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The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America
By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
The Penguin Press, New York, 2004, 400pp, US$24.95
ISBN 1594 2002 03
(Available in Australia in February 2005, $35)

Reviewed by Martin Sheehan

America’s future is conservative. So say the authors of a new book that studies the rise of the right in American politics, and the broader influence of conservative thought in American culture and society. The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America by Jo­hn Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, charts the growth of conservatism in America, from its origins in the 1930s and 1940s, to its ultimate triumph in the Presidency of George W. Bush. The authors also take a look at how a more right-wing America might approach the international community in the 21st Century. As the authors declare in their introduction:

This book is both a portrait and an argument. The portrait is of Conservative America—the Right Nation. The argument is that conservatism explains why America is different.
The authors are well placed to conduct such a study: Micklethwait is the US editor for the British Economist, and Wooldridge is the Economist’s Washington correspondent. Having lived and worked in the US for some time, they combine an obvious love for America and its people, with detached and objective observations of what are often controversial political and social issues in American politics. The book is keen to address as even-handedly as possible polarising issues such as abortion, capital punishment, and gun ownership in the context of current American political debates.

What has made the right so successful in America? Why is it that America is perceived by the rest of the world to be a more conservative nation than others? Only forty years previously, conservatism seemed a fringe movement in the US political landscape. The major intellectual proponents of conservatism seemed to the majority to be eccentric and lonely voices cutting against the liberal grain. By the mid-1960s liberalism seemed triumphant in American political life, and with the ascendancy of Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society programs, liberalism seemed set to become synonymous with the American way of life:

In the 1960s, American liberals advocated the creation of a European-style welfare state, particularly through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program … They imposed greater restrictions on firearms and they mounted campaigns to outlaw executions, legalize abortion and introduce not just racial equality but positive discrimination in favor of minorities … all of which were to bear fruit in the 1970s. The liberal elites of Boston and New York felt that they had a good chance of civilizing what some of them called ‘the Yahoos.’

What ultimately destroyed the liberal dream of a more ‘civilised’ and ‘Europeanised’ America? According to the authors of the The Right Nation, it was the liberals themselves who were the chief cause of their own downfall, through their refusal to take into consideration the depth of conservative feeling among ordinary Americans. Drawing on the feelings of disenfranchisement and disillusionment with the social democratic drift of the nation under successive Democratic administrations, conservatism took off in 1964 with Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency.
One of the prime reasons for conservatism’s success in America is that it worked to provide an outlet for the conservative feelings and patriotic sentiments of ordinary people, unlike liberalism, which failed to become a popular movement, and whose bastions have remained the elite universities and the media.

From the early 1950s onwards conservatism began it own ‘long March through the institutions’, to use a phrase beloved by left-wing activists in the 1960s to describe their own ideological project. Starting with William F. Buckley Jr.’s declaration of war against liberalism in the first edition of National Review in the early 1950s, conservatives began building their own anti-liberal counter-culture. Magazines like National Review, and think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and The Heritage Foundation, sprang into existence to carry the battle of ideas to the enemy. Conservative America contains a plethora of groups and organisations, books and magazines, each with their own agenda but united in their opposition to liberalism.
This sense of counter-cultural radicalism sets American conservatism apart from other conservatives around the world. While the UK Conservative Party maintains strong links with the US Republican Party, and shares much in common with its American cousin in terms of ideology, the British party lacks the kind of radical populism that galvanises the Republicans. Europe’s Christian Democrats have even less in common with the American right. Most European conservatives recoil in horror from the American right’s crusades against abortion and in favour of the death penalty. The socialist inclined political culture of the European Union, with its post-Christian emphasis on comfort and hedonism, is anathema to the American right.
According to the authors, ‘[t]he heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but rugged individualists who don’t know their place: entrepreneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right—unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort or another.’

What struck me most, however, reading this book, is not just the radicalness of American conservative thought, but also its almost existential rebellion against modern society. By this I mean conservatism’s refusal to accept what it views as the materialism and conformity, the rootlessness and cultural nihilism found in many modern liberal democracies. American conservatives, if they stand for nothing else, stand for absolute religious belief against liberal agnosticism; for a stoical patriotism and willingness to sacrifice for the nation against liberalism’s concern with material well-being; and most important of all, conservatives value a virile righteousness against what they see as the softness and ease of contemporary technological civilisation.

Conservatives fear what Alexis de Tocqueville referred to as the ‘benevolent despotism’ of modern liberal democratic states, where the citizenry is reduced to child-like dependence on the state, and where individuality and variety are worn down by the relentless conformity of democratic majorities.

I would have liked to see more discussion in The Right Nation of what is sometimes referred to as conservatism ‘properly understood’ and its relationship to American conservatism. Conservatism properly understood refers to the great tradition of conservative politics in Great Britain and Western Europe, as expounded by Edmund Burke, with its emphasis on community, continuity and tradition. Such a tradition of politics is obviously at odds with the radical individualism and progressive optimism about the human condition inherent in much American conservatism. Indeed, even some American conservatives, like The Washington Post’s self-styled ‘European conservative’, George F. Will, have argued that American conservatives would learn more from ‘the conservatism of Augustine and Aquinas, Shakespeare and Burke, Newman and T.S.Eliot and Thomas Mann’, than from libertarian radicals like Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine.

Be that as it may, The Right Nation is a fascinating study of the right in contemporary America. The authors make a powerful case for viewing conservatism as the dominant ideological and cultural force in American politics at present. This book is not only well-worth a look for students of American politics, but anyone interested in how American political culture will affect the rest of the world in the early 21st century.

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terrorism
By Michael Ignatieff
Princeton University Press, 2004, 160pp, US$22.95
ISBN 0 69111 7519

Reviewed by Nicholas Southwood

It is rare to find a work on the ethics of counter-terrorism that is at once theoretically sophisticated and practically grounded, that draws on the lessons of the past while acknowledging the uncertainties of the future, that takes terrorism seriously without succumbing to fruitless melodrama. Michael Ignatieff’s most recent book manages to do all this and more. Written in clear and elegant prose, it demonstrates an unusual breadth of learning, drawing from literature and history as well as from philosophy, politics and law.

Ignatieff’s stated aim is to identify what liberal democratic states are entitled and obliged to do in defending themselves from terrorist attack. As against ‘civil libertarians’ who hold that rights are inviolable side-constraints and ‘pragmatists’ who hold that rights are merely useful instruments, Ignatieff embraces what he calls a ‘lesser evil position’. According to this position, ‘neither rights nor necessity should trump’ (p. 8). Though, under certain circumstances, it is morally permissible to ‘stray from democracy’s foundational commitments to dignity’ (p. 8),
we should do so, first, in full awareness that evil is involved. Second, we should act under a demonstrable state of necessity. Third, we should choose evil means only as a last resort, having tried everything else. Finally, we must satisfy a fourth condition: we must justify our actions publicly to our fellow citizens and submit to their judgement as to their correctness (p. 19).

Two ideas here are especially worthy of note. The first is the idea that counter-terrorist policies and institutions must be framed within a context of democratic justification. Democracy offers both the normative ground for such policies and the means of preventing the lesser evil ‘from slowly becoming the greater evil’ (p. 10). This is democracy’s great strength. ‘While injustice can always be justified if you have to justify it only to yourself, it is less easy when you have to justify it to other democratic institutions, like courts and legislatures or a free press’ (p. 4).
The second is the idea that we must ‘never…allow the justification of necessity…to dissolve the morally problematic character of necessary measures’ (p. 8). This amounts, in effect, to a plea for collective self-consciousness. Even counter-terrorism of the most morally exemplary kind will inevitably involve wrong-doing. Rather than trying to make ourselves feel better via self-justification, let us freely and openly own up to the wrongs we are thereby doing. Let us be big enough to mourn for the lives that are lost and made worse. To my mind, this represents perhaps Ignatieff’s most original and challenging insight, one that, if taken seriously, could dramatically alter the political landscape.

In applying the lesser evil position to the actual world, Ignatieff warns against searching for a one-size-fits-all solution. The only thing to do is proceed on a case by case basis (pp. 8-9). To do this, we must understand both the reality of liberal democracies and the reality of the terrorist threat that they face.

If we scrutinise the former, we find that they have a fairly dubious track-record. They have often ‘exaggerated the [terrorist] threat’ as a result of failing to ‘distinguish moral condemnation from threat assessment…the anger we feel from the risk [terrorists] actually pose’ (p. 54).

If we scrutinise concrete instances of the latter, we find that, far from constituting a single uniform phenomenon, terrorism takes many importantly different forms. This depends, inter alia, upon the aim of the terrorists (whether it is based on insurrection, liberation, independence, de-occupation, global anarchy, or some relatively specific gripe (p. 83)); and the means that they employ or might eventually employ, the most frightening of which would include weapons of mass destruction (pp. 145-170). It is impossible to determine precisely the appropriate response in ignorance of the circumstances of both aggressor and aggressee.
Impressive as it is, Ignatieff’s work is not immune from criticism. Let me mention two objections in particular. The first concerns the role of democracy. As we have seen, democracy is crucial to Ignatieff’s position. It constitutes at once its normative basis and the major safeguard that prevents states from self-destructing.

This is a heavy burden to bear and I doubt that actually existing democracies are up to the task. Actually existing democracies are characterised by overtly politicised judiciaries, unequal access to decision-making, and public opinion that is led more by free-wheeling emotionalism than by the force of the better argument. Ignatieff knows all this and even explicitly acknowledges it (p. 12).

Nonetheless, I believe he underestimates the extent to which the plausibility of his position presupposes an overhaul of democratic institutions. I am not suggesting that this is impossible. But it does cast Ignatieff’s position in what will seem to some as an objectionably utopian light.

The second objection concerns the role of the nation state. The main problem Ignatieff’s book addresses is how ought nation states to respond to terrorism? But there is a more general problem. This is how ought the world to respond to terrorism? This way of putting the problem leaves as an open question what the role of nation states ought to be, a position that strikes me as methodologically and ethically desirable.

It is methodologically desirable since, while nation states remain an important structure in the world, their importance is diminishing, as the importance of sub-national and supra-national structures is increasing. It is ethically desirable since bad consequences tend to follow from states assuming that the solution to the problem of terrorism lies squarely in their hands. Let me emphasise that Ignatieff does acknowledge at a number of points the importance of international cooperation (e.g. pp. 9, 23). He even flags in the final chapter the possibility that we may outgrow Westphalia (p. 147). For all this, there remains a strong bias in favour of the nation state that we should be aware of when appraising his substantive suggestions.

Despite these objections, Ignatieff’s work forces the reader to think carefully about issues that are among the most pressing of our time. For this reason and plenty of others, I believe it to be essential reading.

Australian Citizenship
By Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts
Melbourne University Press, 2004, 288pp, $39.95
ISBN 0 522 85094 4

Reviewed by D.J. Goodsir-Cullen

It must be recorded at the outset that this is the book from which Mr Latham allegedly lifted ideas in a Sydney speech on 20 April 2004. The authors gave the Opposition Leader an advance copy of the book and asked him to launch it (Professor Galligan in letters to the Age and the Australian, 24 April 2004).

Mr Latham denied the unacknowledged borrowing of ideas and some citizens felt compelled to write to the newspapers on the same day as Professor Galligan to record that, frankly, the ideas were not terribly original in any case. One correspondent wrote to the Australian congratulating the academics for finally putting to paper what ordinary citizens discovered long ago.

The book has all the hallmarks of a first-year university lecture series right down to the chapter topics. Chapter 1 (read ‘Week 1’) Australian Citizenship, Week 2 Institutional Framework, Week 3 Migration, Week 4 Multiculturalism, Week 5 Land and Heritage, Week 6 Nationalism and Patriotism, Week 7 Civics and Everyday Life, Week 8 Aborigines, Week 9 Women, Week 10 Religion, study week, examination period, three questions from a choice of 10, go in peace, Amen: the Holy Communion of undergraduate life.

Intuitively then, in the very writing of this book, the authors have encapsulated one type of Australian citizenship. Credo in unum viam: attend lectures, read the book, pass the course, progress to second year, finish the degree, attain graduate recruitment and a family and ¼ acre in Western Sydney. It is the realisation of an Aussie battler who will spend a lifetime being at once courted and patronised by the weathercock politicians of this world.

For those who have kept abreast of academic fashion it is almost dated to see chapters on women and aborigines; dated and condescending I should think. It recalls the excitement of those many late-1980s scholars who were able to recover from years of dead-white-male neglect by including whole swags of second hand material about women, aborigines and M. Derrida in their articles and lectures.

Notwithstanding the devotion of a whole chapter to women, the authors of Australian Citizenship appear to have missed something useful to their argument. A cursory glance at the ‘citizenship’ entry in the Oxford Companion to Australian History would have furnished them with helpful material supporting their position that citizenship is more than mere civics.

In A Woman’s Constitution, Helen Irving demonstrated that Australian suffragettes claimed political rights on the basis of the ‘citizenship’ that they already enjoyed. Alas, it seems that the authors of Australian Citizenship elected to ignore Irving’s telling narrative and missed an opportunity to elaborate on this thesis with politically correct glee in their chapter on women.
Mercifully the authors of Australian Citizenship have spared us the bad translations of French and seem in fact on top of the game, having overcome their stale chapters on women and aborigines by including a discussion about the latest chic group of Australia’s underprivileged, the new ‘boat people’ otherwise called refugees, asylum seekers, detainees, illegal immigrants, parents with or without children overboard, or whatever term best sits with one’s politics.

Then again, the authors forgot to include a chapter on sexuality, the essential ingredient of truly up-to-the-minute discourse. The only gay in the book is William Gay, poet, whose sickly sentimental federation poem is a favourite of the poetically-challenged political speechmaker:
From all division let our land be free, For God has made her one…

The authors assert that this book is written against the ‘official’ kind of citizenship that reduces it to ‘civics’: ‘shared political institutions, adherence to abstract values and tolerance of difference.’ This does not do justice to Australian citizenship, they argue, because it excludes a sense of history and Australia’s unique heritage. This book will demonstrate that ‘poets, painters, historians, environmentalists, community activists and educationalists have as much to contribute to an understanding of Australian citizenship as do political scientists and lawyers’ (p. xv).

The authors cannot argue that one must include poets, painters and such like alongside political scientists and lawyers but then hardly develop the point, still less quote actual poetry or refer to specific paintings, artists or historians. Australian Citizenship presents very little in the way of fresh and detailed elaboration on how Australia’s arts and heritage have shaped citizenship historically and today.

Poetry for instance is only used in the hackneyed context of the land. All the same the authors do not deal very much with the challenging images of Australia presented by some nineteenth century poets. Adam Lindsay Gordon, who wrote about a country ‘without songs, architecture, history’ where ‘songless birds sing’ is mentioned only in passing as one who expressed a ‘sentiment of attachment’ to the wild and savage character of the land (p. 103).

Nor do the authors deal with responses to Gordon, such as the direct poetical retort in C.J. Dennis’s The Golden Whistler. Ignored too is the famous exchange between Lawson and Paterson about the merits of Australian city and country life.

More troubling is the absence of discussion about twentieth century dissonance from such poets as A.D. Hope who shattered Australia’s bush identity myth with a description of coastal occupation:

Where second-hand Europeans pullulate, Timidly on the edge of alien shores.

The authors refer to Les Murray as ‘Australia’s greatest living poet’ (a subjective and disputable notion) but proceed to quote not his poetry but his prose!

Similarly, the authors call David Malouf a poet. While some might indeed say that despite elegant essays and celebrated novels, Malouf’s poetry is his greatest achievement so far, he might best be described as rather more than a poet. Astonishingly, despite introducing Malouf as a poet the authors do not discuss the man’s poetry. In addition they refer to his 1998 Boyer Lecture, but not his recent and more relevant essay on Australia’s British heritage (Made in England. Australia’s British Inheritance, Quarterly Essay 2003).

And what about music, surely one of the most direct indications of nationalism and an important impulse for a sense of citizenship? There is brief mention that ‘Waltzing Matilda’ is Australia’s unofficial anthem and a tiresome retelling of the process by which Australians selected the official national anthem. Otherwise the authors do not discuss music at all.

Not only does Australia have Gordon’s songless birds to overcome, but it also has few songs of her own. There is hardly any melody that binds the nation in the way that other countries have national and folk songs that encourage patriotism. This interesting and fertile ground for discussion about nationalism, patriotism and citizenship remains unexplored by the authors.
Australia’s poverty of songs provides a palpable signal as to why her nationalism and patriotism has largely been generated through language. As the authors identify, the English language is one of the few unifying devices for native-born and migrant Australians.

On this language point the authors claim some novelty. But, I ask you, what is so new about this argument? Malouf for one has already and recently raised the issue in the 2003 Quarterly Essay.

In the same way, the authors’ account of the failure of multiculturalism is hardly innovative. The authors assert that multiculturalism, a ‘conceptual muddle of prescription and description’ (p.96), is an unsound foundation for citizenship. They declare that we must look elsewhere, such as to Australia’s land and heritage, for a sense of citizenship that can unify all native and foreign-born Australians. Even Mr Latham has thought about these issues.
For a book about Australian citizenship and history many foreigners and alien notions are employed to mount the authors’ case. The chapter on nationalism and patriotism begins with citation of Emerson and Lincoln. In the same chapter the authors inexplicably use Liberty, Fraternity and Equality as subheadings.

The Australian monarchy is hardly mentioned. In fact, over half way through the text the authors apply Galligan’s well-established description of the country as a ‘federal republic’ (A Federal Republic: Australian Constitutional System of Government, 1995). Apart from making sparse references to coats of arms, royal tours and Governors-General that seems to be the end of the matter.

Nor is the common law and equity tradition explored. The basic legal system might not be unique to Australia but out of it the nation has forged a special brand. Between the Westminster system and the law come so many of Australia’s important values that ought to have been explored by the authors of a book about citizenship.

A modest knowledge of legal history might have saved the authors from the error of describing land as having been ‘officially defined as terra nullius’ (p.99). Land never was so defined. It is simply the case that some people, notably contemporary historian Henry Reynolds, use this old foreign term to explain the colonial approach to land occupation in Australia.

With the exception of a page on patriotic war cries at sporting matches, the authors ignore the role that sport plays in building a sense of Australian citizenship beyond mere civics. Theatre and film are largely ignored. A few landscape artists are mentioned rather than discussed. The novels, magazines, literary circles and historical schools of Australia are to all intents and purposes overlooked.

Are there any redeeming features of the book? In general, Australian Citizenship presents an unproblematic and not terribly controversial treatment of the subject. The handling of the topics is quite balanced and sound. Though it has to be said that the authors might have damaged their independence in the partisan display and consequences of having invited Mr Latham to launch the book.

If my trouble with the text can be reduced to one main difficulty then it is that I am left unsatisfied with the authors’ support for their argument that citizenship is more than civics.

I so wanted to believe them but the undistinguished tone, the lack of colour, and the sparse use of sources other than the political all run counter to the claims made in the opening chapter of the book that citizenship is more than this. Unwittingly the authors are clearly more comfortable with the orthodox, ‘official’ line on citizenship than the brave new world that they would like to see.

Australian Citizenship is an uninspiring text written in leaden prose. I pity the undergraduates for whom this will no doubt become a set text.

Rebels with a Cause: Independents in Australian Politics
by Brian Costar and Jennifer Curtin
Sydney, UNSW Press, 2004,
96pp, $16.95
ISBN 0 868 406 593,

Reviewed by Peter Taft

Not many Australians wanted, or thought they’d get, a House of Representatives in which independents would play a key role following the 2004 federal election. As it turned out, they didn’t. But as Costar and Curtin point out in their introduction, independent politicians had been important in the governance of five states and one territory over the previous ten years, and had a significant presence in the Senate during much of that time.

While media attention on certain independents during the campaign was not enough to get them over the line, the three existing independents demonstrated the power of incumbency by being re-elected to the House of Representatives. The potential for them to hold the balance of power at some stage in the future, as their state and territory colleagues have done, remains.
Therefore, a comprehensive study of independent politicians—their motivation, those of their electors, and their impact on governance—would be a welcome addition to the literature. In its limited space, this volume touches on each of these issues, thereby going a small way towards providing such a study.

On the positive side, Costar and Curtin have provided a book that is an easy read and replete with interesting snippets of political history, mostly from the past two decades. The chapter on ‘independents past’ delves further back over the past century, whetting the appetite for further reading. Few students of today would have heard of the likes of Coles and Wilson in the 1940s, while various fascinating mavericks from Queensland parade through in a sentence or two each.

The chapters on government and governance raise more questions than they answer. Costar and Curtin provide useful accounts of how independents came to hold the balance of power in various state parliaments, but there is little attempt to fathom whether the effects of this were positive or negative. The circumstances surrounding the Tasmanian Parliamentary Accord, and the memoranda of understanding in New South Wales and Victoria are given due treatment. However, it was frustrating that the documents themselves were not reprinted in the book for reference. Their omission, and that of an index, was seemingly in the interests of keeping the book short and simple.

There is some original research in the form of qualitative interviews with a small selection of voters in regional electorates, a focus warranted on the basis of the location of independent members (both currently and historically). We discover views such as ‘the Senate is just a remote and intangible thing’ while the local independent member Peter Andren is seen as hard working and committed. It seems unlikely, however, that city and suburban voters, including those who vote for major parties, would think much differently. Previous surveys have established an ignorance of the parliamentary system, and the general popularity of local members notwithstanding a cynicism towards politicians in general. Perhaps mass surveys rather than extensive interviews of a limited number of people would have better fleshed out why people voted for independents.

The question is raised as to whether voters support independent candidates in protest against policies seen as being anti-regional, or whether it is to keep pressure on the major parties to throw money at the bush. The authors manage to confuse themselves (and the unwary reader) in the process. For instance, in the introduction we read about how the major parties ‘have largely abandoned traditional rural policies and now require regional communities to take responsibility for their own sustainability.’ A few pages later, we hear of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent to appease regional and rural Australia in the lead-up to the 2001 election.
Three years down the track, we are no closer to the answer. It has been argued that the government continues to squander its fiscal dividend in regional areas, while failing to make tough reforms in agriculture that may benefit the country but leave certain areas (read ‘marginal electorates’) worse off. One suspects that it is an argument that Costar and Curtin hold little sympathy for.

Indeed, Costar and Curtin manage to portray themselves as rebels with a dubious cause via an unsubstantiated attack on (their own perception of) economic rationalism. Having criticised—quite validly—the arrogance of a senior public servant who argued that Australia could not afford to elect independents, the authors somehow draw a line from this view to ‘an extremely “rationalist” paradigm derived from market economics, which regards efficiency rather than effectiveness as the ultimate good’.

Firstly, whether there is unfettered executive power over the parliament has little to do with any particular form of economic policy. Secondly, few supporters of market economics of whom I am aware would laud its efficiency rather than its effectiveness. Perhaps Costar and Curtin should stick to their discipline of choice—politics.

This book is a start. A more complete study of independents in Australian politics, containing documentary material, a comprehensive index, and deeper analysis, awaits.

In Defense of Globalization
by Jagdish Bhagwati
Oxford University Press
2004, 304pp, $62.95
ISBN 0195 170253

Reviewed by Chris Prunty

Jagdish Bhagwati set out to write a book for the intelligent everyman that explores the nature and origins of anti-globalisation. He spends time ‘understanding the anti-globalization movement and defining its concerns’. He explodes a few anti-globalisation myths and highlights the anti-globalist penchant for presenting fear as fact.

Wittily and eloquently, and using both empirical and anecdotal evidence, Bhagwati shows how globalisation helps the poor, reduces child labour, advances opportunities for women, improves third-world labour standards and wages, and aids environmental protection. So far so good. But nothing very good lasts forever.

Bhagwati has a fascination with putting a ‘human face’ on globalisation.

He argues ‘Globalization has a human face, but we can make that face yet more agreeable’. This may or may not be the case, but how does one measure such a thing? Does a textile worker in Thailand really care whether globalisation is wearing a happy face, or whether they are paid three times what they could earn working in a rice paddy?

Bhagwati undoes his good work by warning of ‘the perils of gung-ho capitalism’ as if it was not gung-ho capitalism that brought about the aforementioned benefits of globalisation. From there it’s all downhill. Bhagwati warns against the ‘freeing of capital flows in haste without putting in place monitoring and regulatory mechanisms and banking reforms’ and seems particularly haunted by the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s. He uses this as an example of the dangers of ‘imprudent financial liberalization…allowing free international flows of short-term capital without adequate attention to the potentially potent downside of such globalization.’

Even Bhagwati admits the Asian crisis happened despite the relevant economies’ ‘splendid fundamentals’ which leads one to the obvious, and correct, conclusion: that, like all crashes, the crisis was driven by fear and greed. Last time I checked they hadn’t worked out a way to regulate against fear or greed or stupidity. However, Bhagwati lays blame at the feet of a ‘lack of banking and financial regulation’.

Bhagwati goes on to say ‘appropriate handling of the downsides of globalization that will undoubtedly occur with integration into the world economy, and in the course of transition to such integration as well, requires a complex set of new policies and institutions.’ Even more disastrously he suggests ‘the design and financing of these new institutions and policies cannot be left simply to the government in these [poor] nations.’ So you know where the money is coming from.

Bhagwati finds the ideas that the difficulties of globalisation are overcome in the long-run and that globalisation promotes growth that aids both rich and poor nations ‘unpersuasive’. He wants ‘institutional mechanisms to cope with the occasional downsides’ of globalisation—whatever that means.

Bhagwati is wrong, wrong, wrong. Globalisation will not become more beneficial if the process is managed—in fact, the opposite is true. Regulation is costly, ineffective and creates perverse incentives unforseen by regulators. Globalisation has already been proven to work—Bhagwati spends the first three-quarters of the book saying so —so why moderate the process?
The answer to this may be that Bhagwati wants to be liked. He wants to be seen as the human face of globalisation. Despite taking a satisfying swing at Arts students and faculties, Bhagwati falls over himself to identify and engage with those ‘critics of globalization whose discontents are well within the parameters of mainstream dissent’. In Defence of Globalization contains concessions that may make its conclusions more palatable to these critics but that are bound to infuriate true proponents of globalisation. Should these ideas take hold they will limit globalisation’s long-term effectiveness.

Bhagwati argues the case for globalisation well and In Defense of Globalization could so easily have been an articulate, not to mention mercifully short, contribution to the often irrational debate on globalisation. Unfortunately, in his attempt to accommodate anti-globalists Bhagwati seriously weakens his argument and does a great disservice to globalisation.

State-Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century
by Francis Fukuyama
Great Britain, Profile Books, 2004, 194pp, $45
ISBN 1 86197 781 6

Reviewed by Susan Windybank

Francis Fukuyama rose to prominence just before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 when he proclaimed the ‘end of history’—that is, the end of ideological conflict and the triumph of liberal democracy as the final form of government. He then turned his attention to issues such as trust and civil society, divorce and family breakdown, and the ethics of biogenetic engineering. State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century marks his return to geopolitics to focus on what he argues is one of the biggest challenges to international order—state weakness and what can be done about it. Weak and failing states are the ‘source of many of the world’s most serious problems from poverty and AIDS to crime and terrorism’, and can no longer be safely ignored.

Based on three lectures delivered at Cornell University in early 2003 (and, in the case of the third lecture, on his 2002 John Bonython Lecture for CIS), the aim of the book is to bridge the divide between development and security studies. For when countries like the United States intervene in failed states, whether for humanitarian or strategic reasons (or both), they end up facing the same questions as international aid agencies: ‘how to build self-sustaining institutions that can survive once foreign advice and support are withdrawn’. This is commonly known as ‘nation-building’ yet, as Fukuyama points out, outsiders cannot create or mend the social, cultural and historical ties that bind people together as a nation. A more accurate term is ‘state-building’—the creation of new government institutions and the strengthening of existing ones such as armies, police forces, judiciaries, central banks, tax-collection agencies, health and education systems, and the like.

Fukuyama acknowledges that his emphasis on building the state may strike some as ‘perverse’ given the prevailing wisdom of the past three decades has been ‘the critique of “big government” and the attempt to move activities from the state sector to private markets or civil society’. This has often been caricatured as a ‘neoliberal’ campaign against government per se, but the goal was limited government not no government. Liberals believe that restraining leviathan is the key to prosperity but they are not laissez-faire anarchists. They recognise that government is necessary to enforce the rule of law and to protect private property rights so that markets can flourish.

This agenda has been a great boon to developed countries and remains a live issue in states like France, Germany and Japan. But transferred to the developing world in the form of the so-called Washington consensus—privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation—the results have been mixed. Fukuyama does not argue that these measures in themselves were wrong but that they often confused scope (the number and range of functions, activities and goals taken on by governments) with strength (ability to enforce laws and plan, implement and administer policies). In Russia, for example, the rush to privatise state assets before establishing an appropriate legal system led to a corrupt oligarchy that discredited Western-style reforms and, for many ordinary Russians, confirmed the old Soviet propaganda that capitalists are crooks.
Now the new mantra in development circles is that ‘institutions matter’. This renewed focus on institutions, however, has created its own problems. Aid agencies talk endlessly about the need for ‘good governance’ and ‘capacity-building’ but often end up weakening rather than strengthening institutions. Outsiders with their First World salaries, air-conditioned 4WDs and laptop computers crowd out the locals, who become little more than liaison officers or who leave to work for the external donor. Instead of ‘capacity building’, says Fukuyama, there is a kind of ‘capacity sucking out’.

The biggest obstacle is on the demand side. If a country’s elites are not committed to reform, then no amount of aid—no matter how well-intentioned—is likely to be effective. Fukuyama cites the example of Sub-Saharan Africa where IMF-imposed structural adjustment programmes and external aid conditionality were used as a excuse to cut back on core state functions while protecting and, in some cases, increasing the size of the ‘patrimonial’ state (the shadow system of political patronage that exists alongside, and often competes with, bureaucracies created in colonial times). Thus investment in roads, health clinics and schools fell but spending on the military and jobs for the boys in the public sector rose.

This discussion of why states fail and how aid often ends up doing more harm than good forms the first two sections of the book, which could be read with profit on their own. But readers might be left wondering what all this has got to do with geopolitics. The answer comes in the final section, where Fukuyama predicts that the ‘art of state-building’ will become as important as traditional military power to the maintenance of world order. As the United States has discovered in Iraq, the hard part is not removing bad governments, but creating better ones. ‘The U.S. Department of Defense’, he writes, ‘lacked the institutional capacity to organise such a complex operation’. Hence his quip that ‘state-building is something needed not just in collapsed or weak Third World states but occasionally in Washington as well’. Indeed, he is highly critical of the ‘ideologised debate over nation-building’ in the United States, where it is derided by many on the right as ‘global social work’, calling this position ‘untenable’ and warning that

[T]he withering away of the state is not a prelude to utopia but to disaster . . . Those who have argued for a ‘twilight of sovereignty’—whether they are proponents of free markets on the right or committed multilateralists on the left—have to explain what will replace the power of sovereign nation-states . . . [Until then state] power is necessary to enforce a rule of law domestically . . . and to preserve world order internationally . . . [W]e have no choice but to go back to the nation-state and try to understand how to make it strong and effective.

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