globalization and regionalisation

This page looks at globalisation, a term that is as problematical as the 'new economy' or 'electronic commerce'. It also questions the more fashionable declarations that the "death of distance" equals the death of the city or a cure for regional woes.

It covers -

• the lobalisation phenomenon
• introductions
• sovereignty
• economies
• barbarians at the gates?
• cities, regions, geographies
• transnational flows
• hegemons

It is supplemented by discussion elsewhere on this site regarding jurisdiction and governance, past communication revolutions (which have both reinforced and eroded national/cultural identities) and borders.

     the phenomenon

Globalisation as a concept is often left undefined (like pornography, you know it when you see it), defined as 'internationalisation', used as a shorthand for transborder (especially transregional) flows of capital, goods, services and expertise or derided as "an economic term used by the neoliberals to reinstitute a low-wage labor policy".

Emphases in the discussion of globalisation throughout this site include

• regional and global integration of markets (with production, research, product development, manufacturing and investment dispersed across a range of countries)
• sourcing by major enterprises of capital and services (eg accounting, advertising, fulfilment) on a global rather than national basis
• the proliferation of global consumer brands, continuing a trend first apparent in the 1870s
• international networking of enterprises through joint ventures, alliances and asset sharing
• export of production outside the First World
• an emphasis on advanced communications for the management of dispersed enterprises and for dealing with global capital flows
• growth of an international class of experts (operating within business enterprises, NGOs, governments and academia) with English as the lingua franca
• strengthening of regional and global agreements (ranging from technical standards through to commercial law and beyond to human rights) that harmonise and in practice often drive legal regimes within individual jurisdictions
• a concurrent revitalisation of some ethnic or other polities within states.

     introductions

Why not begin with incisive coverage by Anthony Giddens in his short Runaway World (London: Profile 1999), Martin Wolf in Why Globalisation Works (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2004), David Held in Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus (Cambridge: Polity 2004), Philippe Legrain in Open World: The Truth About Globalisation (London: Abacus 2002), John Mickelthwait & Adrian Wooldridge in A Future Perfect: The Challenge & Hidden Promise of Globalisation (New York: Times 2000), Jeffry Frieden in Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: Norton 2006) or Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2005) edited by Alfred Chandler & Bruce Mazlish.

For us they are more impressive than Noreena Hertz's shrill The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism & the Death of Democracy (London: Heinemann 2001), rightly criticised for misunderstanding key statistics, John Ralston Saul's The Collapse of Globalism (New York: Atlantic 2005) or Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Exposes The Truth About Globalization, Corporate Cons & High Finance Fraudsters (London: Pluto Press 2002).

The latter might be read in conjunction with Benjamin Hunt's The Timid Corporation - why business is terrified of taking risk (New York: Wiley 2003) and Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter's polemic The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (Oxford: Capstone 2005). Globalinc.: An Atlas of The Multinational Corporation (New York: The New Press 2003) by Medard Gabel & Henry Bruner destroys many of the more facile globalisation myths.

Michael Jordan & the New Global Capitalism (New York: Norton 1999) by Walter LaFeber offers insights into global marketing and manufacturing, wrapped around the sportsman's career. There is another perspective in Coalitions & Competitions: The Globalization of Professional Business Services (London: Routledge 1993), edited by Yair Aharon, The Dynamic Firm: The Role of Technology, Strategy, Organization and Regions (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1998) edited by Alfred Chandler, Peter Hagstrom & Orjan Solvell,Legal Aspects of Globalization: Conflict of Laws, Internet, Capital Markets and Insolvency in a Global Economy (London: Kluwer 2000) edited by J�rgen Basedow & Toshiyuki Kono and Harm de Blij's The Power of Place (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 2008).

For a broader analysis see Anthony Giddens' magisterial The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press 1990), questioned in Justin Rosenberg's The Follies of Globalisation Theory (London: Verso 2001).

     sovereignty

Saskia Sassen's Losing Control: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia Uni Press 1996) and Globalization & Its Discontents: Essays On The New Mobility of People & Money (New York: New Press 1999) are both sparkling, although in our view a tad too pessimistic and usefully read in conjunction with Dynamics of Regulatory Change: How Globalization Affects National Regulatory Policies (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2005) edited by David Vogel & Robert Kagan.

Jerry Everard's Virtual States: The Internet & the Boundaries of the Nation State (London: Routledge 1999) is less entertaining than Sassen but makes a persuasive case for how government institutions and community perceptions will evolve to reflect new technologies.

There are points of reference in Money & the Nation State: The Financial Revolution, Government & the World Monetary System (New Brunswick: Transaction 1998) edited by Kevin Dowd & Richard Timberlake and in Barry Eichengreen's Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1996).

Robert Gilpin's The Challenge of Global Capitalism: The World Economy in the 21st Century (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2000) is a view from the Right by a leading US political economist, echoing Robert Kaplan's sombre The Coming Anarchy (New York, Random 2000) and John Gray's False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (New York: New Press 1999).

We enjoyed - although disagreed with - Doug Henwood's Wall Street (London: Verso 1997), described by Christopher Hitchens as "a charm against the priests and warlocks of pseudo-science".

     economies

Kevin O'Rourke & Jeffrey Williamson in Globalization & History: The Evolution of a 19th Century Economy (Cambridge: MIT Press 1999) offer a useful historical perspective. Williamson co-authored Growth Inequality & Globalization: Theory, History & Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1999). David Landes' The Wealth & Poverty of Nations (New York: Little Brown 1998) is crisp, deeply-researched and intelligent. It complements Manuel Castell's three volume The Information Society (Oxford: Blackwell 1999), which tries, with some success, to tease out the antecedents and consequences of living in the global village.

Although big may not be best, the web isn't a level playing field. Bennett Harrison's Lean & Mean: Why Large Corporations Will Continue to Dominate the Global Economy (New York: Guilford Press 1997) explores some of the questions posed by Dan Schiller's Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge: MIT Press 1999).  His paper Ambush on the I-Way: Commoditization on the Electronic Frontier and Deep Impact: The Web & the Changing Media Economy (Info, Feb 1999) are provocative.

Thomas Friedman's The Lexus & the Olive Tree (London: HarperCollins 1999) - "why is half the world intent on building a better car, while the other half is locked in primordial struggles over who owns which olive tree, which strip of land?" - might be considered a downmarket version of arguments in Samuel Huntingdon's apocalyptic The Clash of Civilisations & the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster 1996). For an analysis of 'non-reciprocal globalisation' campaigns such as AusBuy - they'll buy our goods but we shouldn't buy theirs - see Buy American: the Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Boston: Beacon 1999) by Dana Frank.

Read Gilpin or Sassen instead, or dip into Corporate Governance & Globalization: Long Range Planning Issues (London: Elgar 2000), a collection of papers edited by Stephen Cohen & Gavin Boyd.

     barbarians at the gates?

Anti-globalisation lament One World, Coming Ready or Not (New York: Simon & Schuster 1997) by William Greider - author of an excellent study of US central banking - can be profitably read in conjunction with George Gilder's deliriously upbeat pro-market tract Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics & Technology (New York: Simon & Schuster 1989) and Lewis Lapham's mordant The Agony of Mammon: The Imperial Global Economy Explains Itself to the Membership In Davos, Switzerland (London: Verso 1998).

For us much of Ian Angell's acclaimed The New Barbarian Manifesto: How To Survive The Information Age (London: Kogan Page 2000) is merely silly, but as with comments elsewhere on the site we encourage readers to consult the work and make their own judgements.

In 2005 the OECD announced that China's exports of information and communication technology hardware (including laptop computers, mobile phones and digital cameras) increased by over 46% to US$180 billion in 2004 from a year earlier, easily outstripping US exports of US$149 billion (up 12% on 2003). Some costs are highlighted in Ching Kwan Lee's Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2007)

     cities, regions, geographies

Much writing about the internet and the new economy has exulted in the 'death of distance' and claims that internet economics will solve a multitude of regional problems, through electronic access to services (banking, medicine, education, entertainment) or establishment of digital enterprises.

That hype is considered in our discussion about cyberspace/new economy myths. It reflects works such as Frances Cairncross's The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives (London: Orion 1997) and George Gilder's millenarian Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionise Our World (New York: Free Press 2000). It also reflects government initiatives such as Australia's Networking the Nation program, highlighted in our profile on the former NOIE.

Gilder had earlier proclaimed, bizarrely, that we

are headed for the death of cities ... Moore's Law will overthrow the key concentration, the key physical conglomeration of power in America today: the big city...We've got these big parasite cities sucking the lifeblood out of America today. And those cities will have to go off the dole. Rather than being centers of value subtraction, they will have to learn to add value to the nation's output ...

Notions that the internet will dissolve the city and allow us all to move back to the bush are at best grossly simplistic.

Control Revolution: Technological & Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1989) by James Beninger and Control Through Communications: The Rise of System In American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1993) by Joanne Yates explore how the death of distance allows management-at-a-distance, facilitates the erosion of regional services and encourages concentration of elites within the 'latte belt'.

Other perspectives are offered by Annalee Saxenian's Regional Advantage: Culture & Competition In Silicon Valley & Route 128 (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1996), Understanding Silicon Valley: The Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 2000) edited by Martin Kenney, MoneySpace: Geographies of Monetary Transformation (London: Routledge 1997) by Andrew Leyshon & Nigel Thrift or Matthew Zook's paper (PDF) Grounded Capital: Venture Capital's Role in the Clustering of Internet Firms in the US.

Essays in Multimedia & Regional Economic Restructuring (London: Routledge 1999) edited by Hans-Joachim Braczyk, Gerhard Fuchs & Hans-Georg Wolf are also important.

Our digital and metrics guides point to some of the more cogent studies for understanding how the web has affected globalisation and perceptions of space.

Matthew Zook for example demonstrates that rather than being placeless, the net is strongly connected to the physical world, with the five cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington DC and London 'owning' over 17% of the world's domains. Concentration in Australia appears to be significantly higher.

He comments that

despite its reputed "spacelessness", the internet is grounded in specific locations ... For example, I am sitting in my office in the San Francisco Bay writing this email and although I will send it halfway around the world ... to you, it will eventually end up on a computer in London. Although both of us could be anywhere, ie the beach, a remote mountain cabin, etc it's not coincidence or happenstance that we are located in two of the biggest Internet city-region nodes in the world.

There is a more detailed examination in Joel Kotkin's The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape (New York: Random 2000) and Digital Geography: The Remaking of City & Countryside in the New Economy (PDF). Beate Reszat's 2002 paper Information Technologies in International Finance and the Role of Cities explores particular themes.

     transnational flows

A historical perspective on global capital flows is provided by The Politics of International Debt (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 1985) edited by Martin Kahler, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1996) by Barry Eichengreen, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 2001) by Harold James, Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell 2003) by Christopher Bayly and A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2007) by Kenneth Kiple.

Perspectives on contemporary angst about offshoring are provided in four works by Mira Wilkins: The History of Foreign Investment in the United States, 1914-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 2004), The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914 (1970), The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from 1914 to 1970 (1974) and The History of Foreign Investment in the United States to 1914 (1989). Evolving Financial Markets & International Capital Flows: Britain, the Americas and Australia, 1865-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001) by Lance Davis & Robert Gallman offers insights about the Australian experience.

     hegemons

Conspiracists such as Rev Pat Robertson and Lyndon LaRouche fret that particular institutions, elites or even families are secretly pulling the strings of globalisation. Targets for anxiety include the World Trade Organization, IMF and World Bank, the United Nations and 'big media'.

Among academic expressions of concern are Michael Goldman's Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in an Age of Globalization (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2005), The Chastening: Inside the Crisis that Rocked the Global Financial System and Humbled the IMF (New York: PublicAffairs 2001) by Paul Blustein and Zillah Eisenstein's fervent Against Empire (Sydney: Spinifex Press 2005). There are more nuanced accounts in Sebastian Mallaby's The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: Penguin Press 2004) and China and the Challenge of Economic Globalization: The Impact of WTO Membership (Armonk: M E Sharpe 2006) edited by Hung-Gay Fung, Changhong Pei & Kevin Zhang.

Other perspectives are offered in Barry Buzan's From International to World Society? English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2004), Akira Iriye's Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2002), Michelle Egan's Constructing a European Market: Standards, Regulation, and Governance (New York: Oxford Uni Press 2001), Ruling the World: Power Politics and the Rise of Supranational Institutions (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2000) by Lloyd Gruber, US Hegemony and International Organizations (New York: Oxford Uni Press 2003) by Rosemary Foot, S. Neil MacFarlane & Michael Mastanduno and Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 2004) by Michael Barnett & Martha Finnemore.




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