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By Sharmila Joshi Globalisation encompasses several simultaneous processes, at the base of which is greater interconnectedness across the globe. Liberalisation is a more specific term that refers to a bunch of consequential economic changes underway in several countries. The two terms tend to be used interchangeably though they are not the same, and it is useful to understand the difference
PART I If you ask a group of people what globalisation means, chances are that the responses will be as varied as the number of people in the group. They may say, for example, that globalisation is about greater economic integration into a global market, or that it means growing cultural connectivity between countries, or that it implies an increase in trans-national social exchanges.
And they would be correct—globalisation is indeed all this, and more. However, many people tend to say ‘globalisation’ when they are actually referring to liberalisation, or use the word ‘globalisation’ as an unclear catchall when in fact they are not strictly referring to liberalisation but to other processes associated with globalisation. Liberalisation is only one part, and not the whole complex dynamic, of globalisation, and it is useful to differentiate between the two.
Globalisation, a wider set of processes, has engaged academics, activists and others for many years. As a starting point, globalisation may be understood as an exponential growth in interconnectedness across the globe. This is occurring across various axes—economic, political, social, cultural, environmental. Globalisation is the creation of multiple networks, including those of trade, commodities, finance, people (labour, migration, tourism), environment, media, culture, crime, and so forth. It is also about the concurrent social, political, economic, and other changes that are in motion due to these interactive networks. Each axis, each change, impinges upon the other. Many of the processes of globalisation are made possible, in large part, by technological changes. For example, satellite technology has propelled the growth of a global media industry, which impacts people’s worldviews, and affects the direction of cultural, social, and economic change. Globalisation then is the accelerated and continual formation of a global web that is intricately affecting the lives of perhaps everyone on this planet, one way or another, directly or indirectly. The processes that constitute globalisation have been conceptualised in different ways. Arjun Appadurai, for example, has famously spoken in terms of global “flows” that incorporate “ethnoscapes” (or the “landscape of persons”), “technoscapes” (or the changing global configurations of technology), “financescapes” (related to global capital), “mediascapes” and “ideoscapes” (both related to the “landscape of images”, the first to the electronic capability to produce and disseminate information, the second to the politics and ideologies of States). In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation, Appadurai writes, “The suffix ‘-scape’ allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterise international capital as deeply as they do international clothing styles.” In an attempt to pin down the complexities of globalisation, William Tabb speaks of globalisation as the “ultimate Rorschach test”. Globalisation, he writes, is a “capacious category that encompasses many aspects and meanings. The term depicts interconnectedness among States and societies. It describes how events and activities in one part of the world come to have significant consequences for distant people and communities…A reduction in the cost and an increase in the speed of communication and transportation deepen this process…Globalisation remakes the world’s trade and finance regimes, and also redefines awareness at a most local and intimate level, affecting how people see themselves…globalisation is about relations of relative power, dependencies as much as exchange, and how otherness becomes naturalised or provokes resistance. Far from being a merely technical matter, globalisation is a deeply political process.” At the heart of this “capacious category”, Tabb writes in a book titled The Amoral Elephant: Globalisation and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century, is the amoral elephant: “The elephant is capitalism—so large a presence in our lives that we are like the blind men (with their elephant) who each grasp one seeming logical truth…Our vision of it remains imperfect. Our task is made more difficult because our great elephant seems constantly to change its shape, even as the basic elements of its nature remain, or remain constant through these dramatic transformations….” Given the ever-changing dimensions of this great creature, for Tabb, “the central discourse of the early 21st century is making sense of the same old elephant, now seen in a new and different guise.” Others, such as geographer and anthropologist David Harvey, have theorised globalisation in terms of compression of time and space. In a textbook titled Global Sociology, sociologists Robert Cohen and Paul Kennedy write, “Globalisation is best understood as a set of mutually reinforcing transformations that are occurring more or less simultaneously.” Its component strands include, they write, the commonality of problems facing the world’s inhabitants, growing interdependencies and a network of increasingly powerful trans-national actors and organisations. While the different attempts to view the processes of globalisation produce different perspectives, one of the ideas they have in common is that of interconnectedness. However, networks of trade, of migration, of culture, have existed for centuries. People, things, and ideas have crossed lands and oceans for trade, for war, for labour, for cultural and other exchanges, for a significant part of human history. The slave trade, indentured labour, and European colonialism intensified these processes a long time ago. Is contemporary globalisation simply a continuation of these networks? Or is there something new about what we now call ‘globalisation’? In Global Transformations, a book that is part of their ongoing examination of globalisation, David Held, Anthony McGrew and others provide a useful analytical framework. According to them, historical forms of globalisation can be described and compared in terms of four spatio-temporal dimensions: the extensity of global networks, the intensity of global interconnectedness, the velocity of global flows, and the impact propensity of global interconnectedness. In other words, while diverse exchanges may have existed for centuries across the globe, what is now different is the accelerated intensity of these networks, their extensiveness in terms of the populations and areas they incorporate and impinge upon, the speed of these exchanges, and, as a result of the three, the impact of the processes of globalisation on human and planetary life. It is in these respects that contemporary globalisation is so markedly different from earlier patterns of global interconnectedness. PART II It is not without adequate reason that liberalisation tends to be conflated with globalisation. Economic and technological changes are the primary propellers of contemporary globalisation; the two reinforce each other and also intersect with all social, cultural, environmental and other processes. That is, the economic changes that have been unleashed due to liberalisation are so intensive as to cause or impact, directly or indirectly, the other changes and axes of globalisation described earlier. In other words, liberalisation tends to be used as a synonym for globalisation because the primarily economic processes that constitute liberalisation significantly affect all aspects of globalisation. For example, changes in national budgetary allocation, as a result of fiscal ‘tightening’ or ‘austerity’ measures, may affect state funds for the education or health sectors, which in turn will deeply and irrevocably impact millions of people’s lives. Or, the setting up of SEZs in India as part of the ‘opening’ of the economy will have unprecedented economic, environmental and other consequences. Liberalisation however is a more specific term than globalisation. Liberalisation usually refers to the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) that country after country has undertaken over the last quarter-century, starting with countries such as Chile. The ideological thrust behind these changes is often referred to as neoliberalism, and the package of economic ‘reforms’ that characterise liberalisation was earlier sometimes called the ‘Washington Consensus’. A complex array of forces set in motion these economic changes, this renewed incorporation of different parts of the world into an increasingly global capitalist economy. These factors include the consolidation of powerful trans-national corporations with vast amounts of economic power and political control, pushing for changes in global trading arrangements through such groups as the World Trade Organisation and the World Economic Forum. These changes, which include removing barriers to the movements of international trade and capital, open up the less economically powerful countries to calculated investments from corporations that often benefit only the corporations, and create markets for their products. Liberalisation is thus, as many have argued, the aggressive promotion of a predatory global capitalism. The factors that set in motion the economic changes also include the tightening control of international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund over national economic policies. These tightening loan-linked controls mandate structural ‘adjustments’ or ‘conditionalities’ that ‘open’ a country’s economy and market and weaken the role of the national State. Structural adjustments include stalibilisation policies designed to ‘stabilise’ inflation and exchange rates. These polices include fiscal austerity measures, reduced State spending, a tight monetary policy, and tax breaks. SAPs are ostensibly aimed at adjusting the economy such that there is no negative persistent balance of payment—this can be done by increasing exports or by reducing tariffs on imports (in part by no longer protecting ‘inefficient’ industries through ‘subsidies’), by privatising industries and eventually all sectors (such as even education and health). The closure or privatisation of functioning public sector units in India, the entry of private players into sectors such as electricity, retail, farming, (and now, water), the multiple brands of consumer goods in the market—all are evidence of these processes. As is the agrarian crisis, driven in part by the farmer being exposed to the uncertainties and comparative disadvantages of a global market. Opinions about liberalisation tend to be sharply divided. Advocates believe it is the new magic wand for development, that the power of the mysterious ‘market’ will conquer all the problems of social and economic injustice and bring forth dazzling economic growth. The economic ‘reforms’ have certainly brought about lucrative opportunities for a segment of India’s population. Opponents argue that the economic growth is illusory and limited, that the majority of India’s and the world’s population remains deprived, and liberalisation accentuates rather than mitigates multiple inequalities by ensuring growth for a few at the cost of the many. According to a (somewhat overlapping) typology created by David Held, Anthony McGrew and others, this debate includes the “hyper-globalists” for whom globalisation defines a new epoch in human history, as well as the “sceptics”, who believe that contemporary global circumstances are not unprecedented. “The sceptical position is an acknowledgement of the deeply rooted patterns of inequality and hierarchy in the world economy, which in structural terms have changed only marginally over the last century,” Held and others write. The “hyper-globalists”, they write, may be neoliberals who welcome the ‘end of history’, the final triumph of the market principle over State power, or they may be from the Left, for whom contemporary globalisation represents the triumph of an oppressive global capitalism and the global intensification of inequalities and injustice. One focal point of such debates is the future of the nation-state. Does a globalised world, a globally ‘integrated’ economy, signal the erosion and eventual end of the modern nation-state system, such that everyone will live on a so-called ‘free trade globe’ with no boundaries? Does it signal a replacement of the nation-state as a political unit by regional blocks such as the European Union? What are the consequences for local populations of the “denationalisation” of economies, the erosion of the power of the nation-state by trans-national networks of production, trade and finance? Questions such as these continue to be hotly debated. The wider package of globalisation, on the other hand, evokes less polarised opinions and responses. It is considered somewhat more benign or mixed, with positive as well as negative attributes, benefits as well as pitfalls. While trans-national food chains (amongst other commodity chains) may bring about what George Ritzer calls a “Macdonaldisation” or a homogenisation of cultural practices, global cultural flows can also be potentially enriching and can bring about increased mutual awareness. Or the normative control of the trans-national media by a handful of corporations may homogenise the news agenda, but the same batch of technologies makes possible access to a gigantic database of information. Similarly, the critical environmental destruction caused by global economic and other changes is countered by another global process—environmental movements from across countries coming together to fight a more or less common cause. In fact, this coming together as global networks of social movements, of peoples’ struggles, of causes and concerns, is often cited as one of the positive aspects of globalisation. This ‘globalisation from below’, as many have called it, is a process made possible by the same changes referred to thus far. This form of globalisation is one way to address the concerns of millions who don’t benefit from the global changes but are nevertheless caught in the creeping trans-national web of neo-liberalisation. InfoChange News & Features, August 2007
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