Contesting Globalization

Space and Place in the World Economy

André C. Drainville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134364732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Contesting Globalization makes an innovative and original addition to the literature on globalization examining the challenges faced by those wishing to develop progressive visions of transparent global governance and civil society.

This new study closely traces the history and development of the institutions of global governance (The World Bank, IMF, WTO etc.) as well as the emergence of the anti-globalization movement. The author argues that we are at a unique moment where social forces have moved from national and international struggles to a global struggle and intervention in the world economy. A series of case studies examine the ways in which cities have become contested sites for global struggles from the London dockworkers strikes of the nineteenth century to the recent demonstrations against the international financial institutions in Genoa, Seattle and Washington.

1 More than ghosts

Subjects in places in the world economy

[J]ust as postmodernism was the concept of the 1980s, globalization may be the concept of the 1990s.

(Waters 1995, 1)

The academic literature that deals with social and political relationships in the world economy has grown enormously in the past decade. Whereas but a generation ago the only scholars who enquired into such matters were either engaged politically (in social movements old and new, in the Fourth International and so on) or else belonged to relatively circumscribed schools of analysis outside mainstream paradigms (world-system theory, for instance, or ‘neo-Gramscian transnational historical materialism’), now several academic fields of enquiry have grown up around the concept of globalization that are giving significance and confidence to scholars of all lineages and tendencies, whether engaged or not.

Holding these expanding fields together is the certitude that we live in an historical moment when some kind of transnational subject has appeared to make unprecedented, globally democratic politics. This is the defining paradigm of normal social science in the age of globalization. As I made clear in the Introduction to this book, I want to question this paradigmic certitude, by re-establishing the continuum of experience – severed by cosmopolitan ideology – between contextualized politics and the making of transnational subjects.

Here, I begin by reviewing relevant works published in the past two decades, both to garner what I can that will be useful later, and to penetrate the critical moment in analyses when contextualized experiences get abstracted beyond politics. This, to put it crudely, is where the materialist analyses of politics ends and cosmopolitan ideology takes over. In later chapters I will start from there, to forge a different way forward.

Specifically, the first part of the chapter deals with three clusters of literature that all think global politics apart from contextualized experiences and each invent a cosmopolitan ghost that has little to do with actually existing politics. First will be works of ‘transnational public policy’, principally preoccupied with goings-on within what Anne-Marie Clark termed the ‘international governmental arena’ (Clark 1995). Working acritically from ‘global problems’ (that surfaced as political issues in the 1980s as they had in the 1840s, the dawn of another critical phase in the history of globalization¹), these works make up a problem-solving humanity. As we will see below, this duty-bound global subject is a perfect fit for the global partner that neoliberal governing institutions are working to fabricate. In the second cluster will be works (mostly of sociology) that infer from the study of global processes and practices that a sociological humanity has appeared, without looking into how it made itself or was made. Third will be works of ‘transnational historical materialism’ that enquire into how globalizing élites have created a world in their image, and wish into existence a counter-revolutionary humanity to remake it.

Missing from all clusters is what Contesting Globalization hopes to add: a theoretical argument, informed by the study of concrete – contingent and situated – practices, for how transnational subjects are being made or may be making themselves on the terrain of the world economy. In the second part of the chapter I will move closer to making this argument, by surveying works that look at specific sites of politics in the world economy. This is a rich literature, whose lessons need to be critically synthesized rather than ideolo-gized, as they often are these days. To operate this synthesis we will turn to concepts either invented or worked on by the Internationale Situationnniste, as part of their critique of modern urbanism.

Ghosts in three machines

So prevalent have cosmopolitan postulates become that we can, without excluding any major problématique or strand of literature, divide academic studies of social and political relationships in the world economy by the ghosts they create or allow to haunt what they have constructed.

Although there are arguably as many global ghosts as there are books about global politics these days, three principal figures do stand out: a problem-solving humanity, a sociological humanity and a counter-revolutionary humanity.

A problem-solving humanity (functional and apolitical)

Problem-solving theory ‘takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organized, as the given framework for action . . . to make these relationships and institutions work smoothly by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble’ (Cox 1986b, 88). When Robert Cox wrote this, the crisis of state-centred modes of regulation was only beginning (as we will see in Chapter 4), and social relations were still largely fixed to national social formations. Then, problem-solving theories, loosely gathered under the umbrella of ‘realism’, generally took as a given a difference of kind between intra-states politics (assumed to be the domain of ‘authentic politics’) and inter-state politics (seen as a place of ‘mere relations’).² When they did look into global political relationships and institutions, problem-solving works usually studied them as places of little intrinsic significance, where politics was almost wholly derived from state-bound processes. Or else they busied themselves, à la Allisson and Aron, with micro-sociological studies of soldiers and diplomats working within the confines of a set world. Only works informed by critical theory that did not ‘take institutions and social power relations for granted but call[ed] them into question’ looked to global relationships and institutions as relatively autonomous loci of power, where terms of global order could be defined and limits to political possibilities set (Cox 1986b, 88).

A generation later, numerous international institutions are addressing global problems and labouring to devise strategies ‘to bring more orderly and reliable responses to social and political issues that go beyond the capacities of states to address individually’ (Gordenker and Weiss 1996, 17). We will argue below that these strategies are part of a hegemonical design to tran-form the world into a levelled space to be gridded functionally and managed economically. Although these strategies have not yet brought about anything like a new world order (if they had, this book would make no sense, except as a lament or a pamphlet), works of ‘transnational public policy’ already concede, acritically, that the framework for global actions has been set, and that humanity has fallen into problem-solving ranks.

Key here is the idea that ‘global issues’ (or challenges, or problems) are, by themselves, forcing ‘collaboration or cooperation among governments and others who seek to encourage common practices and goals’ (Gordenker and Weiss 1996, 17). Among the most studied are: environmental troubles (acid rain, ozone depletion, whaling, the trade in ivory from African elephants, global warming, overfishing, pollution, loss of biodiversity and genetic diversity, the degradation of human habitats); gender troubles (the private–public split, structural violence, militarization, prostitution, sexual division of labour, ecological responsibility, unequal distribution of resources); security troubles and issues (land-mines).

For works of this first cluster, global issues, challenges and problems are kernels around which naturally coalesce purposeful units, sometimes called ‘transnational issue networks’ (Burgerman 1998; Price 1998), or transnational ‘networks of knowledge and action’ (Lipschutz 1992), or ‘epistemic communities’ (‘a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue area’).³ There beaver away state representatives, labour representatives, international emissaries, experts, as well as various and sundry CBOs, GONGOs, NGOs, QUANGOs, GOINGOs, CONGOs and INGOs, that are the ‘torch-bearers and stakeholders’ of global civil society (Donini 1995, 83).⁴ Some work ‘upstream’ to aggregate societal demands, others ‘downstream’ to retrofit the local to the global (Gordenker and Weiss 1996; Lipschutz and Mayer 1996). Among states, there are ‘lead states’ with a strong commitment to effective international action, ‘supporting states’ that ‘speak in favour of the proposal’, and ‘swing states’ whose commitment is crucial but fragile (Porter and Brown 1996, 40ss.). The experts’ job is to foster innovative thinking, to deal e ff ect-ively with sources of trouble (Porter and Brown 1996, 51).

Synthesized into global agendas (Porter and Brown 1996), moral pro-grammes (Nussbaum 1996) and global ethics (Midgley 1999), the regimes, norms and policies that are made by global policy units, and the solutions that are found to global problems, are, without further thought, considered the building blocks of a more global, and more human politics (what Edgard Morin called une politique de civilization).⁵

Thus is a first cosmopolitan ghost created, by simultaneously pulverizing humanity into functional bits and reassembling it into an abstract bearer of rights, responsibilities and moralities. This double process, we will see, is an exact match for neoliberal governance, which aims to create a global civil society that is a strategic site of decontextualization, occupied by a politically neutered humanity, held to purpose and efficiency, never whole except when fulfilling appointed duties.

To think critically about this attempt and perhaps envision more than the apolitical reform of the world economy, we will obviously need to conceptualize global politics in a manner that does not just replicate, but actually question, the ways of neoliberal governance.

A sociological humanity (inferred, habitudinal and globally reflexive)

One of the founding myths of sociology – an academic discipline born in the golden age of internationalism – is that a truer, more intrinsically human, humanity exists in the ether above and between positions occupied by actually existing, conjuncturally bound, human beings. If earthly boundaries could be peeled away, the founding fable went (Auguste Comte wrote of a ‘religion of humanity’), this truer subject would be revealed to us.⁶

In the twentieth century, as the academic field of sociology constituted itself on the acceptance of state-defined boundaries of social interaction, society and the nation-state came to be taken as coterminous (Giddens 1985b; Holton 1998) and this myth fell into desuetude. Only mavericks (Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Tofler, for instance), or engaged intellectuals (Franz Fanon, Johan Galtung), or those, like Immanuel Wallerstein, who were consciously working on ‘a protest against the ways in which social scien-ti fi c inquiry was structured . . . at its inception’ evoked or studied human sociability beyond the nation-state.⁷

Now, the myth is surfacing again, in a moment when all social boundaries (and all bounded conceptualizations) are being challenged by dynamics of globalization. Most remarkable in this regard is the literature that focuses on new information and communication technologies, which has tended to embrace rather than problematize the ‘renewal of the expectations for social change and the recomposition of human communities’ that has been spurred by this latest technological revolution (as earlier expectations had been stimulated by previous technological revolutions).⁸ Running through this literature is the assumption that new technologies, by freeing human beings from the misery of context, are allowing for the opening of what Howard Rheingold termed a ‘computer-mediated social formation’ (Rheingold 1993b) and Jean-François Lyotard ‘a universal speech community’.⁹ In these new realms, members of many global ‘non-place’ communities are deemed free to invent new, more human ways of politics, as far above the fret and worry of life in the real world as were William Gibson’s avatars (who lived unfettered lives ‘in a new informational network of computer matrix called cyberspace’ that looked ‘like Los Angeles seen from five thousand feet up in the air’), as freely as game players reinvent themselves in MUDs, MUAs, MUSEs, MUSHes, MOOs, maskenbals and Populopolis of all sorts.¹⁰ Above and beyond all parochialisms (to borrow McLuhnan’s celebratory phrase), new actors ‘intervene, sometimes to resist, to organize, to legislate, to plan and to design’ (Mitchell 1995).¹¹ This is what the ‘ultimate flowering of community’ is in the age of ‘technosociality’.¹²

The new fable, then, goes thus: new (despatialized, desynchronized) agoras will make new citizens, unsullied by context, immaculately conceived.

Within these places, social contracts will be made, economic transactions will be carried out, cultural life will unfold, surveillance will be enacted, and power will be exerted.

(Mitchell 1995, 160)¹³

More seriously concerned with the profane world of material practice (and therefore closer to mainstream sociology), but still as swayed by cosmopolitan mythology (and often as guilty of reasoning by metonymy) are works that offer global variations on the theme of what futurologists in the 1970s used to call the ‘information society’ (Spybey 1996, 104), and sociologists of the 1980s and 1990s have come to study as ‘post-industrial’, or ‘informational’, society. By and large, this literature – too rich and varied to be treated here in anything but the most cursory manner – has tended to argue that improvements in managerial and production practices, as well as radical changes in transportation and communication technologies (e.g. wire, coaxial and fibre optic cables, wireless broadcasting, earth satellites) have opened up a planetary ‘space of flows’ (in Manuel Castells’ celebrated idiom) that now exists above and beyond (or outside and between) the ‘spaces of places’, where political struggles about the collective organization of daily life were hitherto located.¹⁴

Crucially, the global ‘space of flows’ is not, as was the ‘space of place’, a contested terrain, where social relations relativize power and create contingent, historically specific and contradictory modes of production and regulation. It is not a place for the ‘quotidian’ making of social rules, where ‘every day in every context, people acting individually or collectively produce or reproduce the rules of their society’ (Castells 1983, xvi). Rather, it is conceptualized as an immaterial vacuum, where disembodied processes flow unimpeded and technology itself is a ‘mode of social development’, set behind actually existing actors, either busily networking and flextiming with the flow, or folded into themselves, in identity politics.

[O]ur society is constructed around flows: flows of capital, flows of information, flows of technology, flows of organizational interaction, flows of images, sounds, and symbols. Flows are not just one element of the social organization: they are the expression of processes dominating our economic, political, and symbolic life.

(Castells 1996, 412)

Thus, just as liberals imagined that ‘markets maketh citizens’ (MacPherson 1977), so does contemporary sociology assume that flows make humanity, thereby absolutely over-determining what futurologist Alvin Tofler used to call ‘virtual social futures’ (Tofler 1970). Social forces that are taken to preside over the flow, or profit from them, are taken to be part of what Manuel Castells called the ‘technocratic-financial-managerial elite’, a cartoonish character whose power is so absolute and tr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Series editor’S preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: More than ghosts
• 2: Three episodes from cities in the world economy
• 3: Occupying places in the world economy
• 4: The civic ordering of global social relations
• 5: Integrated world creation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography