BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: Far Right ELISABETH CARTER Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe, by Piero Ignazi. Right‐wing Extremism in the Twenty‐first Century, edited by Peter H. Merkl and Leonard Weinberg. From Tax Populism to Ethnic Nationalism: Radical Right‐wing Populism in Sweden, by Jens Rydgren. Modernity and Secession: The Social Sciences and the Political Discourse of the Lega Nord in Italy, by Michel Huysseune. New Labour new NHS? , Jennifer Dixon New Labour's State of Health. Political Economy, Public Policy and the NHS, by Calum Paton. Bad aid , Norman Flynn The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done so Much III and so Little Good, by William Easterly. Plato Lives! , Richard Mullender Plato's Republic: A Biography, by Simon Blackburn. Plato's Children: The State We Are In, By Anthony O'Hear. plato and the Virtue of Courage, by Linda R. Rabieh. Exporting Burke , Richard Bourke Foreign Affections: Essays on Edmund Burke, by Seamus Deane.     

Book Reviews

Arran Gare: NIHILISM, INC.: Environmental Destruction and the Metaphysics of Sustainability. Como, New South Wales, Australia: Eco‐Logical Press, 1996.

David Harvey: Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

David Macauley, editor: Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology. New York: The Guilford Press, 1996.

Daniel M. Herman and John T. O'Connor: Who Owns the Sun? People, Politics, and the Struggle for a Solar Economy. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 1996.

Harold Crooks: Giants of Garbage: The Rise of the Global Waste Industry and the Politics of Pollution Control. Toronto: Lorimer, 1993

Sudhir Chella Rajan: The Enigma of Automobility: Democratic Politics and Pollution Control. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.

Garrett Hardin: Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.     

Reviews

Uncivil society: ‘race’ and murder in Nazi Germany Tim Mason, Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the ‘National Community’, ed. Jane Caplan, introd. Ursula Vogel, trans. John Broadwin. Oxford and Providence, Rl: Berg, 1993. xxviii+434pp. Notes. Append. Bibl. Ind. £50.00.

David F. Crew (ed.), Nazism and German Society, 1933–1945. London and New York: Routledge, 1994 (Rewriting Histories series). xi+316pp. Notes. £11.99.

It's the real thing Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context. Volume 1: The Holocaust and Mass Death in the Modern Age. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. xviii+702pp. Bibl. Ind. Notes. £40.00.

True adventures of court Jews Eli M. Rosenbaum with William Hoffer, Betrayal. The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover‐Up. New York: St Martin's Press, 1993. xx+522pp. Ind. $25.95.

Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace. Jews and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. x+266pp. Ind. $22.00.

Columbus and the legacy of 1492 Zia Sardar, Ashis Nandy and Merryl Wyn Davies, Barbaric Others. A Manifesto on Western Racism, London: Pluto Press, 1993. 95pp. Bibl. £7.95.

Dutch ambivalence Allison Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World. The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993. xx+327pp. Notes. Ind. Maps. Illus. £32.50.

Agile Italian evasions Daniel Carpi, Between Mussolini and Hitler: The Jews and the Italian Authorities in France and Tunisia. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1994 (Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry Series, 17). x+341 pp. Notes. Bibl. Ind. £35.00/$59.95.

What colour are Jews? Milton Shain, The Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa. Charlottes‐ville, VA and London: University Press of Virginia, 1994. xii+203pp. Notes. Bibl. Ind. $45.00.

Surveying European racism John Wrench and John Solomos (eds.), Racism and Migration in Western Europe, Oxford and Providence, RI: Berg, 1993. x+293pp. Bibl. Ind. £34.95.     

Tensions in Belgium

ABSTRACT

Musolff's study applies methods of cognitive metaphor analysis to Hitler's antisemitic imagery in Mein Kampf, especially to the conceptualization of the German nation as a (human) body that had to be cured from a deadly disease caused by Jewish parasites. The relevant expressions from the conceptual domains of biological and medical categories form a partly narrative, partly inferential-argumentative source ‘scenario’, which centred on a notion of blood poisoning that was understood in three ways: a) as a supposedly real act of blood defilement, i.e. rape; b) as a part of the source scenario of illness-cure; and c) as an allegorical element of an apocalyptic narrative of a devilish conspiracy against the ‘grand design of the creator’. The conceptual differences of source and target levels were thus short-circuited to form a belief-system that was no longer open to criticism. The results cast new light on central topics of Holocaust research, such as the debates between more ‘intentionalist’ and more ‘functionalist’ explanations of the origins of the Holocaust, and the question of how the Nazi metaphor system helped gradually to ‘initiate’ wider parts of the German populace into the implications of the illness-cure scenario as a blueprint for genocide. The Nazi antisemitic metaphor system thus provides a unique example of the cognitive forces that can be unleashed in the service of racist stigmatization and dehumanization.     

Book Review

Book reviewed in this article: Italy Since 1989: Events and Interpretations by Vittorio Bufacchi and Simon Burg The Italian Guillotine: Operation Clean Hands and the Overthrow of Italy's First Republic by Stanton H. Burnett and Luca Mantovani.     

Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Cosmopolitanism

In this paper we explore the sustained and multifaceted attempt of Jürgen Habermas to reconstruct Kant's theory of cosmopolitan right for our own times. In a series of articles written in the post‐1989 period, Habermas has argued that the challenge posed both by the catastrophes of the twentieth century, and by social forces of globalization, has given new impetus to the idea of cosmopolitan justice that Kant first expressed. He recognizes that today we cannot simply repeat Kant's eighteenth‐century vision: that if we are to grapple with the complexities of present‐day problems, it is necessary to iron out certain inconsistencies in Kant's thinking, radicalize it where its break from the old order of nation‐states is incomplete, socialize it so as to draw out the connections between perpetual peace and social justice, and modernize it so as to comprehend the “differences both in global situation and conceptual framework that now separate us from him.” ¹ 1 Karl‐Otto Apel, “Kant's Toward Perpetual Peace as historical prognosis from the point of view of moral duty,” in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz‐Bachmann, eds., Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997), 87. Jürgen Habermas, “Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years Hindsight,” ibid., 113–53; and in Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 165–202. His basic intuition, however, is that Kant's idea of cosmopolitan right is as relevant to our times as it was to Kant's own. If it was Kant's achievement to formulate the idea of cosmopolitanism in a modern philosophical form, Habermas takes up the challenge posed by Karl‐Otto Apel: to “think with Kant against Kant” in reconstructing this idea. What follows is a critical assessment of Habermas's response to this challenge. We focus here on the dilemmas he faces in grounding his normative commitment to cosmopolitan politics and in reconciling his cosmopolitanism with the national framework in which he developed his ideas of constitutional patriotism and deliberative democracy.     

Books

The Chinese Army after Mao, by Ellis Joffe. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1987. 210 pp. £20. ISBN 0 6745 4849 3

Centre and Province in the People's Republic of China: Sichuan and Guizhou 1955–1965, by David S. G. Goodman. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986. 257 pp. £22.50. ISBN 0 5213 2530 7.

The China Challenge, by David S. G. Goodman, Martin Lockett and Gerald Segal. (Chatham House Papers 32) Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, New York and Andover, 1986. 86 pp. £5.95 paperback. ISBN 0 7102 1111 2.

Understanding Communist China: Communist China Studies in the United States and the Republic of China, 1949–1978, by Tai‐chun Kuo and Ramon H. Myers. Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, California, 1986. 179 pp. £17.50 hardback, £9.95 paperback. ISBN 0 8197 8341 4 and 0 8179 8342 2.

The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness, by Peter N. Dale. Croom Helm, London, 1986. xi + 233 pp. £25. ISBN 0 7099 0899 7.

Mongolia: Politics, Economics and Society, by Alan J. K. Sanders. Francis Pinter, London, and Lynne Reinner, Boulder, 1987. xxii + 179 pp. £22.50 hardback, £6.95 paperback. ISBN 0 86187 430 7 and 0 86187 431 5.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this issue. ‘Special’ yes, but when and why? Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America, by Kathleen Burk. God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, by Walter Russell Mead. Judicial corruption Global Corruption Report 2007: Corruption in Judicial Systems, by Transparency International. Internet crimes Cybercrime: The Transformation of Crime in the Information Age, by David S. Wall. $$ and €€€ in the global world The Euro and the Dollar in a Globalized Economy, edited by Joaquín Roy and Pedro Gomis‐Porqueras. The engagement of media citizens Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention, by Nick Couldry, Sonia Livingstone and Tim Markham. Scotching the Scots The Scots and the Union, by Christopher Whatley. The Union: England, Scotland and the Treaty of 1707, by Michael Fry. The Union of 1707: Why and How, by Paul Henderson Scot. Citizens and supercapitalists Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life, by Robert Reich. More Blair effects Blair's Britain, 1997–2007, edited by Anthony Seldon. Carl Schmitt: a scholarly Nazi Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The ‘Jewish Question’, The Holocaust and German Legal Theory, by Raphael Gross. Ein gefährlicher Geist. Carl Schmitts Wirkung in Europa, by Jan‐Werner Müller. Carl Schmitt, Ludwig Feuchtwanger, Briefwechsel 1918–1935, edited by Rolf Rieß. Hans Blumenberg, Carl Schmitt, Briefwechsel, edited by Alexander Schmitz and Marcel Lepper. Gretha Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Briefwechsel (1934–1953), edited by Ingeborg Villinger and Alexander Jaser.     

Ways of seeing killing

Eric Markusen and David Kopf, The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing. Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century. Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1994. xvi+354pp. Notes. Ind. Illus. £25.95.

Yves Ternon, L'État criminel: les génocides au XXe siècle. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995. 449pp. Notes. Bibl. Ind. FF 140.     

Japan: Still searching for a role

Japan's Rise to International Responsibilities: The Case of Arms Control, by Reinhard Drifte. Athlone Press, London, 1990. xi + 112 pp. £25. ISBN 0–485–11385–6.

Japanese Defence: The Search for Political Power, by S. Javed Maswood. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1990. ix + 113 pp. US$12.00. ISBN 981–3035–39–0.

The Emergence of Japan's Foreign Aid Policy, by Robert M. Orr Jnr. Columbia University Press, New York, 1990. x + 178 pp. $32.00. ISBN 0–231–07046–2.

Same Bed, Different Dreams: America and Japan—Societies in Transition, edited by Alan D. Romberg and Tadashi Yamamoto. Council on Foreign Relations Press, New York, 1990. xi + 138 pp. $14.95 paperback. ISBN 0–87609–082‐X.     

Glimpsing the Holocaust in post-war British detective fiction

ABSTRACT

Scholars including David Cesarani have noted that there was no concerted effort to represent what we now term the Holocaust in British fiction of the immediate post-war years. What can be found in novels from the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, are suggestive glimpses of how British understandings of the Holocaust were beginning to develop. Detective fiction is a useful point of reference because in the interwar years this form was typically based on simplified or even stereotyped characters, with the war years and the post-war period signalling a turn to greater realism. As Gill Plain has argued, detective fiction expresses a desire both to see and to evade seeing the dead body. Plain explores this as an expression of post-First World War cultural anxieties but, in the wake of the widespread circulation in Britain of images of the opening up of the concentration and death camps, such ambivalence takes on a particular significance. Examining two quite different examples, Agatha Christie’s A Murder Is Announced (1950) and Ellis Peters’s Fallen into the Pit (1951), Stewart’s article reveals contrasting early engagements with the Holocaust. Both novels feature peripheral characters who are refugees from Europe, and whose stories, although told only in fragments, nevertheless destabilize the process of reinstating order that is the usual narrative trajectory of the detective novel. Stewart will argue that such glimpses of the Holocaust are as telling about contemporary attitudes as more concerted, explicit and direct engagements might be.     

Hong Kong between East and West

The Hong Kong Basic Law: Blueprint for ‘Stability and Prosperity’ under Chinese Sovereignty, edited by Ming K. Chan and David J. Clark. (Hong Kong Becoming China Series) M. E. Sharpe, New York, 1991. xv + 311 pp. $45. ISBN 0–87332–835–3.

The China‐Hong Kong Connection: The Key to China's Open‐Door Policy, by Yun‐Wing Sung. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991. xiv + 183 pp. £27.50. ISBN 0–521–38245–9.

The Making of Hong Kong Society: Three Studies of Class Formation in Early Hong Kong, by W. K. Chan. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991. viii + 251 pp. £32.50. ISBN 0–19–827320–7.     

In The Thick of It: ‘high politics’ and the Holocaust in millennial Britain

ABSTRACT

Over the past twenty years, state-sponsored activities related to the Holocaust have been numerous in Britain. Beginning with the creation of Holocaust Memorial Day at the turn of the millennium, successive governments have followed a policy trajectory that has brought forth a slew of new initiatives and projects related to the Holocaust and its memory. Most recently, this has included the creation of a new national memorial and learning centre, to be housed adjacent to the Palace of Westminster. With cross-party support and the pledge of £50 million of public funds, this lieu de memoire is due to open in January 2020. Conceiving of these activities as exercises in ‘high’ Holocaust politics, Pearce’s article examines the various memory-projects of recent decades and argues they reveal much about millennial Britain and its Holocaust culture. He contends that the nature of these and other initiatives means high Holocaust politics must be subject to continued scrutiny and interrogation.     

Holocaust Historiography: The Return of Antisemitism and Ethnic Stereotypes as Major Themes

Ofer addresses the return of antisemitism as a major factor in explanations of the Final Solution, and explores the significance and meaning of the reinstatement of antisemitism at the centre of historical work on the subject. She refers mostly to three books published in the mid-1990s. The one that caused the greatest uproar was Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, the title of which makes clear its thesis, as does that of John Weiss's Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany. The third book discussed is the first volume of Saul Friedländer's Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939. Ofer demonstrates the role of antisemitism in explaining the Holocaust at different stages of post-war research, the historiographical trends in histories of the Holocaust and the transition that these three publications suggest. The main part of the article addresses these books which, despite their common message, are very different in their methodologies and the perceptions of their authors, and are also associated with different historiographic schools.     

Introuduction to Deleuze

Modernity has faced many criticisms but none more disturbing than Bauman's claim that the potential for a Holocaust exists in all modern societies. Though essentially a sociological work, Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust centers on political phenomena: bureaucracy, the State's monopoly of coercion and political democracy. This claimed relationship between modernity and the Holocaust is examined critically, drawing particularly on the classic analyses of totalitarianism. The findings show that there is no inherent potential for a Holocaust in modern, rational, society. Rather, ‘common and ordinary’ aspects of modern society serve not to promote but to prevent modern genocide and chosen policies play the largest part in explaining the horrors not only of Nazi Germany but also of Stalinist Russia.     

Plato in WeimarWeber revisited via Foucault: two lectures on legitimation and vocation

Abstract

The text that follows brings together two papers about resonances between late lectures: Weber's lectures of 1918 on science and politics as vocations, and Foucault's final courses (1980–84) on subjectivity, truth and the political. The title alludes to Foucault's 1983 discussion of Plato's political experiences in Sicily, as narrated in his Seventh Letter, juxtaposed to Weber's public interventions in Germany at the time of the foundation of the Weimar Republic. Linked to this is an exploration of the centrality in the work of both Weber and Foucault of an historical ethnography and ethology of the political, and of the forms of connectivity in our cultures between ethics, truth and government.     

Are China and Japan rivals in Latin America? A rivalry perception analysis

Abstract

This article investigates whether the People’s Republic of China and Japan perceive each other as rivals in Latin America (LA; both the Chinese and Japanese governments tend to refer to the region as Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), but for the purposes of this article we focus mainly on LA), and what impact such a perception might have on their foreign policy decision-making. We take LA as a case study because China’s and Japan’s recent (re-)engagement there began almost simultaneously in the early 2000s, and has developed against the background of domestic leadership transitions, growing demands for energy and markets, as well as international political agendas in which LA might play a key role. Developing the work of Thompson [(1995). Principal rivalries. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 39 (2), 195–223; (2001). Identifying rivals and rivalries in world politics. International Studies Quarterly, 45(4), 557–586] and Vasquez [(1993). The War Puzzle. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press; (1996). Distinguishing rivals that go to war from those that do not: Aa quantitative comparative case study of the two paths to war. International Studies Quarterly, 40 (4), 531–558] on rivalry, in combination with perception theory [Jervis, R. (1976). Perception and misperception in international politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press], the article suggests three indicators by which to measure the extent to which China and Japan might perceive each other as rivals. Drawing on content analysis of a range of Chinese- and Japanese-language official writing, news reports, and academic analysis, the article argues that, despite some media representation of China and Japan as competitors for resources and power in LA, in fact mutual perceptions concerning rivalry have not affected LA policy decisions of these two countries.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this issue. Britain's problem: how to be nice about Europe ILARIA POGGIOLINI Britain's Policy towards the European Community, 1964–7: Harold Wilson and Britain's World Role, by Helen Parr. Harold Wilson's EEC Application, by Jane Tooney. A Stranger in Europe: Britain and the EU from Thatcher to Blair, by Stephen Wall. For love of what you are not Rosemary Bechler Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender Culture and the Normalisation of Difference, by Mica Nava. Globalised capitalism: the migrants Selina Chen Chinese Whispers: The True Story behind Britain's Hidden Army of Labour, by Hsiao‐Hung Pai. Globalised capitalism: the poor Suzanne Franks The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done about It, by Paul Collier. The dark side of globalisation Ombretta Ingrascì McMafia: Crime without Frontiers, by Misha Glenny. The militant matryoshkas F. S. Aijazuddin Frontline Pakistan: The Path to Catastrophe and the Killing of Benazir Bhutto, by Zahid Hussain. Walking under Israeli occupation Jad Adams Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, by Raja Shehadeh. A decade of deconstruction: Britain in the 1970s Richard Mullender Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s, by Alwyn W. Turner. The threat from the Internet Kathy Bowrey The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, by Jonathon Zittrain.     

Keep Them in the Dark: Australian Government Strategy to Weaken Activism against Australia's new Nuclear Reactor

Martin O'Connor, editor: Is Capitalism Sustainable? Political Economy and the Politics of Ecology. New York: Guilford Publications, 1994.

Kate Soper: What is Nature? Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Jim Schwab: Deeper Shades of Green: The Rise of Blue‐Collar and Minority Environmentalism in America. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1994.

Michael E. Zimmerman: Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Michael Hough: Cities and Natural Process. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Wayne Roberts and Susan Brandum: GET A LIFE! How to make a good buck, Dance around the dinosaurs, and Save the world while you're at it. Get A Life Publishing, Toronto, 1995.

Sara Berry: No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub‐Saharan Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.     

Book Reviews: The Balance between Forgetting and Remembering

Books reviewed Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Trials Richard Goldstone, For Humanity: Reflections of a War Crimes Investigator Joanna Van Selm, (ed) Kosovo's Refugees in the European Union Peter Shore, Separate Ways: The Heart of Europe Tommaso Padoa‐Schioppa, The Road to Monetary Union in Europe: The Emperor, the Kings and the Genies Kenneth Dyson, The Politics of the Euro‐Zone: Stability or Breakdown? Stefano Bartolini, The Political Mobilization of the European Left, 1860–1980: The Class Cleavage Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States Richard Little and Mark Wickham‐Jones, (eds) New Labour's Foreign Policy: A New Moral Crusade? Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy Fritz W. Scharpf and Vivien A. Schmidt, (eds) Welfare and Work in the Open Economy Fritz W. Scharpf and Vivien A. Schmidt, (eds) From Vulnerability to Competitiveness Fritz W. Scharpf and Vivien A. Schmidt, (eds)Diverse Responses to Common Challenges Andrew Samuels, Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life John B. Thompson, Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age Andrew Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow 1920–43