Global Citizens

Social Movements and the Challenge of Globalization

Marjorie Mayo

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781842771396
• eBook ISBN: 9781848136878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The dawn of the twenty-first century has been accompanied by an upsurge of anti-capitalist campaigning, challenging the very basis of the New World Economic order. Dramatic events such as the protests from Seattle to Genoa, have captured media headlines. But media headlines leave key questions unanswered, questions about the ultimate significance of the challenges posed by global social movements and the development of civil society, both South and North. This book sets out to explore the lessons from these experiences of social mobilisation. How can non-governmental organisations, community-based organisations and the labour and trade union movement develop effective campaigning alliances – without becoming institutionalised and incorporated themselves? How can they maintain an effective balance between winning immediate gains without losing sight of longer-term strategies for transformation? How can they work with celebrities to gain media attention -- without losing control of the message? And how can social movements develop organisational forms that are genuinely representative and democratically accountable, globally? These questions are explored through case studies of particular networks, movements and campaigns, to tackle the causes of social inequality and social injustice. It concludes by exploring lessons for building global challenges to neo-liberal agendas and developing more transformatory approaches.

1 | Challenging globalization: developing alternative strategies

This chapter explores definitions and perspectives on ‘globalization’ and their varying implications for the development of alternative strategies. ‘Globalization’ itself is a contested term. As this chapter sets out to demonstrate, globalization bears different meanings and varying levels of significance, depending on the theoretical perspective underpinning the analysis in question. These are not simply semantic debates; different perspectives on globalization relate to differing and potentially competing political agendas, whether these agendas are pro- or anti-globalization in principle. As the Introduction suggested, mobilizations in Seattle, Prague and Genoa included protesters from the Right as well as the Left of the political spectrum, a blurring of the difference between left-wing approaches and right-wing approaches that led to considerable questioning and debate among anti-globalization activists and writers (Kessi 2001).

These debates have vitally important implications for the discussions of anti-globalization movements in subsequent chapters. The reader already familiar with these arguments about the nature of globalization and the impact of capitalist globalization, more specifically, may prefer to skip lightly over this chapter. In particular, the reader well acquainted with the criticisms of capitalist globalization, in terms of its effects on increasing poverty and social inequality worldwide, may choose to skip these sections.

Globalization has become a contemporary buzzword, but how new is it? In a much-quoted passage from the Communist Manifesto, in 1848, Marx and Engels described a number of key features that are typically considered characteristic of globalization in the twenty-first century. ‘Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way,’ they argued (Marx and Engels 1985: 81), going on to point to the constant processes of change inherent in capitalism, the ‘everlasting uncertainty and agitation’ that distinguish the ‘bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones’ (ibid.: 83). ‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air’ (ibid.), a phrase that has been regularly quoted in the context of globalization and the increasing rate of economic, political, social and cultural change.

‘The bourgeoisie’, Marx and Engels argued, ‘has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country’ (ibid.). So,

in place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. (ibid.: 84)

In summary, according to Marx and Engels, the development of capitalist social relations was the key factor, leading to associated social, political and cultural changes on a global scale. The so-called McDonaldization of popular culture can be glimpsed in the future, along with the global popularity of Levi’s jeans, Gap t-shirts, Hollywood movies and Starbucks coffee. Each of the features identified by Marx and Engels, the economic, political and social and cultural aspects, emerge in the discussion of more recent definitions of globalization.

Definitions and differing approaches

So what precisely is new about the notion of globalization? Not so much, some critics have argued. ‘“Globalisation” is an extension of the already existing power relationships in the world economy, in which the controllers of capital in the great powers seek to reinforce and intensify their exploitation of the rest of the world’ (Murray 1997: 20). The novelty has been grossly overrated, it has been argued, by those who present globalization as an inevitable process, a juggernaut inexorably sweeping all before it (Hirst and Thompson 1996). ‘Globalization’, it has been argued, is a deeply ideological term. By implication, such critics have suggested, globalization is being defined as an irresistible contemporary process, a process portrayed as ultimately beneficial for humankind, or at least as inevitable.

Such a view of globalization has been characterized as ‘globaloney’ by critics who prefer to focus upon resistance, based upon alternative understandings, linked to fundamentally different political objectives and geared towards achieving very different policy outcomes. Before considering these critiques, however, the concept itself needs to be explored.

In established development discourse, definitions of globalization include a number of related features. The World Development Report produced by the World Bank for 1999/2000 (World Bank 2002) focuses on globalization in terms of technological advances in communication, which ‘have made it possible to know in an instant what is happening in a household or factory or on a stock market half a world away’ (ibid.: 4). Meanwhile, this report continues, in parallel with these advances in communication technology, multinational companies

now rely on production chains that straddle many countries. Raw materials and components may come from two different countries and be assembled in another, while marketing and distribution take place in still other venues. Consumers’ decisions in, say, London or Tokyo become information that has an almost immediate impact on the products that are being made – and the styles that influence them – all over the globe. (ibid.)

The products in question may be automobiles or items of clothing, but the globalization of the processes of design, manufacture and marketing may be comparable. There are parallels here with the factors identified by Marx and Engels, but with the emphasis upon technological advances in communications, rather than in the social relations of production per se.

With a similar emphasis upon capital and the social relations of production as well as an emphasis upon new technologies (including communication technologies) War on Want’s website defines globalization as ‘the way that world trade, culture and technologies have become rapidly integrated over the last 20 years, as geographic distance and cultural difference no longer pose an obstacle to trade. New technologies have increased the ease of global communication, allowing money to change hands in the blink of an eye.’ Globalization, the website continues, involves

the opening up of trade which allows goods and services to travel across the world more freely and increase in foreign investment – companies investing overseas by building plants, contracting subsidiaries or buying stock in foreign countries, the opening up of capital markets which increases the flow of money across the world, improved access to communication – from the development of new technology like the internet to cheaper plane tickets. (<http://www.globalworkplace.com>)

Summarizing the sociological literature on differing approaches, Cohen and Kennedy start from Albrow’s definition of globalization as referring to ‘all those processes by which the peoples of the world are incorporated into a single society, global society’ (quoted in Cohen and Kennedy 2000: 24). Cohen and Kennedy then go on to identify six component strands of globalization:

• changing concepts of time and space

• an increasing volume of cultural interactions

• the commonality of problems facing all the world’s inhabitants

• growing interconnections and interdependencies

• a network of increasingly powerful transnational actors and organizations

• the synchronization of all the dimensions involved in globalization

On the basis of the changes that have taken place in communications technologies this list starts from the impact of these changes on people’s perceptions of time and space, the ‘time–space compression’, which has been speeded up so dramatically by the development of electronic media. The accompanying effects in terms of increasing cultural interactions have also been widely identified as key features of globalization: we live in a global village, it has been argued, albeit a global village which is effectively dominated by Western, and particularly US, cultural influences.

Globalization is not simply a matter of culture and communications, however. As the subsequent items in Cohen and Kennedy’s list indicate, globalization is also defined in terms of increasingly interconnected problems, including problems of the environment – which cannot be confined within national borders – and problems of poverty and civil strife, which give rise to the mass movements of peoples, as refugees and asylum-seekers. These problems, in their turn, point to the economic and political dimensions of globalization, including the increasing power of transnational corporations, globally as well as locally. Their influence impacts on international organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, as well as on national governments across the globe.

This links to debates about the changing role of the nation-state itself. As will be suggested below, one set of conclusions drawn from the increasing power of transnational corporations emphasizes the decreasing power of the nation-state – on its own, no national government can hope to influence, let alone control, the operations of transnational corporations. Total sales of major transnational corporations such as General Motors, the Ford Motor Company, Mitsubishi and the Royal Dutch/Shell Group have exceeded the gross domestic product of nation-states (respectively Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Poland, South Africa and Greece) (UNDP statistics, quoted on War on Want website 2002). Half the largest economies in the world are transnational corporations, not nation-states (Cohen and Kennedy 2000). In an increasingly globalized context, it has been suggested, the nation-state has become, in many ways, redundant.

Alternatively, however, as will be suggested in more detail below, critics have also argued that the effective demise of the nation-state has been vastly overemphasized (Hirst and Thompson 1996). Nation-states, and particularly the most powerful nation-states and groupings of nation-states, can and do play key roles, too often facilitating the pursuit of the interests of transnational capital at the expense of the interests of labour and of the most oppressed and disadvantaged peoples, globally. So even in an increasingly globalized context, in which political mobilizations need to focus on international targets, the nation-state also needs to remain a key focus for strategies for social change.

Cohen and Kennedy conclude their discussion of definitions of globalization by exploring two related terms. ‘Globalism’, they suggest, quoting Albrow again, refers to ‘values which take the real world of 5 billion people as the object of concern … everybody living as world citizens … with a common interest in collective action to solve global problems’, consciousness of the world as a single entity, requiring common solutions to shared problems (Cohen and Kennedy 2000: 34). While this theme emerges powerfully in the subsequent discussion of global social movements, this has also been contentious from the perspective of those critics who emphasize the conflicting rather than the common interests between global capital and labour, between the most powerful and the most oppressed peoples worldwide.

The other term that Cohen and Kennedy explore in this context is that of ‘glocalization’. Far from conceptualizing globalization as a one-way process, sweeping all before it, sociologists such as Robertson, for example, have pointed to its interactive features: the global is also affected by contact with the local. There are two-way processes at work here. Robertson has defined the dynamics of globalization in terms of the ‘twofold process of the particularization of the universal and the universalization of the particular’ (Robertson 1992: 177). One reaction to the apparent tendency towards cultural homogenization has been an increased emphasis upon ethnic cultures and indigenous peoples’ artefacts (increasingly commodified as souvenirs, for the global tourist market). Alternatively, resistance may take the form of conservative cultural and/or religious movements, seeking to preserve an idealized past from the incursions of a globalized future. Subsequent discussions of global social movements include examples of this type, as well as examples of socially progressive global movements.

This makes it all the more relevant to distinguish between different approaches to globalization and their varying takes on what precisely needs to be challenged – if, indeed, anything does. This latter point needs to be emphasized because globalization has its admirers as well as its critics. From the neoliberal stance, after all, globalization is a positive phenomenon, representing the future, the way forward for humankind. Free-market economics, according to the neoliberals, offers the most effective strategies for economic development. Indeed, since the dissolution of the former Soviet Union and the demise of socialist states in Eastern and Central Europe, free-market economics represents the only viable strategy, from this perspective. In the Thatcher/Reagan-dominated 1980s, this approach was summarized by the slogan ‘there is no alternative’. Or in the formula popularized by Fukuyama (1992), civilization had reached the ‘end of history’ by the end of the twentieth century, with the global triumph of free-market economics coupled with liberal democracy.

Neoliberal approaches

Neoliberalism started from what had been described as a ‘tiny embryo at the University of Chicago with the philosopher-economist Friedrich von Hayek and his students – Milton Friedman amongst them – at its nucleus’ (George 2001: 9). Neoliberalism took off from the 1970s and 1980s, as the long economic boom following the Second World War began to slow down and economic growth became more problematic. The neoliberal programme has been described as ‘the way of handling this crisis’ (Amin 2001: 19).

To summarize, the causes of this slow-down, according to the neoliberals of the Chicago School, were to be sought in the growth of state intervention, interfering with the operations of free-market mechanisms. As a result, resources were being drained away from productive investment to support ever-expanding state bureaucracies and inefficient public enterprises. Meanwhile, public services were increasingly being run for the benefit of self-interested professionals: the so-called producer culture that the neoliberals set out to replace with a consumer culture, based upon increasing competition to facilitate consumer choice. The solution, in summary, was to deregulate, to free market mechanisms and to roll back the state – the strategies broadly adopted by the Thatcher government in Britain and the Reagan government in the USA in the 1980s.

Neoliberal economic strategies were increasingly influential, too, at the international level, impacting upon a range of countries in the Third World in the South. Neoliberalism had become the new orthodoxy. Chicago School economists applied their solutions to particular economies (such as Chile after the military coup in 1973, which ended the Allende government’s period of social reform). Neoliberal strategies were also applied via international organizations and agencies such as the World Bank, the IMF and, more recently, via the WTO, established in 1995.

The World Bank and the IMF had increasing influence, while the poorer countries of the South had less and less room for manoeuvre at this period, as prices for primary products fell in the 1980s, reducing their incomes from exports, just when they had taken on increasing liabilities, having borrowed heavily, when credit was relatively cheaper, in the 1970s (money they had been positively encouraged to borrow both by governments and international agencies). By the 1980s, when interest rates rose, many indebted countries in the South were forced to turn to the IMF and the World Bank for assistance. The IMF and the World Bank were therefore in particularly powerful positions to enforce neoliberal policy solutions. If they wanted to borrow, debtors had to put their houses in order, restructuring in neoliberal terms, via structural adjustment programmes.

In summary, these neoliberal strategies included measures to bring down the rate of inflation, to reduce public expenditure (to eliminate budget deficits) and to reduce the role of the state more generally (via privatization, as well as via increasing market mechanisms and charging for public services such as health and education). In addition, debtor countries had to open up their economies, liberalizing trade by reducing tariff barriers. The free market had to be allowed to flourish internationally, through free trade in goods and services, free circulation of capital and freedom of investment. This was supposed to be beneficial in terms of promoting economic growth, the benefits of which would then, it was argued, ‘trickle down’ to the rest of their populations.

These arguments emerge in more detail later in this chapter and in subsequent chapters, together with their critiques. The points to emphasize here are simply these: during the latter decades of the twentieth century, Third World countries in the South became increasingly directly affected by these neoliberal policy agendas and that these agendas were being promoted via international organizations and agencies, particularly the World Bank and the IMF (and more recently the WTO), described as the ‘instruments of neoliberalism’ (Houtart 2001: vi), pursuing these strategies on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Challenging globalization: developing alternative strategies
• 2 Democratization and marketization: the state, the market and civil society
• 3 Social movements: competing approaches
• 4 Social movements old and new: alternatives or allies?
• 5 Empowerment, accountability and participation: challenges for local and global movements
• 6 People to people exchanges: sharing local experiences in a global context
• 7 Globalization and gender: new threats, new strategies
• 8 Rights to public services: the Global Campaign for Education
• 9 Learning from Jubilee 2000: mobilizing for debt relief
• 10 Resisting imperialism: building social movements for peace and social justice
• Select bibliography
• Index