Book reviews
International Relations theory
Just war and international order: the uncivil condition in world politics. By Nicholas Rengger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2013. 205pp. Index. £50.00. isbn 978 1 10764 474 8. Available as e-book.
Harnessing an impressive array of literatures across the fields of political theory, Inter- national Relations and international legal theories, political theology and the history of warfare, Nicholas Rengger has written a subtle set of arguments against recent and contem- porary practices of moral interventionism. Whether one agrees with his reasoning or not (this reviewer happens not to), the book makes an important contribution to debates in the academic and policy worlds around wars of choice. Amidst a plethora of literature on this topic, this book stands out for its philosophical sophistication, its singular use of intellectual history and the measured consistency of its own argument.
The thesis of the book is particular. Rengger follows what he calls ‘a trajectory in the world’ that has led to ‘more harmful politics than what might otherwise be’ (pp. ix, 167).
This trajectory relates to the expansion of the justification for the use of force in the last 100 years and, most particularly, over the last 30. From an intellectual historical perspective, and using the conceptual distinctions of Michael Oakeshott, Rengger argues that the tradi- tion of ‘just war’ thinking has become complicit with the modern ‘teleocratic’ conception of politics (politics of a common purpose) and the modern ordering of society for war (pp.
29−35, 144). The tradition has, accordingly, moved from framing normative constraints on violence (as from the early medieval period to the sixteenth century) to permitting the moral use of violence. The political outcome has been the irony of more violence and less ‘civil association’ in both domestic and international society (pp. 158, 163−7). After the dilemmas of the Second Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan, the paradoxes of liberal internation- alism are familiar in contemporary realist literature. Rengger’s approach is particular in that he places these paradoxes within a specific historical intellectual constellation: the growing domination of purposive politics over the European just war tradition. With this domina- tion, traditional sceptical approaches to the use of force and the ‘casuistic’ application of moral rule to particular circumstances are receding (p. 156). The harnessing of the just war tradition to the ‘teleocratic’ understanding of politics leads, in other words, to the demise of political judgement.
Each of the five chapters of the book provides different aspects of this thesis. Chapters one and two (‘Disordered world’ and ‘War music’) consider the unduly violent extension of just war practices after 9/11 and the way in which the prosecution of war is mistak- enly related to regime types, not modes of civil association. Chapters three and four (‘Just war: ambiguous tradition’ and ‘Force for good?’) consider the pro-interventionist and/or
‘preventive war’ arguments of the communitarian Michael Walzer as well as liberal and
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cosmopolitan internationalists like Alan Buchanan, Michael Doyle, Robert Keohane and Thomas Weiss. Across a range of justifications for the use of force (to stop ongoing violence or prevent its use by a delimited future threat) Rengger argues for highly limited exceptions to the general international rule against organized violence and considers the changing nature of external threats not qualitatively new enough to necessitate a change in the rules of war (a new normative doctrine of ‘preventive war’). Chapter five (‘Supreme emergency’) points to the entanglement of the just war tradition in purposive conceptions of politics at its ‘most absurd’ (p. 136): the doctrine of supreme emergency and the consequent infla- tion of state power. For Rengger (against Walzer), there can be no absolute criterion that justifies the suspension of civil law; the criteria that constitute this judgement can only be diverse and context-bound (pp. 155−6). State power is thereby normatively constrained. In an excellent epilogue, Rengger challenges the ‘growing power of teleocratic politics’ (p.
159) by basically suggesting that realist, liberal and cosmopolitan purposes are a choice, not a necessity, and that, while clearly justified in some circumstances of undue human suffering and global challenge, cosmopolitan purpose should not blunt the civil diversity that makes up the (global) political condition.
There are several questions that Rengger’s thesis leaves unanswered. Among them: is intellectual history not given too much ideational weight in the thesis? How and when can one judge whether new facts require new norms or not (the move, for example, from pre-emption to prevention in face of the dual threat of WMD and non-state actors)? Does the book not wilfully underestimate (see pp. 163−6) the range and extent of the global problems that the international community faces in the coming decades? Is not, in this context, the fashioning of common global vision and purpose a moral and political necessity?
It is the great merit of this eloquent book to make these questions all the more important by arguing, so well, to one side of them.
Richard Beardsworth, Aberystwyth University, UK
Dilemmas of decline: British intellectuals and world politics, 1945−1975. By Ian Hall. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2012. 254pp. Index. Pb.: £24.95. isbn 978 0 98459 099 5.
‘As Britain retreated from power, so too did British thinkers’ (p. 183).
Given the importance of the issues studied by International Relations (IR), the high standing of British IR scholarship and the popularity of IR among students in the UK, it is perhaps strange that there are so few comprehensive and well-researched studies of British international thought in the years after the end of the Second World War. Ian Hall’s eloquent and comprehensive account of the three decades between 1945 and 1975 is a recent and welcome exception. To a certain degree this period is a kind of missing link in the history of international thought in Britain. The pre-1945 period has been well served over the last few decades by a series of works by both historians and IR scholars, that have fleshed out the British debates over international affairs. At the same time, much of the current institutional and intellectual form of what we now know as IR in Britain developed after the early 1970s. After all, as Hall reminds us, the British International Studies Association, the main scholarly association representing British IR, was not founded until 1974 (pp. 6, 169). In this sense IR in Britain is a very recent phenomenon, and the 30 years after 1945 (out of which British IR coalesced) is a maelstrom of competing traditions filled with many names that will (by and large) be unfamiliar to current students of IR. Yet the intellectual
International Relations theory
threads that swirled around British international thought during these years laid much of the foundation for the British IR of today.
Hall’s analysis is based on his identification of the five major traditions of British postwar international studies: realism, internationalism, Whiggism, liberalism and radicalism.
These traditions are not hermetically sealed paradigms, but rather inherited ways of seeing the world that are flexible and open to adaptation and change. Here he draws on the work of Mark Bevir on the role of traditions in political thought. Many students of IR might be surprised by the lack of the usual paradigm divisions associated with IR textbooks. The blunt fact is, though, that the so-called paradigm divisions are post hoc inventions that obscure more than they reveal. Rather, Hall’s use of the fungible and permeable concept of traditions (with many individual scholars often belonging to more than one category at a time) allows him to tell a coherent story without losing sight of the complex connections and interrelationships in the international thought of the time.
To a certain extent, though, this book is a bittersweet narrative. The ‘sweetness’ of the scholarly depth and smooth writing is matched by the bitterness of the story told. This is not a story of a successful adaptation to the new problems faced by the decline of Britain as a Great Power. Rather it is predominantly about the slow retreat of much of what consti- tuted IR in Britain from policy relevance into a detached scholasticism. There are major exceptions to this (Hall singles out the strategists and the peace researchers as among a group that avoided this fate), but the broad theme is of an intellectual retreat from policy relevance. Hall locates the cause of this in the traditions of thought that dominated British scholarship, although other factors, such as the nature of the British civil service, can also account for the drift away from policy relevance. What makes this shift even more inter- esting is that, in comparison with other jurisdictions, it is unusual and possibly even unique.
French and American intellectuals, for example, ‘retained a concern with influencing their countries’ foreign policies’ (p. 171). Here Hall’s analysis places him at odds with many in British IR, who would still see a ‘need to distance oneself from events and practitioners’
(p. 183). At this stage the argument in Hall’s narrative becomes a call for a balance between detachment and engagement.
Like all good histories, Hall’s account raises as many questions about the future as it does about the past. The issue of policy relevance leads to the question of the right balance between applicability and scholasticism. Should academics aim to be advisers to the prince, and to speak truth to power? What is gained and lost when we do? What is the relationship between external events and the course of academic study? To what extent are our ideas about international affairs sculpted by our inherited traditions—whether those traditions are accepted, rejected or reinvented? While, on the face of it, this is a book that provides answers about the interrelationships of thinkers in the past, at a deeper level it also illuminates the structures of thought that continue to discipline international theory today.
Lucian M. Ashworth, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
Thucydides and the modern world: reception, reinterpretation and influence from the Renaissance to the present. Edited by Katherine Harloe and Neville Morley.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012. 256pp. Index. £60.00. isbn 978 1 10701 920 1. Available as e-book.
The meaning of a text is realized at the point of reception. For a complex author like Thucy - dides, this evidently means that the value of the meaning received will depend on the quality
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of reception. In the worst case, the History of the Peloponnesian War will serve as a smokescreen for, or as an amplifier of, the receiver’s preconceived notions and personal commitments.
The volume under review provides us with insightful cases in point. The first substantive chapter, by Kinch Hoekstra, shows how early modern pundits used the History of the Pelopon- nesian War to argue for and against (but typically for) preventive and pre-emptive attack. The next chapter, by Nadia Urbinati, shows how English and French post- revolutionaries took Thucydides to be a crown witness for the merits or flaws of democracy. Johannes Süßmann then shows how German historicists like Schlegel invoked Thucydides as a precursor of their own brand of transformative historiography. Elizabeth Potter demonstrates how John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold used the Thucydidean vision of Athens as a vehicle to influence contemporary political and cultural debates. Neville Morley describes how the eighteenth-century German historiographer and economic historian Wilhelm Roscher started his career with a sophisticated understanding of Thucydidean methodology as combining science and art, in fact an understanding so sophisticated that it went largely unnoticed by his peers.
The chapters are ordered chronologically by the reception period under study. But there are some patterns emerging. Before the French Revolution the international themes of imperial strategy and warfare were predominant, whereas in the post-revolutionary period the more domestic themes of Athenian democracy and political culture came to the fore.
Traumatized by the French Revolution, Parisian intellectuals stuck to the negative image of Athens as a democratic nightmare. Their British counterparts developed more nuanced interpretations to influence ongoing debates on the institutional design of a more democratic but still formally aristocratic and monarchical political system. After the cataclysm of the revolutionary wars and given the political stagnation of the restoration era, German univer- sity professors were mainly interested in how a Thucydidean methodology might contribute to the reconstruction of a mental framework to make sense of past, present and future.
The remaining chapters are dedicated to more contemporary issues. Jennifer Roberts castigates Pericles, the orator of the famous Epitaphios in the second book of the History of the Peloponnesian War, for not having been more sensitive to women (emulators of the Epitaphios are given a better verdict to the extent that they come closer to the ideal of gender sensi- tivity). Emily Greenwood shows how, in the 1920s, the retired Greek politician Elefthe- rios Venizelos understood the History of the Peloponnesian War as a prefiguration of modern Greece’s most recent national calamity.
The next two chapters bring us to International Relations proper, which like no other discipline has appropriated Thucydides for its own purposes. Steven Forde flattens Thucydides to the stature of a classical realist, mainly based on his anthropological pessi- mism, and then compares him to Machiavelli and Hobbes as his sidekicks in the triptych of classical realist patron saints. Richard Lebow gives a survey of the ‘recent’ Thucydides reception in International Relations (the newest couple of references in the chapter is to 2007 and 2003, and the rest dates back to 2001 or earlier).
The volume is framed by a helpful introduction by the editors and a conclusion by Geoffrey Hawthorn, which ends on the following note: ‘To receive someone is indeed to connect them with what one thinks oneself and may want to persuade others to. But that does not preclude its being true’ (p. 228). But is it really enough to study how others have pursued their preconceived notions and personal commitments, leaving aside the question of interpretative accuracy? If not, what should be done?
The remedy is to go back to the sources, ad fontes. This sounds naive and old-fashioned, but it works. In a precocious book at the beginning of my career, I offered a comprehensive
International Relations theory
interpretation of the entire History of the Peloponnesian War, which I had carefully read from beginning to end in the original language. Unfortunately the book appeared in German with an obscure publisher, but my conclusion stands. The History can be under- stood as a diagnostic case-study on the catastrophic degeneration of political rhetoric and culture, both domestically and internationally, under conditions of protracted warfare.
Thucydides has carefully crafted the 141 speeches in the History into a polyphonic drama on how over time the practice of warfare subverts and corrodes them all: the argumen- tative culture of imperial Athens with its separation between a moral domestic and an amoral international sphere, the anti-imperialistic rhetoric of the Peloponnesian Federa- tion with its false claims for the moral high ground, and the Sicilian discourse of liberation from the Athenian yoke.
Jörg Friedrichs, University of Oxford, UK
The silence of animals: on progress and other modern myths. By John Gray. London:
Allen Lane. 2013. 223pp. £18.99. isbn 978 1 84614 450 9. Available as e-book.
John Gray is a significant political philosopher, an engaging cultural critic and a provocative public intellectual. He is a consistent adversary of any orthodoxy, a myth-breaker ready to defy the idols of the tribe, no matter how disappointing this might be for those who look for immediate answers to ultimate questions. His latest book is both illuminating and timely: it continues Gray’s onslaught on the fallacies of modernity, among which is the myth of progress as a linear development from simple to complex and, in a moralizing sense, from evil to good. Gray sees progress as an intellectual tranquillizer, the equivalent of Prozac, meant to placate frustrations, anxieties and fears. He identifies this fascination with progress in most historical metanarratives of modernity, from liberalism and early socialism to Marxism, Bolshevism and their offspring.
The certainty that progress is ineluctable, inexorable and irreversible makes one blind to the darker side-effects of the adventure that we designate as modernity: barbaric outbursts of intolerance, exclusions, persecutions and genocides, irrational onslaughts on nature. The myth of progress is intimately linked to the worshipping of the future and the attempts to escape self-scrutiny: ‘Among the many benefits of faith in progress, the most important may be that it prevents too much self-knowledge’ (p. 4). French novelist Émile Zola, the epitome of the engaged intellectual, once wrote: ‘Je crois que l’avenir de l’humanité est dans le progrès de la raison par la science’ (I believe that the future of mankind lies in the progress of reason through science). Russian writer Osip Mandelstam had a totally different percep- tion of history’s sense when he confessed to his wife that he was five when he first heard the word progress and immediately started to cry. Progress is a contagious illusion, but this enthralment is precisely what the believer refuses to admit: ‘For those who live inside a myth, it seems a self-evident fact. Human progress is a fact of this kind. If you accept it you a have a place in the grand march of humanity. Humankind is, of course, not marching anywhere. “Humanity” is a fiction composed from billions of individuals for each of whom life is singular and final’ (pp. 6−7).
The adamant belief in progress goes hand in hand with the firm conviction that science is somehow able to make human life less miserable. Obviously, there are technological accomplishments that no one can deny, but do they diminish our ultimate anguishes?
Wasn’t science involved in the abominable Nazi designs to impose a racial community purified of all allegedly polluting agents? Wasn’t the Stalinist ‘great experiment’ rooted in a Promethean exaltation of technology?
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In a way, much of Gray’s critique of the Enlightenment’s legacies, so much part of the fabric of our spiritual environment, resonates with the conservative reaction to the fantasy of a continuous advance towards a pacified, blissful community. Gray is neither a conserva- tive nor a pessimist, but there is something Spenglerian in his vision of our civilization as soulless and, in the long run, meaningless. In the same vein, his demonstration of the sense- lessness of any theory that postulates an end to history, be it inspired by Hegel, Marx, their heir Russian-French thinker Alexandre Kojève, or the American Straussian theorist Francis Fukuyama, is utterly relevant for understanding the post-Cold War global turbulence. In fact, far from having ushered in a state of democratic stasis, with liberal values inspiring feverish enthusiasms globally, the end of the Soviet bloc has led to new forms of malaise, perplexities and discomfitures. This is not to deny the world-historical significance of the revolutions of 1989−91, but merely to emphasize, together with Gray, the need to avoid any teleological temptation. Gray’s deconstruction of progress as a redemptive fantasy is not an invitation to fatalism, but rather a call for clear-mindedness and resistance to the siren-songs of ideological systems.
Gray uses literature more than political treatises to make his points. One of his favou- rite authors remains Arthur Koestler, the paradigmatic Central European novelist and maverick thinker who, after his break with communism, often spelled out his contempt for any grandiose attempts to improve the human condition: ‘Koestler grasped a fact liberal meliorists refuse to face: gradual progress is often impossible. When the illusion of piecemeal improvement was shattered by events, he—along with many in his genera- tion—came to think that catastrophes were a necessary part of human advance’ (p. 32). In other words, there is no painless, smooth road to a more dignified human world—disasters and cataclysms are part and parcel of our fate. Koestler was not alone in this melancholy way of looking into history and politics: Gray explores insights of authors such as Joseph Conrad, Sigmund Freud, T. E. Hulme, Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Curzio Malaparte, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, Wallace Stevens and Jorge Luis Borges. They shared a sense of existential displacement, of homelessness, angst, solitude and discomfort, they all had misgivings about the solidity of the democratic veneer of modern societies, they all realized the fragility of humanism: ‘The charm of a liberal way of life is that it enables most people to renounce their freedom unknowingly. Allowing the majority of humankind to imagine they are flying fish even as they pass their lives under the waves, liberal civilization rests on a dream’ (p. 62).
Gray’s book is both diagnosis and caveat. He sees similarities between the 1930s and the early twenty-first century, including global dislocation, mounting xenophobia, populist demagoguery. The philosopher refuses to propose solutions. He indicates the precipice, warns his fellow humans of the dangers, and dismisses any predictive determinism. Like Koestler, he sounds like a Cassandra. It is up to us to hear or to ignore the message. Will we accept the disturbing challenge or will we persevere in escapist denial and utopian reveries confirming Gray’s sad conviction: ‘The pursuit of silence seems to be a peculiarly human activity. Other animals run away from noise, but it is noise made by others that they try to avoid. Only humans want to silence the clamour in their minds’ (p. 157).
Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland (College Park), USA
International organization, law and ethics
International organization, law and ethics
Exit strategies and state building. Edited by Richard Caplan. New York: Oxford University Press. 2012. 320pp. Index. Pb.: £22.50. isbn 978 0 19976 012 1. Available as e-book.
Statebuilding. By Timothy Sisk. Cambridge: Polity. 2013. 200pp. Index. Pb.: £13.99.
isbn 978 0 74566 159 9. Available as e-book.
A book with the words ‘exit strategies’ in the title should sell well at a time when the experi- ences in Afghanistan and Iraq have exposed the limits of international operations designed to transform societies and build peace. Possibly for that reason, a former UN secretary general for peacekeeping operations recommends the book as compulsory reading for ‘all concerned citizens’. But the volume on exit strategies compiled by Richard Caplan is much more than an assessment of exit strategies in the two recent and possibly most controversial operations. It is a comprehensive yet judicious compilation of country and thematic cases that examines disengagement strategies in a wide range of interventions: colonial admin- istrations, peace support operations, international administrations and military occupa- tions. Throughout, the authors examine the conditions that shaped the decision to exit, the criteria for a successful or reasonable exit, and—though to a much lesser extent—the consequences of exit for the intervening and the object states.
The broad comparative perspective yields some important insights. Colonial exit strat- egies, for instance, were for the most part hastily devised in response to public pressures for change, not unlike contemporary cases where exit was shaped by domestic politics in the intervening country (US presidential elections drove US strategy in Iraq), and by the financial costs as well as the saliency of self-determination in principle and practice (the UN administration of East Timor). Moreover, the end of colonial administrations rarely signified a complete break of relations; the same applies to exits from international peace operations and international administrations.
One of the main themes that runs through the book is that ‘exit’ is not an event, and certainly not a terminal event, but a process of transition. UN peace operations of one kind are often followed by one or more successor missions designed to carry on the process and maintain international influence. International administrators likewise seem reluctant to let go. The most striking case is the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, whose power to intervene in administrative and political matters granted after the Dayton agree- ment continues to this day, and has no cut-off date. In Haiti, one UN peace operation after another has come and gone since 1994; the present one (MINUSTAH) is on a one-year time leash by the UN Security Council. Protracted cases of these kinds have pulled regional actors into lead roles (as the Europeans in Bosnia and the Brazilians in Haiti) and one of the conclusions emerging from this volume is that regional actors may play a large role in successor or follow-up missions.
Exit strategies typically contain formal criteria for when and why an operation can end, although these are not necessarily the only, or even the principal, reasons for exiting. Use of benchmarking has become increasingly common, whether related to security, state capacity or development. How and why such benchmarks are determined is a deeply political process rather than a technical exercise, as the chapters show, and benchmarks—like goalposts—can be moved. Reflecting on the criteria for a successful exit strategy, Caplan concludes that a sustainable local peace is desirable, but when this is not possible, ‘a successful strategy will be defined in less ambitious terms’ (p. 314). The goal displacement by the international coalition in Afghanistan from a truly liberal peace to ‘good enough’ governance is a case in point.
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Conclusions on several levels arise from this rich collection of case-studies. Cutting across all is the implication—directed towards policy-makers and managers of future inter- national missions—that continuous assessment of operational goals alongside evaluation of progress will strengthen the prospect for effective exit.
Timothy Sisk’s book—simply called Statebuilding—is a thorough examination of why statebuilding is essential to peacebuilding, and a richly documented case for why the inter- national community should assist statebuilding in fragile states. An ‘explicit and sometimes very assertive liberal interventionist agenda’ (p. 2) may be necessary, Sisk argues, to promote a human rights-based approach to development and democracy. While the period of grand transformative statebuilding missions seems to be closing, one-third of all OECD aid still goes to a few, so-called fragile states, and such states have a tendency to relapse into violent conflict with international ramifications. Hence, the success or failure of statebuilding remains a major concern of international organizations and the aid community, although as a determinant of ‘the future of the twenty-first century’ (p. 157), imploding states may face stiff competition from other calamities.
Sisk’s primary concern is how international assistance to statebuilding can be made more effective. Starting with an analytical framework that recognizes four major dimensions of statebuilding—autonomy, authority, capacity and legitimacy—he mines a wide range of cases and recent practices to distil priorities and strategies. The main theme throughout is that there are no easy, simple or straightforward answers. Every strategy and all prioritizing entail trade-offs. Dilemmas abound. These dilemmas appear in Sisk’s earlier work as well, but they are here laid out, dissected and illustrated in ways that should be of much use to students and practitioners of international statebuilding alike.
Astri Suhrke, Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway
Conflict, security and defence
In defence of war. By Nigel Biggar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. 361pp.
Index. £25.00. isbn 978 0 19967 261 5. Available as e-book.
Nigel Biggar’s target is not only the liberal left for whom there is a strong presumption of pacifism but all those infected by the ‘virus of wishful thinking’, viewing the world as they wish it to be rather than as it is. For Biggar, as ‘a considerably Augustinian Christian’, the world is full of grave injustices, for which war may, at times and regretfully, be the remedy.
He offers a robust and stimulating defence of war as a necessary instrument of policy, drawing on both an erudite understanding of the just war tradition and a plentiful supply of contemporary practical examples.
Biggar lays vigorously into Christian pacifists not only for their ill-founded wishful thinking but also for their lack of scriptural authority, citing the centurion encountered by Jesus, not condemned for his military profession but praised for his faith, as well as St Paul’s approval of the publicly authorized use of force in Romans chapter 13. He wields his scholarly scabbard with equal vigour against recent secular critics of just war thinking, who so extol the primacy of individual rights as to render war practically impossible, reminding them that the just war theory was not an invention of the human rights movement of the late twentieth century but a long pre-existing Christian tradition. In that tradition individual rights do not have absolute status but can be overridden by the claims of both social goods and of charity or neighbourly love.
Conflict, security and defence
For Biggar, war is ‘a punitive response to grave injustice’ (p. 212). That view, central to medieval just war theory, was developed in a hierarchically ordered world, with princes acknowledging the higher authority of the Holy Roman Emperor and Pope. The challenge is whether war as punishment can be justified in a post-Westphalian world of horizontally ordered states not acknowledging such higher authority, and with the United Nations as yet an imperfect instrument. Biggar argues that states can justifiably mete out ‘fraternal punishment’. But are we willing to concede to other states such a right to act as judge, jury and executioner in their own case? A wiser justification of the use of force is to prevent injustice rather than to punish it. This also avoids the objection that if war is punishment it is unfair punishment, punishing the innocent, while those morally guilty of initiating an unjust war (the politicians and generals) escape unscathed.
Biggar demolishes the widespread pacifist presumption that the First World War was a senseless bout of mass slaughter, arguing convincingly that it was fought by the Allies for a just cause, including the defence of Belgian and French independence. Readers may find less persuasive his justification of the scale of casualties incurred in pursuit of that just cause. For classical just war theorists, such as Vitoria, proportion was a key just war principle, requiring care to be taken that the evil effects of war do not outweigh its possible benefits. Applying that principle to Haig’s strategy in the Somme, Biggar concedes other options were available, such as the step-by-step approach advocated by his subordinates.
But he thinks that the 622,221 British casualties were justified: ‘Something may still be worth doing even though it could have been done more efficiently ‘(p. 129). But if other options were available to achieve the objectives with less loss of life should those options not have been pursued?
Never afraid to argue an unpopular cause, Biggar marshals an impressively detailed defence of the justice of the 2003 Iraq War. He argues that there were two just causes: ‘a characteristically atrocious regime and the threat of WMD’ (p. 324). Saddam Hussein was not engaged in or about to commit atrocities, but he was, according to Biggar, a nasty character who had done so in the past and was likely to do so again. The atrocious character of the regime was not, however, the British government’s proclaimed grounds for war.
The case presented to parliament and the public related solely to weapons of mass destruc- tion (WMD). Moreover, if atrocities are future possibilities rather than actual or imminent threats, does that furnish sufficient grounds for war, given the inevitable suffering that war causes? Just war thinking does not rule out regime change by war but does insist on there being compelling grounds, such as an imminent humanitarian disaster. Biggar argues that, without the weapons, the WMD threat lay in the future but was still a matter for serious concern. He notes that for future threats, just war thinkers, including Grotius, require a degree of ‘moral certainty’ (p. 267) which undermines as a just cause the threat of WMD capability being transferred to Al-Qaeda. But was there not a similar lack of moral certainty about other aspects of the WMD threat, given the paucity of supporting intel- ligence evidence?
Turning to the principle of proportion, requiring care to be taken that the harm likely to arise from war will not outweigh the good of the just cause, Biggar argues that it is too difficult meaningfully to apply this principle to war: ‘the costs and benefits of war are so unpredictable and incommensurate that any “calculation” can be little more than a well-informed guess’ (p. 306). Biggar rightly stresses that it is difficult to predict the conse- quences of military action and absurd to suppose a precise cost−benefit calculation can be performed. But is it not reasonable to require our political leaders before they embark on military action to make a well-informed judgement of the reasonably foreseeable consequences
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and to formulate plans that try to ensure that the harm likely to be caused will not outweigh the good? The failure of the coalition leaders to formulate such plans was not a minor peccadillo but a major lapse in moral responsibility, contributing to the unnecessary deaths of many thousands of service people and civilians.
Biggar’s book is a fine polemic, offering a splendidly robust and well-argued defence of war, that deserves to be widely read. My only worry is that at times the defence may be a little too robust.
David Fisher, King’s College London, UK
British generals in Blair’s wars. Edited by Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Hew Strachan. Farnham: Ashgate. 2013. 385pp. Pb.: £19.95. isbn 978 1 40943 736 9. Available as e-book.
In the most bracing of the essays in this book, retired general Graeme Lamb argues that only those who have practised the art of generalship are qualified to preach about it, discounting
‘the faceless critics, those sitting safely beyond the lion’s reach, those not fit for the arena who claim with such conviction that we are not good enough … for me I am not inclined to listen to those who would hail me a donkey when they are quite evidently just a horse’s arse’. This pungently sums up the guiding principle of this book, in which 24 senior military and civilian practitioners give their unique personal perspective on Britain’s recent wars, the better to educate those, faceless or not, who want to understand why and how these campaigns worked out the way they did.
These accounts were first given as a series of seminars at Oxford University between 2005 and 2011, and in some ways they reflect their origin. The best retain the immediacy and fluency which comes when an expert speaks to an attentive audience about something he knows and cares about. Some read as a sort of catharsis, the author struggling to make sense later of what was at the time a messy sequence of events. Inevitably the quality is varied, with some outstanding accounts including those by Graeme Lamb, co-editor Richard Iron and former civil servant Desmond Bowen, the last giving the often- neglected policy-maker’s perspective. Other chapters are less gripping, some suffering either from a bombastic style or from the over-intellectualism which seems to be increas- ingly characteristic of post-modern major generals. The ground covered is selective, most of the book given over to the British Army’s experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, largely neglecting the contributions of the other armed services and with comparatively little about the earlier, more successful military operations in Northern Ireland, the Balkans and Sierra Leone.
A more serious problem, however, is with the overall argument running through the book, set out in Jonathan Bailey’s impassioned essay on the political context, which implies that Britain’s generals have been largely blameless for the military failures of the last few years, as they were merely playing a difficult hand dealt for them by a reckless prime minister. With some honourable exceptions, such as in Richard Iron’s fascinating account of his learning process while advising Iraqi generals in Basra in 2008, few of the contributors admit to making any mistakes at all.
This rose-tinted self-image has already been challenged elsewhere, including in the Iraq Inquiry, which has recorded the army’s own eagerness to participate in the 2003 invasion, and its failure to adjust to an unexpected and fast-changing security situation in Basra. But there is also much material in this book which undercuts its editorial line. Graeme Lamb’s essay (quoted above) is highly critical of some of his fellow contributors: ‘the majority I
Conflict, security and defence
would rate as fair, a few I would gladly join and assault hell’s gate, and some I wouldn’t follow to the latrine’. It is just a pity he doesn’t name names.
The most serious indictment, though, is an unintentional one, contained in Justin Maciejewski’s essay about Operation Sinbad, the bloody 2006−7 effort to wrest control of Basra from the Jaysh al-Mahdi militias. Astonishingly, this operation seems to have been a personal initiative by the British commander, Richard Shirreff, aimed not at securing the objectives of either the British or Iraqi governments (which at the time seem to have been to secure some sort of peace settlement), but at achieving the more parochial aim of enabling the British Army ‘to emerge from Iraq with its reputation and credibility intact’. Unsur- prisingly, Shirreff ’s boss back in Britain, Nick Houghton, did not give him the support he wanted, and the operation petered out in an alleged narrow victory ‘on penalties in extra time’. But what Maciejewski represents as a failure of determination by ‘defeatists’
at home can equally be seen as a baffling reluctance by government to rein in an insurgent commander acting against national policy.
That Shirreff ’s and Houghton’s own accounts are missing from this book is a contro- versy all in itself. They, and four other officers who also addressed seminars at Oxford, have been refused Ministry of Defence permission to publish their papers, as they are still serving in the armed forces. This decision is condemned by the editors, and is indeed a loss for the reader. But it is also understandable when generals see themselves not as neutral, professional implementers of government policy but as critics or challengers of this policy.
This is particularly the case when they occupy powerful and influential positions: Shirreff is now a senior NATO commander, and Houghton has just taken over as Chief of Defence Staff, the most senior officer of all.
In reality, the relationship between prime ministers and their generals is more complex than this book suggests, and both praise and blame must be shared more equally. Never- theless, there is much here of great value, including a masterly concluding essay by Hew Strachan. But it should be seen not as an objective account of Britain’s recent military performance, rather a collection of informative, stimulating and at times highly partisan source material.
James de Waal, International Security, Chatham House
The strategy bridge: theory for practice. By Colin S. Gray. Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press. 2010. 308pp. Index. £56.00. isbn 978 0 19957 966 2.
Perspectives on strategy. By Colin S. Gray. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013.
229pp. Index. £55.00. isbn 978 0 19967 427 5.
The concept of strategy has benefited from the attention of prominent thinkers through the ages. If Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli and Clausewitz wrote the classic works, others, such as Basil Liddell Hart, brought it first into the twentieth century, before still others, such as Bernard Brodie and Lawrence Freedman, carried it into the nuclear age.
At the same time, strategy has come under attack as a concept. Some suggest that defini- tions of strategy have become so diluted as to lose all coherence and use. Others argue that
‘strategy’ is but an illusion in a hyper-complex world that is too unpredictable to be shaped into any form of coherent goal. Above and beyond these more theoretical debates, there are many observers today who lament the lack of planning, let alone strategy, in practice in international affairs. In contributing to this busy and contentious field, these books seek to address this range of complexities—‘strategy is so difficult a subject to understand, let
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alone to practise successfully’ (The strategy bridge, p. 4)—through an approach which at once returns to the classics, seeks to redefine the essential logic of strategy and explores a number of specific aspects in depth.
The author, Colin Gray, is well placed to make what is by his own admission such a bold attempt to contribute further to the debate. A senior figure in the strategic studies field, he has extensive experience in both the policy and academic worlds, and has published many significant contributions to the literature, not least his book Modern strategy (OUP, 1999).
These books build on or slightly modify his previous arguments in a number of ways.
Although The strategy bridge and Perspectives on strategy were published three years apart, Gray explicitly presents them as stand-alone but companion volumes. Together, they serve not merely as a capstone to his career, but as an attempt to develop strategic thought, so that, while continuing to acknowledge Clausewitz’s book On war as the core masterpiece, it
‘move[s] on with, not from Clausewitz’ (The strategy bridge, p. 4). Thus, while recognizing that strategy does not have to refer purely to military matters, and that strategy exists in the wider political context, military matters are his ‘default reality’ (Perspectives, p. 3).
In The strategy bridge, Gray seeks to lay out a general theory for strategy—a task that the author himself acknowledges is ‘ambitious’. The book concentrates on the idea of the single theory of strategy, and its function is to educate those who seek to hold open the bridge between political purpose and action (p. 1). This bridge metaphor, he argues, may be open to criticism from ‘pedants’, but none other conveys the idea of the core function of strategy so well.
A compact but detailed book, the argument is laid out over three parts. In the first part, consisting of three chapters, Gray sets out the enduring nature of strategy, but also its evolving character, and the construction, execution and consequences of strategy. Part two, also consisting of three chapters, explores the difficulties and problems of strategy and strategic effect. The final part, in effect a conclusion, reflects on the context of strategy—
the attempt to secure control of a chaotic environment. The main text is supplemented by four appendices and a substantial and worthwhile bibliography.
Gray’s discussion is built on a series of dicta on strategy, and (sometimes combative) reflections on historical examples of strategic adventures (and misadventures) to illustrate his points. His chapter on the problems of strategy is noteworthy, particularly his reflec- tions about the difficulties of creating strategy in dialogue with an inconvenient enemy, as is his argument that purposeful strategy is, while very difficult, possible.
Perspectives acts as a ‘missing chapters’ volume, addressing in more depth aspects touched on only briefly in Strategy bridge. A similarly compact book, it introduces the ‘master narra- tive’—that strategic history is ‘intellectually coherent, even if strategists and strategic performances are not’ (p. 1)—before delving into stimulating explorations of the relative roles of mind and muscle, ethics, culture, geography and technology in strategy across five chapters and a conclusion. Again, the book benefits from a worthwhile bibliography.
Gray’s discussion in the ethical and cultural chapters engages in sensitive and complex but important topics for today’s strategic thinkers. As he suggests, the problem for the strategist often lies in operating in a context in which the actions of others are licensed and shaped by different moral beliefs and cultural behaviour.
In both books, Gray includes many pithy quotes about strategy drawn from thinkers and strategy makers alike and, for the most part, he himself writes in a robust and trenchant manner—even if sometimes while making a specific point he treads a very fine line between bold statement and sustainable argument. In The strategy bridge, for instance, he asserts that the literature on the nature of war and the relationships between war and peace is
Governance, civil society and cultural politics
‘unimpressive’, and there is ‘little theory of war beyond Clausewitz that is worth citing, let alone studying’ (p. 98). If some will be receptive to this combative style, adopting such an approach may mean that sceptical readers engage in retaliatory arguments while overlooking the detail of his subsequent qualifiers and explanations.
Similarly, if the two books can stand alone, they work best when taken together—even if this can mean some ‘internal’ overlap in and between them. While it is true that there is already a huge literature on strategy, these books make a useful contribution, exploring the classic thinkers and synthesizing complex arguments for the careful and attentive reader.
They will make good introductions for those fresh to the subject, most particularly in the public policy field, though they also deserve their place in the ongoing strategic studies debate, even if the core ideas will be familiar to some readers in the field.
Andrew Monaghan, Russia and Eurasia Programme, Chatham House
Governance, civil society and cultural politics
The Oxford Handbook of the history of nationalism. Edited by John Breuilly.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. 775pp. Index. £95.00. isbn 978 0 19920 919 4. Avail- able as e-book.
‘The most basic tenet of nationalism—the unique nation—is grounded historically’, says John Breuilly (p. 2). No nation likes to think it has appeared out of thin air; thus the frantic efforts of nineteenth-century grammarians, antiquarians and historians to construct a respectable and usable past, a genealogy, for their nations. A nation, as Ernest Renan said, presupposes a past. History, and historians, must necessarily be its life blood. Hence, as Paul Lawrence shows in this Handbook, the close connection between the emergence of the historical profession in the nineteenth century and the rise of nationalism. Much—though not all—of nineteenth-century history was national history, a story that continued through the twentieth century. Even today, despite the rise of transnational and global history, the majority of historians in university history departments teach and write national history, even if not always that of their own nation.
But if one group of historians has been central to nationalist ideology, others have been equally central in deconstructing that ideology, in two particular ways. The first has been to challenge the view of most nationalists that they have always been nationalist, that the nation has existed since time immemorial, or at least for a very long time. This is a view also supported by some students of nationalism today, who regard the Jews of the Old Testament, for instance, as the ‘first nation’, or see England as having invented nationalism in the sixteenth century. Peter Burke examines some of these claims, concluding that while scholars such as Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson are basically right in seeing a ‘great divide’ between a pre-national and a national world, ‘we should not think in crude binary terms’ (p. 33); there were certainly expressions of national sentiments of various kinds in the early modern world, and not just in Europe. Generally though, as Michael Rowe says,
‘historians today spend their time deconstructing national myths rather than creating them’
(p. 128).
But the bulk of the essays in this Handbook, and its organizing principle, relate to a second problem in nationalist thought. This is what has come to be referred to, rather inele- gantly, as ‘methodological nationalism’. This means not simply taking the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis—as in the sociologists’ concept of society, which nearly always means national society—but also treating nationalism as itself a product of the nation-
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state, and so confusing the creator with the creation. It is this that particularly exercises the editor, John Breuilly. ‘Nationalism is a historical subject distinct from national history
… To write any general history of nationalism, one must break the conflation of national and nationalism’ (pp. 2, 14). Accordingly the Handbook resists treating nationalism as the product of particular countries; rather it groups them regionally, as nationalism in the Americas, the Arab world, South-East, North-East and East Asia, south-eastern Europe, etc. The one exception is India, which gets a chapter to itself, though Joya Chaterjee’s handling of its complexities fully justifies it. One might have felt that China too deserves a separate chapter, especially given Rana Mitter’s masterly account of it in his chapter on East Asia.
All contributors recognize that, in the words of Anne-Marie Thiesse quoted by Burke,
‘nothing is more international than the formation of national identities’ (p. 30). Nation- alism has indeed been from the start a global, or at least international, phenomenon, as shown well in contributions by Andreas Eckert, James Mayall, Richard Caplan and Jürgen Osterhammel. How could it be otherwise, given its basic credo that every nation has a right to free and independent existence? ‘The construction of nationalist doctrine’, says Breuilly in his chapter on Italian and German ‘unification nationalism’, ‘was a transnational process’
(p. 151). Scholars from all over Europe participated in the recovery of national epics, such as the Nibelungenlied, and in the construction of national languages and national canons of literature. Nationalist struggles, such as that of the Greeks against the Ottomans, or the attempts by Poles to resurrect their divided nation, drew in intellectuals and statesmen from many countries. To be national was to be part of a global process of national awakening.
In view of the importance of history to nationalism, it is surprising that this seems to be the first large-scale, single-volume treatment of the subject, though Stefan Berger has for some time been coordinating a multi-volume scholarly project on the writing of national histories. In any case, it is hard to see how it could have been done better. Breuilly has assembled a first-class group of contributors, many of whom have written influentially about their topics elsewhere but all of whom express their ideas here concisely and clearly.
All students of nationalism will want to possess this volume. Not only are the individual contributions excellent, with useful up-to-date bibliographies, but there is a bonus in the form of helpful chronologies and maps showing the worldwide spread of nationalism.
Altogether a heroic and singular achievement, the more so as the work of a sole editor.
Krishan Kumar, University of Virginia, USA
The naked communist: Cold War modernism and the politics of popular culture. By Roland Végsö. New York: Fordham University Press. 2013. Index. 245pp. Pb.: £15.99.
isbn 978 0 82324 557 4.
This remarkable book provides an engaging and broad view of the transmission of history through a glimpse at a portion of the Cold War. One of the most noteworthy features of the discipline of history and its engagement with the Cold War, Roland Végsö observes, is that from the very beginning, from the origins of the Cold War, the discipline is an integral part of what it studies. So the historiographical disputes—traditionalist, revisionist and post- revisionist—that still dominate the discipline a full generation after the Cold War were in part shaped by the ideologies, the aesthetics and individuals that laboured to construct the artefacts, both archival and popular, that fuelled the anti-communism of the era. For Végsö, the urgent task was to provide an understanding that moved beyond these paradigms and interpretations. Historical events or eras themselves can create new histories; the Cold War
Governance, civil society and cultural politics
and its interpretations forced us to look to the period before its origins, perhaps to refigure that period in the light of what ‘we now know’ of the Cold War, just as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already started to reshape the histories of the Vietnam War. Similarly, he points out that without the constructs of the Cold War it would be difficult to understand the ‘war on terror’ of recent years because so many of our post-9/11 constructions have been informed by the structures of thought developed during the Cold War: the naked communist might as well be the naked terrorist.
Végsö’s primary task in the book was to move outside the intellectual and cultural struc- tures in setting the Cold War as a defined episode within a longer history of modernity.
By doing so he hoped to ask new questions and to see the period in a different way. It is no coincidence that the end of the Cold War roughly concurred with the advent of post modernity. That is, the period that began with the circumnavigation of the globe ended approximately at the time of the US defeat in Vietnam and the clear delineation of the world into first, second and third, though of course the bipolar configuration would not end until the fall of the Berlin Wall with all of its attendant significance. Végsö argues that the period is unique—not to dismiss earlier political experiments—because it represents one of the successful attempts ‘to impose a global order through the full consolidation and institutionalization of a perpetual crisis’ (p. 202). The Cold War, as in Odd Arne Westad’s study, was a global war.
But the real question is how it became so. The naked communist argues that postwar ideology was shaped by four dominant factors: the ‘world’, the ‘enemy’, the ‘secret’ and the
‘catastrophe’. These factors are explored through deep readings of popular and mass culture using Louis Althusser’s ideology. This ‘aesthetic ideology’ seeks to reveal the political in popular fiction, documents or cultural artefacts that have often been billed as apolitical. The book is not for the theoretically faint-hearted, and the first chapter requires some wading through the density of explication. Ultimately, however, the book provides a fascinating understanding of the mentality at the beginning of the Cold War and during the 1950s through popular culture.
The book is likely to be controversial. The author’s analysis is so close to the pulse that it will offend and hopefully create an engaged reaction. Végsö’s success, whether one agrees with his observations and conclusions or not, is to force a new way of looking at the era and the Cold War; not just that, but also to invite an introspection of the ways in which we gain knowledge through history. It is a layered and complex study. For instance, as the United States globalized its view of communism, the Third World presented particular problems. Decolonization created a dilemma that worked both in favour of US interests and against them because of their West European allied interests. The United States could try to maintain an anti-communist anti-colonialism, but it would have to order hierarchi- cally its concepts of the Other. Because the US anti-communism was so overdetermined, the construct remained unstable, especially once race entered the equation in popular form from the 1950s onwards. Paradoxically, the Cold War and the 1950s aversion to social change detrimentally affected domestic race relations. Yet simultaneously, the overdeter- mined ‘enemy’ in communism facilitated and justified the state’s increasingly undemocratic means of ensuring security in order to protect democracy. The American ‘secret’ in the face of this executive power was to facilitate its withdrawal as a subject from public consid- eration. For Végsö, the ‘catastrophe’ was to institutionalize the crisis as permanent and to legitimate the militarization of US culture.
David Ryan, University College Cork, Ireland
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Political economy, economics and development
The global economic crisis: a chronology. By Larry Allen. London: Reaktion. 2013.
272pp. Index. £18.00. isbn 978 1 78023 092 4. Available as e-book.
It had all the hallmarks of the run-up to a typical financial panic: a rapidly inflating bubble, nearly blind faith in asset markets, governments loosening oversight and actively encour- aging a feeding frenzy, and a public asleep to the looming danger. Speculation accompanied government miscues, such as lowering interest rates to near zero, which removed central bankers’ ability to respond to recession. What made the 2008−2009 global financial crisis different was its rapid sweep and global effects. When the definitive history of the recent calamity is written, it should be conceded that Larry Allen penned an exceptional first draft. He goes far enough back to include most relevant factors in the pending disaster, and lays out the causes and consequences simply enough for ordinary readers to comprehend the dolorous series of events, yet raises sufficient questions for professional economists and policy-makers to ponder until the next crisis once again catches us unaware.
Japan’s struggle to recover from the collapse of its mega-bubble in the 1990s foreshad- owed the recent crisis. Financial liberalization proceeded in stages from the 1970s to 1990s, weakening government control of the sector. Fearing that the Plaza Accord, an international effort to push the yen up and let the dollar fall, could hurt the domestic economy, Tokyo lowered interest rates. Instead of boosting productive investment, greater liquidity fuelled twin bubbles in stocks and real estate. Allen feels that Japan illustrates the validity of Henry George’s insistence on land speculation as the principal cause of depression. Cross-owner- ship and bank ownership of stocks aided the vast circle of securities speculation among large companies. Allen suggests that the bubble did not so much pop as shudder: interest hikes were only partially responsible for the landslide in both assets. As financial troubles deepened, bankers colluded with financial regulators to keep the disaster hidden, but in 1997−8 several key financial institutions spectacularly failed. The government muddled through with recapitalization and merging of banks, along with record-low interest rates and massive public works spending, but the larger economy barely grew until the next decade. Why did western governments not learn more from the slow-motion collapse/
stagnation of the world’s second largest economy?
The West’s liberalization mania began in the inflationary era of the 1970s, when rising prices delivered generally improving living standards and ‘fresh confidence in free markets’
(p. 41). America’s economic success bolstered belief in unfettered financial markets, and governments discounted tendencies towards excess and irrational behaviour among traders and financial firms as a wave of deregulation swept the developed world. New technologies and ever newer instruments of exchange, especially derivatives and options, made available much larger funds for business but also increased inequality, since talented brokers and financial wizards had the best access to them. Just as the effects of deregulation kicked in, housing markets across the developed world exploded in the new millennium. Tradition- ally a non-tradable asset, housing suddenly became both an arena for government monetary policy and a source of considerable income for the financial sector. Globalization tended to harmonize national housing markets, rapidly ageing populations valued home owner- ship, and a flexible menu of housing finance options was pushed on previously marginal home buyers. Even well-off customers were pressured to take on new kinds of mortgages.
Housing loans were then bundled and ‘securitized’, i.e. used to back bonds on international markets. Tightened lending standards finally pricked the bubble in 2007−2008.
Political economy, economics and development
The go-go housing market directly contributed to big banks’ difficulties. Securitiza- tion of loans initially made sense, but gradually included greater chance-taking, and the riskiest investors were large hedge funds and mutual funds. Banks backed themselves into the worst of situations: borrowing short term while lending long term. Large banks began to fail in Europe, but of course the most spectacular failures occurred in America. In several cases, big banks got sick by devouring weaker and sicker rivals. With the economy in free fall and laissez-faire discredited, Keynesian economics made a brief policy comeback. A supposedly self-correcting economy must go through several steps to recover from a more than mild recession, and often becomes too tangled in the hesitancy of economic actors to actually do what is expected. The recession was longer and stickier than in the past because unemployment remained higher and, Allen insists, could not come down because commodity prices were stuck at high levels, creating strong ‘headwinds’ that meant the technologically unemployed could not be absorbed (p. 205). Developing world stars China and India had more room for expansionary policies, but both resorted to creating their own housing bubbles that fuelled a dangerous financial dependency. As housing softened, the eurozone’s debt crisis broke open, spotlighting ‘the tendency for austerity measures to make matters worse’ (p. 228).
A marvellous introduction to the financial crisis, this book nonetheless could have featured more discussion of what the events of the last five years say about the nature of capitalism, i.e. its inherent tendency towards risky behaviour (what Susan Strange called ‘casino capitalism’) and irrational or overheated investment in particular assets (what Keynes dubbed animal spirits), and its proneness to accentuation of wealth disparities in many advanced industrial societies. The book gives us a standard checklist of things that we should look for as future crises loom; but have we as societies and especially our elected representatives and national leaders really learned any tangible lessons that will be applied the next time the financial industry veers into dodgy investments, regulators decide to slack off on oversight, and central bankers encourage excessive risk-taking by lowering interest rates and opening the monetary spigots? I suspect that we will be surprised by the same pattern of behaviour in another decade or two, when we will suffer yet another major crisis.
Another smart author will write another well-argued book about how a run-of-the-mill bubble nearly upended the global economy. When will we ever learn?
Joel Campbell, Troy University, Global Campus, Japan−Korea
Constructing capitalisms: transforming business systems in Central and Eastern Europe. By Roderick Martin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. 342pp. Index.
Pb.: £60.00. isbn 978 0 19965 766 7. Available as e-book.
This book provides an analytical overview of the emergence and evolution of capitalism in post-socialist countries in eastern Europe. How could one describe the character of the emerging capitalisms by focusing on their ‘business systems’, broadly defined? What type of capitalist business systems have emerged in central and eastern Europe? Roderick Martin’s endeavour to answer these questions combines a familiarity with a wide range of relevant theoretical perspectives with a deep first-hand knowledge of the region. His approach deliberately concentrates on the study of national differences, rightly considered crucial for understanding the phenomena under consideration, as well as a prerequisite for any attempt to make relevant generalizations.
Four countries were selected ‘because they were different, not because they were similar’ (p. 5): Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania. They are, the author
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explains, large, medium and small; northern, central and southern east European; they had different socialist regimes and went through different modes of extrication from socialism, with different roles for the post-socialist successor parties, different speeds of transition, different privatization modes and different approaches to foreign investment. Considered both separately and as a group they illustrate the key thesis at the core of Martin’s project:
different circumstances lead to different transformation processes and to different insti- tutional configurations and national systems. The picture that emerges is one of a huge historical laboratory in which not just one but multiple capitalisms were constructed; a multiple-path evolution, rather than a single, homogenous and convergent transforma- tion. National differences matter and the book is an attempt to develop a second-degree comparative analysis that takes differences and heterogeneity as the prima facie reference point and only then moves to articulate and properly assess the relevance of commonalities and cross-national patterns.
The first chapter sets the stage with a discussion of the various models of post-socialist economic development. Several models are introduced and evaluated: the Anglo-Saxon liberal market model, the coordinated market model, the associative capitalism model, the dependency or centre−periphery perspective and the national business systems theory. Each model is found wanting, hence the need to articulate an alternative. The formula suggested is a combination of institutional theory and historical political economy: an induc- tive comparative institutional analysis approach in which path dependencies and critical junctures are as important as the structural and functional dimensions around which the analytical apparatus is organized.
These key dimensions that capture, in the author’s view, ‘the critical axe of the structural change’ (p. 26) during the construction of capitalisms are: (a) asset ownership (changed from state-collective to private); (b) the means of capital accumulation and allocation; (c) the mode and level of firms’ integration into local, national and international markets and production systems; and (d) the extent of the differentiation between the business system and the state. In the process of capitalist institutionalization, each of the four dimensions requires the construction of regulative, normative and cognitive pillars. The book tries to follow and chart that institutional logic, guided by the underlying four-by-four compara- tive analysis framework.
The bulk of the book is thus organized in eight chapters structured by the frame- work outlined above. The findings lead up to a final set of conclusions that look at the problem of institutional and economic system convergence: the institutions of capitalism have definitely gained roots in all four countries, but the culture and economic practices continue to reflect diverging influences from the socialist and pre-socialist past that are nation-specific and path-dependent.
Overall, the book is rich and ambitious; both a work of synthesis and an attempt to advance a fresh perspective. The sometimes dazzling wealth of observations and insights, the multiple arguments and leads not always followed up to their conclusions and impli- cations, as well as some loose ends left hanging across chapters and waiting for the reader to make the connections, are all inescapable costs of such ambitious endeavours. These minor weaknesses notwithstanding, the book is fully achieving its goals. Roderick Martin is successful not only in presenting an illuminating perspective on the political economy of the region but also in making a case for the increasingly influential heterogeneity-focused approach to the comparative analysis of economic systems.
Paul Dragos Aligica, George Mason University, USA
Political economy, economics and development
The rise of the People’s Bank of China: the politics of institutional change in China’s monetary and financial system. By Stephen Bell and Hui Feng. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2013. 384pp. Index. £25.20. isbn 978 0 67407 249 7.
By the end of 2011, the People’s Bank of China’s total assets had reached US$4.5 trillion, making it the world’s biggest central bank in terms of total assets, ahead of the European Central Bank and the US Federal Reserve. Additionally, in 2013 the Chinese renminbi ranked as the ninth most-traded international currency according to the Bank of Inter- national Settlements (BIS), moving up from its position as 17th in 2010.
Against this increasing prominence of China’s monetary and financial power, Stephen Bell and Hui Feng explore the rising authority of the People’s Bank of China (PBC) as the key player in China’s monetary and financial apparatus. They examine the formal and informal dimensions of the PBC’s rise, and how these have helped shape China’s monetary policy and financial reform. The book examines legislative and institutional changes taking place in China in the 1980s and 1990s that strengthened the PBC’s role vis-à-vis other bureaucratic institutions and rival agencies. It also addresses the internal ideational divisions between Chinese bureaucratic institutions and how these differences have influ- enced China’s market reforms.
The authors argue that the rising authority of the PBC within China’s authoritarian political system and ‘steep hierarchy’ of the party-state represents a puzzle; the PBC’s success in protecting its financial and monetary autonomy and in maintaining a decisive influence within the Chinese financial system is especially puzzling. The authors attribute this to the bank’s growing institutional capacities, resources, expertise and credible policy track-record in addressing several economic challenges that could have destabilized the regime. These challenges ranged from rising inflation and banking reforms to managing foreign exchange reserves and the global recession following the global financial crisis. The PBC’s success in addressing these challenges has, according to the authors, created an inter- dependent relationship between the party system and the PBC, and has contributed to the bank’s increasing authority.
The book uses an agent-centred account of historical institutionalism to explain the institutional transformation of the PBC. It is divided into three parts. Part one covers the book’s objective (chapter one) and theoretical framework (chapter two). Part two consists of five chapters dealing with the institutional rise of the PBC. Chapters three and four consider the impact of institutional and structural constraints on the PBC, and on monetary policy in general as a result of the initial transition era and the legacies of the central planning era from 1978 to 1992. The next chapter sheds light on how the PBC interacted with several factors in its wider structure, including rising inflation; changes in elite politics and power within the party; the imperatives of developing market-oriented policies and how this interaction contributed to the bank’s rising authority. Then, in chapter six, the mutual dependency between the PBC and the party leadership—which has been decisive in the rise of the PBC—is explored. The final chapter of the section looks at the impact of this dependency on the formal institutional changes to the PBC’s role, including the legislative changes that were introduced to strengthen the bank’s monetary and financial authority.
Having explained the institutional and political basis for the rise of the PBC’s authority, the authors, in part three, provide an in-depth discussion of how this enhanced authority and mutual dependency between the PBC and the party elites have been translated into real policy processes. Chapter eight discusses the PBC’s quest for a new market-oriented monetary policy framework since the mid-1990s, while chapter nine examines the bank’s