Globalisation is of interest to us in as much as it influences politics, not as an economic, social, cultural event; nonetheless it is useful to establish a couple of basic points that clarify what we are talking about.
The globe has become the easily accessible dimension of many economic activities thanks to technical and policy factors. The first include the invention and rapid spread of both IT (information technology) and containers and container ships, which have hugely increased the size of communication and trade among societies, enterprises and individuals; by the second, the policy factor, I mean the tearing-down of protectionist trade barriers and the opening of more and more free markets, not just for commodities and financial capital, but wage-labourers as well (the latter with limitations to migrations, and a low level of social protection for migrants). What defines globalisation is, however, not just the planetary dimension, but likewise the growing level of interdependence among its participants.
The main areas of globalisation are:
A comprehensive, well-documented and unbiased history of globalisation is still to be written. In the sense of the widening dimension of knowledge and exchange among humans, it has always existed, with leaps forward in the Mediterranean area in Roman times and in all of Europe and beyond at the time of early capitalism, as a world market was created.1 But we are here only interested in its last chapter, which began in the 1970–80s and for the first time in history made the planetary dimension easily available to everybody every day (I can read every morning the newspapers published everywhere, buy stocks on any stock exchange on the planet in real time and fly anywhere, whenever I wish – granted I have enough money and own the appropriate passport). The specificity of the present globalisation wave is undeniable, whereas all insistence on globalisation being a constant in human history and therefore hardly a novelty is of little help – more interesting is the study of retreating or waning globalisation in periods such as the early Middle Ages.
On the one hand, the modern push to globalise was and is inscribed in the logic of capitalism since the creation of a world market, and now particularly in the presence of technological leaps forward and a favourable environment as it was created by the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT 1947, which became in 1995 the World Trade Organization, WTO). In this sense, a new wave of globalisation at the conclusion of what the French call Les Trente Glorieuses (the thirty glorious years of reconstruction, growth, full employment and rising welfare between 1945–1975) was to be expected and inevitable. On the other hand, the new wave was also the result of policies devised by the Bretton Woods institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and entangled in cultural if not policy coordination with the US Department of the Treasury in the framework of the so-called Washington consensus.2 This was a mix of common sense directives and neoliberal dogmas (trade liberalisation, privatisation of state properties, deregulation), whose massive and uncritical application in developing countries created much economic and social havoc and made globalisation the target of protest movements around the world; they were later reunited in the World Social Forum, originally held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001 as a counter-event to the mainstream World Economic Forum, organised every year in Davos/Switzerland. But even critics do not reject globalisation altogether and rather propose an ‘alter-globalisation’, which would change its rules and goals.
Having sketched the essentials of globalisation, we shall now examine
a. Globalisation’s effects on politics are double-edged. On the positive side, it has substantially contributed to economic growth in developing countries, thus lifting hundreds of millions from poverty and illiteracy, as in India and China, and promoting the build-up of a middle class: all conditions that are favourable to political participation and democracy, where this exists and is not spoiled by populism. Another huge advantage of globalisation is that growing interdependence tends to foster peaceful relationships among states, as it replaces hegemony or imperial dominance. It is true that the degree of interdependence existing during the belle époque did not prevent the First World War from erupting, but this time interdependence seems to work hand-in-hand with the deterrence created not only by the nuclear balance of terror, but by the fear of highly destructive conventional warfare as well.
On the problematic side, we meet first the losers of globalisation: all those who have lost their jobs or seen their income dwindle as a side effect of it. Peasants from the traditional agriculture of poor countries or older skilled and unskilled workers from wealthy countries’ factories that have been shut down because of the competition from energetically developing countries are only the best known representatives. For these losers, the trouble is the new political powerlessness of the nation state that would have previously addressed social crises by industrial protectionism or generous social policies; these are now ruled out either by the sharper international competition and/or regulations barring state intervention in the economic life. Besides, what used to be the first tool of redistribution inside a country, fiscal policy, is now severely limited by the free transborder flow of capital, which is pumped out of countries as soon as they try to fund social policies compensating globalisation by imposing more taxes on businesses and the wealthy. Keynesian deficit spending for social purposes is made difficult if not impossible; the attitude towards budget deficit and public debt depends in part on the economic doctrine or ideology followed by the nation’s government. Lastly, inside countries’ income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient, in other words the gap between the very rich and the very poor, has gone up with globalisation, which has in the core capitalist countries unleashed protest movements eager to delegitimise a social and political system privileging – as they say – the uppermost 1% against the 99% of the people. While social conflicts are healthy for democracy, the feeling – particularly in the youth – of being marginalised and politically powerless against the dragons of globalised financial games is not.
Not to forget are the future, indeed imminent effects of the globalisation of health care, due to both the penetration of pharmaceutical corporations into developing countries and the work of international institutions such as the World Health Organization. This has hugely and rapidly extended life expectancy almost everywhere, which along with other factors will further expand world population, thus creating possible food and water shortages and increasing global warming: one more global problem that politics-as-usual is poorly equipped to address.
In terms of the human condition, the balance is, on the whole, likely to tip in favour of globalisation because of the enormous and swift job it did in lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, something that could have not been otherwise achieved. The price paid by the losers we have mentioned was high and could have been softened if less ideological radicalism had been deployed by the neoliberal supporters of globalisation and the governments had put in place timely compensatory policies such as retraining measures for the workforce. But these considerations or speculations do not address the true problem: can globalisation be politically governed?
b. Political globalisation means two different things: which political structures have been globalised, and if and how the globalised world can be politically governed.
Globalisation has so far regarded democracy, human rights and terrorism. After the fall of the Soviet regime and the dismemberment of the Communist empire, liberal democracy has remained the only model of polity with universal appeal around the world. Alternative claims are raised, as in China, but – as we have seen in Chapter 5 – none with the same degree of acceptance and legitimacy as the democracy of Western origin. It is true that this circumstance says nothing on the real democratic quality of the present regimes that label themselves democratic, nor on democracy’s ability to govern the globalised world. What is stunning, is that after the demise of the European regimes that in the Middle Ages all claimed to be Christian, neither Europe nor the world had ever known such a degree of alleged homogeneity. The consequences of this circumstance on political allegiance and participation are still to be seen.
Human rights, or rather the debates and the struggles aimed at codifying them and making them respected all over the planet, have also been boosted by globalisation, which has brought labourers and union activists in the developing countries closer together with the liberal public opinion of Western consumers. In the remaining Communist regimes (China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba) and in some African dictatorships or plebiscitary democracies, little has changed, but there is no longer an alternative empire, like the former Soviet Union, to deny the primacy of liberal democracy in the name of ‘substantial democracy’. The right of women to not be marginalised or kept as men’s servants, to not be sold as child brides, to not be excluded from education and deprived of bodily integrity by genital mutilation is more widely and loudly asserted, though not much seems to have changed in traditional societies. In a backlash against cultural modernity, Islamist fanaticism has even revived the enslavement of women – questionable or outright faked that their attempted resort to Islamic religion may be. In light of these events, a differentiated analysis of the relationship of human rights with the various religions and cultures on earth appears to be more fruitful than philosophical speculations; while the question of their universality or relativity will be discussed in Chapter 8.
With the unrelenting change it has promoted in all societies and its modernist, rationalistic culture, globalisation has created an environment opposite to the religious fundamentalism that since the beginning of the new century has become the main inspiration of international terrorism as a global phenomenon.3 Where does then their connection lie? It is, on the one hand, characterised by international terrorism being, to an extent, a reaction to devastating (for traditional cultures) advances of globalisation. On the other hand, globalisation of trade and communication has greatly facilitated the spreading of terrorism, having created an open, complex and fragile world society, which is easy to attack or even to paralyse by applying the asymmetric warfare of suicide bombers, with its de-globalising effects (on air traffic and tourism, for example). It is not even safe to assume that another piece of asymmetric warfare, a possible nuclear device built by terrorists maybe in the form of a ‘dirty bomb’, can be prevented from ever being created. In general, militarization and war are verifiably anti-globalisation forces (cf. Acemoglu-Yared 2010).
Can globalisation be governed?
We now begin discussing this question, but will be able to complete the discussion only after considering global/lethal challenges in Part 2 of the chapter.
Globalisation means a cleavage in politics, in as much as the problems it raises belong to a dimension for which no government exists. This gap between the size of the issues and the size of the existing governing activity occurs for the first time in history, and makes any political theory obsolete that does not rethink politics and government taking the new conditions into account. On the other hand, the gap also leads many to the illusion that, given the size of the issues to address, a corresponding new size of government and authority will also soon materialise in the shape of world government or global governance. This is the residual outcome of a comfortable, but shortsighted philosophy of history that states that humanity only sets itself tasks it can also manage. Peoples and politicians are reluctant to change their habits and systems of government as long as they still see enough advantages in sticking to the old, and are not driven by compelling forces to change their routes. Are the global challenges of Part 2 compelling enough?
This remains to be seen, while on world government we have said what is necessary in the previous chapter. It is now time to discuss in detail the notion of global governance, which has already popped up somewhere in this book. At first glance, governance looks like a stopgap notion where no government is possible; but it is indeed more than this. Globalisation makes us ask if government as a formal institution is possible and desirable under all circumstances, and think that in the global dimension the absence of government may not necessarily be a deficit. In essence, what we need is that the globalised world is somehow governed rather than having this done by a government – in the sense of a national government writ large.
Now, to make sense of the notion of global governance, it is wise to keep its two prevailing meanings from each other. In the first analytical meaning it is understood as a performance of the international system, provided by the accidental combination of various forces and actions in an impersonal and, as it were, actor-less way; this combination of myriads of actions driven by the most different motives and goals brings about a degree of governance that takes place behind the actors’ back.4 Not unlike what goes on in the concept of anarchical society, it is ‘as if’ actors had agreed to work for certain shared goals (in this case the governing of global processes), whereas we know that they certainly did not. On this count, global governance is a problem that finds unstable and varying solutions in a world in which the space for goal-oriented political management of affairs has become minimal.
Who is unsatisfied with global governance as extra-political performance of the social system handles it as a normative project that has chances to change things and needs to be defined. Here, governance results from the planned actions of the actors; the open question is how the best (best under a general principle such as justice or efficiency) global governance can be brought about. In some versions, global governance is more explicitly presented as an anti-neoliberal project, as it means providing governance for the otherwise anarchical and therefore unjust globalised world, instead of relying on what worldwide market forces and national governments driven by the idea of national interest may bring about; it means to organise solutions for what would otherwise remain an anarchical reality, much to the disadvantage of the weakest. In this direction one – not necessarily the most productive – development is found in the literature related to the topic of global justice, which will be dealt with in Chapter 9.
Global governance, however, is not limited to the two theoretical views we illustrated, but was and remains also a fledgling activity of international, mostly intergovernmental institutions such as the Commission on Global Governance, which worked between 1992 and 1995, and the UN Global Compact Governance Board/Office; not to speak of the bodies that, though not working under that headline, provide some amount of global governance such as G7/8, G20, the Financial Stability Board, as well as two UN-based projects: the Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015) and the Sustainable Development Goals (2016–2030). It is not our task to find out which conception of global governance these bodies heed. Needless to say that, through all of this, it is obvious that no form of global governance of political affairs is on its way to becoming world government, but rather a piecemeal attempt at providing governance of some essential single issue such as health or web addresses or missile technology.5 Instances of global governance are neither universal (not all of the countries participate) nor compelling nor always felt as legitimate.
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At midway through our review of global affairs we stop for a while and draw some provisional conclusions regarding capitalism, the state and democracy.
Capitalism has once again proven its vitality by globalising itself and changing the framework conditions of the economy and politics in the many ways we have tried to sketch. But it has failed to rethink its own governance rules under the new circumstances, in particular after the Great Recession, started in 2008 in America and Europe. This event has disproven the myth of the self-regeneration of the market as far as it was left free to follow its logic of profit disjointed from production and consumption of real goods. Financial capitalism, the motor that cracked in 2008, has been largely successful afterwards in impeding a re-regulation capable of preventing a rerun of the crisis. The capitalism of the twenty-first century has not been so far up to its own Schumpeterian definition as ‘creative destruction’.
The nation state has, on the one hand, acquired unprecedented tools of control on the life of society, for example in fiscal, health and security issues; government techniques, or what Foucauldians would call governamentality, have become more refined due to both technological and organisational advances. On the other hand, the weakening and perforation of borders, in a physical (migrants) and what is more in a virtual (financial transactions) sense, have deprived states of control mechanisms that were an important instance of sovereignty. As we have just seen in the case of financial capital, mechanisms nearly as robust as those once put in place by national governments have not been established at an interstate level. The only still effective national actors in financial and economic policy are the central banks via monetary policy, but only in an indirect and limited measure. In a global perspective, the erosion and partial impotence of sovereign statehood has created a void that is not being refilled by global institutions, but rather left to extra-political forces such as financial markets or multinational corporations. This retreat of politics, which resonates with the ‘retreat of the state’ analysed by Susan Strange (1996), is one of the most significant side effects of globalisation.
Democracy’s fate in globalisation is highly ambivalent: on the one hand, the prevailing state of affairs seems to be democracy’s victory parade across most of the planet, though the non-availability of alternative models does not guarantee the quality of democratisation.6 On the other hand, democracy has been losing effectivity and credibility, in the first case because not only of the dimensional gap between national democracy and issues requiring global governance, but also of the mentioned retreat of politics as human agency in shaping communal life. These factual changes have percolated into the voters’ minds, particularly among the youth in developed countries, and generated waves of disaffection from democratic procedures and proneness to populism or extremism. For situations in which the democratic institutional framework remains in place, yet the citizens no longer feel they can determine the course of public affairs, the keyword ‘post-democracy’ is being put into circulation (cf. Crouch 2004).
What democracy can take advantage of is, however, not any effort of an impossible return to its social-democratic or liberal stage in the nation state, but rather the invention of a new architecture, both domestic and federative, that fits the complex globalised world. This will yet not happen if politics, and democratic politics in particular, does not stand up to the lethal threats that undermine them even more than economic globalisation. Rather than complaints over ‘de-democratisation’, a profound and innovative shift in the theory and culture of democracy is required.