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The New Realism: Perspectives on Multilateralism and World Order. Edited by Robert W. Cox. New York: St. Martin's/United Nations University Press, 1997. 275p. $55.00.
David Skidmore, Drake University
This book is one in a series of publications produced under the auspices of a wide-ranging program on the future of multilateralism sponsored by the United Nations University from 1991 to 1995. According to program coordinator and volume editor Robert Cox, the project's principal aim was to explore the prospects for creating "a new multilateralism built from the bottom up on the foundations of a broadly participative global society" (p. vii).
Cox contrasts the "structural-critical" approach adopted by contributors to the present volume with the "problem-solving" theories that dominate mainstream studies of multilateralism. Scholars working in the regime theory tradition implicitly adopt a normative preference for the status quo while seeking to resolve the short-term coordination problems faced by national authorities in the management of multilateral cooperation. Cox and his fellow contributors to The New Realism instead prefer a more critical stance toward existing multilateral institutions and focus on the conditions that might allow for long-term structural change in the direction of a more just and democratic world order.
The book is organized into three parts. Part I, "Realities," explores the underlying structural trends that are driving the evolution of multilateralism in the present world order. Three of the four essays in this section complement one another nicely. Collectively, these contributions examine the declining competence of the modern state as the central manager of social, political, and economic life. As territoriality becomes an increasingly tenuous foundation for political authority, states face growing challenges from an increasingly diverse array of social forces.
Susan Strange notes that economic globalization has enhanced the bargaining power of internationally mobile capital vis-a-vis state authorities while also complicating the task of managing increasingly integrated national economies. These realities have compelled states to cede growing authority to nonstate actors, including transnational business firms, intergovernmental organizations, and professional associations.
This reshuffling of authority relations takes place, however, within what Cox later refers to as a "dominant transnational class" (p. 247). The diffusion of power away from traditional states in favor of actors and institutions that can better perform certain system-maintaining functions poses no fundamental threat...