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Blackwell Oxford, Business BASR 0045-3609 ??? B 2 102 BUSINESS CYRUS ook 2005 2005 Review Center UK VEESER and Publishing, AND Society forSOCIETY Business Ltd. Review Ethics REVIEW at Bentley College

Book Review: Power and Politics in Globalization: The Indispensable State

(By Howard H. Lentner, Routledge, 2004) CYRUS VEESER

keyword search of the term globalization in any college library catalog will turn up a kaleidoscope of denitions and redenitions, from the rareed postmodern visions of Jean Baudrillard to bestsellers like Thomas Friedmans The Lexus and the Olive Tree.1 No single denition can exhaust the many facets of so encompassing an idea. The house of globalization indeed has many rooms. It is worth recalling that this explosion of interest in globalization dates to the 1990s. The fall of communism in Eastern Europe in late 1989, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chinas accelerating move toward capitalism, the opening of Latin American economies after the debt crisis of the 1980s: together, these changes signaled capitalisms invasion of huge regions that had been off-limits for many years. This wave of market expansion coincided (fortuitously) with the sudden takeoff of affordable computer technology, symbolized by a spike in PC sales and the dot-com boom, making globalization the avor of the decade. Underlying these events was the assumption that the world was evolving toward a single political economy (liberal capitalism) and a single government system (representative democracy), all trussed into seamless unity by the instantaneous diffusion of information through satellite, fax, cable, cell phone, video, DVD, email, and the Internet.
Reviewed by Cyrus Veeser, an associate professor of history, Bentley College.

2005 Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

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Francis Fukuyama wrote globalizations manifesto even before the era properly got under way. In his famous article (later book) The End of History, published while Mikhail Gorbachev was still trying to ne-tune perestroika, Fukuyama declared that the bloody trials of the twentieth century had proven beyond any doubt that democratic government and liberal capitalism were the end points of human social evolution. What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama wrote, . . . but the end of history as such: that is the end point of mankinds ideological evolution and the universalization of western liberal democracy as the nal form of human government.2 With future philosophical and political struggle thus moot, the posthistorical states could (implicitly) move toward world government. As the expression of a popular mood, the era of globalization ended with the September 11 attacks, even though all the processes previously mentioned, except the dot-com boom, continued apace. For Americans, the attacks signaled not so much a coherent ideological challenge to capitalist democracy as the essence of globalization (Al Qaeda may operate in 60 countries, but it is no Comintern), but a grim harbinger of the inherent risks that the openness of globalization entailed: uid borders, free trade, and instant communicationempowered small groups of nonstate actors to terrorize the most powerful nation on Earth and then melt away. The unexamined expectation that the world was moving toward global governance and an integrated world system has been deated, and the nationstate and its prerogativespolicing borders, detaining suspects waging preventive warare very much with us again. The present moment should thus be rather propitious for the critique of globalization offered by Howard H. Lentner in Power and Politics in Globalization: The Indispensable State (Routledge, 2004). A political scientist, Lentner argues that so much rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, the world remains international rather than global (p. 29), that is, essentially dened by nation-states, their actions and interactions. The globe does not form the unit of organization of world society (p. 53). Indeed, Lentners critique is such that globalization in the title should be in quotes: Although globalization is the term of choice in contemporary discourse, it obscures the fact that the world remains divided into states (p. 4). Perhaps the marketing department at Routledge won out over Lentners philosophical convictions. The subtitle, by the way, includes

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the books only laugh line. It ironically appropriates the phrase indispensable state frequently used by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to refer to the vital role of the United States in the world, and redeploys it as shorthand against the conventional globalization thesis that holds that states recede in the face of market pressures (p. 25). Lentner proceeds logically although with little verve to press home the argument that hegemonic states beget and sustain globalization. He takes aim at the more innocent advocates of globalization who variously assert that the state is losing power to the market or that a broad human project of global governance is making the nation-state increasingly irrelevant (pp. 12). Lentner categorically denies that states are being diminished, weakened, and eroded by globalization. Indeed, he argues that the process of globalization builds rather than tears down nation-states (p. 22). For Lentner, all roads lead back to the stateneither markets nor international institutions can operate without states, he writes (p. 36), insisting that international organizations lack effectiveness except as instruments of the powers, above all the United States (p. 34). Lentners argument is refreshingly untrendy, and there is something admirable in his willingness to take on all challengers to the primacy of the state and knock them on their tails. The language is pure, plodding political science, uncontaminated by the soaring rhetoric of high theory. Lentner has little interest in postmodern readings of globalization as a late phase of capitalism in which a new kind of world culture has emerged, a la Fredric Jameson and Mike Featherstone.3 Nor is he concerned with newfangled approaches to geographic space of the kind that propose that state territoriality currently operates less as an isomorphic, self-enclosed block of absolute space than as a polymorphic institutional mosaic composed of multiple, partially overlapping levels that are neither congruent, contiguous, nor coextensive with one another.4 He assumes rather than demonstrates a commonsense meaning for the term nation-state and offers the following minimalist denition of the books central topic: Globalization means increasing connections across the world, a set of processes dating from the mid-nineteenth century that have been largely continuous, except during the world wars (p. 28). One problem with this parsimonious description is that it points toward the 1500s rather than the 1800s as the birth century of

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globalization. It was in the sixteenth century, after all, that Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas rst came into regular contact through exploration, colonization, and overseas trade. The Columbian exchange of people, microbes, food crops, and domestic animals radically transformed the planets formerly discrete biomes long before Queen Victoria took the throne, creating the modern world, which railroads and telegraph lines merely knit together after 1800. Nonetheless, Lentners chronology allows him to argue that global processes strengthen rather than weaken states. The advent of globalization since the 1800s has, after all, coincided with the proliferation of nation-states, bringing us to the current count of 191 member states in the United Nations. Thus evolving globalization and growing states have coincided (p. 31). The book offers vignettes of history, quite conventional both empirically and theoretically, but it is not grounded in a detailed historical argument. Ultimately, Lentner is not interested in a sophisticated timeline of globalization; what matters is the ongoing primacy of the state, the foremost institution in the world (p. 10). The book provides a glimpse or two of the philosophical bases of different approaches to globalization but does not make a sustained philosophical argument. The statist view that Lentner unabashedly embraces runs back to Hegel, who found in the nation-state not only the locus of political power but also an arena of public space wherein citizens can debate common problems and attempt to achieve a common good (p. 103). His philosophical nemesis is liberalism and worse yet neoliberalism, rooted in Adam Smiths notion that the common good is promoted by the selsh interactive behaviors of individuals and rms pursuing only their own interests (p. 27), in contrast to the collective and deliberative function of states. Neosmithians come in two main varieties: first, the neoliberal marketeers who prefer markets over states, assume that greed is good, and focus on individuals rather than communities. They distrust government and the public arena, and they do not like vigorous debate and political contestation (p. 138). Utopian cosmopolitans, on the other hand, include exponents of universal human rights, champions of an international community, supporters of humanitarian interventions, and supporters of rights divorced from citizenship (p. 104). Their long-term hope is that nation-states will give way to world government. Both groups err in privileging the individual over communities and in assuming that human

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nature is essentially benign, and both commit the mortal sin of adopting an antistatist attitude (p. 157). Lentner gives a hearing to various pretenders eager to dethrone the state, including supranational markets, multinational corporations, transnational civil society, multilateral agencies, and global nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Observers taken in by the smoke and mirrors of globalization discourse may accept these epiphenomena as clear signs that nation-states are shufing toward oblivion, but Lentner knows that all extra-national processes and agencies owe their existence to the protection of strong states. It is the fortitude of the United States that sustains the security of order underlying globalization, he insists (p. 78). Nor should we be duped into thinking that the world market trumps state power. The spread of liberal ideology and the proliferation of free markets associated with globalization have resulted from the growth of power of the hegemonic states (p. 25). If the world market cant undercut the power of hegemonic states, dont expect lesser forces to have more luck. Will a new global consensus emerge to confront environmental changes that threaten human existence? It seems more likely that responses to such problems as global warming will occur in the future on a country by country basis . . . despite efforts to coordinate policies under the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol (p. 63). Indeed, the enemies of globalization would do well to realize that nation-states rather than global government are the last great hope of humankind: the state forms the essential means for achieving the values sought even by protesters against globalization (p. 88). Lentners Hegelian devotion to states leads him to elevate the status quo in world affairs to a positive good. Not surprisingly, in toting up the winners and losers in globalization, Lentner identies the use of state power by wise leaders as the critical factor. The winners are developmental statesSingapore, China, South Korea, and Malaysiaas against the predatory and autarkic states which have failed to prot from globalization. These effective states are able to participate in the world economy in ways that increase their own autonomy (p. 67). Neoliberalism is not a viable road to development because a dynamic economy is unlikely to emanate from a desultory state (p. 129). China exemplies success in the face of global pressures. As it grows economically and upgrades its military, Chinas autonomy will increase even in

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the context of operating within the constraints of globalization processes (p. 67). The measure of success here is implicitly where China stands in the pecking order of the great powers. The fact that Chinas rise comes at a considerable cost to many of its citizensfor example, the 140,000 Chinese workers who died in industrial accidents in 2002does not enter into Lentners equation.5 Nor does Lentner mention the human cost of the American hegemony that holds together the interstate system and global capitalismthe deaths of civilians and U.S. soldiers in Iraq are not an issue so long as that discretionary war does not signicantly reduce American power in the world (p. 78). The dogged insistence on a single theme makes this books argument easy to follow, but does not avoid contradictions. Lentner takes aim at all opponents of the centrality of the state, including do-good NGOs like Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders. He dislikes the fact that these humanitarian agencies . . . do not possess charters that make them accountable to any citizenry, and . . . do not need to face elections (p. 147). Even the most well meaning of activists work without any clear institutional forum in which to debate public policy (p. 155). Does it really follow, however, that the actions of groups like Paul Farmers Partners in Health, which has proven that even poor countries can successfully treat HIV and drug-resistant tuberculosis, have diminished the idea of common good . . . from the prior conception that prevailed within states6? By Lentners logic, Human Rights Watch and Union Carbide exist in the same moral plane because both have contributed to the deanchoring of citizenship from the state (p. 155). A more nuanced argument might see the NGOs that try to reduce the cost of medicine for AIDS, limit the use of land mines, and stop global warming as civil societys response to the increasing global power of pharmaceutical companies, arms manufacturers, and industrial polluters. At Lentners level of abstraction, we are not really analyzing globalization at all, but rather sorting dissimilar entities into state or nonstate categories. This view of global actors and processes is static, not statist. Even taking Lentners argument on its own terms, however, contradictions appear. Naturally, Lentner opposes privatization because it further erodes the idea of a common good. Yet he acknowledges that neoliberal governments have stripped themselves of economic power by privatizing services and institutions. In international

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affairs as well, governments choose to devolve such state functions as refugee and humanitarian relief onto the NGOs. The fact that states of their own volition have reduced the scope of their authority and activity points toward a long-term trend undermining Lentners reiterated claim that the search for authority in a globalizing world leads directly to states (p. 14). Lentners response, that creating international institutions to substitute for state ones can obviously be achieved only by states, is a tautology that explains little (p. 149). He denies that the broad adoption of liberal market principles and the shift of production from public agencies to private enterprise results from a shift of power to rms and away from states. Instead, Lentner insists that this is an example of states using their metapolitical power . . . to decide what falls into the public sphere and what, private (pp. 157158). But surely this concession ies in the face of the books thesis that an analyst today must confront the problems of an untransformed world of states (p. 143). Untransformed? If neoliberal states have willingly reduced their domestic authority in pursuit of a higher good (efciency, economic growth, and so on), might they not reasonably sacrice autonomy in pursuit of a greater good in the international arenasay, collective security and a common market? The clear and obvious example is the European Union. And perhaps because it presents such an obvious contradiction to the underlying logic of this book, Lentner has precious little to say about European unication except that it remains exceptional: No other region in the world approaches the depth of the organizational coordination achieved there. . . . No evidence exists for parallel global patterns developing (p. 11). In all, Lentner has provided a useful if blunt rejoinder to the more pie-in-the-sky views of hyperglobalizers who believe that world government is just around the corner and to free marketeers like Kenichi Ohmae who assert that nation states have already lost their role as meaningful units of participation in the global economy of todays borderless world.7 Lentners essay is not really an analysis of globalization per se. It does not offer a judgment about the benets of globalization for ordinary people in developed or less developed countries, nor does it ask if globalizations glass is half empty or half full. It focuses entirely on the fact that in either case, a glass contains the waterthat is, states hold up the world order. By insisting on a hoary and hidebound view of the interstate system, Lentner casts out not only postmodernism but also a

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forward-looking assessment of where that system may be heading. And there is a certain danger in this quaint state-centrism: the hegemaniacs of the current Bush administration invaded Iraq in part because a nation-state is not a moving target, unlike the nonstate actors who pulled off the September 11 attacks. This book achieves its narrow goal of defending the nation-state against all comers more completely than most readers will wish.

NOTES
1. See for example, Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (New York: Verso, 2003), and Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Anchor, 2000). 2. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History? The National Interest 16 (Summer, 1989). 3. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke, 1991), and Mike Featherstone, ed., Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity (London: Sage, 1990). For a quick overview of theories, see Douglas Kellner, Theorizing Globalization, Sociological Theory 20: 3 (November 2002): 285305. 4. Neil Brenner, Beyond State-Centrism? Space, Territoriality, and Geographical Scale in Globalization Studies, Theory and Society, 28: 1 (February 1999): 53. 5. For statistics on industrial deaths in China, see Garrett D. Brown and Dara ORourke, The Race to China and Implications for Global Labor Standards, International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, 9: 4 (OctoberDecember 2003): 300. 6. On Partners in Health, see Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World (New York: Random House, 2004). 7. Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies (New York: Free Press, 1995).