Regional Orders at Century's Dawn: Global and Domestic Influences on Grand Strategy (Princeton Studies in International History and Politics Book 77)

Solingen tackles the question of the causes of war in the late 20th and early 21st century by comparing the empirical evidence for competing international relations research programs (realism, democratic peace hypothesis) with her own view, which proves to be not only surprising and intuitively compelling, but well supported by the facts. Briefly, she argues that there are two basic strategies for dealing with globalization (emergence of strong, extensive international markets): embrace or resistance. Both strategies have self-interested factions within their polities competing with each other for control of the state. Coalitions which embrace international markets find that they have cooperating partners in adjacent states with similar motives, and a preponderance of states controlled by such coalitions in a region leads to peace. By contrast, coalitions with self-interested reasons for resisting trade tend to be aligned with military interests (and the ideological groups that support them: secular and religious nationalists) that regard their counterparts in adjacent states as competitors rather than cooperators. Consequently, regions in which trade resistance dominates tend to be regions of war. Solingen's surprising claim is that the degree to which democracy takes hold is irrelevant, thus refuting in advance a central theme of Bush administration policy. The themes of self-interested coalitions, and fundamental choices to compete or cooperate, lend the book an overall "game-theoretic" flavor. And yet the book is wonderfully clear and non-technical. Though her "economics explains politics" methodology sounds vaguely Marxian, (and perhaps discounts the role of culture too much, as the "nationalist-confessional coalitions" need some sense of communal identity rooted in history to organize themselves around), her implicitly classical liberal emphasis on the virtue of markets to bring peace and prosperity, rather than violence and exploitation, is anything but. One of the best books I've read in the past decade. Etel Solingen provides a comprehensive explanation of foreign policy based on how states throughout the world have confronted the rapid emergence of a global economy and international institutions. A major advance in international relations theory, Regional Orders at Century's Dawn skillfully uses a key issue--internationalization--to clarify other recent debates, from the notion of a democratic peace to the relevance of security dilemmas, nationalism, and the impact of international institutions. The author discusses in rich detail the Middle East, Latin America's Southern Cone, and the Korean peninsula, and builds on examples drawn from almost every other region of the world. As Solingen demonstrates, economic liberalization--with its dramatic political and economic consequences--invariably attracts supporters and detractors, who join in coalitions to advance their agendas. Each coalition's agenda, or "grand strategy," has consequences at all levels: domestic, regional, and international. At home, coalitions struggle to define the internal allocation and management of resources, and to undermine their rivals. Throughout their regional neighborhoods, coalitions opposing internationalization often compete for dominance, sometimes militarily. Coalitions favoring internationalization, instead, often cooperate. At the global level, each coalition finds support for its "grand strategies" from different international institutions and from competing global economic trends. Solingen's concept of "grand strategy" proposes more than a theory of foreign policy and explains the role of nationalism and ethno-religious revivalism in the politics of liberalization. Pt. 1. The Theory. Ch. 1. Introduction. Ch. 2. Internationalization And Political Coalitions. Ch. 3. Coalitions, Strategic Interaction, And Regional Outcomes. Ch. 4. Economic Liberalization, Coalitions, And The Democratic Peace -- Pt. 2. The Empirics. Ch. 5. The Southern Cone: Argentina And Brazil. Ch. 6. The Middle East. Ch. 7. The Korean Peninsula -- Pt. 3. Implications. Ch. 8. Theory And Policy: An Agenda. Etel Solingen. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [291]-321) And Index. 000_FrontMatter......Page 1 001_Chapter 1......Page 15 002_Chapter 2......Page 32 003_Chapter 3......Page 76 004_Chapter 4......Page 104 005_Chapter 5......Page 131 006_Chapter 6......Page 179 007_Chapter 7......Page 230 008_Chapter 8......Page 269 009_BackMatter......Page 305