Latin America Transformed

Globalization and Modernity

Robert N Gwynne, Kay Cristobal, Robert N. Gwynne, Cristobal Kay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134631964
• Subtopic: Economic Policy

Praise for the first edition:

'Accomplishes its task to provide readers with a broad multi-disciplinary view on globalization's many impacts on Latin America ... the organization of the collection is logical and thoughtful, and the structural perspectives offered are convincing and powerful. I recommend it to other Latin American social scientists.' Growth and Change



'An impressive, timely and lively volume, which is especially valuable for teaching purposes.' Journal of Latin American Studies



'Authoritatively written by leading scholars in their respective fields.' Area



Latin America Transformed, 2nd Edition explains the region's economic, political, social and cultural transformations, its association with globalization and the search for modernity, and contributes to a greater understanding of how these transformations are affecting the people of Latin America.



Using a political economy approach to unravel the concepts of globalization and modernity within Latin America, emphasis is placed on interpreting the macro-level structures that frame the transformations taking place. The book also investigates the dynamics of people's livelihoods as they make sense of, rework and live out these structural transformations.



The international team of authors involved with the successful first edition have updated their focus and substantially rewritten their material to examine the challenges facing Latin America in the twenty-first century. Three completely new chapters have also been added. Latin America Transformed, 2nd Edition is now even more useful for undergraduate and postgraduate courses that examine economic, political, social and cultural change in Latin America.

1

GLOBALIZATION AND MODERNITY

1

Latin America transformed: globalization and neoliberalism

Robert N. Gwynne, Cristóbal Kay

Globalization has been associated with a series of economic, political, social and cultural metamorphoses in Latin America. This book aims to explain the various components of these metamorphoses, explore theoretical debates and contribute to a greater understanding of how these transformations are affecting the people of Latin America (see Figure 1.1).

It could be argued that studies on societal transformations in contemporary Latin America have been characterized by their strong fragmentation along disciplinary lines. Since the early 1980s, political scientists have directed their attention to the processes of democratic transition and consolidation taking place in a large number of countries (see Chapters 7 and 8). During the same period, economists have focused on analysing the policies of macro-economic adjustment and trade liberalization implemented in order to regenerate economic growth across the continent (see Chapters 3 and 4). Meanwhile, several sociologists and social anthropologists have begun, in recent years, to examine the nature of the social and cultural transformations generated by modernization and the increasing globalization of Latin American societies (see Chapters 2, 10 and 12). Geographers have tried to examine change at different scales of analysis and by foregrounding place and livelihoods in their analysis (see Chapter 9).

There are many ways of examining how transformations have occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean in the past few decades. Political economy provides one set of tools. Part 1 of this book uses a political economy approach in order to unravel the concepts of globalization and modernity and how they relate to economic, political, social and cultural change in the region. The emphasis is on interpreting the broad structures that frame the several transformations that are taking place. These interpretations cast their analysis at a macro-level, creating arguments that seek to explain the transformations in the region by reference to international, national and regional processes.

In the first two parts, all authors attempt to contextualize their different disciplinary foci within a broad political economy approach that consciously tries to integrate political, economic, social and geographical phenomena. In several chapters, key theoretical perspectives and debates, as far as they exist, are used to analyse these transformations in a critical manner. Other chapters, while discussing theoretical issues, present more empirical evidence to examine the various transformations of Latin America and discuss the adequacy of current theories.

Another dimension is to focus on how people weave their way through, make sense of, rework and live out these structural transformations. Part 3 aims to understand the dynamics of people’s livelihoods. The emphasis in these chapters is on how people construct their livelihoods from below and within the existing structural constraints of the current phase of globalization. We hope that, by having chapters that rely on one or the other of these two dimensions, this book will provide a more comprehensive picture of Latin American transformation. The challenge is to focus on the weave that knits together global and local networks and which has produced and continues to generate distinctive chronologies of place and livelihoods.

Figure 1.1 Latin American countries and capital cities.

UNRAVELLING THE CONCEPT OF GLOBALIZATION IN LATIN AMERICA

The concept of globalization has been strongly linked to the economic (see below), but in this book we aim to emphasize the political, social, environmental and cultural components of globalization as well. The globalization of politics has impacted upon Latin America in such diverse forms as the shift to systems of democratic governance and greater concern for human rights (see Chapter 8). Meanwhile, global environmental concerns (such as global warming) have impacted upon government and public attitudes to the environment in many countries, while the growth of media emanating from the core economies (and most particularly the United States) is transforming social customs and cultural practices in much of urban Latin America (see Chapters 2 and 5). One ought to add that there is also evidence of local reactions to the processes of globalization, as with the rise in grassroots movements representing local environmental issues (see Chapter 6) and indigenous movements (see Chapter 10).

In terms of economic globalization, it should be emphasized that capitalism has always been an international system. However; today, the international integration of the world-market economy is progressing at a very rapid pace. This process encompasses economic transformations in production, consumption, technology and ideas. Many social scientists define the current reality as one of unprecedented globalization and call for new forms of global governance (Soros, 2002). The idea that we have entered an era of globalization is so often repeated in the news media and in scholarship that it has the status of a truism, so obvious that it is beyond refute or need for empirical substantiation. Many observers go one step further, presenting globalization as an unquestionable empirical manifestation of contemporary capitalism. Against this trend, there is now also a powerful anti-globalization movement that receives considerable media attention (see Box 1.1).

BOX 1.1 The anti-globalization movement

The process of globalization has unleashed an anti-globalization movement, largely situated in the countries of the North. In the past decade, it has organized major protest actions in Seattle, Washington, DC, Genoa and other cities where international organizations such as the World Bank have organized key meetings. The anti-globalization movement is a broad coalition of a great variety of groups who wish to voice their concern about the negative impact of the process of globalization on such issues as the environment, labour rights, working conditions and the cultural identity of groups and nations. However, these anti-globalization protests have not yet coalesced into a permanent and coherent social movement. While it may not have fundamentally contested or changed the global capitalist system, it has been relatively successful in raising more widespread concern about the negative consequences of the globalization process. A major anti-globalization movement in the South is being shaped by the Social Forum, which has so far had three gatherings in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Thousands of representatives of NGOs, trade unions, and other organizations from the North and the South meet during a week or so to discuss a great variety of issues concerning the economic, social and political impact of globalization and neoliberalism on mainly the peoples of the South. It attempts to forge an international movement that counters the power of transnational corporations and the policies pursued by governments in the North and the South, which try to further neoliberal globalism. These anti-globalization gatherings and protest movements view globalization as an umbrella term that covers a variety of current transformations which they attribute to the spread and intensification of capitalism, and which they view as having deleterious effects on peoples, cultures and the environment throughout the world.

Theses of globalization

It may, therefore, be useful to refer to some of the key discourses on globalization in the social science literature (with reference to Latin America, see Harris, 2002). This will demonstrate that globalization is a contested concept with a range of arguments and interpretations associated with it. One attempt at classifying the interpretations of globalization was that of Held et al. (1999), who argued that there were at least three such discourses, or as they call them, theses: hyperglobalist, sceptical and transformationalist.

The hyperglobalist thesis

According to the hyperglobalist thesis, globalization defines a new epoch of human history in which traditional nation–states have become unnatural, even impossible units in a global economy (Luard, 1990; Ohmae, 1995). The key assumption is of movement towards global markets and global prices. In this model, national economies become ‘subsumed and rearticulated into the international system by international transactions and processes’ (Michalak, 1994: 53). Although nationally determined policies still operate, they are subordinate to wider international determining factors. The key actor becomes the transnational corporation (TNC), detached from constraints of government regulation and unconstrained by any specific national base. The TNC can thus be seen as the single most important force in economic restructuring both between and within nation–states.

This thesis privileges an economic logic to globalization and argues that economic globalization is bringing about a ‘denationalization’ of economies through the establishment of transnational networks of production, trade and finance (Strange, 1996; Deardorff and Stern 2000). Held et al. (1999) maintain that within this framework, at least two discourses prevail. On the one hand, there is the neoliberal version, which welcomes the triumph of individual autonomy and celebrates the dominance of the market principle over state power that such a thesis of globalization implies (Ohmae, 1995). On the other, this thesis has neo-Marxist adherents for whom contemporary globalization represents the triumph of oppressive global capitalism (Peet and Watts, 1993; Petras, 1999). Petras and Veltmeyer (2001a), indeed, would argue that globalization constitutes a new form of imperialism for the twenty-first century.

The steady erosion of old hierarchies and the generation of new patterns of regional winners and losers are emphasized. A new global division of labour replaces the traditional core–periphery structure and a more complex architecture of economic power evolves. In the creation of these new world geographies, the neoliberals stress advantages in global competition. Some spaces within a country may be made worse off as a result of such competition, but other spaces will have a comparative advantage in producing certain goods for global markets. The neoliberals tend to see all countries (rich and poor) benefiting from globalization, although within each country significant restructuring will take place. In contrast, the neo-Marxists believe that global capitalism creates and reinforces structural patterns of inequality both between and within countries.

The sceptical thesis

Facing the tidal wave of globalization discourse, a few sceptics have countered that many of the fundamental features and empirical manifestations of global capitalism today remain much as they were in the nineteenth century (Hirst and Thompson, 1999; Wallerstein, 2000). Hirst and Thompson (1999: 2) argue that in some ways ‘the current international economy is less open and integrated than the regime that prevailed from 1870 to 1914’. Using statistical evidence of world flows of trade, investment and labour from the nineteenth century, Hirst and Thompson argue that contemporary levels of economic interdependence are by no means historically unprecedented. The sceptics think that ‘true’ globalization must imply a fully integrated world economy, which remains a long way into the future. One crucial economic factor of the world economy, labour, remains relatively immobile, particularly compared with capital.

More generally, this thesis sees the world economy as one in which the principal economic entities are still states, and their governments are involved in facilitating the process of increasing economic interaction at the global scale. International phenomena are outcomes that emerge from the distinct and different performance of national economies (Michalak, 1994). This can explain the increasing importance of trading blocs in the contemporary world. It could be argued that individual states make significant efforts to come together in regional groupings in order to achieve greater economic stability within a world economy that is increasingly uncertain as markets (and thereby prices) become more ‘global’ in character.

Sceptics emphasize the enduring power of national governments to regulate international economic activity. Thus, they regard the early twenty-first century as indicating only heightened levels of internationalization. Economic interactions occur between predominantly national economies, although some of these economies may link together into trading blocs where the law of ‘one price’ can become a reality (unlike in the global arena). However, it could be argued that the law of ‘one price’ has so far only been achieved in the European Union, where full labour mobility within the trading bloc distinguishes it from other examples. Sceptics see globalization as increasingly marginalizing the countries of the world periphery. Globalization provides economic growth for core economies and certain countries of the semi-periphery, but a whole series of economic and political factors retard the economic growth of the poorer countries of the world, most notably in Africa.

The transformationalist thesis

This thesis sees globalization as a powerful transformative force which is res...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• About the authors
• Preface
• Part 1 Globalization and Modernity
• Part 2 Political Transformations
• Part 3 Space, Society and Livelihoods
• Part 4 Latin American Futures
• Bibliography
• Index