The Globalization Backlash

Colin Crouch

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509533794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Globalization, heralded for decades as a harbinger of prosperity, faces a huge backlash. Derided by right-wing nationalists as a 'globalist' plot to undermine traditional communities, and by left-wing critics as the rule of rampaging corporations, it's become a political punching bag around the world.

In this incisive book, leading commentator Colin Crouch defends globalization against its critics to the right and left. He argues that reversing the process would mean a poorer world riven by nationalistic and reactionary antagonisms. However, globalization will only be worth saving if we institute reforms to promote social solidarity and recover pride and confidence for the cities and regions that have lost out. Crouch shows that we can therefore only save globalization from itself if we transcend the nation state and subject global economic flows to democratically responsible transnational governance.

Crouch provides a much-needed riposte to the delusions that risk plunging the world back into a zero-sum game of regressive economic nationalism, combining cool-headed analysis with a visionary call for a reformed and genuinely progressive globalization.

1
The Issues

An epic struggle between globalization and a resurgent nationalism is changing political identities and conflicts across the world. While the term ‘globalization’ refers primarily to the development of relatively unrestricted economic relationships across most of the world, that process has wider social and political implications. People from diverse cultures are drawn together, and national systems of economic governance are challenged. Various kinds of upheaval – economic, cultural and political – accompany globalization, producing a backlash among those who feel negatively affected. From being a process that seemed simply to be bringing us both cheaper products from abroad and new export opportunities, globalization has come for many to mean the loss, not just of individual jobs, but of entire long-established industries and the communities and ways of life associated with them, spiralling into further disorientation as foreign customs and large numbers of persons from other cultures invade and obscure life’s familiar landmarks. The consequent unease is felt alike by American and French former steel workers who have seen their industries and local communities disappear; by Germans talking about Heimat and feeling that it represents something they have lost; by Russians, British and Austrians nostalgic for lost empires and resenting the fact that, in a globalizing world, ‘sovereignty’ has to be shared; by people in Islamic societies feeling invaded by American and British warplanes as well as by western cultures and sexual mores; and by people across Europe and North America horrified by occasional acts of Islamic terrorism and disliking the presence in their streets of women wearing the hijab.

Globalization threatens some people’s desire to feel pride in the circumstances of their lives – in their work, their cultural identity, their communities, the towns and cities where they live, that broad bundle of ideas implied in the German idea of Heimat. Many people are still able to feel this pride, as the areas in which they live and the sectors in which they work have been favoured by globalization; they have relaxed, optimistic and even eager approaches to the opportunities presented by the kaleidoscope of an ever more varied cultural universe. But others have a different experience. Even if they are prosperous in their own lives, they see a wider world of bewildering change, and yearn for the certainties that they, perhaps mistakenly, believe characterized an earlier one.

During the prolonged discussion that took place in the United Kingdom (UK) after the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union (EU) (the so-called ‘Brexit’), the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) interviewed some people in Middlesbrough, a very depressed, former industrial city in the north-east of England that had voted heavily to leave the EU. A recurrent theme of the interviews was: we have lost everything; our young people leave to go elsewhere; we see no prospects for our future; but at least we know that we are British, and we feel pride in that. Therefore, they voted to leave the EU. There is no logic in the strict sense in that chain of argument, but there is a powerful emotional logic. It helps explain why a resurgent nationalism is becoming a dominant popular force in the early twenty-first century.

But the lack of strict logic has to be contested. We can only gain a measure of control over a world of increasing interdependence by growing identities, as well as institutions of democracy and governance, that can themselves reach beyond the nation state. This task is hard enough in itself; it becomes virtually impossible when large numbers of politicians, newspapers and intellectuals are telling people to do exactly the opposite and seal themselves behind national barriers, treating immigrants as a disease that pollutes their culture, relating to the rest of the world only through arm’s-length trade – and therefore leaving transnational corporations and deregulated financial markets beyond control.

Although opposition to globalization comes from all recognizable parts of the political spectrum, its leadership has been firmly in the hands of the traditionalist, nationalistic right. This is interesting. Economic globalization is mainly a project of neoliberalism, which for several decades has been the dominant ideology of the modern right. Does this mean that politics has become a fight between different factions of the right, and that the left no longer has meaning? Or do differences between left and right have no relevance in the struggle over globalization? I shall argue here that left and right certainly retain meaning; that the social democratic left has a distinct contribution to make to this conflict; that it needs to stand on the side of globalization against the new nationalism; but that it must also insist on reforms to the shape that the process is taking. This in no way means – indeed, must not mean – abandoning national and more local identities. Rather, the multiple identities available to us in today’s world become a series of concentric circles, enriching each other and rooted in a cooperative subsidiarity – or a Russian matryoshka doll, with successive dolls of different sizes nested comfortably within each other. We need to be proud of our town or city, of the region within which it is located, of the country within which that is contained, of European institutions (for those fortunate enough to live in a country that is a member of the EU) and of wider global entities. This is only possible if constructive developments are occurring at each of these levels, and where their creative mutual interdependence is clear. We need political and social leaders who are willing to work at reinforcing the links across these levels, helping them to work positively together, leaders who cease insisting on absurd rivalries and an outdated search for sovereignty in a world where no individual person, region or country can stand alone without deep cooperation with others.

Behind all these issues stands a new stage in the great conflict, dating back to the eighteenth century, between the values of the ancien régime and those of the Enlightenment: between the security of conservative authority and familiar tradition on the one hand, and the freedom of rationality, innovation and change on the other. If globalization is examined in these, rather than economic, terms, it is easy to understand hostility to it on the traditionalist, nationalist, but not neoliberal, right. Perhaps it is because in recent decades we have become so accustomed to regarding neoliberalism as the principal force on the right that left-wing opponents of globalization have been rather unaware of the reactionary company they are keeping. The leftist argument against globalization is understandable enough in its own terms. Broadly, it runs as follows:

1. Globalization has involved the extension of capitalism over ever more parts of the world, achieved by breaking down those regulatory barriers that enabled national governments to ensure that firms and markets adhered to certain norms. In other words, globalization allows capitalism to destroy the governance mechanisms that contained those excesses that cause poverty, inequality and the neglect of collective needs.
2. The highest level of governance at which democracy has become established is the nation state. Therefore, as soon as a phenomenon escapes that level, it escapes the reach of democracy and falls under the sole control of the capitalist elites that dominate transnational space.
3. The nation state is not only a democratic level in a formal sense, but also an entity with which most ordinary working people identify; they are willing to commit themselves to it. That kind of commitment will be necessary if democratic political power is to contest the domination of deregulated capitalism.
4. The welfare state, in particular, has been a national construction, drawing on the solidarity with one another that members of a nation feel, members of a shared community, as captured in the Swedish concept of the welfare state as a folkshem (people’s home, ‘home’ here meaning, like the German Heimat, a place where one feels ‘at home’).
5. It is indeed notable that the strongest welfare states developed in the Nordic countries at a time when these were ethnically and culturally highly homogeneous, and that their fragmentation in recent years has been associated with the arrival of large numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers, mainly from Islamic cultures. It is also notable that the ethnically heterogeneous society of the United States of America (USA) has one of the weakest and least generous welfare states in the democratic world. There seems to be a trade-off between a strong welfare state and liberal multiculturalism; if so, the left had better abandon the latter as fast as it can. (This, it should be noted, is a far more respectable argument than one simply telling left-wing parties to run after the xenophobic right in the search for votes.)
6. Globalization and multiculturalism being inimical to a social democratic project, there needs to be a turn towards economic protection and controls over capital movements, and severe restrictions on immigration. For European countries, this means at least a severe limit to, if not total withdrawal from, the process of European integration – which especially in recent years has meant integration on neoliberal terms.

Each step in the progression of this argument is logical, but at point 5 it starts to lead to the path of the xenophobic right, even if for different reasons. We can find examples of where precisely this is happening. Among political parties, there is the position of the French leftist party France Insoumise (literally, France ‘Unsubmitted’), and of the now-dominant left of the British Labour Party. Both, though particularly the former, are inclined towards protectionist economic positions; both are hostile to the EU; and both have ambiguous positions on immigration. Neither shares the outright hostility to immigrants and ethnic minorities of the far right, but they move away from liberal approaches to the issue. France Insoumise rejects an obligation on France to take a share of asylum seekers from North Africa and the Middle East arriving on the shores of Greece and Italy, but stops short of attacking the refugees themselves. The Labour Party never criticizes ethnic minorities originating in countries of the British Commonwealth; these people have the vote, and tend to vote Labour. It has, however, echoed general criticisms of immigrants from EU countries (who do not have the vote), concentrating on their possible negative impact on wage levels and working conditions. The Danish Social Democratic Party currently finds itself part of a triangle comprising: itself as the main opposition party; a minority government of a neoliberal, pro-globalization party trying to weaken the welfare state; and a far-right, xenophobic but pro-welfare party maintaining the neoliberals in office. The social democrats are divided over a strong temptation to forge a pro-welfare alliance with the far right, against the neoliberals. More difficult to place on the left–right spectrum is the Italian party Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement), now the largest party in the country. Founded by a comedian, Beppe Grillo, noted for his scathing criticisms of corruption in the Italian political and business elite, it attracted many supporters from the left. It makes policy through crowdsourcing. This led it to discover considerable hostility among Italians to the refugees arriving on their southern shores; as a result, this issue became prominent on its policy platform, and attracted votes. The party now finds itself in government with the anti-immigrant party La Lega, committed to building internment camps for refugees and to other anti-Islamic measures.

Among academic commentators, the German sociologist and political scientist Wolfgang Streeck has pointed to the basis of the welfare state in national solidarity, and for that reason opposes the EU,¹ but has never criticized ethnic minorities or immigrants. David Goodhart, a prominent British journalist and social commentator, on the other hand, has explicitly blamed the cultural dilution of Britain caused by immigration for weakening support for the welfare state.² He, too, does not attack immigrants or people from ethnic and cultural minorities themselves, but those liberal members of the host society who have not appreciated that welfare states have been national and even ethnic in their appeal to solidarity, and that there is difficulty in enabling them to transcend that level. Therefore, it seems to follow, developments that diminish the sovereignty of the national political level must be resisted, and national societies must restrict their ethnic heterogeneity. The problem with this kind of reasoning, sociologically sound though it is in many respects, is that it leads to a conservative resistance to any kind of change that tries to move democratic politics and feelings of human solidarity beyond the nation state, which then remains frozen in time.

Such positions necessarily oppose globalization. Given the strength of the economic pressure for globalization and the extent to which it has progressed, trying to reverse it now would require multiple allies, and appeals to strong feelings and beliefs that would bring popular support to bear to confront the economic and corporate weight supporting globalization. Once that point has been reached, there becomes little to prevent left-wing critics of globalization from sharing the language and eventually the strategies of the far right.

Political groups on the right have a different dilemma. Over the years, the highly successful alliance of conservatism and neoliberalism has seen the former providing a base of traditional, nationally oriented stability with broad popular appeal, while the latter explores the entrepreneurial possibilities of a destabilizing global deregulation. The tensions inherent in that alliance are being stretched to breaking point as some conservatives respond to the decline of their past popular supports by increasing their reliance on nationalist sentiment. While the potential explosion of these tensions offers scope for optimism to the left, there is a cynical resolution of the right’s dilemma that should alarm them. If concern at the disruption to life caused by neoliberalism can be channelled into blaming ethnic minorities and other potentially unpopular groups, strengthening the increasing xenophobia of conservatism, then neoliberals can be left in peace to intensify a globalizing insecurity that will then be blamed further on the minorities, reinforcing even further the appeal of their incongruous conservative allies.

This fairly accurately describes what has taken place in the UK and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Dedication
• 1 The Issues
• 2 The Economy
• 3 Culture and Politics
• 4 The Future
• End User License Agreement