Review: Miscellaneous: What Went Wrong?
| Author | Louis A. Delvoie |
| Published date | 01 March 2003 |
| Date | 01 March 2003 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200305800123 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
Reviews
-
a
'good
cop,
bad
cop'
routine
-
designed
to
secure
multilateral
legiti-
macy
for
a
possible war to
disarm
Saddam
Hussein,
one in
which
French
(but not
German)
participation would
be
forthcoming.
But
if
it
is
unfair
to
resort
to
hindsight
to
chide
Brenner
and
Parmentier
for
having
misread recent
trends
in
the
bilateral
relation-
ship,
it
is
nevertheless
appropriate
to
wonder
whether
they
have
not
gotten
the
'vision
thing'
in
crisp
focus
when
it
comes
to future
trends
within
the
international
system
writ
large.
In
the
book's
very last
para-
graph, they
exude
confidence
about
that
future:
'The
historical
trend
is
toward
the
benign
multipolar
system
whose
modus operandi
is
mul-
tilateralism,
which
France
desires
and
the
United
States
finds
uncom-
fortable'
(p
125).
The
teleology
of
this
statement
aside
(how
do
they
know
this?),
it
seems
to
clash
with
an earlier,
more
sustainable, com-
ment
in
which they
tell
us
that
France
really
does
not
desire
a
genuine
multipolar
order
after
all,
in
which the
name
of
the
game
is
balancing
America's
power;
instead,
multipolarity
i
lafranfaise
is
'best
under-
stood
as
based
on
the
idea
of
a
loosely
constructed
dominant
pole
composed
of
the
liberal
democracies
that is
distinguished
from
other,
weaker
poles
or
hubs'
(p
20).
How,
one
wonders,
does
this differ
from
a
unipolar
order
whose
modus operandi
is
multilateralism,
which
is
precisely
the prescription
made
by
many
advocates
of
American
pri-
macy,
who
equate
it with
'benign'
liberal-democratic
hegemony?
David
G.
Haglund/Queen's
University
MISCELLANEOUS
WHAT
WENT
WRONG?
Western
impact
and
Middle
Eastern
response
Bernard
Lewis
Oxford:
Oxford
University
Press,
2002,
xii,
180pp,
us$23.00,
ISBN
0-
19-514420-1
N
inety
per cent
of
this
book
consists
of
a
study
of
interactions
between
Europe
and
the
Ottoman
Empire
from the
fifteenth
to
the
twentieth
centuries.
After
briefly
describing the
Ottoman
expan-
sion
through southern
Europe and
the
Balkans
'to
the
gates
of
Vienna,'
Bernard
Lewis
discusses
the
difficulties
the
Turks
subsequently
experi-
enced
in
coming
to
grips
with
new
intellectual
and
other
currents
ema-
230
INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL
Winter2002-2003
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