The State: Back in the Center of the Globalization Debate

Abstract

Miguel Glatzer and Dietich Rueschemeyer's edited volume Globalization and the Future of the Welfare State will hopefully be a precursor to future volumes in international relations that seriously address the interdependence of domestic politics and globalization. The purpose of the book is to critically investigate two competing hypotheses about globalization and its effects on the development of welfare policies. It does this primarily through the use of qualitative comparative case studies of “middle-income” countries in five different regions of the world: Latin America, Southern Europe, East-Central Europe, Russia, and East Asia. The editors choose to focus on “middle-income countries” from these regions because “these countries offer particularly strong insights into the nexus between economic openness and the viability of social welfare policies” given that they have recently become more integrated into the international economy (p. 8). In this sense, these countries stand in contrast to the Northwestern European states, which have had open economies for a longer period of time and are considered to be established welfare states.