plementation are analysed so thoroughly that it would not be a mistake to classify it as political science. One can also find easily visible sociological elements here. The book, therefore, is interdisciplinary in character. The topic is foreign direct investment, analysed from the viewpoint of its regulation by means of the state's economic policy. A strong emphasis is given to how this policy is created; what are its main determinants; the respective importance of domestic and foreign factors; whose interests it serves; who are the main actors participating in its creation; what patterns underlie the evolution of the policy's product, that is, specific state regulations. To put it more succinctly, the book describes the workings of globalisation in Central and Eastern European countries in the transformation period. The starting point is the observation that at the very beginning of the transition it could be anticipated that the role of foreign investors would be substantial and difficult to overestimate. These predictions came true with some delay. Drahokoupil believes that while the whole decade of the 1990s was in this respect varied and difficult to define from the point of view of particular CEE countries. But around 2000 we witnessed a distinct period of the earlier expectations being realised, as we deal with a phenomenon called the 'competition state': dominant state strategies across CEE similarly aim to promote competitiveness by attracting foreign direct investment (p. 1).

The author advances a thesis about the appearance of a lag in the convergence of CEE countries' strategies regarding FDI as being caused by three factors. First, the internally oriented strategies were exhausted by the end of the nineties. Second, it took some time before the foreign investors became really active in the region. Third, the 'processes of state internationalization could work only when both the structural opportunities and political possibilities of the moment allowed domestic groups linked to transnational capital to come to the fore and translate the structural power of transnational capital into tactical forms of power within national social formations'. As far as the third factor is concerned, the author demonstrates that the emergence of externally oriented competition states has been conditioned upon the unfolding hegemonic role of what I call the comprador domestic service sector in domestic politics'. The subjects of the analysis are the Visegrad-Four (V4) countries, with the comparative analysis being focused primarily on the Czech Republic. The book also makes references to Slovenia and the Baltic States. In consequence, it seems that its title is too broad and thus a little confusing. Although the title mentions CEE, the book discusses only four selected countries, with the Czech Republic receiving most of the author's attention in the analysis. The book makes rather difficult reading, chiefly because of an extremely detailed, often complicated, line of reasoning. Nevertheless, the enormous amount of work done by the author to analyse the transformation process from its beginnings to the year 2008 is something to be admired.

The book analyses the implementation of market-oriented reforms between the early 1990s and 2008, which led to the emergence of neo-liberal transformational states (p. 36). The author examines the impact of globalisation and economic liberalisation on the countries' governments, societies, and economies. He compares their different national strategies of economic policy, indicating how market-reform strategies, initially aimed at an internally oriented development which preferred domestic sources of investment, transformed in the late 1990s into externally oriented strategies. Externally oriented strategies consist in laying emphasis on promoting competitiveness by attracting foreign investment. According to Drahokoupil, the externally oriented development strategy became dominant in all V4 countries around 1999. Unlike these countries, Slovenia, for structural reasons in the form of a low level of indebtedness, could afford to make a departure