Canada Among Nations 2013. Canada–Africa relations: Looking back, looking ahead, by Rohinton Medhora and Yiagadeesen Samy, eds
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702013510127 |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Author | Chris WJ Roberts |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
about Greece, Spain, and other states he terms peripheral, he claims that ‘‘clien-
telism, networking, corruption, a different work ethic and lifestyle ...looking down
on thrifty living’’ are characteristics that ‘‘are deeply embedded in those societies’’
(84). Later, he denounces the expanding number of car owners, when public trans-
port is readily available (104), and notes disparagingly that nearly every family has
a colour television and every person seems to own a cellular phone (97). Ironically,
such denunciations of material acquisitions come from someone who has just
advocated the maintenance of the manufacturing sector.
The book also contains a number of factual errors, some of them caused by the
author’s excessive generalizations. It is, for example, not true that ‘‘throughout
history monetary unions have always been combined with a sovereign fiscal policy’’
(86); the Belgium–Luxembourg monetary union of the 20th century, which pre-
ceded the European Economic and Monetary Union; the 19th-century
Scandinavian monetary union; the US–Panama monetary union; and the South
Africa–Namibia monetary union all function without a common fiscal policy. The
Single European Act was signed in 1986, not in 1987 (81). At one point, the author
refers to the European Council as the Council of Europe (128); the latter is a
separate organization, different from the EU, and has its own treaty and
membership.
Some of the most useful information in the text is consigned to the endnotes.
There one finds several lengthy paragraphs about the origins of the idea of
European integration (156), a discussion of the problems facing the Roma minority
(159), and a paragraph about income inequalities in Europe (156). On the other
hand, the text itself includes statistics and direct quotations that are not referenced.
This, for example, is the case with statistics of capital outflows from Eastern
Europe (41) and Hungary’s trade deficit (43).
Most unfortunate of all is that the book was not edited to a standard that one
might expect from a publisher like Routledge. There are passages where the
vocabulary is just plain wrong, as when the author uses ‘‘punctual’’ when he
means timely (5) or ‘‘household’’ when he obviously means budget (16). (In
German the word for budget is Haushalt.)
In sum, the first three chapters of the book are quite informative, the rest not so
much, and the stylistic problems make it a difficult read.
Rohinton Medhora and Yiagadeesen Samy, eds
Canada Among Nations 2013. Canada–Africa relations: Looking back, looking ahead
Waterloo: Centre for International Governance Innovation, 2013. 308pp., $32.00 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-986-70774-2
Reviewed by: Chris WJ Roberts, University of Alberta
In March 2013, barely 13 years after it had written off ‘‘The hopeless continent,’’
the Economist jolted some of its readers with an ‘‘Aspiring Africa’’ cover story. For
the uninitiated, serious discussions about Africa’s new economic potency, declining
650 International Journal 68(4)
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