Current-order Books

THIS BOOK gives a fascinating picture of the European Union's strategy for creating a single European state, and it does so by focusing on Jacques Delors' career as President of the European Commission. Creating a single European state was the EC's aim from its beginning. Ross observes that "In contrast to ordinary international organisations, the European Community was set up to contain a supranational `motor' which would constantly press forward towards more integration."

Deception about this aim was also built in from the very beginning. Pascal Lamy, Delors' chef de cabinet, explained, "The people weren't ready to agree to integration, so you had to get on without telling them too much about what was happening." Ross sums it up very well: "the `Monnet method' politically had a `stealth' side to it. The Community's founders had never been confident that the response would be positive if Europeans were asked clearly whether they wanted European integration. From its origins EC Europe was an elite operation."

Delors (like Blair now) did everything possible to `bring capital on board' for his schemes. The result was to exclude and alienate the working class. In this, as in all else, the European Union is classic social democracy: reformist in words, reactionary in practice. Delors' aim of building a new Europe defeated itself, given that his method was to work with capital and its existing structures.

Now people are increasingly wised up to the economic and political costs of political union. People now know that EU decisions affect them. This causes problems for the EU and creates opportunities for our class to oppose it. Every move by the EU generates greater resistance. For instance, in 1986 Thatcher signed the Single European Act, which carried a commitment to "enhance the Community's monetary capacity with a view to economic and monetary union." This Single Market, that was sold to us as a great creator of jobs and production, destroyed jobs on a huge scale.

The Exchange Rate Mechanism was also supposed to enable productive investment to create jobs. Instead it has brought higher unemployment, which is now well over 10% across the EU. The EU's social programmes mask another 5% more unemployed. In return for losing jobs, Delors gave the trade unions `social dialogue'. The Single Market, the Exchange Rate Mechanism and the convergence criteria laid down in the Maastricht Treaty, together caused the current recession. This in turn slowed the EU's momentum towards integration.

Delors had aimed to find "proposals that played enough to British neo-liberalism to lower the British guard against `the further pooling' of sovereignty down the line." These proposals were enough to seduce successive Conservative Governments into accepting huge losses of sovereignty.

What Delors hoped would be a great advance for the EU, the unification of Germany, has turned into a disaster for the EU, threatening its whole future. Unification imposed vast costs on West Germany, slowing its economic growth and increasing its budget deficit to way above the Maastricht ceiling.

Now the EU faces a killing dilemma: widen, to include the countries of Eastern Europe, or deepen, by moving to a single currency. Ross writes that widening to include the East European countries "would have wiped them out economically as swiftly and surely as German reunification had wiped out East Germany." It would also, as German unification did on West Germany, impose vast costs on the present EU members, especially the richer ones.

Deepening is also creating its own problems. The Maastricht Treaty, and the single currency, was supposed to be the great turning point from market-building to state-building. The French Prime Minister Juppe recently said, "The European single currency is a political issue. It is destined to be the bedrock of the European Union." On present form, it looks more likely to be its gravestone.

The EU increasingly resembles the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, sprawling, unwieldy and bureaucratic, with Delors as its Metternich. In every member country, workers are learning the costs of losing national sovereignty, and in every country, workers are starting to assert a new nationalism, a workers' nationalism, designed to rebuild their country.

Now we must seize the chance to unite Britain against the European Union. We have to take responsibility for solving Britain's problems, for finding a way out of the present mess. We must rebuild Britain by working out ways of getting everybody back to work, and by planning how to improve our area of work.

Ikenberry makes the case that even though the poor distribution of power in a unipolar or bipolar international system may appear to be a negative scenario from a classical realist's perspective; such a system may actually be in the best interest of all the actors involved.

Carlo does a great job of condensing a large subject into a conscise version of who and what has controlled our world for the last two hundred years. Carlo's paper comes with good notes and references and stays focused throughout.

A decade ago the term 'New World Order' was a commonly-used expression. Now - at the beginning of the twenty-first century - the contours of this order are less clear. How can this international order be described and interpreted and how can it be explained from contrasting theoretical viewpoints? Ten scholars in international politics, many of them experts in the field, offer penetrating contributions to provide a survey of the ongoing debate surrounding the new world order.

a caveat: i'm not a lawyer. in fact, this is the first book about international law i've ever read. that said, i thought it was a good introduction to international law, in a real world context. it obviously is taking a Palestinian point of view, and it would be interesting to see a good rebuttal from the other side.

This nice collection of articles, essays and pamphlets is a must for any High School or College course regarding Peace, Conflict Resolution, Political Structure, and War.

There is a nice introduction to every piece to give the reader a decent context, and each article has a few follow-up questions for future insight.

A well-rounded book on political philosophy through the ages. It does a fairly good job of covering the classical tradition through modern times. It does a good job covering antiquity to the middle ages. My gripe is that the modern radicals get covered and their is virtually nothing from the American Founding Fathers or those who inspired the American Constitutional Republic (except John Locke.) Perhaps, something from Montesquieu and Madison could have been included.

It is used for various Political Theory classes. Incidentally, I've acquired a great deal of the writings in this book beforehand and probably never spent as much as this text costs. Also, the bulk of these writings are available in the public domain, which makes one wonder why it is so expensive. Typical of most textooks, it is ridiculously expensive like all textbooks from the Cali Textbook Cartel.

Take a look at the book's publication date. 9 August 2001. We all know what happened a month later. Through entirely no fault of the author, we can see that the book was perhaps prematurely optimistic. The Spoils of Peace?! Nothing wrong with optimism, but as the author was drafting this book, some months earlier, Osama bin Laden and his cohorts were going to upend and obsolete significant portions of the text.

Yet, give Clark his due. The Cold War involved a very real danger of going nuclear. With both sides having tens of thousands of warheads. It could have destroyed civilisation. It is too easy to decry this book as obsolete. Keep some perspective. The terrorist attacks in 2001 killed some 3000 people. Even the protracted conflicts now underway in Iraq and Afghanistan do not contain in them the dangers of global nuclear war. For all the perils that Islamist terrorists pose, they do not have the nuclear armaments that the Soviets possessed.

So, yes, we are indeed in a relative age of peace, as Clark posited.

Howell's book is part of a recent trend towards viewing the president as more than just one player in a larger system. Instead we can better understand the presidency if we realize that the president comes in to the game with institutional advantages over Congress and the courts.

Debunking further Richard Neustadt's bargaining hypothesis (see his book Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents), Howell argues that presidents have the ability in many situations to use direct forms of action, such as executive orders, rather than relying upon persuasion and normal legislative processes.

Howell's argument is a game-theoretic model, which ultimately undermines somewhat the usefulness of his argument. He makes some interesting points, but also leaves the reader wondering whether what he says is true in practice and in history, not just in theory.

Overall, recommended for serious scholars of the presidency only.

Solingen tackles the question of the causes of war in the late 20th and early 21st century by comparing the empirical evidence for competing international relations research programs (realism, democratic peace hypothesis) with her own view, which proves to be not only surprising and intuitively compelling, but well supported by the facts. Briefly, she argues that there are two basic strategies for dealing with globalization (emergence of strong, extensive international markets): embrace or resistance. Both strategies have self-interested factions within their polities competing with each other for control of the state. Coalitions which embrace international markets find that they have cooperating partners in adjacent states with similar motives, and a preponderance of states controlled by such coalitions in a region leads to peace. By contrast, coalitions with self-interested reasons for resisting trade tend to be aligned with military interests (and the ideological groups that support them: secular and religious nationalists) that regard their counterparts in adjacent states as competitors rather than cooperators. Consequently, regions in which trade resistance dominates tend to be regions of war. Solingen's surprising claim is that the degree to which democracy takes hold is irrelevant, thus refuting in advance a central theme of Bush administration policy.

The themes of self-interested coalitions, and fundamental choices to compete or cooperate, lend the book an overall "game-theoretic" flavor. And yet the book is wonderfully clear and non-technical. Though her "economics explains politics" methodology sounds vaguely Marxian, (and perhaps discounts the role of culture too much, as the "nationalist-confessional coalitions" need some sense of communal identity rooted in history to organize themselves around), her implicitly classical liberal emphasis on the virtue of markets to bring peace and prosperity, rather than violence and exploitation, is anything but. One of the best books I've read in the past decade.