In this fresh and interesting book, Alain Noéˆl and Jean-Philippe Thérien ”œseek to offer a better and more relevant interpretation of globalization, which connects the domestic and international politics of economic development and social justice.” In so doing, they pose the crisp and engaging hypothesis that ”œglobal politics is first and foremost a debate between the left and right.” This argument is premised on three related claims: the world is constructed primarily through debates, politics is global and a stark separation between international and domestic politics ”œis no longer tenable” and, in these global debates, ”œthe left-right dichotomy occupies a special place, as the most enduring, universal, and encompassing of all political cleavages.” The book makes an important contribution in advancing these arguments, while at the same time succeeding in sparking debate, which the authors openly invite.

Noéˆl and Thérien are cautious to not overstate the predominance of the left-right divide, offering numerous caveats; for example, the left-right divide cannot ”œfully account for all aspects of global debates,” and the ”œleft-right metaphor does not explain everything.” These caveats, however, raise a critical question ”” what does it mean to explain global politics? Certainly, specific positions in various debates can be characterized along a left-right continuum. Doing so offers conceptual coherence across these debates and may be judged to be valuable in terms of its political impacts: ”œMost importantly, in our age of global politics, this universal metaphor helps to link people across time and space, and over a broad range of issues. In other words, the left-right opposition makes global politics intelligible.” However, whether these charac- terizations explain various political phenomena or global politics more broadly depends on what it is we want to know and what we fail to understand without them. Noéˆl and Thérien them- selves provide a reasonable benchmark when they note that there are many international developments that other approaches explain poorly. It is here that readers might have wished that the authors had developed the central argu- ment more powerfully.

For example, the authors examine emerging global issues such as the poli- tics of identity, the war on terrorism and the global environmental debate through the lens of the left-right divide. While they compellingly argue that competing positions in debates over these issues can be characterized along a left-right continuum, the remaining challenge is to more fully outline the value of doing so. What incisive insights result? What does one fail to understand if one simply follows more conventional approaches to global pol- itics in thinking about these three issues? Does viewing global politics through a left-right lens lead to analysis in new and interesting directions that would otherwise not occur? Noéˆl and Thérien argue that ”œwithout this [left- right] distinction, it would in fact be v e ry difficult to comprehend these con- temporary conflicts.” They might have developed more clearly what it is specif- ically about the rise of identity politics, the war on terrorism or global environ- mental debates that is difficult to understand without this analysis of the phenomenon as conflicts between the left and right. In so doing, the authors might have sharpened the distinction between the left-right divide as on the one hand a social fact (for example, the fact that in a worldwide survey the respondents’ self-identification on a left-right scale is the most powerful pre- dictor of other attitudes they hold), which they compelling establish, and the left-right divide as on the other a useful conceptual construction provid- ing explanatory power and insight into global politics. It might be one without being the other, and they could have gone further in establishing the second.

If, as Noéˆl and Thérien suspect, some readers will ”œsee our book as a polit- ical essay rather than a work of social science,” it likely would not be because, as the authors imply, the work is value-laden, as is all social science. Rather, it may be so because the book is less systematic than it might be in demonstrating how the empirical evi- dence it offers confirms its theoretical approach while disconfirming others’ ”” presumably their intention in offer- ing a ”œbetter” interpretation of global- ization and global politics than other approaches. For example, one of the competing interpretations the authors challenge is that ”œthe left-right cleav- age [is] a fading division, gradually superseded by other oppositions, more relevant for our times.” The evidence they present in regard to survey respondents’ self-identification on a left-right scale worldwide at a single point in time (2001) does not directly address the issue of change over time, even if these data are sug- gestive of the salience of the left-right cleavage. Moreover, the ability of survey respon- dents to self-identify using these classifications (or the power of this self-identification in predicting other values held by respondents) does not empirically challenge the argu- ment that global politics is more likely to be forcefully shaped by cleavages other than those along the left-right axis or, alternatively, by interests rather than ideas, although this may be a prerequisite of such a challenge.

The authors also examine elite discourses on global- ization, characterizing these expert reactions to globalization along the left-right divide. Perhaps the chapter slides too easily into characterizing the opposition in elite debates between these camps as the ”œpolitical dynam- ic” underpinning global debates. Rehearsing these two visions of glob- alization in elite discourse with dis- tinct centres of gravity (which Noéˆl and Thérien characterize as right and left) does not empirically establish that they ”œdominate and structure the public sphere.” (It is interesting to note that this examination of elite discourses is described in the liner notes as an analysis of ”œsocial dis- courses,” which ”œdemonstrates how this debate shapes…collective views of public affairs.”)

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One of the most promising goals of the book, in reconsidering the con- ceptual distinction between domestic political debates and global political debates, is to develop more fully the link- ages between them. Noéˆl and Thérien argue that ”œdebates about the state of the world are conducted concurrently with- in, across, and above national borders, in processes that remain distinct but that are also interconnected and coherent.” The interconnections between these processes might be sketched out more systematically and developed more fully. In this regard the book does not move much beyond generalizations, such as the claim that the ”œworld public sphere…provides every debate with a global connection” and ”œcreates a shared background and vocabulary, which helps to bridge local, national, continental, and global deliberations.”

Among its many strengths, the book neatly presents a wealth of back- ground material, which will be helpful for those unfamiliar with the develop- ment of the left-right divide or the devel- opment of the international system. Four of the book’s eight chapters docu- ment the historical development of the left-right divide, including the rise of the modern state system, the advent of the ”œage of universality,” the ”œtriumph of market democracy” and, finally, the ”œtwenty-first-century rapprochement” between left and right in which the left- right dichotomy ”œcontinued to define the most enduring and fundamental divide of global politics.” The earlier of these chapters (and sections in other chapters on the antecedents and genealogy of the left-right divide) are interest- ing, but less crucial to the central argument regarding the contin- ued relevance of this divide in shaping global politics.

Just as Noéˆl and Thérien expect that their arguments are more likely to challenge views on the right of the political spec- trum, their interpretation will also pose a greater challenge to conventional approaches in some fields in the study of glob- al politics. In others, such as global social governance, the conventional interpretation already sees global politics as an ideological war of positions between those on the left and those on the right. Even in these areas, the authors are almost undoubtedly right in predicting that ”œnot all readers will agree with us.” There is also, however, no doubt that they have clearly estab- lished that the argument that ”œglobal politics is shaped and constructed through enduring and consistent ideo- logical debates” is an argument ”œworth debating.” This book does an excellent job in marking the initial terrain of such a debate.

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