A World of Regions

By Peter J. Katzenstein. 2019

306 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This book is not for the faint-hearted or, indeed, for the thin-skinned. If the reader imagines him or herself to be a reasonably serious and well-read student of international affairs, this book might give rise to a demoralizing sense of inadequacy. The author provides early-warning that the book is intended as an antidote to the realist textbooks that he claims all but monopolize the teaching of international relations in US universities, and to the thinking that has captured the current political leadership: a warning, in other words, that it is not going to be an easy read. This warning is not misplaced, although the prose lightens up refreshingly as the book unfolds. The book’s central proposition is that, especially in the peerless circumstances the United States has found itself of late, the realist school of analysis that dominates both teaching and policy inclines Washington to view the world at a level of geostrategic abstraction that is likely to result in bad policy choices. More specifically, the thesis of the book is that regional differences matter greatly, not least because these differences are essential to understanding the texture of US power and influence, and the manner in which it is transmitted to shape the decisions of others. In international relations, as in politics and economics, the intellectual Holy Grail is to identify and characterize the hidden currents that flow continuously beneath the surface of the events we observe. The better the diagnosis at this level, the more likely it will be that expectations about the thrust of future events will turn out to be correct and the greater the scope to frame policies that are cognizant of these hidden currents, whether to try and shift their direction or to capitalize on the direction they already have. Katzenstein contends that the functioning of the international system is best understood as an American imperium that works preeminently through two key transmission states, Germany and Japan, that are both deeply and reliably aligned with the United States and powerful actors in their respective regions. The author is at his most insightful in accounting for the striking differences between European and Asian regionalism, the consequent differences in the character of the transmission mechanisms and the implications for the management of the imperium both down from and up to the United States. Given the skill and persuasiveness of this analysis, the reader is struck by

Subfields: Cultural Studies

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