Chapter 10

The Global Economy

Jim Glassman

Introduction

The global economy, like national economies, can be seen simultaneously as a set of material processes/practices and a set of intellectual/ideological framings of those processes and practices, with both the material practices and intellectual framings developed through social struggle. Tim Mitchell notes that the Egyptian national economy was produced through a set of interlinked material and intellectual colonial projects, which reorganized phenomena such as investment regimes and property relations, often violently, while making those relations legible and quantifiable through national accounting practices (Mitchell 2002). In a similar fashion, the global economy can be seen as produced through a set of interlinked material and intellectual practices such as geographic expansion of corporate capital, forging of trade agreements and intellectual property rights regimes, imposition of structural adjustment programs, and production of neoliberal/neoclassical theories of globalization and free trade. It is a seeming paradox that the production of modern, national economies emerged as a distinctive phenomenon largely within the period of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century globalization: the great, global expansion of industrial capital in this era gave shape to both notions of a global economy and nationalist reactions that temporarily attenuated the globalization drive (Hirst and Thompson 1999). Indeed, the dialectics of both material practice and ideological construction, on the one side, and national and global reordering of space economies, on the other, are crucial to an adequate understanding of any notion of global economy.

Many space–time framings have been advanced for the global economy. World systems theorists, following Immanuel Wallerstein (1979), date the development of a global capitalist political economy, or world system, from the sixteenth century and the beginnings of European mercantilism. Peter Taylor uses this space–time framing in his analysis of the modern state system, identifying the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia as catalyzing a system of modern territorial states, which, for world systems theorists, is an integral element of the world system (Taylor 1996). Thus, in world systems theory, the dialectic of national and transnational is explicitly present in the form of the two distinct entities that comprise the system from the sixteenth century onwards – transnational (or global) commodity chains and national-territorial states (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986).

Marxist theorists following Robert Brenner (1977) dispute this space–time framing, arguing that what develops from the sixteenth century is not – outside of England – capitalism but rather pre-capitalist and mercantilist. In this view, industrial capitalism emerges in a series of nation-states beyond England only in the nineteenth century. Benno Teschke (2003) argues that even the modern territorial (and capitalist) state develops largely within this later period, interpreting the Treaty of Westphalia as largely a framework of agreements between pre-capitalist sovereigns. In this space–time framing, the global capitalist economy develops largely from the nineteenth century, through the expansion of national capitalist economies that eventually encompassed the planet.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm (1999) like Brenner places the development of a global capitalist economy largely within the nineteenth century but, like Wallerstein, places greater emphasis on the development of transnational economic forces. I do not argue for the superiority of one or another of such framings but note that different framings depend upon particular authors’ conceptions of what constitutes capitalism (mercantilism or only industrialism) and what constitutes the fully global (globe-spanning trade networks for luxuries or more integrated circuits of general production and consumption).

Most writing on global economy by geographers has adopted a yet different framing, locating the development of a global capitalist economy largely within the post-World War II world. This framing has been produced to address a specific set of phenomena, for example the development of transnational corporations (TNCs) rather than just long-distance trade or international corporations, the development of transnational bodies regulating trade and investment (such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO)) rather than just bilateral state-to-state agreements, and the development of neoliberal versions of neoclassical economic theory (for example, Thatcherite arguments that “there is no alternative” to laissez faire) rather than just older Ricardian arguments for the virtues of international trade based on comparative advantage. Here, I address this specific conception of global economy, while nonetheless noting that the views authors take of how globalization worked in earlier periods often become central to their interpretations of the current moment of global capitalist economy.

Post-World War II Global Capitalism

It may seem strange to take the entire post-World War II period as the space–time framing for contemporary global capitalism, given that the 1945–1991 period is seen as the period of the Cold War, with the world divided between capitalist and socialist camps. For neoliberal globalization boosters, it is since the 1990s and the collapse of the former socialist economies that globalization has taken hold (Ohmae 1995; Friedman 2005). Even putting aside, however, the plausible argument that most of what was called “socialism” was developing within a broader capitalist economic and geopolitical context, it can be readily seen that the Cold War itself provided a fruitful context for the geographic expansion of capitalism, particularly within pro-capitalist Cold War states like those of Western Europe and East Asia. As such, dates like 1973 (when the Bretton Woods agreement pegging currencies to the US dollar and the US dollar to gold was scuttled), 1979 (when Deng Xiaoping’s reforms began to transform China), 1989 (when the Eastern European bloc of “actually existing socialist” countries collapsed), or 1991 (when the Soviet Communist Party self-liquidated) are less distinctive points of transition than signposts of change within a broader space–time continuum of global capitalist transformation. To be sure, post-1990 neoliberal globalization has shaped the global economy in distinctive ways, but rather than seeing these as emerging solely within the post-Cold War period much geographical work – including the present – takes the changes set in motion in the Cold War period as broadly continuous with post-Cold War globalization.

An earlier generation of scholarship did identify capitalist globalization as a crucial phenomenon in the 1970s, even as Cold War themes dominated the popular press. Among scholars, Stephen Hymer’s early studies of transnational corporations challenged nationalist understandings of economy (Hymer 1976), while Nicos Poulantzas’ work announced a concomitant “internationalization of the state” in Europe (Poulantzas 1978). In a more popular vein, public intellectuals Richard Barnett and Ronald Muller (1974) analyzed the development of economic actors with “global reach,” while in a 1976 movie, Network, film producer Paddy Chayefsky scripted the following, remarkable neoliberal globalization speech, in which Arthur Jensen (actor Ned Beatty) berates nationalist news anchorman Howard Beale (Peter Finch):

You are an old man [Mr. Beale], who thinks in terms of nations, and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians! There are no Arabs! There are no Third Worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate multi-national dominion of dollars! Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, rubles, rins, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the quality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, sub-atomic, and galactic structure of things today!

(cited in Sheppard et al. 2009: 598)

This framing of neoliberal globalization is important to highlight, since it not only flags the highly visible material processes of transnational economic integration that were underway in the 1960s and 1970s but the awareness and critical construction of these phenomena by (largely) left-leaning scholars and commentators. It was later that globalization became a buzzword in the popular media and among more conservative scholars. This timing arguably corresponded to the fact that the collapse of the Left in much of the world made it easier for conservatives to celebrate neoliberal globalization as a force for which there was no alternative, rather than – as in Left scholarship of the 1970s – a contestable process reflecting the next phase of uneven capitalist development.

Much of the geographical scholarship that has produced conceptions of a global capitalist economy draws from moments of critical insight that emerged in the 1970s, though recent scholarship goes well beyond these starting points. I trace the development of arguments by geographers regarding global economy through the writings of scholars whose work responds to the critical perspectives put forward in and since this period, noting the dialectics that connect their ideas to the political-economic and socio-cultural processes they study. In particular, the broadly Marxist writings of David Harvey and Eric Swyngedouw, the neoMarxist world systems writings of Peter Taylor, the broadly Gramscian writings of John Agnew, the post-Marxist writings of J.K. Gibson-Graham, and the writings of a number of more eclectic scholars, including Peter Dicken, Linda McDowell, Richa Nagar, Eric Sheppard, and Henry Yeung, provide a sense of how geographers conceptualize the coming into being of a global capitalist economy. In lieu of merely summarizing these authors, drawing from them I highlight three thematic arguments about the global economy emerging in economic geography.

Theme I: the Global Capitalist Economy Does Not Abolish – but Transforms – Space

Early, and fanciful, post-Cold War constructions of the global economy sometimes suggested that with globalization the friction of distance was being eliminated and space was being abolished as a barrier to economic processes, the ultimate model of economic interaction being the financial transaction initiated on one side of the globe and culminated in real time on the opposite side (e.g. O’Brien 1992). In Manuel Castells’ less fanciful and highly influential discussion of the “network society,” it was allowed that the friction of distance still marked the activities engaged in by those who are left out of the networks of globalization, but on the inside of the networks there existed a “space of flows” in which space and the friction of distance are largely transcended through the technological effects of developments in fields such as telecommunications, containerization, precision tools, and transportation (Castells 2000).

While recognizing the real effects of what David Harvey and others have dubbed “space-time compression” (Harvey 1989a) – the increasing ability to move more goods, people, and information across larger spaces in less time – most geographers have rightly insisted that contemporary globalization has not only failed to abolish space as a major consideration in economic processes but has, if anything, enhanced its significance. Many factors contribute to this outcome. One is that with more global economic integration individual places and communities are forced to compete with increasing intensity to market themselves as attractive sites for potential investment. While this may lead to at best superficial differences between places – “urban entrepreneurialism” (Harvey 1989b; Leitner 1990) and the increasing commodification of all aspects of life (Wallerstein 1983) leading to much socio-cultural convergence – it is nonetheless the case that places within the global economy are increasingly differentiated according to the prospects they present for global capital. During the latest economic crisis, this kind of differentiation has become painfully evident. As the US property bubble collapsed in the wake of the subprime lending crisis, certain cities and neighborhoods escaped relatively unscathed, while others went to the wall. Detroit, once the heartland of a robust US industrial economy but now suffering from both prolonged “hollowing out” and acute financial collapse, has been devastated to such an extent that average housing prices within the city had plummeted to US$7500 by 2009 (Jones 2009). Similar but less severe problems have plagued the nearby Canadian automobile manufacturing cities of Windsor and Hamilton, Ontario. Yet through the period of subprime meltdown, some Western Canadian cities continued to boom – Calgary in part on the basis of the province’s resource exports to Asia, Vancouver in part on the basis of continued property investment from Asia and elsewhere. Thus, by 2010, average housing prices in Calgary were CD$382 000 (US$371 000) and CD$638 000 (US$622 000) in Vancouver – the latter only slightly less than San Francisco’s US$705 700 (Living in Canada 2010; Zillow.com 2010).

For many geographers, an understanding that space and place remain crucial to economic processes – and to differential outcomes between places – did not await the most recent economic crisis; instead, the differentiated fallout of crisis merely confirmed what was already being argued. In addition to “urban entrepreneurialism” and place-based marketing having become more important in differentiating investment sites, many economic geographers have highlighted how contemporary globalization seems to transform space in particular ways that highlight scale issues. Erik Swyngedouw, for example, coined the term “glocalization” to emphasize the simultaneous increase in importance of global and local scales of organization, relative to the previously dominant national scale (Swyngedouw 1997). For authors who emphasize “glocalization” processes, the naive view that space is becoming less important is predicated on the confused argument that the once seemingly predominant national scale of economic organization constituted the sole fashion in which economic processes could be territorialized. In this naive view, transcendence of the national container by neoliberal globalization erodes the significance of territory for the economy and thereby makes economics less place-bound. Yet for Swyngedouw and others, neoliberal globalization only erodes the importance of national territorial economies by increasing the salience of both local urban economies and transnational economic networks, as well as their attendant institutions of governance (see Brenner 2004). This makes forms of spatiality such as transnational economic networks and translocally-linked urban centers crucial to the functioning of global capitalism (Derudder and Witlox 2010).

World systems approaches have long maintained skepticism about neoliberal globalizers’ visions of a spatially transformed economic world. For Wallerstein, the capitalist world has always been global – at least in its tendencies – composed since the sixteenth century of both global commodity chains and territorial nation-states, the tensions between these two providing the grist for political struggles over capitalism (Wallerstein 2000). Like Swyngedouw, Taylor sees the transnational and local scales of economic organization now becoming more important relative to the national scale – albeit without eliminating the significance of national states (Taylor 2000a). Increasingly, for Taylor and a number of other scholars influenced by world systems approaches, the most fruitful avenue for understanding the global economy is the study of “world cities” – major sites of transnational capitalist investment, especially in advanced producer services (APS) such as finance, accounting, advertising, and law (Taylor 2004; Friedmann 1986; 1995). World cities form the foundation for what Taylor calls a “world city network,” a set of places interlinked through key activities of transnational capital that attempts to establish place-based monopolies in APS industries (Taylor 2000b; 2004). World cities, then, are places in which globalization processes that transcend national borders come to ground. In this sense, they exemplify “glocalization” and “glurbanization.”

While the world cities approach contributes to a construction of global economy that eschews naive notions of increasing abolition of space, it is not without limits. For example, like Castell’s account it seems to neglect a wide array of places and processes that do not fit into the “world city” characterization. Few places in the world are any longer “off the map” of globalization (Robinson 2002; 2006), making it necessary to theorize the global economy in ways that recognize phenomena like world cities while encompassing broader and richer processes of global economic integration (Glassman 2010a).

One approach which attempts to deal with an increasingly complex global economic spatiality is the Global Production Networks (GPN) literature (Coe and Hess this volume). Building from the heterodox work of authors like Peter Dicken and Henry Yeung, this literature has evolved out of the global commodity chains (GCC) and global value chains (GVC) writings of authors influenced by world systems approaches, especially Gary Gereffi (Gereffi 1994; Gereffi, Humphrey, and Sturgeon 2005; Yeung 1997; 1998). Building on the world systems and world cities insight that value production in capitalism always transcends national territorial economies, the GCC/GVC literature has generated empirically rich studies of transnationalized production processes, such as those associated with the garment, electronics, and automotive industries. Redressing weaknesses in the industry-specific focus of the earlier GCC/GVC studies, the GPN literature has gone on to suggest that while GCCs are important to chart, it is more productive to follow the more diffuse but integral connections of production networks that include an array of sites – not only firm headquarters and production facilities, but research and development institutes, legal and public relations firms, and so on – and a complex of production processes (including various subcontracting arrangements). The view of global economy that emerges from this is not of a placeless or egalitarian system, but neither is it of a global economy built around a simple hierarchy of specific production sites, world cities, or “spaces of flows” from which much of the world is excluded. Rather, it is of a global economy that, while hierarchical and built around uneven flows of commodities, capital, and labor, nonetheless encompasses much of the world’s population, albeit in a complicated and highly inegalitarian fashion.

Two kinds of reflections on this increasingly complex global economy summarize well what might be taken as an important result to emerge from work by economic geographers. Eric Sheppard, discussing the “space-times” of globalization, suggests that not only has the contemporary development of a global capitalist economy highlighted the importance of space but it has also made it necessary to more carefully reflect on the spatial concepts with which we produce an understanding of global economy. Increasingly, the global economy is a complex of multiple-scale processes (for example, “glocalization” with residual national-territorial production), transnational networks (GCCs and GPNs), as well as specific forms of connection that reflect the “space-time compression” generated by new communications technologies. For the last of these, Sheppard uses the image of a “wormhole,” a specific location linked tightly by specific forms of information and commodity flows to another location that is not spatially proximate. Within this heady mix of spatial forms, Sheppard argues, the sociospatial positionality of different actors remains important in shaping economic outcomes (Sheppard 2002). This is not a global economy in which space is abolished or transcended but rather one in which spatial interconnections are increasingly important and increasingly – or perhaps simply more obviously – complex.

A second reflection on global economic space by Richa Nagar, Victoria Lawson, Linda McDowell, and Susan Hanson highlights an aspect of the global economy complementary to the complex spatiality emphasized by Sheppard. They argue that the global capitalist economy is gendered and spatially variegated in ways that can only be appreciated when the gender dimensions of labor in specific locales are highlighted (Nagar et al. 2002). Not only the much-discussed phenomenon of “women on the global assembly line” but numerous transformations in household production and social reproduction are thus centrally implicated in the increasing complexity of global economy. Viewing the global economy through the sites of these locations of (re)production, much like viewing the development of globalization from cities that are “off the map” of the world cities network, casts in relief both the integration of most of the world into global capitalist production and the sociospatially uneven ways in which this integration is proceeding, while it also emphasizes that much of the agency of globalization is located outside of the metropole and world cities.

Theme II: the Global Capitalist Economy Perpetuates – and Transforms – Uneven Development

The complex spatiality of the contemporary global capitalist economy tips us off that neoliberal globalization has produced numerous forms of sociospatial inequality. Indeed, it is common to hear that neoliberal globalization has led to increased inequality at all scales, from the household to the municipality, nation-state, and global system.

Such a view has not been endorsed by neoliberal globalization boosters, most of whom argue that the general tendencies of global capitalism are in fact towards greater sociospatial equalization of growth rates and incomes, or at least greater equalization of opportunities to participate in the benefits of globalization (Friedman 2005). Some have gone so far as to suggest that neoliberal globalization is beginning to reverse long-term trends that have produced enormous disparities in incomes across the face of the planet, allowing large countries like China and India to begin catching up with those in the global North that had forged ahead in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Firebaugh 2003).

The most careful studies of phenomena like global income inequality give little comfort to such arguments, but neither do they conform to any simple picture of a global economy in which inequality is increasing everywhere all the time. Instead, the increasingly complex spatiality of global capitalism transforms patterns of sociospatial inequality.

Branko Milanovic’s (2005) review of the evidence regarding world income inequality – the differences in income between all individuals in the world, rather than differences between average national incomes – suggests that total world income inequality has continued to increase with neoliberal globalization, though long-term estimates from Francois Bourguinon and Christian Morrisson suggest that these increases may be smaller than those that occurred from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries (Bourguinon and Morrisson 2002). Equally important, though, is the fact that the geography of world income inequality has begun to shift, slowly but perceptibly. The dramatic growth of China and the less dramatic growth of India have eroded aggregate, statistical differences between average incomes in the global core and global periphery. As such, the growth of China and India – along with a handful of Asian newly industrializing countries (NICs) – might be expected to reduce world income inequality. But the contribution that rapidly growing average incomes in China and India make to reducing world inequality is offset by dramatic increases in inequality within China and India, which have a very strong sociospatial expression in income differentials between states and provinces (e.g. Wu and Perloff 2004; Glassman 2010a). Moreover, as Milanovic argues, although the aggregate growth of China and India reduce the amount of world income inequality statistically attributable to classic, nationally-based core-periphery phenomena, this does little to erode an overall core-periphery structure. While China and India’s growth narrows the gap between the average incomes of core and peripheral countries, the vast majority of peripheral countries have continued to be very poor compared to countries in the global core, and most have even lost relative ground during the period of neoliberal globalization since the 1970s (Milanovic 2005).

The picture that emerges here is one where an increasingly complex global economic spatiality is producing an increasingly complex pattern of sociospatial inequality. Some places and people within the global South – social elites, privileged middle classes, and better off workers in selected locations within the NICs – may be gaining relative ground in world income terms (however grudgingly), but many workers and farmers in these same NICs are at best holding their own, while the majority of people in less privileged sites of the global economy continue to face stark disparities and the prospect of falling even further behind in relative terms (see Davis 2007). The global North is itself becoming more heterogeneous, with a growing class divide in incomes characterizing aggressively neoliberal states like the United States and England (Duménil and Lévy 2004) and regional differences in income and growth rates within OECD countries – differences that were persistent even during the “Golden Age” of post-World War II Fordism (Webber and Rigby 1996) – becoming yet more marked.

If one paints additional dimensions of this picture, the notion that the global capitalist economy continues to produce uneven development – even if in increasingly complex ways – becomes especially compelling. Distribution of wealth, the ownership of assets, is even more skewed than distribution of income. A first of its kind study by economists estimating world disparities in wealth not only provides illustrative numbers for the year 2000 – a Gini coefficient of 0.893 for world wealth distribution, compared to 0.795 for world income distribution – but also shows a persistent core-periphery structure to this skewed distribution, with almost all of the world’s wealthiest residing in the Triad of Europe, Japan, and the United States (Davis et al. 2007: 7–8).

Uneven development of the global capitalist economy becomes increasingly evident, and complicated, when one considers inequalities in income, wealth, and opportunity along such lines as gender and race. The gendering of global capitalism is an especially complex phenomenon. On the one side, increasing participation of women in paid productive labor – always alongside their central role in unpaid social reproductive labor (Mitchell, Marston, and Katz 2004) – complicates the assessment of uneven development. As geographers like J. K. Gibson-Graham have argued, increased labor force participation by women, even if it is made possible by global economic restructuring that is prejudicial to the interests of male workers, may open new opportunities for women, within both the paid labor force and the household (Gibson-Graham 2006). This echoes a long line of Marxist feminist claims recognizing that even if women being inducted onto the global assembly line leads to their exploitation it also potentially strengthens their bargaining power within the household and brings them into broader social collectivities, empowering them to reconfigure their identities and challenge exploitation (e.g. Mills 1999). At the same time, however, a large amount of work by feminist geographers recognizes that women who participate more in paid labor may nonetheless face poor wages and working conditions (Cravey 1998), substantial workplace discrimination even in relatively well-paid jobs (McDowell 1997), considerable constraints on their opportunities for mobility (Pratt 2004), and ongoing violence within and outside the household (Sangtin Writers and Nagar 2006; Wright 2006). Even within the United States, where the gap between men’s and women’s average incomes has fallen slightly in the context of neoliberal globalization (Henwood 1997), it is not clear that the global economy is creating a more level playing field. Indeed, when one considers that the full meaning of economic opportunity must encompass all forms of labor, and that women continue to disproportionately perform the unpaid social reproductive labor that underpins many aspects of global capitalist expansion, the gender equalizing tendencies of the global economy are difficult to ascertain.

The racialization and ethnicization of the global economy presents slightly less ambiguous – if still complex – evidence of continuing uneven development. The dramatic growth of certain Asian countries might seem to betoken the development of a global economy less marked by the global racial division of labor characteristic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the remaining core-periphery features of the global economy, combined with an intense racialization of class differentiation within various countries, makes race a continuing site of enormous conflict and uneven development. In the United States, neoliberalization has been marked by a racialization of disparity so severe that a burgeoning US prison population – comprised disproportionately of the economically disadvantaged – is overwhelmingly Black and Latino (Gilmore 2007). In China, ethnically Han populations prosper in relative terms while stigmatized non-Han populations in regions like the Southwest suffer the greatest rates of poverty (Glassman 2010a). Likewise, in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, indigenous populations are far more likely to experience severe poverty and to be treated as socially backward by more Europeanized elites and middle classes. In Thailand, where a successful capitalist development project seemed at one time to promise modernization, prosperity, and political stability within a putatively culturally unified society, recent events have shown persistent, even increased, virulence of classist-racist perceptions, through which privileged social groups in Bangkok rationalize their political economic domination of poorer people from ethnically distinct regions (Glassman 2010b). Meanwhile, throughout Europe and North America, highly racialized immigration restrictions give the lie to notions that neoliberal globalization is creating a “flat world” based on full mobility of all factors of production (Nevins 2008). As such, large racial disparities in incomes in a country like the United States parallel the continued uneven development of the global economy along racial and ethnic lines, even leading some to speak of the peripheries that exist within the core.

Theme III: the Global Capitalist Economy Does Not Bypass – but Transforms – States

Continuing global economic disparities are sometimes presented by neoliberals – when they acknowledge these – as evidence for the inevitability (and desirability) of differences in income and wealth based on merit, and/or of the inexorable working of an increasingly liberalized “market economy.” Few economic geographers have accepted this proposition, steeped as it is in the neoclassical assumption of an asocial “market” conceptualized as existing independently of politics, culture, and the like. For most economic geographers, a global capitalist economy is produced by processes that are simultaneously political, economic, cultural, social, and ideological.

Among the major consequences of this framing is recognition that, whatever else globalization does, it does not bypass politics or the activities of states (Rankin this volume). Indeed, on most accounts, neoliberal globalization is a function in part of state initiatives, such as the forging of free trade agreements and the imposition of structural adjustment programs on weaker or crisis-ridden states. Equally importantly, the role of both “developmental” states in East Asia and the US Cold War state in forming the foundations for much of the so-called “East Asian miracle” is now recognized (Glassman 2004).

This is not to say that the contemporary global economy features states that function in exactly the same way as those of the Fordist period from the end of World War II to the 1970s. In line with the notion of “glocalization,” authors such as Neil Brenner have emphasized the development of “new state spaces” – an increase in the significance of both transnational and local governance relative to national governance (Brenner 2004). In this context, national policies on taxation, industrial development, and the like, are less likely to be seen as effective, and indeed many of the former developmental states of East Asia are now characterized as “post-developmental” (Doucette 2010). But this transformation does not eliminate or even reduce the significance of state policies to the production of global economy; rather it shifts the scales at which policy becomes most important – as with transnational agreements on trade and investment and local policies encouraging urban entrepreneurialism – and transforms the emphasis of policy, for example, from policies driving the development of specific industries or protecting the national currency to policies subsidizing the development of new technologies and protecting “intellectual property.”

Most tellingly, early neoliberal promises that the end of the Cold War and the creation of a unified, global capitalist economy would bring not only generalized prosperity and equal opportunity but more peace now seem beyond the pale. In much geographical writing, the state’s integument with economic processes came directly to the fore in the early 2000s with the Bush administration’s militarily aggressive stance towards the Middle East, home of the world’s most significant oil reserves. From falling almost entirely off the radar screen of some social scientists, the term “imperialism” came back to the forefront. David Harvey (2003) portrayed the Bush regime’s war in Iraq as a “new imperialism” tensed between the neoliberal quest to free capital from national regulation and US neo-conservatives’ quest to maintain more conventionally territorialized forms of geopolitical dominance. John Agnew (2005) wrote of the US government’s attempts to maintain hegemony and the challenges posed to this project by an increasingly decentralized process of neoliberal globalization.

Amidst all the varied ways that the geopolitical economy of contemporary globalization can be portrayed in light of the wars in the Middle East, it is evident that politics – in this case militarized geopolitics – will continue to play a crucial role in the development of the global capitalist economy. Even if states can no longer control national economic space in the ways it was imagined they did in the past – and Michael Webber and David Rigby’s work on the Fordist era OECD countries suggests that such control may have been more imagined than real (Webber and Rigby 1996) – they are certainly sites of important struggles over the production of economy, including via the more violent means that states have at their disposal.

This recognition opens onto the important point that much of the research geographers have done on processes of social struggle (see Wainwright, Park, this volume) should not be seen as tangential to study of the global economy. While certainly it is not the case that every struggle everywhere has equal impact – Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (2000; 2004) sweeping claims about the effects of the “multitude” notwithstanding – the inherent politicization of global capitalist development, along with the broad integration of people everywhere in the world into GPNs, connects many sites of social struggle to the policies of states and the development of the global economy, shaping its future.

Conclusion

It might be contended that the portrayal of the global economy suggested here has the disadvantage that it leads to no obvious generalizations or conclusions, especially conclusions with obvious policy and institutional political relevance. To some extent, this is true. In challenging the simplistic contention that “there is no alternative” to capitalist globalization, economic geographers and others who have helped produce a more complex picture of the global economy have eschewed the relatively easy contentions of neoliberalism, in its opportunistic deployment of neoclassical economics. The power of neoliberalism as a rationalization of capitalist globalization has rested simultaneously on the real power of a transnational corporate/government/middle class consumer alliance and the power of the geographical imaginaries neoliberal theorists have been able to produce – as often as not, to convince their own ranks of the inevitability and desirability of the global economy their actions are producing (Harvey 2005).

In rejecting this view, the economic geographers and social scientists who highlight continued spatial variegation, uneven development, and political conflict both highlight realities of the global economy that neoliberals wish to ignore (or repress) and construct these realities in ways that might be more supportive of social struggles to make the global economy more egalitarian, something I have attempted in my analyses of Thailand and China (Glassman 2004, 2010a). The visions of what such a transformation might be are themselves enormously varied and are not the topic of this chapter. But suffice it to say that the arguments here point in the direction of some conclusions that do more than just negate neoliberal nostrums about globalization. Specifically, the view of a global capitalist economy outlined here is one which is marked by inexorable, if shifting, patterns of sociospatial inequality, patterns that are not inevitable but are conditioned by the outcome of numerous political and social struggles. In times of economic crisis and restructuring like the present – amplified by concerns over growing environmental destruction – such struggles are likely to intensify. The global economy will continue to be produced, not given, by the next rounds of social struggle over livelihood, well-being, political empowerment, and perhaps even life itself.

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