Explain the implications of globalization. Identify at least two ethical issues that go along with the global societal topic you have chosen fo

New Political Science, Volume 26, Number 1, March 2004

From Globalism to Globalization: The Politics of Resistance1

Benjamin Arditi National University of Mexico (UNAM)

Abstract The assumption of this article is that the “second great transformation” proposed by global actors parallels the one advanced by those who resisted laissez-faire capitalism in the 19th century. Both dispute the unilateral imposition of a new planetary order and endeavor to modify the rhythm and direction of economic processes presented as either fact or fate. In doing so, they effectively place the question of the political institution of this order on the agenda. I look briefly at the familiar underside of globalism and then move on to develop a tentative typology of initiatives that set the tone for a politics of globalization. These include radical and viral direct action, the improvement of the terms of exchange between industrialized and developing countries, the expansion of the public sphere outside national borders through global networks, the accountability of multilateral organizations, and the advancement of democracy at a supranational level. Participants in these initiatives take politics beyond the liberal- democratic format of elections and partisan competition within the nation-state. They exercise an informal supranational citizenship that reclaims—and at the same time reformulates—the banners of social justice, solidarity, and internationalism as part of the public agenda.

Ever since the market ceased to be a taboo and globalization became a dominant cognitive framework, the Left seems to have confined itself to a principled commitment toward the dispossessed and a continual call for measures to ameliorate inequality. Outside the mainstream, globaliphobic groups—an ex- pression I use as shorthand to designate the naysayer as well as Beck’s “black,” “green,” and “red” protectionists2—offer more militant, yet scarcely innovative responses. They conceive globalization as a purely negative phenomenon, little more than old capitalism dressed in new clothes. For them, especially the red and black globaliphobes, the assault on sovereignty spearheaded by govern- ments and multilateral agencies in the name of international trade strengthens the hand of the business and financial community, compromises the autonomy of domestic political decisions, and reinforces the submissive status of less

1 I would like to thank Toshi Knell, Eric Mamer and two anonymous reviewers for New Political Science for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

2 Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). For Beck, “black” protectionists mourn the loss of national values, the “green” variety upholds the state as the last line of defense against the international market’s assault on environmental values, while the “red” ones maintain their faith in Marxism and see globalization as yet another example of the class struggle.

ISSN 0739-3148 print/ISSN 1469-9931 online/04/010005–18  2004 Caucus for a New Political Science DOI: 10.1080/0739314042000185102

6 Benjamin Arditi

developed countries to the dictates of the major industrial nations. Globali- phobes are quite right about this, but they also think about the phenomenon from a reductionist perspective that confuses globalization with what Beck calls “globalism,” that is, “the ideology of rule by the world market, the ideology of neoliberalism.”3 In doing so, they neglect the range of contending forces set into motion by the process of globalization itself. The paradoxical effect of this confusion is that their diagnostic converges with that of the neoliberal right: both conceive globalization as a victory of liberalism, except that each assigns opposite values to it.

Yet the hegemony of the market and free trade is not quite the same as the victory of liberalism tout court. When one looks at the efforts to recast the rules and the institutional design of the international order that has been emerging from the ruins of the Berlin wall, the thesis of a liberal end of history proves to be somewhat premature. Globalism undermines Westphalian sovereignty and deepens inequality, but also has at least a potential for political innovation as the resistance to globalism opens the doors for an expansion of collective action beyond its conventional enclosure within national borders. Notwithstanding the unipolarity of the international order, the wide array of new global warriors that rally around the banner of the World Social Forum—“another world is poss- ible”—are assembling a politics that seeks to move the current setting beyond mere globalism. This intervention examines some of the symptoms of this move.

The Underside of Globalism

Every age of great changes brings along an underside. Nineteenth-century industrialization unleashed a productive power on a scale unknown before while it simultaneously destroyed traditional communities, virtually wiped out the cottage industry of artisan production, and created a new urban underclass. Industrial society also saw the emergence of efforts to resist and modify the capitalist reorganization of the world. Globalization, with its remarkable time– space compression and its impact on our perception of distance,4 presents us with an underside too. It has three salient aspects: the deepening gap between rich and poor countries, the creation of a mobile elite and an increasingly confined mass, and the resurrection of more rigid and less liberal models of identity as a defensive reaction to the dislocations brought upon by globalization under the guise of globalism.

The first point has been discussed profusely.5 For the purpose of our

3 Ibid., p. 9. 4 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press,

1998), pp. 16ff. 5 The figures of inequality are staggering. At the end of the 19th century, the difference

in the average income of the richest and the poorest country was 9:1. Things got much worse since then. According to the UN, the income gap between the richest 20% and the poorest 20% of the planet in 1960 was 30:1, while in 1997 it jumped to 74:1. The case of Africa is even more daunting, as the average GNP of around US$360 per person is below the annual service of the foreign debt. In countries like Angola and the Ivory Coast, it is simply not payable, for it stands at 298% and 146% of their GNP correspondingly. Moreover, despite our extraordinary capacity to produce food, every 3.6 seconds some- where on the planet someone dies of hunger or for reasons directly derived from it. That makes 24,000 deaths per day. In the meantime, average international aid from develop-

From Globalism to Globalization 7

argument, it suffices to point out that one does not need to be an orthodox communist or a Rousseau-style egalitarian to understand that a minimum threshold of equality is required to shore up governance and level the field for participants in the public sphere. The second aspect addresses a sociological issue. While moral indignation in the face of human suffering is not enough to reorient the global patterns of development towards greater social justice and solidarity, the persistence of exclusion confirms the coexistence of two worlds or life-experiences concerning globalization. These typically show themselves, and converge, in one place, border crossings, and around one issue, mobility. Advocates of globalism extol the virtues of the free transit of capitals, goods, services, and people. Without it, globalization faces a real and perhaps unsur- passable limit. That is why the World Trade Organization (WTO) insists on this free passage. However, migratory controls to stop the entry of those fleeing from poverty or persecution multiply. The freedom of the market, say Zincone and Agnew, entails a schizophrenic logic—positive for capital and negative for labor.6 The UN reports something similar: “The collapse of space, time and borders may be creating a global village, but not everyone can be a citizen. The global professional elite now face low borders, but billions of others find borders as high as ever.”7 Bauman builds on this to identify a novel socio-political division developing in the global order. If distance has ceased to be an obstacle only for the rich—since for the poor it never was more than a shackle—this creates a new type of division between the haves and the haves not. The former are tourists who travel because they can and want to do so, while the latter are vagabonds, people who move because the world around them is unbearable, more of a prison than a home.8 While the vagabond is the nightmare of the tourist, he says, they share something in that they are both “radicalized” consumers—they are embarked in a continual pursuit of satisfaction fueled by desire rather than by the object of desire—only that the former is a “defective” one. Thus, they are not mutually exclusive categories, both because tourists might become vagabonds and because one might occupy the position of the tourist in some domains and of the vagabond in others.

The third salient aspect of globalization arises from the exponential increase in the pace of political, technological, economic, or cultural change. Its impact is

(Footnote continued) ment countries has dropped from 0.33% of their GNI in 1990 to 0.23% in 2001, with Denmark topping the list at 1.08% and the US positioning itself at the bottom with just 0.11%. See United Nations, Human Development Report 1999 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); UN, Human Development Report 2003, http://www.undp.org/hdr2003/; Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (London: Penguin Books, 2002); Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Global Inequality: Bringing Politics Back In,” Third World Quarterly 23:6 (2002), pp. 1023–1046; Nancy Birdsall, “Life is Unfair: Inequality in the World,” Foreign Policy 111 (1998), pp. 76–93; Adam Zagorin, “Seattle Sequel,” TIME, April 17, 2000, p. 36; http://www.thehungersite.com; Giovanna Zincone and John Agnew, “The Second Great Transformation: The Politics of Globalization in the Global North,” Space and Polity 4:2 (2000), pp. 5–21; W. Bowman Cutter, Joan Spero and Laura D’Andrea Tyson, “New World, New Deal: A Democratic Approach to Globalization,” Foreign Affairs 79:2 (2000), pp. 80–98; Barry K. Gills (ed.), Globalization and the Politics of Resistance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).

6 Zincone and Agnew, op. cit., p. 12. 7 Human Development Report 1999, p. 31. 8 Bauman, op. cit., pp. 20–24, 92–97.

8 Benjamin Arditi

undecidable. It can be lived as an opening up of possibilities for emancipatory projects or as a threat to identity and to the certainties of a more familiar world. When the latter gains the upper hand, people might turn to aggressive forms of nationalism, religious orthodoxy, tribalism, or messianic leaders—none of which are likely to enhance toleration—with the expectation of restoring certainty. This is not entirely new. The industrial revolution also undermined the referents of everyday life without offering cultural responses, at least not at the beginning. Marx and Engels describe the distinctive traits of the dislocations brought upon by capitalism in a well-known passage of the Manifesto. They say:

Constant revolutionizing 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.

Nationalism helped to counteract this “uninterrupted disturbance” that un- dermined identities and governmentality. Kahler argues that in the 19th century, especially after the expansion of the franchise, the emergence of mass national- ism had a political function, for it enabled states to forge strong links with the citizenry and to ensure their loyalty in an age of democracy. Later, anticommu- nism and the promise of economic prosperity replaced nationalism as a political programmed.9 Globalism has nothing comparable to offer, or rather, as Debray remarks, it seems to offer no other mystique than the prospect of economic growth.10 The latter is certainly desirable, at least if one expects some form of income distribution as its side effect, but it is probably not enough to sway those whose livelihood and identity are threatened by the rapid reorganization of labor markets and trade patterns. As suggested, the danger here is the possible appeal of projects that offer certainty at the expense of toleration. The strong and often violent revival of nationalism and the aggressive affirmation of ethnic identities illustrate an uncanny hardening of territorial and cultural frontiers in a global setting where the role of borders is supposed to have waned. This is complicated further by the rise of religious radicalism and by the religious coding of the global terrorism that became notorious after the events of 9/11. Since then, those hitherto known as freedom fighters became the security nightmare of the West. Much to the chagrin of those advocating the end of history in the aftermath of the Cold War, the enduring presence of such radicalism shows that the liberal world-view is not without rivals. Interestingly, Debray describes religious radicalism—but not religious terrorism—as a defens- ive response to the loss of a sense of belonging, or better still, to the dislocation of cultural referents in the wake of globalism. He argues that when people feel lost the list of “believers” usually grows. That is why he says that sometimes

9 Miles Kahler, “The Survival of the State in European International Relations,” in Charles S. Maier (ed.), The Changing Boundaries of the Political (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 288, 290; also Richard Falk, “The Decline of Citizenship in the Era of Globalization,” Meeting Point (1998), http://www.transnational.org/forum/meet/ falk_citizen.html.

10 Regis Debray, “God and the Political Planet,” New Perspectives Quarterly 4:2 (1994), p. 15.

From Globalism to Globalization 9

religion (but we could also say “nationalism” or “ethnic intolerance,” which are similar in this respect) turns out to be not the opium of the people but the vitamin of the weak.11

Globalism therefore revolutionizes the certainties of the past and inserts entire populations into a more open, changing and diverse world, often enhanc- ing the array of options of how and where to live their lives. Bauman’s tourists embody this freedom of choice and movement, so dear to liberal thought. Yet it also reminds us of a possible trade off between these new possibilities and the relative security that accompanied identities in a more parochial world. Bauman captures this disorientation when he speaks of globalization as the perception of “things getting out of hand.”12 The question here is not simply the fear of turning into vagabonds or remaining trapped forever in that position; it refers instead to the demand for certainty, a desire for more rigid codes that function as navigational maps for living in a world in constant flux. This is what Debray had in mind when he described religion as a vitamin of the weak. This vitamin, however, is not sought by the casualties of globalism alone, but also by the champions of globalism who must now face the flip side of cheap airfares, cheap weapons, and cheap digital communications being available to its opponents too. In an international scene dominated by a neo-Hobbesian concern for security—terrorism, AIDS, drugs or immigration—the trade off between a rapidly changing world and the demand for certainty—both in the center and in the periphery of global capitalism—reinforces our suspicion about a facile endorsement of a liberal telos of history. It does so if only because it reveals that not everyone sees capitalism—which Milton Friedman famously characterized as a general freedom to choose—and political liberalism as universally valid goods, and because sometimes the very advocates of those values easily override them by imposing illegal tariffs on imports or by engaging in wars of aggression in the name of prosperity and security.

Resistances to Globalism

Yet to accept this underside as a necessary consequence of globalization is to submit to the naturalist fallacy of globalism, which presents the unilateral imposition of a world order modeled around the Washington Consensus as our destiny instead of as an act of political institution. Arguably, one could say that the war on terrorism unleashed after 9/11 reactivates its political origin. It is the true index of globalization, or if one prefers, an implicit acknowledgement that globalism seeks to hegemonize globalization but can neither control nor exhaust it. However, it is the disagreement with and resistance to the current state of things that reactivates it explicitly.

What type of resistance? Another parallel with the 19th century can help to clarify this. Simplifying things a bit, the range of responses of those excluded from the benefits of the industrial revolution oscillated between two perspec- tives. One was the destruction of machines advocated by the Luddites in the revolts of the 1810s and 1820s in the North of England—mainly the Midlands, Yorkshire, and Lancashire. Theirs was a mode of direct action motivated by near

11 Ibid. 12 Bauman, Globalization: Human Consequences, p. 59.

10 Benjamin Arditi

starvation and the desperation stemming from it, but also by a desire to restore the working conditions of earlier times, which presupposed that a return to the pre-industrial economy of small-scale producers and artisans was a viable alternative. Marx and the International Working Men’s Association or First International exemplified the other position. For them there was little or no room for nostalgia since capitalism was here to stay, so the political task of the day was not to destroy machines but to organize the resistance of the dispossessed through trade unions and other movements. Their aim was to transform capital- ism from within in order to build a more just and fraternal society. In the celebrated opening lines of the Manifesto, their socialist and internationalist project was the specter haunting Europe—or rather, the European ruling classes. Polanyi sees the alternative in similar, yet less revolutionary terms, as he claims that by the 1830s “[E]ither machines had to be demolished, as the Luddites had tried to do, or a regular labor market had to be created. Thus was mankind forced into the paths of a utopian experiment.”13

Today we face a similar challenge and a new specter, one haunting the neoliberal efforts to reduce globalization to globalism. While globaliphobes—in many ways the latter-day Luddites—see globalization as the ruse of capitalism and call for a return to the state-centered and protectionist policies of the past, others have chosen to become global warriors to transform the current state of affairs. Like their socialist predecessors in the industrial age, the more lucid critics of the global condition are not against globalization or trade per se. Just like those who opposed Gulf War II were not always pacifists, in the sense that many did not pose a moral injunction to war as such but only to a war that lacked the moral and political legitimacy of a UN resolution, these critics are not necessarily opposed to globalization but rather to globalism.14 They do not stand in awe for the momentum it has gathered nor delude themselves about the eventual disappearance of its negative effects either. They partake in the global fray to modify the course of globalization from within. Global warriors aim to bring about what Zincone and Agnew, in a felicitous play of words with the title of Polanyi’s celebrated study of industrialization, call the political phase of the “second great transformation.”15

We can read the latter as a move from globalism to globalization, which amounts to an effort to politicize economic processes currently mystified as either fact or fate. I propose a tentative typology of the initiatives undertaken by global-minded actors. It functions as a provisional guideline to differentiate forms of collective action that seek to modify the course of globalization. Their common trait is the resistance to the Washington Consensus of the 1990s—cap- tured in ATTAC’s slogan “The World is not for Sale”—in order to transform

13 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944), foreword by Joseph E. Stiglitz and introduction by Fred Block (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), p. 85.

14 A similar point is made by Fabio de Nardis, “From Local to Global: Values and Political Identity of the Young Participants in the European Social Forum,” paper presented at the Sixth Conference of the European Sociological Association, Murcia, Spain, September 23–26, 2003.

15 Zincone and Agnew, op. cit., pp. 7–8. Also Mary Kaldor, “‘Civilizing’ Globalization? The Implications of the ‘Battle in Seattle’,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29:1 (2000), pp. 105–114.

From Globalism to Globalization 11

globalism from within and below. Their actions extend the political field—and by implication, the scope of citizenship—beyond the enclosure of the nation- state. As in any classification, the boundaries between the various groupings are somewhat porous, as initiatives tend to overlap and to appear conjointly. I will distinguish six types, the first two being common to political activism more generally.

Radical Direct Action

The lingering perception of the anti-globalization (i.e. anti- globalism) movement consists of a string of cities—Seattle, Prague, Gothenburg, Genoa—accompanied by images of sit-ins, smashed windows, street violence, police barricades, and people being arrested. It also includes iconic referents like the destruction of a McDonald’s restaurant in France led by José Bové and the Confédération Paysanne to protest against the use of genetically modified foods. This imagery is prevalent partly because street-based politics tends to be more salient and thus the media picks on it as newsworthy. They are also the ones that instill most fear in the hearts of governments, business leaders, and multilateral agencies more accustomed to the logic of expert committees than to mass mobilizations, although at times they embarrass and even undermine the strategic planning of other global protesters too. That is why some might argue that many activist groups lack a strategic political compass. This is correct, but it is not the full story, as they range from strict globaliphobes to those with a clearer agenda for transforming globalism. Examples of those who do have such an agenda are those who participate in the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre, in the more recent European Social Forum, which gathered nearly 60,000 people when launched in Florence in November 2002, as well in other initiatives I will mention shortly.16 Leading organizations associated with direct action include the Ruckus Society, Global Exchange, and an array of anarchist groups like the Black Bloc.17 One could also mention the “glocal” dimension of resistance, like the international support for local struggles against privatized utility companies in Third World countries. Here one can think of solidarity campaigns for the Bolivian Water Wars of 2000 against a subsidiary of Bechtel Corporation in Cochabamba, or for the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee set up to resist rate increases of privatized state utilities in South Africa.18

16 See Fabio de Nardis, “Note Marginale del Forum Sociale Europeo,” Il Dubbio: Rivista di Critica Sociale 3:3 (2002), http://www.ildubbio.com.

17 Jeffrey St. Clair, “Seattle Diary: It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas,” New Left Review 238 (1999), p. 88; also “Hans Bennett Interviews Bobo,” Alternative Press Review 7:1 (2002), http:// www.altpr.org/apr16/blackbloc.html. The Ruckus Society (http://ruckus.org/training/ index.html) has a training camp for direct action where “Participants split their time between theoretical/strategic workshops focusing on a wide array of advanced campaign skills and hands-on technical training in tactics for non-violent demonstrations. The objective of each Action camp is to provide participants with the opportunity to share strategies, facilitate leadership development, and build relationships that will help to spawn more collaboration in the form of alliance, networks, and coalitions.”

18 For the Bechtel case, see http://www.democracyctr.org/bechtel/index.htm. For the Soweto and other resistances to the privatization programs induced by the IMF and the WB, see Paul Kingsnorth, “One No, Many Yesses: The Rise of the New Resistance Movement,” June 2003, http://www.signsofthetimes.org.uk/king.html.

12 Benjamin Arditi

Advocates of direct action—who can be violent or non-violent in their expression of discontent with the order of things—are the generic equivalent of the “dangerous classes” of 19th-century conservative discourse. Yet most move- ments and protests have a radical wing or radical strands among their ranks. Luddites shunned negotiation or accommodation within the system, and pro- moted the destruction of machines instead of proposing an alternative to the brutal exploitation of early capitalism. They ultimately failed, but theirs proved to be a productive failure, for cotton merchants and politicians got the message about the perils of excessive greed. New social movements have been perhaps less destructive of private property, although the cathartic dimension of destruc- tion should not be overlooked in mass protests. Yet they also appealed to radical direct action to advance their cause—the antinuclear protests in Germany during the 1970s and the guerrilla tactics of Greenpeace are typical examples. One can agree or not with these “hot” actions, which are often accompanied by more protests and slogans than by strategic proposals, but they play an important role. They provide an initial momentum for resistances to globalism and for the globalization of resistances, and therefore contribute to give visibility to the political phase of the “second great transformation.” As Wallach says, some- times direct action helps to cut through the arrogance of the international bureaucracy.19 Experts of multilateral agencies often refuse to give any serious thought to proposals of advocacy

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