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The editor's introduction reads like a propaganda commissioned by the KMT on Taiwan. I am deeply disturbed at highly biased "beautification" of the KMT rule in Taiwan and the "demonization" of the PLC regime on Mainland China. I also think that the introduction is too much a hodge-podge of KMT orthodoxies and seriously lacking in critical thinking. While I applaud the long- overdu effort to translate Sun Yat-Sen' collective works into English and making available such an important canon of modern Chinese political thought to Western audience, I sincerely hope that the introduction will be revised for future editions to render more objective verdicts (and with more intellecutal depth), of the two regimes on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

The mountains of the Caucasus, the area's remoteness, and its long incorporation in a Russian-dominated empire make it singularly little known in the West. And yet, the region is also one of the most fascinating on earth, what with its intense diversity of languages, its wild beauty, and its celebrated liquors. In recent years, it has also become one of the most troubled regions, as ethnic conflicts have proliferated.

Goldenberg, a journalist working for the Guardian, provides an excellent introduction to the Caucasus, mixing scholarship and personal observation. She makes sense of the devastating civil war in Georgia and offers a balanced account of the Azerbaijan-Armenia war. But perhaps the most valuable section deals with the North Caucasus, a region nominally part of Russia but seething with ethnic and territorial problems, as well as an Islamic revival. To those mystified by the Russian assault on Chechenya, she provides a helpful introduction: how the Chechens provided most of Shamil's troops resisting Russian conquest in the mid-nineteenth century, how they suffered from deportation to Central Asia at Stalin's hands, and declared independence in 1991. Goldenberg sketches a vivid portrait of Dzhokar Dudayev, the Chechens' military strongman, and the eccentric, violent state he has established. Two examples: his bodyguard consists mainly of hardened criminals he sprung from jail and his foreign minister comes from the Chechen population living in Jordan.

Middle East Quarterly, March 1995

An overview of Uzbek history, with focus on Uzbek society, but the book has value as background reading only. The material does not even mention, much less address, the '98 regional crisis and its implications for Uzbekistan (conspicuously missing from the chapter on Economic Transformation) and dramatic changes following 9/11/01 have made the chapter on Foreign Policy and External Relations outdated.

Religion and its place in a society where the leaders are publicly professed atheists almost seems like a topic that is guaranteed to take on a life of its own. However, I found Anderson's book to not only be dry and uninteresting, I also found it to be rather one sided. Yes, religion was supressed and even attacked in the Soviet Union, but wasn't this a case of reversed roles in religon's (particularly Christianity's) history? For many years religon attacked non-believers. So I found it hard to sympathize too much with much of the church's plight in Soviet Russia. This feeling may be compounded by Anderson's dry way of describing "assaults" on religion. Very little specific examples are given, although this may very well be due to the difficulty in obtaining reliable resources which would depict specific circumstances. Despite that possibility, I still found Anderson's style to be very dry, almost monotone, and not an exciting read. One saving grace is that the historical chronology is set up in a manner which makes it easier to see why the "Soviet experiment" didn't work in Russia, at least with regards to religous persecutions.

I picked this book up after seeing it referenced by a favorite columnist of mine, John Leo. Mr. Janeway presents historical background, overview, and analysis, but little hint of any large insight which the reader might savor. It's certainly not muddled, and I learned a lot about journalism as an industry, but for me there was the distinct sense of something missing. My own intuition--and I'm not a journalist--is that his synthesis might have been more complete had it incorporated a consideration of the sorry state of education in our society, a factor I believe should not be minimized when lamenting the increasing civic apathy of the public. Imparting the spirit of participation as a citizen used to be a given as part of a "good" education, and a contemporary lack of that spirit is surely an element of the larger problem Janeway tries dutifully--and thoughtfully--but alas, incompletely, to illustrate. One addendum: stylistically, the writing here is less than engaging, a surprise, perhaps, given his status as a professional. Mercifully, it's not a long book. Marginally recommended.

In his "social history" of the Spanish Civil War Michael Seidman provides a grimly fascinating history of the decline and fall of the Loyalist government. In his introduction Seidman announces that he will bring back the individual. Instead of concentrating on collectivities such as class or party or gender or region he will look at individuals and their own choices. There is something vaguely libertarian and Ayn Randian about Seidman's "individualism." Individuals, after all, fall in love, have children, get married, join political parties or churches. In other words individual men and women can only realize their full potential in working and living with other people. But for Seidman "individualism" refers to selfishness, opportunism, cynicism, and apathy. Although such motives ultimately led to the destruction of the Loyalist cause, one supsects that Seidman believes these were more worthy of our sympathy than the high-handed and bullying abstractions of the Spanish government.

There is considerable detail in the book, and Seidman often makes comparisons with the French, English, American and Russian civil wars. The passages on collectivization are particularly interesting. During the conflict the Communists argued that the anarchists were forcing people into collectives that they didn't want. In response the anarchists argued that the Communists were using force to destroy them. Seidman argues both were right. He further adds that while some peasants supported them, others, from a variety of rural classes, were less enthusiastic about them. Some collectives were not successful. Others were successful but they either were selfishly concerned with their own petty local concerns or they reverted to autarky. However well they worked on a local level, they were not successful enough on a national level.

Seidman's tale tells of a whole host of problems. Soldiers are infected with veneral disease. They are passive and unagressive while their officers are incompetent and occasionally treacherous. Desertion is a constant problem, encouraged by shortages of food and clothing, inadequate medical care, and delays in pay. The Loyalist zone is hampered by hyperinflation, while looting soldiers alienate the peasants and hamper critical offensives. In response to these and price controls farmers refuse to produce, while workers engage in strikes or absenteeism and show little enthusiasm for the cause. There are shortages of everything. Morale is weak, conscription is unpopular and the soldiers it produces are insufficient and unenthusiastic. Corruption and inefficency hamper the cause at every turn. The Nationalists face some of the same problems, but they are more successful in controlling them. By the end of the war the majority of the Loyalist zone are willing to accept peace at any price. All in all, Seidman tells a grim, fascinating story, and the experience is like watching a corpse decay before your eyes.

But the "corpse" did not die until 1939, and that is the key problem with Seidman's account. (1) Although this book's "individualism" reminds one of the late Richard Cobb, unlike Cobb this is not a story that looks at individuals per se. Instead it consists mostly of complaints by central government authorities whose first priority was to win the war. We do not actually look at specific people, and as such their motives are oversimplified. People are either militant or opportunist (or worse); they are never people with conflicting interests trying to make the best of an impossible situation. (2) Seidman's sources consists of archival sources and a large reading of the literature. But reading the archival notations often provides little or no information on the source. Was the complaint a reasoned analysis, an intemperate complaint or a partisan polemic? Seidman only rarely tells us. There is also a tendency to rely on Francoist historians, such as Martinez Blande or Salas Larrazabal, with their ideological bias only becoming clear as one goes through the book. And the story stops with the Francoist victory. How did the cynics and opportunists respond when they faced the starvation and repression so ably delineated by Michael Richards in "A Time of Silence"? (3) There is also a problem of cause and effect. Poor morale, economic collapse, and a disintegrating army are more the result of military defeat than the cause of it. Which leads us to (4). Seidman's comparative account misses several key points. Although the Spanish Right did not have a majority of the Spanish people behind it, it had during the Republic been able to mobilize a large portion of the Spanish people behind it. This is in contrast to the Russian Whites, where support for non-socialist parties was virtually non-existent among the peasantry, and who consisted of a tiny elite who had to build up everything from scratch. At the same time the Nationalist had most of the army, superior foreign support and superior air support. By contrast the legal government was in chaos and had to rebuild everything anew, as we will see in Helen Graham's new book on the war. Considering these disadvantages, it is surprising that the Republic lasted as long as it did.

Despite his stated aim to explore the effects of the War of 1812, Steven Watts' book fails to do so and mainly contributes to the old debate about the war's causes.

In a carefully organized work of intellectual history centered on republican political culture titled The Republican Moment, Philip Nord outlines the social pillars of the Third Republic. Nord offers the striking conclusion that democracy was cemented in France not by the Revolution or the inspiring words of Rousseau, but from the long and gradual struggles of freemasons, liberal Protestants, Jews, and young lawyers during the authoritarian Second Empire. Consequently, there emerges a plausible trajectory leading up to the installation of republican democracy that endured from the late 1870's until it began to slowly wither from 1914 to 1940. However, the explosive and rapturous insinuation of the title remains illusory and fails to come forth in the text.
After reviewing democratic transition theory, Philip Nord lays out the reasonably convincing argument that republicanism was able to construct a democracy in France because it possessed a pre-existing political culture during the imperial dictatorship that was anchored in autonomous social institutions, buoyed by its lure as a liberating alternative. Although not terribly profound, Nord demonstrates his thesis well with a plethora of archival documents from the period, memoirs, contemporary journals, and appropriate references from literature and art. He also builds from the secondary work of Eugen Weber whose notion that rural France was slow to join republican France is congruent with Nord's conclusions.
From a wider perspective, The Republican Moment advances historical knowledge by recasting the Third Republic as an important success in French political history and not the failure that many historians have labeled it. The republican regime has often been viewed from the vantage point of June 1940 as weak in executive power and unable to sustain France internationally. Although Nord concedes the Third Republic stumbled in the twentieth-century era of "fast-paced industrial modernity," it delivered France from World War I and more importantly, it left a legacy of representative government and democratic political culture. Despite the prolific legislation and structural changes undertaken by the Third Republic, Nord asserts its lasting contribution to the French identity was its revolutionary culture of rituals and ceremonies: La Marseillaise, le quatorze juillet, the Panthéon, civil matrimony and burial, statues, print culture, and the cult of Voltaire (216).
The road to the ascendancy of republican political culture in the 1880's began in divergent public and social spheres. The link between freemasonry and republicanism dated from the ancien régime and regained momentum during the Second Empire. In the 1860's, the freemasons embraced liberalism, secularization, and positivism along with currents of early feminism, anti-clericalism and universal education. Consequently, it is no surprise that the lodges supplied the Republic with both enthusiastic public servants and unshakeable support. The second social pillar of republicanism according to Nord was the university and its "cult of science." The universitaires were attracted by republicanism's adherence to the principles of free thought, secularization, the experimental method and the sciences humaines. Together, Nord argues that freemasonry and the Latin Quarter comprised the core support for the fledgling republican spirit in France.
Nord locates key bastions of republican support among liberal Protestants, Jews, young lawyers, and the impressionist painters. Protestants attacked dynastic aristocracy and advocated their faith as exemplary of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Similar to liberal Protestants, French Jewry favored republicanism's secular inclinations as a means of eliminating the stifling grasp of Catholicism over French society. Jews viewed their synagogues as "minirepublics" and they spoke in the language of a common human brotherhood. On the other hand, the new generation of lawyers that matured under Louis-Napoléon strived for the restoration of personal liberties and open political sphere. These men idolized Voltaire and classical virtue as central to the republican mission. The impressionists aligned with the republican cause out of their frustration for being consistently excluded from the state manipulated venues for their works. Although their aims were generally one-dimensional and apolitical, the impressionists repaid the Republic for terminating the old jury system by donating numerous works to the state, many of which became part of the lasting republican culture in France.
Despite the differences among these groups, they all shared the common experience of internal struggles with the state to achieve self-governing autonomy. Therefore, their members possessed the prerequisite skills for participating in an open political system and representative government.
It is clear from The Republican Moment that rural France, Catholics, notables, and even labor fell outside the development of republicanism. Nord implies that French democracy can be attributed to a small minority of influential social groups and not the masses. Democratic political culture in France came from the social margins and not the will of the people. Consequently, it is not surprising that the Third Republic found itself politically threatened on a regular basis and few people mourned its passing in 1940. For Nord, the initial popularity of Pétain's National Revolution revealed that republicanism and participatory government came not from the mainstream, but from groups which were often cast outside the notion of Frenchness.
Although interesting to read, The Republican Moment leaves doubts at the same time. If the Third Republic was truly the creation of a small proportion of Frenchmen, how was it able to last longer than any other post-revolutionary regime, survive the devastation of the First World War, or expand the French empire to its farthest limits? Clearly, part of the social glue is missing from this interpretation. The accomplishments of the Third Republic constitute a long list and would not have been possible without broader public support than that offered by numerically limited groups such as the freemasons, liberal Protestants, or Jews. However, Nord is right to claim that these groups acted as facilitators for the permanent installation of republican democracy in France following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 and the defeat of MacMahon's seize mai coup.
In the end, French democracy and the historical trajectory of the Third Republic appear less like a culminating moment than a gradual process that grew out of leadership struggles within small group structures that were subjected to the Second Empire's repressive manipulation. Following the defeat of the Second Empire, the men who had been active in intra-group politics possessed the skills necessary for success in national politics and carried with them their republican proclivities. Therefore, the Protestant and Jewish consistories, freemason lodges, and a youthful Paris bar association functioned as springboards to modern democracy in France.