realitybase - Journal

One of the arguments made in favor of policies to facilitate globalization is that globalization is inevitable. One may resist only temporarily and incompletely before being overwhelmed, perhaps catastrophically, by the irresistible economic forces that must ultimately result in a single integrated world market system, is the more complete, but usually implicit, statement of the argument. To the contrary, Daniel Little discusses here several books on the history of transnational economic integration which remind us that these processes have ebbed and flowed considerably over the centuries.

Little includes the following quotation from Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (1974):

One of the persisting themes of the history of the modern world is the seesaw between "nationalism" and "internationalism." I do not refer to the ideological seesaw ... but to the organizational one. At some points in time the major economic and political institutions are geared to operating in the international arena and feel that local interests are tied in some immediate way to developments elsewhere in the world. At other points of time, the social actors tend to engage their efforts locally, tend to see the reinforcement of state boundaries as primary, and move toward a relative indifference about events beyond them. (147)

For a more current effort to describe globalization, Little introduces Saskia Sassen, A Sociology of Globalization (2007) and makes this assessment:

Sassen makes an important point about international economic power that has a Wallerstein-like feel to it but that would probably not have been true in 1700 or 1970. This is her view that there has been an important process of "de-nationalization" that has removed traditional powers of the state and placed them in the scope of international economic and finance institutions that are significantly controlled by large economic actors and firms. We sometimes refer to this process as one of "liberalization"; Sassen makes the point that the construction of the new supra-national regulatory regimes is an extended historical process that can be studied in detail. She refers to the result of this process as the global corporate economy. One of Wallerstein's key arguments is that nations in the periphery were dominated and controlled by an economic system run by European nations. Sassen argues for the reality of a world system of regulatory arrangements that subordinates the sovereignty of even previously hegemonic nations to a non-democratic set of institutions and rules that implicitly favor one set of economic actors over others. But Sassen's inference from this fact about international economic power is less about north-south exploitation and more about the rising likelihood of global exploitation of all ordinary citizens by powerful extra-national economic forces that are beyond the reach of democratic processes (what she refers to as the "democratic deficit").

Update on Thursday, December 24, 2009 at 06:41AM by

Skeptic

Martin Wolf says the nougties of the 20th and 21st Centuries can both be described this way:

The only truly global power was in rapid relative decline. Not long before, it had won a pyrrhic victory in a costly colonial war. New great powers were on the rise. An arms race was under way, as was competition for markets and resources in undeveloped areas of the world. Yet people still believed in the durability of the free trade and free capital flows that had nurtured prosperity and, many believed, had also underpinned peace.

It all ended in catastrophe then, and the path forward now is uncertain.

Update on Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 07:16AM by

Skeptic

Another recent book, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium, traces 1000 years of globalization and concludes that its floods and ebbs are fundamentally political, not technological. The authors discuss it in this VoxEU article.

In another VoxEU piece, Acemoglu and Yared report on a perceived inverse relationship between globalization on the one hand and nationalist sentiment and militarization on the other.

In recent research . . . , we examine the political limits to globalisation in the modern era. We explore the claim that changes in domestic political factors might restrict international economic integration by examining the relationship between militarism and international trade flows. The evidence suggests that increased nationalist and militarist sentiments, measured by military spending and size, are negatively associated with trade. A country is less likely to open up to neighbours if the country is also becoming more militarised, and trade between two countries grows less rapidly when both countries become more militarised.

Why do people argue that globalization is inevitable and back away from discussing the pros and cons, the winners and the losers? Perhaps it is because economists have chosen to make considerations of politics, nationalism, etc. "exogenous" to their models because they don't know how to model these factors. Perhaps it is because they think inevitibility absolves them from moral responsibility for the policy choices that are made.