Book Reviews

absolutes, which eliminated complicit actors from the narratives of a

peaceful conflict resolution. Moreover, such a case study implicitly raises
broader questions about a humanitas metaphysics shaped in a western
mould that does not allow all agents to voice their opinions legitimately.
Katja Weber and Paul Kowert provide a constructivist-oriented
analysis on how two individual agents, Adenauer and Schumacher,
influenced the political direction of post-War Federal Republic of
Germany. The consistent discursive positions they held implied different
directions for this country and illuminated its particular historical
dilemma, which in some ways endures to this day: emphasising
federalism on the one hand and insisting upon the sovereign rights of
the state on the other. As the direction of the FRG was and is intimately
linked to the course of European politics, such an analysis shows how
c rucial it may be to address intra-state discourses in order to
comprehend political outcomes that play into the international realm.
The wide range of contributions, united in a common framework,
is the strength of this volume. However, in a volume emphasising the
importance of looking to language for answers, one could perhaps
expect more of a focus on the relationship between discourses of power
on the one hand and the translation of power into language on the other,
though this is not entirely absent. Addressing how such processes can
marginalise entities that are affected by international political practices
but hindered in influencing them could offer valuable insights.
Nevertheless, this does not preclude this volume from being a
recommendable and readable piece of scholarship.

MARIUS KNAGENHJELM

Marius Knagenhjelm has recently completed an MSc in International

Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Barry Buzan, The United States and the Great Powers – World Politics in the
Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004, 240 pp., £15.99 pbk.,
£55 hbk.).

Barry Buzan’s The United States and the Great Powers – World Politics in the
Twenty-First Century is the latest in a series of Buzan’s work designed
both to advance International Relations theory and, at the same time,
provide new explanatory insight into the dynamics of world affairs. Of
particular note here is People, States and Fear (1991, 1983), which contains
the original formulation of Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT)

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Millennium

used in this piece. Considering that the book was originally planned as
part of Regions and Powers (a collaboration with Ole Wæver, 2003) in
which the latest version of RSCT finds thorough empirical application,
this is not at all surprising. Indeed, The United States and the Great Powers
can quite easily be read as a continuation of the ideas developed in
Regions and Powers with particular focus on the practical application of
RSCT. In addition to this continuity, the book also seeks to offer its own
original theoretical advance, which (and the title utterly fails to convey
this) is a combination of traditional (realist) polarity theory, English
school/constructivist notions of identity and, what Buzan calls complex
polarity theory.
Buzan frames the central analysis of the work on page one with the
question: ‘What would world politics have been like between 1945 and
1989 if the US and the Soviet Union had been democracies?’ By asking
this question Buzan challenges the neorealist/Waltzian assumption that,
in the analysis of world politics, only the distribution of capabilities
across units matters, irrespective of the characteristics of the respective
states. In introducing Wendtian and English School ideas about the
social construction of the international system and role of identity to the
subject of polarity, Buzan refutes that claim and argues instead that
polarity theory is only useful if it takes the identities of the respective
states into account. Following Wendt, he argues that identities determine
whether or not relations between states are cast in terms of friendship,
rivalry, or enmity (p. 20). In so doing, Buzan refutes a second key realist
assumption that identities are functions of self-interest, whereby rivalry
and enmity discount the possibility of friendship between states. Taking
into account the role of identity in shaping polarity, Buzan answers his
opening question by arguing that, had the superpowers shared the
common ideology (identity) of liberal democracy, the period from 1945
to 1989 would have been very different (p. 21.). For Buzan, whether
states conceive of their relationships in terms of enmity, friendship, or
rivalry is dependent upon the:

[…] extent to which the ideology with which each major power
constructs itself is supportive of, neutral to, or antagonistic towards
the ideologies with which its contemporaneous major powers
construct themselves (p. 21).

In a second step in his attempt to revive polarity theory, Buzan outlines

strict categories for great power status. In addition to the thre e
traditional criteria of great power status - relative capability, self
declared status, and perception by others - Buzan adds a fourth and a
fifth criterion, namely how states calculate their behaviour, and how
others respond to that behaviour (p. 68). This enables him to circumvent
the problem of whether or not the EU is a great power because,

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 Book Reviews

according to this approach, as long as others perceive of the behaviour

of the EU as that of a great power, it is one.
Buzan further elucidates his distinction between great powers and
regional great powers, fine-tuning at the same time his own definition of
a ‘great’ power:

[…] what distinguishes great powers from merely regional ones is

that they are responded to by others on the basis of system-level
calculations, as well as regional ones, about the present and near
future distribution of power (p. 69-70).

In the empirical part of the book Buzan takes a close look at the three
most likely future polarity structures: a continuation of the unipolar
world, a world with more than one superpower, and a world without a
superpower. In applying the logics of complex polarity theory to
possible future scenarios, Buzan provides an illustrative application of
his argument concerning the role of identity in the social construction of
polarity in addition to some productive insight regarding the future of
world politics.
One reason for the appeal of Buzan’s work lies in its fundamental
disregard for canonical dogmatism. Buzan who sees ‘no reason why one
cannot examine the interplay of different approaches in a disciplined
manner’ (p. ix, emphasis added) shows that real insights into world
politics can only be derived from the utilisation of a number of theories,
each shedding light where others stand blind. If contemporary IR theory
is to have any utility for policy makers, then this certainly is the way
forward.

RITA TAURECK

Rita Taureck is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science and

International Studies at the University of Birmingham.

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Francis A. Beer and Christ’l de Landtsheer (eds.), Metaphorical World

Politics (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004, 342 pp.,
$29.95 pbk.).

Is it possible to make sense of the political world through words? The

contributors to Metaphorical World Politics think it is. They find
metaphors political leaders use indispensable to assess world politics
because metaphors “are part of the political struggle for collective

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