2005 06 02 book reviews

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

Kirk S. Bowman, Militarization, Democracy and Development: The Perils of Praetorianism in Latin America, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002, 289 pp., USD 25.00, ISBN: 0-271-02229-9 (pbk).

Reviewed by John Gledhill (The University of Manchester)

Bowman’s meticulously argued book shows that quantitative and qualitative analysis can mix productively. His thesis is that armies in Latin America have been bad for democracy and development, and that other countries in the region would have done better had they followed Costa Rica’s example and demilitarized before the United States fostered the bloating of military apparatuses in the decades after a CIA-backed coup overthrew the reformist Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954. Bowman does not claim that possessing armies which have little to do except influence the course of domestic politics and run businesses is the only factor responsible for Latin America’s problems, but he does neatly expose the fallacy of analyses carried out at world level that show a positive general relationship between militarization and “development”, thereby offering an interesting defence of the value of area studies in the era of globalization.

The qualitative study compares Costa Rica with Honduras, described even by Voice of America in the 1990s as “a military with a country”. Refuting much conventional wisdom, Bowman makes a significant contribution here to a more nuanced understanding of the political history of Central America. Although more could be said about other subregions and more recent periods than is contained in the chapter on the “lost decade” of the 1980s, by combining a focus on class, state and transnational power, this analysis does more than consider the USA’s role in the region’s affairs, though its lessons on

that front are timely as the “war against terror” adds to the pathologies already produced by the “war on drugs” as a pretext for continuing militarization.

Mario Diani and Doug McAdam (eds.), Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, xx + 348pp., GBP 62.50, ISBN: 0-196925177-0 (hbk), GBP 20.00, ISBN: 0-19925178-9 (pbk).

Reviewed by Robert Gibb (University of Glasgow)

This book is an important attempt to assess the current and potential contribution of different types of network analysis to understanding social movements, political protest and collective action. It includes both detailed empirical studies and chapters relating network perspectives on social movements to broader currents within the social sciences. The latter are likely to be more accessible and interesting to the nonspecialist reader than the valuable but often highly formal, quantitative analyses of particular movements, organisations and protest actions developed in most of the other chapters.

Mario Diani’s introductory chapter provides an excellent summary of different current uses of the network concept in social movement analysis, and a useful overview of the book’s contents and intended contribution. Two chapters follow on ‘Individual Networks’ in which the impact of networks on individual participation in two Swiss political organisations (Passy) and the role of individual activists in the early development of the German Nazi Party (Anheier) are examined. The next section is concerned with ‘Interorganisational Networks’ and contains chapters focusing on oppositional organisations in Poland (Osa) and environmental organisations in Italy (Diani) and the San Francisco Bay area (Ansell).

The third section – ‘Networking the Political Process’ – comprises chapters which draw on network perspectives in thought-provoking ways to clarify and reformulate established concepts within the field of social movements research such as oppositional claims (Tilly and Wood), protest cycles (Oliver and Myers) and political opportunities (Broadbent). The final section is devoted to ‘Theories of Networks, Movements, and Collective Action’, and explores the links between network perspectives on social movements and more general approaches such as rational choice theory (Gould),

conversational analysis (Mische) and cultural sociology (McAdam). The book concludes with a stimulating chapter by Diani in which he proposes a ‘research programme’ for the future development of social movement research through network analysis.

Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs The Storm: Apocalyptic Religion & American Empire, London: I.B. Tauris, 2004, 208 pp., GBP 19.50 / USD 35.00, ISBN 1-85043478-6 (hbk).

Reviewed by Chip Berlet (Political Research Associates) This book may sound off topic, but it can be mined for its clear explanations of how apocalyptic and millennialist belief systems can influence religious and secular movements that then press for specific public policies. The focus is on the historic shifting theological currents within Protestant evangelicalism in the United States, and how they not only shaped the rise of the Christian Right, but also the militant worldview of the more secular political tendency known as neoconservatism. The author sets out to show how President George W. Bush has developed a foreign policy that reflects a particular apocalyptic paradigm that sees confrontation as inevitable, and divides the world into a binary battle between good and evil. Be warned that this book contains a sharp critique of Bush and his foreign policy; and parts of the text are a theological discussion of the relationship between Christianity and empire, including cites to Biblical passages.

What may have more general appeal are the sections of the book that trace how different readings of apocalyptic prophecy in the Bible’s book of Revelation have been intertwined with certain stances on foreign policy in the United States, especially the trend among Christian evangelicals to pursue a theological view know as premillennial Dispensationalism. If that term is opaque to you, this book will explain its significance. Apocalypticism as a style or frame has been linked to a number of antidemocratic movements worldwide, from the Nazis and their millennial “thousand year Reich” to al Qaeda. As Northcott suggests: “In the same way as the secular and religious right in America, Islamists see themselves as engaged in an apocalyptic global struggle over the outcome of modern history” (p. 35). If apocalypticism and millennialism have always seemed hard to pronounce and harder to fathom, this book offers a lifeline.

Michael Saward, Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003, 175 pp., GBP 14.99/USD 49.95, ISBN 0-7456-2350-6 (pbk).

Reviewed by Kwang Ho Chun (Université Catholique de Louvain) What is a democracy? Are the democracies of ancient Greece the same as those of the early nineteenth century and the late twentieth century? Is the practice of democratic forms, such as contested elections, equivalent to institutionalized democracy? These are the sorts of questions that Saward asks. Yet Saward’s primary concern is not to answer all the questions concerning his subject but to stimulate students into asking the questions. As such, it offers students a real opportunity for debating and analyzing democracy.

The book only contains five chapters. Yet throughout, the author raises one stimulating point after another. In the first chapter, the author analyses three different cases – Pakistan after 1999, the US presidential election in 2000 and the British Democracy Campaign - before looking into definitions of democracy. Whilst I would not say that this volume contains a collection of the very best definitions of democracy, his approach is commendable since it provokes some awkward questions about democracy’s meaning and value.

In the following two chapters he examines key narratives of democracy but the next two chapters are the most significant parts of this book. Here he covers all the most current debates relating to the meaning of democracy, dilemmas of measuring democracy, globalization challenges and so on. There is also a glossary of types of democracy and a guide to further reading which students should find particularly useful. I’d like to conclude this review quoting Michael Saward’s words which impressed me: ‘I hope enough has been said to show that the major challenges confronting democracy are finding answers. I hope also that it shows that those answers are not decisive and finished, and that the debate about democracy’s futures remains as open and lively as it is important’.

Book Reviews Nigel Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism: The British National Party and the Quest for Legitimacy, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004, 220pp., GBP 45.00, ISBN 14039-0214-3 (hbk)

Reviewed by Graham Macklin (Reader Advisor, National Archives, London)

Despite the forensic academic and journalistic scrutiny to which the British far right is subject Nigel Copsey’s hugely informative monograph is, surprisingly, the first work to chart the torturous transformation of the British National Party (BNP) ‘from street gang

to political party’. As Copsey reveals this transformation was far from inevitable as the BNP engaged in a bitter struggle for the ‘soul of racial nationalism’ with the National Front to overtake its rival as the ‘brand name’ of British fascism.

Central to Copsey’s study is power struggle between BNP founder John Tyndall who ruled the party as his personal fiefdom and his erstwhile protégé Nick Griffin who succeeded in ousting his former mentor in 1999. By untangling the roots of this struggle Copsey is able to show that this was a contest reflecting the tension between ideological ‘credibility’ and popular ‘legitimacy’ within British fascism rather than a desire to jettison its core values. Indeed as Copsey meticulously documents Griffin was every bit as committed to preserving the BNP’s ideological credibility as his former mentor though, unlike Tyndall, he was savvy enough to realise that if the party were ever to ascend from the political ghetto it had to ‘modernise’. Ironically only the year before Griffin had been resolutely opposed to modernising tendencies within the BNP.

By constructing a sophisticated intellectual and methodological scaffold erected upon the foundations of Roger Griffin’s Weberian ‘ideal type,’ Copsey is able to proffer a calm and measured examination of Griffin’s ‘flexible communication strategy’ and in doing so to penetrate the BNP’s (somewhat thin) veneer of respectability in order to irrefutably define the party as ‘fascist’.

If there is any criticism to made of Copsey’s timely study it is perhaps that too much space is accorded to solitary election of a BNP councillor in 1993 and not enough to the dynamics underlying more recent BNP victories, particularly in the Lancashire mill town of Burnley, which would certainly benefit from similar microscopic scrutiny. Further editions of this important work will no doubt readjust this imbalance something Copsey has in fact already begun to address through his recent contribution to British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State (Palgrave 2005), which offers a more detailed examination of the Labour Party response to the rise of the BNP in Burnley.

Although the reasons for the underlying rise of the BNP certainly give pause for thought Copsey’s sober stocktaking of its progress to 2003 puts matters into perspective.

Although it had amassed seventeen council seats since May 2003, progress unrivalled in the annals of British fascism, the BNP’s seventeen council seats still only represent one tenth of one percent of all the council seats in Britain. The paucity of this achievement is all the more stark when Copsey examines the progress of the BNP through a comparative European focus demonstrating just how far the party still has to travel if it is to achieve the ‘legitimacy’ which so completely eludes it at present. Given

the growing climate of popular racism stoked by mainstream politicians pandering to prejudice and clamouring for votes ahead of the 2005 General Election Copsey is certainly correct to caution against complacency, particularly if the BNP were ever able to successfully wrest the ‘ownership’ of the immigration issue from the three mainstream political parties. The idea muted towards the end of the book that the BNP might be ‘on the cusp’ (p. 149) of achieving the full political ‘legitimacy’ thus prefacing an FN style breakthrough is certainly open to question, however. Recent research suggests that the BNP vote stagnated throughout 2004 though it is certainly too soon to draw any conclusions as to the long-term future of the BNP from this.

Since the publication of Copsey’s book Griffin and Tyndall have been arrested and are currently awaiting trial charged with inciting racial hatred as a result of injudicious boasts to an undercover BBC reporter working on a documentary. The impact their subsequent trial will have on the BNP remains to be seen. Indeed only time will tell whether Griffin is destined to succeed in establishing the BNP as a ‘legitimate’ political party or whether he will ultimately be remembered merely as just another sawdust Caesar. Copsey’s wry assessment provides a very large clue as to which. This superlative study of the BNP will surely become mandatory reading for anyone seeking to understand the roots of contemporary British fascism. One hopes that in particular it will be widely read by members of the mainstream broadcast media some of whose overly facile reporting has failed to understand the BNP as a ‘fascist’ party! The publication of Copsey’s timely study ensures they have no excuse not to know.