Book reviews

Sibyl Crowe and Edward Corp, Our Ablest Public Servant, Sir Eyre Crowe GCB, GCMG, KCB, KCMG, 1864-1925 (Braunton Devon: Merlin Books, 1993) £17.95. ISBN 0 86303 607-4.

Richard J. Aldrich, The Key to the South: Britain, the United States, and Thailand during the Approach of the Pacific War, 1929-42 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1993).

John Saville, The Politics of Continuity: British Foreign Policy and the Labour Government, 1945-46 (London and New York: Verso, 1993). ISBN 0 86091 456 9.

John Kent, British Imperial Strategy and the Origins of the Cold War, 1944-49 (Leicester, London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1993). ISBN 0 7185 1330 4.

Frederick W. Marks III, Power and Peace: The Diplomacy of John Foster Dulles (Westport, CT & London: Praeger, 1993) £45. ISBN 0 275 94497 2.

Charles Grant, Delors: Inside the House that Jacques Built (London: Nicholas Brealey, 1994) pp.305. £12.99. ISBN 1 85788 039 0.     

Managing Fiscal Federalism: Revenue Allocation Issues

Like most federal systems, Nigeria has a revenue distributionsystem in which the national government shares revenues withstate and local governments. Since the early 1970s, the bulkof revenue has been collected by the national government. Muchof this revenue has been derived from petroleum taxes and miningrents and royalties. Various proportions of this revenue havethen been distributed to state and local governments under arevenue allocation system (RAS) using different formulas. Akey problem, however, is that revenue allocations since 1970have been driven largely by political considerations and byformula factors, such as jurisdictional population and stateequality, rather than by factors associated with economic developmentimperatives.     

Prosecuting assaultive psychiatric patients.

For many reasons, inpatient psychiatric units are increasingly faced with treatment and management of violent individuals. This fosters a need to consider potential institutional responses to patient violence. This paper focuses on one response--prosecution of these persons. The existing literature on this topic is reviewed. In addition, the case history of a difficult but successful prosecution of an assaultive patient is presented. This case highlighted the development of guidelines, which are outlined herein, for determining the appropriateness of seeking legal action against patients. The paper concludes with an assessment of the benefits and risks associated with patient prosecution.     

To Manage Is to Govern

Governance structures constrain and enable the actions of public managers. Principal–agent theory has played a dominant role in our understanding of governance structures. This theory suggests that politicians create relatively static governance structures in a top–down fashion and hold managers accountable for mandated results. In other words, public managers are influenced by governance structures but do not affect governance structures. However, we argue that public managers do affect governance structures, and, in order to understand how this influence takes place, we need a new way of thinking about governance structures. We propose thinking about governance structures as relationships created through the interactions of people in different and reciprocal roles that are relatively dynamic. Public managers are an important source of the multiple, reciprocal, and dynamic interactions that produce governance (relationship) structures. As such, managers are accountable not only for policy outcomes, but also for the appropriateness of the relationships they create and support.     

Regulation of Cohabitation, Changing Family Policies and Social Attitudes: A Discussion of Britain Within Europe

This article considers the differing legal and policy responses to the common trends of family restructuring away from marriage within Britain and Europe. Conceding that Europe is in the process of losing heterosexual marriage as a universal epicenter of family law at the very time when legal harmonization within Europe is being promoted, it goes on to explore the best way forward for regulating same- and different-sex cohabiting couples. It concludes that the legal response to these trends should be "de-moralized" but principled. A plurality of legal regulative structures to accommodate the now diverse family forms that are found within our less marriage-centric societies should be put in place providing at least some default protection for all families, yet allowing people to opt out and make their own arrangements.     

'Arming the key battleground': German rearmament, 1950-55

Saki Dockrill, Britain's Policy for West German Rearmament, 1950-1955, Cambridge Studies in International Relations No 13, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, £27.50.

Thomas Alan Schwartz, America's Germany. John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany, Cambridge, USA, Harvard University Press, 1991, £23.95.