International Crisis Group

Does Globalization Cause War? | Scott Malcomson (Crisis Group Director of Communications)

The argument that globalization does not necessarily lead to peace is a pretty easy one to make, the usual example being that German-British trade was going brilliantly right up to World War I. Arguing that globalization leads to war is an altogether different enterprise. In his new book, When Globalization Fails: The End of Pax Americana, James Macdonald comes daringly close to showing that globalization, as a system of interdependence among major states, is an inherently unstable system that breeds insecurity among great powers. The interdependence feeds the insecurity.

Macdonald squeezes a lot into a book of some 250 pages. He traces, from the 1820s to the present, the pendulum swings between open economies at one end and closed, protected ones at the other. Because mainstream economics today – with its central tenet of the pursuit of comparative advantage by economic actors such as states – favors free trade, and because the benefits of free trade over the past 25 years seem so obvious, we see relatively little discussion of the benefits of autarky or of protectionism. Macdonald corrects this. He is by no means against trade or globalization, nor is he arguing for protection. He approaches the topic as a historian, with a dispassion that probably served him well over a long career as an investment banker. (He is the author also of A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy, from 2006, which despite its title is about empowerment.) He’s simply trying to see the world as it is and to describe it with clarity.

FULL ARTICLE (via Huffington Post)

Photo: Ricardo Liberato/flickr