Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. By Patrick Thaddeus Jackson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. 286p. $27.95.

Rarely have I enjoyed (and learned from) reading a book as much as this one, whose parts are quite brilliant on occasion but whose overall argument falls well short of its claim and aim. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson argues with verve and conviction that the Federal Republic of Germany's creation and its subsequent joining in alliances with the United States and its European partners would not have occurred without the invention, the implementation, and deployment of “the West” as a unifying concept of political, cultural, and social identity. Challenging the explanatory powers of realist theories, as well as their international relations constructivist, Marxist, and liberal counterparts, Jackson develops something he calls a “transactional social constructionist conception of social reality: transactional because the analytic focus is on social ties and transactions rather than putatively solid and stable actors with relatively fixed interests, and social constructionist because the causal mechanisms producing policy outcomes involve the social production and reproduction of patterns of meaning” (p. 15, italics in original). This self-labeled “post-structural approach” (ibid., again italics in original) allows Jackson to navigate a fine line between the Scylla of contingency and the Charibdis of determinism even though he comes closer to the “agency” side of the ubiquitous agency—structure tension that will remain forever unresolved.