The Political Economy of NATO: Past, Present, and into the 21st Century. By Todd Sandler and Keith Hartley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 240p. $29.95, cloth.

Abstract

This book has an admirable goal: to present policy-relevant results of past academic research to "a wide audience of students, practitioners, policy makers and researchers who want a modern treatment of NATO" (p. xii). To direct fruitfully the results of scholarly work to less academic audiences is a difficult task, because many theoretical as- sumptions and methodological issues must be skimmed over and criticisms of the work summarized or ignored. Nonethe- less, the goal is a good one, and the authors are well positioned to accomplish their purpose, which they do to a large extent. For more than two decades Todd Sandler has been the primary proponent of the "joint product" model of alliances. This model is possibly the most prominent chal- lenge to (or modification of) the public-goods approach to the study of alliances that was pioneered by Mancur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser. Keith Hartley, director of the Centre for Defence Economics at the University of York, has written extensively on defense procurement, disarmament, and conversion.