Introducing Globalization

Ties, Tensions, and Uneven Integration

Matthew Sparke

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118241110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Globalizzazione

Designed specifically for introductory globalization courses, Introducing Globalization helps students to develop informed opinions about globalization, inviting them to become participants rather than just passive learners.

• Identifies and explores the major economic, political and social ties that comprise contemporary global interdependency
• Examines a broad sweep of topics, from the rise of transnational corporations and global commodity chains, to global health challenges and policies, to issues of worker solidarity and global labor markets, through to emerging forms of global mobility by both business elites and their critics
• Written by an award-winning teacher, and enhanced throughout by numerous empirical examples, maps, tables, an extended bibliography, glossary of key terms, and suggestions for further reading and student research
• Supported by additional web resources – available upon publication at www.wiley.com/go/sparke – includinghot links to news reports, examples of globalization and other illustrative sites, and archived examples of student projects

Engage with fellow readers of Introducing Globalization on the book's Facebook page at www.facebook.com/IntroducingGlobalization, or learn more about this topic by enrolling in the free Coursera course Globalization and You at www.coursera.org/course/globalization

1

Globalization

Chapter Contents

1.1 Introducing a World of Interdependency and a Word

1.2 The Networks of Global Interdependency

Chapter Concepts

Globalization needs to be understood on two levels:

• as a name for increasing global interdependencies
• as an influential key term in political speech.

Key Concept

The two main ways of understanding globalization need to be carefully ­distinguished. On the one hand, it is used by scholars to name the compound effects of intensifying and increasingly consequential global interconnections. By exploring these interconnections – including their component economic, political, legal, and ecological interrelationships – it is possible to understand how globalization has created global interdependencies that link the fates of people around the planet. On the other hand, we additionally need to ­understand how “Globalization” is simultaneously put to work as an influential codeword in political speech, a codeword that shapes policy-making and thus also alters the ways in which lives are actually lived globally.

1.1 Introducing a World of Interdependency and a Word

Why are you reading this book? It seems a simple question, and answers come easily to mind. It was recommended to you or is required reading for a class. It is about a topic that seems relevant, interesting or, at least, socially important. And, of course, you bought it. But think again. What actually enabled that simple purchase to ­happen? When you bought it, did you consider where and how the book was made: where the paper was made (China), where the typesetting took place (India), where the inks were manufactured (Switzerland), where the book was printed (Singapore), or who made the printing presses (Germans and Japanese)? You ­probably did not think of these things because the simple act of buying something usually conceals all this work. Likewise, when you buy a book you do not normally think about the global networks of air, sea, rail, and road transportation that put it in the bookshops; the oil and other forms of energy used in the process of transportation; or the global systems of electronic funds transfer that allow money to move from your account to the bookstore’s account to the accounts of the publisher, to the pension plans, and the stocks and bonds into which people working for the ­publisher might be putting the profits.

As if the globalized ramifications of all the book-publishing economic links are not already hard enough to track, think about the still more complex political and ­cultural phenomena that have come together to make the idea of globalization seem relevant, interesting, and important. When did you first hear the word or some related term like the global economy, global system, or globalism? How many times a day do you see adverts and promotional publications that use images of the globe to sell things? Why do so many activists, economists, reporters, and politicians repeat the word “globalization” as if it is some sort of common-sense code-word that everyone just understands? What has made it the focus of street protests and widespread ­controversy across the planet? And on top of all that, have you thought about why your university or college has come round to the view that it is worth having a course that introduces globalization at a level that demands reading a book that is entirely focused on the subject? What has put globalization onto the academic radar screen? Why has it become relevant and interesting? What makes it important? And what, you should hopefully be asking yourself at this point, is it exactly?

In starting with this set of questions, these first paragraphs have already given a clue as to the way the rest of the book sets about defining and explaining globalization. Global interconnections of production, commerce, and finance like those that made your book purchase possible are key, but so, too, are the political and cultural controversies that have made globalization the latest big buzzword. Other academic surveys of globalization generally prefer to focus only on the interconnections ­themselves. Most scholars are wary of the way in which globalization has become so fashionable as an idea and so blurred as a concept (even if putting it in the title of a book or article helps draw attention to their work). For usually good reasons, academics therefore tend to be suspicious about all the hype surrounding the term. One problem with this tendency, however, is that it treats the slogans, myths, and exaggerations about globalization as just irritants. By contrast, this book pays attention to the hype as more than a mere annoyance. The account that follows is still fundamentally organized around an analysis of real global interconnections. Each chapter is therefore focused on particular types of interconnection ranging from those of world trade and finance to those of law, politics, and health. However, along the way, the book also critically examines the buzz about globalization in order to underline how, as a dominant way of talking about and thinking about the world, the term has had its own global effects. The book as a whole, therefore, works with a double definition of globalization, a definition that addresses both (1) the actual networks of global integration and (2) the political and cultural concerns that have made “Globalization” a buzzword.

1.1.1 Globalization as integration

First of all, globalization refers to processes of economic, political, and social ­integration that have collectively created ties that make a difference to lives around the planet.¹ Another way of saying this is that globalization is the extension, acceler­ation, and intensification of consequential worldwide interconnections. These are ­interconnections that mean that what happens “here” (like you buying and reading this book) affects things over “there” (like the logging of trees in faraway forests). Reciprocally, the interconnections can work the other way round with events over “there” (like an environmental group’s campaign against deforestation) leading to effects “here” (like you wishing that the book was made out of recycled paper or available on the Internet). These sorts of two-way ties are often referred to by social scientists as “interdependencies.” It means that the lines of dependency run in both directions, even if, as is most common, the dependency is felt more strongly at one end of the connection (for example, amongst the different parties to disputes over logging) than at the other (amongst readers of a single book). Whether or not they are felt or even noticed, though, these sorts of interdependencies are creating a world where, despite huge inequalities in life chances, people’s lives are being ­increasingly bound together.

As we shall see in Chapter 3, the capitalist system of economic development has always depended from the sixteenth century onwards on forms of long-distance interdependency. Indeed, capitalism is generally understood to have begun through the gradual incorporation and capitalization of extensive pre-capitalist trading ­networks. From these early developments in the sixteenth century, the webs of ­economic interconnection have grown widely and deeply in terms of both their geographical scope and societal significance. The linkages have nevertheless always expanded unevenly, initially leading to economic growth in just one part of the world (Europe during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries) and then in others (the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, too). Sometimes, most notably in the period of European empire building in the late nineteenth century, the global ties were very strong and had huge day-to-day impacts. Indeed, by the start of the twentieth century, global trade was so extensive that at its epicenter in London, England, most features of daily life – from the cotton people wore, to the sugared tea they drank, to the companies they worked for, to the banks where they deposited their money – were intimately tied to everyday life in places as far apart as Central Africa, the Caribbean, India, North America, and Latin America. At other times, both before and after the height of European imperialism, the consequences of the long-distance ties were less significant in terms of linking and shaping daily life in different parts of the world. Despite this episodic and uneven process of development, though, the important point is that global ties are not new. What is new, and what is quite remarkable in this regard, is the rise of a widely shared sense of the importance of something called “Globalization.” This really only happened in the late twentieth century, starting in the 1960s and becoming increasingly omnipresent as a focus of debate and concern in the periods from the 1990s to today.

One reason for the rising concern with globalization over the last two decades is that it was only after key industrial, financial, and technological shifts in the 1960s and 1970s that the door was opened for different forms of global interdependency to come together to have a collective globalizing impact. Economic, political, and social networks – networks of commodity production, of finance, of trade, of migrants, of communication, of media, of political organizing, and even of new disease vectors – all came together in the sense of accelerating and intensifying one another. In doing so, they linked more and more countries and communities to create an ­interdependent global whole that was greater than the sum of all the particular ­component network parts. No longer was it just trade, or money flows, or political systems, or the movements of migrants that linked different regions. Now, global interconnection was characterized by an evermore dense integration of all these ­different transnational ties into a larger interdependent system in which the spatial reach of the ties, the speed of the relays and reverberations through the ties, and the capacity of the ties to lead to significant impacts were all much greater. These comprehensive integrative effects also had powerful political consequences with ­governments around the world increasingly tying national policies to an acceptance of the idea that economic growth and development are dependent on integrating with global markets and ­liberalizing business from national regulation.

A key sign of this novel late twentieth-century interdependency and market-based integration was the invention of the actual word “globalization” itself. Despite all the global connections of nineteenth-century European imperialism, a word like globalization had never been used before. It only first appeared in a dictionary in Merriam Webster’s New International Dictionary in 1961. Around this time, it was often used in its English spelling (i.e. “globalisation” with an “s”) in British journals and papers such as The Spectator and The Sunday Times (to be followed by its first of many uses in The Economist in 1965). French academics were also early to start using the term (although in France, it came to be replaced by mondialisation). This emergence of the word globalization into popular usage in the 1960s was a sign of the wider developments in the interconnectedness of global networks and their increasingly influential impact on policy making. Reciprocally, however, the ­subsequent explosion of debate and dispute over globalization also reflected the various ways in which politicians, activists, journalists, and other opinion leaders began to load the word with more and more political meaning based on their ­political perspectives on market freedom, market integration and the influence of market forces over much of social life. This process of politicization really only took off two decades later in the 1980s, and to understand it most effectively it is useful to introduce the second definition of globalization.

1.1.2 Globalization as buzzword

In a context where political leaders and polemicists from both the right and the left have increasingly used the term to pursue political goals, Globalization has become an instrumental term put to work in shaping as well as representing the growth of global interdependency. Some scholars refer to such politicized discourse on Globalization as “Globaloney” or “hyper-globalization,” while others view it as a reflection of a cultural common-sense they call “Globalism.”² Here, however, in this book, such political use of the term is indicated by simply spelling “Globalization” with a capital “G.” The key era for the development of this kind of politicized ­discourse about capital “G” Globalization was the 1980s. In this decade, influential politicians in the West – most notably, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and President Ronald Reagan in the United States – made the political argument that a huge range of trade, labor, finance, welfare, and social ­policies had to be radically reformed to make states more competitive and more open to integration in the context of a globalizing capitalist market economy. Free trade, privatization, tax cuts, welfare reform, low inflation, and the general deregulation of business and finance were all necessary, went the argument, if nation-states were to stand a chance of surviving the onrush of global competition.

Although this familiar package of political policies was originally promoted in the United States and United Kingdom by conservative politicians, it was quickly adopted by more liberal governments in wealthy democracies such as Canada and New Zealand. In other countries such as Chile, it was a policy package that was introduced and enforced using military violence, while elsewhere, particularly in Asian countries such as Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and, subsequently, China, it was adapted in ways that combined the commitments to export-led development and market integration with often authoritarian approaches to managing social and political life. In yet other developing countries in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, it was imposed in order to comply with conditions issued by ­international lending agencies – most importantly, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank – and western-trained pro-market economists. The result has been the rise of a form of global political common-sense about the need for ­pro-market policy-making, economic liberalization, and global market integration, a common-sense that is referred to variously as “market ­fundamentalism,” “neoliberalism,” the “Washington Consensus,” “laissez-faire market capitalism” or simply just “Globalization.” In other words, the buzzword usage of Globalization has ­effectively made the word a synonym for a suite of ­pro-market policy norms and the wider influence of market-forces in political, social, and personal relations. Being pro-Globalization has therefore come to mean being pro-market, and being ­anti-Globalization has reciprocally become a simplistic description for activists who contest the benefits and highlight the ­suffering caused by global market forces. Similarly, whether used thus by earnest advocates in books with titles such as Why Globalization Works and In Defence of Globalization, or instead used by trenchant critics in books with titles such as The Endgame of Globalization and Globalization and Its Terrors, the association with pro-market policy norms remains constant.³ For this reason, we have to take a moment here to examine what exactly these norms look like and what capital “G” Globalization and its synonyms therefore seek to name.

The pro-market policy norms associated with Globalization are now so common and widespread that they sometimes seem like they are the only options available. Indeed, a very wide range of politicians – including most Democrats as well as Republicans in the United States, most Labour MPs as well as Conservatives in the United Kingdom, most Liberals and Socialists as well as right-wing politicians in Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden, and most democrats as well as autocrats in the poorer parts of the world – have all at various moments come to the same so-called “TINA” conclusion that Margaret Thatcher reached in the 1980s: namely, that in the context of global market integration, “There Is No Alternative” to pro-market policies. What then do these policies look like? The top 10 are well known, and for each there is also a sound-bite slogan that is also very familiar from everyday political speech:

1. trade liberalization – “adopt free trade”

2. privatize public services – “use business efficiency”

3. deregulate business and finance – “cut red tape”

4. cut public spending – “shrink government”

5. reduce and flatten taxes – “be business friendly”

6. encourage foreign investment – “reduce capital controls”

7. de-unionize – “respect rights to work & labor flexibility”

8. export led development – “trade not aid”

9. reduce inflation – “price stability & savings protection”

10. enforce property rights – “patent protection” & “titling.”

Throughout this book, and especially in Chapter 7, where we examine how these policy norms have come to shape practices of government around the world, the more historically accurate and theoretically nuanced term neoliberalism is used instead of Globalization to describe the resulting policy package (this also helps avoid confusion with lower-case-“g” “globalization”). Like other terms shown in bold in the book, you can look up a longer definition of neoliberalism in the ­glossary. But because understanding this key term is also key to understanding the popular usage of synonyms such as Globalization, and because neoliberalism is counter-intuitive for many students (especially those in the United States who have grown up thinking that liberals are more inclined to regulate the market and impose taxes on business), a few more things must be noted about why scholars find this particular neologism (i.e. term of social science jargon) us...