Book Review: Janne Haaland Matlary, European Union Security Dynamics: In the New National Interest (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 248 pp., £50.00 hbk)

Abstract

that the case for intervention -and, more importantly, rule-change -has seemed mortally wounded. Brooks and Wohlforth revive it in support of a less militaristic but no less ambitious programme: nothing less than the reshaping of the international institutional system to secure American interests.The authors make a lucid, compelling argument, without really addressing the question of the end of anarchy, or at least of its institutionalised, Westphalian form. Such a shift has profound implications not just for US policy, but for the political and social world. It may be that any revolution not directed from the top is doomed to failure, as the authors argue. This means that, from below, there can now only be incremental development of the existing international institutional architecture. The Roman Empire was still alive more than a millennium after Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Inferring the end of anarchy reminds us, however, that we live in changeable times, as always, and that even the international system's most basic foundations may yet be subject to redundancy, or to revolution from above.