Central European U. Press

The anti-American century.

Declaring the end of the American century and the dawn of the anti-American century, Krastev (Central European U., Hungary) and McPherson (Howard U., US) present six essays that explore the causes and consequences of global anti-Americanism from different national perspectives and the following disciplines: history, political science, economics, sociology, and philosophy. Topics include the rise of anti-Americanism as a by-product of democratization in Latin America and South Korea, Islamist anti-Americanism as a consequence of cavalier and mercenary American policy in Southeast Asia form the 1960s to the 1980s that eliminated progressive and secular political trends, the American misperception of Central and Eastern European affinity for American foreign policy as laying the groundwork for an anti-American backlash in that region, and the mistaken propensity to tie anti-Americanism to anti-Semitism. Distributed in the US by Books International. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

State-building; a comparative study of Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia.

Fritz (Overseas Development Institute in London, UK) develops a theoretic framework for assessing the development of state capacity and applies it to the post-Soviet countries of Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia. His conceptualization distinguishes three dimensions of state capacity: the capacity to make decisions, implementation capacity, and the nature of control and accountability relationships. He also adopts a fiscal perspective, analyzing the development of tax systems, budgeting, and fiscal accountability. His central finding is that differentiation in state-building trajectories is primarily driven by choice of political regime, whether authoritarian, democratic, or hybrid. Distributed in the US by Books International. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)