Lesson Proper/Course Methodology:
You have learned the meaning of globalization in the previous lessons.
However, we have to emphasize that globalization and globalism are two different
concepts. Globalism is the driving force of globalization. It helps us understand the
inter-connections of the countries in the modern world.
What is Market Globalism?
Manfred Steger (2005) introduced the idea of market globalism as a rising
political system. According to him, it reflects the concepts of globalization. It seeks to
endow globalization with free market norms and neoliberal meanings. He used six core
claims to better understand its meaning.
These six core claims play crucial semantic and political roles. With regard to
semantics, Steger argue that these claims absorb and rearrange bits and pieces of
several established ideologies and integrate them with new concepts into a hybrid
meaning structure of genuine novelty. Their political role consists chiefly in preserving
and enhancing asymmetrical power structures that benefit particular social groups.
The following are market globalism‗s six core claims. Taken from Manfred
Steger‗s Ideologies of Globalization (2005).
Claim No. 1: Globalization is focused on the global integration and liberalization
of markets.
This core claim of market globalism explores to shape global predisposition
without exercising verbal threats and, therefore, represents the essence of soft power.
It activates the neoliberal ideal, that self-regulating market is the basis for a future
global order. The vital functions of the free market is its rationality and efficiency, as
well as its alleged ability to bring about greater social integration and material progress
can only be realized in a liberal society that values and protects individual freedom.
This core claim believes that globalization is about the victory of markets over
governments. Both the proponents and opponents of globalization agree that the
driving force today is markets, where the truth is that the size of government has been
shrinking relative to the economy almost everywhere.
Claim No. 2: Globalization is irreversible and inevitable.
The study of the observation of the influential globalists in the 1990s reveals
their reliance on an economistic narrative of historical inevitability. While disagreeing
with Marxists on the final goal of historical development, globalists nevertheless share
with their ideological opponents a attachment for such terms as ‗irreversible‗,
‗irresistable‗, and ‗inevitable‗ to explain the predicted path of globalization. For
instance, in a speech on the US foreign policy, President Clinton (as cited by Steger
(2005) told his audience: ―Today we must embrace the inexorable logic
of globalization .Globalization is irreversible. Protectionism will only make things
worse‖ .FrederickW. Smith, CEO of FedEx Corporation, suggests that ‗globalization
is inevitable and it will happen whatever the situation is (Smith, 1999). The global south
neo liberalist faithfully echoed the globalist language of inevitability. For instance, the
Philippines Speaker of the House of Representatives, Manuel Villar, insisted that the
process of globalization is the reality of the modern world (Villar, 1998).
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Around the 1990s, the neoliberal depiction of globalization as a natural force,
like the gravity or weather, made it simple for globalists to persuade people that they
would have to transform to the market discipline if they want to prosper and survive.
Therefore, the globalist claim of inevitability neutralized the challenges of anti- globalist
opponents by depoliticizing the public discourse about globalization: neoliberal policies
were above politics, because they simply carried out what was ordained by nature.
This view implied that, instead of acting according to a set of choices, people merely
fulfill world-market laws that demanded the elimination of government controls.
The irreversible characteristics of globalization can be attributed to
technological innovations. The progressive characteristics of technology seem to
make globalization unstoppable.
Claim No. 3: No one is in charge of globalization.
This core claim emphasizes the leaderless idea of globalization. Market
globalism‗s deterministic language offered its proponents in the 1990s yet another
rhetorical advantage. If the market natural laws have indeed predetermined a
neoliberal course, then globalization does not reflect the arbitrary agenda of a
particular social class or group. In other words, the one in charge with globalization
are the market and technology, and not the people.
Here are two examples. Robert Hormats in 1998, the vice chairman of Goldman
Sachs International, emphasized that the true beauty of globalization lies on the
concept that no one is in control of it, not individuals, institutions, or even government.
Meanwhile, Thomas Friedman in 2000, alleged that the basic truth about globalization
is that no one is responsible or in charge of it. People like to believe that there is
someone controlling it, but the truth is no one. After 9/11, it became increasingly
difficult for market globalists to maintain the position that
‗nobody is in charge of globalization‗. Yet number of corporate leaders still reflexively
referred to the ‗leaderless market‗, neoconservatives close to the Bush
administration lectured market globalists that global security and a global liberal order
depend on the United States that ―indispensable nation‖ wielding its power‗
(Kagan, 2002).
Claim No. 4: Globalization benefits everyone (. . . in the long run)
This claim rest at the very center of market globalism because it provides an
affirmative answer to the crucial normative question of whether globalization
represents a ‗good‗ or a ‗bad‗ phenomenon. Market globalists in the 1990s
frequently connected their arguments in favor of the integration of global markets to
the alleged benefits resulting from the liberalization and expansion of world trade. At
the 1996 G- 7 Summit in France, for instance, the heads of states of the 7 major
industrialized countries issued a joint communique´ that contains the following
passage: today‗s economic progress and growth bounced because of globalization.
The process of globalization supplies great window of opportunities for all countries in
the future. Its positive aspects including opening of international trade and expansion
of investments, give populous regions with more opportunities, specifically in
improving their standard of living, technological innovation, increase in skills that are
needed in work, and rapid dissemination of information. These attributes of
globalization led in the expansion of prosperity and wealth in the world. Hereby, we
are assured that globalization is the hope of the future (Economic Communique´,
1996).
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In addition, globalists often seek to cementum their de-contestation of
globalization as benefits for everyone by coopting the powerful language of science
which claims to separate fact from fiction in a neutral fashion, that is, solely on the
basis of hard evidence.
Claim No. 5: Globalization Furthers the Spread of Democracy in the World
This claim is anchored in the neoliberal assertion that freedom, free markets,
free trade and democracy are synonymous terms. Affirmed as common sense
throughout the 1990s, the compatibility of these concepts often went unchallenged in
the public discourse. Francis Fukuyama, for example, asserted that there existed a
clear connection between a country's successful democracy and economic
development. While capital development and globalization did not automatically
produce democracies, ‗the level of economic development resulting from globalization
is contributory to the creation of complex civil societies with powerful middle class,
where they facilitate democracy (Fukuyama, n.d.).
This idea of securing freedom through an American -led drive for political and
economic ‗democratization‗ around the globe, thus connecting the military objectives
of the War on Terror to the neoliberal agenda of liberalizing markets has emerged as
the centerpiece of imperial globalism.
Claim No. 6: Globalization requires a war on terror.
It argues that while globalization studies have focused substantially on the
marketization of life, including the realms of politics and culture, the current ‗war on
terror‗ phase has directed focus in theory and practice back to traditional state-
centered security concerns and critical investigation of state–citizen relations, notably
in the context of multicultural societies. (Youngs and Widdows, 2009)
Two representative samples of how this new claim has been circulating in the
public discourse are Thomas Barnett‗s ‗The Pentagon‗s New Map‗, published in the
March 2003 issue of Esquire magazine, and Robert Kaplan‗s ‗Supremacy by Stealth‗
featured in the July 2003 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Both publications reach a mass
readership and its authors are respected professionals in their fields. Since then, he
has been giving his briefings regularly at the Pentagon, in the intelligence community,
and to high-ranking officers from branches of the military. In his much- debated Esquire
article, which he later expanded into a best-selling book, Barnett argues that the Iraq
War tag the moment when Washington occupy the real ownership of strategic security
in the age of globalization. He split up the globe down into three distinct regions. The
first is characterized by globalization thick with network connectivity, financial
transactions, liberal media flows, collective security, rising standards of living,
transparency, and more deaths by suicide than by mu rder. The countries that have
these characteristics are America, New Zealand, Australia, and Europe. He calls these
regions the 'Functioning Core', or 'Core'. The breeding ground of ‗global terrorists', is
called the 'Non-Integrating Gap', or 'Gap'. These are Thailand, Malaysia, the
Philippines, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mexico, Greece, South Africa, Turkey,
Morocco, and Brazil. For Barnett, the significance of September 11 is that the
attacks forced the United States and its allies to make a long-term military commitment
to deal with the entire Gap as a strategic threat environment. In other words, in order
for globalization to spread, there must be a War on Terror. Its three main objectives
are: (1) to increase the capabilities of the Core's immune system in responding to
situations like the September 11 attack; (2) to strengthen the Core from exports like
drugs, diseases, terror, etc.; (3) to shrink the gap. The third point is particularly
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