This book has a clear argument. History shows that globalization needs a system of international and domestic rules for advancing trade, making possible cross-national exchanges of labor and capital, promoting economic growth, and achieving peace. The latest stage of globalization, from the end of the Cold War until September 11, is not an exception. Indeed the 1990s were a decade of intense discussion on new international rules and institutions (epitomized by the creation of the World Trade Organization). At the same time, the promotion and implementation of an international regulatory system will inevitably breed discontent and tensions in different areas of the global system. Some countries, groups, or individuals perceive the new regulatory system as imposing on them patterns of behavior and distributive relations proper of or advantageous to dominant countries, groups, and individuals. This generates a reaction against the globalizing process (and the regulatory systems that justify and support it). Each phase of the globalization process has ended in conflict, either in the form of an interstate rivalry that degenerated into war, or in the form of an asymmetrical conflict degenerating into terrorism (with the assassination of individuals representing universal symbols, such as New Yorkers in 2001 or the Austrian Empress “Sissi” one century earlier in 1894).

Thus, in the midst of an expansive period, those who fear or suffer under the process of expansion rally in protest. The effectiveness of their reaction may vary significantly. Indeed, historically, those actors were not able to thwart the globalizing thrust, although they were capable of interrupting, postponing, or transforming it. Above all, such reactions have increased the need for an international power with the necessary military resources to reimpose or recreate order in the international system—that is, an imperial power that substitutes rules with strength and multilateral regulation with unilateral control. As Harold James convincingly argues, globalization and imperialism feed each other. Each, and any, rule-based world order is going to generate the reasons and the actors for its overturning, thus creating the conditions for the ascendancy of an imperial power. Even the most powerful of imperial powers had, and will have, to face their own decline, if not fall. Each of them met, and will meet, the limes of their disintegration.

This is the Roman predicament discussed in the book. On the basis of the interpretative models elaborated more than two centuries ago in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (it is peculiar that both books were published in 1776), James advances a pessimistic (but also stimulating) view of the process of globalization. On the basis of Smith's model, James argues that the liberal hopes of promoting peace through the formation of an open economic international order have to reckon with the contradictory nature of that system. On the basis of Gibbon's model, he argues that the conservative hopes of guaranteeing peace through the formation of an imperial order have to reckon with the negative implications of the exercise of that power. In other words, Smith and Gibbon show that there are no easy ways out of the “Roman dilemma.” Indeed, the empire's supporters of the modern era had to learn that military power is a necessary but not sufficient resource for guaranteeing international order; whereas the empire's critics had to recognize that economic trade is a necessary but not sufficient condition for promoting peace and prosperity. In sum, domestic as well as international systems require rules to function, but those rules are rarely neutral, or better, rarely express universally shared views. Not all (countries, groups, individuals) comply with those rules, as the rules do not always reflect their interests. Such circumstances thus drive the creation and imposition of enforcement mechanisms that make explicit the biased nature of those rules; that is, their existence is the expression of some configuration of dominant powers.

Is there an alternative to what the author defines as the “challenge and response model” that has as its inevitable outcome the clash of civilizations? After presenting in Chapters 2 through 6 a disheartening scenario on the contradictory forms taken by globalization, James discusses what might represent the most innovative attempt to find a way out of the Roman predicament—the European Union. The EU has tried to introduce a new concept of power based on its negation. The EU is a power that has renounced power. In the EU, power is diffused, segmented, disaggregated, shared, and pooled. The EU is a postmodern state, or rather, a premodern one. Indeed, it is the contemporary heir of the long-lived Holy Roman Empire, which organized a highly fragmented continental Europe for roughly a millennium. However, even the EU does not represent a convincing answer to the Roman dilemma. Its “obsession” with processes constitutes an insurmountable constraint on its capacity to solve conflicts. Just as rules and power cannot keep the Roman dilemma under control, the same holds also true for processes. The solution of the Roman dilemma, James finally argues, resides in getting back those values that are the expression of a natural law recognized as such by different countries, groups, individuals, and civilizations.

Whereas the argument of the book is clear and stimulating, the prose is not always clear and persuasive. The book is an exercise in intellectual history and not a text on the history of international political economy supported by empirical evidence. Erudition sometimes overtakes argumentation. The chapter on the EU, for instance, is evocative rather than innovative; whereas the discussion of values in the conclusion is evocative rather than substantial. Moreover, the chapters are not well connected, as if each of them represented an autonomous contribution to the book. In sum, the book is a brilliant endeavor of intellectual history, although its persuasive power is somewhat limited by a too vague and disconnected narrative.