WhatisGlobalization-KelloggInstitute.pdfVIP

WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION? Four Possible Answers Simon Reich Working Paper #261 – December 1998 Simon Reich holds appointments as a Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. In fall 1997 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute. His publications include The Fruits of Fascism: Postwar Prosperity in Historical Perspective and The German Predicament: Memory and Power in the New Europe (with Andrei S. Markovits) both published by Cornell University Press. His most recent coauthored book is The Myth of the Global Corporation (Princeton University Press, 1998). Reich has also published many book chapters and articles in journals such as International Organization, International Interactions, The Review of International Political Economy, and German Politics and Society. He has received fellowships from the Sloan Foundation and the Kellogg Institute and was awarded an International Affairs Fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations. His current work is on the issue of the definitions and central propositions of globalization. This paper was written during my stay at the Kellogg Institute. I wish to express my appreciation to the fellows and staff of the Institute for all their help on this project, notably to Scott Mainwaring who is now director of the Institute. Introduction The end of the Cold War provided a major shock for scholars of politics and policy in at least two respects. First, it provided a classic example of the limitations of both social and policy sciences predictive capacity. Few foresaw, let alone predicted, the tumultuous events that marked the end of the decade. Second, those events simultaneously dislodged the organizing principle—the foundation—upon which much of the study of international relations was constructed in the postwar period.1 The parsimony and simplicity of bipolarity signaled the hegemony of structural arguments in internatio