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.

This book attempts to draw upon some heterodox, mainly Marxist, approaches to Western influence on Central European political economies in the 1990s. It also argues that the European Union's (EU's) role in the Central European transformation was qualitatively more positive than the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

The editors of Bridges and Boundaries asked contributors—nine political scientists and eight historians, all of them North American—to reflect on their respective disciplines and the way they go about “the study of international events” (p. 1). We should notice a positivist disposition here. While contributors “share an interest…in the state, politics and war” (p. 2), events are the stuff of international relations. That the state, politics, and war are complex institutional phenomena perhaps not reducible to events points to conceptual issues that this volume fails generally to address. Instead, contributors discuss the many problems attending generalized explanation and empirical fit—theory and science—as if their shared interests imply a common stock of core concepts.

Merillee Grindle addresses three questions: Why would rational politicians choose to give up power? What accounts for the selection of some institutions rather than others? What are the political consequences of the creation of new institutions? She studies cases of decentralizing political reforms in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina. Her case studies are loosely guided by eleven hypotheses deduced from three schools of thought. The schools to which she refers in an introductory and concluding chapter are rational choice, comparative institutionalism, and new institutionalism (the latter has two subvariants: transaction costs and institutional design). The theoretical perspectives are apparently not equally useful across questions, as new institutionalism is not used to deduce hypotheses on why politicians would choose to reform, and rational choice is not applied to the reasons some some institutional changes are chosen over others.

Rethinking Europe's Future and From the Nation State to Europe? belong to two different genres of European studies. From the Nation State to Europe? is a collection of academic essays about the transformation of the nation-state in the European Union's context and its implications for social scientific theoretical concepts. Rethinking Europe's Future is by contrast aimed at politicians and policymakers. Its major objective is to discourage policies designed to push Europe and NATO to expand eastward, perhaps to embrace Russia, and instead to encourage Western Europe to assert itself as a major independent, even if not fully united, force in the world. Despite this disciplinary difference, however, the two books complement each other well. The former is about the present state of affairs in Europe; the latter concerns the future and, for that purpose, a good deal of the past. Both involve excellent scholarship and thoughtful arguments, though organizationally they share some weaknesses. They should prove interesting to any student of European affairs.

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.

In this book, Festus Eribo gives a broad historical view of Russian–African relations and the role of newspapers in communicating Russian and Soviet perceptions of Africa and its people. Not surprisingly, Eribo argues that ideology drove the content of coverage as the Soviet Union attempted to shape opinion according to Marxist–Leninist principles. In taking on the very broad topic of communication, Eribo notes the presence of multiple audiences but describes the content of Russian domestic newspapers in much greater detail than the story of how Russia communicated with African people. While the topic is important, because this book is descriptive and not theoretical, it leaves the reader with more questions than answers about the role of the media in communicating images of Africa.

The themes of crisis and transformation have fueled a miniexplosion of research on media and democracy in the last decade. Researchers within or close to the “media studies'' school have developed a burgeoning literature on questions of citizenship and the public sphere, in the context of deregulation, expanding media markets, and rising interest in the arguments of the deliberative democrats. Scholars more closely connected to political science have pursued an overlapping but different agenda. From the United States and western Europe, amid concern at signs of a crisis of citizen engagement, the focus increasingly is on media power to mobilize or demobilize voters. From Eastern and central Europe and Latin America there is an emerging corpus on the role of media in the transition and consolidation of democracy. Cross-cutting these various strands are the Internet revolution and the question of globalization and, more specifically, U.S. potency to lead or at least predict trends in political communication for the democratic world.

In Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (2nd edition, 1993), Walter LeFeber analyzes the extraordinary continuity of U.S. policy in Central America. Indeed, from the Rio Bravo all the way to Tierra del Fuego, for more than a century, the United States has refused to tolerate leftist governments when recourse to other options has been available. Thus even in 1959, it didn't take a political scientist to predict that the United States would not accept the Cuban revolution.

One test of a book is how well it weathers major developments in world events, and, as with the end of the Cold War, the beginning of the new war on terrorism presents recent publications in international or military affairs with the danger of untimely relegation to the trash bin of history. After September 11, as we scramble to adjust and make sense of the “hunt for Osama,” Stephen Cimbala's work, however, remains a useful compendium of lessons from several recent wars, crises, and ongoing military challenges. Although the book is not as suddenly relevant as Samuel Huntington's (1998) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order or Chalmers Johnson's (2001) Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, the wisdom distilled within it is sound enough to apply equally well to the pre- and post-September 11 worlds. It is largely rooted in frameworks developed for studying the Cold War and superpower arms races, but Cimbala's examination of the new realities of military strategy and technology still has much to say about the war being waged in Afghanistan and the campaigns that are likely to follow.

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.

Nearly 15 years has elapsed since the World Commission on Environment and Development—the so-called Brundtland Commission—popularized the idea of “sustainable development.” The phrase turned out to be unusually slippery, providing both political cover and ammunition for almost anyone engaged in debates about the global environment and/or development. Indeed, scholars and policymakers of all theoretical or ideological stripes found creative ways to employ the phrase “sustainable development” to support a wide array of arguments in these discussions.

This book is about the motivations of political actors. Many of the most commonly used models of party competition and government formation are grounded in explicit assumptions about the motivations of party strategists. These tend to assume one of three basic and interrelated motivations—the desire to fulfill policy objectives, the desire to control the perquisites of office, and the desire to maximize votes. While recognizing that living and breathing people may be driven by any or all of these motivations, among others, and that these may interact with each other in complex ways, most theorists ground their models in assumptions of policy-seeking OR office-seeking OR vote-maximizing by key political decision makers. Indeed this distinction between motivational assumptions is one of the most common ways to classify models of party competition. In part the grounding of models in a single motivational assumption is for the sake of analytical tractability; in part it is because the heuristic insights made possible by these approaches are enhanced if the models are kept simple and their relationship to core assumptions is kept straightforward.

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.

Human rights as a focus of both theoretical and practical concern came alive in the last decade of the twentieth century. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the “third wave” of democratization, and the globalization-cum-transparency revolution have all played a part in the widening and deepening of global human rights norms. The revitalization of human rights norms has profound implications for the complex interdependence between China and the global community. Indeed, human rights diplomacy is one of the most novel but generally overlooked aspects of international relations in post-Mao China, where it has finally come of age, whatever the motivation.

I have a colleague who collects maps of Africa that demonstrate a specific phenomenon: the developed world's unlearning of African geography. Across the centuries, the maps seem to show that mapmakers know less about the geography of the African continent—particularly the internal parts—than previously was the case. Rivers change direction; mountain ranges disappear. This unlearning, my colleague argues, comes from notions about the acceptability of sources of information previously used. These maps show the social nature of “learning,” the idea that while in many cases there may be actual answers (after all, African geography exists), what information you look for, and from whom, determines how you will view the information you get, and ultimately what you will do with it.

Writing at a time when the literature on transitions to democracy was fixated on the mode of transition, and when concepts such as authoritarian legacy, authoritarian enclave, or the shadow of the past dominated, Wendy Hunter's 1997 book, Eroding Military Influence in Brazil, went against the grain. In a direct attack on institutionalist approaches that emphasized the resiliency of military prerogatives in transitions from military regimes, Hunter argues that democracy itself would, over time, reduce the influence exerted by the armed forces. A solid theoretical orientation, rich casework, and insightful commentary on the dynamics behind the creation of civilian control all mark the book as a noteworthy contribution to the literature on democratic transitions, civil–military relations, and Latin American politics.

This excellent collection of essays takes the reader into a complex area: the relationship between economic development and ethnic conflict. It is such a tricky topic because there is consensus about neither what ethnicity is nor the contributions that economic factors make to the origins, dynamics, and resolution of ethnic strife. In fact the essays presented here steer clear of origins and resolution and focus instead on the less controversial area of how development policy impacts on the dynamics of ethnic conflicts. There is a great need for contributions in this area, because, as the introductory chapter by Herring and Esman notes, the international community is becoming more involved in humanitarian assistance and postviolence reconstruction initiatives in a number of protracted intercommunal conflicts. These include Bosnia, Kosovo, Israel and Palestine, Northern Ireland, and Lebanon. At the same time the increased awareness of ethnic conflict in the past decade has resulted in reassessments of what development means in a multicultural setting.

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.

India's nuclear tests in May 1998 came as a surprise to many observers and proved all the more puzzling when Indian Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee, in a letter to President Clinton, singled out China as the focal point of Indian security concerns. This statement and others led some, including Beijing's own foreign policy community, to view the tests as an effort to boost India's status internationally and to shore up domestic support for a new coalition government. John Garver's book challenges this domestic-driven interpretation of the tests by chronicling in detail a half-century of contentious relations between the world's two most populous states. Seen in historical perspective, India's nuclear tests were another episode in what Garver terms a “protracted conflict” (p. 3) between Beijing and Delhi. (The milder-sounding “protracted contest” serves as the book's title, but “protracted conflict,” a term Garver uses with some frequency, better captures the book's thesis.)