Making Global Rules: Globalization or Neoliberalization?

Globalization or Neoliberalism?

Globalization and neoliberalism are both perplexingly ubiquitous phenomena. The orthodox understanding of globalization is based on a notion of increasingly borderless market extension, an apparently all-encompassing ‘condition’ in which market rules and competitive logics predominate, while the political leverage of nation-states recedes into insignificance. Meanwhile, the political project of neoliberalism represents a parallel attempt not only to visualize a free-market utopia, but to realize these self-same conditions, as the downsizing of nation-states enlarges the space for private accumulation, individual liberties and market forces. Perhaps not surprisingly, globalization and neoliberalism are often elided and entangled. Advocates of both tend to emphasize the need for corporations, governments and social actors to adjust to the new ‘realities’ of global competition; both envisage the role of markets in terms of apolitical, largely benign and integrating forces; both portray governmental bureaucracies and social collectivities as impediments to economic progress; and both actively anticipate world-wide processes of upwards convergence—a ‘race to the top’—culminating in the establishment of a new orthodoxy or ‘era’.

Globalization and neoliberalization are often elided, both historically and analytically: historically, because they are both held up to be creatures of the latter third of the twentieth century, and analytically, because both processes are typically ascribed a kind of ubiquitous causal agency by both celebrants and critics alike. Neoliberal politicians will often invoke globalization, as a signifier of powerful and [Page 164]in many respects unstoppable market forces, in order to advance the case for government sell-offs and privatization, fiscal austerity, financial and labour market deregulation, trade liberalization, welfare cutbacks and so forth. Simultaneously, critics of these policies and opponents of free-market globalization will often pointedly label all such phenomena as evidence of a creeping neoliberal (or, sometimes, American) hegemony. What the former are trying to depoliticize the latter seek to repoliticize—and the use of the label ‘neoliberal’ suits the latter because it is they who wish to underline the political origins and character of the programme.

The economic narrative of globalization and the political script of neoliberalism are both, in a sense, compellingly simple. They describe a new world order of untrammelled markets and competitive freedoms in clean lines and uncompromising terms. Implicitly or explicitly, they portray countervailing interests as unrealistic and outmoded. There are, of course, always alternatives to neoliberal political projects, just as there is a vast array of possibilities for organizing and regulating the global economy. Yet it is one thing to recognize the limitations and silences of the scripts of neoliberal globalism, quite another to move beyond these in a way that is conceptually sound and empirically informed. Economic geographers, in particular, have long opposed ‘flat earth’ conceptions of neoliberal globalization, based on unmediated market hegemony, cultural homogenization, institutional convergence and the associated assertion of a ‘one best way’ in corporate governance, economic regulation and social policy. As Peter Dicken's work has conspicuously demonstrated (see Yeung and Peck, in this volume), globalization tendencies are very much ‘real’ ones in legal, material and discursive terms, but they neither produce unitary outcomes nor do they erase local and national differences in business culture, corporate strategy or government policy. Globalization, in other words, produces its own geography, the resultant unevenness reflecting more than simply residues of ‘pre-global’ social formations, but an array of politically mediated forms of integration into a complex and changing global economic system. More than this, the ‘outcomes’ of globalization are politically negotiated and mediated; they are not predetermined by some ‘hidden hand’ of international market forces (see Gertler, Brenner and Hudson, in this volume).

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