What I'm Reading Now

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	Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Oxford University Press, 2002. This book, which was mostly written before the fateful date of September 11, 2001, examines the history of the intersection of Islam and the West in a variety of important areas: war, the quest for wealth and power, society and culture (including gender relations), modernization, and civil society. Bernard Lewis, the most respected western historian of Islam, provides historical insights into the most important elements of West-Islam relations. The result is, well, truly stunning. I had no idea that the differences between Islamic values and Western values were so deep and historically persistent. The pattern of mutual influence that Lewis recounts is uneven, unequal, uncomfortable, and disheartening. I will quote the final paragraphs of the book, which do speak for themselves:
	"To a Western observer, schooled in the theory and practice of freedom, it is precisely the lack of freedom -- freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and inquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and pervasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny -- that underlies so many of the troubles of the Muslim world. But the road to democracy, as the Western experience demonstrates, is long and hard, full of pitfalls and obstacles." "If the people of the Middle East continue on their present path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression, culminating sooner or later in yet another alien domination; perhaps from a new Europe reverting to old ways, perhaps from a resurgent Russia, perhaps from some new, expanding superpower in the East. If they can abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences, and join their talents, energies, and resources in a common creative endeavor, then they can once again make the Middle East, in modern times as it was in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, a major center of civilization. For the time being, the choice is theirs." (pp 159-60).
	Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250-1350. Oxford University Press, 1989 (available from Oxford through its print-on-demand publication program, which extends the in-print lifetime of important works.) Reading Lewis's new What Went Wrong? made me turn back to a favorite book, Before European Hegemony by Janet Abu-Lughod, which I first read while doing background research for Mountains of Debt in the late 1980s. This book has always been interesting to me because it challenges the common Eurocentric worldview, where all important clocks seem to start running someplace in western Europe in about 1492. Abu-Lughod carefully reconstructs the world system of the Thirteenth Century, which comprises seven overlapping commercial and cultural circuits, each centered on a key cluster of city-states. Together, they connected the world from London to Canton. The center of the universe, however, was clearly the Middle East (see the map on page 34), not Venice, as I had supposed. The Middle East is where the patterns of the world system converged.
	What went wrong? How and why did the center move? Like Lewis, Abu-Lughod dismisses single monocausal explanations. Significantly, she says, the "Fall of the East" took place before the "Rise of the West" (p. 361). So it wasn't the simple defeat of the East by the west, as one might suppose. Re-reading this book, I find the analysis still fresh and the author's conclusion most provocative. The future world system? The "modern" world system, with its "Western" monopole, is a temporary phenomenon, she speculates. A future of multiple centers -- a return to the multiple overlapping rings of the 13th century -- was on the author's mind in 1989. "But that would require a shift to different rules of the game, or at least an end to the rule Europe introduced in the 16th Century." "Under the conditions of the twenty-first century, in which the world system will have become truly global, the ability of nations to live in peaceful coexistence becomes even more imperative than it was in earlier times. In the thirteenth century there were many zones of subsistence untouched by the cores, and, even among the great powers, withdrawal from the system was a viable option. Neither of these conditons applies in today's world. Perhaps we have much to learn from studying the thirteenth-centiry world system, organized so differently from our own." (pp. 371-72)
	Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain 1937-1946. London: Macmillan, 2000. (The U.S. edition of this book has finally arrived. Here is my December 2000 review of the original British edition. The British edition is subtitled "Fighting for Britain," but the U.S. edition substitutes "Fighting for Freedom." I can only speculate at the reasoning behind this change.) This is the third and final volume of Skidelsky's biography of Keynes. I have been very anxious to read it -- so anxious in fact that I had one of the first copies shipped from Britain when it was published (it won't be published in the US until next year). There are many interesting elements of this book, which everyone who is interested in Keynes and in 20th century political economy should read. Skidelsky's main theme is the tension between Keynes's declining health and his British patriotism. The subtitle "Fighting for Britain" highlights Keynes's role as a man of action during the last years of his life and his self-sacrifice to assure Britain's political and economic independence in the postwar world. Skidelsky agrees with Robbins that Keynes literally gave his life for Britain.
	Readers who think they know Keynesian economics should pay special attention to Skidelsky's analysis of Keynes's role in British domestic war finance. The author seems to believe that the ultimate expression of Keynes's macroeconomic policy views is found not in the General Theory but instead in a tiny little book called How to Pay for the War. I agree with this view. What we tend to remember about Keynesian economics is really his Depression Economics. How to Pay for the War shows that his general theories can be applied to economies at full capacity. The macroeconomics of Aggregate Demand and Aggregate Supply appear clearly here. My particular interest, of course, is Keynes's role at Bretton Woods, which is treated very thoroughly here, although there is not much "new" in this section. I guess Harrod borrowed Keynes's wartime papers for his biography and then gave them to the government rather than returning them to the family. Whatever the details of this story, the result is that we see Keynes's actions here thorough the eyes of others and in official cables. Skidelsky's telling of the story is very good but doesn't contain any blockbuster revelations. I was particularly looking forward to the Epilogue "Keynes's Legacy." Skidelsky has practically lived with Keynes for 30 years as he has written this biography (he quite literally lives in Keynes's house -- Tilton), so I was interested in his bottom line on the man and his work. This was perhaps the one major disappointment I had in reading the book. Skidelsky's sums up Keynes's influence in just a few pages (pp. 498-507) in which he seems to conclude that Keynes's ideas were more backward- than forward-looking. In an incredible contradiction of one of Keynes's most-quoted lines, Skidelsky seems to suggest that Keynes the man (and the interests that shaped his actions especially in his final years) is more important than his ideas. Maybe I am not reading Skidelsky correctly on this key point. Keynes, of course, famously said that that ideas, not interests, are what matter -- in the long run. Indeed, he said, the world is ruled by little else. If nothing else, Skidelsky's puzzling conclusion gives us pause to reconsider Keynes's legacy on his own terms. This was the best academic book I read in 2000. (review originally posted in December 2000).
	David P. Calleo, Rethinking Europe's Future. Princeton University Press, 2001. You really cannot do better than this book if you are interested seriously in rethinking Europe and its place in the world. This is a wonderful book. Each chapter contains fresh ideas and insights. Although Europe's future is the ostensible subject matter, Calleo takes us through 80 pages of "Europe's Living History" and 100 more on "Legacies of the Cold War" before finally addressing the assigned topic. Some readers will want to skip ahead to page 187, and Calleo even says it is OK to do this, but I think it is a mistake. The history in the first half of the book is too useful (in understanding Europe's current dilemmas) and too interesting, too. The payoff comes in Part III, "The New Europe," where we see how the intellectual battles of the past shape the present day agenda. There is a lot to admire here, but what I like the most is Calleo's stubborn unwillingness to reduce any issue to a few least common denominators. He refuses simple categories or themes. Does the evolution of the EU strengthen or weaken the state? Neither, it is an evolution of the state in different ways in different areas. Will the EU succeed or fail in its seemingly contradictory efforts to broaden and to deepen? It will succeed, he says, but not without failures, crises, disagreements, and many revised plans. Europe's future is messy, he says. Just like its past.
	Kenneth W. Dam, The Rules of the Global Game: A New Look at U.S. International Economic Policy. University of Chicago Press, 2001. One of my favorite books when I first started teaching International Economics was The Rules of the Game, by Kenneth W. Dam (1982). It explained international finance and the Bretton Woods System as clearly as anything I ever read. I always wished that Dam would revise and update the old book, but now he has written a new one that is both broader in coverage and even better in its clear thinking and analysis. Kenneth W. Dam is both a distinguished academic economist (University of Chicago Law School) and an important economic policy official (currently deputy secretary of the U.S. Treasury). He brings to bear both his knowledge of economic theory and his practical experience of inside-the-beltway politics in this excellent book, which really does provide what the subtitle advertises, "a new look at U.S. international economic policy."
	Dam look at the most important issues of international trade, finance, immigration, and environmental policy and asks three questions. First, what is the current U.S. policy? Second, what should it be from the standpoint of mainstream economic theory. And finally, why is there a difference between theory and practice? I found the explanations of current policy clear and informative, complete with historical context. The economic analysis is clear and free of the graphs and equations that sometimes scare away the very people who need most to read a book like this. Finally, Dam's analysis of the political economy of international economic policy focuses on interest group dynamics, as one would expect, but he doesn't simply blame all problems on the evils of special interests. Rather Dam the public official seems to appreciate that interest groups have a role to play in the democratic system (he quotes from the Federalist papers in this regard) and seeks opportunities for interest group competition and "economic statecraft" to improve public policy outcomes.
	Paul Blustein, The Chastening: Inside the Crisis that Rocked the Global Financial System and Humbled the IMF. Public Affairs, 2001. This sure isn't the book that I thought it would be (based on the title), but it is worth reading. What I expected, obviously, was an exposé of the IMF's blunders during the financial crises of the past decade. The IMF has received a good deal of public criticism from both economists and political leaders. But that's not really what you get here. Paul Blustein is a writer for the Washington Post who had access to many of the real insiders during the financial crises of the 1990s. This book is based upon hundreds of interviews with these officials. He uses these accounts to create blow-by-blow accounts of how the financial crises unwound behind the scenes as well as at the press conferences. If you were fascinated by George Soros's inside accounts of the Russian Crisis in The Crisis of Global Capitalism, you should get this book right away because it is even better.
	I am really amazed at the many officials who let themselves be quoted here. It is a unique insider account of some of the most important international economic policy events of recent history. This is a valuable book and I admire the hard work it took to put it together, but the bottom line isn't "The Chastening." I don't think Blustein condemns the IMF as much as he presents it as a human institution that is flawed in the ways that all human institutions are. Because it is human, it makes mistakes. The policy makers and economists appear here trying to do their best subject to political forces, ideological biases, uncertain information, and surprise events. They grope their way towards solutions, sometimes more successful than not. Their human mistakes have human costs. Some might conclude that we would be better off without the human IMF making its human errors (the author's last chapter searches for a better alternative), but I don't think the book's accounts support this conclusion.
	Harold James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression. Harvard University Press, 2001. After reading a number of bad books about globalization, I finally found some good ones. Harold James, a history professor at Princeton, has written a detailed study of the collapse of the system of global trade and finance in the 1930s (following the era of globalization that lasted from about 1880 to about 1925, with the obvious interruption of World War I). James's careful and detailed analysis in meant both to enlighten the past and to inform the future. The historical account is interesting in itself. Why did that earlier era of globalization collapse? It ended, James argued, because it stimulated three distinct counter-forces: capital movements produced financial instability. Free international trade produced strong economic nationalist reactions. High immigration and labor mobility produced an anti-immigrant reaction. Together these three strong anti-globalization forces created the crisis of globalization in the 1930s. This is a fine, detailed economic history that will be read and re-read by scholars and students for years to come.
	James isn't writing for the ages, however. He has a strong message for today. Our current "millennium globalization" is also opposed by three reactions. The problems of financial instability and rising economic nationalism are certainly plain enough. What about the third force? During the Victorian globalization, the insecurities of globalism had a human face -- the face of the immigrant -- and anti-globalization forces reacted so forcefully that even today international labor movements are very highly regulated. Today's anti-globalization movement is not so strongly xenophobic as yesterday's (that is cold comfort to immigrant communities around the world who cannot help but feel the heat), but the underlying frustrations are still there. I think that since they cannot blame foreigners for the loss of control they feel, their frustrations take many other, usually less violent forms. Could it all happen again? James says no, but he acknowledges frightening parallels between the 1930s and the 1990s. With global finance still very unstable and a frustrated anti-globalization movement on the rise, we can only hope that the world will not fall again in into the abyss of extreme nationalism.
	Manfred B. Steger, Globalism: The New Market Ideology. Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Here is another good book about globalization. One good thing is that it gets the language right. There is globalization, the process, and then their is globalism, the ideology associated with that process. Most of what we read about globalization is not very firmly rooted in fact, it is mostly either rhetoric or reactions to rhetoric. (Samuel Barber's piece in the October 20 Financial Times is a good case in point.) The public debate is about globalism much more than it is about globalization. Manfred Steger understands the difference between globalization and globalism and he has written a fine book. His survey of the academic debate about globalization is through and well-referenced -- a nice primer on the subject for serious readers. His analysis of hyper globalist rhetoric is very good as well. If you are interested in the anti-globalization movement, you should read his chapter on the Battle in Seattle and its aftermath. Finally, his bibliography, although limited to books, is a useful resource for students who want to read more. I hope we see more academic analysis of the rhetoric of globalism -- it is a topic that deserves critical analysis.
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