The masthead of Perspectives articulates our mission in these words: “Perspectives on Politics is a journal of political science that seeks to provide political insight on important problems, as it emerges from rigorous, broad based, and integrative thought.” Although I inherited this mission statement, I find it broadly in keeping with my own aspirations for the journal. I also recognize that there are broad and deep disagreements among political scientists about such things as what counts as “political,” what is “important,” whether the discipline ought to be driven by “problems,” and what it means to be “rigorous,” to say nothing of “broad” or “integrative.” Indeed, it might fairly be said that the journal itself exists in large measure as a result of the ferment generated by such disagreement.

In this article, I attempt to integrate the study of citizenship into debates in comparative politics, in two different ways. First, I justify the real-world importance of the topic, and thereby encourage other scholars to grapple with its manifestations and implications. Second, I present some suggestive evidence, based on the 15 “older” countries of the European Union (EU). The findings not only illustrate the extent of cross-national variation in citizenship policies at two different time periods, but they help to demonstrate the applicability of comparative analysis to categorizing and explaining both long-lasting cross-national differences and more recent change in some countries. In explaining the historical variation within the EU, I consider whether or not a country had a prior experience as a colonial power, as well as whether it became a democracy in the nineteenth century. In accounting for continuity or change over the last few decades, I argue that while various international and domestic pressures have led to liberalization in a number of countries, these usually occurred in the absence of public discussion and involvement. In contrast, when public opinion gets mobilized and engaged on issues related to citizenship reform—usually by a well-organized far right party, but also sometimes by a referendum or petition campaign—liberalization is usually blocked, or further restrictions are introduced. This finding raises important, paradoxical, and troubling questions about the connection between democratic processes and liberal outcomes.Marc Morjé Howard is Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University (mmh@georgetown.edu). Research for this article has been supported by a Research Fellowship from the German Marshall Fund of the United States. In addition to three anonymous reviewers, I am grateful to the following people for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article: David Art, Seyla Benhabib, Mark Blythe, Randall Hansen, Martin Heisler, Dick Howard, Wade Jacoby, Christian Joppke, Evan Lieberman, Adam Luedtke, Willem Maas, Kathleen McNamara, Craig Parsons, Martin Schain, Rogers Smith, and Maarten Vink. I also appreciate the research assistance of Hamutal Bernstein, Aspen Brinton, Anamaria Dutceac, Sean Eudaily, Leah Gilbert, and Sara Beth Wallace on various parts of this project.

Some analysts have raised serious concerns about the foreign and domestic policy implications of the large numbers of Muslims living in Western Europe. The fear is that Muslims as a bloc will co-opt the domestic and foreign policy of various European states, subsuming it to those of Muslims from a variety of Islamic states in the Middle East and Asia, and transform the secular nature of most European states. The historic and ingrained fear of Islam present in the populations of Europe (and, for that matter, the United States) has produced an inability to see the political nature of Islamic groups, especially outside the Islamic world. For example, both Europeans and Americans were quick to question the political motives and actions of Muslims in Europe and the U.S. when there was no organized and orchestrated condemnation of the attacks of September 11, 2001. What such critics fail to take into account is precisely one of the themes analyzed in the paper: the myriad divisions found among the Muslims of Europe. Western fears and criticisms are partly based on serious ignorance of the characteristics of Islam and of the people in Europe who adhere to it. Because Islam is a highly decentralized religion, it is structurally biased against facilitating large-scale collective action by its adherents. The one version which is hierarchically organized, the Shi'a, is barely present in Europe. In addition, Muslim immigrants are divided by their ethnic differences. Islam, being decentralized, allows for a myriad of practices in the different countries from which the immigrants came. Divided by ethnicity and by their own religious beliefs, Muslims in Europe will not constitute a group which will be able to impose its goals on European foreign and domestic policy. Muslims will, instead, be a diverse population with which European states find it difficult to negotiate, because of Islam's decentralized structure.Carolyn M. Warner is Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Studies, Arizona State University (carolyn.warner@asu.edu). Manfred W. Wenner is Visiting Scholar, Department of Political Science, Arizona State University (mwwenner@northlink.com). The authors wish to thank Guity Nashat Becker, Jocelyne Cesari, Colin Elman, Miriam Fendius Elman, Roger Finke, Paul Froese, Anthony Gill, Phillip Hardy, Michael Hechter, Jennifer Hochschild, Kevin Jacques, Ramazan Kilinc, Timur Kuran, Peter McDonough, Michael Mitchell, Christopher Soper, Hendrik Spruyt, Robert Youngblood, three anonymous reviewers, the participants at the University of Washington Center for European Studies/European Union Center “September 11, Immigration and Nationalism in Europe” seminar, and the participants at the University of Wisconsin Madison “East and West: the Experience of Islam in an Expanding Europe” conference for their critical comments and suggestions. Errors and shortcomings remain our responsibility. The authors thank Beatrice Buchegger, Anita Clason, Katie Jordan, Megan McGinnity, and Seth Turken for research assistance, and the Arizona State University Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict for financial support.

Pragmatism, decentralization, and pluralism are typically associated with modern democracies. Yet these are also the attributes that make Islam a widely accessible political-cultural resource. Indeed, such attributes allow for multiple activisms while sparing activists the macro-coordination challenges that often hamper growing movements, and the inertia that can seize vertical organizations. But while Islamists across the spectrum have increasingly deployed this resource, secularists of various stripes have mostly eschewed it. The aggregate effect has been to amplify the voices and to raise the profiles of Islamist groups at the expense of self-described moderns and their secular ideologies. I call this Islamism's reverberation effect.

Deliberate integration of Islamic tradition with democratic thought and action holds substantial promise. Pro-democratic Muslims, backed by Islam's renovated classical principles and practices, can better counter supremacist claims as they arise in the plural contestations that Islam itself helps generate. They can also realistically seek a firm consensus on the inviolable status of Islamic tolerance, which in turn can serve as a functional equivalent to the central authority that Islam lacks. Most importantly, by reconsidering the modernist ideational boundary that separates religion and politics, pro-democratic Muslims can begin to reclaim the transformative power of tradition.Anna Seleny is Professor of the Practice of International Politics at Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy (anna.seleny@tufts.edu). She would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination at Princeton University in the research and writing of this article. She is grateful to Hassan Abbas, Sheri Berman, Consuelo Cruz, Malik Mufti, Assaf Moghadam, and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

A large body of research by political scientists, psychologists and historians suggests that “existential security”—the feeling that survival can be taken for granted—is conducive to tolerance of foreigners, openness to social change and a pro-democratic political culture. Conversely, existential insecurity leads to 1) xenophobia and 2) strong in-group solidarity. This article tests these hypotheses against evidence from a recent survey of Iraq—a society where one would expect to find exceptionally high levels of insecurity. We find that the Iraqi public today shows the highest level of xenophobia found in any of the 85 societies for which data are available—together with extremely high levels of solidarity with one's own ethnic group.Ronald Inglehart is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan (rfi@umich.edu), Mansoor Moaddel is Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University (mmoaddel@emich.edu), and Mark Tessler is Professor of Political Science at University of Michigan (tessler@umich.edu).

Over the course of the last fifteen years states—along with companies, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and others—have increasingly turned to markets rather than state-organized military hierarchies for security. This article puts forth hypotheses about how this marketization might affect three major literatures in international relations theory: the democratic peace, late state building, and theories of the frequency and nature of conflict. Relying on institutional logic, I argue that the marketization of security should redistribute power over the control of force. This redistribution should cause democracies to function differently—increasing the dilemmas between short-term security and long-term relations with other democracies. It should also reinforce the dilemmas pointed to by the literature on the resource curse and rentier states, thus deepening the expected difficulty of state building. Finally, as more states and non-state actors take advantage of market options for security, the oft-assumed collective monopoly of states over violence should suffer a blow. This should lead the chances for conflict to grow but also the purposes for which people and groups use violence to change. These propositions are not tested but serve as a call for further research.Deborah Avant is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University (avant@gwu.edu). The author thanks Fiona Adamson, Risa Brooks, Nora Bensahel, Alex Cooley, Rachel Epstein, Greg Gause, Jonathan Kirshner, Jack Snyder, David Lake, Jim Lebovic, and participants in the Globalization and National Security seminars at Harvard's Olin Institute, as well as participants in seminars at Georgetown University; Northwestern University; and University of Texas, Austin for comments on previous drafts.

Positing behavior as interest driven insufficiently explains why reform is difficult. This article draws on experiences with school reform to argue that ideas in the form of purposes play a part. Purposes, however, are erratic sources of motivation, sometimes generating intense commitments but often functioning in a mercurial manner. They operate in conjunction with the character and strength of supports. Purposes that are compatible in principle may nevertheless compete for time, resources, and especially attention. Because human beings are creatures of bounded rationality, any given purpose is susceptible to attention shift. Interpersonal and interorganizational networks can serve as counterweights by bolstering identity with the reform goal, providing cognitive reinforcement for it, and enhancing the credibility of a reform goal as achievable. In an assessment of the role of ideas, it is important to remember that they come in a variety of scopes and levels of abstractness. As forces in the politics of reform, ideas have a part shaped by context. The role of ideas in the local setting is quite different from their role in media-infused battles at the national level. Local arenas are frequently nonpartisan, with actors focused on immediate concerns, daily demands, and scarce resources. Because concrete actions may be more important than ideological posture, mass persuasion may be of less concern than enlistment of scattered cadres of task-specific activists.Clarence Stone is Research Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at George Washington and Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland (cstone@gvpt.umd.edu). Marion Orr is Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies, Brown University (Marion_Orr@brown.edu). Donn Worgs is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of Metropolitan Studies, Towson University (dworgs@ towson.edu). The authors wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for extraordinarily helpful comments.

Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy. By Mark R. Warren; Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life. By Harry C. Boyte; Going Public. By Michael Gecan; and Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice. By Edward T. Chambers with Michael A. Cowan.

These are not easy times for democracy. In the face of multinational corporations, an increasingly corrupt and deceitful political system, mega-media conglomerates, and militaristic televangelists, it is easy to understand how some radical democrats succumb to a politics of the bullhorn. The objective of such politics is to hone the correct line and strategize ways to project it clearly, loudly, and righteously into the public arena. Yet the success of politics thus framed has been marginal in recent decades, and its democratic credentials questionable—if by democratic we mean a politics that engages a manifold people in the difficult reciprocities of active critical judgment, organizing, action toward common goods, more egalitarian distributions, and deepening acknowledgments of plural modes of being. Most Americans are Teflon to it.Romand Coles is Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University (coles@duke.edu). The author wishes to acknowledge helpful comments and criticisms from Susan Bickford, Kimberley Curtis, Jeffrey Isaac, Sanford Schram, and anonymous reviewers for Perspectives on Politics. Romand Coles is the author of Self/Power/Other: Political Theory and Dialogical Ethics, Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of Caritas, and most recently Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy.

Sex Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2002. Edited by Nicholas Bamforth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 320p. $27.50.

A collection of revised versions of lectures given in 2002 on the general topics of gender, sexuality, and human rights (with two additional commissioned pieces), this volume is in some ways what one would expect: a loosely connected group of essays most (but not all) of which discuss the relationship of gender and (other-than-normative) sexuality to human rights. As the cover photograph—of two men in dress clothes embracing, perhaps in the aftermath of a gay commitment ceremony—suggests, one unifying theme of the work is whether lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) people's claim to be treated by society, the law, and the state with the same respect and protection as are heterosexual couples is, in fact, a human rights claim. However, readers who might be led by the packaging to expect the work as a whole to center on that consideration will be disappointed.

Democracy's Literature: Politics and Fiction in America. Edited by Patrick J. Deneen and Joseph Romance. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. 248p. $80 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Political Philosophy Comes to Rick's: Casablanca and American Civic Culture. Edited by James F. Pontuso. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. 208p. $65.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Democracy's Literature is the most recent foray by political philosophers to save literature from itself, or at least to save good books from Departments of English. At the same time, as coeditor Joseph Romance suggests in the conclusion to his own essay, such an undertaking throws a lifeline to narrow-minded political scientists, urging them—if I may paraphrase Flannery O'Connor—to meet political perplexities with an examination of conscience rather than an examination of statistics. And it is this political examination of conscience that literature will often facilitate.

The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought. By Jesse Goldhammer. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 218p. $45.00.

The problem of how to found a political regime is one of the oldest and most vexed in the history of Western thought. The founding act has often been drenched in blood because certain forms of violence actually help to foster political foundation. This is the illiberal starting point of Jesse Goldhammer's study of the French discourse on sacrificial violence, a theme that he rightly describes as “anathema to mainstream political theory” (p. x), which tends to divert its glance from what it sees as unseemly anachronisms like this. Undaunted, Goldhammer bravely plunges in, turning to 1790s France and the theorizing about sacrifice that it spawned for insight into the violence that he claims is “necessary for political beginnings” (p. 1). While the French revolutionaries engaged in “sacrificial practices and interpretations” such as the beheading of Louis XVI, they never actually developed a theory of sacrifice. That was the contribution of notorious postrevolutionary writers, such as Joseph de Maistre, Georges Sorel, and Georges Bataille, who well understood that violent sacrifice “facilitates the process of conferring moral legitimacy to political power and setting boundaries for political identity” (p. 192).

Democracy and America's War on Terror. By Robert L. Ivie. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. 276p. $38.75 cloth, $24.95 paper.

In the Name of Terrorism: Presidents on Political Violence in the Post–World War II Era. By Carol K. Winkler. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 260p. $65.00.

Two recent books on the relation between the rhetoric of political discourse and American democratic politics explore the ways that language can shape political outcomes. Political culture has been a woolly subject for political scientists, specifically because explanatory models of political culture tend to oppose the more predominant institutional models of explanation. But both books convincingly make the claim that political culture can and is shaped by the rhetoric of political elites and that this has a deep impact on the ways in which political phenomena are interpreted and understood in a collective sense. Both analyze political discourse and seek to show how it impacts, shapes, and can even predict certain outcomes in political life.

Scientific Values and Civic Virtues. Edited by Noretta Koertge. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 256p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This interesting collection of essays is dedicated to the proposition that the values essential for the functioning, indeed even the existence, of a scientific community are by and large the very values necessary for the sustenance and optimal functioning of a democratic society. To this end, the book is divided into three sections: The first is devoted to explicating the values entailed in any real scientific community and to exploring the historical nexus between the development of civil society and science; the second to illustrating the role of these values in science through a number of case studies; and the third to the examination and critique of contemporary anti- or pseudoscientific cultural movements as threats not only to science but to civil society itself.

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. By Bruno Latour. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 320p. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

“What is to be done with political ecology? Nothing. What is to be done? Political ecology!” Bruno Latour begins The Politics Of Nature with this provocative statement (p. 1). What follows is a creative reconceptualization of the relationship among nature, science, and politics with profound implications for the future of ecological change, traditional right/left ideologies, and modern political processes, including globalization.

Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. By Jonathan Marks. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 200p. $65.00.

Many of us feel we know Rousseau, perhaps better than we do any other modern political thinker. For this we have Rousseau himself to thank; his Confessions, though often opaque and perplexing, still give us a vivid sense of the person who wrote them—ardent, dramatic, petulant, grandiose. Anyone who has read Rousseau's own account of his life will surely be puzzled by the cool, muted tones Jonathan Marks uses to portray him: Marks's Rousseau is a sober, measured thinker who tempers his most radical ideas with a sharp awareness of human limitations. This portrait, so deliberately drawn, looks the way it does for several reasons.

Athenian Legacies: Essays on the Politics of Going On Together. By Josiah Ober. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 296p. $29.95.

In the Philosophy of History, Hegel says that the only thing anyone ever learns from history is that no one ever learns anything from history. Josiah Ober dissents. He believes that the study of ancient Greek history provides valuable lessons for maintaining democratic polities in today's world. Athenian Legacies is comprised of 10 essays—eight published previously, lightly revised. Ober is primarily a cultural historian. He describes this field as “concerned with functional explanation: how members of a society, or subgroups within a community, negotiated a set of meanings that allowed them to continue to live in an existing community” (p. 177). This volume can be read as a follow-up (one of several) to his important 1989 work, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens. That study explores the role of discourse and ideology in alleviating conflict between richer and poorer citizens in ancient Athens and so contributing to democratic stability. In this new book as well, Ober's central concern is how products of public culture contributed to the reconciling of differences in Athenian identity, thus helping the Athenians “go on together.” The essays were written for different audiences: political theorists, classicists, moral philosophers. But the collection is more unified than many such works, as most essays bear to some degree on the central idea of “going on together.”

Love and Politics: Re-Interpreting Hegel. By Alice Ormiston. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 164p. $40.00

With this book, Alice Ormiston presents a compelling interpretation of Hegel's philosophy that speaks to the needs of our time. Her central argument is that love is “the continuous foundation at play in Hegel's understanding of the modern self” and the “experiential basis” of his philosophy (pp. 5–6). Hegelian love is an expansive notion that has historical grounding in early Christian mysticism. No longer readily felt in widely shared religious or civic practices, love has been all but eclipsed in the modern world. But love's knowledge is not lost. Reappearing as a moment of grace in situations of moral and political conflict, love helps us heed our conscience. Hegel's political philosophy is, we learn, a call to conscience. If we do not know what conscience requires, we become vulnerable to “the problems of our time”: alienation and social atomism—seen in poverty, weakened commitments to family and local politics, and selfish disregard for the welfare of others—and a collective inability to distinguish right and wrong that contributes to evil (pp. 115–24).

A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. By Jennifer Pitts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 392p. $39.50.

This book is a brilliantly successful attempt to account for the apparent transition from the fierce, bitter assault on the idea of empire by the writers of the second half of the eighteenth century—from Montesquieu and Adam Smith to Benjamin Constant—to the often self-congratulatory, high-minded endorsement of a new kind of imperial mission less than half a century later, here associated most clearly with the writings of John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. To have identified this shift in the first place is not the least of Jennifer Pitts's merits. Much of the modern, postcolonial historiography of this period has assumed, generally without much argument, that it was the “Enlightenment” that provided the ideological inspiration for the evolution of the nineteenth-century European empires. True, Pitts has been greatly assisted by two previous works, Sankar Muthu's Enlightenment against Empire (2003) and Uday Mehta's Liberalism and Empire (1999), but although these have done much to establish the existence of an antiimperial Enlightenment, neither has anything much to say about the transformation in European imperial policy, and in European political theory, that followed the end of the French Revolution.

Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science. Edited by Kristen Renwick Monroe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 608p. $35.00.

Critics have berated the Perestroika movement since it erupted in 2000 for engaging in academic politics before improving the tools available for apprehending the political world. But the guiding thread of any group's thinking generally arises out of its common activities, as Karl Mannheim pointed out. So it is no surprise that Perestroika, as a movement of disaffected political scientists, would coalesce first as an attempt to storm the discipline's citadels in the name of “methodological pluralism.” Some years later, however, we are in a better position to assess the principles implicated in the movement and its slogan, a judgment now enabled by the publication of Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, edited by Kristen Renwick Monroe.

We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. By Tommie Shelby. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 336p. $27.95.

The intellectual and strategic moorings of contemporary black political solidarity are increasingly unstable. As the political memory of the race-specific Civil Rights movement fades further into history, intraracial differences that have always existed, such as gender, religion, sexuality, multiracial identification, immigration, region, cultural affiliation, political ideology, and generation, are being highlighted by race scholars from a variety of fields as reasons for rethinking race-based political cohesion. Tommie Shelby acknowledges all of these internal pressures, but sees the widening gap between poor and more affluent blacks as the intraracial fissure that most threatens political cohesion among today's African Americans. From this sociological premise, Shelby sets out to articulate a “progressive,” philosophically sound basis for black political organization that appeals both to the class interests of poor and working-class blacks and to those of middle- and upper-class blacks. By “progressive,” Shelby means a recognition that basic social injustices linger, and can and should be corrected through state intervention and/or collective political action. Remedies for current racial inequalities cannot be found in a “conservative” return to a former era of ostensibly better social organization.