| Review of: | Partisan Interventions: European Party Politics and Peace Enforcement in the Balkans by B.C. Rathbun |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Jackie Gower |
| Reviewed in: | Journal of Common Market Studies |
| Date accepted online: | 28/03/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 45, Issue 1, Pages 211-229 |
Book Reviews
There is an extensive body of literature on the military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s but surprisingly little work on the heated domestic political debates that took place in the countries that undertook them. The major exception is the case of Germany where the decision to take part in the NATO air campaign against Serbia in 1999 has been extensively analysed within the discourse on the 'normalization' of its foreign policy. So in deciding to make a comparative study of both the intra-party and inter-party debates in France, the UK and Germany (and more briefly the US) on the morality and efficacy of the use of military force to defend human rights abroad, Rathbun has shed new light on one of the most difficult challenges of the post-Cold War period.
However, his objective is much more ambitious; he aims to construct a model to explain the role of party ideology in defining the national interest and shaping foreign policy. The central theme is the identification of what it means to be on 'the left' or 'the right' in foreign policy terms and how parties resolve the critical dilemmas that occur when their core values seemingly clash, for example, antimilitarism versus the promotion of human rights. Peace enforcement in the Balkans proved a particularly rich research ground for exploring such issues and the fact that in all three countries during the critical period there was an alternation in office enabled a rigorous comparative analysis to be made, not only between different states, but also the policies of governments on the left and right in each. A fourth case-study is provided on the decision to equip the EU with the military capability to undertake future humanitarian interventions, but although containing some interesting material it rather detracts from the overall coherence of the book.
This is an impressively scholarly book which raises important theoretical questions and develops a research model which could usefully be applied to other cases to illuminate the complex interplay between domestic politics and foreign policy and the role of ideational factors in the definition of the national interest. In the concluding chapter Rathbun widens the scope to include analysis of the debate on humanitarian intervention in the US, Canada, Japan and Italy and in the epilogue briefly also discusses the war in Iraq to demonstrate the robustness of his model. The book is also significant for the originality of much of the empirical evidence he has obtained from extensive primary sources such as parliamentary debates, records of private party meetings and, most illuminating of all, over 100 interviews with many of the key actors in the decision-making process.
It is a valuable contribution to the literature in both international relations and comparative politics.