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

     

The sources of communitarianism on the American left: Pluralism, republicanism, and participatory democracy

This article considers the nature of communitarian thought in late twentieth century Anglo-American political philosophy. It argues that communitarianism arose out of a critique of modernist theories of justice such as that of John Rawls shared by a group of writers committed to idealist principles that emphasised narrative approaches to the study of political thought, the importance of historical context, and popular participation in political life. It then focuses on one particular American strand of communitarian thought, exemplified by the work of Michael Walzer and Michael Sandel, which draws on a tradition of radical democracy and, in so doing, helps both to create and to transform a new American republicanism. An important connection between Walzer and Sandel is that they share the view that egalitarian politics must draw on shared traditions of social criticism rather than on the abstract individualism that they associate with Rawls. A key difference is that Walzer's vision of American life is pluralist and enthusiastic about difference, whereas Sandel's is republican and concerned above all with fostering civic virtue and identification with the state and political community.     

Natural preservation mechanisms at play in a Bronze Age wooden shovel found in the copper mines of Alderley Edge

A wooden shovel, dating from the Early Bronze Age, has survived in a remarkable state of preservation in the copper mines of Alderley Edge, Cheshire UK. Other historic timbers recovered from the mines, whilst still intact, have fared less well. An X-ray investigation into the distribution of minerals through the shovel using portable X-ray Fluorescence (PXRF) along with the use of synchrotron-based X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS) measurements of the copper and arsenic chemical speciations has provided clues to the methods by which metals from the mining environment have entered the wood of the shovel and ensured its survival. The distribution and nature of the minerals so determined suggest that the copper and arsenic, along with a significant lead content, entered the shovel during its original use in working mineral-rich deposits, rather than through the burial environment. The insights gained are expected to be applicable to other wooden artefacts recovered from ancient copper mines in other places.     

Good guys or bad? Middle class blacks and the black community

William Alan Muraskin. Middle Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. 318 pp. $14.95.