PROSPECTS FOR SOVIET GAS EXPORTS: OPPORTUNITIES AND CONSTRAINTS

This paper assesses the prospects for Soviet gas exports to Western Europe, analyzing both supply (domestic) factors, such as gas production, consumption, and transportation, and demand (foreign) factors such as gas demand and market share. This is done using a network allocation model of the Soviet gas pipeline network (for 1985, 1990, and 1995) and a country-by-country analysis of the gas market in Western Europe. In general, the outlook for increased gas exports to Western Europe, at least to the turn of the century, is rather bleak. This is mainly due to a relatively slower rate of growth of gas demand in Western Europe than projected earlier, coupled with overcontracting of gas supplies, because the USSR has enormous gas reserves, ample production, and no major pipeline bottlenecks restricting export volumes. Its huge pipeline construction program allows both domestic consumption and exports to be comfortably accommodated     

Book Reviews

Baer, Kenneth S. Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000. Pp. xi, 361. $29.95, hardbound.

Canon, David T. Race, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp.'xiv, 324. $50.00, hardbound; $18.00, paper.

Crabb, Cecil V., Glenn J. Antizzo, and Leila E. Sarieddine. Congress and the Foreign Policy Process: Modes of Legislative Behavior. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Pp. xi, 247. $39.95, hardbound; $24.95, softbound.

Goldstein, Kenneth M. Interest Groups, Lobbying, and Participation in America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp xii, 158. $49.95, hardbound; $16.95, softbound.

Gronke, Paul. The Electorate, the Campaign, and the Office: A Unified Approach to Senate and House Elections. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Pp. xiv, 202. $39.50, hardbound.

Jones, Charles O. Clinton and Congress: Risk, Restoration, and Reelection. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Pp. xvi, 221. $26.95, hardbound.

Landy, Marc, and Sidney M. Milkis. Presidential Greatness. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2000. Pp. 288. $34.95, hardbound.

Morris, Irwin L. Congress, the President, and the Federal Reserve: The Politics of American Monetary Policy-Making. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Pp. vii, 165. $39.50, hardbound.

Palazzolo, Daniel J. Done Deal: The Politics of the 1997 Budget Agreement. New York: Chatham House Publishers, 1999. Pp. xii, 244. $24.95, softbound.

Uslaner, Eric M. The Movers and the Shirkers: Representatives and Ideologues in the Senate. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Pp. xii, 234. $44.50, hardbound.     

The Madrasas of Oxford: Iranian Interactions with the English Universities in the Early Nineteenth Century

Against the background of the Russo-Persian wars of the early 1800s, the Iranian government sponsored a series of Iranian students to travel to the homeland of its erstwhile British allies in search of the new scientific and technological learning. Along with members of the Iranian embassies to London in the same period, the students were the first Iranians to acquire extensive and direct knowledge of British society as it entered the industrial era and the earliest to gain access (albeit short-lived) to the English universities. Yet in spite of the practical agenda of the students and their sponsors, on reaching Britain the students found it necessary to engage extensively with the evangelical and more generally religious agendas of their British co-operators. In reconstructing in detail the intellectual circles in which the Iranian students moved in England between 1815 and 1818, the article uncovers the series of religious negotiations that were a necessary part of Iran's early path to modernization.

In Oxford there are twenty big madrasas and five small madrasas they call “halls.”

Mirza Saleh Shirazi, 1818