In his book, Jonathan Paquin aims to explain US government decisions to recognize and not to recognize secessionist states. He justifies a focus on recognition specifically rather than “support” more generally on the grounds that, for the globe's sole remaining superpower, recognizing a state entails ongoing diplomatic ties and requires some degree of commitment to helping the new state maintain its independence against potential enemies. Using the framework of “defensive positionalist realism,” Paquin argues that the US government takes a pessimistic view of changes in the international environment and seeks to minimize rather than to exploit “stability gaps” in the state system (pp. 28–29). Consequently, the US government has maintained a generally antisecessionist stance on recognition. Nevertheless, when circumstances are such that recognizing the seceding state is more likely to create regional stability than withholding recognition, the US decides to recognize the new state.

The sketch of the argument is as follows: If a central government successfully maintains stability, whether through repression or liberality, or makes a good-faith effort to restore stability by negotiating with secessionists, the US government opposes secession. If the preceding conditions do not hold, and the seceding state demonstrates its ability to maintain external and internal stability, then the US government recognizes the seceding state; otherwise, it does not (p. 45). Alternative hypotheses considered at length are that ethnic lobby strength determines US recognition policy and that US business interests guide State Department decision making. (Paquin more summarily rejects several other hypotheses for which there is readily available contrary evidence: weakening threatening powers, supporting secessionists in weaker states, maintaining a consistent antisecession norm, and supporting the side with whom there is a greater “civilizational tie” [p. 27].)

The author tests the argument by means of controlled case comparisons on separatist movements in the former Yugoslavia and in the Horn of Africa (Eritrea, Somaliland). Fluctuations in the relative abilities of central states and secessionist rebels to guarantee stability provide within-case variance that he is able to exploit. Additionally, he provides some “process tracing” evidence from declassified diplomatic cables and analyses and from interviews with policymakers to support the argument.

The evidence largely supports the argument. Paquin persuasively shows that the United States withheld recognition from Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia until April 1992 for fear that premature recognition would encourage interethnic violence and concomitant, destabilizing refugee flows in the latter two countries. At the same time, the United States chose to recognize Bosnia earlier than did the European Union precisely to discourage a Serbian invasion. On the other hand, the US government waited to accord Macedonia full recognition for fear that it would provoke tension or even conflict with Greece. Once the United States did recognize Macedonia (as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM) in 1994, the powerful Greek-American lobby was unable to persuade the US government to reverse its decision. In 2004, the Bush administration recognized the state under the name Republic of Macedonia against strenuous objections from the government of Greece, in order to reward the new government for following through on a controversial decentralization plan intended to settle an Albanian insurgency.

The case that does not fit the argument well is Somaliland. By 2001, Somaliland had established a stable, democratic, federal government at peace with its neighbors, a comparative bright spot in a war-ravaged, anarchic country. Still, the United States withheld recognition, and the evidence shows little internal debate at the State Department on the matter. Paquin appeals to a “Somalia aversion” dating to 1993's Battle of Mogadishu as the main reason for the US government's lack of interest (pp. 164–65). However, this explanation strikes me as ad hoc, and an alternative explanation—appeasing the antisecessionist African Union (formerly OAU, Organization of African Unity)—suggests itself from the interview evidence: “Former assistant secretary of state Cohen reached a similar conclusion [that recognizing Somaliland would yield more costs than benefits for the United States]: ‘The OAU cooperates with us in anti-terrorism and in all sorts of economic issues. If you weigh all that against getting them upset about Somaliland, on balance it's not worth it’” (p. 167).

Indeed, the United States has proven itself to be remarkably sensitive to the demands of friendly countries in several recognition controversies studied in this book. EU recognition of Slovenia and Croatia arguably made the US decision a foregone conclusion. More dramatically, Greece's intransigence over Macedonia's name is the only reasonable explanation for delayed recognition of that country. If the US government thought that recognizing Bosnia would deter Serbian invasion, surely it should have reasoned the same about recognizing Macedonia to deter Greek attack. The key to the inconsistency must lie in the greater sensitivity of the United States to some states' demands than to those of others.

Along the same lines, the author could have done a bit more to distance the book from a purely functionalist account of US foreign policy, which the conclusion seems to endorse at times: “From the Balkans to the Horn of Africa, the American government chose the option that provided the most stable outcome, depending on the profile and on the evolution of each secessionist crisis…. If we focus only on the results, the US approach seems inconsistent, but if we pay attention to the process, or to the causal mechanisms leading to these outcomes, the United States has been consistent through time” (p. 183). But, of course, the mere fact that the United States sought to increase regional stability does not mean that it always succeeded. American perceptions of stability were surely themselves informed by high politics. For instance, the Contact Group's ruling out any partition of Kosovo—despite the Serbian government's expressed willingness to negotiate Kosovo secession under such conditions—essentially predetermined bargaining failure and ongoing international tension over the issue. One does not ensure bargaining success by winnowing issues down to a single dimension over which any conceivable distribution will be zero sum for the parties involved! There is a reason why the United States never adopted a remotely similar stance to stranded Serb minorities in Croatia and Bosnia, even though those controversies—particularly in Bosnia—continue to threaten regional stability.

Despite these quibbles of evidentiary interpretation, A Stability-Seeking Power deserves to be read as the first systematic empirical test of competing explanations for US recognition policy in secessionist crises. Its argument that the United States sees these crises primarily from the perspective of regional political stability as the highest good is clearly and compellingly developed.