Review Article: Hot War,Cold War,New War

STANLEY KARNOW. Vietnam, A History. New York: Penguin, 1984. Pp. xi, 752. $10.95 (US); GABRIEL KOLKO. Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, The United States, and the Modern Historical Experience. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. Pp. xvi, 628. $25.00 (US); TIMOTHY J. LOMPERIS. The War Everyone Lost-and Won: America's Intervention in Vietnam's Twin Struggles. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Pp. x, 192. $22.50 (US); R.B. SMITH. An International History of the Vietnam War: The Kennedy Strategy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. Pp. xii, 429. $25.00 (US); HARRY O. SUMMERS, Jr. On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. New York: Dell, 1984. Pp. 288. $3.95 (US).     

Review Article: Nordic Exceptions in War and Cold War

PHILIP GILTNER. ‘In the Friendliest Manner’: German-Danish Economic Cooperation during the Nazi Occupation of 1940–1949. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Pp. xii, 258. $49.95 (US); T. MICHAEL RUDDY, ed. Charting an Independent Course: Finland's Place in the Cold War and in US Foreign Policy. Claremont: Regina Books, 1998. Pp. 223. $32.95 (US), cloth; $14.95 (US), paper; MAX JAKOBSON. Finland in the New Europe. Westport: Praeger, 1998. Pp. xiv, 176. $19.95 (US), paper; TEIJA TIILIKAINEN. Europe and Finland: Defining the Political Identity of Finland in Western Europe. Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate, 1998. Pp. 185. $68.95 (US). Reviewed by Thomas Munch-Petersen     

Political Science in Mexico: Cold War and Post-Cold War Context

Abstract

Through a critical consideration of recent proposals urging the use of “citizen forums” or “mini-publics” on issues involving science, this article reflects on the challenge posed to democracy and democratic decision making by the intellectual authority of modern science. Though the danger of a descent into technocracy is real and pressing, arguably the most serious challenge to democracy today, these novel “deliberative democratic” institutions are unpromising as a corrective beyond the local level, and may actually exacerbate the problem. The article concludes with a consideration of alternatives.     

Review Article: Total War or Traditional War

MICHAEL ADAMS. Napoleon and Russia. London and New York, NY: Hambledon Continuum, 2006. Pp. xxiii, 596. $34.95 (US); ROY ADKINS and LESLEY ADKINS. The War for All the Oceans: From Nelson at the Nile to Napoleon at Waterloo. London: Little Brown, 2006. Pp. xxix, 534. £10.9g, paper; ALESSANDRO BARBERO. The Battle: A New History of Waterloo, trans. John Cullen. New York, NY: Walker & Company, 2005. Pp. xii, 340. $16.00 (US), paper; DAVID A. BELL. The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. Boston, MA and New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2007; dist. Markham, ON: Thomas Allen. Pp. x, 420. $39.95 (CDN); CHARLES ESDAILE. Napoleon's Wars: An International History, 1803–1815. London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 2007. Pp. xvii, 621. $55.00 (CDN); ROBERT HARVEY. The War of Wars: The Epic Struggle between Britain and France, 1723–1815. London: Constable & Robinson, 2006. Pp. xxx, 962. £10.00, paper; FREDERICK W. KAGAN. The End of the Old Order: Napoleon and Europe, 1801–1805. Cambridge, MA: De Capo Books, 2006. Pp. xxiv, 774. $40.00 (US); MICHAEL V. LEGGIERE. The Fall of Napoleon: I: The Allied Invasion of France, 1813–1814. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xvii, 686. $35.00 (US); THIERRY LENTZ. Nouvelle histoire du Premier Empire: II: L'effondrement du système napoléonien, 1810–1814. Paris: Fayard, 2007. Pp. 835. €30.00, paper; ADAM ZAMOYSKI. Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna. London: HarperCollins, 2007. Pp. xviii, 634. £25.00. Reviewed by Philip G. Dwyer     

Stanner's War

The Pacific War and its aftermath were a turning point in William Edward Hanley Stanner's career. Until then, he had struggled to establish himself as a scholar and seemed destined to stay, like many other Australian scholars, within the orbit of British academia and its colonial empire. Almost immediately after war had been declared, Stanner returned to Australia, working in various capacities and, in May 1942, commanding the North Australia Observer Unit. In October 1943, he was transferred to the Australian Army's Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs (DORCA). Members of the Directorate saw themselves at the forefront of progressive reform in Australian colonial policy. Stanner opposed what he considered the grandiose plans for a post-war Papua New Guinea that were hatched by the DORCA ‘boys’, as they called themselves. By the end of the 1940s, however, control over policy was firmly in the hands of the civil bureaucracy and the new Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck. Any influence that may have accrued to either Stanner or to the idealism of the ‘boys’ in the Directorate was lost.