Motivated originally by a concern for the future of the German and Japanese economic models, the authors in this volume actually probe the origins and evolution of these two varieties of nonliberal capitalism. German and Japanese capitalism is nonliberal in that the economies of these countries are more socially and politically regulated than are their Anglo-American counterparts. Markets are also more “embedded” to the degree that economic transactions are also constrained to serve noneconomic objectives, such as social cohesion, or are supported by noneconomic social ties. Embeddedness, it is argued, creates higher levels of “committed labor” and “patient capital” and thus a long-term focus (and cooperation based on loyalty and trust) in economic relations among actors. One of the more intriguing findings of the volume is that formally, very different institutions generate functionally equivalent outcomes and systemic logics across the two cases.

Faced with similar economic circumstances, France and the United States adopted different immigration policies at various times in the twentieth century. Jeffrey Togman asks why. To account for this variation in public policy outcome, he points to the different structure of political institutions in the two countries.

Elusive Reform is an important and welcome addition to the still underdeveloped area of political science analysis of judicial institutions in Latin America. Few volumes to date have undertaken such an in-depth study of the complex issue of rule of law and its problematic construction in fragile democratic systems in the region. The book analyzes the experience of rule of law reform in Argentina and Venezuela, with some comparative reference to other Latin American countries.

This book tells the story of a dog that did not bark. Since the 1980s, a number of European scholars have advocated a system of income support that would eliminate the stigma attached to most forms of poverty assistance and would be simple, easy, and cheap to implement. Their idea, which has various forms, is to provide all citizens a guaranteed level of support that would have no strings attached. Organized as the Basic Income European Network (BIEN), these scholars have met regularly to discuss the subject of basic income and have endeavored to make their research useful to policymaking by promoting their group's ideas in their home countries. The problem is that after more than a decade of activity, the group cannot claim any major success. To the contrary, many countries have striven to make unemployment and social assistance more conditional by attaching work requirements or lowering thresholds of eligibility.

Before 1990, American political and even legal scholarship paid little attention to the mystery and the marvel of the role played by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in constituting the European Community (EC; now European Union, or EU) as something very like a transnational, federated state with its own higher law constitution and supremacy of union-level law, enforceable and enforced against member-state (i.e., member-country) laws or constitutional provisions to the contrary. Legal scholars Eric Stein and Joseph Weiler and political scientist Mary Volcansek (with a comparative judicial politics approach) had produced sustained bodies of scholarship on the subject, and Stuart Scheingold had offered a book on it back in 1971 (which took an international relations approach), but not much else was available for the curious American academic. The decade of the 1990s changed this picture. Now a generation of young scholars and some more recently engaged established scholars have taken up the challenge of attempting to understand this remarkable, and in many ways unprecedented, phenomenon.

The “borderless world” is an early twenty-first century cliche, particularly in Europe. Overlapping processes of globalization and regional integration have done much over the past decades to alter the political and economic nature of geographic boundaries. As a result, the tendency is to anticipate a fundamental deterritorialization of politics and economics. However tempting, it would nevertheless be hazardous to rush to judgment. Through a series of overlapping case studies—essays, really—Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort demonstrate that frontiers remain important both within the European Union (EU) and without. Politics and economics continue to be rooted in geography despite the transformations of the late twentieth century. This is true not only in practical terms but also in relation to individual and group identities. As the authors suggest, “there remains in Europe a highly developed sense of territoriality” (p. 11).

It seems timely and appropriate that the twentieth century—the century of the Holocaust, the Gulag Archipelago, the Killing Fields, the Cultural Revolution, and the “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans and Rwanda—ended with a wave of growing interest in healing past injustices. Human rights organizations and international commissions investigate violations of human rights. International tribunals judge political leaders, warlords, and their soldiers. Historians, political scientists, and legal theorists study the implications of such crimes and punishments.

A lot of scholarly attention has been devoted to demonstrating that transnational activists “matter” in explaining international outcomes. Having paid those dues, it can be argued that scholars of transnational activity can safely shift from a documentary focus to a more profound inquiry concerning how, why, and to what extent nonstate actors matter. On the other hand, to understand the work of transnational activists for the international implementation of moral and legal standards—not a completely new area of inquiry, but a burgeoning one—still requires a considerable amount of empirical documentation of exactly what that work entails. Only time-intensive, border-hopping research provides the names, dates, and actors' words, deeds, and intentions that comprise whatever political activity there is to be theorized about. Thus, both empirical documentation and theorizing about transnational and multilateral processes are demanding, and interdependent, scholarly necessities. In her book Moral Victories: How Activists Provoke Multilateral Action, Susan Burgerman presents finely articulated empirical research that is a welcome contribution to the literature on human rights in multilateral political processes.

Africa's Challenge to International Relations Theory, edited by Kevin Dunn and Timothy Shaw, offers a timely reflection on the content and nuance of international relations theory in an era of “the new inequality” (Craig Murphy, “Political Consequences of the New Inequality,” International Studies Quarterly 45 [September 2001]: 347–56). The central question posed by the authors is: How international is international relations theory? In the authors' view, not very much. As a consequence, their objective in the volume is “to replace the dominant/dominating denotative reading of the IR text with a more pluralist connotative reading” (p. 8; my emphasis). Drawing on African experiences in the discipline of international relations, all 13 chapters of this engaging volume take aim at various manifestations of the Eurocentricity and “provincialism” of international relations theory then and now. Very early in the volume, Dunn sets the stage for a deliberate and systematic engagement with the discipline for its relegation of Africa to the footnote of international relations theory (p. 4).

As Michael O'Hanlon concludes in his excellent contribution to Rockets' Red Glare: “We should…get used to the debate over ballistic missile defenses. It has been around a long time, and no final resolution is imminent” (p. 132). In one sense, a review of these three recent books makes clear that many analysts had grown a bit too used to positioning themselves in terms of the 1972 ABM Treaty. Preoccupied with arguments over whether the treaty should be preserved, modified, or rewritten in light of a changing strategic and technological context, no one seemed to have anticipated that President George W. Bush would simply withdraw from it, invoking Article XV's provision that either party could withdraw if “extraordinary events related to the subject matter of this Treaty have jeopardized its supreme interests.” Even many strategic defense supporters who deemed the treaty obsolete (as Robert Joseph persuasively maintains in his contribution to Rockets' Red Glare) generally believed that it should only—and would only—be scrapped if negotiations over U.S.-proposed changes broke down. (“The Bush Administration,” surmises O'Hanlon, “will surely try very hard to amend it before going to such an extreme”) (p. 112). In the event, the president's team disavowed even the word “negotiation,” saying they were willing only to “consult” the Russians regarding the treaty's impending demise.

It's not every day that you find a book that argues for its own irrelevance. This is not, of course, how Mark Franke characterizes his project in Global Limits—but it is the upshot, and he is admirably candid in putting together the individual pieces of the argument pointing to it.

Since the Cold War, the United States as well as other countries have struggled with the “new world order.” Further integration of the European Union, mostly in economic and political ways, has given it recognition as an actor within the international arena. During the crisis that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the international community witnessed the EU's failure to bring a speedy end to the genocide and violence in the region. The EU's inability and lack of efficacy in the situation tarnished its image and prompted it to begin working toward the creation of a European Common Foreign and Defense Identity. More recent events of September 11, as well as increased violence between Israel and the Palestinians, once again beg the question: What is the role of an integrated Europe? As the United States takes on its war against terrorism, it looks to its closest allies in Europe to be supportive and to help in the endeavor. Actions or opinions from individual member states, however, seem to gain more public attention in the United States than those from the EU as a single entity acting in the global arena.

This elaborate study analyzes the Nigerian foreign policy decision-making structures and processes from 1960 (when Nigeria became an independent country) until 1999. Using Graham Allison's conceptual models of decision making (the rational-actor model, the organizational process model, and the bureaucratic politics model), Ufot Inamete examines how foreign policy decision making during the Balewa, Ironsi, Gowon, Muhammed/Obasanjo, Shagari, Buhari, Babangida, Shonekan, Abacha, Abubakar, and Obasanjo governments manifested both changes and continuities (p. 289). Importantly, theory from Allison's model is well integrated with the substantive and analytical portions of the book, and, thus, it goes beyond the theory of a strong-leader approach in Third World countries to demonstrate that developing countries do have organizational structures that deal with foreign policies.

Robert Jackson's recent book The Global Covenant is a work in the tradition of the international society school that extends the perspective of that school to today's world events and theoretical debates. Jackson's argument has several important components: that we live in a society of states that operates according to particular norms having significant ethical implications for the conduct of world politics; that this society of states can be distinguished from both the amoral perspective of the (neo)realists and the universalism of cosmopolitans; that this world must be examined primarily through the words and actions of statespeople, its primary articulators; that this world is distinguished by values of antipaternalism, normative pluralism, and the observance of sovereign rights of nonintervention and self-determination; and that recent crises (e.g., the Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, etc.) demonstrate more the continued durability of this world (which has existed roughly since Westphalia) than its decline or demise.

By almost all indicators, Rwanda's civil war should have ended in a successful negotiated settlement. Both the Tutsi rebels and the Rwandan government had agreed to participate in negotiations brokered by a team of Tanzanian mediators whom most people considered highly skilled. The two parties to the negotiations were able to reach and sign a detailed peace settlement that guaranteed both parties representation in the legislature and a set percentage of slots in the military. And the United Nations offered to “guarantee” the security of the two sides during the implementation period. Almost all factors purported to lead to a peaceful solution were present at the time the Arusha accords were signed in 1994. Rwanda's civil war, however, did not end peacefully. Instead, a peace process that seemingly had all the elements of success ended in one of the most rapid genocides in recorded history.

The puzzle of European monetary cooperation—namely, why sovereign nation-states would relinquish monetary autonomy in return for some measure of exchange rate stability—has produced a growing body of highly informed and theoretically strong works on European integration. Matthais Kaelberer's account fits nicely into this mold. The author argues convincingly that European monetary cooperation—especially Germany's leading contribution to the European Monetary Union (EMU)—is the result of a structural conflict of interest between weak and strong currency countries over the rules of monetary cooperation. In laying out his “structural” argument, Kaelberer's analysis, as he notes in his own words, “complements rather than substitutes for other explanations of European monetary cooperation” (p. 6). In making this claim, his work will not settle the extremely lively theoretical debate on European integration, and European monetary cooperation more specifically. However, it is an important contribution to the literature and fills in some of the theoretical void involving concepts of “leadership” and “asymmetry” of power that help explain European integration.

Stuart Kaufman's Modern Hatreds is a serious, original contribution on a highly policy relevant question, which is strengthened by his scrupulous case study design and deep regional expertise. Kaufman asks: when do intercommunal rivalries escalate to large-scale ethnic wars? His answer integrates a number of existing strands of explanation around the central idea that myths, or as he calls them, ethnic symbols, are the root cause of ethnic violence. His core claim is that “people make political choices based on emotion and in response to symbols” (p. 29). Ethnic wars results from the lethal combination of two particularly noxious types of myths: myths justifying the political domination of specific territory, and myths of past atrocities by others that lead to widespread fears of genocide. The realities behind these myths are far less important than that they are pervasive “in each group's mainstream history texts written before the conflict began” (p. 30).

This collection of essays celebrates more than four decades of international relations research by the distinguished scholar and practitioner Richard H. Ullman. The book demonstrates the dilemma faced by the organizers of a Festschrift for a prolific author with wide-ranging interests: Should the chapters focus on, and collectively do justice to, one topic alone; or should the book take a wide-ranging approach that is more representative of the broad spectrum of subjects analyzed by the honoree? The editors of this volume have some success in following both routes simultaneously, albeit with some necessary trade-offs.

Anthony F. Lang's Agency and Ethics is an effort to reinterpret international intervention from a normative perspective, normative in this instance referring to activities that construct identities and provide policy guidance. Although he describes himself as a “realist” (p. 3), Lang sets out to explain the outcome of military intervention in terms of the interaction between the normative dimension and the “political,” which he defines as the competitive elements in a situation. He argues that states intervene in one another's affairs owing to what they believe are the norms that define their role(s) in international politics, and he shows how norms produce conflict as well as cooperation. In the cases that follow, Lang focuses on three norms—liberalism, colonialism, and humanitarianism: The first focuses on democracy, individual rights, and national self-determination; the second on responsibility for politically and economically less developed societies; and the third on assisting those in need. He ascribes the failure of intervention to normative disagreement among both friends and adversaries within and between participating countries, and he uses what Alexander George calls a “focused comparison” of cases to illustrate his claim.

The last decade of the nineteenth century was a traumatic time for many Americans. The federal constitution was a hundred years old, and it no longer fit the nation so neatly as it once had. A new class of economic warlords, commonly called robber barons, made a mockery of some hallowed democratic principles; from behind the walls of their well-defended monopolies they laughed at notions that business should serve the public. “The public be damned!” jeered William Vanderbilt. Meanwhile, millions of immigrants flooded American shores; to many of the native born (or merely earlier arrived), the newcomers appeared an alien horde that would drive down wages, depress the standard of living, and change the character of America even as they were already changing its face. In the West, the frontier was disappearing—in fact, had already disappeared, in the statistical judgment of the director of the 1890 census—depriving the country of the demographic and psychic safety valve that had long bled off the worst of American discontent. As if all this were not enough, the 1890s witnessed the worst depression in American history to that point, closing hundreds of banks and factories and throwing hundreds of thousands of breadwinners out of work and onto the streets and highways.