From market globalism to imperial globalism: Ideology and american power after 9/11

Abstract

As capitalist liberalism reinvented itself in the last two decades, it drew largely on the ideas of nineteenth-century free-market philosophers. The Anglo-American framers of globalism spoke softly and persuasively as they sought to attract people worldwide to their vision of globalization as a leaderless, inevitable juggernaut that would ultimately engulf the entire world and produce democracy and material benefits for everyone. In the bellicose political climate following the attacks of September 11, however, many market globalists believed that the best way of maintaining the viability of their project was to toughen up their some of their ideological claims to fit better the neoconservative vision of a benign US empire backed by overwhelming military power. As a result, market globalism morphed into imperial globalism, but not without some dissent in the neoliberal camp. The Bush adminstration's switch from soft power to hard power tactics has been both documented and analyzed on the policy level in today's raging debates over whether or not the post-9/11 United States actually constitutes an ‘empire’. However, little attention has been paid to the corresponding ideological-discursive shift from a ‘soft’ narrative centered on the idea of a ‘leaderless market’ to a much tougher imperial language of American pre-eminence. Seeking to identify the major ideological differences between the market globalism of the 1990s and the imperial globalism of the 2000s, this essay analyzes a number of representative utterances and writings of influential advocates of globalism before and after 9/11. The discursive shift from market globalism to imperial globalism explicated in this essay attests to the central role played by ideology in the dynamics of growing global interdependence.