As there are vigorous debates about the merits of globalization for developing countries, this book sets out to assess how publics in the developing countries perceive the impact of globalization: Are they embracing it or are they resenting it? The authors have chosen two East Asian (South Korea and Vietnam) and two Eastern European (Ukraine and Czech) countries to conduct both opinion surveys and focus group discussions. The focus is on ordinary citizens, although for opinion surveys a sample of government officials was also drawn in each country. In this book we hear citizens clearly: Responding to survey questionnaires and in focus group discussions, citizens in the four chosen countries expressed what they think about economic openness, marketization, and cultural influences from the outside world; how they would like to respond to the impact of globalization; and how they see the role of the state in the process of globalization.

Despite its excessive usage in public as well as academic discourses, “globalization” as a term still defies clear definition. Hence, one highly commendable undertaking of this study is its effort in pinning down how globalization can be operationalized in public opinion research: How much globalization does an ordinary individual encounter in his or her daily life? Is it improved economic development and prosperity? Is it more presence of foreign employers on the labor market, more foreign consumer goods in the supermarket, more foreign brands in TV commercials, more government officials, or more pollution caused by foreign companies? Is it more foreign TVs and movies and consequently the endangering of national culture? Or is it a conspiracy between government officials and foreign capital that exploits the ordinary people? And if globalization is perceived by citizens as mainly a negative (disrupting, exploiting, unjust, etc.) thing, will they rise to resist it, and if so, how?

The answers the authors found are, from a liberalist point of view, more or less reassuring. Although citizens in these four countries feel some negative impact from globalization (increasing income gap and more pollution, for example), they nevertheless feel that opening their economy to and integrating with the outside world are necessary and will bring benefits to the nation. Citizens may have strong feeling about globalization, but such feelings do not affect their overall sense of how things are going in their country or in their family. Although openness may bring foreign influences, many are optimists and believe that their national culture will thrive, especially their social and family values. And while many people believe that it is legitimate to protest against unfairness and injustice in the practices of foreign companies and international organizations (i.e., the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization), the predominant majority believe that protests must be carried out in peaceful and democratic ways.

The choice of countries is deliberate: The Czech Republic, Ukraine, South Korea, and Vietnam represent different levels of success in harnessing the opportunities provided by globalization in Eastern Europe and Asia, respectively. Yet the inclusion of only four countries allows very limited degree of freedom for generalizable findings. In terms of regional patterns, for example, generalizing the differences between the Vietnam-Korea pair and the Czech-Ukraine pair to depict an East Asia–Eastern Europe divide (in support of protest, for example) sounds highly problematic. The authors are probably aware of this, but it was still difficult for them to resist the temptation to offer regional generalizations. In several of their models, a “legacy” variable was used to account for the differences observed between the two pairs, which basically offers no explanatory power. In fact, within these two regions the attitudes toward globalization may in fact be very diverse. In East Asia, the part of the world with which I am more familiar, for example, citizens in China perceive globalization probably very differently from those in Korea or Vietnam. Citizens in Cambodia and Laos, two countries sharing similar geopolitical and geoeconomic environments with Vietnam, may nonetheless have very different feelings toward globalization.

Perhaps partly due to the fact that the term “globalization” is very difficult to disaggregate and operationalize, in some places one cannot fail to notice conceptual confusions. For example, Chapter 2 is the major chapter that lays out the various aspects of “discontent” that the book intends to examine. But the main dependent variable of this chapter is a citizen's “satisfaction with the way things are going in this country.” This leads the reader to wonder whether the book is about dissatisfaction with globalization or dissatisfaction with domestic politics. Then the regression models in Tables 2.12 through 2.13 (pp. 69–75) are basically no different from other studies of political satisfaction. Hence, in these analyses globalization is not treated as an object of people's discontent, nor a cause of people's domestic dissatisfaction. The finding then has to be somehow a twisted one: Globalization matters because it does not affect people's overall dissatisfaction.

Because the book examines the cultural, social, and political dimensions of the impact of globalization, not just the economic dimension of such opening to the outside world, a more telling title would probably have been something like “Globalization and Its Enemies,” rather than the current mimic of Karl Popper. But a more pertinent question is who, precisely, would the author identify as really the “enemy” of globalization? The book does not seem to answer this question directly at any place, but in its abstract it points to the public's willingness to resort to protests (especially violent protests and sabotage) as among “the most fervent enemies of openness.”

But is it? Should the real enemy be considered foreign companies whose lack of corporate social responsibility induces such protests? Should it be the government agencies and officials who fail to provide protection to citizens? Or should it be the government that distorts market rules and uses liberalization and marketization for the benefit of the officials? These possibilities are all examined, rightly, in the various chapters. But the book does not provide a clear overall perspective on these problems or their remedy. Had it raised its theoretical sights just a little higher, it probably would have concluded that globalization generates many problems, and the solution to these problems lies in effective and accountable governance that can help citizens harness the opportunities of global economic integration and benefit from them. At the same time, this is a laudable study, and it should be read by students of globalization, public opinion, and citizen politics.