The Shape of the World to Come: Charting the Geopolitics of a New Century

Offering the most comprehensive analysis of world politics to date, Laurent Cohen-Tanugi takes on globalization's cheerleaders and detractors, who, in their narrow focus, have failed to recognize the full extent to which globalization has become a geopolitical phenomenon. Cohen-Tanugi argues that economic globalization exists in a complex dialectic with the traditional geopolitics it has, ironically, helped to revive. This tension has created an ambivalent world that requires democracies to operate simultaneously in the realm of economic integration and multilateralism--or peaceful, astrategic, "postmodern" internationalism--and the more traditional, even regressive realm of confrontation between national and regional strategies of power fought against a background of terrorism, civil wars, and nuclear proliferation. Offering an interpretative framework for thought and action, Cohen-Tanugi suggests how we should approach our new "multipolar" world that is anything but the balanced and harmonious system many welcomed as an alternative to the "American empire."