Extract
Globalization and American Power.
ASSOCIATING interdependence with democracy, peace and prosperity is nothing new. Before World War I, the close interdependence of states was thought of as heralding an era of peace among nations, and democracy and prosperity within them. In his widely read book, The Great Illusion, Norman Angell summed up the texts of generations of classical and neoclassical economists and drew from them the dramatic conclusion that wars would no longer be fought because they would not pay. World War I instead produced the great disillusion, which reduced political optimism to a level that remained low almost until the end of the Cold War--"almost", because beginning in the 1970s a new optimism, strikingly similar to the old, began to resurface. Interdependence was again associated with peace, and increasingly with democracy, which began to spread wonderfully to Latin America, to Asia and, with the Soviet Union's collapse, to Eastern Europe. In 1989 Francis Fukuyama foresaw in these pages a time when all states would be lib eral democracies, and more recently Michael Doyle projected that this would happen sometime between 2050 and 2100. [1]
Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence, strengthened the notion that interdependence promotes peace by arguing that simple interdependence had become complex interdependence, binding the economic and hence the political interests of states ever more tightly together. Now we hear from many sides that interdependence has reached yet another height, transcending states and establishing a Borderless World, the title and theme of Kenichi Ohmae's 1990 book. People, firms and markets matter more; states matter less. Each tightening of the economic screw raises the benefits of economic exchange and makes war among the more advanced states increasingly costly. The simple and plausible proposit...See the full content of this document
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