The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World. By Ann Florini. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005. 271p. $45.

The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and the Politics of Global Order. By Nicolas Guilhot. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 286p. $18.95.

Nicolas Guilhot and Ann Florini appear to have hold of rather different parts of the democratic elephant: While the two books are not in direct dialogue with each other, they do provide quite different accounts of some closely related phenomena. Guilhot regards transnational “democracy promotion” and its agents—the World Bank, the U.S. state, nongovernmental organizations, corporations, think tanks—as engaged in the propagation of a neoconservative economic and political agenda around the world. Florini is much more charitably disposed toward a putative global democracy and its proponents, and indeed maintains that unless states, corporations, NGOs, international governmental organizations, and citizens in general are integrated into activism on its behalf (as well as on behalf of other goals), global and national futures look rather bleak.