The author presents how Russia's struggle to find its new identity in the aftermath of Communism's collapse is analogous to America's historical experience of drawing on religious and cultural roots in moving toward democracy. By rediscovering religion and forming voluntary cultural organizations, the Russians are patterning the evolution of the American democracy. Billington highlights Mikhail Gorbachev's crucial role in the early stages of the process. Noting the American experience in dealing with diversity, he notes the central role this experience can play in dealing with “a global process that… is moving forward to democratization and back to religion,” which is where the previously irreconcilable “Slavophile-Westernizer polarity” tends to converge.

The three books reviewed in this essay, Morality Among Nations: An Evolutionary View (Mary Maxwell), Righteous Realists: Political Realism, Responsible Power, and American Culture in the Nuclear Age (Joel H. Rosenthal), and Securing Europe (Richard H. Ullman), in some sense represent a reaction to Reagan's ideological policies. Maxwell's book appeals to the sociobiological nature of international morality. Rosenthal's book invites the reader to consider the valid view of the realist model as a venue toward integration of morals with decision making in international relations. Ullman's main premise is that the disintegration of the Soviet empire and reunification of Germany gave a strong impetus for the European states to seek a common ground in all areas through cooperation, particularly on security issues.

Deliberate and indiscriminate targeting of civilians, most particularly in a non-war environment, is an unjustifiable form of violence that can be defeated most effectively through multilateral efforts, according to Norton, and must not be fathomed as anything but pure and simple terrorism, which is not to be tolerated. The U.S. State Department's definition of terrorism is too ambiguous to allow delineation between what is permissible in time of war and in time of peace, and creates more controversy than consensus: one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. Fortunately, fertile ground for the multilateral combating of terrorist activities and states promoting them (Lybia, Syria, Iran) was laid in 1989 with an unofficial U.S.-USSR agreement to exchange vital information to prevent such acts. The author places great hope in this new dialogue.

Amartya Sen's memoir, Home in the World, is a compelling read, giving a fascinating view of the making of the mind of one of the foremost public intellectuals of our time. In reflections on the first three decades of his life—all filled with an amazing range of experiences, encounters, and intellectual explorations that span Asia, Europe, and North America—Sen weaves a comprehensive and interlocking narrative that brings together a unitary worldview where two multi-dimensional themes are juxtaposed throughout the book: the presence of the past and the convergence of the near and the far. In this essay, I highlight some of the life experiences and lessons shared in Sen's memoir grounded in his ideas of identity and shared humanity. These ideas took on a prominent place in Sen's life, in part, through his educational experience at the innovative school founded by the visionary poet Rabindranath Tagore. I draw on the views of both Sen and Tagore, as discussed in Sen's memoir. These lessons and ideas can help us in appreciating the power of knowledge, the value of education, and the allure of diversity. They can also guide us in our search for a more just world.

Thinking about international affairs has oscillated between idealism and realism throughout the modern period. Moralists continue to search for a way to combine what is reasonable in each in an ethically defensible middle between those extremes. Such efforts often yield a soft version of political realism: an ethics of compromise between moral ideals and real-world interests. But this resolution fails to escape an awkward dichotomy between “morality” and “reality,” as if moral considerations were not real and interests never illusory. It also rests on a simplistic conception of politics. Politics is distinguished from other activities in being concerned with obligations prescribed and enforced within a legal order, and those who make political decisions cannot ignore these obligations. Political decision-making must therefore take account of law, which is distinct from both morality and interest. Law may have its ultimate justification in moral principle, but it provides reasons for acting that are distinct from moral reasons. This is true of law at any level, including international law. Law also has material as well as normative force as part of the world in which decisions are made. A more nuanced middle-ground ethics, then, would take account of law as making demands of its own. If we bring law into the picture, we discover limits to action that are grounded on neither morality nor interest.

The message of Michael Ignatieff's reflections on reimagining a global ethic is a comforting one for political philosophers. It is vital, he writes, for philosophers to keep doing what they have been doing: addressing the injustices of globalization from a perspective of strict impartiality that treats every human being as the object of equal moral concern. Philosophers should continue to elaborate this “one world” perspective against those partial perspectives arising from the claims of one's particular country or particular religious faith. But their aim should not be to replace the one with the other, but to prompt an ongoing critical dialogue in which more particularistic doctrines of country or faith are called to justify themselves before the one-world ethic's impartial standards—thus prompting the kind of critical self-reflection that is essential to moral change. And in so doing, the one-world ethic cannot be uncritical of itself, for there are different ways of conceiving a global ethic, each of which must answer to the others.