Rarely have I enjoyed (and learned from) reading a book as much as this one, whose parts are quite brilliant on occasion but whose overall argument falls well short of its claim and aim. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson argues with verve and conviction that the Federal Republic of Germany's creation and its subsequent joining in alliances with the United States and its European partners would not have occurred without the invention, the implementation, and deployment of “the West” as a unifying concept of political, cultural, and social identity. Challenging the explanatory powers of realist theories, as well as their international relations constructivist, Marxist, and liberal counterparts, Jackson develops something he calls a “transactional social constructionist conception of social reality: transactional because the analytic focus is on social ties and transactions rather than putatively solid and stable actors with relatively fixed interests, and social constructionist because the causal mechanisms producing policy outcomes involve the social production and reproduction of patterns of meaning” (p. 15, italics in original). This self-labeled “post-structural approach” (ibid., again italics in original) allows Jackson to navigate a fine line between the Scylla of contingency and the Charibdis of determinism even though he comes closer to the “agency” side of the ubiquitous agency—structure tension that will remain forever unresolved.

In Chapter 1, appropriately titled “The West Pole Fallacy,” Jackson offers an eloquent demolition of the concept of “civilization(s),” which he augments with an equally powerful demystification of its often-used sobriquet “Western.” Chapter 2 features a presentation of the language of legitimation in which he introduces his interesting concepts of “breaking” and “joining,” with the former denoting a speaker's attempts “to capture a commonplace from her opponent and thus dissolve the claimed connection between that commonplace and others” and the latter implying a speaker's attempts “to link a commonplace to others in such a way as to point in a determinate policy direction” (p. 45). Chapter 3 provides a topography of the postwar debates in the United States and Germany, featuring helpful graphics that nicely delineate the possible as well as actual axes of discourse around which various political groupings in both countries allied.

In Chapter 4 Jackson offers a tour d'horizon of what he calls the “power of ‘Western Civilization.’” Chapters 5, 6, and 7 provide the empirical core of the book in which he discusses how the tracks were set by an occidentalized discourse for the creation of what first came to be West Germany (also known as the Federal Republic of Germany) and subsequently led to this entity's joining the West, culminating in its accession to NATO in 1955. A rather abstract discussion on “Western Civilization's” stabilizing qualities, its contrived character, and its uncertain future conclude this fascinating but flawed book.

To the fascination first: Rarely have I read an author who displays a better command of such diverse literatures as does Jackson. He is as much at home in all relevant theories of international relations as he is with the writings of Max Weber, Jürgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, to name but a few of the many theorists whose work he uses in this book. His chapter on the conceptual construct and discursive powers of Western civilization is superb. Ranging across centuries of European and American history, the reader is even regaled with a fine discussion of the introduction of “Western Civ” courses at American universities in the wake of World War I, of which Columbia University's famed “Contemporary Civilization,” better known as “CC,” was a leading representative (and remains to this day this writer's most important intellectual experience in life).

And now to the flaws: Bottom line, while I certainly can see that “rhetoric deployments” play a role in political outcomes, shape agendas, and influence players, Jackson's story in no way alters my belief that interests matter much more greatly than does rhetoric. In other words, I do not see any evidence why the many extant Marxist interpretations of West Germany's so-called reconstruction—or indeed liberal as well as other explanations featuring structures and politics as conventionally understood—have been rendered invalid by Jackson's insisting on a conceptual primacy or even a rhetorical sleight of hand around the notion of “the West.” His rendering the Germans as equal partners to the Americans (and presumably the French and British, about whom we read far too little though they, too, presumably are parts of the West) in the West project by introducing the concept of “Abendland”—a notion of “West” with which the Germans identified and “Western” with which they did not—begs of course the temporal question: Why only in 1945 and thereafter? What was the story before—and well after Hegel, whom Jackson features as the main conceptual bridge builder between German romanticism, certainly no friend of the West in any of its meanings, and a more rational-universalist notion common to discourse found in countries west of Germany? It is not the West that the Germans embraced after World War II. Indeed, as public opinion data clearly reveal, the Western powers were seen as occupiers and were disdained, except less than other options, particularly the primacy of the Soviets. Indeed, by barely mentioning any interaction between the Soviets and the Germans, and the Soviets and the Western Allies, Jackson's story remains seriously one-sided and conceptually incomplete.

“American exceptionalism,” to many of us political sociologists, has nothing to do with the normative notion of America being singularly wonderful, and everything with the major shortcoming of never having a viable socialism/social democracy/communism in the history of this country's political, social, and economic development. Lastly, by using terms such as “occidentalism,” “occidentalizing,” and “occidentalized” throughout the book, Jackson reveals a normative bent that I would have preferred he lay bare and render explicit. For it is clear that he does not mean this term the way Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit in their book Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies (2004) do (Jackson, incidentally, never mentions their book). Instead, following Edward Said—whose widely known concept of “orientalism” denotes a false, illegitimate, and distorted view by the West (most particularly the French and the British, with the Germans nary mentioned) to exert its illegitimate power over the peoples of the Middle East—Jackson's “occidentalism” has similarly sinister intentions and undesirable qualities. Except that it appears to be self-imposed, since its real mission—other than those of an undesirable domination—remains unclear throughout the book.