Among the casualties of the recession will be the once unstoppable juggernaut of globalization itself, argues this scattershot treatise. Historian James (The End of Globalization
) compares the current economic crisis to the Great Depression to suggest a cyclical dynamic in which advances in global integration are superseded by retrenchments toward economic nationalism and autarky. What links these cataclysms, he contends, is the crumbling of “values” in many senses. As banks' balance sheets grow murky, unemployment soars, currencies fluctuate and economies seesaw between inflation and deflation, the cultural values that depend on confidence in the global economy—trust, openness, tolerance—also waver. The result—in the 1930s and now, he fears—is a swing toward tariffs and trade wars, anti-immigrant backlashes and perhaps authoritarian government. James buttresses his thesis with statistics and graphs and detailed, blow-by-blow chronicles of stock market panics and bank runs past and present, but none of this ever gels into a systematic account of the various crises he investigates or a rigorous model of cyclicality in economic globalization. Instead, he's written an elegy for an expansive form of liberal capitalism that's now been done in by its financial excesses. (Sept.)
