Notermans has written a bold and ambitious book in which he purports to explain the conditions under which social democratic policies, and therefore the social democratic project, have been successful in modern democracies. The book, which relies heavily but not exclusively on historical data, examines the ebb and flow of social democratic domi- nance in five countries-Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Britain-since roughly the introduction of (male) universal suffrage after World War I.

Political globalization makes cross-national comparisons ever more important, especially those that reach widely and over time. Such policy analysis offers potentially practical applica- tions for improved democratic representation. Valerie O'Regan provides such analytic reach in her study about the influence female policymakers have achieved in 22 industri- alized nations. She considers the effects and effectiveness of female legislators and executives in representing women's interests. The central thesis, that gender differences in policy priorities will be reflected in policy outcomes as the number of female policymakers increases, is supported. The second- ary thesis, that (wage) policy comprehensiveness will im- prove, is not.

"Civil society" has become a key concept and a central quest in the search for paths to democracy and liberty in many parts of the world. This search has been particularly notable in Egypt, where an increasingly totalitarian state has sought in recent decades to project an image of democracy but at the same time attack and undermine all potential bases of social autonomy and political action. These are the central issues discussed in this book. The picture is complicated by the prominent part played by religious and religio-communal politics on the Egyptian stage. Are Islamic associations and forms of political action forces of civil society engaged in the quest for social autonomies and liberation from authoritarian strictures, or do they themselves add another tier of repres- sion in the name of religious conformity and moral conduct?

Tong addresses one of the most important issues in compar- ative politics: What are the key factors that determine the courses and outcomes of transitions from state socialism? The book makes three contributions to this field of study. First, it reminds us that the relationship between state and society with regard to either power or objectives may not be zero-sum, as widely accepted by students of politics. The author argues that state and society may share a wide range of objectives, laying the groundwork for a cooperative rela- tionship. This helps explain why the regime and a society may compromise in the transition process.

Daniel Treisman offers an ingenious explanation for the fact that the Russian Federation held together after the collapse of the Soviet regime. Unlike the three other ethnic federa- tions in the communist world-Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR itself-the Russian Federation, which was the largest of the 15 nationally based constituent republics in the Soviet Union, avoided disintegration. Many observers in the early 1990s feared the same pressures that had led to powerful separatist movements among the Soviet republics would prove too strong for the fragile central government to resist. Yet, Russia managed to maintain itself as a federal state, albeit weak. The one constituent republic in which separatism ultimately led to armed confrontation was Chech- nia, where a brutal war began in 1994, paused in 1996, and erupted again in 1999.

This comparison of the relationship between organized fem- inism and partisan politics in Canada and the United States addresses two questions. First, Young asks how much orga- nized feminism has influenced partisan and electoral politics in each country. Second, she asks how political parties in each country have responded to organized feminism. She answers these questions by examining the relationship between each country's largest feminist organization and its party system and by showing how each relationship changed between 1970 and 1997. The result is an important and readable book that demonstrates the value of feminist political science as an approach, especially in comparative politics. The book is head and shoulders above many other texts about feminist political activism, mainly because of Young's ability to bridge between feminist ideas about politics and the comparative politics literature about political opportunities.

Literary forms of inquiry into politics range far beyond the journal article and the scholarly monograph. Myron Aronoff's monograph serves us well by respecting the novel of international intrigue as an insightful form for analyzing the politics of diplomacy, bureaucracy, covert action, and international regimes. Aronoff targets the latter-day dean of spy novelists, David Cornwell, who writes under the name of John le Carre´.

For three decades political scientists have attempted to show that markets reflect the political institutions and politics within which they function. Also, many scholars have traced states' foreign economic policies to their domestic politics. Open-Economy Politics pushes both these projects forward with an extended case study of the world coffee market. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Robert Bates takes us chronologically through key shifts in policies of the chief coffee trading countries-Brazil, Colombia, and the United States-especially the formation, operation, and collapse of the International Coffee Organization from 1962 through 1982.

In introductory international relations courses, we were once accustomed to contrast three alternative approaches: realism, liberalism, and Marxism. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the proclaimed triumph of liberal politicoeconomic ideas has led to a deemphasis on the third paradigm or, in some cases, its substitution by constructivism. But, contrary to Fukuyama, history has not quite ended. Neo-Marxist inter- pretations of international relations persist, and new and interesting ones continue to emerge. The latest entry, Boswell and Chase-Dunn's new book, is a case in point. As long-time and leading contributors to world systems theory, they employ their theoretical interpretation of modern his- tory (the last 500 years) to explain what went wrong with socialism and how the socialist strategy might still be salvaged in a future world-system (with a hyphen).

When I was an undergraduate in the 1960s, as the Vietnam conflict was escalating, I took Stanley Hoffmann's mesmeriz- ing course, "Causes of War." I thought back to this class as I read Cynthia Enloe's book, which deserves all the superla- tives it has accrued. The experience of reading now and remembering back left me wondering: Without Enloe to consult (her first book on militarism and gender came out in the early 1980s), what were we missing in Hoffmann's class? The answer, I think, is this: We could understand well enough the contending theories about why nations go to war; but in the absence of Enloe, we were less able to ask how militaries could manage such massive mobilizations that required the often calamitous sacrifice of precious lives even for wars whose purposes seemed remote or unconvincing.

This complex, ambitious, and large book seeks to question, reformulate, and enhance the scope (and methods) of inter- national relations theories, particularly those formulated within a realist framework. The authors question that frame- work, the Westphalian model of putatively unitary nation- states, quantitative methods of empirical investigation, and the levels-of-analysis paradigm. The breadth of their critique is extensive and, consequently, highly ambitious. Rather than approach international relations as a system of unitary nation-states inspired by realist principles, which is arguably a partial and simplified portrayal of contemporary research, the authors favor a complex system of "overlapping, layered, and linked polities" that have both horizontal and vertical dimensions. The latter dimension is particularly important, as it concerns patterns of authority, identity (including ethnic- ity), and institutions that compete for the loyalty of individ- uals.

Andrew Geddes provides a European analysis of European migration policy. He asks two questions: To what degree has the European Union (EU) garnered control over migration policies of member states? What is the policy outcome? In answering these questions, the author makes two contribu- tions to the literature.

The central theme of this book is that U.S. strategy in the Middle East is fundamentally flawed but not irreparable. This may be the result of the inherent mismatch between strategy and policy and, more significantly, between America's prin- ciples and interests. In particular, the author argues that the U.S. approach toward Islam is "beset with ambiguities and tensions" (p. 3). Furthermore, he stresses that there is a somewhat dangerous growing gap between the American people and their representatives in Congress, on the one hand, and presidential administrations, on the other, when it comes to dealing with "islamists" (those who espouse greater religious activism in politics). The former lean toward a confrontational attitude that is fed by cultural differences, stereotyping, and negative images of Muslims, whereas the latter strive to accommodate or tolerate a majority of mod- erate or pro-West Islamic forces and states.

Social scientific interest in "social Europe" pales in compar- ison with the attention that has been directed toward the economic and political dimensions of the European Union (EU). This is perhaps hardly surprising; for much of its relatively short history, the system that is today the EU has been almost exclusively economic in its focus. Only since the 1980s has the project of European integration acquired a significant social dimension. Given this imbalance, Robert Geyer provides a welcome and timely addition to the litera- ture.

The word globalization first appeared in the second half of the 1980s and now has become the most ubiquitous in the language of international relations. It has spawned a new vocabulary: globaloney (Why all the hype when the global economy was more integrated in the age of Queen Victo- ria?): globaphobia (the new, mainly mistaken, backlash); globeratti (the members of the international nongovernmen- tal organizations [INGOs] who travel around the world from conference to conference, except when they are on the Internet mobilizing for the next conference), and so on. For Robert Gilpin, among the world's most eminent scholars of international relations, globalization is insightfully defined as the deepening and widening integration of the world econ- omy by trade, financial flows, investment, and technology.

Space is a seductive place, where technology-induced vistas often blur the policy vision of earthbound military planners, scientific explorers, or commercial entrepreneurs. This is the message that beams down from Roger Handberg's book on space militarization. He leads the reader through the twists and turns of technology, law, and policy, through the bureau- cratic labyrinth of the U.S. military and space industrial complexes. In the end, one is faced with the same imponder- ables that confronted President Clinton in deciding whether to deploy the National Missile Defense (NMD) system. Like an astute player on fourth down, he punted that space football to his successor, and the Handberg volume gives you the Monday morning quarterback advantage.

Over the past twenty years, the so-called third debate, or the constructivist turn in international relations theory, has elic- ited a great deal of attention. Various critical theories and epistemologies-sociological approaches, postmodernism, constructivism, neo-Marxism, feminist approaches, and cul- tural theories-seem to dominate the leading international relations journals. Postmodernism (also called critical theo- ry), perhaps the most radical wave of the third debate, uses literary theory to challenge the notion of an "objective" reality in world politics, reject the notion of legitimate social science, and seek to overturn the so-called dominant dis- courses in the field in favor of a new politics that will give voice to previously marginalized groups.

This book will enhance Christian Joppke's growing reputa- tion as one of the most thoughtful commentators on the politics of international migration and citizenship. Immigra- tion and the Nation-State is an impressive cross-national comparison that builds on elite interviews and reanalysis of primary materials, but its chief value is in its bold synthesis and critique of a rapidly growing and highly disjointed secondary literature. Although it assesses a variety of theo- retical concepts, the book is primarily a historically rooted, richly empirical work of analysis and interpretation. Joppke deals expertly with three liberal states with different nation- hood traditions and immigration histories. The United King- dom is distinctive in that it was at once a nation-state and an empire. The United States is the only case of the three in which governments deliberately sought to foster immigration for settlement. Germany was a divided nation whose com- mitment to reunification, embedded in the Basic Law, posed particularly troublesome issues for immigration and citizen- ship policy.

Few concepts in international relations have aroused as much debate and emotion among political leaders, activists, and scholars as that of sovereignty. Diplomats continually invoke it, transnational organizations attempt to circumvent it, and scholars debate its meaning and wonder whether globaliza- tion is making it obsolete. Yet, most accept the premise that sovereignty is not only the foundation of our international system but also one of the few consequential institutions we have in world politics.

The end game of peace negotiations between international actors has received a great deal of scholarly attention over the years. Much of this effort focuses on the processes by which states, leaders, or diplomats achieve durable solutions to differences previously difficult to resolve. Christopher Mitchell offers a significant contribution to this literature by centering his attention on the observable starting points of peace, those with the potential to trigger a sequence of interactions that eventually produce an important agreement between previously conflicting sides.