This section includes book notes of 150-300 words as well as some book reviews of 600-900 words on books of particular interest to the members of our group. If you have either suggestions for books you would like to review or see reviewed (including recent books of your own), please contact Cas Mudde. Book Notes Erik Bleich, Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policymaking since the 1960s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 246 pp., GBP 16.95/USD 23.00, ISBN 0-521-00953-7 (pbk) / GBP 45.00/USD 65.00, ISBN 0-521-81101-5 (hbk). Reviewed by Jens Rydgren (University of Stockholm)
According to Randall Hansen, this book “distinguished itself as the finest book on race in France and the United Kingdom.” Without being as well read within this area as Hansen, I have to agree. This is the kind of book you wish you had read long ago; it would have saved you a lot of trouble of finding this out on your own. Bleich, succeeds in this book to present two very good case histories of race politics in two of the most important and interesting countries in Europe: France and the UK. This would be a merit in itself, but emerging qualities also result from putting them against one another, and by posing the question of why these two countries’ paths have diverged so much during the last 40 years? By answering this question Bleich points at the role of ideas in general, and framing activities in particular. Although this is far from the whole story (I would personally have given interests a somewhat greater role), it is a fresh and largely fruitful approach. Thus, I think this book should be read not only by those interested in race politics or the politics of both France andBritain, but also by everyone interested in the general role of ideas in politics.
John D. Brewer, C. Wright Mills and the Ending of Violence, New York: Palgrave, 2003, 197 pp., USD 65.00, ISBN 0-333-80180-6 (hbk). Reviewed by John E. Finn (Wesleyan University)
Brewer’s provocative little book begins with a straightforward and interesting claim: We can use Charles Wright Mill’s concept of the “sociological imagination” to explain peace processes in Northern Ireland and South Africa. For readers unfamiliar with the concept, the basic premise of the “sociological imagination” is that sociology, as an academic discipline, must be able to map the connections between the individual, history, social-structural processes, and the political. As a consequence, the book is not, and does not aspire to be, an exhaustive historical account or political analysis of those peace processes.
Put bluntly, this is a quirky book. Its primary purpose is to advocate for a particular way of understanding and doing sociology, and I’m not confident that non-sociologists will share the enthusiasm Brewer brings to the cause. (Nor am I certain that political scientists will accept unflinchingly his description of the field as being essentially monocausal.) Ultimately, if there is merit to a construct like the sociological imagination, it must reside in its capacity to help understand social and political phenomena in new and important ways. On this score, Brewer succeeds admirably. Brewer’s analysis of why the Northern Irish peace process has been less successful than South Africa, for example, includes a subtle and nuanced discussion about the nature of peace and the social structuring of incentives for it. In short, I’m not sure how much I learned about Northern Ireland or South Africa and their respective peace processes, but I did learn a lot about the value of a certain kind of sociological approaches to the study of communal violence.
Richard Crockatt, America Embattled - September 11, Anti-Americanism and the Global Order, London: Routledge, 2003, 208 pp., GBP 16.00, ISBN 0-4152-8342-6 (pbk). Reviewed by Paul Timmermans (University of Denver)
Did the United States fall victim to its own power? Did American imperialism subsume its own democratic values? To Crockatt’s praise, his answer to these questions never regresses into a study of mere hypocrisy. As Cold War buff, he skillfully traces the roots of anti-Americanism within those cultural and historical values commonly regarded as already present within U.S. foreign policy, such as its sense of exceptional destiny, mobility, pluralism and celebratory patriotism. And the external threats to these values are indeed also permanently -and paradoxically- being manipulated as part of both its liberal values and its imperialist need for security. Crockatt stresses anti-American ideological values. However, he often does so by negatively defining them as antidotes of American culture -rather than as of its interests. He thus ignores Islamic and Arab interests. Despite paying lipservice to Edward Said (but ignoring the latter’s critique of Samuel Huntington) he narrates in terms of civilization rather than of economic inter-dependence. Important economic, geo-strategic and materialist motives for Arab antiAmericanism, such as the silent support for the systematic occupation of the West Bank (and not just about ‘a patchwork of enclaves’), the murderous impact of sanctions against Iraq, the support for Saddam (as anti-Iranian warmonger), the destruction of Afghanistan during the Cold War, and Wahhabist support for the zarkat system (effectively Bin Laden’s income), would all have been worth of much more examination.
Crockatt could have clarified that the globalization of (conflicts between) cultures not necessarily erodes the sovereign state system. The fact that imperialist wars are also waged over resources, and that ‘terror networks’ can also engage in statist Realpolitik, undermines his approach. Maybe that the goal of lower oil prices is even more important in understanding imperialist state power than insights such as that American identity unites itself through antagonism.
Mark Downes, Iran’s Unresolved Revolution, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, 199 pp., GBP 45.00, ISBN: 0-7546-3188-5 (hbk). Reviewed by Misagh Parsa (Dartmouth College)
Mark Downes argues that revolutions should be analyzed in terms of processes rather than outcomes. From this perspective, the Iranian revolution remains unresolved, as the socio-economic conflicts that led to the Shah’s overthrow have produced nearly continuous unrest over the past two decades. Moreover,Iran’s Islamic movement has failed to ‘Islamize’ Iranian politics and has instead damaged the reputation of the clergy and of the faith itself. The author begins with a discussion of the development of Shi’ism and its role in Iranian politics. He then reviews theories of revolution (including Marxism, functionalism, mass society, rising expectations, and relative deprivation), briefly applies them to the Iranian case, but finds them largely insufficient. Downesfurther discusses the ideologies of the Iranian revolution, mostly the works of Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini. Finally, the book discusses contemporary Iranian politics, including the ongoing conflict between reformists and hard-line conservatives Downes claims that the revolutionary process was actually diverted from its true course by a series of events that enabled a segment of the clergy to reinstitutionalize power in the hands of a minority and prevent political pluralism. The revolution consumed many former revolutionaries, casting them into the political wilderness and beyond. His analysis demonstrates, however, that Iran’s political system under the Islamic Republic is more open and permits greater political participation than the Shah’s rule. Although the revolutionary movement promised to restore the “golden Age” of Islam by creating a new kind of society, it failed to live up to those lofty expectations. Islamic ideology could not reconcile itself with the necessity of participating in the international economic order. In the face of demands by inhabitants of Middle Eastern and Islamic countries for the trappings of modernity, Islamic ideology has been unable to succeed.
Joshua D. Freilich, American Militias: State-Level Variations in Militia Activities. New York: LFB Scholary Publishing, 2003, 183 pp., USD 58.00, ISBN 19312-0253-2, (hbk). Reviewed by D.J. Mulloy (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
In the introduction to American Militias Freilich notes that although the appearance of the militia movement in the United States during the 1990s has generated a great deal of popular and media interest, it has produced surprisingly little serious academic analysis. Undertaking a quantitative nationwide study of the rise of the militias—since most works on the militias are either “non-scientific journalistic accounts, or qualitative studies that focus on a particular state or region”—Freilich’s aim is to help fill this “void in the literature” (p4). At the same time, he also wants to address the imbalance in the existing literature on social movements, with, he says, its almost exclusive emphasis on the activities of left-wing social movements. It is a testament to the strengths of Freilich’s research that he goes a good way towards achieving these aims. Freilich is attentive to the varied nature of militia beliefs and organizational structures, and keenly aware of the problems of obtaining reliable data on the movement, as he seeks to explain why some U.S. states had higher levels of militia activity than others in the years 1994-95. Significantly, his (rightly emphasized) preliminary findings challenge many of the prevailing theoretical explanations for militia and other ‘extremist’ behaviour, including thosefavoured by resource mobilization theorists and economic dislocation/social disorganization advocates. It is to be hoped therefore that other scholars take upFreilich’s call for more extensive research into the movement.
Alberto Spektorowski, The Origins of Argentina's Revolution of the Right, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, 269 pp., GBP 41.95, ISBN 0-26802010-8 (hbk) / GBP 20.95, ISBN 0-268-02011-6 (pbk). Reviewed by Sandra McGee Deutsch (University of Texas at El Paso) The durable and influential Argentine nationalist movement of the right deservedly has attracted much scholarly attention. Alberto Spektorowski's book is an important addition to this literature. He traces the ideas that melded into a “third way” that strongly affected the Catholic Church, the military, and Peronism. By 1940 this ideology, according to the author, represented a confluence of corporatist authoritarianism and populist antiimperialism, represented by FORJA, which he identifies with the left. Influenced by Zeev Sternhill, Spektorowski calls attention to the leftist roots of rightist nationalism;
not only did FORJA bestow its ideas, but several key figures moved rightward from an initial leftism. There is much to praise in this book. Extremely knowledgeable on European fascism, the author depicts the links between it and nationalism. He clearly demonstrates that the latter and Peronism were essentially fascist, adding to an emerging scholarly consensus. Spektorowski’s review of theories on fascism and voluminous footnotes are boons to readers, as is his inclusion of overlooked yet important thinkers such as Enrique Osés. Among his sources are valuable police records untapped by other specialists on nationalism. Yet intellectual histories have inherent limitations. They leave out the rank-andfile and women, who did not formulate nationalist thought. They also omit actions, which sometimes contradicted the words uttered by ideologues. Since it does not examine violence against workers, Socialists, and Communists, this approach downplays nationalist antileftism. This book raised questions in my mind. Was FORJA genuinely leftist? Did the Catholic Church stand “equidistant from communism and fascism” (p.111)? I wonder why the author did not discuss the Liga Patriótica Argentina, since its program favored anti-imperialism and the incorporation of workers. Still, students of nationalism, fascism, and Latin American politics will find this articulate, well-researched book a valuable reference.
Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 276 pp., GBP 16.95/USD 23.00, ISBN 0-521-53145-4 (pbk) / GBP 45.00/USD 65.00, ISBN 0-521-82428-1 (hbk). Reviewed by Gerald Cromer (Bar-Ilan University)
The Politics of Collective Violence constitutes Charles Tilly’s attempt to reach some broad and even sweeping conclusions about a topic that he has been in the forefront of studying for the last 40 years. While Tilly accepts, somewhat begrudgingly perhaps, that there are no universal laws governing all episodes of collective violence, he insists that similar causes in different combinations and settings operate through the whole range. In common with the weather, he argues, collective violence is “complicated, changing and unpredictable in some regards yet resulting from similar causes variously combined in different times and places.” According to Tilly, there are three kinds of etiology theories of collective violence. They tend to focus their attention on the power and influence of ideas, impulses or relations between people. Tilly is a firm believer in the latter. Although each of the other two schools of thought have something to offer, examining the effect of social interaction variables is the best way of understanding the wide variety of forms that collective violence takes and their
variation over time - both rapid shifts and long term waves - and between democratic and authoritarian regimes. Writing in the aftermath of 9/11, Tilly expresses the hope that understanding the causes of collective violence will help minimize the damage that human beings inflict on each other. For him, the implications of the theory are clear. Reducing violence depends less on banishing bad ideas or suppressing impulses than on transforming relations between the persons and groups involved. In the introduction Tilly lists the mistakes he made in earlier studies. He also warns his readers of errors in this book, especially because it is designed to open doors rather than close them. This aim is achieved admirably. Each chapter leaves the reader with a great deal to think about, and the book as a whole raises questions that Tilly and others will hopefully tackle in the future.
Klaus Wahl (ed.), Skinheads, Neonazis, Mitläufer. Täterstudien und Prävention, Opladen: Lesk e + Budrich, 2003, 291 pp., EUR 24.90, ISBN 3-8100-3171-2 (pbk). From the book cover:
“This book researches the social and biographical backgrounds of xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and right-wing extremist culprits. It includes the results of three interrelated empirical studies on xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and right-wing extremists’ suspects and culprits in Germany. The book offers a comprehensive overview of the social structure of the circle of culprits, on the one hand, and an in-depth insight into the biographies, the paths of development of aggression, xenophobia and extreme right ideology, on the other. On top of that, it offers recommendations for those dealing with these culprits in practice, including politics, the legal profession, the police, schools, and youth and family help.”
Book Reviews
Jennifer S. Holmes, Terrorism and Democratic Stability, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001, 241 pp., GBP 45.00, ISBN 0-7190-5959-3 (hbk). Reviewed by William Ll Eubank (University of Nevada Reno)
Jennifer Holmes has written a very interesting, if not altogether convincing, book. Terrorism and Democratic Stability is an attempt to examine the reasons
why the governments of Uruguay, Peru and Spain reacted as they did to threats to undermine the countries’ democracies, stable or otherwise. The purpose is to set each country’s problems in the context of Aristotelian assumptions about the purposes and obligations of governments, support of the citizenry for stressed governments, and what kind of government responses to terrorism trigger withdrawal of citizen support, leading to the collapse of democracy. Holmes does this by first describing Aristotelian concepts of good government, stability, and protection of citizens. She concludes that “terrorist and state violence is a cause of democratic breakdown” (p 27). This connection is not always the predicate of collapse, but “creates the opportunity for others to work against the state,” leading to collapse. She offers two hypotheses arguing that as terrorism (or terrorist campaigns) affect the purpose of the state, and the state responds with suppressive means, citizen confidence collapses, and instability increases. The result is decreased security and integration, deflating citizen confidence, and increased government instability. This is followed by a history of democracy in each country, the terrorist violence and campaigns in the countries, and the respective government’s reaction to political violence. Clearly, in a work this slim, these histories cannot be comprehensive, and I will leave it to those more versed than I in each country’s history to dissect these descriptions. They seem to me, however, to be as complete as needed, and to illustrate the point of the exercise. Each history traces, in separate chapters, the origins of violence and terrorism in each country, the groups and individuals involved and the differing reactions of each government in attempting to suppress the violence. Each of the two hypotheses are individually tested and then tested in combination. One finds support for the hypotheses in Peru and Uruguay, and less so in Spain, which held off instability. These tests are impressionistic and not statistical, although Holmes uses empirical evidence to describe the magnitude of the problems, citizen support, and government reaction. The tests are intellectual and result from informed sifting of different kinds of data. From the perspective of “scientific” or “quantitative” research there are a number of problems: different indicators are used for each country; the indicators are not well defined, nor are the hypotheses well or precisely stated. Similarly, the lack of conventional statistical tests undermines the work. The conclusions may not be as clear as Holmes thinks they are. The country histories could be incomplete biased, ill informed or misinterpreted. These problems will give the unconvinced read the ammunition needed to criticize the book. Yet, I like this book even though, I do not think the work is as convincing as it could be. I like it because political science is grounded in very old notions of how government and people ought to behave and what happens when each does behave properly. It is the point of the discipline to worry about such problems. Holmes actually tries to test some of these philosophical ideas against real world conditions. She is trying to do what I think political science ought, in
many cases, to be about: testing long-standing theories of government type. I am not concerned that I am not convinced by this analysis, because no single test is convincing. Also, I am not concerned that the work isn’t comprehensive; it’s merely a first step. I can easily see this work used in several types of classes: methods courses, for integrating theory and measurement; philosophy courses, for the same reason; comparative politics and political violence courses, for obvious reasons. I think this is a very mature work, and very interesting. I would think that anyone concerned about these subjects would want to read it. Norma Kriger, Guerrilla Veterans in Post-War Zimbabwe: Symbolic and Violent Politics 1980-1987, 2003, 293 pp., GBP 45.00/USD 65.00, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-5218-1823-0 (hbk). Reviewed by Ihekwoaba D. Onwudiwe and Uchechi M. Nwakwu (University of Maryland, Eastern Shore)
With this remarkable volume on the historical background of Zimbabwe’s guerrilla veterans and their contemporary involvement with President RobertMugabe’s new war on economic liberation, independent scholar and former Johns Hopkins University political scientist Norma Kriger has once again distinguished herself among her peers. What is unique about Kriger’s study is that it is organized around three themes. At the first level of analysis, the author addresses the issue concerning how the legacy of the resolution that originally ended the guerrilla war for political self-determination wrought post-war political arrangements? Second, after political sovereignty, to what extent did the strategies, resources, and agendas characterize the relationship of the war veterans and theMugabe’s party? Third, what were the political outcomes of the commitment between the veterans and the ruling party and the society at large? Throughout the book, the author places primary emphasis on the role of actors, resources, agendas, and plans of action, which puts the study in line with current literature on “post-Cold War civil wars.” The study points out that in 1980-87, guerrilla veterans and Mugabe’s ruling party conspired with and influenced each other in order to maintain power and control in the various organs of the government. Their strengths, she asserts, were evident in their continued appeal to the roles they played in the anti-colonial struggle. Based on these appeals, both the ruling party and the guerrilla veterans have engaged in the elimination of their political opponents. Because violence and liberation propaganda continue to be used as tactics to acquire land and subdue new political detractors, Kriger argues thatZimbabwe still remains a volatile society.
In addition to providing a rich literature of the war-to-peace transitions, and to suggesting a new approach for examining post-conflict societies, the author attempts to capture a political dynamic between Zimbabwean veteran excombatants and the ruling party. Rather than focusing on the conditions, determinants, or lessons of success and failure for peace building, Kriger’s research examines the strategies, agendas, resources, and interactions of the governing party in Zimbabwe with the ex-liberation war fighters. The goal, unlike in past peace building studies, is to understand to what extent the leadership and the guerrilla veterans were successful in achieving their divergent agendas. We were informed that the veteran guerrillas were politically active in their relationship with the ruling political party. The study demonstrates that as liberation war participants, the guerrillas were selected or targeted to benefit from various government programs. For instance, not only were veteran guerrillas favored to receive “assembly pay” and “demobilization pay,” they also received “preferential access” to employment in the agencies of the government (pp.1889). This also means that the ruling party gave job opportunities to the ZANLA guerrillas for support and stability of the party and that they were “used as the socialist vanguard in the workplace” (p.186). Although Mugabe’s party won the post independent elections; the settlement left undisturbed the Rhodesian army, bureaucracy, and private sector as well as the two hostile guerrilla soldiers, ZIPRA and ZANLA. To control power and legitimacy over the white controlled private sector, Mugabe’s party turned to the guerrillas and relied on their sentiments of the war on liberation. In this evaluative study, the author finds an interesting dynamic, a situation in which the ruling party insists on the cooperation of the guerrillas for survival, where both used violence and intimidation to maintain their staying power, manipulation and control. The study continually alludes to the fact that the ruling party and the veterans appeal to their war efforts and objectives to maintain and sustain their persistent resistance for economic egalitarianism, including the forceful and violent methods utilized to seize “white-owned land” with no reparation. While the opposition party abandoned the idea of gratifying veterans’ sacrifices during the war of independence, it also used the war of liberation strategy to validate the struggle for democratization. Kriger’s book is a source of enlightenment about the commitment of the ruling party and guerrilla veterans in post-colonial Zimbabwe. It also reveals some of the atrocities that have been committed due to the political nexus that exists between the two actors- especially the violence that have been perpetrated against white land owners. While one rejects the use of violence as a strategy—to achieve a modicum of existence for the veterans of war of liberation—embarked upon by the political and veteran actors, the present study disregarded the residual effects of colonial oppression imposed on the black peoples of Zimbabwe. The author’s claim that the methods of repression by the
ruling party and the veterans against the minority population differed from the strategy of the colonial oppressors shows a subjective understanding of the history of colonial subjugation in Rhodesia. It is too soon to write an obituary of the post-war government of Zimbabwe as well as to condemn it for lack of compensation or reparation payments to those citizens whose land have been acquired by the government. In fact, the U.S. government has refused to pay reparations or to officially apologize to African Americans for centuries of slavery. We hope that Zimbabwe follows in the footsteps of South Africa for the good of humanity and quality of life of its people. Oscar Mazzoleni, Nationalisme et populisme en Suisse, Lausanne: Presses polutechniques et universitaires romandes, 2003, CHF 16.00, ISBN 288074-585-3 (pbk). Fredy Gsteiger, Blocher: Ein unschweizerisches Phänomen, Basel: Opinio Verlag/Edition Weltwoche, 2002, CHF 35.00, ISBN 3-03999-015-2 (pbk). Reviewed by Hans-Georg Betz (University of Geneva)
A few weeks before the most recent national election in Switzerland, the St. Gallen section of the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) came up with an election poster, which featured a Swiss man with African features and a ring through his nose, complete with the caption: “We Swiss are increasingly becoming the Negroes.” The poster was a perfect example of a strategy, which made the SVP within less than ten years Switzerland’s largest party and its leader, the multimillionaire Christoph Blocher, one of Europe’s most successful populist politicians. In fact, with the collapse of the FPÖ, the SVP has arguably become the most important representative of radical right-wing populism in Western Europe – a development rarely appreciated by those studying the populist right, who have for the most part ignored the Swiss case. Oscar Mazzoleni’s study of right-wing populism in Switzerland is therefore particularly welcome. Although most of the analysis is devoted to the SVP, other political formations on the populist right, such as the former Autopartei, the Swiss Democrats, and particularly the Lega dei ticinesi, are not ignored. On the contrary, Mazzoleni convincingly shows how the SVP during the past decade aggressively adopted the strategy and issues of the smaller parties and, in the process, to a significant degree absorbed their constituency. The SVP owes much of its recent success to its eminence grise, Christoph Blocher, the leader of the party’s Zurich wing. It was Blocher, who transformed the SVP from a party of peasants and the traditional Mittelstand, largely limited to the German-speaking part of the country,
into a modern right-wing populist party that has extended its reach throughout the country. Significantly, the party has made considerable inroads into Suisse romande, where it was completely absent until a few years ago. As Mazzoleni points out, the party’s expansion coincided with a period of growing economic insecurity and increasing Swiss self-doubts. In this situation, Blocher’s appeal to Swiss nationalism, his defense of traditional culture and identity, as well as his adoption of hard-line positions on immigration, integration, and particularly on the asylum question found growing resonance not only in the backwaters of central Switzerland, but also in urban areas, increasingly affected by growing crime rates. The turning point for the SVP was the (failed) referendum on Swiss membership in the European Economic Area in 1992, which established Blochernot only as the undisputed champion of the opposition camp, but also as the self-declared “Neinsager” and “Bremser” of the nation. Blocher’s stature was even more elevated in the mid-1990s, when he defended Switzerland’s role during the Second World War against accusations that the country had behaved less than honorably during the war. In the process, Blocher established himself as people’s tribune, who says what the average Swiss thinks but does not dare say, and an untiring fighter against political correctness, “Gutmenschen,” and the political establishment. For those interested in Christoph Blocher, Fredy Gsteiger’s “unauthorized biography” is an indispensable introductory text. Unlike many of Blocher’scritics, Gsteiger has ambiguous feelings about a political figure, who in his view, paradoxically has done more to make Switzerland less closed and more European than most other Swiss politicians, by bringing important issues (such as EU membership) out in the open and make them subject to intense public debate. At the same time, however, he also contributed to the polarization and radicalization of the political debate, in the process undermining Switzerland’s cherished system of Konkordanz. No doubt, Blocher will remain Switzerland’s most controversial politician.