The Grand Delusions of Globalization

The articles in this special issue demonstrate that neoliberal globalization has a detrimental impact on most women and their families in the global South or Third World.These essays reveal that not only does globalization exacerbate their already subordinate position in the global political economy, but also that women are fighting back.They have devised various ways to resist the negative consequences of neoliberal policies and corporate globalization on their everyday lives and on their nation states. Their politics of resistance offers strategies, insights and practical ideas about how a better, more just world can be achieved.This concluding article focuses on the common themes that appear throughout the articles in this issue, and it gives particular attention to the contradictions of neoliberal globalization and how these contradictions create resistance to it as well as the search for equitable and empowering alternatives.

Henry George (1839–1897) rose to fame as a social reformer and economist amid the industrial and intellectual turbulence of the late nineteenth century. His best-selling Progress and Poverty (1879) captures the ravages of privileged monopolies and the woes of industrialization in a language of eloquent indignation. His reform agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the Gilded Age, and his impassioned prose and compelling thought inspired such diverse figures as Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, Sun Yat-Sen, Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein. This six-volume edition of The Annotated Works of Henry George assembles all his major works for the first time with new introductions, critical annotations, extensive bibliographical material, and comprehensive indexing to provide a wealth of resources for scholars and reformers. Volume IV of this series presents the unabridged text of Protection or Free Trade (1886). Read into the U.S. Congressional Record in its entirety in 1892, Protection or Free Trade is one of the most well articulated defenses in the nineteenth century for the free exchange of goods, services, and labor. By exposing the monopolistic practices and the privileging of special interests in the trade policies of his time, George constructed a monumental theoretical bulwark against the apologists for protective tariffs and diverse trade preferences. Free trade today is often associated with a neo-liberal agenda that oppresses working people. In Protection or Free Trade George argues that free trade, when linked with land value taxation or the systematic collection of economic rent, reduces wealth and income inequality. True free trade elevates the condition of labor to a degree far greater than any form of trade protectionism. The full and original text of Protection or Free Trade presented in Volume IV of The Annotated Works of Henry George is supplemented by annotations which explain George’s many references to the trade policies and disputes of his day. A new index augments accessibility to the text, the annotations, and their key terms. The introductory essay by Professor William S. Peirce, “Henry George and the Theory and Politics of Trade,” provides the historical, political, and conceptual context for George’s debates with the prominent political economists and trade experts of his time. Trade barriers typically serve the interests of a few and impede the overall economic progress of society. Protectionism fosters poverty and animates global conflict. The development of trade policy cannot be pursued in isolation from the broader principles of sound economics and a radical tax reform that benefits labor.

Henry George (1839–1897) rose to fame as a social reformer and economist amid the industrial and intellectual turbulence of the late nineteenth century. His best-selling Progress and Poverty (1879) captures the ravages of privileged monopolies and the woes of industrialization in a language of eloquent indignation. His reform agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the Gilded Age, and his impassioned prose and compelling thought inspired such diverse figures as Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, Sun Yat-Sen, Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein. This six-volume edition of The Annotated Works of Henry George assembles all his major works for the first time with new introductions, critical annotations, extensive bibliographical material, and comprehensive indexing to provide a wealth of resources for scholars and reformers. Volume IV of this series presents the unabridged text of Protection or Free Trade (1886). Read into the U.S. Congressional Record in its entirety in 1892, Protection or Free Trade is one of the most well articulated defenses in the nineteenth century for the free exchange of goods, services, and labor. By exposing the monopolistic practices and the privileging of special interests in the trade policies of his time, George constructed a monumental theoretical bulwark against the apologists for protective tariffs and diverse trade preferences. Free trade today is often associated with a neo-liberal agenda that oppresses working people. In Protection or Free Trade George argues that free trade, when linked with land value taxation or the systematic collection of economic rent, reduces wealth and income inequality. True free trade elevates the condition of labor to a degree far greater than any form of trade protectionism. The full and original text of Protection or Free Trade presented in Volume IV of The Annotated Works of Henry George is supplemented by annotations which explain George’s many references to the trade policies and disputes of his day. A new index augments accessibility to the text, the annotations, and their key terms. The introductory essay by Professor William S. Peirce, “Henry George and the Theory and Politics of Trade,” provides the historical, political, and conceptual context for George’s debates with the prominent political economists and trade experts of his time. Trade barriers typically serve the interests of a few and impede the overall economic progress of society. Protectionism fosters poverty and animates global conflict. The development of trade policy cannot be pursued in isolation from the broader principles of sound economics and a radical tax reform that benefits labor.

In spite of the eureka-like cries of so many present-day writers on management and organization, the idea that organizationally speaking things get done differently in different cultures is not a new one. Ancient civilizations, like those of Greece and Rome, had more than a passing acquaintance with such differences; indeed, they appear to have spent much of their time trying to iron them out. The Pax Romana was as much about the imposition of standard forms of organization as it was about anything else the promise of peace and prosperity delivered via a uniform system of administration. Likewise in the modern world, the peripatetic organizational researcher will frequently come across the distinctive administrative footprints of more recent colonial powers. From the sands of the Sahara to the jungles of Borneo, clearly discernible amidst the crumbling ruins of older civilizations are the vestiges of British, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial administrations. But with the passing of empires and the emergence of a large number of independent nation states, more subtle terms of trade have had to be developed. It has become necessary for multinational organizations and governments to take account of the wide variety of cultures and environments they encounter in their travels abroad. One of the most currently applauded attempts in recent times to identify cultural clusters of organizationally pertinent values has been that of Geert Hofstede, the Dutch researcher. In this well-known study, inferences about the value systems of 40 nations were drawn from a questionnaire survey of employees in a single multinational organization.1 (A subsequent study by Hofstede supplied data on an additional 10 countries.2) Differences in nations' values systems were explained most parsimoniously by four dimensions power, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and masculinity/femininity. The results of these studies give a clue as to the kinds of things to expect in close encounters with organizations in the nations surveyed. But while such studies provide an admirable skeletal framework for researchers, managers might want more flesh on the bones to make the findings intelligible. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is twofold: First, to propose further organizational examples of values that appear to be common to a subset of Southeast Asian nations by focusing on public organizations in the small, oil-rich nation state of Brunei. And second, to examine the potential impact of culture on the introduction of organizational change by comparing cultural impediments to change found elsewhere with dominant values in the region. A possible, though highly speculative, implication of this discussion is that certain cultures in Southeast Asia may be intrinsically more resistant to change than others. At the same time both the evidence offered and the discussion will furnish some kind of qualitative test of Hofstede's findings. Much of the discussion, however, will be suggestive and conjectural in nature rather than firmly grounded in empirical data.

Neoliberal economic globalization is motivated by the quest for ever-increasing profits and endless economic growth. Both the motive and means of economic globalization prove to be irrational in the context of the ecological limits of the planet. Rising rates of social and economic inequality coupled with growing ecological breakdown and climate change demonstrate that this economic model is neither socially just nor environmentally sustainable. Ethical analysis of different models of globalization provides alternatives rooted in moral norms of justice, equity, democratic participation and environmental sustainability. Studies of human happiness demonstrate that once basic needs are met, there is little to no correlation between increasing levels of per capita consumption and human wellbeing and happiness (Diener et al., 2009; Helliwell, Layard & Sachs, 2012). Hence affluent nations can and must decrease rates of per capita consumption, which can be accomplished while enhancing happiness and wellbeing. While economic growth for poor nations remains a priority to meet basic needs, affluent nations such as the United States need to shift away from neoliberal economics based on endless growth to more localized and sustainable ways of living.

The Anglosphere's political atmosphere is profuse with bourgeois outrage. In the United States, the so-called ‘liberal’ establishment is of the stubborn opinion that it was robbed by an insurgency of ‘deplorables’, backed by Vladimir Putin's cyber assassins and Facebook's menacing epistemic contortionisms, while in Britain, a terribly incensed bourgeoisie falter in the wake of the Kingdom's departure from that grand bulwark of neoliberal internationalism, the European Union, in favour of an inglorious isolationism. The variety of causal explications is dizzying. The emergent militant parochialism is being scrutinized in a veritable intellectual acrobatics: predominant cultural explanations coexist alongside psychoanalytical investigation, anthropological ethnography, aesthetic sensationalism, and identity-based tribalism. Yet, a certain angle has gone largely unexplored: that of the neoliberal socioeconomic project that has for the past three decades loomed ominously over the greater part of the Western hemisphere—in particular, its encapsulation into a discursively hackneyed regime of ‘free-trade globalization’. It is this lacuna which Joseph Stiglitz so prolifically fills in this crucial update of his 2002 Globalization and its Discontents. Here, we overview the major themes of Stiglitz' argument, paying particular attention to his recurrent lurches, at last, to an interests-based Marxist epistemology. We frame the book in its entirety in Foucauldian terms, affirming its instrumentality in the discursive deconstruction of that now tired neoliberal ‘regime of veridication’ that came to dominate the global polity toward the end of the twentieth century. The conclusion is adduced that in fact what was hailed as ‘free trade’ was in fact a congealed form of class warfare, justified and legitimated by a rhetorical veil of neoclassical theoretical utopianism. A la Stiglitz, neoliberal globalization was “not based on ‘free trade’, but on managed trade—managed for special corporate interests in the United States and other advanced countries”.

The implementation of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) in January 1989 marked a decisive moment in the rise of neoliberalism as a political project in Canada. While the left, and socialist political economists in particular, played a central role in galvanizing the agreement and contributed in no small part to the demise of the Conservative government in 1993, the free trade agenda continued to move forward through the 1990s. This Special Issue revisits the history of struggles against free trade in Canada with two aims in mind: first to remember the coalitions through which opposition was organized, the mobilization of socialist critiques by activists and intellectuals, and the key events leading up to the adoption of the agreement. Second, drawing from this history to make sense of how things have changed over the past 30 years, as right-wing nationalists have increasingly taken the lead in opposing free trade, while neoliberals have sought to rebrand their project as ‘progressive’. How can those on the left effectively confront the project of free trade today while at the same time challenging both far-right nationalism and neoliberal globalization?

The World Social Forum (WSF) seeks to bring together, in its own words, all those who oppose ‘‘neo-liberal globalisation’’ and ‘‘imperialism in all its forms’’. It hopes to serve as their common meeting-ground. It has adopted as its principal mode of operation the concept of the ‘‘open space’’. This concept is highly original; it is also quite controversial among the participants of the WSF itself. We need to explore the origins of this concept of the ‘‘open space’’ and the reasons why it arouses so much fervour–both of those who are favourable to it and of those who are quite uneasy about it. Andwe need to explore the dilemmas the concept poses to the viability of the WSF itself. The story starts a long time ago. The year 1848 was a turning-point in the history of modes of opposition to the existing world-system. It was a year of two kinds of revolution. There was the social revolution in France, the first serious attempt by a movement which claimed a base in the urban working class to obtain political power. It was a serious attempt, but a political failure. It actually lasted only four months, and led in a convoluted manner to the seizure of power by Napoleon’s nephew, who in 1852 proclaimed himself Emperor of France, and ruled for two decades. This failure of a social revolution led to a re-evaluation of political strategies all across the political spectrum of Europe–from right to centre to the left. The second revolution, or rather series of revolutions, was the attempt to proclaim national, popular sovereignty in a number of European countries–most notably Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Poland. Historians came to speak of 1848 as the ‘‘springtime of the nations’’. These revolutions too were failures, in the sense that in none of these countries did the groups leading the revolutionary activities achieve (at least in any immediate term) political power. Their failures too led also to a re-evaluation of political strategies. Out of the failures of 1848 came a real impetus for the two kinds of movements–what came to be called the social movements and the national movements–to develop a political strategy based first and foremost on long-term organisation (as opposed to sporadic and ‘‘spontaneous’’ political action). These movements faced new and more efficacious opponents. The liberal centre had been frightened by what had happened in 1848 and made two shifts in its long-term strategy. It toned down its post-1789 conflict with the conservatives in the interests of presenting a common front against the more radical groups. Immanuel Wallerstein is Senior Research Scholar at YaleUniversity andDirector of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations. He was formerly President of the International Sociological Association (1994–1998), and chair of the international Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (1993–1995). He writes in three domains of world-systems analysis: the historical development of the modern world-system; the contemporary crisis of the capitalist world-economy; the structures of knowledge. Books in each of these domains include respectively The Modern WorldSystem (3 volumes, 1974, 1980, 1989); Utopistics, or Historical Choices for the Twenty-First Century (1998); Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of NineteenthCentury Paradigms (1991). Email: immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu

Introduction: three dilemmas of democratic order In the democratic order, in principle, citizens make political decisions under conditions of freedom and equality. Procedures and rhythms of this decision-making follow from a historically specific spatio-temporal regime constituted in a long-lasting process since the beginnings of the “age of liberalism.” The spatial boundaries of sovereign nation states define a limited territory within the “pluriverse” (Schmitt 1963: 54) of nation states. The territory endows citizens with rights (and duties) of participation in decision-making procedures. But because citizens also are involved in economic activities, they are construing an economic space which transcends the limited political territory. The contradiction between economic boundlessness and political limitedness with regard to time and space of action has already been conceptualized by Adam Smith (Rosanvallon 1988). Today the contradiction between political territoriality and economic (global) space has become a common argument in the discourse on “globalization.” In addition to formal and procedural dimensions of participation, the equality of citizens is material and substantial. After World War II the substance of material citizens' rights emanated from the collective welfare state in the form of individual claims which within the United Nations system are considered social, economic, and cultural rights (“human rights of second generation”). In the postwar period, they have become prerequisites of the modern democratic discourse and in some cases they claim the dignity of constitutional principles. But recently globalization processes, including the dissolution of political sovereignty on the one hand and the ecological crisis on the other, have undermined claims to substantial rights.

Free Trade has always been highly contested, but both the arguments about it and the treaties that regulate it have changed dramatically since the Second World War. Under the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) regime, objections to free trade were essentially economic, and tariffs were a nation state's primary means of protecting its interests. However, by the early 1970s, tariffs had been substantially reduced, and the imposition and removal of non-tariff barriers that reflected a wide range of domestic concerns about the protection of health, safety, and the environment have since come to dominate trade agreements and their implementation. The expanding scope of these international treaties, and their effect on domestic regulatory objectives, has created new challenges for the nation-state, and for the international trade system as a whole. Domestic regulatory objectives that are generally embedded in a nation state's legal system or even in its constitution, are now negotiable and are susceptible to adjudication at the international level where they may, or may not, be used to camouflage unrelated economic interests. The international trade system adapted to this situation in 1994 by transforming the GATT into the World Trade Organization (WTO), which has more effective means for dispute resolution and includes a number of special agreements – such as the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) and the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) – with rules for balancing the economic concerns of free trade with the social concerns of regulatory objectives. These developments have generated legal queries about the general legitimacy of transnational governance arrangements and their ‘constitutionalization’, i.e. the quest for transnational governance that is mediated by law and not only accepted de facto but considered deserving of acceptance.

Over the last few decades, neo-liberal globalization—marked especially by the liberalization of finance, extended processes of commodification/privatization, free trade and free flow of capital—has coincided with rising income inequality and an ostensible decline in global poverty levels, the latter being largely attributed to China’s and India’s rapid economic development since the 1980s. Using a three-year-averaged non-overlapping data from 1991 to 2017 covering 39 OECD and western Balkan countries and applying the efficient Feasible Generalized Least Square (FGLS) estimation method, this article examines the effect of institutional ‘quality’, export complexity, and labour union density on income inequality. We have indications that neo-liberal globalization, measured using the KOF globalization index and sub-indicators, is positively correlated with income inequality. We have also indications that institutional ‘quality’, that is, mechanisms of ‘good governance’, tend to reduce income inequality. Importantly, the level of economic or export complexity and the degree of labour unionization were also found to reduce income inequality, while improving institutional ‘quality’ and mitigating downward pressures on wages.

Introduction 1. The Social Sources of American Grand Strategy The Puzzle of Continuity and Change in U.S. Grand Strategy. The Contribution from Elite Studies and Class Analysis. A Critical Political Economy Approach to Grand Strategy Analysis 2. Three Waves of Non-territorial Expansionism: American Grand Strategy from the Civil War to the Cold War Capitalist Expansionism and Expansionist Foreign Policy. From Territorial Expansionism to the First Wave of Open Door Imperialism. The Second Wave: The Great Depression and the Pax Americana. The Third Wave: The 1970s Crisis and U.S.-Centered Neoliberal Globalization. The Ends and Means of Open Door Imperialism 3. America's Post- Cold War Grand-Strategy Makers and Corporate Elite Networks The Role of Corporate Elite Networks in Grand Strategy Formations. Analyzing Social Networks of Grand-strategy Makers: Data and Method. Governmental Career Paths of post-Cold War Grand-strategy Makers. Corporate Affiliations of the Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations. The Shared Policy-Planning Network. Conclusion 4. American Grand Strategy after the Cold War: Clinton's Grand Strategy Makers and Neoliberal Globalization Clinton's Grand-strategy Makers. The Global Context: The End of the Cold War as an Opportunity for Expansionism. The Open Door Worldview under Clinton : Expansionism under the Banner of Globalization. A Grand Strategy of Neoliberal Globalization: Financial Markets, Free Trade and Airstrikes. Conclusion 5. American Grand Strategy after September 11: Bush's Grand-Strategy Makers and the Neoconservative Shift Bush's Grand-Strategy Makers. The Neoconservative Response to a "Squandered Decade": Context and Discourse. The Open Door Worldview under Bush: The Neoconservative Shift. A Neoconservative Grand Strategy: The War on Terror, Regime Change and Unyielding Neoliberalism. Conclusion 6. American Grand Strategy after the Global Financial Crisis: Obama's Grand Strategy-Makers and Imperial Restoration Obama's Grand-Strategy Makers. The Global Context: Eroding Legitimacy, Power Shifts and the Financial Crisis. The Open Door Worldview under Obama: Renewing American Leadership. A Grand Strategy of Imperial Restoration: Maintaining the Open Door from the Asia Pivot to the Drone Wars. Conclusion Conclusion

Social movements, including the women’s movements, operate in social, economic, political, and cultural contexts. While these contexts may constrain movement actors, they also create opportunities for collective action that can shape their politics of resistance toward a more just society. Neoliberal globalization has created contexts of contention on a global scale as its economic project of expanding and maintaining capitalism globally has been gendered, classed, and racialized. It has spurred the growth of transnational women’s movements anchored on nation states while forging alliances on a transnational scale in order to confront the conditions of exploitation and oppression and the neoliberal structures and policies that create them. The dialectical dynamics of exploitation/oppression and resistance become the crucible for change. This chapter examines examples of transnational women’s movements, their dynamics of resistance and strategies of action, as they confront various issues of injustice, human rights, sustainability, and violence under neoliberal regimes.

Special economic zones (SEZs) are a key manifestation of neoliberal globalization. As of 2020, more than 150 nations operated more than 5,400 zones. The combined workforce of factories and service industries in bonded warehouses, export processing zones (EPZs), free trade zones (FTZs), science parks (SPs), regional development zones (RDZs), economic corridors (ECs), and other types of SEZs exceeds one hundred million. These figures include tax havens, offshore financial centers, and free ports. Neoliberal academics and researchers from international organizations say that this has been a long time coming, as the freedom offered in the zones was integral to being human and first implemented in free ports of the Roman Empire. Critical social scientists, among them many anthropologists, have instead identified the zones as products of a 1970s rupture from Keynesian welfarism and Fordist factory regimes to neoliberal globalization and post-Fordist flexible accumulation. Since the early 21st century, scholarship in anthropology has expanded this critical stance on worker exploitation in SEZs toward a historical analysis of SEZs as pacemakers of neoliberal manufacturing globalization since the 1940s. A second strand of ethnographies uses a postmodern lens to research the zones as regimes that produce neoliberal subjectivities and graduated sovereignty.

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