Globalization

Description

Peter Taylor:

"Globalization comprises a bundle of processes that originated in the 1970s with: 1. the rise of multinational corporations culminating in “global reach” (a popular book of that name appeared in 1973) producing a new international division of labour; and 2. the collapse of Bretton Woods fixed currency arrangements in 1971 culminating in a new worldwide financial market (transcending national control); both based upon 3. computing/communication enabling technology that made such worldwide organization possible.

The concept of globalization has been applied to all spheres of social activity – global civil society, global governance, global culture, and global economy – but it has been the latter that has dominated the discourse. This is because globalization has been closely associated with the rise of neo-liberalism, the dismantling of state mechanisms of economic protection and redistribution built up throughout the twentieth century. With its privileging of market processes, proponents of globalization favour, indeed famously proclaim, a borderless world.

The discourse of globalization is largely a product of the 1990s. There were three key political challenges that globalization proponents were trying to overcome. This politics was about making all the world attractive to capital:

In the “second world” through the incorporation of the USSR and its sphere of influence with the end of the Cold War;

In the “third world” through structural adjustment programmes to reduce social expenditure in the new “unipolar world” (the “Washington consensus”);

In the “first world” through cutting back on the welfare state provisions (Reaganomics, Thatcherism, TINA – “there is no alternative).

Generally, this involved the privatization of state assets, and “opening” state economies to foreign investment and trade. The end-result was to move from “three worlds” to “one world” = GLOBALIZATION.

15Globalization is truly a keyword of our times, overwhelming all other conceptions of macro-social change in the 1990s. Today it is a hugely contested concept both empirically and politically. My position is as follows:

Empirically, I accept the evidence for contemporary social change being truly distinctive, in part, because of the intensity of its global operations;

Politically, I reject the globalization mantra that “there is no alternative”; globalization does not have to be regressive."

(https://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/12292)