In the crowded marketplace of globalization studies, Philip Cerny offers a refreshing and ambitious entry. His book is refreshing in its rejection of both globalization enthusiasm and antiglobalization hostility. Refreshing as well is its theoretical eclecticism: Although Cerny crafts an original theoretical position centered on neopluralism, he is the rare student of world politics who deploys with equal ease Oliver Williamson, Michel Foucault, and contemporary neo-Marxists. At the same time, Rethinking World Politics is ambitious, not only in his theoretical scope but also in its effort to capture a broad vision of globalization—economic, political, and social—and its effects on world politics.

Cerny begins with a conceptual disassembly, dissecting key concepts in conventional views of world politics and ascertaining the ways in which globalization has transformed them. He declines an extended discussion of globalization's definitions and endorses a multifaceted conception from the start: “the shift of a crucial range of economic, social, and political activities to a global scale” (p. 39). He does identify an increasingly hegemonic discourse as one central dimension (p. 27). In contrast to other accounts that emphasize the spatial consequences of globalization, Cerny's does not predict the demise of the nation-state as a key unit in world politics. Like other institutions and actors, however, the nation-state is subject to entanglement and transformation by the forces of globalization.

Cerny's core arguments lie in the second section of the book, where he maps the new pattern of world politics. He draws upon a venerable political science theoretical tradition, pluralism, to analyze a new multinodal politics. This neopluralist politics empowers new agents, redefines the state as a “Competition State” oriented to promoting successful positioning in the international economy, and produces a new transnational policy process. Policy outcomes point toward a broad acceptance of embedded neoliberalism, successor to the ideological pact that dominated the post-1945 industrialized world. Although the author admits that critics and opponents of a globalized world will necessarily find voice in the new world politics, the new policy process tends to reinforce the neoliberal status quo; at points, he comes close to arguing that the “trend toward openness” is irreversible (p. 150, for example). His conception of neopluralist world politics contains some familiar elements (transnational politics) and also some unexpected ones. For example, he does not emphasize a strengthening of conventional intergovernmental institutions; rather, he views the transfer of domestic political practices (governmentality) to global politics as a more important innovation.

A final section promises to describe the implications of this epochal political change. Instead, it delivers a series of chapters that consider alternative visions of contemporary world politics, filled with sharp critical insights. Cerny takes on the proponents of global democracy (he is skeptical), traditional realists (the new world politics has overturned the conventional security dilemma), and neo-Marxists (who add little to existing accounts of globalization). He concludes with four scenarios of the future of world politics, ranging from minor modifications of the status quo to a descent into neomedieval disorder.

Cerny has subtitled his book “a theory of transnational neopluralism.” Despite his theoretical aims, his arguments for a particular model of an emerging world politics must be tested against empirical referents. Without imitating the overheated anecdotal accounts of Thomas L. Friedman, examples of the new political processes that he identifies in contemporary world politics would lend weight to his claims. A key chapter on institutional bricolage and global governmentality (Chapter 9) includes only two concrete examples—and those represent conventional intergovernmental institutions. The bricolage of nonstate, intergovernmental, and national actors that deals with internal conflict and humanitarian emergencies would have provided an excellent field for exploring these theoretical themes. Instead, very broad claims are made with little or no empirical support. Is “the pace, density, and complexity of change today … unprecedented” (p. 117)? Are political processes increasingly transnational? Is the contemporary state “fundamentally different from its pre-1980s form” (p. 157)? How can we assess these statements about world politics in a rigorous fashion?

Closely linked to these questions regarding empirical validation is the issue of historical time frame and geographical scope. Surprisingly, given the rich literature on the pre-1914 era of globalization, Cerny seldom refers to that lost world and its politics. More attention to globalization's past might have induced greater caution in portraying globalization and its political offspring as a unidirectional path, unlikely to face retrogression. In confronting globalization's recent history, he struggles not only with the implications of the Great Recession but also with the uncertain record of the past decade: heightened security concerns, U.S. military interventions, and the rise of emerging economies, such as China and India. Too often the book reads as a turn-of-the-millennium view, based on the high tide of 1990s globalization, rather than a theoretical foray into our grayer, crisis-ridden world.

Too often, as well, Cerny paints a theoretical portrait that resembles Europe, or, at best, the industrialized world, rather than world politics. He criticizes the neo-Marxists Bob Jessop and Neil Brenner for producing theory that may not apply to the developing world; the same criticism could be leveled at his own work. China barely appears, and, when it does, it is surprisingly enfolded into the category of “Competition States,” despite its large state sector, its tough capital controls, and the regime's resolute hostility to free movement of information across national borders. To characterize “a whole swath of emerging market economies” as representing “social neoliberalism” (p. 161) suggests either little detailed knowledge of those countries or a conceptual frame—social neoliberalism—so broad that only the most benighted of rogue states (and Russia) are excluded (p. 152). Overall, Cerny's version of world politics appears to fit European politics—at least within the “old” European Union—and perhaps certain dimensions of international relations among the industrialized countries. Even in those cases, the patterns that he describes, such as the transnationalization of political processes, are often less advanced than he claims. Political parties, for example, despite a European Parliament and decades of inter- and transgovernmental collaboration, remain, for the most part, creatures of the nation-state; as the author himself admits, so do labor unions.

Despite Cerny's acknowledgment that globalization has brought convergence and harmonization, on the one hand, and fragmentation and conflict, on the other, what is missing in Rethinking World Politics is a sense of the unevenness of globalization and its consequences. The dense networks of transnational economic and social ties that characterize relations among some of the rich countries may eventually encompass the world, but even among the industrialized countries, the patterns of a new world politics are far from clear. China, Japan, and South Korea enjoy high and growing levels of economic exchange, yet their cross-border political and social networks are exceedingly thin. In many developing countries, migration is a key economic and social dimension of globalization, but its political consequences are hardly the same in Mexico, Albania, and Indonesia. Cerny has performed an admirable service in offering this original vision of world politics in the new century. It remains for others to fill in the details of light and shadow based on careful investigations of our postmillennial world.