Milan Jazbec

Trsl. from Slovene by Maja Visenjak-Limon (Ashgate: Aldershot, etc., 2001), pp. 237, ISBN 0-7546-1706-8

Milan Jazbec is the State Secretary at the Ministry of Defence in Slovenia responsible for his ministry’s co-operation and preparations for integration with NATO. Unfortunately, I cannot be enthusiastic about his book, which is concerned chiefly with practical guidance for ‘new small states’ on setting up ‘diplomatic organisations’, i.e. MFAs and diplomatic and consular missions. The general subject is certainly well chosen, and the text contains some useful information, notably that, at least in the limited number of cases studied, women predominate among new diplomatic service recruits. However, the content is on the whole very ordinary and I cannot help feeling that it would have been better packaged as an in-house training manual. Besides, the sub-title is a more accurate guide to the book’s contents than the main one, it appears to have been translated by a non-native speaker of English, the copy editing and/or proof-reading was sloppy (there are five mistakes on the first page of the Acknowledgements alone), and there is no index.