An Unruly World?

Globalization, Governance and Geography

Andrew Herod, Geroid O Tuathail, Susan M. Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415169318
• eBook ISBN: 9781134740567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

An Unruly World explores the diverse conundrums thrown up by seemingly unruly globalization. Examining how fast transnational capitalism is re-making the rules of the game, in a wide variety of different places, domains, and sectors, the authors focus on a wide range of issues: from analysis of 'soft capitalism', and the post-Cold War organizational drives of international trade unions, to the clamour of states to reinvent welfare policy, and the efforts of citizen groups to challenge trade and financial regimes. An Unruly World argues that we are not living in a world bereft of rules and rulers; the rules governing the global economy today are more strictly enforced by international organizations and rhetoric than ever before.

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NEGOTIATING UNRULY PROBLEMATICS

Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Andrew Herod, and Susan M.Roberts

Unruly: not amenable to rule or discipline; ungovernable; turbulent; disorderly.

Oxford English Dictionary

We live in unruly times and, increasingly, in unruly places and spaces. Throughout the globe at the end of the twentieth century, a series of unruly and contradictory problematics are working themselves out across states, nations, economies, environments, and bodies. From the emergence of integrated global financial systems, the globalization of production, the rise of planetary networks (Castells 1996), and the de-traditionalization of identity (Heelas et al. 1996), to the collapse of “actually existing socialism,” the end of the Cold War, and the creation of new transnational institutions, longstanding structural forces and processes are colliding and converging to produce a fin de millénaire world that is relentlessly compressed and restlessly dynamic, while also spectacularly riven and dangerously fragmented. Just as Halford Mackinder (1904) proclaimed a “post- Columbian epoch” of closed global space at the beginning of the twentieth century, so might one be tempted to proclaim at century’s end the emergence of an “unruly epoch” of ungovernable, turbulent, and disorderly global space. Caught in the maelstrom of the processes which are re-writing the rules of world order are the old masters of global space, the state formations that have historically divided territories and organized economies, ruled sovereignly over populations and corporations, disciplined subjects, and consolidated identities. Absolute rulers no more, the slipping power of states threatens the advent of an unruly world, a world no longer amenable to the state-centric ruling systems and disciplining institutions of the past.

Within numerous of the defining problematics of the late twentieth century—problematics such as globalization, governance, and geography— unruliness appears as a mantra to some and as a paradigmatic and spectral condition to others. In and of itself, the concept of “unruliness” is not a secret cipher to our contemporary global political economy. It expresses no hidden essence nor does it offer divine revelation, a mastering concept based on a God’s-eye view (the position of a Mackinder) from which to make sense of the messy complexity of our world at the end of the millennium. Like all concepts, its multiple uses are delimited contextually. Our interest in it is as a path of entry into the problematics of ungovernable globalization, turbulent governance, and disorderly geography, problematics where “unruliness” registers in ways which divulge certain lines of power and disclose ironic contradictions in the structural trends and tendencies reconfiguring the rules of the globe. In this sense, the unruly is, for us, a question and not an answer, an open line of inquiry and not a closed definitive description. So it is, too, for the chapters that make up this volume which engage the unruly problematics of globalization, governance, and geography in different places, contexts, sectors, and institutional sites. Rather than describe each essay in detail or discipline all in the name of a forced thematic singularity, we wish to use this introduction to articulate the multiple problematics they negotiate, articulating as we go along the particular sites of power addressed by the various chapters in the volume. Our goal in this volume is not to survey the global political economy we work within from some transcendent “geographical perspective” but, instead, to engage with the polymorphous unruliness of our world to gain a greater understanding of its shifting tectonics of power and the faultlines they generate.

GLOBALIZATION

As an imperfect name for a differential and uneven process of transition from an international economy to an imaginary unified global economy, “globalization” is a flexible concept for flexible times, one that is much evoked by commentators and capable of being articulated in a variety of ways (Kofman and Youngs 1996; Mittelman 1996). As a means of approaching the concept, two useful distinctions are worth making at the outset. The first is made by Robert Cox (1996) who notes, following Marx, that capitalism has always been global. Cox usefully distinguishes between a historical materialist and an ideological understanding of the term. From a materialist perspective, globalization has its origins in the crises of the international economic order of the 1970s as the capitalist organization of production began to move beyond the Fordist mode of (national) regulation that had structured it during the immediate post-war decades. Internationally, the bargain between states and capitalist markets that characterized this era has been identified by John Ruggie as “embedded liberalism” (Ruggie 1982). As capitalist production moved to new forms and (global) scales of organization, however, the post-war national bargains established in various countries between capital, labor, and the states began to unravel. Crudely summarized, an international economy made up of discrete and strongly regulated national economies trading with and investing in each other slowly became eclipsed by a world economy “in which production and finance were being organized in cross-border networks that could very largely escape national and international regulatory powers” (Cox 1996:22).

Numerous symbolic dates and events characterize this change: the breakup of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates; the Japanese challenge to the American automobile industry; the global effects of the OPEC oil price increases and the subsequent flooding of the international economy with petrodollars; the fall of Saigon; and the Thatcherite and Reaganite offensive against organized labor and the post-war social bargain in their respective states. In a materialist sense, then, globalization marks a crisis of the nationally constituted territorial rules and regulations governing the relationship of states to capitalism. It marks a shift towards an unruly and ungovernable form of capitalist organization at a global scale, a form of organization promoted and sought by capital itself both materially and discursively. As Cox notes, the world economy grew by taking advantage of the territorial fragmentation of the international economy. “This allowed capital to choose the most propitious site in which to locate diverse phases of a geographically disseminated production process, taking account of differences in labor costs, environmental regulations, fiscal incentives, political stability, and so on” (Cox 1996:23).

By the mid-1990s it was estimated there were 40,000 corporations in the world whose activities crossed national boundaries, with these firms having an estimated 250,000 foreign affiliates (Anderson and Cavanagh 1996). For these transnational corporations and the states within which they operate, “globalization” has become a pervasive ideology which explains, justifies, and further facilitates their material interests. Globalization is represented as an economically overdetermined necessity, a material inevitability, and a political imperative (Gibson-Graham 1996). It is the material transformation at the center of the increasingly hegemonic discourse of transnational liberalism (also known as neoliberalism), the doctrine that holds that movement towards so-called “free trade” and “open markets” at a global scale is in the interest of all the world’s peoples (Agnew and Corbridge 1995). In the discourse of neoliberalism, globalization is the unfolding of the latent potential of laissez-faire capitalism to revolutionize the globe. It is seen as a tsunami of transformation that will, sooner or later, wash away the staid regulations of the territorial state, uprooting old bureaucracies and protected markets, and launching them into the global flows of free market capitalism (Luke and Ó Tuathail this volume). It is transnational corporate capitalism’s manifest destiny, its vision and promise of an (b)orderless world where consumers are the ultimate sovereigns and “nothing is overseas any longer” (Ohmae 1990: viii). Globalization envisions the re-making of the globe, the transformation of “safe and sleepy markets…into fluid and complex business environments where change and uncertainty seem to be the only constants” (Smithson et al. 1994:3).

Such change and uncertainty is reflected in the ways in which transnational corporate capitalism is conceptualized and managed (Barnes 1996). Thrift argues in this volume that a “new managerialism” is emerging in response to a world that appears uncertain, paradoxical, unruly, complex, and chaotic. Whilst traditional managerial discourses have drawn on what Jowitt (1992) calls a “Joshua discourse” founded on the notion that there is a single, God’s-eye view of reason which suggests some underlying logic to the organization of the world, more recently what Thrift calls a “Genesis discourse” has begun to gain ascendancy in management (and academic) circles. Whereas in the Joshua discourse order is taken as the rule and disorder as the exception, the Genesis discourse sees disorder as the rule and order as the exception, such that knowledge is no longer based in eternal “truths” but is simply “an archipelago of islands of epistemic stability in a sea of disorder, fluctuations, noise, randomness and chaos.” Coincident with such discursive transitions are significant changes in the logistical ways in which global capitalism is managed as numerous corporations rip out layers of middle management and adopt looser forms of business organization which are able to respond quickly to the challenges of an evermore integrated globe. As capitalism has become increasingly globalized, it has also, Thrift suggests, become increasingly oriented around issues of discourse, knowledgeability, and access to information, such that the contemporary discourses articulated by corporations and various management gurus are serving as instruments of the regulation of capitalism through the process of new institutional and subject formation—what Thrift calls the rise of “soft capitalism.” Although knowledge has, of course, always been central to the way that capitalism works, increasingly various discursive practices appear to be playing a much more significant regulatory role as the power of the state to regulate through legislative fiat seems to be diminishing. Hence, by way of example, Bridge’s chapter in this volume both illustrates and embellishes this point through its analysis of how global mining concerns are reshaping discourses concerning environmental stewardship so that they might negotiate crises of accumulation and legitimation which emerge as a result of challenges by environmentalists.

A second useful distinction for clarifying globalization is that between a “globalization-from-above” and a “globalization-from-below,” as elaborated, albeit somewhat simplistically, by Brecher and Costello (1994).For Brecher and Costello, globalization-from-above refers to the globalization sought and promoted by powerful corporate actors and institutions in our contemporary global political economy. It is the command and control globalization being created by transnational corporations thinking glocally as they shift from multidomestic to global competitive strategies. It is the US-European Union-Japan triadic management globalization sought and promoted by quasi-state and quasi-private institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Finally, it is the commodified cultural globalization imagineered by transnational media and corporations which project consumer Utopias—Disney Worlds and Marlboro countries, Planet Hollywoods and Banana Republics—where consumption not citizenship defines identity and where brandnames like Sony and not nationalist visions of soil are meant to inspire loyalty (Barber 1995).

By contrast, globalization-from-below is Brecher and Costello’s somewhat idealistic and normative interpretation of the web of transnational networks and connections between grassroots social movements, non-governmental organizations, and trade unions in many different states trying to ameliorate and democratize globalization-from-above. Like the most powerful actors in our global political economy, they suggest, grassroots activists—whether they be environmentalists and labor unions, farmers and public health activists, human rights groups and women’s forums—need to “think globally and act locally,” rejecting appeals to chauvinistic nationalism and local prejudice in the name of a more equitable and just globalization (for examples of such activities, see Herod 1995; Roberts, this volume).

The notion of the “unruly” is quite different for these contrasting forms of globalization. Within the neoliberal discourses of the most active advocates and agents of globalization-from-above, a certain form of what we might call “economically correct” unruliness is a vital prerequisite for radical change and future economic success. As a de facto vanguard pushing a revolutionary doctrine, the polemicists and practitioners of neoliberalism mythologize the unruliness of the market and demand its emancipation from the fetters and discipline of statist regulations. The revolution they ferment is a revolution to free markets across the globe in the name of rationality, growth, and efficiency, a concerted effort to promote unruliness by abolishing all restrictions, brakes, and fetters on “the market.” The resistance of entrenched interests and territorially bound bureaucracies must be overcome. In a world where transnational corporations are “moving at the speed of business” (UPS advertising slogan) globalization is conceptualized in dromocratic terms as a mythic acceleration (“take-off”) towards the future (Thrift this volume). Dromo-globalization as an ideology celebrates visions of an “accelerated transition” to what Toffler (1980) has called “Third Wave capitalism,” “friction-free exchange,” and “superconductive” financial markets (Luke and Ó Tuathail this volume). In the technofuturism of Newt Gingrich (architect of the New Right’s takeover of the US Congress in 1994), where revolution is only technological and always capitalized, the Third Wave will supposedly re-create the good old mythic days of nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalism and democracy. In his infamous book To Renew America, for which Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins initially paid Gingrich an exorbitant advance fee (which Gingrich was later forced to decline because of the perception of corruption), Gingrich declares that;

more and more people are going to be operating outside corporate structures and hierarchies in the nooks and crannies that the Informational Revolution creates. While the Industrial Revolution herded people into gigantic social institutions—big corporations, big unions, big government—the Information Revolution is breaking up these giants and leading us back to something that is—strangely enough—much more like Tocqueville’s 1830s America.

(Gingrich 1995:63; emphasis and capitalization in original)

Classic liberalism is joined to neoliberalism and neoliberalism to democracy in this determinist textbook vision wherein the Tofflers lead us right back to Tocqueville. Third Wave capitalism will supposedly set us free, erasing social barriers and hierarchies and leading, ultimately, to a “market democracy” of small entrepreneurs and innovators in perfect competition with each other.

Gingrich’s register of paradox—“strangely enough”—cannot, however, disguise or smooth over the contradictions of such discourse. First, the unruly globalization represented and promoted by neoliberal ideologues as inevitable and imperative (the “there is no alternative” and the “no turning back” slogans popularized by Thatcher) requires strong state action to realize itself. Rewriting the rules for the global economy necessitates the rule of the neoliberal right (or, in countries with nominally leftist governments such as New Zealand and France in the 1980s, at least the rule of neoliberal rites) to deregulate national markets and unleash the revolutionary potential of the global marketplace. With the bound rules of national capitalism as the Bastille to be stormed and finance capital as Robespierre (Greider 1997:25), the revolutionaries promise the freedom and democracy of a liberated market, where individuals are no longer fettered and encumbered by the repressive and restraining rules imposed by earlier generations of politicians and bureaucrats. However, the state must still be “seized” in order for the market to be liberated. Control of the organs of the national state is still required to manage the perpetual “transitions” neoliberals imagine, transitions from national capitalism to global capitalism, from socialism to capitalism, from the plan to market, from the bureaucratic past to the “opportunity society” of the future (World Bank 1996). Politics becomes infused with the discourse of the neoliberal vanguard, pushing the acceleration of transitions, polemicizing on behalf of the future U...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES AND TABLES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1: NEGOTIATING UNRULY PROBLEMATICS
• 2: THE RISE OF SOFT CAPITALISM
• 3: GLOBAL FLOWMATIONS, LOCAL FUNDAMENTALISMS, AND FAST GEOPOLITICS
• 4: FROM FEDERAL WELFARE TO LOCAL WORKFARE?
• 5: GEO-GOVERNANCE IN TRADE AND FINANCE AND POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF DISSENT
• 6: PRODUCING GLOBALIZATION
• 7: OF BLOCS, FLOWS AND NETWORKS
• 8: MAGHREBIN IMMIGRATION, FRANCE, AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE “SPATIAL VENT”
• 9: EXCAVATING NATURE