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Volume 3, Number 1, 1997
James H. Mittelman, ed. As the 20th century draws to a close everyone seems to be obsessed with globalization. The questions -- what it is, and when and how it arrives -- apply as equally to the 21st century as they do to globalization, as if the two go together quite naturally in some millennial dynamic. There is a sense of inevitability on the one hand, and on the other, considerable trepidation. Globalization: Critical Reflections addresses these sensibilities directly. This collection of chapters offers perspectives on globalization from quite diverse standpoints. The editor, James Mittelman, organizes the collection thematically, presenting globalization as the multi-faceted and the quite contradictory process that it is. Underlying the theme of the contradictions of globalization is Karl Polanyi's double movement, of market forces and the protective response. The book is divided between essays on neoliberal pressures to relax and eliminate market regulations, and essays on social movements resisting the reduction of social life to the commodity form, offering alternative political and cultural paradigms based on justice and an ethic of cosmopolitanism. But all chapters acknowledge, explicitly or implicitly, the complexity of globalization's simultaneously integrating and fragmenting forces. [Page 226] Mittelman opens with the questionable claim that globalization is a market-induced rather than a policy-led process. This claim derives from his legitimate proposition that a new global division of labor embodies a series of relationships whereby the sites, practices, and objectives of politics are transformed through the globalization process. The state facilitates globalization through material necessity, but such loss of state power releases historical forces in the form of sub-national identity politics on the one hand, and democratizing forces on the other, including various resistance movements such as feminism, environmentalism and human rights organizations. As he argues, globalization is "about opportunities arising from reorganizing governance, the economy, and culture throughout the world ... opening up possibilities for more vigorous political participation at non-state levels" (p. 237). In a companion opening chapter Robert Cox, using the powerful metaphor of the Wizard of Oz, wonders aloud if there is any coherent regulatory power in the global economy, noting also that globalization undercuts conventional national political authority. Given this, and social polarization on a global scale, he suggests the conditions may be emerging for alternative forms of civil society and civilizational unity on a world scale. The economic dimensions of globalization are featured in chapters by Saskia Sassen and Gary Gereffi. Sassen juxtaposes the global economy of "flows" (of capital and services), advanced by information technologies, with the new geography of centrality of regulatory nodes, stemming from the centralization of command and the provision of services in global cities. The significance of her juxtaposition is that states remain important vehicles of the global economy, in the sense that, being spatial and legal organizations, states accommodate and contribute to the elaboration of new transnational regimes regulating these flows (rather than withering away). Gereffi reviews the shifting ground of development strategies, under conditions of transnationalization of production. Referring to various case studies, his focus is on the global scale of the ladder of industrial development, represented spatially by commodity chains. Development, here, involves climbing the ladder by technological upgrading and adapting the institutional practices of successful upwardly mobile states, such as the Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs). [Page 227] A bridging chapter on the state by Leo Panitch is in a category of its own. Here is a sophisticated argument about how globalization involves the restructuring of states, rather than bypassing them, as states internalize neoliberal principles and author their own internationalization. This observation is grounded in a case study of NAFTA, and its institutionalization of a global property regime through investment and intellectual property laws that exceed property laws in its member states. The logic of this argument is that globalization accentuates a long-standing accommodation of states to capital, and that neither entity in and of itself is an adequate basis for an alternative democratic politics. The second part of this collection comprises a rich set of case studies. There is Glenn Adler's analysis of the rise of the new social unionism in the context of South African industrialization under the aegis of transnational corporate investment, followed by Fantu Cheru's recounting of the material and political betrayals of African development projects, leading to a multi-faceted (and not necessarily coherent) social movement with a healthy suspicion of formal politics and development rhetoric. And, beyond South Africa, the experience of globalization is largely one of marginalization. June Nash and Christine Kovic offer a detailed examination of the limits of Mexican President Salinas's attempt to restructure political and economic networks to favor entrepreneurialism in the context of NAFTA, limits that were exposed dramatically by the Zapatista-led rebellion of 1994. Finally Mustapha Kamal Pasha and Ahmed Samatar peel back the layers surrounding Islamic movements to reveal a complex and fragile combination of reaction to, and qualification of, modernity, rooted in a social base increasingly marginalized by the forces of globalization. While there is by no means a common understanding of what globalization entails, with each essay situating its subject matter's relationship to globalization in quite different ways, arguably this is the point. Something is happening, but we don't know quite what it is, do we? Which is why there is so much up for grabs, and why centers may not yet hold, and why millennial themes and identity politics are in the forefront. [Page 228] The concluding section of the book by Stephen Gill and Mittelman offers perspective on the limits of globalization. Gill, who is the progenitor of the idea of the "new constitutionalism," whereby (unrepresentative) rules institutionalizing global market relations overlay member states, sees paradoxes in contemporary globalization. First, the existence of alternative civilizations make a neoliberal world order a logical impossibility. Second, the democratizing trends associated with global resistances are profoundly limited by the rollback of institutionalized social rights by globalization. Finally, the social inequality produced by contemporary globalization not only unmasks development rhetoric, but represents a crisis of social reproduction of such enormity that it can only generate alternatives. There is an inevitability in this scenario, including a certainty that new political avenues will gain ground. Mittelman's concluding chapter synthesizes the collection and explores various responses to globalization via the question: how does globalization work? Perhaps the most prescient line in the book is his final phrase: "what if globalization doesn't really work?" This is a fine collection of essays overall. The range and variety of treatments of the complex (or inchoate) subject of globalization makes this a quite representative collection. Mittelman's attempts to weave thematic unity through a set of questions work by default because globalization is such a slippery concept. As Panitch and Gill observe, globalization is not unique to the late-twentieth century, and this collection would benefit from a clearer statement of its specificity at this time. In my opinion, all the elements are present in the collection for such a statement, in the discussions of the political project of globalization and its countercurrents. These suggest that this movement involves a profound restructuring of political power, inscribed as it is with an economic logic that presents a selective (and divisive) outcome as a universal benefit. Under these conditions, arguing about corporate/economic power versus the state is a fruitless line of inquiry, since states themselves are integral to relations of production and circulation. As a result, the restructuring of capital is simultaneously the restructuring of states and political power, and vice versa. In this restructuring lies the generation of alternative forms of politics that are featured in theory and in case study throughout this collection. Herein lies the strength of this book. It presents globalization as a moving target, and, as such, a subject that is difficult to conceptualize -- especially when it crystallizes alternative epistemologies and cultures to the rationalizing thrust of those who would manage the global market. In these senses, this is a rich and worthy treatment of a phenomenon that is often taken for granted as an inevitable process of economic integration on a world scale. [Page 229] |
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