Confusion Abounds: Globalization and Global Governance

Abstract

Transformative Change and Global Order: Reflections on Theory and Practice. Edited by Doris A. Fuchs, Friedrich Kratochwil. Munster: Lit Verlag, 2002. 280 pp., $24.95 (ISBN: 3-8258-6374-3). Globalization and global governance can be analyzed in two broad ways: by exploring the empirical facts about their effects in current world affairs, or by exploring the political discourse surrounding them. Transformative Change and Global Order , edited by Doris Fuchs and Friedrich Kratochwil, follows the latter approach. It is concerned with the use and function of both concepts as discursive formations within international studies. The second wave of globalization studies, which challenges the taken-for-granted theories and approaches of the 1990s regarding the origins and consequences of globalization, provides the background for this investigation (Garrett 2000; Scholte 2000; McGrew and Held 2002). Transformative Change and Global Order tries to illuminate some of the false theoretical starts as well as the empirical deadlocks that have harmstrung the academic debate about globalization and the closely related but more policy-oriented concept of global governance. The book provides a useful overview of the myths that characterized, and still partly shape, the study of globalization and its purported effects on international and domestic politics. Fuchs and Kratochwil's principal aim is to reintroduce plain and simple politics into the dominant technocratic discourse on globalization and global governance. In her introduction, Fuchs laments that academic accounts of globalization are beset with differences in conceptualization, focus, and underlying ideological belief systems. This situation leads to assessments of the implications of global governance that are fundamentally at odds with each other. The first part of Transformative Change and Global Order is thus devoted to the task of inserting some order into the academic debate. Friedrich Kratochwil addresses the major concepts and metaphors that have been causally related to the onslaught of globalization. In congruence with recent empirical studies (Garrett 1998; Mosley 2003), he systematically debunks such notions as a “race to the bottom” with respect to …