Review: Why Globalization Works
| Author | Daniel W. Drezner |
| Date | 01 June 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200506000227 |
| Published date | 01 June 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
I
Reviews
|
WHY
GLOBALIZATION
WORKS
Martin
Wolf
New Haven:
Yale
University Press,
2004.
xviii,
398pp.
$43.50 cloth
(ISBN
0-300-10252-6)
Give
the antiglobalization gaggle their due. After the 1999 "battle in
Seattle,"
mainstream commentators summarily dismissed most of the
claims
of most of the antiglobalization protestors—often within the space
of
a single op-ed column. That was then. Over the past five years the
antiglobalization crowd has managed to convince a fair fraction
of
the globe
of
the correctness of their arguments: global economic integration empow-
ers multinational corporations at the expense of citizens, enriches the
wealthy while impoverishing the poor, and strips away the autonomy
of
gov-
ernments, leaving them at the mercy of global capital markets.
As
these claims have garnered greater credence, the reaction has been
a
fuller articulation of the mainstream response. Economists and policy-
makers who
support
the reduction of national barriers to exchange have
generated a raft of books devoted to debunking the myriad claims of the
antiglobalization and alternative globalization crowds. Some of them—
Douglas Irwin's
Free
Trade
Under
Fire,
Brink
Lindsey's
Against
the
Dead
Hand,
Raghuram
Rajarfs
Saving
Capitalism
From
the
Capitalists,
Johan
Norberg's In
Defense
of
Global
Capitalism,
and Jagdish Bhagwati's In
Defense
of
Globalization—have
made some excellent points. However,
Martin
Wolf's
Why
Globalization
Works
is the best single book to
date
that
comprehensively addresses all of the claims and counterclaims with regard
to economic globalization.
Wolf,
a World
Bank
economist
turned
Financial
Times
editor and columnist, has written the kind of book that makes me
envious—because I wish I had written it.
Wolf's
argument is simple but compelling: compared to all other
forms of economic organization, a system based on free market principles
brings the greatest good to the greatest number. A market system
support-
ed by the legal and popular sovereignty of a liberal democratic polity func-
tions even better. Globalization increases the size of the market, which
increases
the opportunities for growth, which increases the number of
nonzero-sum interactions as compared to zero-sum
conflicts.
When con-
trasted against the alternatives, both theory and practice strongly recom-
mend the unfettered integration
of
national markets. Critics
of
global
mar-
ket
integration—variously dubbed "new millennium collectivists" or
I 586 I International
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