Defensive Internationalism: Providing Public Goods in an Uncertain
World. By Davis B. Bobrow and Mark A. Boyer. Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 2005. 411p. $65.00 cloth, $34.95 paper.
Davis Bobrow and Mark Boyer address a topic of considerable current
importance in both scholarly and policy circles—international
cooperation, particularly among advanced industrial democracies—to
produce what the authors call “progress,” that is,
“improvements in actual and perceived conditions in fundamental
terms—physical security, economic prosperity, ecological
sustainability, and cultural continuity” (p. 6), and to avoid
“regression,” defined as “worsening of those conditions
in one or more of those respects” (p. 6). Their stated goal is to
understand (in a clever reframing of the famous Harold Lasswell
[1936] quote) “who gives, what, when, and
how” (p. 1), since they believe that understanding this question is
key to dealing successfully with a range of current global problems.