2008 09 03 book reviews

This section provides review coverage of recent contributions to research into various aspects of ‘extremism and democracy’. We include shorter book notes (150-300 words) and as well as more substantial reviews (600-900 words) of books that are of particular interest to group members. In addition to providing a broad range of reviews the team also welcome suggestions for future book reviews (including your own) or ideas for review symposia. If you would like to review one of the currently available titles (below) please contact one of the reviews editors: Matthew Goodwin(University of Manchester, email: matthew.goodwin@manchester.ac.uk) or Sarah de Lange (Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute and University of Amsterdam, e-mail: sarah.delange@gmail.com and s.ldelange@uva.nl. The current issue of e-Extreme contains reviews of the books listed below. Please click on the title of the book to directly navigate to the book review you are interested in.

John Davis (ed.), Africa and the War on Terrorism, Ashgate, 2007, 192 pp., ISBN: 9780754670834 (hbk).

Shlapentokh, Dmitry (ed.), Russia Between East and West: Scholarly Debates on Eurasianism. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007, ix + 198 pp., ISBN 978-9004154155 (pb).

Roger Woods, Germany’s New Right as Culture and Politics. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. 183 pp., ISBN 978-0230506725 (hbk).

SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1Christopher Deliso, The Coming Balkan Caliphate. The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West. Westport & London: Praeger Security International, 2006, 240 pp., ISBN: 978-0275995256 (hbk).

Arun Kundnani, The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain. London: Pluto Press, 2007. 221pp., ISBN 978-0745326450 (pb).

Kris Deschouwer (ed.), New Parties in Government: In Power for the First Time. London: Routledge, 2008. 224 pp., ISBN 978-0415404990 (hbk).

The following books are currently available for review. Please contact one of the review editors if you would like to review one of the listed titles.

Jason Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization, Cambridge University Press, 2007

Natividad Chong (ed.) Women, Ethnicity and Nationalism in Latin America, Ashgate, 2007 Jo Reger, Daniel J. Myers, and Rachel L. Einwohner (eds.), Identity Work in Social Movements, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 Leigh A. Payne, Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence, Duke University Press, 2008 Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2007

BOOK NOTES John Davis (ed.), Africa and the War on Terrorism, Ashgate, 2007, 192 pp., ISBN: 978-0754670834 (hbk).

Reviewed by Nicolas van de Walle (Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University)

Africa has long constituted a secondary but significant theater in the global war on terror. The simultaneous August 1998 bombing of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya by local members of Al Qaeda killed several hundred people and constituted the most notorious attack of that terrorist organization before 9/11. There is today much evidence of a continuing Al Qaeda presence in East Africa, notably in Somalia, where an Islamic fundamentalist presence with apparent links to Bin Laden’s group has emerged from the chaos following the collapse of the central state. In addition, Algeria’s secular government spent much of the 1990s in a vicious civil war against the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation front (FIS, from the French acronym), and its various highly factionalized off shoots, that resulted in well over 100,000 casualties. One offshoot, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (SGPC) emerged in the late 1990s and has been linked with activities further south in countries like Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad, though much of it appears to be little more than smuggling and petty crime. The present collection of essays edited by John Davis takes these incontrovertible facts, adds some speculation about the threat that Islamic fundamentalism could grow in the near future, assesses the US response and arrives at some policy conclusions for the United States. The collection is decidedly uneven and several of the essays might have benefited from more strenuous copyediting, but the topic is important and unsettling.

The book grapples with two important questions: first, just how serious is the terrorist threat in the region? On the one hand, it is hard to disagree with the proposition made repeatedly in these essays that the combination of weak illegitimate states, economic stagnation in large pockets of absolute poverty, and large Muslim populations provides a hospitable breeding ground for terrorism. On the other hand, the degree to which all three of these factors actually exist in the region varies more than one might think. Islam is largely absent in the southern half of the continent, except for the Indian Ocean coast line. A number of African countries have benefited from thriving economies during the course of the last decade and so on. In fact, perhaps as a result, the often predicted emergence of radical Islamic fundamentalism in countries like Nigeria has not come to pass. One lesson from these essays is that Africa must be disaggregated into several distinct sub-regions to really understand the current dynamics relating to Islamic fundamentalism.

Second, the book asks what the US response to this nebulous but real threat should be.

There can be little doubt that US policy to Africa following the end of the Cold War was at best, largely one of benign neglect. Since 2001, however, the war on terror has led the US to devote more attention and resources on the region. The Bush administration has substantially increased economic aid to the region, as well as military assistance.

The US set up a significant military base in Djibouti in late 2002, which it uses to train troops for desert conditions, and to coordinate anti-terrorist efforts in the Horn region.

Several broad initiatives have been undertaken between the US and African governments on regional anti-terrorism training and coordination. As is often the case, the number of new programs, policy white papers, and acronyms accompanied by dollar price tags in the millions sounds impressive and suggests a deep and abiding commitment on the part of the US government. At the same time, the numbers do not lie, even an expansive estimate of the cost of the African theater of the war on terror reveals that it is but a decidedly small fraction of the costs of the major theater, which remains Iraq and the middle east. Could the US do more? The authors appear to agree that the US administration does not understand that winning the war on terror implies building stronger states in Africa and eliminating poverty there.

Shlapentokh, Dmitry (ed.), Russia Between East and West: Scholarly Debates on Eurasianism. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007, ix + 198 pp., ISBN 9789004154155 (pb).

Reviewed by Andreas Umland (National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv)

In spite of what its sub-heading promises, there is little ‘debate’ in this book. This is a standard collection of papers that relate to a common set of topics, yet rarely to each other. Neither do the scholars debate among themselves, nor do they particularly focus in their contributions on Russian or non-Russian scholarly debates on Eurasianism of which there has been a lot (although Rossman partly deals with non-scholarly debates on Eurasianism in post-Soviet Russia). In fact, I am not sure that all scholars contributing to this volume will be that happy with the presentation of their contributions.

Marlène Laruelle’s informative contribution ‘The Orient in Russian Thought at the Turn of the Century’, for some reason, includes, at the beginning, a second introduction to the other essays of the book (in addition to Shlapentokh’s brief introductory summary) although Laruelle is not an editor for this book. She mentions ‘articles’ by Vadim Rossman although there is only one contribution by Rossman. Also, there are two contributions on Lev Karsavin by Françoise Lesourd and Ryszard Paradowski (whose article though also includes a two-page section on Nikolai Alekseev) with the second one being less deep than the first and thus, largely, redundant. Surprising is, finally, the presentation of Vadim Rossman’s long paper ‘Anti-Semitism in Eurasian Historiography: The Case of Lev Gumilev’ – a title which does not indicate that only less than half of the paper is devoted to Gumilev, and, instead, a large part to Aleksandr Dugin’s ‘neoEurasianism’ as well as some other publicists. It might have been also useful to mention that Rossman’s entire contribution is a slightly re-configured reprint of two chapters of his 2002 pioneering monograph Russian Intellectual Antisemitism in the PostCommunist Era.

BOOK REVIEWS Roger Woods, Germany’s New Right as Culture and Politics. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. 183 pp., ISBN 978-0230506725 (hbk).

Reviewed by Tamir Bar-On (Wilfred Laurier University)

Germany’s New Right as Culture and Politics is one of the first coherent attempts to specifically analyse the German New Right in the English-speaking world. The other notable attempts to examine the historical genealogy of the European New Right (ENR) in general are Tomislav Sunic’s Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (Peter Lang, 1990) and my Where Have All The Fascists Gone? (Ashgate, 2007).

Both of the aforementioned works downplay the importance of the German New Right in the context of the wider ENR. Woods, on the other hand, makes the opposite omission by exclusively focusing on the German New Right without adequately considering the

increasingly pan-European attempts of the ENR to de-legitimize liberal democracy, equality, and multiculturalism. Yet, the strength of this approach is a meticulous case study that overflows with rich insights about the key theoreticians of today’s German New Right.

Woods grasps the inherent ambiguities in the German New Right. In the first place, he highlights the contemporary German New Right’s oscillation between extreme cultural pessimism and a “feelgood culture” that valorises a return to “normal” and “healthy” German nationalism and cultural rootedness (pp. 35-39). Second, Woods underscores the inability of the German New Right to express a unified and coherent political platform, its internal divisions regarding interpretations of the Nazi past, and “how Modernity provides the disturbing backdrop to much New Right thinking” (p. 131).

Finally, Woods correctly points to the elevation of culture as the German New Right’s idol in a Nietzschean tone reminiscent of On The Genealogy of Morals (1887).

Politically, Woods neatly situates the Germany New Right as a cultural and political “hinge” between conservatism and extremism (p. 14). That is, the German New Right sits in intermediary political space between a rejection of rigid, Old Right National Socialism and the rise of contemporary anti-immigrant and ultra-nationalist political parties such as the NPD, DVU, and Republikaner. The author has two profound insights. The first is to recognize the historical specificity and particularism of the German New Right in contrast to other New Right movements throughout Europe. The German New Right alone must fundamentally confront the absolute horrors of National Socialism from 1933 to 1945, which in effect gives other New Right formations outside of Germany more room to minimize their respective authoritarian, collaborationist, proNazi, or fascist national pasts. His other fundamental insight is to see the German New Right in Habermasian terms as a cultural and political project that straddles a simultaneous support for technological modernity and a radical rejection of cultural modernity: egalitarianism, liberalism, multiculturalism, and pluralism (p. 132).

Woods briefly mentions yet minimizes the Europeanizing dimension of the German New Right (pp. 2-3). Admittedly, he correctly points out that France’s Alain de Benoist has used his collection of nouvelle droite think-tanks to spread his anti-liberal, antiegalitarian, anti-capitalist, anti-communist, and increasingly anti-American message to the German New Right through Armin Mohler, the former press secretary of the conservative revolutionary idol Ernst Junger (pp. 25-28). Yet, de Benoist’s impact clearly spread beyond France and Germany, especially to Italy’s nuova destra, as well as Belgium, Holland, Austria, Spain, and even Eastern European countries such as Romania and Russia through prominent intellectuals such as Alexander Dugin and Alexander Panarin.

There is a general tendency to dismiss cultural movements like the German New Right because they reject both direct parliamentary and extra-parliamentary avenues to power in favour of a long-term evolution of mentalities throughout the entire political landscape.

What is more important is that the impact of a de Benoist or German New Right thinkers from Pierre Krebs of the Thule Seminar to Botho Strauss cannot be readily underestimated. Was not de Benoist celebrated by Le Figaroin the late 1970s and the prestigious Academie francaise in 1978 for his Vu de droite (Seen from the right)? And did not the wide circulation German daily Der Spiegel publish “Mounting Tragedy” in 1993, an assault on the “foundations of German liberalism”? (p. 1) Moreover, in different periods the theses of de Benoist, Strauss, and other New Right theoreticians were subject to long debates in mainstream press outlets, influenced various right-wing and extreme right-wing political parties, and helped to push the larger political debate towards anti-egalitarian, anti-immigrant themes in numerous European countries from France and Germany to Italy and Austria. In the last two countries, anti-immigrant parties ominously participated (Austria) or still participate (Italy) in national coalition governments.

Woods sees many diverse voices in the Germany New Right with a complex appraisal of modernity. Some thinkers like Heimo Schwilk or Gunter Figal insist that “New Right culture itself is part of Modernity that causes it such anxiety” (p. 132). This ambiguity in the German New Right worldview should not underestimate the attraction of a cultural message cleverly suited to a decidedly liberal, anti-fascist, post-war epoch. At its heart, the ENR, with the German New Right being a fundamental component due to the country’s size, history, intellectual prestige, and geopolitical value, seeks to spread its message to cultural and political forces of various stripes in an oblique, Gramscian strategy. This “right-wing Gramscianism,” as Ruth Levitas called it in the mid-1980s, is designed to awaken European elites to reject the egalitarian “slave morality” of the Judeo-Christian tradition and its secular derivatives from liberalism and social democracy to Marxism, feminism, and multiculturalism. The goal is a more elitist, hierarchical, martial, self-assertive, and culturally rooted pan-European political framework. Is the contemporary European political turn towards anti-immigrant political parties such as France’s Front National (FN) or Italy’s Alleanza Nazionale (AN), as well as concomitant public discussions on a less permissive immigration regime, not a product of a shift in cultural values?

A liberal democratic society, as Antonio Gramsci pointed out, is particularly susceptible to a cultural strategy precisely because of its openness to multiple ideological voices in civil society. The Gramscian framework waits for the day when there is a rupture between the values of ruling elites and the masses. Counter-hegemonic discourses of newer elites are increasingly accepted by the masses. We should ask whether this

cultural strategy does not operate on a delayed effect in which intellectuals figures like de Benoist, Mohler, or Strauss put their ideas out there and wait for their impact many years later in the political realm? De Benoist began thenouvelle droite enterprise back in 1968. As political circumstances dramatically changed with the official fall of the MarxistLeninist Soviet Union in 1991 and the virtual collapse of strong communist parties in France and Italy, de Benoist became heavily indebted to the discourse of the Left, New Left, and even ecological movement. Yet, in the new millennium de Benoist retained his conservative revolutionary right-wing commitment to national or regional homogeneity, restrictive immigration, and a complete disdain for multiculturalism. In this way, despite de Benoist’s protestations to the contrary and his open declaration of war with FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1990, the ENR nonetheless provided the intellectual ammunition that made possible the rise of anti-immigrant political parties beginning in the mid-1980s.

All in all, Woods raises important questions about what differentiates the Old and New Rights, the political impact of the German New Right, and the general impact of cultural movements on political life. Are New Rightists merely Old Rightists in new clothes? And how does one distinguish between the New Right in its continental European incarnation and the Anglo-American New Right with its extreme veneration of the “god” of the “free market” as the model for the state? In addition, Woods thoroughly investigates the writings of German New Right figures, while exploring their different approaches to Germany’s troubling past. What is clear is that in almost all New Right movements, including the German New Right, there is a glorification of insular ultranationalism or ultra-regionalism, an attempt to sanitize the national past in sophisticated or unsophisticated ways, and a sense of despair, dread, and hatred vis-à-vis the purportedly “meaningless” and “materialistic” liberal, parliamentary, egalitarian, and multicultural project of modernity. Woods has penned an invaluable resource for English-speaking scholars studying the Right and all those concerned about the future of Europe. This excellent monograph will surely inspire new research in a hitherto neglected field.

SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1Christopher Deliso, The Coming Balkan Caliphate. The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West. Westport & London: Praeger Security International, 2006, 240 pp., ISBN: 978-0275995256 (hbk).

Reviewed by Maya Shatzmiller (University of Western Ontario)

Public US bashing, especially of its foreign policy is no longer the preserve of hostile governments but is now ‘de rigueur’ among American academics and journalists abroad. While most critics quibble about the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, the book under review returns to the Clinton administration’s decision to intervene in the Balkan war of 1992-1995. The thesis of the book is simple: the misguided US policy, which the author names “Clinton’s gift to fundamentalist Islam”, is the reason why Islamic radicalism has now swept the Balkans where it is being allowed to grow “as cancer” (the author’s metaphor) and become an imminent threat to the West’s security.

Behind the apocalyptic pronouncements of an impending Islamically-triggered doom, the book has another theme, which is the victimization of Serbia by the West. The author sees Serbia as the injured party, both Christian and a former ally who joined World War II on the side of the Allies, and since then, has time and again been aggressively and ungratefully punished by the West with brutal military might in the conflicts over Bosnia and Kosovo. The author believes that both the US and NATO’s policies towards the Balkan’s Muslims were and are misguided and that the formation of the Bosnian and Kosovo states took place at the expense of Serbia, ignoring Serbia’s legitimate claims. Besides being a monumental historical injustice, this will also return to haunt the West, or so he predicts.

Indeed, a link between Bosnia and Bin Laden was first suggested in reports by security agencies a mere two months after the attacks of 9/11. The discovery of Islamic terrorist cells with varying degrees of operational capacity and ideological extremism in European countries such as Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Greece and France and the success of terrorist acts in France, Great Britain and Spain, further contributed to the fear that Bosnians as a society or as individuals might harbour, help and sponsor terrorist activities. Islamic cells discovered in the Czech Republic demonstrated that the collapse of State surveillance in Eastern Europe since the fall of Communism has opened up this part of the world, which Bosnians used to inhabit, to clandestine activities as well. With radicalization taking root in every Islamic country, the subject could not be dismissed out of hand.

Where is the evidence and what is are its manifestations? The author, a journalist, bases his argument on data collected from newspapers articles and “intelligent experts” reports. He traces manifestations of Islamic radicalization among Balkan Muslim communities in Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, as well as in Islamic enclaves in the Serbian Sanjak and Macedonia, and the involvement of Turkey, and claims that these visible manifestations of the changing face of Balkan Islam, are indeed a result of the 19921995 war. The penetration of Saudi Arabia’s influence in Bosnia is chiefly visible in the new style mosques built with Arab funds. These were built to replace the ones destroyed by Serbian and Croat artilleries during the war, so instead of the charming

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Ottoman style mosques, we now have white washed austere looking structures, built in the Wahhabi puritan style embraced by the Saudi family in the 19th century. Another visible sign of transformation in Balkan Islam were the Arabic speaking Middle Easterners volunteers, of no particular cohesion, the Mujahiddin, who arrived in the Bosnia during the war, though most have left by now, since their requests for Bosnian citizenship were denied. Much harder to spot are the brochures of Islamic fundamentalist propaganda, which have supposedly been smuggled into the region. Since the locals do not speak Arabic, a major translation effort must have taken place in order to supply those brochures, though we are not sure where or how this happened. The language barrier would also apply to the foreign imams and preachers in the new mosques, who have been accused of indoctrinating the locals with Jihadi tenets, since no foreign imam is allowed to preach there unless he has been trained in the local madrasas. Islamic Aid and charity agencies accused of being behind the diffusion of propaganda, were also a remnant of the war, and were accused of linking financial help to the adoption of “Wahhabism”. In areas such as Albania, where no evidence of the unstoppable Islamic fundamentalism is visible, the author suspects the long arm of the local mafia, which sees radical Islam as interfering with business. In Bosnia, however, there has been a firm and persistent effort by the Islamic community since the end of the war to oppose the diffusion of ideologies foreign to their religious identity and to neutralize and eliminate whatever inroads they may have made among the population. Most of the resistance has consisted of reclaiming and regaining control over Islamic education, which has once again become concentrated in the hands of the state. The country as a whole is willing to engage in an open debate about religious extremism.

As to its claim to scholarly inquiry and academic standing, the book suffers from some serious shortcomings, the most important one being its one-sidedness. The author did not consult, nor does he refer to any alternative, or opposing views, but selectively quotes only sources which echo his own opinions. He does not hide his view that Serbia fell victim to a misguided Islamic pacification by the West, but while discussing the events that triggered the Clinton’s administration decision to intervene, there is no mention of the Srebrenica massacre by the Bosnian Serbs, nor the bombardment of the market in Sarajevo by the Yugoslav army. The UN mission to the region is labeled “dysfunctional” and NATO’s units deployed in Bosnia and Kosovo, KFOR, are accused of hiding information about fundamentalist activities from their superiors, without reporting any of the achievements of the Dayton agreements. The sources quoted are also problematic. We have no way of verifying the nature of the information collected by the “terrorism experts”, as the book makes use of articles without authors’ names, listing four pages of them in the final bibliography. There is neither theoretical nor analytical framework to the narrative of myriad anecdotes, and a larger historical context is also lacking. The so called “threat” of the radicalization of the Balkans is discussed in the complete absence of any comprehensive framework, social, political, economic, communal, cultural and especially religious, let alone a historical one. There is a failure to distinguish between the different Islamic ideological and operational groups and their

sponsors. Using the terms Caliphate, Jihadi or Wahhabi, fundamentalists and radicals interchangeably and without explaining their historical roots and current meaning or providing any other context is misleading. “Wahhabi” and “Jihadi” are not the same.

The war indeed facilitated the arrival of the Saudis and their brand of Orthodox Islam in Bosnia, but there is no evidence to connect them as a state to terrorism or to the radical Islamic brand of Usama bin Laden, who, while being a Saudi, is nonetheless considered an enemy of the state. Nor is there any room to ideologically link Wahhabism with terrorism or with ideology of the Shicite Iranian brand of permanent revolution. The linking of Turkey’s religious revival to the spread of international terrorism in the Balkans is equally misguided. Recent events in Turkey have demonstrated that the danger of political extremism comes not from the AKP, the religious party, which claims joining the European Union as its political goal, but rather from the ultra nationalists.

This is an accusatory book which does not mince words. Starting with the foreword, written by Loretta Napoleoni, and throughout the book the idea that a major political mistake has been committed is hammered home, with the conclusion that an alliance with Serbia offers the West the only defense against the Islamic “threat”. The book is replete with misconceptions, simplistic and reductionism assertions, but mostly devoid of standards of objectivity. Impartiality is crucial for responsible reporting, let alone scholarly work, its absence in this case deprives the argument of credibility, and the book of scholarly merit.

Arun Kundnani, The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain. London: Pluto Press, 2007. 221pp., ISBN 978-0745326450 (pb).

Reviewed by James Rhodes (University of Manchester)

In this important and timely text, Arun Kundnani traces the emergent forms of racism within Britain. Taking the summer riots of 2001 and 9/11 as a key historical juncture he argues that we have entered a new era of intolerance, as immigrants, asylum-seekers, and well-established minority ethnic communities, especially Muslims, have been subject to unprecedented levels of state regulation and coercion. Central to Kundnani’s analysis is his identification of the dual logics of ‘managed migration’ and ‘integration’, which have underpinned New Labour’s approach to the politics of ‘race’ and immigration since 2001. The author observes how migrants to Britain are increasingly subjected to new forms of surveillance and exclusion as poor immigrants and asylum-seekers from Eastern Europe and beyond become symbolic of global insecurity, the folly of the welfare-state, and the withering of the nation-state.

Allied to this ‘anti-immigrant racism’, Kundnani identifies the emergence of an ‘antiMuslim racism’, that is most visible in the government’s pursuit of ‘integrationism’. For the author this strategy represents a move away from a political tradition which has viewed integration as achievable through diversity, equal opportunity and mutual tolerance. Instead, integrationism should be seen as a thinly veiled assimilationism, in which cultural diversity is erroneously blamed for contemporary fears over segregation, immigration, terrorism, and a lack of social cohesion. Kundnani states that the attack on British Muslims and the Islamic world more generally, has since 2001 been able to draw upon support from political commentators on the left as well as the right. This has led to a broad consensus in which anti-Muslim sentiment has become legitimised, and tolerance of cultural pluralism is viewed as inherently dangerous. Multiculturalism has been abandoned, argues the author, due to the role it is granted in Britain’s national and moral crisis. The author suggests that these developments mark an important shift, as racism is depoliticised and reduced simply to a lack of familiarity and shared values.

This means that the institutional and structural roots of racism and discrimination are downplayed.

A key strength of this text is Kundnani’s ability to situate the changing contours of racism in Britain within a global account. He argues that the new forms of racism that have emerged result from a failure to understand the processes which have driven forced migration, segregation, and global terrorism. The author calls for a recovery of a historical and geopolitical element in the study of contemporary racisms. Updating A. Sivanandan’s famous maxim, Kundnani argues that ‘we are here because you are there’. Kundnani traces the roots of current concerns around immigration, asylum and terrorism back to the age of Empire, through the Cold War, and the ongoing ‘War on Terror’. He effectively demonstrates how an aggressive neo-liberalism, manifest in the shift from industrial to global capitalism in which the West has sought to extend its economic hegemony, has led to global instabilities which can no longer be kept at arm’s length.

The central irony for Kundnani has been the failure of Britain, and particularly the incumbent New Labour government, to recognise its own role in the production of contemporary anxieties. He observes how at the same time that British Muslims are being urged to assimilate and accept national values of tolerance and respect, these very concepts are being undermined within the dual ‘War on Terror’ and ‘War on Asylum’. It is this global dimension that makes this text so relevant. While the sheer scope and ambition of Kundnani’s argument mean that these issues cannot be covered definitively, the book provides an excellent overview of contemporary racisms in Britain and also demonstrates how for a more fulsome understanding of these ‘new’ issues there is a need to situate analyses within a global context.

Kris Deschouwer (ed.), New Parties in Government: In Power for the First Time.

London: Routledge, 2008. 224 pp., ISBN 978-0415404990 (hbk).

The edited volume New Parties in Government: In Power for the First Time brings together a series of studies on (relatively) new parties that have recently entered government coalitions. It focuses primarily on the road to power these parties have to travel and the ways in which they change when they make the transition from opposition to government. It explores how and why new parties, which usually gain parliamentary representation on the basis of their principled opposition to the system, decide to take up a fundamentally different role once sufficient voter support has been secured. The volume also addresses the impact government participation has on new parties and examines whether this affects their electoral success, ideologies, organizational structure, and strategies. To explain these changes, party characteristics as well as contextual factors are taken into account.

Although the volume consistently speaks of new parties, it concentrates first and foremost on parties that are located on the fringes of the left-right dimension and which several scholars have recently labelled niche parties. These parties belong to either the communist, green, or radical right-wing populist party family. Given their position on the left-right dimension, as well as their lack of political experience, they are confronted with a number of political trade-offs other parties are unfamiliar with. For communist, green, and radical right-wing populist parties it is extremely difficult to reconcile electoral success, ideological purity, and organizational distinctiveness with coalition membership and policy influence.

The volume is a valuable asset to the comparative literature on new (and de facto extremist) parties for several reasons. First, it bridges the gap between theory and empirics. In an innovative theoretical framework introduced by Nicole Bolleyer, many of the dilemmas new parties face when they join government coalitions are analyzed. In the subsequent empirical chapters, which discuss broad comparative research as well as case studies, many of these dilemmas are addressed in more detailed. It is a pity though that they do not form the central point of departure on which these chapters are based. A more systematic analysis would have generated better comparable findings, and hence would have constituted a greater contribution to our knowledge about new parties in government.

Second, the volume contains chapters on a wide range of countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Sweden) and parties (Alleanza Nazionale, the Australian Greens, D66, DS’70, Ecolo, Forza Italia, FPÖ, Front National, Groen, Kristdemokraterna, Lega Nord, Lijst Pim Fortuyn,Miljöpartiet de Gröna, New Zealand First, Ny Demokrati PDSI, PPR, and Vihreä liitto). Interestingly, several studies explicitly compare left- and right-wing parties and most of them come to the conclusion that there are more similarities than differences in the way these parties approach the question of government participation.

Unfortunately, the volume eschews discussions about the normative aspects of the government participation of new parties. Does the government participation of these new parties constitute in any way a threat to democracy? And if yes, how do mainstream parties reconcile their normative concerns and strategic considerations?

The edited volume largely avoids these questions and hence does not address many of the issues which have been the topic of recent public debates.

In sum, New Parties in Government delivers what it promises. It is indeed of interest to scholars and students concerned with party systems, political parties and comparative politics. To scholars and students that wish to explore the consequences of the sustained success of extremist parties of the left and right in the post-war period it is an indispensable source of information. Although the quality of the chapters varies and the integration of the chapters could have been better, the book offers some important insights that might inspire new research projects.