786 SEER, 79, 4, 2001 an analysis of the policy-making process as well as the effects of competing political forces on economic determinants.Nevertheless, this is an exceptionally fine book and an important addition to the study of post-communist transitions. Department ofPolitics D. J. GALBREATH UniversityofLeeds Olcott, Martha Brill; Aslund, Anders, and Garnett, Sherman W. Getting It Wrong.RegionalCooperation and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, I999. Viii+ 242 pp. Map. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. $I 9.95 (paperback). THE failure of the Commonwealth of Independent States to match the expectations that greeted its creation as the putative successorto the Union of Soviet SocialistRepublics, and as substitutefor the projected 'renewed'union mooted by Gorbachev and put to the people in a referendum on i 7 March I99I, is one of the perhaps surprising 'non-events' of the past decade. Surprising,because, as the authors of this study amply demonstrate, most of the components have found great difficultyin establishingindependent states and economies that come near matching the achievementsof the failed Soviet Union. In a real sense, the whole was significantlygreaterthan the sum of its parts,yet the CIS has failedto add the extradimension. To arguethusis, of course,misleading.Nations habituallyregardindependence and the ability to control their own affairs as something priceless, far outweighing economic losses. Even so, judged in its own or any other terms, the successorcommunity has been a failure. The authorsof thiscomprehensivestudyare allwell-respectedspecialistsin the field, and they present a broad-ranging picture of the experiences and problems that have arisen in the former Soviet space. As they show, the fortunes of the post-Soviet stateshave been exceedingly mixed, rangingfrom the relative success of the Baltic States and perhaps Russia (although in this case accompanied by a national searchforidentitythatcontinues into the new millennium), to the inability of Moldova and Georgia to maintain their territorialintegrity in the face of breakaway groups, the apparent failure of Belarus to establish an adequate measure of national self-consciousness to exist outside Russia's orbit, the civil war in Tajikistan, and the permanent stand-off between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the status of Nagorny Karabakh one of the key episodes in the collapse of the Soviet Union. As newly independent nations and states they have gone their own way, reassertingancient identities or strugglingto establish new ones, identifying and pursuingnational interestswithout Moscow's hegemonic interference. Despite a long list of subsidiary committees and agencies created at the varioussummitmeetings, CIS leaderscan point to verylittlerealachievement. In areas of real concern to the peoples and governments of the region the organization has failed, economically, politicallyand militarily.Country after REVIEWS 787 country has found it expedient to use the CIS for limited purposes, supplementingits channelswith othersthatlead in quite differentdirections. As the authors correctly point out, the fundamental problem in relations among the countriesof the formerSoviet Union lies in the enormous disparity between the size, population, capabilityand ambitions of Russia and those of all the other formerSoviet republics.Unlike the EuropeanUnion, on which it was partly modelled, the CIS has not given the smaller nations any sense of equality, so that the 'Big Brother'element that characterizedrelationshipsin the Soviet Union (and in its predecessor, the Russian Empire)has continued, with inevitable suspicionson the part of the smallernations. Moreover, there were at the very outset differencesover the very purpose of the CIS: was it a way of reintegrating the territory of the USSR, or a way of managing its disintegration?While the public recordcontains few reliablestatementsof the intentions of those who set up the organization, enough is known of different perceptions to suggest that it was never likely to win the full-heartedsupport of all but a minority of the new political elites, now dependent on a public opinion that had to be won over. While not a lesson in how notto create a multi-national organization, the history of the CIS is worthy of study by anyone interested in political change, and this book is an essential startingpoint . In their final section the authors cautiously give advice for managing the post-Soviet space. They stay within the ideology of the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank in implying that 'reform' means...