Global Economic Crisis and the Politics of Diversity

Y. Atasoy, Y. Atasoy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137293688
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Política económica

An interdisciplinary group of scholars from the global North and South critically explore the global deepening of market economy models. In case studies including Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, they examine the associated tensions of livelihood and ecology in the current context of global economic crisis, considering issues of natural ecology, water use, health, childcare, technology and work, migration, and economic growth. The analysis of the complex connections between domestic and global dynamics across diverse cases and issues helps reveal that state-centric approaches are still hovering over the politics of restructuring through which conformity to economic growth is addressed.

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Introduction: Global Economic Crisis and the Politics of Diversity

Yildiz Atasoy

The current global economic crisis has led countries in Europe and the United States to adopt various austerity measures, following an initial emergency policy response of monetary and fiscal stimuli and a series of government bailouts of banks and other financial institutions (Boyer 2012; Callinicos 2012; King et al. 2012). However, this is not a general trend in the global economy, as there is great variation among countries in terms of the impact of the crisis and policy responses to it. While economic growth in Canada, for example, has been slow, many countries from the global South continue to experience higher levels of economic growth. These divergent patterns and context-bound particularities require critical reflection in regard to the intensification of a market-oriented path of development and the tensions and uncertainties associated with an increasingly precarious mode of living for many in the world. This book analyses the deep structural issues, fundamental ontological insecurities, and ecological consequences that express uneven processes in the global proliferation of a market model. The authors in this collection concretize these processes across geographically varied contextual conditions, yet do so within the general global conjuncture of the economic crisis.

The book does not debate with various explanations as to the causes, consequences, and impact of the economic crisis, for which there is a now a significant body of literature (e.g. Callinicos 2010; Crotty 2009; Reinhart and Rogoff 2009), nor does it treat ‘diversities’ and/or geo-historical differences observed across cases as national/regional instances of a global project of restructuring capitalism. The study of such a project is undoubtedly worthwhile in its own right. Certainly, growing commercial and financial ties can be expected to create interesting and novel forms of global interconnectedness (cf. Arrighi 2007; 1994; Panitch and Gindin 2012), but this is beyond the scope of the present book. Our book avoids a conceptual leap from the empirical observation of a diversity of specific cases to theoretical conclusions which insinuate an ‘enclosed’ outcome as to the fundamental nature of the restructuring of capitalism occurring in response to economic crisis. Rather, the book observes that a complicated political process is currently underway in deepening a market-oriented model of development that is directed towards buoying economic growth. In describing and interpreting this process, the book brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from five countries: Brazil, China, Mexico, Turkey, and Canada. Our goal is to generate interdisciplinary dialogue across empirical cases and theoretical perspectives in order to critically explore the various forms of social polarization, ontological insecurity, and ecological consequences that have accompanied the historical and geographical variation among cases in the global intensification of market-driven solutions. This approach is useful for rethinking the global restructuring of the capitalist economy – not as a coherent and unified system but as a phenomenon which is entirely historical (cf. Block 2000) and deeply messy. The contributors to this volume investigate the localized meanings, dynamics, and consequences of market intensification. We do not engage in a macro-historical comparison of cases. Our cases are different from one another in regard to their domestic politics, specific trajectories, and geo-historical complexities, even though we observe that they also reveal reasonable similarities in regard to their placement in the global economy and their policy choice of a market-oriented economic-growth model. While it seems that a policy commitment to a market model persists in the name of economic development, our analysis of various forms of socio-economic insecurity, exclusionary practices, and ecological consequences helps us expose the different realities of market models which express multifaceted forms of global crisis. In short, the book interprets the varied experiences of Brazil, China, Mexico, Turkey, and Canada with a market model. These countries are geographical representatives of four distinct regions of the world: North America, Latin America, East Asia, and the Middle East. All reveal different aspects of global processes that have resulted in the consolidation and reformulation of – as well as critique of – a market form of development.

The market form of development has often been defined in the literature as characterizing the ‘neoliberal’ phase of the capitalist economy. Since its emergence in the 1970s and the 1980s, this phase has been expressed through trade liberalization, the privatization of various forms of public property, services and policy/norm-making, welfare retrenchment, public austerity measures, and new contractual and managerial arrangements (e.g. Atasoy 2009a: 7; Short 2012: 47). Beyond this ‘general’ understanding, however, there are different meanings attributed to neoliberalism. Harvey (2005: 19), for example, sees it as a ‘political project’ closely associated with the restoration of the power of economic elites and the revitalization of global capital accumulation. For Callinicos (2012: 67), neoliberalism is best understood as ‘an economic policy regime whose objective is to secure monetary and fiscal stability, and is legitimised by an ideology which holds that markets are best treated as self-regulating’ entities. Callinicos’ definition draws attention not only to the ‘restoration of class power’ argued by Harvey, but to a much broader process of ‘financialization’,¹ which represents a significant change in the structure and dynamics of capitalism (Callinicos 2012: 67–9; 2010: 24–34). On the other hand, McMichael (2012) and Gill (2012) regard neoliberalism as something more than an economic project and a set of policy measures that emphasize market-based mechanisms designed to bolster business and economic growth. They view it as an intellectual, normative project which justifies the elevation of market principles to the status of an organizing principle of society. As an intellectual project of market rule which ‘brings an economic calculus to cultural and social relationships’ (McMichael and Morarji 2010: 235), neoliberalism rests on certain normative assumptions about the nature of lived reality. For Gill (2000: 49), these assumptions constitute ‘the knowledge structures of political economy’. In this volume, Adaman and Madra propose that the knowledge structure of neoliberalism is best understood as a drive towards the ‘economization’ of the social. This entails more than market rule; economization as a form of governmentality institutes the ideational dominance of a calculative episteme in a plethora of social, cultural, and ecological relationships. It does so based on the assumption that all social agents are calculatively rational and calculably responsive towards economic incentives. On the whole, and particularly since the 1980s, neoliberalism has gained prominence in regard to its role in the intensification of market-driven development projects, continuing a process of commodification across the globe, and an epistemic drive towards economization of the ensemble of social, cultural, and ecological relations.

In explaining why the ongoing economic crisis has not resulted in a shift away from neoliberalism, and why it persists despite resistance and crisis, Peck, Theodore, and Brenner (2010) point to the tremendous adaptive capacity of neoliberalism. These authors (2010: 95) describe neoliberalism as a ‘flexibly mutating regime of “market rule” ’. It is continuously contested as a variety of different social groups across the world struggle for power and make demands for social inclusion and justice (e.g. Atasoy 2009b; Lindblom and Zuquete 2010; McMichael 2010; McNally 2006). It is through, and in response to, this contestation that neoliberalism is simultaneously restructured as an adaptive, regulatory regime of ‘market rule’ in the management of the economy. According to Peck, Theodore, and Brenner (2010: 104–5), neoliberalism should therefore be conceptualized as a ‘restructuring ethos’, a dominant pattern of regulatory transformation, politically reshaped in the process of regulatory political struggles. For King et al. (2012) and Callinicos (2012), the evolving political and economic responses to the crisis, which they observe in relation to a policy reversal from fiscal stimuli and bank bailouts to austerity measures, make sense if considered as part of the market-oriented reorganization of capitalism and balance of class power designed to roll back the welfare state. This explanation may be true for EU-member countries and the United States, as well as Canada, which indeed instituted a welfare-state structure during the mid-twentieth century international political economy (e.g. Harvey 1989). However, it is not a useful explanation for other countries from the global South which have experienced greater inequality, poverty, inadequate social-welfare programmes, debt, and serious environmental damage as they implemented ‘developmentalist projects’ (Crow and Lodha 2011; McMichael 2012; Rist 1997). Similarly, although economic-crisis management through austerity measures has been a signifier of neoliberal policy restructuring since the 1970s, neoliberalism has not taken hold to the same degree nor have its effects been uniform across all countries (Brady et al. 2005).

Without doubt, there is significant geo-historical diversity across places and cultures, and context-specificity always matters in any meaningful analysis of social change. In their recent book, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (2012: 1), Panitch and Gindin present an analytical approach which shows that global capitalism has now ‘truly encompassed the world’, mainly through an exceptional role played by the American state ‘in managing and superintending capitalism on a worldwide plane’, in addition to its ‘restructuring other states to these ends’. They further argue that the global extension of capitalism has been intimately related to the development of new mechanisms of international coordination and cooperation with the American state for the management of the global capitalist system. For Panitch and Gindin, then, the political fault-lines of global capitalism do not seem to be running between states but within them. However, they do not focus on what actually happens within states. In their analysis, the significance of diversity and context-dependency across states is secondary. Thus, we may conclude that it is necessary to direct attention to an examination of specific features and particularities of cases, but without neglecting general, world-historical circumstances. Our book forwards distinct, context-bound, social, economic, and environmental relations observed across cases. And these relations are increasingly marked by the pursuit of an economic calculus and political reworking of a market-economy model with long-held views, ideological commitments, and varying degrees of compliance from a variety of actors.

Recently, the concept of ‘post-neoliberalism’ has come to figure in debates on policy modification and transformation in neoliberalism (e.g. Grugel and Riggirozzi 2012; Macdonald and Ruckert 2009). Specifically, it has been advanced to address the policy shifts in neoliberalism experienced across Latin America since the late 1990s, following the 1998 presidential election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Post-neoliberalism expresses the legitimacy crisis of neoliberal austerity and draws inspiration from widespread deepening poverty, inequality, and diminished social rights (McMichael 2012: 228). It captures an attempt to refocus the direction of the economy through greater state involvement, both in ensuring economic growth and attending to the challenges of poverty, unemployment, and inequality (Panizza 2009). The recent and ongoing wave of rebellion across the Middle East and North Africa known as the ‘Arab Spring’ also reflects neoliberalism’s crisis, drawing on high levels of unemployment, poverty, and inadequate social-welfare programmes, combined with the political repression of old authoritarian regimes, to mobilize support. The current global economic crisis has played an important role in the outbreak of these rebellions, often expressed through the slogan ‘bread and freedom’ (e.g. McNally 2012; Messkoub 2011). Those participating in the Arab Spring are demanding the restoration of citizenship rights by combining economic and social issues with pleas for democracy.

Interestingly, according to Grugel and Riggirozzi (2012: 6), ‘postneoliberalism’ does not undermine the normative dominance of market-based economic growth. Hence, it does not signal a new way of rebuilding the economy and society by unravelling neoliberalism, nor does it portend a ‘paradigm shift’ away from market-oriented growth strategies. It combines market-oriented growth-restoration strategies with government attentiveness to citizen demands and social-redistributive issues (Macdonald and Ruckert 2009: 6–10). This approach is also in line with the characterization of poverty advanced by various policy-oriented international agencies – through a ‘rights-based approach’ (as seen with UNICEF – the United Nations Children’s Fund), through ‘social exclusion’ (the EU and ILO – the European Union and the International Labour Organization), and through ‘human security’ (the UN – the United Nations) (e.g. R. Bush 2007). Moreover, the World Bank’s World Development Report: Attacking Poverty (2001) and the UN Millennium Project have framed their approach to poverty management using the strategies of redistribution and asset building in human capital via education and skill attainment. Therefore, post-neoliberalism ‘is best understood as a call for a “new form of social contract between the state and people” ’ (Wylde 2011: 436 quoted in Grugel and Riggirozzi 2012: 4), which is more inclusive, rather than ‘the dawning of a post-neoliberal era in which the tyranny of market rule is vanquished’ (Peck, Theodore, and Brenner 2010: 109). Post-neoliberalism indicates a modality of economic growth reshaped through regulatory struggles in the context of the crisis conjuncture, but it continues to value the normative primacy of market rule. This may seem to be business-as-usual within neoliberalism, but it also helps direct our attention to the importance of specificity of context in an analysis of social change.

The contributors to this volume maintain a context-bound focus in their examination of market-oriented restructuring by situating their analysis within the commonly experienced material and discursive relations of global capitalism, as well as the associated social tensions of livelihood and ecology. They point to significant diversity across places and cultures in the intensification of market-based development models. The contributors are well aware that the historical conditions for rethinking restructuring and the possibilities for conceiving ways to combine social–ecological tensions into a coherent politics of contention might be best described as muddy. Thus, they avoid using the term ‘post-neoliberalism’ altogether as it generates more confusion than clarity in regard to what it actually refers to in relation to creating new choices for restructuring. Post-neoliberalism as formulated in the context of Latin America does not refer to building social forms beyond market capitalism but to a process of restructuring a twenty-first century capitalism which remains within neoliberalism, assigning a stronger role to the state and its attentiveness to citizen demands (e.g. Altvater 2009; Brand and Sekler 2009; Sader 2009). In this volume, we approach capitalist restructuring historically in terms of the complicated relations at play in the intensification of a market-economy model, the process of commodification, and the normative principles of neoliberalism. Emphasis is given to exploring geo-historical differences, rather than formulating some type of conceptual aggregation into a unified understanding of change.

The current economic crisis has not affected the countries studied in this book in a significant and enduring way. Even Mexico, which suffered an economic downturn in 2007–10 (Cypher 2011; 2010), has largely recovered and is now recording economic growth. However, the centrality of economic crisis is undeniable as a crucial factor in policies which are being implemented in the United States and the EU. Recent collections published in the Socialist Register (2011), for example, describe the crisis as an ‘interruption of accumulation’ in the United States and European economies. While the US economy appears to have registered recent improvements, it remains fragile. Crisis in the Eurozone remains very volatile as many countries continue to struggle with massive debt, fiscal discipline and stability in banking, and the widespread promotion of austerity policies. The European response to the economic crisis has included a new ‘fiscal compact’, involving a joint effort by France...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Global Economic Crisis and the Politics of Diversity
• Part I: Commodification and Environmental Governance
• Part II: Market Developmentalism and Livelihood Change
• Part III: State Restructuring and Economic Development
• Part IV: Alternative Forms of Politics
• Index