Abdelal observes that at the time of the Soviet collapse, all of the 14 smaller successor states depended heavily on Russia economically, with tightly integrated trade, energy, and monetary relations. After the political breakup, strong material incentives militated in favor of continued close economic relationships among these states. Yet one group, the Baltic states, acted against their immediate material interests by strongly reorienting themselves toward Europe and breaking key economic ties with Russia. A second group of states, most notably Belarus and Kazakhstan, scoffed at this imprudence and acted to reforge and strengthen their economic ties with Russia. Yet another group, exemplified by Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, adopted highly inconsistent and ambiguous policies in this regard.

To shed light on this phenomenon, Abdelal closely analyzes the roots of the divergent trade and monetary policies among three of these states, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. In doing so, he argues that differences in the content and contestation of these states’ national identities led them to interpret similar material circumstances in different ways, with some having viewed continuing economic dependence on Russia as a security threat while others saw it as a mutually beneficial exchange. Lithuania, in particular, was imbued with a sense of “national purpose” that led it to redirect its foreign economic policy toward Europe, despite the short-term economic costs such a policy entailed.

As such, the independent variable in this study is the collective identity of a society. Foreign economic policies will differ among postimperial states not because of power politics or material circumstances but because of contingent historical and institutional factors that cause nations to define themselves (and their “others”) in particular ways. Abdelal argues that such nationalism can give social purpose to foreign economic policy, engender societal acceptance of economic sacrifice, lengthen time horizons, and specify a direction for foreign economic policy. This “directionality,” in turn, can be both geographical and ideological. Imbued with a sense of national purpose, a former subject state such as Lithuania embraced Western Europe and capitalism as everything that its disliked “other,” Soviet Russia, was not.

Abdelal does not claim that this Nationalist approach is generalizable to all times and all places. Instead, he argues that national identities matter most in the foreign economic policymaking of postimperial states. He bolsters this contention through a deft extension of his analysis to explain foreign economic policies in interwar Eastern Europe, postcolonial Indonesia, and French West Africa. On the basis of these wide-ranging comparisons, he concludes that “the Nationalist perspective provides the best theoretical interpretation of the political economy of postimperial international relations in the twentieth century” (p. 152). He also offers the key policy insight that not all economic nationalisms are necessarily destructive or autarchic. Rather, this depends upon the content and directionality of national identity.

This book's primary contribution is theoretical. As Abdelal rightly admits, it is not empirically surprising that national identities played a central role in determining the foreign economic policies of the Soviet successor states. However, international political economy lacked the theoretical tools with which to explain this development. To fill this gap, he extends constructivist theory by conceptually splitting it into two approaches, “institutionalist” and “nationalist.” Both deal with the social construction of preferences, but on different terms. While the institutional version focuses on the role of international norms and institutions in forging state identities, the Nationalist perspective concentrates on the role of national identity in determining foreign economic policy. In short, the first approach is outsidein, while the second is inside-out. Abdelal's analysis does seem overly defensive at times, as it repeatedly points out the distinctions between his Nationalist perspective and realism, liberalism, traditional constructivism, and Samuel Huntington's “Clash of Civilizations” argument. This is understandable, though, as the book's main goal is to carve out new theoretical space.

The author's theoretical analysis reveals a solid understanding of the scholarly literatures on both international political economy and nationalism, and usefully blurs the increasingly artificial subdisciplinary distinction between international relations and comparative politics. In doing so, he persuasively demonstrates the importance of studying the specific domestic contexts in which foreign economic policies are made. Overall, this book represents a strong and persuasive critique of the “grand theorizing” prevalent in international relations scholarship, arguing that the usefulness of any individual theory depends upon the specific research question asked. Moreover, although he does not dismiss rationalist approaches as a whole, his work serves as a caution to those who would derive preferences solely from material circumstances.

Abdelal's book explicitly focuses on postimperial, reactionary economic nationalisms, and as such does not seek to explain foreign economic policies in former imperial core states, such as Russia or France, or in states well past the classical imperial experience. But by limiting his reach to postcolonial states, he has written himself into a temporal corner. Now that the last territorial empire, the Soviet Union, has dissolved, what further relevance will the Nationalist perspective have? I would suggest three possible extensions of this approach. First, it is clearly relevant to the orientation of postimperial security policies as well. Using the Nationalist perspective, one can quite accurately predict many post-Soviet states’ attitudes toward joining NATO (oriented toward the West) or the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) collective security agreement (oriented toward Russia). Second, the current static theory could be developed dynamically to incorporate the ways in which postimperial national identity changes over time, and to explain how these changes subsequently affect foreign economic policies. Finally, the Nationalist perspective could be applied toward analyses of “indirect imperialism” as well. Import substitution and the rise of dependency theory, the current backlash against economic globalization, and Third World critiques of the International Monetary Fund all arguably have some roots in nationalist sentiment. Nor is the role of nationalism in foreign economic policy limited to the developing world, as Britain's “Euroskepticism” demonstrates.

In sum, Abdelal's Nationalist perspective gives an exciting and important new twist to constructivist theory that deserves to be further explored and expanded. I highly recommend it to international relations scholars, comparativists, and policymakers alike.