the Valley, drawing on the resources of the inhab-itants; and the other the Zimbabwean war of independence in which ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army) forces used the Valley as a staging post between retreat in Mozambique and warfare in wider Rhodesia, and the Rhodesian government forces who followed them there. During this period the population was acutely affected by the warfare going on around them, by the forced villagization that the Rhodesian Army imposed in the area in an attempt to shut down support for the ZANLA forces, and through the migration forced on many who fled to Mozambique. Although the Zimbabwean war for independ-ence ended in 1979, for the Honde Valley inhabitants conflict continued until the end of the war in Mozambique more than ten years later.

Schmidt re-examines the concept of violence, exploring its ‘creativity as a means of articulating personhood and belonging’ in an attempt to establish wider lessons about how people experience conflict, not only to survive it, but as a way of affirming identity (p. 3). Three themes run through the book: violence, memory (in the ways violence is remem-bered and not remembered) and landscape. Ultimately, the Honde people’s resilience comes down to the place itself, its marginality or in-betweenness causing ‘fluidity, rupture and dislocation [that] can signify that strength of African societies, in this case a distinct frontier

Book reviews


identity that requires a shared moral ethnicity rather than the multiplicity that population fluctuation might suggest’ (p. 66).

The book’s strength is its wealth of fascinating anecdotes: the ways in which inhabit-ants resisted the promotion of tea cultivation and punished those who colluded with the scheme; how a group of ZANLA soldiers, attempting to establish their authority with the locals, were humbled by an elderly man inhabited by a spirit from an earlier war; how a sick woman was able to find healing through a communal remembering of how her husband had been executed for ‘selling out’ during the liberation struggle; and stories of how the landscape itself castrated those who treated it disrespectfully. It is the way in which people forget or stay silent about suffering, and then bring memory forth in times of safety, that enables the community to articulate its experiences and establish its identity.

My only criticism of this book is Schmidt’s rather too light development of its concep-tual scheme. I would have liked a more assertive, critical treatment of the empirical material as a way to develop her themes of violence, memory and landscape. Instead, she is mostly content to let the people she interviewed speak for themselves. It’s a perfectly reasonable approach to take, but as a result the book felt at times like a series of stories. They were interesting and engagingly explained, but they did not amount to as compelling a wider narrative, either about Zimbabwean history, or geographical marginality, or even about how suffering can shape identity, as the book initially seemed to promise.

Julia Gallagher, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

South Asia

The wrong enemy: America in Afghanistan 2001–2014. By Carlotta Gall. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2014. 329pp. £16.52. isbn 978 0 54404 669 6.

In this controversial new book, the veteran New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall makes the case that the United States has for too long focused on ‘the wrong enemy’ in its 13-year- long war in Afghanistan. The true enemy, Gall argues, is Pakistan, which has funded and protected a range of Islamist militant networks (including the leaders of the Taliban, such as Mullah Omar) while playing a double game as an ally of the US forces battling the insurgency. Her book alleges that Pakistan is more than simply complicit with the opera-tions of these militant networks—a well-acknowledged fact, even by top US government officials—but is in fact carefully controlling them to keep the war raging and to extract more military and financial concessions from the United States. According to Gall, this cynical duplicity is not just at the level of the powerful but factionalized Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), but extends throughout the highest levels of the Pakistani political estab-lishment.

As her thoughtful, often impressionistic, narrative of the twists and turns of the decade-long war in Afghanistan shows, much of NATO’s woeful record in that conflict is due to US and European officials denying, or even wilfully ignoring, mounting evidence concerning Pakistan’s funding of Islamist networks in Afghanistan. What they have too often missed is the fact that in the eyes of Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment Islamist militant networks are a vital strategic asset in a plan to keep Afghanistan destabi-lized and prevent it from being drawn into India’s diplomatic orbit. For this reason, the ISI has appointed handlers and interlocutors for organizations as diverse as the Pakistani Taliban, the Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, and has developed a secret infra-structure of operatives—often retired military—and safe houses designed to protect their

South Asia


key players from attack. In some respects, this structure is a mechanism of control: the ISI houses these operatives, with varying levels of security and freedom of movement, to keep an eye on them and to ensure that their activities are directed towards Pakistan’s strategic priorities. Gall shows that parts of the ISI are so invested in these groups that the very thought of abandoning them, as US officials have long urged, would cause a serious revolt among much of the military and intelligence rank and file. This fact explains why Pakistan’s embrace of these groups has proved surprisingly durable, even after parts of these Islamist networks turned their fire on the Pakistani military in 2008–2009.

Given this infrastructure, Gall notes throughout the book, the conventional wisdom that Pakistan simply cannot control the Taliban or stop assaults on US and Afghan govern-ment forces across the border cannot be upheld. Her first-hand account of the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, drawn from over a dozen years of reporting and interviews, is full of fascinating insights and anecdotes that strongly support this case, although she does allocate some blame to the US government and to the Karzai administration. On the latter, she provides considerable detail on the scale of corruption in the Afghan government, but tempers it with a sympathetic portrayal of Hamid Karzai as a politician trying to play tribal politics to keep his fragile administration together. She also provides the best explanation yet of why Karzai turned his ire against the US in 2009–2010, based on his preference for tactics over strategic thinking.

Perhaps the most explosive allegation in the book is that a secret cell within the ISI was also protecting and sheltering Osama bin Laden as a strategic asset. Gall makes a convincing, if circumstantial, case that bin Laden’s residence in Abbotabad fits a pattern employed by the ISI in keeping senior militants protected in army towns for close monitoring. Her inves-tigation after bin Laden’s death revealed that houses in that town were regularly inspected by police and intelligence operatives and she also notes that ISI officials would certainly have kept accurate records on every resident in a town with so many high-level military and intelligence visitors. Finally, and most controversially, according to her confidential sources, bin Laden was directly handled and managed by a cell within the ISI, and senior political figures, perhaps even up to Pervez Musharraf, knew of this arrangement.

This chapter makes perhaps the most compelling case yet that parts of the ISI knew of bin Laden’s whereabouts and deceived the US for many years. Yet as she admits, relatively little hard evidence is provided; most of what Gall reports is based on hearsay, often from sources that either have their own agenda or may be engaging in conspiracy theories. On this basis, it is hard to accept her strongest conclusions, particularly that Musharraf and other senior figures knew about bin Laden’s presence. Nevertheless, as a whole, her book makes a convincing case that Pakistan’s behaviour in Afghanistan has turned it into a deter-mined enemy of the United States.

Michael Boyle, La Salle University, USA

Military adaptation in Afghanistan. Edited by Theo Farrell, Frans Osinga and James A. Russell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2013. 368pp. Pb.: £18.99. isbn 978 0 80478 589 1.

This richly documented book details how NATO militaries have adapted over time to the tasks they faced in Afghanistan. The main theme of the work quickly emerges: forces for the most part were given inadequate resources, laboured under political constraints at home, had little relevant experience and military doctrine, and were short on local intelligence but up against a resourceful enemy. Yet overall they adapted well, thanks to a combination of

Book reviews


bottom-up innovation—often through trial and error—strategic realignment and personnel change in key institutional locations.

What are the main drivers of innovation and adaptation in military establishments that typically have a strong conservative bias—popularly depicted as always fighting the last war? The analytical framework developed for the case-studies distinguishes between ‘drivers’ and ‘shapers’. Operational challenges and new technology are the main ‘drivers’ of change, but the form this change takes is shaped by domestic and alliance politics, strategic culture and civil–military relations. The outcome is registered on the strategic level in terms of changing strategy, force levels and resources, and on the operational level in terms of doctrine, training, plans and operations.

In the Afghan case, the operational challenges were legion. The Taliban and their foreign allies were much stronger than expected, and they themselves adapted successfully, notably through asymmetric warfare. ISAF’s (International Security Assistance Force) added-on task of statebuilding and reconstruction initially baffled several national contingents, above all the United States. Military doctrine was lagging, with a new counter-insurgency (COIN) manual not published until 2006, and then with only US authorship. While this initially incentivized freewheeling, bottom-up attempts to innovate, many contingents faced severe domestic political constraints, exemplified by the caveats laid down by the German Bundestag on its national contingent in Kunduz.

The case-studies are varied, and so are the patterns of innovation and adaptation. For a small country like Denmark, which had a force of only 650 within the larger British Task Force in Helmand, adaptation mostly meant ‘second order adaptation’ to its larger ally (p. 136). The British field commanders, who traditionally enjoy significant operational freedom, experimented with a range of different tactics to beat back a resilient enemy—‘mowing the grass’, ‘persistent presence’, ‘oil spots’ and so on. The Canadians, like the Germans, had to navigate political constraints at home. When the Kandahar experience exacted too heavy a toll on the Canadian troops, the political leadership redefined the mission to a safe ‘behind the wire’ operation in Kabul (‘strategic realignment’).

In the German case, adaptation was paradoxical and counter-intuitive. Initially bound by extremely defensive terms of engagement, the force moved towards more robust opera-tions only after the disaster in 2009 when a German colonel ordered an air attack on two stranded oil tankers in Kunduz, in the process killing around one hundred civilian villagers. The event caused an uproar in Germany and many heads rolled in the defence establish-ment, starting with the defence minister. The outgoing staff had reached their position by virtue of seniority; they represented conservative and post-Second World War thinking about the limited role of German military forces. Their removal made room for a younger generation of officers and officials who were less constrained in this respect and not afraid to use the term krieg for the operation in Afghanistan.

The term ‘adaptation’ is in this volume used as the equivalent of ‘change’, or ‘flexi-bility’, in contrast to the common usage which is ‘change that connotes improvement’ (OED). Reading the book with this commonsense meaning of the term in mind suggests that all this change and trial and error was indeed adaptation that enhanced operational efficiency or produced strategic gain. The conclusion is all but explicit in the case-study of the Dutch deployment in Uruzgan. The Dutch developed a distinct approach of a COIN variety that the author recommends be institutionalized and incorporated as lessons learnt for future engagements. No evidence is offered, however, to show that the approach produced more than short-term and transient gains that disappeared when the Dutch departed.

East Asia and Pacific


While flexibility clearly has an inherent value, the successive adaptations documented here appear to a less sympathetic eye as a frantic set of trial and error as NATO forces were trying to find their way, and the result of which is still uncertain. The point emerges most clearly in a finely grained analysis of the Afghan National Army (ANA), which is the subject of a separate chapter. Sponsored by the international military, the ANA underwent frequent and major changes, indeed ‘an epic level of adaptation’ (p. 272). Yet the results were dismal: high absenteeism, high rates of drug use, high rates of illiteracy, and by 2001, not one unit judged by ISAF as capable of conducting independent operations. Adaptation or maladaptation?

Astri Suhrke, The Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway


By all means necessary: how China’s resource quest is changing the world. By Eliza-beth C. Economy and Michael Levi. New York: Oxford University Press. 2014. 279pp. Index. £18.99. isbn 978 0 19992 178 2.

Spoiling Tibet: China and resource nationalism on the roof of the world. By Gabriel Lafitte. London and New York: Zed Books. 2013. 204pp. Index. Pb.: £16.99. isbn 978 1 78032 435 7.

Two recent books examine from different angles the nature and implications of China’s demand for resources, a topic which has risen to the top of global concerns in this century.

In By all means necessary, Elizabeth Economy and Michael Levi take a comprehensive look at the implications outside China’s borders of its growing resource quest—from minerals to water and grain. They find important differences across the various resources they examine, and show that global markets have been affected in a variety of ways by the growth in China’s demand, depending on factors such as the nature of the market itself (spot prices versus long-term contracts, for example), the availability or otherwise of new supply, and the policy and practical approaches of the Chinese authorities and the many actors in China who are seeking resources. For example, China’s disruption of the previous system for global iron ore negotiations had an unexpected outcome, one which actually led to a freer market (pp. 37ff.).

A number of implications flow from their analysis. In looking at the price of resources, expectations are key, and they argue that even with continued growth from China, future price shocks are less likely. They also contend that, although resource security remains a major concern, China is ‘becoming more trusting of international [resource] markets’ (p. 188). In sum, and in spite of the rapaciousness suggested by the book’s title, China’s resource quest is neither totally benign nor an unmitigated disaster; this book is a useful antidote to tendencies to generalize about China’s resource impact.

Lafitte’s focus is on the development of mining industries within China, on the Tibetan plateau (which he calls ‘Tibet’ throughout). He offers four case-studies which demonstrate differences between resources. In oil and salt, the mode of exploitation is a command economy, supporting a wider conclusion of Lafitte’s that the state command economy has not disappeared in Tibet, even as it has become a thing of the past elsewhere in China. In surface gold, there has been a ‘Wild West frontier rush’. And while chromite extraction has seen what he calls a failed experiment in statist large-scale exploitation, Tibet has seen a burgeoning experiment in globalizing the extraction of its underground copper and gold deposits.

Book reviews


Lafitte’s style is rather anecdotal at times, though the book is based on careful research from a range of sources. For this reviewer, several themes stood out. Although Tibet’s resources are often cited as an important strategic driver for China’s sovereignty over Tibet, Lafitte says that so far mining in Tibet has brought little benefit to the state’s assimilation agenda (tourism is more effective). In many cases, Chinese companies would much prefer to ‘go out’ and invest overseas to secure resources (a theme of Economy and Levi’s book) than to extract them in Tibet; Lafitte shows this is particularly the case with regard to chromite. This is partly because most of China’s economy is actually much more closely integrated with the global economy than with that of Tibet, and it means that resources in Tibet have been much less exploited than they might have been.

However, Lafitte suggests this is changing, with infrastructure links to industrial centres in western China now opening up the possibility that Tibet will supply more of the resources to cities such as Chongqing or Chengdu, as Chinese manufacturing moves inland from the coast. Lafitte’s account seems to support two possible interpretations: that Tibet has been passed over and market and environmental pressures mean full-scale extraction there will never be worthwhile; or that Tibet’s time as a major provider of minerals to the Chinese economy will come shortly.

Neither book engages in much depth with existing academic literature, and both may be of more interest to policy-makers and other practitioners, including those with slightly wider interests than resources. Lafitte’s book gives broader insights into Chinese policy towards and resistance from within Tibet, and Economy and Levi’s has useful material on China’s outward investment, much of which has been driven by demand for resources.

Both conclude that Chinese demand for resources is changing the world, in complex and differentiated ways. But China is not the only actor in this. This provokes the thought—touched on by Lafitte—that what we are witnessing is not so much a consequence of China’s rise, but the globalization of a capitalist modernity, which now includes China (or at least the commanding heights of its economy). It is ultimately a global developmentalism that happens currently to be most evident in China, which lies behind the resource quests changing the world.

Tim Summers, Asia Programme, Chatham House, UK

North Korea: state of paranoia. By Paul French. London: Zed Books. 2014. 453pp. Pb.: £12.99. isbn 978 1 78032 947 5. Available as e-book.

I have occasionally had nightmares in which I was trapped in North Korea. I was forced to live a drab existence in an oppressive police state, and there was no escape. I awoke quite relieved to be back in the real world. This may be an indicator that I think too much about that benighted country, or it could be that North Korea is an actual nightmare. Paul French, a Shanghai-based Korea analyst, provides a strong overview of the North’s society, politics and economy. He seeks to explain why this last remaining Stalinist outpost is still a ‘state of paranoia’ and why the Cold War on the peninsula remains frozen in place. The book could have used a good deal of paring and tighter editing, but is a must-read for anyone seeking a comprehensive picture of how the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) works.

French gives a virtual tour of a ‘normal’ day that brings to life conditions of ordinary North Koreans, at least those in the capital of Pyongyang. Housing conditions are often difficult for all but the most elite: frequent electrical stoppages mean a lack of heating in most apartment blocks, families must share communal bath and kitchen facilities, the elderly



and the sick are stuck at home because of increased malnourishment and non-functioning lifts, and the neighbours are noisy because walls are universally thin. Clothes tend to be in short supply, and winter clothes often come from aid agencies. Most people have to walk to work, though bicycle numbers are increasing, but only party and government officials have cars. Fewer non-party members attend daily political indoctrination, since they must spend more time searching for food. Food is more plentiful than in the 1990s, but few Northerners are well nourished. The DPRK has a growing and noticeably assertive criminal underclass, especially in provincial cities. Love marriages are becoming more common, but women are largely responsible for birth control and face discrimination if they divorce. Entertainment options are limited, but more people are turning to South Korean or Japanese movies and music at home. Health care is spotty at best, while traditional diseases have come back with a vengeance.

Chapters on the Kim dynasty and Juche, the nation’s self-reliance ideology and quasi-religion, cover much of the same ground as many other studies of the DPRK. Perhaps the strongest chapters detail the idiosyncratic workings of the North Korean economy. French asserts that it is just an extreme version of a communist centrally planned economy, and has failed for the same reasons that the Eastern Bloc economies fell apart in the 1980s. As in other socialist economies, problems became glaringly obvious in the 1970s, and accelerated in the 1980s. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a badly timed calamity, since Pyongyang had become dependent on Russian aid. The economic collapse and famine, or ‘arduous march’ (p. 169), of the 1990s, French asserts, can be blamed entirely on failed central planning. The famine crisis created a new North Korean reality, in which the state ignored a private economy outside the plan, international aid agencies gained a permanent place within the country, and agriculture was slightly reformed to allow farmers more flexibility. The broader economic ‘reforms’ of 2002–2003 largely failed because their underlying motive was to assert more state control. The showcase Sinuiju special economic zone became a spectacular fiasco because officials built no discernible infrastructure and were unwilling to let international investment function as it does in a market or quasi-market (read: Chinese) context.

French also provides an intriguing overview of North Korean–American relations and the nuclear issue. Unlike many authors on Korea, he suggests that changes in US policy towards China and South Korea drove major changes on the Korean peninsula and in North–South Korean relations. He also departs from other scholars in noting that the primary motive for the ascendance of Pyongyang’s Military First Politics was the economic failures of the 1990s, while the nuclear issue and the need to bolster Kim Jong-il’s succession were secondary considerations.

The book could use quite a bit of tidying up for a second edition. Frequently repeti-tive and constantly cycling back to the same points, the book could easily shed 100 of its 400-plus pages of text and so become a more manageable and exciting read. The most effective recent works on North Korea have incorporated the wrenching experiences of ordinary defectors living in the South. Relying primarily on secondary sources, French misses this human element that would have made his study even more compelling. Also, we need more on the way forward. We know that the North Korean system is unsustainable, but here it is 23 years after the collapse of Soviet communism. Beyond sheer terror, what really is keeping it going? French surveys Korean reunification, but primarily as a historical overview. He discusses the potential of a refugee crisis or a military takeover, but only in the most general terms. With only a few pages devoted to Kim Jong-un, mention of recent events seems tacked on. This book nonetheless adds to the general picture of North Korea’s

Book reviews


sad plight. Let us hope that one day someone can write a happier book on the long-suffering Northerners, and they can awake from their seventy-year nightmare.

Joel Campbell, Troy University, Global Campus, Japan-Korea

North America

The end of the American world order. By Amitav Acharya. Cambridge: Polity. 2014. 138pp. Index. £45.00. isbn 978 0 74567 247 2. Available as e-book.

Amitav Acharya, a well-respected professor at American University and president of the International Studies Association, has produced a stimulating argument even when one disagrees with parts of it. In his view, the debate about the decline of the United States is inconclusive, but the American world order is coming to an end whether or not the United States is itself in decline.

What is the American world order? He uses the term interchangeably with ‘American-led liberal hegemonic order’ which is supposed to have a universal quality. Following the Princeton scholar John Ikenberry, he describes a hierarchical international order with liberal characteristics where ‘weaker and secondary states were given institutional access to the exercise of American power’ and ‘the United States provided public goods and operated within a loose system of multilateral rules and institutions’ (p. 36).

Acharya argues that there is a lot of fiction mixed with the facts in this common descrip-tion of American hegemony. It was never really a global order, but a group of like-minded states centred primarily in the Americas and Western Europe, and it did not always have benign effects on non-members. Since the largest countries of China, India, Indonesia, the Soviet Union and the continent of Africa were not members, the American world order was really less than half the world.

Geir Lundestad, a Norwegian scholar, once categorized the American world order after 1945 as an ‘empire by invitation’ and its proponents have argued that by fostering multilat-eral institutions and allowing access to power for other states, the Americans legitimized a liberal order that, in principle, could survive their gradual decline. Can China and other emerging powers be co-opted into this order? Acharya thinks not, and its decline may be good for the US if it limits over-reaching. He foresees a world order based on regionalism and plural narratives. He offers the image of a multiplex theatre where rather than one film playing, there will be many equal choices under a common architecture. ‘Hence, instead of pining for the American-led liberal hegemonic order, we should prepare to “boldly go where no-one has gone before”’ (p. 11).

Acharya makes a number of important critical points. First, the term ‘hegemony’ is an imprecise word. Sometimes it means having a preponderance of power resources; sometimes the behaviour of setting the rules for others, and getting the outcomes one prefers. If there was a US hegemony, it would have been from 1945—when the US had nearly half the world economy as a result of the Second World War—to 1970—when the US share of world product declined to its prewar level of a quarter of world product. Yet during this period, the US often failed to get what it wanted: witness Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons; communist takeover of China and half of Vietnam; stalemate in the Korean War; Soviet suppression of the revolts in Hungary and Czechoslovakia; Castro’s control of Cuba and so forth. The reason was that the world was bipolar, and the Soviet Union balanced American power. Unipolarity did not come until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. As for the benign hegemon providing public goods, the American world order did

North America


provide shared goods such as security and prosperity for part of the world, but these were club goods rather than global public goods. For many non-members of the club such as India, China, Indonesia, Congo, Iran, Guatemala and Chile, among others, the measures taken to provide security and prosperity for members of the club did not look so benign.

Acharya’s criticisms are more convincing than his alternatives. His multiplex theatre with multiple narratives and regional dialogues assumes an architecture without saying much about how it will be provided. As I argue in The future of power (PublicAffairs, 2012; reviewed in International Affairs 87: 6), there are two great power shifts occurring in this century: power transition from West to East, and power diffusion from governments to non-state actors as a result of the global information revolution. This may or may not lead to new architectures. Will China step in to provide the public goods that hegemonic stability theorists search for? Certainly China has benefited greatly from the liberal institu-tions like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, but China’s record is far from perfect. Nor are we likely to see global public goods provided by other emerging powers. Perhaps there is some consolation in the projection by the National Intel-ligence Council that estimates that the US will remain the most powerful country in 2030, though it will need more help in providing global public goods.

Joseph S. Nye, Jr, Harvard University, USA

Oxford encyclopedia of American military and diplomatic history. Edited by Paul S. Boyer, Timothy J. Lynch, David Milne, Christopher McKnight Nichols and Danielle M. Holtz. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. 1,488pp. 2 vols. Index. £192.50. isbn 978 0 19975 925 5.

In over 450 articles on 1,488 pages in two volumes, the Oxford encyclopedia of American military and diplomatic history marshals hundreds of authors to offer ‘a path through the central themes of America’s rise—its accomplishments, its many imperfections, its glories, and its failures—and into the period of what many claim is its inevitable decline.’ (By ‘America’ the editors mean the United States.) They succeed admirably: readers will find articles signed by authorities, complete with bibliographies, that assess subjects like ‘Manifest destiny’, ‘The strategy and ethics of bombing’ and ‘Counterinsurgency’; profile more than 80 individuals from Crazy Horse to Billy Mitchell; give short histories of key events, wars and treaties like the battle of Antietam and the Mormon War, and review broad topics in foreign relations, historiography, scholarship, theory and institutions. A directory of contributors lists authorial affiliations: famous names are legion; most are from universi-ties in North America, the United Kingdom and Australia. These volumes are a valuable reference for professionals and will launch a thousand student papers—likely many more.

This is not to say the Encyclopedia’s judgements, from a prefatory claim that the US is ‘the greatest political, economic, and military power in world history’ to its asserted arc from glory to decline, will be universally accepted. Its strength is the verve and determination with which its well-informed authors press their claims. Thus, for example, John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School writes of Ronald Reagan, ‘It is hard to find another example, in any era, of a world leader who was able to bend the arc of history so decisively, and almost completely on the basis of powerful ideas rather than by means of the use of force.’ Donald M. Snow of the University of Alabama concludes in ‘National security’, ‘For the roughly two-thirds of American history prior to World War II, national security was not a continuous or major concern.’ Robert S. Singh of the University of London states in ‘Terror, war on’: ‘As prior commitments made it politically damaging to bring new

Book reviews


detainees to Cuba, the base at Bagram near Kabul swelled instead, and the new administra-tion increasingly solved the problem by extrajudicial assassinations.’ Powerful statements.

‘To increase analytical depth, the encyclopedia favours longer entries that unite in comparative context shorter entries …. The reason for doing this is to invite readers to consider military and diplomatic history in the round, rather than as a series of discon-nected events and trends,’ writes editor Timothy J. Lynch of the University of Melbourne. This approach generally works: ‘American military historiography divides into four broad types. In the order that they made their mark, they are the grand narrative; government-sponsored “official” history; the field’s most familiar genre, often styled “old” military history, which focuses on battles, campaigns, technology, and leadership; and the “new” military history that considers war and war fighters in broader political, economic, social, or diplomatic contexts,’ Carol Reardon from Pennsylvania State University, for example, lucidly explains in the ‘Historiography: American military history’ entry.

In addition to its aspirations as a guide, however, the encyclopedia ‘aims to replace casual reliance on often untrustworthy, consensus-based Internet sources and “idiot” guides with a text written and validated by experts.’ Here it is less successful: Oxford’s encyclo-pedia, for all its virtues, is best used in conjunction with, rather than as a replacement for, Wikipedia and other internet sources. First, the web offers resources that a print publica-tion cannot match. This encyclopedia has no illustrations, graphs or charts; even if it did, it could not offer audio or video, or near-instant access to relevant primary documents and secondary sources. Colin G. Calloway of Dartmouth College, for example, provides an exquisite discussion of Shawnee chief Tecumseh: expert, concise and thought-provoking. Wikipedia, however, which agrees with Calloway’s dates, offers more detail in its entry on the warrior, and provides a variety of images with useful captions and substantial selec-tions from his speeches. Second, although it is a bargain at £192.50 ($395), the price effec-tively limits acquisitions to institutions and the most well-capitalized individuals. Third, succinct though it is, the two volumes weigh nearly 3.5 kilogrammes (around 7.5 pounds). This reviewer can testify that they are impractical for frequent mobile consultation, and no online edition is available. Finally, while the analysts are encyclopedic, they are not omniscient. History, as series editor the late Paul S. Boyer of the University of Wisconsin–Madison wrote in his introduction, is ‘ever new’: additional points of view are irreplace-able. (The complete idiot’s guide to US government and politics and US military history for dummies exist, it may be noted, but are beyond the scope of this review.)

Quibbles are always possible. The Central Intelligence Agency, run by a civilian, is discussed in a lengthy article. The National Security Agency, headed by a military officer and of roughly comparable size, does not receive an article and is mentioned largely in passing. More generally, the encyclopedia never makes clear why diplomacy and the military, often judged inimical, should be joined in a single collection.

The Oxford encyclopedia of American military and diplomatic history is part of a larger ‘Oxford encyclopedia of American history’ project that includes separate analyses of business, labour and economic history, cultural and intellectual history, political and legal history and the history of American science, medicine and technology. Buy it if you can afford it, or ask your favourite library to add it to their acquisitions list.

Robert M. Neer, Columbia University, USA

Latin America and Caribbean



Brazil: the troubled rise of a global power. By Michael Reid. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2014. 336pp. £20.00. isbn 978 0 30016 560 9. Available as e-book.

Over the past five years a flurry of books on Brazil and its rise have appeared, catering to a wide range of general audiences. While Michael Reid’s contribution to this oeuvre is barely in time for Brazil’s cycle of sporting celebrations in 2014 and 2016, it may prove to be one of the best. Brazil, to paraphrase the cliché, is an enormously complicated place. Outward appearances frequently shed little light on the underlying reality and consequently anyone interested in the country has to acquire a sweeping knowledge of history, culture, politics, economics, geography and sociology. Several authors with deep knowledge of Brazil have tried to tie these elements together with varying degrees of success, but it is arguably Reid, better known to most readers for his reporting and columns in The Economist, who has best blended academic understanding, cultural fluency and a deep familiarity with current Brazilian realities to provide a cogent and compelling introduction to this complicated and contradictory country.

The book takes a broadly chronological approach to the country, working from colonial times through to the street protests that rocked Brazil on the eve of the 2013 FIFA Confed-erations Cup. Thorny questions that plague nearly everyone interacting with Brazil— why are the tax codes so complicated, how come there is so much paperwork, why is there a general sentiment of alegria, what explains the parlous state of public services despite massive taxation—are set in a historical context. Reid builds this narrative around running themes of elite economic power, racial and social exclusion, and the construction of polit-ical institutions to offer insight into why Brazil constantly seems ready to take off, but falters just as it leaves the launch pad. The level of detail in the book and Reid’s use of strategically placed anecdotes are very effective, particularly when attention is turned to relating economic failures and successes, as well as unpacking the dynamics driving the rise of President Lula da Silva’s Workers Party (PT) and the nationalist development policy he implemented and his successor Dilma Rousseff has continued. This brings a dynamic sense of engagement to the prose, setting the book apart from some of the more academic treat-ments of Brazil currently available.

Scholars experienced with Brazil will find space to argue and call for more detail and explanation at frequent points throughout this book. This is to be expected given the scale of the task Reid sets for himself in a little under 300 pages. What is more interesting is the extent to which Reid draws out the competing sides to the issues he is addressing. A clear theme emerges: part of Brazil’s problem is that it merely flirts with liberalism in its polit-ical, economic and social policies, which explains why the country has bursts of positive progress followed by periods of stagnation, as detailed in the final quarter of the book where pernicious problems such as the ‘Brazil cost’, the persistent barrier of bureaucratic process and the sustained ability of the economic elite to co-opt new political voices such as the PT are unpacked.

What is interesting about the way in which Reid frames his discussion is that while a liberal view dominates his thinking, it is not left unquestioned, and the positive potential of carefully constructed and managed statist policies are highlighted. This has the effect of greatly complicating the shiny and simple picture often presented by promoters and critics of Brazil alike. What it means to be of the left is no longer straightforward and might involve deep connections to business elites, particularly the country’s powerful

Book reviews


construction conglomerates. Likewise, success on the right comes with a need to provide social goods in order to build mass political support. Simple political answers are similarly dismantled through a fast but perceptive deconstruction of the electoral process, which in turn serves to further explain the sorts of economic and political contradictions that often flummox western media.

Clearly, there is a lot more to all of the issues and stories presented by Reid, a factor which he acknowledges explicitly in the book and through the ample use of references to primary and secondary sources. But if you are a newcomer to Brazil or looking for a book to guide someone’s introduction to this fascinating country, then this is an excellent starting point.

Sean W. Burges, The Australian National University, Australia

Suriname in the long twentieth century: domination, contestation, globalization. By Rosemarijn Hoefte. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2014. 312pp. Index. £60.00. isbn 978 1 137 36012 0.

Closely tied to the Netherlands after independence in 1975, ostensibly isolated until recently from its immediate neighbours in South America and the Caribbean, sharply differentiated from them by language, and free of the overt interethnic strife that has at times wracked neighbouring Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago despite an even more complex multiethnic composition, Suriname has understandably rarely intruded on international consciousness. An unexpected military coup in 1980 led by Dési Bouterse (president from 2010 to the present) and an apparent turn towards the left that mirrored regional trends led to a brief flurry of interest—and the country’s anomalous inclusion in UK publisher Frances Pinter’s well-regarded 1980s series on Marxist regimes. The scholarly literature on Suriname has been mostly published in the Netherlands, either in Dutch or in English; as a result, it has not been readily accessible to a broader audience. Dutch scholar Rosemarijn Hoefte’s latest work thus fills an important lacuna by incorporating earlier findings as well as proffering her own research and analysis of developments.

The chronological parameters of this study of Suriname’s ‘long’ twentieth century stretch back to the abolition of slavery in 1863 and carry over into the first decade of the twenty-first century. Hoefte eschews a simple chronological narrative of events in favour of an examination of the underlying socio-economic changes that led to Suriname’s slow transformation from a colony dependent on plantation-based agriculture to one based on natural resource extraction, interspersed with separate chapters on salient political develop-ments. She allots considerable space to the recruitment of British Indian, and later Javanese, labourers to work on the plantations in the wake of abolition, as this dramatically altered the demographic profile of the colony with enormous political ramifications for the future. Given its importance in transforming the economy in the mid-twentieth century, generating at one time a third of GDP and making a substantial contribution to government revenues, a chapter is also devoted to a socio-economic dissection of the bauxite mining complex at Moengo. Paramaribo, a primate city par excellence in a polity with no secondary towns of importance, and a beacon for successive waves of migration from the rural hinterland, also receives extended treatment. Residential patterns in the city, the author finds, are based more on socio-economic status than ethnicity, thus accounting for the diminution of tensions that have proved combustible elsewhere. The fear of ‘another Guyana’ did not materialize in Suriname ‘in the form of ethnic violence between Hindustanis and Creoles’, she avers, ‘but in the form of severe economic decline and social dislocation’ (p. 158) in the 1980s and 1990s.



While the chapters on socio-economic change are quite detailed, underpinned by exten-sive statistical data and animated by personal testimony, those on political developments are generally more episodic and at times overly sketchy. This is particularly the case for the period between the granting of autonomy to the colony in 1954 and independence, and for the years immediately leading up to the 1980 coup. This is, however, more than compensated for by the author’s exposition of the intricate ins and outs of the post-coup years as well as the final chapter which provides an incisive analysis of the fundamental problems underlying Suriname’s political system, in which some interesting parallels are drawn with the late President Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. There is a good summary here too of Suriname’s expanding foreign policy as it attempted to move out of the Dutch polit-ical orbit while at the same time strengthening the country’s Dutch cultural identity at home. Hoefte sees the key developments as Suriname’s decision to join CARICOM (Carib-bean Community) in 1995 as its first non-Anglophone member, the growing relationship with Brazil, and membership of the Venezuelan-led ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América). In fact, Suriname was not as neglectful of its South American neighbours in earlier years as the author implies: Paramaribo joined the Organization of American States in 1977, was a signatory the following year to the Amazon Cooperation Agreement (and its formal institutionalization in 1995), and in 1983 heeded Brazil’s concerns over its close ties to Cuba (p. 143).

Since the book appears to be directed at readers with presumably a limited familiarity with Suriname and on account of its organizationally loose, often overlapping chrono-logical approach, it would have assuredly benefited from an appendix setting out the main sequence of events. A more detailed map of the country than the one supplied, indicating its place in the region, and an actual map of Paramaribo—given the emphasis on the reshaping of social–spatial structures in the aforementioned lengthy chapter on the city—would also have been helpful. Finally, the work could have done with a more serviceable index that listed the parties separately rather than as sub-entries under the heading ‘political parties and coalitions’. These are, however, distinctly minor criticisms.

All in all, the book provides the reader with a very clear understanding of the dynamics of modern Suriname.

Philip Chrimes

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