Your first choice takes us back to the past with Strobe Talbott’s The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation.

This is a curious book because its author, Strobe Talbott, is a very old friend of mine and in some ways a similar sort of practitioner and theoretician of globalisation, in that after a long career writing for Time magazine he went to work for his old Oxford roommate Bill Clinton, and ended up the Deputy Secretary of State. As such he really understood the hidden back-story of modern politics, which always gets shoved out of view by the more familiar story of nation-states.

So Strobe went back to the beginning, to the Greeks and the Romans, to show that there is a whole kind of alternative narrative of world history, which is of abortive efforts to form political organisations that operate above country level. He has done, at a much more academic rigorous level, what I sought to do at a kind of anecdotal personal level in my book, which is to say that this prism of looking at politics through the nation-state misses out a lot.

So what do you think people should be focusing on?

It is not that you should ignore the nation-state, but going back a very long way people have realised that one should also be trying to look for forms of organisation which transcend the state. So whether it is trading arrangements or other treaty arrangements over many centuries, people have always been struggling for cooperative ways of working together which aren’t just limiting themselves to nations.

But, in practice, it is difficult to make that work. We are seeing this played out with the situation in Libya, where France, Great Britain and the U.S. are all trying to work out what role the UN should be taking and not necessarily agreeing.

But you can also look at it through the other end of the telescope, because, in fact, Britain, France and the U.S. for different reasons – the first two because they didn’t have the capabilities in a sustained way, and the U.S. because it has other commitments – actually weren’t willing to do this alone as countries. They were determined to do it through a global arrangement, the UN Security Council, and Obama spent much of the week leading up to the action insisting that the U.S. would only be part of it if the rest of the world was on board.

Do you see that as a turning point for the UN?

It has had a reasonable start, but it is a resolution which, like so many UN resolutions, has found forms of words and phrases that people can agree on but it doesn’t necessarily reflect a coherent political strategy or even an operational military one. It is good as far as it goes and it serves its immediate objective, which was stopping Benghazi being turned into a Srebrenica. But what it didn’t offer was a strategy for the international community to give Libyans the right to choose their own government, so I expect they will have to circle round and come back to this again.

Let’s move on to your next book,Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia, by William Shawcross.

This is the book that my generation, interested in Indo-China, grew up on. It is an astonishing story of one small country’s attempt to move itself from an absolute kingship system of government to a more democratic constitutional monarchy. It was aborted because it got sucked into the Indo-Chinese war because the North Vietnamese military were using it as a means to infiltrate South Vietnam. It was subjected to a brutal bombing campaign by the U.S., which caused many casualties. One of which was a more pluralistic future for Cambodia. This essentially got bombed out of the political culture and the country became highly radicalised under the Khmer Rouge, so to me it was a book which pointed the way to the vital importance of democracy as a way of building some kind of middle road between Maoism and an absolute monarchy or military dictatorship, which seemed the two extreme choices.

And how does this move towards democracy help with globalisation as a whole?

I see globalisation as having come from two interlinked phenomena: one the rise of national democracy, and on the heels of that market liberalism became the preferred economic doctrine. These two together have had unintended consequences, which were that they facilitated the rise of globalisation. Liberal market economics particularly was a vehicle for global integration. Protectionism was reduced and the state share of the economy brought down as well. Having helped father globalisation, national democracy has been threatened by its own offspring. Because so many issues have migrated from a national level to a global level, you need a global democracy not a national democracy to provide some kind of accountability.

So what about the U.S.’s role in globalisation – what do you see that as and what do you think it should be?

U.S. policy has always been a mixture of altruism and self-interest. The altruism goes back to a Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson strain of emerging international engagement, which is around a value-based view of these things, where democracy and capitalism are seen by Americans as their two most important exports. Democracy because it provides freedom, and capitalism because it is seen by Americans as the best way to create prosperity and economic opportunity. But behind that altruism is a much more self-interested opportunistic commercial strain, which is American companies enjoying access to global markets through globalisation and often on terms and conditions that America as the dominant power has set.

That mixture of altruism and self-interest is very similar to what fuelled the British Empire and pretty much every other system of economic global relations that we have seen over the centuries.

Let’s look at America a bit further with your next book, Alpha Dogs: The Americans Who Turned Political Spin into a Global Business. by James Harding.