Globalization Revisited

Grahame Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317598466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Written by one of the leading scholars of global politics, Globalization Revisited is a major new book for students of globalization. It describes and explains the challenges to liberalism and the global order as result of globalizing forces - from financial interconnectedness to the growth of religious fundamentalisms.

The text:

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• provides a detailed analysis of the economic and financial aspects of globalization;

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• examines the changes to global power and governance created by globalization including its effect on the sovereignty of the nation state;

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• discusses recent trends such as the increased use of networks and social media;

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• assesses the rise of globalizing fundamentalism;

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• analyzes the challenges to globalization posed by contemporary events such as the global financial crisis.

This book will be essential reading for all students of globalization, and will be of great interest to students of global politics and global governance.

1 Introduction

What is at stake in revisiting globalization?

Introduction

The issue of ‘globalization’ refuses to go away. In the early 1990s when I began investigating this category, and the trends in the international economy it purports to describe, many of my academic colleagues assured me that it was only a passing phase and like other fashionable concepts of the day it would be short-lived. They have been proved wrong. Globalization has endured: both as a conceptual formulation and as an analytical description of the current condition. Indeed, if anything it has expanded its range and content way beyond economic analysis. In late 2008, for instance, my attention was drawn to a symposium on globalization at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy where the following were among the scheduled topic sessions: energy demand and supply; climate change and the environment; water management and waste management; the ageing population; corruption; big cities; terrorism; immigration; health care/epidemics/pandemics; social fragmentation; and more besides. And this was an event organized by an economics’ institute. If one were to enter the world of politics, technology or culture an even wider range of topics would be squeezed under the umbrella term of globalization. The category has become the ubiquitous indicator of a claimed epochal change in the modern condition, something enthusiastically embraced by politicians, journalists, management gurus, commentators and academics alike. And it is something that unites the political left and the right (and almost all those in between), even as the former are suspicious of it or condemn it while the latter welcome it or think its effects benign. It is with us and must be accepted as a valid analytical or descriptive device whatever might be one’s normative attitude towards its determinants or its consequences. It has become the common-sense and taken-for-granted mantra of our times.

One of the most fascinating features of globalization is its ability to inflate. More and more aspects of social existence are taken under its wing – as indicated by the list from the Kiel Institute just mentioned. The umbrella of globalization continues to expand, gathering an increasing number of features within its analytical embrace. So, as a result, it rather ends up trying to explain everything. Just like its intellectual cousin and prior meta-conceptual category – ‘modernization’ – globalization inherits the mantle of epochal change agent with a ubiquitous systemic consequence. But this presents a problem. Anything that tries to explain everything ends up explaining nothing. And rather like a balloon that is continually inflated, it becomes vulnerable. To try to include everything means the boundary around the edifice becomes stretched and thinner and thus is easily punctured: intellectual compromises and looseness become the rule, leading to a lack of precision and focus. While an inflating balloon eventually bursts, a similar fate awaits globalization. Any currency that inflates eventually devalues itself. Thus, in trying to explain too much, the outcome is for globalization to collapse as a successful analytical device.

I have been a consistent critic of these positions, and continue to be one, though now from a somewhat different vantage point – one explained at length in this volume. Originally with my colleague Paul Hirst (and later with Simon Bromley) we mounted a sustained investigation into the strong claims made about globalization, and found them wanting (Hirst and Thompson 1996, 1999; Hirst et al. 2009). In the early debate about globalization we were designated as the traditionalists and sceptics, in contrast to the enthusiasts or agnostics (Goldblatt et al. 1999; Held and McGrew 2002; Martell 2007). Our initial project was to criticize globalization in the name of the continued salience of domestic political capacity to manage economies and organize their effective governance. The strong globalization thesis disarms politicians and citizens alike. It characterizes national economic policy-making as pointless, and political resistance as counterproductive to economic success. But what if globalization was not as pervasive or totalizing as it might seem? This we wanted to explore with an eye to its political consequences. So there was a political project of sorts behind our initial investigations: to combat exaggerated claims about globalization and its tendency to inflate. This accounts for the focus of our early work and, indeed, the chapters that follow in this volume.

In these chapters I revisit globalization, but mainly within the limited scope of its economic and political dimensions. Where these directly abut cultural or technological aspects some attention is devoted to these features, but they are not the main focus. This is because, as indicated above, I remain suspicious of attributing too much to globalization. I think the category works best when it is limited and focused, and the politico-economic domain provides the most productive terrain for its exploration and is central to the debate about the other aspects. This is not an argument for the economy being somehow structurally ‘determinant-in-the-last-instance’, but it is about how economic and political forces serve to shape cultural and technological ones. As far as I am concerned culture is the least globalized aspect of globalization, particularly popular culture. While there is a lot of talk about the Americanization of global culture – so-called ‘McDonaldization’ – and the ubiquitous reach of ICTs and social media etc., when it comes to it who is willing to fight and get killed for the chance to watch Robocop III (or whatever number it is now!), or any other Hollywood film and its like, or indeed for the chance to consume a McDonalds’ hamburger? Admittedly these films are watched, and no doubt enjoyed, around the globe, but their impact is limited. Similarly with cuisine. When it comes to it, people will only fight and die for deeply held and embedded cultural values and beliefs, ones they have adhered to for a long time. This arises most forcefully in the book with the analysis of fundamentalisms, centred on Chapter 3. Fundamentalists want to defend their beliefs and values in a situation of perceived threat and turmoil. Of course some have argued that it is precisely globalization that is responsible for this hardening of attitudes and reactions. Globalization exposes cultural differences and fragments continuities. But this is an argument that both wants to have its cake and to eat it at the same time. Cultures were fragmented and remained segregated long before the advent of globalization (see, in particular, Chapter 3). But what about the much vaunted social media revolution? The problem is that, although used by a broadly middle class intelligentsia to initiate several pro-democracy movements in Arab countries – for instance – it failed to alter the political landscapes there because already well-entrenched and organized political forces (such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Army in Egypt) took advantage of the situation to advance their own agendas and marginalize the original protesters. If one refuses to yield to a Kantian-inspired myth of an enlightened global cosmopolitanism the result is a non-homogeneous global culture: it remains fractured and often antagonistically poised. We still live in a cultural pluriverse, not a cultural universe. There is no ‘globe’ to which globalization can be the adequate response as far as culture is concerned. And, as we will see, this may also be the case for the economy.

The chapters in this book derive from several of my publications, many of which have appeared since the last edition of Globalization in Question (GiQ) was published in 2009. They represent an advance on the argument of that book, taking up new issues and reformulating others as responses to new developments and arrangements in the international political economy. It was never the argument of GiQ that ‘nothing had changed’, despite the fact that the book was highly sceptical about everything changing with globalization. We were always attentive to innovative developments and dynamic adjustments. Our working motto was ‘always expect the unexpected’. That has been taken forward into the present volume. So I have tried to come to terms with both changes in the intellectual environment of debate about globalization, as well as what has happened to the international political economy on the ground, so to speak. This means that a new set of issues are taken up in this book that were not the concerns of my previous ventures into examining the nature of globalization. Things have moved on and so have I. Nowhere is this more so than in the context of the financial system and the economic crisis that developed in its wake after 2008. So there will be much to say about this in the chapters below.

But I remain sceptical of globalization nevertheless. The sources of this continued scepticism will become evident later in the chapter, and those that follow. However, this is now a milder scepticism. I have learned to be somewhat more nuanced about my attitude towards globalization, more attuned to the criticisms made of the original formulations advanced in GiQ. For instance, I accept now that there has been a certain loosening of sovereign power, but without this in any way destroying such power. What is the point of taking up a hard sceptical position yet again if, as a result, no-one listens to it anymore? It may indicate an intellectual disappointment or failure on my part but the attempt to persuade others that globalization was, at its simplest, exaggerated, and at its most complex, a myth, seems to have failed. Anyway, that is how it has turned out. There is even more ‘globo-speak’ nowadays than ever before. So one has to be pragmatic and realistic as well as sceptical – at least that is my intellectual disposition. In the early 1990s there was a case for taking up a hard position, to differentiate oneself from both the novel hype around globalization at the time and the developing positions of others. My feeling now is that a different strategy is needed. The hype has turned into the norm. This requires a review of the characteristics of the debate, a subtle reassessment and possible adaptation of the argument, and a sober revisit to its terms. That is what is offered in the chapters that follow.

Setting the scene

This section raises some general issues about globalization that will inform the more specific analysis contained in the chapters that follow. It provides an opportunity to clarify the type of analysis being offered and its methodological protocols. Here I differentiate the approach adopted in the book from other ways of dealing with globalization, indicating the range of issues tackled and, importantly, what is not dealt with in the book. As will become clear, my interests and concerns are particular and directed at a set of rather specific aspects of the global order: territorial formation and its politics; fundamentalisms and their connection to globalization; financial calculation, model-building and the ‘irrationality’ of much financial activity; domestic and international financial relationships; and Central Bank activity.

The reasons these particular areas are focused upon is that they represent key themes in current debates about globalization. As discussed later in this chapter, territory (and along with it, sovereignty) continues to be central to conceptions of how the international system might be being transformed under contemporary conditions. Second, fundamentalisms have perhaps rather unexpectedly appeared to galvanize forces that are challenging a broadly liberal domestic and international order. These fundamentalisms are not just confessional but also secular in character: newly invigorated meta-enthusiasms, for which there is little that cool heads can do to counter. And fundamentalisms are vigorously trans-territorial: they recognize no national boundaries to the embrace of their enthusiasms. The significance of these should not be exaggerated but, nevertheless, they also represent a threat that should not be easily underestimated either. Third, financial matters have become central to any analysis of the international economic system, so three chapters are devoted to this aspect of globalization. Finally, Central Banks have emerged as the major managers of their economies in the wake of austerity politics after the 2007–8 financial crash. But the way this activity is configured has served to bring sovereign debt, and its associated risks, to the fore in international relations and economic policy-making.

But do all these issues add up to comprise a meaningful whole that can be subject to a single theoretical endeavour? I am often asked about my ‘theoretical position’, and whether I have a theory of globalization or whether I am trying to develop one. The rest of the chapter will show why I am reluctant to conceive the project of analysing globalization as fitting into a single specifiable theoretical framework, or of trying to find such a framework. The social sciences are saturated with theories. Many of these are over-elaborate, too complex for their own good, and never quite up to the task at hand. But the response is not to insist on yet further elaborate theorizing but to be modest about the scope of theory. Surely we do not need yet another grand social theory, this time about globalization? In fact this is both unnecessary and impossible. Even if globalization existed in the manner the enthusiasts for it insist, it would be too complex to be encompassed within a single theoretical endeavour. So, in contrast to an overly theoretical approach (‘theoreticization’ much for its own sake), the emphasis here is on a political arithmetic that is parsimonious in terms of theory but generous in terms of empirics. Instead of making wild and unsubstantiated a priori claims about the ubiquity of globalization, I have always been sensitive to providing empirical evidence for the trends identified. Thus this approach is more sympathetic to an emphasis on ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) than to a stance where a preferred theoretical framework is announced in advance and the subsequent analysis merely elaborates on that or fills in the empirical detail. But such an approach is not blind to theory: quite the contrary. It is highly sensitive to theory but does not defer to a single theoretical model (see Thompson 2012). As will become clear, theories are mobilized throughout the analysis – how could it be otherwise? But these are pragmatically assembled as suits the purpose, not imposed from without or in advance. Different theories suit different parts of the analysis and they are treated in that context. Theory is mobilized in the interests of a strategy, not the other way round.

In a moment I turn to various approaches to globalization that are either not the centre of attention in this volume, or which are taken up in it in a rather limited and particular manner, or for specific purposes. Outlines of these positions – what are termed below ‘analytical stances’ – are presented as a prelude to distinguishing between these and the one that informs the analysis in the subsequent chapters. There is a voluminous literature on globalization, which it would be impossible to summarize adequately so I concentrate on some rather generic characterizations, ones that have proved enduring and important in the general debates about globalization since the 1990s.

Approaching globalization

Independently of explicit theories of globalization – where these tend to mirror general theories of socio-economic affairs – there is a series of what might be termed ‘analytical stances’ directed towards its description. These analytical stances have themselves proliferated: another aspect of the inflationary process associated with globalization. They represent analytical claims of what globalization is, how it is organized and what to do about it. By and large these positions take globalization as an accomplished fact, though they all hedge this in various ways and with various degrees of reservation. And as will become clear, these alternative positions are not totally exclusive of one another: they overlap and merge into one another. The rest of this subsection outlines these different analytical stances (and draws on Hirst et al. 2009: Chapter 1). It is worth reiterating these here so as to further clarify and differentiate the approach of this volume from these other stances.

From ‘globality’ to ‘planetarity’?

The first influential position on globalization is one that links it to a ‘post-colonial’ discursive approach. Often based around avant-garde anthropological and post-structuralist intellectual trends, this position works with a number of complex concepts, stressing aspects such as different spatial levels in the global arena and their manifestations, which involve multiple connections, relationships, flexibilities, flows, etc. (Ong and Collier 2004; Tsing 2004). These ‘assemblages’ are argued to be continually evolving: dissolving and reforming, producing new and often surprising terrains of activity. In this case globalization is viewed as the consequence of these multiple flows and connections – and a state of affairs that now needs to be transcended. One of the objectives for this perspective is to disrupt this conception of ‘globality’, and even repl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: what is at stake in revisiting globalization?
• 2 The fate of territorial engineering in an era of ‘durable disorder’: mechanisms of territorial power and post-liberal forms of international governance
• 3 Exploring sameness and difference: fundamentalisms and the future of globalization
• 4 Globalization, finance and the ‘crisis’: a critical assessment
• 5 The global regulatory consequences of an irrational crisis: examining ‘animal spirits’ and ‘excessive exuberances’ as features of the financial system
• 6 Sources of financial sociability: networks, ecological systems or diligent risk preparedness?
• 7 From artisan to partisan: what would it mean to be an artisan of finance?
• 8 Creating credit and rating it: Central Banks in post-crisis global finance
• References
• Index