The book is a multi-authored collected of papers which first appeared as a special issue of the journal Southeast Europe and Black Sea Studies. Many of the contributions attend to the situation in (parts of) the former Yugoslavia, with Albania, Bulgaria and Greece receiving more attention than Romania or Turkey. The weighting of the contributions rather undermines the editors' claims to present a "regional perspective." In addition, individual authors display a variety of understandings of what constitutes Southeastern Europe (SEE), a term which we learn has emerged as the designation for the region preferred by western agencies, "the Balkans" being deemed to place the region outside Europe. The absence of a consistent approach to conceptualising the region creates problems for the overall cohesion of the volume. In particular, one major thread running through the volume is that SEE requires the prospect of formal political and economic integration with the European Union if stability is to be ensured. What is rarely taken sufficiently into account is that the counties of SEE enjoy very different relationships with the EU. Greece is a member, Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania are formal candidates, while Albania and the countries emerging from the former Yugoslavia (Slovenia excepted) occupy into a much more distant orbit.

That the EU is the key to future stability is never seriously questioned despite evidence from around eastern Europe (Turkey too, for that matter) to suggest that harmonization with the economic, political, legal and administrative regimes of the EU entails its own stresses and strains, and creates the potential for new kinds of fragmentation and instability. However, the book does advance the argument that the EU's approach to the region has been less than comprehensive, giving rise to the concern that the regional Stability Pact adopted in 2000 might serve as a substitute for integration (Bokova). Given the titular question (to which the answer is unsurprisingly "no"), an examination of the assumption that integration with the EU will lead to greater stability is regrettably absent. The book would also benefit from a more critical approach to the EU and its policies, for example an acknowledgement that EU moves to encourage democracy can work to disrupt democratization in target countries by favouring some actors over others. The general lack of a critical perspectives on the EU results in the perpetuation of a number of EU myths. For example, that the neo-liberal preference for privatisation and deregulation equates to the absence of state intervention: it does not, it is evidence of a different kind of intervention. Similarly, the absence of any theoretical framework for interpreting the changes in Southeastern Europe result in some pretty dubious claims. For example the suggestion that "communism was global, nationalism by definition needs to be particular," ignores the palpable fact that in the C20th the national principle became universalized as the basis of state building. Most dramatically, the chapter on corruption and organized crime (Minchev) falls into what Arjun Appadurai calls the "Bosnia Fallacy," the belief that nationalism in the Balkans is tribalist and primordial: "the traditional cultural inability to separate rational from emotional choices, combined with a number of inbred beliefs, have made it impossible for a large number of Albanians to make the distinction between crime and patriotism."

The chapter on civil society and NGOs (Kondonis) deals with the vexed issue of state/civil society relations prevalent in (parts of) the region. In the context of greater democracy there is a need to develop both legitimate state institutions and a culture of civic engagement. In the former Yugoslavia in particular a key problem is the use by the state of civil society to promote its own policy. What is needed, it is argued, is a greater role for the state in protecting the realm in which civil society can function. This echoes the formulation made famous by Michael Walzer: only a democratic state can create a democratic civil society, only a democratic civil society can sustain a democratic state. It is commonly held that the role of the media in a democratic society is the litmus test of democratic state/society relations. The chapter on the media (dealing mainly with the former Yugoslavia) by Lani and Cupi examines the problem of a post-communist media (mainly print and TV journalism), which often used its newfound "freedoms" to embrace nationalist authoritarianism. This paper explores important issues surrounding professional, moral and legal restrictions on the activities of journalists, but struggles rather with the question of the independence of the media. The question of what exactly constitutes an independent media is not fully explored. Media independent of what? It may be desirable for the media to be independent of the state, but where does this leave public service broadcasting? Can the media be economically independent when it has to be owned by someone? It would have been interesting to read about new media in the context of the former Yugoslavia and its relationship to democratisation and "civil society."

The book succeeds in demonstrating that stability in each country in the region is necessary to ensure wider regional stability, but less successful in demonstrating that there exists any meaningful regional unity underlying the great diversity evident in the region, as manifested in patterns of economic development, processes of democratization, and intensity of disputes between and within nation-states. Nevertheless, the book makes the case that key regional challenges centre on the need to ensure democratic states, civic freedoms and responsibilities, and the ability to deliver these in ways compatible with developing market economies. This means that the prospect of stability in Southeastern Europe resides not in regional cooperation as such, but in greater integration with the European Union (EU).

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