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An older colleague recently observed to me that today we stand further removed in time from the end of World War II than Americans at the beginning of that conflict were from the Spanish American War. To those Americans of 1939, he said, the war with Spain seemed almost antediluvian, while to us World War II lives vividly in memory, and its consequences still shape our lives. As a student of modern American foreign policy, I found my colleague's observation particularly appropriate. American and Soviet soldiers still face each other in the middle of Germany, and Europe remains divided along the lines roughly set by the liberating armies. Yet could we now be facing major changes? Will an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons in Europe, and glasnost in the Soviet Union transform this environment? Will the postwar division of Europe come to an end? What will be the consequences for the United States?

Thomas Alan Schwartz: Die Atlantikbrücke. John McCloy und das Nachkriegs-Deutschland. Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin 1992. 560 Seiten, 58,- DM

A considerable theoretical literature argues that if everyone votes sincerely, then an agenda setter has near dictatorial influence on final outcomes, whereas if everyone votes strategically, then an agenda setter's power is considerably reduced. This literature assumes that all feasible agendas are of a special type called amendment agendas. But actual legislative and committee agendas—notably those found in Congress—often are not of this type. Once we expand the domain of feasible agendas to include all types allowed by common parliamentary practice, the influence of agendas on legislative outcomes expands, even with strategic voting. Besides showing with counterexamples that previous results do not extend to a more realistic domain of agendas, we prove some theorems that specify the limits (such as they are) of an agenda setter's power.