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Globalization
CMN 2168
Definitions

Globalization has different meanings and is
perceived in different ways: ‘for some,
globalization means freedom, while others see it
as prison. For some it means prosperity, while
for others it guarantees the poverty of the
developing world’ (2).
Definitions
 Globalization
-
-
changes meanings
according to the sphere of human activity
one refers to.
Economy
Culture
(Geo)-politics
Ecology
Terrorism etc.
Economy
 Globalization
is understood as the
economic interpendence of different
nations through international transactions
in goods and services, fast and
widespread diffusion of (new) technologies
etc.
Economy

Globalization is based on capitalist economy. To
a certain extent, capitalism has always
functioned as a world economy.

It is based on the Washington consensus.

What has changed?

Some argue that there has been a rupture in
contemporary capitalist productions and global
relations of power.
Neo-liberalism

Neo-liberal doctrine is decided by the government of the
USA (backed by the UK) and the various financial
organisms that the US control in great part (Noam
Chomsky, Profit over People, 1998. p.19). The
participants in neo-liberalism are mostly large
corporations.

The aims of the neo-liberal doctrine is to remove
obstacles to its own development: state intervention,
protectionism, workers rights, public services, regulation,
trade unions etc.
(Florian Grandena, PhD dissertation, 2005)
Neo-liberalism

‘Liberal’ has different meanings.
1.
Socially progressive, open-minded;
Political doctrine that aims at limiting the
State’s powers regarding individual freedom;
Economic doctrine of free enterprise according
to which the State must not interfere in the
market and competition (free trade).
2.
3.
 Neo-liberalism
relies on the ideas of Adam
Smith (who was one of the intellectuals
who developed the idea of free trade and
capitalism).
 Privatisations
 Liberalisation
of trade and finance
 Supremacy of markets
 All
activities and services need to be
rationalized.
Rationalization: the re-organization or restructuring of a company in order to
improve its functioning. It corresponds to
the ‘mathematization’ of work and aims at
increasing efficiency and flexibility.
 Neo-liberalism
is also known as the
Washington consensus, and is defined by
the US government (and usually back by
the British one).
 The
actors in the neo-liberal order are
usually huge corporations.
 As
-
neo-liberalism relies on free trade, it
aims at removing what it considers
obstacles to its own development:
State protectionism
Public services
Trade unions and workers’ rights.

Neo-liberalism also represents a specific type of
management and decision-making where
productivity, efficiency and immediate profit are
the main criteria.

it is the financial logic that governs decision
making: it is the permanent search for new
means to increase profit and share value that
now acts as the main managerial drive in large
groups and conglomerates.
 Performance
and competitivity are central
to neo-liberalism.
 These
are present in other spheres of
human activities, such as the cultural and
intellectual spheres.
 In
other words, neo-liberalism uses
concepts usually identifies with trade to
everything else.
 Neo-liberalism
leads to an important
cultural change (if not a change of
civilization).
 Neo-liberalism
is partly characterised by a
high concentration of power and money
within the hands of a small minority, which
represents more than 95% of international
financial transactions.
(General Electrics, CNN etc.)

Neo-liberalism partly relies on trade regulations
defined by and originating from wealthy
countries.

However, there is a difference between the
theory of free trade / neo-liberalism and its
practices.

See example of Moroccan tomato growers p.234.
’central logic is that
individuals, ideas and the movements of
the market are inextricably bound together’
(25). It aims at creating a global free
market.
 Neo-liberalism’s
 ‘What
we see in studying the history of
neoliberalism is the use of reason and a
utopian discourse to justify the setting free
of the economic field from social, national
and humanitarian obligations’ (27-8).
Politics
 Some
theorists argue that the new political
order of globalization should be seen in
line with our historical understanding of
Empire as a universal order that accepts
no boundaries or limits
(see Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri. Harvard, 2000).
The politics of naming

There are different positions that seek to explain
and describe globalization.

Globalists or ‘liberals’ believe that globalization
is an important and overall positive development
(‘the effect of real structural changes in the past
few centuries’). Liberals usually present
globalization as an order that is both natural and
unavoidable.
 Sceptics
think that globalization is an
extension of ‘trends that developed in the
period of European colonial expansion,
peaked during the period 1870-1914, and
were interrupted by the two great wars and
the ‘cold war’ of the 20th century’ (7).
Globalization is more a matter of discourse
than reality.

Some theorists add another category: the
‘moderately optimistic’.

For this group, the market economy is not as
important as for the sceptics and the liberals.

Also, the moderately optimistic agree ‘that there
are globalizing tendencies which can be
identified and measured, but that they are not
all-encompassing as the literature might imply:
and nor are they operating without resistance,
and without exceptions’ (8).
Defence of globalization
http://www.freeworldacademy.com/globalleader/globalisation.htm#1

Globalization is the international system that
replaced the Cold War system. It relies on
two principles:

-Firstly, the idea that freedom, human rights
and democracy are the most efficient means
of sustaining growth and development.
 -Secondly,
globalization implies a
panel of policies based on the
Washington consensus: fiscal
discipline, a redirection of public
expenditure priorities toward fields
offering both high economic returns
and the potential to improve income
distribution...
 In
short, globalization is the integration
of democracy, legal reforms, capital,
technology, and information across
national borders, in a way that is
creating a single global market and a
global village.
 ‘Globalization
can be understood as a set
of technologies, institutions and networks
operating within, and at the same time
transforming, contemporary social,
cultural, political and economic spheres of
activity’ (21).
 Globalization
is often referred to as
‘neocolonialism’ or ‘neoimperialism’.
 Globalization
‘should be understood as a
kind of grid of power, one which
incorporates globalists and sceptics,
liberals and Marxists, libertarians and
fundamentalists, First and Third World
nations and their economies, and so on,
all within a dynamic and often agonistic
relationship’ (p.19-20).
 ‘Globalization
[can] be understood as a set
of technologies, institutions and networks
operating within, and at the same time
transforming, contemporary social,
cultural, political and economic sphere of
activity… it is the evaluation and
interpretation – the naming – of those
technologies, institutions and networks as
socially, culturally, economically and
historically identifiable phenomena that in
a sense bring globalization into being, or
make it real to most people’ (p.21).
Empire
 Hardt
and Negri argue that ‘the various
practices, institutions and discourses
associated with globalization can be
understood as a machine-like grid of
power which incorporates and transforms
politics, economics and the social (and its
many aspects such as culture, civil society
and subjectivity)’ (31-2)
 Empire
is different from other forms of
state-driven imperialism.
 In
Empire, there is no traditional / territorial
centre of power.
 Empire
is a move beyond state
sovereignty.
 ‘…the
inability of nation-states to control or
manage their economic, political, social
and cultural affairs is a symptom of the
more or less terminal decline of state
sovereignty, and the ascent of Empire’
(32).
 Globalization
= Empire.

Empire has four main characteristics:
1. Empire is a system and a hierarchy. It has its
own logic.
‘Sovereignty has taken a new form, composed
of a series of national and supranational
organisms united under a single logic of rule’
(Hardt and Negri).
‘The declining sovereignty of nation-states and
their increasing inability to regulate economic
and cultural exchanges is one of the primary
symptoms of Empire’ (Hardt and Negri).
2. ‘Empire processes cultures, crises, resources
and power formations in order to reproduce
and extend itself’ (33).
‘The rule of Empire operates on all-registers of
the social order extending down to the depths
of the social world. Empire not only manages a
territory and a population but also creates the
very world it inhabits’ (Hardt and Negri).
3. Empire is decentred and boundless.
Power is now diffused throughout different
apparatuses, organizations, agents…
4. ‘Empire is constituted by, and constitutive
of, the imbrication of the economic,
political and cultural aspects of
contemporary life’ (34).
 ‘Empire
presents its rule not as a transitory
moment in the movement of history, but as
a regime with no temporal boundaries and
in this sense outside of history or at the
end of history’ (Hardt and Negri).
Globalizing technologies
 ‘Digitalization
is probably the most
important technological advance in the
area of communications. The term refers
to the process whereby information is
produced as a universal binary code, and
is thus able to circulate more freely and at
greater speed across communication
technologies, and not just within them’
(59).
 Digitalization
brings together different
media (telephone, television, computers)
and texts (pictures, sounds, words).
 Greater
flexibility.
 Greater speed.
 The
relationship between the place of
technology in our lives and its supposedly
progressive dimension needs to be
discussed in terms of the actual effects of
these technologies and global
convergence.

Global convergence: ‘the tendency facilitated by
communication technologies, to bring together different
communities, institutions, media’ (217).
 Castells
argues that corporations both
participate into and are dependent on
information networks.
 As
virtually all corporations are connected
to and reliant on information networks,
they cannot place themselves or think
outside these networks (partly because of
the general interdependence on such
communication systems).
 The
exclusion of some kind of information
in analysis is part of a much wider
tendency which Bourdieu refers to as the
‘editing out of the human’.
 ‘Mathematization’ of
human behaviours
(‘scientific’ authority associated with
statistically and mathematically based
information. 66-7).
 According
to Virilio, information networks
contribute to the development of
endocolonialism (as opposed to
exocolonialism).

Endocolonialism: Paul Virilio’s term for the new form of colonialism
where social and economic inequalities are not exported ‘to the
colonies’ but are accentuated within colonialist states such as the
United States and the United Kingdom (216).
 There
is now a network of flows across the
globe. The old imperial centre / periphery
has disappeared into a confusing system
of power relations and connections. What
appear to be free and interactive trade
relations are in fact an utterly constricting
set of obligations, tendencies and
imperatives (70).
Global capitalism
 Globalization
can be understood as ‘the
relationship between the development of
new communication technologies, on the
one hand, and the contexts and politics of
the use of that technology, on the other’
(73).

We can also understand globalization ‘as an
aspect of its effects on and in relation to the
institutions, practices and strategies of
capitalism’ (73).

Capitalism is ‘currently the dominant system for
the organization of economies; characterized by
the private ownership of the means of
production, and reliance on the market to direct
economic activity and distribute economic goods
and rewards. Its founding principle is the pursuit
of self-interest through competition’.
Logic of capitalism
 Capitalism
operates through the creation of
surplus value, but that surplus value must
always find a market.
 Surplus
value is created when the value of
production exceeds labour and other
associated costs.
 Surplus
value is only realized, however,
through the process of consumption.
 Surplus
value is then (at least parlty)
returned to the capitalist process as
investment, which in turn creates more
surplus value and more goods for
consumption.
 Capitalism’s
basic principle is the ‘pursuit
of self-interest, which is achieved
economically through competition between
producers and producers, consumers and
consumers. This competition, under
capitalist logic, creates a state in which the
right amount of goods and services at the
right price are made available to meet
consumer demands’ (79).
 Under
capitalism, the means of production
are privately owned. The levels of
exchange and the production of goods and
services are reliant on the market and the
relation between supply and demand
rather than through intervention (79-80).