If commerce among nations truly undermines their proclivity to settle differences by resort to arms—as philosophers like Montesquieu and Kant believed so ardently—then globalization should portend a new era of world peace. More than a few overly optimistic liberals like Thomas Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000) have made just such a claim. But the world is hardly such a simple place, as we learn in Stephen Brooks's carefully crafted book. Brooks begins by unpacking the multifaceted nature of economic globalization itself, and through the main body of the book he closely examines how individual threads of this phenomenon may pull some nations toward more pacific relations while tugging others in more dangerous directions. A great deal of case-based and anecdotal evidence is marshaled along the way, and some of his arguments are made more convincingly than others. But in the end, he has given us a clear, comprehensive, and forward-looking treatment of a question that has heretofore been dismissed with oversimplified answers.
A central contribution of this book is Brooks's focus on the growth in transnational production above that of international trade or finance. While trade and finance are important aspects of globalization, it is transnational production that is reorganizing economic life so that fewer and fewer items are being manufactured, start to finish, in a single country. Production lines now routinely cross national boundaries, and the associated “international” trade that actually takes place within individual firms already represents an amazingly large share of world commerce. This is the dimension that is missed by old-school realists who are so quick to dismiss the significance of globalization by pointing out that trade and financial flows were comparably large in an earlier period of high interdependence, 1870–1914. How, then, does transnational production affect the likelihood of armed conflict among nations today and in the future?
Brooks tells us that economic interdependence may change the capabilities of actors, the incentives that actors have to resort to armed force, or it may change the nature of the actors themselves. Chapters 4–6 lay out ways in which transnational production affects each of these, and the main claim in each case would seem to reaffirm the dreams of Kant and his modern disciples. Transnational production, Brooks tells us, undermines the war-making capability of nations by ending all hope of autarky in the arms industry. Incentives for conflict are likewise eroded because the rewards of conquest have been powerfully diminished, and the nature of actors is changed in a pacific direction because the drive to attract foreign direct investment leads nations to form supranational economic organizations. Each of these developments makes war more difficult, less profitable, or both. Is this the final triumph of liberalism? Alas, no.
As always, the devil is very much in the details. The impact on future conflict brought about by each of these grand trends contains important limits and boundary conditions. The benefits of conquest, the author shows us, only disappear in target nations that possess knowledge-based economies. The Kuwaits of the world, therefore, will not be protected by the economic forces of globalization. And while organizations like Mercosur just might create the ground in which a security community could bloom in the Southern Cone, there are too few regions on earth with similar conditions that permit this hopeful model to become commonplace. Taking his final stand, Brooks concludes that globalization, in general, and transnational production, in particular, will reinforce pacific relations among the great powers, have little effect (or even exacerbate conflict) among developing nations, and produce mixed results in security relations between rich nations and those who aspire to be. We must applaud this author for tracing out his arguments in such full length and tempering his claims so thoroughly. At the same time, a reader can wonder why the liberal line shapes the book's main claims so strongly when the results of the study show the boundaries and limitations of those claims so effectively (see esp. Chapter 7). Identification of these boundaries and limits is as important as the tracing of claimed effects. Both are found in this book, but the former are somewhat downplayed in the presentation.
I cannot agree with certain claims made by Brooks. He documents the erosion of autarky in arms production quite impressively. But does this hinder any nation's war-making capability decisively? Partial if not complete dependence on foreign sources for armaments is more the rule than the exception. Think of lend-lease in 1940, or of Argentina's French-made Exocet missiles in 1982, or NATO coproduction schemes. National self-sufficiency in arms manufacture is neither necessary nor sufficient to make war. I also note that globalization has growth effects as well as interdependence effects. There is a large literature, including theorists like A. F. K. Organski, Robert Gilpin, Charles Doran, Nazli Choucri, and Robert North who show that uneven growth has major destabilizing effects on global security. Brooks—and nearly every author who writes about globalization—focuses only on the interdependence effects, and thus may overestimate the pacifying force of this grand trend. Finally, the case study Chapters 4–6 are offered as tests of specific hypotheses derived in Chapter 3. I take each more as a thoroughly documented “proof of concept” than as a hypothesis test, but this does not void them of value. Brooks is breaking a great deal of new ground here, and new ideas should be given prima facie validity before they can be tested more rigorously.
Such criticisms notwithstanding, Producing Security remains an original and important work that all researchers concerned with the security implications of economic trends will want to read. Brooks's careful craftsmanship is evident from start to finish. Importantly, he forces our attention away from simple trade flows to the underlying forces of transnational production that will continue to have central consequences for global security in our age.
