Modeling Globalization from the Bottom Up: A Review Essay of John Braithwaite and Peter Drahos, Global Business Regulation

Modeling Globalization from the Bottom Up: A Review Essay of John Braithwaite and Peter Drahos, Global Business Regulation John Braithwaite and Peter Drahos, Global Business Regulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 704 pages. $100.00 cloth; $37.99 paper. Here is one picture of globalization: in the film Hotel Rwanda (2004), Paul Rusesabagina, entrusted with the protection of a thousand Tutsi refugees who have taken sanctuary in the Hotel Mille Collines, must stave off the Hutu militia that seek to exterminate the "Tutsi cockroaches." Belgian francs, European liquor, and fashionable jewelry provide the currency to purchase the lives of the condemned Rwandans. Reminders from Rusesabagina to the generals that the Belgians would not like their property to be destroyed restrain the Hutu militia from damaging the hotel and its inhabitants. At one point, when the Hutus demand immediate abandonment of the hotel and the releases of the Tutsi refugees to their slaughter, Rusesabagina quickly calls the CEO of Sabena, the Belgian airline that owns the hotel, and describes the impending purge. A quick phone call from the CEO to the Ministry of Defense in France results in diverting the Hutu troops and sparing the Tutsis at the Hotel Mille Collines for another day (Gourevitch 1998:132-44). Human lives turned into fungible commodities, former colonial outposts as center stage for violent drama, transnational business entities sparking and mediating ethnic vendettas-these are just some of the hallmarks of globalization. Surprising is the role of one man who seems to orchestrate all of these elements in order to save his fellow countrymen. The story of Rusesabagina is as much about the possibilities of globalization as well as its excesses. Almost mystically, the disease becomes the cure as the modest hotel manager plays the various shards of the globalized world against each other in order to ensure escape from local tribalism and into the unmapped promised land beyond. Braithwaite and Drahos's study of global business regulation is also about the possibilities of globalization. Although their work is narrowly focused on the regulation of business and economic activities, the authors present a tableau of globalization that exposes its logic and provides a blueprint for its management. For those who have lost hope about human agency and individual self-determination as oppositional to multinational corporations and superpower (read U.S.) excesses, Braithwaite and Drahos redefine the human agent in the modern world. Self-consciously opposed to big theories (read Marxism), the social scientist and the law professor remap the history of the commercial world from Roman times to the post-Bretton Woods era to demonstrate the place for consumer activism that restrains concentrated economic and political power. The book is dedicated to Esther Peterson, labor organizer, consumer activist, former Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Kennedy, and Vice-President for Consumer Affairs at Giant Food, Inc. From her varied roles on the ground and in the boardroom, Peterson is the type of leader Braithwaite and Drahos seek to breed through their nearly 700-page tome. Global Business Regulation, with all its theoretical rigor, is basically an empirical book. Regulation is understood through detailed conversations with regulators and the regulated, at both the micro level of corporate boardrooms and the macro level of the nationstate. The authors conclude, evoking a perhaps surprising source: Like Adam Smith (1776), our empirical findings are that purposive conspiracies by business actors with the resources to enact change are common in shaping regulatory change globally. Equally, we find that purposive model mongering by NGO's to exploit fissures between powerful states and corporations can also shape global change, but against the odds. (p. 601) Put simply, the Invisible Hand in the globalized world has a discernible outline and form whose actions can be consciously traced through the hallways of the powerful and the back alleys of the preterite. …