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Overview
Tony Blair
This book gives the lie to that claim. Economic globalization has never been an inevitable part of human history. It is eminently reversible and hugely resistible.
Greg Buckman argues there are two broad approaches within the anti-globalization movement. One, perhaps the most widely supported and influential strand today, calls the Fair Trade and Back to Bretton Woods school. This argues for immediate reforms of the world's trading system, capital markets, and global institutions, notably the World Bank, IMF and WTO. The other, the Localization school, takes a more root and branch position and argues for the abolition of these institutions and outright reversal of globalization. Buckman explains the details of each school's outlook and proposals, their weaknesses, where they disagree, their common ground, and where they might come together in campaigns.
This book gives the lie to the claim that globalization is 'irreversible and irresistible'. Greg Buckman argues there are two broad approaches within the anti-globalization movement, explaining the details of each school's outlook, their weaknesses, where they disagree, their common ground, and where they might come together in campaigns.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848136946 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2013 |
| Series: | Global Issues |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 250 |
| File size: | 999 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Globalization: Tame it or Scrap it?
Mapping the Alternatives of the Anti-globalization Movement
By Greg Buckman
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2004 Greg BuckmanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-694-6
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Every era has its defining influences. In the post-Second World War decades of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s it was technology. The world then was either awestruck or horrified by Sputnik, the moon landing, the Aswan Dam, the 'green' (fertilizer) revolution, the Thalidomide scare, the birth-control pill and mainframe computers.
In the 1980s, the 1990s and the present decade, the defining influence is money – particularly global money. We've become familiar with the Nasdaq and the Dow Jones indexes. Everyone knows what Enron is. Most of us have a pretty good idea what the latest national exchange rate is or what the daily spot prices for oil and gold are. We've seen the Asian 'meltdown' of 1997, the Argentinian collapse of 2002 and the post-September 11 stock-market gyrations played out on our television screens. There's no escaping the all-pervading influence of economic globalization. We are all caught up in it now.
This book holds a mirror to the face of economic globalization. It charts the rise and negative consequences of economic globalization and profiles the policy responses of the anti-globalization movement, which, like the Nasdaq and Dow Jones indexes, has become ubiquitous, particularly since the 'Battle for Seattle' protests of 1999.
The anti-globalization movement is a very broad church which takes in activists concerned with nonviolence, feminism, poverty, the rights of indigenous people, the rights of the unemployed, preservation of the environment and responsible media, to name just a few issues. This book concentrates exclusively on economic globalization. Economic globalization is necessarily connected to all the myriad issues covered by the anti-globalization movement but it deserves specific attention. It is the dominant influence behind many of the world's present-day ills and needs to be examined in its own right. This does not mean the other issues covered by the anti-globalization movement are not important; they are important, but for the purposes of understanding and reasoned response it is necessary to pull the globalization machine apart and specifically examine its economic parts.
Many would have you believe that economic globalization is the product of an inevitable rightward swing in politics over the past few decades. Others say it is the predictable consequence of the march of technology. Many in the anti-globalization movement say it is the product of the irrepressible greed of transnational corporations. In reality it is the result of all these things, and more. It is the convergence of many haphazard and planned influences. As a result this book tries to avoid pigeon-holing economic globalization, and its origins, into neat boxes, and instead tries to take a holistic overview of its various defining influences and consequences.
Like economic globalization in general, the anti-globalization movement has evolved haphazardly with resulting significant internal policy differences on economic globalization. But increasingly there is common ground, common purpose and common hope that economic globalization can be redesigned in a sustainable way. The first half of this book (Chapters 2 to 6) examines what economic globalization is, how it has emerged and what its consequences have been. The second half of the book (Chapters 7 to 13) presents an overview of the anti-globalization movement, paying particular attention to its policy alternatives to economic globalization. It focuses on the radical and more mainstream policy schools within the movement and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of each school's policies, as well as the areas of agreement and disagreement between them.
In 1998 British prime minister Tony Blair said 'globalization is irreversible and irresistible'. This book gives the lie to that claim. Economic globalization has never been an inevitable part of human evolution and is therefore eminently reversible and hugely resistible. This book attempts to give hope to those dedicated to resisting and reversing it – not a naive hope but one based on real and viable alternatives.
CHAPTER 2The Evolution of the Global Supermarket (A History of World Trade)
Today's global trade network is very much a product of history, a history that at times has been convoluted and unpredictable. To understand economic globalization you have to understand its origins and where it has come from.
You could get involved in a long and complex debate about when, exactly, economic globalization began. You could argue it began as early as two thousand years ago when the Silk Road was established between the Mediterranean and China. Or you could argue it began when Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492. Historian Robbie Robertson claims there have been three major 'waves' of globalization. He says the first wave began with Columbus's voyage in 1492, and that of Vasco da Gama in 1497, and ended before the Industrial Revolution (which began in the eighteenth century). He says the second wave went from the Industrial Revolution through to the start of the Second World War. His third wave went from the Second World War through to the present day. Many regional trade networks existed around the world before the start of the first wave, but Robertson says the European conquest of the Americas, during the first wave, gave it wealth that allowed it to engage with those regional trade networks for the first time (although trade in the first wave of globalization was mainly only concerned with luxury items). This chapter and the next chapter mainly look at Robertson's second and third waves of globalization.
The British invention of the steam engine kicked off both the Industrial Revolution and the second wave of globalization. The steam engine allowed two things to happen for the first time that were vital to the growth of economic globalization. It allowed countries to produce large surpluses of produce and it allowed those surpluses to be transported over vast distances.
It is oversimplifying things, however, to ascribe all of the birth of the second wave of economic globalization to the Industrial Revolution. Independent of the Industrial Revolution had been the creation and refinement of an international payments system that started in the fourteenth century. This progressed to the development of 'forward exchange systems' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that allowed exporters and importers to reduce currency fluctuation risk through being able to contract on the basis of agreed spot prices. And separate to all this had been the spread of European colonization ushered in by da Gama's and Columbus's voyages. By 1800 extensive fertile and mineral-rich areas of the Americas and the Pacific, in particular, had been settled by Europeans whose colonized area by then already exceeded that of Western Europe. These newly colonized areas fed the raw material hunger of Britain's emerging Industrial Revolution. The infamous British colonizer Cecil Rhodes even once remarked, 'we must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies.'
World trade in the nineteenth century
The upshot of these influences was an explosion of industrialization and world trade that Britain managed to keep largely to itself until the mid- to late nineteenth century. At about that time the Industrial Revolution crossed the English Channel and began to take root in continental Europe. Steam-based transport in the form of railways (which enjoyed an explosion in popularity from the 1820s) and steam ships (which took off much later, in the nineteenth century) provided the arteries for the spread of the Industrial Revolution. They were augmented by the development of telegraph communication, a huge migration of nearly 50 million people out of Europe and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The upshot was that by 1900 Europe had established itself as the world's centre of industrialization, with raw materials being fed into it from 'regions of recent settlement' like the United States, Canada, Argentina, Uruguay, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. All of this had enormous implications for world trade. World trade doubled between 1830 and 1850, then trebled between 1850 and 1880. In 1800 world trade only equalled about 3 per cent of the world's combined gross domestic product but by 1913 it equalled 33 per cent – a proportion similar to that which exists today. During the nineteenth century the foundations of today's global supermarket were well and truly established, leading some supporters of economic globalization to characterize the century as the 'golden age' of capitalism.
Today it is easy to think that the tentacles of economic globalization must have spread quickly once the Industrial Revolution crossed the English Channel, but in fact they remained fairly constrained for a long time. Even by the First World War it was really only Europe, Japan and the United States that had experienced any significant degree of industrialization.
World trade in the twentieth century
Although a clear periphery/core template of global trade, centred around Europe, had been established by 1914, the First World War, and the years between it and the Second World War, altered Europe's domination of the world economy. The First World War ushered in a major shift in the architecture of global trade. The war hugely disrupted Europe's production but left the economies of most of the rest of the world, particularly that of the United States, unscathed. The result was that between 1913 and 1937 Europe's share of world trade fell from two-thirds to half. But the First World War did little to stop the spread of world trade. The economy of the United States kept growing quite rapidly, enabling world trade to continue expanding, with the result that the United States became the new giant of the global trade network. This status was confirmed by its large post-war reconstruction loans to Europe and its large level of post-First World War foreign investment.
Europe emerged from the First World War in a vulnerable state with reconstruction and inflationary pressures upon it. It was just starting to get those under control when the tumultuous stock-market crash of October 1929 heralded the start of the Great Depression. This had a major dampening effect on world trade, with the result that after expanding by 40 per cent between 1881 and 1913 it grew by only 14 per cent between 1913 and 1937. As well as shifting the spotlight of world trade away from Europe for the first time, the inter-war years also introduced some crucial qualitative changes in world trade, some of which were to have profound ramifications in years to come. Food and agriculture lost their dominance of the world's trade in raw materials, while minerals significantly increased their share. Oil, the 'blood' of world trade, began to take off as a major globally traded raw material for the first time. The mix of trade in globally traded manufactured items also began to change with a shift away from trade in mainly 'capital' goods (machinery etc.) to a greater share of consumer goods. And, most crucially for exporters of raw materials (poor countries mainly), the first wave of downward pressure on world raw material export prices began to be felt. Many farming and mining processes were becoming increasingly mechanized, which increased world supply, while new influences like synthetic substitutes for wool and cotton fabric, which decreased world demand for those materials, also began to take root. The result of all these influences was the start of a long-term global slide in raw material prices that is still happening today.
World trade after the Second World War
Unlike the First World War, the Second World War did significantly disrupt the expansion of world trade. Europe in particular finished the war with acute shortages that resulted in high inflation and low economic growth, which depressed world trade. As with the First World War, however, the economy of the United States finished the Second World War relatively unscathed, with the result that its dominance of the world trade market reached its peak in the early 1950s when a full third of all the world's exports came out of the country. Shortages after the Second World War persisted for five or six years when, among other things, the start of the Korean War raised world production and broke the post-Second World War downturn.
If the nineteenth century had been capitalism's first 'golden age', then once the world economy had recovered from the Second World War it entered what supporters of globalization sometimes describe as its second golden age. With the exception of a few very brief periods in a few particular economies (which each lasted less than a year), from the early 1950s right through to 1973 the world experienced two decades of continuous high economic growth that gave a major push to the expansion of world trade. By the 1960s world trade was growing by 8 per cent per year, which had it nearly doubling every decade. This major push took the relative size of the world trade network back to the proportions it had assumed prior to the First World War. After the slowdowns of two world wars, and the Great Depression, the global supermarket was back in business.
The shocks of the 1970s
The rapid expansion of the 1950s and 1960s came to a dramatic halt, however, in 1973 when the first big oil price increase induced by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the Yom Kippur war in Israel caused a sudden slowdown in world growth and the hitherto breakneck post-war expansion of world trade. A second sharp oil price increase in 1979–80 (caused by the fall of the Shah of Iran) induced another major slowdown in 1981–82.
The trade in oil is massive; by weight it exceeds the combined total of the world's next three most traded raw materials, iron ore, coal and grain. During the years after the Second World War rich countries hugely increased their appetite for oil. Between 1949 and 1972 Europe's oil consumption grew fifteenfold, for instance. Middle Eastern oil producers realized the increased power this gave them, and after Colonel Qaddafi seized power in Libya in 1969 they were increasingly prepared to use it. From 1970 OPEC began demanding increased prices for oil, which by 1973 saw the price of oil reach a level more than five times what it had been in 1970.
The 1970s not only reduced the pace of world trade expansion; the decade also reduced the economic domination of the United States. For all of the first half of the twentieth century the US had enjoyed uninterrupted trade surpluses with the rest of the world and had been self-sufficient in oil. The US had, in fact, been the world's largest producer of oil until the 1950s and had also been a major world oil exporter (which helped boost its trade surpluses). But in the 1950s all that changed. In 1950 the vast US thirst for oil began to outpace its production and the US started importing oil for the first time. And in 1958 the US recorded its first trade deficit since the late nineteenth century. By the 1970s the occasional US trade deficits had become a permanent feature and the US became a long-term, large, net importer of goods and services in general and of oil in particular. Between 1967 and 1971 the US trade deficit increased from US$2.9 billion to US$19.8 billion. Ongoing US trade vulnerability, which has continued to this day, is not helped by the fact that today it imports half the oil it consumes and by 2020 is projected to be importing as much as two-thirds. Nor is it helped by the fact that the US accounts for a quarter of all the world's current oil consumption.
Another key trade development of the 1970s was the rising trade power of Japan, which by the end of the 1970s had established itself as a third major giant in the global trade network. After accounting for just 3 per cent of world exports in 1950, Japan was producing 15 per cent by 1987. This rise in trade power allowed Japan to take its place alongside Western Europe and the US as one of the 'triad' of dominant players in the global trade network. Japan's new East Asian influence over global trade was augmented in the 1980s by the rising trade power of its four neighbouring East Asian 'tiger' economies: Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Globalization: Tame it or Scrap it? by Greg Buckman. Copyright © 2004 Greg Buckman. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Part I: The Evolution and Consequences of Economic Globalization1. Introduction
2. The Evolution of Global Supermarket: A History of World Trade
World trade in the nineteenth century
World trade in the twentieth century
World trade after the Second World War
The shocks of the 1970s
Causes of the spread of world trade
3. The Evolution of the Global Bank: A History of World Capital Flows
Pre-Industrial Revolution global finance
The influence of the Industrial Revolution
The emergence of the gold standard
The First World War and the interwar years
The Bretton Woods twins
The world economic order from the 1950s to the 1970s
The shocks of the 1970s
Todayûs casino economy
4. The Engines of Globalization
Transnational corporations
The political influence of TNCs; The on-the-ground influence of TNCs; Changing attitudes
towards TNCs
The World Trade Organization
Trade negotiations; The Doha Round; The bizarre rulings of the WTO; The new trade
boundaries pushed by the WTO; Regional trade deals
The International Monetary Fund and World Bank
The rise of the IMF and World Bank; The fall of the IMF and World Bank
The Washington Consensus
The technological engines of globalization
The environmental price of world trade
5. Rich versus Poor in the Global Economy
The polarization of global wealth
Concentration of economic globalization around rich countries
Relative size of poor economies
The third world debt crisis
Poor countries and global trade
Trade winners and losers
Poor country raw material exports
Poor country trade winners
Export-processing Zones
Rich country trade losers
Aid to the rescue?
Ecological debt
6. Rich Country Double Standards
Rich country double standards on trade
Double standards on patents
Double standards on agricultural and textile trade
Part II: The Policy Alternatives of the Anti-Globalization Movement
7. The Anti-Globalization Movement
The global loss of democracy
The anti-globalization movement
Origins of the anti-globalization movement
The anti-globalization protests
Policy formulation by the anti-globalization movement
NGOs and non-mainstream parties
8. The Fair Trade/Back to Bretton Woods School
Trade
Ending rich country protectionism, allowing poor country special and different treatment;
Protection of national agricultural industries; Social and environmental trade clauses
The Future of the IMF, World Bank and WTO
The World Trade Organization; No new issues; Services and patent agreements; The
International Monetary Fund and World Bank; Debt cancellation
Capital Market and Transnational Corporation Regulation
Different types of capital control; The Tobin Tax; Control over Transnational Corporations;
An international bankruptcy mechanism
9. The Localization School
Advocates of Localization
Localization aiding Democracy
Trade
The Future of the IMF, World Bank and WTO
The World Trade Organization; The International Monetary Fund and World Bank
Capital and Transnational Corporation Regulation
Control over transnational corporations
10. Globaphobes versus Globaphiles
The Oxfam Rigged Rules report debate
Short versus long term strategies
Corporate engagement
Rich country versus poor country anti-globalization organizations
Changing fashions within the anti-globalization movement
Policies that straddle both schools
Policies that stand outside the localization / fair trade divide
11. Deficiencies of Both Schools
Deficiencies in Fair Trade school policies
Deficiencies in Localization school policies
Deficiencies common to both schools
12. The Policy Future of the Anti-Globalization Movement
The common ground between the two schools
Common policies of the Fair Trade and Localization schools; Philosophies common to both Schools
Broader areas of agreement between the two schools
Agreement on need for international finance institutions; Agreement on need for residual
world trade and limited protectionism
Potential areas of better consistency between the two schools
Capital market / TNC regulation policies ; Management of the IMF, World Bank and
WTO policies; Trade policies
The general policy future of the anti-globalization movement
The need for the anti-globalization movement to engage with the public more; The need for the
anti-globalization movement to engage with itself more
13. Conclusion