This edited volume addresses a question of great interest to scholars working at the intersection of international and comparative politics: What influence does culture exert over a state's foreign policy? In seeking to provide answers, the book focuses on the foreign policies of the states of the greater Caspian region during the first decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In addition to an introductory overview and conclusion by the editor, the book contains two primarily theoretical chapters that explore in greater depth the relationship between culture and foreign policy, and seven primarily empirical chapters. Five involve case studies of Central Asia, Iran (the subject of two chapters), Afghanistan under the Taliban, and Pakistan, and two explore cultural influences on U.S. foreign policy.

The overall conclusion of the volume is that cultural interests are promoted only where material costs are few or when the material trade-offs are unknown to decision makers. Thus, the amount of information that decision makers possess about the consequences of policy actions will impact the degree to which culture influences foreign policy (pp. 326–27). This conclusion is supported by numerous findings from the empirical cases. As the editor summarizes, “The emerging foreign policies of the Caspian states … all provide a significant challenge to the culturalist argument…. [C]ulture seems to give us little explanation for the foreign policies of these states” (p. 7). Particular emphasis is placed on the failure of culture to account for coalition and alliance choices: “The coalitions formed in the Caspian region were not determined by shared cultural or religious affiliations, and cultural differences did not prevent the creation of the most interesting bedfellows” (p. 330).

The volume has several strengths. While some examinations of the influence of culture on foreign policy have focused on just one or two countries, the inclusion of a number of cases potentially permits multiple tests and the cumulation of findings across disparate circumstances. At the same time, the book places special emphasis on several most likely cases, self-proclaimed Islamic republics, which may facilitate the evaluation of cultural arguments. It also goes beyond empirical description and theoretical analysis to explore the policy implications of its findings. Perhaps the volume's greatest contribution, however, is contained in the detailed examinations of states in a poorly understood region that has assumed heightened strategic significance since the end of the cold war. Those interested in the external behavior of the countries of the broader Caspian region may find this book particularly useful.

Nevertheless, the book does little to advance the more general debate among political scientists about the impact of culture on foreign policy. This limitation becomes apparent at the outset, when the introductory chapter presents the existing scholarly literature in oversimplified and somewhat misleading terms. The editor's observation that in “the second half of the twentieth century, culture became a mainstream explanation in international relations theory of states' foreign policy” (p. 8) overlooks the fact that cultural arguments were almost completely out of fashion during the 1970s and especially the 1980s, following the advent of neorealism. Although it is true that cultural explanations achieved a new prominence beginning in the 1990s, the chapter fails to distinguish between the contributions of constructivism, which emphasizes broad social structures that shape and reshape the identities and interests of actors, typically in similar ways, and those of the revival and refinement of more traditional cultural approaches, which stress the distinct and often enduring cultural attributes of states and substate actors.

More substantively, the volume suffers from four weaknesses that limit its ability to contribute to the debate. The first is its very conceptualization of culture. On the one hand, it may be too broad and undifferentiated, lumping together as it does a number of distinct ideational phenomena—culture, religion, ethnicity, history, civilization, and ideology—that might arguably benefit from separate treatment. After all, these features of a society do not always offer identical prescriptions, and one might reasonably ask about the circumstances in which one or another might be expected to influence foreign policy.

On the other hand, the volume's conceptual scope is arguably too narrow, neglecting other clearly cultural phenomena. It contains little or no mention of political culture, national security culture, and organizational culture, all of which have figured prominently in the new culturalist literature. And the editor explicitly excludes the concept of strategic culture because “it is neither a form of culture nor is it a source of a collective's identity” (p. 2, n. 3), a view that is unlikely to command a wide following.

In practice, moreover, much of the focus of the volume is on officially articulated state culture. This may be a legitimate and interesting topic of inquiry, but it cannot do justice to the subject of culture as a whole. These forms of culture are likely to be the least deeply rooted and most subject to opportunistic manipulation. Thus, one should not be surprised to find that they exert little influence over foreign policy.

A second weakness is the volume's generally simplistic view of the potential relationship between culture and foreign policy. Although more nuanced treatments can be found here and there, especially in the theoretical chapters by Markus Fischer and Douglas Blum, the hypothesized impact of culture is largely limited to providing goals and interests. But culture can influence foreign policy in other ways. For example, it can shape the worldviews of decision makers. It can determine which options they see as available and appropriate. And it can color their assessments of the likely consequences of different actions.

One consequence of this limited theoretical understanding is the volume's tendency to draw a sharp distinction between a state's cultural and material interests. This practice ascribes an objective quality to material interests that is rarely, if ever, present. To the contrary, it is much more common now to think of culture and ideas more generally as shaping leaders' interpretations of the material world, often with major implications for policy. Even when a state's survival is clearly at stake, culture can determine what alternative strategies are imagined and influence the choices made among them.

The paucity of detailed culturalist hypotheses is paralleled by a third weakness: the absence of any controlling methodological framework for evaluating the influence of culture. As a result, the findings from the individual chapters do not readily cumulate. As the editor notes, “the contributing authors presented different approaches to the question of the impact of culture on foreign policy” (p. 325). In principle, the use of disparate methods can increase the plausibility of a consistent set of findings. Unless carefully supervised, however, it is more likely to prevent a systematic, in-depth examination.

Finally, the choice of cases, because of their temporal and spatial limitations, is not optimal for drawing broad conclusions about the influence of culture, and even of Islam more narrowly, on foreign policy. The cases are not broadly representative in at least three respects. First, they exclude many regions of the Muslim world, including Arabia, North Africa, and Southeast Asia, which are characterized by very different histories, ethnicities, and cultures. Second, while it is important to develop a better understanding of the states of the Caspian and Central Asia, many of these are small, new, and weak states that have been preoccupied to an unusual extent with their own survival. Third, the restrictive time frame precludes the detailed examination of cases in which, at least the conventional wisdom suggests, countries acted against their material interests, such as Iran immediately after the revolution.

In sum, The Limits of Culture should be of interest to those who wish to gain a deeper understanding of the foreign policies of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries of the greater Caspian region. Despite its title, however, it contributes little to our understanding of the broader issue of whether, how, when, and how much culture shapes the external behavior of states.