Wed Dec 27 10:14:10 EST 2006
Published by EH.NET (December 2006)
Daniel Cohen, _Globalization and Its Enemies_. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2006. ix + 192 pp. $28 (cloth), ISBN: 0-262-03350-X.
Reviewed for EH.NET by John R. Hanson, Department of Economics, Texas
A&M University.
This book is authored by the well-known French economist Daniel
Cohen, a professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure and the University
of Paris, who has a penchant for the historical approach to economic
problems and a willingness to engage controversial topical issues,
such as, in this case, globalization. Here he purports to explain why
globalization, toward which he is generally sympathetic, is not
universally admired. Not for him the normal arguments against it,
such as destruction of indigenous cultures by rapacious capitalists
or exploitation of labor in developing countries. He also lacks
patience with the old critiques of commerce between rich and poor
countries, dismissing unequal trade as a danger to poor countries and
urging enlightened people to drop that canard.
His claim is that globalization is not evil, but is oversold as a
method of lifting impoverished countries out of their misery. As far
as he is concerned, it does not have grandiose potential; in this
sense he resembles the late, wise Irving Kravis, who called
international trade a "handmaiden of growth." Yet the hype, in
Cohen's view, has created inflated expectations in less developed
countries and elsewhere, with impatience toward globalization,
sometimes bitterness, the result. This, in turn, fosters blindness
and irrationality in assessing globalization's consequences, even to
the extent of educated people sometimes treating it as a satanic
instrument. Cohen seems to imply that certain fashionable ideas, such
as the notorious "clash of civilizations," would disappear or lose
salience, if only globalization's limitations as a speedy
wealth-creating machine were more widely appreciated. According to
Cohen, we have, in short, a global crisis of disappointed
expectations.
What to make of this? To me it seems easy to utter and hard to prove.
Perhaps that is why most of the book -- a long essay, really -- is
merely a wide-ranging meditation on poverty and related matters, such
as 9/11, from an historical perspective. Cohen is well read, cites
pertinent authors, and writes many astute paragraphs and pages about
the world economy and the contemporary geo-economic scene. Often he
is on the side of the angels, as when he stresses that failures of
economic development are ascribable to local social and cultural
conditions not external predation.
Yet Cohen's discourse cannot be regarded as a rigorous marshaling of
apposite evidence to document a scientific hypothesis. Quite often,
in fact, the prose gets mystical, overblown, and banal. He writes
that "...globalization does not keep its promises" (p. 166). He
amplifies, "...the world will never be 'just' as long as people do
not have the conviction that they all contribute to discovering and
molding a shared human destiny" (p. 169). Or, "For [some] countries
... to be dispossessed from creating new knowledge ... is equated
with exclusion from History" (p. 168). And this: "The tragedy of the
poorest countries is that they want to participate, without losing
themselves, in a world that essentially ignores them" (p. 164).
(Ignores them? Somalia, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, and so forth regularly
get headlines as trouble spots. Some are regarded hysterically as a
threat to prosperity in rich countries because of their cheap labor.)
Again: "...it will be necessary ... to open a public space outside
the realm of economic forces" (p. 164).
I never imagined that the psychological fragility of poor nations and
their sense of betrayal was behind hostility to globalization. I did
suppose that misguided ideologues and rent-seeking special interests,
such as labor unions in developed countries, had something to do with
it. I further doubt that less globalization, including Cohen's bete
noire satellite TV transmissions, would, as Cohen seems to imply,
mitigate the poor's jealousy of the rich by removing the cause of
frustration. Am I to take seriously Cohen's insinuation that, out of
pique, the typical poor nation someday might renounce its share of
globalization's benefits, however meager?
Finally, let me make a more conventional criticism of this
navel-gazing book. Cohen doesn't have a clear idea of what modern
globalization is. He treats it as analogous to the shrinking of the
world through the transportation and communications revolution of the
nineteenth century. To him, as to many others, it appears to be an
unstoppable technological phenomenon which brings promise and peril.
Actually, modern globalization is mostly a massive but still hugely
incomplete lowering of political barriers to the movements of labor,
capital, and knowledge. The transfer of useful things is endogenous,
not exogenous, to political decisions taken everywhere, and the world
is merely less statist than it used to be. The way to accelerate the
benefits of globalization (which also might mitigate impatience and
jealousy on the part of the world's dispossessed by keeping
"promises") is to lower barriers more. So, buck up Cohen old boy.
Let's get on with it.
John R. Hanson II is Professor of Economics at Texas A and M
University. He is the author of "Proxies in the New Political
Economy: Caveat Emptor," published in _Economic Inquiry_ in October,
2003. He is currently researching the colonial American money supply.
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