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Globalization CMN 2168
Recap • Neo-liberalism is based on the Washington consensus, also called the neo-liberal doctrine (or neo-liberalism). It puts great emphasis on liberalisation of trade and finance, privatisations and the supremacy of markets. This system praises the rationalisation of all activities and services, but it generally leads to the concentration of money within the hands of a small minority.
Neo-liberalism • Neo-liberal doctrine is decided by the government of the USA (backed by the UK) and the various financial organisms that the US control in great part (Noam Chomsky, Profit over People, 1998. p.19). The participants in neo-liberalism are mostly large corporations. • The aims of the neo-liberal doctrine is to remove obstacles to its own development: state intervention, protectionism, workers rights, public services, regulation, trade unions etc. (Florian Grandena, PhD dissertation, 2005)
More precisely… • 1. Neo-liberalism aims at getting gouverments ‘away from controlling or intervening in the affairs of business’; • 2. ‘…each goverment’s reforms involved the reasonably predictable neoliberal goals of downsizing or privatizing public institutions, services and utilities such as airlines and telecommunications’
3. ‘…a failure to embrace the imperative to ‘reform’ bureaucracies could involve negative consequences for those failing to comply’ (37).
First way: Marxist uses of history (Monday) Today: • Second way: cultural theory and history • Third way: globalist perspectives
Empire • Hardt and Negri argue that ‘the various practices, institutions and discourses associated with globalization can be understood as a machine-like grid of power which incorporates and transforms politics, economics and the social (and its many aspects such as culture, civil society and subjectivity)’ (31-2)
Empire is different from other forms of state-driven imperialism. • In Empire, there is no traditional / territorial centre of power. • Empire is a move beyond state sovereignty.
‘…the inability of nation-states to control or manage their economic, political, social and cultural affairs is a symptom of the more or less terminal decline of state sovereignty, and the ascent of Empire’ (32). • Globalization = Empire.
Empire has four main characteristics: 1. Empire is a system and a hierarchy. It has its own logic. ‘Sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule’ (Hardt and Negri). ‘The declining sovereignty of nation-states and their increasing inability to regulate economic and cultural exchanges is one of the primary symptoms of Empire’ (Hardt and Negri).
2. ‘Empire processes cultures, crises, resources and power formations in order to reproduce and extend itself’ (33). ‘Empire is both a universal form of reason… and an ineluctable, and therefore uncontestable, grid of power’ (33).
‘The rule of Empire operates on all-registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the social world. Empire not only manages a territory and a population but also creates the very world it inhabits’ (Hardt and Negri). • The object of Empire’s rule is social life in its entirety.
3. Empire is decentred and boundless. Power is now diffused throughout different apparatuses, organizations, agents… 4. ‘Empire is constituted by, and constitutive of, the imbrication of the economic, political and cultural aspects of contemporary life’ (34).
Also… • ‘Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history’ (Hardt and Negri).
‘… although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace’ (Hardt and Negri).
Cultural theory and history • French intellectual Pierre Bourdieu rejects the ‘fatalism’ of Marxism and examines other aspects located outside the economic sphere (the state, the art, the media, education etc.) in order to explain domination and the exercice of power.
For Bourdieu, domination and power can partly be explained by the effects of doxa. (Doxa is a ‘set of core values and discourses which a field articulates as its fundamental principles and which tend to be viewed as inherently true and necessary’ 215) • These discourses, ideas, values… are simply accepted, but are not debated.
For Bourdieu, one of the most influential doxa is neo-liberalism. • Neo-liberalism has been established and imposed as a doxa through language and media. • ‘the process of naming that brings about this taken-for-grantedness is based on euphemisms which direct attention away from the negative social effects of economic competition and the goal of maximum profit, and which is consequently difficult to critique’ (35) • See example p.35 (boldness and flexibility).
(Euphemism is a polite word or expression that people use when they are talking about something which they or other people find unpleasant or embarassing). E.g.: ‘social plan’.
‘Many locate the ultimate authority that rules over the processes of globalization and the new world order in the United States. Proponents praise the United States as the world leader and sole superpower, and detractors denounce it as imperialist oppressor. Both these views rest on the assumption that the United States has simply donned the mantle of global power that the European nations have not let fall’.
‘The most damning charge critics can level… is that the United States is repeating the practices of old European imperialists, while proponents celebrate the United States as a more efficient and more benevolent world leader, getting right what the Europeans got wrong… ‘. • However, ‘…a new imperial form of sovereignty has emerged [and] contradicts both these views’.
‘The United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way European nations were.’ (Hardt and Negri).
Third way: Globalist perspectives • Globalists too make use of history to explain globalization. • History confirms the existence of globalization as a long term phenomenon but also shows that it has different effects on different groups at different times (40).
One must not ignore the role of technology and informationalism in globalization (see following slideshow…).
