Whose World Order? Russia's Perception of American Ideas After the Cold War

Extract

Whose World Order? Russia's Perception of American Ideas After the Cold War. By Andrei P. Tsygankov. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 224p. $45.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

One consequence of the end of the Cold War has been the muddling of boundaries between Russian and Western, notably American, scholars. In my own experience, this has been all to the good. Social scientists at the University of Michigan have had, for instance, an ongoing relationship with their counterparts at the European University in Saint Petersburg (EUSP) for many years now. In our meetings, the distinctions between the Self and the Other (to use the constructivist jargon favored by Andrei P. Tsygankov in the book under review) have often been rather arbitrary. The intellectual divide we have most frequently encountered has been between those of us, Russians and Americans, who attach relatively greater weight to the role of culture and those for whom institutions matter more, a divide that separates us more by disciplinary background than by citizenship or where we teach.