Globalization and Its Enemies.

• Author: Powell, Benjamin
• Position: Book review

Globalization and Its Enemies

By Daniel Cohen

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006.

Pp. 256. $27.95 cloth.

In Globalization and Its Enemies, Daniel Cohen deals with an important and timely topic, but he does so inadequately. The title leads one to believe that Cohen will defend globalization against its enemies or identify those enemies and describe their arguments. However, the book provides, at best, a weak defense of global capitalism, and it does not clearly identify globalization's enemies and their agenda. The book is perhaps strongest when the author puts the current wave of globalization into historical context. The book is at its weakest when the he tries to describe why poor nations have failed to develop and what can be done to make globalization work better. These two topics fill most of the book, making brevity (169 pages) perhaps its greatest merit.

Cohen begins by drawing heavily on Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: Norton, 1997) to explain the birth of the "North-South Axis," which he describes as the first wave of globalization. He then moves on to what he calls the second wave of globalization in the nineteenth century. Backed by statistical data on the volume and pattern of trade, he makes the reasonable case that globalization is nothing new, that it has always been a part of human development, and that in many ways the nineteenth-century world economy was even more globalized than today's.

In describing development in today's globalized economy, Cohen draws on Amartya Sen's notion that development consists in giving people the ability to build futures worthy of their expectations (Development as Freedom [New York: Anchor, 2000]). According to Cohen, those who oppose globalization "find themselves clinging to the idea that globalization imposes a model that people do not want. The truth, however, is probably the reverse. Globalization shows people a world that subverts their expectations; the drama lies in the fact that this revelation is incapable of satisfying them" (p. 5). Modern globalization's unique aspect, he argues, is that the speed of technological change has given the world's poor the ability to see that the West has prospered faster than they have. "The central issue regarding globalization is not that it develops too quickly or that its effects are too brutal. On the relatively short time scale of capitalism, what is striking is its poor capacity to diffuse technical progress rather than...