This project responds critically to the paradigm of neo-liberal globalism that has become dominant in the past 20 years. Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, observes that the Western form of capitalism is now the consensus model of how each individual country should run its economy (in Wade, 1999, 4). Lawrence Summers, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and former chief economist of the World Bank argues that “globalist economic policy ... is the forward defense of America’s deepest security interest”. He states that anyone who is a critic of the “Bretton Woods Washington Consensus” is a “separatist” (1996:3).
The neo-liberal globalism paradigm is known by several terms: Structural Adjustment Programs, The Washington Consensus, the Wall Street-Treasury Complex, Liberal Productivism, and the New World Order. The prescription for every country is to:
It is the American model. The spread of this model indicates the presence of an overarching ideology of governance that we will refer to as “neo-liberal globalism” or simply “globalism”. Globalism is an “ism”, an ideology.1
By “globalism”, we mean the norms, institutions, and laws that support global capital accumulation along neo-liberal principles. Globalism challenges democratic assumptions about the sovereignty of states and national citizenry (Laxer, 1995a). Under globalism, states are:
Neo-liberal globalism is a specific response to the perceived requisites of globalisation That the concept of globalisation lacks both a precise definition and theory is not surprising. It was first consistently used, not by academics, but by The American Banker in 1978. Since it came into the academic lexicon it has generated an ongoing debate about what it is, whether it is a useful term and how much of it is new. David Held et al (1999) identify three distinct understandings of globalisation - the hyperglobalist, sceptical and transformationalist perspectives. Summarised in Table 1, this typology is useful in identifying the dimensions and scope of the debate. In brief, the hyperglobalist school sees globalisation primarily as an economic phenomenon that has ushered in the harmonization of economic, political and cultural practices worldwide thereby heralding the end of the nation-state, the emergence of a global society and the necessity to create institutions of global governance. Sceptics, in contrast, point to historical and comparative economic indicators to argue that globalisation, far from being a new world order, is neither new or as all-encompassing as the hyperglobalist school proposes. Sceptics argue that the late 19th and early 20th centuries experienced more extensive and intensive levels of integration and that the current era requires strong national governments to regulate, reverse or enforce neo-liberalisation. Moreover, rather than the emergence of a homogeneous civil society, sceptics predict economic and cultural fragmentation and possible deepening patterns of social inequality. Finally the transformationalist thesis emphasizes that globalisation is best understood, not as a static end-point, but instead as a multifaceted process with historically transformative impacts which cannot be predicted with any certainty. This perspective underlines the centrality of agency, resistance, politics and indeterminacy. The hyperglobalist and transformationalist schools accept that globalisation is a real qualitative break from the past. They are discontinuity perspectives, while the sceptical school emphasizes historical continuity.
Table 1 here [sorry - couldn’t reproduce here]
Researchers in this project come from a diversity of perspectives and disciplines, but are critics of neo-liberal globalism in one way or another. They share the view that transnational capital has escaped from democratic accountability and needs to be brought back under citizen control. Beyond this common premise, however, there is disagreement over the extent to which globalized economic structures are matched by similarly globalized political and socio-cultural institutions. Are we witnessing the globalisation of civil society and is this desirable? Or are we witnessing counter moves to deglobalize the corporations in what David Korten calls “rooted” or “stakeholder capital” (1999)? Is this desirable or even possible? We have chosen researchers who are loosely grouped in one or other of the schools outlined above. Few fit neatly into one camp or other, but the different orientations are real. Our purpose is to bring together researchers with diverse starting points to produce creative tensions amongst them. Researchers in each school will face the task of having to convince other members of the research team who are sceptical of their claims. The project will explore the questions posed by the above schools simultaneously.
Although business, states, and even workers often seemed to accept neo-liberal globalism, there are signs of a growing gap between its promises and its realisation. Signs of dissatisfaction and intellectual challenges amidst economic crises suggest that the pendulum could move back towards support for re-localization, re-regulation, a caring state, and non-market values like deep democracy and social cohesion (Cohen, 1997a; Hutton, 1996).
Challenges to neo-liberal globalism are coming from disparate sources: intellectuals, corporate and political leaders, and citizens’ movements. Just as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman attacked Keynesianism when it was dominant, key intellectuals are now critiquing neo-liberal globalism. Hayek and Friedman won Nobel prizes for economics in 1974 and 1976 respectively, when applied Keynesianism failed to run surpluses in boom times to finance deficits in recessions and could not cope with inflation and stagnation concurrently. Recent Nobel prizes in economics may be an early sign of a paradigm shift once again. William Vickrey received the 1996 prize for game theory analysis and for his research on the need for full employment and a fairer distribution of resources. The 1998 winner, Amartya Sen, restored an ethical dimension to economics in his work on famine, welfare economics and human capabilities. Sen was instrumental in reorienting the United Nations Development Program to a “human development” focus. James Tobin won the Nobel prize in 1981, but only recently has the “Tobin tax” - his proposal to penalise speculative, short-run financial transactions that have most recently destabilised Asian economies - come to prominence.
Ironically, challenges to globalism are also coming from business leaders. Sir James Goldsmith, the richest man in Europe, wrote about the free trade doctrine: “What an astounding thing it is to watch a civilisation destroy itself because it is unable to re-examine the validity, under totally new circumstances, of an economic ideology” (1994). George Soros, who made billions in currency transactions, wrote that “untrammelled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values to all areas of life are endangering our open and democratic society” (1997). World Bank head, James Wolfenson (1997), questions economic growth as the primary measure of a society’s progress. Some leaders of the new right are joining left commentators as critics of globalism. “Broken homes, uprooted families, vanished dreams, delinquency, vandalism, crime,” writes Pat Buchanan (1998), Reagan’s speech writer, “these are the hidden costs of free trade”. Leading Thatcherite, John Gray, states that “free markets are creatures of state power, and persist only so long as the state is able to prevent human needs for security and the control of economic risk from finding political expression” (1998).
Popular resistance is emerging in diverse locations and conditions. The Zapatista uprising in Chiapas broke out the day NAFTA came into effect. Initiated by Canadian economic nationalists, an international coordination of citizens movements led a successful campaign against the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment at the OECD in Paris in 1998 (Laxer, 1999). Norway is holding an inquiry into the ethical implications of globalization. A century ago, the laissez-faire consensus that spawned the “robber barons” in the U.S. was ended by progressive-populist challenges on the left and right.
Will current challenges from diverse sources lead to a new paradigm at the turn of the new century (Cohen,1999)? Although challenges to neo-liberal globalism are coming from the right as well as the left, we will limit ourselves largely to the latter. We explore the limitations of neo-liberal globalism from the viewpoints of Canada, Australia, Norway, and Mexico - countries we call semi-peripheral.
Critiques of neo-liberal globalism are rising in all quarters of the world. Our strategy is unique in taking the perspective of the semi-periphery, a view which has provided great insight. This perspective spawned post-colonial studies exposing Eurocentrism and Peter Evans’ classic study of dependent development in Brazil (1979). The contribution of Harold Innis, the father of Canadian political economy, rested on his insights about the differences between being at the centre and the margin of Western civilization. In the critical study of neo-liberal globalism and challenges to it, we expect views from the semi-periphery to again provide us with insights not obtainable from the existing literature that focuses mainly on the periphery or the core.
The condition of semi-peripherality, whether defined as primarily social, cultural, economic or spatial, can be understood as having both the consciousness of subordination and the means of resistance – unlike the core which may lack the consciousness, and the periphery which may lack the required means. Being in the contradictory position of the semi-periphery distances actors and observers from the taken-for-granted assumptions of the centre, while still being close enough to have an insider understanding of those assumptions and the state capacity to do something about them. In short, the semi-periphery is a provocative environment from which to study both the dynamics of closer global integration and resistance to globalism.
We have selected Canada, Australia, Norway and Mexico as cases to be studied. These countries have been described as hinterlands, dependencies, go-between nations, semi-satellitic countries, resource exporting economies. But they have enjoyed more economic sovereignty and more “development” than the periphery. Each of these descriptions, including the term semi-periphery, carries a rich theoretical and empirical background that defies easy categorization. We use the term semi-periphery to designate those countries that are closely integrated into the U.S. and Western centred, global economic-order as political junior partners. This usage of the term semi-periphery is different from that associated with dependency and world-systems theories. In the analysis of globalism and challenges to it, however, the concept of semi-periphery helps us identify contradictions. We will research how semi-peripheral status has recently changed as our country cases conformed to neo-liberal globalism.
Canada, Australia, Norway and Mexico have long been much more open to international pressures and stimuli than metropolitan countries. Their semi-peripherality exposed them to earlier forms of global integration. They never had the degree of autonomy that is currently being eroded by globalism in many core countries. A history they share in varying degrees is that as countries long subjected to the influences of powerful core countries, they developed state-centred policies aimed at achieving more autonomy, diversified development and redistribution of incomes. Their policies diverged significantly from the classical liberal models of Britain and the United States.
All that changed after 1981 when globalism gained sufficient force, beginning with the debt crisis in the South. All four countries abandoned many of their long-held statist policies of autonomy and nationalism, and embraced, in varying degrees, neo-liberal globalism’s prescriptions. Through our research, we expect to find answers to why such developments took place, the intellectual currents that emerged, and the reactions of citizens, states, and other institutions. We will study whether neo-liberal globalism is dismantling the very category of ‘semi-periphery’. If so, what are the political consequences and new possibilities of these changes? Are there, or will there be new semi-peripheral revolts, manifest in the resurgence of semi-peripheral nationalisms? Will resistance take transnational forms or will the semi-periphery be quiescent?
We have selected the four countries for their similarities and their differences. All were exporters of resources to metropolitan countries and dependent on the imports of finished goods. All have had high levels of foreign ownership at one time or other and been subject to great influence by transnational corporations before the era of globalism. Canada, Australia and Norway were rich dependencies, with wages, consumption patterns and class structures virtually indistinguishable from the core. Mexico was very different in these respects. However, these past bases for similarities and differences are fast changing and the distinctions between North and South are blurring. Each country’s circumstances are different and these differences are as much part of this study as their similarities. All the semi-peripheral countries exhibit differences in their adaptations to globalism. Two cases, Canada and Mexico, are locked into the American orbit while two cases, Australia and Norway, are less integrated into that block, and less integrated, too, into any block. This opens up useful lines of investigation. As well, through discourse analysis we will compare how the ideology of globalism is differentially portrayed in each country and evaluate the circumstances in which it has greatest and least support. We want to understand why intermediate states move towards greater alliances with the core in some circumstances, and to support more autonomous development paths in others.
There are four primary research objectives:
The project will examine three broad questions. First, we will explore whether neo-liberal globalism has eroded sustainability in all senses of the term in the four case studies. Secondly, we will evaluate the degree of pressure for counter-hegemonic alternatives to the globalism model. Our task is to map the strengths, weaknesses, tendencies, and contradictions of these types of pro-democratic resistances in our four country cases – a task that has not been done before. Third, we will examine whether alternatives to neo-liberal globalism are emerging most forcefully at the level of the state, inter-nationally or trans-nationally, as well as at the levels of community, the family, and life-worlds. If so, are these alternatives revisions of already existing paradigms or are new counter-hegemonic paradigms emerging?
Sustainability is a contested concept. It means different things to different writers, depending on whether they stress environmental sustainability, economic growth or human development. William Rees argues that sustainability includes political recognition of environmental decay, economic injustice, and limits to growth. Reminding humans that they are not isolated, but deeply embedded in natural systems with inescapable limits, Rees raises moral and normative considerations such as “the need in a finite world for an equitable sharing and conservation of natural bounty.” (1990:1). Other writers emphasise the rights of future generations to access the earth’s resources, and the right of every person to an equal access to an intact environment (Sachs, 1998:11). From a different perspective, the United Nations Human Development Report (1999) argues that human development is the end, and economic growth simply a means to that end:
The real wealth of a nation is its people. And the purpose of development is to create enabling environments for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives. This simple but powerful truth is too often forgotten in the pursuit of material and financial wealth. (United Nations, 1999: 1).
Despite such laudable aspirations, there is intense disagreement about the extent to which sustainability and human development should restrict the pursuit of economic growth. Even the World Commission on Environment and Development, which published Our Common Future, equated sustainable development with more rapid economic growth and diversification that will “help developing countries mitigate the strains of rural environment, raise productivity and consumption standards, and allow nations to move beyond dependence on one or two primary products for their export earnings.” The UN Human Development Report supports the search for rules and institutions for stronger governance, but argues that the challenge is not to stop the expansion of global markets (1999:2).
The rhetoric of sustainable growth has been taken up by business schools and environmental economists to legitimise neo-liberal globalism. Beder argues that “the goal of sustainable development is viewed by some economists and business groups as being merely to preserve the environment to the extent that it is necessary for the maintenance of the economic system. For them future generations can be compensated for the loss of environmental resources” (1996). She concludes that “so long as sustainable development is restricted to minimal low-cost adjustments ... the environment will continue to be degraded.” The United Nations Development Report (1996) contends that “the purpose of growth is to enrich people’s lives, but far too often it does not ... There is no automatic link between growth and human development”.
Critics such as Herman Daly reject sustainable growth, and argue instead, for communities to design economies that develop without growth; that is “qualitative improvement of the physical economic base that is maintained in a steady state by throughput of matter-energy that is within the regenerative and assimilative capacities of the ecosystem” (1990: 3-4, 45-47). Mexican economist David Barkin argues that “Sustainable Development goes beyond environmental protection to incorporate the ability of the “system” to generate productive opportunities for all segments of society, while allowing each to protect its unique heritage and in this way contribute to make the whole society better able to escape from its dependency on the single product or market”. Working with large sections of Mexican society left behind or resisting international economic integration programs such as NAFTA, Barkin’s Centro de Ecologia y Desarollo discovered that sustainability provided opportunities for mobilising people and resources that “improve living standards while contributing noticeably to protect the environment (1998:62).
Although the language of sustainability has been co-opted by powerful groups, the concept is still useful. James O’Connor argues that if capitalism were truly sustainable, it would be able to accomplish four things: 1) maintain capital accumulation globally; 2) provide basic needs for humankind; 3) manage a system of accumulation without rebellion and 4) achieve these things while respecting natural resource limits (1994). Leslie Sklair has identified key actors of globalism embedded in the economic, political, and socio-cultural realms: transnational corporations, inter-governmental institutions, and transnationalised consumerism (1991). Each of these forces can be seen as creating crises of sustainability: the exercise of transnationalised corporate power leads to economic and ecological exhaustion; the creation of neo-liberal inter-state institutions has contributed to a loss of political legitimacy; the emergence of a transnationalised ideology of consumerism has contributed to socio-cultural exhaustion. Put simply, it appears that neo-liberal globalism is a key factor in understanding why these criteria for sustainability are unfulfilled.
Drawing on the writings of Sklair, O’Connor and others, we define the criteria for system sustainability on four levels: ecological, economic, political, and socio-cultural. These criteria allow us to research whether neo-liberal globalism is sustainable. Researchers have developed indicators of sustainability for comparative purposes. Given the politics of sustainability, indicators are not neutral tools. They, too, are contested – and used both by progressive activist/researchers and the World Bank. Indicators must be comprehensive enough to be accurate, but not too complicated. In itself, each indicator cannot prove, or disprove the notion of sustainability. But taken as a whole they can.
For ecological indicators, we will rely on the seminal work of Wolfgang Sachs in developing a “preventive system of environmental impact indicators”. This model includes categories such as resource withdrawal (materials, energy, water, land) and substance emissions (CO2, etc.), recognising that the major limiting factor today is not a dearth of resources, but a limited capacity of air/water/soil to absorb emissions from human sources (1998). To measure ecological sustainability we will also rely on Hans Opschoor’s concept of environmental space. Environmental space “refers to the area humans beings can use in the natural environment without doing lasting harm to essential characteristics” (as in Sachs, 1998:12). It takes into account the diversity of human uses of the natural world, and the different carrying capacities of different eco-systems. We will evaluate the extent to which each semi-peripheral country relies on the environmental space of peripheral countries, and the extent to which its resources are absorbed in the environmental space of core countries. For economic sustainability we will use the measures set out in the United Nations Human Development Reports and the Genuine Progress Index. The human development index is based on three distinct components: indicators of longevity, education and income per head. According to the UN, human development is promoted by policies that eradicate poverty, generate full employment and security of livelihoods, narrow the gap between developed and developing countries, re-invigorate the provision of public goods, promote a more equitable distribution of assets and income, re-balance gender roles, secure health and education for everyone, foster peoples’ freedom and empowerment, and safeguard future human development.
Economic sustainability also requires market stability and the use of sustainable economic models and development projects. The Genuine Progress Index (GPI) is an alternative measure of economic well-being that is meant to replace the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It has been developed by Clifford Cobb, Ted Halstead and Jonathan Rowe (1995) and is being refined by a network of economists. Its purpose is to provide a more comprehensive measure of economic progress that does not indicate that the economy has grown, while the well being of most citizens has deteriorated. The GPI uses measures such as loss of leisure time, loss of farmland and resources, cost of commuting in addition to those of the standard GDP.
Political sustainability refers to situations where political systems can satisfy conditions for ecological sustainability, democratic participation, autonomy, and self-governance. State legitimacy is also important, and can be measured quantitatively – as statistics on democratic participation, or the proportion of aboriginal people, women, wage-earners etc holding office or top positions; or qualitatively – as perceived feelings of empowerment, respect for community values etc. Other measures of political sustainability include levels of citizen participation (in both the formal electoral realm and civil society), the acceptance of deep diversity in Charles Taylor’s (1991) sense, the recognition of collective as well as individual rights etc. We will also explore whether democracies with little substance or authoritarian regimes are as sustainable and legitimate as those with deep democracy.
Socio-cultural sustainability is inextricably linked to the above systems, centred on the normative ideal of democratic communities, but is separated for analytical purposes. Socio-cultural sustainability refers to social systems which provide room for independent and autonomous cultural development, as well as democratic relationships at various levels of society. Targeted variables for study include levels of independent cultural expression, concentration of control over the mass media, the power of consumerism as a cultural force, trends in crime, and other indicators of social-upheaval and instability.
In short, the concept of sustainability is holistic, inter-disciplinary, and provides a framework capable of documenting current crises. These sustainability criteria force researchers to ask difficult questions about neo-liberal orthodoxy, and challenge a dominant productivist logic that has been hegemonic at both ends of the political spectrum. These crises challenge us to research the effects of neo-liberal globalism, examine the political direction, strategies and effectiveness of challenges to it, and propose the redesign of international, national and local governance institutions along more equitable and sustainable lines. This research proposal involves researching the following questions in each realm.
ECONOMIC and ECOLOGICAL SUSTAINABILITY.
Sub-questions: Does Neo-liberal globalist governance lead to domination by financial capital? How stable is this model of development in short term? How ecologically-sustainable is this model in the longer-term?
Globalism is characterised by the dominance of speculative capital over productive capital. Besides long-term questions about ecological sustainability, crises in core centres like Japan suggest that this model is volatile and subject to recurrent crises of over production. Maldistribution of income and wealth mean that persistent human need is not translated into effective demand. Research suggests that the move towards liberalised markets in South America, Indonesia, India, and parts of China could put 1.2 billion workers into the labour market over the next generation (Hoogvelt, 1997). Most will work for less than $3/day, possibly causing wages in the advanced countries to fall by as much as 50%. Who are the consumers who will maintain demand? State policies of simultaneous deflation, high real interest rates, exporting cheap products to pay debt charges and competitive devaluations, could have negative multiplier effects and result in world deflationary recession (Greider, 1997). Current investment agreements organised around unchecked capital flows seem hopelessly unprepared to manage global overproduction so that global recession is prevented.
Besides the short-term financial instability associated with this model, there is growing body of research on its long-term ecological sustainability. The issue of economic sustainability is usually addressed in a short term, superficial sense. Will the model provide jobs? Will it keep inflation low? Sophisticated work on steady-state economics has been accomplished and more links are being made between labour issues and ecological concerns (Daly, 1990; Lipietz, 1992). Even so, much environmental analyses avoids questions of economic sustainability and economic alternatives, while many economists and political economists ignore environmental sustainability. A major contribution of this study will be the persistent questioning of the links between ecological sustainability and questions of economic, societal and political sustainability.
POLITICAL SUSTAINABILITY.
Sub-questions: Are internationalised states that are unreceptive to citizens’ demands prone to legitimacy crises? Are the scope and depth of citizens’ participation maintained or minimised by models of neo-liberal globalism?
Political sustainability refers to situations where political systems can satisfy conditions of ecological sustainability, democratic participation, deep diversity, autonomy, and self-governance. Has neo-liberal globalist governance made the satisfaction of these conditions more difficult? The new constitutionalism refers to the reorganisation of legal and constitutional practices to create a lack of accountability to citizens, at the same time creating special rights for corporations (Gill ,1992). Corporations gain citizenship rights, unattainable by average citizens: avoiding taxes, drawing huge welfare benefits, and suing governments when they feel their ability to make profits is constrained by protective environmental or health legislation. The new constitutionalism is enshrined in agreements like NAFTA, the proposed MAI and institutions like the WTO. Globalism requires compliant states to provide critical public goods and public services (Gill & Law, 1989: 492). In return for acceptance from international finance, the state enforces neo-liberal globalism at home.
Several writers argue the following. The process of internationalising the state is never complete, argues Cox: “the further it advances, the more it provokes counter tendencies sustained by domestic social groups that have been disadvantaged or excluded” (1987, 253). As the goal of broad-based development becomes more illusory, the legitimacy of internationalised states falters (Drache and Gertler, 1991). It becomes virtually impossible for semi-peripheral states to balance international financial pressures from above, with democratic pressures from below. As the needs of non-elites expand, the environmental resources, tax base, and state capacity needed to provide sufficient public goods and services are depleted (Cohen, 1997b). The accessibility of governments makes them prime targets for backlash against exclusion, and they must find ways to contend with demands for democratizing the political-economic order. Lacking resources to smooth over these conflicts, the state often responds through increased surveillance and social control over marginal populations. The possibility of neo-fascism re-emerges in some countries. We will research whether these arguments are borne out in our semi-peripheral cases in the first five years of the next century.
SOCIAL-CULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY.
Sub-questions: Does neo-liberal globalism create social integration or disintegration? Does it promote the progress of human development, democratic communities and cultural sovereignty?
Socio-cultural sustainability refers to social-systems that satisfy conditions for ecological sustainability, yet also provide room for independent and autonomous cultural development as well as democratic relationships at various levels. Some have argued that globalism, however, is directly associated with inequality, marginalization, and social disintegration (Bakker, 1996; Brodie, 1999). Neo-liberal policy focuses on “managing” rather than incorporating the excluded (Hoogevelt 1997, 148). The social component of globalism is the most obvious area where sustainability is questioned in the lifeworlds of average citizens. Rising suicide rates, growing violence, police clashes with student protestors, and peasant uprisings in Mexico all suggest that vibrant democratic communities and nations are difficult to sustain within the neo-liberal paradigm. The state frequently turns to a “law and order solution”, rather than attempting the difficult task of creating sustainable, democratic communities. Cultural disintegration is a threat as well. Many nations and their arts communities are disturbed by threats the American entertainment industry poses for the sustainability of their unique national and local cultures. Canada is coordinating a group of nations attempting to protect cultural autonomy and receive cultural exemptions from neo-liberal investment agreements that portray cultural sovereignty as economic trade protectionism. How well are the diverse cultures of our four country cases surviving the globalism and porous borders of the information age?
In sum, economic and ecological crises, political alienation and growing violence indicate that neo-liberal globalism is undergoing a major crisis, involving the reorganisation of the ideas, institutions, and material capacities of the world order. We will research whether the growth in the structural power of corporate and financial capital in the past 20 years is politically, ecologically, economically, and socially sustainable. Contradictions may generate resistance which may have different outcomes in different countries, but which de-legitimise the dominant model and make political consensus impossible. States face pressures for citizen accountability, pressures that worsen as states find it difficult to deliver prosperity for the majority. This brings us to a primary purpose: to construct a sophisticated, multi-layered, multi-national intellectual map exploring the direction(s) of challenges. This is the task to which we now turn.
Globalism was always largely elite driven and never gained as much popularity as post-war Keynesianism did in the West. The dominant paradigm, however, has had a much wider geographic reach, extending into most international institutions and most states, with the partial exceptions in Asia and Cuba. But popular support for neo-liberal globalism is shallow. Bill Clinton recognised this at the 1998 WTO Summit when he warned that governments and global institutions had to develop “a dialogue with civil society”.
In contrast to the piece-meal approach of social movement literature, and the elite focus of most research on globalism, we propose to map the political direction, strategies and effectiveness of challenges to globalism. This will fill a chasm in the literature, identifying the sources and possible directions of change. Policy-relevant research must have a critique of social change – its origins, possibilities, and diverging orientations. A neo-Gramscian framework, as developed by writers like Robert Cox (1987) and Stephen Gill and David Law (1989) to apply to the world political economy, helps us understand globalism as dialectical rather than an inevitability. “Hegemony” refers to the replacement of societal coercion with consensus, and is thought of as a process rather than a fixed state. The concept of hegemony is not about imposing ideas on subordinate groups, but describes a process of negotiation with opposing classes and values which often involve genuine compromises by dominant groups. Although some groups have greater access to ideological resources, their cultural leadership is never completely secured. Hegemony generally does not go un-resisted, but tends to be part of a movement/counter-movement dynamic, as described by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation (1957). Market expansion generates movements to protect people from the insecurities of capitalism – from the Poor Laws in England, to the welfare state. By applying Gramscian and Polanyian perspectives to globalism, we resist deterministic conclusions and look for points of fissure, contradiction, and change.
There are hopeful signs that the “global democratic deficit”, is being re-balanced nationally and internationally. Our conceptual map of challenges to neo-liberal globalism will consider a wide variety of movements, including citizen activist movements, political parties, cultural and intellectual currents critical of globalism, religions, the state and international institutions. Our goal is not to document the existence of every movement, but to focus on analysis of mobilisations and movements which show awareness that the ‘enemy’ is neo-liberal globalism and its supporting institutions. Are such movements part of a post-globalism paradigm centred around re-democratization? To reiterate, this is not a broad-brush account of all activism in all four countries. Instead, it is a much more focussed search for exemplars that highlight the possibilities for democratic mobilisation in the context of neo-liberal globalism. In particular, we will focus on groups struggling to move power back in the hands of the people, whether this means an elected village council, a national government capable of setting its own national policy, or an international tribunal enforcing collectively agreed upon human rights. This may include examples of “re-localization” and anti-global policy initiatives.
This research will grow out of the findings in the first two parts. It is not clear if neo-liberal globalism will remain the reigning model, but it appears that alternatives are emerging. The research team will research and partner with citizens groups to explore their explicit and implicit models in challenging neo-liberal globalism. Our research role is to think through the complexities and barriers to the creation of a new paradigm or sub-paradigms based on the concept of deep democracy. We will examine the redesigning of institutions at the transnational, international, national and local levels to deal with changes brought about by globalist governance and evaluate which levels are showing the most potential for citizen-based democracy. Now that national governments are more constrained in controlling capital and markets, we will explore how this function is best strengthened at the international level, and by institutionally redesigned national and local governments.
The research team will develop pedagogical strategies to disseminate our findings about sustainability and neo-liberal globalism, drawing lessons from the challenges studied in the four countries. This component of the proposal will rely on traditions of critical pedagogy, inspired by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s dialogical philosophy of encouraging active citizen engagement with the subject matter (1970).
We will build research partnerships with the following research organisations:
We hope to forge similar links to research organisations in Mexico and Australia once the project is underway.
Given the diversity of the research team, the project will employ the methodologies of the several disciplines of the researchers. Discourse analysis will be used to research the language and ideology of neo-liberal globalism in each country setting. Field research methods will be employed to study sites of opposition to globalism. Researchers will use analysis of aggregate data to test such things as ecological sustainability, human development indices, the genuine progress index, political participation measures and crime rates. Historical methods will be used to research changes over time in the impacts of neo-liberal globalism, opposition to aspects of it and the extent to which a country has become more globally integrated. Although not everyone on the research team works within the tradition of political economy, the findings of the diverse research techniques and approaches will be integrated following the methodologies of comparative political economy.
An outcome of our research will be the identification of the key variables that best explain national and regional responses to globalism . At this beginning stage, we posit that nations experience globalism differently across at least seven axes (see table next page):
These variables, as well as the researchers’ areas of expertise, led to the selection of the four country cases.
Besides using common hypotheses to test across the four cases, the project will also be methodologically situated in the different terms of political discussion and debate surrounding neo-liberal globalism in each context. The focus of this methodology will not be on finding a standard set of political economic parameters for each case. Rather it will be on exploring the specificities of the debate on globalism in each case. This will enable our research team to sketch out the direction of paradigm or sub-paradigm shifts, if they are occurring.
We have adopted a comparative methodology because it allows us to determine which trend is stronger or weaker under which conditions and why it is stronger or weaker there than in the other cases. Comparison steers a middle course between 1) idiographic research on a single country, which can leave the impression that events are unique and sui generis to that case and 2) nomothetic research, which universalizes trends, usually from core countries, at a high level of abstraction and ignores crucial differences amongst countries and regions (Laxer, 1989). Neo-liberal globalism and closer global integration have differential impacts. Our country case variations allow us to test the hypotheses outlined below. Canada and Mexico are NAFTA signatories, while Australia is not a member of a highly integrated investment pact with major powers. Norway is not in the EU, but has accepted many of its neo-liberal policies through the European Economic Area Agreement. Canada and Australia are settler countries of the English-speaking world which have vigorously embraced neo-liberalism (Brodie, 1997). Mexico has been pulled into a pact along English-speaking neo-liberal lines, and against its own nationalist-populist traditions (Otero, 1996). Norway has resisted the full embrace of neo-liberalism, but is wrestling with its prescriptions as well as pressures created by the rapid changes in information and communications technologies.
We make the following preliminary hypotheses about country variations:
|
Canada |
Norway |
Australia |
Mexico |
|
|
Position in world economy |
semi-periphery to core |
semi-periphery to core |
semi-periphery to core |
semi-periphery to periphery |
|
Degree of dependence: Exports, foreign ownerhsip, foreign loan dependence |
High re exports and foreign ownership. moderate re loan dep. |
High export dependence. moderate re for. ownership. low re for. loan dep. |
High re export dep. and for. ownership. Moderate re loan dependence |
High in all respects |
|
Surplus Labour / vulnerability to low wage manufacturing |
Low |
Low |
Low |
High |
|
Degree of dependence on commodity exports |
Moderate/High |
Moderate |
Moderate/High |
Moderate/High |
|
Institutionalization of neo-liberal globalism |
High |
Medium |
High |
High |
|
Deterioration of natural resources / deteriorating quality of life |
Moderate / High |
Moderate |
Moderate / High |
High |
|
Strength and location of organized resistance to globalism |
Moderate; national civil society organizations |
Moderate; formal political sphere |
Minimal; localized social movements |
Minimal; Localized movements (Zapatistas) |
The first task will be to establish a starting point for each country. What kind of state, politics and assumptions did it have before the real challenge of neo-liberal globalism struck? This bench mark will allow us to get a better sense of the magnitude of the transformations in each case. (This will be on the agenda at the team’s first working meeting after the project begins.)
For each country we will ask the following questions about trends in the past two decades:
Graduate students will be junior colleagues on the team (see 3.4). Amongst their tasks on this section of the research will be to:
With expertise in Sociology, Political Science, Economics, Women’s Studies, Labour Studies, Law, Political Ecology and Popular Education, the international team is in an advantageous position to examine the objectives outlined above. The team of 19 researchers have a wealth of experience in doing comparative and collaborative studies on globalisation, discourse analysis and the political economy of the semi-periphery.
GORDON LAXER, Sociology, University of Alberta, Canada, Director of Parkland Institute.
Principal Investigator. Gordon Laxer will serve as the overall coordinator of the research project.
MARJORIE COHEN, Economist / Women’s Studies, Simon Fraser University, Canada.Areas of research: The transformation of international institutions along the principles of globalism; possibilities for creating new international institutions that can control capital (rather than states), and promote stability as well as sustainability.
PAUL BOWLES, Economics, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada.
Areas of research: Impact of globalisation and financial crises on semi-peripheral economies; resource regions (especially Northern British Columbia) and globalisation.
MICHAEL GISMONDI, Athabasca University, Canada.
Areas of research: Public participation in environmental decision-making in Canada, Latin America, and the Philippines; environmental impact processes; ability of citizens’ groups to confront value decisions and make their voices heard.
SATOSHI IKEDA, Sociology, University of Alberta, Canada. (also has a PhD in Economics)
Areas of research: Four aspects of financial globalisation – 1. Historical Analysis, 2. Implications for the end of national monetary sovereignty, economic development, and enslavement of periphery, 3. Analysis of chronic and cyclical concordance/contradiction in capital accumulation under deepening financial globalisation, 4. Policy analysis for the construction of local/national alternatives that can channel investment funds into projects for human empowerment.
STEPHEN MCBRIDE, Political Science, Simon Fraser University. Canada. (also works in Political Sustainability)
Areas of research: Labour markets, employment, social policy; possibility for contradictions within neo-liberal globalism to create conditions for opposition and alternatives; capacity of the state to resist/challenge globalism.
GERARDO OTERO, Political Science, Simon Fraser University. Canada
Areas of research: Emerging alternatives to globalism; Zapatista movement; socioeconomic impact of biotechnology on agrarian social structures and biodiversity; focus on the Americas, especially NAFTA signatories.
JUAN PALACIOS, Political Economy, Founder and Director of the Department of Pacific Studies, University of Guadalajara, Mexico.
Areas of Research: Interplay between globalisation and regionalism; impact of foreign direct investment and transnational corporations in regional economic integration processes in Asia Pacific and North America; cross-border production networks and the emergence of a global network economy.
STEPHEN CLARKSON, Political Science, University of Toronto, Canada.
Areas of Research: Impact of trade liberalisation on the Canadian and Mexican states; theories of the state as a tiered reality consisting of shifting powers amongst local, provincial, federal, continental and global levels; impact of telecommunications for strengthening and opening up the state; democratic deficits.
RAY BROOMHILL, Labour Studies, Adelaide University, Australia.
Areas of Research: Impact of globalisation and neoliberal policies on the Australian national and South Australian state political economies; impact of global restructuring on gender and gender relations within households in South Australia.
JOHN ERIC FOSSUM, Political Science, University of Bergen, Norway.
Areas of Research: Globalism’s impact on the nation state, with particular emphasis on core concepts (citizenship, national identity, and national community), and normative standards (democracy, and democratic legitimacy); case-studies and future research to focus on the EU and Canada.
ÖYVIND ÖSTERUD, Political Science, University of Oslo, Norway; leader of “Power and Democracy” research group (appointed by Government of Norway in March 1998)
Areas of Research: The nation state, its challengers, and possibilities for resistance; nationalism and conflicts of nationality; conditions for popular participation in Norway.
MARÍA TERESA GUTIÉRREZ-HACES, Economics, National University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico.
Areas of Research: The process of continentalization looking specifically at Mexico; the effect of globalisation on the North American state.GORDON LAXER (Also works in Economic, and Socio-Cultural sustainability).
Areas of Research: Relevance of nationalisms and sovereignty, especially Canadian, in an age of globalism and globalisation; political and cultural identities as national and international, versus those that are cosmopolitan, transnational and global; tensions between globalising civil society to deal with the power of transnational corporations, and de-globalising the transnationals to re-democratize nations.
DAVID SCHNEIDERMAN, University of Toronto Law School, Canada. (Also in social / cultural sustainability)
Areas of Research: Relationship between economic globalisation and domestic constitutionalism; the capacity of the state to retrieve a regulatory role; case-specific research has focussed on how the ideology of globalism has impacted Canadian constitutional interpretation, the effects of bilateral investment treaty regimes on the new South African Constitution and the constitution-like effects of the MAI.
JANINE BRODIE, Political Science, University of Alberta, Canada(Research also involves questions of Political Sustainability)
Areas of Research: cultural changes that have accompanied globalisation and globalism in Australia and Canada; how nationalism has changed in relation to transmigration and diversity; changes in the state’s relations to civil society and institutions; negotiation of a new social contract; social citizenship rights versus human rights.
JAMES GOODMAN, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. (Also political sustainability)
Areas of Research: Irish and Australian case studies of transnational social movements / campaign strategies; problems faced by social movements contesting neo-liberal globalisation.
HABIBA ZAMAN, Women’s Studies, Simon Fraser University, Canada.
Areas of Research: Women of Colour and work in the developing world; case-specific research has looked at Bangladesh.
JOSÉE JOHNSTON, Doctoral Student, Sociology, University of Alberta, Canada. (Also economic and ecological sustainability)
Areas of Research: the impact of globalism on identities of citizenship and consumerism; ecological sustainability of hegemonic modes of consumption in the North; alternatives to mass consumerism, and its associated identities and social practices.
ANNA YEATMAN, Sociology, Macquarie University, Australia.(Also political sustainability)
Areas of Research: Challenges of democratic governance for globalism; contractualism and citizenship, connections between individualisation, cosmopolitanism, democratic globalism, and ecological thinking.
Over five years, each collaborator is committed to contributing to three books. The first book will focus on sustainability in the semi-periphery and will have four sections: 1) general assessment, 2) economic and environmental sustainability, 3) political sustainability, and 4) socio-cultural sustainability. Sections two to four will each have four chapters, one on each country.
The second book will be on sites of opposition to neo-liberal globalism. There will be separate sections on the state and international institutions, social movements, nationalisms and transnationalism, and on country-specific discourses on neo-liberal globalism and globalisation. Each of the sites of opposition will be analysed in the four countries.
The third book will focus on the emergence of alternative paradigms and sub-paradigms. This book will explore the themes of the two schools of thought within the collaborative team. It will explore attempts at re-democratisation through localisation, national and state re-autonomy movements, internationally-coordinated citizens movements and transnational agreements and institutions. Chapters will be composed of case studies, country-level and transnational assessments and policy recommendations. The research team will write about envisioning new ways society can work sustainably and with equity in a more integrated world of post-neo-liberal globalism.
The authors of these books will be the research team, post-doctoral fellows and graduate students. The research project will actively recruit excellent graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, providing publishing opportunities to those who demonstrate the capability to produce excellent work. The general editor of the series will be Gordon Laxer. The three research co-ordinators (Brodie, Clarkson, Cohen) and the principal investigator will act as editors or co-editors of the books. We will seek a university press for the series.
We also expect that the research team may publish journal articles in collaboration or alone, and may contribute to special journal issues. The researchers are committed to discussing the policy implications of their research. Graduate students and post-doctoral fellows will be encouraged to contribute to journal articles either alone, or in combination with members of the research team. Subsidiary goals are as follows:
Nineteen graduate students (9 Masters and 10 doctoral students) are expected to be funded and participate in the project in Canada. The project will recruit outstanding graduate students to the three co-sponsoring universities. Graduate students who are already working with any of the researchers in the four countries will also be encouraged to work on this project. The opportunity to publish is a great incentive and reward for gifted graduate students. The research team will treat graduate students as junior colleagues and encourage them to publish, give conference papers, and where appropriate, co-publish with them. Graduate students will be involved in all phases of the research, from literature reviews and library searches to giving conference papers, and writing publications. Students will be encouraged to choose thesis topics focussing on aspects of the project, allowing them to benefit directly from a supportive and stimulating intellectual environment.
Neo-liberal globalism has challenged traditional theories of politics and society and have become a predominant area of research for a new generation of social scientists. Collaboration between the research team and --- postdoctoral fellows is a critical dimension of this project. Postdoctoral fellows will be selected on the basis of their experience in one of the three areas of sustainability to be explored. It is expected that the project fellows will actively contribute to the production and dissemination of research as well as in the organization of conferences and publications. The project will provide an opportunity for promising young scholars to network nationally and internationally, to contribute to the emerging globalization debate, and develop alternative policy perspectives.
Much of the collaboration has been described in the previous section. The value of bringing researchers together from semi-peripheral countries is that the team can do comparative analysis with a depth of understanding that is not possible from the vantage point of one country. We anticipate that crossing the North-South divide will be a fruitful collaboration. What can a “Southern” semi-peripheral country learn from “Northern” semi-peripheral countries? The Northern experience of organizing broad citizens’ coalitions against globalism is particularly instructive. Canadian citizens’ groups, for example, took on international leadership roles in the campaign that defeated the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment – at the OECD in Paris), while groups in Norway formed a broad coalition that successfully mobilised against membership in the European Union in 1994. What can the Northern semi-periphery learn from a “Southern” country? In Mexico researchers will find opposition to neo-liberal globalism which is more radical, and less co-opted by mass consumerism. The research team will take hypotheses generated in one country and test their applicability in other national settings. This cross-fertilization of hypotheses and insights will allow conclusions to be made on the extent to which neo-liberal globalism is blurring the North-South division.
The project will hold one start-up meeting and one symposium in Canada, one workshop each in Mexico, Norway and Australia. These research meetings will provide opportunities for members of the international research team to present ongoing work, gain intensive feedback from colleagues, solidify collaborative relationships, and plan current and future directions of work. The two Canadian meetings will include the research team, an audience mix of academics, policy makers, proponents of neo-liberal globalism and activist opponents. For the workshops in Mexico, Norway and Australia we will ask for organizational assistance from the Canadian studies programmes, Foreign Affairs and the Canadian embassies. The second and third meetings will combine research evaluating the sustainability of neo-liberal globalism with analysis of currents and organizations challenging it. The fourth meeting will explore whether new paradigms are emerging from the critiques and the premises of the challenges. Researchers will present new ideas, models and scenarios. The symposium will present to a large audience, the sum of what we have learned over the five year collaboration.
The executive will be composed of the principal investigator, the three research coordinators (Brodie, Clarkson and Cohen) and one post-doctoral fellow, to be chosen each year, starting in Year two. The executive will manage and coordinate the project. Laxer and the three research coordinators have met several times by teleconferencing and in a one-day meeting in Victoria on May 15, 1999. We communicate regularly by e-mail. We expect these practices to continue and deepen once the project gets under way. In addition, the executive and all the researchers will meet at the meetings / conferences planned. [See 4.1] At each meeting / conference the executive, co-investigators, collaborators and post-doctoral fellows will plan the current and future intellectual directions of the project In addition, all researchers are currently discussing ideas by e-mail and we expect the practice to continue. In preparation of the proposal, all researchers critiqued it and we incorporated their comments into the final draft. As well, we encourage horizontal communication between individual researchers or groups of researchers who will work on research projects and will provide everyone with the support needed to network.
The following is the plan for financial management of the research fund. (The plan will be modified after the first year if necessary.) The executive will set up an adjudication committee, composed of two of the research co-ordinators, two other co-investigators and the principal investigator. The make up of the adjudication committee will change each year, choosing, as far as possible, those researchers not likely to apply to the fund in that year. If and when an adjudicator’s grant proposal is discussed, he or she will be absent from the discussion.
The administration of the research will be done at the Parkland Institute at the University of Alberta. This is the home university of Gordon Laxer (principal investigator) and Janine Brodie (research co-ordinator) as well as a co-investigator (Ikeda) and a collaborator (Johnston). The plan, outlined in the budget, is to hire a full-time administrative coordinator, with a minimum of a master’s degree, to organize the meetings / conferences, symposium, collect articles, coordinate the books, find reviewers, do some editorial work, coordinate correspondence, support networking, disseminate the results, as well as other activities. She or he will be chosen by the executive from a list of applicants and work under the direction of the principal investigator.
See sections on collaboration and management.
1. In his speech on global integration, Lawrence Summers declared that “our ideology, capitalism, is in ascendance” (1996:3).
Copyright remains exclusively with the author.