To listen to a podcast interview with Dan Drezner, click here. More GMF audio is available on the Multimedia page.

Professor Drezner's analysis tackles a poorly-understood issue at the heart of today's debate on globalization: who sets the rules of the game, determines the regulatory standards, and chooses the approaches which underpin economic activity around the world? He argues that, in contrast to common assumption, it is the, "great powers," those states that have large internal markets, that remain the primary actors in defining the rules of globalization. From this, he asserts that in a world where economic power is becoming more dispersed, it takes a, "great power concert," to implement successful global governance. In today's world, that means cooperation between the EU and U.S. 

Drezner argued that popular discourse, including Thomas Friedman's book The World is Flat and similar analyses, overestimate the way in which globalization limits the ability of states to govern. For example, Friedman's description of the, "golden straitjacket," that globalization imposes on countries ability to make different policy choices. Other arguments also point to a growing power of non-state actors such as NGOs, which are said to promote policy convergence, including of regulation, by working across borders. However, Drezner argued that the major flaws in these analyses stem from a failure to explain variation in the degree of coordination on international regulation. Regulation differs around the world, and while there are examples of countries bringing their policies more into line with one another, there are significant examples of where policy convergence between countries has been, at best, limited.

Instead, Drezner's argument was that economic size and power still matter. The key issue is whether the interests of the big powers are close enough for them to want transnational governance in any given area.

Nonetheless, domestic politics determines those interests, because while globalization has made it more rewarding for regulatory policy to converge internationally, the costs to domestic companies and individuals from adjusting to a new system of regulation have not changed. The more domestic actors have invested in maintaining the status quo, the greater the incentive to try to control political discourse and influence the national interest away from policy convergence. The result, he argues, is that cooperation will be greater in new areas where interests are not entrenched, with variation in the degree of convergence even within some sectors, such as, regulation of internet domain names as an area where there has been transnational governance but no effective cooperation over the regulation of internet content.

Drezner said non-cooperation is, sometimes, an acceptable outcome perhaps because of country-specific cultural and societal values.  Is there a way, it was asked, to identify those sectors in which non-cooperation was the likely outcome, or even desirable, before entering into the intensive evaluation and negotiating process?  Drezner argued that sometimes we don't know until trying. 

In addition to his arguments for cooperation, Professor Drezner outlined some dynamic situations that will likely make regulatory cooperation more difficult. The services sector presents a particular challenge to cooperation, as it is often subject to considerable regulation, and efforts to coordinate internationally will open up new, vested interests in opposition. Moreover, the decline of bipolar influence on the world stage, specifically the emergence of China and India, will create a, "messier," distribution of economic power that will be less conducive to cooperation.