The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire

Extract

The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire. By Harold James. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 166p. $24.95.

This book has a clear argument. History shows that globalization needs a system of international and domestic rules for advancing trade, making possible cross-national exchanges of labor and capital, promoting economic growth, and achieving peace. The latest stage of globalization, from the end of the Cold War until September 11, is not an exception. Indeed the 1990s were a decade of intense discussion on new international rules and institutions (epitomized by the creation of the World Trade Organization). At the same time, the promotion and implementation of an international regulatory system will inevitably breed discontent and tensions in different areas of the global system. Some countries, groups, or individuals perceive the new regulatory system as imposing on them patterns of behavior and distributive relations proper of or advantageous to dominant countries, groups, and individuals. This generates a reaction against the globalizing process (and the regulatory systems that justify and support it). Each phase of the globalization process has ended in conflict, either in the form of an interstate rivalry that degenerated into war, or in the form of an asymmetrical conflict degenerating into terrorism (with the assassination of individuals representing universal symbols, such as New Yorkers in 2001 or the Austrian Empress “Sissi” one century earlier in 1894).