Having first made his mark as a scholar of the military industrial complex in the United States, Kurth emerged as a theoretician of industrial cycles and political change in Eastern Europe challenging the theories of Raymond Aron and Ernest Geilner. In the late 1970’s Aron and Geilner had fought over the prospects for future liberalization of the Soviet Union. Geilner argued that a yuppified stratum of bureaucrats would carry out reform of the system; Aron countered that the nomenclature would resist all change. In 1979, Kurth supplied a more sophisticated theory of liberalization, showing how the transition from heavy industry such as steel to the production of consumer durables including electronics and computers would escalate pressures for a less heavy handed and authoritarian mode of rule. In retrospect, he produced one of the few alternatives to the widely accepted cliché of Reaganism that only a massive increase in defense spending produced the collapse of communism.

Kurth’s contribution to Mediterranean Paradoxes builds on his earlier work and compares transitions to democracy in Southern and Eastern Europe. His essay is weighty and full of current significance, and those Poles and Hungarians who have made pilgrimages to Rome and Madrid in the hope of finding the road to democracy would do well to read it. Kurth argues that the Italian model of political economy is more relevant to Central and Eastern Europe than the Anglo American institutions and shock therapy nostrums pedaled in Washington and by the likes of Harvard’s jet setting Jeffrey Sacks.

Unlike Kurth who is known for his focus on Europe, Petras made his mark as a prolific commentator on Latin America. In the 1980’s, however, he became more outspoken on politics in Southern Europe. His hostile critiques of “Club Mediterranée” Socialism attracted attention in Madrid’s leading newspaper El Pais and among circles close to Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou. Over the years, I have witnessed my share of Greek cabinet and public officials on leave at Harvard and MIT variously chuckling and churning in rage at Petras’s condemnations of Socialist capitulation to capitalism and electoral expediency. Mediterranean Paradoxes provides an ample dosage of Petras’s vitriolic attack on the Southern European political class, with Spain’s Felipe Gonzalez standing out as the most shamelessly aggrandizing figure of the lot. Petras portrays Gonzalez’s helmsmanship of the Spanish economy as a Thatcherite nightmare, that led to a 20 percent unemployment rate and ravenous overdevelopment of Spain’s polluted coastline. Those accustomed to the elite press in the United States which has generally cuddled Gonzalez for unleashing the magic of the free market will find Petras’s essays jarring.

If there are any shared themes between Petras and Kurth, it is their prominent distaste for the tiresome and ever-present chorus putting forth the free market as the solution to all that ails Eastern and Southern Europe. Although Kurth is apparently more appreciative of postwar Europe’s Christian Democratic legacy, they are both disillusioned by the Socialist party. Their disillusionment at times evokes Regis Debray’s recent encomium to Charles de Gaulle in his book Charles de Gaulle: Futurist of the Nation (1994) in which he declares that “In the end the big commercial bourgeoisie ‘dropped’ de Gaulle, who never made electoral capital by attacking big business. Now it lives harmoniously with Mitterrand whose mandate was to oppose it... under [Mitterrand’s] reign, money has run amok and swallowed the last islets of art, charity and sport. Under his reign, public television has been yielded up tamely to the advertising men.”

The leading Southern European Socialists-Spain’s Gonzalez, Italy’s Bettino Craxi, Portugal’s Mario Soares, and, to a lesser extent, Greece’s Papandreou-found the allures of the market too tempting to resist. The essays in presented in Mediterranean Paradoxes document the scale and scope of their retreat.

In his essay Kurth shows the patterns and similarities in the societies of Southern Europe since the age of Napoleon. Influenced by economic historians Alexander Gerschenkron and Albert O. Hirsch Mann, he distinguishes between early industrializers (Britain), late industrializers (Germany, Russia, and Japan), and late late industrializers (Latin America and Southern Europe). He points out that in most of Southern Europe the landed elite’s dominance over the industrial bourgeois classes lasted well into the twentieth century. Their combined support for high tariffs protected agriculture and small scale manufacturing enterprise. The elites proved receptive to hierarchical order. The peasantry and working classes, on the other hand, were more responsive to anarchism than the pro socialist proletariat lodged in Northern Europe’s large scale industry. “Late late industrialization” led to roughly similar political configurations throughout Mediterranean Europe for the second half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries. Kurth argues that the Allied occupation after World War II represented the breach in this remarkable convergence, as postwar Italy and Greece took a detour from Spain and Portugal’s dictatorial orders.

In an essay on postwar Italy, Sydney University’s Diarmuid Maguire sketches Italy’s shift from relative poverty to a nation wealthier than Great Britain. Maguire argues that in the 1980’s, a tradition of high domestic savings, restrictions on real estate speculation, and popular distrust of the stock market helped Italy escape the worst effects of the “casino economy” of Thatcher and Reagan. And yet, Italy’s new affluence also made its political system long due for an overhaul.

Petras writing about Greece and Ronald Chilcote about Portugal show how the Socialist parties accommodated themselves to capitalism. Maguire tells the story of the Italian PCIMPDS shrinking its traditional hammer and sickle so that it is now dwarfed by the symbol of an oak tree and the PSI abandoning the hammer and sickle for a pink carnation. The preference for symbols of nature over those of production indicates the abandonment of the old working class in favor of postmortem politics. In the book’s finale, Kurth shows how Southern Europe has many lessons for post Cold War Central and Eastern Europe. He suggests that post Communist countries might do better to ignore their Gucci loafered UPS economic consultants and advocates of UPS style constitutions. Kurth remarks that they should instead look at European alternatives that would be more harmonious with their cultural and religious heritage-what he calls “the mixed economy, Italian style.”

For those needing a quick introduction to the main historical literature on the region, the annotated bibliography at the end of the book is a valuable resource. Readers are also advised to take up John Trumpbour’s brief but incisive preface to the collection. Underlining the major themes touched on by Petras and Kurth, Trumpbour identifies the sociological transformations of Mediterranean Europe and the desires for modernization that led the Club Med Socialists to hitch the region’s wagon to the European Union.

Kurth and Petras’s collection does have some soft spots. For example, there are snarls of contempt for the media-induced political circus of the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Yet, Maguire’s warning about “a populist coalition of neoliberals, anti-southerners, and racists coming to power” does not yield many insights into the Silvio Berlusconi phenomenon, although the book was finished before his electoral triumph. Similarly, Petras might show greater generosity about the Socialists’ improvement of civil liberties in the region. While Gonzalez’s hands may be stained by revelations of death squad activity against the Basque ETA, Papandreou is still hailed by those formerly cowering in terror under the Colonels. His appeal has not yet faded, despite lackluster economic performance. Furthermore, Petras’s Spanish chapter, irritates with its tendency of cataloging a series of defeats for the traditional left and then ending with a lyric upsurge forecasting the revival of a militant popular movement. Petras’s politics of hope seem suffocated by a previous narrative of despair. Moreover, the decline of the Socialists has less heroic sources than the resurgence of the popular classes. The Socialist parties depended on charismatic leaders virtually all of whom have failed to groom successors, and they have weak support among the generational cohort aged 18 35 years who are too young to have painful memories of fascism.

Petras’s chapter on Greece is more convincing in so far as it spells out the vices of the Greek middle classes and the obstacles they pose for any government committed to progressive social change. Written with Athens based researchers Evangelos Raptis and Sergio Sarafopoulos, Petras observes that few among Greece’s new middle classes questioned the need for public controls and expenditures. Indeed, the polluted air, unpaved suburban sidewalks, and chaotic educational structures helped inspire in them a vague demand for change, so long as they did not have to foot the bill for the necessary modernization. The shirking of responsibility was manifest in a sort of pseudo-radicalism purveyed by PASOK in the 1970’s which pointed to the upper classes without recognizing that even the confiscation of all their wealth would not begin to make a dent on the investment needs of the public sector. “Nourished on the myth of being an outsider...it perceived and aggressively presented any serious revenue raising by the state as an attack on the people.” This blindness on the part of the new middle class virtually precluded the bourgeois republic from establishing itself on the same social content as the postwar regimes of Northern Europe.

All in all, Mediterranean Paradoxes supplies a learned and provocative introduction to modern Southern Europe. Its scowls of disapproval for the political caste and its new middle class supporters are tempered by a recognition that Anglo American solutions are hardly the answer to the political problems of our time. And, to evoke James Kurth’s conclusion, “Talleyrand and Metternich move over-Europe no longer stops at the Pyrenees Southern Europe is not beyond the pale of civilization!”