A POLITICAL DIMENSION

9 A POLITICAL DIMENSION

1 When thinking about globalization as a political process, it is

2 important to recognise that what we are not talking about is the

3 emergence of a new supranational form of global government. But

4 what has increasingly crept into the language of IR, as we saw in

5 Chapter 4, are discussions of ‘global governance’ which might be

6 understood as frameworks of rules set up to tackle global problems

7 that have been agreed upon by both international organizations and

national governments. Thus for example, we have seen an emerging

142 R ECONFIGURING WORLD POLITICS consensus around how to deal with issues like international trade,

environmental degradation and human rights. Discussions of global governance have been criticized by many. The argument has been put forward, for example, that the concept focuses on technical fixes to current global problems but fails to investigate how emerging systems of global governance may in fact reflect the interests of the most powerful/privileged states and/or groups of people in the world today (Cammack 2002; Overbeek 2005). Thus for example, should the World Trade Organization be regarded as an institution offering all countries of the world practical help in adjusting their economies to free trade? Or should it be viewed as an institution that legitimizes an economic system based on free trade and neo-liberalism that works to the advantage of richer countries?

But talk of global governance is not the only thing to consider when looking at the political dimension to globalization. More generally, ideas have been raised about the ‘reconfiguration’ of political power that many have come to define as integral to understandings of globalization (Held and McGrew 2002: 9–24). One element of this reconfiguration are the debates that rage over the role of the state in an era of globalization (a debate that we focus on in more detail below). But ideas of globalization as a political process involve a number of other complex issues. For example, recent years have seen a fragmentation of political power as the end of the Cold War brought about a multitude of ‘new’ states in East and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. The years since the Cold War have also witnessed a rising tide of nationalist politics, separatist movement in places like Chechnya, East Timor and Kurdistan and a devolution of national government in places such as the British Isles. On top of these developments, as we saw in Chapter 5, there has also been a consolidation of political power into regional alliances and regional organizations such as the European Union and ASEAN. Although we are commonly presented with a picture of globalization that shows states losing power to global forces, globalization also appears to unleash oppositional, contradictory forces. The years of ‘globalization’, therefore, have ironically also been the years of rising nationalism. Some would suggest that these two processes go hand in hand, that fragmentation is the inevitable

R ECONFIGURING WORLD POLITICS 143

1 corollary of globalization, as national cultures look inwards to protect

2 themselves from the perceived threat of globalization. As Anthony

3 Giddens (2000) argues:

5 Most people think of globalisation as simply ‘pulling away’ power or

6 influence from local communities and nations into the global arena. 722

And indeed this is one of its consequences. Nations do lose some of

8 the economic power they once had. Yet it also has the opposite effect.

9 Globalisation not only pulls upwards, but also pushes downwards,

10 creating new pressures for local autonomy.

1 (Giddens 2000: 31)

3 Thus questions of governance, of where political power and authority

4 lies, of the role of the state in international politics today are central

5 in understanding globalization as a political process. We suggested

6 above that the term ‘global governance’ can be somewhat problematic

7 – because it often rests on assumptions that the ceding of political

power to multilateral institutions and regimes is a ‘good’ thing. But

9 this is not to suggest that we should abandon thinking about

20 governance issues in the world today. As Jan Aart Scholte argues:

2 The dispersal of governance in contemporary history has occurred not

3 only across different layers and scales of social relations from the local

4 to the global, but also alongside the emergence of various regulatory

5 mechanisms in private quarters alongside those in the public sector.

6 Many rules for global companies, global finance, global communica-

7 tions, global ecology and other global matters have been designed

8 and administered through nongovernmental arrangements. . . . This

9 situation of multi-scalar and diffuse governance might be called

30 ‘polycentrism’, to denote its distinctive feature of emanating from

1 multiple interconnected sites.

2 (Scholte 2005: 86–87)