Justice Globalism

Ideology, Crises, Policy

Manfred Steger, James Goodman, Erin K Wilson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781446291429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Mondialisation

Are political activists connected to the global justice movement simplistically opposed to neoliberal globalization? Is their political vision ?incoherent? and their policy proposals ?naïve? and ?superficial? as is often claimed by the mainstream media?

Drawing on dozens of interviews and rich textual analyses involving nearly fifty global justice organizations linked to the World Social Forum, the authors of this pioneering study challenge this prevailing view. They present a compelling case that the global justice movement has actually fashioned a new political ideology with global reach: ?justice globalism?. Far from being incoherent, justice globalism possesses a rich and nuanced set of core concepts and powerful ideological claims. The book investigates how justice globalists respond to global financial crises, to escalating climate change, and to the global food crisis. It finds justice globalism generating new political agendas and campaigns to address these pressing problems. Justice globalism, the book concludes, has much to contribute to solving the serious global challenges of the 21st century.

Justice Globalism will prove a stimulating read for undergraduate and graduate students in the social sciences and humanities who are taking courses on globalization, global studies and global justice.

1

JUSTICE GLOBALISM AND GLOBAL CRISES

The Problematic

The breakdown of the Cold War order organized around the opposing ideological poles of capitalist liberalism versus state-controlled communism and the ensuing wave of globalization have unsettled conventional political belief systems. Across political, economic, and cultural dimensions, the expansion and intensification of social relations across world-space and world-time both generate and respond to new ‘global crises’ beyond the reach of conventional political institutions and their associated ideologies. These new challenges include worldwide financial volatility, climate change and environmental degradation, increasing food scarcity, pandemics such as AIDS, SARS, and H1N1, widening disparities in wealth and wellbeing, increasing migratory pressures, manifold cultural and religious conflicts, and transnational terrorism. Intrinsically connected to these complex global problems, we have witnessed a noticeable shift away from state-based international governance mechanisms to transnational networks, NGOs, and non-state actors often referred to as ‘global civil society’. The current transformation of nation-centered political ideologies is part and parcel of these powerful globalization dynamics.

However, much-needed assessments of the current makeover of the ideological landscape have been largely confined to what has been variously referred to as ‘neoliberalism’, ‘globalization-from-above’, ‘market globalism’, and the ‘Washington Consensus’ (Falk 1999; Rupert 2000; Barber 2001; Stiglitz 2003; Mittelman 2004; Harvey 2005; Schwartzmantel 2008; Steger 2009). To some extent, this research focus makes sense. After all, market globalism has remained the most dominant global political ideology in spite of the serious challenges posed by the global financial crisis and the EU debt crisis. The chief codifiers of market globalism have been transnationally networked elites, most of whom are frequent attendants of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. These include corporate managers, executives of large transnational corporations, corporate lobbyists, high-level military officers, journalists and public relations specialists, and prominent intellectuals writing to large audiences, high-level civil servants, and politicians. Confining the meaning of their core concept ‘globalization’ to the allegedly ‘inexorable’ formation of a single global market, these power elites assert that, notwithstanding the ‘cyclical downturns’ of the world economy, the global integration of markets is a fundamentally ‘good’ thing for it represents the ‘natural’ progression of (Western) modernity.

Drawing on the economic doctrine internationally known as ‘neoliberalism’, market globalists argue that state interference with the global economy should be minimal, confining itself to providing the legal framework for contracts, defense, and law and order. Public-policy initiatives should be limited to measures that liberate the economy from social constraints: privatization of public enterprises, deregulation instead of state control, liberalization of trade and industry, massive tax cuts, strict control of organized labor, and the reduction of public expenditures. State-regulated models of economic organization are discredited as ‘protectionist’ or ‘socialist’. Ultimately, market globalists seek to enshrine economic neoliberalism as the self-evident and universal doctrine of our global era by claiming that the liberalization of trade and the global integration of markets will ‘inevitably’ lead to rising living standards and the reduction of global poverty. Enhancing economic efficiency and expanding individual freedom and democracy, market globalism is said to usher in a global age of prosperity and unprecedented technological progress.¹

Despite its hegemonic status as the dominant ideology of our time, market globalism has been challenged by new global movements on the political Left, which project alternative visions of a global future based on values of ‘social justice’ and ‘solidarity with the global South’. For more than a decade, this ‘global justice movement’ (GJM) has demonstrated its popular appeal on the streets of major cities around the world. Yet, prominent market globalists – and even some influential reformists like Joseph Stiglitz – have dismissed the GJM as unreflectively ‘anti-globalization’. They allege that its agenda amounts to little more than a superficial shopping list of complaints devoid of conceptual coherence and a unifying policy framework capable of responding to the global challenges of the 21st century (Friedman 2000, 2005; Stiglitz 2003; Wolf 2004; Bhagwati 2004; Greenwald and Kahn 2009). Testing the validity of these highly influential allegations, this book undertakes as the first of its two principal research objectives a thorough examination of the under-researched ideological framework of the GJM – an ideational constellation we call ‘justice globalism’. Indeed, this study engages in the first in-depth mapping and analysis of core ideological concepts and claims that span across a wide range of actors connected to the GJM.

The Evolution of the Global Justice Movement

As far back as 1994, Zapatista rebels in Southern Mexico called for the creation of a worldwide network of resistance to neoliberalism. In the following decade, a number of events served as additional catalysts for the emergence of the GJM: the 1997–98 Asian Financial Crisis, the mass strikes in France in 1995 and 1998, the debt crisis in the global South, the growing power of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other international economic institutions based in the North, and the US-led ‘global war on terror’, following the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001. Since then, progressive thinkers and activists have gradually developed and articulated ideological claims that connect local and global issues. This expanding ‘network of networks’ demonstrated its popular appeal on the streets of cities around the globe where the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and other key institutions of global capitalism held strategic meetings. Although market globalists quickly branded the movement as ‘anti-globalization’, most organizations emphasized that they were actually ‘alter-globalization’ – in the sense that they envisioned alternatives to corporate-led globalization. Rallying around the slogan ‘Another World is Possible’, the ‘anti-globalization movement’ gradually came to be known as the ‘global justice movement’.

Progressive academics and activists tracing these new social movement developments posited the emergence of a ‘new cosmopolitanism’ anchored in ‘the worthy ideals of justice and equality’ as well as solidarity with people in the disadvantaged global South (Held 1995; Nussbaum 1996: 4). These scholars also identified what Sidney Tarrow (2005) would later call ‘global framing’ – the act of connecting local problems to broader contexts of global injustice, inequality, and unsustainability (Bello 1999; Klein 2000; George 2004). However, despite the continuing attention from these social movements scholars (Tarrow 2005; Della Porta (ed.) 2007; Smith et al. 2007; Moghadam 2008; Cumbers and Cumbers 2009; Pleyers 2010), the GJM has escaped close academic scrutiny with regard to its ideological structures and its role in generating policy alternatives.

As noted above, our first research objective is to fill the vacuum of scholarship on the ideological dimensions of the GJM by mapping and analyzing its core political ideas and claims. The relevance of this research effort seems to be even more obvious in the second decade of the 21st century when, after a temporary setback caused by the attacks of 11 September 2001, the combined forces of justice globalism have gathered political strength. This has been evident not only in the massive demonstrations against bank bail-outs during the global financial crisis, the global impact of WikiLeaks and its radical ‘informationism’, but also in the worldwide proliferation of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ network.

One ideational inspiration of this new wave of global justice activism can be found in informal global forums such as the World Social Forum (WSF), a key ideological site of the GJM. To this day, the WSF still draws to its annual meetings tens of thousands of delegates from around the world. These proponents of justice globalism established the WSF in the global South as a ‘parallel forum’ to the influential WEF in the global North. Similar to market globalists who treat the WEF as a platform to project their ideas and values to a global audience, justice globalists have utilized the WSF as one of the chief sites for developing their ideological vision and policy alternatives. The abiding relevance of such massive informal ‘think tanks’ reinforces not only the increasingly globalized nature of political contestation but also underlines the academic imperative to move beyond the conventional research focus on state-based political actors.

The Significance of Ideology

Political ideologies are comprehensive belief systems comprised of patterned ideas and values believed to be ‘true’ by significant social groups (Freeden 1996; Schwartzmantel 2008; Steger 2009; Sargent 2009). Codified by political elites who contend over control of political meanings and offer competing plans for public policy, ideologies play a key role in consolidating social forces as political groups. The perpetual struggle over meaning and control places ideologies at the heart of the political process. Consequently, scholars have highlighted the importance of the comparative and transdisciplinary study of ideologies (Zizek 1994; Ball and Dagger 2008). For many years, the pioneers of ideology studies have used various qualitative methodologies to analyze and evaluate the historical evolution and conceptual structures of political belief systems. Their efforts have yielded familiar ideal-types: liberalism, conservatism, socialism, anarchism, communism, and fascism/Nazism. Ideology is often viewed as a tool of power, and certainly all ideologies engage in simplifications and distortions, but their functions should not be reduced to such a ‘critical conception’ (Thompson 1990). A more ‘neutral conception’ would also affirm their constructive and integrative functions as indispensable shared mental maps that help people navigate the complexity of their political environments (Mannheim 1936; Althusser 1969; Gramsci 1971; Ricoeur 1986; Freeden 1996; Steger 2008).

During the last two decades, political and social theorists have researched the impact of globalization on existing ideational systems, arguing that the contemporary transformation of conventional ideologies is linked to the rise of a new social imaginary that casts the world as a single, interdependent place (Robertson 1992; Albrow 1996; Appadurai 1996; Giddens 2000; Sassen 2006; Steger 2008). Like all social imaginaries, the rising global imaginary fosters implicit background understandings enabling common practices and identities (Taylor 2004) as well as providing common background understandings for our daily routines (Bourdieu 1990). But the thickening consciousness of the world as a single, interdependent place neither implies the impending ‘death of the nation-state’ (Ohmae 1995; Guehenno 1995) nor suggests the disappearance of localisms and tribalisms (James 2006). As we emphasized above, the local, national, and regional persist in hybrid symbolic markers, identities, and socio-political systems, but these are increasingly reconfigured and recoded around the global.

Political ideologies translate the largely prereflexive social imaginary – and their associated social forces – into concrete political agendas. Conventional political ideologies have been predominantly linked to national imaginaries, such as Italian fascism, American liberalism, Russian ‘socialism in one country’, ‘communism with Chinese characteristics’, ‘Swedish democratic socialism’, and so on (Anderson 1991; Steger 2008). Since the late 20th century, however, political ideologies have been articulating the emerging global imaginary into political programs. Variants of political Islamism, ecologism, and transnational feminism are obvious examples of how the rising global imaginary has provided a novel frame of reference that increasingly destabilizes nationally based ideologies and introduces new ideational formations assembled around the global.

This unsettling dynamic is reflected in a remarkable proliferation of qualifying prefixes adorning conventional ‘isms’: neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, neo-fascism, neo-Marxism, post-Marxism, post-modernism, and so on. These semantic add-ons point to the growing public awareness that something ‘new’ is pushing conventional worldviews ‘post’ their traditional meanings and categories. An underlying force generating such novelty, we argue, is globalization manifesting itself subjectively in the form of a rising global imaginary – a globalizing reflexivity – and its associated ideological articulations. Conditioning the norms and interests of actors, competing globalisms both shape and are constituted by the contemporary global order and its many fissures. However, rather than adding prefixes to conventional political ideologies rooted in the national imaginary, globalization researchers need to develop new typologies of political ideologies that more adequately recognize an important source of their ideational novelty. A central factor in this process is the increasing prominence of the global in contemporary political belief systems.

Recent attempts to sketch the conceptual structures of today’s political belief systems have so far focused on market globalism, and, since 9/11, religious globalisms like political Islamism (Kepel 2004; Karam (ed.) 2004; Mandaville 2007). As we noted, the considerable lack of research on justice globalism has fueled confusion and speculation over the main claims, objectives, and policy alternatives of the GJM. Previous conceptual mapping exercises have been carried out chiefly to track organizational flows and processes, the geography of global civil society, and the intricacies of North–South relations (Rupert 2000; Bleiker 2000; Carroll 2007). General forays into the ideational composition of justice globalism can be found in the burgeoning literature on new global justice movements (Tarrow 2005; Della Porta et al. 2006; McDonald 2006; Pleyers 2010). But even in these very useful studies, the focus is more on ‘issue framing’ than on the analysis and evaluation of politically potent ideas and claims, leading one observer to describe ideology as the neglected ‘orphan’ of social movement theory (Buechler 2000).

One possible explanation for this neglect of ideology within social movement theory may be the long shadow cast by the ‘end of ideology’ debates. Erupting in Europe and the United States in the late 1950s (Waxman (ed.) 1968), the first wave of these debates postulated the exhaustion of both Marxist socialism and classical liberalism. Proponents argued that modern political belief systems were rapidly displaced by a non-ideological pragmatism associated with the Keynesian welfare state. A side effect of this argument was that the already pejorative concept of ‘ideology’ accumulated further negative connotations. Professionals working in areas of policy development and provision viewed ideology with suspicion and skepticism, a view that continues to be held even by members of the GJM (Wilson 2009a, 2009f, 2009i; Steger 2011a).²

After the upsurge of ideological politics and cultural protest in the 1960s and 1970s discredited the end of ideology thesis, it was unexpectedly resurrected with the 1989 collapse of communism. A number of influential scholars argued that the passing of Marxism-Leninism marked the disappearance of viable ideological alternatives to capitalist liberalism from the stage of world history, which signified the unabashed victory of an increasingly information and communication technology-driven liberal capitalism (Fukuyama 1989, 1992; Furet 2000). However, the emergence of the GJM and the significance of globalized Islam have once again cast severe doubt on the validity of this thesis.

As we noted earlier, a globally articulated political ideology of the Left centered on ‘social justice’ and ‘solidarity with the global South’ emerged forcefully during the 1990s in response to market globalism’s unfulfilled promises (Steger 2008: 197; Wilson 2009b, 2009c). But rather than looking for new ways of folding social justice issues back into nationally-based political ideologies, many GJM activists sought to link their normative commitments to concrete policy alternatives capable of tackling the global problems of our age. The universalist claims of market globalism, and the global crises they create, have required a dramatic rescaling and transformation of justice questions. The GJM has responded, as we shall see, with an insistence on multiplicity against the singularity of market globalism, framed by a distinctly global set of alternative values and claims. Our assessment of the connection between ideology and policy initiatives relate...