Nongovernmental organizations (NGOS) both lobby states and work within and across societies to advance their interests. These latter efforts are generally ignored by students of world politics because they do not directly involve governments. A study of transnational environmental activist groups (TEAGs) such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and World Wildlife Fund demonstrates that NGO societal efforts indeed shape widespread behavior throughout the world. TEAGs work through transnational social, economic, and cultural networks to shift standards of good conduct, change corporate practices, and empower local communities. This type of practice involves “world civic politics.” That is, TEAGs influence widespread behavior by politicizing global civil society—that slice of collective life which exists above the individual and below the state yet across national boundaries. This article examines the activity of world civic politics as practiced by environmental activists and evaluates its relevance for the study of NGOs and world politics in general.

Most comparative studies of public strategies for competitiveness focus on the links between public agencies and industrial sectors. This paper argues that the professions—or knowledge-bearing elites—that animate these organizational links are equally significant. For public policies to promote technological advance, the visions and self-images of knowledge-bearing elites are particularly important. By examining administrative and technical elites in France and Germany in the 1980s, the paper identifies characteristics that enable these elites to implement policy in some cases but not in others. France's “state-created” elites were well positioned to initiate and implement large technology projects, such as digitizing the telecommunications network. By contrast, Germany's state-recognized elites were better positioned to facilitate framework-oriented programs aimed at the diffusion of new technologies throughout industry. The linkages between administrative and technical elites also explain why French policymakers had difficulty adapting policy to changing circumstances over time, whereas German policymakers managed in many cases to learn more from previous policy experiences and to adapt subsequent initiatives accordingly.

A two-stage Asymmetric Escalation Game is developed to explore the connection between stage credibility and deterrence stability. There are two players in the model: Challenger and Defender. Challenger may initiate or not. If Challenger initiates, Defender may do nothing, respond in kind, or escalate; Challenger may then escalate or counterescalate, and so on. Each player is uncertain about the other's intentions at the final stage of the game. Escalation represents a choice that both players believe is qualitatively different from other available responses. Thus the model applies to any situation in which Defender may respond by crossing a threshold, thereby inducing a (psychologically) distinct level of conflict.

The Perfect Bayesian Equilibria are identified and interpreted, and inferences are drawn about the viability of limited war options and various competing flexible response deployment policies. In general, the model reveals that substrategic deployments add little to overall deterrence stability. Under certain relatively rare conditions, a policy called no-first-use in the super power context offers Defender advantages that might conceivably warrant the deployment stance associated with it. But a war fighting deployment never benefits Defender. Within the confines of the model, therefore, limited or substrategic wars are possible but unlikely.

This article reviews three recently published books: Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, Liah Greenfeld's Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, and Anthony D. Smith's National Identity. It examines these books in search of clues that explain the enigma of nationalism: What are the sources of the mysterious vitality of nationalism? Why does nationalism provide the most compelling identity myth in the modern world? Why can it motivate individuals more than any other political force? This inquiry reveals an irony attendant upon the study of nationalism: the more we learn about the emergence of nationalism, the less credible is the nationalist pretense that nations are natural, continuous communities of fate. Yet it is precisely this image of nationalism that nurtures the unique power of nationalism. The power of nationalism thus seems to be embedded in self-deception.

This review article examines four recent volumes on the European Union, each of which takes as its substantive and theoretical starting point the relaunching of the European Community in the mid-1980s around the single market initiative. Taken together, they provide a comprehensive account of the momentous events leading up to the Maastricht summit. They also present an accurate reflection of the current state of the subfield. Their basic research agenda, a continuation of traditional approaches in Community studies, revolves around the “big bangs” of integration and the conventional models of neofunctionalism and intergovemmentalism. This scholarly continuity generates unwelcome consequences for the selection of research puzzles and for the robustness and reach of the findings. As a remedy, several strategies—some methodological, others theoretical—are outlined for generating new insights into the growing complexity of the European Union.