One consequence of the end of the Cold War has been the muddling of boundaries between Russian and Western, notably American, scholars. In my own experience, this has been all to the good. Social scientists at the University of Michigan have had, for instance, an ongoing relationship with their counterparts at the European University in Saint Petersburg (EUSP) for many years now. In our meetings, the distinctions between the Self and the Other (to use the constructivist jargon favored by Andrei P. Tsygankov in the book under review) have often been rather arbitrary. The intellectual divide we have most frequently encountered has been between those of us, Russians and Americans, who attach relatively greater weight to the role of culture and those for whom institutions matter more, a divide that separates us more by disciplinary background than by citizenship or where we teach.

Tsygankov himself represents an example of such blurring of boundaries. He was trained in Moscow and the United States and now teaches here. But his Whose World Order? tells a much different story from that recounted in the previous paragraph. Rather, it is a story in which ethnocentrism, realism, and cosmopolitanism as exemplified by the writings of Francis Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington have had profoundly deleterious affects on U.S.–Russian relations. Fukuyama's “end of history” thesis and Huntington's “clash of civilizations” thesis, Tsygankov argues, shaped the Russian elite dialogue about Russia's relations with the West and about its own internal evolution in ways that have had adverse consequences for Russian–American relations and for the flourishing of Western values in Russia. He recognizes there are others (e.g., p. 129) who must share some of the blame for the deterioration of Russian–American relations in the years following those immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, to the stock Russian question, Kto vinovat? (Who is to blame?)—in this instance, for the precipitous decline in favorable views about the United States and its foreign policy among Russian elites in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union—a substantial part of his answer is that Fukuyama and Huntington are the culprits.

Two things are at the basis of this conclusion. The first is his reading of the Russian commentary about both the clash-of-civilizations and the end-of-history arguments. His account of that commentary is plausible enough. But this depiction of the Russian dialogue is then followed by some inferential leaps that are really quite startling and a normative critique of Fukuyama's and Huntington's work that most readers, I suspect, will find ultimately unpersuasive, even if they, like me, find the evidentiary basis for both the clash-of-civilization and end-of-history theses quite dubious. Thus, he asserts that “to the extent that the ‘end of history’ and ‘clash of civilizations’ theses were involved in Russia's domestic intellectual developments, their authors are responsible for the rise of Russian discourses of isolation and anti-Western hostility” (p. 129). That is pretty stern stuff, especially if Huntington's and Fukuyama's writings are placed on a scale that includes other real world examples of insensitivity to Russian concerns on the part of U.S. and International Monetary Fund policymakers, along with a litany of ways that Russian economic and political developments in the 1990s contributed to the tarnishing of Western ideas.

The second element underlying Tsygankov's conclusion is his communitarian belief that “the central moral lesson of Fukuyama's and Huntington's engagements with Russia is that an intellectual is responsible for how his or her ideas are perceived outside the idea's immediate cultural context” (p. 129). From this premise, he argues that culturally sensitive scholarship that is multidisciplinary and epistemologically pluralistic rather than privileging a single discipline or epistemology, that is cross-cultural and politically diverse, and that entails “globally oriented” rather than “locally oriented” policy prescriptions is to be preferred (p. 131).

At some level, such propositions are unexceptional; my colleague Scott Page is one of those who has shown most rigorously the gains from diversity (“Problem Solving by Heterogeneous Agents,” Journal of Economic Theory 97 [2001]: 123–63, with Lu Hong). At the same time, it pays to remember some propositions that may get lost in our quest for cultural sensitivity. Not all epistemologies are created equal; there is a there there. Sometimes multidisciplinarity is a cover for lack of rigor. Occasionally, even, responsible decision makers are morally justified in advocating positions that preference intense local feelings over generalized global beliefs. That being said, it is to Tsygankov's credit that he has reminded us that what we do as scholars sometimes has far-reaching effects and is urging us to be mindful of the consequences of our actions.