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Since the 1980s, global financial integration and the rise of neoliberalism have significantly changed the terrain on which European social democratic parties operate. However, fierce debate persists over the evaluation of these changes. Some observers—from widely differing political standpoints—insist that social democracy and the free movement of capital across national boundaries are fundamentally incompatible. It follows that the only options for social democratic parties are either to embrace neoliberalism and dismantle much of the welfare state or organize concerted action to reshape the global financial architecture. An opposing group of analysts are equally adamant that while the terrain has certainly become more difficult, it is still possible for Social Democrats to preserve much of the welfare state and even launch new policy initiatives.

Shane Phelan and Mark Blasius have played a leading role in the development of a lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgender (LBGT) literature within political science, and their most recent texts enrich both this specialized field and the study of politics as a whole. Phelan's investigation of citizenship begins with the claim that LBGT people are “strangers” in American society. According to Zygmunt Bauman (Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 1991), the Jews in European history were strangers. Neither friend nor enemy, they were treated as an ambiguous and shifting figure of otherness that marked the boundary between us and them, but at the same time calling into question the very possibility of such a clear exclusionary division. Critical readings of anti-Semitic discourse can be quite fruitful for the study of homophobia because the demonized subject in both cases is an enemy within who is simultaneously excessively present but invisible; powerful and threatening but harmless and effeminate; physically close but spiritually remote; embodying the highest intellectual and aesthetic values but expressing modern urban decadence and decay, circulating in “mainstream” society and seductively corrupting the innocent, but shunning “mainstream” society and remaining an unassimilated difference within its own separatist cultural enclave. Phelan puts Bauman's stranger trope to good use as she explores the complex positioning of LBGT people in American official discourse and culture.

Rethinking Europe's Future and From the Nation State to Europe? belong to two different genres of European studies. From the Nation State to Europe? is a collection of academic essays about the transformation of the nation-state in the European Union's context and its implications for social scientific theoretical concepts. Rethinking Europe's Future is by contrast aimed at politicians and policymakers. Its major objective is to discourage policies designed to push Europe and NATO to expand eastward, perhaps to embrace Russia, and instead to encourage Western Europe to assert itself as a major independent, even if not fully united, force in the world. Despite this disciplinary difference, however, the two books complement each other well. The former is about the present state of affairs in Europe; the latter concerns the future and, for that purpose, a good deal of the past. Both involve excellent scholarship and thoughtful arguments, though organizationally they share some weaknesses. They should prove interesting to any student of European affairs.

Joel Fetzer is to be congratulated for a serious attempt to bring a public opinion approach to comparative immigration politics. His book represents an ambitious step toward bridging the gap between policy input and output in the immigration equation of advanced industrialized democracies. Its occasional choppy organization and underdeveloped data analysis tend to distract from the import of the work and leave the reader yearning for a deeper and more substantive discussion.

David McNally styles this book as beginning in a polemic and ending in a “materialist approach to language” much indebted to the German critic Walter Benjamin. The charge is that “postmodernist theory, whether it calls itself poststructuralism, deconstruction or post-Marxism, is constituted by a radical attempt to banish the real human body—the sensate, biocultural, laboring body—from the sphere of language and social life” (p. 1). By treating language as an abstraction, McNally argues, postmodernism constitutes a form of idealism. More than that, it succumbs to and perpetuates the fetishism of commodities disclosed by Marx insofar as it treats the products of human laboring bodies as entities independently of them. Clearly irritated by the claims to radicalism made by those he labels postmodern, McNally thinks he has found their Achilles' heel: “The extra-discursive body, the body that exceeds language and discourse, is the ‘other’ of the new idealism, the entity it seeks to efface in order to bestow absolute sovereignty on language. To acknowledge the centrality of the sensate body to language and society is thus to threaten the whole edifice of postmodernist theory” (p. 2).

Venezuelan politics attracted little attention from political scientists for thirty years after the defeat of the fidelista guerrillas in the 1960s, but there has been a surge of interest in recent years. The country retained civilian, elected govern- ment through a dark period of authoritarianism in Latin America, which seemed to make it a good candidate for deriving lessons about transitions to democracy. In the 1990s, however, the democratic system entered into crisis. Venezu- ela experienced urban riots, two unsuccessful coups, removal of a president from office before completion of his term, rising electoral abstention, collapse of the traditional parties at the heart of the system, and the election of a coup leader to the presidency. Attention shifted from what went right to what went wrong. These books help us understand the limitations of the Venezuelan democratic model.