International Democracy and the West: The Role of Governments, Civil Society, and Multinational Business. By Richard Youngs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 232p. $99.00.

In his seminal article published nearly 30 years ago, cleverly called “Second Image Reversed,” Peter Gourevitch outlined a set of arguments for why and how to study the international causes of domestic outcomes. This framework had a profound effect on several literatures, but only a minor ripple in the study of regime change. A handful of international relations scholars, including John Owen and Mark Peceny, have made important contributions to this field, and a smattering of comparativists have added the international dimension to their list of independent variables that influence regime type, but the subject could not be considered a mainstream field. In fact, the third-wave transitologists gave only passing attention to the international dimensions of democratization. Laurence Whitehead did write an important chapter on international dimensions of democratization in the four-volume study on transitions from autocratic rule edited by Louillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Lawrence Whitehead. Yet, in one of the introductory essays in this study, Schmitter wrote that one “of the firmest conclusions that emerged … was that transitions from authoritarian rule and immediate prospects for political democracy were largely to be explained in terms of national forces and calculations. External actors tended to play an indirect and usually marginal role” (in O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Southern Europe, 1986, p. 5). Scholars and policy analysts writing about democratization after the end of the Cold War have devoted more attention to international factors, yet the subject is still grossly neglected. This absence of scholarship is all the more surprising given the foreign policy debates in Washington, Brussels, Moscow, and Tehran about the role the United States in fostering “regime change.”