The Sources of Neoliberal Globalization (original) (raw)
Related papers
Article in International Relations: Globalization
Globalization and Transformations in the World Politics: Global Politics, Global Governance, Geopolitics, and International Politics., 2024
This article is a focus on Globalization of the economy, which has become, over the past four decades, a new field of study in world politics. Its impact on the world order draws all eyes to the political system put in place since the end of the Second World War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, marking the end of the Cold War and the rise of the United States on the international arena. It encompasses all human activities related to production, economy, trade, finance and even migration. Globalization is the fruit of liberal democracy promoted by the Western civilization, which proclaims individualism, that means, people are born equal and free, which freedom is more important than justice and authority, and then, since people are capable of reasoning, this leads them to self-actualization and prosperity. The right to freedom and self-determination of peoples becomes the cornerstone of the neoliberal ideology that promotes the principles of economic liberalization, that is, the rights of states and peoples to productivity, commercialization and privatization of the economy. The principles that allowed the re-foundation of the State, born with the Treaty of Westphalia, putting an end to private or religious wars, and enshrining the principles of territoriality, sovereignty and self-determination, have admitted that States can no longer continue to remain hidden behind their borders. The globalization of the economy has come to erase the borders fixed between peoples and countries, promoting a new economic order due to three scientific revolutions that began in the 19th century: the industrialization of the world, the technological revolution and the revolution of communication and information, which at the same time allow the new revolution of consumption. Globalization and De-globalization, Global Governance, Interdependence, Internationalization, Liberal world order, Transformalism, and so on, are among some key terms of this study.
NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION AND ITS POLITICS
During the 1990s, globalization was one of the hotly discussed concepts of social sciences. Previously associated with liberalism, it acquired a neoliberal character with the dawn of the 21 st century. Nevertheless, the meaning of neoliberalism and its relation with liberalism still needs to be clarified. Mainly, it is asserted that neoliberal globalization thoroughly disengaged from liberal globalization as the former requires and nourishes strong states rather than the weak states of the latter era. Internationally, it is said to be transformed into a new type of imperialism and witness the emergence of an empire. Domestically, neoliberal globalization is strengthening authoritarian policies and practices both in anti-democratic states and established democracies. On the one hand, these two developments go hand-in-hand and trigger each other. On the other hand, they share a common point: strong states are both internally and externally dedicated to liberalization of markets, and support liberal market values. This situation refutes conventional liberal theories on globalization, according to which internationalization of capitalism and market relations would boost the development of democracy in nation states. In this framework, this paper will focus on the domestic politics of neoliberal globalization. First, it will introduce the conceptual richness that describes neoliberal politics, such as electoral authoritarianism and competitive authoritarianism. It will assert that neoliberalism reinvigorates archaic political regime types, which are unbounded by the constitutions, and only sporadically respect rights and liberties.
Globalization and Politics, Vol. 3: Political Critiques and Social Theories of the Global (2014)
2014
There are many different approaches to the study of globalization. This simple point testifies at once to the vitality of the field of global studies, but also to the contested and diverse nature of contemporary social theory. Alongside this diversity of theory in general, the range of approaches to the global is difficult to categorize into straightforward theoretical lineages. This is in part precisely because the intellectual climate in which most of the studies of globalization emerged was one of fundamental fracturing across many different fields. Studies of globalization and, more generally, studies in the broad and loosely defined field of global studies, became conscious of themselves as such during the 1990s at a time when the direct-line lineages of classic social theory were being broken or at least segmented. As we will argue, this had profoundly contradictory implications for the narrative of globalism, the newest and grandest of all the grand narratives. Paradoxically, globalism was the one generalizing narrative that seemed to escape this critique, at least in the mainstream. This was partly because the dominant ideological expression of globalism at the time—neoliberalism, which was yet to be named as such—was also beginning to take questions such as movement across borders and the dissolution of national sovereignty as both self-evidently good things. Concurrently, many critics of emergent neoliberalism came to the same political conclusions on these matters, albeit with quite different normative content. That is, while methodologically everything conspired against an integrated theory of globalization, normatively there was a shift in the dominant common sense of the age, such that both right-oriented economists and some left-oriented theorists and activists began to advocate a ‘borderless world’.
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AND GLOBALIZATION
GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AND GLOBALIZATION, 2016
This book argues that, though further elaborations are necessary in the light of new developments within capitalism since the late 1970s, the concept of imperialism is still a powerful one both analytically and politically, since the immanent contradictions and distinctive features of capitalism are at the centre of the analysis. 1990s. To put it differently, this book is an attempt to break the inherent relationship between the common literature and the idea of ‘globalization’ which reflects itself in the conceptualization of transition to a supra/trans-national phase and the emergence of a transnational state through re-conceptualization of its major problematics and concepts within the context of capitalism imperialism. To begin with, the time period between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s witnessed the rise and the hegemony of the idea of ‘globalization’ in social sciences as well as the intellectual sphere, politics and the daily life. This rise and the hegemony of the concept of ‘globalization’ reflect itself in what Held and McGrew (2003) calls the “great globalization debate”. Clearly, there are various approaches within this debate to the term ‘globalization’, which consist of different methodologies and theoretical positions. Since, it is not possible to review this massive literature, this book shares the distinction provided by Rosenberg (2000) both for the sake of simplicity and for the categorization of the literature on ‘globalization’ on a broader methodological standpoint. Rosenberg (2000) makes a distinction between “globalization theory” and “theories of globalization” on the basis of the logical construction of the arguments. This book claims that, it is the “globalization theory” or “globalist” interpretation of ‘globalization’ that dominated the literature on ‘globalization’ and provided the concept of ‘globalization’ its analytical power. Moreover, according to this book , it is this version of the literature that resulted in severe consequences for the “theories of globalization” as well. Thus, this book argues that a return to the concept of imperialism can also help to overcome this disconnection.
The Limits Of Neoliberal Globalization
Montenegrin Journal of Economics, 2020
This paper explores the theoretical determinants of modern globalization and the limitations it poses as a natural reaction to its consequences. The author assumes that planet Earth is a natural global system, and that, owing to the contrast of interests in resource scarce conditions, humans have established a social global order with significantly different rules of functioning than the natural global order. Modern globalization is based on the ideology of neoliberalism. Globalization on this foundation has led to an increase in the World's wealth, but also to an increase in the inequality of its distribution and to the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor. The author sees the causes of globalization's bad consequences in the redistribution of accumulated wealth on the basis of economic power and in the unwillingness and inability of the state to limit it. A series of contradictions that globalization is burdened with, causes several forms of resistance to globalization, which set its boundaries. These resistances arise due to: non-harmonized motivations of the participants in globalization; the price convergence of factors of production, different economic powers of market participants, differences in the market size, widening inequality of wealth distribution, widening gap between the rich and the poor, negative selection, moral hazard and captured resources. Neoliberal globalization has reached a stage in which it autonomously creates the limits of its own expansion and abolishes its own principles.
Cambridge Scholars publishers, 2022
The purpose of this work was to clarify the nature of globalization in contemporary times. Globalization represents a Durkheimian mechanicalization of the world via the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism under American (neoliberal) hegemony. The power elites of the latter (American hegemon) serves as an imperial agent, an empire, seeking to interpellate and embourgeois the masses or multitudes of the world to the juridical framework of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, and in the age of (neoliberal) capitalist globalization and climate change this is done within the dialectical processes of two forms of fascism or system/social integration: 1) right-wing neoliberalism and 2) identity politics masquerading as cosmopolitanism or hybridization.
Key Words internationalization, neoliberalism, trade opening, social dumping, states and markets s Abstract This chapter reviews the issues at stake in current public and scholarly debates over the impact of changes in the international economy on domestic politics and society. Over the past two decades, there have been dramatic increases in the flow of portfolio capital, foreign direct investment, and foreign exchange trading across borders at the same time as barriers to trade in goods and services have come down. These changes raise many new questions about the effects of trade and capital mobility on the autonomy of nation-states and the relative power in society of various groups. The first signs of realignments within and between political parties of both the left and the right over issues of national independence and trade openness suggest a rich new terrain for political inquiry.
WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION? Four Possible Answers
The end of the Cold War provided a major shock for scholars of politics and policy in at least two respects. First, it provided a classic example of the limitations of both social and policy sciences predictive capacity. Few foresaw, let alone predicted, the tumultuous events that marked the end of the decade. Second, those events simultaneously dislodged the organizing principle-the foundation-upon which much of the study of international relations was constructed in the postwar period. 1 The parsimony and simplicity of bipolarity signaled the hegemony of structural arguments in international studies and a corresponding ascendancy of questions posed by security studies over those relating to international and comparative political economy. Scholars and policy analysts alike thus favored these approaches, employing theories such as deterrence, compellence, and modernization in political science, while policy analysts often subsumed critiques of American policy in the Third World for the sake of strategic advantage over the Communist bloc.
The international journal of interdisciplinary global studies, 2020
The last decade of the twentieth century was a momentous period in contemporary history. A revolutionary wave that started in Poland in 1989, and continued in Hungary, East Germany and elsewhere, led to the end of Soviet domination in Central and Eastern Europe, and ultimately the collapse, in 1991, of the Soviet Union itself. Today, the contrast between the current direction that the world is headed and the accelerated globalization of the 1990s is pronounced. While in the aftermath of the Soviet Bloc's defeat, the discourse of capitalist triumphalism prevailed-with Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis as its most influential example (Fukuyama 1992)three decades on, more cautious assessments are in order. Although global capitalism-especially of a particular, neoliberal kind-has maintained its tight grip over almost the entire globe, the obituaries written in the early 1990s, for social democracy, the state, the nation, sometimes modernity itself, now seem utterly premature. Far from homogenizing the world, the processes of globalization have clashed with tendencies toward fragmentation, globalism has been undermined by nationalism, and the hegemony of free-market economics is often described as zombie-like, exhausted by challenges both on the right and the left (Peck 2014). The articles gathered together in this special issue of the International Journal of Interdisciplinary Global Studies look back at the hopes that were invested in the new world of the 1990s as it was emerging out of the ashes of the great ideological battles of the twentieth century, consider what went wrong to produce its unforeseen dysfunctions, and postulate some tentative ways to get out of the multiple crises we find ourselves in at the outset of the 2020s. In this introductory article we map the insights provided in the following four contributions to this issue-by Darren J. O'Byrne, Paul Kennedy, Andrew Z. Katz, and Zdzisław Mach-while complementing them with our own observations. The first part takes a brief look at how the 1990s were interpreted by intellectuals and commentators at that time. The second part descends from the realm of dreams to the realities on the ground and sheds some light on recent developments, including the rise of national populism. Finally, the third part, which is more explicitly normative in nature, takes a glimpse into the future. When the World Was Being Flattened The end of the Cold War opened the way to a far-reaching and multidimensional social transformation on both sides of the former geopolitical divide (Soborski 2013). Perhaps most importantly, the world then, as much as now, was subject to rapid advances in the means of