Debating Globalization

Anthony Barnett, David Held, Casper Henderson, Anthony Barnett, David Held, Casper Henderson, David Held, Anthony Barnett, David Held, Casper Henderson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745635255, 9780745635248
• eBook ISBN: 9780745657912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Debating Globalization is a short, accessible introduction to the debate about globalization written by many of the most prominent figures in the field. Published by Polity in association with openDemocracy, the book is notable not just for focusing on the pressing difficulties facing our world, but also on solutions. Rich and positive suggestions are made for reshaping globalization into a force that will work for humans everywhere.

In an extended analysis, David Held provides a robust critique of the present order and sets out his alternative vision. Building on arguments he made in Global Covenant, he calls for a new global political agenda, informed by social democratic political values. His analysis has been criticized by leading figures and their responses follow in this book. There are chapters by, among others, Martin Wolf, Roger Scruton, Grahame Thompson, David Mepham, Meghnad Desai, Maria Livanos Cattaui, Patrick Bond, Benjamin Barber, John Elkington, Takashi Inoguchi, Narcís Serra, and Anne-Marie Slaughter and Thomas N. Hale. The volume ends with David Held's reply to his critics.

The book provides a fascinating introduction to the debate about globalization today.

1

Globalization: The Dangers and the Answers

David Held

Washington-led neoliberalism and unilateralism have failed the world. It is urgent that we find a way beyond their legacy. This calls for a new model of globalization that works for humans everywhere. In this opening chapter, David Held provides a unified critique of the present global order and sketches his alternative.

1 The crisis of globalization

Over two hundred years ago, Immanuel Kant wrote that we are ‘unavoidably side by side’. Since Kant, our mutual interconnectedness and vulnerability have grown in ways he could not have imagined. We no longer inhabit, if we ever did, a world of discrete circumscribed communities. Instead, we live in a world of what I like to call ‘overlapping communities of fate’ where the trajectories of all countries are deeply enmeshed with each other. In our world, it is not only the violent exception that links people together across borders; the very nature of everyday living – of work and money and beliefs, as well as of trade, communications and finance, not to speak of the earth’s environment – connects us all in multiple ways with increasing intensity.¹

The word for this story is ‘globalization’. It is not a singular, linear narrative, nor is it just a matter of economics. It is cultural as well as commercial and in addition it is legal: it is about power as much as prosperity or the lack of it. From the United Nations to the European Union, from changes to the laws of war to the entrenchment of human rights, from the emergence of international environmental regimes to the foundation of the International Criminal Court, new political narratives are being told – narratives which seek to reframe human activity and entrench it in law, rights and responsibilities that are worldwide in their reach and universal in their principles.

The development of this process and the international institutions that embody it began in the immediate aftermath of formidable threats to humankind – above all, Nazism, fascism and the Holocaust.

After 1945 there was a concerted international effort to affirm the importance of universal principles, human rights and the rule of law in the face of strong temptations simply to ratify an overt system of great power interests favouring only some countries and nations. The traditional view of national and moral particularists, that belonging to a given community determines the moral worth of individuals and the nature of their freedom, was rejected. Instead, the principles of equal respect, equal concern and the priority of the vital needs of all human beings were affirmed. The irreducible moral status of each and every person was placed at the centre of significant post-Second World War legal and political developments.

Half a century on, the international community has reached its next clear moment of decisive choice. I am an optimist. I am confident that it is still possible to build on the achievements of the post-Second World War era. The proposals that I advocate, and the direction that I argue the international community should take, are easily within our grasp economically and technically. Politically, they demand new efforts, skill and above all a shared will to achieve them. They are not utopian or unrealistic in the sense of being impractical or beyond our mental and physical resources – on the contrary.

But it is especially important for those of us who are optimists of possibility to be clear about the dangers and difficulties. A combination of developments points towards a catastrophic combination of negative factors which could lead us into another century marked by war, massive loss of life and reckless and destructive violence. We are at a turning point. It will not be measured by days or months, but over the coming few years between now and 2010 choices will be made that will determine the fate of the globe for decades to come. It is that serious.

Just note, by way of introduction, four major ongoing developments I will return to in a moment, each reinforcing the other, all pointing in a negative direction:

• the failure to move towards the United Nations’s Millennium Development Goals which set the minimum humanitarian levels for large sections of the world population;

• the potential collapse of the regulation of world trade, and the clear danger that trade negotiations could worsen not redress global inequality;

• the complete failure to address the awesome consequences of global warming;

• the erosion of the multilateral order symbolized by the United Nations but extending through a whole series of international agreements and agencies.

The signs are not good, therefore. The postwar multilateral order is threatened by the intersection and combination of these crises that are taking place simultaneously at the humanitarian, economic, environmental and political levels. The crisis in each is likely to exacerbate the others. More serious still, there is a driving force taking them from bad to worse. This force is willed, even though it often presents itself in the form of inevitability, and it can be summed up in two phrases: the Washington economic consensus and the Washington security agenda.

I will take a hard look at them both. Any assessment of them must be grounded on the issues each seeks to address. But they are also now connected, if distinct, drivers of the specific form of globalization which the world is being forced to experience. Together they have become a combined assault on the principles and practice that began to be established after 1945. Together they promulgate the view that a positive role for government is to be fundamentally distrusted and that the sustained application of internationally adjudicated policy and regulation threatens freedom, limits growth, impedes development and restrains the good. Of course, neither exhaustively explains the current structures of globalization, but they form the core part of its political drive.

It does not follow that, in terms of economics, what the Washington Consensus opposes is good, any more than it follows that the critique of the present working of the UN and international system associated with Washington’s security agenda is entirely false. On the contrary, a merely conservative resistance to them that seeks to hold on to the status quo would also fail to deliver what the world badly needs.

Both need to be replaced, and in their place the world needs a progressive framework that:

• encourages and sustains the enormous enhancement of productivity and wealth that the global market and contemporary technology make possible;

• ensures that the benefits are fairly shared and addresses extremes of poverty and wealth;

• provides international security which engages with the causes as well as the crimes of terrorism, war and failed states.

I will call the approach that sets itself this task social democratic globalization and a human security agenda.

Four crises, one challenge

But before outlining what this framework needs to deliver, and why the current one fails, I give a reminder of the four major current crises in the condition of humanity, trade, the environment and current global governance, which make the call for the creation of a better kind of globalization imperative.

First, very little progress has been made towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals. These set down minimum standards to be achieved in relation to poverty reduction, health, educational provision, the combating of HIV/Aids, malaria and other diseases, and environmental sustainability. They are the moral consciousness of the international community. Progress towards the millennium targets has been lamentably slow, and at current rates they will be missed by a very wide margin. In fact, there is evidence that there may have been no point in setting these targets at all, so far are we from attaining them in many parts of the world.

Second, the collapse of the trade talks at Cancún raised the possibility of a major challenge to the world trading system. At the same time, a large growth in bilateral trade arrangements and preferential trading agreements singled out some nation-states for particularly favoured treatment by others. If growth in such bilateral agreements were to continue, there would be a real danger that the Doha trade round would collapse – or produce derisory results.

Recent trade negotiations have made progress on the phasing out of vast subsidies offered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries to their agricultural and related sectors, but there is no clear timetable attached to the implementation of many of the key points. There are many risks involved, the most serious being to the world’s poorest countries. They cannot alone overcome the handicaps of a world trading system marked by rigged rules and double standards. If the world’s poorest countries (along with many middle-income nations) are to find secure access to the global economic order, they require a free and fair footing to do so. The slow progress on trade talks signals that they may not reach this point.

Third, little, if any, progress has been made in creating a sustainable framework for the management of global warming. The British chief scientist, David King, warned in January 2004 that ‘climate change is the most serious problem we are facing today, more serious than the threat of terrorism’. Irrespective of whether one finds this characterization accurate, it is the case that global warming has the capacity to wreak havoc on the world’s diverse species, biosystems, and socioeconomic fabric. Violent storms will become more frequent, water access a battleground and the mass movement of desperate people more common.

The overwhelming body of scientific opinion now maintains that global warming constitutes a serious threat not in the long term, but here and now. The failure of the international community to generate a sound framework for managing global warming is one of the most serious indications of the problems facing the multilateral order.

Fourth, the multilateral order is being gravely weakened by the conflict in Iraq and the American administration’s response to the terror attacks of 9/11. The value of the UN system has been called into question, the legitimacy of the Security Council has been challenged and the working practices of multilateral institutions have been eroded. The arrogance of the great powers has dramatically weakened international law and legitimacy, and the prospects for combating global terrorism have been lessened not improved.

How do we address problems on this scale? The economic, political, social and environmental fortunes of all countries are increasingly enmeshed, but the richest and the most powerful nations are not dedicated to building an international order which delivers relief, hope and opportunity to the least well-off and those most at risk, even though this is in their own interests, as well as being in line with their expressed values. A global commitment to justice is essential to ameliorate the radical asymmetries of life chances that pervade the world.

We need structures as well as policies to address the harm inflicted on people and nations against their will and without their consent. Instead, while there is a high degree of interconnectedness in the world, social integration is shallow and a commitment to social justice pitifully thin. Why? I will focus here on two reasons above all others: the old Washington Consensus, and the new Washington security agenda. These two hugely powerful policy programmes are shaping our age and profoundly weakening our public institutions, nationally and globally. Only by understanding their failures and limitations can we move beyond them to recover a democratic, responsive politics at all levels of public life.

2 The Washington Consensus

The Washington Consensus can be defined as an economic agenda which advocates the following measures:

• free trade;

• capital market liberalization;

• flexible exchange rates;

• market-determined interest rates;

• the deregulation of markets;

• the transfer of assets from the public to the private sector;

• the tight focus of public expenditure on well-directed social targets;

• balanced budgets;

• tax reform;

• secure property rights;

• the protection of intellectual property rights.

A combination of most or all of these measures has been the economic orthodoxy for a significant period of the last twenty years in leading OECD countries, and in the international financial institutions. It has been prescribed, until recently without qualification, by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank as the policy basis for developing countries.

The ‘Washington Consensus’ was first set out authoritatively by John Williamson.² While Williamson endorsed most of the approaches listed above, he did not advocate free capital mobility.³ His original formulation drew together an agenda which he thought most people in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the policy-making circles of Washington DC – the Treasury, the World Bank and the IMF – would agree were appropriate for developing countries.

Subsequently, the term acquired a sharply right-wing connotation as it became linked to the policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They emphasized free capital movements, monetarism and a minimal state that accepts no responsibility for correcting income inequalities or managing serious externalities.

There were important overlaps between the original Williamson programme and versions of it which came to be called the neoliberal agenda, including macroeconomic discipline, lauding the free market economy, privatization and free trade. Today, however, Williamson distances himself from the neoliberal definition of the Washington Consensus, although he accepts that it was this version, with its endorsement of capital account liberalization, which became the dominant orthodoxy in the 1990s. I will use the term Washington Consensus in the latter sense: to refer not to the theory, but to the policies of American administrations and their close allies and associated institutions.

Critics charge that the measures of the Washington Consensus are bound up with US geopolitics, and are all too often preached by the US to the rest of the world but not practised by it, and worse, are deeply destructive of the social cohesion of the poorest countries. Interestingly, Williamson holds that while aspects of such criticism of the neoliberal version are true, his policy recommendations are sensible principles of economic practice that leave open the question of the progressivity of the tax system.

Indeed, some of the proposals and advice of the Washington Consensus may be reasonable in their own terms. Others are not. Taken together, however, they represent too narrow a set of policies to help create sustained growth and equitable development. Crucially, the Washington Consensus underplays the role of government, the need for a strong public sector and the requirement for m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Globalization: The Dangers and the Answers
• Chapter 2: The Case for Optimism:A Response
• Chapter 3: Delusions of Internationalism
• Chapter 4: The Limits to Globalization: Questions for Held and Wolf
• Chapter 5: The Far Side of Globalization: David Held's Missing Links
• Chapter 6: Social Democracy as World Panacea? A Comment on
• Chapter 7: The Test of Practice: GlobalProgress in a World of Sovereignty
• Chapter 8: Top Down or Bottom Up? A Reply
• Chapter 9: Global Governance from Below
• Chapter 10: Globalization's Reality Check
• Chapter 11: Three Modes of Ordering amidst Globalization
• Chapter 12: The Debate on Globalization:Two New Contributions
• Chapter 13: A Covenant to Make Global Governance Work
• Chapter 14: Three Crises and the Need for American Leadership
• Chapter 15: What are the Dangers and the Answers? Clashes over Globalization
• APPENDIX A
• APPENDIX B
• Notes
• Index