state-run Intershops, where goods could be had for western currency, also cemen- ted the view that the ‘have-nots’ in the GDR were those without relatives in the West. The Wall also contributed in unexpected ways to the revolution of 1989. Would- be emigrants, increasingly vocal in 1989, coalesced into inter-regional groups that developed into an embryonic civil society. The mass emigration of East Germans that occurred when Hungary opened its border to Austria in the summer of 1989 – the pent-up result of the Wall – caused more protest at home, among those refor- mers who did not want to simply abandon the GDR. As Major summarizes: ‘The refugee wave thus acted as an important catalyst to formalization of the citizens’ initiatives’ (244). Major successfully demonstrates the role that the Wall played in East German state and society, although it must be said that his strictly clinical approach tends to downplay the tragic human elements of the Wall. After all, many East Germans may have been allowed out on compassionate grounds, but many more were not. Gary Bruce University of Waterloo Marc Trachtenberg, The Cold War and After: History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2012; xii + 317 pp.; £19.95 pbk; ISBN 9780691152035 There is a long tradition of debate between practitioners of international history and International Relations (IR) about the relative merits of their contrasting approaches to the study of international politics. Some commentators tend to re-in- scribe the differences between the two fields, identifying a whole series of opposed characteristics or preferences that supposedly inhere in their respective practices. These include empirics versus theory; idiographic versus nomothetic orientation; narrative construction versus theory testing; employment of archival sources versus secondary sources; and explanatory complexity versus the valorization of parsi- mony. This move is often accompanied by the claim that one or other approach is superior, or that one is in effect a mere auxiliary to the other. Others are keener to build bridges, arguing that in reality practice in both fields is more varied than this rigid binary model suggests and even that it is only disciplinary politics and insti- tutional imperatives that lead to their perpetuation as separate enterprises. On this view, the two should rather be seen as complementary and overlapping elements of a common endeavour. Marc Trachtenberg is definitely located within this second camp. He is a distinguished senior scholar who has long straddled the boundary between the two disciplines, and who not only discerns distinct value in both but also preaches the virtues of bringing them into productive conversation. This collection of previously published essays from the last decade or so is intended to make the case for this kind of approach. Trachtenberg states clearly in his preface that ‘the key to doing meaningful work’ on international politics is ‘to 464 Journal of Contemporary History 49(2)