National Purpose in the World Economy: Post-Soviet States in Comparative Perspective (Cornell Studies in Political Economy)

Rating:
Summary: Winner of the 2003 AAASS Marshall Shulman Book Prize
Review: 2002 Marshall Shulman Book Prize sponsored by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University is awarded annually by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) for an outstanding monograph on the international behavior of the countries of the former communist bloc.
The award committee wrote:
In National Purpose in the World Economy: Post-Soviet States in Comparative Perspective, Rawi Abdelal combines considerable theoretical sophistication with extraordinarily in-depth empirical grounding. Asking how states develop foreign economic policy in the aftermath of imperial domination, Abdelal builds a new approach distinct from the dominant realist and liberal paradigms within the field of International Political Economy. He argues that neither statist realism nor economic liberalism captures the importance of national identity, and he demonstrates the power of his nationalist approach by comparing the foreign economic policies developed by Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His rich case studies are based on extensive interviewing with the key actors. Finally, lest the readers believe the argument is relevant only to the experience of post-Soviet states, Abdelal concludes with additional evidence from the experience of post-Habsburg Eastern Europe, 1950s Indonesia, and 1960s French West Africa. In this outstanding book, Abdelal makes a major contribution to the fields of post-Soviet studies and international political economy.
The 2002 Marshall Shulman Book Prize was awarded during the AAASS National Convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 23, 2002 at the Saturday Reception and Awards Presentation.