Globalization, Difference, and Human Security (Interventions)

The possibility that cross-border trade and investment might be economically damaging to the weaker party, or that they might erode democratic controls in both the stronger and weaker countries, is excluded from consideration by mainstream economists and pundits. As an ideology, globalization connotes not only freedom and internationalism, but, as it helps realize the benefits of free trade, and thus comparative advantage and the division of labor, it also supposedly enhances efficiency and productivity.

Because of these virtues, and the alleged inability of governments to halt "progress," globalization is widely perceived as beyond human control, which further weakens resistance.

Globalization, Difference, and Human Security: 1st Edition (Hardback) - Routledge

But the elites have done well despite the slackened productivity growth. But it was a different story for the global majority.

Income inequality rose markedly both within and between countries. Inequality rose to levels of 70 years earlier, and underemployment, job insecurity, benefit loss, and worker speedup under "lean" production systems all increased. As Alan Greenspan complacently explained to Congress in , wage rates were stagnant in this country because worker insecurity was high. Per capita incomes have fallen in more than 70 countries over the past 20 years; some 3 billion people--half the world's population, live on under two dollars a day; and million suffer from malnutrition.

The new global order has also been characterized by increased financial volatility, and from the Third World debt crisis of the early s to the Mexican breakdown of to the current Asian debacle, financial crises have become more and more threatening. With increasing privatization and deregulation, the discrepancy between the power of unregulated financial forces and that of governments and regulatory bodies increases and the potential for a global breakdown steadily enlarges.

Only an elite perspective permits this record to be regarded as an economic success.

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This undemocratic process, carried out within a democratic facade, is consistent with the distribution of benefits and costs of globalization, and the fact that globalization has been a tool serving elite interests. Globalization has also steadily weakened democracy, partly as a result of unplanned effects, but also because the containment of labor costs and scaling down of the welfare state has required the business minority to establish firm control of the state and remove its capacity to respond to the demands of the majority.

The mix of deliberate and unplanned elements in globalization's antidemocratic thrust can be seen in each aspect of the attack process. Labor is often cheapest, and least prone to cause employer problems, in authoritarian states that curb unions and enter into virtual joint venture arrangements with foreign capital, as in Suharto's Indonesia and PRI's Mexico.

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Capital moves to such friendly investment climes in an arbitrage process, shifting resources from the more expensive to the less costly locale, in a process that penalizes and thereby weakens democracy. The actual shift of capital abroad, and the use of the external option to drive hard bargains at home, has weakened labor. Labor has also been weakened by deliberate government policies of tight money and restrictive budget policies to contain inflation, at the expense of high unemployment. These policies, and the incessant focus on labor market "flexibility" as the solution to the unemployment problem, reflect a corporate and antilabor policy agenda, fully institutionalized.

There have even been more open and direct attacks on organized labor--both Reagan and Thatcher engaged in union busting, and the latter was quite explicit in her aim to weaken labor as a political force. The deliberate weakening of such groups is thus an attack on democracy. These campaigns have proceeded in parallel with globalization and have been remarkably similar, reflecting the global flow of ideology and overlapping sources of funding.

The favored neoliberal ideology pushes the idea that the market can do it all, that government is a burden and threat, and that deregulation and privatization are inherently good and inevitable. It presses an extreme individualism and the value of "personal responsibility," which is highly advantageous to corporate power, leaving bargaining between large firms and isolated individuals.

Collective and community values, the threat of externalities and ecological damage from unconstrained business growth, free market instability--all are shunted aside in this ideological system. This ideological campaign has been highly successful, because vast sums of business money fed to intellectuals and think tanks, and business domination of the mass media, have allowed their views to prevail.

The business community has also mounted a powerful effort to dominate governments--either by capture or by limiting their ability to serve ordinary citizens. Globalization has contributed to this effort, partly by the arbitraging process mentioned earlier, which favors authoritarian rule.

Apart from this, by enlarging business profits and weakening labor it has shifted the balance of power further toward business, so that political parties have been even more decisively influenced by business money in elections. In the United States, it is notorious that Mr. The Study of World Politics. The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development. Politics of Anti-Racism Education: In Search of Strategies for Transformative Learning. Routledge Handbook of Queer Development Studies. Education and Emancipation in the Neoliberal Era.

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European Cosmopolitanism in Question. Critical Imaginations in International Relations. The Postcolonial Politics of Development. Anti-Colonial Theory and Decolonial Praxis. Race Critical Public Scholarship. International and Cross-Cultural Management Studies.

Radicalizing Democracy for the Twenty-first century. Civil Society in Liberal Democracy. The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory.

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Global Civil Society and Transversal Hegemony. Constructing a Global Polity. Postmodernism in a Global Perspective. Community and Collective Rights. The Future of Human Rights. The Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology.

Social Inequalities, Media, and Communication. Democracy, Education, and Multiculturalism. A Companion to Social Geography. Multicultural Citizenship of the European Union. The Politics of Legality in a Neoliberal Age. Educational Commons in Theory and Practice. Democratic Theorists in Conversation. Development Ethics at Work. Making Human Rights Intelligible. As a whole, the collection issues a serious critical challenge to international studies and to both scholarly and applied policy communities.

This is a valuable contribution on a much contested concept.

Globalization, Difference, and Human Security

Human Security, Culture, and Globalization: Transculturality, Creative Practice, or Oeuvre? The Series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages with alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and cultural approaches to international relations and global politics.

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