Empire in The Age of Globalization

Empire in the Age
of Globalisation
US Hegemony and
Neoliberal Disorder
Ray Kiely
Pluto P Press
LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI
First published 2005 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Ray Kiely 2005
The right of Ray Kiely to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by
him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Series introduction vii

Acknowledgements viii
1. Introduction 1
2. Globalisation Theory or Capitalist Globalisation? 7

Defining globalisation 8
Theories of globalisation/globalisation theory 17
Repoliticising globalisation 31
Globalisation as Reality, Globalisation as Ideology 36
3. Globalisation and Politics I: State Sovereignty,

Imperialism and Cosmopolitanism 39
The modern state system 40
The nation-state and global governance 46
Debating global governance 49
4. Globalisation and Politics II: International Relations

and the Post-9/11 World 67
From 9/11 to war in Iraq 67
The Iraq war: wider implications 74
The Iraq war and US imperialism 79
5. The Global Economy: US Hegemony from Bretton

Woods to Neoliberalism 88
From Bretton Woods to neoliberalism 88
Neoliberalism, the Third Way and neoconservatism 95
Poverty, inequality and US hegemony 103
6. Globalisation, Culture and Rights: Liberal

Internationalism, Imperialism and Universalism 120
From modernisation to cultural imperialism 121
The cultural imperialism thesis: an assessment 123
Neoliberalism, rights and universalism 127
Globalisation, freedom and cultural standardisation 143
vi Empire in the Age of Globalisation
7. Conclusions: US imperialism, Actually Existing

Globalisation, and the Question of Alternatives 154
Globalisation and the character of contemporary
imperialism 154
The new superpower? The politics of ‘anti-globalisation’
and global justice 165
References 190
Index 202
Series Introduction
Critical Introductions to World Politics

Series Editors:
Alejandro Colás (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Richard Saull (University of Leicester)
World politics in all its socio-economic, cultural, institutional and

military dimensions affects the lives of billions across the globe. Yet
international relations is still an area of study associated with the
‘high politics’ of statecraft, strategy and diplomacy, or with distant
and seemingly uncontrollable global flows of money, people and
commodities. Critical Introductions to World Politics aims to reverse
this prevailing elitism by illuminating and explaining the causes and
consequences of these diverse aspects of international relations in
an accessible way, thereby highlighting the impact of international
processes and developments on the lives of ordinary people. The
series will bring together a range of theoretical and empirical studies
into the workings of world politics, while also identifying areas for
political intervention by those seeking not just to interpret the world,
but also to participate in political struggles to change it.
The series engages with key areas, providing succinct, informative
and accessible overviews to central debates in global affairs. It
draws mainly, although not exclusively, on Marxist approaches
to international relations concerned with the analysis of, among
other issues, transnational class formation, the role of international
organisations in sustaining global capitalist hegemony, the sources
of violent conflict and war, and the nature and evolution of state
sovereignty. Empirically, it focuses on such issues as the origins of the
modern international system, the Cold War and the consequences of
its end, globalisation, and the character of American global power.
Critical Introductions to World Politics builds on a new, distinctly
historical materialist approach to global affairs, serving as a key
reference point and resource for those studying and teaching
international relations from a critical perspective, as well as those
involved in the various movements for a more just, equal and
sustainable world.
vii
Acknowledgements
Thanks to David Castle, Roger van Zwanenberg, Robert Webb and

Melanie Patrick at Pluto, for seeing this book through to completion,
and Alex Colás and Rick Saull, the series editors of Criticial
Introductions to World Politics. Thanks also to Denis Cattell, Robin
Cohen, Paul Kennedy, Jens Lerche, Subir Sinha and Damian White,
for constructive criticism, debate and support. Most thanks go once
again to Emma and Will.
viii
1
Introduction
The purpose of this book is to examine the relationship between US

hegemony, contemporary imperialism and globalisation. Specifically,
it examines the claims that the more belligerent foreign policy of
the US state since the terrorist attacks in September 2001 constitutes
a significant departure from ‘globalisation’. In order to address this
question, we need to examine what is (was?) meant by globalisation;
consider the practices of the Bush administration, and relate these to
claims made concerning the nature of globalisation; and deliberate
on the extent to which these constitute a break from globalisation.
In order, in turn, to address these questions we need to consider
in detail the claims made about globalisation, and a critique of some
of these claims is central to the book’s overall argument. Specifically,
the book challenges the claims made by a body of thought that can
be called globalisation theory, focusing on the flawed methodology
of this theory and its problematic interpretation of the decade of
globalisation in the 1990s. This critique is then used to challenge
the argument that post-‘September 11’ US foreign policy represents
an unambiguous and regressive retreat from the potential of
globalisation. While there are crucial differences between the 1990s
and post-2001, there are also considerable continuities. Crucial
to these continuities is the neoliberal character of contemporary
globalisation. In making these arguments, the relationship between
the US state and imperialism will also be addressed.
Globalisation was undoubtedly central to political debate in the
1990s. This was true in the academic social sciences, but equally
in mainstream (and alternative) political discourse. But the precise
definition of globalisation was less than clear. Briefly, globalisation
refers to a set of processes that have increased interconnectedness
across the globe, and where, crucially, these connections in many
respects transcend the narrow boundaries of the nation-state. Central
to this argument is the idea of a widening of ‘spatiality’ through
the severing of the intrinsic connection between territoriality and
polity. These contentions have enormous political implications:
globalisation is said to have given rise to such far-reaching changes
1
2 Empire in the Age of Globalisation
that the ‘international’ – or relations between nation-states – may be

a thing of the past. Certainly, no globalisation theorist actually argues
this point, and most qualify statements such as Giddens’ (1999: 18)
contention that ‘following the dissolution of the Cold War, most
nations no longer have enemies’, or indeed Scholte’s (2000: 61) claim
that ‘(w)e no longer inhabit a territorialist world’. Nevertheless, some
globalisation theorists1 have drawn particular, optimistic conclusions
from the deepening and stretching of social relations that was said
to characterise globalisation. In particular, the argument was made
that the stretching of social relations across national borders provided
the basis for a new cosmopolitanism, in which a genuinely global,
universal interest could result (Held and McGrew 2002). This was
linked not only to the end of the Cold War, but also to the idea that
there are genuinely global problems that require cooperation between
states, which saw the rise of various institutions of multilateral global
governance, and the emergence of a transnational civil society, in
which global, non-state actors could put pressure on nation-states
and international institutions in order to facilitate ‘global justice’.
This relatively optimistic perspective usually separated such issues
from the dominance of neo-liberal economic policies (Held et al.
1999), although in some cases the claim was made that the 1990s
represented a shift towards a post-neo-liberal world (Giddens 2000).
This was usually associated with the ‘third way’ of the Clinton and
Blair governments in particular, but also with many governments in
the South that supported market expansion alongside appropriate
institutional changes that could facilitate such expansion. Much
was also made of the new post-Cold War extension of the principles
of ‘liberal internationalism’ through expansion of the European
Union (EU), the creation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO),
and of new regional agreements such as the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA). While these were considered to be far
from perfect vehicles of global democratisation, they were also said
to have some potential, in that they were at least preferable to an
international order composed of self-interested nation-states.
For globalisation theory, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001
undermined this potentially better future. The attacks themselves
were of course atrocities, carried out by reactionary political forces
that would have little sympathy with the liberal cosmopolitanism
advocated by globalisation theorists. But equally, the response of the
Bush administration to these attacks laid the basis for what some
globalisation theorists have called a ‘regressive globalism’ associated
Introduction 3
with the Bush II Doctrine. Globalisation theorists generally reject the

Bush II Doctrine on the grounds that it breaks with the expansion of
multilateral governance, using the United Nations (UN) as a simple
tool of US state interests. In the case of Iraq, globalisation theorists
generally reject the contempt that the Bush II administration
(among others) showed for the UN and regard the war as an affront
to the principles of international law and multilateral cooperation.
Not all globalisation theorists agree – Anthony Giddens, for one,
has supported the actions of British Prime Minister Tony Blair in
supporting the war in Iraq. But most globalisation theorists regard
world events since 2001 with dismay, arguing that limited but
real advances in ‘global governance’ have been reversed by the
actions of the Bush administration. Indeed, this applies not only
to the question of military action, but also to issues such as non-
cooperation on arms limitation, the international criminal court,
environmental regulation, and protection of US industries from
foreign competition. The potential for progressive globalisation has
thus given way to the self-interested, unilateralist foreign policy of
the Bush II government.
There is plenty of evidence to support the idea of a radical break
in US foreign policy from 2001 onwards. The Bush II administration
has undoubtedly been more unilateralist than its predecessor.
Moreover, the neoconservative defeat of the Democrats did represent
an important shift away from Clintonite policies. This was rooted
not only in the more overt unilateralism of Bush II, but was also
the product of an ‘America first’ strategy that combined the idea
of promoting forward thinking Americanisation abroad, while
simultaneously restoring the values of a mythical America at home
(Lieven 2004). These ideas are far from novel in US political culture,
but they were central to the Bush II administration’s critique of
Clinton, who was accused of not pursuing primacy with enough
vigour abroad (see Chapter 4), and who was regarded as a decadent
liberal at home.
But this book suggests that the extent of the break may not be
as great as is often suggested, and that indeed there are areas of
substantial continuity and convergence between Democrats and
Republicans. In particular, I will suggest that Clinton was not as
multilateral, and that, equally, Bush II is not as ‘anti-globalist’, as
is sometimes suggested. I will then move on to suggest that these
observations have implications for understanding the reality of
globalisation, under both Clinton and Bush II (and their predecessors
dating back to Reagan), and that the central continuity is based on

an intrinsic link between US hegemony and the neoliberal nature of
contemporary global capitalism.
This argument has implications for understanding both the
‘globalisation’ of the 1990s and US unilateralism since 2001. This
book argues that globalisation theory does not represent a convincing
account either of the post-2001 period, or of the globalisation period
of the 1990s. Indeed, Chapter 2 argues that globalisation theory all
too easily accepts the political parameters established by the victory
of neoliberalism in the 1980s, which argued for the primacy of
market forces, free trade, liberalised finance and open competition.
This neoliberal globalisation is neither inevitable nor desirable. At
best, globalisation theory underestimates the neoliberal nature of
the international order, and at worst it apologises for it. Moreover,
even in its more critical variants, this theory does not provide a
convincing account of the nature of the contemporary international
– or indeed global – order. A critique of this view is undertaken
through a consideration of international politics, economics and
culture in Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6.
Chapter 3 examines the debates in the discipline of international
relations, and relates these to the issue of multilateral global governance.
The main focus of this chapter is an assessment of the development of
state sovereignty, the international institutions of multilateral global
governance, and how these operate within a hierarchical nation-
state system under US hegemony. The main argument made is that
institutions of global governance have not transcended the deeply
unequal international system of nation-states, and that the world
can still in some respects be regarded as imperialist. These debates
are further illustrated in Chapter 4, through a detailed discussion of
international relations after 2001, and especially of the war in Iraq
in 2003. Together, Chapters 3 and 4 also reconsider the relevance
or otherwise of classical Marxist theories of imperialism and newer
theories of transnational capitalism. The broad argument made is that
contemporary globalisation has undermined much of the relevance
of classical Marxist theories, with the partial exception of Kautsky,
and that the current international order is best characterised as an
ultra-imperialist world led by the US state, actively supported by other
states and capitals. In the neoliberal era, this hegemony has changed
its form, with a passage from Reaganite neoconservatism, through
the Clintonite Third Way and back to Bush II’s neoconservatism; but
the underlying neoliberal content is similar.
Introduction 5
These arguments are further considered in Chapter 5, through

an examination of the global economy from Bretton Woods to the
present. The chapter thus mainly focuses on the development of
‘free markets’ since 1945. In examining and challenging the claims
that neoliberal global market expansion unproblematically promotes
economic growth and poverty reduction, the contradictions and
tensions of the global economic order – and the role of the US in
that order – are highlighted. The chapter particularly highlights
the unequal competition associated with the global ‘free market’,
and the ways in which the promotion of ‘free trade’ undermines
sustained capitalist development in the periphery. This is intensified
by the dominance of financial capital, which further diverts funds
from productive investment and increases economic instability
in emerging markets, but which is also central to the continued
hegemony of the US state. Once again, these arguments are illustrated
through an examination of the policy process from the 1980s to
the present, with particular reference to their relationship to the US
state and international financial institutions. The dysfunctionality
of these processes is illustrated through a consideration of global
poverty and inequality, and of the concentration of capital in some
areas and consequent marginalisation of other locations, which free
trade intensifies.
Chapter 6 then reviews debates over the globalisation of culture,
examining questions related to consumer culture, liberal rights,
universalism and cultural standardisation. The argument is made
that while the cultural imperialism thesis is deeply flawed, increased
cultural flows are far from equal; and, more importantly, the expansion
of the commodity is deeply implicated in specific power relations that
do not transcend territorial place. Theories of global consumer culture
too easily take ‘the market’ as a given, abstracting it from the social
relations and territorial places that have the most power to direct
processes of globalisation. This critique has implications related not
only to the narrow concerns of specific cultural goods, but to wider
issues related to questions of human rights and freedoms, of what
constitutes ‘progress’ and the ‘good life’, and indeed who or what
agency promotes the universal good. These debates are in turn related
to US-led liberal internationalism (including neoconservatism),
associated with this perceived universal good, and again the argument
is made that while the form of US state power may have changed,
there has been substantial continuity in terms of content.
These critical accounts are made not only as a contribution to the

globalisation debate, and as a critique of mainstream globalisation
theory, but also as the basis for providing a clearer understanding of
the realities of the contemporary world order. In so doing, I attempt
to provide an understanding of the contemporary nature of US
hegemony, imperialism and globalisation. In conclusion, Chapter
7 revisits the debates set out and discussed in Chapters 2 to 6, and
summarises the nature of contemporary imperialism and ‘actually
existing globalisation’, and then moves on to discuss the question
of alternatives to it. These alternatives are addressed, with specific
reference to the questions of politics, economics and culture examined
in the previous chapters. These issues are then finally related to the
issue of progressive, as opposed to reactionary, alternatives to the
current international capitalist order. As will become clear, this final
question is not unrelated to the main focus of the book, which is how
we theorise the relationship between US hegemony and neoliberal,
capitalist globalisation.
2
Globalisation Theory or
Capitalist Globalisation?
This chapter provides a broad overview of the globalisation debate,

with particular emphasis placed on sociology and globalisation
theory. It starts by examining definitions of globalisation, and some
of the problems with these definitions. The focus in this opening
section is on global interconnectedness, an increase in the intensity
of this interconnectedness, and the intensification of what can be
described as a global consciousness. In the second section of the
chapter, I move on to an examination of the globalisation debate,
focusing on the distinction (Held et al. 1999) between hyper-
globalisers, sceptics and transformationalists. The debate here rests
on the division between the hyper-globalisers and the sceptics over
the degree of globalisation, which is measured in terms of such factors
as capital flows, state autonomy and the fate of national culture.
Transformationalists, on the other hand, focus less on quantitative
measures (although these are regarded as important) and more on
qualitative change, such as the intensity of flows and the prominence
of international institutions. In this section I argue that there is
much to be learnt from this debate, but in some respects it confuses
a number of important issues, which essentially relate to the politics
of globalisation. This issue is taken up in the third section, which
does not completely reject the distinctions within the globalisation
debate, but argues that an alternative approach may be more useful.
This alternative attempts to place agency, power and politics (in the
widest sense of the term) at the centre of the globalisation debate,
and to define globalisation as not only a set of processes but also a
political project. The main features of this project are briefly outlined,
and related to the current neoliberal era of global capitalism. This
discussion then sets the scene for later chapters, where there is a more
detailed analysis of specific debates related to globalisation, and of
how these relate to US hegemony and neoliberal capitalism.
7
DEFINING GLOBALISATION
Anthony Giddens’ The Consequences of Modernity (1990) is one of the

most important sociological works that attempts to construct a theory
of globalisation. In this work, Giddens (1990: 64) defines globalisation
as ‘the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant
localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events
occurring many miles away and vice versa’. In what is probably the
most comprehensive examination of globalisation to date, David Held
and his co-authors similarly define it as ‘the widening, deepening
and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects
of contemporary social life, from the cultural to the criminal, the
financial to the spiritual’ (Held et al. 1999: 2). They then develop a
more rigorous definition, arguing that globalisation is ‘[a] process
(or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial
organization of social relations and transactions – assessed in terms
of their extensity, velocity and impact – generating transcontinental
or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and
the exercise of power’ (Held et al. 1999: 16). In these definitions,
globalisation refers to increased interconnectedness across and
beyond national borders, and an increase in the speed and intensity
of these connections. These in turn have promoted an increase in
global awareness – what Giddens calls reflexivity – which undermines
localised social relations and consciousness.
Interconnectedness means that events in one part of the world will
impact on different localities in other parts of the world. There are
plenty of examples that support this idea: the impact of financial flows
in one region on other regions, such as in 1997–98, when the financial
crisis in East Asia had spill-over effects in Russia, Latin America,
and ultimately the United States, when a serious global financial
crisis was only averted by the actions of the US government and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF); the destruction of rainforests
in much of the world, but particularly Latin America, which has
exacerbated the environmental problem of global warming; and
‘local’ wars, which, when they involve the actions of superpowers,
can have all kinds of unanticipated consequences. The context for
the atrocities committed on September 11, 2001, for instance, can be
traced back to superpower intervention in Afghanistan, the US-led
attack against Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait in 1990–91, and the
subsequent decision to increase US troop numbers in Saudi Arabia.
Clearly then, the world is interconnected. But a note of caution
is also necessary, for how novel is this interconnectedness? Events
Globalisation Theory or Capitalist Globalisation? 9
in one locality have always impacted on events in other places.

One thinks here of old empires, the slave trade, and wars between
competing powers. For those countries that were established in the
move to independence after the Second World War, the idea that
events in one part of the world impact on their own territories is
hardly new, for they had experienced years of colonialism. But, for
many writers and commentators, globalisation is supposed to be
something that is a relatively recent phenomenon. Clearly it is not,
and it may be that the notion of novelty is a peculiarly western
one, for in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was western
countries that clearly directed the process of colonisation, whereas
globalisation today may be a less clearly directed process (though
this is a contentious point, as I show below). Seen in this light, those
who claim that globalisation is novel may be betraying a western
bias in their thinking, as it is only in recent years that the former
colonial world has more directly impacted on the west – through,
for example, post-war migration.
These points are not made to deny the reality of contemporary
globalisation. As will become clear, I think the concept of globalisation
does ‘capture’ some important changes in the world over the last
30 years or so. But we also need to remember that globalisation
is in many respects much older, and so we need to be sensitive to
what precisely is new in the current era of globalisation. Writers
like Giddens (1990), Tomlinson (2000) and Urry (2002) have all
argued that a novel feature of contemporary globalisation is that
the direction and origins of global flows are difficult to pin down or
locate, in contrast to earlier periods of globalisation, which were really
about ‘westernisation’. But I will argue that the contemporary period
of globalisation is one characterised by the dominance of neoliberal
capitalism, and that in some respects globalisation can be regarded
as a project designed to expand this domination, in part through the
actions of the US state. This dominance may be contested, above all
by the rise of East Asia; but as we will see, this challenge can hardly
be explained by globalisation theory.
Another way in which some writers have attempted to specify what
is novel in the current period of globalisation is to emphasise the
increase in the speed and intensity of global flows. Interconnectedness
is not new, but what is novel is the amount, extent and rapidity
of these flows, and the extent to which we experience them.
Following Marx’s prophetic analysis in the mid nineteenth century
(see below), David Harvey (1989) calls this process ‘time–space
compression’. Put differently, we live in a shrinking world. Thus,

air travel is faster, cheaper and more available (for some) today than
in the past. The development of information and communications
technologies (ICTs) means that we – or some of us – can communicate
instantaneously with people across the globe through email and the
World Wide Web, or immediately experience a far-off event through
satellite television.
Manuel Castells (1996) argues that the development of this
shrinking world has led to new social divisions, chiefly between those
at the cutting edge of the new ICTs and those that are marginalised
from them. The marginalised are still largely confined to their
particular, localised places, and experience life mainly in what he
calls the ‘space of places’: they are marginalised because they are
insufficiently globalised. On the other hand, members of the global
elite experience much of their life – both in work and leisure – in
the ‘space of flows’, in which they link up with other, distant places,
in order to make money and take expensive holidays. They still live
in particular localities, but are abstractly – and literally – fenced
off from those confined only to the space of places. For Castells,
because power is increasingly globalised, it is increasingly difficult
to find political opposition that can challenge these unequal and
unjust power relations. What was often considered to be the main
vehicle of opposition in the era of ‘national capitalism’ from the
1940s to the 1970s – the organised labour movement – is said to be
too confined to the space of places in the era of globalisation, and so
has been seriously undermined. In this globalised world of intensified
information flows, there needs to be a radical reconceptualisation of
our ways of thinking about this world, including a greater sensitivity
to the fluidity of social structures, and a recognition that some of
these have been seriously weakened. Thus, Castells argues that the
old manufacturing working class of industrial capitalism is not as
significant as it once was. At times – though he often qualifies this
argument – he also argues that the nation-state, perhaps the key
reference point for classical sociology, is also changing rapidly, and
may even be in decline.
The French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard takes these arguments
even further, suggesting that attempts to understand ‘the social’ are
doomed to failure, even perhaps that there is no longer anything that
can be called ‘the social’. Rather than focusing on power relations, as
in sociological analysis (including Castells), he argues that the world
is full of global flows, and that these are moving with such speed
and intensity that it is impossible to find any deeper meaning or

truth beyond them. Instead, the world of global commodities lacks
any depth or meaning, and is simply one of surface appearances.
We may experience distant local events on our television screens,
but it is this very immediacy that leads to a lack of meaning or
depth. These events are simply one more meaningless occurrence
in an increasingly shallow world. Hyper-mobility means a placeless
world, and therefore a meaningless world. Thus, to return to the
definitions of globalisation above, the ‘stretching’ of social relations is
so great that they have effectively snapped. There is no ‘real’ or ‘social’
anymore, just a proliferation of images and signs that represent or
refer to nothing but other signs and images. Crucially, Baudrillard
argues that we are not manipulated by some other power – be it the
state, dominant classes including owners of media companies, or even
advertising agencies. Instead, we are fully aware of the shallowness
of global flows, but we do not care about their lack of meaning or
correspondence to a supposed reality. For Baudrillard (1993: 17), ‘we
manufacture a profusion of meanings in which there is nothing to
see’. Baudrillard’s infamous and much misunderstood claim that the
Gulf War of 1991 ‘did not take place’ should be seen in this light.
He was not literally claiming that the events that made up the Gulf
War of 1991 did not occur, merely that this could not be described
either as a war or a particularly meaningful event. It was less a real
war than a spectacle.
There is obviously some truth in the notion of time–space
compression. However, there is a danger of exaggerating the degree
and significance of this phenomenon. Baudrillard is right to focus
on the spectacular in the reporting of the 1991 Gulf War, which was
a highly mediated event (as was, in a different way, the 2003 war).
But to claim that because it was so mediated it was simply a spectacle,
or that it was without any meaning, is too one-sided, and betrays a
tendency in Baudrillard to over-generalise from his own cynicism.
The deaths, political protests and conflicts that arose out of the 1991
war made it a far from meaningless event. More generally, the claim
that global flows have intensified so much that we have witnessed
the death of the social, and indeed the ‘end of reality’, is based on
contradictory logic. As Strinati (1992: 78) notes,
if the ‘real’ has ‘imploded’, as Baudrillard argues, then what ‘real’ evidence
can we refer to in order to show that it has done so? If we could find this
evidence then the point would be disproved, but if we couldn’t then we

wouldn’t know if it had or hadn’t.
Clearly, then, Baudrillard’s views are questionable, and even he

seems to be developing a more nuanced (though still unconvincing)
account in relation to the events after September 11, 2001 (Baudrillard
2002). But even the more carefully considered views of Castells
need to be treated with some caution. Castells (1993: 20) has
argued that ‘the enhancement of telecommunications has created
the material infrastructure for the formation of a global economy,
in a movement similar to that which lay behind the construction
of the railways and the formation of national markets during the
nineteenth century’. But this view can be questioned. Certainly,
information and communications technologies are important, but
they may not be as important as Castells suggests. Commercial and
financial transactions make up a tiny proportion of total world gross
domestic product, with estimates ranging from a high of 1.25 per
cent to a low of 0.3 per cent. In other words, ‘old economy’ activity
constitutes around 98.75 to 99.7 per cent of world GDP (Thompson
2003: 194–5). Moreover, most internet traffic is focused on fairly
mundane and/or leisure activity. Even the supposed indirect benefits
of new technologies for the rest of the economy is hard to identify
– there were certainly no unprecedented increases in productivity
in the so-called new economy of the 1990s, and this in fact turned
out to be a largely old-fashioned speculative boom (Henwood 2003;
and see Chapter 4).
This is not to deny that new technologies have facilitated some
changes, such as providing increased information in the provision
of supplies and stocks to manufacturers and retailers, but their
overall significance has been exaggerated. Golding (2000) usefully
distinguishes between two different effects of new technologies. The
first allows existing social processes and interaction to occur more
quickly, while the second allows for completely new forms of activity.
New information and communications technologies fit more closely
into the former than the latter category. Indeed, the current vogue for
describing a shrinking world is actually far from new, and was also
seen in the nineteenth century, in the context of the disembedding
effects of railways and the telegraph (Thrift 1996). It could even be
argued that the telegraph – which ‘shrank’ communication times
with distant locations from weeks to minutes and seconds – was more
revolutionary than the web, which shrinks communications from
seconds to fractions of seconds. Moreover, it could be claimed that

this debate focuses too narrowly on one issue, and that the impact
of technology on society is exaggerated in these accounts. Frankel
(2000: 6–7) points out that
there is a tendency to see globalization as irreversible. But the political forces

that fragmented the world for 30 years (1914–44) were evidently far more
powerful than the accretion of technological progress in transport that went
on during that period. The lesson is that there is nothing inevitable about
the process of globalization.
This can be illustrated by taking the example of financial capital,

which in many respects conforms most closely to the idea that capital
has now transcended the limits of place (O’Brien 1992). Implicit
in this argument is the assumption that new developments in
communications technologies have determined this process, as these
allow people to switch money to new locations literally ‘at the flick of
a switch’. But this is too simplistic. It is more accurate to say that the
new technologies have facilitated this process, but that its ultimate
cause lies in decisions by states to liberalise financial regulation, and
therefore end border restrictions on the movement of money – a
point I will return to in the next chapter (see also Helleiner 1994).
Time–space compression may therefore be facilitated by technological
developments, but there are also underlying political causes.
Moreover, there are also limits to the degree to which time–space
compression exists. The world has certainly ‘shrunk’, but it does not
necessarily follow that the world is therefore made up of hyper-mobile
global flows in which particular, local places become irrelevant.
Mittelman (1997: 229) acknowledges the reality of increasing capital
mobility, changing forms of state regulation, and wider patterns of
globalisation, but, crucially, he also argues that ‘the compression of
time and space is limited because flows of capital and technology
must eventually touch down in distinct places’. In other words, there
are enormous costs to capital – particularly productive capital – in
simply relocating from one place to another, and leaving behind
plant, machinery, labour, suppliers and markets. It is certainly easier
in some sectors than others, and mobility is greater in labour-intensive
sectors, but this does not apply to most sectors.
The importance of place can also be understood by looking at the
question of access. There is a great wealth of evidence that shows the
reality of unequal access to cutting-edge ‘global’ technologies (as well
as basics like food). For instance, there are more telephone lines in
Manhattan than there are in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. In the
mid 1990s, the United States had 35 computers per 100 people, South
Korea 9, and Ghana 0.11. Internet use remains heavily concentrated
in Western Europe and the United States, and to some extent parts of
East Asia (Kiely 1998a: 5). Some may claim that this information gap
can be closed through the diffusion of technology to the developing
world, presumably through a trickle-down process. But the question
of how this will occur is not simply one of technological diffusion.
The significance of social and political relations also demands
some attention. Important questions have to be asked, such as how
‘catch-up’ can occur – either through incorporation into the world
economy through a process of market-friendly policies, or through
selective protection, whereby technology is borrowed from abroad
and gradually unpacked and developed in new ways. To ask such a
question leads us back to debates about the role of markets and states
in the process of development, something that pre-dates the literature
on globalisation, and which returns us to the question of agency.
Neither should we lose sight of the fact that power relations can exist
within the social relations that embody the new technologies. For
example, the last few years have seen a sustained attempt by private
companies to assert ownership of ‘intellectual property rights’ (see
Chapter 5).
These points reflect a basic tension in Castells’ work. On the one
hand, he tends to suggest that power relations exist on the basis of
people operating in the space of flows, rather than the space of places.
The latter are therefore marginalised in relation to the former. But
on the other hand, because the space of flows transcends the space
of places, in principle the network society could operate anywhere.
Indeed, for this reason Giddens effectively co-opts Castells’ work
for the global third way project, as he argues that every ‘place’ can
effectively compete, provided the correct (neoliberal) policies of trade
and investment openness are adopted. The problem here is that
the very fact of marginalisation implies the continued importance
of the space of places, as capital concentrates in some areas and
marginalises others. In other words, to use the language employed
by Castells, some places continue to matter more than others. The
basis for this concentration coexisting with relative marginalisation
is the competitive advantage that some locations enjoy over others,
based on a clustering of socio-economic activity. Crucial here is the
development of technological capacity, which does not involve simply
the importing of machinery or information technology, but also the

development of technological knowledge, so that the technology can
be used efficiently and competitively. This involves the development
of a state ‘interventionism’ that takes us far beyond the ‘market-
friendly’ interventionist policies advocated under neoliberalism.
This also suggests that the dominance of neoliberalism undermines
the ‘development’ prospects for the developing world (Kiely 1998b:
Ch. 9). I shall return to these issues in Chapter 5.
Taken together, the arguments so far suggest that globalisation is
associated with a reconfiguration of particular economic, political
and cultural conditions, but that it has not destroyed the importance
of particular places (Dicken et al. 1997). Much of the debate on
globalisation tends to assume that there is a ‘global level’ operating
independently of particular places, and impacting on them in uniform
ways. Even when lip-service is paid to the importance of the ‘local’
or ‘particular’ (as by Giddens), globalisation still tends to be seen as
a free floating, agentless, and therefore placeless phenomenon. This
culminates in the extreme arguments of Baudrillard, which most
writers quite correctly reject. But this tendency is present in the
work of Giddens (and to some extent Castells), and it has serious
implications for an understanding of the politics of globalisation
– a point taken up in the following parts of this chapter, and in
later chapters.
Before moving on, however, we need to look at the third defining
feature of globalisation. This is the notion that there has developed
a global consciousness, so that we are more consciously aware of the
notion of ‘one world’, first in terms of a common global fate, and
second (and relatedly) in terms of the fate of ‘distant others’, and
their awareness of us (Robertson 1992). This has implications for our
understanding of the global, but also for how we perceive the local
spaces in which we live. In terms of the former, a common global
fate can perhaps be seen most clearly in terms of the environment,
and specifically in relation to fears of global warming. In terms of
the latter, the impact of global flows means that no ‘local’ society or
culture can exist in a self-contained way, which in turn means that
it cannot any longer justify its existence through appeals to ‘local
tradition’. This is what Giddens means when he refers to a process
of disembedding, and he sees this as a progressive development.
In some respects I share this view, but once again I think there is
a need for caution. I argue this point in more detail in Chapter
6. For now, I would simply say that it is one thing to argue that
this is a progressive development, but quite another to argue that

it is a directionless or placeless one. For many of the processes of
disembedding are products of free-market, consumer capitalism. This
system is certainly not placeless, but is located most powerfully in the
United States and a few other ‘advanced’ capitalist countries. To point
this out is not necessarily to reject the products in question, nor to
champion a crude anti-Americanism; but it is to suggest that, once
again, globalisation is a process that lacks neither place nor power.
These issues are also reflected in debates over the question of
human rights. The 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human
Rights championed the principle of universal rights, though there
existed a tension between the sovereignty of nation-states and the
rights of individuals (see Chapters 3 and 4). There are also important
debates over the question of which rights are important. Western
governments have tended to see individual rights such as freedom
of speech, freedom of movement (for some) and the right to own
property, as most important. Some developing-country governments
have tended to argue that collective rights, such as freedom from
poverty and the right to development, are more important. Both sides
in this debate have at times been hypocritical, sometimes being more
concerned to justify their own existence than to extend any rights at
all, individual or collective. In other words, important debates about
global justice have all too easily become caught up in the messy
reality of power politics. For example, Robert Mugabe’s ‘concern’ for
the landless in Zimbabwe now appears to be motivated less by an
older commitment to social justice, and more by a desperate (and
probably doomed) attempt at self-preservation.
But on the other hand, even leaving aside colonial history, western
governments are far from benign. Concern for human rights is
undoubtedly justified, but there is then a question of who polices
human rights violations. A global concern for the rights of distant
others presumably means protection for those others from serious
human rights abuses, such as genocide. But this begs the question
of how this protection is to be implemented and who defines the
violations in the first place. Thus, in 2003, the initial justification for
the war in Iraq was the existence of weapons of mass destruction, but
when it appeared that these may not have existed in any immediately
usable form, some apologists for war made the post-hoc justification
that the war was necessary to oust the serious human rights abuser,
Saddam Hussein. This begs a number of questions examined in more
detail in Chapters 3 and 4, which include: Who has the power to
decide that war is justifiable and necessary? What of those killed in
the war? And what about the US-and British-led occupations after
the war? More generally, there is also the question of human rights
abuse: Why in 2003 was Saddam Hussein considered to be such a
violator, when his worst atrocities were committed in 1988 (when he
was an ally of western governments) and in 1991 (when retreating
US forces effectively turned a blind eye to massacre)? Similarly, why
were atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia (eventually)
deemed to be worthy of military intervention, while genocide in
Rwanda in 1994 was not? Indeed, the US and British governments,
among others, deliberately played down the atrocities in Rwanda in
order to discourage intervention. The 2003 war was launched against
Saddam Hussein’s regime at a time when more pressing human rights
abuses were being committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
To note these examples is not to downplay the atrocities that were
committed, nor to deny the murderous nature of regimes like those of
Slobodan Miloševiç and Saddam Hussein. Still less is it an argument
for ignoring these human rights abuses (though whether war is the
best way to deal with them is another issue). It is, however, to suggest
that the selective nature of interventions – which by definition
means that some abuses are ignored – cannot be divorced from the
question of power, including the continued power of nation-states.
Moreover, what is to be made of action designed to promote other,
more collective rights (such as development), which relate to issues
of debt relief, increased aid and trade justice, but where it may be
harder to pinpoint individual villains accurately, and which may
actually cost more lives? At best, there has been limited progress on
these issues; and at worst, western action has been negligent. These
issues are taken up further in Chapters 3, 4 and 6.
This section started with three quite simple definitions of globali-
sation, and extracted three main characteristics: interconnectedness
through flows that go beyond national borders; an increase in the
intensity and speed of these flows; and an increase in global con-
sciousness. We have also found, however, that these definitions and
characteristics are very contentious. In my discussion we will con-
tinually return to the questions of agency, politics and power. This
implies, at the very least, the need for a more in-depth consideration
of theories of globalisation.
THEORIES OF GLOBALISATION/GLOBALISATION THEORY
This section examines a text that tries to provide a more theoretically

rigorous account of the nature of globalisation. David Held et al.’s
Global Transformations (1999) is perhaps the most comprehensive

account of the phenomenon to date, so it is worthy of some further
consideration. The main purpose of the book is to look at contemporary
manifestations of processes of globalisation, including the state and
global governance, trade and production, the environment and
culture. But also of interest is how the writers attempt to define
the theoretical debate on globalisation, and it is this account that
I will examine in this section. Held et al. identify three theoretical
positions in relation to globalisation: those of the hyper-globalisers,
the sceptics, and the transformationalists. Here I will examine in
detail these three positions; But I will also provide a critical account
of this way of dividing the globalisation debate, and thus return to
the questions discussed in the first section, particularly those relating
to Giddens’s definition of globalisation.
The hyper-globalisation thesis

The hyper-globalisation thesis argues that globalisation represents
an unprecedented change in recent years, so that global flows have
undermined the existence of the nation-state. According to Kenichi
Ohmae (1995: 5), ‘traditional nation-states have become unnatural,
even impossible business units in a global economy’. In other words,
capital flows have eroded the capacity of the nation-state to regulate
the market. Instead, we have a borderless world, in which capital
effortlessly moves from one part of the globe to another. There is,
however, considerable disagreement over the political implications
of the development of hyper-mobile capital. On one side are the
neoliberals, including Ohmae, who welcome this development; on
the other are various radicals who see it as regrettable. To confuse
matters further, there are also some radicals who welcome the
development of hyper-mobile capital.
Neoliberals welcome it because they regard free markets as being
more efficient than states. All individuals and countries, they contend,
can develop through the exercise of comparative advantage – in other
words, countries should specialise in producing those goods that they
can produce most efficiently (that is, cheaply). The question of what
to specialise in can be discovered through operating according to
the principles of free and open competition. Thus, if country A can
produce cars cheaply and country B computers, they should specialise
in each and then exchange their surpluses with each other, which
will mean more cars and computers in both countries. States should
not intervene to protect economic sectors from foreign competition,
which means that they should adopt low tariffs and eliminate other
controls on their trade and investment policies (for a critique of this
view, see Chapter 5). Quantitative increases in global capital flows,
measured by such phenomena as increased foreign investment and
trade/GDP ratios, are therefore welcomed, because they undermine
the capacity of nation-states to regulate – and therefore distort –
the global economy. In the long run, neoliberal hyper-globalisers
maintain, a world economy determined by market forces will operate
to everyone’s benefit.
Radicals, on the other hand, draw very different implications.
They argue that the undermining of the nation-state gives capital a
free hand to promote a race to the bottom, based on undermining
wages and social and environmental conditions, through a move
from high-wage, heavily regulated areas to areas of low wages and
worse social conditions. In an early formulation of this argument
(Frobel et al. 1980), it was argued that the selective industrialisation
of the former Third World had given rise to a new international
division of labour. The newly industrialising countries of the former
Third World had developed through the attraction of cheap labour,
so that transnational companies relocated from expensive First
World to cheaper Third World locations. This amounted to super-
exploitation of cheap, Third World labour – a practice that states were
powerless to stop. If states tried to regulate capital and improve social
conditions, then capital would simply relocate to areas where wages
and conditions were worse, and costs to capital correspondingly low.
Insofar as states retain power, it is only to accept the new competitive
conditions imposed by transnational capital. Hyper-globalisation is
thus said to represent the triumph of exploitative capital, manifested
most visibly in the resurgence of sweat-shop labour – a particular
bête-noire of the anti-globalisation movement (see Chapter 7).
A small minority of radicals actually welcome globalisation, as it is
said to increase the development performance of the former Third
World. States, according to this view, entrench the power of already
powerful countries; so the loosening of the ties of capital to particular
nation-states means that the developing world is likely to benefit from
an increasing share of world investment and trade. Of course this
investment may be exploitative, but all countries that develop have to
go through stages of particularly acute exploitation before economic
growth secures social advances. Moreover, it is better to be exploited
through capital investment than it is to be marginalised through lack
of capital investment. The globalisation of ‘cosmopolitan capital’
(N. Harris 2003), freed from ties to particular nation-states, therefore

prepares the way for the ending of uneven development, and of the
domination of weaker states by more powerful ones. Globalisation
thus allows capital to fulfil its historic mission of promoting the
development of the former Third World (Kitching 2001; Desai 2002).
To borrow the words of Marx (at his worst), the rapid development
of East Asia ‘shows to the less developed world, the image of its own
future’ (Marx 1976: 91).
As should by now be clear, the hyper-globalisation thesis – in its
neoliberal and radical (and dissenting radical) versions – tends to
focus very much on political economy. But it is clearly possible to see
that there is something like a cultural equivalent, which would not
be so far removed from the strong notion of time–space compression
discussed above. Although political economists would certainly reject
Baudrillard’s notion of the death of the social, where there is some
common ground is in the idea of hyper-mobility. In the case of
Baudrillard, this is so great that it undermines meaning; in the case
of the views discussed in this section, mobility is seen as so great that
it undermines the nation-state (Kiely 1999). This similarity gives us
some clue as to the problems with this perspective. Leaving aside
disagreement over the political implications of the ‘death’ of the
nation-state, hyper-globalisers believe that capital can simply move
from one location to another without cost. But the evidence does not
bear this out – Chapter 5 demonstrates that there are significant costs
associated with relocation (particularly for productive capital), and
strong reasons for capital (including financial capital) to continue to
concentrate in specific locations. Indeed, while the absolute amounts
of capital investment going to the developing world have increased,
the relative shares of global investment and trade have in many
cases fallen, thus undermining any simplistic thesis based on capital
effortlessly moving to lowest-cost areas. If capital is not as mobile as
this approach implies, then clearly the state still has some economic
role to play – even if this may have changed since, say, the 1950s and
1960s. Indeed, much is made of East Asia in the hyper-globalisation
approach; or at least the rise of East Asia before the financial crisis
of 1997–98. Neoliberals argue that the region developed because
states played a limited role in these economies, and because their
intervention was only market-friendly (World Bank 1993); or rather,
this was the argument made until financial collapse led to a renewal
of the claim that there was too much government intervention in
the economy. Theories of the new international division of labour
argued that the region developed as capital relocated in order to

take advantage of cheap labour. And the theory of cosmopolitan
capital argued that the rise of East Asia could be explained by the
diffusion of the capitalist mode of production from the ‘advanced’
capitalist countries of the west. But each of these theories discounts
the role that the nation-state played in the industrialisation processes
in South Korea and Taiwan, where states targeted credit, protected
particular industries from foreign competition, restricted foreign
investment (relocation by transnationals was strictly limited in these
countries), and limited the export of capital (Kiely 1998b: Chs. 7 and
8). Indeed, the gradual lifting of this regulatory framework in South
Korea was one reason for its financial crisis, in striking contrast with
the more heavily regulated Taiwanese economy. Moreover, the cheap
labour argument is also problematic, because workers in both South
Korea and Taiwan won large increases (from admittedly low starting
points) without facing wholesale relocation of capital investment to
lower-cost sites.
These comments hint at the basic problem with the hyper-
globalisation thesis, which is that globalisation is held to have impacts
on particular places in a one-sided way. Globalisation is active, while
local and national places – including nation-states – are passive.
Although in this case some agency is at least specified (transnational
capital) – unlike in some of the approaches to globalisation discussed
so far – it still does not stand up to critical scrutiny, as South Korea
and Taiwan ‘took off’ with limited foreign capital investment; and
more generally, capital flows show a strong tendency to concentrate
in particular regions, rather than disperse across the globe.
The sceptical thesis

Sceptics are particularly concerned to challenge the notion of the
death, or even serious weakening, of the nation-state. Once again,
this account does not belong to any one political tendency, and can
be associated with political realists, who see international politics
as conflict between states (and differ among themselves on political
implications); social democrats, who place continued faith in the
hope that the state can continue to regulate capital; and some
Marxists, who believe that the current internationalisation of capital
is an expression of inter-imperialist rivalries.
Some of these debates are addressed in detail in Chapter 3.
Here I want to outline broadly the reasons why the state is still
seen as powerful in terms of its relationship to ‘global markets’,
and then problematise some of their associated contentions. One

major measure of the extent of globalisation is the degree of trade
openness of countries, as measured by the ratio of trade to GDP.
Hirst and Thompson (1999) argue that, compared to the year 1913,
there is actually little change in the openness of many economies.
Thus, measured at current prices, the 1913 trade/GDP ratios were
35.4 per cent for France, 35.1 per cent for Germany, 31.4 per cent
for Japan, 103.6 per cent for the Netherlands, 44.7 per cent for the
United Kingdom, and 11.2 per cent for the US. In 1995, the figures
were 36.6 per cent for France, 38.7 per cent for Germany, 14.1 per
cent for Japan, 83.4 per cent for the Netherlands, 42.6 per cent for
the UK (for 1994), and 19 per cent for the US (Thompson 2000:
97). The US alone, therefore, has seen a sharp increase, while Japan
has seen a sharp decline. The overall trend is one of little change,
hardly amounting to a picture of unprecedented change to a wholly
new era of globalisation. One common objection to this argument
is that figures are measured in constant prices, and are therefore
unadjusted for inflation. Once the measure is switched to constant
figures (adjusted for inflation), then there is an unambiguous increase
in trade/GDP ratios, such as an increase in export/GDP ratios from
11.2 per cent for all developed countries in 1913 to 23.1 per cent
in 1985 (Held et al. 1999: 169). However, adjusting for inflation
can be problematic, since it is in the traded goods sector that prices
generally rise more slowly than the economy as a whole, because this
sector tends to be the most efficient and to have the fastest rates of
productivity growth. Adjusting for inflation for the economy as a
whole cannot distinguish between sectors in the required way, and
so the growth of trade relative to GDP may exaggerate the growth of
trade relative to total output. It is also sometimes argued that, with
the movement towards a service economy – at least in the ‘advanced’
capitalist countries – there is less likely to be international trade in
this sector, and so comparing 1913 (when economies produced or
traded more manufactured goods, and traded more primary goods)
with the 1990s is not sensible. But this argument is unconvincing,
because the fact that some countries have shifted to services, which
are less likely to be traded across borders, highlights the fact that
employment prospects in such sectors are not only subject to the
pressures of international competition. The clear implication of this
argument is that nation-states continue to have an important role
in economic policy-making, and are not powerless in the face of
transnational capital.
Moreover, it is not only in the economic sphere that nation-

states continue to be relevant. The creation and maintenance of
international institutions is ultimately sanctioned by nation-states,
and they ultimately stand or fall on the basis of agreement between
(at least) some states. As we will see in Chapter 3, this has given rise
to an important debate over the nature of ‘global governance’, and
whether international institutions can move beyond the interests
of particular nation-states (realism), or whether states and other
institutions simply reflect powerful capitalist interests (Marxism). A
similar point can be made in terms of the fate of national cultures,
which are not simply being swept away by a global culture, but
are in some respects strengthening as part of the processes of
resistance to perceived cultural homogenisation (often regarded as
‘Americanisation’). This issue is taken up further in Chapter 6.
The sceptical account is useful. Above all, it reminds us of the
continued centrality of the nation-state. Indeed, in one respect the
world has changed enormously since the late nineteenth century,
as the end of empires has seen the emergence and universalisation
of the nation-state. Thus, one manifestation of globalisation is not
the decline of the nation-state, but rather its universalisation (see
Chapter 3). In terms of economics, states retain considerable leverage
over taxation and expenditure decisions, the setting of interest
rates, continued protectionist policies, research and development,
education, and so on. More widely, two points can be made. First,
states do not become irrelevant in the context of enmeshment
in the institutions of ‘global governance’; and second, national
cultures retain considerable vitality even when faced with enhanced
cultural diversity.
But in other respects the sceptical position is problematic. In
particular there is a tendency to argue that nothing of great significance
has changed in recent years. Indeed, the argument is sometimes made
that globalisation should be seen simply as an ideology, a way of
justifying unpalatable policies such as redundancies as necessary in
the face of ‘global competition’. I will argue later that much of the
rhetoric on globalisation is ideological in precisely this way. But on
the other hand, globalisation is not just ideology, and there have
been some important changes in the last 30 years.
National cultures still exist, and these have always been in some
sense open to flows from ‘other’ cultures. However, the intensity
and immediacy of global flows in recent years does mean an increase
in the likelihood and amount of cultural ‘mixing and matching’
– what is sometimes called cultural hybridity. Similarly, the number

of international institutions, and the recognition of the reality
of the need for global solutions, no matter how contested, does
mean that globalisation is not simply an extension of nation-
state interests. In terms of political economy, there have also been
important changes. Rather than being mainly a producer of primary
products, the developing world has become increasingly involved in
manufacturing. On the other hand, trading and production of these
goods remains highly stratified, and developing world exports to the
developed world are quite low (see Chapter 5). Production has in
some respects been globalised, as unfinished parts of manufactured
goods may be produced in a variety of countries. There has been an
increase in global competition between companies and nation-states,
but there has been no level playing field, and no unambiguous race
to the bottom. Financial flows have been increasingly deregulated, so
that many states now allow the more-or-less free movement of money
across national borders. These flows can undermine state-directed
policies, especially those that aim to boost economic growth through
expansionary – and inflationary – policies, as these can undermine
the confidence of financial investors and lead to a flight of capital.
This may not be a new phenomenon, but it certainly represents a
reversal of dominant policies from the late 1940s to the 1970s. The
liberalisation of trade, production and finance of the last 25 years,
associated with neoliberalism, does represent very real changes, even
if they are not completely novel. Sceptics rightly point to an earlier
period of ‘globalisation’, from the late nineteenth century to 1914,
but do not sufficiently emphasise that this earlier period was not one
that experienced neoliberal globalisation. Indeed, while there were
significant rates of growth in world trade in this period, they were no
higher than in the 1950–73 period, when, compared to contemporary
globalisation, ‘national capitalisms’ were relatively closed (Baker et
al. 1997: 6). Moreover, in the earlier period, from 1875 to 1913,
average tariff rates among the more developed capitalist economies
(except Britain) were higher than in the current era of globalisation
– and, indeed, higher than they had been in the period from 1820
to 1875, which is not generally regarded as an era of globalisation
(Chang 2002: 17). Sceptics tend to make these valid points in order
to illustrate their argument that neoliberal accounts of nineteenth-
century globalisation – and neoliberal arguments that the current era
of supposedly unprecedented global interdependence forces neoliberal
policies on all states – are equally invalid.1 The question of agency
in promoting these policies does of course need to be addressed, but

a sceptical analysis that either denies real changes or suggests that
states can simply reverse these policies is not particularly useful.
Certainly, states can change policies, but then we need to address the
question of why so many states, and above all the US state, adopted
neoliberal polices in the first place. The sceptics are therefore correct
to question the globalist assumption that an era of unproblematic
state-centrism has given way to an equally unproblematic era of
globalisation; but, on the other hand, they are wrong to deny that
the neo-Keynesian era has given way to a new era based on the
dominance of neoliberalism. These issues are addressed in detail in
later chapters. For the moment, we need to return to the third and
final theoretical perspective.
The transformationalist thesis

The transformationalist thesis argues that the debate between
the hyper-globalisers and the sceptics focuses too narrowly on
quantitative measurement of the extent of globalisation, when
instead we should see globalisation in terms of qualitative change.
This approach, pursued by Held and his collaborators, argues that
‘at the dawn of a new millennium, globalization is a central driving
force behind the rapid social, political and economic changes that
are reshaping modern societies and world order’. They go on to
suggest that ‘contemporary processes of globalization are historically
unprecedented such that governments and societies across the
globe are having to adjust to a world in which there is no longer a
clear distinction between international and domestic, external and
internal affairs’ (Held et al. 1999: 7). The direction of these processes
of globalisation is uncertain and contradictory. Certainly the world
is increasingly globalised, but this has not led to anything like global
convergence. Instead, it has seen new sources of power and inequality,
and the relative marginalisation of some parts of the world – some
becoming more firmly entrenched in the circuits of global power,
while others are simply left out. However, no single state has absolute
power, since the nature of (unequal) interdependence compels all
states to adapt to a globalising world.
There is undoubtedly something useful in the transformationalist
account, particularly its tendency to define globalisation in terms of
a set of processes rather than as an end-state (which is implicit in the
debate between hyper-globalisation and scepticism). The direction
of globalisation is in many respects uncertain and contingent, and
it is true that globalisation is a process in which no single agent has

overall control. However, much the same point could be made about
capitalism – Marx’s theory of alienation was based on the fact that
neither workers nor capitalists were in control, even if capitalists
had far more power in this anarchic system than workers. This is an
important point, because the argument made by transformationalists
that power is fluid (Held and McGrew 2002: 6–7), and that no one
is in absolute control, is correct; but again, we have to question the
view that this is entirely novel. Similarly, the transformationalists’
attempt to transcend the debate between the other two positions is
unconvincing. The claim that the transformationalist view based on
qualitative change moves us beyond the focus on quantitative change
begs the question, because a marked qualitative change presupposes
quantitative change that is so great as to have produced it.2 But I
think the main problem with this account is more fundamental. The
quotation above refers to globalisation as a ‘central driving force’
behind rapid changes in the world order. But is globalisation a driving
force at all? Is it not, rather, simply a concept that attempts to capture
some important changes in the contemporary world, without saying
how they have come about? In other words, is globalisation a concept
concerned only with a series of broadly related outcomes or processes,
but which actually has little to say about the agencies that lead these
outcomes and processes?
The force of this critique can be seen by returning to a consideration
of Giddens’ definition of globalisation. For Giddens (1999),
globalisation is a revolutionary development, in which formerly
locally embedded social relations break free from spatial and temporal
boundaries, and abstractions such as science, markets and human
rights come to replace local, traditional norms. Disembeddedness
means that people no longer have their lives set out in advance, but
are instead constantly faced with choices about how to live. The
establishment of identity therefore becomes a life project of reflexive
subjects. These processes reach a climax with globalisation, as nation-
states lose control in the face of global communications, capital flows,
shared aspirations, and so on (Giddens 1990: 76–8). Globalisation
therefore becomes an established fact; in Giddens’ words, it has ‘come
from nowhere to be almost everywhere’, and is ‘simply what we are’
(Giddens 1999: 1; 1997).
Giddens’ approach to globalisation therefore clearly establishes
the argument that there is no alternative to globalisation.3 In this
approach the concept of globalisation is used to explain widespread
social change. But at the same time, globalisation also refers to a set
of processes. It is therefore not altogether clear what globalisation
actually is in Giddens’ account. Is it (i) a new theory used to explain
important social changes; or (ii) a concept used to understand and
clarify a number of important social changes? (Rosenberg 2000) This
is not a semantic point. If globalisation is a theory used to explain
the world, then it must explain the mechanisms that account for the
change from pre-globalisation to globalisation proper. However, if it
is a concept used to aid understanding of a concrete set of processes,
then we need to look for other factors that might determine processes
of globalisation. In other words, is globalisation determining (the
first definition) or determined (the second definition)? Again, this
may seem like the worst sort of academic pedantry, but in fact
the distinction has enormous implications. For if globalisation
determines, then there is no alternative to it; but if it is determined
by other factors, then clearly globalisation is a contested process, to
which there are clearly alternatives. Giddens’ response may well be
that there are alternatives, but that these are available within the
context of globalisation – or else they betray a fundamentalism that
seeks to restore ‘local embeddedness’. He may well be right about this,
although it does not really capture the complexity of global–local
relations, or the contexts in which (very different) ‘fundamentalisms’
arise. But there is a more important argument to be made, which is
that if alternatives take place within globalisation, then it is surely
more important to talk about the nature of those alternatives then
it is to assert the significance of globalisation. For example, some
people support the free movement of money across borders, while
others do not, arguing the case for capital controls by nation-states.
Interestingly, Third Way British Prime Minister Tony Blair is in the
first camp, while Third Way intellectual guru Anthony Giddens is in
the second. The implications of this difference are enormous, as the
free flow of money is central to neoliberal domination, while controls
on the movement of financial capital constitute a major challenge to
it. But such is the over-generalised discourse of globalisation – and of
the Third Way – that such differences can easily be reconciled.
Ultimately, this reconciliation can occur because Giddens’
definition of globalisation attempts to tell us a great deal about the
contemporary world, but in fact tells us very little. In one sense it
tries to do too much, arguing that almost all change in the world
is a product of globalisation. But in another sense it tells us little,
because it is theorised at such a high level of abstraction and
generalisation. This problem pervades the work of another leading

globalisation theorist, Jan Aart Scholte. Scholte goes to great lengths
to distinguish globalisation from internationalisation, liberalisation,
universalisation, and westernisation/modernisation. In contrast to
these older, clearly defined concepts, globalisation is defined as
deterritorialisation, which is said to refer to ‘a far reaching change in
the nature of social space’ (Scholte 2000: 46). Whereas previous eras
had seen a compression of time and space, which reduced the impact
of location, globalisation is a ‘supra-territorial’ process, in which the
only limit is planetary or global. In this definition, Scholte links the
significance of globalisation to information and communications
technologies, which have literally taken us (to cite Castells) beyond
the space of places into the space of flows. This leaves Scholte open
to the charge of technological determinism, whereby the focus is
placed on the new technologies themselves rather than on the uses
made of them by human beings in the process of carrying out social
activities in particular places. Moreover, if the focus is only on new
technologies, then one has a very restricted definition of globalisation,
which begs the question of the significance of the so-called global
transformation. Indeed, Scholte himself qualifies the significance of
the transformation when he argues that globalisation has ‘shown
few signs of bringing an end to the predominance of capitalism in
production, bureaucratisation in governance, communitarianism
in community and rationalism in knowledge’ (Scholte 2000: 5). As
Rosenberg has pointed out, this leaves Scholte facing a catch-22
situation, in which he either defines globalisation so narrowly that
its significance is limited, or relaxes his definition, but at the cost of
re-introducing those definitions – internationalisation, liberalisation,
universalisation, westernisation – previously discarded (Rosenberg
2000: 18–26). Scholte opts for the latter, and in doing so discusses
various global phenomena – including trade unions, nuclear weapons,
international institutions, and so on. At times the qualifications
are so great as to render his theoretical analysis redundant – for
instance, he argues that globalisation and territoriality are not
diametrically opposed, and that, before contemporary ICTs there
were earlier moments of globalisation (Scholte 2000: 8, 60). This
latter argument is also made by Held et al. (1999: 415), which begs
the question of the timing of the global transformation that they
otherwise endorse. What is clear is that Scholte’s (and for that matter
Held et al.’s) empirical discussion, much of which is of great value,
has re-entered the discussion only at the cost of dispensing with his
theoretical approach. Indeed, substantive discussion is only possible

because it breaks from the circular reasoning and spatial fetishism
of globalisation theory.
The latter problem is also prevalent within the political analysis
of globalisation theory. Much emphasis is placed on the changed
context in which nation-states now operate, or the development of
a global civil society beyond the narrow confines of national politics
(Kaldor et al. 2003). The former is often linked to the question of
US hegemony (Chace 1992), and the main argument made is that
military might is no longer the main source of power in the post-
Cold War, interdependent world order. The only effective means
of exercising leadership (as opposed to hegemony) is to develop a
truly liberal vision of collective defence, international cooperation,
multilateral diplomacy (Nye 1990). This argument is sometimes
explicitly linked to debates around ‘liberal internationalism’, and
the argument is often made that globalisation provides an enabling
context for such internationalism at last to be properly exercised.
We will consider these arguments in detail in later chapters, but two
critical points need to be made here. First, they ignore the capitalist
and neoliberal nature of globalisation and liberal internationalism,
and thereby also ignore the reality of uneven development and the
limitations of multilateral institutionalism in this context. Second,
they also closely parallel the logic of neoliberalism in its treatment
of globalisation. Just as neoliberals talk of ‘market imperfections’
as being caused by ‘external’ interventions, so globalists implicitly
point to ‘global imperfections’ caused by the same interventions. The
implicit assumption is the market or the global could be effective in
the absence of such interventions. The most serious intervention is
the action of states that do not play by the rules of the game. But,
given the uneven development of global capitalism and the intensified
inequality associated with neoliberalism, such interventions are
bound to occur (see Chapter 5). In other words, the ‘imperfections’
of globalisation (or of the market) are not external to it, but are an
intrinsic part of the way it operates. Moreover, markets do not exist
in isolation from states, since states play an important role not only
in protecting, but even in creating markets. This point can be related
to post-war US hegemony, since globalists argue that in the post-
Cold War era the US state can play a new role in the international
order. But this argument ignores the fact that the US was concerned
not only with the containment of communism, but equally with
liberal, capitalist expansion, which has intensified since the end of
the Cold War. Indeed, this point was explicitly stated in one of the
main National Security Memoranda of the post-war period, NSC-68
(see Robinson 1996: 15). The important point here is not whether
or not liberal capitalist expansion is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing,4 but that
this old question cannot be evaded by ideas like cosmopolitanism
and global civil society; indeed, its proponents cannot avoid making
implicit assumptions about a liberal capitalist order, and about the
role of the US in promoting such an order.
Similarly, the assumption of an intrinsically progressive global
civil society collapses a potentially useful analytical concept into an
automatically desirable normative principle. Moreover, globalisation
tends to be theorised as a linear process that outgrows the nation-
state, and so politics is measured solely by the extent to which
movements and ideas react to globalisation. Like the globalist
position on US hegemony, this argument downplays the agencies
involved in the processes of globalisation, and in seeing globalisation
as largely progressive, ignores its predominantly neoliberal character.
Moreover, as we shall see, neoliberal globalisation is a process that
has been promoted in part by nation-states. Theorists of global civil
society express regret that, since September 11, 2001, there has been
a movement back towards ‘nation-state thinking’, particularly under
George Bush (Kaldor et al. 2003: 7). The problem with this argument
is that it exaggerates the ‘non-nation-state thinking’ before Bush,
and sets up a false dichotomy of global good and national bad. It is
not spaces in themselves, be they national, local or global, that are
intrinsically progressive or reactionary, but the social relations and
politics within and between such spaces5 (Kiely 2004).
So, returning to the two definitions of globalisation outlined above,
it is clear that globalisation is not a ‘big theory’ that can explain current
events in the world. Rather, it is a concept that can be used to clarify
a set of processes taking place in the world order. Globalisation thus
refers to certain outcomes, themselves determined by other factors. This
implies that processes of globalisation are the product of particular
social and political agents, and that there are conflicts among these
agents. This in turn implies that these processes of globalisation are
intimately connected to relationships of power and domination. This
section has therefore argued for a view of globalisation that refers
to a set of concrete processes, promoted and resisted by different
agents. I am therefore arguing against globalisation theory, but in
favour of a theory of globalisation that explains certain outcomes
and processes through a proper examination of social and political
agencies. The final section in this chapter draws out the implications
of the discussion so far, and argues for a thorough repoliticisation of
the globalisation debate.
REPOLITICISING GLOBALISATION
My argument so far is that there are serious problems with globalisation

theory. Globalisation is a useful concept, as it does capture the reality
of certain globalising processes in the contemporary world. Indeed,
transformationalists do a useful job in outlining what some of these
are, even as sceptics draw our attention to their limitations. The
following chapters will provide some illustration of this point by, for
example, showing that capital does not disperse equally throughout
the globe, and that institutions of global governance exist alongside
the nation-state. But in later chapters these issues will be addressed
in a different way from the threefold divide outlined above. Instead,
they will be addressed in terms of agency, power and politics, bringing
us back to questions of capitalism, neoliberalism and state power. I
start by making a few brief comments about political confusion in the
globalisation debate. I then move on to suggest that this confusion
can lead to a conflation of two things – the ‘reality’ of globalisation
on the one hand, and globalisation as a political project on the
other – which again returns us to the question of agency. I will then
conclude by making some suggestions concerning the relationship
between capitalism and globalisation.
The globalisation debate has often conflated two issues: the
extent to which globalisation is a reality, and the extent to which
it is desirable. As we saw above, it is perfectly possible to accept the
hyper-globalisation argument and to see its conclusions as good or
bad; similarly, some sceptics will support continued US state power,
while others will oppose it. But the confusion is most obvious in the
transformationalist account, which accepts globalisation as a reality,
and then insists that politics must take place within its framework.
But the question that then needs to be asked is: What should we take
for granted, or accept as given, when talking about globalisation? Do
we simply accept its capitalist nature? More narrowly, do we accept
the rise of neoliberalism, both empirically and morally, and the end
of neo-Keynesianism?6
A few examples illustrate the point. British Prime Minister Tony
Blair constantly asserts that global competitive pressures mean that
we have to respond by increasing this flexibility of our labour market.
In Blair’s tautologous thinking, this is a necessity because there is no

alternative: it is a constraint on the state. On the other hand, together
with former Home Secretary David Blunkett, he has also argued that
the state must tighten its policies on entry for asylum seekers. In
other words, the state can be pro-active in this case, and is not a
prisoner of forces beyond its control – namely, wars and human rights
abuses in other countries. Where then does this leave globalisation
rhetoric? In the first case, globalisation is ‘merely the way we are’,
but it clearly is not in the second. Discourses of globalisation all too
easily conflate inevitability and desirability, reality and ideology,
established fact and political project. Globalisation becomes so all-
pervasive that there is little that we can do to change it, and we must
work within clearly established political parameters. But crucially,
these parameters are largely set by the victory of neoliberalism
in the 1980s, which argued for the primacy of market forces, free
trade, liberalised finance and open competition. Insofar as there is
a theory of power in this approach, it is located in the discourse of
globalisation, which is said to set the boundaries for debates about
the limitations of politics. Power – in the sense of social and political
actors promoting certain globalising tendencies – tends to disappear
from view. Of course, the discourse of globalisation is important, but
this is precisely because it is used by these same dominant social and
political forces to justify the notion that ‘there is no alternative’. In
this way, contingency is redefined as necessity (Watson and Hay
2003). At the same time, there have been some concessions about
the problems of the rampant neoliberalism of the 1980s, with a
renewed focus on poverty reduction and institutional development
at the World Bank, for instance; but these concessions remain firmly
within a neoliberal framework (see Chapter 5). Similarly, there is also
massive state intervention – both by nation-states (especially the US
Treasury) and international institutions (especially the IMF) – but this
is designed above all to protect investors when markets (especially
financial markets) threaten economies with widespread collapse. State
(national and international) regulation is largely market-expanding
rather than market-restricting. Similarly, neoconservatism breaks with
some core themes of the Third Way, such as (selective) commitment
to multilateralism. But this break in terms of means hides substantial
continuity over the ends of globalisation. In particular, I will argue
that we can identify three broad projects that relate to the current
period of contemporary, neoliberal globalisation. The first is associated
with the move towards neoliberalism in the 1980s, the second with
the consolidation of neoliberalism through the Third Way in the

1990s, and the third with the neoconservative moment in the US
under Bush II.
But in order to understand the neoliberal nature of globalisation,
we first have to understand its capitalist nature. This point is
crucial if we are to grasp the fact that globalisation is not simply an
established fact, but instead represents processes that are inseparable
from relationships of domination, and are therefore contested. This
argument can be illustrated by starting with a famous quotation from
as long ago as 1848:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the

instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with
them the whole relations of society … Constant revolutionising of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and
agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast
frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and
opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before
they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and
man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life
and his relations with his kind. (Marx and Engels 1977: 36–7)
This quotation from the Manifesto of the Communist Party captures

something of the globalising processes that lie at the heart of the
contemporary globalisation debate. There is discussion of the notion
that the world is increasingly interconnected, that the intensity and
velocity of these interconnections is increasing, and that distinct
localities are thus increasingly ‘disembedded’. There is also some
notion (and too much optimism) that a genuine global consciousness
is developing as a result. But what is also apparent from the first
sentence is some notion of agency, related to the notion of competition
between capitals. Marx and Engels (1977: 37–8) go on:
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the
bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,
settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere … The bourgeoisie has
through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character
to production and consumption in every country … The bourgeoisie, by the
rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facili-
tated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations
into civilisation … It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the
bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls

civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word,
it creates a world after its own image. (Mark and Engels 1977: 37–8)
Thus, for Marx globalisation is ultimately a product of the dynamism

of the capitalist mode of production, which itself is a product of
historically specific relations of production. These relations are
based on the separation of labour from direct access to the means
of production – that is, on the removal of producers from the land.
This ongoing process was particularly common in England from the
seventeenth century, and continues throughout the world to this day.
With this removal, labourers are forced to find paid employment in
order to be able to buy commodities, which enables them to feed
and clothe themselves and their families, and enables their capitalist
employers to make a profit through paying a wage lower than the
value of the commodities produced by labour. The removal of the
producers from the land simultaneously generalises production for
the market. When labour has direct access to land, it consumes
goods produced on that land (and sells its surplus); when labour
ceases to have access to land, it consumes goods bought through the
market mechanism. Displacement of labour from the land – or the
commodification of labour power – thus simultaneously generalises
commodity production. Market societies do not arise spontaneously
or naturally; rather, they are the product of political and social
processes (Polanyi 1944).
At the same time, this generalisation of commodity production leads
to competition between units of production, as each unit attempts to
sell its goods at the most competitive rate in the marketplace. If goods
are too expensive, then a particular production unit will go bankrupt.
Potentially uncompetitive producers can lower costs by cutting wages
or increasing the intensity of work (extracting absolute surplus value),
but this process eventually comes up against physical limits – wages
can only be cut so far, and people can only work so hard. So, an
alternative strategy is for capital to invest in new technology, which
increases labour productivity (and therefore increases the extraction
of relative surplus value). This investment in new technology is a
never-ending process, as specific capitals always face the danger of
being undercut by innovative competitors. States may protect specific
capitals from competition, but ultimately capital accumulation is
an ongoing, dynamic and never-ending process. This accumulation
is uneven and unequal, and potentially uncontrollable, and it is a
process that is not, and never has been, confined to national borders.
In the quotations above, Marx was clearly wrong in his belief that
the global expansion of capitalism would lead to similar processes of
capitalist development throughout the globe; instead there emerged
an unequal international division of labour. But he was clearly correct
that the dynamism of capitalism paved the way for what we now
call globalisation.
At the same time, the ‘freeing’ of labour from the land also led to a
further separation.7 In feudal society, the regulation of peasant labour
with access to land was the task of the ‘state’. There was no economy
or civil society separate from the state: the state was the economy.
Peasants worked the land to feed themselves, but states also ensured
that landlords received a rent in the form of goods, labour or money-
rent. With the emergence of capitalism, the state did not directly
regulate the relationship between employer (capitalist) and employee
(worker), as this was a purely ‘economic’ matter. The modern state
– the creation of a separate political sphere – is thus also the product
of capitalist social relations. The separate economic sphere (the
market) is thus no longer directly regulated by the political sphere.
Indeed, the very separation of these spheres is accomplished by the
rise of capitalist social relations. We therefore have a potentially
global market existing side by side with national states. States and
globalisation, therefore, do not exist in opposition to each other; the
expansion of one does not lead to a weakening of the other, since
both are the product of capitalist social relations. Moreover, states are
not irrelevant, nor merely instruments of capitalist domination. They
serve a number of functions for capital, including the protection of
private property rights, the provision of infrastructure, the protection
for industries, as well as broader functions of repression and the
provision of social legitimation. Some states – above all the US state
– have also actively promoted processes of globalisation, as we will
see in later chapters.
Understanding the relationship between capitalism and
globalisation is essential, because we need to understand how
specific processes of globalisation relate to wider social and political
structures. We will then be in a better position to understand that
these processes have not simply ‘come from nowhere’, and that they
are a product of particular agents, embedded in particular places, based
on particular power relations (and therefore relations of conflict).
Having said that, recognising the global character of capitalism from
the outset does not tell us what is distinctive about the current period
of contemporary (neoliberal) globalisation, or how this came about,

and these tasks will be undertaken in Chapter 5. But what should be
clear by now is that, in claiming that globalisation has either come
from nowhere, or is the product of new technologies, globalisation
theory fails convincingly to address US hegemony and neoliberal
capitalism, and is thus in some respects complicit with both.
GLOBALISATION AS REALITY, GLOBALISATION AS IDEOLOGY
My main argument in this chapter has been that globalisation

theory conflates globalisation as outcome (something that needs to
be explained) with globalisation as agent (something that does the
explaining). The result is that globalisation easily slips from being
a concrete analysis – globalisation as reality – to become a political
project. Focusing on political economy, James Cypher (cited in Dowd
2000: 170) usefully distinguishes between globalisation as tendency
and globalisation as ideology:
As an objective tendency, globalization implies a deepening and strengthening

of trade, financial markets and production systems across national
boundaries. Propelling this tendency we find broad institutional changes
occurring, strengthening the integration of the circuits of trade, finance and
production. Globalization implies a greater degree of convergence in markets
and institutions, and a greater degree of homogenisation of dysfunctional
movements such as economic crises which quickly shift across national borders
… As an ideology, globalization implies both the inevitability and desirability
of the above described tendencies toward integration and the denial of the
existence of dysfunctional movements arising from this tendency.
The approach suggested in this chapter, and taken up in the rest of the
book, is to argue that globalising outcomes have intensified in recent
years, and that these need to be explained in terms of specific agents
who have promoted them. Indeed, many of the changes in the global
order since the 1970s have been the product of particular nation-
states, and of political projects within those states. And these projects
have essentially been neoliberal in character, whether in the form of
neoliberal fundamentalism in the 1980s, the Third Way of the 1990s,
or the neoconservatism of the Bush II administration (Kiely 2005: Chs
2 and 4). This project is above all committed to market expansion
through trade, investment and financial liberalisation, and to the
universal (cosmopolitan) expansion of liberal democratic politics.
Globalisation is therefore linked to the (neo)liberal internationalists’

project of the expansion of free-market democracies. This is
regarded as a progressive aspiration, as it will enhance the ‘goods’
of globalisation, such as economic growth, poverty alleviation and
universal human rights (through market efficiency and humanitarian
intervention), while reducing the ‘bads’, such as environmental
destruction and global terrorism (through multilateral cooperation
and the promotion of peaceful, liberal states).
My argument in the chapters that follow therefore suggests
that, despite some differences, there is fundamental continuity in
the expansion of neoliberal capitalism from the early 1980s to the
present. But because I also want to address the issue of the ‘outcomes’
of globalisation, I suggest that these have not been as benign as
implied by various advocates of globalisation. Neither is it the case
that bad outcomes have been caused by insufficient globalisation.
Instead, the argument will be made that neoliberal globalisation
is intrinsically hierarchical and exploitative. Of course, we should
not expect anything else from capitalism, whatever social gains
may be made under this system. However, I will also argue that, in
many respects, neoliberal globalisation constitutes a backward step
from the gains made in the post-war period – and that, therefore,
whatever the prospects for socialist alternatives to capitalism, it is
simply illegitimate for globalisation theorists such as Giddens to
take neoliberal capitalism for granted on the grounds that there
is no alternative to it. This is a debatable point, which I return
to in Chapter 7. But Giddens makes the leap from acceptance of
capitalism to unsustainable arguments about its capacities to deliver
a better world.
There is a close parallel between the perspective offered in this
chapter and Karl Polanyi’s critique of the laissez-faire ideology of
free-market economics. I will return to Polanyi in the concluding
chapter, but I want briefly to outline his argument concerning the
relationship between ‘states’ and ‘markets’ here – not least because
it gives some insight into the relationship between the US state and
contemporary globalisation. Polanyi, like Marx before him, argued
that there is no such thing as the free market as such. Instead,
the market economy is created by a process of disembedding the
‘economy’ from social regulation. Markets exist in all societies, but it
is only in the market economy (capitalism) that the market becomes
the overriding principle of production and distribution. Key to this
process is the creation of the ‘fictitious commodities’ of land, labour
and money. These commodities are defined as fictitious by Polanyi on

the grounds that they are not naturally commodities, but become so
through specific social and political processes. Thus, following Marx,
Polanyi argued that labour power and land only become commodities
when labourers are separated from direct access to land. This has the
effect of converting increasing areas of production into commodities,
and thus creating the free-market economy. It is for this reason that
Polanyi (1944: 141) argued that ‘(l)aissez faire was planned’. The
creation of a market economy therefore occurs through a process of
disembedding, so that economy is separated from polity and society.
Such a separation is never complete, however, as ‘economy’ always
relies on regulation by polity, and the free market has a number of
destructive effects precisely because it is based on a severing of the
market from social regulation. These include inequality, exploitation,
alienation, and accumulation without end.
I return to these issues in later chapters, but what should be clear is
how this approach provides us with a potentially useful starting point
for understanding globalisation. For the current era of globalisation is
about a new stage of increased disembedding, involving the expansion
of commodity production and distribution. However, contra Giddens,
this process has not simply come ‘from nowhere’, but needs to be
seen in terms of a political project closely tied to neoliberalism. This
has implications for our understanding of global politics (whereby
some nation-states and international institutions are directly part of
the neoliberal project, while others play a wider policing role), the
global economy (whereby trade, production and finance have in
some respects become more closely, though hierarchically, integrated)
and global culture (whereby the promotion of ‘universal’ human
rights exists alongside the increased domination of the commodity).
Globalisation is also, however, a contested process, so that, for
example, institutions of global governance are not simply reducible
to the neoliberal project, even if they are seriously implicated in it.
3
Globalisation and Politics I:
State Sovereignty, Imperialism
and Cosmopolitanism
One of the most important areas of contention in the globalisation

debate relates to the questions of the nation-state, international
institutions and global governance. The post-war period has seen
a proliferation of international institutions and agreements, or an
increased role for already established ones. This can be seen in the
cases of the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, regional
agreements, the World Trade Organisation and the International
Criminal Court, and in the increase in the number and the reach of
international summits.
The growth in the significance of such institutions of governance
is said to constitute a significant ‘break’ from existing modes of
international political interaction, which was based on the nation-
state system, empires and colonialism. For those independent states
that existed at the time, international relations were said to be
premised on the sovereignty of states. This notion of state sovereignty
dates back to 1648, but it was actually only generalised as a principle
in the era after the Second World War, when the former colonies
began to win their independence, a process that was supported by
the US. But it has been claimed by some globalisation theorists (see
Chapter 2) that recent changes associated with political globalisation
have undermined state sovereignty, and indeed may eventually lead
to the end of the nation-state. In its place, some argue that we now
have a system of global governance, and for some ‘cosmopolitan’
theorists this represents a potentially welcome development. Most
Marxists, on the other hand, argue that the current global order
is still composed of nation-states, and that the international state
system and the uneven nature of capitalist development mean that
the world order is still based on relations that can be characterised
as imperialist.
This chapter examines these issues, relating them to globalisation
through detailed discussion of the development of state sovereignty
39
and the international institutions of ‘global governance’. The chapter

engages particularly with the theories of cosmopolitanism and
Marxism, relating them to the question of US hegemony. I start
by examining state sovereignty, and question the idea that 1648
represents the starting point for understanding the modern state
system. Rather than undermining states, I argue that globalisation is
actually associated with the (still incomplete) universalisation of the
system of nation-states. Having said that, there is a need to recognise
that there has been a considerable increase in the number and role of
international institutions, especially since 1945, and this is discussed
in the second section. In the third section I examine some of the
debates around global governance, and focus on whether these have
led to – or at least opened up the possibility of – the promotion of
genuinely multilateral governance, beyond the system of nation-
states. I examine competing approaches that attempt to understand
the nature of global governance, and pay particular attention to
the possibility of dialogue between cosmopolitan and open Marxist
approaches. The discussion is then developed further in Chapter 4.
THE MODERN STATE SYSTEM
Standard realist accounts of international relations argue that the

world order is anarchical, as it is composed of nation-states all
exercising their self-interest. The world order may change, in that
some states may climb the hierarchy of the international order while
others fall. But the international order itself is characterised essentially
by a permanent state of anarchy. This system had its origins in the
Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War in
Europe. From this point on (if not before), the international order
was based on modern, sovereign nation-states.
This view can be challenged in a number of ways. For the moment,
the focus will be on the question of the origins and development
of supposedly modern states. Some Marxists have argued that the
modern international system of nation-states actually developed
at a later date than 1648 (Wood 1991; Teschke 2003; Lacher 2003).
The essential argument is that a specifically capitalist sovereignty
only emerged in the nineteenth century, and this specific form of
sovereignty was based on the development of impersonal public
authorities – modern states – that recognised the sovereignty of
other (European) states. Existing alongside these modern states were
capitalist market economies, under which commodity production
Globalisation and Politics I 41
was generalised, thus replacing the dominance of production for

direct consumption.
To understand the distinction between the sovereignty of 1648
and capitalist sovereignty, we first need to understand the distinction
between feudalism and capitalism. Feudal Europe emerged out
of the collapse of the Carolingian Empire around the turn of the
tenth century (Teschke 2003: 84–6), which covered much of what
are now France, Germany, Austria, Italy and north-east Spain. The
result of this breakdown was the fragmentation of power, and the
development of overlapping forms of sovereignty based on personal
rule or patrimonial power (Anderson 1974; Weber 1978). The feudal
political order was thus based on a number of overlapping systems
of authority, and political power and the means of violence were
distributed among a variety of dominant classes. The exercise of force
was crucial to the extraction of a surplus from the peasantry. In feudal
society, peasants retained access to land, their principal means of
livelihood, and political power was the instrument by which peasants
were compelled to give up a surplus, which could take the form of
labour, goods or rent. The ability to extract surplus thus depended
on access to political power, which facilitated extra-economic
compulsion. Expansion in this era largely took a territorial form,
and was designed to increase the number of peasants (and therefore
surplus) that came under the jurisdiction of a particular lord.
However, lords held land as a ‘fief’ from an overlord. Fiefs were
granted in return for military and administrative services. Property
rights were therefore dependent on certain obligations to higher
lords, and ultimately this system of obligation was directed up
towards the king. As bearers of arms, lords could carry out feuds,
which ‘straddled the boundaries between the private and the public,
the domestic and the international, the legitimate and the criminal
recourse to arms’ (Teschke 2004: 17). This order ensured that, as
the means of violence were distributed (upwards and downwards)
among a variety of lords, medieval ‘international’ politics were prone
to violence and territorial acquisition. The acquisition of land was
central to increasing finance, as this was ultimately derived from the
exploitation of peasant labour. Political accumulation (Brenner 1986)
was the driving force in feudal society, and geopolitics was based on
territorial competition for increased territory which would enhance
access to the exploitation of peasant labour.
However, feudal society was more complex than this, and the
existence of different kinds of lordship in the Carolingian Empire
crucially influenced later developments. First, banal lordship was

based on the king’s royal power, and entailed direct taxation of the
peasantry (or at least taxation through the king’s counts). Second,
there was domestic lordship, based on absolute power over serfs.
Third, there was landlordship, based on land ownership, tenant
freedom and limited rights of service. At the height of the Empire, the
first two kinds of lordship existed side by side. Local lords therefore
extracted rents in both labour and kind from serfs who worked on
their manor, while the king taxed free peasants. Potential territorial
conflict between competing lords was partly moderated by the king’s
protection of the free peasantry, who were an important source of
revenue for the king. But crucially, internal conflict was moderated
by outward expansion through conquest, and the consequent
redistribution of land acquired through wars of annexation (Teschke
2003: 69–73).
These opportunities for territorial acquisition gave the Empire
some stability. But this was undermined by the expansion of Vikings,
Hungarians and Saracens into the Carolingian Empire, which
weakened territorial jurisdiction, imperial authority and ruling-class
solidarity. The result was an increase in attempts to extract surplus
from peasantries, the usurping of public offices in order to maintain
control of the peasantry and to offset lost income opportunities, and
open conflict between regional lords and overlords. The centralised
authority of the Empire was gradually broken up and decentralised.
Political units were decentralised, local fiefs and local taxes were
developed, and free peasants became serfs. The period from 950 to
1150 was one of great violence, territorial competition, and military
innovation. Localised banal lordship required heavy military backing
in the context of heightened competition over land, labour and other
feudal privileges.
From the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, feudal Europe
recovered, and underwent a new period of expansion, fuelled
by population growth, reclamation of arable land, and increased
exploitation of serf labour. The increase in lords’ incomes further
stimulated demand and laid the basis for urban revival and long-
term trade (Hilton 1976: 145–58). The growth in trade was still
embedded however, in predominantly feudal social relations, under
which production for use dominated. As a result, there was little
incentive to increase productivity. However, there was significant
regional variation, which is crucial for understanding the transition
to capitalism in England.
In France, political power was fragmented. The king and princes

tried to regain power from the lowliest of lords, known as the
castellans. The authority of the king was quite weak, and competition
emerged between different sections of the ruling class, particularly
over taxation of the peasantry. This conflict within the ruling class
gave some space for the peasantry to resist successfully: they shook
off the bonds of serfdom, some labour rents were turned into money
rents, and by the fourteenth century peasants had de facto property
rights. Rents became fixed, which – reinforced by peasant appeals to
the royal courts, which were supported by the king, who benefited
from free peasants paying tax to him rather than rent to landlords
– undermined the income of the castellans. This development meant
that, by the fourteenth century, independent lords had effectively
disappeared, the peasants had independent property rights (subject
to royal taxation), and the nobility’s income was mainly acquired
through service to the king. This eventually led to the emergence of
the absolutist state, in which the feudal lord–peasant rent regime was
replaced by the absolutist king–peasant tax regime. Absolutism did
not lead to modern, capitalist sovereignty based on a market economy
and a bureaucratic, impersonal state that monopolised the means
of violence. Instead, production was still mainly for consumption,
and peasant taxation was used to finance consumption and military
spending. The long-term tension between punitive taxation and
increased military spending eventually led to the French Revolution
of 1789 (Comninel 1987). State sovereignty was based on proprietary
kingship and personal domination. The aristocracy were incorporated
into the state as office-holders, which gave them access to new
privileges. In particular, the means of violence were personalised by
the king, but also awarded to patrimonial officers through the sale
of army posts. Foreign policy was carried out, not in the ‘national
interest’, but in the name of the king. Accumulation continued to
take place through war and marriage between dynasties, and trade was
politically enforced through the sale of monopoly trading charters to
merchants. War was essentially fought over dynastic territorial claims
and exclusive trading routes. The Westphalian system of 1648 was
essentially, then, a treaty between absolutist, personalised states, not
modern, capitalist states.
In England, on the other hand, (and, from 1707, Great Britain)
social development took a radically different direction. After 1066,
Anglo-Saxon landowners were dispossessed or killed, and land was
redistributed to William the Conqueror and his leading warriors.
These barons held estates in the service of the king, and the king in
turn presided over a centralised state and exercised unquestioned
sovereignty. Private feuding in the context of parcellised sovereignties
was thereby minimised, institutions were established for peacefully
settling land disputes, and peasants were turned into serfs. England
therefore maintained a system of lords exploiting serfs on their
manors, alongside a king who taxed freeholding peasants. The English
system of a centralised state, powerful ruling class and serfdom
contrasted sharply with the decentralised state, divided ruling class
and independent peasantry of France. This contrast was sharpened
further by the reaction to the crises of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. While in France, lords turned against each other to retain
income, in England lords attempted to recover income by increasing
rents, despite a fall in the population. Peasants successfully resisted
attempts to increase the rate of exploitation, and as a result serfdom
ended (Hilton 1973). But instead of the establishment of freeholding
peasants based on owner-occupation, the English peasantry were
gradually removed from the land through enclosure. Landlords
then leased the land out to tenants who employed wage labour.
Surplus was thus extracted less by direct coercion, as in France, and
more by the success of tenants in selling products in a competitive
marketplace. A growing number of English tenancies were basically
economic in nature, with rents fixed not by legal obligation but by
market conditions. In other words, there was a market for leases, and
thus competition in the market for consumers and access to land
(Brenner 1976). Agricultural producers therefore became increasingly
market-dependent for their access to land, with the result that
‘advantage in access to the land itself would go to those who could
produce competitively and pay good rents by increasing their own
productivity’ (Wood 2002: 100–1). The most competitive farmers
therefore had potential access to more land, while the less competitive
faced the danger of losing direct access. French peasants thus had
the potential to specialise and increase production for the market,
but they generally did not respond to this market opportunity. In
England, on the other hand, variable economic rents meant that
peasants were compelled to do so – otherwise they would not be able
to pay their rent and would therefore risk losing their lease (Wood
2002: 102).
The (long, slow) process of peasant differentiation, in which some
peasants were displaced from the land and became wage labourers, was
reinforced by the emergence of a strong state that facilitated, rather
than restricted, this market imperative (Marx 1976: Ch. 27; Corrigan
and Sayer 1985). In the long run, the English social structure based
on landlords leasing to capitalist farmers, who in turn increasingly
employed wage labourers, facilitated the movement from agrarian to
industrial capitalism. This was due to the increase in productivity that
fed a rising non-agricultural population, the emergence of a labour
force displaced from the land, and the competitive accumulation
of capital which eventually gave rise to industrial development
(Hobsbawm 1962: 47).
The long-term result of these processes was the establishment of a
specifically capitalist sovereignty (Rosenberg 1994), based on a market
economy of generalised commodity production, and a political state
that had a monopoly over the means of violence. Surplus extraction
now took place through ‘purely economic’ relations (the market),
but the state still (indirectly) guaranteed capitalist social relations
through its defence of the system of private property, of contracts,
and of violence. British capitalist development paved the way for
new geopolitical relations. From the late seventeenth century, British
politics was based on parliamentary sovereignty and a constitutional
monarch. Foreign policy was now directed by parliament and
separated from dynastic interests. Britain played the role of balancing
power relations in Europe, which was still dominated by territorial
accumulation. Rivalries persisted, and Britain became involved in a
number of wars, maintaining territorial ambitions outside of Europe,
albeit for commercial gain. In the long run, Britain benefited most
from European rivalries, as its productive, market-led, economy
ensured that it alone could afford military, and especially naval,
expansion. On the other hand, other absolutist states faced ongoing
fiscal crises and peasant revolt.
Capitalism was thus ‘born into’ a European state system, which
it then transformed but did not displace (Teschke 2004: 45; Lacher
2003). By the nineteenth century, European powers and the US
were effectively forced to promote capitalist development in order
to defend and promote their interests. Capitalism was thus often
promoted by pre-existing states, which intervened to promote
‘market economies’, and often protected themselves against foreign
competition, particularly from the already highly productive British
economy (Chang 2002). Thus, it was not until the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries that geopolitics based on capitalist sovereignty
emerged. However, the unevenness of the emergence of sovereign
states and market economies was most clearly apparent in the
continued territorial expansion of the dominant capitalist powers

in Europe (Wood 2003: 119–30). It was only after the Second World
War, when colonies slowly won their independence, that we can
identify a system of sovereign, capitalist nation-states, which existed
alongside an increasing number of international institutions. The
promotion of sovereign states and the capitalist market took place
in the context of US leadership of the ‘free world’, and indeed both
state sovereignty and capitalist expansion were encouraged by the
US, albeit so long as such states were its allies. Indeed, given that
much of the world remained communist until recently, perhaps we
should consider 1989 as the key date on which capitalist sovereignty
was (almost) universalised. Ironically, just as the capitalist-led nation-
state system had become universalised in the international order,
many globalisation theorists began referring to the hollowing out
of the nation-state.
THE NATION-STATE AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
The fate of the nation-state is often linked to the rise of contemporary

globalisation. As we saw in Chapter 2, much of the debate focuses
on the ways in which global flows or international institutions may
undermine the authority of the nation-state. But a further point has
been developed, which can be related to the idea of the rise of a global
consciousness based on the rights of ‘distant strangers’, regardless
of nation-state affiliation. This cosmopolitan perspective has seen a
significant resurgence in recent years, although it is not necessarily
linked to contemporary globalisation. For example, US President
Woodrow Wilson established his ‘Fourteen Points’ for national self-
determination after the end of the First World War, and even Lenin
championed the right of nations to self-determination. Lenin was fully
aware that this principle was not an accurate reflection of the actual
behaviour of imperial nation-states, which had constantly colonised
overseas territories, but he saw it as a useful tool in the mobilisation
of people oppressed by colonialism to establish independence. On
the other hand, Wilson hoped to establish a principle of collective
security through the League of Nations, which aimed to provide some
protection if the self-determination of (some) nations was threatened
by hostile aggressors. In practice, however, the League was relatively
powerless. The US Congress successfully resisted US membership, and
the conflicts between European states undermined any commitment
to multilateral agreement. This culminated in the rise of Hitler and

the Second World War. However, after the war the United Nations
was established, and this helped to set the agenda for a new era of
(limited) global governance, albeit one where the US was clearly
‘first among equals’.
The principle of self-determination for nations implies the need
for some policing of this system, in order to protect those nations
under threat from aggressor states. This means some limitation on
the principle in the first place, as states agree to some policing by
international systems of governance. Even more important, the
primacy of state sovereignty can be questioned in cases where those
same states exercise systematic human rights abuses within their own
territory. Indeed, this was a point powerfully made in the eighteenth
century by the leading philosopher of cosmopolitanism, Immanuel
Kant (Kant, 1983). Thus, the United Nations was committed to
the principle of the right of nations to self-determination, but was
also committed to the rights of individuals, and the two principles
could potentially contradict each other. If the right of the individual
took precedence over the principle of self-determination, then the
sovereignty of the nation-state would be questioned. This debate has
become particularly acute, both since the end of the Cold War and
after the terrorist attacks on the US in September 2001, as we shall
see in the next chapter.
The establishment of the UN was thus an important development
in the exercising of the principle of governance alongside the nation-
state system. The UN is composed of an enormous number of agencies
that have played an important role in the affairs of nation-states,
particularly those former colonies that won their independence in
the post-war period. These include UNESCO (Educational Scientific
and Cultural Organisation), UNHCR (High Commission for
Refugees) and UNICEF (Children’s Fund). Moreover, wider social,
economic and political change since the establishment of the UN,
and especially since the 1970s, has provided further impetus to
the expansion of global governance. This includes the expansion
of the global economy, which has meant, for example, increased
regional agreements between states (such as the North American
Free Trade Agreement), newly established regional institutions such
as the European Union, an enhanced role for the IMF since 1982,
and the formation of the World Trade Organisation in 1995 (see
Chapter 5). These developments have been further reinforced by
the recognition that some problems operate beyond the interests of

particular nation-states – a principle most clearly established in the
case of environmental regulation. Finally, they are not only restricted
to the growth of formal, governmental institutions of governance.
Indeed, one can recognise the development of a transnational or
global civil society, made up of international NGOs that lobby these
same formal institutions and attempt to mobilise public opinion
around specific issues, such as debt relief. It could be argued that
the rise of ‘anti-globalisation’ protest movements is part of this
emerging global civil society, based on the transnationalisation of
social movement organisations.
In some respects, then, there has been a global transformation
in the character of politics in recent years. In 1900, there were 37
international government organisations and 176 international non-
government organisations. By 1996, there were 1,830 international
government organisations and 38,243 international non-government
organisations (Held and McGrew 2002: 6–7). But does this quantitative
increase amount to a qualitative transformation? This debate is
discussed in detail in the next section, through an examination
of competing theoretical perspectives on global governance. But
some immediate comments need to be made, and these relate to
the continued significance of the nation-state. In some respects, the
principle of state sovereignty has always been limited. As we saw in
the first section of this chapter, capitalist sovereignty is based on
a territorial state and a generalised commodity-producing market
economy, the latter never having been completely embedded in the
former (Lacher 2003). Moreover, in much of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, most of today’s states were colonies. Even the
most powerful state during the nineteenth century, Britain, did
not enjoy full sovereignty or the total exercise of power over other
states – a point that became slowly clear to a backward political class
as competitors eroded British hegemony. Even the most powerful
nation-states were therefore influenced by international affairs
over which they had limited control. On the other hand, in the
era of so-called global governance, we should not make the mistake
of thinking that new international institutions have completely
undermined the power of states. The UN has never been able to
exercise governance entirely beyond the interests of specific states,
as the UN Security Council gives five nations (US, UK, Russia, France
and China) the right to exercise a veto power. In the Cold War period
the power of the Security Council was almost always undermined

by US–Soviet conflict. One-member-one-vote does exist in the UN
General Assembly, but this body has no meaningful power. Deadlock
at the Security Council can in theory lead to an emergency debate
at the General Assembly, but this practice has not been exercised
since the 1950s, when the US successfully lobbied for a debate on the
Korean War. Interestingly, it could technically have been exercised
in the build-up to war with Iraq in 2003, potentially causing massive
embarrassment to both the US and Britain, whose governments both
seemed intent on going to war with or without UN approval. That
it did not – and indeed that it was not even seriously considered
– perhaps tells us something about the nature of power relations at
the United Nations.
I will return to the Bush administration in the next chapter. What
should be clear from this brief discussion is that it is a mistake to argue
that globalisation means the end of the nation-state. Nation-states
have never been fully sovereign, and in the current period it has
often been these same states (or some of them) that have promoted
pro-globalisation policies, as well as undermining the principles of
multilateral global governance. Indeed, one of the main characteristics
of contemporary globalisation is actually not the erosion, but the
universalisation, of the nation-state system. The nation-state system
and global governance are therefore not opposites, but part of a
greater whole.
DEBATING GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

There is widespread agreement that the last 50 years have seen a
large increase in the number of international institutions, both
governmental and non-governmental. The disagreement concerns
the significance and political implications of the growth of these
institutions. For some, these institutions could potentially lead to
the growth of genuinely multilateral global governance, above and
beyond the interests of specific nation states. Others are far more
sceptical. This section reviews the debate, focusing on the following
areas: neo-liberalism and liberal internationalism; cosmopolitanism;
communitarianism and localism; realism; and Marxism.
Neoliberalism and liberal internationalism

Neoliberal approaches to global governance are ambiguous, since
they contend both that markets are self-adjusting, with no need
for public institutions to regulate the free market and that there
is a need for the state in order to provide law and order, and some
public goods such as defence. Public goods are goods that cannot
be consumed by one individual without others also enjoying them.
The classic example in neoliberal thought is that of street lighting
– one individual alone cannot pay for this service, as it will lead to
others using it for free. In order to overcome this problem of free
riders, the state has to provide some public goods. There is, however,
an important debate over whether public goods can be objectively
defined, or whether the definition in part reflects the values of a
particular society at a given time – for example, is health a public
good, as the health of one individual may well have implications
for the rest of society?
This is not a purely academic debate, as the definition of a public
good has implications for the extent to which a state intervenes in
the so-called free market, and this brings us back to the question of
global governance. For, despite their anti-state rhetoric, neoliberals
have continually relied on public intervention to protect market
transactions. For instance, the debt crisis of 1982 was regulated by
the IMF, and this public institution continues to play a crucial role in
lending to countries (and bailing out creditors) in financial difficulty.
Moreover, along with the World Bank, it is an institution that promotes
‘free-market’ policies. Critics have argued that the main purpose of
this lending is not to protect the interests of debtors – especially the
poor in indebted countries – but to protect creditors from the prospect
of failed repayment and bankruptcy (see Chapter 5).
Market forces, then, are imposed on the weak, while the rich have
the protection of public institutions. Indeed, there is no such thing as
the free market, as markets are always regulated by the state, and so
the key question concerns the form of regulation. The expansion of
neoliberalism over the last 20 years has not occurred because of the
natural behaviour of markets, but because mechanisms of regulation
have promoted such expansion. Thus, the increase in financial flows
has occurred because states – above all the US – have liberalised and
deregulated controls on the movement of money. Public institutions
such as the IMF and the Bank of International Settlements, as well
as nation-states, continue to regulate these movements, but the
trend has been for regulation to be market-expanding rather than
market-restricting. Free trade has (selectively) increased because of a
reduction in tariffs in most sectors of the international economy, and
this has been agreed by states at meetings of the General Agreement

on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and, since 1995, the WTO.
Thus, despite claims to the contrary, neoliberalism does rely on
international and national institutions in order to expand the realm
of the market. What is important here is that a great deal of the
regulation of the last 20 years has promoted such market expansion,
and that for neoliberals this is a desirable outcome. They argue that
the expansion of markets will lead to rapid growth, as each country
specialises in producing those goods in which they have a comparative
advantage. This specialisation occurs through the principle of open
competition, according to which barriers to trade are eliminated, or
at least severely reduced. Through such specialisation growth will
occur, and eventually developing countries will catch up with the
advanced countries. Thus, insofar as global governance promotes
market expansion, it is seen as a desirable outcome. Just as states
should limit intervention into the ‘free market’, so institutions of
global governance must also play a ‘minimalist’ role.
This leads us to consider the related perspective of liberal
internationalism, which itself can be related to the question of US
hegemony (Deudney and Ikenberry 1999). In this approach, US
hegemony is regarded as being a force for good, and there is no
inherent conflict between the US’s promotion of its national interest
and the interests of international order. This argument can be traced
back to the establishment and expansion of the US in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, but its implementation beyond national
borders is often linked to President Wilson. In response to the First
World War, he wanted to restructure Europe, avoid conflict that
might again involve the US, and promote international cooperation
through the League of Nations. His vision was undermined by
continued European instability, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia,
and domestic opposition within the United States. US promotion of
a liberal international order was revived during and after the Second
World War, with the establishment of the UN and Bretton Woods
institutions, and support for the independence aspirations of anti-
colonial movements. This liberalism was undermined by the concrete
agreement made at Bretton Woods, the undemocratic nature of the
Security Council, and the intensification of the Cold War, particularly
in the context of conflicts in different parts of the developing world.
But it was revived after the Cold War with talk of a new world order,
and especially of the idea that the US could act for the ‘global good’.
This ‘new world order’ was quickly undermined by the failure of
intervention in Somalia in 1993, but by the late 1990s the idea of a

benevolent hegemonic power acting for the global good was revived.
The Clinton administration accepted – albeit selectively – that such
benevolence could only be guaranteed through cooperation in a
multilateral environment, and globalisation theory argued that the
context of globalisation facilitated the genuine promotion of liberal
internationalism, or even cosmopolitanism. Insofar as US hegemony
continued, it could therefore be exercised in a more benevolent
fashion. Whether or not the Clinton administration represented a
benevolent hegemon is a matter for debate, but certainly the Bush
administration interpreted the idea of benevolence in a more openly
unilateralist way, as we will see.
Cosmopolitanism
Influenced by Kant, contemporary cosmopolitan ‘is concerned to
disclose the cultural, legal and ethical basis of political order in a
world where political communities and states matter, but not only
and exclusively … [It] should be understood as the capacity to mediate
between national cultures, communities of fate and alternative
styles of life.’ (Held 2003: 167–8) For cosmopolitanism to become a
reality, at the very least there is a need for the institutions of global
governance (and nation-states) to be properly reconstructed and
democratised. There needs to be an expansion of international law
so that all states are subject to the rule of law. Although not without
its problems, the recently created International Criminal Court is
regarded as a potential enforcer of the cosmopolitan principle of
the international rule of law. International institutions need to be
democratised, so that the United Nations General Assembly has more
power, and veto power and permanent membership of the Security
Council is abolished. Regional bodies such as the European Union
also need to be democratised. This global democratisation also needs
to be accompanied by an expansion of democracy at national and
local levels.
The more radical cosmopolitans also argue that democratisation
should not only be about institutional change. Liberal democrats
have an essentially limited conception of democracy, based on
formal procedures leading to the election of a government. A more
substantive approach to democracy is needed, which includes
more participatory mechanisms at all levels, as well as a radical
redistribution of resources at local, national, and above all global
levels. This would include regulations restricting market mechanisms,
rather than simply enhancing them, and so they would be concerned

with social and collective as well as individual rights (see Chapter 6).
This would involve policies such as an increase in the amount, and
improvement in the quality of, aid to poorer countries; increased
controls on capital, including on the movement of money; and
possibly some investment priorities set by public institutions, as well
as increased social and environmental regulation. This version of
cosmopolitanism is thus a kind of globalised social democracy.
However, one of the most controversial issues associated with
cosmopolitanism is its approach to state sovereignty. Cosmopolitans
do not see this principle as so important that it can override all
others, as this can lead to an undermining of the rights of individuals
within sovereign states. The restructuring of democracy involves the
promotion of ‘a model of political organization in which citizens,
wherever they are located in the world, have a voice, input and
political representation in international affairs, in parallel with
and independently of their own governments’ (Archibugi and Held
1995: 13). This approach can therefore rationalise a number of
more contentious positions, such as support for neoliberal policies
or the promotion of humanitarian military intervention. Seen in
this light, cosmopolitanism has a wide range of political colours, as
we will see.
Critics argue that there are two main problems with the cosmopolitan
approach: feasibility and desirability. The first of these relates to the
extent to which existing institutions are not multilateral at all, but
actually dominated by certain states. Indeed, in some respects these
institutions can enhance such domination. Much of the recent
expansion of institutions of ‘global governance’ is not associated
with a movement towards greater global democracy, but actually
involves the expansion of market forces and the power of some
states over others. So, for instance, the WTO may have a principle
of one member one vote, but this is meaningless in the context of
massive discrepancies in global resources. If, for example, the US does
not abide by a WTO decision, threatened sanctions against it are of
relatively little significance. However, if the US takes a developing
country through the dispute settlement mechanisms of the WTO and
wins its case, the effects on that developing country of US retaliation
are potentially catastrophic. Moreover, dispute settlement takes time,
and can therefore be very expensive, disproportionately affecting
poorer countries. In addition, decision-making at the WTO is often
carried out by major powers in closed meetings, and, given that the
WTO expands free-market principles with only limited attention to

the relative competitive capacities of individual countries, it actually
undermines the development potential of later developers (see
Chapter 5). For all these reasons, critics argue that global governance
is not genuinely multilateral, and that it in fact expands the power
of special interests – be they dominant states (realism) or both states
and capital (Marxism).
Cosmopolitanism is aware of these difficulties, but insists that there
are more hopeful signs of progressive social and political change.
This is because of the complexity and plurality of a multi-layered
system of global governance, which means that not all international
institutions can be reduced to the power of dominant states or
capital. It is also clear that, precisely because some issues are of global
importance, no one nation state can impose its will entirely separately
from every other nation. Global problems such as environmental
destruction and terrorism require global solutions, and therefore
global cooperation. There has also been an increase in the number
of international conventions and agreements on human rights,
and promotion of an international criminal court, which, despite
their limitations, show that there is some basis for international
agreement on universal principles. Moreover, governance also
involves some processes of dialogue with transnational civil society,
which is composed of international NGOs that can pressurise existing
institutions into implementing more progressive social policies. For
instance, the campaign around Jubilee 2000 in the late 1990s had
the effect of forcing the issue of debt relief for the poorest countries
onto the agendas of the G7 nations, the World Bank and the IMF.
Like theorists of ‘global transformations’, cosmopolitans of all shades
argue that there is some room for optimism because of the increased
intensity of global interconnectedness, even if such optimism has
been undermined since 2001.
The other question that needs to be addressed is that of desirability.
Cosmopolitanism clearly involves some commitment to universal
principles; indeed, as I noted above, state sovereignty can be
questioned in this approach if specific states are not conforming to
these principles. Critics argue that this carries its own dangers, as it
fails to address the question of who sets the ‘universal’ norms. If it
is an unaccountable hegemonic power, then this cosmopolitanism
can easily become an ideological justification for the exercise of
power-politics. While Marxists and realists again link this to the
dominance of states and/or capital, relativists argue that universalism
is impossible, and that what is needed is the restriction of globalisation

in favour of localisation.
Communitarianism and localisation

Communitarian approaches to international relations contend
that local and national diversity should be celebrated, and that
cosmopolitan universalism is likely to lead to the dominance of
the most powerful states over weaker states. There are no universal
values, because norms and ideals can only exist within particular
localities and cultures. Although we all have identities that may cross
borders, our most important identities are political and bounded,
and are therefore linked to the nation-state. For some – though by
no means all – communitarians, state sovereignty therefore trumps
other values, including human rights, which are too easily used by the
powerful to justify their continued dominance of the international
order (Chandler 2002).
Though not identical, the localisation approach draws on some of
these arguments and often applies them to an explicitly environmental
and anti-globalisation politics. Although there are important
differences, the focus of this approach is on grassroots movements,
and a bottom-up approach to politics. Like cosmopolitanism,
localism challenges state sovereignty, but in this case in the name
of greater local rather than global power. Burnheim (1995) advocates
the principle of demarchy, in which governance would be based on
what he calls communities of fate. These communities would be
self-governing, and tend to exercise the principle of subsidiarity, in
which ‘all decisions should be made at the lowest level of governing
authority competent to deal with them’ (IFG 2002: 107). For some
deep ecologists, this principle can only be exercised in bioregions,
where boundaries are said to be created by natural divisions.
Such decentralised systems of governance will exercise the principle
of self-determination, and so the issue of universal values does not
arise. But the problem of course, is that it does arise. What if one
locality has far more resources than another? Or, what if one locality
imposes its will on another? What if inequality and oppression are
particularly great in specific localities? One prominent international
NGO, the International Forum on Globalisation (IFG 2002) accepts
that these are important issues, and calls for systems of global
governance to redistribute wealth from richer to poorer areas. It
envisages the bypassing or elimination of pro-free-market institutions
like the IMF, World Bank and WTO, and the creation of democratic
institutions through the United Nations. These reforms are not so

far removed from the principles of cosmopolitanism. This may not
be a bad thing, but it certainly undermines the principle of self-
determination for localities. Localisation, in other words, implies that
there must be some global governance to guarantee this commitment,
even if this means some watering down of localist principles and
practices. Thus, even those most suspicious of globalisation and
cosmopolitanism are forced to recognise that institutions of global
governance are necessary, but that they need to be more accountable
to localities and regions, and that therefore they are not intrinsically
imperialist.1 One clear implication is that the universal principles
espoused by cosmopolitanism do not necessarily lead to the exercise
of power-politics. Nevertheless, there is a need to separate the current
reality of power-politics from a commitment to universalism, and so
a critique of cosmopolitanism should be made at the level of practice
(Marxism or realism) rather than principle (relativism).
Realism
Realist accounts of international relations are sceptical of normative
approaches such as cosmopolitanism. The realist argument is that
we have to take the world as it is, rather than how we would like it
to be, and that this world is made up of competing, self-interested
nation-states. International relations are based on the struggle for
power between these states, and security and peace can only be
guaranteed by the maintenance of a precarious balance of power.
The need for international order is therefore paramount, and it can
only be maintained by hegemonic states. In practice, this currently
means that order is maintained by US hegemony (although in the
absence of other balancing forces, this may present some dangers).
Global governance is therefore neither feasible nor desirable.
Democratisation of the foreign policy of each state is said to render
it vulnerable to the irrational whims and desires of an ill-informed
mass of people, and is therefore potentially far more dangerous than
existing practices. Moreover, it is unlikely to take place anyway, as talk
of global democracy will always be biased towards some states: thus,
‘global democratisation’ will in practice favour US interests. There is
no global will above and beyond the interests of competing nation-
states. Global governance is thus little more than an extension of the
interests of these states, and of the hegemonic state in particular.
There are enormous problems with the realist perspective. The
existence of sovereign states tends to be taken for granted, and
there is little analysis of how these states are influenced by social

and political forces in civil society. Moreover, realism assumes the
existence of nation-states prior to the existence of an international
system, when in fact the two exist at one and the same time. This has
at least two major implications. First, it is an individualist myth that
a single person exists outside of society, and a similar argument can
be made regarding the relationship between an individual nation-
state, and the international state system. Most nation-states did not
first enter an unregulated international system, and then pursue their
national interest; rather, they emerged out of an already established
international system of nation-states. It is therefore a mistake to
dichotomise the nation-state and the international system, including
in the current era of globalisation. A second, related point follows
– namely, that the power of some states over others cannot simply
be taken for granted, as it is in realist theory. This tells us little about
the rise and fall of particular powers, other than the fact that such
movement occurs in a never-changing, anarchical international
system of national states. Indeed, in assuming a never changing
international order based on the state-system, realism ultimately fails
to provide us with a theory of the transformation of the international
order. Even more seriously for a theory that sees the state as central
to its analysis, it therefore fails to provide us with a theory of the
state, assuming that all systems of territorial authority are basically
the same – a position challenged earlier in this chapter.
Moreover, realism can also easily conflate (supposed) analysis with
apology, as hegemonic states are deemed to be necessary providers of
international order. Many rogue states have been led by dictatorships
that terrorise their own populations, but it is equally true that the
hegemonic state in the international system has often been guilty of
showing a similar contempt for international rules and norms. The
effect of states should not be measured purely in relation to domestic
populations, but also in respect of the wider international system of
nation-states. Insofar as realism theorises this relationship, it tends
to be through an ahistorical notion of anarchy that can only be
alleviated by a hegemonic state and a balance of power. The theory
thus assumes that, in this respect, the hegemonic power preserves
order. But this may be at great cost – and indeed the hegemonic
power may well undermine order.
However, for all its weaknesses, realism at least accepts that states
continue to be major political actors in the international order, that
the US is by far the most powerful state, and that the real world
of international politics is subversive of the aspiration for global

governance – a point also emphasised by Marxism.
Marxism
Marxist approaches to contemporary international relations emphasise
how the rule of capital, and of nation-states promoting ‘their’ capital,
undermines any trend towards global governance. Beyond this point,
there are many disagreements among contemporary Marxists as to
how to theorise the international system. This is probably because
of the legacy of classical Marxism, which, unfortunately is treated by
some Marxists as the gospel truth to this day. In this section, I will
briefly examine classical Marxist theories of imperialism, assessing
the relevance of these accounts to an understanding of contemporary
global capitalism.
As is well known, Marx was sometimes an apologist for colonialism,
because he believed it would hasten the development of capitalism
in the colonies. Although Marx was anti-capitalist, he believed that
capitalism was progressive compared to pre-capitalist societies, and
so the spread of capitalism into the colonies was welcomed, even if
it was unfortunate.2 Capitalism was progressive because it developed
the productive forces and created a working class. Development of
the productive forces expanded the total wealth by increasing the
social surplus product, which potentially meant that people would
not have to work so much, and could live off the surplus product.
However, this potential could not be realised in capitalist society
because a dominant class (the bourgeoisie) continued to live off the
social surplus product at the expense of the producing class (the
proletariat). However, capitalism created its own gravedigger because
the working class would, through its cooperative and unifying role
in the process of production, eventually overthrow capitalism and
create a society (socialism) in which everybody lived off the social
surplus product. This process would occur globally, as what we would
now call a transnational capitalist class exploited a transnational
proletariat, and so nation-states and national differences would
gradually be eroded by the dynamic, expansionary but exploitative
nature of capitalism.
There are problems with this account that relate to the nature of
the goods produced in capitalist society, the optimism concerning
working-class revolution, and the fact that socialist revolutions have
taken place in peasant-based societies where the social surplus product
was relatively underdeveloped, with disastrous consequences for the
building of socialism.3 What is more important for our purposes is

to recognise that capitalism was regarded by Marx as progressive,
compared to previous modes of production in history. Indeed, for all
its shortcomings, I think Marx was correct in this view. On the other
hand, in apologising for colonialism, Marx often assumed that the
international expansion of capitalism – imperialism – would lead to
a similarly dynamic capitalism in the colonies. In this respect Marx
was wrong, and indeed he appeared to recognise this in much of his
work (see Kiely 1995: Ch. 2). The expansion of capitalism did not
lead to a simple replication of an ‘English model’ in the colonies, or
in other parts of the world. Indeed, colonial powers ensured that this
would not occur. Instead, many colonies and independent countries
were integrated into an international division of labour, mainly as
producers of low-value primary products. Clearly, societies did not
follow similar stages of development, and uneven development
– between and within countries – was the norm.
These debates were taken up later by classical Marxist theories
of imperialism. Marx’s optimism concerning the disappearance
of national differences was undermined by the intensification of
rivalries between imperialist powers, as shown for example in the
late-nineteenth-century scramble for Africa and the First World War.
Capitalist expansion, or imperialism, had led to a dual process of
nationalisation and internationalisation. The nationalisation of state
capitals did not mean taking the private sector into public hands,
but an increased role for states in promoting their capitals at the
expense of others. Internationally, this was reflected in intensified
competition, which included territorial conquest, and uneven
development. For two of the major Marxist theorists of imperialism,
Lenin and Bukharin, this competition culminated in the devastation
of the First World War. These theories are problematic, and Lenin’s
argument (Lenin 1975) that imperialism was the highest stage
of capitalism is unconvincing. Most capital flows actually went
to other imperialist countries (though in different forms from
today), and there was actually limited capital accumulation in the
colonies – indeed, this was a reason why they were ‘left behind’ in
the world economy (Emmanuel 1974; Phillips 1987). Ultimately,
late-nineteenth-century imperialism was a product of a relatively
early period of capitalist expansion. This did indeed involve inter-
imperialist rivalry, as states undertook protectionist policies at home
and territorial, exclusivist policies abroad, designed partly to ensure
‘catch up’ with Britain, whose productive superiority meant that it
could support free trade abroad. There was thus some considerable
continuity with earlier periods of territorial expansion, albeit now in
a capitalist framework and extending beyond Europe. In this early
period of capitalist expansion, imperial power embraced the world
‘less by the universality of its economic imperatives than by the
same coercive force that had always determined relations between
colonial masters and subject territories’ (Wood 2003: 125). Under
US hegemony, capitalist expansion by the mid-to-late twentieth
century increasingly took more directly economic forms – albeit
not completely independent of the state and in an international
system where the principle of state sovereignty had massively
expanded. It is partly for this reason that some Marxists now prefer
to use the term ‘globalisation’ or ‘transnational capitalism’ rather
than imperialism.
Nonetheless, whatever the weaknesses of classical theories, they
maintained a strong hold over Marxist theory throughout the twentieth
century. After the first World War and the Bolshevik Revolution in
Russia, these theories of imperialism came to be dominated by the
cruder interpretations of the Stalin-dominated Third Communist
International. From the late 1920s, it was argued that imperialism was
a reactionary force, because it held back the progressive development
of capitalism in the colonies and semi-colonies. Lenin and Bukharin
had not theorised in any depth the effects of imperialism on the
developing world, and were more interested in how competition
between imperialist powers led to war. Stalin and his cronies were
unambiguously anti-imperialist, and recommended support to all
forces, including national bourgeoisies, that supposedly opposed
imperialism. In the process, analysis based on class struggle between
capitalists and workers was eroded, and replaced by a conception
of the world in which there were imperialist and anti-imperialist
nations. This analysis remained very influential within Marxist circles
after the Second World War, even after the crimes of Stalin gradually
eroded the appeal of official Communism.
Today, classical Marxism influences three theories: those of
super-imperialism, inter-imperialist rivalry and ultra-imperialism.
Super-imperialism refers to the unquestioned hegemony of the
United States in the capitalist world after the Second World War.
Clearly, there were no (capitalist) challengers to the US at this time,
and so some writers argued that US leadership had changed the
nature of imperialism. This leadership included military as well as
economic hegemony, and an enhanced role in policing the world to

protect it from the ‘communist threat’, and to preserve the expansion
of an increasingly internationalised capital. The post-war era saw a
massive increase in the growth of multinational companies, and US
hegemony played a key role in policing the profits of this expansion
(Baran and Sweezy 1966). For underdevelopment theory, the effect on
the developing world was disastrous (Frank 1969). There were many
wars, where the superpowers usually backed opposing sides, and
the ‘space’ for capitalist development was increasingly undermined
by the control of investment and trade by western, especially US,
companies. Capitalist expansion and imperialism did not involve the
promotion of a dynamic capitalism in the developing world; it did
not even involve an unevenly developing capitalism; rather, it led to
the development of underdevelopment, in which established powers
grew by underdeveloping weaker powers. But in fact these claims were
unconvincing. The East Asian region began to develop rapidly from
the 1960s, and its defeat in its war in Vietnam undermined the US’s
hegemony, both militarily and economically. From 1975 onwards,
the US was increasingly reluctant to commit itself to ground-troop
interventions in the developing world. This was further reinforced
by the Iranian revolution in 1979, and the forced withdrawal from
Lebanon in the early 1980s. Interventions continued, but (under
Reagan) these were usually illegal or covert, or (under Clinton)
were basically wars fought from the sky rather than on the ground.
Economic hegemony was undermined by the massive cost of the war
in Vietnam, which paved the way for the devaluation of the dollar,
discussed in the next chapter. For some Marxists, this led to a new
era of imperialism based on a return to inter-imperialist rivalry. This
was reflected in the rise of competition, especially from Germany and
Japan, and their leadership of alternative areas of capital accumulation
– the European Union and Pacific Asia. However, continued US
military hegemony, the collapse of the Soviet Union, US success in
getting countries to liberalise trade and especially the movement of
money (which has been a major factor in financing US trade and
budget deficits), plus an economic boom in the 1990s, led to a renewal
of analyses based on the super-imperialism of US hegemony.
These two principal analyses – of inter-imperialist rivalry and
super-imperialism – are not mutually exclusive. The argument of the
former is that the main conflict in the world today is between major
capitalist powers, and that in fact the wars of the 1990s were really
proxies for these rivalries4 (Callinicos et al. 1994; Callinicos 2003).

Rather than stressing inter-imperialist rivalry, the super-imperialism
thesis emphasises the successes of the US in exercising its hegemony
in this competitive environment (Gowan 1999; Hudson 2003). But
despite this difference, both perspectives share the view that global
governance is simply an ideological screen that attempts to cover up
the exercise of power in the world system (Chandler 2000; Gowan
2001; Baxter 2003). Although they may disagree on the mechanisms
and implications, Marxists agree that there is no prospect for
democratic, multilateral, global governance. Thus, Gowan (2001)
points out that the US successfully removed the Secretary General of
the United Nations, despite the fact that every other country wanted
Boutros Ghali to remain in post. The US also successfully eroded the
Articles of Agreement of the IMF, and won further liberalisation of
capital accounts in East Asian states in 1997–8. It has also ignored the
formation of the International Criminal Court, arms reduction treaties
and international treaties that attempt to control environmental
degradation. For this approach, then, global governance amounts to
the exercise of entrenched power, whether that of the US state, or of
competing capitals and their states.
However, there is another Marxist approach that also has its
roots in the Marxist debates that led up to the First World War.
This is associated with the work of Karl Kautsky, and his concept of
ultra-imperialism. He argued that capitalist competition need not
give rise to war, as international capitalism requires mechanisms of
cooperation as well as competition. Obviously, this argument looked
unconvincing in the wake of two world wars; but Kautsky’s contention
was not that war would not take place, it was just that it need not
necessarily occur. Moreover, the world has changed substantially since
Lenin’s day, and it could be argued that international capitalism – or
at least relations between the leading capitalist states – is in many
ways structured more closely along Kautskyan lines. Immediately
before the First World War, rivalries took place in the context of
relatively closed national capitalisms and colonies. Those sceptical
that globalisation constitutes a new reality have rightly argued that
trade-GDP ratios were not substantially lower in 1913 than in the
current era (see Chapter 2), but there were still important differences
between then and now. Money and traded goods did flow between
countries, but tariff rates among the ‘advanced’ countries were
high (except in Britain), trade with colonies was generally based
on an exclusive system of imperial preferences, and above all the

internationalisation of productive capital was extremely limited. In
the current era, firms that originate in one country are likely to
compete with a wide range of companies from other countries in
a number of ‘national economies’, which renders a very different
picture from the pre-1914 period. Indeed, after the First World War
and into the 1930s, world trade actually declined amid protectionism
and competitive devaluations.
The Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 was designed to promote a
capitalist system of global governance which explicitly avoided the
economic problems – competitive devaluations and trade contraction
– of the first half of the twentieth century. The US was clearly the
leading power, but other major capitalist powers were prepared to
submit to US leadership in return for military protection in the
Cold War, aid in the form of the Marshall Plan, favourable access
to the US market, and US foreign investment, the last of which was
reciprocated by transnational investment in the US from the 1970s
onwards (see Chapter 5). In a sense, then, the post-war order was
organised along the lines of ultra-imperialism, albeit with the US as
the unquestioned leader (Bromley 2003). Competition continued,
and in many ways intensified, taking the form of disputes at trade
talks, limited protectionism, and some devaluations – but not war.
Of course, wars persisted, particularly in the developing world. But
insofar as these local and national conflicts were internationalised,
they were wars between the two rival blocs – communism and
capitalism – organised in the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic
Treaty Organisation (NATO), and not between rival capitalist powers.
A pact between capitalist competitors in NATO would, on the other
hand, have been unthinkable before 1945.
This analysis also has implications for how we think about
imperialism and anti-imperialism. It is plainly unconvincing to
reduce the bloody wars of the 1990s to simple proxies for inter-
imperialist rivalries and/or the projection of US power. There may
be disagreements between powers over the conduct and principles
of war, but there is also considerable cooperation. Indeed, there is a
tendency in such accounts to divide the world into an imperialist and
anti-imperialist bloc, and to support the latter against the rivalries
and big power projections of the former. But this is a particularly
one-sided account of imperialism – it would be absurd to reduce the
Gulf War of 1991 to the supposed rivalries between Germany and
Japan, on the one hand, and the US on the other. Some account
of the ‘sub-imperialist’ ambitions of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and
its territorial ambitions in Kuwait, is also necessary. The ignoring
of such factors betrays a commitment to an old-fashioned Stalinist
anti-imperialism, in which the world is divided into imperialist and
anti-imperialist blocs, with Saddam (when fighting the US, but not
when he enjoyed its support) in the latter camp. Contemporary anti-
imperialism often reduces the developing world to a theatre in which
rival imperialisms play out their expansionary ambitions. In fact, parts
of the developing world remain areas where bloody, violent processes
of primitive accumulation, state formation and inter-state conflict
persist.5 Certainly these processes have been influenced by the actions
of powerful states, but they are not reducible to them – indeed,
‘blowback’ implies that the movements that the US has supported
in the past cannot be fully controlled (Johnson 2002).6 Similarly, it
is completely reductionist to argue that imperialism automatically
leads to underdevelopment in the periphery. This will depend on
specific relationships between imperialist states and local states, and
between class forces and forms of resistance. Certainly, the promotion
of neoliberalism is not conducive to the promotion of sustained
capitalist growth and development in the periphery, but even this
does not necessarily mean unchecked underdevelopment.
Thus, simplistic Leninist updates for the twenty-first century are
themselves guilty of a kind of methodological imperialism, which
denies any agency – or even relevance – to the developing world.
On the other hand, recognition of the weaknesses of contemporary
anti-imperialist analyses does not necessarily mean endorsement of
‘post-imperial’ interventions in the developing world. Martin Shaw
has argued that
[t]he global system of power is centred on a post-imperial, internationalised

Western state-conglomerate, which harnesses – although not
unproblematically – the legitimate global layer of institutions to its own
purposes, and responds to the contradictions of quasi-imperial power
elsewhere. Global power networks are best understood, therefore, as
frameworks in which the dominant West negotiates its relationships with
the other major and minor state centres (Shaw 2002: 335–6).
This argument has the undoubted strength that it recognises agency

in the developing world, and that such agency can have reactionary
intent. But the notion of a western state conglomerate – what Shaw

elsewhere calls a global state (Shaw 2000) – is under-theorised.
First, the reference to the ‘not unproblematic’ nature of western
intervention requires further consideration. Second, and related to
this point, western intervention is regarded as reactive to events in
the ‘minor state centres’, which takes the argument about agency too
far in the other direction. The puppets of anti-imperialism become
the only pro-active agents in Shaw’s account, which again begs a
number of questions about western domination.7
Where, then, does this leave the Marxist position on global
governance? I would suggest that the Leninist-Bukharinite position is
based on an outmoded anti-imperialism, and an overly instrumentalist
account of global governance. On the other hand, it would be foolish
to ignore the unequal context of global governance, or the ways in
which states and capitals subvert the potential for genuine global
democratisation. The cosmopolitan perspective argues that global
governance is contested, and that progressives should support further
democratisation within this contest. Marxists rightly argue that this is
too optimistic about the prospects for democratisation, as it ignores
the structured inequalities that pervade both the system of nation-
states and ‘global civil society’. But at the same time, all but the
most dogmatic Marxist would accept that, even in an international
capitalist system, some social and political arrangements are better
than others. Marxists have accepted this point at the domestic level
– social democracy is preferable to fascism, for example – and I see
no reason why a similar point cannot apply internationally as well.8
Nation states may ultimately be capitalist states, but they are also
sites of struggle. International institutions may be dominated by
the most powerful capitalist states, but they too are sites of struggle9
(Bartholomew and Breakspear 2003). This point is not made to
champion cosmopolitan over national politics, as though the two
could be separated. Rather, it is made in order to problematise any
simplistic separation of national and cosmopolitan politics.
This chapter has outlined the broad debates on the relationship

between state sovereignty, global governance and globalisation. It
has problematised the idea that globalisation constitutes a radical
break from an era of state sovereignty, and indeed has argued that a
specifically capitalist sovereignty has only been universalised in the
post-1945 period. It has also argued that there is a tension between the
principle of state sovereignty and the cosmopolitan idea of universal

human rights that may provide some grounds for ‘humanitarian
intervention’. But we have also seen that the universalisation of state
sovereignty has not meant the necessary expansion of cosmopolitan
democracy, and that systems of ‘global governance’ remain seriously
compromised by the hierarchical nation-state system – and possibly
even by contemporary, US-led imperialism. These issues – and their
full implications – are addressed further in the next chapter.
4
Globalisation and Politics II: International
Relations and the Post-9/11 World
The terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001 had

a significant impact on the conduct of international relations. In
particular, they enhanced the unilateralist stance of the administration
of George W. Bush. This is sometimes presented as the start of a
substantial break in the conduct of US foreign policy (Kaldor 2002).
There is even sometimes nostalgia for previous US administrations.
Much of the rest of this book will challenge this argument, showing
how the US has behaved in unilateralist ways in the past – a point
that even applies to the Clinton administration. Nevertheless, 9/11
and the prior ‘election’ of Bush intensified the unilateralist agenda
and paved the way for a more overt exercise of US state power. This
was clearest in the cases of war in Afghanistan (although this did
command wider international support), and, most controversially,
the war in Iraq in 2003. This chapter develops the general themes
discussed in the previous one, and applies them to an understanding
of international relations since 2001. It does so by focusing particularly
on the invasion of Iraq in 2003, its wider implications, and how these
relate to the questions of imperialism and cosmopolitanism.
FROM 9/11 TO WAR IN IRAQ
Before 11 September the foreign policy of the Bush administration

was ambiguous. For example, Bush claimed that US-led intervention
in the former Yugoslavia was Clinton’s war.1 But at the same time
many top advisers within the new administration had called for a
far more active and aggressive approach by the US in world affairs,
and they were hopeful that Bush was ‘their man’.2 Inspired by the
highly questionable practices of the Reagan administrations of the
1980s, the right-wing think-tank Project for the New American
Century was established in 1997. Its founding statement was signed
by prominent members of the Bush team like Paul Wolfowitz, Donald
Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney. The statement embraced the
idea that US strategic power was paramount, that there was a need
67
for greater military spending, that ‘economic and political freedom’

should be promoted abroad, and above all there was a need ‘to accept
responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending
an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity and
our principles’ (Project for the New American Century 1997). The
following year, in an open letter to President Clinton, the Project
called for the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. The
letter also argued that there were sufficient UN resolutions to justify
this approach, and that ‘(i)n any case, American policy cannot
continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in
the UN Security Council’ (Project for the New American Century
1998). In 2000, the Project argued that there was a need for substantial
military presence in the Gulf, and that this issue transcended ‘the
issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein’, and must be linked to a broad
project to democratise the whole of the Middle East (Project for the
New American Century 2000). Clinton and the so-called US liberal
elite promoted complacency among the US electorate, which was
reflected in liberal decadence at home and a confused foreign policy
that did not sufficiently embrace the country’s dominant role in the
international order (Kagan and Kristol 2000a, 2000b). What was
needed was a far more belligerent US foreign policy; but, crucially,
the US would be first among a system of liberal democratic nation-
states. Although the realist wing of neoconservatism was more
sceptical, this world-view amounted to advocacy of the unilateral,
US-led promotion of liberal democracy throughout the world, which
was deemed to be good for both the US and the world
(Wolfowitz 2000).
The influence of US neoconservatives increased enormously after
the atrocities of 9/11. After the quick removal of the Taliban regime
in Afghanistan and the (temporary) dispersal of al Qaeda forces,
Bush made his infamous ‘axis of evil’ speech in January 2002. The
terrorist threat was linked to the opposition to rogue states that were
said to back terrorists and undermine international stability. Iran,
North Korea and above all Iraq were initially targeted, and Libya,
Syria and Cuba quickly followed. In June 2002 Bush first outlined
the strategy of pre-emptive action, which upheld the right of the
United States to strike against potential and actual enemies before
these countries or terrorist groups acquired significant weapons. The
unilateralism of the administration was made clear in its National
Security Strategy:
Globalisation and Politics II 69
While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the
international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to
exercise our right of self-defence by acting pre-emptively. (National Security
Strategy 2002)
In the build-up to war with Iraq, there was some conflict in the Bush
administration between unilateralists around Cheney and Rumsfeld,
who were prepared to bypass the UN, and multilateralists, led by
Colin Powell (and in Britain by Tony Blair). However, multilateralism
was always conditional and qualified. After winning agreement
for the return of US inspectors, Powell’s ‘victory’ was qualified by
remarks by Cheney that there was no doubt Saddam had breached
US resolutions and had Weapons of Mass Destruction (see Coates and
Krieger 2004: 31–2). Moreover, in the build up to the passing of UN
Resolution 1441, it was clear that US multilateralism was conditional.
Colin Powell himself stated on 4 September 2002:
The President made it clear today that he has every intention of consulting
widely ... with our friends and allies and with the UN. He at the same time
made it clear that we preserve all our options to do what we believe is
necessary to deal with this problem ... We cannot allow the international
community to be thwarted in this effort to require Iraq to comply. (quoted
in Coates and Krieger 2004: 33)
Immediately after Resolution 1441 was passed, on 8 November

2002, there began a propaganda battle in which the US and British
governments continued to pre-judge the outcome of inspections, and
even made efforts to undermine Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix.
Blix himself was critical of Iraq’s non-compliance with inspectors
in his first report to the UN, which further fuelled Washington’s
impatience. On 5 February 2003, Powell addressed the UN with
‘evidence’ of Iraqi links to al Qaeda, and of the country’s possession of
chemical and ballistic missiles, and programmes for the development
of nuclear weapons. Except by those already converted to the case
for war, this evidence was treated with scepticism at the time, and
became a major embarrassment after the war (though for some time
Tony Blair continued to ‘believe’, in much the same way that James
Stewart believed in the existence of Harvey the rabbit). Certainly, the
majority of the Security Council remained unconvinced of the case
for war, but Powell’s basic message was that, given this ‘evidence’,
the UN would become irrelevant if it did not act. When it became
clear that even a ‘moral majority’ could not be won at the Security
Council, despite promises of considerable amounts of aid to some of
the poorer member countries, the argument was retrospectively made
that there was no need for a second resolution. This despite the fact
that, in Britain at least, Blair had explicitly promised the House of
Commons that 1441 was not ‘an automatic trigger point’ and that
‘paragraph 12 of the resolution makes it clear that it is not’ (quoted
in Coates and Krieger 2004: 57). It also begs the question of why Blair
put so much effort into winning a second resolution. A green light
was given to Blair when Jacques Chirac stated that France would
veto any Security Council resolution that supported war. The British
government then selectively interpreted Chirac’s statement to mean
that whatever happened France would veto war; and so bypassing
the UN – and war – was justified. Many Labour politicians used the
Chirac statement – even implying that war could have been avoided
if not for Chirac’s stubborn behaviour; or they simply claimed that
support for Resolution 1441 meant support for war (conveniently
ignoring Blair’s statements to the contrary).
Previous resolutions such as 678 authorised the use of force against
Iraq in the context of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, but this was ended
by 687, which agreed a ceasefire and made the Security Council
responsible for enforcing implementation. Resolution 1441 did talk of
serious consequences for Iraq if it violated its obligations concerning
disarmament, but these consequences were to be considered in the
context of a report by the UN weapons inspectors. The actions of
the US and British governments ensured that war occurred before
inspections could be fully carried out and a report presented. Some
Labour politicians claimed that chief UN weapons inspector Hans
Blix had been sufficiently critical in preliminary reports to the UN for
war to be justified, but in fact Blix was highly critical of the decision
to go to war, and argued that the US had planned war irrespective
of the outcome of the weapons inspections. Moreover, it was quite
clear that the Blair government itself was searching for reasons for
war almost as frantically as the Bush administration. In the face of
public disquiet about the build-up to war, a dossier was published
in September 2002 (HM Government 2002: 6, 163), which alleged
that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, ‘some capable of
deployment within 45 minutes’; that Iraq was seeking quantities of
uranium from an African country; and that it was hiding missiles with
a range beyond the prescribed 650km. The dossier led to a degree of
panic about the 45-minute claim at the time of publication, and the
misinterpretation of the weapons by the press (they assumed this

referred to WMD and not battlefield weapons) was not corrected by
the government. But the dossier still failed to convince, although the
45-minute claim did come back to haunt the government after the
war, when a dispute with the BBC led to allegations of ‘sexing up’ by
the government, and the suicide of a civil servant who had spoken
to a BBC reporter. But this sideshow, in relation to the decision to
go to war was far less important than the publication of a second
dossier in February 2003, some of which was quickly shown to be
plagiarised from an academic article. This caused some considerable
embarrassment to the government and forced a grudging apology
– but no resignations.3
It is clear, then, that both the US and British governments were
committed to war with Iraq. What is perhaps of wider interest,
particularly for our understanding of globalisation, is that the war
coalition was based on an alliance between US unilateralists and
a British government that claimed allegiance to multilateralism,
and even to the principles of cosmopolitan democracy. If Bush is
‘anti-globalisation’ and Blair is ‘pro-globalisation’, how was such an
alliance possible? In some respects, of course, the alliance reflected
the messy world of real politics, and Blair’s (misguided) view that
by entering an alliance with Bush he could have some influence
over him and (presumably) curtail the latter’s worst unilateralist
tendencies. But entering such an alliance – and indeed Blair’s claim
to have exercised some influence on Bush – implies that there was
sufficient common ground in the first place. We therefore need to
understand where such common ground existed.
The starting point is that both the neoconservatives and Blair’s Third
Way support the expansion of liberal democracy in the developing
world. This may be no more than rhetoric, and neoconservatives have
been more than prepared to support authoritarian regimes when it
suited US interests – including, to some extent, Saddam Hussein. But
they do believe that US hegemony is good for the whole world, and
they are basically prepared to utilise hard power in order to achieve
this aim. In his speech to the US Congress on 18 July 2003, Blair
made the following statements:
Ours are not western values. They are the universal values of the human
spirit ... What you can bequeath to this anxious world is the light of liberty
... Why America? ... [B]ecause destiny puts you in this place in history, in this
moment in time, and the task is yours to do. And ... our job is to be there with
you. You are not going to be alone. We’ll be with you in this fight for liberty.
(quoted in Coates and Krieger 2004: 9)
Clearly, Blair is committed to the idea that the national interest of

the US and the universal interest of humanity is inseparable – an
argument with deep roots in British Labourism,4 old and new (Coates
and Krieger 2004: Ch. 6). As we have already seen, this argument is
not a new one, and can be traced back at least as far as the liberal
internationalism of Woodrow Wilson. But crucially, as we have
seen, this belief is also central to neoconservative thinking. When
President Bush (National Security Strategy 2002: 3) argues that ‘[t]he
United States ... [has] unparalleled responsibilities, obligation and
opportunity’, he is merely echoing a long tradition in US foreign
policy. The same point applies to Condoleezza Rice’s assertion that
the US has unrivalled power and ‘is on the right side of history’
(Rice 2000: 47). For those who believe that there is an inseparable
link between US national interest and universal, global interest,
the complaint made by former British cabinet minister Robin Cook
that the war in Iraq was about the expansion of US hegemony is
irrelevant. What therefore links Blair and Bush is the belief that US
hegemony and the global good are inseparable. Blair therefore saw
his support for the US-led war against Iraq as fully consistent with
his underlying political philosophy, and on its eve talked of a ‘Third
Way war’ (Blair 2003).
The case made for this link is closely related to the neoconservatism
of the Project for the New American Century, which argues that
freedom, the free market and liberal democratic states are universal
goods, and that the US must play a role in their promotion (Kristol
2000). The definition of freedom is contested, but in this case it means
certain individual freedoms such as freedom of speech and movement,
and above all the right to own private property and compete in a
free market. Thus, both Bush and Blair remain committed to the
expansion of neoliberal globalisation. Quite typically, for example,
Chapter 6 of the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States
was titled ‘Ignite a new era of economic growth through free markets
and free trade’. In this context of globalising market expansion,
liberal democracy is regarded as the best type of government, partly
because it allows for such market expansion, but also because it
is associated with government which is neither authoritarian nor
dictatorial. It is for this reason that many critics of Bush (and to an
extent Blair) supported the war against Saddam Hussein – a point I
will return to below. According to Bush and Blair, then, US hegemony

expands human rights and democracy (see also Chapter 6). Moreover,
in the process of such expansion, the threat of war, terrorism and
instability is undermined, as liberal-democratic states are more likely
to negotiate and compromise, rather than go to war with each other.
In opposing individuals and groups hostile to democracy and freedom,
US hegemony therefore serves to promote a democratic peace. It is
therefore the duty of freedom-loving peoples to support the US-led
war against terror and rogue states, even if this must involve some
considerable historical amnesia about the country’s allies – including
bin Laden and Saddam Hussein – in its recent past.
Robert Cooper, a former adviser to Tony Blair, has argued that the
world can be divided into three kinds of state (Cooper 2002). Post-
modern states are basically advanced liberal democracies, committed
to peace and compromise and beyond the power-politics of the old
state system. Modern states, such as China, are relatively stable but
are still committed to competitive expansion. Finally, pre-modern
states are failed states and sources of instability. It is the duty of the
post-modern states to intervene in the pre-modern states in order to
preserve order, even if this means the promotion of double standards
and colonial power. Interestingly, Cooper is hesitant over the nature
of the US state, and it is not clear whether he would categorise it as
modern or post-modern. Indeed, Robert Kagan (2002) has criticised
Cooper for failing to recognise that the rejection of power-politics by
‘post-modern’ states rests on the continued exercise of benign power-
politics by the United States.5 Nevertheless, despite these differences,
it could be argued that, given the right direction by someone like Tony
Blair, the US would fit the role of the post-modern hegemonic state.
In this way, the Third Way acts as a kind of bridge between ‘European
cosmopolitanism’ and ‘US neoconservatism’. Indeed, Cooper is a
far from isolated figure, and another link between the Clinton–Blair
Third Way and neoconservatism is provided by Philip Bobbit. He
argues that the Clinton years constituted a sea change in international
relations, as the principle of national sovereignty was challenged
and intervention justified on the basis of defence of human rights,
anti-terrorism, and in order to block nuclear proliferation. The long-
term goal of such interventions was incorporation into the liberal
sphere through the extension of the market state (Bobbit 2002: 228).
This state is defined as a constitutional adaptation to contemporary
political changes, which together effectively comprise what is often
described as globalisation. Bobbit does not share Cooper’s ambivalence
about the US state, arguing that ‘it is simply not in the same position
as other states, and therefore should not be shamed by charges of
hypocrisy when it fails to adopt the regimes that it urges on others’
(Bobbit 2002: 691). Certainly these arguments link Blair, Bush II
and Clinton, the last of whom was a very prominent cheerleader
for the war in Iraq. They also suggest that liberal internationalism,
supposed cosmopolitanism and neoconservatism are not necessarily
mutually exclusive.
THE IRAQ WAR: WIDER IMPLICATIONS
What, then, are we to make of the arguments concerning hegemony

and intervention, both in relation to the Iraq war and more generally?
Specifically in relation to the Bush administration, a number of points
can be made. While there are significant continuities between Bush
and previous presidencies, particularly over conceptions of the
relationship between US national interest and the global interest,
what was different about Bush was the way in which this leadership
role was justified. In effect, the supposedly special role of the US was
used to ignore dissenting voices, both within and beyond the US.
US leadership and its manifest destiny were regarded as articles of
faith, requiring little reasoned justification, and therefore justifying
unilateralism. There was no need to promote multilateralism because
‘American values are universal’ (Rice 2000: 49), and the US leads a
‘benevolent empire’ (Kagan 1998; 2003). But this is mere assertion
dressed up as argument, and easily leads to double standards. Thus,
in addressing the UN, Bush made the case for military intervention
against Iraq on the basis that ‘a regime that has lost its legitimacy
will also lose its power’ (quoted in Reus-Smit 2004: 155). But, as
Reus-Smit argues, ‘[o]ne might well ask why the Bush administration
comprehends the importance of international legitimacy for Iraqi
power, but fails to understand its importance with respect to American
power’ (Reus-Smit 2004: 155). Much the same point can be made
against those liberal imperialists, like Cooper (2002) and Ignatieff
(2003), who argued that double standards are an unfortunate but
necessary practice in an imperfect world. But this argument is simply
an assertion that, within the international state system, might is right.
This argument is rightly rejected for states in terms of their relations
with domestic populations, but not for states in relation to each other.
Moreover, given the practising of double standards, it is hardly a
surprise when this is met with resistance by other states and peoples
throughout the world. Such resistance may not have progressive

means or ends, but the practice of double standards certainly provides
a recruiting ground for terrorism and other forms of resistance to
US power. Seen in this light, the attempt to portray such resistance
under the blanket term ‘evil’ is symptomatic of the unquestioned
belief that the US must represent the global good. In unconvincingly
contrasting the Hobbesian US with Kantian Europe, Kagan and
Cooper are essentially arguing that good rests on the exercise of
power, rather than power resting on the exercise of good. But if this
is so, then it is hardly surprising that people resist US hegemony.
Thus, if this hegemony represents cosmopolitanism – as Tony Blair,
for one, believes – then it is a highly selective cosmopolitanism. This
view is reinforced by the non-cooperation of the Bush administration
in arms limitations, the International Criminal Court, and by its
breaches of the Geneva Convention and non-compliance with the
Kyoto agreement.
Specifically in relation to the war in Iraq, the case was made that
Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and had
links with al Qaeda, both claims now having been discredited.6 The
argument that the war was good because it rid the world of an evil
dictator is more convincing, but the post-war situation – within both
Iraq and the Middle East region – suggests that the world is a far
more dangerous place, while it ignores the deaths caused by the war
(the coalition has made no attempt even to count the number of
Iraqi deaths7), the continued questionable alliances made in the war
on terror,8 and their long-term consequences (see further below).
These factors suggest that while the removal of Saddam is the one
desirable consequence of the war, removing an evil dictator was not
the main motive for the war: as Monbiot argues, the US state ‘is not
morally consistent, it is strategically consistent’ (Monbiot 2003a).
Given this strategic consistency and moral inconsistency, Monbiot
rightly concludes that ‘the wrong reasons, consistently applied lead,
at the global level, to the wrong results’.
The Bush regime therefore hardly counts as a benign hegemonic
power. It could of course be argued that the problem lies not with
US hegemony itself, but with the way the Bush administration has
projected this hegemony. This is an argument made by a number
of liberal critics of the Bush government, who are committed to
the multilateral route to preserving hegemony. Thus, cooperation
represents the best way forward for preserving what is usually a benign
hegemony (Nye 1990; 2002). This view advocates a multilateral route
both on its own merits and as the best way of securing prolonged
US hegemony. While it undoubtedly captures the break that Bush
made from the Clinton presidency, especially after 9/11, there is
still some need for caution, as it also exaggerates Bush’s break from
previous governments. First, previous US administrations, including
the ‘globalist’ Clinton presidency, have behaved unilaterally. It was
Clinton’s second term that saw the sanctions regime most stringently
implemented, air-strikes intensified, and international organisations
bypassed – most notoriously in the case of the illegal bombing
of Sudan in 1998 – as well as air-strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Clinton’s second Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, once
infuriated Colin Powell by asking him ‘[w]hat’s the point of having
this superb military that you are always talking about if we can’t use
it?’ (quoted in Dorrien 2004: 225–6) Even Bush’s supposedly novel
strategy of pre-emptive war can be traced back to Cold War strategic
discussions in the 1950s. Moreover, the US has a long history of
self-interested interventions throughout the world, and few of these
have been made to promote democracy. Indeed, most have been anti-
democratic, some have been declared illegal under international law,
and some members of the Bush team have been implicated in the
past in illegal activities – most notably John Negroponte and Elliot
Abrams. The much admired Reagan administration was on friendly
terms with Saddam’s regime, and supported resistance movements
in Afghanistan, among them the forerunners to al Qaeda. It could
be argued that these policies were in the past, and a product of the
necessary power-politics of the Cold War. But history cannot simply
be ignored; not least because of the consequences of questionable
alliances for future scenarios. Current US policy is critical of human
rights in Saddam’s Iraq but not in Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel
and the Occupied Territories, Pakistan or Uzbekistan. To argue once
again that such double standards are necessary – better to have US
hypocrisy than Saddam’s dictatorship – is an evasion of politics,
because the likelihood is that current questionable alliances will
have dire consequences in the future, just as past alliances have
done. To ignore such alliances is to condemn the world to ongoing
processes of constant war, not least against past and present US allies.
Certainly the commitment to an independent Palestinian state – a
concession perhaps granted to Tony Blair in the run-up to war in
Iraq – was quickly abandoned when Bush met Ariel Sharon after
Saddam Hussein’s removal from power. Indeed, neoconservatives
– particularly their Christian fundamentalist contingent – have close
ties with the Israeli right, and regard the current territorial boundaries
of the state of Israel as largely nonnegotiable.9 This failure to resolve
the Israel–Palestine conflict – indeed, the effective support of Israel
in it – is not conducive to the pursuit of peace in the region. More
generally, the commitment to global neoliberalism has exacerbated
problems of inequality and marginalisation, and is therefore unlikely
to enhance the prospects for a peaceful and prosperous future for
the world.
Liberal notions of democratic peace should therefore be seen in
this light. It is true that liberal democracies in the advanced capitalist
countries are less likely to go to war with each other today than in the
past. But this so-called ‘liberal peace’ is itself a product of a history of
bloody conflict, and the idea that such peace can be simply imposed
on ‘pre-modern states’ ignores the ways in which the advanced
powers have generated bloody conflict in those parts of the world.
It also ignores ongoing processes of state formation and territorial
conflict in relatively new states. Cooper’s division of the world into
post-modern, modern and pre-modern states has a simplistic appeal,
but it is purely descriptive, and tells us nothing about the (violent)
histories of state formation that have led to such a division. It also
betrays a simplistic linearity in which the virtues of the advanced
can quickly be imposed upon the backward. This is a version of
modernisation theory, in which countries are said to be poor simply
because they are insufficiently globalised (see Chapter 5). Quick-
fix solutions such as the illiberal imposition of liberal democracy
are thus likely to exacerbate such problems, no matter how well-
intentioned they may be – and we would do well to remember that
past interventions have been justified by recourse to support for
freedom and democracy. Indeed, these have often been based on the
idea that intervention in the past was ill-intentioned or misguided,
but that we have got it right ‘this time’. These points are not made
to support a blanket anti-interventionist position, but they do warn
against easy solutions, liberal follies and messianic rhetoric.
Moreover, no US administration has really been committed to
genuinely democratic principles of multilateral global governance. All
post-war US governments have upheld the belief in the desirability of
US hegemony, even if some have regarded multilateral negotiation
as more important than others. It could of course be argued that
because the US is a liberal democracy it has a greater right than others
to exercise world leadership. But if democracy is to be valued, then
it cannot be selective: it must apply to states not only in relation to
their domestic populations, but also in relation to the international

system of nation-states.10 In this international system, the US has a
poor record in terms of democratic principles, as we have seen. Singer
usefully makes the point:
Advocates of democracy should see something wrong with the idea of a

nation fewer than 300 million people dominating a planet with more than
six billion inhabitants. That’s less than 5 per cent of the population ruling
over the remainder – more than 95 per cent – without their consent. (Singer
2004: 191)
It may of course be utopian to espouse the cause of global democracy,

even if, as cosmopolitan democrats point out, a similar argument was
used in the past to argue against democracy within nation-states.
But surely it is wishful thinking to expect the world’s population to
acquiesce passively to such a patently undemocratic international
system. This is not to romanticise much of the ‘anti-imperialist’
resistance to current US global domination, much of which is
reactionary. Terrorism should be condemned, and indeed efforts
should be made to counter terrorist attacks. But it is absurd to dismiss
all resistance to the US as the actions of terrorist minorities, whose
actions are completely beyond explanation. Only the most ardent
wishful thinking about ‘US destiny’ and the most dangerous amnesia
about history – such as that shared by George Bush and Tony Blair
– can reduce global politics to simplistic struggles between good and
evil.11 This is hardly surprising, as it reflects a long tradition of liberal
thought justifying illiberal measures against ‘illiberal people’. John
Stuart Mill argued that ‘despotism is a legitimate mode of government
in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement
and the means justified by actually effecting that end’ (Mill 1974:
69). In the ‘war on terror’, terrorism has been reduced to a totally
inexplicable, polymorphous mass. As a result, ‘[w]ithout defined
shape or determinate roots, its mantle can be cast over any form of
resistance to sovereign power’ (Gregory 2004: 140).
Before we return to the specifics of the Iraq war, one final point
should be made, which brings us back to the question of US
hegemony – and to an understanding of globalisation. Bush and the
neoconservatives have attempted to develop a strategy of ‘US first’
without any meaningful global dialogue. Insofar as the US government
has committed itself to multilateral principles, it is largely on the
country’s terms – thus, on the eve of war the UN was expected to
carry out the US’s wishes or risk becoming an irrelevance. But this
begs the question not only of the desirability of such ‘unilateral
multilateralism’ (J. Anderson 2003), but its feasibility. The idea that the
US can lead without any challenge rests on the belief that US power,
especially military power, is alone sufficient to secure dominance.12
This may be reinforced by notions of ‘US destiny’, ‘divine right’
or even soft, cultural power, but it is ultimately backed up by US
resources, which ensure total domination through ‘unashamedly
laying down the rules and being prepared to use them’ (Krauthammer
1990: 33; 2002/3). Indeed, many neoconservatives outside the
Bush administration have criticised its foreign policy for not being
sufficiently belligerent. Kaplan and Kristol (2003: 98–9; Kaplan 2003)
were unconvinced that the administration, including their allies such
as Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz, had the stomach for a long-term
occupation, or for invasion of other ‘enemy states’.13 The former
were therefore critical of the latter’s support for ‘Iraqification’ in
the face of continued insurgency, arguing that this should be met
with overwhelming military force (Kristol and Kagan 2003). Indeed,
perhaps the most open advocate of US empire,14 Max Boot, argues
that ‘blowback’ can only be avoided by a massive expansion of US
overseas commitments. For him, the international cause of 9/11 was
not US support for Islamic militancy against the USSR, but rather the
withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan in 1989 once the communists
had been defeated (Boot 2003a). Boot (2003b) advocates a mixture of
liberal imperialism (‘Wilsonian internationalism’) and conservative
realism (‘US unilateralism’), backed up by a massive expansion in US
military spending, amounting roughly to a 25 per cent increase every
year. This amounts to a call for massive expansion of US overseas
commitments, but it is difficult to see how this can be compatible
with the preservation of a system of state sovereignty, or any idea of
liberal or perpetual peace (see chapter 6).15
THE IRAQ WAR AND US IMPERIALISM
Neoconservative realist arguments for US domination through

military resources are not so far removed from Marxist theories of
‘super-imperialism’, which similarly argue that such resources are
sufficient to ensure US domination – though of course they draw
very different political conclusions (Gowan 2001: 89). But against
Krauthammer’s neoconservative realism and Gowan’s theory of US
super-imperialism, it could be argued that military power alone is
insufficient to secure hegemony. Indeed, some Marxist theorists

of transnational capitalism argue that military intervention may
actually be dysfunctional from the viewpoint of a novel transnational
capitalism that has ‘outgrown’ the nation-state system, including
the dominance of the single hegemonic state (Hardt 2002; N. Harris
2003; Negri 2003; J. Harris 2003). For these theorists, transnational
capitalist expansion is best secured through ‘the dull compulsion
of economic relations’, and therefore the expansion of global
capital through trade, investment and financial liberalisation.
More traditional Marxists like Callinicos, who is keen to defend the
relevance of Lenin and Bukharin’s analyses for the current epoch,
tend to argue that military expansion does ultimately represent the
interests of capital, and of US capital in particular. Both arguments,
however, tend to miss the wider picture, and measure state action by
the extent to which it follows a (functional or dysfunctional) logic
for capital. Both are therefore guilty of economism, with theories of
transnational capitalism exaggerating the ‘globality’ of capitalism
and the decline of the nation-state system, and classical theories
of imperialism collapsing the state and capital into one (see Kiely
2004/5). More fruitfully, we need to recognise that the Bush doctrine is
a political project in its own right, but also that this impacts on wider
international relations in a variety of different ways. The recognition
of an internal relationship between the ‘market economy’ and the
‘political sphere’ does not mean that the latter should somehow be
reduced to the former.
How then do we situate the Bush doctrine and US hegemony
within wider international relations? The Bush doctrine is an attempt
to reinvigorate US hegemony in the post-Cold War world, partly in
response to the perceived vacillations of the Bush Sr and Clinton
presidencies. This does involve the exercise of US military power, and
even a commitment to the (attempted) expansion of US principles
of liberal democracy and free enterprise throughout the world. The
hope is that this expansion will lay the basis for the defeat of terrorist
networks and rogue states, and thus for promotion of liberal peace
under US leadership. This is not mere rhetoric, designed as a cover
for US economic interests, even if such interests may gain from the
policy. The Bush administration, like previous US governments, is
convinced that this doctrine does serve the ‘global good’, even, if at
times, others have to be forced to see the world this way. But this is
the great weakness of the doctrine, because it essentially has to rely
on military might in order to secure hegemony, and this alone cannot
succeed for any lengthy period of time; it is bound to meet resistance

throughout the world, which in turn forces the US back to negotiate
with institutions – such as the UN – that it previously dismissed.
Contrary to the interpretations of classical Marxist theories of
imperialism, the relationship between military and economic power
is far from straightforward. Moreover, neoconservative strategy is
not simply an ideological screen for US economic interests, not
least because – given ongoing political instability in areas where
the US has intervened, especially post-9/11 – it is a strategy that is
unlikely to work. The neoconservatives – and Tony Blair – may have
naively believed that the strategy could work, and that therefore
US economic interests could be served, but this strategy was also
carried out in order to undertake regime change as part of a wider
geopolitical vision. More generally, among the leading capitalist
states there is a growing interdependence, which makes the revival
of inter-imperialist rivalry both unlikely and counterproductive. This
is especially reflected in Europe’s and Japan’s reliance on the US
market and the US’s reliance on capital inflows to finance its long-
running trade deficit (and, under Bush, its renewed budget deficit).
Contrary to theories of transnational capitalism, the current era of
globalisation is one in which the nation-state system remains central,
and the US retains some degree of economic, as well as unprecedented
military, hegemony. The current order is therefore one of economic
multi-polarity and interdependence alongside military uni-polarity,
which is very different from the pre-1914 world order,16 and indeed
the post-1945 world order (see Chapter 5).
How then should we contextualise the Bush doctrine in terms
of US hegemony in the Middle East? One common explanation is
that the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq were concerned with
securing access to oil supplies. The usual argument is that the US
wanted to secure oil pipelines through Afghanistan, while Iraq is
potentially the second-largest supplier of oil in the world today.
Historically, the US has not been as reliant on Middle East oil as
other major capitalist countries, but this dependence is increasing as
domestic production declines and consumption increases. Moreover,
as a strategic commodity, control over oil supplies gives the US a
certain leverage over its (actual and potential) competitors. Although
it was mainly committed to finding ways of increasing domestic
energy efficiency, the National Economic Policy Development Group
Report of 2001 (better known as the Cheney Report) accepted that
the US would become increasingly dependent on oil imports, which
in turn meant dependence on ‘foreign powers that do not always

have America’s interests at heart’ (NEPDG 2001: x). This meant that
‘[e]nergy security must be a priority of US trade and foreign policy’
(NEPDG 2001: xv; see also Klare 2004). Clearly, such statements can
be linked to neoconservative support for US-led power-politics, and
the removal of over-ambitious tyrants like Saddam Hussein. But the
question of US hegemony is wider than the question of oil, and US
control of Iraqi oil supplies provides only some leverage over other
countries. If the objective is to secure access to cheap oil, then war is a
very expensive way of gaining Iraqi supplies.17 Moreover, if the price
of oil fell too much then this could have disastrous consequences
for US oil magnates, not least those working in Bush’s cabinet. If
the objective is to restrict competitor access to Middle East oil, then
war is again a limited strategy. The international oil industry is too
complex and interdependent for a strategy of restricting supplies to
competitors to work. This argument repeats the errors of those Marxist
fundamentalists who continue to try to mechanically apply the
theories of imperialism of Lenin and Bukharin to a changed world.
Having said that, oil is not irrelevant, and it has played an
historically important role in the promotion of US hegemony in
the region. As the main transnational oil companies lost direct
control of oil supplies in the region in the early 1970s, US hegemony
increasingly relied on close connections to politically independent
allies, and in particular Saudi Arabia and Iran. In the case of the latter,
this was undermined by the revolution in 1979, and the growth of
what was perceived by the US right to be an ‘Islamic threat’. New
but unreliable alliances were formed, including one with the secular
regime of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The US and Britain both provided
intelligence and weapons to his regime in the 1980s, along with more
prominent (and generous) allies such as the Soviet Union and France.
The oil price rises helped to fuel Saddam’s own imperialist ambitions
in the region, and he declared war on Iran in 1980. Despite western
and Soviet assistance, the war was a disaster for Saddam. Desperate
for increased oil revenues to finance post-war reconstruction, Saddam
invaded Kuwait in 1990. Saddam accused Kuwait of cheating on its
agreed OPEC quotas, and thereby undermining agreed oil prices, and
of stealing oil from the shared Rumaila oilfield. He also thought that
the US would turn a blind eye to the annexation – an assumption based
on the US’s effective support for Iraq in the Iran–Iraq war. In fact, after
some initial ambiguity, the US strongly opposed the invasion and
went to war to remove Iraq from Kuwait. In 1991, after an uprising by
Iraqis against Saddam’s regime, the US withdrew, leaving Iraqis to the

mercy of a brutal dictatorship. The US withdrawal was based on a fear
of the creation of an Islamic (or, less likely, communist) state, which
would be even worse (from the US’s viewpoint) than Saddam’s Baath
regime. In this sense, the 2003 war was both a return to unfinished
business and an important break with the post-1991 status quo.
But there was also continuity, in that the longer-term exercise of
hegemony remained the most important factor in explaining the
two wars. The US led the war effort in 1991 not because of oil per
se, but as part of its exercising of hegemony in a strategically vital
region for global capitalism (Bromley 1991). The war was fought
in defence of US allies (Kuwait and Saudi Arabia), who were major
contributors to global oil supplies. But the need for these supplies was
not exclusive to the US, which has in fact not in the past been overly
dependent on Middle East oil – although, as we have seen, this is
likely to change in the near future. But oil has been crucial for global
capitalism, and for the US’s post-war role as the hegemonic power
policing the world order. Moreover, there was also a more direct link
between Middle East oil revenues and US capital, as such revenues
were generally deposited into global financial markets, rather than
used for productive and social investment within the Middle East
region. Since the early 1980s, these markets have overwhelmingly
concentrated their investments within the US, financing budget and
trade deficits and helping to preserve US hegemony.
For all these reasons, then, the wars can be linked to the exercise of
US power. They do represent the expansion of US military hegemony,
and even of US corporate investment in Iraq. However, it is unlikely that
this latest war will lead to an era of generalised colonial annexation,
and access to Iraqi oil supplies is unlikely to deprive competitors of
access to oil from other sources. Moreover, even if it were possible,
the denial of such access could have negative side-effects for the US,
not least in relation to continued access to the overseas investment
that helps to finance its twin deficits. We thus arrive back at a theory
of imperialism that (in some respects) is closer to Kautsky than to
Lenin. Moreover, contemporary theories influenced by Lenin tend to
downplay the nature of reactionary regimes in the developing world.
As I argued above, despite the continued reality of US and other
imperialisms, the world is not reducible to these phenomena. Indeed,
Saddam’s regime was clearly one that had its own imperial ambitions
in the region. These came into conflict with the far more powerful
US state, with its own imperial interests; but this does not nullify
the fact that Saddam’s regime was both repressive and imperialist.
These points return us to wider questions of anti-imperialism, state
sovereignty and cosmopolitan human rights.
This chapter and the preceding one covered three main issues, and
I want to bring these together in this conclusion. In particular, the
links between state sovereignty, imperialism and anti-imperialism,
and cosmopolitanism, discussed in the previous chapter, require
further consideration. The first issue addressed was the question of
state sovereignty, and I argued, contrary to realism, that a specifically
capitalist sovereignty emerged from the long history of state formation
and primitive accumulation, generalised in western Europe only
as recently as the nineteenth century, and globally only after the
Second World War. But we can go further than this, because it can
be argued that such processes continue to this day. Given that these
processes were violent and unstable in Europe, it is not surprising
that such instability and violence has repeated itself in parts of the
former ‘Third World’. This violence has been further complicated
by the intervention of major powers, through colonialism, the
Cold War and contemporary ‘humanitarian military intervention’.
The second major issue was that of the relationship between state
sovereignty and international institutions. I showed how state
sovereignty had become more universalised in the world, but at the
same time international institutions had become more significant.
This leads to the problematic argument that the latter has led to the
marginalisation of the former. Sometimes this argument is based on a
rigid dichotomy between a realist system of nation-states, from 1648
to ‘globalisation’, and the current, post-Westphalian era. I suggested
in the first section that the characterisation of a Westphalian era of
state sovereignty was problematic, and that the notion of a clear
break with this era is equally problematic. Nevertheless, the rise
of international institutions is an issue that required theoretical
reflection, and this task was undertaken through consideration of
a number of perspectives on ‘global governance’, with particular
attention paid to cosmopolitanism and Marxism.
These strands must now be brought together to address some
difficult – and uncomfortable – questions. If we accept that, in
Europe, state formation and the primitive accumulation of capital
was violent, and that parts of the periphery are repeating these bloody
processes (though with no predetermined outcomes), then there are
a number of possible political implications. One is that the so-called
failed states of the periphery are simply states that are undergoing
inevitable historical transitions, and that the end result may (or
may not) be a progressive one. Dominant interpretations of failed
and rogue states therefore lack historical awareness, not least of the
bloody history of their own states. Moreover, it could be argued that
western imperialist intervention has simply made matters worse,
and therefore that there can be no intervention in the developing
world. Intervention can thus be opposed on grounds of historical
inevitability and anti-imperialism. Let us leave aside anti-imperialism
for the moment, and focus on historical inevitability, which does
beg a number of questions. If we support such a linear account of
history, so that some nation-states (in formation) are at a lower stage
of history, and that the lives of many people in those states are simply
necessary sacrifices in the onward march of progress, then we have
a politics of indifference, in which the suffering of such people is an
unfortunate necessity. Of course, most anti-interventionists do not
make their case in terms of historical necessity, but instead refer to the
self-interest of major powers or the (under-theorised) expansion of
capitalism. But both positions do face the problem of insensitivity to
the sufferings of people living under highly authoritarian states. This
brings us back to the cosmopolitan perspective, which supports forms
of intervention that can protect the rights of individuals, over and
above the sovereignty of nation-states. The question then becomes:
What kind of intervention? Most contemporary cosmopolitans have
strongly opposed the wars of the Bush administration (Archibugi
2003; Held 2004), but (one-sided) cosmopolitanism has become a
guiding principle of Blair’s commitment to humanitarian wars in the
age of globalisation. This cosmopolitanism, however, suffers from
effective indifference to the inevitable deaths of innocents in wars
which, given the inevitability of such deaths, cannot be excused by
reference to ‘higher motives’ than those of the deposed dictators.18
Moreover, double standards and military might are experienced by
many of the world’s population, not as the promotion of human
rights, but as the imperialist exercise of power. This is all the more
visible in the light of the unilateralism of the Bush administration.
Moreover, cosmopolitanism itself can suffer from a linear approach
(ironically, given its eighteenth-century origins) based on a broad
acceptance of the rigid Westphalia–globalisation dichotomy that this
chapter has rejected. As a result, it too easily lends itself to notions
of globalisation as progressive and state-centrism as reactionary
(see, for example, Kaldor 2003). This first step can then move on to
Blair’s self-defined cosmopolitanism, and ultimately to a defence of

US hegemony in the name of human rights and against failed (pre-
modern) states. In other words, cosmopolitanism can easily lead to
justifications for the exercise of power by the dominant states. And
when it is further linked to the globalisation of neoliberalism, it
becomes the latest phase of capitalist imperialism.
These issues also relate to questions of ‘difference’. Post-
colonial critiques of liberalism and Marxism, and by implication
cosmopolitanism, emphasise the ways in which ‘universal’ theories
tend towards an authoritarian homogenisation of societies, cultures
and polities that do not ‘fit’ the requirements of the theory in
question. But the problem with post-colonialism is that it too can
lead to ‘indifference’, so that acts of violence, persecution and so
on are tolerated in the name of ‘difference’. Thus, in our discussion,
crude relativist arguments could be used to justify slavery or
political persecution in the name of ‘anti-imperialism’. Arguments
along these lines have been made by Saddam Hussein and Robert
Mugabe, among others. Much has been made of this ‘instrumental
relativism’ by liberal imperialists who supported the war in Iraq.
However, the approach to difference taken here is slightly different,
and the focus is less on cultural particularity and more on social
specificity. In other words, in the absence of wider social and political
change, notions of ‘universal standards’ are unlikely to have the
desired results, precisely because universal standards ignore such
specificity in the first place. This focus on social specificity does not
mean accepting the rhetoric of a Mugabe, Miloševiç or Saddam; but
neither does it mean minimising the unequal social and political
contexts that militate against the quick-fix solutions offered by liberal
imperialists. This is not an argument for blanket relativism; nor
against universalism (see Chapter 6); nor indeed for total opposition
to all forms of intervention in the developing world. Crude relativist
arguments are guilty of absolutising difference and, insofar as they
assume that dominant norms are shared by all within specific nation-
states, of bad sociology. However, this accusation applies equally to
liberalism, which tends to assume that human behaviour can be
reduced to the rational individual of liberal thought, except when
this is ‘held back’ by rogue states or terrorists. Thus, in the case of
post-intervention Iraq, the population has been represented as being
divided into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ Iraqis (and outsiders), the former said to
be clamouring for western-style free markets and liberal democracy,
the latter simply promoting nihilism. But while it is the case that
much of the opposition to the occupation in Iraq may be reactionary,

it is equally true that ‘good Iraqis’ have increasingly opposed the
occupation, and even shown some sympathy for some (though not
all) insurgent groups within Iraq. The misplaced optimism of the
interventionists is rooted in liberal claims to universalism outside
specific historical and social contexts, and thus fails to recognise
the limitations of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and nation-building,
and the fact that, in many cases, certain forms of intervention make
things worse. Indeed, US neoconservatism is more guilty of liberal
optimism than US liberalism, even if the former is more willing to
compromise its liberalism than the latter, in terms of promoting the
means to the desired ends.
If this attention to context sounds like a recipe for indifference,
then apologists for the war in Iraq would do well to remember the
rhetoric of those pro-war politicians who argued that there was
simply no time to delay intervention. Such a war was ‘sold’ – at least
to those who wanted to believe – at a time when US annual military
spending remains significantly higher than the finance required to
eliminate the extremes of global poverty (Pogge 2002: 2). There are
over 1 billion people in the world who have no access to clean water,
and one-third of the world’s population have no access to essential
medicines. Every year 2 million children die as a result of hunger.
The causes of these specific manifestations of poverty are complex,
and the question of whether neoliberal, ‘pro-globalisation’ policies
are good for the poor is addressed in the next chapter (where I give
a negative answer). Nevertheless, one final point can immediately be
made. Britain’s commitment to increased aid is well documented, but
the actual amounts of aid still fall well short of the UN target of 0.7 per
cent of GNP. The average was 0.31 per cent from 2000 to 2002, which
meant a shortfall on the UN target of £9.5 billion. In contrast, after
just one year, the British war and occupation in Iraq cost $5 billion
(Independent, 28 July 2004). Given the human rights rhetoric deployed
in support of war, we are entitled to ask the question addressed by a
New Statesman leader during the war in Iraq: ‘[W]here are the strict
deadlines, the inspectors, the urgent meetings in the Azores, the
announcements of exhausted patience?’ For cosmopolitanism to have
any real meaning, it must be suspicious of, and ultimately challenge,
the cosmopolitan rhetoric of imperialist states.
5
The Global Economy: US Hegemony
from Bretton Woods to Neoliberalism
This chapter examines the emergence of the contemporary global

economy, and critically examines the arguments made by advocates
of ‘economic globalisation’. It first provides a brief outline of the
post-war international settlement at Bretton Woods, and its effective
breakdown in the early 1970s. The focus in this section is on the key
role that the US played in stimulating post-war recovery, but also how
this partly undermined US hegemony and led to the effective collapse
of the post-war settlement. This shift also led to the weakening of the
viability of ‘national capitalist’ development, and the beginning of
pro-globalisation economic policies, which would have a wider global
impact in the 1980s. The first section thus focuses on the broad context
in which contemporary economic globalisation emerged, as well as
making some reference to agencies that promoted globalisation. The
chapter then examines neoliberalism in the 1980s, the Third Way
in the 1990s, and neoconservatism in the early 2000s, all of which,
despite important differences, argue that increased ‘globalisation’
is good for every country and person in the world economy. This
second section therefore focuses on both agency and outcome in
the globalisation debate. Finally, through an examination of trade,
production and financial flows, I suggest that, globalisation has in
fact been associated with increased inequality in the world economy,
and that it has not alleviated poverty or uneven development. This
final section therefore suggests that the outcome is not as benign as
the ideologists of globalisation suggest.
FROM BRETTON WOODS TO NEOLIBERALISM
US hegemony and the Bretton Woods agreement

The world economy between the wars was characterised by depression,
a breakdown in world trade, and competitive currency devaluations.
These factors helped to undermine liberal capitalism, particularly
in Germany and Russia, and facilitated war. Towards the end of
88
The Global Economy 89
the Second World War, a meeting was held in Bretton Woods in

the United States. The purpose of this meeting was to provide the
basis for a more secure post-war world order, which would avoid the
disasters of the 1930s. In the political sphere, the US would join the
new United Nations, and in the economic sphere, there was to be a
commitment to (managed) free trade. For free trade to be advanced,
there would have to be an internationally acceptable currency to pay
for internationally traded goods. At the same time, if some countries
faced persistent trade deficits, they would not be able to pay for
their imports. The problem, then, would be that international trade
could break down, since one country’s imports are another country’s
exports. Therefore, an institution would be needed to ‘tide countries
over’ through the provision of loans when they faced such deficits.
This institution was the International Monetary Fund (IMF). At
the same time, the US was committed to rebuilding war-damaged
economies in Europe and Japan, and the promotion of ‘development’
in the colonies. The US gave political support to the end of Empire
and the move to independence in what came to be known as the
‘Third World’, and economic support through the provision of aid.
Aid therefore became a major vehicle for development, and this was
to be dispensed partly through the second economic institution that
came out of the Bretton Woods agreement – the International Bank
for Reconstruction and Development, better known as the World
Bank (Brett 1985).
The post-war settlement at Bretton Woods therefore appears to
be one based on US generosity. Money was to be made available
for ‘development’ and reconstruction, support was to be given to
countries facing balance of payments difficulties, and the US supported
independence for the colonial world. This generosity should not be
dismissed out of hand, and some European liberals would do well to
remember how the US supported the end of European empires. The
European powers were too weak to challenge this view, especially
as nationalist movements in the colonies were successfully resisting
colonial rule. The period from the mid 1940s through to the mid
1970s and beyond was one of independence for a whole host of
former colonies, including India in 1947, Ghana in 1958 and Jamaica
in 1962.
On the other hand, the agreement at Bretton Woods was not as
generous as may first appear. The US needed some reconstruction,
in part as a market for its own mass-produced goods that could
only realise a profit through massive production and sales. Marshall
Aid to Europe was partly implemented for this reason – and aid
to the Third World was far less generous, and usually tied to US
commercial, military or political interests. The second, related reason
for US generosity was fear of the spread of communism, which
could potentially undermine those sought-for markets, but above
all represented a challenge to the ‘US way of life’ (see Chapter 6). In
other words, aid was substantially a political vehicle that was used to
boost US interests in the context of the ideological division between
capitalism and communism. Communist states were in many respects
repressive and authoritarian, but this was also true of many countries
in the (developing) capitalist world, and the US and its allies were
more than happy to support some brutal dictators of their own, as
well as intervening in many countries during the Cold War era.
Furthermore, it was more immediately clear at the Bretton
Woods negotiations themselves that the US was not committed to
an altruistic set of policies. The key British delegate, John Maynard
Keynes, had very specific expectations of the role of the World Bank
and IMF. He argued that these should operate in the context of a new,
specially created international money, which he called the ‘bancor’.
This currency would facilitate international transactions, and the IMF
would operate as a central bank. It would then automatically recycle
money from countries with balance of payments surpluses to those
with deficits, thus effectively acting as a redistribution mechanism
at an international level, as money would automatically flow from
surplus to deficit countries. For Keynes, this mechanism represented
the common interest, as it would mean that deficit countries would
not have to cut imports and living standards to restore equilibrium,
and surplus countries would not lose important export markets. In
addition, Keynes argued that the World Bank should be provided with
large sums of money to facilitate the rapid growth and development
of the colonies. He therefore envisaged an international market
economy based on genuinely transnational governance, which would
be above the interests of particular nation-states.
However, representatives from the US rejected these proposals.
Instead, the dollar was to be the international means of payment, the
IMF and World Bank were to have relatively small amounts of money,
and voting power within these institutions would be dominated by
the most powerful capitalist countries, above all the US. Due to the
low levels of finance committed to the World Bank, aid levels through
the Bank were low, and the burden of restructuring deficit countries
would be faced largely by these countries. In the case of the World
Bank, loans would be charged at higher rates of interest than Keynes

envisaged, and even in the case of concessional loans (that is, long-
term aid), there would still be interest charges. Having the dollar as
the main reserve currency potentially gave the US enormous power,
as it could in theory run payments deficits with the rest of the world
without penalty, as the dollar was also its own domestic currency.
It could effectively print money to relieve any payments deficits.
However, it was initially agreed that the value of the dollar should
be fixed against the value of gold, and that all other currencies would
be fixed against the dollar. Some managed devaluations would occur,
but the basic principle was a commitment to fixed exchange rates.
At Bretton Woods, there was also a proposal for an International
Trade Organisation, which would help to facilitate free trade.
This was rejected, however, mainly because of pressure from US
farmers, who benefited from a system of government protection for
agriculture. Instead, a more informal General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (GATT) was established, in which trade talks between
various government ministers would periodically take place over a
number of years. The various rounds of GATT talks, from the 1940s
to the early 1990s, showed some commitment to free trade, mainly
through the reduction of tariffs. There were some double standards
in this commitment, however, and many developing countries felt
discriminated against through ‘advanced’ country protection of its
own agriculture and clothing – the two areas where the developing
world in general enjoyed some export successes. On the other hand,
the GATT did allow for some protection for weaker economies from
the potentially devastating effects of cheap imports from more
established competitors, and this provided considerable leeway for
European and Japanese recovery after the war, and indeed some
development in the Third World. The basic development strategy
in the developing world was one that promoted industry through
state protection from foreign competition, usually through a mixture
of high tariffs, import controls, currency controls and subsidies. This
strategy of import-substitution industrialisation was not without
its problems, but it did at least provide some ‘space’ for national
development, a space which had been similarly granted to earlier
capitalist industrialisers (Chang 2002). In the ‘advanced’ capitalist
countries too there was some ‘space’ for progressive reform. Controls
on the movement of capital facilitated expansionist economic policies
that guaranteed high rates of employment and substantial increases
in state spending on social welfare. Fordist manufacturing techniques,
based on capital-intensive technology and hierarchical methods of

work organisation, were unevenly introduced throughout the First
World, and this facilitated high rates of productivity, thus allowing for
substantial wage increases and therefore mass consumption (Harvey
1989: Ch. 8).
The post-war international order was based on a long-term
commitment to free trade, in which trade would be largely paid for
in international dollars. There was some space for the management of
national economies, through state-managed capitalist development,
which led to some industrial development in the developing world,
and indeed close to full employment and welfare states in the First
World. From the 1950s to the late 1960s, there were considerable
advances in terms of economic growth, increased trade and output,
and wider social improvement, including in the developing world.
For these reasons, some have called this the Golden Age of capitalism
(Glyn et al. 1990). By the late 1960s, however, there were considerable
strains in the system, and by the early 1970s it had effectively
collapsed.
The breakdown of Bretton Woods

There are a whole host of reasons for the breakdown of the post-war
agreement, but we need only focus, for our purposes, on the narrowly
economic ones (although some wider analysis is unavoidable). These
reasons are closely linked, and they relate to declining US hegemony,
the changing role of the dollar, intensified competition, and the
internationalisation of production and finance. After the war, the
US was the uncontested power in the capitalist world. The dollar
was the only national currency that could act as an international
currency. Dollars therefore flowed out of the US, in the form of US
Marshall Aid to Europe, and later through very high rates of military
spending in Korea (1950s) and Vietnam (1960s), and increasing rates
of direct foreign investment. In this way a potential liquidity shortage
was averted, and between 1950 and 1958 global foreign exchange
reserves increased by nearly $7 billion (Glyn et al. 1990: 69–70). This
expansion enabled some countries to buy US goods on favourable
terms, including the purchase of capital as well as consumer goods,
which helped to facilitate their long-term recovery. While this
was clearly a system which benefited some of the US’s potential
competitors, there was also some benefit to the US, as it could run
balance of payments deficits on its overseas accounts without having
to ‘balance the books’ through deflating its economy.
It should be clear, then, that the US dollar deficit was essential to

the post-war economic recovery, providing war-damaged economies
with much needed money to finance reconstruction. However, in
the long-term the competitive strength of the US economy was
undermined. There was a basic contradiction between the dollar as
the national currency of the US and the dollar as the international
currency. Its value relative to other currencies rested on the viability
of the US economy, for if this became so weakened that it could
not compete, or if the US government adopted inflationary policies,
which increasing its balance of payments deficit, its foreign exchange
reserves would disappear and it would have to devalue. The basic
problem, then, was that the supply of US dollars to the rest of the
world depended on the US deficit, while the stability of the dollar
depended on the US economy returning to surplus.
These problems cut across a number of competing, and largely
incompatible, interests. From the viewpoint of the US, the deficit
guaranteed military supremacy, but also reflected a decline in US
productive power located in the ‘home economy’, while at the same
time guaranteeing expanded consumption without normal balance
of payments constraints (because of the role of the dollar). From
the viewpoint of Europe and Japan, their surpluses meant that their
foreign exchange reserves were constantly expanding, but these
surpluses were mostly held in dollars. Devaluation would wipe out
the value of some of these savings, but if the US deficit continued,
there was the problem of growing inflation. In either case, the
problem manifested itself as a dollar glut, in which excess dollars in
the international economy were increasingly worthless. As the US’s
competitors no longer needed as many dollars to buy US goods, so
dollars stockpiled in European banks. The Eurodollar currency market
developed from the 1950s, and it was basically composed of deposits
that fell outside the control of normal domestic banking regulations.
These Eurodollars reflected the erosion of US competitiveness, as these
dollars would have returned to the US as payment for goods, had it
been able to sell more goods. Transnational companies based in the
US also took advantage of this market to finance foreign investment
in Europe and elsewhere (Kiely 2005: Ch. 3).
By 1971, in order to counter declining competitiveness, the US
decided to sever the link between the dollar and gold. Two years
later, fixed exchange rates across the world had effectively ended,
and the values of currencies would now be decided by international
financial markets. This paved the way for the deregulation of financial
markets, which came to dominate the era of globalisation from the

1980s. In the 1970s there was a massive glut of Eurodollars held in
European banks. These increased with the oil price rises of 1973–74,
when oil producers deposited their oil windfall profits in European
and North American banks. Faced with increased import bills (in the
case of oil importers), or the potential for substantially enhanced
development (oil exporters), richer developing countries increasingly
borrowed money from these banks at low rates of interest (poorer
developing countries were not sufficiently credit-worthy, and so relied
on government aid). Some of these loans were undoubtedly wasted on
useless projects, or simply went into the hands of corrupt dictators,
but much was also used for longer-term productive purposes. The
problem was that these projects would take time to make a profit
and/or earn foreign exchange, which was needed to pay back the
debt (Kiely 2005: Ch. 3). This became an increasingly important
issue from the late 1970s, as more and more debt had a short-term
payback period, and interest rates increased. From 1980 to 1982, some
countries began to default on the interest payments on their debt,
until in 1982 Mexico threatened default and other high-debt Latin
American countries followed. This was potentially a major problem
for the creditors, as they had committed so much capital to Latin
America that wholesale default threatened banks with widespread
bankruptcy. A way had to be found to police this debt crisis, and it
was the IMF that took on this job and paved the way for neoliberalism
in the developing world.
Meanwhile, in the First World, there was a major economic
recession in the mid 1970s, and both inflation and unemployment
soared. From the late 1970s and early 1980s, this paved the way
for a neoliberal restructuring in the developed world. Associated
principally with Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in
the US, this led to a set of policies designed to curb inflation through
control of the money supply, and to bring down unemployment
through a reduction in the power of trade unions, who were
supposedly responsible for winning wages that were so high that
they priced other workers out of jobs. In practice, this led to a policy
of high interest rates and cuts, or lower increases, in state spending,
which had devastating consequences for economic expansion and
employment, as well as for indebted Third World countries. These
policies were applied inconsistently, and the deregulation of the
economy made it very difficult to control the supply of money, as
liberalised financial companies found new ways of expanding credit.
In the US the Reagan administration abandoned efforts to roll back

the state, and instead cut taxes for the rich while massively expanding
military spending, leading to enormous budget deficits. The US thus
now actively competed for global investment, and used high interest
rates as an inducement to financial investors searching for high
returns on their investments. This policy starved other countries of
investment funds and led to the debt crisis, as interest rates soared.
This laid the basis for a sea change in government policy, in both
First and Third Worlds, involving above all a general commitment to
expanding the private sector and cutting the state sector, discussed
in the next section.
The contemporary, neoliberal globalisation of the economy can
therefore be traced back to the 1970s and the growing crisis of
global capitalism. This was reflected in slower rates of growth, high
inflation, and intensified social struggles across the world. It was also,
crucially, associated with the threatened decline of US hegemony,
and the decision to sever the gold–dollar link and the fixed exchange
rate system. This laid the basis for the liberalisation of finance and
important changes in US economic policy, which led to increased
bank lending to the developing world in the 1970s and the debt
crisis in the 1980s. Globalisation thus did not arrive literally from
nowhere, as Giddens has claimed (see Chapter 2). It was a product
of the transition from neo-Keynesian to neoliberal capitalism in the
1970s and early 1980s – a transition in which the actions of the
US state were central. In the 1980s and 1990s, globalisation was
further extended – a process in which the US-dominated international
financial institutions played a central role, as we will now see.
NEOLIBERALISM, THE THIRD WAY AND NEOCONSERVATISM
Control of inflation and the debt crisis helped to set the agenda for
a new – or more precisely, a revived – political project in the 1980s.
Associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but also with
the IMF as the regulator of the debt crisis, this project came to be
known as neoliberalism. The basic contention of this approach was
that states should leave economies to the efficiencies of market forces.
State-led development was deemed to be inefficient, not only in the
communist world, but in the post-war capitalist world. States should
be rolled back through processes of privatisation, deregulation and
liberalisation. The freeing of market forces from state restrictions
would lead to rapid growth and improved living standards for all.
This may involve considerable inequality, but it was better to have

‘efficient inequality’ than ‘inefficient equality’, as the poor would
still be better off in a situation of high growth/high inequality than
in one of low growth/low inequality.
The 1980s debt crisis and neoliberalism

The IMF’s policing of the debt crisis from 1982 onwards was more
or less in accordance with the ideology of neoliberalism. As we have
seen, the debt crisis was a crisis for the debtor countries because they
were not earning sufficient foreign exchange in order to meet their
debt (or interest) payment obligations. For the creditors, the debt
crisis was a crisis because they faced the prospect of never recovering
their debts, or even interest payments on their debts, which could
undermine confidence in the international banking system. The
way out of this problem was to ensure that debtor countries were
granted sufficient new money to meet their short-term obligations to
creditors, while at the same time restructuring their economies so that
their balance of payments deficits would be restored to surpluses, thus
earning sufficient foreign exchange to meet longer-term obligations.
The problem was that while it made sense for all banks to provide
new loans, it made no sense for one individual bank to do so,
since other banks might not follow suit: what was rational for the
international banking system was irrational for each individual bank.
An institutional mechanism was therefore required that ensured that
interest payment obligations would be met, in both the short and
long term. This task was carried out by the IMF, which after years of
relative neglect became a major actor on the international stage. It
loaned money to countries, and approved policy changes by states
that acted as a green light to new, but now highly restricted, rounds
of bank lending.
However, to win access to new loans, countries now faced the
prospect of adhering to certain conditions. This conditionality also
applied to the World Bank, which from 1981 became an institution
increasingly committed to neoliberal ideas, and which pursued
‘structural adjustment’ loans that reflected this commitment. The
basic assumption of neoliberalism was that the debt crisis was
not caused by unfavourable international circumstances – such as
declining demand for Third World exports, or higher interest rates –
but by policy errors internal to their national economies (World Bank
1981). This applied not only to the globally high debts owed by Latin
American and East Asian countries, but also to the comparatively
smaller debts of poorer countries, especially in Africa and parts of

Asia, where actual debt levels were internationally insignificant, but
which were a major burden for the countries themselves. Failure
to meet debt obligations reflected a balance of payments deficit,
which in turn was caused by importing too much and not exporting
enough. Another way of putting this – though not strictly the same
thing – was that indebted countries were consuming too much and
not producing enough. What was needed, then, was a set of policies
to either increase production and exports, or decrease consumption
and imports. Contrary to Keynes’s wishes, the burden of adjustment
therefore fell largely on the deficit countries. There were new loans
by the IMF, and some debt relief, both of which effectively meant
that some public money was being used to police the debt crisis;
but the amount of money was too small to alleviate the devastating
effects of adjustment on the deficit countries – or more accurately, on
some people in the deficit countries. In the short term this led to a
set of policies that essentially cut consumption and/or imports. This
included state expenditure on essentials like health, education and
food subsidies. New bank loans to ‘bad debtors’ declined enormously
and so, in an unsympathetic international environment, there was
little alternative to making drastic cuts in order to return a balance of
payments surplus. For most of the 1980s, substantial debt relief was
not on the agenda, and the consequences of default by individual
countries were likely to be even worse than the consequences of not
meeting debt obligations. Nevertheless, creditors wanted a guaranteed
return on their loans, and IMF programmes were designed less to
meet the needs of debtors than they were to ensure that creditors’
interests were served. The results of such cuts were devastating, and
sacrifices were forced on the very people who had hardly benefited
at all from the original loans. Indeed, as creditors demanded that
countries meet their interest payment obligations, the rich in those
same countries often exported their own money into the US to take
advantage of the very same high interest rates that had aggravated
the debt in the first place.
For neoliberals, the development reversals of the 1980s were
regarded as an unavoidable sacrifice, caused not by the adjustment
itself but by the policies that made adjustment necessary. In the longer
run, more efficient policies would lead to countries producing more
and exporting more. Although adjustment varied from country to
country, and continues to do so 20 years later, it was united by a broad
commitment to pro-free-market policies. The essential rationale for
structural adjustment policies is that countries have not produced or

exported enough because there has been too much state intervention
in the economy. This intervention is inefficient because it leads to the
protection of inefficient producers from competition, both within the
domestic economy and in international trade. Import-substitution
industrialisation is thus regarded as one example of inefficient
government policy. For neoliberals, tariffs, overvalued currencies and
import controls protect high-cost domestic producers from foreign
competition, while subsidies work in a similar way, in that they
discriminate between domestic producers without the discipline of
market competition, and also encourage corruption. High tax rates
are also said to crowd out private investors and thus lower investment
levels. The result of too much government is therefore deemed to
be the protection of high-cost, inefficient producers, operating in
closed national economies sealed off from the opportunities of the
world market.
The solution to this set of problems was a set of ‘structural
adjustment’ policies that encouraged the promotion of market forces.
In practice this means a basic triumvirate of policies: privatisation,
deregulation and liberalisation. Privatisation of former state
companies is said to lead to the enhancement of competition, and
therefore efficiency. Deregulation, often seen as a second-best option
to privatisation, involves the trimming of the state sector and the
introduction of competitive practices that make this sector run along
lines similar to those of the private sphere. Liberalisation is a policy
of openness to international trade and investment, so that countries
can grow through increased exports and foreign investment. In the
1990s it also included liberalisation of the capital account, which
meant that individuals could now easily move money from their
domestic currency to a foreign currency. This certainly occurred
before adjustment – though it was often illegal, and usually more
difficult to practice – but adjustment has made it easier. This practice
is said to be conducive to growth, as it increases a country’s access
to foreign savings (McKinnon 1973; Shaw 1973).
In the 1990s the debt crisis officially ended, as the Latin American
debtors received substantial amounts of foreign capital flows,
combined with debt relief. Debtors therefore no longer faced the
prospect of financial collapse. However, as a crisis of development, the
debt crisis continued. The poorest countries continued to face massive
debt service burdens, and economic growth and social development
continued to stagnate for many – including in the higher-growth
Latin American countries. The much-trumpeted debt relief for Heavily

Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, introduced in 1996 and
extended in 1999, has had little impact for the majority of countries
that qualify for relief. Moreover, the post-communist countries saw
massive reversals of living standards as the IMF promoted a policy
of shock therapy, in which it was assumed that Eastern Europe and
West Asia could quickly attract mobile foreign capital, and therefore
rapidly develop. Instead, open competition intensified massive social
disruption, and in some cases the development of unproductive,
import-based gangster economies. Moreover, the capital flows to
Latin America and East Asia proved to be unstable and volatile, as
we will see.
Neoliberalism modified: the Third Way and neoconservatism

By the early 1990s it was clear that the optimistic expectations of
neoliberalism had not been fulfilled. Low growth rates and poor
social development persisted. Nevertheless, neoliberals insisted that
embracing the world market continued to be the best policy option,
and for a while pointed to the success of East Asia to back up this
claim (World Bank 1993). What was needed was some ‘tinkering’ with
the free market, to ensure that it was implemented more effectively.
This paved the way for a movement away from the straightforward
neoliberalism of the Washington consensus to a new, post-Washington
consensus, which included increased attention to some safety nets
for the poorest, as well as the promotion of institutional reforms to
enable markets to work more effectively. These included reform of
the institutions of ‘governance’ in order to allow state intervention
to be more ‘market-friendly’. Projected reforms were intended to
make government more accountable and transparent, which in turn
would undermine unproductive activity such as corruption, which
was said to be derived from the opportunities that arose through
government over-regulation (World Bank 1989; 1994). The 1997
World Development Report was perhaps the most sustained effort
to theorise the relationship between institutional development and
market expansion. The Bank explicitly rejected the increasingly sterile
state-versus-market debate, and called for more attention to be paid to
the issue of state effectiveness. Crucially, however, such ‘effectiveness’
was defined in terms of developing rules and institutions that would
‘allow the market to flourish’ (World Bank 1997: 1). Bad policies
were said to include the raising of unexpected taxes on the private
sector, the redistribution of economic benefits, and restrictions on
the operation of markets, including import restrictions (World Bank

1997: 51). The Bank also embraced more radical concepts such as
empowerment, participation and partnerships between aid donors
and recipients. While these were potentially radical ideas, the Bank
essentially saw empowerment solely in terms of the capacity of
individuals to participate in markets. The Bank’s explanation for
poverty and lack of power was that people lacked access to income-
earning activities that were derived from the market (World Bank
1994), and so markets themselves should be expanded. This was also
the basic thinking behind the movement from structural adjustment
to so-called poverty-reduction strategy papers, where an increased
emphasis on poverty reduction remained tied to the idea – and the
condition – that this was best achieved through market expansion.
It was also central to the Poverty Reduction Growth Facility, which
was designed to give the IMF a greater role in the Heavily Indebted
Poor Countries Initiative,1 and which tied limited debt relief to
the usual package of neoliberal policies. In all these initiatives, the
idea that markets themselves could marginalise some people was
thus dismissed from the outset. In the process, participation and
empowerment were effectively depoliticised, and the power relations
generated by markets were ignored. Similarly, partnership and local
‘ownership’ of adjustment policies was limited by the need to gain
approval for endorsement by the Washington institutions. The post-
Washington consensus thus represented only a partial break with
neoliberalism (Fine et al. 2001; Porter and Craig 2004).
This search for appropriate institutional support to enable the
free market to work effectively closely paralleled the politics of the
Third Way, associated primarily with Bill Clinton in the US and Tony
Blair in Britain, as well as neoliberal social democrats like former
Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Indeed, although
this Third Way envisaged greater regulation of markets and a more
activist state, in some ways this regulation actually enhanced the
power of the free market. Clinton followed through with plans to
increase free trade between the US, Canada and Mexico with the
passing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in
1994, and supported the (admittedly already planned) creation of
the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995. In 1997, the Clinton
administration increasingly pressurised the IMF to make liberalisation
of the capital account a condition of IMF membership. The Third Way
therefore involved substantial continuity with neoliberalism.
With the arrival of the administration of George W. Bush, there

was some initial tension between government and the World Bank
and IMF. Following the report of the Meltzer Commission in 2000,
which criticised their records on poverty reduction, there was some
initial talk of the end of bailouts for indebted countries and their
creditors, and a consequent reduction in the role of the World Bank
and IMF. Certainly there were protracted negotiations over loans
to Argentina, but this was less true in the case of Brazil. There were
also tensions over IMF proposals to establish some forms of limited
liability for sovereign debtors – a move successfully resisted by the
US Treasury. But these conflicts do not represent a radical shift away
from neoliberal globalisation. Indeed, in many respects they reflect an
administration that wants to control foreign economic policy more
directly, but still in ways that are compatible with neoliberalism.
This is perhaps most clear in the field of aid and development,
with the development of a new policy that dispenses even with the
limited and largely rhetorical commitment to partnership and local
ownership. This approach was formalised with the announcement of
the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) in March 2002. Aid was
to be increased substantially, with a phased-in annual increase of up
to $5 billion a year (although such a large amount has been resisted
by Congress). This aid is subject to 16 conditions, which essentially
conform to the neoliberal formula of open government, respect for
civil liberties and market expansion (see www.mca.org). Where the
MCA differs from the post-Washington consensus is in its pre-emptive
nature. In the past, conditionality was implemented after loans had
been dispensed, which at least led to some negotiation, whereas the
MCA imposes conditionality before aid is dispensed. Under MCA,
therefore, aid increasingly takes the form of grants rather than
loans, which allows for greater policing of conditionality.2 This does
constitute a significant change in development policy on the part
of the US government, but at the same time it remains committed
to the promotion of an efficient, free-market economy, introduced
through appropriate changes in government. Thus, ‘the form of
the MCA appears novel, [but] its content is the same as preceding
development agendas’ (Soederberg 2004: 281). This policy of pre-
empting development therefore closely parallels the security policy
of the Bush administration, and it reflects similar attempts to impose
political and social stability in order to reduce the threat from terrorist
networks and ‘failed states’. This linkage of security and development
is also closely related to the idea that the expansion of free-market
democracies will lead to prosperity and the extension of the liberal

zone of peace (National Security Strategy 2002).
Under Bush, trade policy has at times been more openly
protectionist than under Clinton, and US relations with the WTO
have been more difficult. However, these changes did not mean the
end of neoliberal policies, as US inconsistency on trade liberalisation
was established practice stretching back to the 1970s and Reaganite
1980s, and Bush continued to pursue a policy of pressurising other
countries to liberalise their markets. For the Bush administration, if
this could not occur through the WTO, then it could happen through
bilateral and/or regional trade agreements. These initiatives were
not designed as an alternative to multilateral – or, where they also
stalled, regional – trade talks, but instead as an addition to them,
designed to hasten free-trade initiatives in the face of obstacles to
wider agreements. After the collapse of trade talks at Cancún in 2003,
US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick stated that ‘[w]e are going
to keep opening markets one way or another. We are not waiting
forever. We are moving elsewhere.’ (Cited in Weisbrot and Tucker
2004) Indeed, Bush even won authority to fast-track regional free-
trade agreements through Congress.
From the 1980s onwards, there has been an increase in the
liberalisation of the world economy. For its advocates, this is regarded
as desirable because it promotes a situation in which all participants
would win through the exercise of mutual comparative advantage.
This argument is based on a very one-sided interpretation of the
work of the classical political economist David Ricardo, who argued
that, under specific conditions, each country can benefit from free
trade, as open competition allows them to specialise in producing
those goods and services in which they are most efficient – in other
words, which can produce more cheaply than anyone else. Unlike
most contemporary advocates, Ricardo argued that for such a win-
win situation to occur, certain conditions must be met. For instance,
he argued that for free trade to be mutually beneficial, the factors
of production (land, labour and capital) must be immobile and
that (leaving aside climate conditions) countries must have equal
capacities to produce goods. This in turn rested on the assumptions
of balanced trade, perfect competition and full employment. This
is essentially the same case as that for the economic project of
globalisation. Countries have certain capacities, and can produce
certain goods and services better than other countries. They can only
find out what they are best at producing through open competition,
and should then specialise in production in those sectors (see Chapter

2). National economies can therefore best develop by ‘going global’,
rather than focusing on production for the national market first,
and the international markets second. For the Third Way, this does
allow the state to ‘pick some winners’, but in a way that enhances
rather than restricts the market. Thus, the richer countries can afford
higher-paid, skilled jobs, especially in the information technology
sector, and it is envisaged that this new economy will provide for
most of the jobs in the ‘advanced’ countries. Developing countries
can then attract capital through a comparative advantage in lower
wages, which will eventually allow them to climb the ladder towards
the developed world (Reich 1983).
Neoliberal, Third Way and neoconservative policies have all
promoted liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation. These
policies have been promoted by states and international institutions.
States have also promoted liberalisation through international and
regional trade agreements, such as NAFTA and the WTO. States are
therefore active agents of the globalisation process, and not simply its
passive victims – though of course some states are far more powerful
than others. The US state also promoted the liberalisation of finance
– a point I return to below. These processes have been legitimised
(or rather, their advocates have tried to legitimise them) through
arguments that suggest that everyone – all individuals and countries –
can benefit from them. I now will examine this argument in detail.
POVERTY, INEQUALITY AND US HEGEMONY
Global poverty reduction?

On the face of it, the argument that global ‘market forces’ work
to everyone’s benefit sounds like wishful thinking, but many of
the ideologists of globalisation argue that this process of poverty
reduction is already taking place. The World Bank has periodically
claimed that those countries that have gone furthest in carrying
out structural adjustment polices have been the most successful
developers. More recently, it has argued that the number of people
living in poverty has fallen from 1.4 billion in 1980 to 1.2 billion
in 1998 (World Bank 2002a: 30). Although using a different set of
figures, it has also argued that the proportion of people living in
poverty fell from 28 per cent in 1987 to 24 per cent in 1998 of the
world’s population (World Bank 2001: 3). These figures used a poverty
measurement based on people living on an income of less than $1 a
day. However the ‘dollar’ in question is not actually a US dollar, but

what is called a Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) dollar. The concept
of the PPP dollar attempts to find a unit that can account for local
differences in living standards and buying power across the globe.
This is based on international price comparisons, which are made
periodically, and which most recently draw on comparisons initially
made in 1985 and 1993. The World Bank claim cited above is actually
based on a usually unacknowledged switch from using the 1985
comparison, in 1987, to the 1993 comparison, in 1998. But this shift
had the effect of lowering the poverty count in 77 out of 92 countries
in which data were available, and these countries contained 82 per
cent of the population of the 92 countries (Pogge and Reddy 2002:
7). Therefore, the ‘reduced poverty’ often cited as an established fact
is actually based on two very different headcounts, and these appear
to show a downward bias in poverty trends. Poverty may not have
been reduced; rather, the way in which it has been counted may be
biased towards reduction. In this way, the target of halving world
poverty by 2015 may be ‘achieved’ (though this in itself is highly
unlikely) less by a reduction in real poverty than by an effect of the
way in which we count poverty. Moreover, PPP is based on a wide
basket of consumer goods for international comparison, most of
which are not relevant to counting poverty – for instance, cars and
airline tickets. A general increase in income – a tendency that predates
globalisation – will therefore lead to some people increasing their
consumption of such goods. This does not mean that the poor do so
– but PPP assumes that the increase in income over time is general.
Most of the measured fall in poverty in recent years is attributable to
changes in India and China, but neither country participated fully
in the price comparisons of 1985 and 1993 – China in neither and
India only in 1985.
For these and other reasons (see Kiely 2005: Ch. 5), we need to
treat claims that absolute poverty has fallen with extreme caution.
Moreover, such measures betray an excessively technocratic approach
to the question of poverty. Income is only one measure of poverty,
and the PPP dollar benchmark is largely arbitrary. Moreover, it tells
us nothing about inequality. For neoliberalism, inequality is not an
important issue so long as the poor are lifted out of poverty. But if
we are to take democracy seriously, then it must involve everybody
having the chance to participate equally in both national and global
society. Simply lifting people out of absolute poverty does not address
the question of relationships of power between individuals and social
groups, and it therefore betrays a particularly limited approach to

politics and democracy. Inequalities between the richest and poorest,
in terms of countries and people, have undoubtedly increased in
the era of globalisation, as have inequalities within most countries
(Milanovic 2002).
But there is still a need to deal with the question of rapid growth in
China and India, especially as these two countries account together
for over a third of the world’s population. For the World Bank, these
two countries are part of a group of ‘highly globalised’ countries,
which are said to have benefited from pro-globalisation policies in
recent years. Revisiting the theory of comparative advantage, albeit
without Ricardo’s qualifications, the Bank argues that a reduction
in trade barriers accelerates growth, enhances productivity, creates
new jobs and reduces poverty. The good globalisers of recent years
are those countries that have increased their ratio of trade to GDP
for the years 1977–97 (World Bank 2002b). This measure is said to be
a useful approximation of trade openness, and countries like India
and China have increased their trade/GDP ratio in recent years. Such
measures are also implicit in the far more casual claims made by both
neoliberal advocates of American empire and Third Way ideologues
that poverty has been reduced through pro-globalisation policies,
and that the failure of poverty reduction is due to countries being
insufficiently globalised (Lal 2004; Giddens 2002: 73).
Unfortunately for neoliberals, this distinction is useless. Measuring
changes in trade/GDP ratios from 1977 to 1997 tells us nothing
about trade openness. First, it is quite possible for a country to have a
relatively closed economy in some sectors, and still have high trade/
GDP ratios because it has successfully broken into export markets, and
can therefore also afford substantial imports. Second, measuring the
changes from 1977 to 1997 does not tell us anything about openness
in the latter year, only the degree of change that has occurred over
the 20 years. Indeed, the measurement is biased towards high-growth
countries because it excludes countries with high but not increasing
trade/GDP ratios from the more globalised category. This includes a
number of very poor but relatively open countries dependent on the
export of low-value primary commodities (UNCTAD 2002: Pt. 2, Ch.
3). Similarly, the rapid economic growth of China and India pre-dates
increased openness, and ignores the fact that, measured in terms of
tariffs, these remain relatively closed economies, at least compared
to some poorer countries. While their rate of opening up was quite
high, the amount of openness remains comparatively low.
Much the same argument can be made for the East Asian ‘miracle’
economies. The rise of South Korea and Taiwan in particular, but
also Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, is often cited as
evidence that pro-globalisation policies can work. Before the Asian
financial crisis of 1997–98, these countries were often cited as models
of ‘market-friendly intervention’ for the rest of the world (World
Bank 1993). Indeed, structural adjustment and good governance were
often justified on the grounds that these were the means by which
East Asia managed to develop rapidly. Again, unfortunately for the
neoliberals and pro-globalisers, this is not the case. Certainly, these
economies exported successfully, and some (especially Malaysia and
Singapore) successfully attracted large amounts of foreign investment.
But outside the city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore, the miracles
took off from the early 1960s in the context of a nationalised banking
system, import controls and high tariffs, state planning to favoured
industries, and rigid controls over the export of money capital.
Controls over the export of money were largely lifted in the early
1990s (though not in Taiwan, and they were quickly re-introduced
in Malaysia), and this was certainly one cause of the financial crisis.
Clearly, then, East Asia did not develop simply by drawing on the
benign effects of global ‘market forces’; like earlier developers, in
many ways it actually adopted policies that included considerable
protection from such forces.
These points undermine some key arguments of the advocates
of globalisation. Most obviously, the market-friendly position is
unsustainable. But the argument that the rise of East Asia confirms
the view that globalisation is a process without direction is also
undermined by the financial crisis of the late 1990s, which can be
linked to financial liberalisation and US hegemony.3 The neoliberal
case has therefore misinterpreted the ‘development successes’ of recent
years. There have been important gains over the last 40 years, but these
cannot be attributed to unambiguously pro-globalisation policies.
Moreover, we should remember that these gains have also taken place
at considerable cost to some people in the region. South Korea and
now China have notoriously high rates of accidents at work; most of
the countries in East Asia have had, or still have, repressive political
regimes; there has been considerable environmental destruction as
rapid industrialisation has taken place. None of these things may
have caused the economic miracles, and we should remember that
similar costs have occurred elsewhere, without the longer-term social
benefits. But we should also remember that rapid growth and social
improvements for some have come at considerable social cost to

others. It is not sufficient for advocates of growth simply to say that
this is a necessary consequence of ‘development’, a sacrifice made by
the present generation for future generations. This growth fetishism
(see Chapter 6) has led to too many deaths and sacrifices in the name
of a better future, not least under state ‘socialism’. Economic growth
may be important, but it is not that important.
Global inequality
But this problem of sacrifice is all the more troubling for neoliberalism.
Some sacrifice may be necessary – the transition from poverty to
abundance is far from painless – but uncritical pro-globalisation
policies call for short-term sacrifice in the pursuit of long-term gain,
while the policies result in too much sacrifice and too little gain.
Integrating into the world economy through structural adjustment
and trade liberalisation is not a recipe for rapid long-term growth, or
for catching up with the ‘advanced countries’. Indeed, those countries
that have had some success with catch-up have generally not carried
out these policies. The underlying reason why they have not is that
the global economy is not the benign force that apologists make out.
It isn’t necessarily completely malign, but neither is it all good. To
explain why, we need to take a brief look at trade, productive and
financial investment flows, and then use these to criticise the theory
of comparative advantage.
If we look at the share of world trade in the late 1990s, we can
see that it is highly concentrated. The ‘developed’ world accounted
for around 75 per cent of world trade in 1999, the developing world
(including East Asia) 25 per cent (UNCTAD 1999). The share of Africa
and Latin America in world trade has fallen in the years of globalisation:
Africa’s share declined from 4.1 per cent in 1970 to 1.5 per cent in
1995, and Latin America’s from 5.5 per cent to 4.4 per cent over the
same period (UNCTAD 1998: 183). Asia’s share increased, from 8.5
per cent to 21.4 per cent, but as we have seen this was not because
of unambiguously open trade policies, still less because of neoliberal
policies. Of course, the actual amount of trade has not fallen; rather,
Africa’s and Latin America’s shares are rising less quickly than those
of other regions. In 1960, Africa’s share of total merchandise exports
was 5.6 per cent, and Latin America’s 7.5 per cent; by 2002, Africa’s
share had declined to 2.1 per cent and Latin America’s to 5.4 per
cent (UNCTAD 2004: 51). In services, concentration was even greater
– in 2002, developed countries accounted for 73.2 per cent of the
total value of service exports, Central and Eastern Europe 4.2 per
cent, and developing countries just 22.6 per cent. Africa’s and Latin
America’s shares have both declined since 1980 (UNCTAD 2004:
61). Advocates of trade liberalisation and globalisation assume that
once the correct policies are put in place, both the amount and the
share of world trade should increase for the ‘backward’ areas, because
they will specialise in those goods in which they have a comparative
advantage. This has clearly not taken place, and trade shares have
concentrated despite the liberalisation policies carried out since the
early 1980s. Moreover, the rate of growth of international trade has
actually been slower in the era of open trade than it was in the era of
‘national capitalisms’. From 1950 to 1973, the annual average rate of
growth was 1.7 per cent, while from 1973 to 1992 it was 1.1 per cent
(Baker et al. 1997: 6). The type of goods exported from the developing
world has changed substantially, and manufacturing now accounts
for the majority of developing-world exports, but this increase is
mainly in low-value, labour-intensive goods, such as clothing and
footwear, where there is a significant ‘mark up’ at the marketing
rather than the production stage of the commodity chain.
On the face of it, there seems to be room for greater optimism
when we examine foreign investment. The 1990s did see a massive
increase in foreign investment, from $59 billion in 1982 to $1.2
trillion in 2000 (although it has fallen substantially since then). This
includes substantial increases in the developing world, particularly
Latin America and East Asia. Indeed, these flows in the early 1990s
were sufficient to turn Latin America around from being a net capital
exporter in the 1980s, paying back interest on bad debts, to a net
capital importer. But this investment remains highly concentrated.
Throughout the 1990s, the developed countries received around two-
thirds of total direct foreign investment (DFI), while the capital-scarce
developing countries (including East Asia) received one-third
(UNCTAD 2002: 5). Moreover, the investment that goes to the
developing world is itself highly concentrated, with 10 countries
receiving 75 per cent (UNCTAD 2002: 9). Direct foreign investment
levels fell in 2001 and 2002. Total DFI for 2001 was $823 billion, of
which developed countries received $589 billion and developing
countries $209 billion. In 2002 total DFI was $651 billion, with
developed countries receiving $460 billion and developing countries
$162 billion. Asia and the Pacific received $95 billion, Latin America
and the Caribbean $56 billion, and Africa just $11 billion (UNCTAD
2003: 7).
DFI figures do not tell the whole story, and they distort the picture in
a number of ways. First, mergers and acquisitions between companies
can lead to an increase in DFI figures even though they do not involve
any new investment. As most mergers and acquisitions take place
between ‘First World’ companies, this has the effect of exaggerating
the concentration of DFI in the developed countries. But DFI figures
also increase when countries sell off previously state-run enterprises
to foreign capital – once again, this is not new, greenfield investment,
but a simple takeover of existing assets. This process has occurred in
the developed world, but so too has it occurred on a massive scale,
after structural adjustment, in the developing world, especially in
Latin America. Indeed, Brazil experienced high rates of FDI in the
1990s, but averaged lower rates of fixed capital investment than in the
disastrous 1980s. Second, the value of manufacturing imports into
the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries originating from the developing
world is low. For the US in 1995, the figure was 7 per cent, for the
European Union 4.5 per cent, and for Japan 3.3 per cent (UNCTAD
1999). In other words, in each case over 90 per cent of manufacturing
imports came from other ‘advanced’ countries.
Two final factors confirm the concentrated nature of world
investment flows. First, given that the developing world has a higher
proportion of the world’s population than the developed world, the
concentration of DFI is in fact greater than the figures cited above
indicate (UNCTAD 2002: 265). Second, as globalisation sceptics
remind us (see Chapter 2), DFI only makes up a small proportion of
total global capital investment. In 1995, it contributed only about
5.2 per cent of the world’s capital investment, and the stock of
inward DFI represented just 10.1 per cent of world GDP (Thompson
2000: 109). Thus, big transnational companies like General Motors
continue to employ far more people in the US than in any other
single country, and in many cases such companies employ and hold
more assets in their home country than in all other countries put
together. Though there are some exceptions, where companies rely
on raw materials (ExxonMobil) or have been particularly successful
as global market players (Coca Cola), transnational companies that
hold more assets or employ more people beyond their country of
origin tend to be those with small domestic markets. Clearly, the
hyper-globalisation image of footloose capital dispersing investment
throughout the globe is a fallacy. For all these reasons, the argument
that globalisation will lead to a global dispersal of capital investment
looks to be highly problematic.
US hegemony and global finance

Global financial flows also increased substantially in the 1990s.
After the 1980s debt crisis, bank loans became less significant, and
following structural adjustment there was an increase in portfolio
investment, which basically meant investment in stock markets
and in government bonds, and various derivatives. Advocates of
deregulated finance argue that these are potentially useful, as they
enable capital-scarce developing countries to draw on global sources
of savings, and so can be used to finance investment and trade flows.
Such flows, like trade and DFI, are extremely concentrated, and
largely bypass the poorest countries. But even for those ‘emerging
markets’ that received increased foreign portfolio investment in the
1990s, it was at best a mixed blessing. These financial flows have
increased enormously since the breakdown of fixed exchange rates
in the early 1970s, but they have not had the desired effects. Indeed,
the overwhelming majority of these flows are not designed to increase
trade and investment, but are purely speculative. In the late 1990s,
the annual value of trade in goods and services was equivalent to
four days’ trading on foreign exchange markets (Singh 2000: 16). The
effect of such speculation is to divert funds away from productive
investment, which for all its faults at least has the potential to be used
for socially useful purposes. Financial investment remains reliant on
the ‘real economy’ of production and trade, as these are necessary
for debts to be repaid, but it is also parasitic upon it.
This parasitism takes a number of forms. First, as we have seen,
funds are diverted away from investment in the real economy into
what is usually little more than financial speculation. Second, even
when funds are not used simply for speculation, such as when money
is diverted to hedge against sharp movements in currencies, there
is still considerable diversion from production to deal with the
uncertainties of a world of flexible exchange rates. Moreover, these
funds can become so vast that they encourage further speculation.
Third, such funds are often attracted to countries through high
interest rates, which have the effect of further choking off productive
investment, and therefore undermining expansionary policies that
might encourage an increase in employment. Productive investment
does at least have the merit of providing some means of economic
expansion, and therefore a livelihood for substantial sectors of the
population. Indeed, such is the power of financial interests in the
current global economy that the decision to withdraw funds held
in one currency into another can have a devastating impact on real

economies. The East Asian crisis of 1997–98 was just one of a series
of financial crises in the 1990s and beyond, which included Mexico
in 1994, Russia in 1998, and Brazil and Argentina at the turn of the
century. Each of these was facilitated by the rapid removal of ‘hot
money’ that had initially promoted largely speculative investment,
and, once removed, had a devastating impact on the real economy
(through the build-up of debt, declining share values, and declining
national currencies, which further increased dollar-denominated
debt). Thus, in five East Asian economies in 1997, there was a reversal
of capital flows of $105 billion, the equivalent of 11 per cent of the
combined GDP of South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and
the Philippines (Kiely 2005: Ch. 4).
Indeed, it could be argued that, at the global level, the effect of
the dominance of financial capital is even more parasitic than this.
For above all it is the US that has the most interest in maintaining
global financial hegemony, and it is the US that has above all
promoted policies to liberalise the movement of finance across
borders. Although this can be traced back at least to the 1971 dollar
devaluation, the real turning point came in 1981 under Ronald
Reagan. As we have seen, his presidency saw the implementation
of policies (begun tentatively under President Carter in 1979) based
on controlling inflation, high interest rates, tax cuts for the wealthy,
and deregulation of capital investment. The US therefore started
to compete for greater global capital inflows as it faced increasing
budget and trade deficits, exacerbated by Reagan’s decision to increase
defence spending massively. The US thus went from being the world’s
main source of liquidity in the 1950s to being the world’s main
debtor and recipient of foreign capital in the 1980s, and this remains
the case to this day. This process was above all facilitated by one of
the key legacies of the Bretton Woods agreement – the role of the
dollar as the main international currency. As a result, the US is able
to finance deficits with the rest of the world by selling government
debt securities, secure in the knowledge that there is demand for
these dollar bonds. At the same time, to facilitate this process there
needs to be active encouragement of the free movement of finance,
so that money can move freely into the US. Thus, the country retains
a position of hegemony in the world order today, above all because
of the globalisation of finance. Indeed, it could be argued that the
rest of the world is actually financing the continued military/political
hegemony of the US, investing money into the US and thereby
financing its deficits. This was certainly the case under Reagan, and
to a lesser extent the elder Bush; and while Clinton successfully
eliminated the budget deficit, the trade deficit continued to soar.
Moreover, the presidency of the younger Bush saw a return to the era
of high trade and budget deficits, thus intensifying US dependence on
liberal financial flows. By 2003, both trade and budget deficits stood
at record levels: since early 2000, the federal budget deficit has grown
from 1.8 per cent of GDP to an estimated 3.7 per cent (2003) and 4.3
per cent for 2004 (Brenner 2003: 21). In 2001, the trade deficit was
a record $435 billion, which increased to an unprecedented $489
billion by 2003 (Monthly Review 2003: 8). These deficits have been
financed by foreigners speculating in the stock market, buying real
estate, acquiring firms or setting up new sites, and buying US Treasury
bonds. Equity purchases fell by 83 per cent from 2000 to 2002 as share
prices fell, and so there has been a sustained movement into buying
government bonds. In 2001, 97 per cent of the US current account
deficit was financed by foreign purchases of these bonds. From 1992
to 2001, the foreign share of US national debt increased from 17 per
cent to 31 per cent (Monthly Review 2003: 10). So long as there is
confidence in the US economy and the dollar, these deficits may be
manageable, but there is a serious question mark as to whether high
trade deficits are sustainable. They are more sustainable for the US
than for other countries because of the international role of the dollar,
but ongoing deficits are likely to erode this role further.
The continued power – and potential weakness – of the US state is
thus central to an understanding of globalisation. Indeed, the US state
has been a major agent in the promotion of financial globalisation,
and the free-trade policies that indirectly resulted through structural
adjustment policies. This of course does not mean that ‘globalisation’
(either of the economy or more generally) is reducible to the actions
of the US, but still less does it mean that globalisation has simply
arrived from nowhere and does not involve relationships of hierarchy
and power. It also does not mean that the US is fully in control of
this process, and the deficits may become so great – particularly with
current military commitments – that investors will lose confidence
in the dollar, and move into other currencies. But still this potential
fragility of US hegemony does not contradict the reality of US power,
and its success in promoting capital flows into the US, partly at the
expense of other countries, including in the developing world.
The myth of economic globalisation

What should be clear by now is that in the era of globalisation we
have not seen a dispersal of capital throughout the globe. Instead, it
has tended to concentrate in certain countries and regions, and to
bypass others. The questions that follow are: Why does this occur,
and what can be done about it? Is it because some countries are
insufficiently globalised? In other words, is it the fault of the countries
themselves (or, more accurately, some people in those countries) or
of the global order of which they are a part? Neoliberalism contends
that the answer lies mainly with the countries themselves, just as
the 1980s debt crisis was regarded as being a product of the bad
policies of the debtors. Some criticism of the richer countries is
allowed in this account. In particular, First World governments
should level the playing field by practicing what they preach, and
endorse free-trade policies in agriculture and other sectors, thereby
allowing developing countries to export to potentially lucrative
First World markets. Unfortunately, this principle is applied very
inconsistently by western leaders, with Jacques Chirac and George
W. Bush among the worst offenders (though none can be considered
blameless). Neoliberals are rightly critical of these double standards,
but they still argue that there is a need for developing countries to
open themselves up to foreign competition, in order to eliminate
inefficient production and specialise in those areas in which they
have a comparative advantage.
Certainly the ‘advanced’ countries should have a more open
policy towards imports from the developing world. It is also true
that some developing countries make things worse through bad
policies. Having said that, as we saw in the previous chapter, the
emergence of ‘advanced’ capitalist societies was the product of a
long history of social struggles, and therefore arguments that reduce
‘underdevelopment’ to bad policies, as if ‘policy’ is a simple matter of
technical prescription, are guilty of anti-sociological arguments.4 But
perhaps most important of all, the exercise of blanket free-trade policies
is not in the interests of developing countries. This is not to endorse a
case for autarchy, but simply to question a blanket case for more
pro-globalisation policies. There has been a generalised pattern of
trade, money and investment liberalisation in the developing world
in the last 10 to 20 years. For instance, for every year from 1991 to
2002, around 90 to 98 per cent of national regulations covering
foreign investment have involved greater liberalisation (UNCTAD
2003: 21). But in that same period there has been an intensification
of the concentration of capital in certain parts of the world. The
argument that countries need to be more ‘globalised’ implies that,
once liberalisation occurs, there will be an evening up of development
between countries; but this has clearly not taken place. As I have
argued elsewhere, ‘it is not the case … that some parts of the world
are effectively incorporated while others are insufficiently globalised;
rather, it is the case that the actual processes of globalisation that
have occurred have been intrinsically uneven, unequal and unstable’
(Kiely 1998a: 11; emphasis in original). Contrary to the claims of
neoliberalism, capital does not move from (‘high-cost’) areas of capital
abundance to (‘low-cost’) areas of capital scarcity. Rather, through a
process of cumulative causation, it tends to concentrate in established
areas of accumulation. It does so to take advantage of technological
development, labour skills, infrastructural development, and close
proximity to suppliers and markets. Capital is attracted by the wealth
of existing capital, and repelled by the poverty represented by capital
scarcity. The concentration of capital is therefore not caused by
market imperfections or the absence of competition; instead it is
the very process of competitive capital accumulation that leads to
such concentration. This means that transnational companies tend
to invest most in other advanced economies; and as we have seen,
much capital is also invested financially rather than productively
(including from the developing world), attracted above all to Wall
Street and the main international currency, the dollar. This has
enormous implications for strategies that attempt to incorporate
‘the periphery’ into the liberal core, not only through neoliberal
policies but also through state-building by military intervention (I
will return to this point in the next chapter).
In terms of the more immediate policies of promoting economic
growth in the developing world, this concentration of capital has two
related implications. Given the inequality of competition promoted
by capital concentration, it is very difficult to break into export
markets on the same level as existing producers. And given that
pro-globalisation policies of structural adjustment lead to domestic
competition with these same established overseas producers, it is
these same policies that undermine the construction of developed
capitalist economies. Of course it is likely that most countries will
find one or two niches in the world market, and their own domestic
market, but this hardly means equality of competition. These points
were not lost on South Korea and Taiwan, which deliberately went
against the grain of market forces in developing domestic industrial

capacity, even when the industries concerned were not initially
competitive. They also faced favourable open-market conditions in
a world economy that was then growing far more rapidly than it is
today. Indeed, for all the rhetoric about the efficiency of globalisation,
average growth rates for most countries in the world were far higher
in the 1960s and 1970s then they were in the 1980s and 1990s.
Improvements in living standards were generally also more rapid in
the former than the latter period, which reflects the fact that, in both
the ‘advanced’ and ‘developing’ capitalist countries, some important
gains were made in the earlier period, and these have been partly
eroded in the era of globalisation (Weisbrot et al. 2002). The two
countries that have bucked this trend – though inequality within
them has increased – are India and China; but as we have seen, they
do not meet the neoliberal criteria of pro-globalisation policies.
Some capital does flow to developing countries, as we have seen.
Productive capital does have potentially socially useful effects, such
as increasing employment, income, skills and technology. However,
for countries to utilise these effectively, they must be regulated by
the state; but structural adjustment and pro-globalisation policies
generally undermine the capacity of states to undertake this task.
Of course, states may not want to carry out the task, and we should
not assume that they act for the ‘national interest’ – too often they
act for the interests of the powerful minority ruling classes. But the
fact remains that in every case of a transition from ‘backward’ to
‘advanced’ capitalism, the state has played a highly active role in
regulating capital, forcing capitalists to reinvest and develop new
technology, investing in public goods, and so on. These capacities
have often been undermined in the last 20 years, with the result that
some foreign investment is locked into a vicious downward cycle of
low-wage, low-productivity investment – the sweat-shop production
so well described in Naomi Klein’s No Logo (2000). Contrary to the
claims of the crudest Third Way apologists (Lloyd 2001), it was not
economic growth alone that moved earlier developers out of this
cycle, but the struggles for social improvements that forced the
state to act in more socially progressive ways. Moreover, as we have
seen, it is far from clear that pro-globalisation policies are the most
effective means of stimulating growth. The ‘globalisation’ of the
world economy therefore means the expansion of the role of global
markets in distributing and allocating resources. But, contrary to the
expectations of globalisation’s advocates, this market expansion has
not led to a dispersal of capital investment throughout the globe.

Of course, actual amounts of investment and trade have increased,
but not at unprecedentedly higher levels than in previous eras; and
the shares of such capital flows have increasingly concentrated. This
has led to increasing inequality, and at best a disappointing record
of poverty reduction (Kiely 2005: Ch. 5). The countries that have
made some advances in poverty reduction are not countries that
have carried out markedly pro-globalisation policies.
The need for regulation applies not only at the level of the nation-
state, but also to the institutions of global economic governance.
However, as we have seen, institutions like the IMF and World Bank
have generally not restricted, and instead have usually enhanced,
market expansion. This point also applies to the WTO, formed in
1995 to formalise trade agreements previously discussed through the
more informal GATT mechanism, and regarded as one of the central
achievements of Clinton’s ‘geo-economic’ strategy (although in fact
the GATT talks that led to the WTO preceded Clinton’s presidency).
The WTO is committed to the expansion of tariff reduction in
agriculture, clothing and textiles, though to date there has been
limited success on these fronts, which partly reflects the successful
resistance of the most powerful states. There are also mechanisms
for the expansion of patents and copyrights, which mean that
purchasers will have to pay a fee for the use of certain protected
commodities. This is known as the TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual
Property Rights) agreement. In addition, there is provision for the
privatisation of public services through the General Agreement on
Trade and Services (GATS).
The case made for the TRIPS agreement is that extra payments or
rents are necessary in order to guarantee the recovery of research
and development (R&D) expenses. In this way, pharmaceutical
companies argue that patents are necessary to help finance R&D
into new drugs, some of which will help the poor. But in fact most
R&D financing is spent on research into illnesses that affect the
comparatively wealthy, and as much is often spent on advertising as
on R&D itself. It may well be unrealistic to expect drugs companies
to act in an altruistic way and concentrate on developing low-cost,
low-profit drugs for the global poor. But it is equally naive simply to
wait until the poor can afford the most expensive drugs, as though
drug company profits are a simple fact of life, outside the realm
of politics. Certainly the TRIPS agreement remains an area of great
contention, and has been resisted by some developing-country
governments, who want to draw on cheap generic drugs that can

help the poor effectively and far more cheaply than the patented
drugs. What is undoubtedly needed is the development of public-
sector investment in cheap, generic drugs, for market forces lead to
money being attracted to existing wealth, and repelled by poverty.
The TRIPS agreement further intensifies inequality, undermining the
chance for developing countries to develop indigenous technological
capacity, thus cementing the concentration of technological capacity
in the hands of the already wealthy.
The rationale for the GATS agreement, like structural adjustment
programmes in the 1980s and 1990s, is that the private sector is
a more effective service-provider than the state. This argument in
turn rests on the broader notion that the private sector is more
efficient than the public sector, because it allows for competition
between innately self-interested human beings. But the assumption
that humans are naturally selfish ignores the ways in which humans
cooperate in everyday life, including the commitment to the public
service ideal. This ideal is assumed to be irrelevant in a world
dominated by the free market. We will return to this debate in the
last two chapters, but what is clear here is that the free market does
not represent the ‘universal interest’, but rather the entrenched power
of a privileged minority.
This chapter has documented the movement from the Bretton

Woods era of 1945–71, to the era of globalisation. The former era
was committed to free trade and some global governance, but it
also made provision for national capitalist development, above
all through state expansion, which facilitated (for a while) high
growth, full employment and welfare in the ‘First World’, and
‘development’ in the ‘Third World’. By the late 1960s, this era was
coming to a close, as the hegemony of the US dollar on which it
rested was undermined. In order to restore competitiveness, the US
government abandoned the link to the dollar in 1971, which paved
the way for floating exchange rates for the major currencies and the
gradual deregulation of finance. In the late 1970s and early 1980s
this liberalisation of finance was enhanced by increased government
commitment to neoliberal policies, through both government and
structural adjustment policies, which emerged from the debt crisis
in the developing world and the inflationary crisis in the developed
world. Despite the poor record of these policies, the promotion of
a ‘Third Way’ in the 1990s tended to accept the need for globalised
markets, and so further expanded free trade and deregulated finance.

Under George W. Bush a much greater degree of distrust emerged
between the US government and the WTO, further intensified by a
number of clashes over trade policy between Europe, the US, Japan
and the G20 group of developing countries. But this did not mean
a wholesale rejection of free-trade principles – instead, the Bush
administration focused more on regional and bilateral free-trade
deals, and the selectiveness of its free-trade commitments, while
more extensive than the Clinton administration, was far from novel.
Furthermore, as we have seen, Bush’s policy in terms of development
aid has been more unilateralist than previous administrations; but at
the same time it is clearly committed to the development of ‘market
economies’ in poorer countries – a policy which, this chapter has
suggested, will not work.
For advocates of neo-liberalism, policies that promoted economic
globalisation were supposed to be good for economic growth and
poverty reduction. Claims were made that poverty levels were
indeed falling in the world economy; but these claims were based
on questionable data, and ignored the ways in which some countries
continued to adopt policies that were not fully compatible with the
pro-globalisation agenda. On the whole, the record of economic
globalisation is not good. A global free market entrenches inequalities,
as capital tends to concentrate in already relatively rich areas, while
deregulated finance has increased international instability.
Contemporary globalisation was a product of the economic and
social crisis of the 1970s, and of the US decision to liberalise finance
as a way to try to restore global competitiveness, initially through
a weak dollar policy and then, from the 1980s, through aggressive
policies designed to attract capital investment. These included high
interest rates which, together with the movement of capital towards
the US, had devastating consequences for many countries. Faced with
debt and high interest repayments, these countries were only granted
access to credit on condition that certain neoliberal policies were
adopted, which led to a reorientation away from the home market
and towards the world market. In the 1990s, in the context of the rise
of the Third Way, a great deal of faith was placed in increasing foreign
investment in ‘emerging markets’. However, this investment often
only amounted to the takeover of assets privatised through structural
adjustment policies. Of course, there was also some investment
in new plant, but this was generally not on a sufficient scale to
increase overall investment rates substantially. Moreover, much of
the investment was made up of financial flows into stocks and bonds,
attracted by high interest rates that kept growth rates low, and was
often liable to rapid withdrawal at the first sign of trouble. The result
was a whole series of financial crises that had a severe impact on real
economies in Latin America, East Asia and Russia. Perhaps above all,
these new flows of investment were highly concentrated, and simply
bypassed many parts of the developing world – and indeed were
often not used productively at all. The unsurprising result has been
an increase in inequality both within and between countries. These
outcomes are not the product of ‘insufficient globalisation’, but in
fact reflect the particular form that economic globalisation has taken.
Such globalisation is a product of two closely linked factors outlined
and discussed in this chapter: those of US hegemony (supported by
other states) and neoliberalism. We will return to these economic
questions in the concluding chapter.
6
Globalisation, Culture and Rights:
Liberal Internationalism,
Imperialism and Universalism
This chapter addresses questions around the relationship between

globalisation, culture and rights, and relates these issues to different
ways of talking about ‘Americanisation’. The first section examines
the theory known as cultural imperialism, which focuses on the
Americanisation of popular culture across the world. I then move
on to a critique of this account of cultural globalisation, which
partly questions the view that we are moving towards a culturally
homogeneous global society, but which above all suggests that this
debate focuses too narrowly on consumer culture. The third section
draws on this critique and re-examines the defence of the ‘free
market’, relating such a defence to debates around universalism,
rights and difference. It revisits the debates over US hegemony
and liberal internationalism that were first discussed in Chapters
3 and 4. This section argues that the US has been inconsistent in
its promotion of liberal rights, and further that liberal rights are
themselves limited. Following this discussion, in the final section
I suggest that the liberal right of sovereign consumers exercising
their choice in the free market is based on a one-dimensional view
of freedom. In focusing on culture as a way of life (rather than
the dissemination of particular products), I suggest that there are
important tendencies towards cultural standardisation, which can
be linked to liberalism and US hegemony. I will argue that we live
in a world increasingly dominated by rationalisation, consumer
capitalism and ‘growth fetishism’. In this respect we are living in an
increasingly standardised world, even though the actual commodities
produced and consumed often remain quite different. The freedom of
the marketplace thus becomes a form of social tyranny. In making this
critique I am careful not to romanticise poverty, so-called ‘traditional
societies’, or ‘fundamentalist’ responses to US hegemony or consumer
capitalism, but at the same time I suggest that a one-sided obsession
with economic growth is neither socially nor environmentally
120
Globalisation, Culture and Rights 121
sustainable. My discussion in this section focuses on questions of

commodification, rationalisation, and what Ritzer (2004) describes
as the excessive focus on the need for growth, or ‘grobalisation’. I
examine the impact of these tendencies, not least for understanding
politics in the age of globalisation.
FROM MODERNISATION TO CULTURAL IMPERIALISM
In the 1950s and 1960s, most sociological theories of development

argued that Third World societies needed to catch up with the west.
Development would be achieved through a process of modernisation,
which basically meant the adoption of western technology and
values, such as the need for economic growth, meritocracy and
entrepreneurship. This approach did not necessarily conform to the
reality of western development, and it would be difficult to claim that
the US in the 1950s was in any sense a meritocracy. But the ideological
role of modernisation theory was important, and it influenced key
figures in both First and Third Worlds, who believed that this was
the way to ‘catch up’ with modern, western societies. Various grand
theories of development emerged, such as Rostow’s theory that all
societies pass through similar stages of development on their way
to the end-goal of a modern, consumer society, not unlike the US in
the 1950s (Rostow 1960). As part of this process of modernisation, it
was argued that developing societies should westernise both media
practices and cultural values and products. The development of an
independent mass media, adopting (supposedly) western values of
efficiency, professionalism and cutting-edge technology was seen as
an intrinsic part of the modernisation process.
By the 1960s, this conservative view was increasingly rejected in the
developing world. Disappointed by the promises of development, and
inspired by successful resistance in Vietnam and Cuba, parts of the
Third World began to radicalise, questioning the need for development
through westernisation. Development was still regarded as necessary,
but emphasis was now placed on finding alternative paths, which
included the rejection of western ‘neo-colonialism’. It was now argued
that wholesale contact with the west actually hindered development,
and led to an intensification of western domination. Neo-colonialism
took place through western transnational domination of specific
developing countries, and through western domination of the world
economy. For this dependency approach, the end of colonialism had
not led to the end of imperialism.
One area in which the west continued to dominate was the

media. Contact with the west did not lead to modernisation, but
to the continued promotion of westernisation. The western media
were therefore agents of cultural imperialism. Through ownership,
education, or the diffusion of western values, the media promoted
conservative western values that undermined local cultures, and
therefore the resources on which the foundations of alternative
development strategies could be built. This cultural imperialism could
have a directly political effect, as in the case of Chile from 1970 to 1973,
when the media played a role in undermining the elected socialist
government of Salvador Allende, which was eventually overthrown
in a US-backed military coup in 1973. Cultural imperialism was thus
a major issue in the developing world in the Cold War era, specifically
in the context of US intervention and the widespread belief that
cultural flows had a propaganda effect, justifying wider intervention
through the promotion of the ‘American dream’ (Tunstall 1977;
Schiller 1979; Seabrook 2004).
In the era of globalisation, the language is couched in terms of the
global destroying the local, but the argument is very much the same.
Globalisation is said to lead to cultural homogenisation, in which
local cultures are destroyed through the homogenising effects of the
western media. Indeed, this process is accelerating with the growth
of genuinely global media such as satellite television. Thus, Barnet
and Cavanagh argue that
[s]atellites, cables, walkmans, videocassette recorders, CDs, and other

marvels of entertainment technology have created the arteries through which
modern entertainment conglomerates are homogenizing global culture. With
the toppling of the Berlin Wall and the embrace of free market ideologies
in former and current communist countries, literally the entire planet is
being wired into music, movies, news , television programmes and other
cultural products that originate primarily in the film and recording studios
of the US. The impact of this homogenization on the rich cultural diversity of
communities all around the world is immense, and its contours are beginning
to emerge. (Barnet and Cavanagh 2001: 169)
Post-9/11, these critiques are linked to a more overtly propagandistic

role for the US culture industries, which are said to be central to
the promotion of US imperialism. Sardar and Wyn Davies claim
that Hollywood ‘has shaped America’s self-image and projected the
rightness and justification of its will and claim to empire’. They go
on to suggest that ‘[t]he business of show business is the business of

colonising all minds and undermining all imaginations’ (Sardar and
Wyn Davies 2004: 121, 159). The ‘soft’ cultural power embedded in the
US culture industries is thus as central to imperialism as the economic
power of the dollar and the hard power of the US military.
The cultural imperialism thesis thus makes the following
arguments:
1. Through wider (political, social, economic) forms of domination,

the west controls the ‘global media’;
2. Through this control it leads to the elimination of cultural
difference, or, in other words, the (western-dominated) global
media industries destroy local cultures;
3. This can have wider political effects, as consumers are seduced by
the ‘American dream’, and are less likely to search for alternatives
to Americanisation.
THE CULTURAL IMPERIALISM THESIS: AN ASSESSMENT
Although I want to question the broad argument of the cultural

imperialism (CI) thesis, I first want to suggest that it should not be
rejected out of hand. Cultural flows are massively unequal, and there
is a tendency towards cultural standardisation in the world. The
ubiquitous western brands, like Coca Cola, McDonald’s and KFC,
selling products but also a ‘lifestyle’, are testimony to this fact. But
does this really mean the end of cultural difference, or that consumers
of western brands – whether films, television programmes or junk
food – are merely passive dupes of westernisation? I want partly
to challenge this contention, by looking at three closely related
issues: first, the question of the ‘sending culture’; second, that of
the ‘receiving culture’; and third, the relationship between the
global and the local. I then want to suggest that some of the fears of
cultural homogenisation themselves betray a patronising, romantic,
and indeed imperialist approach to local cultures. The force of this
critique paves the way for a reconsideration of the role of the free,
sovereign consumer, exercising his or her freedom in the marketplace,
an issue taken up in the final sections.
The CI thesis can first be faulted for its tendency to homogenise
the culture of the ‘sending’ country. In most cases, this means the US.
There is an implicit assumption that all of the cultural products that
originate from the US somehow represent the ideology of the dominant
forces in US society. But this is clearly not the case, and of course
those same forces often come into conflict with the entertainment
industry, which is often accused of promoting decadent liberal values.
There are many examples of such conflicts, such as George Bush
Sr’s assertion that he wished American families to be more like The
Waltons than The Simpsons. At its peak, The Simpsons was one of the
most subversive (and funny) programmes ever to grace our television
screens. It was hardly a programme that was guilty of promoting the
‘propaganda’ of the ‘American dream’. The owners of this series are
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network, some of whose television coverage
could be described as propaganda. This was true in its abysmally
crude pro-war coverage of the conflict with Iraq in 2003. However,
two points that relate directly to the CI thesis need stressing. First,
while the Fox network may be owned and run by US conservatives,
not all of its output is conservative, or a simple promotion of the
American dream. Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, ensured full
creative control for the makers of that programme. Indeed, in 2003
one episode satirised the gung-ho coverage of the Fox network’s news
channel, and the latter is rumoured to have withdrawn the threat
of a lawsuit only when it realised that the former was owned by the
same company.1 Provided it makes them money, Fox are happy to
comply with creative freedom for The Simpsons. Second, the effects of
the pro-war propaganda cannot be predicted in advance – certainly,
its effect in Europe was to harden anti-war sentiments.
Similar points could be made for the popularity of many other
US products. The global success of Nirvana and hip-hop cannot be
regarded as straightforward propagation of the values of the white,
middle-class conservative US. Of course, it is crucial to the companies
that promote these products that they make a profit, but this only
demonstrates that making a profit and challenging those same US
conservative values can be compatible. The economics of making
money do not uniformly dictate the promotion of a homogenised,
conservative US. Indeed, among the main critics of American popular
culture is the American right, who tend to regard it as a purveyor of
decadent liberal values.
Just as the CI thesis tends to homogenise the sending culture, it
tends to make similar assumptions about the receiving culture. In
some cases, complaints that cultural imperialism is undermining
the nation are made by authoritarian state elites who have little
claim to represent the nation, or progressive culture and politics.
Resistance to Americanisation dates back to Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union in the 1930s. Too often, CI theorists take complaints

of cultural homogenisation at face value, and conflate the interests
of state elites with those of national culture (Tomlinson 1991: Ch.
3). Similarly, CI theorists often assume that the effects on receiving
audiences can be predicted. But things are more complicated than
that, and audiences construct their own meanings from specific
media ‘texts’. Many foreign products do not actually sell in sufficient
quantities to realise a profit, and ‘local’ products remain very popular
– the Indian film industry, for example. Moreover, those foreign
products that do sell have unpredictable effects. Similarly, it is too
one-sided to claim that ‘global’ (or western) destroys ‘local’. In many
cases, western companies have found that they have had to draw
on, rather than destroy, the local. Thus, Music Television (MTV)
attempted to promote a globally homogeneous music policy when
it first expanded its operations (Negus 1996). However, this was not
an economic success, and so it responded by localising its operations,
and therefore played more local music alongside its more standardised
product. Similarly, McDonald’s in India does not sell beef or pork
products, but instead sells its ‘McVeggie’ burger and the ‘McAloo
Tikki’ burger (a potato dish), while pizza chains have toppings such
as the ‘Peppy Paneer’ and ‘Chicken Chettinad’. Global companies
thus localise in specific settings, and the same point applies to
global commodities – that is, they become ‘hybridised’. It may be
true that corporate executives want to promote a safety-first policy,
and promote homogenised, predictable, safe, commercial rubbish.
There is certainly a tendency for this to happen – the recent success
of disposable, promotional pop shows on British television is just
one of many examples. But there are counter-tendencies too, and
if companies wish to make money they have to respond to these
pressures. This is not to accept that entertainment companies are
simply responding to our individual needs as we express them in the
marketplace; it is only to question the view that we, or consumers
in the Third World, are simply passive dupes.
Indeed, the CI thesis too easily accepts that we – or ‘they’ in the
Third World – are victims, easily subject to the manipulative practices
of the culture industries. This criticism all too easily becomes a
romantic apology for the supposed authenticity of local cultures,
and a call for their decontamination from western commercialism
through cultural delinking. This argument is often made by those
who implicitly assume that they are ‘above’ such commercialism,
unlike the ‘ignorant masses’ of the First World, and the ‘manipulated
masses’ of the Third. Unfortunately for such patronising romantics,

connections between different cultures are so old that one wonders
when ‘authentic’ culture actually existed. As Marshall Sahlins
points out:
Why are well-meaning Westerners so concerned that the opening of a Colonel

Sanders in Beijing means the end of Chinese culture? A fatal Americanization.
But we have had Chinese restaurants in America for over a century, and it
hasn’t made us Chinese. On the contrary, we obliged the Chinese to invent
chop suey. What could be more American than that? French fries? (Sahlins
(1999: 34)
Such arguments are often linked to the idea of global hybridity, in

which global and local interlink in culturally specific ways (Tomlinson
2000: Ch. 4). The idea of hybridity is in many respects useful, as it
undermines the argument that there exist pure cultures unaffected
by a long history of cultural flows between different regions. At its
worst, then, the CI thesis is itself guilty of cultural imperialism,
as it assumes that ‘local cultures’ are pure, static and unchanging,
and by implication too weak to resist the homogenising thrust of
‘Americanisation’.
But on the other hand, these points beg the question of how
contemporary culture itself should be understood. In terms of consumer
culture, one possible interpretation is that audience responses to
particular cultural goods always take on a resistant quality, which
challenges the intentions of the (supposedly) conservative culture
industries. This is an argument often associated with cultural theorists
such as John Fiske (1989). Another, not unrelated interpretation, is
that the western culture industries are simply providing a service,
expanding the choices available to rational, sovereign consumers in
the marketplace. In both approaches, the assumption is made that
we are free to choose, which either ignores or celebrates the wider
social context in which such commercial transactions take place. This
is the context of the dominance of free-market consumer capitalism.
In cultural populist approaches such as that endorsed by Fiske, this
largely disappears from the analysis (McGuigan 1992); while in the
case of the celebration of consumer culture, we essentially return to
the assumption that exercising consumer choice in the marketplace
represents the freest choice available to humanity. This argument
is close to Giddens’ position of global hybridity, in which cultural
flows have no direction. But this argument also presupposes the view
that the market is the natural arena for social interaction – hardly
a politically neutral view (Scott 1997: 6). We thus arrive back at
neoliberalism, and the related claim that the ‘liberal internationalism’
(theoretically) promoted by US hegemony represents freedom. These
arguments are considered in detail in the following sections. In the
following section I consider the question of liberal internationalism,
returning thereafter to the question of culture, and how this relates
to ideas of freedom and rights.
NEOLIBERALISM, RIGHTS AND UNIVERSALISM
The critique of cultural imperialism outlined above suggests that it is

one-sided, if not mistaken, to view the diffusion of specific cultural
products from the ‘west’ to the ‘developing world’ as imperialist. My
own critique left room for some recognition that while the CI thesis
is one-sided, it does at least attempt to recognise the reality of power
relations in the world order. I return to this issue in the following
section, but first we need to discuss one possible interpretation of
the critique of the CI thesis. This is the argument that, rather than
imposing products on consumers in the developing world, such
diffusion actually allows consumers to express their preferences,
choices and therefore freedom in the context of a competitive
marketplace. In other words, this critique of the CI thesis has much
broader implications, as it embraces wider assumptions about human
freedom and rights, and their supposed universal applicability. It
also, of course, returns us to the questions of neoliberalism and
Americanisation.
This section therefore examines the relationship between human
rights, freedom and US hegemony in the global order. It starts by
briefly defining human rights, and outlining some of the contentious
points around the idea. It then moves on to examine how human
rights discourse has been linked to the US state’s perception of itself,
and its hegemonic role in the international order. Particular attention
is paid to the Bush administration. As was argued in Chapter 4, in
some respects the Project for the New American Century can be
considered a liberal cosmopolitan project, even if these principles
are exercised through unilateral means and are therefore applied
inconsistently. There is thus some overlap with the arguments made
in that chapter, but in this case they are related more explicitly to
the question of rights.
The idea of human rights can be traced back to ancient Greece,

but they were most fully developed from the seventeenth century
onwards. Hobbes challenged the idea of the divine right of kings
and attempted to ground the state in a social contract between ruler
and ruled, whereby the latter have obligations to accept the right
to rule of the former, provided that the state provides the right to
security for its subjects. The first natural law theorist, John Locke,
argued that humans have rights precisely because of their humanity.
He argues that the pre-contract state of nature was based on peaceful
coexistence in which people engaged in commercial activity and
exchange, but that a state was necessary to arbitrate in the case
of disputes over property and exchange in the free market. Locke
therefore argued in favour of a limited state, in which the state
exercised minimal interference in the behaviour of individuals, thus
allowing them to exercise their freedom through choices made in the
free market. Central to Locke’s conception were the natural rights to
life, liberty and property. Rights theory has developed substantially
since Locke’s day, but his argument continues to provide the basis
for liberal theories of universal human rights.
The idea of universal rights has been challenged on three related
grounds. First, that there is no such thing as natural law, and that
rights can only ever be established through states granting civil
liberties to individuals. Rights are therefore historically specific and
only exist within particular social and political communities. This
point is not necessarily an argument against the desirability of human
rights, but it is based on a recognition that they must be grounded in
social and political realities. Second, the argument is often made that
rights are too selective, and that their origins in western, individualist
liberal thought means that social, economic and collective rights
tend to be ignored. These include the ‘positive rights’ identified by
Berlin (1969), such as the right to a basic income, food, clothing and
shelter. ‘Negative’ freedoms, based on the right to exercise individual
autonomy from the state, through ownership of private property,
free speech and so on, do not guarantee these rights. Indeed, because
of the inequalities associated with ownership of private property –
advocated by liberal rights theory – some critics argue that individual
rights actually undermine collective rights. These points lead to a
third objection, which is that ‘universal rights’ are nothing of the
sort, and that the claim to universalism is actually made to justify
western rights over other ideas about rights. This ignores not only
the different social context identified by the first criticism, but also
the very different cultural values that exist in the world order – a
critique we have already come across in Chapter 3, in the context of
‘communitarian’ and ‘local’ critiques of cosmopolitanism.
These critiques of universalism are complicated further when we
come to examine the international sphere, because this is made
up of a world of (sovereign) nation-states. Although globalisation
is sometimes associated with the rise of a cosmopolitan, universal
human rights regime, this has not led to anything like a global
consensus around human rights. This is partly because of the power
of the critiques of universal rights (though, as we will see, some of
these are problematic), but also because of the difficulty of finding
an effective enforcer of global human rights, which again brings us
back to the question of US hegemony in the global order.
Since its foundation, the US state has regarded itself as the bastion
of liberalism, and quite exceptional in terms of its exercising the
liberal principles of liberty, opportunity and democracy. The US thus
regards itself as an exceptional state, one that has a special status and
is more advanced and freer than the rest of the world. This has led
to some considerable suspicion of the rest of the world, which has
given rise to the powerful impulse towards isolationism. At the same
time, the US state has also regarded itself as a model for the rest of the
world, and so has simultaneously promoted engagement with others,
so that they may learn from its example. This self-belief is closely
linked to the idea of US ‘manifest destiny’ (Weinberg 1963): that US
intervention is designed, in the words of President Wilson in 1916,
to ‘make the world safe for democracy’ (cited in Heffer 1976: 249).
Indeed, these beliefs go to the heart of state formation and expansion
in the US itself, which was justified on the grounds that it meant
extending the area of freedom, and therefore equating US national
interest and the universal interest of humanity (Foner 1998: Ch. 4).
As US President Polk put it in 1845, ‘foreign powers do not seem to
appreciate the true character of our government. To enlarge its limits
is to extend the dominions of peace’ (cited in McGrew 2000: 229).
It is not surprising, then, that William Appelman Williams argued
that the US has always had an imperial vision based on the idea of
‘empire as a way of life’ (Williams 1980). In many ways, this is not so
different from the British Empire’s perception of itself (Howe 2003),
but the US is crucially different in one respect. Although the US has
engaged in a number of colonial enterprises in its past, it has not
developed the kind of territorial empires that existed in Europe until
the second half of the twentieth century (Williams 1980). The US
has certainly engaged in many bloody interventions, but these have

been designed to promote territorial sovereignty (since 1945 at least),
albeit through independent states friendly to US interests.
This self-perception depends upon the suppression of many bloody
episodes in US history, including the slaughter of native Americans,
the annexation of territory in the making of the US, the practice of
slavery and ongoing institutionalised discrimination, and civil war.
Moreover, American freedom has itself been contested throughout
that country’s history, and this has included important struggles for
labour and social rights by a variety of political and social movements
(Foner 1998). Nevertheless, the image of US manifest destiny is an
important one, as it has helped to shape US foreign policy since the
state’s foundation.
Since the Monroe doctrine of 1823, the US has advocated an
interventionist policy in its own backyard. After the First World War,
President Wilson advocated a far more interventionist role for the
US globally, and he envisaged that this would take place through
multilateral institutions. To an extent, this ideal was defeated by
isolationists in Congress, although this did not prevent continued
interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, in the
post-war period the US’s role as one of the two superpowers was
assured. As we saw in Chapters 3 and 4, this was partly due to the
country’s international commitments, alongside promotion of the
related ideals of anti-communism, freedom and universal human
rights. The US thus played a central role in the formation of the
United Nations, and in the drawing up of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights in 1948. In declaring itself the leader of the free
world, the US thereby globalised the idea that it was a desirable model
for the rest of the world. The idea of the inseparability of the US
national interest and the universal interest was thus also globalised.
In practice, this did not stop the US from acting in unaccountable
ways or of putting its state interests first (as in the cases of voting
power at the Security Council and the agreement at Bretton Woods),
but the discourse of universal human rights was not just self-serving
rhetoric. Above all, it paved the way for the beginning of the end
of colonialism, as independence movements advocated the right of
self-determination for sovereign nation–states.
But there were also problems with the discourse of universal
rights which were contested on the basis of their selectivity. The
state socialist world placed greater emphasis on social and economic
rights, emphasising the ‘positive’ freedoms later identified by Berlin.
Some reference was made to social and economic rights in the UN

Declaration, but critics felt that far more emphasis was placed on
liberal, individual rights such as freedom of speech and movement,
and above all the right to own property. The former colonial world
also tended to emphasise a less ‘American-centric’ definition of rights,
which involved allowing the new states to adopt a non-aligned path
independent of both capitalism and communism. The basis of this
non-alignment was often vague, but the search itself often caused
hostility on the part of the US, which often conflated nationalism
with communism, a policy which tended to become a self-fulfilling
prophecy as US hostility led to some nations being forced to
become Soviet allies. The US in turn also gave its support to many
authoritarian, but anti-communist regimes, and to insurgents that
played a central role in the defeat of communism. Indeed, support
was extended to Islamic political movements in Afghanistan, some
of which came later to be regarded as ‘evil’ opponents of freedom
and democracy (Mamdani 2004: Ch. 3). The US policy of support for
democracy, human rights and the ‘free market’ thus often became
support for only the third of these three principles, which in turn
fuelled the suspicion that human rights amounted to the right to own
private property. For instance, the Reagan administration, through
former US ambassador to the UN Jeanne Kirkpatrick, distinguished
between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes (Kirkpatrick 1982).
Drawing on Hayek (1960), Kirkpatrick argued that the latter were
preferable to the former because they still allowed negative freedoms
to operate, while the former did not. Although this was an argument
used to justify conservative, ‘realist’ foreign policy, and particularly
the Reaganite policy of intervention through ‘low-intensity conflict’
(Halliday 1989: Ch. 3), it was also one that attempted to provide some
ethical foundations to the policy that were rooted in liberalism. That
these foundations were, to say the least, questionable was also true
– for example, the only freedoms that Chile under Pinochet allowed
was the right to own private property and endorsement of the free
market, and the state essentially crushed anyone who got in the way
of these rights. While this could be partly explained by the nature of
power-politics in the Cold War, it also reflected the one-sided nature
of liberal rights.
This was also clear with the end of the Cold War, which presented new
challenges and opportunities for US hegemony and universal human
rights. On the one hand, the US became the one major superpower
in the world, which potentially gave it unrivalled power. Moreover,
the collapse of communism intensified the promotion of liberal

internationalism, and in particular of the neoliberal direction that the
US state had promoted since the Reagan presidency. Furthermore, it
was now argued that the end of the Cold War provided fertile ground
for the genuine promotion of liberal internationalist values, as the
‘new world order’ meant that the US no longer had to compromise
human rights promotion in the face of a ‘communist threat’. In this
context it was not surprising that books claiming that there was no
alternative to liberal democracy and the free market, and indeed that
History had come to an end, became bestsellers (Fukuyama 1992).
On the other hand, US hegemony was perceived to be under threat
in a number of ways. The rise of East Asia was seen as a particular
challenge, especially when combined with the twin deficits faced
by the US in the early 1990s. Indeed, the emergence of a powerful
economic bloc in East Asia was also accompanied by renewed debates
about the universalism of western liberal rights, and the importance
of social and economic rights that were supposedly expressed in
the idea of ‘Asian values’ (Bangkok Declaration 1993). There was
also fear that new threats were emerging in the South, based on the
breakdown of states, growing populations, poverty, lawlessness and
the continued threat from rogue states that threatened US interests,
and therefore the interests of universal freedom (Kaplan 1994).
Perhaps above all, there was a new perceived threat based on the
clash between different cultures, particularly between the freedom-
loving west and a homogeneous alternative cultural force united by
the belief in Islamic religious doctrine (Huntington 1996: 29).
This idea of a clash of civilisations had some influence on US
thinking both before and after the attacks in September 2001, although
interestingly Huntington’s work is at times quite ambiguous. He
clearly does see the west as superior to the other cultural formations
identified in his book, but at the same time he does not express the
same cultural certainties as Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’. He was at
times quite critical of the west’s claim to represent universal ideals,
and indeed of western power (see Huntington 1996: 310). On the
other hand, in homogenising both Islam and the west (and other
cultures), he allowed no room for conflict within cultures. At one
point he even argues that ‘[t]he underlying problem for the West
is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization
whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and
are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.’ (Huntington 1996:
217) Interestingly, Huntington then goes on to problematise the
west in its dealings with Islam, arguing that western intervention in

‘other civilisations’ is bound to promote and intensify conflict. It is
for this reason that Huntington opposed the war in Iraq, and indeed
why prominent neoconservatives have criticised him and others for
being right-wing ‘anti-Americans’ (Kaplan 1998). But Huntington’s
arguments concerning the dangers of US power tend to be forgotten,
and crude interpretations of the clash of civilisations have instead
been used to mobilise support for war against ‘backward cultures’,
which reject Huntington’s pessimism concerning cultural change
and instead argue that US power can be used for cultural, political
and economic progress. Conservative uncertainties such as those
associated with Robert Kaplan and Huntington therefore question
the role of the US state in a uni-polar world.
Whatever the specific disagreements over policy after the Cold War,
the US continued to promote the ideal of itself as a model for the rest
of the world. Bill Clinton echoed a long line of US presidents when
he talked of the need for America to ‘continue to lead the world we
did so much to make’, adding that ‘our mission is timeless’ (Clinton
1993), while Bush Sr talked of the US’s ‘unique responsibility’ (Bush
1992). The US state found a new mission for itself after Saddam
Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, and after the Gulf War
of 1991 Bush Sr talked of a ‘new world order’. A number of US-led
interventions took place against ‘rogue’ and ‘failed’ states, including
Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Sudan and Serbia. There were
also some significant changes in policy – most important, the US
state, as well as institutions such as the World Bank, began to promote
democratisation as a crucial policy for the developing world. In
the 1950s and 1960s, when modernisation theory dominated US
thinking, the argument was made that democracy would follow
development as a by-product of economic growth and social and
political modernisation. In the 1990s, the argument was made that
democratisation and good governance were essential to democracy
because they would lead to the promotion of market-friendly policies
and therefore freedom, human rights and economic growth. This
change in the policy from adjustment in the 1980s to (global)
competitiveness in the 1990s was only a change in form, not content,
and indeed in many respects neoliberal policies of market expansion
intensified (see Chapter 5). In terms of power, Clinton envisaged
a complementary policy of ‘engagement and enlargement’, which
entailed using a multilateral approach whenever possible in order
to expand market democracies, and deal with the ‘zones of war’ in
the international order. These were largely identified as rogue states,

which should be contained in the short term and incorporated into
the liberal order in the longer term (Clinton 1994; Litwak 2000). This
incorporation could take the form of incentives, such as conditions
applied to aid or trade sanctions, but in some cases the use of military
power was also deemed to be acceptable. These arguments were linked
not only to the idea that free markets would promote growth and
prosperity, but also to the idea that liberal democracies were more
stable and peaceful, and therefore more conducive to a democratic
peace, which was itself sometimes linked to Kant’s theory of perpetual,
republican peace (Doyle 1983; Russett 1990). Democratisation was
therefore accompanied by continued neoliberal policies such as
trade liberalisation and privatisation, and if necessary by (selective)
humanitarian intervention in the case of failed states. It was these
policies that essentially came to be associated with globalisation and
the (neo)liberal internationalist project.
For a wide range of globalisation theorists, these post-Cold war
developments were welcomed. The Clinton and Blair ‘Third Way’
was particularly conducive to policies of global engagement through
multilateral institutions, the promotion of human rights through
intervention, democratisation, and market expansion. Indeed,
in terms of rights, state guarantees of positive freedoms become
irrelevant, on the grounds that market-friendly policies can ensure
that these will be fulfilled without the bureaucracy and hierarchy
of state intervention. In this account, globalisation facilitates a
progressive, liberal internationalist project with desirable political
outcomes. The Bush administration, on the other hand, like many of
the fundamentalisms to which it is opposed, represents a ‘regressive
globalisation’ based on the self-interest of US state power (Kaldor et
al. 2003; Shaw 2003).
But, as earlier chapters argued, this dichotomy is unsatisfactory, and
the linkage of universal rights, globalisation and US hegemony persists,
albeit in a more unilateral form. Certainly the neoconservatives in
the Bush administration were critical of Bush Sr and Clinton. They
grew particularly impatient with the way in which they dealt with
multilateral institutions, as well as their (comparative) reluctance
fully to utilise hard, military power. Whether or not this is an
accurate representation of those presidencies is debatable, and some
commentators have argued that Clinton was particularly effective in
strengthening US interests against potential competitors (Bacevich
2002). Certainly, as we have seen, the commitment to multilateral
rules and to expanding free trade in many ways undermined the

development prospects of much of the world – and so the arguments
about positive rights will not go away. But more important is the fact
that the neoconservative project largely saw itself as continuing the
project of liberal internationalist expansion, albeit by different and
more openly unilateralist means. This not only paved the way for
new certainties in the post-Cold War world, and thus the rejection
of Huntington and Robert Kaplan, but reinvigorated the idea that
the US state was a force for the global good. Indeed, it was actually
more optimistic concerning the expansion of liberalism and freedom
than its predecessors. Perhaps the most prominent neoconservative
thinker and official, Paul Wolfowitz has argued that ‘nothing could
be less realistic than the version of the “realist” view of foreign
policy that dismisses human rights as an important tool of American
foreign policy … what is most impressive is how often promoting
democracy has actually advanced American interests (Wolfowitz
2000: 38)’ The US’s National Security Strategy for 2002 stated that
‘[t]he United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend
the benefits of freedom across the globe … We will actively work to
bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free
trade to every corner of the world.’ (National Security Strategy 2002)
Neoconservatives themselves therefore partially endorse Wilsonian
liberal internationalism, albeit in a unilateralist context, and through
the use of military power to promote American liberalism abroad
(Podhoretz 1999; Kagan and Kristol 2000).
As we saw in Chapter 4, these principles have been applied
inconsistently, partly because unilateralism itself involves
considerable compromise with democratic principles, and also
because neoconservatives themselves are divided on these issues.2 In
particular, there is also a more straightforward ‘realist’ fear of the rise
of rival powers to US dominance, and this is particularly applied to
the rise of China, Russia, and ‘Arab and Islamic nationalism’.3 Indeed,
in 1992 Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby had argued for preventive
policies against potential competitors, an argument treated with
considerable hostility at the time (see Bacevich 2002: 44). Thus, even
in its idealist, democratic-globalist form, neoconservative foreign
policy has combined liberal internationalism with an advocacy of
US domination.4
But is this as different from Clinton as is sometimes implied? The
substance of the Libby–Wolfowitz argument influenced Clintonite
policy on rogue states and liberal expansion (Bacevich 2002), and is
a major reason why Bobbit admired Clinton’s presidency so much

(see Chapter 4). Indeed, prior to 9/11, and despite his own criticisms
of Clintonite complacency, Wolfowitz himself argued that many had
come round to the arguments that he had made in 1992, arguing that
many liberal critics now ‘seem quite comfortable with the idea of a
Pax Americana’ (Wolfowitz 2000). Certainly, post-9/11, it was not
only neoconservatives who were openly advocating the use of ‘hard’
power, partly to deter potential rivals.5 This more open advocacy of
military power was one of the reasons why neoconservatives were so
critical of Clinton’s policy of giving less priority to military spending.6
Neoconservatives called for renewal of the Reagan Doctrine (Project
for the New American Century 2000) and the more overt use of US
unilateralism, and hard, military power. This call for a return to
Reaganite policies and the promotion of democracy was ironic, for
the Reagan administration was hardly sympathetic to the promotion
of liberal democracy, and indeed had allied itself with the likes of
Saddam Hussein and the forerunners of al Qaeda.
Having said that, before the fiasco of the war and its aftermath
in Iraq, neoconservatives were very optimistic about the capacity of
the US to promote ‘universal’ rights and expand democracy in the
region. Indeed, neoconservative advocacy of the democratisation of
the Middle East is a major source of concern to traditional realists in
the Republican Party (Hulsman 2004; Halper and Clarke 2004). But
the more idealist neoconservatives did not share these reservations.
For example, neoconservative commentator Thomas Barnett divides
the world into a ‘functioning core’ and a ‘non-integrating gap’, and
frames the divide in terms of the degree of states’ incorporation into
‘globalisation’ (Barnett 2003). State Department Director of Policy
Planning Richard Haass argues that these divisions mean that the core,
functioning states have an obligation to intervene in non-functioning
states that have limited rights of sovereignty, a duty that has increased
since the attacks on 11 September 2001 (Mazarr 2003: 508). Mazarr,
a senior official at the Department of Defence and admirer of Bush’s
‘idealism’, goes as far as suggesting that it represents an idealism
worthy of the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson (Mazarr
2003: 509). What is crucial here is the belief that the world can be
re-made in the US’s own self-image, and therefore, in the process,
that human rights, democracy and freedom can be universalised.
As two prominent neoconservatives argue, ‘democracy is a political
choice, an act of will … History suggests it comes most effectively
from the United States.’ (Kaplan and Kristol 2003: 108–9) In this
argument, liberal cosmopolitan ideals can be unilaterally promoted

by the US state, rather than, say, through the United Nations. This
takes us back to the arguments of Bush, Rice and Blair outlined in
Chapter 4, but as we saw there this reflects a basic contradiction,
‘since such principles and ideals are incompatible with the imposed,
unelected global dominance of any single nation’ (Singer 2004: 192).
It is therefore impossible for the US to be both a model for the rest of
the world and the global hegemonic power, for if it is a model to be
followed by others than at some point in the future it must give up its
latter role, something deemed unacceptable by neoconservatives. In
this way, liberal democratic expansion is compromised by the more
important principle of continued US dominance.7
This compromise on the issue of liberal rights is not necessarily
an argument against rights per se. The belief that liberal democratic
government is most conducive to guaranteeing human rights should
not be dismissed out of hand, and a case can be made for universal
human rights and the utility of liberal democracy over other political
forms. In the case of liberal democracy, for all its limitations it is
indeed preferable to dictatorship. Relativist arguments such as
those associated with the ‘Asian values’ debate wrongly assume
that cultures are based on consensus and do not change over time.
Moreover, claims made by authoritarian leaders that Asian culture
demands respect for hierarchy and traditional values beg the question
of how we can know this to be the case when people are denied the
right to express these (or other) views. Certainly many people in
Asia have struggled for democracy, not least because this represents
the best political system for people to exercise their cultural values
fully (though a distinction should be made between liberal and
other forms of democracy). It is therefore no accident that relativist
arguments are most commonly made by powerful people with a
particular interest in preserving a status quo of which they are the
prime beneficiaries. Arguments for cultural relativism should thus
be treated with suspicion. A more powerful argument, outlined in
Chapters 3 and 4, is that liberal universalism has no basis in the real
world, as it ignores the history and specificity of particular social and
political formations. But to describe or even explain such forms does
not justify them. As Beetham points out:
It is difficult to see how a liberal society could ever have emerged in the
first place except by challenging the validity claims of a paternalist and
hierarchical social order; or a democratic polity except by exposing the
distortions or falsehoods underpinning exclusionary forms of politics.

(Beetham 1999: 14)
A commitment to universal rights can therefore be defended, and

indeed liberal rights have been important as defences against more
authoritarian forms of government. But on the other hand, liberal
conceptions of rights are limited, as they do not focus on collective
rights. Indeed, in defending unequal ownership of private property,
it can be argued that liberalism in some respects undermines the
rights of others, as it justifies the power of the propertied over the
propertyless. For this reason, some liberals argue that the freedom of
private property and the ‘free market’ is more important than political
democracy. But this argument sounds remarkably like an ideology
intended to defend the interests of the powerful.
How then do these issues relate to the question of US hegemony?
A number of conclusions can be drawn. First, US hegemony has
historically been committed to liberal internationalism through
sovereign states. This has meant the use, at times of unilateral and,
at other times, multilateral means. It has also involved some attempts
to retreat into isolationism, but international commitments have
largely undermined such a policy, at least since 1945.8 Second, while
the US has genuinely supported state sovereignty, US penetration has
occurred through economic means, via foreign investment, trade
liberalisation and so on; through military means, such as the use and
construction of US bases or even direct intervention; and culturally
through dissemination of US products. Sovereignty has thus been
compromised by the US’s attempts to ensure that independent states
are its allies. Third, the US state’s perception of itself as a defender
of the universal good has been easier to justify during multilateral
‘moments’, but even in the context of rules-based liberalism, this has
not meant that a ‘level playing field’ has been promoted. Indeed, at
worst US military interventions have usually undermined democracy
and rights, and even when they have not they have involved great
cost and very limited, if any, advances in terms of improvements
in human rights. Moreover, in terms of economics, rules-based
neoliberal expansion effectively takes from developing countries the
right to pursue policies that were pursued in earlier periods by the
now developed countries: Put differently if Americanisation means
advanced capitalist societies developing through neoliberal policies of
sovereign states promoting free markets, then US foreign policy, based
on both unilateralist military expansion and multilateral neoliberalism,
actually undermines the prospects for the Americanisation of the world.

Fourth, in terms of rights, US-led liberal internationalism has focused
on individual and not collective rights, which has led to conflict
such as the current debate over so-called Asian values, but implicit
in the rhetoric of globalisation theory is the idea that positive rights
– insofar as they exist – will be guaranteed so long as sovereign
states adopt the correct, market-friendly policies. This can only be
guaranteed through state reform, leading to market-friendly policies
of good governance; or in the case of failed states, nation-building
designed to promote both state sovereignty and market expansion.
The neoconservative project that came to prominence under Bush
was more prepared to use hard, military power and act unilaterally
than previous administrations (though military intervention and
unilateralism were far from rare prior to Bush), but the end-goal
of ‘Americanisation’ or liberal expansion through state sovereignty
and the free market was the same. But the problem with this view
is the assumption that such a model can easily be implemented,
and that conflict and liberal democracy are incompatible. In fact,
something close to the opposite is true: namely, that state sovereignty
and liberal democracy are the outcomes of conflict, as we saw in
Chapters 3 and 4. In a sense, the neoconservative position does accept
this argument, given that it recognises the need for benign force to
overcome dictatorship. But the problem here is the assumption that
this force can provide ‘quick-fix’ solutions that will then lead to the
extension of liberal democracy. Neoconservatives make much of the
success of nation-building in post-war Japan and West Germany,
but crucial to those successes was the existence of domestic social
and political forces to lead the democratic transition. The record
in Afghanistan and Iraq is very different, and popular forces are
in the long term unlikely to enjoy the support of the US. Indeed,
despite consistent warnings from the CIA, neoconservatism’s project
in Iraq was essentially based on a naive belief that Ahmad Chalabi’s
Iraqi National Congress was a serious social force that could lead the
country to liberal democracy. This project was seriously undermined
during the occupation, and Chalabi no longer enjoys the significant
support of any arm of the US state.9 In the case of post-intervention
Iraq, interventionists have divided the population into ‘good’ and
‘evil’ Iraqis (and outsiders), the former said to be clamouring for
western-style free markets and liberal democracy, the latter simply
promoting nihilism. This argument updates Bernard Lewis’s idea
that there are good and bad Muslims, the first of whom can become
like ‘us’, while the latter will always remain irrational (‘them’) (Lewis
1990). But while it is the case that much of the opposition to the
occupation in Iraq is indeed reactionary, it is also the case that the
‘good Iraqis’ have increasingly opposed the occupation, and even
shown some sympathy for some (though not all) insurgent groups
within Iraq. This reflects the bloody nature of the intervention, as well
as the coalition’s own human rights abuses and priorities in post-war
reconstruction, which fuelled the suspicion that US corporate interests
took priority over the needs of Iraqis. The transfer of sovereignty to
the Iraq people in late June 2004 took place in the context of the
continued presence of 138,000 US and a further 20,000 coalition
troops, as well as an estimated 20,000 foreign contractors. All were
fully under US control and immune to Iraqi laws. The Coalition
Provisional Authority passed a number of ‘Bremer orders’ (named
after CPA head Paul Bremer), which essentially privatised Iraqi assets
and gave special preference to US companies10 (IPS 2004: 33; Juhasz
2004). While such laws probably do not represent a general return
to the imperialism of territorial exclusiveness, as theorised by Lenin
(see Chapter 3), they are fully consistent with a US-led, neoliberal
world order. Just as the expansion of the liberal democratic system
of states is compromised by the priority of continued US dominance,
so the so-called freedom of the marketplace takes priority over the
liberal democracy of the sovereign state.11
This final point brings us back to a more general consideration of the
question of liberal democracy. Insofar as it relies on the construction
of institutionally separate ‘economic’ and ‘political’ spheres, and
confines formal politics to the latter, liberal democracy is itself a limited
form of democracy. It therefore rests on a ‘depoliticised politics’, in
which citizens are entitled to vote and to own private property, but
are expected to limit their demands so that there is no excessive
‘intervention’ in the sphere of ‘freedom’ – the market economy (Wood
1995). The tension between liberalism and democracy is therefore
all too apparent, and, when faced with the alleged trade-off between
‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, neoliberals and indeed neoconservatives
opt like Kirkpatrick for the former. The neoconservatives in the Bush
administration may therefore be committed to the expansion of
‘democracy’ to the Middle East and beyond, but it is a limited kind
of democracy, and one that can easily be dispensed with in favour
of the primacy of ‘market expansion’ and/or the guarantee of a state
allied to the US. Just as the most powerful in Asia may have a vested
interest in the supposed exceptionality of Asian values, so the most
powerful in the US and elsewhere may have a vested interest in

proclaiming the universal virtues of liberalism. The falsehoods, cover-
ups and human rights abuses in the war in Iraq are far from being
aberrations in the history of US – and western – foreign policy (and
are reinforced by the US’s recent role in Venezuela and Haiti). Indeed,
labour movements have historically often played central roles in the
expansion of a democratic public sphere, at least in the western world
(Rueschmeyer et al. 1992). These movements have faced a number
of political defeats in the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries, which have
facilitated the increased domination of the market and the erosion
of liberal democratic procedures. Moreover, in Iraq there has been a
limited but significant revival of trade unions since the invasion, but
this is hardly likely to be regarded as a positive development, either
by US neoconservatives or Islamist forces in Iraq.12
Indeed, the spread of liberal democracy to the developing world
since the 1980s can be seen in this light. The Trilateral Commission
of 1975 was an influential document, arguing that there was some
need for concessions to the democratic pressures emanating from
within the developing world (Crozier et al. 1975). However, this
commission – and US government policy under Carter, Reagan, Bush
Sr and Clinton – effectively promoted a limited form of democracy
in which the demands of political and social movements would at
best be contained, through institutional procedures in which the
population chose a government but real power remained in the hands
of the propertied minority. At worst, of course this meant continued
commitment to authoritarian regimes, as in the Kirkpatrick-influenced
Reagan doctrine. This position changed under Clinton, but the limited
approach to democratisation did not. As Samuel Huntington, one of
the contributors to the Trilateral Commission report, argued, ‘in all
democracies, private ownership of property remains the basic norm
in theory and in fact … Defining democracy in terms of goals such
as economic well-being, social justice and overall socio-economic
equity is not … very useful.’ (Huntington 1989: 18) Democratisation
has essentially been limited to formal procedures which have left
largely intact wider social structures that guarantee high levels of
social and political inequality, and have undermined labour and
other movements. Indeed, it could further be argued that neoliberal
expansion actually undermines freedom and human rights, for in
the context of structural adjustment, inequalities have often been
intensified and, given the influence of the Washington institutions
in heavily indebted developing countries, serious questions arise as
to the autonomy that democratic states actually enjoy. This does not
necessarily mean that processes of democratisation have simply been
a ‘sham’: the end of authoritarian and military dictatorships has been
a welcome development. But equally, the limitations are so great
that the designations ‘low-intensity democracy’ or ‘polyarchy’, are
appropriate (Gills et al. 1993: Robinson 1996; Evans 2001). Moreover,
the advances in terms of democratisation have been brought about
largely through the struggles of social movements, while the forces
limiting it have enjoyed the support of the US state – and, of course,
some authoritarian states have continued to enjoy US support.
Some commentators have pointed to a close relationship between
contemporary neoconservatism and the political philosophy of Leo
Strauss (Drury 1997). Strauss argued that the best form of government
is an aristocracy disguised as a democracy, which clearly relates to
neoconservative methods in achieving their goals (the selective
evidence leading to the war in Iraq), but equally to the limited
democracy that they perceive to be desirable for the world, including
the US itself. Indeed, US neoconservatives regard liberal democracy in
the US as something that has been corrupted by excessive liberalism,
and that must therefore be constrained by conservative values.
There is thus a tension between a messianic liberal foreign policy
combined with a suspicion of both liberalism and democracy at
home.13 The former can in some respects be regarded as an attempt
to reinvigorate the latter. But neoconservative foreign policy is not
simply a means of promoting conservatism within the US.14 Instead,
it must be analysed in its own right, which in turn brings out the
tensions between the liberal optimism of neoconservative foreign
policy and the conservative pessimism of domestic policy. Moreover,
these tensions again point to the selectivity of the commitment of
neoconservatism to democracy.
A recent international survey, based on interviews with 36,000
citizens across 47 countries, 15 found that two-thirds of those
interviewed disagreed with the idea that their country was ‘governed
by the will of the people’ (World Economic Forum 2003). There is
thus a crisis of official politics and liberal democracy throughout
the world. In contrast to the neoconservative explanation that this
reflects a ‘lack of values’, the crisis at least partly reflects the fact that
genuine democratic development plays a strictly subordinate role
to the priority of the ‘free market’, whose expansion is endorsed
by neoconservatives. As we have seen, such expansion means
continued and intensified inequality, which in turn undermines
social and economic rights – and, in the context of continued uneven

development, is one reason why cultural homogenisation has not
occurred. But equally, the priority given to market expansion does
promote a tendency towards some forms of cultural standardisation,
and in the process rests on a one-dimensional view of the ideas of
freedom and the ‘common good’. These issues are taken up in the
next section.
GLOBALISATION, FREEDOM AND CULTURAL STANDARDISATION
As the previous section three made clear, neoliberal cases for

globalisation argue that it is desirable because it represents progress,
itself linked to the expansion of freedom and the free market. But
as we saw, this begs the question of what is meant by progress –
a concept that has been used by many thinkers over the last few
hundred years, but often without sufficient critical reflection. This
section expands on this discussion, and reflects in more detail on the
question of progress. As we have seen, too often progress has been
used as a shorthand for becoming more like the west. Thus, apologists
for colonialism often argued that, as western societies represented the
highest stage of civilisation, the colonisation of backward societies
was part of a progressive, civilising mission. This crude apology often
took an overtly racist form, in which the human species was divided
into supposedly superior and inferior races. This led to attempts
to justify all kinds of oppressive practices – including slavery and
other forms of forced labour, segregation, political repression, and
even genocide. While biological racism is usually rejected today,
forms of cultural racism are still very influential. These practices
can take all kinds of distasteful forms, and are unfortunately not
confined to extreme right-wing political parties. For instance, British
governments of both left and right have appealed to a cultural racism
in which fears are expressed of the dominant culture being ‘swamped’
by other, ‘alien’ cultures. These episodes are of less relevance to my
immediate concerns, however, than less overt manifestations of
cultural arrogance, particularly in the period since 1945.
The idea of development has a long history, which goes back at least
as far as the debates over the industrial and commercial revolutions
in Europe and beyond. In the post-war period, it was more closely
linked to discussion of the poorer parts of the world: what came to
be known as the Third World. Led by the US, and inspired by its
liberal internationalist project, western nations began to promote a
specific idea of development in which the Third World would catch

up with the ‘advanced’ countries. Development thus became the
post-war manifestation of the idea of progress. As President Truman
stated in 1949 (cited in Escobar 1995: 3):
More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching
misery. Their food is inadequate, they are victims of disease. Their economic
life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both
to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history humanity
possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people
… I believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples the
benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their
aspirations for a better life … What we envisage is a program of development
based on the concepts of democratic fair dealing…Greater production is the
key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and
more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.
Thus, in the postcolonial era, the ‘west’ was still regarded as the area
containing the most advanced, liberal societies – those that had made
the most progress; the ‘rest’ (or at least the non-communist world)
could catch up by travelling along a similar path to development
as had (supposedly) been followed by the former. This process of
liberal internationalist modernisation could be achieved through
a combination of economic growth and the adoption of western
values, such as individualist entrepreneurship. Before the resurgence
of neoliberalism, development was compatible with the adoption of
strategies of import-substitution industrialisation (ISI) (see Chapter
5). But from the 1980s onwards, statist ISI strategies were criticised
as economically inefficient by the newly converted neoliberals of
western and Third World governments, international institutions
and so on. Both neoliberals and more radical thinkers argued
that development failed, as it did not lead to catch-up or poverty
alleviation. In relation to these contentions, it has been argued that
globalisation has rendered development centred on the nation-state
increasingly irrelevant. The task of the nation-state – development
– was now handed over to ‘global markets’. The desired result was
said to be a global society based on market expansion, individualism,
fragmentation and disembeddedness, enhanced risk and opportunity,
and consumerism. For globalisation theorists like Giddens, such
‘free-floating’ phenomena are simply products of modernity, and
cannot be tied to a particular location. But, clearly market, expansion,
individualism and consumerism are not as placeless as this argument

contends (Scott 1997: 9–10). Indeed, they are not so far removed
from the older project of western modernisation. Seen in this light,
globalisation is in some respects a new form of westernisation, linked
to the project of market expansion (see Chapter 2).
These points have enormous implications for how we think about
the relationship between globalisation, culture and human rights.
While there are strong grounds for rejecting some versions of the
cultural imperialism thesis, this does not mean that alternative theories
based on a world of directionless cultural flows or disembedded ‘free
markets’ is more satisfactory. Rather than trying to identify complete
homogenisation or total fragmentation, we should instead refer to
(selective) processes of cultural standardisation. We may consume
different consumer goods throughout the world, or give different
meanings to similar goods in different places, but more important is
the fact of the spread of consumer culture, and with it the increased
commodification and rationalisation of the world. In this respect,
irrespective of the effects of particular cultural products, globalisation
does lead to some processes of cultural standardisation, through the
almost exclusive promotion of a (global) society that champions the
maximisation of production, economic growth and consumption,
regardless of social and environmental consequences. This argument
presupposes an account of culture that focuses less on the analysis
of particular cultural products, and more on culture as a ‘way of life’
(Williams 1958). Tomlinson argues accordingly that
[t]o grasp the order of ‘blame’ in cultural domination we have to think of

capitalism as something wider than the practices of individual capitalist
organisations, however large and powerful. This wider view of capitalism
as one of the key autonomized institutions of modernity represents it as
something within which the routine practices both of ordinary people and
of individual capitalist organisations are locked. It is in this wide sense that
we can speak of a ‘culture’ of capitalism. But here the notion of blame is
more problematic: it is not individual practices we are blaming, but a
contextualising structure: capitalism not just as economic practices but
as the central (dominant) position of economic practices within the social
ordering of collective existence. (Tomlinson 1991: 168)
The rest of this section will examine these issues through a

critique of western-led cultural standardisation, drawing on this
wider definition of culture as a way of life. Chapter 5 already
questioned the contention that pro-free-market policies were leading

to economic convergence between richer and poorer countries and
peoples, insisting that, if anything, there was increased divergence. It
therefore undermined the argument that ‘catch-up’ was increasingly
attainable. Here, the focus will mainly be on whether such ‘catch-up’
is desirable (Sutcliffe 1999). However, in order to address the question
of desirability, some further comments on attainability must first
be made, which relate to the environmental costs of development.
It is unlikely that all societies could develop along similar lines to
western societies, because the strain on global resources would be
enormous. Moreover, many forms of economic growth are likely
to intensify existing problems of global warming, pollution, ozone
depletion and the destruction of biodiversity. As long ago as 1928,
Gandhi warned:
God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner
of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom is
today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took
to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.
(cited in Allen 1992: 389)
Radical environmentalists argue that environmental problems are

not simply an unfortunate accident, but are actually an intrinsic
part of the problems of the modern world. Western philosophy puts
humans above nature, and argues that the former should use the
latter for their own purposes. This anthropocentric perspective argues
that nature is a resource to be plundered, and used instrumentally
for human development. This is reflected in the western obsession
with economic growth, and increasing production and consumption.
Indeed, progress is often conceptualised in precisely these very narrow
terms. The health of a nation is often reduced to quantitative increases
in Gross National Product (GNP), despite the fact that this may
include severe costs to the environment, and fails to incorporate social
costs. Environmentalists have tried to develop accounting methods
that more accurately incorporate measurements of sustainability.
These include the Adjusted National Product, which subtracts
any effects that are detrimental to human capital (such as health
considerations), natural capital (such as consumed non-renewable
resources), and wider sustainability losses such as species extinction.
Other measures include the Genuine Progress Indicator (Redefining
Progress 2003), developed in 1995 in the context of the US stock
market-and consumer-led boom that came to an end in 2000. This

attempts to modify GDP through adding household and voluntary
work, and subtracting growth associated with crime, pollution and
family breakdown. Using this measure, it was concluded that there
was growth in GPI in the US in the 1990s, but not as great as the GDP
growth. Other, more official measures (used by the United Nations
Development Programme, for instance) attempt to incorporate
social development measures such as life expectancy, literacy and
infant mortality, as well as the more standard per capita income.
These include the Physical Quality of Life Index and, more recently,
the Human Development Index. Attempts have also been made
to incorporate measures based on degrees of inequality reflecting
gender relations (UNDP 1995). These measures are not without their
problems, but they do at least point to the shortcomings of focusing
exclusively on GDP growth as the measure of human happiness,
which in turn also undermines simplistic notions that the ‘West’
is an ideal model for the rest of the world. It is therefore not only
unlikely that developing societies can catch up with the west; given
these environmental and social considerations, it is also questionable
that they should try to catch up.16
These points relate to the wider question of the desirability of using
the ‘west’, and therefore US led liberal internationalism as a model.
For whatever the desirability of some forms of liberal rights, economic
liberalism is also associated with increasing inequality and cultural
standardisation.17 Debates concerning cultural standardisation in
the era of globalisation are not necessarily new, and many of the
most influential critiques can be traced back to nineteenth-century
classical sociology. One of the most interesting classical accounts
was Max Weber’s theory of rationalisation, which has been updated
for the global age by George Ritzer. Weber argued that modernity
replaced ‘traditional’ society’s religious account of the world with one
based on rationalisation. This meant the development of a rational,
calculated approach to the world, focused on ends rather than means.
Human beings were reduced to calculations, measurements and
control. Modern societies therefore focused almost exclusively on
work, transformation, progress, the individual, and the acquisition
of money. Weber argued that humans became defined by their
relationship to things, rather than in their relationships to other
human beings. Thus he argued that capitalism is rational ‘to the extent
that it is organized around capital calculations. That is, if it is ordered
in such a way as to make planned use of material goods and personal
services as a means of acquisition, so that, when the final balance

sheet is drawn, the final revenue … should exceed the “capital”’
(Weber 1978: 334). But the development of formal rationality was
not substantively rational, and indeed in some respects constituted a
loss for modern societies. For Weber, ‘the ultimate and most sublime
values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental
realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and human
relations’ (Weber 1970: 155). This was not a call for a return to an
idealised past, but a recognition that the scientific calculation of the
modern world could not give meaning to that same world.
Marx’s account of alienation in capitalist society is also relevant:
indeed, for Marx it was the domination of the market – the sphere of
freedom in liberal thought – which meant that humanity lived in an
unfree world. In neoliberal, capitalist, consumer societies people are
free to choose within an unfree context, from a bewildering array of
commodities (Dean 2003). What they cannot choose, however, is the
kind of society in which they live, because (so advocates of neoliberal
claim) there is no alternative to this commodity-based society. But
if there is no alternative, then how can such a society be free? This
claim closely parallels the conflation of desirability and inevitability
in the globalisation debate, discussed in Chapter 2.
Marx argued that this unfree world could be ‘re-humanised’
through a process of working-class revolution and the creation of
a socialist or communist world. Weber, on the other hand, was
much more pessimistic. He argued that instrumental rationality
had come to dominate the social system. The modern world was
ruled by technical, specialised knowledge, in which people acted
in accordance with their immediate interests and saw market forces
as paramount. There was greater efficiency as more goods were
produced, but this was at the cost of a disenchanted world. Beyond
a call for the development of an ethic of responsibility, Weber saw
little hope of breaking out of this situation. Although he did recognise
that some controls could be imposed on bureaucracy, he also argued
that modern societies could not avoid the iron cage of rationalisation.
The individual rights championed by liberalism thus existed within
a distinctly unfree social context.
George Ritzer has updated Weber’s theory in his account of
contemporary ‘McDonaldization’. He argues that the fast-food
restaurant is symbolic of wider social change, both in the US and
globally. McDonald’s represents efficiency, calculability, predictability
and control. The McDonald’s meal is quick, cheap, predictable and
time-saving. There is an almost conveyor-belt mentality, in which the

customer orders a set meal and sits down and eats quickly on relatively
uncomfortable chairs. The meal is quickly over, and the customer
leaves the restaurant quickly. The workforce is strictly controlled by
management and technology, and much emphasis is again placed on
rapid turnover. Ritzer argues that this rationalisation can be seen in
all kinds of sectors of society, including tabloid journalism, lowest-
common-denominator television, film sequels, league tables for work
in the public sector, standardised shopping malls, and so on.
Following Weber, Ritzer distinguishes between formal and
substantive rationality. The modern world is dominated by formal
rationality, in which we aspire to satisfy short-term interests, but at
the cost of longer-term and wider social interests. Thus, we eat food
that is convenient but not good for us; we live in societies based on
massive discrepancies in wealth and income, which have enormous
social costs; while some of us work far too many hours, others cannot
find a job, and so live in a state of poverty; we aspire to buy cars even
though roads are dangerous – or, where they are less dangerous, it is
only because they are so overcrowded that car transport is too slow to
be efficient. Our obsession with expanding wealth knows no limits,
but precisely because it is an infinite, never-ending process, it is one
that can never satisfy us. Simon Fairlie makes the point effectively
when he hypothesises that by the year 2100, average incomes will
have increased 18-fold over the century (see Monbiot 2002). This begs
the question of what exactly we would spend this money on, and how
we could accommodate such expanded consumption. For instance,
if there were around 5 billion cars, ten times as much as at present,
where would all the new roads be built to accommodate such an
increase? Moreover, does increasing consumption lead to an increase
in happiness? In the US from 1969 to 1999, average annual work
hours increased by 18 per cent for married-couple households, and
28 per cent for single-person households. In surveys, just over two-
thirds of workers said that they have to work ‘very fast’, and over 50
per cent reported recent significant stress levels. Almost two-thirds of
workers said that they worked longer hours than they wished (Schor
2001). These figures, which are representative of a general trend,
have increased in recent years, as government and business attempt
to justify such increased work intensity in terms of the pressures of
global market competitiveness. Seen in this light, the free market
appears less as a sphere of freedom and more as a constraint, and this
seriously compromises the utility of liberal rights.
Ritzer’s argument, then, is that the processes of standardisation

that emerged in the west in the nineteenth century have increasingly
become globalised. The fact that some cultural products, foods, and
so on, are available throughout the world is not unimportant, as
the cultural imperialism thesis (one-sidedly) reminds us; but far
more important is the wider social and cultural context in which
these goods are consumed and produced. Cultural globalisation
thus represents an increase in rationalisation, bureaucratisation,
commodification and alienation. Due to the emphasis placed on
quantity and growth in place of meaning, Ritzer describes this process
as one of ‘grobalisation’ (Ritzer 2004).
This approach therefore sees cultural globalisation as leading
to a cultural standardisation, and an increasingly disenchanted
world. It paints a very pessimistic picture, but unfortunately quite a
persuasive one as well. In the era of global rationalisation, different
political and social movements have responded, not only to the
inequalities generated by global capitalism, but also to the alienation
and shallowness of public life. Within this context, such movements
have taken a number of forms. Some versions of political Islam
emerged in the context of the perceived failure of secular pan-Arab
and communist projects; and as we have seen, some movements
enjoyed the patronage of the US state through low-intensity
conflicts against communism. But equally, these movements grew in
popularity even when US support had ended, and this can be linked
to the failures – social, political, economic and cultural – of neoliberal
globalisation. This does not represent a ‘clash of civilisations’, but
a political clash between advocates of neoliberal capitalism18 and
reactionary responses to it (and to US hegemony). For some writers,
then, it is a ‘clash of fundamentalisms’ or a ‘clash of barbarisms’ (Ali
2002; Achcar 2002).
These clashes are political ones, and therefore by implication they
confirm that it is possible for social and political agents to change
the world. In contrast, Weber’s account tends to present certain
rationalising practices and standardising tendencies as iron laws, as
though the past agency that created the present society now ceases
to operate (Beetham 1985: 268–9; Sayer 1991: 155). In relation to
globalisation, it is not the case that global culture leads to unambiguous
standardisation; on the contrary, particular places represent specific
configurations of global and local cultures (Robertson 1992). This is
true not only of particular television programmes, news broadcasts or
films, but also of religion, politics, social movements, and so on. These
points relate to the wider one made by Giddens that ‘late modernity’
involves not only an intensification of the disembeddedness of social
relations, but also an intensification of the processes of self-reflection
on these very same processes (Giddens 1991). We have seen already
that Giddens’ account may not be sufficiently sensitive to the agency
and power relations involved in these processes, and his attempt to
‘bring agency back in’ is not altogether convincing – we can reflect
on globalising processes, but for Giddens we also need to take
these as a given. Nevertheless, Giddens’ point remains useful, as it
reminds us that processes of rationalisation can never be completely
sealed off from human intervention, and so the ‘cage’ can never be
made of iron. The rise of ‘new social movements’ since the 1960s
reflects this fact, as they emerged in part to monitor the bureaucratic
policing of modern institutions of rationalisation. Indeed, global
communications have increased such monitoring, helping to promote
the rise of transnational social movements and NGOs.
Giddens thus also reminds us that processes of disembedding are
not simply constraining, but can present opportunities as well. This
is an important point, for while Weber and others were correct to talk
about the downside of modernity, it would be a mistake to present
this as an exclusively bad thing. One of the dangers of doing so is a
tendency to romanticise pre-modern societies – to champion ‘local
traditions’ (‘Asian values’) at the expense of global processes. It is one
thing to criticise the inequality, greed, environmental degradation
and alienation of modern society, but it is quite another to claim that
pre-modern societies were somehow better. There is thus a need for
caution in celebrating the ‘local’ preference to globalisation. Majid
Rahnema’s rejection of development is illustrative of this kind of
reactionary politics:
Vernacular societies had a much more realistic view of things. Not blinkered
by the myth of equality, they believed that the good of the community was
better served by those of its members it considered to be the wisest, the most
virtuous, and hence the most ‘authoritative’ and experienced persons of the
groups – those who commanded everyone’s respect and deference.
This statement sounds suspiciously like a defence of (‘traditional’)

dictatorship. Just which societies this refers to is not clear, but pre-
capitalist societies certainly had their own inequalities, tyrannies
and oppressive practices. Similarly, current regimes and political
movements that challenge US imperialism are not necessarily

progressive, and all kinds of repressive politics are often justified in
the name of ‘anti-imperialism’. Global modernity is in need of radical
social, political, cultural and economic change, but this does not
mean a wholesale rejection of all its manifestations, or a conservative
nostalgia for a pre-modern age.
This chapter has examined contemporary debates concerning the

relationship between culture, rights and liberal internationalism, and
how these relate to Americanisation. I started by arguing that older
debates concerning cultural imperialism have their merits, but often
tend to betray a patronising tone, in which westerners romanticise
other cultures as somehow more authentic than the commercial
west. More importantly, they tend to focus on consumer culture, and
therefore presuppose a particular social and political context – that
of neoliberal capitalism. In this way, cultural diffusion is linked to
‘progressive’ expansion of (western) modernity through the liberal
internationalism advocated by the US. But this liberal expansion
has been selective, usually undemocratic, and, in its neoliberal
and neoconservative forms in particular, has intensified inequality.
Moreover, such expansion is based on a one-dimensional view of
freedom, which sees market expansion as paramount. As well as
justifying inequality and intensifying uneven development, it also
promotes alienation, rationalisation and disenchantment. In this
sense, the liberal internationalism associated with US hegemony,
and indeed liberal theories of rights, ultimately tend to support social
and political developments in which the market ‘trumps’ politics and
liberal democracy. This point applies not only to the ‘low-intensity
democracies’ of the developing world, but also the more established
liberal democracies of the west – including perhaps above all, the US
itself, although it must be said that Blair’s Britain runs it a close second
(Marquand 2004; Crouch 2004). Indeed, we must recognise the way in
which the liberal internationalist project itself has served to promote
global processes that have led to cultural standardisation. If we are
to challenge these processes, then ‘actually existing globalisation’
must itself be challenged. Of course, if we are to find progressive
alternatives to current globalisation, then it would be foolish to focus
narrowly on consumer culture, or to look for supposedly authentic
local cultures or reactionary ‘fundamentalisms’. On the contrary, we

need to move beyond the aforementioned ‘clash of barbarisms and
fundamentalisms’. In this respect at least (although there needs to
be greater precision over his meaning), Giddens is right to suggest
that alternatives are to be found within globalisation, not outside it.
But these alternatives will constitute a far more radical challenge to
neoliberalism, and even capitalism, then Giddens envisages. These
issues are taken up in the final chapter.
7
Conclusions: US imperialism,
Actually Existing Globalisation,
and the Question of Alternatives
GLOBALISATION AND THE CHARACTER

OF CONTEMPORARY IMPERIALISM
‘Globalisation’ refers to the increased interdependence in the world,

much of which transcends the boundaries of the nation-state. This
is reflected in the growth of international institutions and summits
(global governance), increased capital flows (global economy),
increased information flows, including the speed of such flows
(time–space compression), and growing cultural linkages (global
culture). While there are important debates over the amount and
form of these flows, even global sceptics would agree that there have
been some changes that can be properly described as globalisation.
However, globalisation theory draws particular implications from
such changes. Perhaps above all, it regards at least some of these
changes as both inevitable and desirable. Often these two arguments
are conflated, and the inevitability thesis attempts to take the politics
out of globalisation, so that it becomes a purely technical process
– as natural as the weather (though environmentalists would rightly
question this contention). Globalisation’s advocates argue that global
interdependence is also mutually beneficial, and largely devoid of
relations of denomination, except perhaps when subverted by the
narrow interests of particular nation-states. So global governance
is regarded as an opportunity for all countries to have an equal say
in the world order. This may still be imperfect, as in permanent
membership of the Security Council and weighted voting at the
IMF and World Bank, but the principle of one member one vote
(as at the WTO) can lay the basis for genuinely democratic global
governance. This is reinforced by the mutual benefits of a free-trade
world order in which each country specialises in producing those
goods in which they have a comparative advantage.1 Again, this
may be subverted by specific protectionist practices, but in the long
154
Conclusions 155
run this can be dealt with through institutional reform. Similarly,

cultural and information flows provide an opportunity for access to
a range of lifestyle choices, and so should be embraced. These may
be resisted by parochial fundamentalists, but in the long run the
opportunities of globalisation will outweigh the constraints. This,
then, is the optimistic thesis concerning globalisation, and is often
associated with the ‘globalisation theory’ of the 1990s, discussed in
Chapter 2.
For these theorists, the George W. Bush administration undermined
the onward march of globalisation (Held and Koening-Archibugi 2004).
Instead of focusing on cosmopolitan principles, Bush promoted a US-
first strategy that narrowly focuses on the country’s own interests.
The rhetoric of globalisation has been replaced by a return to old-
fashioned power-politics. So, has globalisation ended? Certainly, the
Bush administration has been more unilateralist than Clinton. It has
ignored international treaties and institutions, and attempted to carry
out protectionist measures in defence of US industry and agriculture.
But on the other hand, the idea that Bush represents the end of
globalisation downplays the continuities between US administrations,
and ignores the realities of ‘actually existing globalisation’. It is
clearly the case that globalisation was never completely independent
of the interests of state, or indeed capitalist power. This is true of
neoliberalism and neoconservatism in the 1980s, the Third Way and
globalisation in the 1990s, and US neoconservatism in the early
2000s. While the Clinton administration gave more active support
to the WTO, the fact is that free-trade policies do not promote a level
playing field, but best represent the interests of already powerful
producers who can benefit from competitive advantage. Moreover,
Clinton’s commitment to free trade was itself selective, and he
continued to provide protection to some US domestic producers.
Furthermore, while the Bush administration has been more openly
unilateralist in its methods, its aims of (selectively) developing liberal
sovereign states (albeit US allies) with efficient market economies was
compatible with a whole tradition of US liberal internationalism, and
therefore with the globalisation project endorsed by politicians who
advocated the global Third Way.
In practice, of course, there is no single liberal internationalist
project, and what is crucially different about the current globalisation
project is its commitment to ‘free markets’ without some of the
qualifications of earlier periods. In other words, the current liberal
internationalist project associated with globalisation is more explicitly
neoliberal than say, the (neo-Keynesian) liberal internationalism of

the Bretton Woods era, in which there was a commitment to market
expansion, but also some basis for ‘market-restricting’ state regulation.
It also follows from this point that, despite significant differences over
means, the neoliberal era has witnessed Reagan’s neoconservatism,
the Washington and post-Washington consensus of the World
Bank and IMF, Clinton’s Third Way, and Bush’s neoconservativism.
The Reagan era saw the promotion of state sovereignty, albeit one
compromised by the promotion of low-intensity conflict in the
Cold War and the promotion of the free market abroad (alongside
considerable protection at home). The presidency of the elder
George Bush saw the continued promotion of state sovereignty
and market expansion, and the use of military power against Iraq
through multilateral institutions, especially the UN. The Clinton
era saw the extension and expansion of the ‘free market’, above
all through free-trade agreements and the further liberalisation of
finance. Clinton’s Third Way did involve some regulation of markets
beyond that advocated by neoliberalism in the 1980s, and this
coincided with a set of policies at the World Bank and IMF that
came to be known as the post-Washington consensus. But these
policies did not substantially alter the view that market expansion
was the best means of producing growth and social development.
Alongside these policies, and especially in his second term, Clinton
(like Bush Sr) also advocated ‘low-intensity democracy’ in a post-
Cold War context, and was prepared to use military power against
rogue states, and in doing so often bypassed the United Nations.
Bush Jr has been far more hostile to multilateralism than Clinton,
and has more openly pursued a US-first policy. Particularly after the
murderous attacks of 9/11, the US pursued a more explicitly US-
first policy, and was prepared to use military power whatever the
rest of the world thought. Crucial to this world-view is the idea of
‘pre-emptive action’, whether against mythical threats from Iraq or
through the forms of conditionality attached to aid. David Harvey
has rightly described this as a movement from consent to coercion,
and for this reason some talk about the end of globalisation. But as
we have seen, the multilateral globalisation supposedly championed
by Clinton was hardly committed to the expansion of genuine global
democracy, and the free-trade policies that he advocated actually
undermined such an aspiration. Moreover, as Harvey also points out,
there is also substantial continuity between the administration of
Bush Jr and other moments of US hegemony – in terms of not only
Conclusions 157
market expansion, but also the use of hard power and unilateralism
(Harvey 2003: Ch. 5).
The optimism of the ‘globalisation talk’ of the 1990s was
thus misplaced, and this can be rooted in the weaknesses of
globalisation theory. In that decade, globalisation theory tended to
be accompanied by a ‘cosmopolitan optimism’. The problem was
that, just as globalisation theory tended to ignore social relations,
so cosmopolitanism tended to ignore the political form that such a
philosophy could embrace. In both cases this could be linked to the
fetishisation of space, so that globalisation focused on social relations
beyond the territoriality of the nation-state, while cosmopolitanism
focused on politics beyond the sovereignty of the nation-state.
Neither was necessarily wrong, but both failed to specify the forms
of social relations or politics beyond the state. Thus, as we saw in
Chapters 3 to 6, cosmopolitanism, for example, can be linked to the
extension of ‘market forces’ and global governance, or ‘humanitarian’
military intervention; equally, however, it could be tied to Marxist
conceptions of international labour solidarity or anti-war politics.
In the process, the specific content of politics was lost as a result of
an over-emphasis on ‘globality’. The first argument that the book
made, then, is that, contrary to the claims of globalisation theory,
there has been considerable continuity in the last 25 years, based on
the expansion of neoliberal globalisation.
Its second argument was a challenge to claims made by the
advocates of neoliberalism and US hegemony. In Chapters 3 and 4,
through an examination of contemporary international relations, I
characterised the US-led global order as imperialist, and developed
this argument in Chapter 5 through an account of the relationship
between US hegemony and neoliberalism. However, I also argued
that even on its own terms, the project of liberal internationalist
expansion through the development of sovereign states and market
economies was unlikely to work. This was because of the social,
political and historical conflicts that have led to ‘failed states’, and
the political and economic hierarchies of the global order, which
global ‘market expansion’ actually intensifies. These arguments were
further developed in Chapter 5, which looked at the globalisation of
popular culture and of human rights. The argument was made that,
contrary to some radical theories of cultural imperialism – and, it
should be stressed, the arguments of US neoconservatives – there is no
intrinsic link between the consumption of an ‘American’ commodity
and wider support for ‘Americanisation’. However, more significant
is the debate about universal human rights, whether they exist, and
whether the US is the rightful enforcer of such rights. It was suggested
that US hegemony has been inconsistent, at best, in promoting
human rights, and that, though they are important, liberal rights
are also limited. In practice, liberal rights and US hegemony have
often combined to mean simply the freedom of the free market.
This has meant growing inequality within countries alongside the
failure of developing countries to move towards ‘developed’ status. In
other words, the ‘globalisation’ of the free market has not led to the
‘Americanisation’ of the world. Insofar as there has been a tendency
towards cultural standardisation, it has been through the increased
dominance of the commodity. In this respect, the rule of the market
has become a realm of global ‘un-freedom’. For all these reasons then,
‘globalisation’ is a deeply flawed project, and it is one that cannot be
divorced from the realities of capitalist and state power, and indeed
of contemporary imperialism.
But to talk of imperialism does not mean that we are simply
witnessing a repeat of the economic and political rivalries that
occurred in the build-up to the First World War. As I explained in
Chapter 3, there is a far greater number of independent nation-states
now than in the pre-1914 period. Moreover, these states are more
interdependent, partly because of the internationalisation of capital,
which means that investment and trade may derive from a wide
variety of sources, as opposed to the more exclusive policies of the
pre-1914 era. This does not mean that competition between states
has ceased to exist, and indeed we have seen how in the post-Cold
War period the US has attempted to pursue polices designed not only
to police zones outside the liberal order, but also to deter potential
competitors to US hegemony. But equally, I also argued that this was
unlikely to give rise to a repeat of the inter-imperialist conflicts of the
pre-1914 period, or indeed to war. Indeed, it is this interdependence
that leads some globalisation theorists to claim that there is no single
source of power in the current global order. While this is true, it is still
clear that some states have far more power than others. This power
is exercised not only through international institutions such as the
Security Council and weighted voting at the IMF and World Bank,
but also through military and financial power, which are heavily
concentrated in the hands of the US. Continued US hegemony
actually relies on the continued liberalisation of financial capital,
which ensures that capital will flow to the US, so that the widening
trade deficit can be financed through capital inflows from overseas.
Conclusions 159
Despite their misgivings, other countries accept this framework,

not least because the US acts as the major market for the goods
produced by those countries with trade surpluses. But this ‘system’ is
unstable, and if confidence in the dollar declined and foreign capital
stopped flowing to the US, then that country would have to carry
out some strict austerity policies in order to balance its payments,
which in turn would have considerable knock-on effects for other
countries. The current era of globalisation is thus one in which power
relations persist, and competition and cooperation between the most
powerful nation-states exists in an uneasy alliance. Thus, insofar
as this represents an era of imperialism, it is one ultimately based
on ultra-imperialist cooperation between the core capitalist states,
although this cooperation is led by the most powerful state.
However, it is also a highly unstable international era, not least
because this neoliberal order serves to marginalise so many regions
and countries from the centres of capital accumulation. 2 For
developing countries, the current era is not one that is conducive to
rapid development, since free-trade policies in goods and services
threaten to undermine their capacity to develop new, competitive
industries, while the surge of finance steers investment into speculative
rather than productive activity, which is further reinforced by the
concentration of finance capital in the US economy. For these
countries, then, liberal incorporation is unlikely to take place, as
weaker states face a situation that Mann characterises as ‘ostracising
imperialism’, based on the tendency of capital to concentrate in
some areas and marginalise others (Mann 2001). This marginalisation
is caused not only by neoliberal policies, though they remain a
significant factor. In some places – those territories often designated as
failed or rogue states – political and social instability persists reflecting
continued conflict over state formation, politically grounded ethnic
rivalry, inter-state conflict, and so on. The US state has led the way in
attempting to incorporate some of these territories into the ‘liberal
core’, even using military intervention as a means towards this end.
But the rationale for such intervention has been based on ‘quick-fix’
solutions that ignore these social and historical processes, and which
themselves have led to many deaths, usually described as ‘collateral
damage’. The failure of these states to be incorporated into the liberal
‘zone of peace’ is then put down to the existence of non-liberal ‘evil’,
which paves the way for ongoing conflict. Contemporary imperialism
is thus not based on the pre-1914 era, but can in some respects
be described as ‘liberal imperialism’. But the liberalism of such an
imperialist strategy is neither benign nor effective, as it involves

double standards by the core nations so that claims to represent
the global good involve ‘evil’ acts and wholesale slaughter of the
non-liberal periphery, or indifference to some non-liberal states so
long as they remain allies of the US. Moreover, liberal incorporation
fails partly because neoliberal policies themselves militate against it
(see Ch. 5).
As we have seen, compared to the pre-1914 period, the present
era is characterised by the increased internationalisation of capital
– especially productive capital – and the uneven universalisation of
the nation-state. These processes have led to the development of new
Marxist theories that suggest that the era of classical imperialism has
been replaced by a new period of international capitalism (Sklair
2002; Becker and Sklar 1987; Hardt and Negri 2000). These are united
in the belief that the development of transnational capitalism has
undermined state-based inter-imperialist rivalries, although these
may still occur if particular ‘hegemonic’ fractions of the state
managerial class become dominant, as in the case of the Iraq war.
The development of a transnational capitalist class has also promoted
the nascent development of a transnational state, in which global
capital is regulated beyond the archaic boundaries of the nation-
state (Robinson 2004). These approaches have perhaps been best
developed by neo-Gramscian theories of international relations,
which particularly attempt to theorise the idea of hegemony. Gramsci
argued that the ruling class rules not only through force, but through
the capacity of the ruling class to convince everybody that its ideas
are universal, and therefore win the (contested) consent of the lower
classes (Gramsci 1971: 182). Cox (1987) and Gill (2003) have attempted
to use this idea to historicise the process of hegemonic state formation
within international relations. In contrast to realist accounts of
hegemony, neo-Gramscians attempts to historicise and periodise
both US hegemony and international capitalism.3 This has led to the
criticism that neo-Gramscian theory therefore ignores the totality of
capitalist social relations, and separates the historically constructed
social forms of capitalist society, thus reifying capitalist social relations
(Burnham 1991; Clarke 1992). This criticism is misplaced, because
neo-Gramscians accept the totality of capitalist social relations as their
starting point, but then attempt to historicise such relations and the
changes that occur within capitalist social relations (Bieler and Morton
2004; Panitch 2003). Neo-Gramscian perspectives are particularly
concerned with theorising the relationship between changing forms
Conclusions 161
of US hegemony and the rise of neoliberal capitalism since the 1970s

and 1980s. This task is carried out by attempting to explain the
relationship between social forces that are historically constituted
within capitalism and particular state forms (Cox 1987: 105). Cox
uses this approach to explain the movement from US hegemony to
the system of transnational capitalism that emerged in the 1970s.
The Bretton Woods era, based on liberalism and some regulation of
capital, has been replaced by a transnational managerial class (Cox
1981: 147), which has promoted the globalisation of capital. Gill
argues that these processes are the product of the replacement of the
post-war international bloc of social forces by a new, transnational
bloc, albeit one still centred on US hegemony (Gill 1990). This is
reflected in the development of new institutional think-tanks such
as the Trilateral Commission (Crozier et al. 1975), as well as the
transnationalisation of the state in the 1980s.
These theories have usefully attempted to come to terms with the
changes that have occurred since 1914, and especially 1945 – not
least the increased cooperation between the major capitalist states.
They also usefully remind us that current wars cannot be read off
from perceived inter-imperialist rivalries, but may be political projects
of dominant state actors in the US, as well as manifestations of Cold
War legacies and/or of the unevenness of state formation in particular
localities. But at the same time, these theories tend to exaggerate
the decline of the nation-state, and underestimate the continued
centrality of the US state in the ultra-imperialist order of cooperation
between the main imperialist powers. Negri’s related contention that
no state is in control of the world order, but that some states are
more powerful than others, begs the question asked of mainstream
globalisation theory in Chapter 2, namely: When were states in total
control? (Negri 2003) Moreover, the exaggeration of state power in
the past is accompanied by an underestimation of state power in
the present, and – in relation to the nation-state system at least
– much US uncertainty is not so much a product of the mobility
of capital (indeed its continued hegemony relies in part on flows
to the US economy), but rather the problem of securing hegemony
through strategies designed to promote and generalise the nation-
state system.4 While these criticisms do not necessarily apply to all
neo-Gramscians, and certainly not to Gill in particular, considerable
problems remain. While neo-Gramscians are certainly correct to
recognise the change from neo-Keynesian to neoliberal capitalism,
and indeed the ways in which this has been promoted by the US state,
they tend to do so in a way that overestimates the structural power

of the dominant social forces, and underestimates the ways in which
neoliberalism is resisted. In particular – like the transnational class
theory of Sklair – neo-Gramscians tend to theorise class in isolation
from social relations of exploitation and resistance. These points in
turn can be related to the fact that neo-Gramscians tend towards an
overly descriptive account of the international order, which never
quite succeeds in linking the general features of capitalism to their
specific manifestations in the post-war order, and in its transition to
neoliberal capitalism. In these respects at least, the criticisms made
by Burnham and others are convincing.
Nevertheless, these newer theories attempt to address the nature
of contemporary global capitalism, which has been the main focus
of this book. My account has tried to forge a path between classical
theories of imperialism and contemporary theories (mainstream and
Marxist) of globalisation. There is greater interdependence through
the (uneven and unequal) diffusion of capital in the nation-state
system, but this has not eroded the power of some nation-states. The
role of states has changed, but this is a product of the movement
from neo-Keynesian to neoliberal capitalism, a shift that was led
by the US, but which has won widespread support among ruling
classes and states in the world order. This support is sometimes
contested, for instance through trade conflicts and debates over
financial liberalisation, but such conflict is very different from old
inter-imperialist rivalries. On the other hand, and contrary to theories
of cosmopolitan capital (Desai 2002; Harris 2003), neoliberalism has
not led to global convergence through the progressive diffusion of
capitalism throughout the globe, but has instead actually intensified
uneven development based on the concentration of capital. Insofar
as there are counter-tendencies to this process, they have operated
through the continued interventionist role of the state, and have
therefore occurred despite rather than because of neoliberalism (see
Chapter 5). This can perhaps best be described as an ‘imperialism of
free trade’, rather than of colonial state capitalist trusts (Gallagher
and Robinson 1953).5
If it is an imperialism of free trade, then it is one that is ultimately
backed by the US, and this brings us back to the question of hegemony.
The US has acted as the hegemonic power in the capitalist world
since 1945. In the post-war period, this hegemony was guaranteed
by overwhelming military and economic dominance, which left
even the most powerful of the other capitalist countries dependent
Conclusions 163
on the US. This dependence was reinforced by the perceived threat

of the communist alternative. The US’s hegemonic position since
1945 has experienced two significant changes ‘from above’ in the
period. The first was the challenge from revived capitalist powers
– particularly Japan and Germany – from the late 1960s onwards,
which was reinforced by the end of the Bretton Woods agreement
and the gradual shift towards neoliberal policies from the late 1970s.
As we have seen, this shift led to the US securing its hegemonic
role through reliance on foreign capital inflows, secured partly by
the neoliberal turn, which was broadly accepted (albeit with some
resistance6 at times) by the other major capitalist states. The second
change occurred with the end of communism, which secured the US’s
dominant, unipolar position in the global order – albeit in the context
of continued concern about revived economic competitors, including
China. The question of securing US hegemony in the post-Cold War
world has been a matter of considerable debate, with Clinton focusing
more on ‘geo-economics’ and Bush Jr on military power. However,
as we have seen, this distinction is sometimes made too sharply, as
it ignores the military power exercised by Clinton and the neoliberal
economics promoted by both presidencies.
But this leaves us to ponder one further question – namely: What is
the future for US hegemony? As we have seen, some argue that we are
in an era of US super-imperialism (Gowan 1999; Hudson 2003), based
on the US’s dominant military role, the continued strength of US
companies in key economic sectors such as information technology,
and the continued dominance of the US domestic economy and
transnational companies, and of the dollar internationally. On the
other hand, others argue that US hegemony has weakened (Arrighi
1994; Mann 2003; Wallerstein 2003; Harvey 2003), as a result of the
comparative decline of the US economy, at least since the 1940s
and 1950s, the limitations of military power in a world of sovereign
states and capitalist interdependence, the rise of East Asia, increased
hostility to the US under Bush Jr, the US budget and trade deficits,
the bubble economy in the US (stock markets in the 1990s, housing
in the 2000s), and the possible rise of the euro as an alternative
international currency. Certainly there are convincing arguments
made by both sides in this debate, and while there are clear signs of
US vulnerability, there remain considerable sources of strength.
These tensions will continue and possibly intensify in the second
presidency of George W. Bush. The election victory of 2004 has
reinvigorated the Bush administration, including the neoconservatives
within it. The changes in personnel suggest a further shift to the right,
but how this will relate to future policy direction is unclear. Certainly
we can be sure that many in the administration would like to see an
extension of military power, into Iran at the very least. Bush himself
has attempted to link al Qaeda leaders to the leadership in Iran, an
argument as vacuous as the supposed Saddam–al Qaeda connection.
The supposed voice of moderation in the first administration, Colin
Powell, argued immediately after the election victory that the
president had won a mandate to continue to pursue an aggressive
foreign policy, and was unlikely to be held back (Pena 2004). Wesley
Clark, former Supreme Commander of NATO and unsuccessful
Democrat nominee in 2004, has alleged that the Pentagon has a
five-year plan to remove the governments of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon,
Iran, Somalia and Sudan, as well as now presumably discarded Libya
(Clark 2003). On the other hand, while the fiasco in Iraq may not
have undermined the ambitions of the neoconservatives, it may
have left the US considerably overstretched.7 This point applies not
only to the continued conflict in Iraq, but also to wider issues that
relate back to the wider questions of the strengths and weaknesses
of US hegemony. These include the expanding budget deficit, which
Bush at least claims will be cut during his second term; continued
economic tensions in the world economy, which relate back to the
question of the dollar and the US deficit; and popular opposition
to US policies, not least within the deeply divided US itself (Mann
2003).
These, then, are some of the tensions that exist in the neoliberal,
US-led, international order. But pointing to these weaknesses is not
the same thing as suggesting anything like an imminent collapse.
For one thing, US hegemony is relational, and depends partly on
the actions of other states and capitals in the world order. These
are bound to provoke competition, and even hostility at times, but
equally, as I have argued, the neoliberal years have been characterised
by remarkable levels of cooperation too, which are rooted in the
interdependent nature of the contemporary capitalist world. The
rapid fall in the dollar in late 2004 has undoubtedly fuelled tensions
between Europe and the US, not least because the unilateralism of the
latter has ruled out multilateral cooperation to manage exchange rates,
as occurred for instance in 1995, when the dollar was revalued. The US
appears to be relying on a strategy of relatively painless adjustment,
as the falling dollar increases competitiveness and exports, even at
a cost of its European competitors. But this strategy is likely to lead
Conclusions 165
to capital flight from the US economy, with the result that overseas
investors will no longer finance the twin deficits. Adjustment then
would be much more painful – and unilateralism would be likely to
give way to multilateralism. But this future scenario is one in which
Europe does not so much present an alternative to US hegemony as
seek the US’s active cooperation in a system which is ultimately led
by the US. This has important implications, including the fact that
alternatives to US hegemony and liberal capitalism are unlikely to
be found ‘from above’ (Grahl 2004). We therefore need to examine
the questions of alternatives ‘from the bottom up’.
THE NEW SUPERPOWER?

THE POLITICS OF ‘ANTI-GLOBALISATION’ AND GLOBAL JUSTICE8
If globalisation is not independent of questions of power, then neither

is it independent of the questions of agency and resistance. Such
resistance takes a number of forms in a number of movements, usually
captured by broad terms like the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, or
the movement for ‘global justice’. This movement became very
visible through the protests at the Seattle meeting of the WTO in late
1999, although its origins can be traced back to protests in the South
against structural adjustment policies in the 1980s. Representing a
great variety of interests and agendas, anti-globalisation politics was
initially critical of the neoliberal agendas of the World Bank, IMF and
WTO, certain manifestations of global exploitation, such as the use
of sweat-shop labour, and global environmental destruction. Seen
by many as a kind of travelling circus of activists, the movement was
often criticised for its alleged lack of concrete alternatives to ‘actually
existing globalisation’ and its tendency to celebrate resistance as an
end in itself. The movement was also challenged by the events of
11 September 2001, and the US state’s response to them. This was
important, as many activists, particularly those in the west, tended
to internalise the argument that global flows had undermined the
nation-state, and that therefore the focus of resistance should be
transnational capital and international institutions. The war drive
of the Bush administration showed in a particularly stark form the
continued relevance of the nation-state, and the hierarchies of the
international system of nation-states.
The anti-globalisation movement has thus had to respond to
the challenge of proposition as well as opposition, alongside the
questions of the continued importance of nation-states and war. This
has led to vigorous debates at World and European Social Forums,

perhaps most notably over questions of the ‘space’ for reforms at the
level of nation-states, and ‘anti-imperialist’ solidarity in the face of
US imperialism and reactionary opposition movements (Fisher and
Ponniah 2003). Perhaps as important is the manner in which these
debates have arisen, as the movement demonstrates an awareness that
while anarchism tends to celebrate lack of organisation, Leninism has
a history of intolerance to dissent that has encouraged authoritarian
forms of politics. The key organisational task of the movement has
therefore been to find a compromise between effectiveness and
democracy, which itself entails recognition that the separation of
means and ends has been disastrous in the history of socialism. The
concluding section can provide only a taster of the kinds of debates
that have taken place within the ‘movement of movements’. I do
this by returning to the themes of the previous chapters – politics,
economics and culture – and focusing on some of the critiques made,
and alternatives proposed by ‘anti-globalisation’ movements. This
separation is made for analytical purposes, and in no way means that
priority should be accorded to any of these themes.
The global economy

Critique
The anti-globalisation critique of the global economy is quite
straightforward. Its essential claim is that it has led to increased
inequality, exploitation and instability. These processes have
occurred because of the nature of global free-market competition,
transnational production and international finance. The increase in
free trade has led to an increase in inequality, because competition
is intrinsically unequal. First, the commitment to free trade is
selective, discriminating against those products in which developing
countries may have potential competitive advantages. Thus, tariffs for
developing world exports to the advanced countries are on average
four times greater than the tariffs for goods that originate from First
World countries (Oxfam 2002). The WTO may be committed to
changing these discriminatory practices, but this may be little more
than rhetoric. Negotiations at the WTO tend to be dominated by the
most powerful countries, leaving poorer countries with little more
than ‘take it or leave it’ options. This ‘choice’ is further narrowed by
the time and cost of settling disputes, and above all by the fact that
weaker trading nations that retaliate against discriminatory practices
Conclusions 167
of powerful trading nations are bound to have little or no effect on

the practices of the latter. The institutional principle of one member
one vote, even if it was actually employed by the WTO (as opposed
to its current rhetorical commitment to the principle), is largely
irrelevant in the context of such political and economic inequality.
A second point, which follows from the first, is that even if free-trade
policies were more consistently adopted throughout the world, it
would not lead to a level playing field. As I argued in Chapter 5,
free trade ignores enormous inequalities in structures of production,
so that some locations, regions and countries can generally out-
compete others, even if the ‘losers’ may still find the odd niche
in the world market. Capital tends to concentrate in certain areas,
and not disperse in such a way as to promote global governance.
In free-market situations, ‘late developers’ thus find it hard to
break into established world markets for many goods. Moreover,
as pro-free-trade policies also mean liberalisation of domestic trade
policy, this can have devastating effects for countries attempting to
establish reasonably efficient domestic production, as they can be
put out of business through import competition from established
overseas producers. Free trade therefore protects the interests of the
powerful, and it is for this reason that all successful developers have
(selectively) protected domestic producers from overseas competition.
Of course, this has not been through blanket protection to all
producers regardless of economic performance, but neither has it
been through neoliberal policies. There is some controversy over the
extent to which the WTO undermines the ability of ‘late developers’
to continue to protect domestic producers but, given that selective
protection will be outlawed, it appears that the WTO undermines
at least one basis for the replication of new ‘East Asian miracles’.
Instead, it is assumed that economic growth and social advance will
be achieved through the ‘one size fits all’ neoliberal policies of free
trade, in which all countries exercise their respective comparative
advantages. Unfortunately, while this may promote some growth
and other advances, it is unlikely to alleviate global inequalities, or
even absolute poverty.
The second argument is that globalisation has led to increased
exploitation. The basis for this charge is that capital investment flows
are now so mobile that investors can move from one country to another
in order to avoid regulations and controls on capital. Such factors
may include environmental regulations, or pressure for employers
to pay higher wages. To avoid these problems, capital moves on, or
at least threatens to do so, to lower-cost, less regulated countries or

regions. But this threat of unemployment means that areas lower their
standards and wages in order to attract and retain capital investment
in the first place. The globalisation of production therefore leads to a
race to the bottom, in which countries compete to attract investment
through low wages or lack of controls on capital.
It is certainly true that many workers have seen an erosion of
their bargaining position over the last 20 to 30 years. Real wages
have fallen, the threat and reality of unemployment has increased,
and protection at work has often been undermined. However, it is
far from clear that the mobility of capital is the main cause of this
downward trend. Real wages have often declined most in sectors in
which capital mobility is not particularly great, such as local services.
Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 5, the relocation of investment to
the developing world has been very limited, and in fact in many
respects there has been an increase in the concentration of capital
investment in established areas of accumulation, together with a
few select countries of developing countries (including where there
has been substantial development of trade unionism). ‘Race to the
bottom’ rhetoric implies that there should be a dispersal of capital
throughout the globe in order to take advantage of cheap labour,
but this has not occurred, and the tendency has been towards
increased concentration – one of the reasons why there has been an
intensification of inequality in recent years. None of these points
disprove that there has been some relocation of capital investment
in recent years, and Naomi Klein has done a valuable job in exposing
the conditions faced by workers in the Mexican maquiladoras and
in factories producing for the world market throughout the globe
(Klein 2000). But it must be remembered that these factories do not
generally utilise capital-intensive techniques or produce goods in
the fastest-growing manufacturing sectors. (It also needs stressing
that, for similar reasons, the use of such factories cannot constitute a
model for the developing world in general for, leaving aside the awful
working conditions, the goods that are produced eventually come
up against limited market demand.) Again, this is not to deny the
erosion of labour and social standards for workers in many countries,
but this has at least as much to do with national (state) restructuring
of labour relations and work organisation as it has to do with the
global mobility of capital in some sectors. Such restructuring includes
technological change that displaces full-time workers, and the use
of suppliers in preference to in-house production. Such cost-saving
Conclusions 169
satisfies short-term shareholder profits, which in turn encourage

financial speculation in favour of profitable company stock.
In this respect, the more significant ‘relocation’ has not been
from First to Third Worlds, but from productive to financial capital.
Indeed, the contemporary global economy is associated with the
intensification of financial flows, which in turn are a product of
liberalisation policies that stretch back to the 1970s. This liberalisation
is often justified on the grounds that it increases access to savings,
and therefore stimulates investment. However, as we have seen, most
financial flows are used to generate income through investment in
further financial instruments, rather than to increase productive
investment. In other words, financial liberalisation encourages
unproductive speculation rather than growth of the ‘real economy’.
This is further reinforced (at times) by high interest rates designed
to attract flows, and by the risks associated with a rapid withdrawal
of funds at the first sign of weakness in the real economy. Such
withdrawals can exaggerate trends in the real economy, and therefore
have a devastating impact on the real economy. Moreover, financial
flows tend to concentrate in established areas and bypass poorer
economies. Financial flows are therefore at best a mixed blessing, and
their global impact reflects less considerations of economic efficiency
and more the interests of financial capital, and the need of the US
state to preserve its hegemony through allowing the free flow of
capital into the US.
Alternatives
It is simplistic to argue that anti-globalisation politics are always based
on a simple opting-out from globalisation. Instead, what is proposed
is a restructuring of the relationship between global, national and
local levels. Probably the movement’s leading intellectual, Walden
Bello has characterised this restructuring as part of a process of
‘deglobalisation’ (Bello 2002: 114–17). Such a strategy focuses on
the development of an alternative and more progressive global
structure. This would include: production based first on the local
market; local finance (not foreign investment); less emphasis on
growth per se; the subjection of the market to social control; and
the development of community-based and public-sector initiatives,
along with the continued development of the (local) private sector.
Bello argues that, to facilitate deglobalisation, there needs to be a
reconstruction of global institutions, which rejects the monolithic
approach of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, and instead adopts a
more pluralistic system. These institutions would be weakened or

abolished, and replaced by strengthened UN institutions such as the
UN Economic and Social Council of the General Assembly and the
UN Conference on Trade and Development, a new United Nations
International Insolvency Court to negotiate debt settlements, and a
United Nations International Financial Organisation to implement
controls on finance.
The desired effects of these policies can be seen if we examine some
of the proposals in a little more detail. Thus, in the field of international
finance, the proposed new regulations are designed to alleviate the
inequality and instability associated with current international
financial transactions. National capital controls – including those
actually implemented in the 1990s by Malaysia and Chile, for example
– would give states some leverage over otherwise volatile financial
flows, stabilise exchange rates, and prevent an over-valuation of
currency. An international tax on transactions in the foreign exchange
market would reduce speculation, and thereby further increase the
possibility of states pursuing expansionary economic policies, and
the revenues generated from the tax could be used to finance aid to
poorer countries (ATTAC 2003). Other financial reforms could include
cancellation of international debt, and new public institutions such
as a World Financial Authority that could more effectively distribute
financial flows, so that they tended to move from richer to poorer
countries, rather than vice versa. Deglobalisation policies therefore
do not necessarily mean a rejection of globalisation per se, but rather
a rejection of neoliberal globalisation.
These proposals are not without their problems (see below), but
what is also clear is that they involve substantial reorganisation
of the world economy and its forms of regulation. Alongside such
ambitious demands, the anti-globalisation movement also makes
more immediate demands, such as the call for a reversal of the
privatisation of goods and services, of the liberalisation of trade,
and of the expansion of patents. This amounts to a defence of ‘the
commons’ against the threat of commodification. ‘Commonly owned
goods’ denotes not only commonly owned land and public goods,
but also the modern commons such as health, water, education, and
so on. This represents a cultural revolution in terms of the values that
determine economic activity. In contrast, the WTO, and in particular
its GATS and TRIPS agreements, advances a new round of ‘primitive
accumulation’, in which new sectors of society are privatised – a
process in which, to recall Karl Polanyi, the economy becomes
Conclusions 171
disembedded from society. A new global regime would therefore

explicitly limit the right of private appropriation of the commons.
A more extreme version of deglobalisation is associated with
the strategy of localisation. Colin Hines argues that actually
existing globalisation leads to a race to the bottom and cultural
homogenisation (see above and Chapter 6). In addition to the race
to the bottom, there is the environmental cost of transporting goods
from one location to another (known in orthodox economics as an
‘externality’). The alternative, as well as the race to the bottom, is
a strategy of localisation. Although there is disagreement on how
this perspective would be applied in practice, all of its advocates
are agreed that the problem is partly one of ‘gigantism’ (Bello
2002: 112–18; Hines 2000: 62–8). As we have seen, Walden Bello
advocates the alternative of ‘deglobalisation’, in which new or heavily
reformed global institutions guarantee the right to develop through
state-directed, neo-Keynesian policies. Bello’s particular brand of
localisation is thus one of allowing a return to import-substitution
industrialisation based development strategies which, contrary to
neoliberal myth, were crucial to the success of the East Asian newly
industrialising countries. For Bello, then, deglobalisation does not
represent an alternative to development; rather, it proposes global
reform as a means of making sufficient space to allow development
to take place.
There is considerable overlap – but also difference – between Bello’s
conception of deglobalisation and more decentralised strategies that
are more explicitly localist. The basic principle of localisation is to
discriminate in favour of the local, so that ‘all decisions should be
made at the lowest level of governing authority competent to deal
with them’ (IFG 2002: 107). This means that international trade
will only occur where it promotes the reconstruction, rather than
destruction, of local economies. Therefore, while total delinking from
the world economy is not advocated, the principle of self-sufficiency
would be applied wherever possible. Some global institutions would
be needed in order to preserve local autonomies, and therefore protect
the principle that ‘small is beautiful’.
Local autonomy is thus seen as a desirable alternative, because
it maintains diversity and avoids the undesirable consequences of
global free trade – namely, environmental destruction and a race to
the bottom. In contrast, local communities can develop a ‘subsistence
perspective’, regarded as being closer to nature than industrial society.
Vandana Shiva regards pre-colonial India as an ideal model based
on the subsistence perspective (Shiva 1989). Subsistence production

is said to guarantee food for the local population, rather than
production for export, and its simplicity means that the eco-feminist
principle of respect for ‘Mother Earth’ is embraced. For the extreme
localisers, the problems of globalisation are thus transcended by re-
establishing local ‘community’, and therefore they (unlike Bello)
reject development. This account tends to ignore inequalities within
and between localities (not least in terms of access to food), and can
often lead to a justification of hierarchy and exploitation, so long as
they are ‘embedded’ in local cultures.
The proposals discussed in this section are thus not without their
problems. As we have seen, localisation can easily lead to a local-first
strategy that can pave the way for all kinds of reactionary parochial-
isms, despite the best intentions of its proponents. The less explicitly
localist strategy of deglobalisation can suffer from similar problems,
as it tends to assume that many of problems are caused by foreign
rather than local capital. Marxists on the other hand, tend to argue
that the problem is less one of foreign or local capital, but one of
capital itself. That is, faced with similar circumstances, capitalists tend
to behave in similar ways, exporting capital, speculating rather than
investing productively (and exploiting cheap labour in the latter
case). In other words, all capitalists, regardless of origin, have little
motive in pursuing local or national interests per se, as their primary
motivation is to make a profit. This has implications for how we
think about struggles both globally and within particular localities,
and by implication about the role of the state as a site of struggle
that can win reforms for exploited classes and oppressed groups. It
also has implications for how we think about the relationship between
institutional reform and systemic critique. Briefly, institutional reform
may be necessary and welcome, but in the absence of wider social
and political change it is unlikely to challenge the dominant
tendencies of global capitalism. This is not to say that reform is
irrelevant, or that meaningful social change can only come about
through a classical Marxist revolution (Kiely 2005: Ch. 9). But neither
can the centrality of uneven capitalist development in the world
order be ignored (T. Smith 2003).
Global governance
Critique
Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the US response to them, the
anti-globalisation movement has developed a more explicit critique
Conclusions 173
of the state system and of global governance. The anti-globalisation

movement is moving beyond a critique of corporate globalisation to
one that includes the state system, militarism and (less economically
based) international institutions in its analysis (Social Movements
Manifesto 2003). Thus, at the second World Social Forum at Porto
Alegre, Brazil, in 2002, there was considerable debate about the need
to reform the UN, and especially the Security Council. As discussed in
Chapter 3, this institution allows veto powers for its five permanent
members, and the UN itself is often bypassed by leading powers
– the US in particular. The double standards of some states perhaps
reached the nadir in 2003, when the US and Britain introduced the
spurious concept of ‘unreasonable veto’, which essentially argued
that war with Iraq would occur if the other permanent members of
the Security Council vetoed any decision to go to war. This concept
is not recognised in international law, and moreover it is one that
ignores the US’s use of the veto throughout the Cold War, and six
times since the end of the Cold War in 1990. For some Marxists, such
behaviour means that the UN should be disbanded, as it is a toothless
organisation at best and an instrument of western imperialism at
worst (Anderson 2002). But in the absence of wider changes, this
proposal would lead to a step back into a more starkly hierarchical
system of nation-states. But what is also clear is that movement
towards a system of democratic global governance, operating beyond
the specific interests of nation-states, is far from a reality. Indeed,
George W. Bush’s administration is quite blatantly unilateralist in
its behaviour, and has done much to undermine any optimism
concerning the politics of globalisation.
So the basic critique of actually existing global politics is that they
have not escaped the reality of state power, and of how some states
continue to exercise power over others. Indeed, the most powerful
states use international organisations when it suits them, but discard
them when it does not. This criticism applies to institutions of global
economic governance such as the WTO, as much as to political
organisations such as the UN.
Alternatives
As I have said, some Marxists see no hope for existing international
institutions and therefore welcome the decline of the UN and the
WTO. But it can be argued in response that, in the absence of any
concrete replacement, this could actually make matters worse, as
there would then be no countervailing power to the interests of
the most powerful states and transnational companies. Of course,

such countervailing power is already weak, and even sometimes
non-existent, but this is an argument for strengthening institutions
– an International Clearing Union, for example, would have far
more power and independence from nation-states than the IMF. A
strengthened system of global regulation does not necessarily mean
that all of the current international institutions should continue to
exist, but neither does it mean that they should all be abolished. As
we have already seen, many anti-globalisers propose a whole host
of new institutions and the strengthening of some existing ones, as
well as the abolition of others.
In the realm of global politics, a reformed UN is one obvious
proposal. Concrete programmes are thin on the ground, but they
would include at the very least the end of the veto power of the
five permanent members of the Security Council. This arrangement
could be replaced by a reformed Security Council with far more
members, or even one that worked according to the principle of
one member one vote. In practice, this would remain far from
perfect – as we saw in the build-up to the war in Iraq in 2003, the
US attempted to buy the votes of non-permanent members of the
Security Council through promises or the threatened withdrawal
of aid programmes. This is not, of course, an argument against the
extension of democracy to the Security Council; but it does emphasise
the limitations of the potential of democracy in such an unequal
global order. But such expansion of democratic practices within the
sphere of global governance limitations make the expansion all the
more imperative.
However, there is a further proposal that seeks to transcend the
interests of nation-states, and that is the call for a global parliament.
Such a parliament would not be international, as representatives
would be independent of specific nation-states. In this respect, a
global parliament would constitute a genuine attempt to globalise
– rather than simply internationalise – politics. George Monbiot
suggests that such a parliament could comprise representatives
of constituencies of around 10 million people, who would not
necessarily all live in the same nation-state (Monbiot 2003b). He
also (somewhat optimistically) hopes that such a parliament could
gradually bypass existing institutions such as the Security Council,
and thereby increase its powers.
Objections to this view are based on both principle and strategy.
Some argue that a global parliament would undermine diversity,
Conclusions 175
and that democracy is only possible at a local level. But as we have

seen, this perspective can ignore power relations within and between
local communities; and it still ultimately accepts some role for
global governance in order to ensure local diversity. Thus, a global
parliament is not necessarily incompatible with diversity – indeed,
it may actively encourage it (though presumably such diversity
would not include acceptance of local hierarchy and exploitation).
The strategic objection is perhaps more convincing, as it is far from
clear that such a parliament is either a feasible short-term goal or
an immediate priority. More local and national demands may be
of greater immediate importance, such as democratisation within
nation-states. This does not, of course, mean a rejection of globalist
principles – still less that the local or national should always be
prioritised as a matter of priniciple over the global; but it does involve
some prioritising of short- and medium-term political aspirations.
Related to this debate is the issue of whether institutions of global
economic governance should be reformed (‘fixed’) or abolished
(‘nixed’). These are important debates, and the anti-globalisation
movement has no single position on these issues. For critics, this is
a sign of the movement’s incoherence. But, there are two responses
to this criticism. First, why should there be a single position? Any
movement that wishes to promote social and political change is bound
to be divided in some ways, and singular answers often carry their own
political danger. Second, pointing to some (alleged) inconsistencies
in terms of alternatives is not the same as justifying the existence of
the current order. Too often, defenders of the status quo assume that
the one leads to the other. But as we have seen in earlier chapters,
actually existing globalisation works in ways that are very different
from how its advocates hope, and it is hierarchical, exploitative and
unstable. It is therefore imperative that the – difficult and sometimes
inconsistent – work of finding alternatives continues.
Of course, these debates tend to focus narrowly on international
institutions. This book has argued that nation-states remain central
to understanding the reality of intensified capitalist globalisation,
and that the hierarchical nation-state system is still highly relevant.
Nation-states therefore continue to remain central sites of conflict,
and while transnational solidarity is important it should not be
at the expense of politics that continue to focus on the nation-
state (Kiely 2005: Ch. 8). This point is now increasingly recognised
by many in the global justice movement, although there remain
important dissenters (Hardt and Negri 2000). The reality of the wars
launched by the Bush administration after 2001 partly explains this

renewed focus on the state, and it has been reinforced by growing
disillusionment with the limitations of summit-stalking by activists.
This of course does not mean that politics focused on the nation-state
should simply replace ‘global politics’, but it does undermine the
ways in which the dichotomy was sometimes presented in the late
1990s, so that global resistance was seen as progressive and national
resistance as parochial.9
Global culture
Critique
The anti-globalisation movement’s critique of culture argues that it
has been colonised by consumer capitalism. This has taken a variety
of forms, such as the increased visibility of global products like Coca
Cola and McDonald’s, through to the advocacy of GNP and GDP as
supposedly objective measures of progress. As I argued in Chapter 5,
this critique can sometimes lead to a politics that romanticises the
past, or local cultures in the Third World, in the name of a spurious
authenticity. But, shorn of such romanticism, it can promote a radical
approach to politics based on a challenge to the inequality, alienation
and growth fetishism of contemporary global capitalism.
Alternatives
The basic alternative offered by anti-globalisation movements is a
commitment to the principle of ‘reclaiming the commons’ – in other
words, a rejection of the increased privatisation, commodification
and rationalisation of the planet. As the prominent French activist,
Jose Bove insists, ‘The world is not for sale’ (see Bove and Dufour
2001). This notion of the commons, and even more the claim that
they can be reclaimed, can certainly sometimes be associated with
a romantic notion of local communities, in which peasantries are
said to be at one with nature, and inequality and poverty are either
romanticised or ignored. This position is often proposed in the
context of the localisation strategies discussed critically above.
However, the idea of reclaiming the commons need not be
backward-looking, localist and romantic. Perhaps we should talk
about democratisation of the commons, rather than reclamation,
as it is difficult to conceive of a time when there was a genuinely
democratic commons. Seen in this light, the anti-globalisation
movement is based less on a romantic attachment to the past (though
Conclusions 177
such tendencies certainly exist), and more on a position that is united

through opposition to increasing commodification, privatisation and
rationalisation, and to the institutional arrangements that promote
these practices. This entails nothing less than a cultural revolution
– a new way of life. This does not mean a simple ‘New Age’ change
in consciousness, but a change at one and the same time in people’s
consciousness and in the social circumstances in which they live.
Moreover, this cultural revolution does not occur in some distant
future, but starts in the here and now, in everyday struggles against
privatisation, deregulation, war, and so on. Many anti-globalisation
activists therefore argue that there is a cultural revolution in the ways
in which they ‘do politics’, so that, in the famous slogan, there is
‘one no, but many yeses’.
This involves commitment to the principles of democracy, diversity
and even open-endedness. Certainly there can be no rigid blueprints,
as the future cannot be predicted precisely, the outcome of struggle
being open-ended. But having said that, a politics that is so open-
ended as to avoid any decisions is one that ultimately evades the
question of politics (Kiely 2005: Ch. 7). Politics does involve the
making of decisions, and a politics that avoids any ‘closure’ ceases
to be politics. There is clearly a need for commitment to some
principles, policies, and indeed political programmes, even if these
should not become ahistorical blueprint. Similarly, anarchists
tend to downgrade organisation and fetishise direct action. In this
approach, organisation is regarded as something that inevitably gives
rise to hierarchy and the domination of minority leadership. This is
certainly a danger, but it is true of all political action, not least the
‘unorganised’, leaderless direct action supported by anarchists and
autonomists. In this system of ‘unstructured tyranny’, leadership
is effectively in the hands of those that are most politically active,
and there is no accountability precisely because there is no formal
organisation (Ross 2002). Moreover, politics tends to be reduced to
the deed, and direct action is celebrated as an end in itself. The result
is that resistance becomes just another spectacle – something ignored
in the ongoing dominance of neoliberal capitalism. For the anti-
globalisation ‘movement of movements’ to grow and have a wider
impact, there is a need to learn from the authoritarian lessons of the
‘socialist’ past, but no lesson will be learned through a total rejection
of leadership, organisation and political programmes.
CONCLUSION: PROGRESSIVE ALTERNATIVES TO

US HEGEMONY AND NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM
I want to link the question of the relationship between neoliberal

global capitalism, US hegemony and political alternatives by returning
to the work of Karl Polanyi. He argued that the rise of the ‘market
economy’ was distinct from the market as one particular means of
allocating resources. The market economy did not arise naturally or
spontaneously, but was in fact the deliberate creation of the state. A
separate market economy was thus the product of historical social
struggles, such as the enclosure of land. Once a ‘separate’ economic
sphere was created, it tended to dominate all aspects of social life
– instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social
relations are embedded in the economic system’ (Polanyi 1944:
57). Profit-maximisation thus becomes the main goal of economic
activity, and capital tends to commodify ever more aspects of social
life, with destructive consequences. As Polanyi argued, ‘To allow the
market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings
and their natural environment … would result in the demolition
of society.’ (Polanyi 1944: 73) Unsurprisingly, this tendency for
capital to penetrate into new areas was resisted in the nineteenth
century, and attempts were made to ‘re-embed’ the economy within
wider social relations. There thus occurred what Polanyi called a
‘double movement’:
While on the one hand markets spread all over the globe and the amount
of goods involved grew to unbelievable proportions, on the other hand a
network of measures and policies was integrated into powerful institutions
designed to check the action of the market relative to labour, land and money.
(Polanyi 1944: 76)
So, in phase one of the double movement the market became

separated from social control, which led to intensified inequality and
conflict, while in phase two society restored some control over the
market economy. Such means of control included universal suffrage,
the rise of ‘mass politics’, trade unions, and so on. The 1930s saw a
challenge to the democratic potential of the double movement, in the
shape of Stalinism and fascism, but the post-Second World War period
constituted a democratic second phase of this double movement.
Although we should be careful not to romanticise the post-war
settlement, or to overestimate the re-embedding of the economy
Conclusions 179
in that period,10 it is still useful to think of the current period in

terms of a renewed double movement. With the breakdown of neo-
Keynesian welfare and developmental states, and the resurgence of
a global ‘market economy’, neoliberal capitalism can be regarded
as the first phase of a new double movement. Until the rise of the
anti-globalisation movements can thus be seen as its second phase,
constituting an attempt to reassert social control over the capitalist
economy. Thus, ‘global’ protests against the IMF, World Bank and
WTO, and ‘local’ protests against privatisation and deregulation,
are clearly part of a protest against the tendency of capital to
become disembedded from wider social relations. Although many
protestors are probably unaware of Polanyi’s work, placards at May
Day anti-globalisation protests in Sydney and Melbourne in 2001
most clearly expressed the Polanyian influence on anti-globalisation
politics. They read: ‘We live in a Society, not an Economy’ (Daily
News 2001). The politics of anti-globalisation recognises that this
must be the starting point in constructing alternatives to ‘actually
existing globalisation’.
But when talking of a new double movement, there is a strong
need for political caution. We should remember that, like the first
double movement, responses to the dominance of what Polanyi
called ‘market society’ are not necessarily progressive. This has
implications for how we think about responses to the dominance of
contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Chapter 5 challenged the idea
that the world can be reduced to a clash of civilisations, but equally
we need to avoid simplistic divisions based on a binary division
between a homogeneous imperialist bloc and a homogenous anti-
imperialist bloc. Moreover, anti-globalisation and anti-imperialist
politics are not automatically progressive. As we saw in Chapter 3,
some anti-imperialist politics have promoted alliances purely on the
basis that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ – a mirror-image of the
world outlook of George W. Bush. Indeed, some political movements
in the periphery have a great deal in common in this respect with
the populist right in the US and Europe, and of course some ostensibly
anti-US movements have in the past made strategic alliances with
their own current enemy. The idea of a clash of civilisations must be
rejected, and this point is as relevant to ideologues who espouse this
view outside US as for those within it. But the search for a European,
social democratic alternative to US hegemony is also problematic.
This perspective, advocated by Jürgen Habermas, ignores the ways
in which European states are integrated into the world capitalist
order, and how this has led to a sustained reliance on the US domestic
market for exports, and on US transnational companies for investment
within Europe. France and Germany may have opposed the war in
Iraq, but such disagreements over military strategy have largely been
tactical, and have not challenged US hegemony in any sustained
way. Moreover, Europe’s record in relation to the developing world
– in terms of protectionism, aid levels and conditions, limited debt
initiatives, support for the penetration of domestic markets, and so
on – leaves little room for optimism. These brief comments illustrate
the fact that anti-American politics are not necessarily progressive
politics. If the global justice movement represents the best agency
for challenging actually existing globalisation, then that reflects the
fact, that while US hegemony may rightly be opposed, then so too
should many reactionary anti-Americanisms: opposition to US
hegemony should not be made because it is American, but because
of the role played by the dominant capitalist state in the neoliberal,
global order.
Notes
1 INTRODUCTION
1. A distinction should be made between globalisation theory and theories of

globalisation. This will become clear in the argument that follows, but for
now my focus is on the former, which suggests that globalisation, rather
than being the outcome of social processes, actually determines other
factors. Not all globalisation theorists are necessarily optimistic – Castells
could be considered a pessimist, for instance. See further Chapter 2.
2 GLOBALISATION THEORY OR CAPITALIST GLOBALISATION?
1. These observations also have implications for debates over the relevance of
classical Marxist theories of imperialism to the current era of globalisation
– a point taken up in Chapter 3.
2. Interestingly, in more recent work, Held and his colleagues have slightly
amended their three-fold divide in the globalisation debate. Instead, we
have a divide between those who see globalisation as a myth and those
who see it as a reality (Held and McGrew 2002; 2003). However, there
are still massive divisions within the two camps, and still the question of
agency is downplayed. This point is all the more true of Giddens’ (1999)
survey of globalisation, which divides the debate between radicals (who
believe – like Giddens himself – that strong globalisation is an established
fact) and sceptics (who dispute this claim).
3. This paragraph draws heavily on Kiely 2005: Ch. 2.
4. This is the subject of later chapters, particularly Chapter 5, but also
Chapters 3, 4 and 6.
5. This does not imply that ‘global civil society’ is meaningless, nor that
transnational solidarity or cosmopolitan politics are not laudable
aspirations. It is merely to suggest that progressive politics cannot be
measured in terms of space. These issues are addressed further in Chapters
5 and 7.
6. In fairness to Held and his colleagues (see especially Held 1998), they
are critical of accounts that regard globalisation as simply impacting on
nation-states, in the way that Tony Blair (selectively) argues his case.
However, the transformationalist account still has little to say about the
question of agency.
7. See Kiely 2005: Ch. 2.
3 GLOBALISATION AND POLITICS I: STATE SOVEREIGNTY,

IMPERIALISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM
1. At first sight, this statement appears to confirm Giddens’ view that

there is no escape from globalisation. But as I argued in chapter 2,
181
this statement is made at such a high level of generalisation that it is

effectively meaningless.
2. See also the outline of the position of optimistic Marxist hyper-globalisers
in Chapter 2.
3. For a full analysis see Kiely (2005: Ch. 9).
4. As we will see in Chapter 6, US policy after the Cold War has been
influenced by the objective of pre-empting potential competitors. The
fact that such concerns have influenced US policy-makers does not,
however, confirm the relevance of Lenin and Bukharin for the current era.
As my argument makes clear, analyses based on inter-imperialist rivalry
ignore the interdependence and cooperation between major powers, and
ignores the local reasons for these conflicts.
5. For one very useful analysis of state formation along these lines, see
Bromley 1994: Chs. 4 and 5. For all its (economistic and functionalist)
faults, see also the ‘modes of production’ literature of the 1970s, discussed
in Kiely (1995: Ch. 4). Unfortunately, development studies rarely concerns
itself with such issues these days.
6. This point is not made to absolve the US state from its responsibility for
past (and present) actions, but equally these actions alone cannot explain
tragic events like those of September 11 2001. Arguments of this kind
simply reproduce the ‘us’ and ‘them’ thinking of George W. Bush’s axis
of evil speech. On this point, see Gregory (2004: 45–6) and Mamdani
(2004: 14). See also the discussion of rights in Chapter 6.
7. These criticisms are not meant to imply that Shaw is an advocate of
‘liberal imperialism’, or ‘humanitarian military intervention’. Indeed,
his work has argued strongly against the latter, and has usefully argued
that ‘anti-imperialism is not enough’. My disagreement is that this valid
point does not make imperialism irrelevant.
8. Crude Marxist assertions that global governance is simply capitalist
governance neglect the institutional forms that make up such governance,
and the ways that capitalism can change over time. In this respect they
closely parallel the Stalinist dogma of the 1930s, which denied any
difference between social democracy and fascism.
9. It therefore follows that some international institutions, no matter how
imperfect, may act as restraints on the most powerful states. Arguments
like those made by Tariq Ali (2004) appear to be close to the realist
position that the dominant state always secures its interests. Faced with
this never-ending triumph of imperialist power, the question of how we
move to a more democratic and indeed socialist world is left unanswered.
This reflects Ali’s crude mixture of third-worldism (whereby all resistance
is assessed as anti-imperialist and therefore of equal value – a mirror image
of the Bush-Blair homogenisation of terrorism), anti-institutionalism
(see note 8) and realist defences of state sovereignty. The rejection of
institutionalism leads to ultra-leftist dismissals of all institutions, and
the failure to see any difference between, say, Clinton and Bush – a
position increasingly advocated by the New Left Review. Certainly there
are significant continuities, but there are differences too, even if much
of the globalisation thesis is hopelessly nostalgic for the Clinton era.
Indeed, Perry Anderson (2001) effectively advocated support for Bush in
Notes 183
the 2000 election, showing an ultra-leftism that drifts towards despair or

admiration for the right. The political trajectory of Christopher Hitchens
can be regarded as a kind of twisted cousin of this perspective – and Ali
does a useful job in demolishing that particular rightward drift.
4 GLOBALISATION AND POLITICS II:

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE POST-9/11 WORLD
1. Neoconservatives were divided on the war over Kosovo. Robert Kagan

and William Kristol, for instance, supported it, and Charles Krauthammer
opposed it. But even those who supported it argued that Clinton was not
exercising US hegemony in a decisive way.
2. This was not always the view taken by neoconservatives, especially prior
to Bush’s nomination as Republican candidate for the 2000 election.
Many neocons initially gave their support to John McCain. See Kristol
and Brooks (2000).
3. The probably doomed efforts to impeach Blair for misleading Parliament
have led to the production of a devastating indictment. See Rangwala
and Plesch (2004).
4. This point applies not only to US hegemony, but to the British Empire
too. In 1900, Fabian Society member George Bernard Shaw wrote: ‘a
great power must, consciously or unconsciously, govern in the general
interests of civilization’, and that any state ‘large or small, which hinders
the spread of international civilisation must disappear’. (quoted in Ali
2004: 179)
5. Kagan does this by contrasting Kantian Europe with the Hobbesian US.
This ignores the co-operation between Europe and the US prior to 2003,
and rests on a woeful understanding of Hobbesian political philosophy,
which most certainly does not give a free licence to the exercise of power.
The idea of a US constitution without the influence of Kant is similarly
ludicrous, as is the idea of international law based solely on the exercise
of ‘good power’. As Hardt and Negri argue, ‘[t]he idea of republican virtue
has from its beginning been aimed against the notion that the ruler,
or indeed anyone, stands above the law. Such exception is the basis of
tyranny and makes impossible the realization of freedom, equality and
democracy.’ (Hardt and Negri 2004: 9) These themes are explored further
in relation to rights in Chapter 5.
6. Advocates of the war have argued that even its most prominent opponents
believed that Saddam had WMD on the eve of war, and so everyone
was mistaken. However, at the time many cast doubt on the so-called
intelligence presented to the UN and to the US and British publics,
which was precisely why liberal opponents of the war argued that the
UN inspectors should be given more time.
7. Among the counts available are www.iraqbodycount.net, the Brookings
Institution (O’Hanlon and de Albuquerque 2004), and Iraqi Peoples Kifah.
Some of the data below can be found at IPS (2004). According to Iraq
Body Count, whose estimates tend to be lower than others, civilian deaths
as a direct result of the invasion and occupation (measured in terms of
the failure of the occupying forces to carry out their security obligations
as laid down by the Geneva Convention) stood at between 14,181 and
16,312 at 29 October 2004 (insurgent deaths accounted for a further
6, 000 deaths at least). In addition, morgues in Baghdad have reported
massive increases in deaths through violent crime – from an average of
14 a month in 2002, compared to 357 a month (a total of 4,279) in the
first year of occupation. In October 2004, a new report, published by the
medical journal The Lancet, estimated that the figure could be as high as
194,000 (Roberts et al. 2004). This report caused enormous controversy
and criticism on its publication, particularly the headline figure of almost
100,000 deaths. In fact, the 100,000 figure (actually 98,000) was based
on an estimate of deaths that stretched from one as low as 8,000 to
one as high as 194,000. This high margin for error was used by critics
to rubbish the report’s findings (see, for instance, Kaplan 2004). But in
fact the report went to great lengths to incorporate probabilities and
eliminate uncertainties (for details, see Soldz 2004), particularly those
likely to bias the figures upwards. Indeed, the headline 98,000 figure
excluded the findings from some outlier areas (such as Fallujah), where
death rates were much higher than the average, and did not include
other areas with high rates of conflict such as Ramadi and Najaf. It is
for such reasons that the report’s authors suggested that the headline
figure may be conservative. There is no way of verifying this statement,
but critics of the report, including (to return a term of abuse) the ‘usual
suspects’ such as the British Prime Minister’s office and liberal pro-war
newspaper The Observer, simply did not engage with its findings, resting
content with assertions that a figure closer to the lowest estimation was
the true figure.
8. Of the 30 states willing to be identified as being part of the coalition (a
further 15 preferred to remain anonymous), the US State Department’s
own survey of human rights identified 18 as having ‘poor or extremely
poor’ human rights records (IPS 2003, Coalition of the Willing or Coalition
of the Coerced, cited in Gregory 2004: 184, 321).
9. Many neoconservatives therefore opposed the Blair–Bush road map to
peace in the Israel–Palestine conflict. See for instance Krauthammer
(2003a) and Muravchik (2003).
10. A failure to recognise this distinction between nation-states and the
international system of nation-states lies at the heart of liberal cases for
humanitarian military intervention. See for instance the journalism of
Johann Hari. Notwithstanding his one-dimensional view of US state
power, it is precisely a recognition of this distinction that lies at the heart
of Chomsky’s case that the US state is the main terrorist in the world
today (Chomsky, 2001).
11. For a neoconservative statement along these simplistic lines, see Perle
and Frum (2003).
12. The US military budget for 2004 was $399 billion. This is almost as
large as that of the rest of the world combined, and 29 times as large
as the combined spending of those Bush identified as rogue states that
comprised the axis of evil (Cuba, Iran, Iraq before 2003, Libya before
Notes 185
2003, North Korea, Sudan and Syria). See Centre for Defense Information
(2004) and www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade.
13. There is a whole list of such states, not all of which neocons agree on.
These include Syria, Iran and North Korea, on which there is general
agreement. More divisive are states such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and
Egypt, all of which are allies of the Bush administration.
14. See also Ferguson (2003) and Ferguson and Kagan (2003).
15. Thus, to paraphrase a famous definition of neoconservatism, we can
distinguish between those neocons outside the administration and those
inside it, the latter of which have been hit by the reality of the limits of US
power. Even Krauthammer complained that ‘If the world wants us to play
God, especially in godforsaken places, it had better help’ (Krauthammer
2003b).
16. Callinicos provides some useful substantive discussion of the current order.
However, this discussion leaves one at a loss as to why he continues to
defend the relevance of Bukharin and Lenin in the current era (Callinicos
2003).
17. This point relates to a wider problem with Marxist theories of imperialism
– namely their tendency to regard wars as necessities of imperialism rather
than policy choices in the context of an imperialist world order. In other
words, specific strategies cannot be ‘read off’ from the general reality of
imperialism, not least because imperialism does not only involve war
(Nederveen Pieterse 2004: 27).
18. The Blair government’s efforts to link its foreign policy to the Report of
the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
(ICISS 2001), which attempts to provide a clear basis for humanitarian
intervention and respect for state sovereignty, is therefore unconvincing.
This report may suffer from some of the optimistic fallacies of liberal
cosmopolitanism, but equally its clarity on the principles necessary for
intervention to be classified as humanitarian are in stark contrast to
Blair’s case for war in Iraq. This point applies in particular to the ‘right
authority’ principle (the UN), but also to the principles of last resort,
proportional means, and perhaps, with hindsight, reasonable chances
of success. Given the contorted and changing justifications for the war,
‘right intention’ also seems problematic.
5 THE GLOBAL ECONOMY:

US HEGEMONY FROM BRETTON WOODS TO NEOLIBERALISM
1. The HIPC initiative was introduced in 1996 to give debt relief to some of the
poorest countries in the world. The countries that qualify are low-income
countries that are not considered credit-worthy by international capital
markets, and that have unsustainable debt. The countries qualifying are
those with an annual debt service ratio of 15 per cent (initially set at 25
per cent in 1996, but changed in 1999). However, in practice the amount
of debt relief actually committed has been limited, as has the movement
of countries from unsustainable to sustainable debt.
2. This strategy of pre-emption has also influenced more specific aid policy,
such as the refusal to channel money through NGOs who advocate birth
control. This is likely to have devastating effects on the spread of HIV/
AIDS, thus undermining the increase in aid money to AIDS-stricken
territories in Africa.
3. Of course such setbacks are not irreversible, and the East Asia region
may continue its rise to prominence. But globalisation theory, with
its emphasis on flows that transcend location, cannot hope to explain
this phenomenon. The rise of East Asian capitalism clearly points to
the continued importance of location, as do state strategies that have
facilitated this process..
4. Ironically, such an anti-sociological argument is made in Giddens
(2002).
6 GLOBALISATION, CULTURE AND RIGHTS: LIBERAL

INTERNATIONALISM, IMPERIALISM AND UNIVERSALISM
1. This is probably only a rumour, which may have been started by Matt
Groening himself.
2. For a highly informative account of current neoconservatism, emphasising
common positions and differences within the neoconservative camp, see
Dorrien (2004).
3. China remains a major concern of US neoconservatives and of the Bush
administration, but the issue was far less visible in the 2000 election
campaign than in 2004. Indeed, Democrat candidate John Kerry was
much more vocal on the issue of China.
4. Indeed, prominent neoconservative intellectual Charles Krauthammer
distinguishes between the ‘democratic globalism’ of Bush and Blair,
and the ‘democratic realism’ advocated by those who regard strategic
considerations as a condition for intervention. This division reflects
the different emphases placed on (perceived) global democratisation
alongside a more realist strategy of dealing with US enemies (who happen
to be non-democratic), while still possibly including non-democratic
states as allies. For Krauthammer, the main enemy is said to be ‘Islamic/
Arab radicalism’. This strategy is at least honest about the double
standards that are promoted by either strategy, and the fact that neither
can ultimately advocate a genuine universalism (Krauthammer 2004).
5. Although, as we saw in Chapter 4, military power has its limits, and it
is hard to see how it could be used against China, for example.
6. From 1992 to 2000, military spending as a percentage of GDP fell from
4.72 per cent to 2.99 per cent (Pollin 2003: 29).
7. This point is most clearly made by the leading neoconservative realist,
Charles Krauthammer (1990; 2002/3).
8. Isolationist ideas do, however, continue to influence the ways in which
the US interacts with other states, not least in the unilateralism of the
Bush administration. The argument that US interventionism can be
rigidly contrasted to isolationism – advanced by Christopher Hitches as
justification for his support for Bush – is guilty of the spatial fetishism
Notes 187
that was criticised in Chapter 2. In particular, in proposing an ‘isolation

bad/intervention good’ dichotomy, it tells us nothing about the different
forms – the politics – of interventions.
9. Indeed, post-Saddam Iraq has provoked considerable conflict among
neoconservatives. See for instance Krauthammer (2004) and Fukuyama
(2004a).
10. These orders have not, however, been implemented, because of both the
chaos in Iraq and the end of the CPA.
11. In a poll conducted in May 2004, commissioned by the US-led Coalition
Provisional Authority, 92 per cent of Iraqis considered the coalition forces
to be ‘occupiers’. The poll, taken just before Iyad Allawi was appointed
as Prime Minister in the ‘return to sovereignty’, found that he had the
support of just 23 per cent of Iraqis, compared to opposition from 61
per cent (IPS 2004: 5–6).
12. Or indeed by some on the anti-imperialist left, who have accused Iraqi
trade unions of collaboration with the occupation. Indeed, some crude
anti-imperialists are completely indifferent to internal developments in
Iraq, both before and after the US invasion. This reflects the wider problems
of a strand of anti-imperialism, discussed in previous chapters.
13. This is especially evident in the neoconservative cynicism of Charles
Krauthammer, which is essentially characterised by indifference to the
idealist neocon project of liberal democratic expansion abroad. Fearing
active citizenship within the US, Krauthammer also finds indifference
to the political process within the US to be desirable.
14. This conflation is the ultimate weakness of the BBC series of 2004, called
The Power of Nightmares. Having noted this weakness, I should stress
how this brilliant, thought-provoking programme rightly points to areas
of convergence between neoconservatism and some political Islamist
strands, and the functionality of each for other.
15. The survey was carried out by Gallup International and Environics
International, and reported by the World Economic Forum. It included a
survey of the trust ratings of 17 different institutions, of which parliaments
had the lowest rating, closely followed by global companies. In terms of
the regional breakdown for responses to the idea of being governed by the
will of the people, the Middle East saw an 82 per cent negative response,
Latin America 78 per cent, Asia and the Pacific 74 per cent, Eastern and
Central Europe 70 per cent, Africa 69 per cent, the EU 61 per cent, and
North America 52 per cent (compared to 43 per cent positive).
16. This argument is made in order to question the one-sided emphasis
on growth, but not to reject growth outright. There is a great deal of
envisionmentalist hubris that must be rejected, including the deep
green perspective that argues against any growth and industrialism.
The problems of romantic ‘localist’ utopias are briefly discussed later in
the text.
17. As Thomas Friedman, one of the most prominent US advocates of
globalisation argues, ‘Globalization-is-U.S.’ (cited in Bacevich 2002: 40)
18. But we should be careful not to homogenise this political clash.
Neoconservatives are clearly generally committed to liberal democratic
and market expansion, but they are ultimately cynical about the former
and tend to suggest that the latter leads to complacency and indifference
(see also note 12). This is yet another way in which neoconservatism’s
advocacy of liberal expansion rapidly becomes support for conservative
elitism, whether in the form of imperialism, the pacification of the
citizenry, the limiting of democracy, or a hierarchical nation-state system.
Ultimately, neocons have contempt not only for the Iraqi, but also the
US, ‘masses’, not to mention other countries. Ultimately, this can be
traced back to the problems of (versions of) liberalism, and its implicit
support for the market over politics.
7 CONCLUSIONS: US IMPERIALISM, ACTUALLY EXISTING

GLOBALISATION, AND THE QUESTION OF ALTERNATIVES
1. Of course not all globalisation theorists accept the argument for neoliberal
free trade, although Giddens comes closest to this position. Held, Kaldor
and others reject neoliberalism and suggest reforms of global governance
to promote a level playing field. Nevertheless, they remain optimistic
that institutions of ‘global governance’ can alleviate these inequalities,
and that they can do so more effectively than the nation-state. (See
Chapter 2).
2. This is not an argument that necessarily involves advocacy of some
crude versions of dependency. I accept that the world can be divided
into cores and peripheries, but this division is more than a binary one,
and it changes over time. Most important, the division intro core and
periphery reflects the latter’s marginalisation from global capital flows,
and not their incorporation. Contrary to neoliberal theory (which, like
crude dependency theory assumes that capital will flow from core to
periphery), this is not because of market imperfections, but rather reflects
the ways that markets work in the real world. See Chapter 4.
3. A project that overlaps with the concerns of regulation theory. See Aglietta
(1976) and Jessop (2002).
4. Hardt and Negri’s characteristically brilliant but fundamentally flawed
account of war should be seen in this light. They rightly emphasise
that the ‘war on terror’ is not simply a war against territorial states, and
from the point of view of the purveyors it must involve ‘the continuous,
uninterrupted exercise of power and violence’ (Hardt and Negri 2004: 14),
and thus argue that this constitutes a war that transcends the older idea
of war between sovereign nation-states. While much of this is true, Hardt
and Negri also underestimate the extent to which the advocates of such a
war believe that it can be won through the policing of sovereign nation-
states, and the extension of the ‘liberal zone of peace’. This weakness can
be traced back to their exaggeration of the decline of the nation-state
system, first outlined in Empire. See the interesting review of Hardt and
Negri (2004) by the (ex?) neoconservative Francis Fukuyama (2004b).
See also Fukuyama (2004c) and Lal (2004).
5. This is not the place for a full consideration of the work of Gallagher and
Robinson, and their critical account of Marxist theories of imperialism.
(This will be undertaken as part of the author’s long-term project on
Notes 189
comparative state formation, capitalist development, imperialism and

globalisation over the next few years.) Whatever the status of their
work, what is useful is their emphasis on the fact that free trade is fully
compatible with the domination of some states by others, and that
such domination may be accepted by some dominant agents in the
subordinate states – a central argument of this work.
6. This is reflected in the ending of many capital controls in the 1980s and
1990s, which became all but inevitable once the dominant state had itself
liberalised in the 1970s and 1980s. Some states, however, continue to
regulate their capital accounts, including China, India and Malaysia.
7. The outcome of proposed elections in Iraq, both in early 2005, and (after
the construction of a new constitution) late 2005 or early 2006, will have
an important impact on US policy. The best-case scenario is likely to be
the development of a kind of low-intensity democracy, as discussed in
the previous chapter. The worst case is likely to be a full-scale civil war.
The most likely scenario is somewhere between these two extremes – a
‘low, low-intensity democracy’ accompanied by ongoing conflict. This
will obviously have very significant implications for the US occupation
and future US foreign policy.
8. This phrase is taken from a New York Times article of 17 February 2003,
in response to the massive, global, anti-war protests of 15 February.
The article actually regarded ‘world public opinion’ as the second
superpower.
9. In this way the movement tended to accept the arguments of neoliberalism
and globalisation theory regarding the increased irrelevance of the
nation-state.
10. The post-war period was after all one in which mass production and
consumption were developed to unprecedented levels, at least in the
western world. Nevertheless, there was important non-market protection
against the full effects of the market economy, such as full employment
and the welfare state, which have been undermined in recent years.
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Index
Abrams, Elliot, 76 Bank of International Settlements,

absolutism, 43–4 50
Achcar, Gilbert, 150 Baran, Paul, 61
Afghanistan, 8, 67, 76, 79, 81, 133 Barnet, Richard, 122
Africa, 97, 107, 108, 186, 187 Barnett, Thomas, 136
Aglietta, Michael, 188 Bartholomew, Amy, 65
aid, 87, 90, 101 Baudrillard, Jean, 10–11
AIDS, 186 Baxter, John, 62
Albright, Madeleine, 76 BBC (British Broadcasting
Allawi, Iyad, 187 Corporation), 71, 187
alienation, 148 Becker, David, 160
Allen, Tim, 146 Beetham, David, 137–8, 150
Allende, Salvador, 122 Bello, Walden, 169–72
Ali, Tariq, 150, 182–3 Berlin, Isaiah, 128, 130
al Qaeda, 68, 69, 75, 136, 164 Bernard Shaw, George, 183
Americanisation, 120–7, 139, 157, Bieler, Andreas, 160
158 bilateral trade agreements, 102
anarchism, 177 bin Laden, Osama, 73
Anderson, James, 79 bioregionalism, 55–6
Anderson, Perry, 173, 182–3 Blair, Tony, 2, 3, 27, 31–2, 69–70,
ANP (Adjusted National Product), 71–4, 76, 78, 81, 86, 100, 134,
146 137, 152, 181, 184, 185
ATTAC (Association for the Blix, Hans, 69, 70
Taxation of financial Blunkett, David, 32
Transactions for the Aid of Bobbit, Philip, 73–4, 136
Citizens), 170 Bolshevik Revolution, 51, 60
anti-capitalism, 58, 165–80 Boot, Max, 79
anti-globalisation movement, Boutros Ghali, Boutros, 62
165–80 Bove, Jose, 176
Arab nationalism, 136 Brazil, 109, 111
Archibugi, Daniele, 53, 85 Breakspear, Jennifer, 65
Argentina, 101, 111 Bremer, Paul, 140
Arrighi, Giovanni, 163 Brenner, Robert, 41, 112
Asia, 97, 107, 108, 140 Brett, Edward, 89
Asian values debate, 132, 137, 139, Bretton Woods agreement, 5, 39,
140–1, 151 51, 63, 88–95, 111, 130, 156,
autonomism, 177 161, 163
axis of evil, 68, 182 Britain, 43–4, 59, 82, 87, 100
and British hegemony, 48, 129,
Bacevich, Andrew, 134, 135, 187 183
Baker, Dean, 24, 108 Bromley, Simon, 63, 83, 182
balance of power, 56–8 Brookings Institution, 183
Bangkok Declaration, 132 Brooks, David, 183
202
Index 203
Bukharin, Nikolai, 59–60, 65, 80, Chile, 122, 131, 170

82, 182, 185 China, 73, 104, 105, 106, 114, 136,
Burnham, Peter, 160 163, 186, 189
Burnheim, John, 55 Chirac, Jacques, 70, 113
Bush, George, 30, 33, 67, 71–4, 78, Chomsky, Noam, 184
80, 100, 102, 112, 113, 118, Christian fundamentalism, 76–7
137, 155, 179, 182, 184, 186 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency),
Bush administration, 2–3, 4, 67, 139
69, 70, 71–4, 75–6, 80, 85, 101, Clark, Wesley, 164
127, 134, 155, 163, 164, 165, Clarke, Jonathan, 136
173, 176 Clarke, Simon, 160
Bush, George snr., 80, 112, 133, clash of barbarisms, 150, 153
134, 141, 156 clash of civilisations, 150, 179
clash of fundamentalisms, 150, 153
Callinicos, Alex, 62, 80, 185 Clinton, Bill, 2, 3, 4, 52, 61, 67, 68,
capital, 13, 19–20, 35, 58, 80, 114, 73, 74, 76, 80, 100, 102, 112,
147, 148, 154, 161, 167, 172 118, 133, 134, 136, 141, 154,
accumulation of, 34–5 156, 163, 182
controls, 53, 106, 170 Coates, David, 69, 70, 71–2
financial, 13, 24, 27, 36, 50, 62–3, Coca Cola, 109, 123, 176
80, 93–5, 110–12, 156, 158, Cold War, 30, 47, 48–9, 51, 76, 90,
169, 170 122, 131, 156, 161, 173, 182
internationalisation of, 158, colonialism, 9, 39, 46, 58, 60, 63,
160–1 see also transnational 89, 129, 143–4
corporations commodification, 121, 148
mobility, 13, 18–21, 161, 168 commodity chains, 108
capitalism, 7, 16, 26, 27, 29–30, commons, the, 170–2, 176–7
33–6, 39–40, 44–6, 58, 84, 85, communism, 46, 90, 132, 163
88, 90, 145, 148, 150, 151, 155, Communist International (Third
157, 158, 160–5, 172, 177, 186, International/Comintern), 60
189 Comninel, George, 43
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 100 comparative advantage, 18–19,
Caribbean, 108, 130 102–3, 154
Carolingian Empire, 41–2 communitarianism, 55–6, 129
Carter, Jimmy, 111, 141 Congo, Democratic Republic of, 17
Castells, Manuel, 10, 12, 14, 15, consumerism, 144–5
28, 181 Cook, Robin, 72
Cavanagh, John 122 Cooper, Robert, 73–4, 75, 77
Center for Defense Information, Corrigan, Phillip, 45
185 cosmopolitan capital, 19–20
Central Europe, 187 cosmopolitanism, 2, 30, 36, 39–40,
Chace, James, 29 46–9, 49, 52–5, 56, 65, 66, 67,
Chalabi, Ahmad, 139 71–2, 73, 74, 78, 84, 85, 86, 87,
Chandler, David, 55, 62 127, 129, 136, 157, 181
Chang, Ha-Joon, 24, 45, 91 Cox, Robert, 160, 161
Cheney, Dick, 67, 69 Craig, David, 100
Cheney Report, see National Crouch, Colin, 152
Economic Policy Development Crozier, Michel, 141, 161
Group 2001 Cuba, 68, 121, 184
cultural imperialism, theory of, England, 43–4

120–7, 145, 152, 157 ‘English model’, 59
culture, 5, 120–7, 143–5, 154, 157 Environics International, 187
consumer culture, 5, 120, 152, environment, 37, 53, 54, 62, 106,
cultural homogenisation, 122, 146, 154, 165, 167, 187
123, 124 Escobar, Arturo, 144
cultural hybridity, 23–4, 125–7 Eurodollar market, 93, 94
cultural standardisation, 5, 23, Europe, 40–6, 73, 81, 91, 93, 164,
143–52 179, 183
culture industries, 122 European Social Forum, 166
Cypher, James, 36 European Union, 2, 47, 52, 61, 109,
187
De Albuquerque, Adriana, 183 Evans, Tony, 142
Dean, Kathryn, 148 ExxonMobil, 109
debt crisis (1982), 50, 94–5, 96–9
debt relief, 54, 98–9, 100 Fabian Society, 183
deglobalisation, 169–71 failed states, 84, 133, 157
demarchy, 55 Fairlie, Simon, 149
democracy, 52, 53, 56, 71, 73, 77–8, fascism, 65, 178
129, 131, 133, 136, 137, 138, Ferguson, Niall, 185
141–2, 156, 166, 174, 186, 187, feudalism, 35, 41–3
188 finance, see capital, financial
democratic peace, 77–8, 101–2, Fine, Ben, 100
133–4, 159–60 First World War, 46, 51, 59, 60, 62,
Desai, Meghnad, 20, 162 130, 158
Deudney, David, 51 Fisher, William, 166
development, 121, 133, 144–5 Foner, Eric, 129, 130
Dicken, Peter, 15 Fordism, 91–2
direct action, 177 foreign investment, 108–9, 110,
dollar, as international currency, 91, 138, 167–9
92, 93–5, 111–12, 117–18, 158 Fox network, 124
Dorrien, Gary, 76, 186 France, 43–4, 70, 180
dossier, September 2002, 70–1 Frank, Andre Gunder, 61
dossier, February 2003, 70–1 Frankel, Jeffrey, 13
Dowd, Douglas, 36 freedom, see liberalism, human
Doyle, Michael, 134 rights, and free market
Drury, Shadia, 142 free market, 16, 50–1, 54, 72, 86,
Dufour, Francois, 176 95–6, 101–2, 118, 120, 126–7,
134, 135, 138, 143, 145, 148,
East Asia, 8, 9, 20, 61, 96, 99, 106, 149, 156, 157, 158, 166, 169
107, 108, 111, 119, 163, 167, free trade, 5, 50–1, 72, 89, 118, 135,
186 154, 156, 162
financial crisis (1997), 106, 111 French Revolution, 44
Eastern Europe, 99, 187 Friedmann, Thomas, 187
Egypt, 185 Frobel, Folker, 19
Emmanuel, Arghiri, 59 Frum, David, 184
empires, 39, 122 Fukuyama, Francis, 132, 188
end of History, 132
Engels, Frederick, 33–4 G7 (Group of 7 Nations), 54
Index 205
G20 (Group of 20 developing GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator),

nations), 118 146, 147
Gallagher, John, 162, 188 Grahl, John, 165
Gallup International, 187 Gramsci, Antonio, 160
Gandhi, Mahatma, 146 Greece, ancient, 127
GATS (General Agreement on Trade Gregory, Derek, 78, 182, 184
and Services), 116–17, 170 Groening, Matt, 124, 186
GATT (General Agreement on growth, economic, 145, 146
Tariffs and Trade), 51, 91, 116 growth fetishism, 120
GDP (Gross Domestic Product), Gulf War, 1991, see Iraq, Gulf War,
147, 176 1991
General Motors, 109
Geneva Convention, 75, 184 Haass, Richard, 136
Germany, 61, 63, 88, 139, 163, 180 Habermas, Jurgen, 179
Ghana, 14, 89 Haiti, 141
Giddens, Anthony, 2, 3, 8, 9, 14, 15, Halliday, Fred, 131
18, 26, 27, 37, 38, 95, 126, 144, Halper, Stefan, 136
151, 153, 181–2, 186, 188 Hardt, Michael, 80, 160, 175, 183,
Gill, Stephen, 160, 161 188
Gills, Barry, 142 Hari, Johann, 184
global civil society, 29, 30, 65 Harris, Jerry, 80
global governance, 2, 3, 4, 23, Harris, Nigel, 19–20, 80, 162
39–40, 46–66, 77, 84, 154, 188 Harvey, David, 9, 92, 156–7, 163
globalisation, 1, 4, 6, 7, 21, 23, 25, Harvey the Rabbit, 69
27, 29, 30, 31, 37, 38, 39, 46, Hay, Colin, 32
60, 71, 73, 81, 84, 88, 94, 95, Hayek, Frederick, 131
102–3, 106, 112, 113, 115–16, HDI (Human Development Index),
118–19, 120, 121, 122, 134, 147
136, 143, 145, 151, 152, Heffer, Richard, 129
154–65, 166–80, 181, 189 hegemony,
and politics, 31–8 hegemonic states, 57
as ideology, 36, 105 Held, David, 2, 7, 8, 17–18, 19, 25,
as political project, 7, 155–6, 157 26, 28, 48, 52, 53, 85, 155, 181,
global consciousness, 15 188
globalisation theory, 7, 17–31, Helleiner, Eric, 13
39, 46, 139, 144, 155, 157, 158, Henwood, Doug, 12
181, 188, 189 Her Majesty’s Government, 70
global transformationalists, 7, 8, Hilton, Rodney, 42, 44
25–31, 48, 54, Hines, Colin, 171
hyper-globalist thesis, 18, 109 HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Coun-
sceptical thesis, 21–5, 154 tries) Initiative, 99, 100, 185
global parliament, 174–5 hip-hop, 124
global warming, 8, 146 Hirst, Paul, 22
Glyn, Andrew, 92 Hitchens, Christopher, 183, 186–7
GNP (Gross National Product), 146, Hobbes, Thomas, 128, 183
176 Hobsbawm, Eric, 45
Golding, Peter, 12 Hollywood, 122
good governance, 133, 139 Hong Kong, 106
Gowan, Peter, 62, 79–80, 163 House of Commons, 70
Howe, Stephen, 129 International Monetary Fund (IMF),

Hudson, Michael, 62, 163 8, 32, 47, 50, 54, 55, 62, 89,
Hulsman, John, 136 90–1, 96–9, 101, 116, 154, 156,
human rights, 5, 16, 54, 73, 76, 84, 158, 165, 169, 174, 179
120, 127–43, 149, 157, 158 International Trade Organisation,
humanitarian intervention, 53, 66, 91
84, 85, 134, 182 IPS (Institute of Policy Studies), 183,
Huntington, Samuel, 132–3, 135, 184, 187
141 Iran, 61, 68, 82, 164, 184, 185
Hussein, Saddam, 8, 16–17, 64, 68, Iraq, 3, 4, 133, 140, 141, 142, 184,
70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 82, 83, 186, 189
86, 133, 136, 164, 183, see also Gulf War 1991, 11, 63, 133
Iraq Iraq Body Count, 183–4
war in 2003, 11, 16–17, 49,
ICISS (International Commission 67–87, 124, 160, 173, 174,
on Intervention and State 183–4, 185
Sovereignty), 185 Iraqi National Congress, 139
Ignatieff, Michael, 74 Islam, 132–3, 150
Ikenberry, John, 51 Islamic militancy, 79
imperialism, 3–4, 56, 59, 67, 79–87, Islamic nationalism, 136
121, 140, 152, 154–65, 181, Israel, 76, 77
185, 189 Israel–Palestine conflict, 77
and anti-imperialism, 63–4, 78,
84, 152, 166, 179 Jamaica, 89
of free trade, 162–3 Japan, 61, 64, 81, 91, 93, 109, 139,
Marxist theories of, 59–60, 61, 163
62–3, 63–4, 81 Jessop, Bob, 188
import substitution Johnson, Chalmers, 64
industrialisation, 91, 144 Jubilee 2000, 54
Independent, 87
India, 89, 104, 105, 114, 171, 189 Kagan, Robert, 68, 73, 74, 75, 135,
inequality, 5, 104, 107, 142, 149, 183, 185
151 Kaldor, Mary, 29, 30, 67, 85, 134
information and communications Kant, Immanuel, 47, 134, 183
technologies (ICTs), 10, 12–13, Kaplan, Fred, 184
14, 15, 28, 36 Kaplan, Lawrence, 79, 136
and information gap, 14 Kaplan, Robert, 132, 133, 135
instrumental rationality, 148–50, see Kautsky, Karl, 4, 62–3, 83
also rationalisation Kerry, John, 186
intellectual property rights (IPRs), Keynes, John Maynard, 90–1, 97,
14, 116–17 see also neo-Keynesian
International Criminal Court, 39, KFC, 123
52, 62, 75 Kiely, Ray, 14, 15, 20, 21, 30, 36, 59,
international division of labour, 59 80, 93, 94, 104, 111, 114, 116,
International Forum on 172, 175, 177, 181, 182
Globalization, 55, 171 Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 131, 141
international institutions, 7, 38, Kitching, Gavin, 20
39, 46, 48, 76, 154, 158, 165, Klare, Michael, 82
170, 175 Klein, Naomi, 115, 168
Index 207
Koenig-Archibugi, Mathias, 155 low intensity democracy, 142, 156,

Korea, 92, see also North Korea, 189
South Korea
Korean War, 49 Malaysia, 106, 111, 170, 189
Krauthammer, Charles, 79, 183, Mamdani, Mahmood, 131, 182
184, 185, 186, 187 Mann, Michael, 159, 163, 164
Krieger, Joel, 69, 70, 71–2 markets, 14, 51, 139, see also free
Kristol, William, 67, 72, 79, 135, market
136, 183 Marquand, David, 152
Kuwait, 8, 64, 82, 83, 133 Marshall Plan, 63, 89–90, 92
Kyoto agreement, 75 Marx, Karl, 20, 26, 33–4, 37, 44–5,
58, 59, 148
labour, 19, 34, 167–9 Marxism, 23, 39–40, 54, 56, 58–66,
labour markets, 31–2 79, 82, 84, 157, 172, 173, 181
Lacher, Hannes, 40, 45, 48 Mazarr, Michael, 136
laissez-faire, 38 McCain, John, 183
Lal, Deepak, 105, 188 McDonaldization, 148–50
Lancet, The, 184 McDonald’s, 123, 125, 148, 176
Latin America, 8, 94, 96, 98, 99, McGrew, Anthony, 2, 26, 48, 129, 181
107, 108, 119, 130, 187 McGuigan, Jim, 126
League of Nations, 51 McKinnon, Ronald, 98
Lebanon, 61 media, 121, 122
Lenin, Vladmir, 59–60, 64–5, 80, Melbourne, 179
82, 83, 140, 182, 185 Meltzer Commission, 101
Lewis, Bernard, 139–40 Mexico, 111
Lewis, Libby, 135 Middle East, 75, 81, 82, 136, 187
liberal democracy, 68, 71, 73, 77, Milanovic, Branko, 105
80, 86, 136, 137, 139, 140–1, Mill, John Stuart, 78
152, 187–8 Millennium Challenge Account, 101
liberal imperialism, 74, 86, 159–60, Miloševiç, Slobodan, 17, 86
182 modernisation theory, 77, 121, 133
liberal internationalism, 5, 29, 37, Monbiot, George, 75, 149, 174
49–52, 74, 120, 127–44, 152, Monroe Doctrine, 130
155–6, 157 Monthly Review, 112
liberalisation, 113–14, 189 Morton, Adam David, 160
financial, 93–5, 98, 100, 156, 158, MTV, 125
162 Mugabe, Robert, 16, 86
investment, 98, 113–14 Muravchik, Joshua, 184
trade, 98, 113–14, 138 multilateralism, see global
liberalism, 5, 87, 120, 127–43, 144, governance, United States
158 foreign policy
Libya, 68, 184 Murdoch, Rupert, 124
Lieven, Anatol, 2 Muslims, 139, see also Islam
Litwak, Richard, 134
Lloyd, John, 115 nation-state, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25,
localism, 55–6, 59, 129, 171–2, 29, 32, 38, 39–40, 46–9, 65, 66,
176–7, 187 80, 81, 85, 129, 130, 144, 154,
Locke, John, 128 157, 162, 165, 173, 174, 175–6,
low intensity conflict, 131, 150 188, 189
National Economic Policy Develop- O’Hanlon, Michael, 183

ment Group 2001, 81–2 Ohmae, Kenichi, 18
National Security Strategy, 68–9, oil, 81–3
72, 102 oil price rises, 94
NATO (North Atlantic Treaty OPEC, 82
Organisation), 63, 164 Oxfam, 166
Nazi Germany, 124
Nederveen Pieterse, Jan, 185 Pakistan, 76, 185
Negri, Toni, 80, 160, 161, 175, 183, Palestine, 76, see also Occupied
188 Territories
Negroponte, John, 76 Panama, 133
Negus, Keith, 125 Panitch, Leo, 160
neocolonialism, 121 Pena, Charles, 164
neoconservatism, 5, 32, 36, 67–8, Perle, Richard, 184
72, 73, 74, 76–7, 78, 80, 82, 87, Philippines, 111
103, 133, 134–6, 137, 139, 142, Phillips, Anne, 59
152, 155, 156, 163–4, 186, 187, Plesch, Dan, 183
see also Project for the New Podhoretz, Norman, 135
American Century Pogge, Thomas, 87, 104
neo-Gramscian theory, 160–2 Polanyi, Karl, 34, 37, 38, 170–1,
neo-Keynesian, 25, 31, 95, 156, 179 178–9
neoliberals and neoliberalism, 3–4, political accumulation, 41
5, 6, 7, 18, 20, 24–5, 27, 29, 32, political organisation, 177
36, 37, 38, 49–52, 72, 77, 94, Polk, James, 129
95–9, 99–103, 104, 107, 113, Pollin, Robert, 186
115–16, 118, 133, 134, 138–9, Ponniah, Thomas, 166
148, 150, 152, 155, 157, 159, Porter, Doug, 100
162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 177, Porto Alegre, 173
180, 189 post-war international order, see
new international division of Bretton Woods agreement
labour, 19, 20–21 post-Washington consensus, 99,
New Left Review, 183 100, 101, 156
New Statesman, 87 poverty, 5, 87, 88, 103–7, 120, 144
new world order, 133 Poverty Reduction Growth Facility,
New York Times, 189 100
NGOs (Non-Government Organisa- Powell, Colin, 69, 76, 164
tions), 48, 55, 151, 186 Power of Nightmares, The, 187
Nirvana, 124 PQLI (Physical Quality of Life
non-alignment, 131 Index), 147
North American Free Trade progress, 143–7
Agreement (NAFTA), 2, 47, Project for the New American
100, 103 Century, 67–8, 127, 136, see
North Korea, 68, 185 also neoconservatism
NSC-68, 30 public goods, 50
Nye, Joseph, 29, 75 public service, 117, 169
purchasing power parity, 104
O’Brien, Richard, 13
Observer, 184 race to the bottom, 19, 168–9
Occupied Territories, 76 racism, 143–4
Index 209
Rahnema, Majid, 151 ‘September 11th’ (9/11) 2, 8, 12, 30,

Rangwala, Glen, 183 47, 67–8, 76, 79, 81, 122, 132,
rationalisation, 120, 121, 147, 150 136, 156, 165, 172–3
Reagan, Ronald, 61, 67, 76, 94, 95, Sharon, Ariel, 76
111, 112, 131, 132, 136, 141, Shaw, Edward, 98
156 Shaw, Martin, 64–5, 134, 182
realism, 23, 54, 56–8, 84, 135, 136 Shiva, Vandana, 171–2
Reddy, Sanjay, 104 Simpsons, The, 124
Redefining Progress, 147 Singh, Kavaljit, 110
Singapore, 106
regional trade agreements, 102
Singer, Peter, 77, 137
regressive globalism, 2–3, 134
Sklair, Leslie, 160, 162
Reich, Robert, 103
Sklar, Richard, 160
relativism, 54, 56, 86, 137
Smith, Tony, 172
Republican party, 136
social democracy, 53, 65
research and development, 116–17 socialism, 107, 166, 177
Reus-Smit, Christian, 74 Soederberg, Suzanne, 101
Rice, Condoleezza, 72, 74, 137 Soldz, Stephen, 184
rights, see human rights Somalia, 52, 133
Ritzer, George, 121, 147, 148–50 South Korea, 14, 21, 106, 111, 114
Roberts, Les, 184 sovereignty, 16, 39, 40–6, 56–7, 79,
Robertson, Roland, 15, 150 84, 129, 130, 138, 139, 155,
Robinson, Bill, 30, 142, 160, 188 156
Robinson, Ronald, 162 space, 14
rogue states, 73, 86, 133, 135 Stalin, Josef, 60
Rosenberg, Justin, 27, 45 Stalinism, 178, 182
Ross, Stephanie, 177 state-centrism, 25
Rostow, Walt, 121 states, 14, 32, 34–5, 45, 51, 56–7,
Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, 141 65, 74–5, 79, 84, 95, 138, 139,
Rumaila oilfield, 82 144, 155, 156, 157, 158, 174,
Rumsfeld, Donald, 67, 69, 79 175–6, see also nation-state,
Russet, Bruce, 134 sovereignty
Russia, 8, 51, 60, 88, 111, 119, 136 Stewart, James, 69
Rwanda, 17 Strauss, Leo, 142
Strinati, Dominic, 11–12
structural adjustment, 96–9, 118,
Sahlins, Marshall, 126
141
Sardar, Ziauddin, 122–3
sub-Saharan Africa, 14
satellite television, 122
subsidiarity, 55
Saudia Arabia, 8, 76, 83, 185
Sudan, 76, 133, 185
Sayer, Derek, 45, 150 Sutcliffe, Bob, 146
Schiller, Hans, 122 sweat-shop production, 115, 165,
Scholte, Jan Aart, 2, 28 167–9
Schor, Juliet, 149 Sweezy, Paul, 61
Scott, Allan, 127, 145 Sydney, 179
scramble for Africa, 59 Syria, 68, 185
Seabrook, Jeremy, 122
Second World War, 9, 39, 46–7, 60, Taiwan, 21, 106, 114
84, 89, 178 technological determinism, 28
terrorism, 78, 80, 86, 182 United Nations, 39, 46–9, 51, 56,
Teschke, Benno, 40, 41, 42, 45 60, 61, 62, 78–9, 87, 89, 130,
Thailand, 106, 111 137, 156, 173, 174, 183, 185
Thatcher, Margaret, 94, 95 General Assembly, 49, 52, 170,
Third Way, 2, 4, 27, 32, 36, 71, 173
72, 73, 88, 96, 103, 105, 115, Security Council, 48–9, 51–2,
117–18, 134, 155, 156 69–70, 130, 154, 158, 173, 174
Third World, 19, 20, 84, 90, 94, 95, Security Council Resolution 678,
117, 121–7, 143, 176 70
Thirty Years War, 40 Security Council Resolution 687,
Thompson, Graham, 12, 22, 109 70
Thrift, Nigel, 12 Security Council Resolution
time–space compression, 9–10, 13, 1441, 69, 70
28, 154 UNESCO, 47
Tomlinson, John, 9, 125, 126, 145 UNHCR, 47
trade, 62–3, 107–08 UNICEF, 47
transnational capitalism, 22, 60, 80, Universal Declaration of Human
160–2, 165 Rights (1948), 16, 130, 131
transnational civil society, 2, 54 see United States, 8, 14, 46, 53, 56, 57,
also global civil society 63, 67, 73, 74, 76, 77, 81, 82,
transnational corporations, 93, 109, 83, 89, 100, 109, 121, 122, 123,
166 124, 129–30, 134, 136, 143,
transnational social movements, 146, 148–50, 152, 179, 182,
151 183, 186
Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 40, 43 balance of payments deficits,
Trilateral Commission, 141, 161 92–3
TRIPs (Trade Related Intellectual budget deficits, 81, 83, 111–12,
Property Rights), 116–17, 170, 158, 163, 164
see also intellectual property Congress, 46–7, 71, 101, 102, 130
rights empire, 79–87, 105
Truman, Harry, 144 foreign policy, 3, 67, 135, 138,
Tucker, Todd, 102 141
Tunstall, Jeremy, 122 hegemony, 6, 7, 29–30, 36,
Turkmenitsan, 76 39–40, 71–2, 73, 75, 79–81, 82,
83, 88–92, 95, 103, 110–12,
ultra-imperialism, theory of, 62–3 120–53, 156, 157, 158, 160.
UNCTAD (UN Conference on Trade 161, 164, 165, 180
and Development), 105, imperialism, 79–87, 152, 154–65,
107–9, 113–14, 170 166
underdevelopment, theory of, 61, manifest destiny, 129
64 military, 79, 87, 138, 156, 159,
UNDP (United Nations 184–5
Development Programme), 147 state, 9, 29, 30, 31, 50, 51, 67, 75,
uneven development, 39, 59, 88, 79, 83, 101, 103, 133, 150, 159,
113–17, 152, 172 165, 182
unilateralism, see United States trade deficits, 81, 83, 111–12,
foreign policy, Bush 158, 163, 164
administration Treasury, 112
Index 211
universalism, 5, 54, 56, 65, 71–2, William the Conqueror, 43–4

86, 87, 117, 127–43, 158 Williams, William Appelman, 129
Urry, John, 9 Williams, Raymond, 145
USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Wilson, Woodrow, 46–7, 51, 72, 79,
Republics), 61, 79, 125, see also 129, 135, 136
Russia Wolfowitz, Paul, 67, 79, 135, 136
Uzbekistan, 76 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 40, 44, 46, 60
World Bank, 20, 50, 54, 55, 89,
Venezuela, 141 90–1, 96, 99, 103–4, 105, 106,
Vietnam, 61, 92, 121 116, 133, 154, 156, 158, 165,
169, 179
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 163 World Economic Forum, 142–3, 187
Waltons, The, 124 World Social Forums, 166, 173
war against terror, 73 World Trade Organisation (WTO),
Warsaw Pact, 63 2, 47, 51, 53, 54, 55, 100, 102,
Washington consensus, 95–8, 103, 118, 154, 155, 165, 166–7,
99–100, 156 169, 170, 173, 179
Watson, Matthew, 32 Cancun talks, 102
weapons of mass destruction, 69, Seattle meeting, 165
70, 71, 183 Wyn Davies, Merryl, 122–3
Weber, Max, 147–8, 150
Weinberg, Albert, 129 Yugoslavia (former), 17, 67
Weisbrot, Mark, 102, 114
West Asia, 99 Zimbabwe, 16
westernisation, 122–3, 145 Zoellick, Robert, 102

Empire in The Age of Globalization

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Empire in the Age

Copyright © Ray Kiely 2005

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 0 7453 2449 5 hardback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by

Series introduction vii

2. Globalisation Theory or Capitalist Globalisation? 7

3. Globalisation and Politics I: State Sovereignty,

4. Globalisation and Politics II: International Relations

5. The Global Economy: US Hegemony from Bretton

6. Globalisation, Culture and Rights: Liberal

7. Conclusions: US imperialism, Actually Existing

Critical Introductions to World Politics

World politics in all its socio-economic, cultural, institutional and

Thanks to David Castle, Roger van Zwanenberg, Robert Webb and

The purpose of this book is to examine the relationship between US

that the ‘international’ – or relations between nation-states – may be

with the Bush II Doctrine. Globalisation theorists generally reject the

dating back to Reagan), and that the central continuity is based on

These arguments are further considered in Chapter 5, through

These critical accounts are made not only as a contribution to the

This chapter provides a broad overview of the globalisation debate,

Anthony Giddens’ The Consequences of Modernity (1990) is one of the

in one locality have always impacted on events in other places.

compression’. Put differently, we live in a shrinking world. Thus,

and intensity that it is impossible to find any deeper meaning or

evidence then the point would be disproved, but if we couldn’t then we

Clearly, then, Baudrillard’s views are questionable, and even he

seconds to fractions of seconds. Moreover, it could be claimed that

there is a tendency to see globalization as irreversible. But the political forces

This can be illustrated by taking the example of financial capital,

the importing of machinery or information technology, but also the

this is a progressive development, but quite another to argue that

THEORIES OF GLOBALISATION/GLOBALISATION THEORY

This section examines a text that tries to provide a more theoretically

Global Transformations (1999) is perhaps the most comprehensive

The hyper-globalisation thesis

(N. Harris 2003), freed from ties to particular nation-states, therefore

argued that the region developed as capital relocated in order to

The sceptical thesis

and then problematise some of their associated contentions. One

Moreover, it is not only in the economic sphere that nation-

– what is sometimes called cultural hybridity. Similarly, the number

in promoting these policies does of course need to be addressed, but

The transformationalist thesis

it is true that globalisation is a process in which no single agent has

generalisation. This problem pervades the work of another leading

theoretical approach. Indeed, substantive discussion is only possible

My argument so far is that there are serious problems with globalisation

In Blair’s tautologous thinking, this is a necessity because there is no

the consolidation of neoliberalism through the Third Way in the

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the

This quotation from the Manifesto of the Communist Party captures

bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls

Thus, for Marx globalisation is ultimately a product of the dynamism

of contemporary (neoliberal) globalisation, or how this came about,

GLOBALISATION AS REALITY, GLOBALISATION AS IDEOLOGY

My main argument in this chapter has been that globalisation