Harold James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 288 pp., $39.95.
Roger M. Kubarych, Stress Testing the System: Simulating the Global Consequences of the Next Financial Crisis (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 2001), 187 pp., $15.
Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, Globalization and History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 355 pp., $27.95.
The rewards for reducing uncertainty in an uncertain world are so
large that the demand for political and economic forecasts never
ends. Yet demand far outruns supply. We seem unable to predict the
really big system breaks like the fall of Soviet communism or the
Asian crisis, or at any rate to do so persuasively enough for society
to prepare for them. How might we do better?
The answer depends to some extent on understanding the context in
which forecasting takes place. The main process affecting
international affairs has for some time now been the increased
integration of global economic activity--"globalization" in the
common parlance. That being so, do earlier manifestations of economic
integration provide clues about the probable future of the current
phenomenon? The sometimes violent backlash against trade and
financial liberalization that we have witnessed since the final years
of the 1990s gives the question a pertinence that seemed absent
during the previous couple of heady decades when multinational
enterprises rode high and trade barriers so conveniently fell before
them. The upsurge of resistance makes it urgent to seek for
indications as to whether phases of globalization are fated to be
slowed, brought to a standstill, or even thrown into reverse.
