A new and original history of the forces that shaped the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century. For many in the West, after the two world conflicts and the long cold war, the verdict was clear: democratic values had prevailed over dictatorship. But if the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism, as many intellectuals proclaimed, why have the era’s darker impulses—ethnic nationalism, racist violence, and populist authoritarianism—revived?

The Project-State and Its Rivals offers a radical alternative interpretation that takes us from the transforming challenges of the world wars to our own time. Instead of the traditional narrative of domestic politics and international relations, Charles S. Maier looks to the political and economic impulses that propelled societies through a century when territorial states and transnational forces both claimed power, engaging sometimes as rivals and sometimes as allies. Maier focuses on recurring institutional constellations: project-states including both democracies and dictatorships that sought not just to retain power but to transform their societies; new forms of imperial domination; global networks of finance; and the international associations, foundations, and NGOs that tried to shape public life through allegedly apolitical appeals to science and ethics.

In this account, which draws on the author’s studies over half a century, Maier invites a rethinking of the long twentieth century. His history of state entanglements with capital, the decline of public projects, and the fragility of governance explains the fraying of our own civic culture—but also allows hope for its recovery.

Mexico and the United States each have a constitution and a federal system of government. This fact has led many historians to assume that the Mexican system of government, established in the 1820s, is an imitation of the U.S. model. But it is not.

First published in Spanish in 1955 and now translated by the author and amplified with new material, this interpretation of the independence movement tells the true story of Mexico's transition from colonial status to federal state. Benson traces the Mexican government's beginning to events in Spain in 1808–1810, when provincial juntas, or deputations, were established to oppose Napoleon's French rule and govern the provinces of Spain and its New World dominions during the Spanish monarch's imprisonment.

It was the provincial deputation, not the United States federal system, that provided the model for the state legislative bodies that were eventually formed after Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821. This finding—the result of years of painstaking archival research—strongly confirms the independence of Mexico's political development from U.S. influence. Its importance to a study of Mexican history cannot be overstated.

It is commonly agreed that the history of France at the end of the eighteenth century was influenced powerfully, at times decisively, by collective interests and group actions. Yet, as Philip Dawson shows, this consensus has been the foundation of endless scholarly argument over the purposes of group actions and their effects on economic, political, and intellectual life, the accuracy of facts reported, the validity of different methods of analysis, and the significance of the whole topic for previous and subsequent human experience. In probing these questions, this monograph contributes research findings to the historical controversy over the political motives and conduct of the upper bourgeoisie during the French Revolution.

Chosen for study is a well-defined occupational group near the pinnacle of the bourgeoisie, the 2700 judicial officeholders in the bailliages and sénéchaussées--royal courts from which appeals were taken to the parlements. These lower-court magistrates were generally well-to-do and esteemed personages in the provincial bourgeoisie, who could potentially be drawn to either side in a political struggle between nobility and bourgeoisie. They constituted more than 20 percent of the bourgeois representation in the Estates General of 1789. Revolutionary legislation abolished their offices, but many of them remained active in politics even under the revolutionary republic.

Dawson makes use of a variety of manuscript materials pertinent to the magistrates as he treats their activities as members of corporate groups before 1790 and follows many of them as individuals through the revolutionary years to 1795. In part, the book is based on biographical data relating to 230 magistrates--all who were in office in the provinces of Burgundy and Poitou at the outbreak of the revolution.

By the end of 1789, the author concludes, most of the magistrates came to accept revolutionary change because alternative courses of action had been made more unacceptable to them. It was their support that helped to make possible the revolutionary process itself. "They were not the leaders of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. Before 1789, they had been in the highest rank of the bourgeoisie and they remained a notable part of it, but most of them had come to support revolution hesitantly, cautiously, with moderation and many a backward glance."

Public diplomacy enables private citizens to be involved in international relations either through initiatives sponsored by governments or through direct people-to-people contacts in areas such as culture, business, education, tourism and sport. Public Diplomacy in Ireland and Japan traces the evolution of this growing branch of diplomacy and examines the role it has played in the foreign policies of Ireland and Japan, and in their bilateral relationship. It concludes that public diplomacy has contributed significantly to strengthening the links between the two countries.