REVIEW
Six Faces of Globalization: Who wins, who loses, and why it matters Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp, Harvard University Press, 2021, 400 pages Nailing the narrative
By Mahdi Rahimi, Senior Financial Analyst, OPEC Fund
The six different narratives discussed in Roberts’ and Lamp’s book are the establishment narrative, the left-wing populist narrative, the right-wing populist narrative, the corporate power narrative, the geostrategic narrative and the global threats narrative. Building on these narratives, the authors create a multi-faceted view by highlighting issues and policies where these narratives overlap and where they differ. They treat economic globalization as a complex system that means “different things to different people in different contexts, places and networks,” and show that, just like in any complex system, looking at the issues at hand from just one perspective does not lead to any solutions. Although the authors are by their own acknowledgement no experts on developing countries, they raise important points about climate and development justice and offer interesting thoughts about global inequality. The book’s structure offers readers a broad understanding of the “uneven and combined development” (a concept first formulated by Leon Trotsky) of interdependent world economies. One view of globalization points to the growth of aggregate wealth “as the market is the most powerful institution for raising living standards,” exemplified by the fact that around 1 billion people were lifted out of poverty in East Asia in the past 40 years. At the same time this development eroded communities in the United States Rust Belt or the North of England, where decisive votes were cast in 2016, or a race to the bottom for wages and corporate taxes in developing countries to stay competitive. The rules of globalization as laid down in treaties have at their core and origin
I n July 2001, the anti-globalization protests reached their pinnacle during the G8 meeting in Genoa, culminating in the tragic death of the 23-year-old Italian Carlo Giuliani, who was shot by a police officer. His death marked a tragic point in the anti-globalization protest movement. To this day he is commemorated on murals in cities around the world with the inscription “Carlo Vive!” (Carlo lives!). Fast forward to 2016 and the Western world was shocked by two seismic election results, the Brexit vote leading to the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union and Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections. Both winning camps were rallying against economic globalization. To understand why so many people across the world have a critical view of globalization, while the same development has lifted around a billion people out of poverty, the book Six Faces of Globalization makes an important contribution. The authors Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp,
kaleidoscope and offer an outlook on the challenges the world is facing. The book treats each narrative and perspective with appropriate seriousness and diligence and offers a dialectical reading of globalization. With this approach they try to correct a
“The book’s structure offers readers a broad understanding of the ‘uneven and combined development’ of interdependent world economies.”
lecturers at universities in Australia and Canada, respectively, look at economic globalization from six different perspectives and create narratives around these issues, in order to later overlap these perspectives like a
deficit that the former World Bank lead economist Branko Milanovic noted as early as in 2003: “The prevailing view of globalization represented only one positive face of globalization, while entirely neglecting the malignant one.”
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