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Articles from New Statesman
Book Review: Engine of Growth
Robert Skidelsky
New Statesman
| Monday, July 12, 2004
In Defence of Globalisation
by Jagdish Bhagwati
Oxford University Press, 324pp, £17.99
Why Globalisation Works
by Martin Wolf
Yale University Press, 398pp, £19.99
These two books offer a defence of globalisation against its critics. Both cover much the same ground, though with differing emphases. Martin Wolf, a noted economics columnist at the Financial Times, has written the more comprehensive, better organised and (despite its greater length) more concise book. It is a necessary and compelling read for all who want to understand the logic of unfolding events. Jagdish Bhagwati is one of the world's leading trade theorists. His book has its moments, but he is not at his best. It is intellectually self-indulgent, and his style - with
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Book Review: The Global Guru
Robert Skidelsky
New Statesman
| Thursday, April 15, 2004
The Bubble of American Supremacy
by George Soros
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 224pp, £12.99
Having made a fortune as a financier and then given much of it away in philanthropy, George Soros has embarked on a new career as a guru. He urgently wants to put his mouth where his money is. He looks at our arrangements for managing the planet and finds them sadly wanting. "The combination of financial markets and national politics," he writes, "has created a lopsided system designed primarily for the production and exchange of private goods. Collective needs and social justice receive short shrift because the development of international institutions . . . has not kept pace with the development of markets."
To the task of plugging the
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Essay: The Killing Fields
Robert Skidelsky
New Statesman
| Monday, January 26, 2004
Changes in the character of war partially account for the mass murders of the past century. But the rise of democracy also plays a role
Why did the 20th century produce so much mass killing of civilians - a phenomenon so terrible and unexpected that it caused a new word, "genocide", to be coined to describe it? Mass slaughter is nothing new. What was new was its return to the centres of civilisation after two centuries of progress. From Europe, it spread to Asia and Africa. In Rwanda on 7 April 1994, the Hutus started killing the Tutsis, or "cockroaches" as they were called. They shot and hacked a million to death in three months. The killings were as coldly deliberate as those organised by Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. The great powers
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Book Review: A Janus-faced World
Robert Skidelsky
New Statesman
| Monday, November 17, 2003
The Breaking of Nations: order and chaos in the 21st century
by Robert Cooper
Atlantic Books, 180pp, £14.99
International relations may or may not be in a mess; the theory of international relations certainly is. The old theory was that the world consists of "states" which exist in an "international anarchy". It was an "anarchy" because there was no world government. But there was, nevertheless, a principle of order, or rather two: empire and the balance of power. These coexisted in uneasy juxtaposition. By the end of the 19th century, the balance of power in Europe had become a world balance as the United States and Japan took their place as "great powers" alongside the empires of the main European states. After 1945, there was a
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Book Review: Inside the Bubble
Robert Skidelsky
New Statesman
| Monday, October 27, 2003
The Roaring Nineties: seeds of destruction
Joseph Stiglitz Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 389pp, £18.99
This book is the story of the forces that drove the American economy to frenzy in the 1990s and collapse in 2000. It is much better than Professor Stiglitz's last offering, Globalization and Its Discontents (2002), which was largely a rant against the IMF and the World Bank. Diatribe is not absent from this book. But it is much more solidly rooted in his own path-breaking work on the economics of risk and information, for which he won a Nobel prize in 2001. Stiglitz is not an elegant, nor even a punchy writer. But when he relates the politics of the 1990s to the economics he knows well, the discussion becomes exciting.
In
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