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 Nigel Copsey of the University of Teesside (UK).
Book Notes Bruno Coppieters et al Europeanization and Conflict Resolution, Ghent: Academia Press, 2004, 258 pp., EUR 8.50, ISBN: 9-038-20648-8 (pbk). Reviewed by Christopher Hewitt (University of Maryland)
This is a study of four unresolved secession crises on the periphery of the European Union, and how Europeanization could mitigate and help to defuse the conflicts. The cases chosen for analysis are Cyprus, Serbia and Montenegro, Georgia-Abkhazia, and Moldova-Transnistria. The authors deliberately exclude secessionist movements within EU member states, and note that including other secessionist conflicts such as Chechnya, Kosovo, and Nagorno-Karabakh might have revealed additional interesting features. "Europeanization" is understood as a process that links the final outcome to some degree of integration of the opposing actors into the European Union. It has a number of dimensions; the EU may serve as a framework, and as an actor. By insisting that in order to gain access to the EU, the conflicting parties must modify their positions, the EU can encourage a compromise solution. Through social learning, it is hoped that "European values" will become manifested within those societies who aspire to closer links with the EU. As a thoughtful and sophisticated analysis of several important ethnic-secessionist conflicts and a history of attempted solutions to these conflicts, this is an excellent book. However, the overall impression that it leaves is one of pessimism, since none of the conflicts are in any sense resolved. According to the introductory essay we live in a "post-national" world, in which Europeanization is "based on [both] universal values and the acceptance of the principle of multiculturalism." Yet these secessionist cases clearly show how strong are the forces fostering ethnic communalism and nationalism, and how difficult it is to resolve ethno-nationalist conflicts.
Steffen Kailitz, Politischer Extremismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag f端r Sozialwissenschaften, 2004, 259 pp., EUR 19.90,ISBN: 3-531-14193-7 (pbk).
Reviewed by Megan Greene (Oxford University, Nuffield College) With a history that involves both National Socialism under the Third Reich and Communism in the DDR, Germany lies further under the shadow of political extremism than any other country in the Western world. First establishing a framework to delineate between different shades of political extremism, Steffen Kailitz applies his definitions to both far-right and far-left parties in Germany. He then expands his study to include radical parties in France, Italy, and Great Britain. Ultimately, however, Kailitz argues that left and right-wing extremists no longer seriously threaten western democracies. The greatest threat to constitutional states today is instead posed by militant Islamic fundamentalist groups. Kailitz rightly acknowledges that extremists tend to bejewel themselves in the word “democracy� and, therefore, that political extremism is not always easy to identify. He therefore defines political extremism as being the opposite of democracy and the ideals of a democratic constitutional state. Kailitz recognizes that the traditional left-right classification of political parties is problematic because it indicates opposites where they often do not exist. The author therefore builds a continuum with full democracy on one end and totalitarian dictatorship on the other. In classifying extreme political parties, Kailitz appropriately distinguishes between their goals and methods. As he builds his framework for classifying extreme parties, Kailitz acknowledges that models for ruling radical right and left wing parties today are scarce. As a result, the author should have extended his study to include a discussion of populist parties. Several populist parties such as the Austrian Freedom Party and Italian Lega Nord have recently enjoyed success in governmental elections in Europe. While not at the very end of the author’s democracy-totalitarian dictatorship spectrum, these populist parties have some extreme tendencies and pose a threat to western democracies. While political extremism is a normal occurrence in any constitutional state, it must be harnessed and channeled properly for democracy to prevail. Kailitz gives some theoretical suggestions for how this can be accomplished in Germany and other western democracies. This book is very ambitious in the breadth of issues it raises and discusses. While not universally relevant for someone studying political extremism, it provides some creative ideas for classifying and reacting to extreme parties using interesting case studies. In addressing Islamic fundamentalism as one of several forms of political extremism, however, Kailitz is only able to superficially address the threat militant Islamic groups pose to western democracies. Certainly, this topic deserves to be developed into a book of its own.
Michael Mann, Fascists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 429 pp., GBP 15.99, ISBN 0-521-5385-6 (pbk).
Reviewed by Steven Woodbridge (Kingston University)
This interesting study is the result of seven years of research into the nature of fascist movements in six European countries, arranged in the following case-study sequence: Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Spain. The chapters on individual countries are preceded by two theoretical chapters which seek to explain the sociology and multi-causal rise of fascist movements. Mann is evidently interested in the history of wider ethnic cleansing and genocide, and in this study he contends that fascism shares a ‘family resemblance’ with other forms of genocidal ideology that arose during the modern period. For the sake of ‘conceptual precision’, however, he decided to deal with fascism in a single volume rather than as part of a longer exploration of ethnic cleansing, which he intends to produce at a later date. Underpinning the book are a number of key arguments concerning the overall nature of the extreme right. Fascism, he believes, has been very much at the ‘heart of modernity’ and, alongside environmentalism, it was the major political doctrine created during the twentieth century. According to Mann, fascism also shared another characteristic of modernity: like other modern movements, it embraced the nation-state, albeit in a more extreme form. He identifies ‘organic nationalism’, ‘radical statism’, and ‘paramilitarism’ as the three main ingredients of the fascist creed. Indeed, Mann defines fascism as the ‘pursuit of a transcendent and cleansing nationstatism through paramilitarism’. Moreover, in the concluding chapter, he raises the possibility that something quite like it, ‘though almost certainly without the name’, will perhaps play a role in the twenty-first century. There are also some useful and sceptical comments on the use of the term ‘Islamic fascism’ by recent scholars. Mann’s study is a bold and welcome attempt to present a broad-brush overview of the fascists in interwar Europe, although its claims to present a new generic theory of fascism are somewhat overstated. Its main strength is in the application of sociological theory and perspective to the topic, employing a case-study methodology. This results in a series of valuable comparative insights on the general rise of authoritarianism and, above all, on the factors which enabled fascist parties to mobilise the masses during particular social crises.
David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements., Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004, 754 pp., GBP 95.00, ISBN: 0-631-22669-9 (hbk). Reviewed by Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler (University of Antwerp) Social movements have long been an important agent for expressing a collectivity’s interests and advancing their claims; thus, it is hard to imagine a world functioning
without them. In particular, the fact that social movements appear to have become prominent actors in almost every society of the world today cannot be overlooked. It would appear that, to a great degree, their importance lies in their constant attempts to challenge an array of key social issues (e.g. democratization, human rights, environmental protection, civil rights, gender equality, among others). Consequently, during the past several decades, and particularly during the 1990s, there has been a rapid growth of scholarly research examining these movements. Numerous articles and books have been written on the subject, and the term has been used in various theories, and at all levels of analysis. Yet as the editors of this volume humbly note, "there is no single volume that provides in-depth, synthetic examinations of a comprehensive set of movement-related topics and issues in a fashion that reflects and embodies the growing internalization of social movement scholarship" (p.5). As promised by the editors, this volume provides an outstanding view of the current state of social movement studies, not only in terms of its in-depth comprehensive work, but in its well-organized framework, as well. The volume, which was written by an impressive number of respected scholars of social movements, focuses mainly on factors which are relevant to the emergence, dynamics, and consequences of social movements. The volume opens with a superb Introduction (Chapter I) to thecurrent state of the art of social movement studies and a conceptualization of the term 'social movements'. The volume is then organized around three general topics: the first focuses on a variety of contextual factors (Chapter II) which facilitate the emergence and operation of social movements (such as historical, strain and conflict, political, cultural, and resource contexts); the second focuses on the dimensions and processes (Chapter III - V) that define the traits of social movements (such as organizational forms, leadership, tactical repertoires, collective action frames, collective identity, among others), and the dynamics within which social movements function (participant mobilization, tactical innovation, diffusion, and framing); the final topic is a view of six general movements (Chapter VI) which are well-known and operative throughout most of the world (e.g. the labor movement, women's movements, environmental movements, antiwar and peace movements, ethnic and nationalist movements, and religious movements). Undoubtedly, this volume is an essential addition to the private libraries of both scholars who are interested in social movements and those who are taking their first steps in this field of interest. Nevertheless, those who wish to deepen their knowledge in one of these fields will miss the in-depth possibilities and intricacy of a focused onedimensional analysis. Therefore, anyone interested in understanding a particular aspect of the field might use this comprehensive work alongside a deeper, more penetrating analysis, as only in this way can the complete picture be illustrated. James P. Sterba (ed.), Terrorism and International Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 252 pp., GBP 11.99, ISBN 0-19-515888-1 (pbk). Reviewed by M. George Eichenberg (Tarleton State University)
This somewhat eclectic edited volume contains a series of essays dealing more or less with the ethics of terrorism and counter-terrorism. Topics range from appropriately defining the rhetoric of terrorism and counter-terrorism within a context of ethical theory to whether any form of counter-terrorism can be considered ethical. The book is divided into three sections of varying length with a total of 12 chapters. Section one of the book contains two chapters dealing with the definitions and rhetoric of terrorism within a context of morality; section two, containing four chapters, deals with identifying and explaining the major players on the field of international terrorism, and section three contains six chapters dealing with the morality of counter-terrorism. A few professors might find this section/chapter arrangement a bit unwieldy for classroom use. While the chapters are a bit eclectic, in content the unifying theme is purported to be, “…the interface between terrorism and international justice” (p.11). In actuality, the unifying theme seems to be a strong left of center world-view as applied to the ethics of international relations. For example, Israel is repeatedly castigated as an illegitimate state and the cause of her own suffering while the United States is most often identified as a rogue state; the greatest threat to world peace today. While the points are well argued and the chapters uniformly well cited, there is certainly room for equally well argued disagreement with many of the points raised while citing equally authoritative source material. While the authors make many good points and in general support them with at least a reasonably effective argument, one is left with the impression of having heard it all before. We have, in fact, heard it all before; to the point this world view has become a cliché of the modern academy. This is the book’s weakness; there is nothing new here. The only real contribution of this volume is the editor having grouped the chapters so nicely into a single volume. The reader looking for objectivity or an analysis equal to the complexity of the topic will have to look elsewhere.
Vidoslav Stevanovic, Milosevic, The People’s Tyrant (trans. Zlata Filipovic, and with a preface by Trude Johansson), London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2004, xvi + 256 pp., GBP 18.95, ISBN 1-860-64842-8 (pbk). Reviewed by Daniel Chirot (University of Washington) The publisher’s preface states that this is not a history but a historical document and that it is rhetorical and impressionistic rather than analytical. Indeed, that is the case, and the reader should be forewarned. The book goes over what is now well known territory – Slobodan Milosevic’s nasty childhood with suicidal parents, his emotional dependence on his brutal but well placed wife, his rise to power as a communist hack turned nationalist Serbian hero, and his reign of bloodshed, corruption, and selfindulgent incompetence that led to the ruin of Yugoslavia and of the Serbia he ostensibly wanted to save. The author’s tone is so angry that even though we may sympathize with his despair, after a while we can only wonder how it was that almost
everyone was so fooled, in Serbia, among the Western powers, and even among most of his opponents. This book essentially dismisses almost all the relevant domestic and international actors as fools, hypocrites, cowards, and criminals. Well, yes, but are Serbs more foolish than their neighbors, the Romanians and Bulgarians, who pulled back from ethnic conflict and worked hard to reform themselves in order to enter Europe? Perhaps so, but at some point, we will need to know why Serbs are like this. Given that the Western powers eventually did intercede, though too late to save the hundreds of thousands who perished and were ruined, we need to know why they finally did something, whereas in many cases elsewhere in the world no one did anything at all to stop similar massacres and criminal regimes. In other words, after all the testimonies and accounts and analyses we have had about the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, it may be time to move beyond simple outrage to a more careful consideration of what it was that was so unique about this situation, and to what extent it was just the way most intractable ethno-nationalist conflicts turn out. At any given time there are a half dozen or more such conflicts going on in Africa, with similar levels of criminality, corruption, and killing, and several endemic ones in Asia. So was Milosevic so unusual, or should we come to grips with the fact that crises situations like the one that existed in Yugoslavia in the late 1980s are bound to throw up leaders of this type? These provocative questions should be addressed by someone. This cris de cœur, while sometimes moving, often tragic, and occasionally revealing with a few new anecdotes, does not.
Book Reviews Roger Griffin with Matthew Feldman (eds.), Fascism. Critical Concepts in Political Science, London and New York: Routledge, 2004, 2188 pp.,GBP 625.00, ISBN 0-415-29015-5 (5 volume set). Reviewed by Stein Ugelvik Larsen (University of Bergen) I certainly have to congratulate Routledge for the publication of five volumes on Fascism. Critical Concepts in Political Science edited and compiled by Professor Roger Griffin. Without doubt, this represents a landmark in the ever growing industry of fascist studies. It is the most extensive and thorough publication to date bringing almost three generations of scholarly writing on fascism into an orderly edited and comprehensive series. The series is built around five themes, each comprising one hard bound book: I. The Nature of Fascism, II. The Social Dynamics of Fascism, III. Fascism and Culture, IV. The Fascist Epoch, and V. Post-War Fascism. All five books have introductions written by Roger Griffin. In volume I there is an overall list of content of all the volumes to inform the reader about how the series is constructed and at
the end of volume V there is a one hundred page, double column index for the entire series. The volumes are divided into sub-sections or 16 ‘parts’ and 100 chapters. This gives the reader an easy task to locate the themes which may be of her/his interest within the different volumes. Roger Griffin became internationally known with the publication of his first book in 1991 on fascism: The Nature of Fascism, where he introduced his (rather awkward?) definition of fascism as an ideal type of “a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism” (p. 26). With this term (i.e. ‘palin’= again/anew and ‘genesis’=creation/rebirth p. 32-33) he pointed towards the “mythic core” of “national rebirth” as the ultimate goal of all fascist movements and ideological claims. Since then he has worked very energetically toward the wider recognition of this term and definition. For Griffin, it is the study of fascist culture and ideology which carries the strongest potential for the understanding and theoretical explanation of international fascism. In 1995 he published his first collection of “Readers” on Fascism, a book which in some sense is the precursor of the five volume study reviewed here. With his article in The Journal of Contemporary History, 2002 he established what he since then called the “new consensus” within fascist studies (Chapter 17 in Volume I) leaning strongly on the heritage of the late George L. Mosse, who claimed that the true theory of fascism had build on the study of culture in its complete societal manifestations (Vol I, Chapter 7, See p. 142.). The affinity to the thinking of the Italian scholar Emilio Gentile on “sacralization of politics” is also felt (Vol. III, Chapter 39). Therefore we can identify the editor’s intellectual profile as belonging to the scholars who put emphasis on identifying fascism by ideological elements within fascism much more than on structural and organizational factors (including actor’s decisions). I may disagree with Griffin on his strategy and emphasis, but indeed admire the courage and strength in which he puts forward his message. It is hard to be fair to the editor, in a short review like this, when trying to make a judgement on this ambitious undertaking. The collection covers the main themes which have been central to the scientific development of thinking and what they in the human sciences call the ‘historiography of fascism”. I am surprised however, that Griffin has decided not to include the seminal work on Seymour Martin Lipset on “extremism of the centre” and works like William Kornhauser’s “Theory of the Mass Society” in volume II. They discuss such important things as the structural location in society of class (the middle class squeezed between cartels and big unions) and strategic situations in organizational networks (“buffer” between elites and masses). The important contribution by William Brustein on the “rational choice” idea of Nazism (based on new analyses of the NSDAP membership data from cooperation with Jürgen Falter) I also feel should have been included (mentioned in bibliography). But then one starts to imagine an even larger set of the series. This will also be the case if one includes the research done through ‘oral history’ and particularly the many new studies of
regional and local recruitment to fascism rooted in the traditions of Willam S. Allen’s study the single German town and before him by Rudolf Heberle on Schleswig Holstein. With Griffin’s interest in culture and ideology I would also have imagined that he would have included excerpts from the analyses of Theodore Abel and later reanalyzed by Peter Merkl. All in all the role of ideas and culture has been the central concern for Griffin and that is reflected in his selections in Vol II, part 6, the entire Vol III and much of Vol V (which also contains some post-modernist contributions). In the other volumes his interest in “culture” is also apparent, giving the series a distinct identity. Let me end this brief review in the manner in which I started: with praise to the publisher and the editors for having given us a valuable source for further study of fascism. Janja Lalich, Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 329 pp., USD 21.95, ISBN 0-520-24018-9 (pbk) Reviewed by Jeffrey M. Bale (Monterey Institute of International Studies) For far too long public and scholarly debates concerning cults have been characterized by bitter polemics and dominated by individuals and organizations that profess to be concerned primarily with questions of religious orthodoxy, religious extremism, or religious freedom. This has led to a highly polarized discourse that has frequently generated more heat than light. On one side there are the so-called “cult bashers,” either members of the Counter-Cult Movement (CCM), who are above all concerned with defending orthodox Christianity from the allegedly “threatening” doctrinal or ritual innovations posed by unconventional, fringe, or “heretical” religions, or members of the Anti-Cult Movement (ACM), “apostate” former cult members, and their academic allies, who have sought to alert the public – quite justifiably, in most cases – about the authoritarian social control methods employed by various sectarian groups, whatever their proclaimed theological or ideological orientation. On the other side are cult spokespersons and the so-called “cult apologists” in academia and the media. These latter, who include both civil libertarians and social scientists who have carried out anthropological fieldwork and, in the process, all too often crossed that notoriously fine line between displaying appropriate empathy for their subjects and uncritical sympathy for their actions, have a tendency to view all criticism of unconventional “New Religious Movements” (NRMs), no matter how legitimate, as examples of prejudicial if not persecutory attacks on religious freedom. Although the influence exerted by these two contrasting paradigms has waxed and waned over time, during the past decade the latter view has emerged as the dominant orthodoxy in the field of religious studies and related social science disciplines, so much so that the term “cult” has practically been banished from academic discourse.* Given this exasperatingly partisan context, those of us who have always argued that the term “cult” properly applies solely to organizations characterized by the systematic
employment of certain highly authoritarian social control mechanisms, irrespective of their regnant worldviews, are bound to welcome the appearance of Lalich’s Bounded Choice. Why? Because she endeavors to strike a balance between simplistic “rational choice” and reductionist “mind control” approaches – even though she clearly sides more with the less histrionic cult critics than with the more naive or disingenuous cult defenders – and because it is the most scholarly and theoretically informed of a series of recent studies that deal specifically (at least in part) with political cults, including Inside Out by Alexandra Stein and On the Edgeby Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth. That alone would make it valuable, since it permits us to shift the often sterile debate about cults away from a narrow focus on sectarian religious groups towards political, psychotherapeutic, or hybrid groups with similar characteristics. Indeed, despite taking full cognizance of the unpopularity of the term “cult” in her own academic fields, Lalich nonetheless courageously employs it, in part on the basis of the distinguishing micro-sociological dynamics noted just above (pp. 4-5). Beyond these broader benefits, the book also has a great deal of intrinsic merit. In the first place, Lalich was herself a long-standing mid-ranking member of the political cult she focuses her attention on, a San Francisco-based Marxist-Leninist and feminist group known as the Democratic Worker’s Party (DWP). Hence the book benefits from her profound inside knowledge of crucial aspects of that group’s organizational hierarchy, decision-making processes, social control techniques, and doctrinal permutations. Secondly, in an effort to test some of her hypotheses and establish a broader comparative framework for her own theories, another section of her book is devoted to an examination of the Heaven’s Gate group, an idiosyncratic “UFO religion” whose members committed collective suicide in 1997. One may well quibble with specific factual claims or interpretations in her two case studies, e.g., her attribution of the demise of the DWP to a process of “internal revolution and collective vote” rather than to a unilateral decision taken by its alcoholic leader Marlene Dixon to dissolve the group (pp. xviii [quote], 202-6), but in general they serve to illuminate her broader arguments. Her principal theoretical contribution is the development of the “bounded choice” concept. Although any brief summary risks oversimplifying Lalich’s subtler and more elaborate exposition, this basically refers to a situation whereby once one becomes a Hofferian “true believer” who enthusiastically embraces a charismatic leader, a close-knit community, and/or a transcendent ideology, one’s options can thereafter be severely limited, perhaps imperceptibly, to the degree that one has become enmeshed within and constrained by an oppressive and authoritarian micro-social structure (pp. 1-2, 14-15, 233-6, 247-63). To put it another way, a conscious, freely-made choice to join a sectarian group may end up placing one in a context within which the further exercise of individual judgment and choice becomes increasingly restricted. This was precisely what happened to Lalich herself inside the DWP. In sum, this is a very welcome addition to the literature on cults in general and political cults in particular, one which not only develops a useful new theoretical paradigm but also successfully challenges the current ideological hegemony of the “cult apologists” by
demonstrating that the term “cult� still retains its usefulness providing that one properly delimits its meaning and applies it in appropriate contexts.
*Members of the e-Extreme group who are specialists on aspects of political extremism but are relatively unfamiliar with the ongoing scholarly polemics over religious cults would do well to consult Benjamin Zablocki and Thomas Robbins, eds., Misunderstanding Cults: Searching for Objectivity in a Controversial Field (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2001), an excellent introduction to these matters.