When Globalization Fails
The Rise and Fall of Pax Americana
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- 47,99 zł
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- 47,99 zł
Publisher Description
IS GLOBALIZATION AN UNINTENDED RECIPE FOR WAR?
Taking this question as its starting point, James Macdonald's When Globalization Fails offers a rich, original account of war, peace, and trade in the twentieth century—and a cautionary tale for the twenty-first.
In the late nineteenth century, liberals exulted that the spread of international commerce would usher in prosperity and peace. An era of economic interdependence, they believed, would render wars too costly to wage. But these dreams were dashed by the carnage of 1914–1918. Seeking the safety of economic self-sufficiency, nations turned first to protectionism and then to territorial expansion in the 1930s—leading again to devastating conflict. Following the Second World War, the globalists tried once more. With the communist bloc disconnected from the global economy, a new international order was created, buttressing free trade with the informal supremacy of the United States. But this benign period is coming to an end.
According to Macdonald, the global commerce in goods is a mixed blessing. It makes nations wealthier, but also more vulnerable. And while economic interdependence pushes toward cooperation, the resulting sense of economic insecurity pulls in the opposite direction—toward repeated conflict. In Macdonald's telling, the First World War's naval blockades were as important as its trenches, and the Second World War can be understood as an inevitable struggle for vital raw materials in a world that had rejected free trade. Today China's economic and military expansion is undermining the Pax Americana that had kept economic insecurities at bay, threatening to resurrect the competitive multipolar world of the early twentieth century with all its attendant dangers. Expertly blending political and economic history and enlivened by vivid quotation, When Globalization Fails recasts what we know about the past and raises vital questions about the future.
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In this succinct and thorough economic history, MacDonald (A Free Nation Deep in Debt) examines the theory that free trade ensures prosperity and prevents war. He finds that it might, when backed by a powerful force, such as the powerful British navy that ruled the 19th-century, or the American hegemony that marked the late 20th. Breaking down complex swaths of historical events and economic theories into manageable chunks, MacDonald posits that protectionism, imperial expansion, and increased militarism led to the bloody carnage of the First World War, and that the rise of "economic nationalism" helped incite the Second. His studied and balanced analysis cuts through the rhetoric of "national pride" to expose the pragmatic geopolitical issues at stake, explaining why the Cold War played out on fringes such as Korea and Vietnam (where Soviet expansion threatened Western access to resources), and how current tensions in the Middle East rest on a century-long struggle over access to oil. The lessons of history urge us, MacDonald concludes, to be wary of expansionist ambitions that resemble a "pre-1914 mind-set," and to find peaceful solutions if the "hitherto unimagined destructiveness" of the previous century is not to repeat itself.