All Politics Is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes

Has globalization diluted the power of national governments to regulate their own economies? Are international governmental and nongovernmental organizations weakening the hold of nation-states on global regulatory agendas? Many observers think so. But in All Politics Is Global, Daniel Drezner argues that this view is wrong. Despite globalization, states--especially the great powers--still dominate international regulatory regimes, and the regulatory goals of states are driven by their domestic interests.

As Drezner shows, state size still matters. The great powers--the United States and the European Union--remain the key players in writing global regulations, and their power is due to the size of their internal economic markets. If they agree, there will be effective global governance. If they don't agree, governance will be fragmented or ineffective. And, paradoxically, the most powerful sources of great-power preferences are the least globalized elements of their economies.

Testing this revisionist model of global regulatory governance on an unusually wide variety of cases, including the Internet, finance, genetically modified organisms, and intellectual property rights, Drezner shows why there is such disparity in the strength of international regulations.

Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is the author of U.S. Trade Strategy and The Sanctions Paradox and has been published widely in scholarly journals as well as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He is a regular contributor to Newsweek International and NPR’s Marketplace. He keeps a daily Weblog at www.danieldrezner.com.