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Abstract: The best way to understand how stable, well-functioning democracies develop is to analyze the political trajectories such countries have actually taken. The political backstory of most democracies includes struggle, conflict, and even violence. Problems and failures can in retrospect often be seen to be integral parts of the long-term processes through which non-democratic institutions, elites, and cultures were delegitimized and eventually eliminated, and their democratic successors forged. Understanding past cases is a crucial step toward putting today's democratization and democracy promotion discussions into the proper intellectual and historical context.

Over the last several years a rift has opened beneath the Atlantic, pushing the United States and Europe farther apart. One cause has been increasingly different approaches to foreign policy. Another has been a sense that Europeans and Americans have distinct approaches to domestic affairs as well. Alongside the shelf of books chronicling transatlantic disputes over Iraq, terrorism, the United Nations, and similar topics, another shelf is filling up with analyses of how the "European model" is not just different from the American one but superior to it. This literature (T.R. Reid's The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy; Jeremy Rifkin's The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream; and Mark Leonard's Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century) does a good job of pointing out the chinks in America's armor and highlighting the ways Europessimists have overdone their gloomy portrait of the continent and its future. The books tend to have significant flaws of their own, however—including, oddly enough, a shared blind spot regarding Europe's true hope for long-term greatness and the obstacles it must surmount to achieve it.

Unter gewissen Voraussetzungen ist die Zivilgesellschaft nicht förderlich für Demokratie und sozialen Ausgleich, sie bahnt vielmehr Gewalt, sozialem Konflikt und antidemokratischen politischen Bewegungen einen Weg. Wenn Staaten und politische Institutionen schwach sind oder es ihnen an Legitimität mangelt, wird ein Anwachsen zivilgesellschaftlicher Aktivität wahrscheinlich zu einer Überbetonung politischer und sozialer Probleme führen und das Konflikt- und Gewaltpotenzial erhöhen. Der Zusammenbruch der Weimarer Republik und der Aufstieg der Nazis in den 1930er Jahren sowie die Entstehung eines radikalen Islamismus in Teilen der arabischen Welt heute sind nur zwei Beispiele einer solchen Dynamik. Sie erlauben nicht nur ein besseres Verständnis einer der wichtigsten Tragödien des 20. Jahrhunderts und eines Schlüsselproblems des jungen 21. Jahrhunderts, sie ermöglichen auch Einblick in die Faktoren, die Aufstieg und Erfolg radikal-extremistischer Bewegungen zu jeder Zeit und überall ermöglichen. (ICEÜbers)

Berman reviews An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate by Gareth Stedman Jones and The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs.

Berman reviews The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy by T.R. Reid; The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream by Jeremy Rifkin; and Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century by Mark Leonard.

A review essay on books by (1) Michael Mann, Fascists (New York: Cambridge U Press, 2004); (2) Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004); & (3) Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U Press, 2004).