David A. Lake and Patrick M. Morgan, eds., Regional Orders: Building Security in a New World (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997) pp.403, price not listed.

"During the Persian Gulf War, George Bush sought to evoke a "new world order". The president was right in seeing a new potential for the international management of interstate and intrastate conflicts, but he was wrong in his horizons. Rather than a single world order, we are witnessing today the emergence of a variety of new regional orders." (Emphasis in original) This is the opening sentence of a book appropriately titled Regional Orders: Building Security in a New World.

Equally appropriately, it is based on a futuristic assumption: "In the foreseeable future, violent conflicts will mostly arise out of regional concerns and will be viewed by political actors through a regional rather than a global lens." We are either still on the way towards evolving regional arrangements and actions to cope with conflicts; or the entire project has been an unattainable ideal from the beginning. The book reflects innovative mode and optimistic mood in the discipline of International Relations in the early nineties. That is its contribution and that is its weakness.

In fact, one of the contributors attempts to draw parallels between the Concert of Europe and the Arab-Israel situation in West Asia and concludes on the note of optimism tempered with caution. (David J. Pervin, "Building Order in Arab-Israeli Relations: From Balance to Concert?" pp. 271-296) Susan Shirk, in her paper on "Asia-Pacific Regional Security: Balance of Power or Concert of Powers? (pp.245-270) argues that since successful management of relations between powers in the Asia-Pacific would be difficult to achieve by power-balancing alone, a regional concert of powers could emerge involving the US, Russia, China and Japan. "...there remain two possible obstacles ...a lack of ideological consensus and uncertain acceptance of the status quo," she concedes. No minor irritants, these!

Edmond J. Keller, on the other hand, is less upbeat. He identifies progress toward democracy and self-sustained development as the priority goals in Africa and will be content to see the development of interlocking collective security management systems linking the Organisation of African Unity with subregional organisations having common collective security interests. ("Rethinking African Regional Security" pp.296-317) Yuen Foong Khong is even less sanguine regarding Southeast Asia in the New World. As ASEAN moves toward expanding its membership and reaches out to nest itself in larger multilateral organisations such as the ARF and APEC, "it is conceivable that the spirit of togetherness engendered by ASEAN's cooperative ventures in the previous decades may come under strain." ("ASEAN and the Southeast Asian Security Complex" pp.318-339).

After the end of the Cold War, political analysts and policy makers alike turned their attention to the regional conflicts. Against the background of improving relations between the US and Russia, the conflicts in the margins of the global system, i.e., South Asia, West Asia, Africa, the new states in Central Asia etc., were seen as the fresh and more dangerous threats - to the states, to the regions and to the world. The political analyses broke new grounds at times. At others, old tools were employed to understand and explain new realities.

David A. Lake divides regions into three neat categories: unipolar, bipolar and multipolar and goes on to apply the Neorealist maxims to explain the regional dynamics. For example, he says, the unipolar regional security systems will be relatively autonomous, according to the theory of hegemonic stability; the multipolar ones will also be autonomous but plagued by problems of conflict management; and the bipolar ones will be less cooperative and less autonomous. (pp.60-61). There are several problems with such formulations. One, the Neorealism does not provide a comprehensive framework for understanding international relations. Two, the regional systems are inherently open. The global system, other regional systems, and even "outside" states can have a major impact on a region. (PP. 9-10). Autonomous regions, in the circumstances, can only be less penetrated vis-à-vis the highly penetrated ones. Three, as Hurrel puts it, "...all regions are socially constructed and hence politically contested." A state can be a member of two regions simultaneously; at times, three. Or a state can choose to look east, west, north or south according to its needs at various points in time. Or a region can choose to deny a state its membership in the region.

To sum up, even if one rejects the contention that 'in marked contrast to the Cold War era, we do not see global political considerations leading to the consistent imposition of global issues, institutions or orders on all regional security complexes," (p.347) the book is a welcome input to the burgeoning literature on regions in a comparative perspective.

Gulshan Dietl, Professor, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi - 110067.