Page 2 of 2 Globalization in retreat By Walden Bello
hypocritically
preached free trade while practicing
protectionism. Indeed, the trade policy of the
Bush administration seems to be free trade for the
rest of the world and protectionism for the United
States.
Fourth, there has been too much
dissonance between the promise of globalization
and free trade and the actual results of
neo-liberal policies, which have been more
poverty, inequality, and
stagnation. One of the very
few places where poverty diminished over the past
15 years is China. But interventionist state
policies that managed market forces, not
neo-liberal prescriptions, were responsible for
lifting 120 million Chinese out of poverty.
Moreover, the advocates of eliminating
capital controls have had to face the actual
collapse of the economies that took this policy to
heart. The globalization of finance proceeded much
faster than the globalization of production. But
it proved to be the cutting edge not of prosperity
but of chaos. The Asian financial crisis and the
collapse of the economy of Argentina, which had
been among the most doctrinaire practitioners of
capital-account liberalization, were two decisive
moments in reality's revolt against theory.
Another factor unraveling the globalist
project is its obsession with economic growth.
Indeed, unending growth is the centerpiece of
globalization, the mainspring of its legitimacy.
While a recent World Bank report continues to
extol rapid growth as the key to expanding the
global middle class, global warming, peak oil, and
other environmental events are making it clear to
people that the rates and patterns of growth that
come with globalization are a surefire
prescription for ecological disaster.
The
final factor, not to be underestimated, has been
popular resistance to globalization. The battles
of Seattle in 1999, Prague in 2000, and Genoa in
2001; the massive global anti-war march on
February 15, 2003, when the anti-globalization
movement morphed into the global anti-war
movement; the collapse of the WTO ministerial
meeting in Cancun in 2003 and its near-collapse in
Hong Kong in 2005; the French and Dutch people's
rejection of the neo-liberal, pro-globalization
European Constitution in 2005 - these were all
critical junctures in a decade-long global
struggle that has rolled back the neo-liberal
project.
But these high-profile events
were merely the tip of the iceberg, the summation
of thousands of anti-neo-liberal,
anti-globalization struggles in thousands of
communities throughout the world involving
millions of peasants, workers, students and
indigenous people and many sectors of the middle
class.
Down but not out While
corporate-driven globalization may be down, it is
not out. Though discredited, many
pro-globalization neo-liberal policies remain in
place in many economies, for lack of credible
alternative policies in the eyes of technocrats.
With talks dead-ended at the WTO, the big trading
powers are emphasizing free-trade agreements
(FTAs) and economic partnership agreements (EPAs)
with developing countries. These agreements are in
many ways more dangerous than the multilateral
negotiations at the WTO, since they often require
greater concessions in terms of market access and
tighter enforcement of intellectual property
rights.
However, things are no longer that
easy for the corporations and trading powers.
Doctrinaire neo-liberals are being eased out of
key positions, giving way to pragmatic technocrats
who often subvert neo-liberal policies in practice
because of popular pressure. When it comes to
FTAs, the global South is becoming aware of the
dangers and is beginning to resist.
Key
South American governments under pressure from
their citizenries derailed the Free Trade Area of
the Americas (FTAA) - the grand plan of Bush for
the Western Hemisphere - during the Mar del Plata
conference in November 2005.
Also, one of
the reasons many people resisted prime minister
Thaksin Shinawatra in the months before the recent
coup in Thailand was his rush to conclude an FTA
with the United States. Indeed, last January, some
10,000 protesters tried to storm the building in
Chiang Mai where US and Thai officials were
negotiating. The government that succeeded
Thaksin's has put the FTA on hold, and movements
seeking to stop FTAs elsewhere have been inspired
by the success of the Thai efforts.
The
retreat from neo-liberal globalization is most
marked in Latin America. Long exploited by foreign
energy giants, Bolivia under President Evo Morales
has nationalized its energy resources. Nestor
Kirchner of Argentina gave an example of how
developing-country governments can face down
finance capital when he forced Northern
bondholders to accept only 25 cents of every
dollar Argentina owed them.
Hugo Chavez
has launched an ambitious plan for regional
integration, the Bolivarian Alternative for the
Americas (ALBA), based on genuine economic
cooperation instead of free trade, with little or
no participation by Northern TNCs, and driven by
what Chavez himself describes as a "logic beyond
capitalism".
Globalization in
perspective From today's vantage point,
globalization appears to have been not a new,
higher phase in the development of capitalism but
a response to the underlying structural crisis of
this system of production.
Fifteen years
since it was trumpeted as the wave of the future,
globalization seems to have been less a "brave new
phase" of the capitalist adventure than a
desperate effort by global capital to escape the
stagnation and disequilibria overtaking the global
economy in the 1970s and 1980s. The collapse of
the centralized socialist regimes in Central and
Eastern Europe deflected people's attention from
this reality in the early 1990s.
Many in
progressive circles still think that the task at
hand is to "humanize" globalization.
Globalization, however, is a spent force. Today's
multiplying economic and political conflicts
resemble, if anything, the period following the
end of what historians refer to as the first era
of globalization, which extended from 1815 to the
eruption of World War I in 1914. The urgent task
is not to steer corporate-driven globalization in
a "social democratic" direction but to manage its
retreat so that it does not bring about the same
chaos and runaway conflicts that marked its demise
in that earlier era.
Walden Bello
is professor of sociology at the University of
the Philippines and executive director of the
Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute
Focus on the Global South. An extended version of
this piece titled "The Capitalist Conjuncture:
Overaccumulation, Financial Crises, and the
Retreat from Globalization" appears in the latest
issue of Third World Quarterly (Vol 27, No 8,
2006).
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