Cohen's analytical framework draws from a wide spectrum of political writings, borrowing from Murray Edelman's work on the symbolic uses of politics, to Robert Reich's and Dani Rodrik's political economy perspectives, to Roland Robertson's cultural studies of globalization. Following an introductory chapter, which lays out the book's argument, Cohen presents two conceptual chapters that draw upon this eclectic mix of research to provide an elaboration of terms, and which address questions central to current debates over globalization: Is globalization a phenomenon “new” to the late twentieth century; in what ways is state sovereignty being affected by globalization; what are the varied policy impacts, especially beyond material interests, of globalization; who are the winners and losers, and what sorts of societal divisions are being created by globalization in the United States today?

Cohen answers these questions and illustrates these divisions and their link to the increased exposure of Americans to a more global environment through examples from recent battles over trade, immigration, and language policy in the book's middle three chapters. For him, the increased immersion of Americans, especially since the 1970s, into this global context is not the result of unstoppable, untraceable malicious forces. Rather—and this is the crux of his argument—globalization is the result of purposeful “policy choices designed to expand the role of market institutions in American life” (p. 75). Moreover, rather than resulting in a loss of American sovereignty, globalization and the reordering of state-society relations in the United States that have resulted are a product of U.S. sovereignty, which “remains alive and well” (p. 25). For Cohen, sovereignty is comprised of more than just a state's capacities and resources, but refers as well to the purposes and goals of a state. The policies devised over the past two decades, then, to increasingly expose more individuals and institutions in the United States to market forces and create a “competition state” (p. 110) have been the product of sovereign political choices. However, these political choices, he argues, have in turn undermined a shared sense of responsibility, identity, and destiny and created an America increasingly divided over global policy issues.

The early 1990s battle over the North American Free Trade Agreement is a logical choice for illustrating the economic dimension of the globalization debate in the United States. President Clinton's struggle to convince his political allies in the Democratic Party of the trade accord's benefits, culminating in the creation of the environmental and labor sideagreements designed to appease the more agitated in the liberal-left of this constituency, hinted at the public divisions soon to emerge between centrist “new Democrats” favored by the Democratic Leadership Council and increasingly disaffected groups from labor, human rights, and environmental and consumer groups who felt betrayed by Clinton's determined push for NAFTA. Moreover, the NAFTA battle clearly helped mobilize what later became known as the “Seattle coalition” of civil society groups, with Clinton's failed attempts to have fast-track (now known as trade-promotion) authority renewed by a rebellious Congress concurrent with the eventual embarrassing collapse of World Trade Organization talks in Seattle in the midst of a sea of thousands of angry anti-WTO protestors.

Astute observers of the globalization debate are by now well versed in these battles, and Cohen usefully drives his analysis beyond debates over the distribution of material benefits in an era of continental free trade, to what he argues are just as important symbolic and cultural dimensions of globalization's divisive impact on the American polity. The continued influx of immigrants into the United States, as well as the accompanying rise of educational, welfare, and voting policy adjustments for non-English speakers, has driven a powerful symbolic wedge into a country increasingly confused over the requisites of membership and citizenship in the American political community (p. 119). Yet, again, for Cohen, these social conflicts are not due—as some involved in anti–free trade, anti-immigrant, and English-language-only movements might contend—to an erosion of American state sovereignty. Rather, the political backlash against the more liberal trade and immigration policies of the past two decades is linked to the conscious decision by influential business and policy interests to redirect American power toward the enhancement of competitive market forces.

Cohen's argument that both the capacities and purposes of U.S. sovereignty over the past two decades have been reworked in favor of market imperatives, thus encouraging the latest round of globalized trade, information flows, and migration, is a persuasive one. However, this writer is less sanguine than is Cohen about the condition of popular sovereignty in the United States, or that there has not been “any significant diminution of American sovereignty as a result of this agreement [NAFTA] or the WTO” (p. 113). It is notable that there is no discussion of the increasingly controversial investment protections in Chapter 11 of NAFTA. NAFTA's Chapter 11 was seemingly designed to protect investors from the threat of expropriation or nationalization. Yet corporations have increasingly used these protections to sue NAFTA-member governments in secret tribunals if regulations or government decisions are interpreted to negatively affect investment opportunities. The result has been a growing list of so-called investor-to-state cases that involve challenges to state or federal regulations, and which have raised concerns about the constraints being placed upon democratic governance in the United States by these new trade and investment accords.

Moreover, while Cohen can be forgiven for not anticipating the stock-market bubble and the numerous examples of corporate corruption that have captured the headlines of late, his insistence that the United States has entered the twenty-first century “with the most competitive economy in a global system organized around the virtues of market competition and efficiency” (p. 77) now rings a little hollow. Crony capitalism, it turns out, is not a concept foreign to U.S. corporate boardrooms. Those market-friendly policies, which Cohen argues helped to propel the United States to its preeminent globally competitive position, were of course cheered on with help from an infusion of record amounts of bubble-assisted campaign money during the 1990s, a perversity that has clearly helped to promote political disaffection across the country.

Nonetheless, Cohen is to be applauded for developing a more multifaceted study of globalization that promises continued analytical relevance as divisive policy debates continue to unfold. The razor-thin congressional renewal of trade-promotion authority for President Bush only sets up what promises to be bruising trade battles over passage of the Free Trade Area of the Americas and the WTO Doha round. Moreover, in the post–September 11 environment, concerns over border security and immigration control have again become more salient. Debates, then, over the meaning of identity and membership in the American political community will remain with us for the foreseeable future, and Cohen's multidimensional analysis in The Politics of Globalization in the United States provides guidance for understanding the roots and contemporary significance of this political turbulence.