In How Patriotic Is the Patriot Act? Amitai Etzioni analyzes the United States response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, from the perspective of “responsive” or “new” communitarianism. New communitarianism, according to the author, can be distinguished from authoritarian communitarianism because it seeks a balance between freedom and security or social order (pp. 3–4). According to Etzioni, during the 1960s and 1970s, America “overcorrected” for forms of authoritarian government, such as racial segregation or J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation. As a result, the country experienced “excessive individualism” and “moral anomie.” With what he considers to have been an overemphasis on individual rights, certain policies, such as the possibility of a quarantine in the face of bioterrorism or highly communicable disease, have been “stigmatized” as being “beyond the pale” of reasonable discussion (pp. 87–89). By noting, for example, that the United States has allowed for quarantines at earlier junctures in its history and that a quarantine could be set up on a vacation island, he is clearly trying to rehabilitate the quarantine as a policy option. But this is just one policy among many that are emerging post–September 11 in the United States that are correcting the balance between liberty and security, for Etzioni. That is, he understands policies such as the USA Patriot Act, US VISIT (U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indication Technology program), CAPPS II (a proposed measure to update the current Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System (CAPPS) airline security program that was subsequently killed in the summer of 2004 because of its burden on civil liberties), national identification cards, and various biometric and facial recognition technologies to be relocating a balance between freedom and security that was apparently lost in the 1960s and 1970s.

In Chapter I, the author argues against those who are concerned that the U.S. response to September 11 is undermining democracy. Although the Weimar Republic is the only case that he considers at any length, he contends that once firmly established, democracies are rarely lost and that when they are undermined (the Weimar example), it is because they did not provide an adequate response to a new challenge. When levels of fear rise with the appearance of a new threat and government reacts firmly to them, fear is eased and support for further actions diminishes; using polling data, Etzioni also finds that support for constitutional democracy is thereby sustained rather than undermined (p. 14).

In Chapters 2 though 5, Etzioni describes a number of policy responses to September 11, as well as a number of technologies that, in his view, are promising possibilities for enhancing collective security. With few exceptions, this section of the book provides an up-to-date overview of a variety of policies and technologies that seek to gather data or to track persons. (Congress passed the Real ID Act after the book was published by tacking it onto “must pass” legislation authorizing money for the Iraq war; as noted, CAPPS II was ultimately rejected, while the reauthorization, amendment, or sunset of various provisions of the USA Patriot Act is under discussion as of this writing). Against those who are concerned that the government will collect too much data on its people, Etzioni claims that as data collection becomes more reliable, less data will need to be collected and that therefore, persons' privacy will be enhanced by these new technologies and policies (although the programs and technologies he considers do not seem to be substitutes for existing programs but, rather, complements to extend existing technologies and databases).

Chapter 6 argues that nation building, democratization, and economic reconstruction—policies the United States claims to be pursuing in Afghanistan and Iraq—are more difficult than currently recognized; hence, such policies are likely to fail. Deliberate social change is “unnatural” and “difficult to achieve” (p. 133). Because political and economic development is based in culture, which is, in turn, “embedded in personalities” (p. 142), societies are resistant to purposive attempts to change them. Therefore, the author advocates a “restrained approach” that would vaccinate, feed, and educate children while supporting “pacification” to prevent genocides. This approach would not dress these minimal efforts up as something they are not (i.e., they are not democracy per se) and otherwise would “let ‘nature’ take its course” (p. 148). It is unclear how this chapter fits with the others. There is no conclusion.

We have reason to question Etzioni's assumption that post–September 11 policies represent the country's finding a balance between freedom and security. In a section entitled “Crime Rates and Liberty,” he applies his model to developments beyond the emotional example of September 11 by describing crime legislation passed in the 1990s as a similar response to fear that adjusted the earlier “overcorrection” in favor of individual rights (pp. 22–24). His complacent assumption that government will not seek political advantage through the manipulation of fear is contradicted by Katherine Beckett's Making Crime Pay (1997). Beckett's careful empirical study of the relationship among crime rates, public perception of crime, and congressional legislation finds that there is not a correlation between crime rates and crime legislation, and she further finds that public opinion on the crime issue follows, rather than leads, legislative initiatives. In other words, politicians have found the crime issue useful for electoral purposes.

Set in this empirical context, we might want more than Etzioni's assurance that the country is striking the right balance between freedom and security (the book gives us no principles by which to define the proper balance, absent his opinions) and instead seek structural checks on governmental power, either from legislation or congressional oversight, or from courts to prevent tyranny and to protect rights. Etzioni realizes that the executive branch is virtually unchecked in its war on terror, and he believes that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which in its history has denied only one of thousands of requests by executive branch officials for “spy warrants” not subject to the Fourth Amendment, provides an ample check on executive branch overreaching (p. 70). The ultimate source of accountability for the author is public trust in the government, despite the fact that he concedes the public cannot be informed about all the details of the “protective technologies” (those who distrust the government should either “move to another country or fight for an entirely new political system,” p. 75). Scholars concerned about the constitutional implications of the USA Patriot Act, rule changes within the executive branch that make it easier to spy, or the apparent use of spy warrants to circumvent the Fourth Amendment will have to look elsewhere (see, e.g., Kim Lane Scheppele, “Law in a Time of Emergency,” Journal of Constitutional Law 6 [May 2004]: 1–75).

From Empire to Community applies Etzioni's communitarianism to the field of international relations and asks whether a new global architecture might be created out of the current American semiempire (as he notes, the United States has an armed presence in 170 out of 200 countries). The answer the book gives is that this is a real possibility, as the world is evolving toward a global synthesis and, ultimately, toward one global nation. Etzioni groups cultures into two opposed categories—the East and the West. What is occurring globally, according to the author, is that Eastern societies are becoming more Westernized, and, in response to September 11, Western societies are becoming more Easternized as they become more oriented to security than to individual rights. This process is producing, according to Part I of the book, a “global synthesis.”

Readers familiar with the more philosophically rigorous communitarianism of Charles Taylor may wonder whether this counts as any synthesis at all. If the capacity to exercise the freedom to choose one thing over another is given by the community that has constituted one's self—one must have substantive grounds to choose one thing over another, and these grounds are completely lacking in an “abstract” self; hence, an abstract self philosophically lacks any reason to choose one thing over another—then there are an infinite number of ways that freedom and solidarity might be synthesized, depending upon the values that constitute the grounds of synthesis. Nor would it take much creativity to conceive of conflicting syntheses constituted from the cultural values of this world.

While Etzioni imagines that this synthesis might emerge through moral dialogues, a number of theorists, such as Chantal Mouffe or Jodi Dean, have made powerful criticisms against this model of politics (Etzioni does not acknowledge this massive critical literature), and these would have to be addressed before a reader could be persuaded of a global consensus emerging through dialogue. Indeed, the polling data that Etzioni cites elsewhere in the book showing worldwide condemnation of the U.S. invasion of Iraq—even within U.S. allies (cf. p. 98)—as well as unfortunate remarks from President George W. Bush describing the “war on terror” as a “crusade,” or a general's description of this effort as a battle against “Satan” (p. 91), all raise serious questions regarding Etzioni's claims for synthesis or consensus. Indeed, the slowness of the United Nations that leads him to consider humanitarian interventions that have not been approved by the UN, or that lead him to suggest that it might be easier to create a new global governing body than to change the UN, might be a result of real political differences that would mean any alternative to the UN would be far more coercive than the present arrangement (impose “consensus”), not truly global (create “consensus” through exclusion), or just as bedeviled by disagreement as the UN is. Finally, there is an equally massive critical literature that questions the usefulness of an East versus the West analytic that social scientists have relied upon in the past (cf. Thomas Gossett's Race: The History of an Idea [1965] or Edward Said's Orientalism [1978]).

Part II constitutes the most interesting part of the book. Here, Etzioni discusses the “antiterrorism coalition.” He describes how 50 nations provide intelligence to the United States and arrest terror suspects at the behest of the country, and how many nations have harmonized changes in domestic laws and have interrogated suspects. The U.S.-led antiterrorism coalition acts as a “world-wide agency, as if it were some kind of global Interpol” (p. 105). Etzioni claims (p. 106) that this coalition has achieved a “fair level of institutionalization” and is a “new global architecture” or “de facto Global Antiterrorism Authority” (GAA) that now serves more than just U.S. interests. (He notes that it also serves the interests of Russia, China, Egypt, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka, all of whom are “also threatened by radical Islamic groups,” p. 107.) This GAA is an example of the East working with the West, and in the future it may take on further responsibilities by evolving into a Global Safety Authority (GSA) that might engage in humanitarian interventions or social missions that go “beyond law and order” (p. 165).

Documenting a growing institutionalization of “antiterrorism” laws and structures in a careful, empirical way would have made for a fascinating book in its own right, and one wishes that Etzioni had chosen this more modest yet potentially significant task. Such a study might have engaged with other recent international relations scholarship that also documents a growing institutionalization of interstate regimes but differs over whether this demonstrates imperialistic power enforced by a dominant state or if this indicates the emergence of an entirely new global form of sovereignty. (Compare Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, “Retrieving the Imperial,” Millenium 31 [no. 1, 2002]: 109–27, with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 2000.) At times provocative, From Empire to Community ranges widely, but sacrifices scholarly depth for breadth.