2000 01 02 book reviews

This section includes book reviews of 600-900 words as well as book notes of 100-200 words on books of particular interest to the members of our group. If members either have a review that they consider of interest to the SG, or a recent book of their own, which they would like to see reviewed in the newsletter, they should contact Cas Mudde at: c.mudde@ed.ac.uk.

•

Jeffrey C. Alexander (ed.)., Real Civil Societies. Dilemmas of Institutionalization. London, etc.: Sage, 1998, 246 pp., £ 49.50 (cloth) / £ 16.00 (paper), ISBN 0-7619-5820-7 / 0-7619-5821-5.

Reviewed by Cas Mudde (University of Edinburgh) In the introductory chapter, the editor provides a short historical overview of the concept of ‘civil society’, outlining the different meanings through time, before presenting his own definition: "civil society as a sphere that is analytically independent of – and, to varying degrees, empirically differentiated from – not only the state and the market but other social spheres as well" (p.6). These other social spheres Alexander terms "non-civil spheres" – including also religion, science and the family – and it is the "civil and non-civil boundary relations" that are at the core of this edited volume.

In the first chapter of part I (Uncivil Hierarchies), Elisa P. Reis uses the concept of ‘amoral familism’, developed by Edward Banfield in 1958 to denote "a situation in which social solidarity and the feeling of belonging did not extend beyond the home environment" (p.22), to argue that societies with high inequality structures impede the development of civil society (drawing upon the Latin American experience). In the second chapter, Michael Pusey, drawing on the example of Australia, uses a lot of rational choice jargon to argue (though hardly persuasively) his highly normative case that economic rationalism attacks civil society. Next, Luis Roniger makes a case for a revision of the view on patronage, arguing its potential value for democracy and civil society. And in the final chapter of this first part, Göran Ahrne addresses the relationship between civil society and uncivil organisations, arguing that "(t)he notion of civil society cannot be grasped inside any special type of organization – only in the interaction between a multitude of organizational forms" (p.94).

In the excellent first chapter of part II (Bifurcating Discourses), Jeffrey Alexander provocatively discusses the polarising discourse of civil society, schematically laying out the dichotomies in the discursive structures of social motives, social relationships, and social institutions (Tables 6.1-3, pp.100-1). He argues that the three structures are related and together form the narratives of social communities. In a similar vein, and with some overlap, Philip Smith analyses and compares the discourses of fascism, communism, and democracy, concluding that "a dialectic of civility and barbarism lies beneath all three political systems" which "can be understood relationally as a series of transformations of a common underlying set of orienting concepts" (p.119). In the final chapter of part II, Ronald N. Jacobs applies the same framework in a very interesting comparative analysis of the coverage of the Watts and Rodney King crises in the main African-American and mainstream newspaper in Los Angeles. He argues that though the crises were covered differently by the two newspapers, they did share a ‘racial discourse of civil society’.

The chapters in the third part (Arbitrary Foundings) have a European focus. In the first chapter, David Zaret argues that the development of print technology had the unintended effect of changing both the scope and the content of communication, thereby creating ‘public opinion’. In the second chapter, Piotr Sztompka discusses civil society in post-communist societies, mainly based on the (rather typical) case of Poland. He argues that though civil society has developed reasonably well in sociological and economical terms, the ‘Leninist legacy’ of distrust has prevented similar success in cultural terms. The book is finished by one of the more disappointing chapters, in which Víctor Pérez-Díaz discusses the difficulties involved in creating a ‘European civil society’. In a mix of critical analysis and normative statements, he comes to the not particularly remarkable conclusion that the development of a European (Union) civil society is hampered by the public’s focus on national matters, the "logic of self-interested nationalisms" (p.235) which prevails within the EU, and the lack of a European ‘community’ (feeling).

Overall, this edited volume is difficult to assess. It includes some very interesting and thought-provoking chapters, most notably the three in part II, but as a whole it is fairly unstructured. Most chapters deal with civil society as a "sphere", taking a rather abstract meta-approach. Despite the sub-title, very few chapters focus on the institutions of civil society, barring the rather general and abstract discourse approach in part II, let alone identify concrete actors of civil society. So, assessing the book on the basis of its most ambitious and challenging aim -- "to show how this concept must be redefined if it is to make the transition from a normative and political idea to a concept that plays an important role in theoretical and empirical social science alike" (p.17), I would argue that the book has been able to show the importance of civil society to more theoretical social science, but has largely failed vis-à-vis empirical social science. This notwithstanding, Real Civil Societies is a welcome addition to the still rather singleminded literature on civil society, looking beyond the traditional narrow borders of the concept and thereby raising new questions for research.

•

Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas (eds.)., Encyclopedia of the American Left. New York, etc.: Oxford University Press, second edition, 1998, 988 pp., £ 75.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-19-512088-4.

Reviewed by Cas Mudde (University of Edinburgh) To quote the preface: "This volume is a revised and expanded edition of the first comprehensive reference work on the history of the American Left to be published" (p.vii). The topic is defined as "that segment of society that has sought fundamental changes in the economic, political, and cultural systems, the subject does not include reformers who believe that change can be accomodated to existing capitalist structures, or who believe that an egalitarian society can be attained ultimately within national borders. By placing a strong emphasis upon radicals – anarchists, socialists, and communists – the Encyclopedia of the American Left has been able to delve into many topics that are otherwise little known or that are frequently discussed without relation to their actual Left context" (p.ix).

This gigantic volume of almost 1000 pages is the collective effort of over 350 (!) contributors – mostly American(-based) academics, but also various non-Americans and non-academics, most notably many activists of the Left. Contributions deal with individual people (James Patrick Cannon), newspapers (e.g. Daily Worker), organisations (e.g. American Labor Party), events (e.g. Moscow trials), ideologies (e.g. socialist feminism), ethnic groups (e.g. Czech Americans) and so on, and vary in length from a few lines to several pages. Not surprisingly, the book comes at a hefty price, which begs the question: is it worth it? The answer is not as difficult as it seems: yes, if you are a scholar of the American Left, no if you are not (as would be the case with any specialist encyclopedia). More difficult is a recommendation for those who (or whose library) already possess the first edition, published in 1990. According to the editors, the new edition is approximately one-quarter larger and includes more than seventy new articles.

•

Peter Davies, The National Front in France: Ideology, Discourse and Power. London: Routledge, 1999, 278 pp., £ 55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0415158664.

Reviewed by John W.P. Veugelers (University of Toronto) In The National Front in France: Ideology, Discourse and Power, historian Peter Davies provides a rich portrait of the doctrine and local governance of France’s far-right party. Allowing for differences among party leaders and local organizations, Davies nonetheless argues for the fundamental coherence of the Front national (FN) program: "the core ideas and assumptions that lie behind FN ideology have remained in place for three decades" (p. 18).

Central to this ideology is a defensive form of nationalism. The different races are unequal and incompatible; the French must honour the sacrifices of their ancestors by preserving and transmitting tradition. These core beliefs are refracted through the party’s treatment of religion, race relations, local

politics and economics (over time, the FN has wavered between interventionism and laissez-faire).

Davies also shows how the party has treated cultural change, French naturalization law, the Gulf War, European unification, the question of regional autonomy, and French myths involving the land, the people and Joan of Arc. Beneath it all, major threats to the nation are said to be the declining French birthrate, the spread of Islam, and immigration from the Third World.

Davies makes these points in detail and with abundant documentation. Further, in an analysis that is briefer than I would have liked, he brings out some contradictions in FN doctrine. The party views the nation as a primary value, yet also defends regional cultures as authentic because rooted in tradition.

Similarly, the party’s deterministic view of how personality and society are shaped by race and geography cannot be reconciled with its call for national regeneration or its celebration of political will and charismatic heroes.

In his final chapter, Davies turns to four municipalities in which FN mayors were elected in 1995-97: Toulon, Orange, Marignane and Vitrolles. This allows him to consider the relationship between party statements and actual policies. These southern towns have served as laboratories for the far right, but not without tensions between their new FN mayors and party leaders in Paris who sought credit for the results. Cultural politics – battles over programming, library acquisitions, funding for arts groups, access to cultural events for local residents – have set the FN against an establishment it treats as elitist, permissive, left-wing, decadent and cosmopolitan. Some mean-spirited policies have targeted minorities as well, though "the dominant impression is that the FN has talked a lot about immigration-related matters, but has not had the power to deliver" (p. 194). For the FN, local governance has mostly involved mundane matters that leave "very little room for ideology and a specifically nationalist approach" (p. 217).

Davies also writes: "Too often, it could be argued, the political doctrine of the FN has been dismissed as simplistic and crude, as either racist, neo-fascist or anti-Semitic, as uncoordinated and anti-intellectual. As this study has suggested in places, there are grounds for many, if not all, of these accusations" (p. 224).

What therefore motivated his study? Davies does summarize the specialist literature on the FN, but on the whole I found the theoretical stakes either remote or absent from this book. Davies says the FN’s ideas are interesting because they are timely; I think there are more compelling lines of inquiry and reasons for studying the subject.

For example, did the FN fill a vacuum of identity created by the end of the Cold War or the weakening of Catholicism in French society? Peter Merkl argues that contemporary far-right parties show continuities with the past through their distinctive notions of a Golden Age, and for FN supporters, he says, the Golden Age was France before 1968. Can this be true, especially given that De Gaulle, who led France in the decade before 1968, was seen as the enemy by the pieds-noirs – the ex-colonials from Algeria who supported Tixier-Vignancour (in the presidential campaign organized for him by Le Pen in 1965) and were later over-represented among the cadres and supporters of the FN? Elsewhere in the comparative literature, Nonna Mayer argues that the contemporary far right does better in countries of interwar rightwing extremism and Nazi collaboration that did not come to terms with their past, such as France, Belgium and Italy. Again, one might ask what connection exists between an alleged repression in French collective memory (say, of Pétain and Vichy) and sympathy toward the ideas of the FN. My point is that real issues – issues that are both unresolved and not limited to the FN phenomenon alone – were avoided in this study.

[1] Peter Merkl, "Conclusion: A New Lease on Life for the Radical Right?" in Peter H. Merkl and Leonard Weinberg (eds), Encounters with the Contemporary Radical Right (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1993), p. 216).

[2] Nonna Mayer, Ces Français qui votent FN (Paris: Flammarion, 1999), pp. 293-295.

•

James Gregor, Phoenix. Fascism in Our Time. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1999. pp. xiv, 204, £ 25.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-56000422-3.

Reviewed by Roger Griffin (Oxford Brookes University) The appearance of a new publication by A. J. Gregor on generic fascism should be a major event for all those concerned with right-wing extremism, yet "Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time" never quite gets off the ground. Despite its title, Gregor is remarkably unforthcoming about fascism's putative revival in recent years, choosing instead to spend most of the book going over old ground, that is when he is not pouring scorn on the work of other academics in this field. Chapter one defiantly restates his own approach to generic fascism, while, in what is almost a sustained act of self-plagiarism, the next section focuses on the revolutionary ethos of Italian Fascism, dwelling on two case-studies in its ideology, Robert Michels and Giovanni Gentile (chapters 2-6). There follows a single brief chapter where the reader gains some sense of fascism's capacity to reinvent itself in the post-Cold War era. It concentrates on the new ‘Russian nationalism’ illustrated mainly by Gennadi Ziuganov, leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (chapter 7). The conclusion, too, offers something fresh in its suggestion that postMaoist China provides an ideal incubator for the ‘reactive nationalism’ that lies at the heart of all fascism.

Yet despite the nagging sense of déja vu which this book constantly generates, there is no reason for the reader to feel cheated. Within its covers he has performed a remarkable piece of leger-de-main which makes a new theory of fascism flutter forth from the old hat. In the opening chapter he craftily creates the illusion that his position has not changed an iota since the 1970s: "It will be argued here that Mussolini’s Fascism was a form of reactive, antidemocratic, developmental nationalism that serves as a paradigmatic instance of revolution in the twentieth century. As such it featured a coherent, manifestly relevant political ideology committed to the redemption of a humiliated and retrograde people" (p. 20). This last phrase imperceptibly signals a radical overhaul of the original theory. The recurrent theme of the book thereafter is that fascism is not rooted in a sense of backwardness but of decadence, not in a drive towards modernization, but towards rebirth. Paradigmatic Italian Fascism, he assures us, was ideologically prepared for by an elite bent on using "the mobilizing power of myth to launch the people on a programme of rebirth" (p. 30-1), and the hallmark of all movements akin to it is that they aim to "uplift and renovate the nation and empower the nation long enured to humiliation and exploitation" (p. 138), their psychodynamic power stemming from a "tortured, enraged, and passionate demand for national renewal" (p. 162).

There are two significant consequences to the fact that Gregor’s bird now sings a different tune. The first is that it makes more problematic than ever one of the striking features of Gregor’s earlier theory of fascism which is again underlined in the course of this book, namely that it excludes Nazism. Yet his make-over of his ‘developmental’ thesis to take in contemporary Russia and China (hardly underdeveloped countries) and to stress the central role played by the ‘passionate demand for renewal’ in conditions of national trauma, now makes it fit Nazism like a glove. The precondition for the rise of Nazism and then its final breakthrough was precisely the widespread populist longings for redemption in a nation which had lost a major war in catastrophic circumstances, felt crushed and humiliated under the Weimar system, and then fell apart after the Wall Street Crash.

The second consequence is that, however unwittingly or reluctantly, Gregor has now become a major spokesman for the new consensus on generic fascism which emerged in the 1990s on the basis of extensive groundwork done by Eugen Weber, Juan Linz, Ze’ev Sternhell, George Mosse, Stanley Payne, and, paradoxically, Gregor himself in the 1970s. At the core of this consensus (which is by its nature inevitable partial and contested) lies the understanding of fascism as a "genus of modern, revolutionary, mass politics" whose core myth is that "a period of perceived national decline and decadence is giving way to one of rebirth and renewal in a post-liberal new order" (Stanley Payne, "Review Article. Historical Fascism and the Radical Right", Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35, no.1, 2000, pp.111-3). Indeed, the fact that both the title and jacket design which has been chosen for the book evoke one of the archetypal symbols of the myth of palingenesis, the phoenix, underscores how fully Gregor now tacitly

acknowledges that what he formerly mistook for ‘developmental dictatorship’ was really a dictatorship of ‘palingenetic ultranationalism’.

As a theory of fascism Phoenix flies vigorously but perversely in the face of the very positions it claims to adopt. This internal inconsistency, combined with the contempt with which Gregor treats ‘rival’ theories of fascism to which he is demonstrably indebted, condemns this book to have as little practical impact on research into the empirical phenomena of fascism as his earlier ones.

•

William David Jones, The Lost Debate. German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999, 358 p, $ 49.95 (cloth), $ 21.95 (paper).

Reviewed by Uwe Backes (TU Dresden) The renaissance of the concept of totalitarianism, which can be observed since the 1980s, has reawakened an interest in its intellectual history. In recent years various studies have appeared which examine its origins in the 1920s and 1930s. This book by the American historian William David Jones (Mt. San Antonio College/Claremont Graduate University) deserves specific attention, if only because it does away with the still widespread, yet false assumption that the concept of totalitarianism is ‘a product of the Cold War‘ and a weapon of the Right against the Left. Instead, Jones argues that the category of the ‘totalitarian’ has played an important role in the debates of the German Left since the late 1920s.

Using a wealth of sources and literature the author traces discussions by the Left concerning bolshevism and fascism, the crisis and breakdown of the Weimar Republic, the controversy over the nature of the NS system and its parallels with bolshevism (most notably since the Hitler-Stalin Pact), up to the high point of the concept of totalitarianism in the years of the Cold War. He thereby uses a ‘word historical approach‘, concentrating on contributions in which the formulations ‘totalitarian‘ and ‘totalitarianism‘, which stem from the language of the Italian anti-fascist opposition and the debates over the ‘total State‘, are employed in the characterisation of new (appearing) extremist movements. As could be expected, the different ways in which the terms are used by various authors, influenced by Marxist thinking patterns, do not create a unified picture: the concept has many shades, sometimes referring to the economic, sometimes to the political, it is not limited to only those forces that oppose the fundamental consensus of the democratic rule of law, and by and large does not reach a high degree of theorising.

Overall, the author tends to overestimate the contribution of socialist authors to the totalitarianism debate.

On the basis of examples such as Karl Korsch he himself clearly shows that in their analysis dominated

by Marxist categories many authors remained economy-centred and either rejected or downplayed the autonomy of the political sphere in securing individual freedom. Famous representatives like Franz Neumann and Ernst Fraenkel remained fixated on the NS regime and did not develop a comparative concept. Protagonists of "critical theory" such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno voiced their cultural critique at a highly abstract philosophical basis, or, like Herbert Marcuse, put liberalism, fascism and ‘real existing socialism‘ under the same category. The consequent fading of borders between constitutional state and dictatorship does not receive the required critical attention of Jones. The author, who of all those mentioned developed the most systematic contribution to the uncovering of the power structure underlying the totalitarian systems, Franz Borkenau, had largely broken with Marxism at the time of his most important analyses of this theme ("The Spanish Cockpit", 1937, and "The Totalitarian Enemy", 1940).

In conclusion, those who would come to a different conclusion with regard to the contribution of the German Left to the totalitarianism debate, and who value the analytical strength of the concept of totalitarianism developed by other authors such as Hannah Arendt and Carl J. Friedrich higher than Jones, would benefit greatly from this ‘archaeological‘ word and concept historical rich study.

•

Mladen Lazic (ed.) Protest in Belgrade. Winter of Discontent, Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999, pp. 236, £ 31.95 (cloth), £ 13.95 (paper), ISBN 963-9116-72-6 (cloth), ISBN 963-911-45-9 (Pb).

Reviewed by Florian Bieber (Central European University) Serbia is the only country in post-communist Eastern Europe that has not witnessed a change of regime since 1989. Nevertheless, the regime led by Slobodan Milosevic has been shaken by a number of protests in the past decade, which have been the most pronounced representation of opposition to the regime. In most of the literature on the conflicts in former Yugoslavia the Serbian political dynamics have received inadequate attention. As a result there has been a tendency to simplify or neglect opposition against the regime and its policies in Serbia.

Protest in Belgrade is about the protests in the Winter of 1996/7, which were in fact two parallel events; one organised by the opposition alliance Zajedno (Together); another one organised by the students of Belgrade University. Both were, however, triggered by the attempt made by the regime to rig the local elections in November 1996, which threatened to bring the opposition to power in a significant number of cities and communes. Moreover, the protests reflected a broader disappointment with the authoritarian nature of the rule of the Socialist Party, which was postponed by the war in Bosnia. While the government was forced to back down and recognise the electoral victory of Zajedno in February 1997, the coalition broke down soon afterwards amid a quarrel between two of its leaders, Vuk Draskovic and Zoran Djndjic, over the participation in Serbian presidential elections in 1997.

Two questions in connection with the protests have drawn the interest of observers: 1. What were the political alternatives, especially in regard to the national question, proposed by the opposition leaders and supported by the protests? 2. Why did the protests eventually fail? An article published in the New York Times (10/12/96) caused controversy among the Serb opposition for accusing the students of being more nationalist than the regime. The journalist quotes students who accuse Milosevic mostly for having lost the wars in Croatia and not having waged them. This report lead to a number of protests, among them by the editor of this book, Mladen Lazic, who defended the students and pointed out that nationalist symbols played only a marginal role during the protests. The studies in the volume do not offer any conclusive answer to this issue. While national identity played an important role for most of the student protesters (p.

143) and 65 percent of the protesters agree with the statement that ‘a nation without a leader is like a man without a head,’ this figure is by no means higher than among the general population (p.105).

Vladimir Ilic points out the contradiction that most protesters were strongly pro-European and wanted Serbia to orient itself towards Western Europe, while at the same time having strong xenophobic and authoritarian attitudes (pp. 105-6). However, Slobodan Cvejic’s study in the volume concludes that only approximately 10 percent of the protesters could be considered nationalist. (pp. 70-72).

The failure of the protests is foreshadowed in the study, which identified that most protesters joined the demonstrations out of frustration with the regime, rather than out of support for the opposition (p. 63, p.

84). It has been the gap between a popular will for political change and the inability of the opposition to offer a viable alternative that has helped the regime in preserving power. Protest in Serbia has been the strongest when the regime blatantly dropped its democratic facade, rather than when the opposition itself sought to initiate protests (as seen with the rather dismal turnout during the protests in the fall of 1999).

The reader could have benefited from a broader contextualisation of events in the Winter of 1996/7. In his introduction (pp. 1-30) Mladen Lazic offers the democratic challenges in broad strokes from a sociological perspective. The book would have profited from an additional discussion of authoritarianism and democratisation in Serbia from a political science perspective. While Dragan Popadic compares the earlier student protests in 1992 with the demonstrations in 1996/7, a broader comparison with protests in Serbia and throughout Eastern Europe might not only help explain the dynamics of the protests, but also their eventual failure.

As the Serbian original of this book was published in February 1997, i.e. during the protests, many of the studies do not benefit from hindsight and do not mention the political events which ensued (the disintegration of Zajedno and the electoral success of Seselj, as well as the escalating conflict in Kosovo and the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia). Only the chronology and the introduction take these events partially into account. While the timing of the Serbian original and the involvement of the research with the protests gives this volume a special and ‘involved’ feel, some articles examining the protests in retrospect and contextualising them with the protests in Pristina and Belgrade by Serbian and Albanian students in 1997/1998 would have helped readers to better the understand the protests.

Altogether this is an important book for understanding not just Serbian politics, but also the difficulties for any opposition in semi-totalitarian states in Eastern Europe. The failure of these protests and elections to change the regime, has built up a degree of frustration among the opposition and accentuated the authoritarianism of the regime, rendering the political situation in Serbia increasingly volatile and dangerous.

•

Vladimir Tismaneanu (ed.), The Revolutions of 1989. London and New York: Routledge, 1999, 246 pp., £ 15.99 (paper), ISBN 0-415-16950-X.

Reviewed by Cas Mudde (University of Edinburgh) This latest book in the "Rewriting Histories" series includes a collection of classic texts on the ‘triple transition’ in Eastern Europe written by leading academics and dissidents. All chapters, except Tismaneanu’s introduction, have been published before as either articles in journals, such as Daedalus and Journal of Democracy, or as parts of a book. The volume is divided into three thematic parts: Part I deals with the causes of the breakdown of ‘real existing socialism’, featuring articles by Daniel Chirot, Leszek Kolakowski, and Katherine Verdery. Part II features chapters on the meaning of the year 1989, including contributions by S.N. Eisenstadt, Timothy Garton Ash, Jeffrey C. Isaac, Tony Judt, G.M. Tamás, and Jacek Kuron. The third and final part deals with the future, with articles by Bruce Ackerman, Ken Jowitt, Jacques Rupnik, Adam Michnik, Mircea Mihaies, and Zhelyu Zhelev. The book clearly proves the editor’s thesis that "(r)emembering the real message of these revolutions, revisiting their main interpretations and a number of key pronouncements made by the revolutionaries themselves, is (…) a politically, morally and intellectually useful exercise" (p.2). Though some contributions might prove a bit dated by now, this edited volume does provide a fascinating collection of keen observations from in- and outsiders of the transition period, which should be left out of no reading list on democratisation in Eastern Europe.