Power and Politics in Globalization

The Indispensable State

Howard H. Lentner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135933609
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Challenging the conventional view that globalization embodies a new and inexorable process, this book analyzes the political foundations and choices involved in contemporary arrangements in the world. Rather than treating politics as contention for control over an unforeseeable future, the book explains the background by which the world has arrived at its present state. Thus, the author presents a view that emphasizes continuity with the past while still acknowledging what is new in the present. Invoking many examples throughout, the author bolsters the theoretical analysis in an extended case study of Malaysia.

1

Globalization and Politics

Introduction

The politics of globalization includes two dimensions. The first embodies the practical distribution of power and the constraints imposed by existing arrangements. Those constraints flow from choices that have established and now manage existing structures and processes. The second dimension embraces a more visionary quest for alternative arrangements in the future.

As is true of all politics, both cooperation and struggle are involved, domination and resistance are evident, and contestation abounds. This book deals with present realities and future visions, with both cooperative and conflictive aspects of globalization, and with issues of power and domination in the contemporary world. Certainly, substantial changes have occurred and continue to occur in the modern world. Nevertheless, in my opinion, both the realities and the visions express a good deal of continuity with the past.

Globalization is most commonly presented as an inexorable process that involves bringing the world together through technology. Although the fundamental processes bringing human beings into contact with one another have been at work for millennia, high-speed transport and especially the computer have speeded up the process in the last quarter century or so. Travel, trade, and financial flows now characteristically flow across the globe in voluminous amounts at rapid rates.

These developments are commonly regarded as transforming the world in which we live, but there are four basic assertions about globalization that either restate or modify received ideas about liberal thought. Foremost among the claims is that the state is losing power to the market and has been or will be modified in fundamental ways. This contention restates the Lockean position that society and market relations precede the state. Another claim holds that communities are breaking down and that individuals are becoming increasingly isolated. Traditional liberalism is founded on the notion that rational individuals formed contracts and constituted civil society, which Locke equated with the state. With the increase of the market and other contractual relations, traditional communities and societies faded before free thought in which different ideas of morality and reason emerged, and individuals were no longer constrained by social conventions and traditions.

Another assertion promotes the formation of new identities and novel social and political formations, indeed the creation of a transnational civil society. Given both the absence of constraints and the individualistic origins of society and government, aspirations for universal freedom of association, identity, and contractual relations have always been implicit in the liberal consensus, and aspects of the globalization debate claim that these aspirations are now being brought to fruition.

Still another assertion foresees the development of a broad human project of global governance that includes a universal legal system and intervention nearly everywhere on behalf of human rights or humanitarian principles. Although consistent with the universalizing tendencies of traditional liberalism, in some ways this last claim flies in the face of the others, for governance requires state power both for its formulation and its enforcement. Whatever diversity exists among those regarding globalization as inexorable, the basic argument tends to treat politics largely with an outlook geared to the future.

Two implications flow from such a treatment: analysis tends to have an ideological or at least normative orientation, and analysts tend to assume that politics in the future will less and less resemble what has gone before. Furthermore, as the very term “globalization” itself suggests, many analysts assume that a politics of the globe, however fragmented or inchoate, has already emerged and that the world can be treated—at least to some extent—as a unit in which some sort of new form of politics is already being practiced.

In my judgment, developments in the world are not inexorable. Without denying that technology has an impact on the lives of people all over the world, I argue that the arrangements for channeling and using resources are chosen by people who act within political and social contexts, all of which exist within conditions structured by power. That means that people, using their material resources and ideas, have conflicted and cooperated with others to establish extant arrangements. Moreover, they continue to contend to preserve, modify, or drastically alter the arrangements. Thus, to understand the conditions of globalization, one needs to examine the array of power underlying them, the agents who propel and contend over them, and the values and aspirations at work in contentions over managing the arrangements.

The fundamental problem of politics stems from the simultaneous existence of human striving for autonomy and community. Aristotle’s assertion that “man is by nature a political animal” includes the notion that individuals seek to lead a good life but they are enabled to do so only within a good state. Such a state requires institutions, the rule of law, citizenship in which recognition is accorded individuals, justice which in the first place entails equality, and some purpose or end. Although ultimately the purposes of the individual are served by the political community, those purposes are not merely matters of human needs for food, clothing, shelter, and so forth, but encompass something larger.

Such larger purposes that forge a unity among free individuals and political units are lost in the liberal views, based on Locke, that figure most prominently in contemporary thinking about politics and civil society. In general, liberal thinking promotes merely the interdependence of individuals who cooperate with and assist one another through a division of labor. At best, the state provides the elementary services of law and order to facilitate the pursuit of individual, group, and corporate interests. No common interest or larger purpose brings people together into a common endeavor. To the extent that a common good can be identified, it grows out of selfish pursuits, as Adam Smith averred, and does not result from distinct deliberation and formulation of definite public purposes. Neither does it allow for essentially antagonistic interests between different groups. A peculiarly American emphasis on individualism goes further in claiming increasing scope for autonomous persons to act without restraint by either government or society.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Hegel tried to recapture the larger purpose within which people lived by distinguishing between civil society, a realm of particular interests supported and regulated by a governmental apparatus, and the state, a realm of freedom in which a universal societal purpose enabled individuals to transcend mere needs and to choose beyond them. Despite his intriguing solution to the fundamental tension between autonomy and community, Hegel’s understanding has not been widely adopted.

If liberalism has produced an excess of individualism and a reduction of community feeling, history is filled with many examples of community domination squeezing individual autonomy. One interpretation of the bloody history of the twentieth century that remained quite popular in the wake of World War II construed it as a struggle between tyranny on the one side and respect for the individual on the other.

Within states, politics consists of constituting arrangements for continued deliberations about policies as well as ongoing monitoring of the enforcement of those policies. Arrangements include the building of institutions and rules by which discourse can be conducted, determining who should be included among the ranks of citizens, and principles and procedures to be employed in coming to decisions. In addition, some understanding of the basis of legitimacy—the right to rule and the obligation to obey—has to be formulated.

All states include violence, some in their formation, others in rule without politics, still others providing for the monopoly by the state of the legitimate means of violence to be used in maintaining order and enforcing law. Thus politics consists of both nonviolent deliberation and the use of force at different stages in the lives of states as well as the pursuit and administration of justice. For losers in deliberations and for dissenters from systems of domination, their autonomy may be sacrificed to community rule, often through the use of violence. Furthermore, all states retain at least the potential and, more often than not, the capability to employ violence in their relations with other states.

But the tension between autonomy and community prevails in the relations among states as well as within them. It is here where globalization and politics intersect, and in the present world violence and imposition of the strong on the weak tend to prevail over politics, although the discourse of globalization hardly notes it. Developments within the context of globalization, such as the worldwide rationalization of production and convergence through the spread of best practices as well as cultural exchange, follows in the wake of the rise to systemic domination of a coalition of liberal states.

Although globalization is the term of choice in contemporary discourse it obscures the fact that the world remains divided into states, which are aggregates of power with independent decision-making centers. In part, the matter tends to be hidden by the application of the term “state” to very loosely organized entities that lack the conditions and attributes that characterize states and are thus open to domination. Sometimes these entities are referred to as failed states. Except for these and minuscule, very weak units it is politics among states, not politics within a global entity, that operates in the world. Furthermore, many observers interpret the increasing connections across state boundaries as erosion of borders; still others treat their speculations about the future as settled facts, leading them to assume that the world will one day, usually soon, be integrated into a single unit.

What Is the Politics of Globalization?

The examination of the politics of globalization pursued in this book does not assume the inevitability of global integration and then formulate views about global governance. My analysis aims to understand the background and politics of the contemporary world in which globalization trends contain responses to many different political questions and in which contenders struggle for power. Ideas and conceptualizations themselves are tools in contentions over domination and resistance. This approach differs from that which assumes that the world is undergoing a fundamental transformation that makes it sensible to treat the globe as a unit.

In perhaps the most thoughtful book on the subject, Held and his associates (1999, p. 49) take such a tack when they write:

Today, virtually all nation-states have gradually become enmeshed in and functionally part of a larger pattern of global transformations and global flows.… Far from this being a world of ‘discrete civilizations’, or simply an international society of states, it has become a fundamentally interconnected global order, marked by intense patterns of exchange as well as by clear patterns of power, hierarchy and unevenness.

In setting out a formulation that posits either the existence or inexorability of such a global order, politics then tends to be treated as an ideological struggle for control of the future. Held and associates (1999, Table C.1) describe three distinct “political projects” for “civilizing and democratizing contemporary globalization.” The first, “liberal-internationalism,” aims for “reform of global governance” based on an ethic of “common rights and responsibilities.” The second, “radical republicanism,” stresses “alternative structures of global governance” guided by an ethic of “humane governance.” And the last, “cosmopolitan democracy,” strives for “reconstruction of global governance” founded on the notion of “democratic autonomy.” Although discrete, each of these distinct alternatives assumes the inevitability of a future characterized by global unity.

If, instead, the world is treated as an international system undergoing some change that increases interconnectedness but that does not amount to profound transformation, analysis of the politics of globalization proceeds along quite different lines. Rather than perceiving an inevitable development, this view notes that the most powerful countries, coordinated in a coalition led by the United States, promote a liberal ideology of free trade, unfettered financial flows, direct investment, and other objectives. These powerful countries, furthermore, advocate a neoliberal ideology that aims to reduce the involvement of states in economic production by privatizing state-owned enterprises and to put into place states that are open to the influence of those powerful countries operating both directly and through the market. To facilitate this project, both intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, together with rules and regimes that may be put into place, provide institutional support. In short, this concert of leading states promotes an international community. Observers often regard the direction of developments to equal either the actual or the potential integration of the world.

But the direction of things relies upon power and purpose, the fundamental components of politics. The leading powers’ policies shape international institutions and procedures, and then they push smaller countries to join in those arrangements. But as the powerful promote community, the weak aspire to autonomy within whatever community may be formed. To be sure, the powerful hold out incentives—the promise of development and the threat of economic collapse—but, unless the weak are sufficiently autonomous to enter into agreements freely, their range of choice is severely constrained. The issue resides not so much in separation as inclusion on the basis of choice. Small or weak countries aspire to gain the advantages of participation in the regimes of free trade and investment. On the other hand, they do so not to be submerged in an order dominated by the more powerful but rather to gain wealth and power themselves. However, they can gain such enhancements only by engaging in the larger cooperative schemes.

Just as surely as there are tensions and disagreements between the strong and the weak, divisions occur within the coalition of the leading countries. Frequently, disputes break out that amount to conflict over important issues such as trade rules or intervention policies. Very few conflicts hold the potential for war among the major powers, although the status of Taiwan provides a deep conflict between the United States and China that has to be handled in a particularly delicate way so as to restrain the dogs of war.

One also needs to note that, although each weak country seeks autonomy in the face of domination by a system of rules fashioned by the leading powers, this conflict does not array a coalition of the weak against a concert of the strong. Instead, in parallel with the situation of the individual in society, each country strives for autonomy against domination but also for cooperation in order to achieve those purposes that cannot be achieved autonomously.

To elucidate that struggle, the following discussion analyzes the discrete political issues at play in the contemporary international arena. These include matters of power, institutions, ideas and ideology, authority, democracy, human rights, law, justice, equality, regimes, legitimacy, sovereignty, citizenship, civil society, and violence. Analyzing present arrangements in each of these matters describes the shape of politics in globalization as it occurs. This approach may be contrasted with the debate over future policy.

Foundations of Globalization

Although theoretical concepts offer useful insights and directions for inquiry, specific human arrangements are always historical. That is to say, in inquiring into the issues that have been resolved in the building of globalization, it is important to remember that what exists today has emanated from previous experience. Certainly events like the Cold War come to an end, and conditions afterward differ from those that prevailed during its existence, but present conditions nevertheless have been shaped by arrangements and decisions made in the past. Furthermore, both the past conditions and the circumstances emanating from them have been experienced differently by different persons and separate countries. At some level of generality, for example, colonialism had common characteristics for all colonies and colonists; nevertheless, each suffered or enjoyed separate experiences and has developed in the post-colonial period in at least semi-autonomous ways. Thus the following analysis adheres to historical specificity and aims to describe the conditions supporting globalization. Should those change in substantial ways, the course of the future is likely to veer into a different direction than it seems to be heading now.

Power

As the fundamental concept of politics, power has been thought of in many ways. One prominent conceptualization stresses the domination of one person or entity over others, whereas another emphasizes the construction of power through interactive speech that leads to acting together (Arendt 1958, 1970). A favorite of political scientists focuses on the specific acts by which one individual or group induces another to do things that the other would not otherwise do (Dahl 1957). In a more modern formulation that draws on the French writer Foucault, Clegg (1989) stresses that power relations are reproduced through the accession of individuals to structural power and that sometimes people resist rather than cooperate in their own submission. Waltz (1979) treats power as a fund of capabilities that enables the more powerful in general to work their wills with greater regularity than can the weak. Violence seems intimately related to power (Weber 1948; Schelling 1960, 1966), although Goehler (2000) distinguishes between transitive power, which includes violence, and intransitive power, which does not. Any historical narrative about power arrangements is likely to touch on various of these formulations, for each reveals a facet of a complex set of relationships (Haugaard 1997).

In elucidating contemporary power arrangements in their historical specificity, many things need to be taken for granted. Modern science and the modern period of enlightenment comprise one dimension of the world in which we live. Scientific knowledge and its technological applications have contributed to the immense productive capacity of industry, commerce, information, and finance. Growth of the world’s population, which reached one billion only in 1850 then three billion almost exactly a century later only to double before the end of the twentieth century, can largely be attributed to a reduction of the death rate through public health measures based upon modern science and technology. On the other side, the expansion of military force over the past two centuries has also occurred as a product of science and technology. Faith in human improvement and progress forms part of the enlightenment character, and modern democracy as well as conceptions of humanitarianism and human rights flow from an enlightenment commitment to the individual human being as central to social organization.

In addition, some basic forms of political organization provide a backdrop for the world’s contemporary situation. Even though it frequently offers a target for transformationalists in today’s world, the state and its sovereign constitution give fundamental shape and outline to the political organization of the world. From its origins in the fifteenth century, the state has provided the blueprint for political organization. In recent history, the political choice of societies emerging from colonialism turned universally to the state form. Bringing the matter forward to very recent breakups of empires, specifically the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, successors have taken the form of states. The reason for these choices is not far to seek, for the state affords a mechanism for making autonomous political and policy decisions in a world of other states. Moreover, this advantage of the state gets reinforced by the institutions and mechanisms of international politics, such as the United Nations and other organizations that are founded by states and dedicated to perpetuating them (Lentner 1996).

Another background feature for contemporary history is provided by the nation and modern nationalism. Despite some dispute about whether nations emanate from primordial origins (Smith 1986) or are modern inventions (Greenfeld 1992), we can assume that modern nationalism dates from the time of the French and American revolutions. Both of these revolutions incorporated the idea that citizens, enjoying some fundamental right...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Globalization and Politics
• 2. Alternative Conceptions of the Contemporary World
• 3. Globalization and Power
• 4. World Problems and Specific State Problems
• 5. Hegemony: The Liberal International Political Economy
• 6. Management in the Contemporary World
• 7. Developmental States and Global Pressures
• 8. State Responses to Globalizing Pressures
• 9. Civil Society and Conditions of Peace
• 10. Citizenship and Public Space in Globalization
• 11. Malaysia and Southeast Asia in Globalization
• 12. Summary and Conclusion: Globalization and States
• References
• Index