Reglobalization

Matthew Louis Bishop, Anthony Payne, Matthew Louis Bishop, Anthony Payne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367639303
• eBook ISBN: 9781000373790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Business

This book charts the way towards a better, repurposed globalization, which it calls 'reglobalization', and shows how this can be built, incrementally but realistically, via reforms to the partial and fragile existing structures of global governance.

In making this argument, the book firmly rejects the new fashion for a politics of deglobalization, which has appeared of late in both left-wing and right-wing variants. Instead, it suggests that a reformed Group of 20 (G20), for all its current inadequacies, can still provide the critical coordinating function that the management of a process of reglobalization requires. The book argues that globalization is too important to be lost; rather, it needs to be saved from its capture by neoliberalism and rebuilt around different values for a post-neoliberal era. The emergence of global pandemic as an issue only goes to emphasise the necessity, importance and urgency of the reglobalization project.

Reglobalization is essential reading for everybody living in the era of globalization, which is all of us, and worried about its many economic, social and political problems, which is a growing number of us.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Globalizations.

The political economies of different globalizations: theorizing reglobalization

Matthew Louis Bishop

and Anthony Payne

ABSTRACT

Globalization remains contested, and often misunderstood, with damaging real-world consequences. We make four interlinked contentions in this regard. First, globalization is here to stay: although critics might wish it away intellectually, and populists might attempt this practically, the scale of contemporary global integration renders these aims implausible and even undesirable. Second, by viewing neoliberal globalization as a distinct variant rooted in a particular time and place and born of a particular constellation of contingent social and political forces, we can conceive of, and ultimately construct, ‘different globalizations’. Third, emergent forms of both right-and left-wing ‘deglobalization’ do not provide meaningful routes out of the crisis of a decaying neoliberalism. Fourth, only a repurposed form of ‘re-embedded post-neoliberal reglobalization’ can deliver this. By conceptualizing the challenge in these terms, we provide the theoretical underpinnings for the special issue which addresses the potential for reglobalization in practice across the global political economy.

Introduction: we need to talk about globalization, again

It may seem strange to suggest, even in the subject’s eponymous journal, that we must consider once more what we really mean by ‘globalization’. Notwithstanding the immeasurable number of words already devoted to the explanation of this ubiquitous term – indeed, has any concept ever been subject to quite so much scrutiny from such a range of disciplinary vantage points? (James & Steger, 2014) – globalization as a phenomenon remains widely misunderstood. Yet it is too important for the argument to be left where it mostly sits in the general discourse of politics and political economy, particularly during our era of profound (and profoundly disorientating) global upheaval.

The core problem can be simply expressed. Globalization is treated too often as if it has a kind of pre-ordained technological inevitability that has huge political consequences, but is, at the same time, beyond political explanation. However, it cannot be sensibly said to cause anything (Hay, 2001). This way of thinking has the effect of turning it into an actor in the drama, propelled to the centre of the stage by some celestial will or force of nature. To be precise, it is to reify globalization – to make it into a thing that of itself can act and bring about outcomes. This does not really stand up to scrutiny since the concept refers to a highly complicated process of economic, social and political change that unfolds at a global level and, arguably, is distinctive and important precisely because it does unfold at that level.

This was the insight that underpinned the classic definition offered during the late 1990s in Global Transformations, a brilliant overview of the early debate by Held et al. (1999). They argued that globalization should be thought of as nothing less, but also nothing more, than ‘the widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life, from the cultural to the criminal, the financial to the spiritual’ (Held et al., 1999, p. 2). Two decades on, all that needs to be added to this still-relevant definition is the qualification that counter-processes to ‘world-wide interconnectedness’ could nevertheless be mobilized at any time. The point we are making here is not a merely academic argument about conceptual precision; it is rather that the reification of globalization as a thing that can exercise intention, the framing of it as some sort of external actor bearing down on all of us, actually obscures, elides and therefore implicitly absolves of blame the social and political forces – the real actors in the great game of the new globalizing political economy – which have pushed every country in the world to live and make their way in a global context that is structurally different from that which prevailed, broadly speaking, from 1945 to the mid-1970s.

Moreover, we know who these actors are. Without wishing to appear excessively conspiratorial, it is clear that the big global corporations, the political leaders of the major Western states, the formers of opinion in the global media, think-tanks and in some leading universities, have collectively built and defended ideologically the theory and practice of global neoliberalism that has been, and still broadly remains, the ruling framework of governance within which Britain and so much of the world has been enmeshed for so long (Payne, 2016). Put starkly, it has been global neoliberals, understood as real actors with interests that they have pursued, who have knowingly driven forward and defended the new behaviours that have, over time, come to constitute globalization, thereby reproducing and refashioning the very structures that condition the parameters of action within that context. Equally, it was real politicians who subsequently argued, as did Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, in his valedictory speech to the Labour Party conference in September 2005, that we should not bother to ‘stop and debate globalization’, because ‘you might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer’ (Blair, 2005).

Yet, today, globalization is actually being debated more than ever. It has, for many, gone too far, reached too deeply into too many areas of social life, undermined democracy and led to severe economic dislocations, the costs and benefits of which have been grotesquely maldistributed. The back-lash against the kind of depoliticized technocracy that Blair and other ‘Third Way’ leaders represented has been fierce. There is no shortage of critical literature that emphasizes the many problems with which these shifts are associated: among the voluminous literature on the subject, numerous recent (or recently revised and updated) books have examined the detrimental outcomes for, inter alia, the reproduction of racial and neo-colonial logics of accumulation and exclusion (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Shilliam, 2018), development (Selwyn, 2017), inequality (Bourguignon, 2015), authoritarian forms of marketization (Tansel, 2017) and the horrifying militarization of society (Enloe, 2016). It is certainly true that ‘more globalization’– or, as we would have it, ‘better globalization’– is a hard sell in inauspicious times characterized by enduring economic stagnation and decaying social security in much of the West (Gamble, 2014, 2016; Hay & Wincott, 2012), unprecedented and extreme imbalances of power and capital (Piketty, 2014, 2020) and a looming environmental crisis of historic scale (Klein, 2014).

However, it is crucial to stress again that globalization itself did not – indeed could not – cause these ruptures of its own volition; they derive instead from the aggregate decisions of powerful actors, underpinned by particular ideas about the world, and, within that context, the everyday actions of billions of people, some more influential than others. Furthermore, the challenges we face remain genuinely global in scope and their magnitude demands a planetary response. Any political posture that advocates backing away from globalization is delusional, since it takes aim at the wrong target based on a problematic analysis; rather, the urgent task is to build a variant of globalization which is geared towards finding solutions to those truly global challenges. Tony Blair was thus surely correct, in an ontological sense, to argue that the fact of globalization is undeniable, but he was evidently wrong, epistemologically speaking, since its nature and consequences – including the contours of the politically possible for dealing with it – are very much up for grabs. As Matthew Watson and Colin Hay (2003, p. 289) suggested at the time, by disingenuously invoking ‘the image of globalisation as a non-negotiable external economic constraint’ underpinned by a ‘logic of no alternative’, Blair and his contemporaries were able to ‘render contingent policy choices “necessary”’. Yet there are, in fact, many possible globalizations, and the orthodoxies that prevailed before 2008 have never been more fiercely challenged (Hunt & Stanley, 2019).

Consequently, key political actors, especially those of the left, have a duty to shape policy actively at both the domestic and international level in socially beneficial ways, rather than passively bowing to the presumed inevitability of market forces. In light of the difficulties we face in grappling with these processes – including contesting those accounts which advocate, as we describe it, a ‘deglobalization’ approach – we make four interlinked contentions in this article. These reflect the organizational architecture for each substantive section, and they also underpin our broad agenda in the special issue as a whole. First, globalization cannot be wished away, much as many of its most tren- chant critics would like it to be. It is here to stay in some form and cannot be wound back in any fundamental fashion. Consequently, vacating this terrain is an abdication, since globalization can be resisted, reshaped and repurposed, as well as more rigorously managed, just not demolished entirely. We need, in other words, to recognize that the globalization we currently have, including the backlash against it, reflects a political construction born of a particular phase in history.

Second, we need therefore to recognize the essentially neoliberal character of ‘actually-existing’ globalization (Harvey, 2005; Peck, 2011). This has brought with it a great many problems, and it has palpably extended too far – or at least too far too quickly, with insufficient and insufficiently democratic governance – in certain spaces of the global political economy. But it has also brought great benefits in some areas and has not extended far enough into others. Indeed, it is at least arguable that many of the pathologies we can identify today – not least the racialized forms of populism that are increasingly evident in many countries – might be even worse were it not for the scale of global integration hemming in nativist, nationalist projects. Contemporary critical accounts, from both right and left, which argue against globalization in general, discount this reality to an unacceptable degree: there is, put crudely, a real danger of throwing out the baby of globalization with the bathwater of neoliberalism.

Third, the major challenges we face are inherently transboundary in nature. There is no getting away from this simple reality, and it seems absurd, even fatuous, to have to reiterate it. Some of the most obvious difficulties include: the emergence of digital monopolies and their continued accretion of power; the destruction of domestic tax bases, debasing of work conditions and accentuated poverty; regional instability, weapons trafficking, wars and ongoing refugee crises; declining biodiversity, the destruction of natural patrimony and emergent pathogens which can lead to pandemics; and, of course, global heating and the rapidly accelerating climate emergency. No single state has the power to deal with any of these problems itself. But it is also unclear whether collective answers can be found by the international community. Nevertheless, what is certain is that those answers will definitely not be discovered via a retreat inside national borders. The only plausible solutions are global ones, requiring a global response by actors operating via institutions at the global level. As such – and this is our fourth and final point – the only real thing worth debating when it comes to globalization nowadays is how it should, and could, be better organized, managed, democratized and reoriented to serving society. Consequently, in the final substantive section of this article we shall set out the case for seeking collectively to build a new and different globalization, which we call ‘reglobalization’, structured around different ‘post-neoliberal’ ambitions and values. To envision this in practice is an undeniably thorny challenge. However, in this special issue we present a series of pieces that seek precisely to envision just such a future in some of the primary policy areas of global governance. In our conclusion here we briefly introduce them as illustrations of what we call ‘reglobalization in action’.

Separating globalization from a decaying neoliberalism

Globalization is a highly political process, and we should not be misled by the myth of its technological inevitability. It is important, too, to understand that the form of it that we have experienced up to now has been distinctly neoliberal in character. To deploy again the phrase of Held et al., ‘the widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness’ that has occurred over the past four decades progressed on specifically neoliberal terms and gained all of its social and political character from the major political shift towards the hegemony of neoliberalism that was initiated in the West in the early 1980s and rolled out thereafter.

In other words, globalization could in theory have been done differently. At its heart, the term connotes only a spatial expansion of the terrain on which political economy functions. It was the neoliberal project that coloured globalization, propelling it forward to become the ‘actually existing’ variant within which we live at the start of the 2020s. There has not been created the fully-blown ‘hyperglobalization’ or ‘borderless world’ envisioned by some liberals like Kenichi Ohmae (1990, 1995) wherein the market completely triumphs over states. This is partly because the binary distinc- tion between ‘markets’ and ‘states’ can only ever be analytical, given their co-constitution and consequent existence in a relationship of deep interdependence. The global financial crisis of 2007–8 certainly demonstrated that finance had been steadily unleashed to a point where it was no longer properly under control and threatened the stability of the whole global political economy (Tooze, 2018). However, it was states that came to the rescue. In sum, the particular type of globalization that has emerged is historic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 The political economies of different globalizations: theorizing reglobalization
• 2 Creating a race to the top in global tax governance: the political case for tax spillover assessments
• 3 The IMF, tackling inequality, and post-neoliberal ‘reglobalization’: the paradoxes of political legitimation within economistic parameters
• 4 Reglobalizing trade: progressive global governance in an age of uncertainty
• 5 Towards a feminist global trade politics
• 6 Reforming global climate governance in an age of bullshit
• 7 Philosophies of migration governance in a globalizing world
• 8 Steering towards reglobalization: can a reformed G20 rise to the occasion?
• Index