Petar Popović

Popović, Petar

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164in Bosnia-Herzegovina; a focus on a few sites of memory or a stricter chronologi-cal framework would have strengthened the author’s arguments.As mentioned earlier, the book suffers from the lack of a more cohesive theoreti-cal approach which could have been laid out in an introductory and comparative chapter. Moreover, despite being inhe-rently comparative because of its analy-sis of three ex-Yugoslav countries, there is little reference to comparative memory politics in other parts of Europe. For ex-ample, Govedarica’s discussion of the im-pact of the Škorpioni video depicting the murders of Bosniak civilians could have parallels with the role of documentaries and ﬁ lms in opening the dark sides of the World War Two past in Western European countries in the 1960s and 1970s. There is also considerable room for comparative analysis with other former communist countries and how their memory politics differ from or resemble those in the Yugo-slav successor states, especially the Baltic countries or Hungary which are also deal-ing with the legacies of fascist collabora-tors up to the present day. While the chap-ter on Serbia brings up the role of victims (and auto-victimization) in the discourse of the past, a greater emphasis and reﬂ ec-tion on this phenomenon throughout the book would have represented a signiﬁ -cant contribution to the ﬁ eld. Despite a few rough edges, the volume is a valuable addition to the body of work dealing with the culture of memory in the former Yu-goslavia, and one hopes a starting point for further research endeavors.Vjeran PavlakovićUniversity of RijekaReviewVéronique Pin-FatUniversality, Ethics and International Relations: a Grammatical Reading Routledge, London and New York, 2010, 157 pp.The book Universality, Ethics and Inter-national Relations: a Grammatical Read-ing by Véronique Pin-Fat presents an in-teresting hermeneutical journey into the unsolvable philosophical issue of ethics and universal human rights in global poli-tics. Thus, for students of International Relations theory (especially the norma-tive wing dealing with ethics in IR) this book is a must-read.The central theme of the book is what the author calls a “metaphysical seduc-tion” of IR scholars, who are seduced by the search for eternal universal standards of ethics. They use speciﬁ c words form-ing a distinctive grammar to explain their respective theories. It is precisely the au-thor’s intervention into these grammars that makes this book an original contri-bution to IR theory. The author tends to investigate the grammatical “digging” of IR scholars beneath the surface of the perceptive reality of international politics. In other words (as the author explains in chapter 1 relying on the interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein) the words that we use to name objects do not necessarily refer to the nature of objects themselves, Book Reviews165but rather to the meaning we subjectively give to these objects. The book concludes that the outcome is an overall failure: seeking answers to eternal questions of universal ethics remains impossible. The idea of universality remains distant – a pure object of theoretical desire.The IR scholars in question are Hans Morgenthau (a realist approach to uni-versality, chapter 3); Charles R. Beitz (a cosmopolitan approach, chapter 4); and Michael Walzer (a communitarian ap-proach, chapter 5). By focusing on these three distinctive theoretical traditions of IR theory, the author in the ﬁ nal chapter 6 concludes that there is no “common” uni-versality. Rather, we are looking at a fa-mily of different universalities. Even though this book is an important contribution to the normative study of IR theory, one critical point should be ad-dressed – the selection criterion of the three scholars. All three may come from a different theoretical tradition (realist, cosmopolitan and communitarian), how-ever, they do share the same theoretical background of the American IR science, which has often been criticized for be-ing exclusively empirical and positivis-tic. This becomes evident in chapter 2 in which the author discusses the issue of the ontological disjunction between domestic and international politics, which is spe-ciﬁ c for the American scientiﬁ c culture in IR. It would have been interesting to see how the author explains the “metaphysi-cal seduction” of Hedley Bull (or R.J. Vincent for that matter) and the overall English School’s “Grotian tradition” (i.e. Bull’s concept of an “international socie-ty of states”, which explicitly emphasizes the dominant role of the “whole” (norms, values, culture) over its “parts” (the sta-tes)). The “divine universality” of Morgenthau the author locates in his separation of thought (via contemplative) and action (via active). This distinction in Mor-genthau’s work is synthesized through what he calls a “creative middle” – a mid-dle between the will to live (actual) and the will to know (divine). In the context of IR, the creative middle reﬂ ects society’s effort in acquiring metaphysical know-ledge of morals and applying them in real world politics. For Morgenthau, gaining such divine knowledge means knowing how to formulate “national interests”. This is the part in Morgenthau’s grammar where the author objects. The national in-terest of the state is prone to change, so the question remains – how can the universal moral standard, eternal by its nature, be applied to the politics in the speciﬁ c place and time of the “historical” state? The “cosmopolitan universality” of Be-itz, heavily reliant on John Rawls’s inﬂ u-ential book A Theory of Justice, draws an analogy between the concepts of Rawls’s intrastate distributive justice and justice in the global order. Beitz is here primarily focused on the ideal theory of cosmopoli-tan universal morality. The idea would apparently come into practice through what Beitz calls “natural duty”, which according to him states and societies are supposed to be aware of. From the analy-sis of Beitz’s work, the author located two major problems in his grammar. First, his overall emphasis on the ideal theory com-pletely rejects the non-ideal real world of politics; and secondly, Beitz does not seem to be able to bridge the gap between Politička misao, Vol. 49, No. 5, 2012, pp. 164-166166domestic and international politics. As with Morgenthau, the author seeks to ex-plain the grammatical problems of Beitz who does not overcome the disjunction in the dualistic IR picture of domestic and international politics. The third and ﬁ nal concept is the “bi-nary universality” of Walzer. This theo-retical aspect on universal ethics comes through communitarian lenses. For Wal-zer, despite his particularistic notions in IR, universality indeed exists: ﬁ rst is the “thin” universality of strangers, and se-cond is the “thick” universality of mem-bers. Basically, this binary characteris-tic of Walzer’s universality – thick and thin – refers to the question of when and how should certain countries intervene in other countries in order to preserve a just global order. What the author suggests is that Walzer’s grammar is entrapped by his own wishful thinking – his desire to fat-ten up the thin. Again, as in Morgenthau’s and Beitz’s case, it is just the theoretical desire to see a universal ethic function in a state-centered conception.By speciﬁ cally focusing on American scholarship and avoiding the international law tradition in IR, the author intention-ally does not want to enter a theoretical discussion, but narrows her study exclu-sively to “language games”. Pin-Fat con-stantly reminds us that her objective in this book is not to offer her theoretical view on the subject, not to deal with the three IR scholars intellectually and that this book is not about seeking the proper concept of universality at all. Even so, her in-depth reading of three distinct approaches offers much more to the study of ethics and uni-versality in IR than just a simple decon-struction of the grammar. By deconstruct-ing the three scholars’ metaphysics, the book opens many new perspectives. Thus, this book is at the same time satisfactory and disappointing for being too short; it should have encompassed a larger body of literature in IR scholarship.Petar PopovićUniversity of Donja GoricaReviewJon Meacham Thomas Jefferson: The Art of PowerRandom House, New York, 2012, 800 pp.Jon Meacham, author and executive edi-tor at Random House, has earned a repu-tation with books on American and British political history, which include American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation and Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his account of the life of the seventh US president American Lion: Andrew Jack-son in the White House. Although neither a historian nor a political scientist (he is a journalist with a degree in English li-terature, earned at the University of the South), Meacham has a good feel for me-ticulous archival work, but also for po-litical analysis and contextualization. His new book is a complex and profound po-litical biography of Thomas Jefferson, a man often surrounded with mystery and controversy and a political leader whose Book Reviews

Véronique Pin-Fat: Universality, Ethics and International Relations:a Grammatical Reading

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