Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrants in France and Germany by Riva KastoryanoReview by: Stanley HoffmannForeign Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 3 (May - Jun., 2002), pp. 166-167Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20033194 .

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communication and processing of data. He points out, for example, that until recently the State Department has been saddled with four separate internal com

munications networks, none of which were compatible with each other. Public diplomacy today is more powerful and vastly more complicated, especially as transnational networks and nongovern

mental organizations become major players. Domestic telecommunications policy is now a critical foreign policy topic as well. Directly and indirectly, some

American decisions are helping wireless phone services and Internet access providers offer novel opportunities for poorer countries to jump the digital divide.

The Cat From Hue:A Vietnam War Story. BY JOHN LAURENCE. NewYork:

PublicAffairs, 2002, 850 pp. $30.00. Laurence was as good a television journalist as any who covered the Vietnam War, going out in the field over and over from

1965 to 1970 and creating a renowned documentary, "The World of Charlie Company." After decades of writing, he has finally completed a memoir that relives not just the world of that company, part of the First Cavalry Division, but also the world of the TV reporter watching

American infantrymen cope in every major phase of the war. His focus is always on soldiers in the field. Strategy and politics stay far in the background. Laurence helps a reader understand how TV tries to cover war-the good and the bad.

But above all, he matter-of-factly counters the familiar literary images of stylized characters in a surreal conflict. What stands out in this book is his plain, fair, and sympathetic observation of recognizably real Americans of every rank and the

everyday detail that accumulates into the experience of war.

Western Europe STANLEY HOFFMANN

Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrants in France and Germany. BY RIVA KASTORYANO. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2002, 248 pp. $ss.oo (paper, $24.95).

Kastoryano's fascinating book dissects the relationship between the nation and its immigrants, looking specifically at

France and Germany. France's long tradition of linking nationality to territory has fostered a policy of "assimilation" of its foreign-born. Naturalization is therefore easy, but difficulties arise when immigrants want to preserve their own cultural communities. In contrast, Ger

many's ethnic conception of nationality has set up a significant hurdle for those permanently resident foreigners seeking citizenship. For both countries, Kastoryano shows how representatives of the state and immigrants have negotiated their relationship, and how foreigners' associa tions have been (at least partly) creations of the states, which use these groups as interlocutors. Both sides have benefited from this process. The states obtain some social peace; the immigrants obtain improved rights. The great merit of this thoughtfil and intelligent volume is that it shows how the "politicization of identities" has led to demand for "collective identi ties" among foreigners. But this approach has also limited citizenship to "a right of civic participation" in the French case, and reduced the role of ethnic identity in

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Recent Books

the German case. Kastoryano wisely concludes that "it is still the states that

will ultimately negotiate the limits of recognition of differences and, as a result, the identities that can be expressed."

Markets and Moral Regulation: Cultural Change in the European Union. BY PAULETTE KURZER. NewYork:

Cambridge University Press, 2001, 210 pp. $54.95 (paper, $21-95).

Anyone interested in alcohol, drugs, abortion, morality, cultural change, and Europe should read this book. Kurzer examines, inter alia, the antialcohol policies in Finland and Sweden, the lenient drug policy of the Netherlands, and the clash between "Irish moral conservatism and European sexual permissiveness." She points out that national regulation of alcohol has come under attack from the European Union's free marketers, while the EU'S focus on drugs as an issue of pub lic order collides with the Dutch policy of drug decriminalization. Kurzer concludes that the real agents of cultural change have been not new institutions but Euro peans themselves, as they embrace greater individualism. By taking advantage of the removal of borders within Europe, these people have become "Europeanized" in their cultural consumption even before the advent of the single currency. On the other hand, the EU offers no alternative institutional model to which national arrangements can conform. Hence real cultural change is slow and piecemeal. The

member states have lost some cultural autonomy, but the disappearance of na tional cultural identities is far away.

Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Ldwith, HansJonas, and Herbert

Marcuse. BY RICHARD WOLIN.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, 276 pp. $29.95.

Wolin examines the personal and intellec tual relations between the great philosopher of existentialism who was seduced by Nazism and several of his Jewish disciples. Heidegger never fully repudiated his pol itical views (including his antisemitism), and his disciples remained highly critical of liberalism, capitalism, and democratic politics. Wolin's knowledge is broad and his philosophical analysis impressive, and yet one finishes this book with a sense that it falls between too many chairs.

The philosopher himself is sidelined to the beginning and the end; the chapters on Lowith and Jonas (who have generally gotten less attention from scholars than Arendt and Marcuse) are too sketchy here. The account of Marcuse's attempt to synthesize Heidegger and Marxism is perfunctory; the author's nontreatment of Marcuse's 1960s activism is regrettable; and Wolin is almost disparagingly critical of Arendt. Above all, the connections between the master's and the disciples' thoughts are not systematically examined.

These shortcomings do not serve well such an important topic for intellectual historians and students of political thought.

A LiJe in Pieces. The Making and Unmaking ofBinjamin Wilkomirski. BY BLAKE ESKIN. New York: W. W.

Norton, 2002, 251 pp. $25.95.

Published in 1995, Wilkomirski's Holocaust memoir, Fragments, was a harrowing tale of suffering that received many prizes and made its author famous. Eskin and his family-whose original last name was

Wilbur, an abbreviation of Wilkomirski wanted to meet this man, whom they

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