In his latest book, Hendrik Spruyt returns to a long-standing debate among scholars of twentieth-century decolonization: Why did some metropolitan governments withdraw from their empires fairly quickly, while other imperial powers waged a protracted struggle to retain their overseas possessions, sacrificing men and money in the process? Spruyt not only offers a sophisticated theoretical response to a question of historical significance but also applies it to more contemporary cases of dissolution by examining the breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 independent states and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

At the core of the debate regarding territorial disengagement by twentieth-century imperial powers is an intriguing paradox. On the one hand, powers such as Britain or Russia that appeared to have obtained considerable economic and military benefits from their possessions actually withdrew promptly and without heavy bloodshed once nationalist movements emerged. On the other hand, powers such as France and Portugal that had incurred significant costs managing their empires derived little military assistance to their overall defense from colonial armies, received few economic benefits, and engaged in long, bitter, and ultimately futile wars in an effort to retain their possessions. Contrary to what realists might predict, then, metropolitan executives varied in their abilities to calculate accurately the gains and losses from empire, and consequently, they did not always act in their self-interest when deciding to resist or accept dissolution.

Although changes in the international environment clearly influence the assessments by states about their power relative to other states, as realists would expect, Spruyt argues that the solution to the puzzle of colonial retreat lies not in a realist explanation, but rather in the domestic institutional architecture of the metropolitan power. Building on the work of George Tsebelis (Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work, 1999) and others, Spruyt observes that whether imperial powers opted to withdraw or to remain rested on the degree of institutional access that “veto players” had to the metropolitan government. If institutional arrangements were such that potential hard-liners such as the military, settlers, or business had many opportunities to exercise a veto over policy changes, then it was more likely that metropolitan governments would resist demands for reform emanating from nationalists. Alternatively, if “veto points” were limited as in, for example, unitary states like Britain, then opponents would have had fewer opportunities to block policy changes and leaders would be freer to change the status quo. Institutionally fragmented states tended to produce policy stasis because those who opposed change had more chances to block reform.

Spruyt develops this argument by comparing five historical cases that vary considerably according to regime type, institutional configuration, and relative power in the international environment. He thus includes democratic (Britain, France, the Netherlands) versus authoritarian states (Portugal, Russia); single-party (Britain) versus multiparty (France, the Netherlands) parliamentary systems; hierarchical (former Soviet Union) versus corporatist (Portugal) authoritarian regimes; and major (Britain, France, Russia) versus small (the Netherlands, Portugal) powers. There is variation on the dependent variable also, from cases where states willingly dissolved their empires (Britain, Russia) to those such as France, the Netherlands, and Portugal that forcefully resisted dissolution. Spruyt acknowledges that actors' preferences clearly played a role in whether policies changed or not, but the generalizability of his claim that institutional arrangements in the metropole (or in Russia's case, the “center”) can obstruct or facilitate policy change is elegantly and powerfully demonstrated across the five cases, as well as in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Much of the literature on institutional configurations and the role of veto players has focused on single-party versus multiparty parliamentary systems or presidential versus parliamentary democracies. Ending Empire extends the analysis to authoritarian regimes such as those which prevailed in Portugal until 1974 and the former Soviet Union until 1991. Spruyt's explanation of their divergent responses to demands for change is counterintuitive, but it is plausible. Even though both regimes were undemocratic, their institutional arrangements varied considerably. The Soviet Union's more centralized system actually disintegrated faster than Portugal's more institutionally fragmented, corporatist, authoritarian system because veto players in the USSR were less able to block policy change.

Despite the elegance of its deductive logic, the explanatory framework has several shortcomings. First, some aspects of the analysis are undertheorized. Key actors (particularly proponents for change as opposed to veto players) are written out of the script because they do not fit the model. For example, the book's cover illustration (which is based on a poster of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) depicts an arm defiantly wielding a machine gun, but the book downplays the importance of liberation movements, their metropolitan supporters, their rise or decline over time, and their institutional access to political leaders. One of the justifications for the rather one-sided focus on veto players is that they are more “well-organized” (p. 268) than proponents for change, and therefore they are more successful at blocking reform in fragmented regimes. Yet if that is true, it is rather difficult to explain the fact that decolonization eventually occurred in all five cases.

Moreover, in the cases of the two authoritarian regimes, not only did the empires dissolve but also their governments disintegrated. If policy stasis sometimes produces government instability, as Tsebelis claims, then Spruyt needs to explain why both governments collapsed even though their approaches to territorial partition were so different. Of course, the explanation for collapse in the Portuguese metropole or the Soviet center cannot be pinned entirely on imperial troubles. Yet it would seem that part of the answer to the similar fates of these two regimes might be found in the way that proponents for change were able to gain more institutional access to these governments or to disable and divide veto players over time.

Lastly, for a theory that depends so completely on the historical evidence, the complexities and contradictions of historical processes are frequently sacrificed to abstract theorizing. The book is very stylized and highly selective in its use of sources. It eschews extensive inclusion of archival work and does not engage with some of the best or most recent historical studies of empire in a few of the cases. There are few sources in the French language, none in Portuguese or in Russian. In the case of Portugal, Spruyt ignored published work that might have weakened his claims, as well as material that might have strengthened them.

Ending Empire systematically explains why some imperial governments chose to maintain the status quo when confronted with nationalists' demands. The book further illustrates the versatility and flexibility of the veto points approach with regard to a variety of policy issues and within countries with different institutional arrangements. More historically grounded research is needed on the theory's generalizability to other types of regimes and on the connection between territorial policy and government stability or instability.