Sovereignty Under Siege: Globalization and New Zealand.

• Author: Easton, Brian
• Position: Book review

SOVEREIGNTY UNDER SIEGE: Globalization and New Zealand

Editors: Robert Patman and Chris Rudd Published by: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Aidershot, 2005, 258pp, 55 [pounds sterling].

Much of the public's anxiety about globalisation is concerned with sovereignty. However its understanding of the previous sentence's last two nouns is vague and imprecise, for each requires careful definition. In their introduction Patman and Rudd define sovereignty by tracing back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. They note that 'a sovereign state ... exercises supreme legal unqualified and exclusive control over a designated territory and its population', and claim that there are 'close to 200 sovereign states' (which almost resolves their question, since if they exist what is the problem?). They are less sure of giving a 'precise meaning to the term globalisation', broadly defining it as 'the in-tensification of interconnections between societies, institutions, cultures and individuals on a worldwide basis'. Note the first definition involves a situation, the second a process, which complicates the coupling of the two.

That aside, the introduction is a useful beginning, although it is not clear that the eleven chapter writers saw it before they wrote their essays. As with many such books, the quality of the contributions is uneven; and the argument is not consistent. A serious weakness is their insularity, for there is little reference to issues except in a New Zealand context, despite the topic of globalisation crying out for comparative analysis. It is one thing to look at the New Zealand-United States relationship, but surely it needs to be put in the context of the US relationships with a host of other countries.

Part I, Political and Economic Engagement, begins with Brian Roper asking whether there has been a decline of national and state autonomy. Roper has his own distinctive (Marxist) approach to New Zealand, which begins by contradicting the editors by taking globalisation to be the latest stage of capitalism (as indeed does the London Economist). So did Lenin 90 years ago. History provides such challenges. Did New Zealand ever have much de facto sovereignty? Have we not always been a colony or neo-colony? Is the golden past when New Zealand was really 'sovereign' just a myth? Such questions undermine the pristine definition of 'sovereignty' of the introduction.

The remaining three chapters of this part--Martin Richardson (the economy), Paul Roth (human...