Henry Farrell

Chained to Globalization – with Abraham Newman

Why It’s Too Late to Decouple

In 1999, the columnist Thomas Friedman pronounced the Cold War geopolitical system dead. The world, he wrote, had “gone from a system built around walls to a system increasingly built around networks.” As businesses chased efficiency and profits, maneuvering among great powers was falling away. An era of harmony was at hand, in which states’ main worries would be how to manage market forces rather than one another.

Friedman was right that a globalized world had arrived but wrong about what that world would look like. Instead of liberating governments and businesses, globalization entangled them.


Read the full article at Foreign Affairs

Other Writing:

Academic Article

Codecision and Institutional Change

March 15, 2007 West European Politics 30 with Adrienne Hèritier
This article examines the sources and processes of institutional change in one important aspect of EU politics – the legislative procedure of codecision – and shows how interstitial change of institutions that emerges between formal Treaty revisions and under specific conditions may be formalised in subsequent formal Treaty reforms. We develop two related models of ...
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Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Transnational Actors and the Transatlantic Relationship in E-Commerce” in The Negotiation of the Safe Harbor Arrangement, Creating a Transatlantic Marketplace – ed. Michelle Egan

July 22, 2005 ed. Michelle Egan Manchester University Press: 2005
In the recent past, scholars have sought better to understand the evolving EU-US relationship, both in its own right, and as an important example of emerging forms of international governance.1 Particular attention has been paid to the important role that transnational actors have begun to play in this relationship. Business, consumer, labour and environmental interests ...
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