This thoughtful book builds on Schmitter's earlier work on European integration and, more recently, his interest in democratization in Latin America and southern Europe. Schmitter joins the ever expanding ranks of scholars and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds who have tackled the devilish issue of European Union (EU) democracy and legitimacy. This attempt is more hands-on than others. As the title suggests, Schmitter offers a do-it-yourself checklist of reforms to improve the EU's democratic credentials. His larger self-assigned task is to "provoke as wide-ranging a debate as possible on an issue that has just begun to receive the attention it deserves" (p. viii).

Now that more than a decade and two American presidencies have come and gone since the end of the Cold War, the United States has articulated no new grand strategy to address the novel security demands of the new age. There is nothing remotely comparable to the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan that so radically reoriented U.S. strategic policy at the start of the era now ended. No doubt, the reasons for that absence have something to do with the "if-it-ain't-broke" dictum. Confrontation and deterrence ev- idently worked to win the Cold War and, by this logic, should continue to serve the nation's security into the murky future.

Over the past twenty years, the so-called third debate, or the constructivist turn in international relations theory, has elic- ited a great deal of attention. Various critical theories and epistemologies-sociological approaches, postmodernism, constructivism, neo-Marxism, feminist approaches, and cul- tural theories-seem to dominate the leading international relations journals. Postmodernism (also called critical theo- ry), perhaps the most radical wave of the third debate, uses literary theory to challenge the notion of an "objective" reality in world politics, reject the notion of legitimate social science, and seek to overturn the so-called dominant dis- courses in the field in favor of a new politics that will give voice to previously marginalized groups.

This book will enhance Christian Joppke's growing reputa- tion as one of the most thoughtful commentators on the politics of international migration and citizenship. Immigra- tion and the Nation-State is an impressive cross-national comparison that builds on elite interviews and reanalysis of primary materials, but its chief value is in its bold synthesis and critique of a rapidly growing and highly disjointed secondary literature. Although it assesses a variety of theo- retical concepts, the book is primarily a historically rooted, richly empirical work of analysis and interpretation. Joppke deals expertly with three liberal states with different nation- hood traditions and immigration histories. The United King- dom is distinctive in that it was at once a nation-state and an empire. The United States is the only case of the three in which governments deliberately sought to foster immigration for settlement. Germany was a divided nation whose com- mitment to reunification, embedded in the Basic Law, posed particularly troublesome issues for immigration and citizen- ship policy.

It is evident to any serious observer that the practice of governance in Western democracies is increasingly divergent from traditional theoretical and conceptual models. In West- ern Europe, traditional models of parliamentary democracy no longer accurately describe reality. The neocorporatist literature of the 1970s and 1980s pointed out the key role of organized interests and their (often formally recognized) privileged relationship with the state, creating arrangements that bypassed or subverted usual parliamentary processes.

In the Stephen Skowronek tradition of leadership studies (The Politics Presidents Make, 1993), Patricia Lee Sykes makes an important substantive and methodological contri- bution with her cross-national comparison of conviction politicians in the United States and the United Kingdom. She begins with a topology that dichotomizes two basic leadership styles: conviction and consensus. She carefully defines these on the basis of their goals and strategies and the external conditions that facilitate them.

Few concepts in international relations have aroused as much debate and emotion among political leaders, activists, and scholars as that of sovereignty. Diplomats continually invoke it, transnational organizations attempt to circumvent it, and scholars debate its meaning and wonder whether globaliza- tion is making it obsolete. Yet, most accept the premise that sovereignty is not only the foundation of our international system but also one of the few consequential institutions we have in world politics.

The end game of peace negotiations between international actors has received a great deal of scholarly attention over the years. Much of this effort focuses on the processes by which states, leaders, or diplomats achieve durable solutions to differences previously difficult to resolve. Christopher Mitchell offers a significant contribution to this literature by centering his attention on the observable starting points of peace, those with the potential to trigger a sequence of interactions that eventually produce an important agreement between previously conflicting sides.

After a highly successful series of revisions of his original Gorbachev in Power (1990), which ultimately became After Gorbachev (1993 and 1994), Stephen White has written an entirely new book that takes stock of contemporary Russian politics after nearly a decade of postcommunist experience. He draws upon a mass of new and newly available data, including archival materials, survey data, memoirs and peri- odical literature, interviews with political principals, and a series of Russian elections at the national, regional, and local level. White has written a very solid companion to any course on the structure, dynamics, and economic and social conse- quences of Russian and, to a certain extent, postcommunist politics.

This book assesses how Taiwan, the nation officially known as the Republic of China but called "Taiwan Province" in the People's Republic of China, uses propaganda to pursue foreign policy objectives, attain its national interests, and, even more than that, survive.

The central puzzle motivating this book is why different systems of sovereign states develop different types of systemic institutions. Why did Greek city-states favor arbitration, whereas Italian city-states adopted what the author calls "oratorical diplomacy," the absolutist state preferred "old diplomacy" instead, and the modern nation-state relies on international law and multilateralism?

Stephen Van Evera explicitly sets out to accomplish two tasks. The first is to present a set of five hypotheses on the causes of war grounded in "misperceptive fine-grained struc- tural realism" (p. 11). He lists (1) false optimism about the outcome of a future war, (2) perceived first-mover advan- tages, (3) opening and closing windows of opportunity and vulnerability, (4) cumulativity of resources, and (5) beliefs about the offense-defense balance. He then develops 23 related hypotheses. The second task is to test some of the major hypotheses (the second, third, and fifth) against a small set of cases. He succeeds at the first task but is not so successful at the latter. He also briefly speculates on the effects of the "nuclear revolution."