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Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions After the Cold War . By Sarah E. Kreps. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 240p. $99.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

fueled by transnational relations. King argues that the reduction in manpower and funding available to Europe’s armed forces in the post–Cold War era has been accompanied by the concentration of national military power in elite expeditionary forces, which “have expanded in size, capability and strategic significance” (p. 10). These national military cores in which resources and professional expertise are concentrated have evolved close transnational ties under the aegis of NATO, which provides a framework within which European officers circulate and new professional expertise and best practices are developed and diffused. While King emphasizes the transnational convergence of the institutional forms, doctrines, expertise, and practices of Europe’s militaries, he does point out that the process is both shaped and limited by distinct national military institutions and cultures. He explores transnational changes at the operational level (the headquarters of Europe’s new rapidreaction corps) and tactical level (Europe’s new intervention brigades and special forces) in considerable and often fascinating detail. Among other things, he maps and analyzes changes in military planning, detailing how new standards of operational planning have been elaborated in a bottom-up and contingent fashion in response to pressing needs on the battlefield; explores the role of collectivememory constructions and special military insignia in explaining the rise of elite forces; and examines the increasing role of drills and rituals of battle preparation in enhancing combat effectiveness. The author contextualizes his sociological explorations in terms of a liberal IR argument about security interdependence. For King, Europe’s military transformation is ultimately aimed at ensuring that Washington continues to provide crucial collective-security goods for a world characterized by nontraditional security threats, such as ethnic and religious conflicts, terrorism, and failed states. In this view, Europe needs to transform its armed forces in order to make them interoperable with those of America because the ability and willingness to contribute to America’s wars of choice are the political price Europeans have to pay for sustaining their crucial alliance with Washington. In many ways, the strengths and weaknesses of these two books mirror each other. Rosato’s main achievement is the stunningly simple theoretical extension of structural realism to account for centralized interstate cooperation. His main weaknesses are that he downplays the ambiguity of the historical record and overplays the explanatory power of his theory. Kings’ main achievement is the thick description of European military integration below the level of governments. His bottom-up perspective captures aspects of integration that escape Rosato’s structural theory. For instance, Rosato’s claim that “there has been no meaningful . . . military integration [in Europe] since 1991” (Europe United, p. 10) has to be qualified in light of King’s findings. Yet King’s focus on close-up portrayals of military lifeworlds has downsides, notably too much reliance on what Clifford Geertz called experience-near concepts, that is, concepts that express the lived experience of those immersed in a particular social milieu, soldiers in King’s case, and insufficient contextualization (empirical and theoretical). For instance, King’s account of the ability of the British-run Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) to innovate operational planning when it was deployed in Afghanistan in 2006 seems largely based on sources from within the ARRC.The account, which sidesteps intraorganizational power struggles, which are emphasized by one of King’s theoretical inspirations—actor-network theory—would have benefited from better empirical contextualization, including a discussion of the constraints imposed on the ARRC by the fact that America has dominated the campaign in Afghanistan, and from more interviews with non-ARRC personnel familiar with the ARRC’s tour of duty. In addition, King’s mobilization of liberal IR to frame his sociological study seems based more on hunches than on rigorous theoretical arguments and evidence. On a more basic note, his book would have benefited from more careful editing to avoid factual mistakes, such as referring to the German Bundeswehr as Bundesheer (Transformation, p. 158 and others) or the claim that the shift toward an all-volunteer force in Germany was at least a decade away (p. 37), when it was actually predecided in 2010 and ratified in 2011. In conclusion, both books, in their own distinct fashion, add considerable value to the existing literature. Rosato expands the frontiers of structural realism and makes a powerful case that it has something important to say about the causes and limits of European integration. Seen in light of structural realism’s somewhat precarious standing within contemporary IR research, and the fact that the field of European integration studies is dominated by postrealist theories, this is no minor achievement. King’s book is an important extension of the sociology of European integration pioneered by Karl Deutsch and masterly elaborated more recently by Neil Fligstein. King applies the sociological perspective to the military field, from which it has largely been absent, and he does so in a manner which, in terms of empirical scope and depth and ethnographic sensitivities, is unmatched by any of the studies, few in number, that have looked at this issue form the vantage point of transnational interaction.