Barbarian Sentiments: Nationalism and Ideology in the Modern Age

Pfaff sees America's abysmal failure to grasp the independent nature of resurgent nationalisms in the Third World as the Achilles' heel of U.S. foreign policy. This reporter for the New Yorker (where many of these seven compelling essays first appeared) takes both liberals and conservatives to task for their sentimental, self-aggrandizing as sumptions that other countries should be more like us. A tough-minded, shrewd critic who takes the long view, Pfaff ( Condemned to Freedom ) suggests that Japan's meteoric transformation into industrial superpower may be an exception rather than a norm of development, and argues that the U.S.S.R. has lost a cultural struggle in Central Europe, where continued Soviet domination has become intolerable. He ponders Gorbachev's seemingly impossible balancing-act as the Soviet leader attempts to introduce greater freedoms while promoting a one-party system that will strengthen his own power. (May)