3 Review(s)

This powerfully argued and cogent book challenges the widely prevalent idea that the age of international rivalries is finished. Kees van der Pijl maintains that below the surface of the current trend to globalise and homogenise through the transnationalism of capital and class formation lies a profound drift towards disintegration and conflagration. In this well-documented study of modern international history, the author: - challenges the notion that the world today has been unified under a single economic system (capitalism) with an ‘international community’ policing it to protect democracy and human rights; - views capitalist globalisation as opening up rifts of the past, exhausting nature, exacerbating inequality and creating instabilities; - argues that the apparent homogenisation of the global political economy hides a definite movement towards social crisis and conflict; and - deals with some of the key issues of our time, in the time-honoured manner of the great sweep of history.