A Critical Look at Globalization

Abstract

Globalization and International Political Economy: The Politics of Alternative Futures. By Mark Rupert, M. Scott Solomon Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006. 192 pp., $66.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7425-2942-8), $24.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7425-2943-6). The cover of Globalization and International Political Economy: The Politics of Alternative Futures features two pictures. The first picture shows Paul Wolfowitz, the former President of the World Bank; the second picture is a landscape of Hong Kong that shows the disparities in life between those who inhabit the city's downtown high-rise buildings and those who inhabit its shabby apartments. The fact that Paul Wolfowitz is no longer President of the World Bank may have been a source of concern for the publisher as well as the book's authors: Mark Rupert and Scott Solomon. In fact, the ousting of Wolfowitz—which was engineered primarily by the Bank staff, much to the annoyance of the Bush Administration in the United States—could be viewed as representing a change in the politics of globalization that may enhance the kinds of policies that Rupert and Solomon advocate in the book. In essence, Rupert and Solomon assert that the current era of globalization needs to be analyzed anew, through a critical theoretical framework that uses “historical materialism to sketch some of the more significant ways in which globalization is being contested and point toward some of the possible worlds that could emerge from the politics of globalization” (p. 2). It is Rupert and Solomon's use of historical materialism as an analytical framework that makes Globalization and International Political Economy unique within the literature on globalization. Much of this literature can be grouped into two categories: the anti-globalization literature and the pro-globalization literature. Examples of the former include works by Joseph Stiglitz (2003), whom Rupert and Solomon cite as a critic of neoliberal globalization (pp. 50–51), and Robert Wade (2004). Examples of the pro-globalization literature include works by Jagdish Bhagwati (2004), Martin Wolf (2004), and Miguel Glatzer and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (2005). This …