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Hegemonic Transitions, the State and Crisis in Neoliberal Capitalism Routledge Studies in Governance and Change in the Global Era ; 7.7 Atasoy, Yıldız Taylor & Francis Routledge 0415473845 9780415473842 9780203884027 English Hegemony, Globalization--Economic aspects, Globalization--Political aspects. 2009 JZ1312.H434 2009eb 327.101 Hegemony, Globalization--Economic aspects, Globalization--Political aspects.
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Page i Hegemonic Transitions, the State and Crisis in Neoliberal Capitalism More than 15 years have passed since the end of the Cold War, but uncertainty persists in the political-economic shaping of the world economy and state system. Although many countries have institutionalized neoliberal policies since the mid-1970s, these policies have not taken hold to the same degree, nor have their effects been uniform across all countries. Nevertheless, there has been widespread deepening of inequalities, and, therefore, scepticism towards the neoliberal project. Uncertainty prevails not only in the relations between states, but also in the relations between forces of capital, citizens, and political power within states. Moreover, there is conceptual confusion in our understanding of the events and processes of neoliberal global transformation. This collection of essays provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical examination of neoliberal restructuring as a complex political process. In an effort to penetrate and clarify this complexity, the book explores the connections between the economy, state, society, and citizens, while also offering current examples of resistance to neoliberalism. The book provides a forum for re-thinking politics that represents a turn to societal forces as essential not only to the uncovering of this complexity but also to the formulation of democratic possibilities beyond global hegemonic projects. The book does not seek to produce a new model for social change, nor does it dwell on the spatial aspects of modernity’s new form or the emergence of a new state hegemony (China) or new forms of rule (empire) in managing the world capitalist economy. Instead, the book argues that an understanding of hegemonic transformations requires the problematization of global power as embedded in historically specific social relations. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers engaged with global power and the state, citizenship, globalization and neoliberalism, development policies, foreign relations, non-governmental organizations, and grassroots activism. Yıldız Atasoy is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her books include Turkey, Islamists and Democracy: Transition and Globalization in a Muslim State (2005) and Global Shaping and Its Alternatives (coeditor, with William K. Carroll, 2003).
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Hegemonic Transitions, the State and Crisis in Neoliberal Capitalism Routledge Studies in Governance and Change in the Global Era ; 7.7 Atasoy, Yıldız Taylor & Francis Routledge 0415473845 9780415473842 9780203884027 English Hegemony, Globalization--Economic aspects, Globalization--Political aspects. 2009 JZ1312.H434 2009eb 327.101 Hegemony, Globalization--Economic aspects, Globalization--Political aspects.
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Page ii Routledge Studies in Governance and Change in the Global Era Edited by Daniel Drache, York University, Canada Harold Innis, one of Canada’s most distinguished economists described the Canadian experience as no one else ever has. His visionary works in economic geography, political economy, and communications theory have endured for over fifty years and have had tremendous influence on scholarship, the media and the business community. The volumes in the Innis Centenary Series illustrate and expand Innis’s legacy. Each volume is written and edited by distinguished members of the fields Innis touched. Each addresses provocative and challenging issues that have profound implications not only for Canada but for the new world order including the impact of globalization on governance, international developments, and the environment; the nature of the market of the future; the effect of new communications technology on economic restructuring; and the role of the individual in effecting positive social change. The complete series will provide a unique guide to many of the major challenges we face at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Proposals for future volumes in the series are actively encouraged and most welcome. Please address all enquiries to the editor, by email
[email protected] or by fax 1.416.736.5739. 1. New Socialisms Futures beyond globalization Edited by Robert Albritton, John Bell, Shannon Bell and Richard Westra 2. International Crisis Management The approach of European states Marc Houben 3. Citizenship in a Global World European questions and Turkish experiences Edited by E. Fuat Keyman and Ahmet Içduygu 4. The New Economy in Transatlantic Perspective Spaces of innovation Edited by Kurt Huebner 5. Worlds of Capitalism Institutions, governance, and economic change in the era of globalization Edited by Max Miller 6. International Trade and Neoliberal Globalism Towards re-peripheralisation in Australia, Canada and Mexico Edited by Paul Bowles, Ray Broomhill, Teresa Gutiérrez-Haces and Stephen McBride 7. Hegemonic Transitions, the State and Crisis in Neoliberal Capitalism Edited by Yıldız Atasoy Other titles in this series include: States Against Markets Edited by David Bell, Lessa Fawcett, Roger Keil and Peter Penz Political Ecology Edited by David Bell, Lessa Fawcett, Roger Keil and Peter Penz Health Reform Edited by Daviel Drache and Terry Sullivan Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City Edited by Engin F. Isin The Market or the Public Domain Global governance and the asymmetry of power Edited by Daniel Drache
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Page iii Hegemonic Transitions, the State and Crisis in Neoliberal Capitalism Edited by Yıldız Atasoy LONDON AND NEW YORK
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Page iv First published 2009 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2009 selection and editorial matter, Yıldız Atasoy; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN 0-203-88402-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-47384-5 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-88402-7 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-47384-2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-88402-7 (ebk)
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Page v For my husband, Ken Jalowica, and for my parents, Fatma and Mehmet Atasoy
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Page vii Contents List of figures List of tables List of contributors 1 Introduction YILDIZ ATASOY
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x xi xii 1
PART I Global power in world historical context: citizenship and the state 21
2 Global citizenship and multiple sovereignties: reconstituting modernity 23 PHILIP McMICHAEL 3 Tracking the transnational capitalist class: the view from on high 43 WILLIAM K. CARROLL 4 Global state formation and global democracy: a world historical 65 perspective CHRISTOPHER CHASE-DUNN, HIROKO INOUE, ALEXIS ÁLVAREZ AND RICHARD NIEMEYER
PART II Global authority: finance, health, and food
5 The US Treasury and the re-emergence of global finance DAVID SARAI
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Page viii 6 Calling the shots: global networks of trade in vaccines ANNA DA SILVA 7 The human right to food: ‘voluntary guidelines’ negotiations JULIAN GERMANN
104 126
PART III Reconfiguring states and the economy: the fragile diversity of 145 neoliberalism
8 The divergent roles of political and economic elites in NAFTA countries MALCOLM FAIRBROTHER 9 Islamic engagement with European universalism: state transformation in Turkey YILDIZ ATASOY 10 Privatization and corporate reforms in post-Soviet Tatarstan ANNA SHER
PART IV Paradoxes of citizenship: the recomposition of social solidarity networks
147 166 186 207
11 A cultural turn in politics: bourgeois class identity and white-Turk 209 discourses SEDEF ARAT-KOÇ 12 The permanent state of exception: international administration in 227 Kosovo BESNIK PULA 13 Left-indigenous politics in Bolivia: the constituent assembly and Evo 244 Morales JEFFERY R. WEBBER
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Page ix 14 The Brazilian landless movement: mobilization for transformative politics ABDURAZACK KARRIEM Author index Subject index
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Page x List of figures 3.1 Mean board size, select countries, 1996 and 2004 3.2 National and regional interlockers, 1996 and 2004 3.3 Numbers of national interlockers, G7 Countries, 1996 and 2004 3.4 Numbers of intra- and inter-regional TN linkers, 1996 and 2004 3.5 The international network in 1996 3.6 The international network in 2004 4.1 Rise, fall and upward sweeps of polity size 4.2 Rise, fall and upward sweeps as revealed by Taagepera’s estimates of the territorial sizes of the largest empires in the central system 4.3 Core-wide empire vs. modern hegemony 4.4 Modern colonies established 4.5 Waves of decolonization 6.1 Changes in centrality as vaccine exporters for countries exporting to more than one partner, 1996–2004 8.1 Trade as a share of GDP, 1950–2004 10.1 Networks of ownership ties and interlocking directorates created by top managers of Tatarstan’s industrial and financial companies, 2001 and 2005 10.2 Economic indicators of Tatarstan, 1960–2000: bread production, oil production, and an annual relative change in consumer price index
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52 54 54 55 56 57 66 67
69 70 71 116 148 201 202
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Page xi List of tables 3.1 Regional distributions of domiciles for global 500 firms (%) 3.2 Number of transnational linkers on global 500 boards, 1996 and 2006, featuring North America and Europe (%) 6.1 Changes in number of importing partners and degree centrality for top vaccine exporters, 1996–2004 6.2 Inter/intra-regional vaccine trade: average number of export/import ties per country in each region, 1996 6.3 Inter/intra-regional vaccine trade: average number of export/import ties per country in each region, 2004 8.1 Three pathways to North American free trade 8.2 State-owned enterprises 8.3 State-owned enterprises 10.1 Interlocking shareholdings (%) in the largest industrial and financial companies and banks of Tatarstan, 2001 10.2 Supervisory Board composition (%) by directors’ primary employment, 2001 10.3 Sales, profits, and ranking of the largest companies in Tatarstan (in millions of RUR), 2003–2005 10.4 Supervisory Board composition (%) by directors’ primary employment, 2005 13.1 Indigenous self-identification, 2001
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Page xii List of contributors Alexis Álvarez is a Research Associate at IROWS. Sedef Arat-Koç is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University. Her recent publications have appeared in the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2007); Transnational Identities and Practices in Canada (Lloyd Wong and Vic Satzewich, eds 2006); Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal (2002); and Caregivers Break the Silence (2001). Yıldız Atasoy is Associate Professor of Sociology at Simon Fraser University. Her recent publications include Turkey, Islamists and Democracy: Transition and Globalization in a Muslim State (London: I. B. Tauris 2005) and Global Shaping and Its Alternatives (co-edited with William K. Carroll) (Aurora: Garamond Press 2003). Her current research is on Turkey, Islamism and the European Union. William K. Carroll is Professor of Sociology at University of Victoria. His publications include Remaking Media: The Struggle to Democratize Public Communication (2006, with Bob Hackett); Corporate Power in a Globalizing World (2004); Challenges and Perils: Social Democracy in Neoliberal Times (2005, co-edited with Bob Ratner); Critical Strategies for Social Research (2004); Global Shaping and Its Alternatives (2003, co-edited with Yıldız Atasoy); Organizing Dissent (1997, 1992); Corporate Power and Canadian Capitalism (1986). Christopher Chase-Dunn is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California-Riverside. His recent research focuses on the causes of empire expansion and urban growth (and decline) in several world regions since the Bronze Age, and on models of future global state formation. Anna da Silva is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. Her dissertation research focuses on transnational governance of global public health and global networks of production and distribution of vaccines. She teaches sociology at Empire State College.
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Page xiii Malcolm Fairbrother is Lecturer in Global Policy and Politics in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. His current research seeks primarily to explain the worldwide proliferation of pro-globalization public policies since the 1980s. Julian Germann is a PhD candidate in Political Science at York University. He worked with FIAN, an international human rights organization. His publications include Policies against Hunger IV: Implementing the Voluntary Guidelines (2006, co-editor). Hiroko Inoue is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California-Riverside. Abdurazack Karriem is a PhD candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. His dissertation research focuses on the rise and transformation of the Brazilian Landless Movement into a counter-hegemonic political actor. His publications have appeared in Revista Nera (2005); The Bookpress (2002, with Goldsmith and Whittman); and Africa Notes (May). Philip McMichael is Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University. His publications include Settlers and the Agrarian Question (1984); The Global Restructuring of Agro-Food Systems (1994, editor); Food and Agrarian Systems in the World Economy (1995, editor); New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development (2005, co-editor); and Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective (2008). Current research is on the politics of globalization, with a focus on agrarian movements, food regimes, and climate change. Richard Niemeyer is a graduate student at the University of California-Riverside. Besnik Pula is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. His dissertation analyzes state building in post-independence Albania. His most recent publication is ‘Designing the cities of Empire: urban planning in the colonial cities of Italy’s Fascist Empire’, in Sociology and Empire (2008). David Sarai is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at York University. His dissertation research on the internationalization of the US Treasury and US structural power in international finance had been supported by the Canada-US Fulbright Program. Anna Sher is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her dissertation research examines the role of the state in the redistribution of power and property in post-state-socialist Russia.
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Page xiv Jeffery R. Webber is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto. His dissertation focuses on left-indigenous struggles in Bolivia. His recent articles have appeared in Historical Materialism, Third World Quarterly, Latin American Perspectives, and Monthly Review .
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Page 1 1 Introduction Yıldız Atasoy More than 15 years have passed since the end of the Cold War, but uncertainty persists in the political-economic shaping of the world economy and state system. In response to the uncertainty, some scholars and public spokespersons have advocated neoliberalism as a global policy idea in the hope of ensuring predictability and unity in the world through the primacy of market forces (Soros 2000). Although many countries have institutionalized neoliberal policies since the mid-1970s, these policies have not taken hold to the same degree, nor have their effects been uniform across all countries (Brady et al. 2005). Nevertheless, there has been widespread deepening of inequalities, and, therefore, scepticism towards the neoliberal project. Neoliberalism has clearly not succeeded in unifying the world around market capitalism, and insecurity continues to characterize the world we live in. This is especially evident in the context of wars waged in Iraq and Afghanistan after the events of September 11, 2001. Uncertainty prevails not only in the relations between states, but also in the relations between forces of capital, citizens, and political power within states. Moreover, there is conceptual confusion in our understanding of the events and processes of neoliberal global transformation, even though social theorists remain deeply committed to producing a general account of neoliberalism. This collection of essays provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical examination of neoliberal restructuring as a complex political process. In an effort to penetrate and clarify this complexity, the book explores the connections between the economy, state, society, and citizens, while also offering current examples of resistance to neoliberalism. The book considers the events and processes of neoliberalism both in practice and as a mode of thought. It aims to increase our understanding of the transformation in the world economy and the state system as an outcome of historically specific social relations with live political content. It argues that hegemonic changes cannot be reduced to the policies of a powerful state and behaviour of states, contrary to what Arrighi (1994) and Wallerstein (2003, 1999) have claimed, nor to a multipolar world of hegemonic blocs, which Amin (2006) argues is emerging from the regrouping of the global South, nor to an emergent ‘empire’ as Hardt and Negri (2000) suggest in relation to transnational
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Page 2 organizations. Instead, the book argues that an understanding of hegemonic transformations requires the problematization of global power as embedded in historically specific social relations. Hegemonic restructuring is an ongoing, timespecific project which reconstitutes the economy, the state, society, and indeed the individual, whose character varies in different historical periods. Each period is subject to conflicting interpretations, tactical alliances, and political and military struggles that promote or challenge interpretations of existing social arrangements. The present restructuring process, then, needs to be theorized by examining the historically specific relations between forces of capital, citizens, and political power within states, as well as the relations between states. Rossi’s (2007) Frontiers of Globalization Research examines both the usefulness and uselessness of existing paradigms and concepts in guiding ‘globalization research’. He concludes that at present there is no consensual understanding of a new paradigm which can serve as a referent for studying globalization. The present work is not an attempt to develop such a model for the interpretation of current changes. Rather, by drawing conceptual connections between neoliberalism, political authority, and the politics of alternatives, this book aims to present a global perspective that highlights the very complex political process involved in the global restructuring of social life. More specifically, the book sheds light on capitalist rivalries between states and regional blocs, as well as US dominance in unifying, however tenuously, global social, political, economic, and military space. It articulates the processes of restructuring of capital and classes, and the reorganization of states, supra-national organizations, and political alliances. Much sociological theorizing about ‘globalization’ embeds a view of the world from the metropole-centred logic of the global North (Connell 2007). In contrast, this book provides an explanation of the ways in which current restructuring generates new dynamics of global inequality, including those relating to capital, culture, food, and health. Moreover, it brings forth resistance strategies designed to reduce inequalities and discusses the possibility of constructing political alternatives to hegemonic projects. By generating debate on the issues and themes noted above, the book provides a forum for rethinking politics and the possibility of new political strategies. It offers an historical understanding of global power in ways that suggest a new direction for global restructuring. This rethinking represents a turn to societal forces as being essential not only to the uncovering of this complexity but also to the formulation of democratic possibilities beyond global hegemonic projects. Theories of hegemony Current theories of global transformation often provide a broader understanding of the dominant social structures on which an explanation of hegemony has been premised. Theorists of hegemony (Abu-Lughod 1989; Amin 2006; Arrighi 1994, 2007; Wallerstein 1999, 2003) focus on the
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Page 3 restructuring of the connections between states and the economy. They argue that restructuring is governed through the deployment of disciplinary techniques of coercion and consent that underlay political authority at the world level. From this perspective, the question of hegemony concerns the political organization of cooperation and consent in the operation of the world economy. Here, hegemony refers to the historical agency of a powerful state in making and enforcing rules in the international order (Keohane 1984). The present uncertainty in the global system is explained by the inability of the USA to rebuild the connections between states and the world economy (Tabak 2005). This literature takes as its historical turning point the world-system cycles of hegemony, the end of pax Americana , the concomitant rise of rivalry and ‘economic globalization’, and a decline in the sovereign power of nation-states. It conceptualizes global transformations as instances of the periodic rise and decline of hegemonic state powers in the world system that span from the mid-sixteenth century to the present. Each hegemonic moment enlarges the territorial space of the world capitalist economy and intensifies its social reach through the expansion of the interstate system across the globe. According to Wallerstein (1999), US hegemony reshaped the post-war world economy by expanding the nation-state system to replace the colonial order of pax Britannica . Current uncertainty results from a decline in US hegemony since 1968. This is rooted in a process whereby the growing transnationalization of capital threatens the sovereign power of nation-states to sustain capital accumulation and thus dismantle the global political order of pax Americana . Various outcomes have been suggested: the advent of rivalry from East Asia (China in particular) (Arrighi 2005, 2007), from the European Union (Gowan 2005) or from the triadic rivalry of India, China, and Russia (Sandhu and Gulick 2007). Hardt and Negri (2000) follow a similar premise, but argue for a different outcome. They foresee a decline in the sovereign power of states, gradually giving way to ‘empire’ emerging as a new form of sovereignty expressed in ‘global constitutionalism’ under the influence of a ‘transnational capitalist ruling-class’ (Sklair 2001, 1991). While debate continues over whether a rival state or ‘empire’ will replace US hegemony, predictions for the future are highly contentious. For Wallerstein (2003), a decline in state sovereignty will mean an eventual dissolution of the world capitalist system as its basic institutional premise, the interstate system, becomes ever weaker. This will result in increasing American militarism, ‘systemic anarchy’, and wars in state-to-state relations which the USA cannot entirely control (Wallerstein 2005). On the other hand, Arrighi (2005, 2007) argues that peace will eventually prevail in the global system after US hegemony, with other states agreeing on the rules and norms of a global market economy. This is because China lacks military power with a global reach; thus, its rise to global dominance will not result in Chinese hegemony. Gowan (2005) counters Arrighi’s prediction on the rise of East Asia and China to the position of global rule-maker. He argues that the European Union presents
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Page 4 an alternative rival to the USA, relying more on multilateral institutions than military coercion. Nevertheless, Hardt and Negri (2000) continue to insist that after US hegemony declines, the ‘empire’ will re-institute political authority to bring about certainty in the global system. These studies tend to offer a US-centric perspective by framing their research question around the perceived ability or inability of the USA to reorganize the global economy and state system. This is especially pronounced in Tabak’s (2005) book, which to a large extent focuses on the war in Iraq and presents a world systemic analysis of the conflict. With its heavy emphasis on tactical strategies for world dominance, it argues that the USA has moved from a hegemonic power ruling by consent to an imperial power dominating through coercion. Both globalization and militarism are viewed as strategies adopted by the USA to reverse its hegemonic decline. Similarly, Gardner and Young (2005) argue that the USA is visibly engaged in re-instituting its rule through coercion and militarism. Soederberg (2006) also argues that the USA is still the most powerful country but no longer hegemonic. In reordering policy agendas of other states, it exercises power largely through coercive force rather than consensus. It is difficult to argue for the complete passing of US hegemony. For Reifer et al. (2005), the USA will succeed itself and reassume a dominant position in the world economy despite having been in decline for some time. This is because of its preeminence not only in military power but in information technology and biotechnology. Panitch and Leys (2004) also argue that the USA maintains economic and financial dominance in the global system. Similarly, Sarai’s chapter in this volume analyzes the US Department of the Treasury to illustrate the centrality of the US state in setting up the basic policy parameters of the global economy. States as agents of social change? The debates on hegemony outlined above are located within the unfolding history of discursive struggles over how to organize and administer the world capitalist economy – politically, fiscally, commercially, and militarily. They are grounded in conventional theories on the organization and administration of the world capitalist system. Speculation on US hegemony continues in relation to the future of capitalism and the rebuilding of global politics. Here, again, interaction between the sovereign power of states and global economic forces remains the starting point for debate. Predictions on the future of capitalism remain contentious. Wallerstein (1999) continues with his state-centric perspective of human history. He argues that the growing transnationalization of capital is dismantling the global political order governed through US hegemony and threatening the sovereignty of states to sustain capital accumulation. For Wallerstein, the history of the world economy over the last 500 years is the history of state sovereignty within the interstate system. And state sovereignty is a
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Page 5 fundamental pillar of the capitalist world economy as it creates the legal, social, ideological, and political conditions for capital accumulation. If state sovereignty declines, ‘capitalism is untenable as a system’ (Wallerstein 1999:33). And for Wallerstein, capitalism is indeed in decline today – a sure sign of systemic crisis. For Arrighi (1994), and Arrighi and Silver (1999), the crisis does not lie in the future of capitalism but in US inability to institute a certain degree of regulation in the system. Arrighi and Silver point out that global changes are cyclical, and therefore explain US hegemonic decline in terms of world historical recurrences. They examine the similarities and differences between two cases of historical transformation: the transition from Dutch to British world hegemony and the shift from British to US world hegemony. Each era constitutes a moment in the competitive expansion of the dominant state and the changing balance of power between states. The present cycle appears to be qualitatively different from the historical trajectory of the past 500 years – defined as periods of hegemony based on a certain and variable combination of state financial and political/military power. Military power is now separated from economic power: the USA still enjoys military strength but economic power is divided among various states in East Asia. Thus, the current uncertainty in the global system is seen as resulting from the theoretical expectation of cyclical recurrence in the regulation of the global economy. The fundamentals of this argument are set out in Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century . He situates the twentieth century from 1870 to the present in the context of the last 600 years, during which there have been three systemic cycles of accumulation. Each systemic cycle of accumulation is a period of hegemony understood in terms of a dominant state’s possession of both political and financial power. World hegemonies include the Dutch, British, and US systemic cycles of accumulation. Each hegemonic power brings an order to the system by making and enforcing system-wide rules of capital accumulation. Although significant, this argument brings us back to the highly speculative and contentious predictions for the future that turn around the question of US hegemony. The most problematic aspect of the literature that constitutes this body of work is that it conceptualizes states in relation to their capacity to compete against each other, and theorizes social change in terms of the rise and fall of hegemonic states. The problem with conventional approaches is twofold: their emphasis on the state as the historic agent of social change, and the conceptualization of power in generic terms as the capacity to influence international outcomes. Taking a cue from the realist theory of international relations (Waltz 1979), their starting assumption is that states are autonomous, self-interested actors that behave in certain ways: they wage wars and pursue territorial security, in addition to accessing the material resources necessary for that end and for enhancing their material well-being. In the absence of a strong state and with the advent of competition and rivalry, anarchy-like uncertainty would be the
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Page 6 defining feature of the global order – arising from the competitive pursuit of security and resources by self-interested autonomous states (Baldwin 1993). In order to prevent anarchy, resolve conflicts, and restore order in the global economy, an empire-like political authority is needed to make and enforce rules for cooperation. For Axelrod and Keohane (1993), international cooperation contains a mixture of complementary and conflicting state interests. Both complementary preferences and significant competition and rivalries over global norms and rules are aspects of cooperation. This points to complex relations in instituting cooperation, yet the basic ontological assumption continues to be state autonomy. It is this assumption of state autonomy which appears to be impossible to hold on to as empirically valid. As Rosenberg (1994) argues, this kind of theorizing is deeply problematic. It implicitly relies on a pre-social, trans-historical definition of state behaviour and a unitary-rational agency of the state. That is, the assumptions made in regard to the maintenance of a strong state in order to prevent anarchy, and a view of the state as an autonomous actor, constitute a real paradox. Rosenberg’s (1994:123–58) notion of the ‘paradox of sovereignty’ is a critique of the onedimensional understanding of the state which is assumed to be losing its sovereign power under the influence of an ahistorical understanding of ‘economic globalization’. It is undeniable that the USA was the dominant power in the relations of post-war global capitalism and that its power has been challenged for some time now. Still, there is considerable complexity, as well as a multiplicity of determinations involved in the changing framework of global-rule and the institutional regulative space of capitalism. A historical contextualization of global-rule should also include many other important issues ranging from gender, racialization, and immigration, to health, culture, technology, and the environment. Although such complexity is beyond the focus of this book, it is important to note that these debates point to conceptual confusion in the literature and an epistemic crisis (see McMichael, this volume) in our social, cultural, and political categories. The epistemic crisis stems from a complex combination of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003) and various forms of privatization, including the ‘privatization of the state’ (Clapham 1996; Ferguson 2006; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Hibou 2004). Leys (2007) describes the ‘privatization of the state’ as ‘the market state’. As the state gradually withdraws from welfare provision and public services, any public service including security can be transformed into a commodity and be defined as a private service offered up by private enterprise and various advocacy groups. The process of commodification of the state concerns not only state economic enterprises and public services but includes varied state practices and interventions in policy, norm, and lawmaking, as well as public oversight (Hibou 2004). In relation to both the spread of private enterprises and the redeployment of state power, this process cannot be understood through arguments on the ‘retreat of the state’ (Strange 1996) or ‘disengagement by the state’. A complex process is involved, as I illustrate in Chapter 9
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Page 7 of this volume, that radically transforms and reconfigures state institutions and practices to facilitate the exercise of power in the direction of commodification, which, for Leys (2007), signals a restructuring process towards ‘total capitalism’. Neoliberal restructuring of capitalism Neoliberal restructuring is a more complicated process than the one presented by the media, whose perspective of global politics is that of ‘US power and the rest of the world’. What we actually observe is not ‘anarchy’ or the lack of US political authority, but a complex political process involving the restructuring of capital and classes, the reorganization of states and political alliances, and the reconfiguration of societies and human life. There is little doubt that the forces of transnational capital broaden and deepen the rule of the neoliberal market economy in the world (Atasoy and Carroll 2003). There is also broad agreement that prevailing forms of the state are changing as national states and cultures become subordinated to the global market economy and its structure of class domination (Atasoy 2007). However, the precise direction of change in the forms and activities of the state remains unclear (Brady et al. 2005; Hall and Soskice 2001; Huber and Stephens 2001; Swank 2002). Also less clear are the ways in which social life is reconfigured as the current neoliberal restructuring of the economy, state forms, society, and the individual is occurring globally. Much uncertainty arises from the wider social relations and massive inequalities that characterize neoliberalism. Neoliberalism refers to a form of global restructuring of capitalism, mainly through trade liberalization, the privatization of various forms of public property and public services, policy/ norm-making, and new contractual and managerial arrangements. This entails subjecting all public and private life to a market-driven rationale of increasing competitiveness in order to maximize efficiency for wealth creation. Rather than generating a ‘self-regulating market economy’ (Polanyi 1944) to ensure the well-being of all and provide the material basis of social solidarity, neoliberal restructuring is a class project which centres on the centrality of free markets to which all public and private life is increasingly subordinated. It embodies a specific reconfiguration of class power in relation to global forms of capital accumulation (Holloway 1995, in Soederberg 2006:49). While private enterprise and entrepreneurship are promoted as the keys to wealth creation for everyone, economic pauperization is increasingly the everyday reality for large sections of the world population. This is well expressed in Harvey’s (2003) concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and in Davis’ (2006) idea of a ‘planet of slums’. McMichael (this volume) describes these uncertainties as giving way to a universal ontological insecurity resulting from increasing levels of impoverishment, stunning growth in the informal sector, and tenuous employment, as well as the increasing militarization of societies. Ramesh (2007:3) observes this insecurity in terms of the state’s indifference to
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Page 8 the poorest 120 million nomadic and semi-nomadic tribal peoples laying claim to lands in India. As India’s most important development agency, the Planning Commission has initiated plans for the liberalization of land laws – the consequence of which is a massive land grab. The seizing of village lands on a vast scale by local mafia and officials has become commonplace. Land is confiscated for the cultivation of biofuels to facilitate large-scale export-corporate farming. Tribal people, who have no deeds, are driven off their ancestral village lands into impoverishment in urban slums. Popular political consent was also generated to extend neoliberalism over a vast global space of cultural diversity, despite the enormous disruption it caused. The postSeptember 11, 2001 ‘war on terror’ complicates the uncertainty generated by and the legitimacy given to neoliberalism by providing an extraordinary pretext for the reduction of social democracy, the dismantling of civil liberties, and an increase in repressive state powers (Pilger 2002). The short-term manoeuvring of US policymakers designed to enhance political power and economic interests adds an element of uncertainty to the trajectory of declining US hegemony. That said, there is an important crack in theory in terms of the connection between long-term US hegemonic decline and the political legitimacy of neoliberalism. As the US state continues to lose the political power necessary to manage the global system, it seeks to reconstitute its authority through institutions ranging from the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO to free trade agreements (FTAs) and intellectual property laws. These institutions promote further deepening of disciplinary neoliberalism by settingup parameters and shaping agendas via multilateral and bilateral policy negotiations (Gill 2004). However, it is not clear how the USA can re-institute its global power via these institutions, as they themselves have been widely criticized for contributing to an ongoing crisis of indebtedness, stagnation, and poverty (Woods 2006). The organization of this book: conceptual and historical possibilities This book does not engage in a debate with conventional theories of global hegemonic transformation but offers a perspective that responds to the epistemic crisis in our conceptual categories. It questions the externality assumed in the relationship between states and the economy and advances a perspective that aims to integrate the reciprocal relations between world-projects and particular societal configurations of social classes, political alliances, and cultural relations. It avoids treating states as fixed, closed entities, and offers an analysis of historically identifiable, space-specific processes and moments of decision-making as linked to the reformulation of power within and between states. Rosenberg’s notion of the ‘paradox of sovereignty’ is a good starting point. Formulating the paradox of sovereignty in reference to its Westphalian understanding, Rosenberg (1994:131) argues that Westphalian sovereignty is
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Page 9 a highly ambitious concept as a measure of actual practice of power within the given territory of a state. Sassen’s (2007) ‘localization of the global’ concept expresses this paradox. Global processes take place inside the territory of a sovereign state and within national institutional domains. In turn, the national is constituted as an instantiation of global processes. The norm of state autonomy, which is the essential component of Westphalian sovereignty, has been challenged in terms of the actual practice of infringement on domestic autonomy and the ‘denationalization’ of what were once national authorities and policy agendas. Thus, a paradox emerges for organizing political life within the territorial boundaries of a state. In this sense, Westphalian sovereignty, whose principles and rules are well-defined and understood, has always been violated, not only through international coercion and impositions, but also through participation in international conventions and contracts (Krasner 1999:8, 20–42). Given that it has never been achieved, conventional assumptions about state sovereignty as the defining feature of stability in the global order constitute an organized hypocrisy for Krasner (1999). Rosenberg’s paradox of sovereignty is an example of such hypocrisy. This is also similar to what Sassen implies with the concept of ‘denationalization’. For Sassen (2006), denationalization entails specific transformations of some of the components of the national state, conceptualized as an outcome of private power installed in the public realm. This is a process of disassembling the national – indicating a shift in the foundational logic of a particular global system (Sassen 2006:21). Denationalization, then, becomes constitutive of the global. But the global is embedded in the local, particularized assemblage of a variety of dynamics and cross-border circuits. Hence, it is subject to certain forms of state regulatory authority, although that authority is highly problematic. In response to the paradox of sovereignty notion, and in order to envisage emergent social forms, McMichael opens Chapter 2 with an alternative understanding of sovereignty. It helps us to imagine an alternative politics while living in the increasingly uncertain world of a crumbling Westphalian system. McMichael argues that the possibility of re-thinking politics is given in our imaginative response to the long-term transformation of our social, cultural, and political categories, which were based mainly on the nation-state frame of reference. When the claims of nationstates for sovereignty are being challenged all over the world, a search for alternative conceptual categories is in order. According to Ferguson (2006:50–68), this is an urgent task if we wish to re-politicize our perceptions of the global restructuring of capitalism and its outcomes. This is not a question of whether neoliberal restructuring is rendering states weak and irrelevant, nor is it a question of the ‘retreat of the state’. Rather, it is a question of re-thinking global politics. Consequently, McMichael’s chapter argues for new forms of political mobilization that reformulate conceptions of sovereignty dissociated from the national and reconnected to the development of ‘global consciousness’ (Oleson 2005:102–26).
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Page 10 McMichael reformulates sovereignty in terms of a historical transition between the two modernities as outlined by Beck (2000) in What is Globalization? The first modernity represents the Westphalia system of situating sovereignty within national jurisdictions and the second refers to a post-national era. Conventional theories of the first modernity appear to be trapped within the current epistemic crisis resulting from a gap between the transnational space of the economy and the nationally divided ‘territorial’ social space of its institutional framework – the nation-state system. The possibility of an alternative understanding of sovereignty is sought in terms of ‘global citizenship’, ‘food sovereignty’, and ‘global democracy’. All posit a substantive conception of the rights of self-determining individuals and self-reliant/self-governing communities. These conceptions of sovereignty formulated for the second modernity represent the politics of diversity in the context of shared (but differentiated) experiences and the impact of a shift to the global. Instead of the one-sided, singular perspective associated with the modern state, McMichael’s chapter argues for a multi-perspectival politics associated with multiple sovereignties based on cultural, environmental, and economic sustainability. The concept of ethical universalism, which reflects the voices and practices of selfdetermining, self-defining individuals and communities, connects alternative sovereignty movements to an integrated world. It is not a parochial turn away from world consciousness, nor prey to arbitrary authority, yet it is outside of ideological/political struggles over hegemony and state-centred projects. Participatory alternatives, then, represent the building of cosmopolitan resolutions, founded in alternative understandings of sovereignty. They depend on engagement not only with the state but with global diversity and are based in ethical universalism. The realization of engaged universals through rebuilding institutions, reorganizing lives and reconfiguring social relations requires overcoming the externality assumed in the relationship between states and the economy. This is a very difficult task, given that states continue to play a significant role in facilitating the neoliberal restructuring of capitalism. There is continuing insistence in the literature on the possibility of a global society and global state in regulating the global expansion of a market economy (Robinson 2004). This reflects the conceptual dominance of the state-economy dichotomy as an analytical framework for understanding global processes, as was the case with eighteenth-century liberal theory (Misztal 2004:84; Somer 1995a,b). In light of this, Alexander (2007) argues that ‘globalization’ represents continuity with modernity. Alexander’s conception of modernity is consistent with the first modernity outlined by Beck. Although we experience a process of compression/expansion of space, time, and meaning, ‘these expansions have not yet…created the basis for globality in the sense of supranational civil society’ (Alexander 2007:380). Thus, there is no need to ‘invent new or alternative knowledge. Rather, we must better apply the theoretical and empirical ideas already available, which means to orient them in a more global way’ (Alexander 2007:373). This book departs from the contention
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Page 11 that conventional theories – whose frame of reference is Enlightenment-based modernity – are sufficient. But it by no means seeks to produce a new model of modernity for interpreting current changes. Beck (2000:23, 65) presents an argument for transition to the second modernity through a critique of the container theory of society expressed in a politically defined and controlled space by the state. His second modernity is a consequence of ‘economic globalization’, which breaks up the national categorization of politics and society. No doubt, this process does not create an automatic mutation in modernity’s forms. As nations and national states still matter (Calhoun 2007), the emergence of a ‘transnational civil society’ appears to be a partial possibility, certainly in the longer term. Overall, the book does not dwell on the spatial aspects of the onset of modernity’s new form, nor the emergence of new state hegemony (China) or new forms of rule (empire) in managing the world capitalist economy. Rather, each essay in this volume provides a deeper understanding of the neoliberal restructuring of our existence by offering a global perspective that explores actual events and processes involved in organizing the ruling relations of emergent social forms. The contributors illustrate how our economic, social, cultural, and political categories are mutating as they confront a variety of neoliberal forces and complex processes. This forces us to think carefully about how these categories work and how they are produced and reproduced in a way that they figure significantly in the reformulation of the state. The essays in the present work problematize ruling relations of the global economy by critically examining transnational capitalist class formation, with particular attention given to territorially defined spaces of states. In Chapter 3, Carroll takes issue with the very notion of a ‘transnational capitalist class’ (Robinson 2004). Robinson argues that the world is going through an epochal transformation from a capitalism organized within states to a global system of capitalist production in which nation-states are less relevant to the production and circulation of commodities. With the emergence of global capitalism, class formation is also shifting from a national to global level, while global-governance institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization will eventually form the transnational state. Carroll’s chapter shows that the formation of a unified transnational ruling class is problematic. Capitalist classes deepen the rule of neoliberalism across the globe but not necessarily as members of a unified transnational class; they are nationally divided. This finding helps us better understand current institutions of neoliberal capitalism, insofar as they reflect both complementary expectations and significant competition and rivalry over global norms and rules, thus expressing a wide range of interests. This is important as it invites us to be critical of suggestions that postulate a ‘global civil society’ and ‘global state’ as the basis of social solidarity and participatory politics in place of the older logic of national states. The chapter advances the idea that the national is still important in the formation of the global economy. Rather than building on older categorical divisions between the
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Page 12 economy and the state as separate spheres – whether conceived at the national or global levels, Carroll problematizes power relations of neoliberal capitalist restructuring as embodying a whole range of conflictual social relations between capitalist classes. Despite considerable criticism, conventional theories of hegemony are still discussed in the literature. The terms ‘global state’ and ‘global civil society’ continue to figure in discussions of global politics. In a similar vein, in Chapter 4, Chase-Dunn et al. examine the possibility of ‘global state formation’ as a resolution to world-system cycles of hegemony and military power employed as a last ditch effort to uphold a declining hegemony. Expressed in the rise of transnational organizing and the deepening of a global social justice movement against neoliberal globalization, ‘global state formation’ does not necessarily eliminate a political hegemon but situates it within a stronger context of multilateral global governance. Chase-Dunn et al .’s global state, then, differs from McMichael’s ‘global democracy’, formulated as a vehicle of global citizenship for the second modernity. Chase-Dunn et al. see historical continuity with the foundational logic of the first modernity based on the national state but believe there now exist greater democratic possibilities. Similarly, in Carroll’s analysis, global economic integration does not break from the logic of the inter-state system of the first modernity either. These chapters allow us to engage in fruitful discussion by enlarging the scope of the debate to include other social possibilities, without rehashing conventional theories of hegemonic transformation and without the logic of inevitability. In Chapters 5 to 7 Sarai, da Silva, and Germann, respectively, deal with uncertainties in the political management of neoliberal capitalism. Given that current institutions of neoliberal capitalism reflect a wide range of diverse and competing interests, and the fact that prevailing political-military relations point to greater uncertainty in the state system, these chapters concede that there is no single, clear meaning attached to the political management of neoliberal capitalism. Global political authority cannot be taken as a monolithic entity in its own right. The US state alone cannot sustain the material basis of neoliberalism. There are other power players that are responsible for managing the global economy. These include: Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and the World Bank), other formal organizations (such as the WTO, the G-7/G-8, and the UN), and informal private forums (such as the Trilateral Commission and World Economic Forum) (Gill 1992; Soederberg 2006). These institutions, however powerful, play their regulatory oversight in maintaining global capitalism under US pressure. For Sarai, the global market economy is highly politicized and hence its stability ultimately resides in decisions made by US policy-makers. Sarai’s analysis illustrates how the US Treasury Department plays an integral role in the constitution and expansion of global financial markets. This generates structural power for the US state while reinforcing the very institution of the market. The USA does not entirely dictate the policies of international financial institutions.
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Page 13 However, because it is able to penetrate the very institutional set-up of the global system, the USA can draw capital from all over the world and run massive current account and budget deficits with few constraints. According to Woods (2006), there are serious problems arising from a conception of global economic management which envisions US control through these international financial institutions. More generally, these institutions appear to have been losing legitimacy as they face difficulties in persuading member countries to implement specific economic policies. As they are ‘increasingly financed by [the] poor and directed by the rich’ (Woods 2006:213), they have being accused of promoting the economic and security concerns of the USA as a self-interested hegemon. Despite differences in perspective, the chapters that follow argue that these institutions still play a significant role in managing diverse, conflicting interests to promote adherence to global norm-making. And yet, as shown by da Silva and Germann, their managerial role is subject to rival interpretations, challenges, and constant renegotiation. This illustrates that, even as they continue to enforce neoliberalism as a boundary-setting project, their role in the re-composition of the rule of capital is uncertain. An analysis of the stability or instability in the reproduction of the material basis of neoliberalism should also include this uncertainty in the development of a multidimensional concept of global power. Da Silva’s chapter examines global networks of trade in public health and vaccines since the onset of the WTO’s 1995 TRIPS Agreement which regulates intellectual property rights in trade. Her findings are based on a network analysis of trade patterns of countries within the global vaccine trade. Da Silva argues that the global production and consumption of vaccines involve shifting balances of power between states, citizens, the business community in health-care provision, and the international community. As these interests collude, compete, and struggle to maintain power and control in the arena of global public health, the global vaccine trade reveals increasing instability in global governance. The specific case of India reveals some of the nuances emerging in the pattern of global governance of vaccine production and distribution. Similarly, Germann, by focusing on the recent multi-stakeholder negotiations over a set of Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food, shows that the ‘human right to food’ embodies both counterhegemonic and hegemonic discourses. On the one hand, the articulation of food as a fundamental right politicizes the ‘problem’ of hunger, casting a critical light on the global restructuring of production and subjecting the market to the primacy of human rights. On the other hand, the ‘right to food’ discourse as negotiated in the Guidelines process aligns it with neoliberalism. Relating these findings back to the political struggles contesting ‘globalization’ from below and co-opting resistance movements from above, the chapter highlights the potential for reconstituting state power through the reformulation of the ‘right to food’ idea as project of food sovereignty.
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Page 14 All of the chapters dealing with global authority reveal that there is a gap between national states and their social commitment to citizens, as well as between global material integration and the reformulation of strategies seeking to organize market conditions for private capital. This is best understood as being situated within the larger struggles of neoliberal capitalist restructuring. These essays make the argument that an understanding of global conjunctures must be part of any structural analysis. Connections between economic and social processes and the reconfiguring of state forms are historically situated within the complexities of global rulemaking, yet they are context-bound in observable localities and subject to change. In a manner similar to Sassen’s notion of the ‘localization of the global’, Soederberg et al. (2005) argue that there is a shared experience with neoliberal capitalist restructuring but that the process is diverse. Neoliberal restructuring is not an allencompassing process that would enclose all possible contents; it is a ‘process of diversity within convergence’ (Soederberg et al. 2005:2–3). Within this process of internalizing the global, domestic political institutions and practices are restructured. Neoliberalism, in turn, becomes further embedded in the domestic institutional structure. The local internalization of neoliberalism points to the fact that its form is changing from the market orthodoxy of the 1980s, which was based on structural adjustment programs, to ‘social neoliberalism’ in the twenty-first century, based on ‘the spread of a hegemonic “embedded neoliberalism”’ (Soederberg et al. 2005:10). This conceptual intervention allows us to argue that context-bound specificity in the relations of capital accumulation and reconfiguration of state forms is part of the neoliberal re-shaping of global power and political management of the global economy. Neoliberal restructuring now includes ‘a form of pro-market re-regulation ’ which consists of more socially oriented goals (Soederberg et al. 2005:17). These include poverty reduction, human-capital creation through investment in education and job creation, social-capital growth through community participation, various economic opportunity and empowerment projects, delivery of basic social services, environmental sustainability, better labour regulation programs, and capable state and good governance, etc. Formulated through the three integrated concepts of economic opportunity promotion, social and economic security , and empowerment (Craig and Porter 2006:4), social neoliberalism of the twenty-first century now assumes an inclusive form. ‘Inclusive neoliberalism’ (Craig and Porter 2006:12) is a political project for market enablement, facilitating the participation of the poor, the weak, and the marginalized in the market economy. There exists no global government to manage the spread of market economic relations; what we have is a greater politicization of the market economy in culturally diverse localities that is attached to communal ethics and a moral commitment to individualism. Chapters 8 to 10 by Fairbrother, myself, and Sher, respectively, examine the social embeddedness of neoliberalism by exploring how general global trends intersect with historically specific transformations and politico-
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Page 15 cultural meanings. They help us to historicize the relations of neoliberalism in the global economy and understand the political-cultural transformations within states that generate sustaining ideas. Fairbrother’s chapter examines how NAFTA’s free trade arrangements interconnect with specific economic transformations in the USA, Canada, and Mexico. It analyzes NAFTA negotiations by the US, Canada, and Mexico in terms of variations in the structural location of these countries in the world economy. Fairbrother finds that countries’ pathways vary systematically according to their positions in the world economy, in part because such positions condition – and are conditioned by – domestic political economic circumstances. Differences in the level of development and the character of domestic state-capital relations including the balance of power between public and private elites explain differences in the American, Canadian, and Mexican pathways to the North American free trade regime. Business mobilization plays a large role in the adoption of free trade in the USA and Canada, whereas the state ruling elite plays a more important role in Mexico. The chapter concludes that although policy shifts to free trade are made for different reasons and driven by different actors, business is heavily involved in the formulation of each country’s policy objectives. This raises the importance of a separate yet contingent conjunction of economic, cultural, and political processes to be incorporated into an analysis of the changing conditions of states and the economy. These processes operate both within the social space of the state and in a world historical setting. My own chapter analyses these dimensions of power by adding a political culture twist to the neoliberal turn in state transformation. The chapter examines state transformation in Turkey through an Islamic re-signification of cultural values and ethical standards that is specifically tied to Turkey’s EU membership. Both the current pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and other Islamic groups centre an Islam-sensitive approach on the epistemic privilege of European normative patterns based on a free market economy and liberal democracy. But, these groups still conceive of individual development in terms of Islamic narratives about righteous individual and the good society. These dimensions of an Islamic ethic in the context of Turkey rearticulate an Islamic political project in reference to ‘European universalism’. This ethic finds its expression in the strengthening of civil society engagement with the neoliberal economy and the reworking of civic nationalism. Incorporated into place-specific interpretive struggles over the state trajectory, the material and discursive global dynamics of neoliberalism facilitate a shift in the authoritarian Kemalist state. Yet, the longstanding statist, nationalist tradition continues to be integral to the processes that confront Turkey’s neoliberal turn through an Islamic engagement with European universalism. Sher’s chapter considers the making of neoliberal capitalism in the Republic of Tatarstan as an example of transitioning societies. Sher analyzes it as a partnership between state bureaucrats, political elites, and big business.
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Page 16 Although Tatarstan adopted a neoliberal economic model as part of a general change from the state-socialist system of the Soviet Union to a market-oriented economy of the Russian Federation, political-strategic considerations played an important role in the transition. In the context of successfully negotiating its political autonomy within the Russian Federation, thereby gaining control over vast oil resources and large-scale industrial companies, the government of Tatarstan developed a particular type of corporate model for managing the economy. The shareholder-oriented model of corporate management has served as a framework to legitimize the spread of neoliberalism, integrating a plurality of shareholders. Workers, managers, and government bureaucrats now appear as partners in corporate decision-making and control, albeit in an unequal partnership. As the neoliberal restructuring of capitalism envelops the entire globe, denationalized states play an important role in its local embeddedness (Sassen 2006), thereby changing the meaning of citizenship. The change follows a shift in the notion of society presumed to be a bounded, sovereign, social entity with the state organizing the rights and duties of each member territorially (Urry 1999). Chapters in the Paradoxes of Citizenship section of the book examine the emergent forms of politicocivic engagement and the potential of a ‘civil sphere’ (Alexander 2006) fostered by participation in the neoliberal market economy. The authors argue that rather than guiding inclusive forms of citizenship concerned with equality, solidarity, and democracy, neoliberal restructuring often imposes restrictive, exclusionary, and various other forms of anti-democratic political practices. This is contrary to the argument about social neoliberalism (Soederberg et al. 2005) as instigating a ‘more “inclusive,” responsive and “participatory,” and thereby, somehow, more legitimate’ form of pro-market re-regulation (Craig and Porter 2006:4). Reminiscent of Craig and Porter’s critique of inclusive neoliberalism promoted by the World Bank as a poverty reduction strategy, these chapters direct our attention to democratic possibilities for organizing social change beyond neoliberal frameworks. What is interesting is that political responses to the negative aspects of neoliberalism continue to spur a conceptual reconfiguration of cultures and individuals often connected with national state projects of the first modernity. One issue which becomes clear is that the dissolution of existing social solidarity networks does not always invoke comfortable attachments to more globalized, cosmopolitan forms of civic engagement and global consciousness. Of course, the emergence of a new social space from local solidarity movements that fits into a global-experience perspective is always a possibility. Chapter 11 by Arat-Koç outlines a beyaz Türk (white Turk) discourse that articulates the worldview of a laik (secularized) segment of the Turkish capitalist class. This worldview reconfigures cultures and hierarchically repositions social classes in the economy according to their imagined embodiment of a certain Western and European cultural experience. During the very same time period that neoliberalism generates unprecedented social inequalities,
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Page 17 culturalization generates a nearly complete indifference to the class conditions of those citizens who are on the losing end. A shift in political discourse from one that emphasizes neoliberal restructuring of class inequality to one that emphasizes incommensurable and irreconcilable cultural differences gives rise to the reconfiguration of individuals who become responsible for their own marginal status in society. In this way, the beyaz Türk discourse helps naturalize the economic hierarchy of social classes as a culturally justified system of ranking. This undermines classbased political solidarities and further contributes to the cultural turn of the excluded to identity politics. Chapter 12 by Pula examines the juridical and political basis of the international administration in Kosovo, arguing that under international administration the ‘state of exception’ becomes a normal technique of rule. Pula provides a critical evaluation of Kosovo’s rule by UNMIK, a UN peacekeeping operation, from the end of the 1999 conflict to the present. He shows that the UN is changing from being a multilateral organization regulating interstate relations to an instrument of global authority with its own sovereign power to intervene and govern the legal ‘black holes’ of the state system. The prevailing discourses of stability, security, and human rights legitimize this transformation and create possibilities for a lasting authoritarianism in which the state of exception becomes a fully normalized form of rule. The use of extra-legal measures by international agents for the arrest and prolonged detention of individuals without due process results in the creation of states, societies, and individuals whose histories have been denied. Although the essays by Arat-Koç and Pula draw a bleak picture for the future, there are other possibilities that challenge strictly controlled meanings of cultures in constituting social categories, individuals, and human rights discourse. Examples drawn from the Bolivian Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) and the Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) point to the possibility of reformulating political terms, reconstituting cultural ways, and redefining a citizenship with global consciousness. In Chapter 13, Webber examines the transformative role of left-indigenous politics in Bolivia. Since early 2000, the Bolivian Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism, MAS), consisting of indigenous-peasant community structures, trade unions, and neighbourhood councils, has represented local movements mobilized against neoliberal restructuring. By centring his analysis on the formation of the Constituent Assembly after the election of President Evo Morales in 2005, Webber argues that left-indigenous movements lost momentum as relations between the MAS, the government of Evo Morales, and the economic elite began to shift towards building a more ‘inclusive’ form of government. In the process, the Constituent Assembly, originally conceived as a space for direct participation of popular social justice movements, emerged as a governmental technique, connecting local movements to the state without transforming the existing state or conditions of neoliberal restructuring. Although MAS’s attachment to the government undermines its potential, this chapter demonstrates that popular
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Page 18 struggles still constitute a transformational possibility, reconfiguring social and political forces, programs, and policies. In Chapter 14, Karriem examines the Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) as an example of a renewed political activism by subordinate groups to realize such a possibility. It brings forward the organizational agency of the MST in shaping broader projects for social change that ground local struggles for land in the larger national and global political economy. The MST’s success lies in its ability to draw membership from the unemployed, informally employed or other marginal groups in society who are to a large extent outside the employment-related disciplinary practices of neoliberalism. Through the MST, the struggle for land moves beyond the corporate understanding of land reform demands based on the liberal conception of individual rights to include broader popular demands for reconstituting community rights and an alternative understanding of citizenship. The arguments made in this collection of essays point to the necessity of moving beyond conventional categories of state-society relations, reworking our concepts beyond the categories of the first modernity, and re-imagining the politics of transformation. This requires building coalitions on a global scale which encompass social movements of great diversity. However, it is certainly worth the effort if we are to avoid the possibility of ‘global fascism’ (Patel and McMichael 2004) emerging from a crisis in neoliberalism. While Karl Polanyi (1944) articulated fascism as a national phenomenon which emerged in Europe due to a crisis in the liberal market economy, his analysis may also have applications at a global level during the era of neoliberalism. Polanyi described fascism as a protective social movement embedded in the cycles between the market economy and the local space of territorial states. Although difficult, uncertain, and complex, detaching ideas of self-protection from national states and reattaching them to a commitment to global solidarity movements would foster the possibility of a more democratic future. The possibility of imagining strategies beyond hegemonic arrangements lies within the political space created by the illegitimacy of both neoliberalism and US global authority. References Abu-Lughod, J. (1989) Before European Hegemony, New York: Oxford University Press. Alexander, C. J. (2007) ‘“Globalization” as collective representation: the new dream of a cosmopolitan civil sphere’, in I. Rossi (ed.) Frontiers of Globalization Research , New York: Springer. Alexander, C. J. (2006) The Civil Sphere , New York: Oxford University Press. Amin, S. (2006) Beyond US Hegemony, London: Zed Books. Arrighi, G. (1994) The Long Twentieth Century , London: Verso. Arrighi, G. (2005) ‘Rough road to empire’, in F. Tabak (ed.) Allies as Rivals , Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Arrighi, G. (2007) Adam Smith in Beijing , London: Verso.
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Page 19 Arrighi, G. and Silver, B. (1999) Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Atasoy, Y. (2007) ‘The Islamic ethic and the spirit of Turkish capitalism today’, in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds) Socialist Register 2008: Global Flashpoints, Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism , London: The Merlin Press. Atasoy, Y. and Carroll, W. K. (eds) (2003) Global Shaping and its Alternatives , Aurora, ON: Garamond Press. Axelrod, R. and Keohane, R. O. (1993) ‘Achieving cooperation under anarchy: strategies and institutions’, in D. A. Baldwin (ed.) Neorealism and Neoliberalism , New York: Columbia University Press. Baldwin, A. D. (ed.) (1993) Neorealism and Neoliberalism , New York: Columbia University Press. Beck, U. (2000) What is Globalization? , Cambridge: Polity Press Brady, D., Beckfield, J. and Seeleib-Kaiser, M. (2005) ‘Economic globalization and the welfare state in affluent democracies, 1975–2001’, American Sociology Review 70(6): 921–48. Calhoun, C. (2007) Nations Matter, London: Routledge. Clapham, C. (1996) Africa and the International System , New York: Cambridge University Press. Connell, R. (2007) ‘The Northern theory of globalization’, Sociological Theory 25(4): 368–85. Craig, D. and Porter, D. (2006) Development Beyond Neoliberalism , London: Routledge. Davis, M. (2006) Planet of Slums , London: Verso. Ferguson, J. (2006) Global Shadows, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ferguson, J. and Gupta, A. (2002) ‘Spatializing states: toward an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality’, American Ethnologist 29(4): 981–1002. Gardner C. L. and Young, M. B. (eds) (2005) The New American Empire , New York: The New Press. Gill, S. (1992) ‘Economic globalization and the internationalization of authority: limits and contradictions’, Geoforum 23(3): 269–93. Gill, S. (2004) ‘The Contradictions of US Supremacy’, in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds) Socialist Register 2005: The Empire Reloaded , London: The Merlin Press. Gowan, P. (2005) ‘The trans-Atlantic conflict over primacy’, in F. Tabak (ed.) Allies as Rivals , Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Hall, A. P. and Soskice, D. (2001) Varieties of Capitalism, New York: Oxford University Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism , Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism , New York: Oxford University Press. Hibou, B. (2004) Privatizing the State , New York: Columbia University Press. Huber, E. and Stephens, J. D. (2001) Development and Crisis of the Welfare State , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Keohane, O. R. (1984) After Hegemony, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Krasner, D. S. (1999) Sovereignty, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Leys, C. (2007) Total Capitalism, London: The Merlin Press. Misztal A. B. (2004) ‘Civil society: A signifier of plurality and sense of wholeness’, in J.R. Blau (ed.) The Blackwell Companion to Sociology , Oxford: Blackwell.
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Page 20 Oleson, T. (2005) International Zapatismo , London: Zed Books. Panitch, L. and Leys, C (eds) (2004) Socialist Register 2005: The Empire Reloaded , London: The Merlin Press. Patel, R. and McMichael, P. (2004) ‘Third Worldism and the lineages of global fascism: the grouping of the global South in the neoliberal era’, Third World Quarterly 25(1): 231–54. Pilger, J. (2002) The New Rulers of the World, London: Verso. Polanyi, K. (1944) The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press. Ramesh, R. (2007) ‘India’s landless march to the capital with their demands’, The Guardian Weekly 2 November. Reifer, T., Chase-Dunn, C. and Jorgenson, A. (2005) ‘The U.S. trajectory: quantitative and historical reflections’, in F. Tabak (ed.) Allies as Rivals , Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Robinson, I. W. (2004) A Theory of Global Capitalism, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rosenberg, J. (1994) The Empire of Civil Society , London: Verso. Rossi, I. (ed.) (2007) Frontiers of Globalization Research , New York: Springer. Sandhu, A. and Gulick, J. (2007) ‘Emerging Asia and the post-cold war reshaping of global power’, unpublished paper. Sassen, S. (2006) Territory, Authority, Rights , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2007) A Sociology of Globalization , New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Sklair, L. (1991) Sociology of the Global System , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sklair, L. (2001) The Transnational Capitalist Class, Oxford: Blackwell. Soederberg, S. (2006) Global Governance in Question , London: Pluto Press. Soederberg, S., Menz, G. and Cerny, P. G. (eds) (2005) Internalizing Globalization , London: Palgrave Macmillan. Somer, M. (1995a) ‘What is political or cultural about political culture and the public sphere? Toward an historical sociology of concept formation’, Sociological Theory 13(2): 113–41. Somer, M. (1995b) ‘Narrating and naturalizing civil society and citizenship theory: the place of political culture and the public sphere’, Sociological Theory 13(3): 229–74. Soros, G. (2000) Open Society , New York: Public Affairs. Strange, S. (1996) The Retreat of the State , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swank, D. (2002) Global Capital, Political Institutions, and Policy Change in Developed Welfare States, New York: Cambridge University Press. Tabak, F. (ed.) (2005) Allies as Rivals , Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Urry, J. (1999) ‘Globalization and citizenship’, Journal of World-Systems Research V(2): 311–24. Wallerstein, I. (1999) ‘States? Sovereignty?: the dilemmas of capitalists in an age of transition’, in D. A. Smith, D. J. Solinger and S. C. Topik (eds) States and Sovereignty in the Global Economy , London: Routledge. Wallerstein, I. (2003) The Decline of American Power, New York: The New Press. Wallerstein, I. (2005) ‘The Bush regime and the collapse of the postwar geopolitical structures’, in F. Tabak (ed.) Allies as Rivals , Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Waltz, K. (1979) The Theory of International Politics , New York: Random House. Woods, N. (2006) The Globalizers , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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Page 21 Part I Global power in world historical context Citizenship and the state
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Page 23 2 Global citizenship and multiple sovereignties Reconstituting modernity Philip McMichael The ‘neoliberal’ development project has had a profound impact on the international state system, raising new questions about sovereignty.1 While states are not disappearing, they are nonetheless being transformed, from within and without.2 Global financial relations and multilateral institutions pressure states to author rules that privatize and/or weaken national capacity and strengthen the reach of global supply chains. Transnational corporations deepen the ‘material integration of social reproduction across borders’ (Rosenberg 2001:134–5), constructing ‘comparative advantages’ in the world market which generate selective forms of development, fragmenting national economies and conflating public goods and private goals in political discourse. In the shadow of US hegemonic decline, the geo-political landscape has become more fluid and uncertain, evident in the current stalemate and delegitimization of the WTO. The latter reflects the discrepancy between the rhetoric (‘free trade’) and reality of the neoliberal project, as a device to secure access to resources and markets for consumer states. While attempts to institutionalize neoliberalism represent a rear-guard action by the US ruling class to preserve the fruits of its former global hegemony (Panitch 1996; Harvey 2005), neoliberalism, as a political project, is in crisis. One measure of this is conjunction of a social revolt in Latin America, and the neoconservative mobilization on Iraq, including an extensive illegal privatization of the Iraqi state under US occupation. Transnational corporate processes and relations call into question national boundaries, so that ‘seeing (the world) like a state’ is becoming an increasingly limited and limiting perspective. And yet, while states relinquish legibility, paradoxically they continue to anchor juridical, and sometimes jurisdictional, relations. This crisis of sovereignty, associated with privatization, is expressed in Justin Rosenberg’s concept of the ‘empire of civil society’, where the disjuncture of national/public and transnational/private realms across the modern states system ‘explains part of the paradox of sovereignty: why it is both more absolute in its “purely political” prerogatives than other historical forms of rule, and yet highly ambiguous as a measure of actual power’ (Rosenberg 2001:131). Rosenberg is referring to the growing contradiction between spaces and flows that characterizes the neoliberal state system.
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Page 24 This contradiction embodies both a crisis of the state system, as well as an epistemic crisis. It signals a long-term transformation in the content, meaning, and scope of our political and social categories. A transformation such as this stems from a complex combination of various forms of privatization and ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003), expressed in growing human redundancy, a ‘planet of slums’ (Davis 2006) where almost half of the population of the global South comprises slumdwellers, and universal ontological insecurity in the face of tenuous employment and militarization of societies. In this context, new ‘modes of political participation and community-based survival politics’ (Swords 2007:1) proliferate alongside a perpetually deepening movement of humans across national boundaries in search of the means of social reproduction, increasingly detached from civic politics and prey to arbitrary authority. These labour circuits are not the ‘empire of civil society’, but they are both condition for, and consequence of, that empire, otherwise known as a system of ‘global apartheid’ (Bond 2003). My argument is that this deepening paradox of sovereignty transforms social and political geographies, giving rise to novel forms of political mobilization that reformulate conceptions of sovereignty itself – expressing seeds of hope in a neoliberal world in crisis. I examine this proposition from the perspective of the (related) projects of ‘global citizenship’, ‘food sovereignty’, and ‘global democracy’. Global citizenship ‘Global citizenship’ refers to an emergent, rather than an accomplished, or even inevitable, project. The condition for a mature ‘global citizenship’ is a global order where human rights become the normative and juridical core of governance. In this emergent world, states would no longer have sole jurisdiction over their subjects, and would be part of a set of multiple sovereignties. Such a world was foreshadowed in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which conferred on a person the ‘status of a subject of law beyond domestic jurisdiction’ (Lindgren Alves 2000:478) – representing the ‘first attempt in human history to extend the same set of rights to all people, and thus to construct them as formally equal’ (Olesen 2005:38). But, at the same time, the Declaration rooted the realization of ‘the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for [the citizen’s] dignity and the free development of his personality’, in the state. Arguably, this ambiguity expressed a transition between what Ulrich Beck (2000) calls the two modernities: the first modernity represented by the Westphalian system of situating sovereignty in national jurisdiction, and the second modernity referring to a post-national era in which cross-border and diasporic circuits complicate the geography of rights, drawing attention to questions of global inequalities among states and their peoples (Yeatman 2002). The Declaration anticipated a world in which human rights were the responsibility of a community of nation-states, and yet social rights remained
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Page 25 the responsibility of individual states. The sleeper in this formulation, of course, was the colonial legacy. Diasporas were already a significant element of the post-Second World War world, which, however, was focused at that time on the completion of the states system as the universal expression of sovereignty. National independence, via the universalizing ‘development project’, acknowledged inequality, but not in historicalrelational terms, rather in categorical terms. Certain regions of the world were simply un/ underdeveloped. In this context, post-colonial state sovereignty was a key condition for ‘development’, represented as a universal narrative to be realized at the national scale, as achieved by Western countries, and symbolized in the maturation of ‘citizenship’. States were accorded disproportionate bio-political power to manage their citizen-subjects, in the name of ‘development’ (Patel and McMichael 2004). This has been extended in the era of ‘neoliberalism’. Despite the growing ideological, and institutional, presence of ‘civil society’ – in the form of ubiquitous transnational corporations and NGOs as purveyors of development, states ‘continue to play an integral role in guaranteeing and recreating the conditions necessary for the restructuring of global capitalism’ (Soederberg 2005:37). The discourse of ‘global citizenship’ is integral to the unravelling of the ‘first modernity’ and the rising urgency of the ‘second modernity’. The transition from one to the other marks the unfolding of a world consciousness, or global social episteme, reaching beyond the principle of national self-determination to an alternative principle of cosmopolitan governance. We might think of this as a historical phase in the development of an ethic of citizenship governed by human rights, rather than the instrumentalism of national solidarities. But a world consciousness needs both a world time and a world space through which it can be realized, and, arguably, it is these coordinates that preoccupy global justice movements. John Ruggie (1993) reminds us that modern territoriality (and its single-point perspective) was never fully accomplished, and, further, that acknowledging this is the epistemological precondition for recognizing transformation in the political and social categories with which we work. The transition between the two modernities is by no means complete – indeed, in the short term, there is an unfortunate recrudescence of nationalisms. But rather than viewing this is as simply the stubborn persistence of the first modernity, it is perhaps more an expression of the tensions of transition in citizenships, registered in ‘the claims of aliens in relation to those who enjoy national citizenship rights’ (Yeatman 2002). John Markoff notes: ‘With millions of North African Muslims in France, Turks in Germany, and Albanians and Africans moving to Italy, the mobilization of xenophobic sentiment is readily linkable to an attack on welfare’ (2006:346). Under these circumstances, the paradox of citizenship, as an imperial accomplishment, is laid bare. Wolfgang Sachs put it this way: For the first time the Northern countries themselves are exposed to the
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Page 26 bitter results of Westernizing the world. Immigration, population pressure, tribalism with mega-arms, and above all, the environmental consequences of worldwide industrialization, threaten to destabilize the Northern way of life. (Sachs 1993:20) The predictable reaction to such uncertainty is exclusionary. It is also easily harnessed by political and economic elites anxious to profit from fear with rhetoric about being ‘with us or against us’. For example, the topical question in the USA following September 11, 2001, fuelled by the governing elite and a sycophantic media: ‘Why do they hate us?’ subconsciously projected deep-seated envy of Western freedoms onto the Muslim world. What is not acknowledged is that the ideals and accomplishments of national citizenship are not an inalienable right by virtue of being Western, but have been historically constructed as a right in context of the outsourcing of the worst of the excesses of modern capitalist history. Progressive narratives routinely occlude, or silence, historical relations that produce the social transformations that we know as history (cf. Trouillot 1995). In the post-Second Word War world, the social sciences scrambled to understand the horror of fascist and communist dictatorships, and how these could have so threatened Western civilization. Perhaps understandably un-reflexive about the intimations of each within Western civilization itself, in the aftermath of world war, works of the stature of Barrington Moore’s (1965) Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy appeared, offering interpretation through comparison. This was a work comparing England, France, the USA, Japan, China, and India as independent units. The first three states traversed versions of the ‘bourgeois route to modern society’, while Japan and China represented the ‘reactionary route’, and India lay somewhere in between. The implicit model of modernity was England, which, in this narrative, transformed its aristocracy, and eliminated its peasantry through a gradual, nevertheless economically violent, process. To all intents and purposes, that resolved the agrarian question, yielding the most mature European civil society as the yeast of modern democracy. Where was India in this story? In a chapter of its own, separated artificially by the conventions of the comparative method. If one now reads Late Victorian Holocausts. El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, by Mike Davis, the agrarian question suddenly reappears. Britain had simply outsourced its food production to the colonies, where telegraph and merchants combined to commodify Indian grain, and transport systems carried it from village India to London – by the end of the nineteenth century, Davis remarks, ‘Londoners were in effect eating India’s bread’, and quotes an observer: ‘It seems an anomaly, that, with her famines on hand, India is able to supply food for other parts of the world’ (Davis 2001:26). Not only that, Britain exported its aristocracy to colonial service. And once it mobilized its working class to fight the First World War, the
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Page 27 British ruling elite, as elsewhere, was forced to extend civil and social rights to its subject citizens (Halperin 2004). Hardly a natural process, the maturation of modern democracy came with a complex imperial baggage. And citizenship, anchored in labour organization and its allies, nevertheless was a quid pro quo for states prosecuting competitive military-economic relations. This first modernity, expressed in the rise of sovereign nations with their imperial supports, was the condition for the second modernity, expressed in the diasporic cycles that now unsettle national citizenship, and represent, phenomenally, a destabilization of the Westphalian enterprise. I say phenomenally because the tensions over dwindling social resources, and expanding migrant labour forces, amplify the privileges of national citizenship, especially in Western states, and are often expressed in racialized or ethnicized terms. In these outbreaks of ethno-nationalism, the diaspora phenomenon exposes the liberal state as an ideologized representation of the first modernity. Its abstract universal of ‘formal citizenship’ is contradicted by historic legacies of inequality and discrimination from the colonial era. Through this encounter, a politics of inter-subjectivity opens up the possibility of recognizing differential experiences of modernity. Arguably, this possibility depends on the dilution of the single-point perspective of the first modernity – a perspective well-represented in the projections of the development paradigm, which projects a ‘racialized theory of human perfectibility and progress’ (Saldaña-Portillo 2003:22). An illustration of such projection is Vandana Shiva’s claim that: ‘The paradox and crisis of development arises from the mistaken identification of the culturally perceived poverty of earth-centred economies with the real material deprivation that occurs in market-centred economies, and the mistaken identification of the growth of commodity production with providing human sustenance for all’ (Shiva 1991:215). It is not that so-called ‘earth-centred economies’ are necessarily virtuous alternatives, rather it is that the development lens is so reductionist in its representation. For people of the so-called ‘earth-centered economies’, their historical lack of access to, and control over, the means of representation is also impoverishing (Da Costa and McMichael 2007). Perversely enough, this is what lent legitimacy to the development project and a politics of decolonization focused on a limited goal of formal independence – as Gilbert Rist observed of postcolonial states: ‘Their right to self-determination had been acquired in exchange for the right to self-definition’ (1997:79). As a condition of each, decolonization bridges the ‘first’ and ‘second’ modernities. In 1987 in the Peruvian Andes, indigenous writers and activists formed PRATEC, an NGO concerned with recovering and implementing customary Andean culture and technologies via educating rural developers, in context of austere structural adjustment policies and environmental deterioration. A founding member claims that ‘to decolonize ourselves is to break with the global enterprise of development’ (quoted in Apffel-Marglin 1997). Concretely, the failure of the bioengineered potato symbolized the
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Page 28 vulnerability of Andean ecology and peasant communities to abstract homogeneous knowledge associated with the first modernity, reaffirming the greater security of biodiverse agriculture as perhaps a condition for the second modernity. Does a revaluing of indigenous knowledge represent a parochial turn away from world consciousness? Only if one views it outside of history. Material security here depends not so much on technology, but on sovereignty, which includes control over the means of reproduction and representation in an integrated world. One of the features of the second modernity is the rising indigenous voice. Amory Starr (2005:50–1) writes: the movements’ confidence that another world is possible is rooted in the recuperation from centuries of ridicule of the social and economic methods of indigenous peoples. Hundreds of thousands of distinct peoples lived for millennia, providing for their own material, spiritual, social and political needs. Those who survived colonialism are now continuing a complex process of agentic creolization, despite conditions of seductive cultural invasion, genocidal state-corporate land grabs and biopiracy. The operative word here is creolization, as this is not a nostalgic so much as a survival reflex. In Ecuador, the ‘Intercultural University of Indigenous Nationalities and Pueblos’ was inaugurated in October 2000 by the indigenous movement, whose strategic politics have transformed the national constitution along ‘pluri-national’ lines. A key vision of this educational project is ‘scientific or epistemological interculturality; the interrelation of knowledges of the “first peoples” with the knowledges of the cultures denominated as “universals” upon which the curriculum is based’. It is not about adding an indigenous perspective, but about institutionalizing a theoretical dialogue premised on inter-culturality, and de-centring Western knowledge. And it is also about revealing the politics of knowledge and how power can limit knowledge production through normalizing narratives that marginalize the lifeworlds of the powerless (Casas 2006:50). De-centring the West has a palpable context. It cannot be uniform, or formulaic, because of ontological diversity. In the Peruvian case, mere survival on the so-called margins may dictate a re-engagement with traditional methods of agricultural experimentation. But it is survival in a different space-time, the space-time of the ‘globalization project’, through which Northern states seek to impose uniform intellectual property rights protocols on all states. In pluri-national Ecuador the model of inter-culturality is a dialogical strategy of knowledge production, premised on a post-colonial sensibility. What unifies these distinct cases is the colonial relation. Decentring is more than a spatial metaphor, implying balance, or relativity, of perspectives, rather, it considers their mutual conditioning as a first step
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Page 29 towards a world knowledge. It is strategic, not ultimate. It engages history, situating the universals of the ‘first modernity’. De-centring, therefore, seeks to uncouple modernity from its abstracted Western claims, and reclaim it as an unfinished, differentiated and contradictory project – a recombination of first, and second, modernities. An emergent world knowledge, conscious of its historical dimensions, is a condition of global citizenship. More than relativism, it is rooted in a politics of ‘strategic diversity’, which situates alternative visions/knowledges in the context of shared, but differentiated, experiences of the discourse and impact of global integration. The concept of strategic diversity represents an emerging politics in which, on the one hand, rights are not ascribed exclusively to individuals, but to social collectivities, and on the other, their interpretation and implementation depends not on abstract universals, rather on what might be termed ‘engaged universals (which) travel across difference and are charged and changed by their travels’ (Tsing 2004:8). In transitioning between the two modernities, ‘strategic diversity’ substitutes rights for entitlements as its political focus. The notion of entitlement derives from the understanding of citizenship as a contract realized through the state (cf. Marshall 1977). Recently, Amartya Sen has transported this notion into a ‘neoliberal’ context, where ‘entitlement’ refers to the means to material improvement (notably education and property). The 1948 UN Declaration juxtaposed civic entitlement with human rights, pointing the way towards a transnational conception of human rights, as yet unrealized – precisely because the formal nationalism of the first modernity subordinates rights to entitlements, where inclusion depends on class and racial exclusions on national and international scales (Wallerstein 2003). Concomitantly, decolonization, first via national independence, where followed by a progressive politics of multi-culturalism across the state system, anticipates a generalization of the principle of human rights in a post-national world. Consolidating human rights is a necessary but not sufficient condition of global citizenship (cf. Yeatman 2002). As Hannah Arendt reminded us, it is by no means certain that humanity as such could guarantee ‘the right of every individual to belong to humanity’ (1976:298). Humanity as such can concretize progressively through struggle, founded in an ethical universalism practiced by self-determining individuals who ‘accept and respect each other as such’ (Yeatman 2002:16). Contemporary formulations appear in diverse forms. The Zapatistas, for example, articulate ethical universalism, in collectivist terms, as ‘dignity’: ‘Dignity is a bridge … Dignity is thus recognition and respect. Recognition of what we are and respect for what we are, yes, but also recognition of what the other is, and respect for what the other is’ (quoted in Olesen 2005:120). The international peasant movement, Vía Campesina, constructs its transnational organization through networks of mutual respect for the particular circumstances and projects of its constituent chapters. Implementation of such mutual respect, as ethical universalism, depends on individual and collective struggles for
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Page 30 self-determination against historic social injustices and prejudice. Its realization requires the institutionalization of human rights as a transnational or cosmopolitan ethic, rather than as a national project. This goal is presaged in the practices and discourses emerging from global justice movements as they constitute a counterhegemonic voice and presence in an era of neoliberal market rule (McMichael 2005a), and it is paralleled by new regional groupings such as the EU and the South American Community of Nations. Whatever the limits and contradictions of these regional formations, their organization includes potentially counter-hegemonic principles – such as agricultural ‘multifunctionality’ in Europe (viewing agriculture as providing social, cultural and ecological services beyond commodity production), and ‘cooperative advantage’ – reciprocal, rather than competitive, relations among states, as practised in the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. Arguably, contemporary networks of sovereignty movements represent a tactical intervention on the path toward global citizenship, marking the deepening of transboundary issues, where ‘the fortunes and prospects of individual political communities are increasingly bound together’ (Held 2000:400). The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) puts it this way: ‘if you want to help the Zapatistas, go home and fight for justice in your own lands, because if there is justice in your own lands, there will be justice here as well because it is all in the same struggle’ (quoted in Olesen 2005:172). This statement expresses an essential element of global citizenship, namely, recognition that despite the formal boundaries of sovereignty in the state system and despite different modalities of struggle, social justice and alternative sovereignty movements confront shared institutional conditions through which corporate globalization, and its military force, exerts its impact. Food sovereignty A powerful example of interconnection is the ‘food sovereignty’ project, a transnational federation of 149 peasant organizations from 56 countries named La Vía Campesina, the peasant way (Desmarais 2007:21). Food sovereignty challenges the form in which ‘food security’ is advocated via the corporate food regime, namely, a privatized relation dependent on the management of food production and circulation by transnational agribusiness enabled by unequal trade rules monitored through the WTO (McMichael 2005b). As the Vía Campesina’s (2006b) website observes: The liberalization of agricultural and fisheries markets, the manipulation of market prices by transnational corporations, the re-concentration of land in the hands of big land owners and corporations, the patenting of seeds and other life forms, and the slashing and privatization of public services have deepened already existing inequalities, while mainly benefiting transnational corporations and elites around the world. The result is
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Page 31 an increase in poverty and marginalization in the very rural areas where more than two third of poor and hungry people live. The result is the expulsion of millions of peasants from the countryside. The corporate assault on domestic food producers depends on a state system governed by the neo-classical principle of comparative advantage, and hostage to agro-exporting to reduce debt. Accordingly, the food sovereignty movement intervenes at both the multilateral and the domestic scale. Its organizational culture combines a universal critique of the corporate food regime with particular critiques of national food policies. A difficult juggling act, such intervention involves framing common understandings that resonate within and across national borders – constituting a transnational movement on the basis of ‘empirical credibility and experiential commensurability’ (Olesen 2005:31). Food sovereignty appeals to the experience not only of food deprivation and underdevelopment, but also of the undemocratic regime embedded in multilateral food trade policies. Thus it is defined as: the right of peoples to define their own agriculture and food policies, to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives, to determine the extent to which they want to be self reliant, and to restrict the dumping of products in their markets. (Vía Campesina 2001) At base, food sovereignty advocates food security through self-reliance, since ‘food is first and foremost a source of nutrition and only secondarily an item of trade’ (Vía Campesina 2002:8). But embedded in the concept of ‘food sovereignty’ is a reformulation of power via the politicization of the food relation. Thus Vía Campesina proclaims: ‘producing quality products for our own people has also become a political act … this touches our very identities as citizens of this world’ (Vía Campesina 1999). Politicization in this way both unmasks the naturalizing market rhetoric of the globalization project, and devolves political decisions to hitherto excluded groups – otherwise known as the principle of subsidiarity (Olesen 2005:160; Patel 2007). In reformulating sovereignty thus, combining redistribution and recognition, it invokes, critically, the contemporary focus on democracy. In the post-Cold War world, as ‘democracy’ has displaced ‘development’ and ideology as the new international ideal (Gills and Rocamora 1992), Thomas Olesen notes that ‘social critiques not formulated in a democratic language lack resonance and legitimacy’ (2005:13). This is underlined by the EZLN’s Subcomandante Marcos: It is not only that we do not set ourselves the task of taking power, but we propose that the very relationship of power with society must itself
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Page 32 change. It must invert itself, or turn itself around in some form. This new relationship with power we have synthesized in the phrase mandando obediciendo (to rule by obeying). (quoted in Olesen 2005:10) Consistent with second modernity sensibility, the food sovereignty movement claims ‘hunger is not a problem of means, but of rights’ (quoted in Starr 2005:57). As part of the new politics of strategic diversity, food sovereignty posits a substantive, rather than formal, conception of rights ‘whose content is not necessarily preordained by the state … the right is a right to self-determination, for communities to redefine for themselves the substance of the food relations appropriate to their geographies [and ecologies]’ (Patel and McMichael 2004:249). The point is that states, and/or other international institutions, should guarantee, but not necessarily author the content of, these rights. In this sense, strategic diversity in this domain emerges through different, but related, experiences of resistance to the corporate food regime, from environmentalists through seed savers and landless movements to communitysupported agricultures. Thus the Vía Campesina’s method of attempting to unite a variety of agrarian producers under the banner of ‘food sovereignty’ unifies an internally diverse resistance, anticipating the project of global citizenship. In this way, sovereignty movements reformulate elements of the first modernity as expressions of the second modernity. A dramatic example is that of the Brazilian landless-workers movement, which complements land reform demands, a material entitlement of the first modernity, with legitimizing a reconstituted peasant culture, and, by extension, reformulating the state, via the language of ‘agrarian citizenship’ (Wittman 2005). In transcending conventional categories, the movement for the peasant way seeks to transcend the development narrative of the first modernity that consigns peasants to the historical dustbin. By reasserting the politics of the ‘peasant way’, in this conjuncture, the agrarians reformulate the political terms of resistance. The agrarian resistance rejects the temporality of capitalist modernity that regards peasants as pre-modern, and the spatiality that removes and divides humans from nature. In fact, the modernity of the ‘peasant way’ is precisely to challenge the autonomous liberal subject of neoliberal development with concrete collective subjectivities that reintegrate the human/ecological divide through reconstituting spaces of resistance (McMichael 2006). Thus the International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty states: No agrarian reform is acceptable that is based only on land distribution. We believe that the new agrarian reform must include a cosmic vision of the territories of communities of peasants, the landless, indigenous peoples, rural workers, fisherfolk, nomadic pastoralists, tribes, afrodescendents, ethnic minorities, and displaced peoples, who base their work
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Page 33 on the production of food and who maintain a relationship of respect and harmony with Mother Earth and the oceans. (quoted in Vía Campesina 2006a) Put another way, MST leader, João Pedro Stedile (2002:100) observes: From the time of Zapata in Mexico, or of Julio in Brazil, the inspiration for agrarian reform was the idea that the land belonged to those who worked it. Today we need to go beyond this. It’s not enough to argue that if you work the land, you have proprietary rights over it…. We want an agrarian practice that transforms farmers into guardians of the land, and a different way of farming, that ensures an ecological equilibrium and also guarantees that land is not seen as private property. In countering formal, and individualized, understandings of land reform, whether state-sponsored or market-sponsored in the ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ version promoted recently by the World Bank, ‘food sovereignty’ politics draws on substantive conceptions of rights, economies, and ecological relations (cf. Otero 2001). It transgresses the liberal conception of rights, rooted in the individual and its derivative, private property. There are two consequences: first, it is difficult for neoliberal principles to co-opt a politics of (collective) rights (Harvey 2005:178–9); and second, this politics of rights advocates realization through non-state subjectivities. That is, the right to food sovereignty is right to self-definition – for communities of producers to ‘redefine for themselves the substance of food relations appropriate to their geographies’ (Patel and McMichael 2004:249), ecologies, and histories. In the discourse of capitalist modernity, food is conceived essentially as a commodity – an input to enhance accumulation and urban provisioning. Peasant mobilization today conceives of food as comprising social, ecological, cultural, and political relationships. As such it is increasingly understood as a source of political identity and substantive rights, to be realized through a substantive understanding of citizenship. Thus the International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty challenges states, as members of the interstate system, to respect food sovereignty, observing that the ‘State must play a strong role in policies of agrarian reform and food production’, and to accomplish this, ‘States have the right and the obligation to sovereignty, to define, without external conditions, their own agrarian, agricultural, fishing and food policies in such a way as to guarantee the right to food and the other economic, social and cultural rights of the entire population.’ Reconstituting the ‘first’, as the ‘second’, modernity, the obligation to sovereignty here entails recognizing the ‘laws, traditions, customs, tenure systems, and institutions, as well as the recognition of territorial borders and the cultures of peoples’ (quoted in Vía Campesina 2006a). Ultimately, this is a question of recognizing new subjectivities,3 that deepen the formal rights of citizenship with substantive meanings, deriving from historical processes of
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Page 34 differentiation. And, to the extent that the food sovereignty movement is transnational, it articulates an incipient form of ‘global citizenship’. Tactically, the food sovereignty movement reasserts the formal (Westphalian) concept of sovereignty against corporate globalization, and yet at the same time advocates, strategically, a substantive reformulation of sovereignty. Politically, this represents a ‘transgressive use of the discourse of rights’ (Patel 2007:91), where Vía Campesina has consistently called for context-specific rights to decide the content of food policy, through the principle of subsidiarity. This ‘approach to rights is transgressive, insofar as it orients itself not toward the institutions that enshrine, enforce, and police rights, but toward the people who are meant to hold them’ (Patel 2007:92). In this sense, ‘sovereignty’ is a strategic weapon in a struggle committed to realizing a new politics of subjectivity geared to transforming ‘the state’. It advocates an alternative development narrative to reverse the social and ecological catastrophe of neoliberal capitalism. Thus the International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty declares: In the context of food sovereignty, agrarian reform benefits all of society, providing healthy, accessible and culturally appropriate food, and social justice. Agrarian reform can put an end to the massive and forced rural exodus from the countryside to the city, which has made cities grow at unsustainable rates and under inhuman conditions. (quoted in Vía Campesina 2006a) Clearly, this vision is at odds with WTO trade rules that deepen agro-exporting across the world, contributing significantly to the generation of what Mike Davis calls a ‘planet of slums’ (2006). While rejecting WTO involvement in agriculture, Vía Campesina nevertheless views democratic multilateral institutions as appropriate legal forums through which to realize claims for sovereignty in various spatial and cultural forms. Food sovereignty formulations propose access to credit, land and fair prices to be set via rules negotiated in a reformed UN and alternative multilateral institutions such as a Convention on Food Sovereignty and Trade in Food and Agriculture, an International Court of Justice, a World Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Food Sovereignty, and so forth. As French peasant leader Jose Bové asks, ‘Why should the global market escape the rule of international law or human rights conventions passed by the United Nations?’ (Bové and Dufour 2001:165). Bové and the Vía Campesina emphasize two central premises: first, that the current stalemate on trade rules ultimately derives not from conflict between governments, but between models of production and rural development – ‘a conflict that exists in both the North and the South’ (Vía Campesina 2003:5); and second, that the food sovereignty struggle is global but decentralized in content and leadership. Bové articulates the latter point as follows:
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Page 35 The strength of this global movement is precisely that it differs from place to place…. The world is a complex place, and it would be a mistake to look for a single answer to complex and different phenomena. We have to provide answers at different levels – not just the international level, but local and national levels too. (Bové and Dufour 2001:168) Such ‘polycentrism’ means the food sovereignty movement simultaneously addresses state, and interstate, political relations – within an asymmetrical world. When Bové claims ‘For the people of the South, food sovereignty means the right to protect themselves against imports. For us [French peasants], it means fighting against export aid and against intensive farming’ (Bové and Dufour 2001:96), he identifies the uneven and combined political conditions precipitating the current agrarian crisis. In other words, the food sovereignty movement is not about recovering a mythical peasant past, rather it is about politicizing the global food system, and its agnostic model of ‘food security’ (Patel 2007:90). In this sense, the food sovereignty movement represents a self-conscious peasant politics in the historical present for the future – an expression of the ‘second modernity’. The global democracy movement How to bottle this new wine, expressing the ‘second modernity’, in a set of ‘alternative multilateralisms’, is the question of our times. In relation to recent waves of democratization in the global South, Markoff notes: ‘the density of economic and cultural interconnection across national frontiers now threatens to trivialize the democratization of those states that have achieved significant democratization, raising the question of whether there is a meaningful future for the democracy of the states that does not address democracy beyond the states’ (2006:354). The late Terry Boswell and Christopher Chase-Dunn put it this way: ‘The Westphalian interstate system has allowed powerful capitalists to repeatedly escape the institutional controls that have emerged from antisystemic movements that have sought to protect workers and communities from exploitation. Only a democratic world state can produce institutions that can guarantee social justice’ (Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2006:330). The conundrum confronting the global democracy movement is precisely how to imagine the state form, as a vehicle of global citizenship – that is, how to institutionalize global governance as an immanent, extra-territorial process. Heikki Patomäki and Teivo Teivainen note that the World Social Forum can be understood as either an emergent ‘world parliament in exile’, or as ‘a space for actors that may construct democratic projects in different contexts, both local and global’ (Patomäki and Teivainen 2004:121). An organization like Vía Campesina constitutes one of these ‘actors’, and it is reasonable to expect that the success of the food sovereignty project will
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Page 36 depend on strategic alliances with other, related movements (slum dwellers, greens, indigenous, human rights, labour, health, etc.) that come to share the importance of the multiple relations of food on the one hand, and the historic significance of mutual learning in the development of an alternative, cosmopolitan politics. The MST attempts to practice this kind of strategic outreach in relating agrarian conditions directly to urban unemployment, political hierarchies, property inequalities, food access for the poor, and so on. It would model, perhaps, what Stephen Gill, pacé Gramsci, calls the ‘postmodern Prince:’ a form of political agency, engaging with the ethics of rule, that is ‘plural and differentiated, although linked to universalism and the construction of a new form of globalism, and … needs to be understood as a set of social and political forces in movement’ which challenge ‘some of the myths and the disciplines of modernist practices’ (2003:218–19). A key element of the MST struggle is the politics of autonomy. Amory Starr and Jason Adams argue that autonomous movements not only refuse ‘distant authority’, but also practice the Zapatista dictum of desiring not simply ‘another world’, but ‘a world in which many worlds fit’ (Starr and Adams 2003:21). They describe a panoply of autonomous movements, from Slow Food through micro-enterprises to local currency systems, linking them to the ethical concerns of the Gandhian Swadeshi vision of selfgoverning and self-reliant communities, and to the practical benefits of ‘scaling down’ to achieve ‘more security than an integrated global economy’ (Starr and Adams 2003:38). Localism, of course, is problematic, unless it is animated by a politics of democratization engaged with transitioning to the ‘second modernity’, and articulated with higher-scale governances. Starr and Adams argue that autonomous movements today are more reflexive, emulating the Uruguayan anarchist principle of specifismo: ‘a strategic method of organizational fluidity and openness to changing circumstance’, where people self-organize beyond the social categories with which they have been historically depicted and oppressed (Starr and Adams 2003:41–2). The food sovereignty movement precisely challenges the single-point perspective on the peasantry and its accompanying developmentalist episteme. As Starr maintains, ‘ Specifismo brings to life what Northern scholars had vaguely termed a “politics of difference” in which those differences are maintained while collective work is also engaged’ (2005:97). Drawing on contemporary examples, such as the recent insurrections in Buenos Aires, Starr and Adams argue that the conditions of such activism rearrange ‘the rules of engagement, forcing people to seek solutions in the present tense, outside [but in relation to the limits of] the system’ such that ‘revolt against established authority can often be more powerful and infectious than the more finalistic ideology of change embodied in traditional notions of revolution’ (Starr and Adams 2003:42). Arguably, specifismo can scale up/across in such a way as to inform and yet be informed by strategic alliances with other democracy/justice movements, in such a way that its politics is governed by recognition of the different, yet commensurable, experiences of corporate globalization. Here, the dialectic of
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Page 37 composition and context becomes indispensable to the process of global democratization, because it engages with the state-corporate globalization project. This dialectic is just as important in tempering Monbiot’s proposal for a ‘world parliament’ (2003). Arguing for a direct form of representation of the world’s people (not peoples), Monbiot claims ‘our parliament would possess the moral authority which all other bodies lack’ – an assembly ‘whose primary purpose is to hold other powers to account’ (2003:94, 99). Answering scepticism regarding community consciousness at the global level, Monbiot maintains that a global identity is latent, having been suppressed through the alterity, or single-point perspective, of the nation-state system. Thus a world forum would reveal the reality of ‘engaged universals’, suppressed by the territorial perspective, much as indigenous movements have succeeded recently through international activism – ‘by appealing to universalism, they defend diversity’ (Monbiot 2003:115). Monbiot concludes that the process of building the ‘moral power of political globalization’ involves cultivating ‘a universal consciousness of the right to be different’ (Monbiot 2003). That is, the principle of difference (many worlds) could be represented through an open-ended forum reflecting an ongoing process of global democratization,4 animated perhaps by David Sabean’s principle of ‘community as discourse’. Here, what ‘is common in community is not shared values or common understanding so much as the fact that members of a community are engaged in the same argument … in which alternative strategies, misunderstandings, conflicting goals and values are threshed out…. What makes a community is the discourse’ (Sabean 1984:28–30). This kind of forum, possibly based on overlapping networks of resistance, would transcend the limits of the UN system, based as it is on the national principle (increasingly bankrupt, or corrupted by banking relations), as well as the global power hierarchy. It approximates the model of ‘global parlamentum’ proposed by Patomäki and Teivainen as a forum for coordinating different systems of authority (2004:185). Just as they argue that a world parliament would not be a sovereign body, rather a body ‘to prepare and put forward motions in various other fora’ (Patomäki and Teivainen 2004), there is no reason why such a body could not accept submissions from other organizations, networks and movements. Patomäki and Teivainen’s (2004:145) warning against the centralizing tendencies of a world parliament is acknowledged in the antipathy of the World Social Forum towards assuming an organizational structure. And yet they argue the WSF’s feasibility depends on its construction of the necessary infrastructure to ‘address and resolve satisfactorily the problems of creating a democratic global organization’ (Patomäki and Teivainen 2004:201). José Corrê Leite, member of the Secretariat and International Council of the World Social Forum, counters that the WSF is a horizontal space, not a pyramidal organization, and, perhaps more to the point: The WSF is a process and not just an event, and it is part of a bigger
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Page 38 movement. With the multiplication of forums, some organized at the continental level, others at the city level, the WSF has become a worldwide process. It helps to provide continuity to the new internationalism that, since Seattle, has been spreading around the world, confronting neoliberal globalization…. The multiplication of WSF spaces makes it possible for people to meet more frequently, establish ties and relationships of trust, and better coordinate their actions…. The WSF is contributing to altering the ideological climate in today’s world, helping to break the hegemony of the values of marketization, neoliberalism, and growing militarism. (Leite 2005:137–8) Acknowledging the difficulties and tensions involved in managing the ‘structural relationship between the forum and the wider movements that gives it meaning’, via the ‘method of open space’, Leite concludes that the ‘ WSF architecture must evolve with the process ’ (2005:158, 162–3). In fact, the WSF ‘Charter of Principles’ selfdefines as ‘a permanent process of seeking and building alternatives, which cannot be reduced to the events supporting it. [That] brings together and interlinks only organizations and movements of civil society from all the countries in the world, but does not intend to be a body representing world civil society’ (quoted in Morgan 2006:94). Such sentiments rather emphatically mark a historic divergence in conceptions of sovereignty from the vertical, centralized social topography of the modern state, which, in James Ferguson’s words, should be treated in the neoliberal age ‘not as a taken-for-granted fact, but as a precarious achievement’ (Ferguson 2006:112). Conclusion As a discursive project of market rule, corporate globalization enlists the instrumentality of the modern state in increasingly unaccountable policies with profound, crisis-ridden social and ecological consequences. The crisis of sovereignty has three dimensions: first, the erosion of citizenship rights in modern states via broad strategies of privatization and narrowing of the social contract; second, an increasingly evident ‘citizenship gap’ associated with processes of exclusion and displacement; and third, rising political claims for participatory alternatives within the global counter-movement. Many of these contradictory circumstances stem from the crisis of development and its global extension via the neoliberal project, a class project posing as a neutral, market-driven form of development (Harvey 2005). Perceiving states as part of the problem, rather than the solution, contemporary counter-movements reach beyond the formula of national market regulation and wealth redistribution to develop an alternative politics rooted in an ecological paradigm, rejecting modernity’s separations of politics and economics, natural and social worlds, and rulers and ruled (McMichael
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Page 39 2005a), and advocating for the so-called ‘life economy’ (McMurtry 2002), as counterpoint to the reductionist values of the corporate market. Instead of the singlepoint perspective associated with the modern state, these movements practice a multi-perspectival politics asserting the right to alternative forms of democratic organization and the securing of material well-being through multiple sovereignties based in cultural, environmental, and economic sustainability. The dilemma facing this alternative politics is how to secure these social experiments in a world based on the increasingly fragile routines of the Westphalian system, expressed in militarism and reactive terrorism (cf. Hardt and Negri 2004). With imperial over-reach and likely irreversible global warming, the basic conundrum facing the global democracy movement may be understood temporally. In the absence of a juridical global citizenship the immediate task of the global democracy movement is to simultaneously play the roles of ‘midwife’ and ‘infant’. Midwife , in addressing the protective limits and possibilities of current multilateral arrangements, and infant, in the sense that birthing is an emergent process of reformulating the institutions of a second modernity. In both roles, time is a contingent, not an inevitable, process, and what is possible will only be resolved through the consolidation of a new world time and world space, based in a global social episteme currently taking root. There is perhaps a new double movement for the twenty-first century. Polanyi’s twentieth-century scenario pivoted on the contradictions of commodification of land, labour, and money (Polanyi 1957), leading to a protective movement realized in the great transformation as society was discovered, formally, in the liberal-regulatory state of the mid-twentieth century. The twenty-first century’s ‘great transformation’ may be the substantive discovery of a formative global society in some cosmopolitan political outcome based in an ethical universalism. What I have argued here, essentially, is that the possibility of realizing this distant goal is given in today’s attempts to commodify the state. Just as labour, land, and money are not produced for sale in the market, neither is the state. And just as Polanyi’s counter-movements to protect labour, land, and money contributed to the rise of the citizen-state (Polanyi 1957), so the decomposition of that social form, through privatization, is generating a new global counter-movement that reaches beyond this social form towards a cosmopolitan resolution, founded in alternative understandings of sovereignty, but most of all in new, modern subjectivities of the ‘engaged universals’ kind. Notes 1 John Markoff notes: ‘At the historical moment when more citizens of more states than ever before in human history have been acquiring some control over the incumbents in office of the national states, the capacity of those incumbents to function as autonomous national policy makers has been seriously eroding’ (2006:343).
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Page 40 2 This process is not two-dimensional – for example, Yıldız Atasoy’s research ‘reveals the complicated way in which globalized Western ways enter into Islamic framing in repositioning … morally entitled groups in the economy’ (2003:76). 3 I am grateful to Gayatri Menon and Martin Weber for encouraging this formulation. 4 There are acknowledged shortcomings in Monbiot’s proposed system of direct representation (by 600 (de-nationalized) representatives, each with a constituency of 10 million people), straddling borders (2003:87). References Apffel-Marglin, F. (1997) ‘Counter-development in the Andes’, The Ecologist 27(6): 221–24. Arendt, H. (1976) The Origins of Totalitarianism , New York: Harvest/Harcourt. Atasoy, Y. (2003) ‘Explaining local-global nexus: Muslim politics in Turkey’, in Y. Atasoy and W. K. Carroll (eds) Global Shaping and its Alternatives , Aurora, ON: Garamond Press. Beck, U. (2000) What is Globalization? , Cambridge: Polity Press. Bond, P. (2003) Against Global Apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance, London: Zed Press. Boswell, T. and Chase-Dunn, C. (2006) ‘Transnational social movements and democratic socialist parties in the semiperiphery: on to global democracy’, in C. Chase-Dunn and S. J. Babones (eds.) Global Social Change: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Bové, J. and Dufour, F. (2001) The World Is Not For Sale , London: Verso. Casas, T. K. H. (2006) ‘Return of the rainbow: indigenous activism in Ecuador’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, Development Sociology, Cornell University. Da Costa, D. and McMichael, P. (2007) ‘The poverty of the global order’, Globalizations 4(4): 593–607. Davis, M. (2001) Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, New York: Verso. Davis, M. (2006) Planet of Slums , New York: Verso. Desmarais, A. A. (2007) La Vía Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants, London: Fernwood Books & Pluto Press. Ferguson, J. (2006) Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order , Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gill, S. (2003) Power and Resistance in the New World Order , New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gills, B. and Rocamora, J. (1992) ‘Low intensity democracy’, Third World Quarterly 13(3): 501–23. Halperin, S. (2004) War and Social Change in Modern Europe: The Great Transformation Revisited , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004) Multitude , New York: Penguin. Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism , Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism , Oxford: Oxford University Press. Held, D. (2000) ‘Regulating globalization. The reinvention of politics’, International Sociology 15(2): 394–408. Leite, J. C. (2005) The World Social Forum. Strategies of Resistance , Chicago: Haymarket Books.
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Page 41 Lindgren Alves, J. (2000) The Declaration of Human Rights in postmodernity, Human Rights Quarterly 22: 478–500. McMichael, P. (2005a) ‘Globalization’, in T. Janoski, R. Alford, A. Hicks, and M. Schwartz (eds) The Handbook of Political Sociology , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McMichael, P. (2005b) ‘Global development and the corporate food regime’, in F. H. Buttel and P. McMichael (eds) New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development , Amsterdam: Elsevier. McMichael, P. (2006) ‘Reframing development: global peasant movements and the new agrarian question’, Canadian Journal of Development Studies 27(4): 471–83. McMurtry, J. (2002) Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy , London: Pluto Press. Marshall, T.H. (1977) Class, Citizenship and Social Development , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Markoff, J. (2006) ‘Globalization and the future of democracy’, in C. Chase Dunn and S. J. Babones (eds) Global Social Change. Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Monbiot, G. (2003) The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order , London: Flamingo. Moore, B. Jr. (1965) Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy , Boston: Beacon. Morgan, J. (2006) ‘Interview with Michael Hardt’, Theory, Culture & Society 23(5): 93–113. Olesen, T. (2005) International Zapatismo: The Construction of Solidarity in the Age of Globalization , London: Zed Books. Otero, G. (2001) ‘The “Indian Question” in Latin America: class, state and ethnic identity construction’, Latin American Research Review 38(1): 248–66. Panitch, L. (1996) ‘Rethinking the role of the state’, in J. Mittelman (ed.) Globalization: Critical Reflections, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner. Patel, R. (2007) ‘Transgressing rights: La Vía Campesina’s call for food sovereignty’, Feminist Economics 13(1): 87–116. Patel, R. and McMichael, P. (2004) ‘Third Worldism and the lineages of global fascism: the regrouping of the global South in the neoliberal era’, Third World Quarterly 25(1): 231–54. Patomäki, H. and Teivainen, T. (2004) A Possible World: Democratic Transformation of Global Institutions , London: Zed Books. Polanyi, K. (1957) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times , Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Rist, G. (1997) The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith , London: Zed Books. Rosenberg, J. (2001) The Empire of Civil Society , 2nd edn. London: Verso. Ruggie, J. G. (1993) ‘Territoriality and beyond: problematizing modernity in international relations’, International Organization 47(1): 139–74. Sabean, D. W. (1984) Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sachs, W. (1993) ‘Global ecology and the shadow of “development”’, in W. Sachs (ed.) Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict , London: Zed Books. Saldaña-Portillo, M. J. (2003) The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development , Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shiva, V. (1991) The Violence of the Green Revolution , London: Zed Books.
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Page 42 Soederberg, S. (2005) Global Governance in Question: Empire, Class and the New Common Sense in Managing North-South Relations , London: Pluto Press. Starr, A. (2005) Global Revolt: A Guide to the Movements against Globalization , London: Zed Books. Starr, A. and Adams, J. (2003) ‘Anti-globalization: the global fight for local autonomy’, New Political Science 25(1): 19–42. Stedile, J. P. (2002) ‘Landless battalions’, New Left Review 15: 77–104. Swords, A. (2007) ‘Neo-Zapatista network politics: transforming democracy and development’, Latin American Perspectives 34(2): 1–16. Trouillot, M. (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History , Boston, MA: Beacon. Tsing, A. L. (2004) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vía Campesina (1999) ‘Seattle Declaration: Take WTO out of Agriculture’, December 3. Online. Available: www.viacampesina.org (accessed: 14 February 2008). Vía Campesina (2001) ‘Our World Is Not For Sale: Priority to People’s Food Sovereignty’, Bulletin, November 1. Online. Available: www.viacampesina.org (accessed: 14 February 2008). Via Campesina (2002) ‘Proposals of Via Campesina for Sustainable, Farmer Based Agricultural Production’, World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg. Online. Available: www.viacampesina.org.main_en/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=50&Itemid=27 Vía Campesina (2003) ‘Statement on Agriculture after Cancun’, Bulletin, December 15. Online. Available: www.viacampesina.org (accessed: 14 February 2008). Vía Campesina (2006a) ‘ Sovranita Alimentare: Final Declaration: For a New Agrarian Reform Based on Food Sovereignty’, March 9. Online. Available: www.viacampesina.org/main_en/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id =180&Itemid=27 (accessed: 14 February 2008). Vía Campesina. (2006b) ‘FAO should return to its original mandate’, November 21. Online. Available: www.viacampesina.org/main_en/index.php?option=com_ content&task=view&id=248&itemid=38 (accessed: 17 February 2008). Wallerstein, I. (2003) ‘Citizens All? Citizens Some! The Making of the Citizen’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 47(4): 650–79. Wittman, H. (2005) ‘The social ecology of agrarian reform: the landless rural workers’ movement and agrarian citizenship in Mato Grosso, Brazil’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, Development Sociology, Cornell University. Yeatman, A. (2002) ‘Globality, State and Society’, Globalism Project Conference, February 19–22, Mexico City.
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Page 43 3 Tracking the transnational capitalist class The view from on high William K. Carroll In appraising various dimensions and scenarios of hegemonic transformation, the question of a transnational capitalist class (TCC), commanding the heights of the global economy, looms large. There can be little doubt that the complex array of practices and processes falling under the rough rubric of recent globalization has created the objective conditions for such a class. In its most basic sense, the globalization of capital entails the globalization of the capitalist mode of production, a process in which capitalist classes are always directly active, but not necessarily as members of a transnational capitalist class. Indeed, Marx and Engels (1968:38), writing in the mid-nineteenth century, provided the classic description of the bourgeoisie’s globalizing mission, without invoking the imagery of a transnational capitalist class: ‘The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.’ In this characterization, the objective need for self-expansion obliges the many capitals that compose the bourgeoisie to globalize, but there is no implication that national affinities, identities and forms of capitalist organization fall away in the process. As the capitalist mode of production globalizes, as the circuitry of accumulation crosses national borders, the relations of production and the forces of production themselves become global. Rising volumes of trade and foreign investment, the growing share of the world economy claimed by the largest transnational corporations (TNCs), the expansion of global transportation and communication flows and the formation of integrated global financial markets are all indicative of this process (Dicken 2003). Even so, the increasingly integrated character of global capitalism does not in itself dictate a specific form of capitalist class social organization. This is so because capital is not a unified macro subject but is divided microeconomically into competing units which themselves are positioned within and across the boundaries of an international political system, rendering tendencies toward global capitalist unity always tenuous. Thus, the question of the transnational capitalist class cannot be reduced to the globalization of capitalism per se. Rather, it remains amenable to sociological investigation of how capitalists and their advisers are embedded in a panoply of socio-political relations.
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Page 44 The debate on the transnational capitalist class The contingent relation between global capital accumulation and class formation has spurred a vigorous debate on the transnational capitalist class, which has implications for our understanding of hegemonic transitions in the world system. Canadian political economist Stephen Hymer was among the first to discern a nascent transnational capitalist class, in the 1970s. For Hymer (1979:262), an international capitalist class is emerging whose interests lie in the world economy as a whole and a system of international private property which allows free movement of capital between countries…. [T]here is a strong tendency for the most powerful segments of the capitalist class increasingly to see their future in the further growth of the world market rather than its curtailment. It was not until the late 1990s, however, that work began to appear around the thesis that a transnational capitalist class has actually formed out of the processes of globalization. Leslie Sklair (2001) presented the first in-depth investigation, based on interviews with leading CEOs of TNCs. Sklair posited a weak version of the thesis, emphasizing transnational practices1 such as the foreign direct investments that fuel the industrialization of the semi periphery and the consolidation and diffusion of a culture-ideology of consumerism throughout both the global North and South. He divided the transnational capitalist class into four fractions: ‘corporate executives, globalizing bureaucrats and politicians, globalizing professionals, and consumerist elites’ that create and satiate desires for ever-growing quantities of commodities. Although he posited extensive communication among the four fractions, through interlocking directorates and other cross memberships, Sklair himself did not map the transnational capitalist class’s social organization. However, according to Sklair (2001:21), ‘the concept of the transnational capitalist class implies that there is one central inner circle that makes system-wide decisions, and that it connects in a variety of ways with subsidiary members in communities, cities, countries, and supranational regions.’ Like Sklair’s, William Robinson’s prodigious writings on the ascendance of a transnational capitalist class rely primarily on aggregated statistical evidence, supplemented by citation of instances of transnational corporate mergers and quotation of corporate CEOs, rather than on sociological analysis of class organization. On the basis of the aggregated evidence, Robinson asserts that the transnational capitalist class is in the process of constructing a new globalist historic bloc whose policies and politics are conditioned by the logic of global rather than national accumulation. Surrounding the owners and managers of major corporations, who form the core of the bloc, are the elites and the bureaucratic staffs of the supranational state agencies such as the World Bank, and the dominant political parties, media
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Page 45 conglomerates, technocratic elites and state managers – both North and South (Robinson 2004:75). Compared to Sklair, Robinson offers a narrower definition of the TCC as ‘the owners of transnational capital … the group that owns the leading worldwide means of production as embodied principally in the TNCs and private financial institutions’ (2004:47). In effect, his concept of the globalist bloc corresponds to Sklair’s more expansive concept of the TCC. But Robinson advocates a stronger thesis of transnational capitalist class formation, claiming with Harris that the TCC ‘is increasingly a class-in-itself and for-itself;’ that it has ‘become conscious of its transnationality and has been pursuing a class project of capitalist globalization, as reflected in a transnational state under its auspices’ (Robinson and Harris 2000:22–3). Robinson’s work is notable not only for its clarity of expression but for the spirited responses it has evoked.2 Analysts like Walden Bello sharply disagree with Robinson’s prognosis. Pointing to the turn in 2002–3 to national-imperialism by the George W. Bush administration – with the attendant disciplining of peripheral states – Bello argues that globalization is actually going into reverse: What was seen, by many people on both the left and the right, as the wave of the future – that is, a functionally integrated global economy marked by massive flows of commodities, capital and labour across the borders of weakened nation states and presided over by a ‘transnational capitalist class’ – has retreated in a chain reaction of economic crises, growing inter-capitalist rivalries and wars. Only by a stretch of the imagination can the USA under the George W Bush administration be said to be promoting a ‘globalist agenda’. (Bello 2006:1346) Radhika Desai also questions the cumulative character of globalization but allows for the possibility of global governance superseding a declining US hegemony. She identifies ‘globalization’ with the conjuncture of the Clinton presidency, as ‘the ideology under which, for a time, the rest of the world seemed quite happy to lend the USA more money than it ever had, and moreover, to lend it to US private industry’ (Desai 2007:451). For Desai, the period since 2000 has been marked on the one hand by a far more political and unstable debt relation between the USA and the rest of the world and on the other by USA attempts to regain its declining hegemony through imperial aggression (cf. Pieterse 2004). However, the new US imperialism is unstable, based more in weakness than strength, and most likely to eventuate in the kind of collective international economic and political organization that Robinson places under the rubric of the transnational state and globalist bloc. Beyond the question whether the globalization that drives TCC formation is really a cumulative process, there is the issue of how the TCC is articulated
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Page 46 to the still nationally defined spaces (i.e. territories) into which world capitalism is structured. For Robinson, the TCC is ascendant in an era of global de-territorialization. As he has put it recently, ‘spatial relations have been territorially defined relations. But this territorialization is in no way immanent to social relations and may well be fading in significance as globalization advances’ (Robinson 2007:14). Thus, for instance, although the Bush administration has in its military adventures pursued narrow corporate interests, ‘the beneficiaries of US military action around the world are not US but transnational capitalist groups’ (Robinson 2004:139). Doug Stokes sees this formulation as putting the cart before the horse. In Stokes’s view ‘the US state acts to secure the generic global conditions for transnational capital accumulation less at the behest of a TCC, but rather because, in so doing, the US state is, by default, acting in the generic interests of its national capital because of its high level of internationalisation’ (2005:228). For Kees Van der Pijl, Robinson’s claims about the TCC and the transnational state are both true and false. At a very abstract level of analysis, there may well be a convergence of interests which aligns capitalists from anywhere in the world with whatever project opens markets and investment opportunities. Yet, specific ruling classes have also built up, over decades or longer, specific transnational networks which offer them competitive advantages. Thus the US and the UK have used (in Iraq for instance) their military ‘comparative advantage’ to trump the Russian and French willingness to strike oil deals with the Saddam Hussein regime when it appeared that UN sanctions were unravelling. (Van der Pijl 2005:276) In Robinson’s formulation ‘a formal unity between concepts leads us astray’ (Van der Pijl 2005:275): terms like globalization, the transnational state and TCC ‘remain abstract whereas they claim to denote concrete realities’ (Van der Pijl 2005:274). Jason Moore has also noted the abstract placelessness at the heart of Robinson’s characterization of the late twentieth century as a new, global era in which stateless, mobile, transnational capital gains ascendency. Moore points to new forms of territorialization and regionalization and suggests that capital’s ‘global’ moment ‘depends upon very particular places ’ (Moore 2002:481) – in which case what appear, abstractly, as aspects of transnational capitalist class formation may actually be macro-regional processes – as in the rise of South and East Asia or the economic integration of Europe. Saskia Sassen’s (1991) close analysis of New York, London, and Tokyo as ‘global cities’ – production sites for the information industries needed to run the globalized corporate economy – highlights one emergent form of territorialization. Her more recent discussion of the ‘northern transatlantic economic system’ as globalization’s centre of gravity (Sassen 2002:10)
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Page 47 reminds us that globalization transforms but does not transcend territorial division. For Sassen, ‘the global partly inhabits and partly arises out of the national’ (2007:1), and in so doing troubles two core propositions in modern social science: (1) that the nation-state is the container of political and social processes and (2) that the national and the global are two mutually exclusive entities. Robinson’s thesis of TCC formation may be seen as dispensing with the first of these but retaining elements of the second, as in the assertion that ‘contradictory logics of national and global accumulation are expressed in distinct political projects’ (Robinson 2004:49) championed by national and transnational fractions of capital. Rather than partly inhabiting and partly arising out of the national, the hegemony of Robinson’s TCC’s issues from its ‘capture’ (in the 1980s and 1990s) of national states: Once they have been captured by transnational groups, national states internalize the authority structures of global capitalism; the global is incarnated in local structures and processes. The disciplinary power of global capitalism shifts the actual policymaking power within national states to the global capitalist bloc, which is represented by local groups tied to the global economy. (Robinson 2004:50) This formulation locates the prime agency for economic globalization within the transnational capitalist class, and begs for a systematic empirical analysis of that class’s actual social organization. A global corporate elite? A research literature germane to these issues has centred on study of the global corporate-interlock network. Interlocking directorates link the key centres of command within the corporate economy, and provide us with a window on the social organization of the capitalist class’s dominant stratum (Useem 1979). They can serve instrumental purposes of capital control, coordination and allocation, but also they serve as expressive , cultural relations, building solidarity among leading corporate directors and underwriting a certain class hegemony (Sonquist and Koenig 1975). In mapping whole networks of interlocked corporate directorates, we open a window on to the capitalist class’s social organization, or at least that of its top tier – the corporate elite. Of course, the elite networks that are sustained through corporate interlocking provide only one means of social organization for a TCC. Others include the widespread participation of leading capitalists in such global policy groups as the World Economic Forum (Carroll and Carson 2003), the recruitment of foreign nationals on to the boards of large corporations (Staples 2006), and the global network formed by TNC parent-subsidiary relations (Kentor 2005). Still, in as much as Robinson and Sklair both cite interlocking directorates as an important aspect of TCC formation,
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Page 48 the evolving character of the global corporate-interlock network is germane to the assessment of their claims. The empirical literature on transnational interlocking begins with Meindert Fennema’s (1982) study of the formation of a Euro-North American network in the 1970s. Fennema and I (Carroll and Fennema 2002) compared data for 1996 with his data from 1976. We found only a modest increase in transnational interlocking, along with the persistence of national networks, suggesting ‘path dependencies’ that reproduce institutionalized patterns, as with the German system of ‘organized capitalism’ as distinct from the looser Anglo-American business system (Whitley 1999:136). For the most part, from the 1970s to the 1990s there was no massive shift from a national to a transnational pattern of interlocking; the process of transnational class formation did not fragment national corporate networks but occurred alongside their reproduction. Thus, the transnational network formed a thin superstructure atop rather resilient national bases.3 The thinness of the transnational interlock network is also evident when analysis moves from the level of corporations to the level of global cities. Recently (Carroll 2007a), I mapped the global city network as a configuration of interlocking directorates among the world’s 350 major corporations as of 1996. The starting point was the network of corporate interlocks, but by aggregating these to the level of cities, it was possible to trace the network of interurban corporate-elite relations. Overwhelmingly, I found, in accord with Sassen’s (2002) notion of a northern transatlantic economic system, that the transnational network is based in the cities of northeastern North America and northwestern Europe. Indeed, a finding common to all these studies is the marginal position of corporations headquartered on global capitalism’s semi-periphery, or for that matter outside the North Atlantic region. But, what of the current decade? The most recent analyses of global corporate interlocking consider data from the 1990s. It is possible that, as Robinson (2007) intimates, the last few years have marked a more substantial shift to transnational capitalist class formation. There have certainly been qualitative advances in communications technology since the mid-1990s – notably, the internet – and flows of trade and investment have continued to densify capitalism’s transnational circuitry. Yet the extent to which these developments in the mode of production correspond to changes in the social organization of the capitalist class remains an open question. Again, the densification of transnational capital circuits does not necessarily mean that the global corporate elite has become more integrated. My current research examines changes between year end 1996 and year end 2006 in the network of the world’s 500 largest corporations: 100 largest financial institutions (ranked by assets) and 400 largest non-financials (ranked by revenue). This period has witnessed a number of geo-political transitions: in Washington, from the unabashedly pro-globalization Clinton administration to the unilateralist Bush administration, in Europe, the consolidation of the EU (including the launching of the Euro in 1999), in Asia the visible rise of
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Page 49 ‘Chindia’ (Engardio 2007). It has been a decade of speculative bubbles and crises, beginning with the Asian financial crisis of 1997, which ramified into further crises in Russia and Argentina, and continuing through the dot.com bust of 2000–1, and the downturn particularly in air transportation and related industries that followed in the wake of September 11, 2001. These developments have left their traces in the global corporate network, as major firms disappeared in bankruptcy or were reorganized and amalgamated into new entities. In my ongoing research, I am examining the impact of crises and capital restructurings on the shape and form of the global corporate network; however, the research questions motivating this chapter are more modest: 1 Is the global corporate interlock network becoming more transnational; and 2 How can we understand continuity and change in the specific regional configurations of corporate power?4 Findings: changes in the global 500 This chapter presents some very preliminary findings and covers only the eight years from 1996 to 2004, since data for year end 2006 are not yet available. This analysis of structural change in the corporate network requires, first, an examination of the changing composition of the Global 500 (G500), which is a marker for shifts in patterns of capital accumulation. We are particularly interested in shifts in the spatial distribution of the world’s largest corporations – the units of capital that form the global corporate elite’s accumulation base (Carroll 1982). Changes in the accumulation base are themselves a structural source of change in the corporate network, as firms based in certain locations or industries gain or lose standing in capital’s global league table. Previous research using similar samples of G500 companies has confirmed the continuing predominance of Northern-based corporations (i.e. the ‘Triad’ of North America, Europe and Japan/Australia), although Sklair and Robbins (2002) have made the case for a growing though still modest segment of global corporate capital based in the South. In these comparisons, it is illuminating to divide the G500 into its two basic components: the 100 largest financial institutions (ranked by assets) and the 400 largest industrial and commercial firms (ranked by revenue). The former are key centres of allocative power in global capitalism (Mintz and Schwartz 1985); they gather money capital from various sources and (in theory at least) steer it toward the most promising ventures. The latter are the organizations within which actual commodities are produced and marketed. In this case, corporate power asserts itself at place-specific points of production and in marketing practices aimed at wholesale or retail buyers. Table 3.1 cross-classifies the G500 both by economic sector and by domicile of head office. It groups domiciles into six categories: three zones of the core and three zones of the semi-periphery. (No G500 corporation in either
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Page 50 Table 3.1 Regional distributions of domiciles for global 500 firms (%) Domicile 1996 2004 NonFinancialNon-financialFinancial financial Core North American 37.8 25.0 38.0 33.0 Core Western Europe 31.5 45.0 34.0 51.0 Core Asia-Pacific 25.0 30.0 19.3 13.0 Semi-peripheral Latin America 1.5 0.0 1.3 0.0 Semi-peripheral Eastern Europe/Middle 0.8 0 1.3 0.0 East Semi-peripheral Asia 3.5 0 6.3 3.0 Total 100 100 100 100 year is domiciled in Africa.) For the world’s 100 largest financial institutions, it tells a familiar story: in 1996 every head office of these centres of allocative power was located within the Triad. Two ensuing developments are notable. First, North America and Europe consolidate their status as the locus for the lion’s share of head offices, while financial institutions based in Japan lose position. Second, semi-peripheral Asia (China and South Korea) emerges as the one locus outside the core for giant financial institutions, with the rise of the Bank of China, the China Construction Bank, and the Kookmin Bank. When we consider the assets controlled by these 100 financial institutions, the growing concentration of the command of capital in Europe and North America by 2004 is even sharper. The share of total assets controlled by giant financials based in Japan drops from one third to 11.2 per cent; the share controlled in Europe and North America grows from 66.9 to 86.5 per cent. The world’s leading sources of allocative corporate power remain ensconced mainly in Euro-North America. Much the same holds for the world’s 400 largest non-financials, although the placespecific character of commodity production favours the location of many head offices close to production sites. Here we do find a few corporations domiciled on the semiperiphery even in 1996, and the same pattern of recent growth in the Asia Pacific semi-periphery combined with a somewhat less pronounced decline in corporate Japan. And once again, the distribution of capital (in this case, total revenue), as opposed to firms, accentuates the growing dominance of Euro-North America in these eight years. By 2004, 76.1 per cent of total revenue is accounted for by firms based in Euro-North America (up from 65.2 in 1996), 16.5 per cent is claimed by firms based in Japan or Australia (down from 28.8), and 7.4 per cent is accounted for by firms based in the semi-periphery (up from 6.0 in 1996). Overall, the eight years witnessed a substantial shift toward Euro-North America, both in the number of G500 corporations and in the capital
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Page 51 controlled by them. If we look within the North Atlantic heartland, the shift in locus of corporate command reflects a strengthening of Europe more than a resurgence of the USA. Across the eight years, the number of G500 firms domiciled in western Europe grew from 171 (45 of them financials) to 187 (51 of them financials); the number domiciled in the USA grew from 167 (21 of them financials) to 170 (27 of them financials); and the number domiciled in Canada grew from nine (four of them financials) to 15 (six of them financials). Accompanying the shift toward Euro-North America was a collapse of corporate Japan – particularly its financial sector – and a modest growth in corporations based on the semi-periphery. The changing global corporate-interlock network Consider now the directorial links between the world’s largest 500 corporations. Across the eight years, the total number of interlocking directors, or linkers, falls from 837 to 736. That is, the global network is actually thinning – a finding that continues the network’s trajectory from the 1970s (Carroll and Fennema 2002). Coinciding with the thinning of the global network is the shrinking of corporate boards – a process that leaves fewer possibilities for interlocking directorships. In the most recent eight years, the average size of corporate boards drops from 20.3 to 14.6 – a substantial decline that partly reflects the implementation of corporate governance reforms in various countries, favouring the Anglo-American model of smaller boards with fewer inside (executive) directors. The background to this is complex, but a major aspect issues from the rise of investor capitalism (Useem 1996; Bieling 2006:432–3), wherein the high rates of profit demanded by institutional investors are supposedly facilitated by slimming corporate boards to ‘leaner, meaner’ proportions (Carroll 2004; Heemskerk 2006). This Anglo-American model contrasts with the Continental model of corporate governance, for which Germany provides the classic exemplar: large boards with many interlocks to associated corporations and financial institutions, as in Rudolf Hilferding’s (1981) notion of finance capital. Overall, the trend seems to be toward the Anglo-American model, implying smaller boards and a sparser network of interlocks. However, the situation becomes recognizably more complicated as we examine, in Figure 3.1, the particular countries that the companies call home. In most cases, the decline in mean board size is fairly small. The overall drop mainly reflects radical governance reforms in Japan and South Korea, in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis (Ahmadjian and Song 2004). Mean board size for G500 firms based in South Korea plummets from the highest to the lowest value in the series. The drop in Canada is also sharp as Canada’s big banks adopt new norms of governance after the mid-1990s (Carroll 2004). Yet in Germany, in part due to the organizational inertia in the co-determination system, corporations continue to have boards more than twice the size of their US counterparts, giving little
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Figure 3.1 Mean board size, select countries, 1996 and 2004. (Black) 1996 year end; (Grey) 2004 year end. Table 3.2 Number of transnational linkers on global 500 boards, 1996 and 2006, featuring North America and Europe (%) Number of transnational linkers on board North America Europe G500 1996 2004 1996 2004 1996 2004 None 61.4 57.8 41.5 29.2 64.6 56.0 One 20.5 29.7 17.5 22.5 14.6 20.4 Two 10.8 7.6 14.6 16.6 9.0 10.0 Three 5.7 3.2 7.6 12.3 4.6 5.8 Four 0.6 1.1 7.6 8.0 2.8 3.4 Five or more 1.1 0.5 11.1 10.7 4.4 4.4 Total 100 100 100 100 100 100 evidence of harmonization down to an American norm – i.e. the difference between Continental and Anglo-American forms of corporate governance persists. Our main interest here is in the phenomenon of transnational interlocking : board links that span national borders. As the column marginals of Table 3.2 show, although the average corporate board is shrinking, the number of transnational linkers on corporate boards is increasing. By 2004, nearly half of the G500 have at least one transnational linker on board – that is, it is beginning to be a typical corporate practice to maintain board ties with major companies domiciled in other countries – presumably engendering
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Page 53 a more cosmopolitan ethos in the boardroom. This finding points to transnational capitalist class formation, reinforcing Clifford Staples’s (2006) argument that an important aspect of that process is the increasingly multinational composition of major corporate boards. Once again, however, when we look more closely we find that the overall trend is not a summation of homogeneous regional trends. In fact, the tendency toward transnational interlocking is largely concentrated among companies based in Western Europe . As of year end 2004, most firms based in North America continue to have no transnational linkers on their boards, and only very rarely does a company have more than a single such director. Even here, however, the tendency is uneven, as 11 of the 15 G500 companies based in Canada have one or more transnational linker on their boards compared to only 67 of the 170 US-based corporations. Meanwhile, in Europe it is not unusual for a major corporate directorate to have two, three or more such cosmopolitans – the mean being 1.9. Indeed, European boards are becoming stocked with such transnational linkers. Fully 75.6 per cent of G500 firms based in six major European countries (France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, and Belgium) participate in transnational interlocking. In contrast, only 6.1 per cent of Japanese-based firms and 39.4 per cent of US-based firms do. These regional comparisons raise the issue of whether transnational interlocking is primarily an inter-regional or intra-regional practice. On this point, a simple comparison of three types of corporate interlocker is revealing (Figure 3.2).5 Over the eight years, the number of national interlockers drops by more than one fifth. Indeed, the overall drop in corporate interlocking is entirely due to the decline in national interlocking. In the same period, the number of transnational interlockers increases substantially. But most of this increase derives from increased intra-regional interlocking, from directors whose affiliations cross national borders within the same region of the world system . This category shows a sharp increase of 39.2 per cent. The increase in the number of transnational interlockers who link across the major regions of the world system is more modest (15.6 per cent). And it is well to note that by 2004, nearly three-quarters of all interlocking corporate directors of the G500 participate only in nationally contained interlocking. Even in Western Europe, the average G500 board remains composed predominantly of individuals with no transnational G500 directorships.6 To a considerable extent, the global network continues to be primarily an assemblage of (thinning) national networks . Looking more closely still, first, at the national interlockers (Figure 3.3), among the G7 countries, there is again unevenness in the net change over eight years. In France, the number of national interlockers grows dramatically; i.e. the French national network seems to have been further consolidated; in Germany, Canada and the USA the change is not very great.7 While in most countries there continues to be a strong basis for national corporate-elite networks, in Japan and Italy the basis weakens, at least among the world’s
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Figure3.2 National and regional interlockers, 1996 and 2004.
Figure3.3 Numbers of national interlockers, G7 Countries, 1996 and 2004. (Black) 1996 year end; (Grey) 2004 year end.
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Page 55 very largest firms. In Japan this is due to the decimation of the financial sector as well as corporate governance reforms; in Italy it is due in part to massive corporate restructurings that reduce its complement of G500 firms from 14 to eight. The changes among transnational interlockers (Figure 3.4) are also quite uneven, and they carry important implications for our interpretation of change in the global corporate elite. Across the eight years, the growth in transnational interlocking is centred on Western Europe. Most of what we are talking about when we speak of an increase in transnational interlocking is the consolidation of a Western-European corporate elite, entailing a proliferation of ties across European borders. Inter-regional interlocking registers a more modest increase, with most of the traffic continuing to run between the USA and Europe, and with Canada-Europe links more than doubling. Nearly all inter-regional interlocks connect firms based in the Triad; the number of transnational interlockers with extra-Triadic directorships remains quite small, increasing only from five to seven. Primarily, what is happening is an integration of the European corporate elite , along with the continuing reproduction of an ‘Atlantic ruling class’ (as in Van der Pijl 1984). The vast majority of transnational interlocks fall within these broad categories. The Euro-North American character of the network is visible in Figures 3.5 and 3.6, which show the international links created by transnational interlockers. The size of the nodes roughly corresponds to the number of national linkers for each country; the thickness of lines roughly corresponds
Figure3.4 Numbers of intra- and inter-regional TN linkers, 1996 and 2004. (Black) 1996 year end; (Grey) 2004 year end.
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Figure3.5 The international network in 1996. with the number of transnational linkers between any two countries. In Figure 3.5, depicting the international network in 1996, we can discern the network’s basic architecture as a combination of North Atlantic ties (particularly USA to Britain and the Netherlands) and ties within Europe. By 2004 (Figure 3.6), more extensive ties reach across borders within Europe, including Britain, whose giant corporations in 1996 were mainly tied to US-based firms and only weakly tied to the Continent. The directorates of French, German and Dutch companies are especially interlocked. But the ‘special relationship’ between the two major Anglophone countries also seems to have deepened; indeed the link between the USA and UK, involving 29 directors, is by far the strongest in the network. Firms based in Canada, like those based in Britain, interlock both with American and European corporations. Bermuda has become the tax haven of choice, particularly for several firms with operations primarily in the USA, creating a somewhat
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Figure3.6 The international network in 2004. dubious set of transnational interlocks. And there is not much indication of a network beyond the North Atlantic heartland. Discussion and conclusions If anything, these preliminary findings underline the importance of place in transnational processes, and the perils of overly abstract and polarized formulations. At most, we find support for a qualified version of the TCC thesis. Overall, there has been some decline in national networks and a net increase in transnational interlocking. Still, as of 2004, three-quarters of corporate networkers remain national, and most transnational linkers participate primarily in one national network. There has been an overall decline in national interlocking, but the pattern is uneven, with France actually showing a resurgence
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Page 58 of its national corporate network, and some other countries holding fairly steady. The dramatic instances of decline in within-nation interlocking reflect shifts in nationally defined corporate governance regimes. Most significantly, the ties that are proliferating are not abstractly global so much as they are pan-European, and pan-Atlantic. Michael Mann surely exaggerates when he claims that economic globalization under the sign of the Washington Consensus ‘is not without nationality; it is substantially American’ (Mann 2002:467). But it would be less of a stretch to claim that the most recent movement toward transnational capitalist class formation has been substantially European. This consolidation of a European business community should not be read as a mere instance of TCC formation. Politically, the project of European unification is less about relinquishing national sovereignty than it is about consolidating monetary and financial integration and accelerating neoliberal restructuring (Bieling 2006:439). This process is fraught with internal contradiction, but it is also likely to intensify trans-Atlantic conflict over trade issues and exchange-rate policies, and possibly over US world leadership (Bieling 2006:441). To appreciate processes such as these, we need to ‘ historize theory , that is to problematize globalization as a relation imminent in capitalism, but with quite distinct material (social, political and environmental) relations across time and timespace’ (McMichael 2001:202). A place-specific interpretation of TCC formation accords with the analysis provided by Ruigrok and van Tulder, who point out that much of what passes for globalization is actually regionalization (including what they call ‘Triadisation’, 1995:151). Indeed, at the level of TNCs, Rugman and Verbeke’s ‘regionalization hypothesis’ of world business seems to fit our findings well. Compared with inter-regional expansion, intraregional expansion offers firm-specific advantages of lower costs and more tractable managerial networks. In view of the fact that only nine of the world’s top 500 firms have been able to achieve balanced sales across the three regions of the Triad, Rugman and Verbeke (2007:200–1) argue that most transnational business is characterized by ‘semi-globalization’, and that many TNCs ‘are organized at the regional level rather than the global level’. At the third corner of the Triad, another regional aspect of restructuring over the eight years we have examined here is the weakened position of corporate Japan, particularly its financial sector. This decline reaches back to the 1985 G5 Plaza Accord, which in setting the Yen on a path of appreciation against the US dollar led to massive but unsustainable growth in financial assets controlled by Japanese financial institutions. Despite the 1990 collapse of the bubble economy, Japanese financial institutions controlled a substantial share of global financial assets as late as 1996. But the 1997 East Asian financial crisis hit Japan-based financial capital hard, and contributed significantly to the ‘debacle’ that is evident in our results (Ikeda 2004:370–2). What financial institutions based in Japan have lost has been gained by their counterparts in Europe and North America. Meanwhile, the long-term
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Page 59 erosion of the USA as a site for the command of capital appears to have been halted. Closer analysis than I have space for would, however, show that although the number of giant non-financial corporations based in the USA has dropped only slightly, this is due to the increasing presence of retail and service-sector companies, not manufacturers, among the complement of American firms.8 The North-South disparities that characterize global capitalism are strikingly evident in our findings and, despite the rise of Chindia, show few signs of abating at any appreciable rate. Control over economic sectors central to financialized, hyperconsumptive capitalism is firmly lodged in the North, and the global corporate elite continues to be almost entirely contained within the Triad. The capitalist classes of China, India, and South Korea are not integrated into the elite9 – although each semi-peripheral country has its local elite network, not charted here. What finally are the implications of these findings for our thinking on hegemonic transitions? One lesson I would draw is the need to acknowledge complexity: to resist abstract, polarized characterizations – as in either national or transnational capitalist class; either an American hegemon bent on world domination or a Washington that acts at the behest of the transnational capitalist class; either inter-imperialist rivalry or the united rule of global capital. Despite competition among capitals, inter-state rivalry and uneven development, it is certainly the case that capitalism’s globalization creates an objective basis for capitalist class unity (also for proletarian unity, though that is another story). If nearly a century ago Lenin’s prognosis of inter-imperialist rivalry leading to war proved more accurate than Kautsky’s notion of ultraimperialism, since the end of the Second World War, the latter has been the dominant tendency. In the midst of the First World War, Kautsky speculated that ‘the striving of every great capitalist State to extend its own colonial empire in opposition to all the other empires of the same kind … represents only one among various modes of expansion of capitalism’ (Kautsky 1970:45). For Kautsky, the result of war between the great imperialist powers might be ‘a holy alliance of the imperialists’ that would usher in an era of ‘ ultra-imperialism ’ (ibid: 46): a ‘shift from conflict between imperialist powers to maintenance of a world system of exploitation’ (Brewer 1980:124). The WTO, World Bank, IMF, G7, OECD and the like are precisely vehicles for the sort of collective imperialism that Kautsky envisaged, which now runs under the banner of ‘global governance’ (Soederberg 2006). But these agencies, along with the extensive cross-penetration of capitalist investment, the practice of transnational interlocking and the annual be-ins at Davos do not eliminate rivalries based in the objective necessity of capitalist states to manage capital flows to their own territorial advantage (Harvey 2005). And the political-economic integration of Europe, which is where most of the action is in TCC formation, does not break from the logic of the inter-state system, it replicates it at a higher level, even as it also provides firmer conditions for the international investment flows that ultimately
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Page 60 integrate the world economy.10 Even as ‘the global partly inhabits and partly arises out of the national’ (Sassen 2007:1), tendencies toward TCC formation coexist and intersect with counter-tendencies, limiting the prospects of a TCC-for-itself. Conscious efforts to create such a class should not be confused with its arrival.11 As Lacher (2005:46–7) concludes in his study of the persistence of territoriality in the era of globalization, we would do well to analyse current processes of socio-spatial transformation from the perspective of the continuing dialectic of territorialisation and globalisation, rather than from the expectation that the globalising tendency is about to obliterate the territorialising one…. From this perspective, the question that has to be asked about our current period is not only in what way global economic integration is undermining the state, but also in what way the continuing territoriality of capitalist political space is undermining the possibility for globally integrated production and finance. Taking a page or two from Van der Pijl (1984, 1998), we can say that the transnational capitalist class continues for the most part to take the geographically specific form of an Atlantic ruling class. This class has been based in capitalism’s Lockean Heartland of self-regulating market relations and civil society, a unique state/society complex that originated in England and expanded initially by colonial settlement to North America and elsewhere (Van der Pijl 1998:7). In the twentieth century, contending, ‘Hobbesian’ formations such as the fascist-corporative Axis Powers and the redistributive party-states of the Soviet Bloc attempted to confront and catch up with the Lockean Heartland by means of state-directed socioeconomic mobilization (Van der Pijl 1998:78–89). If in hindsight, imperialism has been about expanding the Heartland and incorporating Hobbesian contending states, by peaceful means or otherwise, we have surely not reached the end of that story. There are continuing grounds for state-mediated struggles over incorporation, and excorporation. One basis lies in a key finding from this study: the detachment of Southern bourgeoisies from the elite networks of the North. Isolated for the most part from the global corporate elite, the leading lights of semi-peripheral capitalism may be more open to new alignments such as the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Concomitantly however, transnational practices are incorporating these formations, as exemplified in China’s entry to the WTO and its opening of the door to foreign financial participation (and board representation) in its semi-privatized banks (Engardio 2007). More hopefully, and breaking from the view from on high I have presented here, the globalization of capitalism opens opportunities for transnational counter-hegemony, as in the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA; Kellogg 2007), the Zapatista Network (Olesen 2005), and the World Social Forum (Carroll 2007b).
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Page 61 Notes 1 Namely, ‘practices that cross state boundaries but do not necessarily originate with state agencies or actors’ (Sklair and Robbins 2002:82). 2 There is also a sceptical literature on globalization, preceding the work of Sklair and Robinson, that still has relevance. See especially Hu (1992) and Hirst and Thompson (1996). 3 In a dissenting opinion, Kentor and Jang have reported a shift toward transnational interlocking between 1983 and 1998. However, Fennema and I have pointed to problems in their methodology, which cast doubt upon the findings (Kentor and Jang, 2004, 2006; Carroll and Fennema, 2004, 2006). 4 Other research questions I am currently pursuing are: (3) How can we understand changes in the interurban network of corporate power; (4) What have been the local and global impacts of crises and corporate restructuring on the network; and (5) What has been the contribution of other mechanisms of elite integration (in particular, elite policy groups and forums such as the World Economic Forum) to the global network? 5 For present purposes, a transnational interlocker with inter -regional affiliations holds directorships in companies domiciled in two or more of the major regions depicted in Figure 1 (e.g. Europe and North America). A transnational interlocker with intra regional affiliations holds directorships in companies domiciled in two or more countries within one region (e.g. Europe or North America). National interlockers are those whose corporate directorships are contained within a single country. 6 As of 2004, the average proportion of transnational linkers on western European boards was 12.2 per cent, up from 10.6 per cent in 1996. 7 At this preliminary stage of analysis, the actual densities of inter-corporate ties have not been calculated. It is very likely though not certain that an increased number of interlockers means an increased density of ties in a given segment (national or otherwise) of the global network. 8 From 1996 through 2004, the number of US-based non-financials in the Global 500 dipped from 146 to 143, and the US-based complement of retail or service-sector firms grew from 32 to 43. Hence, the number of giant industrial corporations based in the USA continued its decline. In Europe, the number of retail or service-sector firms fell from 29 to 28, while the total number of non-financials grew from 126 to 136. 9 This may be changing, and emerging developments merit careful attention. For instance, the major Chinese banks, which have only recently been converted from government ministries into veritable corporations, are establishing relations with US and European banks. The recent purchase by Bank of America of a 9 per cent stake in the China Construction Bank, with the expectation of obtaining one seat on the latter’s board of directors, may be indicative of things to come (Engardio 2007:212– 13). As for the domestic corporate elite, by 2004 six directors knit Chinese corporations in the G500 into a network that remained detached from the global network. 10 In recent years, Western Europe has been a prime destination for foreign direct investment, but much of this investment (71 per cent in 2001) has involved intraEU flows (Oxelheim and Ghauri, 2004:7). As Peter Buckley has noted, regional economic integration is both a means of attracting TNC investment within the integrating area, ‘and of increasing relative discrimination against firms outside the area of integration’ (2004:35). 11 As Callinicos recommends in his critique of Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000), which posits such an arrival, ‘rather than seek to hypostatize capital in general as a collective subject … it might be more useful to analyze the concrete forms of
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Page 62 competition and cooperation among “many capitals” at both the national and international level and how these articulate with the processes of geopolitical competition constitutive of the interstate system’ (2006:137–8). References Ahmadjian, C. L. and Song, J. (2004) ‘Corporate governance reform in Japan and South Korea: two paths of globalization’, Center on Japanese Economy and Business Working Paper 221, Columbia University Business School. Online. Available: http://digitalcommons.libraries.columbia.edu/japan_wps/21 (accessed: 14 February 2008). Bello, W. (2006) ‘The capitalist conjuncture: over-accumulation, financial crises, and the retreat from globalisation’, Third World Quarterly 27(8): 1345–67. Bieling, H. J. (2006) ‘EMU, financial integration and global economic governance’, Review oh International Political Economy 13(3): 420–48. Brewer, A. (1980) Marxist Theories of Imperialism , London: Routledge. Buckley, P. J. (2004) ‘Regional integration and foreign direct investment in a globalised world economy’, in L. Oxelheim and P. Ghauri (eds), European Union and the Race for Foreign Direct Investment in Europe , Amsterdam: Elsevier. Callinicos, A. (2006) The Resources of Critique, Cambridge: Polity Press. Carroll, W. K. (1982) ‘The Canadian corporate elite: financiers or finance capitalists?’, Studies in Political Economy 8: 89–114. Carroll, W. K. (2004) Corporate Power in a Globalizing World, Toronto: Oxford University Press. Carroll, W. K. (2007a) ‘Global cities in the global corporate network’, Environment and Planning A 39: 2297–323. Carroll, W. K. (2007b) ‘Hegemony and counter-hegemony in a global field’, Studies in Social Justice 1(1): 36–66. Online. Available: http://137.207.120.196/ojs/leddy/ index.php/SSJ/issue/view/44 (accessed: 14 February 2008). Carroll, W. K. and Carson, C. (2003) ‘The network of global corporations and policy groups: a structure for transnational capitalist class formation?’, Global Networks 3(1): 29–57. Carroll, W. K. and Fennema, M. (2002) ‘Is there a transnational business community? ’, International Sociology 17: 393–419. Carroll, W. K. and Fennema, M. (2004) ‘Problems in the study of the transnational business community’, International Sociology 19: 369–78. Carroll, W. K. and Fennema, M. (2006) ‘Asking the right questions: a final word on the transnational business community’, International Sociology 21(4): 607–10. Desai, R. (2007) ‘The last empire? From nation-building compulsion to nationwrecking futility and beyond’, Third World Quarterly 28(2): 435–56. Dicken, P. (2003) Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in the 21st Century , 4th edn, London: Sage. Engardio, P. (ed.) (2007) Chindia: How China and India are Revolutionizing Global Business, New York: McGraw-Hill. Fennema, M. (1982) International Networks of Banks and Industry , London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Page 63 Harvey, D. (2005) The New Imperialism , New York: Oxford University Press. Heemskerk, E. (2006) The Decline of the Corporate Community, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Hilferding, R. (1981) Finance Capital, London: Routledge. Hirst, P. and Thompson, G. (1996) Globalization in Question , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hu, Y. S. (1992) ‘Global or stateless corporations are national firms with international operations’, California Management Review 34(2): 107–26. Hymer, S. (1979) The Multinational Corporation: A Radical Approach , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ikeda, S. (2004) ‘Japan and the changing regime of accumulation: a world-system study of Japan’s trajectory from miracle to debacle’, Journal of World-Systems Research 10(2): 363–94. Kautsky, K. (1970) ‘Ultra-Imperialism’, New Left Review 59:41–6. Kellogg, P. (2007) ‘Regional integration in Latin America: dawn of an alternative to neoliberalism?’, New Political Science 27(2): 187–209. Kentor, J. (2005) ‘The growth of transnational corporate networks: 1962–1998’, Journal of World-Systems Research 11(2): 262–86. Kentor, J. and Jang, Y. S. (2004) ‘Yes, there is a (growing) transnational business community: a study of global interlocking directorates 1983–98’, International Sociology 19(3): 355–68. Kentor, J. and Jang, Y. S. (2006) ‘Different questions, different answers: a rejoinder to Carroll and Fennema’, International Sociology 21: 602–6. Lacher, H. (2005) ‘International transformation and the persistence of territoriality: toward a new political geography of capitalism’, Review of International Political Economy 12(1): 26–52. McMichael, P. (2001) ‘Revisiting the question of the transnational state a comment on William Robinson’s “Social theory and globalization,”’ Theory and Society 30: 215–21. Mann, M. (2002) ‘Globalization is (a long other of things) transnational, international and American’, Science & Society 65(4): 464–8. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1968) ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works , New York: International Publishers. Mintz, B. and Schwartz, M. (1985) The Power Structure of American Business, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moore, J. W. (2002) ‘Capital, territory, and hegemony over the longue duree’, Science & Society 65(4): 476–84. Olesen, T. (2005) International Zapatismo: The Construction of Solidarity in the Age of Globalization , New York: Zed Books. Oxelheim, L. and Ghauri, P. (2004) ‘The race for FDI in the European Union’, in L. Oxelheim and P. Ghauri (eds), European Union and the race for Foreign Direct Investment in Europe , Amsterdam: Elsevier. Pieterse, J.N. (2004) Globalization or Empire? , London: Routledge. Robinson, W. I. (2004) A Theory of Global Capitalism, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Robinson, W. I. (2007) ‘Beyond the theory of imperialism: global capitalism and the transnational state’, Societies Without Borders 2: 5–26. Robinson, W. I. and Harris, J. (2000) ‘Towards a global ruling class? Globalization and the transnational capitalist class’, Science & Society 64(1): 11–54.
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Page 64 Rugman, A.M. and Verbeke, A. (2007) ‘Liabilities of regional foreignness and the use of firm-level versus country-level data: a response to Dunning et al . (2007)’, Journal of International Business Studies 38: 200–5. Ruigrok, W. and van Tulder, R. (1995) The Logic of International Restructuring , New York: Routledge. Sassen, S. (1991) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2002) Global Networks, Linked Cities , New York: Routledge. Sassen, S. (2007) ‘Introduction: deciphering the global’, in S. Sassen (ed.), Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects, New York: Routledge. Sklair, L. (2001) The Transnational Capitalist Class, Oxford: Blackwell. Sklair, L. and Robbins, P. T. (2002) ‘Global capitalism and major corporations from the Third World’, Third World Quarterly 23(1): 81–100. Soederberg, S. (2006) Global Governance in Question , Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring. Sonquist, J. A. and Koenig, T. (1975) ‘Interlocking Directorates in the Top U.S. Corporations: A Graph Theory Approach’, Insurgent Sociologist 5(3): 196–229. Staples, C. L. (2006) ‘Board interlocks and the study of the transnational capitalist class’, Journal of World-Systems Research 12(2): 309–19. Stokes, D. (2005) ‘The heart of Empire? Theorising US empire in an era of transnational capitalism’, Third World Quarterly 26(2): 217–36. Useem, M. (1979) ‘The social organization of the American capitalist class’, American Sociological Review 44: 553–71. Useem, M. (1996) Investor Capitalism, New York: Basic Books. Van der Pijl, K. (1984) The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class, London: Verso. Van der Pijl, K. (1998) Transnational Classes and International Relations , London: Routledge. Van der Pijl, K. (2005) ‘ A Theory of Global Capitalism, feature review’, New Political Economy 10(2): 273–7. Whitley, R. (1999) Divergent Capitalisms: The Social Structuring and Change of Business Systems, New York: Oxford University Press.
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Page 65 4 Global state formation and global democracy A world historical perspective Christopher Chase-Dunn, Hiroko Inoue, Alexis Álvarez and Richard Niemeyer The long-term trend since the Stone Age has been for polities and states to get larger. This long-term trend is partly masked because all inter-polity systems oscillate between relatively greater centralization and decentralization. During the centralized phase a single very large polity is predominant, but then this power declines relative to competitors. The long-term upward trend in polity size has been produced by occasional upward sweeps in which a new polity that is much larger than any earlier one emerges. The modern world-system is different from earlier systems in that the centralization/decentralization sequence has taken the form of the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers rather than the earlier pattern of the rise and fall of core-wide empires. Imperialism in the modern world-system has usually taken the form of vast dispersed colonial empires, and formal empire has been abolished as the system of states that began in Europe has been spread to the rest of the world. In the long run, the human species is probably headed toward global state formation, but the contemporary institutionalization of the multipolity interstate system remains very strong. Yet there has been an upward trend toward the formation of international political organizations since the Napoleonic Wars and national states have become reconfigured by the forces of the ‘globalization project’ (McMichael 2004; Sassen 2006) so that they are increasingly coming to be the enforcers of institutions that support neoliberal accumulation – a process that can be seen as a form of global state formation. The hegemony of the USA is declining and a new period of interimperial rivalry seems to be in the making, but there are also possibilities for new and more democratic forms of multilateral global governance to emerge within the next few decades. All systems of interacting polities oscillate between relatively greater and lesser centralization as relatively large polities rise and fall. This is true of systems of chiefdoms, states, empires and the modern system of the rise and fall of hegemonic core states. But there has also been a long-term trend in which polities have increased in population and territorial size since the Stone Age and the total number of polities has decreased. These trends have been somewhat masked in recent centuries because the processes of decolonization and the emergence of nation-states out of older tributary empires have
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Page 66 increased the number of smaller polities. But the general trend toward larger polities can be seen in the transition from smaller to larger hegemonic core states (from the Dutch, to the British to the US), and in the emergence of international political organizations and an expanded and active global civil society that participates in world politics. This chapter reports some of the results of a project that is studying the growth of polities and settlements since the Stone Age in order to model the socio-cultural evolution of larger and larger polities and potential future world state formation.1 We empirically identify ‘upward sweeps’, when the population scale of settlements and spatial scale of territorial control of polities dramatically increased. We review and synthesize explanations of chiefdom-formation, state-formation, empire-formation and the rise and fall of modern hegemonic core states in order to produce formal explanatory models. And we study the emergent characteristics that distinguish these different scales in order to comprehend how the processes have qualitatively evolved, and in order to consider what kinds of qualitative transformation might occur in the future. Our approach avoids the unscientific pitfalls of progressivist, functionalist, inevitabalist, and teleological presumptions that have plagued many earlier approaches to socio-cultural evolution. We do not identify complexity and hierarchy with progress, but neither do we assume that they are the opposite of progress. Upward sweeps and ceilings Figure 4.1 is a stylized depiction of the rise and fall of large polities and occasional upward sweeps that portrays, not the history of a single world
Figure4.1 Rise, fall and upward sweeps of polity size.
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Page 67 region, but rather the general evolution2 of what has happened over the past 12,000 years as many small polities (bands, tribes and chiefdoms) have been consolidated into a much smaller number of larger polities (states, empires and a possible future world state). George Modelski’s (2003) recent study of the growth of cities over the past 5,000 years points to a phenomenon also noticed and theorized by Roland Fletcher (1995) – cities grow and decline in size, but occasionally a single new city will attain a size that is much larger than any earlier city, and then other cities catch up with that new scale, but do not much exceed it. It is as if cities reach a size ceiling that it is not possible to exceed until new conditions are met that allow for that ceiling to be breached. Figure 4.2 plots Rein Taagepera’s (1978a,b, 1979, 1997) estimates of the territorial sizes of the largest and second largest empires in the ‘Central System’3 for the purpose of identifying empire upsweeps. We know that the first upsweep was that of the Uruk expansion that began on the flood plain of Southern Mesopotamia (Algaze 1993), but we do not have quantitative estimates of the settlement and empire sizes in the early Bronze Age. After a long period of competing city-states in Mesopotamia the Akkadian Empire emerged as the first core-wide empire.4 Its territorial size is estimated by Taagepera and so it appears in Figure 4.2. After the fall of the Akkadian Empire there was a millennium of no comparably large states until Egypt managed to attain a size as large as that of the Akkadian Empire (around 0.8 square megameters). That was the ceiling until
Figure4.2 Rise, fall and upward sweeps as revealed by Taagepera’s estimates of the territorial sizes of the largest empires in the central system.
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Page 68 the rise of the Neo-Assyrians to a size twice as large, which was then quickly superseded by much larger empires – Achaemenid Persia and the Hellenic Empires. They reached a new ceiling that was as large as Rome and Parthia at their height several centuries hence. A new upward sweep was made by the Islamic caliphates, but then there was a trough followed by the Eurasian-wide, but brief, Mongol conquest, and then another trough that was transcended by the emergence of the modern colonial empires of the European states, with the largest of these being the British Empire of the nineteenth century. So there have been five major polity upward sweeps in the Central System that we may label: 1. Akkadian-Egyptian, 2. West Asian-Mediterranean, 3. Islamic, 4. Mongol, and 5. Modern. Theories of rise, fall and upward sweeps There are many theories about why systems of interacting polities experience cycles of rise and fall. A thorough overview of the anthropological literature on ‘cycling’ – the rise and fall of large chiefdoms – is presented in David G. Anderson’s (1994) The Savannah River Chiefdoms . Anderson and Chase-Dunn (2005) present an overview of earlier theories and a new theoretical synthesis based on Peter Turchin’s (2003) model of the dynamics of agrarian state growth and decline, network theory, a population pressure iteration model and explanations of the rise and fall of modern hegemons. This approach has been further modified to reincorporate the operation of trade networks (Chase-Dunn et al. 2006). Explaining the upsweeps requires adding a discussion of emergent properties and the increasing geographical scale of interaction networks to the theories of rise and fall. The question of the timing of upward sweeps to new levels is entirely germane to the problem of modelling of contemporary and future global state formation. So also is the issue of how unusually large states have been formed in the past. Upward sweeps have mainly been instances of a semi-peripheral marcher state conquering and unifying adjacent older core states and nearby peripheral areas. Conquest of adjacent territories has been the main mechanism of large-scale political integration in the past. But the pattern of hegemonic rise and fall in the modern world-system has been different (Figure 4.3). The most powerful states, the hegemons (the Dutch, the British, and the US), have fought semiperipheral challengers (e.g. Napoleonic France and Germany) to prevent the emergence of core-wide empires. We contend that this is because the hegemons are the most capitalist states in the system, the ones for whom economic success is most closely tied to the ability to make super profits on the technological rents that return from new lead technologies. Only during hegemonic decline have the modern capitalist hegemons shown a tendency toward ‘imperial overreach’ in which their military power is employed in a last ditch effort to prop up a declining economic hegemony. These efforts have not been successful, and a new hegemon only emerges after
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Figure4.3 Core-wide empire vs. modern hegemony. a period of hegemonic rivalry and world war. This is a primitive method of choosing ‘global leadership’ that we can no longer afford to employ because of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. This is analogous to the succession problem within states. The construction of institutions that can peacefully resolve the struggle for hegemony is of the first importance for our very survival as a species. The approach that we propose is to model the main causes of state formation and upward sweeps taking into account the ways in which the basic processes have been altered by the emergence of new institutions. We elaborate and improve upon the recent work of Robert Bates Graber (2004). Graber develops both an ahistorical and an historical population pressure model of political integration. His ahistorical model is a very simplified version of the iteration model that includes population growth rates and the number of independent polities. Graber’s historical model takes account of the emergence of the League of Nations and the UN. But we add the rise and fall cycle, the emergence of markets and capitalism, and the growth of other international political organizations and non-governmental organizations to our model of the evolution of global governance. The main political structure of global governance in the modern world-system has been, and remains, the international system of states as theorized and constituted in the Peace of Westphalia. This international system of competing and allying national states was extended to the periphery of the modern world-system in two large waves of decolonization of the colonial empires of core powers. The modern system already differed from earlier imperial systems in that its core remained multicentric rather than being
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Page 70 occasionally conquered and turned into a core-wide empire. Instead, empires became organized as distant peripheral colonies rather than as conquered adjacent territories. Earlier instances of this type of colonial empire were produced by thallasocratic states, mainly semiperipheral capitalist city-states that specialized in trade (e.g. Carthage, Venice, etc.). In the modern system this form of colonial empire became the norm, and the European core states rose to global hegemony by conquering and colonizing the Americas, Asia and Africa in a series of expansions (Figure 4.4) (Bergesen and Schoenberg 1980). Extension of the state system to the periphery The international system of sovereign states was extended to the colonized periphery in two large waves of decolonization (Figure 4.5). After a long-term trend in which the number of independent states on Earth had been decreasing, that number rose again with decolonization and the core states decreased in size when they lost their colonial empires. The decolonization waves were part of the formation of a truly global polity of states. The system of European core states, each with its own colonial empire in Asia, Africa and the Americas, became reorganized as a global system of sovereign states. Most of the former colonies remained in the non-core and new forms of neocolonialism emerged to allow the core states to continue to exploit the non-core states. But one of the early decolonized regions, ‘the first new nation’, rose to core status and then to become the largest hegemon the modern world-system has yet seen – the United States of America. The doctrine of the national self-determination, long a principle of the European state system, was extended in principle to the periphery but new forms of economic imperialism continued to reproduce the core/periphery hierarchy.
Figure4.4 Modern colonies established.
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Figure4.5 Waves of decolonization. Our historical model adds marketization, decolonization, new lead technologies, the rise and fall of hegemons, and the rise of international political organizations to the population pressure model in order to forecast future trajectories of global state formation. Because we are sensitive to the cyclical nature of many processes we can easily consider how downward plunges and possible collapses might affect the probable trajectories of global state formation. We also take into account the structural differences between recent and earlier periods. For example, the period of British hegemonic decline moved rather quickly toward conflictive hegemonic rivalry because economic competitors such as Germany were able to develop powerful military capabilities. The US hegemony has been different in that the USA ended up as the single superpower after the decline of the Soviet Union. Some economic challengers (Japan and Germany) cannot easily play the military card because they are stuck with the consequences of having lost the Second World War. This, and the immense size of the US economy, will probably slow the process of hegemonic decline down relative to the speed of the British decline (Chase-Dunn et al. 2005). Our modelling of the global future also considers changes in labour relations, urban–rural relations, the nature of emergent city regions, and the shrinking of the global reserve army of labour (Silver 2003). The trajectory of global governance and political globalization Global governance can refer generally to the nature of power institutions in any world-system. In this sense there has been global governance all along. It
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Page 72 has not emerged. But it has changed its nature by evolving. The modern worldsystem that arose out of Europe was originally the interstate system in which states allied and fought with one another for territory, control of trade routes, and other resources. As Europe became hegemonic over the rest of the world this system became the predominant form of global governance. The basic logic is the anarchy of nations and geopolitics, but this anarchy always had a cultural backdrop that the English school of international relations calls ‘international society’ (Buzan and Little 2000). In earlier millennia Christendom and the other world religions proclaimed and developed a set of ethics that differentiated the world into civilized, barbarian, and savage peoples. Cannibalism, ritual human sacrifice, and polygyny were banned. Individualism based on a confessional relationship with god, rather than having been born in a particular ethnic group or city, raised the moral status of the person. A greater degree of individualism and humanism emerged in the context of the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the rules of this ‘civilized’ culture were applied in geopolitical alliances and conflicts. Wars with other ‘civilized’ peoples were somewhat different than wars with barbarians or savages. Thus did a moral and legal order come to stand behind the anarchy of nations, an order that tended to condone less ethical forms of coercion when dealing with the peoples of the non-core (Benton 2002). The interstate system that emerged in Europe soon adopted institutions that had previously been elaborated in relations among the Italian city-states during the Renaissance. Diplomatic immunity and rules of engagement came to regulate warfare within the core. These rules were made explicit in the treaty of Westphalia in 1644. The balance of power among states was reinforced by the notion of ‘general war’, which prescribed that all states should band together against any ‘rogue state’ that aggressively attacked another. Theorists of the international system often portray this as a great discovery that distinguished the European interstate system from others, especially those more hierarchical interstate systems known to exist in South Asia and East Asia. But similar institutions are known to have existed in much earlier interstate systems (e.g. the system of Sumerian city-states in the early Bronze Age). The European balance of power system coincided with the emergence of Dutch hegemony in the seventeenth century, and indeed it was the Dutch state, arguably the first capitalist nation-state, that played a pivotal power-balancing role in that century. The growing importance of the accumulation of profits shifted the logic of state power increasingly away from tribute and taxation without dispensing with these entirely. Indeed, some states continued to pursue the tributary logic, but they were consistently beaten in competition with newly emerging capitalist states in the core. Thus did the logic of adjacent tributary empires become increasingly supplanted by a new imperial logic that sought the control of trade routes and access to valuable raw materials and labour that could contribute to the profitable production of commodities.
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Page 73 The emergence of colonial empires corresponded with the reproduction of a multicentric core in which several European states allied with and fought each other (Figure 4.3). This system came to be taken for granted by International Relations theorists as the natural mode of global governance. Despite that earlier systems had repeatedly seen the emergence of ‘universal states’ such as the Roman Empire, the notion of a global state is now nearly unthinkable because many International Relations theorists define states in relationship to each other, thus making it impossible to have a ‘universal state’. This is part of the strong institutionalization of the modern interstate system – an historically constructed structure that has come to be seen as natural. The oscillation of earlier systems morphed into the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers in the modern system. A series of hegemons emerged from the semiperiphery – the Dutch, the British and the US. This cycle or sequence has itself evolved, with the hegemons becoming increasingly larger with respect to the size of the whole system, and with the institutional nature of states and finance capital getting reorganized in each ‘systemic cycle of accumulation’ (Arrighi 1994). Tributary empires survived into the nineteenth century, but they were increasingly supplanted by national states. And the colonial empires of the European states brought the whole Earth into a single relatively homogenous global polity for the first time. The penetration of Qing China in the nineteenth century brought this last semiindependent centre into the fold of the now-predominant Europe-centred system of states. The evolution that occurred with the rise and fall of the hegemonic core powers needs to be seen as a sequence of forms of world order that evolved to solve the political, economic and technical problems of successively more global waves of capitalist accumulation. The expansion of global production involved accessing raw materials to feed the new industries, and food to feed the expanding populations (Bunker and Ciccantell 2004). As in any hierarchy, coercion is a very inefficient means of domination, and so the hegemons sought legitimacy by proclaiming leadership in advancing civilization and democracy. But the terms of these claims were also employed by those below who sought to protect themselves from exploitation and domination. And so the evolution of hegemony was a dynamic interaction between the global elites and the global masses. World orders were challenged and reconstructed in a series of world revolutions (Arrighi et al. 1989; Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000). Political globalization The nineteenth century saw the beginning of what we shall call political globalization – the emergence and growth of an overlayer of regional and increasingly global formal organizational structures on top of the interstate system. We conceptualize political globalization analogously to our understanding of economic globalization – the relative strength and density of
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Page 74 larger versus smaller interaction networks and organizational structures (Chase-Dunn et al. 2000). The most obvious indication of political globalization is the evolution of the uneven and halting upward trend in the transitions from the Concert of Europe to the League of Nations and the United Nations. The waves of international political integration began after the Napoleonic Wars early in the nineteenth century. Britain and the Austro-Hungarian Empire organized the ‘Concert of Europe’ that was intended to prevent future French revolutions and Napoleonic adventures. After World War I the League of Nations emerged as a weak proto-state designed to provide collective security by preventing future ‘Great Wars’. The failure of the USA to take up the mantle of British hegemony during the Age of Extremes (Hobsbawm 1994), and the weakness of the League (which the USA never joined) led to another round of unbelievably destructive world war. After the Second World War, a somewhat stronger proto-world-state, the United Nations Organization, emerged and the USA stepped firmly into the role of hegemon. The trend toward political globalization can also be seen in the emergence and reconfiguration of the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) and the more recent restructuring of the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade as the World Trade Organization, and the heightened visibility of other international fora (the Trilateral Commission, the G7/G8). Some of the proponents of a recent stage of global capitalism contend that strong transnational capitalist firms and their political operatives working within national states have combined with existing international organizations to constitute an emerging transnational capitalist state (e.g. Robinson 2004). This version of the global state formation hypothesis claims that a rather integrated transnational capitalist class has emerged since the 1970s, and that this global class uses both international organizations and existing national state apparatuses as coordinated instruments of its rule. This perspective may somewhat overstate the degree of integration of class governance on a global scale, though there is some strong evidence that integration is far greater in the most recent wave of globalization than it was in earlier waves (see Carroll, this volume). The debt crisis of the 1980s did not result in a global financial collapse largely because the major banking institutions of the world were able to implement a coordinated approach to debt restructuring. This is good evidence that the global institutions have reached a greater degree of coherence than they had in earlier financial crises. Saskia Sassen (2006) has analyzed the ways of political globalization in world historical perspective. Her main idea is that the old national institutions have become reconfigured for new global purposes (see also McMichael, this volume). Institutional capabilities can ‘jump tracks’ to support new normative orders. While the institutions are serving a new logic, traces of the old logic more or less remain and new assemblages occur within the structures built with the previous logic. She provides support for this thesis by focusing on the patterned changes and continuities in the nature of territorial
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Page 75 authority, political economy, and citizenship and law in European and Europedescended societies since the eleventh century ce. She begins by tracing the emergence of a system of national societies out of a multijurisdictional and multiscale medieval assemblage of manors, city-states, empires, and churches. The divine right of kings (legitimation from above) became reconfigured as secular national authority based on social contracts with citizens (legitimation from below). Similarly, in late twentieth-century USA, the institutions of the national state, particularly those established at Bretton Woods, began to be reorganized to serve the ends of the neoliberal globalization project. According to Sassen this shift has mainly been directed by the executive branch of government that has used its growing strength relative to legislatures to privatize the state while simultaneously eroding the privacy rights of the populace. This historical and ‘world scale’ approach has been noticeably missing from most of the other authors who contend that a qualitatively new stage of global capitalism has recently emerged. Sassen insightfully portrays the emergence and empowerment of national capitalist classes and the constitution of workers as disadvantaged citizens in polities that protect property from democratic claims by defining politics and economics as institutionally separate realms. And Sassen emphasizes that these changes were structured by the context of expanding colonial empires in which each European state was competing with other states for control over distant resources, markets and peoples. Sassen’s analysis of the emergence of the national is similar in many respects to the one told by Michael Mann (1993), though she is not so rigid as Mann in insisting that the political and economic institutions were running on separate and disconnected tracks.5 As with many other global capitalism scholars (and most neoliberals), the issue of who has the guns in the contemporary period is almost completely ignored, as if the rising salience of economic institutions has completely relegated the issue of military power to the dustbin of history. The fascinating discussion of changes in the construction and practices of citizenship and the emergence of global law manages to completely avoid mention of an emergent global state by using the metaphor of a multilayered, multijurisdictional system analogous to the pre-national medieval world. As with Sassen’s earlier studies of global cities and migration, she includes others besides the elites in her characterization of the emerging global system. Immigrants, disadvantaged low-wage workers and political activists join the professionals and experts as incipient members of global classes, while most of humanity remains embroiled in the national. There is an interesting contention that cities are becoming more important loci of political action in the globalizing world, and Sassen examines both the positive and negative possibilities of digital space (the internet) for the future of democracy. Little is said about how humanity is going to deal with imminent ecodisasters or ‘global impasse’ - the fact that most Third World peoples have become convinced that they want a First World lifestyle but that this is a
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Page 76 physical impossibility under current and probable medium-term technical, ecological and demographic conditions. The ‘democratic deficit’ of existing institutions of global governance is also not mentioned. Huge inequalities in a world that has mainly accepted the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ as a sacred text portends serious challenges to the current global distribution of power and wealth. How are these global problems going to be solved? A more integrated and systemic evolutionary analysis of institutional change has implications for helping to resolve these crises. As Sassen’s analysis implies, the current reality is that both the old system of nationally competing capitalist classes and a very high degree of global integration now exist and these contend with one another to an extent that is much greater than in the past. An internationally integrated global capitalist class was also in formation in the second half of the nineteenth century, but this did not prevent the world polity from descending into the violent inter-imperial rivalry of the two twentieth-century world wars (Barr et al. 2006). The degree of integration of both elites and masses is undoubtedly greater in the current round of globalization, but will it be strongly integrated enough to allow for readjustments without descent into a repetition of the Age of Extremes? That is the question. In addition to the formation of regional and global international organizations, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also saw the emergence of trans-national social movements and the enlargement of what has come to be known as global civil society. These have also altered the form of global governance by providing expanded arenas in which individuals and organizations participate directly in world politics rather than through the mediating shell of national states. Specialized international and transnational non-governmental organizations (e.g. the International Postal Union) exploded in the middle of the nineteenth century (Murphy 1994). Abolitionism, feminism and the labour movement became increasingly transnational in nature. Earlier local movements had also had a transnational aspect because sailors, pirates, slaves and indentured servants carried ideas and sentiments back and forth across the Atlantic (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000) but the large global consequences of these movements occurred when many mainly local developments (e.g. slave revolts) occurred synchronously or within the same time period. We follow Mary Kaldor in defining civil society as ‘the medium through which one or many social contracts between individuals, both women and men, and the political and economic centres of power are negotiated and reproduced’. (Kaldor 2003:44–5). Kaldor’s explication of this descriptive and aspirational concept considers its emergence in Greek and Roman antiquity, the European Enlightenment, the twentieth-century totalitarian challenges to individual rights, and the world revolution of 1989 in which Eastern European and Latin American political theorists redefined the concept in ways that allow it to be expanded to a global political arena. It now includes the domestic realm of institutions as well as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), informal networks, social clubs and non-state religious
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Page 77 organizations, and social movement organizations (SMOs). Global civil society, as defined above is a medium of contention in which all humans on Earth participate in one guise or another, since all are involved in the politics of the family and the household during at least some parts of their lives. We recognize that the aspirational elements of the idea of civil society, including civility, the rule of law, tolerance, reasoned political conversation, and etc. do not extend to all the people of the Earth, and we agree with Kaldor that it is a laudable goal to try to extend these virtuous conditions and opportunities to all. We also note that some who enjoy these conditions within national polities do not conceive of themselves as active direct participants in world politics at the global level. We employ the term ‘transnational activists’ to designate those who identify with, and actively participate in, social movements, including religious movements, that are composed of social networks based in two or more nations (Tarrow 2005:29). Some have claimed that the pattern of hegemonic rise and fall is now morphing into a new structure of core condominium (Goldfrank 1999) while others see the rise of the neoconservatives in the USA as a repetition of the pattern of ‘imperial overstretch’ that may portend another period of contentious inter-imperial rivalry. Several outcomes are possible, including a repeat of what happened after the last decline of a hegemon – another world war among core states (Chase-Dunn and Podobnik 1995). The current crisis of the world-system seems fraught with several possible, and potentially inter-active, dangers of collapse – huge international and growing within-nation inequalities, ecological disaster, what would appear to be an unsustainable trade and investment imbalance, and a huge mountain of debt structured as ‘secure’ claims on future profit streams. Democratizing global governance Charles Tilly’s (2007) remarkable analysis of the processes that make democratization and de-democratization more likely in national states completely ignores the problem of global state formation and the question of democratization of the global polity. But Tilly’s approach has important implications at the global level. He contends that state capacity is fundamentally relevant for understanding democratization. Low capacity states in poverty-stricken (peripheral) societies are very hard to democratize because the state itself is the only resource worth controlling and so local power groups use any means necessary to gain and hold state power. This explains volumes about why states in the periphery have had a hard time democratizing. This dimension of state capacity is also entirely relevant for the consideration of global state formation. Democratizing a weak global state may be easier, but is unlikely to be very efficacious for dealing with the difficult environmental, security and global justice issues that humanity will confront in the twenty-first century. Progressive movements must seek to both democratize and make more capacious the emerging world state.
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Page 78 Tilly’s analysis of competing institutional bases of power within a national society is also relevant at the global level, where existing powerful national states constitute alternative and potentially challenging bases of power. And his focus on trust networks as important in the processes of democratization – the linking of old or new trust networks into the structures of political democracy – implies that the discourses about global civil society and transnational social movements are focusing on matters that will have great significance for the emergence of a world state and its democratization. Ideas of democracy that are deeply institutionalized in modern societies are being increasingly applied at the global level, raising issues about the democratic nature of existing institutions of global governance. Why are some countries allowed to have weapons of mass destruction while others are not? How have these decisions been made? Are the institutions of global governance legitimate in the eyes of the peoples of the world? Ann Florini (2005) acknowledges the need for democratic global governance processes to address global issues that simply cannot be dealt with by separate national states. Florini contends that global state formation is impossible as well as undesirable and that it would engender huge opposition from all quarters. Instead she sees a huge potential for democratizing global governance through uses of the internet for mobilizing global civil society. Florini and others point out that existing institutions of global governance have a huge democratic deficit. The most important and powerful elective office in the world is that of the US presidency, but only citizens of the USA can vote for contenders for this office. Thus is existing global governance is illegitimate even by its own rules. George Monbiot’s Manifesto for a New World Order (2003) is a reasoned and insightful call for radically democratizing the existing institutions of global governance and for establishing a global peoples’ parliament that would be directly elected by the whole population of the Earth. Monbiot also advocates the establishment of a trade clearinghouse (first proposed by John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods) that would reward national economies with balanced trade, and that would use some of the surpluses generated by those with trade surpluses to invest in those with trade deficits. He also proposes a radical reversal of the World Trade Organization regime, which imposes free trade on the non-core but allows core economies to engage in protectionism – a ‘fair trade organization’ that would help to reduce global development inequalities. Monbiot also advocates abolition of the UN Security Council, and shifting its power over peacekeeping to a General Assembly in which representatives’ votes would be weighted by the population size of their country. And Monbiot advocates global enforcement of a carbon tax and a carbon swap structure that would reduce environmental degradation and reward those who utilize green technologies. Monbiot also points out that the current level of indebtedness of non-core countries could be used as formidable leverage over the world’s largest banks if all the debtors acted in concert. This
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Page 79 could provide the muscle behind a significant wave of global democratization. But in order for this to happen the global justice movement would have to organize a strong coalition of the non-core countries that can overcome the splits that tend to occur between the periphery and the semiperiphery. This is far from being only a utopian fantasy. It is a practical and achievable program for global democracy. Upward sweeps have led to new levels of political integration in the past. What are the prospects for another upward sweep that would result in the formation of a real global state? It is generally the case that increases in organizational complexity and hierarchy require the appropriation and control of greater amounts of energy (Christian 2003). The last big upward sweep of city sizes and colonial empires was greatly facilitated by the harvesting of fossil fuels that stored the sunlight and heat of billions of years of photosynthesis and carbon storage below the surface of the Earth. New energy technologies will eventually emerge that can facilitate new levels of human complexity, but in the mean time we will have to deal with the negative anthropogenic environmental consequences of this colossal harvest of energy, the coming of ‘peak oil’ and the eventual exhaustion of the fossil fuel stores. It would be reckless to bet on a ‘technological fix’ that will arrive in time to allow us to continue to rely on the existing institutions of global governance. Thus the processes of political globalization, the growth of transnational activism, and the potentials for democratizing global governance that we have discussed above are needed to manage the huge issues that are on the immediate horizon: the inter-imperial rivalry between a declining US economic hegemony and the rise of East Asia, the timely achievement of demographic stability as the non-core moves on from an industrial death rate and an agricultural birth rate to the demographic transition, the transition to a sustainable relationship with the biosphere and the geosphere, and the reduction of global inequalities. The global democracy movement constitutes the further expansion of global civil society and the orientation of millions of non-elites toward world politics. This development is very critical of existing institutions of global governance, but at the same time that demands are made for abolition, reform, or replacement of these institutions, the basis of an emergence global multilateral state is reinforced. By forming mobilized constituencies oriented toward world politics this movement of movements provides the basis for further global state formation. And this is the case despite the fact that large numbers of the participants are quite sceptical about the potentially democratic nature of a future global state. By trying to either abolish or democratize global governance institutions the global justice movement actually strengthens the hand of those institution-builders who want to create democratic global instruments that can represent the interests and wills of the world’s whole population. Certainly is more politically palatable to use the term ‘multilateral global governance’ rather than world state. But calling a spade a spade focuses
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Page 80 necessary attention on something that should not be left out of the discussion – the monopoly of legitimate violence. Control of the instruments of violence is a basic element of democracy and is one of the main issues that need to be confronted in moving toward a global democratic order. It is likely that the USA will be ‘the last of the hegemons’ (Taylor 1986). A new economic and political challenger is emerging (e.g. China), but the future role of the economic and political predominance of a single national state will be played within a context of stronger multilateral global governance. The European Union integration process is of great interest and relevance, though by itself it only creates a larger core state that can contend with the USA. As such it changes the distribution of relative power among states but does not much alter the logic of the interstate system or of global governance. But the example of the real emergence of a multinational state apparatus out of a process of peaceful politics, rather than as a result of conquest, holds important lessons, both positive and negative, for the larger process of global state formation. It shows that it can be done. And it shows that popular social movements need to be an important part of the process rather than an after-thought. The current stalemate of the neoliberal elite effort to integrate Europe shows this clearly. Such a process has already been occurring on a global scale. The failure of most social scientists to see the signs of global state formation results from a narrow temporal perspective that does not put the last 200 years in an anthropological framework of comparison and the masking affect of the cycle of hegemonic rise and fall. The current phase is one of decentralization with the decline of US hegemony. The policies and rhetoric of deregulation and governmental devolution, and other trends toward less centralization of control over technology make it difficult to perceive the long-term trend toward global state formation. But the twenty-first century will see much more multilateral global governance in response to the huge problems that the human species has created for itself. The extent to which this will be a move toward greater democratization depends on those who are struggling for global justice. Notes 1 Our National Science Foundation proposal is online. Available at: http://irows. ucr.edu/research/citemp/globstat/globstatprop.htm 2 We use the term evolution despite its tawdry history. We are talking about sociocultural evolution, not biological evolution and we are well aware that teleology and progress need to be washed out of the concept of evolution before it can be scientifically useful (Sanderson 1990, 2007). 3 The idea of the Central System is derived from David Wilkinson’s (1987) definition of ‘Central Civilization’. It spatially bounds a system in terms of a set of allying and fighting states, and the Central System (or Political-Military Network) is the one that emerged in Mesopotamia with the birth of cities and states, then merged with the Egyptian system around 1500 BC and subsequently engulfed the rest of the Earth. Because it is an expanding system its spatial boundaries change over time.
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Page 81 4 There were a few instances in which new core-wide empires were formed by internal revolt (e.g. the Akkadian Empire, the Mamluk Empire) or conquest by peripheral marchers (e.g. the Mongol Empire), but by far the majority of new empires were the work of semiperipheral marcher conquests. 5 But, as with Mann, the notion of systemic world historical evolution is absent. Immanuel Wallerstein’s (2000, 1984) claim that capitalism, once it had become predominant in the long sixteenth century, exhibited cycles and trends but remained basically the same system for hundreds of years, is used by Sassen as a straw man in contrast to her sequential transformations of world scale logics. She largely ignores Giovanni Arrighi’s model of the evolution of ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’ and there is no discussion of hegemonic rise and fall as a process that both repeats and evolves, though the tale of the hegemons (Dutch, British, America) is told as so many different cases of national development along with the French and the Germans. References Algaze, G. (1993) The Uruk World-System , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anderson, D. G. (1994) The Savannah River Chiefdoms , Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Anderson, E. N. and Chase-Dunn, C. (2005) ‘The rise and fall of great powers’, in Christopher Chase-Dunn and E. N. Anderson (eds) The Historical Evolution of WorldSystems, London: Palgrave. Arrighi, G. (1994) The Long Twentieth Century , London: Verso. Arrighi, G., Hopkins, T. K. and Wallerstein, I. (1989) Antisystemic Movements, London: Verso. Barr, K., Lio, S., Schmitt, C., Carlson, A., Lawrence, K., Krause, J., Hsu, Y., ChaseDunn, C. and Reifer, T.E. (2006) ‘Global Conflict and Elite Integration in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries’, IROWS Working Paper #27. Online. Available: http:// irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows27/irows27.htm (accessed: 16 February 2008). Benton, L. (2002) Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400– 1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bergesen, A. and Schoenberg, R. (1980) ‘Long waves of colonial expansion and contraction 1415–1969’, in A. Bergesen (ed.) Studies of the Modern World-System , New York: Academic Press. Boswell, T. and Chase-Dunn, C. (2000) The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism: Toward Global Democracy , Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner. Bunker, S. and Ciccantell, P. (2004) Globalization and the Race for Resources , Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Buzan, B. and Little, R. (2000) International Systems and World History , New York: Oxford University Press. Chase-Dunn, C., Alvarez, A., Inoue, H., Niemeyer, R., Carlson, A., Fierro, B. and Lawrence, K. (2006) ‘Upward Sweeps of Empire and City Growth Since the Bronze Age’, IROWS Working Paper #22. Online. Available: http://irows.ucr.edu/ papers/irows22/irows22.htm (accessed: 16 February 2008). Chase-Dunn, C., Reifer, T., Jorgenson, A. and Lio, S. (2005) ‘The U.S. trajectory: a quantitative reflection’, Sociological Perspectives 48(2): 233–54 Chase-Dunn, C., Kawano, Y. and Brewer, B. (2000) ‘Trade Globalization since 1795: waves of integration in the world-system’, American Sociological Review 65: 77–95.
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Page 82 Chase-Dunn, C. and Podobnik, B. (1995) ‘The next world war: world-system cycles and trends’, Journal of World-Systems Research 1:6. Online. Available: http://jwsr. ucr.edu/archive/vol1/v1_n6.php (accessed: 16 February 2008). Christian, D. (2003) Maps of Time, Berkeley: University of California Press. Fletcher, R. (1995) The Limits of Settlement Growth , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Florini, A. (2005) The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running A New World Order, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Goldfrank, W. L. (1999) ‘Beyond hegemony’, in V. Bornschier and C. Chase-Dunn (eds) The Future of Global Conflict , London: Sage. Graber, R. B. (2004) ‘Is a world state just a matter of time?: a population-pressure alternative’, Cross-Cultural Research 38(2): 147–61. Hobsbawm, E. (1994) The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991, London: Abacus. Kaldor, M. (2003) Global Civil Society: An Answer to War, Cambridge: Polity Press. Linebaugh, P. and Rediker, M. (2000) The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic , Boston, MA: Beacon. McMichael, P. (2004) Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective , Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge. Mann, M. (1993) The Sources of Social Power, Volume 2: The Rise of Classes and nation-states, 1760–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Modelski, G. (2003) World Cities: –3000 to 2000 , Washington, DC: Faros 2000 Monbiot, G. (2003) Manifesto for a New World Order , New York: New Press. Murphy, C. (1994) International Organization and Industrial Change: Global Governance since 1850, New York: Oxford. Robinson, W. R. (2004) A Theory of Global Capitalism, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sanderson, S. K. (2007) Evolutionism and Its Critics, Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Sanderson, S. K. (1990) Social Evolutionism , Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Sassen, S. (2006) Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Silver, B. (2003) Forces of Labor , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Taagepera, R. 1997 ‘Expansion and contraction patterns of large polities: context for Russia’, International Studies Quarterly 41(3): 475–504. Taagepera, R. (1979) ‘Size and duration of empires: growth-decline curves, 600 B.C. to 600 A.D’, Social Science History 3(3–4): 115–38. Taagepera, R. (1978a) ‘Size and duration of empires: systematics of size’, Social Science Research 7: 108–27. Taagepera, R. (1978b) ‘Size and duration of empires: growth-decline curves, 3000 to 600 B.C.’, Social Science Research 7: 180–96. Tarrow, S. (2005) ‘The Dualities of Transnational Contention: “Two Activist Solitudes” or a New World Altogether?’, Mobilization 10(1): 53–72. Taylor, P. (1986) The Way the Modern World Works: Global Hegemony to Global Impasse, New York: Wiley. Tilly, C. (2007) Democracy , New York: Cambridge University Press. Turchin, P. (2003) Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
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Page 83 Wallerstein, I. (2000) The Essential Wallerstein, New York: New Press. Wallerstein, I. (1984) ‘The three instances of hegemony in the history of the capitalist world-economy’, in G. Lenski (ed.) Current Issues and Research in Macrosociology , International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology, Vol. 37. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Wilkinson, D. (1987) ‘Central civilization’, Comparative Civilizations Review 17: 31–59.
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Page 85 Part II Global authority Finance, health, and food
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Page 87 5 The US Treasury and the re-emergence of global finance David Sarai Many accounts of globalization/financialization tend to suggest that financial markets have both outgrown states and constrained states, limiting the autonomy of macroeconomic policy. However, these explanations are problematic as they fail to recognize the uneven and highly hierarchical quality of the global financial order. Further, some states are more privileged within this uneven financial order than others. Most significantly, the USA, which stands at the apex of the global financial order, has been able to run both massive current account and budget deficits with little if any constraint. This ability of the USA to run such deficits is not despite the expansion of global financial markets but precisely because of the development of these expansive markets. In fact, it is these global markets which allow the USA to draw in capital from all over the world. Moving beyond this apparent paradox of the world’s sole superpower as the world’s largest debtor requires understanding the unique power of the USA in the global financial sphere. The USA does not simply rely on coercive force but also derives a certain ‘structural power’ from the global economy.1 This more indirect, diffuse form of power tends to be generated by the central position that the USA plays within the structure of the global economy. However, this structural power is also intimately connected to the US influence over the construction of frameworks/rules/institutions which provide the basic parameters of the global economy. It is important to recognize then that the US state itself has been intimately involved in the construction of the global financial system. While this point has been made in much of the IPE literature, what has been too little examined is the specific role that the key financial centres of the US state apparatus have played in this push for global finance. This chapter explores the relationship between the US Treasury and the internationalization of US financial markets. The Treasury has typically been portrayed as a national institution pushing forward financial globalization in order to further the interests of US financial services firms. In contrast, I argue that the relationship between the US Treasury and financial globalization is more complex. In virtue of both its position within the political apparatus of the state and its position within the market framework, the US Treasury came to play a key intermediary role
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Page 88 within global financial markets. The USA then is not simply externally related to global financial markets, but has been integral to such markets, thus creating a reinforcing dynamic between the structural power of capital and the structural power of the US state. The first part of this chapter looks at the idea of a Wall Street–Treasury–IMF complex and discusses how such an instrumental understanding of the Treasury fails to adequately capture the Treasury’s larger role in the global economy. The second part puts forward a theoretical framework centred around the concept of structural power which shows how the Treasury is integrally related to the global financial order. Particular emphasis is placed on the way in which the US Treasury market is internationalized in the 1980s and the Treasury’s subsequent global management role in the 1990s. The state and the globalization of finance in the post-Bretton Woods era The literature on financial globalization has tended to overlook the role played by the Treasury. This is not surprising given that a great deal of the emphasis has been on how financial markets have outgrown territorial boundaries and become seemingly autonomous. These globalized financial markets have come to be seen as disciplining states’ economic policies (Friedman 1999; Greider 1997). Capital inflows reward market liberalization while capital flight punishes any state policies which harm shortterm profitability. The suggestion is that the economic logic of the market ‘unbound’ has come to predominate over the political authority of states. Such interpretations tend to set up a clear dichotomy between the de-territorializing market and the seemingly outmoded territorial state. Alternative interpretations which trace out the historical development of the contemporary financial order stress that states play a key role in the globalization of finance (Helleiner 1994; Pauly 1997). This is an important corrective as it showed that certain states had made key decisions which led to the re-emergence of global finance during the 1970s in the context of a broad international crisis of capitalist accumulation (see Harvey 2005). During this same period, states had worked toward developing new multilateral regulatory frameworks to accommodate and support rapidly growing global financial activities. In fact, industrialized states’ active crisis management role via the IMF during the debt crisis in the early 1980s was key to deepening the global financial system. It also is quite evident that the USA, in particular, played a major part in expanding the global financial system. This effort by the USA has, in large part, been attributed to domestic pressures including the lobbying efforts of large US financial services corporations. What is not clear is the social relations which connect key financial centres within the US state apparatus, such as the Treasury, with the wider financial sphere – both within the USA and globally. In much of the IPE literature, the state is simply treated as a unitary actor. This abstracted
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Page 89 conception of the state makes it difficult to see exactly how financial interests are able to have their interests represented within the political process. On the other hand, the literature on US international economic policy-making that does discuss the institutional dynamics within the state apparatus spends very little time on the intricacies of the development of global financial markets (Cohen 2000). As such, the Treasury has remained on the periphery of much of the literature. The Wall Street–Treasury–IMF complex The exception to this general oversight has been the development of the concept of a Wall Street–Treasury–IMF complex (WTIC). The term was originally coined to explain the aggressive US stance on financial liberalization throughout the 1990s and particularly during the Asian financial crises (Wade and Veneroso 1998a,b). The US Treasury had pushed for capital account liberalization and reform of domestic financial systems as key conditions for IMF assistance programs to countries such as South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand. At the same time, the Treasury had actively blocked alternative plans for resolving the crisis, including Japan’s proposal for an Asian Monetary Fund. This drive for financial liberalization was somewhat perverse given that the economic success of the Asian Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) had been predicated on relatively closed financial systems. Furthermore, these reforms did little to stem the crisis since liberalization made the afflicted countries more susceptible to massive outflows of foreign capital. The WTIC is not restricted to the immediate Asian crisis; it covers the more general relationship among the US international institutions and the US financial services sector. Although the concept is somewhat undeveloped, there are several different perspectives on the particular connections between the Treasury and Wall Street that can be grouped under the WTIC. First, there is the notion that the Treasury has an inherent ideological affinity with the interests of Wall Street (Stiglitz 2003). Certainly, the Treasury has been a consistent champion of free market ideology within the US state. This can be traced to the Treasury’s lead role in the development of the ‘Washington Consensus’, which involved structural economic reforms (e.g. highly restrictive monetary policy, balanced budgets, austerity programs, privatization of the public sector, and other policies which enhanced market efficiency) imposed on the global South through the lending programs of the IMF and World Bank. Financial liberalization was a key part of these reforms, as it was a way in which to re-establish market-based price signals in the allocation of domestic investment and subjected states’ budgets to market discipline. These policies conformed with the interests of Wall Street banks which have been heavily exposed to countries from the global South afflicted by financial crises. Yet this perspective suggests that the Treasury and IMF ‘truly’ believed that their policies were the best way of resolving financial
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Page 90 crises based on a zealous faith in an unobstructed global free market. This however seems a rather weak connection and is somewhat indistinguishable from the wider influence of neoliberal ideology. A second perspective suggests a more direct relationship between Wall Street and the Treasury. The argument is that the WTIC resembles a type of elite complex similar to that of the military industrial complex (Bhagwati 2004). Like the defence industry, it is often believed that economic power on Wall Street is concentrated in a fairly select number of financial services firms with global operations such as Goldman Sachs or Citigroup. It seems quite plausible then that such concentrated economic power would have privileged access to political power and specifically state institutions responsible for the financial sector such as the Federal Reserve and Treasury. This can be understood in terms of ‘agency capture’ as the government agencies responsible for overseeing and regulating a particular sector tend to take on and promote the interests of that sector (Earle Vass Johnson 1983). The US Treasury has been very attentive to the health of US banks which have been overextended abroad during financial crises since this has an immediate relevance to the soundness of the domestic US financial system. It has also been noted that there are numerous cases of Treasury officials being drawn from the ranks of Wall Street firms and former Treasury officials moving into key positions of these financial firms (Bhagwati 2004).2 This circulation of key personnel reinforces the Wall Street–Treasury relationship and provides the basis for the development of a common ideological framework such as that which developed around the desirability of capital account liberalization. A third perspective highlights the direct financial incentives which link together the WTIC. This has been the emphasis of many critics who charge that the Treasury’s push for financial liberalization was actually designed to enhance the profits of large US financial services firms (Wade and Veneroso 1998a,b). It has allowed these firms to expand to new markets where their large size and global reach gives them a decisive advantage, particularly in countries with relatively underdeveloped financial systems. As in the case of the Asian crisis, the Treasury has been particularly aggressive with countries such as South Korea or Japan whose banking systems had tended to shut out US firms. Critics point out that while this did boost potential profits for US financial firms, it exacerbated global financial instability. These same financial firms have been able to contribute vast sums to both of the major political parties during presidential races. A fourth perspective points to a more indirect economic connection underpinning the WTIC that is tied up with a theory of hegemonic decline (Arrighi 1994; Brenner 2002). It points to a secular decline in the profit share of US manufacturing firms in the face of stiff foreign competition. In contrast to the waning US industrial hegemony, there has been a corresponding rise in the profit share of US financial services firms and a more general
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Page 91 financialization of the US economy. This simply represents an increased circulation of ‘fictitious capital’ and cannot ultimately resolve problems such as overproduction that plague the global economy (Harvey 2003:114, 139–43). Nevertheless, due to the increase in importance of the US financial sector within the US economy, the Treasury has come to represent the interests of the financial sector in order to preserve the position of the USA within the global economy. The emphasis is placed on the US Treasury’s exchange rate policy. Specifically, the strong dollar policy throughout much of the 1990s enhanced the global weight of the US financial sector and led to the dramatic expansion of US financial markets. While this suggests quite a different explanation for the alignment of the WTIC, once this relationship had been established the Treasury seems to have directly catered to Wall Street’s interests. Such a structural explanation is then not so far removed from some of the other perspectives on the WTIC which suggest a direct linkage. Problematizing an instrumentalist conception of the Wall Street–Treasury relationship Although these conceptions of the WTIC provide some insight into the Treasury’s role within the global economy, they have some serious limitations. They tend to suggest that the Treasury simply acts to promote the interests of the US financial community and, more widely, the internationally oriented sectors of the US business community. This leans toward an instrumentalist conception of the state, whereby the Treasury is understood as a political extension of Wall Street. This is not to suggest that the Treasury does not sometimes represent the interests of the US banks and the financial services sector for capital account liberalization. It is important to recognize that the US Treasury at times has run into serious conflict with the interests of Wall Street. For example, in 1987 the Treasury Department, concerned by revenue losses created by offshore tax havens, terminated a tax treaty with the Dutch Antilles. This created a furore in the financial community which used the island as an important conduit to the international bond market. The Treasury did back down, instituting an exemption for Eurobonds; however, this was not done simply to pander to the interests of the financial community but because the entire US bond market, including the US Treasury market, had become destabilized. One should also keep in mind that the US financial community is itself not always united or coherent in its policy preferences. This was certainly true for much of the 1980s and 1990s in the area of banking reform. Major commercial banks, often supported by the Treasury, were pushing for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall legislation which prevented them from expanding into securities markets. Yet, major investment banks, many with close ties to the Treasury, were keen to keep in place these provisions as they provided protection from increased competition.
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Page 92 Perhaps most significantly the WTIC is problematic insofar as much of the Treasury’s operations have garnered little significant interest or concerted lobbying by the US financial community. This is true of some of the more mundane day-to-day domestic affairs of the Treasury, but it is also true of some key policy decisions. Indeed, it is striking that the US financial community was really not involved in the decision to abandon fixed exchange rates in 1971 which is arguably the most important policy move to emerge from the Treasury in the later half of the twentieth century (Odell 1982). As well, the financial community was not centrally involved in the process surrounding the negotiation of the Plaza and Louvre Accords by the Treasury in the 1980s (Destler and Henning 1989; Henning 1999).3 It is therefore quite difficult to explain the Treasury’s role simply as directed by the interests of the Wall Street financial community. Yet, there clearly is an important connection between Wall Street along with the wider financial sphere and the US Treasury. Understanding this relationship is somewhat difficult due to the diverse and complex role that the Treasury plays within the US state. The Treasury’s operations encompass economic policymaking, taxation, debt management, financial administration, the production of money/coinage, and the regulatory oversight of the banking system. While other departments have some specialized area of focus such as defence or agriculture, the Treasury’s work touches every aspect of the state’s operation. What then is the basis of the special connection that the Treasury has with the financial community? The Treasury’s central responsibility is financing the US state through both taxation and borrowing. While the Treasury does have a major role in tax policy, its influence in this area is shared with numerous other institutions. On the other hand, its role in debt management is far more exclusive. It is this part of the Treasury’s operations which comes into close contact with the financial market as the Treasury floats government securities within the market. In fact, the Treasury becomes part of the market since it is enmeshed in a cooperative/competitive dynamic with other participants in the market. Of course, the Treasury is not just simply another participant in the market but has a degree of autonomy arising from the political authority of the state. In the international sphere, the Treasury’s main role is maintaining and managing the international standing of the US dollar. This also connects Wall Street with the US state/Treasury at the global level. Indeed, the reciprocal relation between the US state’s role ensuring the dominance of the dollar and the predominant position of Wall Street as the centre of global finance each reinforces the other (Gowan 1999). This international role however cannot be thought of as completely distinct or separate from the Treasury’s close relationship to domestic financial markets which are themselves global in scope. It is necessary then to understand the manner in which the Treasury’s intertwined relationship with financial markets shapes the Treasury’s role in managing the dollar globally.
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Page 93 Structural power of finance and the US Treasury The relationship between the US Treasury and the wider financial sphere has the effect of generating a certain structural power for the US state while at the same time reinforcing the structural power of capital. The concept of structural power points to a diffuse, indirect form of social power – power that is mediated through social institutions and practices (Gill and Law 1993; Strange 1996). Insofar as social institutions consist of a complex of interconnected social relations and practices, structural power is less visible than the power directly exercised by one social actor to force a change of action on the part of another actor. Structural power can be understood in two ways. On one hand, it can be understood as the ‘non-intentional’ power that specific actors have within a prevailing framework or set of institutions (Guzzini 1993). Yet, it can also be understood as the power to shape and define the rules, frameworks or institutions in which other social actors participate. The first understanding of structural power is particularly applicable to the power of capital within the framework of the market. The market institution allows for coordination among many competing capitals with little external organization or management. This is especially true in the case of an ‘investment strike’ or ‘capital flight’ whereby capital can discipline the state and other social actors (Gill and Law 1993). Such a phenomenon might appear uncoordinated insofar as it is not organized or managed; however, it is, in fact, coordinated, but this coordination is inherent in the very institution of the market. The second understanding of structural power indicates that the market is not a fixed institution but rather a dynamic set of practices that are continually being constructed. In particular, the state plays a key role in defining the basic rules and parameters of the market. However, the state cannot simply dictate ‘the rules of the game’. Instead, the state’s ability to set rules or frameworks depends on actors’ willingness to recognize and participate in these frameworks. Crafting institutions acceptable to social actors requires an interactive process between the state and these actors which draws together both understandings of structural power (Seabrooke 2001). Drawing together these two notions of structural power might then be understood in terms of an organic relationship as the state/market interpenetrate one another. This recalls Gramsci’s notion of an integral state which looks beyond the formal but purely analytical separation between state and market to look at the complex interrelation that ties these two spheres together (Gramsci 1971:261–3). It is important to understand that in this regard the state is not primarily reliant on coercion. Instead, the state is able to draw on a degree of consent insofar as it is able to interpenetrate civil society and position itself in such a way as to reconcile the universal public interest with the more restricted interest of the leading capitalist class. While the coercive apparatus of the state armours this consent, the relations of civil society and the market serve to reinforce or fortify the state. This
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Page 94 understanding of the integral state is very much the context for Gramsci’s discussion of state financial policies and debt in certain notes on ‘Americanism’ (Gramsci 1971:293). What intrigues Gramsci in these passages is the way in which the state’s financial channel (i.e. debt) becomes a refuge for savings in the context of the financial crisis associated with the Great Depression. With this concentration of capital, state financial policies intermediate financial flows and private investment, giving the state a key role in the financial system and the reorganization of the wider economy. However, Gramsci’s focus on the development of the national state, the breakdown of the international economy and the shift toward economic nationalism is far removed from today’s global capitalism. The understanding of the integral state must then be revised to capture the current historical conjuncture in which global finance plays such a prominent role. While markets and civil society have expanded beyond territorial borders, the world is still politically divided into territorially defined states. Nevertheless, through the concept of the integral state , it is possible to see how the social relations of the state are enmeshed with the globalized market and civil society. While the state still has a prominent national aspect, there is also this internationalized aspect which also draws the state into a set of social relations within other states (Panitch 1994). In tracing out how structural power operates through this myriad of social relations, it is important to move away from a reified view of a homogenous and unified global market to recognize the uneven, overlapping, and hierarchical character of global markets. The structural power of the state then depends on the extent to which it is able to penetrate these social relations and influence the organization of the global economy. This in turn depends on the state being able to balance the imperatives of transnational capital with the broader development of the global economy, including the domestic US economy and the domestic economy of other states. US government debt in the global finance order Conceptualizing structural power in terms of an integral state allows us to look at how the US Treasury is enmeshed within global financial markets. The Treasury is at once part of the political apparatus of the state but also the particular branch of the state apparatus that is part of the market. At the heart of this interaction between the state and the financial sphere is the government debt market. The US Treasury market is the largest, deepest, and most liquid financial market in the world (Dupont and Sack 1999). As of 2006, the market consisted of US$4.84 trillion of securities with on average US$531 billion transactions carried out by primary dealers daily.4 The USA derives a certain power from its debtor position in the market. US government debt is not simply a liability for the US government: it has much wider significance within the global financial structure. Treasury securities are secure, highly liquid assets that are integral to the operation of financial markets.
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Page 95 In fact, researchers attached to the IMF capital markets section identified several functions played by Treasury securities (Schinasi et al. 2001). Treasury securities are used to manage firms’ liquidity and therefore play an important role in risk management. Treasury securities also provide a benchmark for interest rates and thus play an important role in hedging interest-rate risk. As such, the Treasury market extends far beyond the market for government debt into all other financial markets, providing a common point of reference for the entire global financial system as well as for all business enterprises operating on a transnational scale. However, the Treasury market also is important in facilitating the circulation and mobility of capital. Both financial firms and business enterprises operating on a transnational scale are able to quickly move in and out of the highly secure Treasury market. In this manner, such tremendous liquidity creates a form of global financial intermediation through the Treasury market. It might then be suggested that it is not simply a matter of exorbitant privilege which allows the USA to finance massive budget and current account deficits, but rather it is this intermediary function which is integral to global capitalism. At the same time, insofar as this intermediation enhances the mobility of capital, it underpins the structural power of capital on the global level. This structural power of capital, rather than being external, is integral to the US state. Treasury securities are central to global finance because of the institutional structure of the Treasury market. In contrast, the Japanese government bond market as well as the total combined government bond markets of all the Euro member countries approach the size of the Treasury market, yet none of these government bond markets can match the level of sophistication and development of the Treasury market (see OECD 2002; Schinasi and Smith 1998). Furthermore, the Treasury market is a fully internationalized financial market with a 24-hour trading centre in New York, London, and Tokyo in rank order of importance (Fleming 1997). The Treasury is highly enmeshed within the financial market. Instead of restricting the market, the Treasury worked toward debt management techniques that are adjusted to the dynamics of US financial markets. The Treasury works to maintain an orderly and predictable market, not simply to boost US financial markets, but to provide the best terms for financing the US state. In this manner, the Treasury concurrently cooperates with market participants while simultaneously competing within the market. The international scope of the market gives US financial firms distinct advantages globally as their own institutional structure and expertise have been shaped by this interactive dynamic with the US Treasury. By drawing in capital from all over the globe, the US Treasury market allows foreign capital to bypass uneven domestic financial systems, thus drawing this foreign capital into the interactive dynamic with the integral US state. In this manner, the US state represents all global capital though US capital has a clear advantage within the institutional framework of the state. This relationship then goes beyond the narrow separation between state and society, economics and politics. The
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Page 96 USA is positioned at the centre of the global financial system due to the fact that the Treasury’s credit practices serve to universalize monetary relations, providing an encompassing abstract form for capital. This abstract form enhances the structural power of capital and subjects other states to the discipline of capital markets. The US Treasury’s management of the global economy – the Bretton Woods era The US Treasury had been the key framer of the Bretton Woods system in 1945 which sought to restrict international finance in order to allow for more independent national economic policy-making despite strong opposition from the New York banking community (Helleiner 1994). Rather than pressure from the financial community, it was the increasingly serious balance of payments problems the USA faced after the European return to convertibility in 1958 that motivated the Treasury to begin to push for financial liberalization. Treasury officials such as Robert Roosa (1967) pointed to capital outflows as a major source of this balance of payments deficit. This was due in large part to the burgeoning role of New York as a financial centre which European governments, companies, and US multinationals abroad were increasingly calling upon for financing. In an extensive study of foreign capital markets, the Treasury determined that European markets were undeveloped and overly restrictive which resulted in increased financial demand being displaced to US markets (US Department of the Treasury 1964). The USA began to push within the OECD for greater liberalization of domestic financial markets in Europe. However, the Treasury also put in place a number of capital controls such as the Interest Equalization Tax in order to discourage further outflows. This move, far from advancing the perceived interests of the US financial community, actually damaged New York as an international financial centre. However, despite some initial misgivings, the Treasury became quite willing to allow US banks the freedom to move to London in order to escape these restrictions while also taking some pressure off the US balance of payments situation. This along with the increasingly tight credit conditions within the US in the late sixties pushed US banks offshore. While only four major national banks had significant international operations in 1960, by the end of the decade, over 59 banks had sought to internationalize their operations (US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency 1969). The US Treasury’s management of the global economy – the post-Bretton Woods era With the US decision to abandon the dollar-gold peg in 1971, the immediate pressure on US balance of payments was removed as the dollar was devalued through the mechanism of international foreign exchange markets. Helleiner
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Page 97 (1994) points out that in this manner, the USA drew on its structural power to adjust through the marketplace instead of via multilateral negotiation. Rather than return to a revised fixed exchange rate system, the US Treasury increasingly came to be a staunch advocate of the flexible exchange rate system. The Treasury also maintained a largely non-interventionist exchange rate policy in accordance with the stance that currency valuation determined by foreign exchange markets tended to be the best representation of the underlying economic fundamentals.5 The Treasury also encouraged the development of private international financial flows. Under the fixed exchange rates of the 1960s, Treasury officials had complained bitterly about the speculative nature of private financial flows which put pressure on the dollar’s fixed rate of exchange. In contrast, under the flexible exchange rates, these markets became the key arbiters of economic policy. The Treasury not only defended the Euromarkets from accusations by the Europeans of its negative inflationary impact but also, in the wake of the oil crisis, promoted the Euromarket as the primary channel for petrodollar recycling rather than an expanded multilateral mechanism. At the same time, the Treasury removed the US capital controls program and began to press for the removal of foreign countries’ capital controls. This was important because capital inflows to the USA were seen as an important source of credit for overly tight US financial markets. As well, the rapid development of private financial markets locked in the flexible exchange rate system as such private markets were seen as antithetical to a fixed-rate system, at least in the absence of significant capital controls. The rapid development of international financial markets was also intertwined with the internationalization of the US Treasury market itself. In the 1960s, by far the vast majority of foreign holdings of US government securities were held by foreign governments as official reserves. Under the fixed exchange rate system, these increased reserve holdings were seen as a burdensome way of cooperating with the USA to defend the dollar’s fixed value. In the 1970s, countries vastly expanded their official holdings of US government securities in order to moderate the fluctuation of their currencies against the dollar under the somewhat chaotic new reality of flexible exchange rates. It was in the 1980s that private foreign holdings of US Treasury securities began to rise dramatically during a period of high US interest rates and rapidly expanding fiscal deficits. In fact, fears that US capital markets would be crowded out did not materialize in large part due to this foreign financing. The US Treasury certainly recognized the importance of this foreign financing and even launched a specific foreign-targeted US Treasury security program to encourage this trend (US Department of the Treasury 1984). The liquidity within this market provided the perfect supporting environment for the financial innovation including the expanding use of derivatives. This in turn created the conditions for a broader financialization of the US economy as non-financial US corporations were forced to restructure and emphasize short-term profit growth amidst a wave of mergers
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Page 98 and acquisitions and leveraged buyouts (LBOs) financed in the junk bond market. Much of this foreign capital inflow into the Treasury market came from Japan which ran a significant trade surplus with the USA. This imbalance was seen as a critical issue for American international economic policy-makers and a source of mounting political tension and protectionist pressure within the US. Policy-makers believed that Japan’s economy was shielded by structural barriers that discouraged US imports and foreign investment. From the US Treasury’s perspective, the key issues with Japan were the ‘artificially’ undervalued yen and excess savings, both a result of Japan’s segregated and highly regulated financial system. As such, when the Treasury entered into the ‘yen/dollar talks’ with the Japanese Ministry of Finance in 1983, the central issue was not simply exchange rate adjustment but rather financial liberalization (US Department of the Treasury and Japan Ministry of Finance 1984). This was critical from the Treasury’s perspective for several reasons. First, the liberalization of the financial system and the internationalization of the yen would allow the exchange rate to be influenced more by the international foreign exchange market and, therefore in the Treasury’s view, better reflecting underlying economic fundamentals. Second, liberalization would allow Japanese savings to be reallocated internationally, thereby reducing the advantage of Japanese firms’ exclusive access to low-cost capital for investment. By allowing Japanese funds to flow abroad, some of the excess savings flowed into the USA to offset the growing investment demand (Destler and Henning 1989; Krippner 2003). This liberalization did not narrow the US/Japanese exchange rate differential or the current imbalance but instead contributed to the further appreciation of the US dollar. However, this liberalization did provide a steady flow of foreign capital into the Treasury market and the wider US financial system providing abundant liquidity and under-pinning a wave of financial innovation. While the US Treasury subsequently shifted to coordinated exchange-rate intervention in concert with Japan and Germany with the Plaza and Louvre Accords in order to relieve the pressure of the strong dollar on the US manufacturing sector, the Clinton/Rubin Treasury would resume a strong dollar policy in mid-1990s. This together with a significant effort to reduce the budget deficit created a strong pull for foreign investment flows into the USA. The emphasis on financial liberalization as a strategy for dealing with US bilateral current account deficits would also continue into the late 1980s and 1990s. Much of the emphasis shifted to the East Asian NICs and, in particular, South Korea and Taiwan which were both running significant current account surpluses with the USA. The Treasury again pushed for financial liberalization including the development of accessible domestic money markets. While this certainly would create opportunities for US banks, it was not a key focus for the US financial community in the late 1980s and early 1990s as US banks were actually cutting back international operations in order to strengthen their balance sheets hurt by both the debt crisis in the global
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Page 99 South and the downturn in the US real estate market. Instead, the Treasury emphasized these measures in order to break down structural barriers within these economies and also to develop the financial infrastructure necessary for marketdetermined exchange rates. However, this again did not resolve the US imbalances and also made the NICs vulnerable to massive inflows/ outflows of short-term foreign capital as the Asian financial crisis clearly demonstrated. With the increasingly global reach of US capital markets, the Treasury’s most significant role internationally during the 1990s was that of a financial crisis manager, ensuring the continued reproduction of the global financial order, preserving the value of financial assets thereby preserving both global capital and US structural power. In sharp contrast to the 1980s when the debt crisis in the global South dragged on for almost a decade, under the Clinton administration the Treasury assumed a much more activist role. In particular, Secretary Rubin organized a daring bail out for Mexico during the ‘peso’ crisis of 1995 (Rubin and Weisberg 2003). Recognizing that US banks were heavily exposed due to holdings of short-term Mexican government dollar denominated securities (tesobonos) and the newly signed NAFTA agreement was in jeopardy, Rubin used the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, skirting Congressional approval, to provide the greater portion of the rescue package along with contributions from the IMF and the BIS (Henning 1999). During subsequent financial crises, the Treasury would experiment with a variety of techniques to handle different crises such as ‘bailing-in’ investors by requiring exposed firms to provide emergency financing during a crisis. However, there were several principles that might be discerned underlying all of these efforts. The priority of the Treasury was to prevent systemic breakdown of the international financial order rather than to prevent crises through restrictive measures. This preserves the unabated dynamism driving financial innovation and global financial integration which are so fused with US power. However, such a focus on systemic crisis management tends to allow for future financial crises along with the tremendous social costs such crises unleash. These crises are more likely to occur in the countries of the global South whose financial systems are less integrally related to the global financial order. During the fall out from the Asian financial crisis, a variety of potential proposals for reforming the international financial system emerged (Soederberg 2004). These ranged from a variety of proposals for capital controls to plans to reform or even abolish the IMF. While some of the more radical plans put forward came from countries from the global South, some of these proposals for reform gained traction among European countries. The Treasury attempted to defuse this movement for reform by recognizing the problem of financial instability and developing the more inclusive G20 forum which would include many of the leading countries from the global South. Within this forum, the Treasury promoted instead a series of marketbased reforms. In particular, the notion of a ‘New Financial Architecture’ emerged (Soederberg 2004; Rude 2005). The focus of this proposal was to
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Page 100 prevent ‘breakdowns’ in the markets which were presumed to flow from flaws such as inadequate information or undeveloped market institutions. The emphasis of the reform agenda therefore included measures such as improving market transparency, disseminating codes of conduct and best practices, and extending existing frameworks for international banking regulation/ supervision. For Rude (2005), the extension of the BIS Basel II framework is particularly interesting. At the heart of the Basel II framework lie standards for capital adequacy, requiring a capital reserve determined by the risk weighting of a financial institution’s assets. This system tends to privilege US Treasury securities as risk-less insofar as they are considered among the most secure assets and are backed up by the sophisticated infrastructure that has developed around the Treasury–money market nexus. The Treasury has likely been weakened by a decline in significance within the state apparatus throughout much of the Bush administration’s tenure. The institution took on a secondary role in the ‘War on Terrorism’ and the active global management role which characterized the Rubin/Summers period declined markedly in favour of a more laissez-faire approach. As well, the rapid increase in the budget combined with aggressive tax cuts has reversed the successful deficit reduction of the 1990s. The current decline in the US dollar is somewhat more complex. The fall of the dollar against other major currencies is often taken as a sign of the US state’s growing financial weakness. However, the US has been able to increase export competitiveness, reduce the external value of the debt burden and, at the same time, increase the value of US assets abroad. This might be viewed as testing the limits of the structural power inherent in the global financial order. Structural power perhaps works best when the relationships that created this power are unnoticed as part of the ‘common-sense’ embodied in the day-to-day operation of the economy. The budget deficit (US$248.2 billion in 2006), along with the massive current account deficit (US$178.5 billion in 2007), has called attention to the unequal power dynamics of this financial order and led to growing disquiet about the imbalances within the global economy.6 The US Treasury does seem to have regained some influence after the appointment of Secretary Paulson. The pattern of promoting financial liberalization as a response to bilateral current account deficits seems to have continued to the present. One of the key goals of the Treasury in the recent US–China Strategic Dialogue being led by Paulson is to insist that China liberalize its domestic financial system as part of the necessary shift to market-determined exchange rates. Appearing before the House Ways and Means Committee in May 2007, Treasury Deputy Assistant Secretary, Mark Sobel faced sharp criticism of the Treasury’s unwillingness to act on Chinese exchange rate manipulation. His response emphasized that the Treasury’s key goal is to push the Chinese to further develop domestic financial markets including money markets and a corporate bond market. This will then integrate China’s exchange rate regime with the global financial order. What is less clear is whether this will resolve the drastic imbalances within the global
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Page 101 economy and narrow the glaring US current account deficit. The structural power of global finance continues to underpin US financial strength but aspects of this highly interdependent system are nonetheless fragile as demonstrated by the recent global credit crisis which exploded in the summer of 2007. The Treasury’s efforts organizing the creation of the Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit (M-LEC) in an attempt to stem the crisis, suggests a return to a more active global management role (Mollenkamp et al. 2007).7 Nevertheless, it is not yet apparent whether the contraction in global credit markets has been resolved. Prolonged financial instability could likely weaken Treasury’s position within the G7 and other multilateral forums which will inevitably review the regulatory structure of global financial markets in light of this latest market failure. Conclusion The foregoing analysis has suggested that the US Treasury be understood, not as wholly distinct from global financial markets but instead, as integral to the globalization of finance. This then shifts away from explaining the Treasury’s role in encouraging globalization as simply a function of pressure from US financial services firms. The US Treasury has become part of the global financial system as the US financial markets in which it was embedded have become global in scope. This insight is an important element in understanding the future trajectory of the global economy and the continuing relevance of American power. Notes 1 Strange (1996) defines structural power as ‘the power to shape and determine the structures of the global political economy within which other states, their political institutions, their economic enterprises, and (not least) their scientists and other professional people have to operate’. 2 While Bhagwati points to the fairly evident circulation of officials between Wall Street and the Treasury; this interlinkage has not been mapped out in any detailed fashion. 3 The 1985 Plaza Accord was the result of negotiations within the G5 to jointly coordinate a devaluation of the US dollar vis-à-vis the yen and the Deutsche Mark. The negations were driven by increasing protectionist sentiment within the USA and demands to improve trade competitiveness of US domestic manufacturers which had suffered under the high dollar exchange rate of the early 1980s. The Louvre Agreement of 1987 involved coordination to re-stabilize the dollar after a 56 per cent fall in the dollar/yen exchange rate. 4 Figure taken from Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s primary dealer statistics and the Treasury Bulletin. 5 There have been some notable exceptions to this policy of non-intervention such as the active defense of the dollar by the Treasury in the late 1970s and the extensive exchange rate intervention that surrounded the Plaza and Louvre Accords. However, the Treasury has justified these instances in terms of correcting ‘disorderly markets’.
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Page 102 6 Figures taken from Economic Report of the President 2007 and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. 7 The M-LEC proposal fell apart in late 2007. Many market participants expressed doubt as to whether this fund could really stabilize markets given the limited capital available to the fund drawn from commercial banks many of which already faced capital shortages. The Treasury was quite unwilling to provide any suggestion of providing government funds for the M-LEC to avoid any suggestion of a government ‘bail-out’ for the US financial sector. This suggests that in this instance the USA was unable to fully utilize its structural power to reinforce the market due to domestic political considerations. References Arrighi, G. (1994) The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times , London: Verso. Bhagwati, J. N. (2004) In Defense of Globalization , New York: Oxford University Press. Brenner, R. (2002) The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy , London: Verso Cohen, S. D. (2000) The Making of United States International Economic Policy: Principles, Problems, and Proposals for Reform , 5th edn, New York: Praeger. Destler, I. M. and Henning, C. R. (1989) Dollar Politics: Exchange Rate Policymaking in the United States, Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics. Dupont, D. and Sack, B. (1999) ‘The Treasury securities market: overview and recent developments’, Federal Reserve Bulletin (85): 786–806. Earle Vass Johnson, E. (1983) ‘Agency “capture”: the “revolving door” between regulated industries and their regulating agency’, University of Richmond Law Review 18(1): 95–119. Fleming, M. J. (1997) ‘The round-the-clock market for U.S. Treasury securities’, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Economic Policy Review 3(2):9–32. Friedman, T. L. (1999) The Lexus and the Olive Tree, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Gill, S. and Law, D. (1993) ‘Global hegemony and the structural power of capital’, in S. Gill (ed.) Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gowan, P. (1999) The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance, London and New York: Verso. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith (eds), New York: International Publishers. Greider, W. (1997) One World, Ready or Not: the Manic Logic of Global Capitalism , New York: Simon & Schuster. Guzzini, S. (1993) ‘Structural power: the limits of neorealist power analysis’, International Organization 47(3): 443–78. Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism , Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism , Oxford: Oxford University Press. Helleiner, E. (1994) States and the Reemergence of Global Finance: from Bretton Woods to the 1990s , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Henning, C.R. (1999) The Exchange Stabilization Fund: Slush Money or War Chest, Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics. Krippner, G. (2003) ‘The Fictitious Economy: Financialization, the State, and
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Page 103 Contemporary Capitalism’, unpublished dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Mollenkamp, C., Solomon D., Sidel R. and Bauerein V. (2007) ‘Gordian knot: how london created a snarl in global markets’, Wall Street Journal 18 October: A1. Odell, J.S. (1982) U.S. International Monetary Policy: Markets, Power, and Ideas as Sources of Change, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. OECD (2002) OECD Public Debt Markets: Trends and Recent Structural Changes , Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Panitch, L. (1994) ‘Globalisation and the state’, in R. Miliband and L. Panitch (eds) Socialist Register 1994: Between Globalism and Nationalism, London: Merlin Press. Pauly, L. W. (1997) Who Elected the Bankers?: Surveillance and Control in the World Economy , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Roosa, R. V. (1967) The Dollar and World Liquidity , New York: Random House. Rubin, R. E. and Weisberg, J. (2003). Dealing with an Uncertain World: Making Decisions on Wall Street and in Washington , New York: Random House. Rude, C. (2005) ‘Role of financial discipline in imperial strategy’, in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds) Socialist Register 2005: The Empire Reloaded , London: Merlin Press. Schinasi, G. J., Kramer, C. F. and Smith, R. T. (2001) ‘Financial Implications of the Shrinking Supply of U.S. Treasury Securities’, IMF Working Paper 01/61:20 March. Online. Available: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/supply/2001/eng/ 032001.pdf (accessed: 17 February 2008). Schinasi, G. J. and Smith, R. T. (1998) ‘Fixed-income Markets in the United States, Europe, and Japan: Some Lessons for Emerging Markets’, IMF Working Paper 98/ 173:1 December. Online. Available: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/ wp98173.pdf (accessed: 17 February 2008). Seabrooke, L. (2001) U.S. Power in International Finance: The Victory of Dividends , New York: Palgrave. Soederberg, S. (2004) The Politics of the New International Financial Architecture: Reimposing Neoliberal Domination in the Global South , London: Zed Books. Stiglitz, J. E. (2003) Globalization and Its Discontents, New York: W. W. Norton. Strange, S. (1996) The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. US Department of the Treasury (1964) A Description and Analysis of Certain European Capital Markets, Washington, DC: U.S. G.P.O. US Department of the Treasury (1984) ‘Registered Securities Targeted to Foreign Investors’, Washington, DC: U.S. G.P.O. US Department of the Treasury and Japan Ministry of Finance (1984) ‘Report on yen/dollar exchange rate issues’, Washington, DC: G.P.O. US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (1969) ‘Annual Report of the Comptroller of the Currency’, Washington, DC: G.P.O. Wade, R. and Veneroso, F. (1998a) ‘The Asian crisis: the high debt model versus the Wall Street-Treasury-IMF complex’, New Left Review I/228: 3–23. Wade, R. and Veneroso, F. (1998b) ‘The gathering world slump and the battle over capital controls’, New Left Review I/231: 13–42.
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Page 104 6 Calling the shots Global networks of trade in vaccines Anna da Silva Immunization stands as one of the most important public health accomplishments to date, having curbed many global epidemics of infectious diseases. Yet annual mortality figures from vaccine preventable diseases reach millions, most deaths occurring in the global South. One of the major impediments to achieving the goal of universal immunization is the limited access to affordable medicines in areas of the world where such diseases are endemic. Vaccines are becoming increasingly less profitable to produce when compared with other pharmaceuticals, while production processes remain complex and product liabilities magnify. The neoliberal global economic policies create additional hurdles for both access to medicines and building up of industrial capacity for pharmaceutical production in the global South. Despite the growing global awareness of vaccine preventable diseases and the impact of the neoliberal policies on global production and trade, international trade in vaccines has not been examined in its own right. In this chapter, I aim to bridge the areas of global health and global trade by examining the changing patterns of trade in vaccines since the onset of the WTO’s 1995 TRIPS Agreement which regulates intellectual property rights in trade. Drawing on the rich traditions of historically informed economic sociology and political economy, I offer a systemic analysis of the vaccine trade structure and reflect on the changes in transnational governance of both global health and global trade in which it is rooted. This chapter is part of a larger project on the changing role of the state and its ability to provide basic healthcare services and here focuses only on the structure of the global vaccine trade. Trade patterns identify countries that export vaccines globally, and capture stratification of countries into tiers of players variously involved in the global trade in vaccines. Documenting vaccine-trade flows allows me to address the issue of structural inequality by providing empirical answers to the following questions: (1) Does the global vaccine trade have a hierarchical structure where some countries occupy dominant positions? (2) Is the hierarchical structure of global vaccine trade stable over time? (3) Does it allow for vertical mobility of individual actors over time? (4) Are there any variations in
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Page 105 intra/interregional trade? (5) What are possible historical reasons for and also the consequences of such a structural arrangement? The next two sections offer a broad overview of the political economy of global public health and the context of neoliberal trade regulations affecting pharmaceutical production. The third part of this chapter briefly introduces network analysis and reports my findings on the structure of global trade in vaccines. Finally, my discussion of the findings offers reflections on who is ‘calling the shots’ on the vaccine scene. Political economy of global public health The neoliberal trade policies have been institutionalized in many countries since the 1970s, with a gradual shift from state-led and nationally managed to globally managed economic growth projects, which redefined development as participation in the world market. McMichael (2004) refers to this globally managed development as the ‘globalization project’. It entails adoption of neoliberal policies which aim to restructure economies and societies in terms of trade liberalization and privatization. The globalization project relies on a distinct institutional structure of global governance, which is comprised of multilateral interventions in state policy executed through transnational corporate and political elite structures, aiming to institute a global free-trade regime. In addition to governments and the Bretton Woods institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, the regional free trade agreements such as the NAFTA, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and numerous private elite formations such as the G7 constitute the global governance structure of neoliberal capitalism. The gradual institutionalization of the globalization project since the mid-1970s also reverberates in global health governance, inciting careful investigations of the changes in the balance of power between the state and privately held capital. Gereffi’s (1983) examination of steroid industry in Mexico shows that TNCs undermined the Mexican state and its project of strengthening a domestic pharmaceutical industry. Despite access to abundant raw material and global prominence of a technologically sophisticated producer (Syntex), the Mexican state was strong-armed by foreign control (both the US government and the TNCs) into favouring the foreign producers and surrendering control of steroid industry. Barlow (2002) offers an account of the erosion of healthcare services globally and in Canada in particular, under market opening policies commandeered by global financial institutions (such as the IMF and the WB) and powerful lobby groups representing transnational business interests (such as the Coalition of Service Industries in the USA or the European Services Network). Such studies identify the states, private capital, and global institutions as actors involved in the contentious struggle for power over industries and services in national contexts all over the globe, but they place the states at the losing end. In 1974, when the World Health Organization (WHO) launched its
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Page 106 Expanded Programme on Immunization, vaccines were available for the six target diseases (diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio, measles, and TB), but only 5 per cent of the world’s children were immunized against them (Hardon and Blume 2005). By 1990, the WHO (1996) reported that 80 per cent of children under the age of 13 months worldwide were immunized against polio, TB, and measles. And yet, UNICEF estimates that currently approximately 3 million children die each year from vaccine preventable diseases (Leading Edge Editorial 2004). In fact, reduction of child mortality, ‘halting’ and ‘reversing’ the spread of major infectious diseases remain among the goals presented in the UN Millennium Declaration. The pace of progress in improving health services worldwide has been uneven, and accounts of successful alleviation of the diseases’ burden abound alongside records of stagnant rates of improvement, while the elusive goal of universal immunization remains out of reach (World Bank 1993; WHO 2005). More specifically, global and regional trade agreements are increasingly limiting regulatory options available to national governments (Labonte 2004). Yet, there are also strategies and responses aimed to maximize such options. Biehl (2006), for example, documents Brazil’s AIDS policy as a well conceived and coordinated effort of an ‘activist’ state and patient citizenship to redefine both access to medicines and care. Another response to the failings of the neoliberal global order involves the reconceptualization of global health beyond national state regulation. Select international agencies and non-governmental organizations seek to refocus the international community’s attention on social and economic conditions that underpin most of the world’s persisting health problems (Labonte and Torgenson 2005), including pandemics of infectious, communicable and vaccine preventable diseases. Citing increasingly porous borders and growing cross-border activities, such reconceptualizations stress the global nature of public goods such as communicable disease control and assert that many public health goals can no longer be achieved by domestic policy action alone (Kaul and Faust 2001) or even by international efforts which focus narrowly on individual national contexts. It appears that a subtle shift in the emphasis on just what kind of a ‘right’ the right to health is captures the ideological shifts of the last half-century and underscores the accompanying transformations of the major global institutions. When in 1948 the UN ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNUDHR), medical care was recognized as a basic human right (UN 1948, Article 25). Every member state has a duty to defend human rights of its citizens as well as a duty to protect their own ability to ensure such rights against attempts to undermine them. The right to health was placed squarely in the purveyance of the state, while the UN system embodied a supra-national overseer. Creation of the World Health Organization in 1948 embodied international cooperation on health and marked a transition to a new period of international governance in health. The WHO added eliminating communicable diseases to its mandate of containing their spread across borders (Arhin-Tenkorang and Conceicao 2003). National
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Page 107 health authorities remained in control of healthcare and disease control. But by linking official development assistance with the ‘human capital’ approach (Kunitz 2007), the global governance institutions gradually assumed the disciplining authority urging nations to ‘invest’ in health. Investment in health was considered an improvement of human capital, which in turn would increase productivity and ultimately lead to economic development. As the development project unravelled in the 1970s, and a shift to the globalization project ensued, the framing of health not as a basic human right but as an industry to be managed crystallized even further. The 1993 World Bank’s World Development Report , for example, bears a subtitle of Investing in Health, and promises that ‘millions of lives and billions of dollars could be saved’ (World Bank 1993:13). Emphasizing cost effectiveness of select health measures is echoed in WHO’s report on Microeconomics and Health (WHO 2001). Health is reframed as an investment and a commodity, and market rationality is extended into areas of health provision. Completing this ideological shift is the most recent reformulation of global disease management (of infectious and communicable diseases in particular) as a public good. For instance, the authors of the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) Report (2002) believe that such services and protections qualify as ‘modern commons’. Thus, disease control becomes a ‘global public good’, as Inge Kaul, the head of the UNDP’s Office of Development Studies describes: ‘Given the current trend towards increasingly porous borders and growing cross-border activities, many public goods can no longer be achieved through domestic policy action alone and depend on international cooperation’ (Kaul and Faust 2001:870). Unfortunately, as with any ‘commons’, an accompanying ‘tragedy’ plagues infectious disease control as well as vaccine research and development. Public goods are customarily underprovided (Archibugi and Bizarri 2005), and providers of public goods are usually not adequately compensated by the market (Kaul and Faust 2001). And consequently, the role of the state in providing such global public goods needs to be augmented by supranational organizations and entities, or as Cabalerro-Anthony (2006:111) puts it, ‘non-state actors across state boundaries’. This reconceptualization of health places medicines squarely in the ideological domain of the markets. Vaccines, as any other pharmaceutical product, are at the intersection of science/technology and markets; like any other commodity, they cross state borders, carried across by the geopolitical currents of the world economy. But unlike most of the commodities, vaccine trade relies heavily on public procurement from private suppliers, both by individual governments and agencies such as UNICEF (Batson 2005). Additionally, such agencies are not the end users of the vaccines, but rather acquire them for distribution and administration, making vaccine market inherently ‘imperfect’ in economic terms. To paraphrase Lakoff (2006), the one who procures vaccines is not the one who consumes them, and the one who consumes them is often not the one who pays for them. Both of these factors create a unique situation on the demand side of vaccine trade, by
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Page 108 instituting multiple regulatory barriers to entering the market, and simultaneously creating a more stable demand in an otherwise unstable market. On the supply side, historically, most of the complex research and development that went into vaccine production has been carried out in research laboratories funded publicly by the taxpayers and supported by government grants (Milstien and Candries 2002; Basu 2003; Srinivas 2004). Now the major vaccine producers are either divisions of global pharmaceutical houses or private firms that were able to capitalize on the existing infrastructure and develop process capacities. As Stern and Markel (2005) and Milstien and Candries (2002) indicate, however, instead of bringing the positive results of competition and lower costs, this shift of vaccine production into commercial hands resulted rather in a marked drop in the number of pharmaceutical companies producing vaccines worldwide and continually rising costs. Vaccines, when compared with other pharmaceuticals, are not a highly profitable business (Kremer and Snyder 2003). Combined with diverging lines of production, tiered pricing, and increased liability costs and regulatory oversight, the global vaccine market has seen the reduction in numbers of vaccine manufacturers. In part, the diminished ranks of vaccines producers is a function of the latest wave of consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry, which since the 1990s has witnessed a sweeping tide of mergers and acquisitions (Busfield 2003). But there is also indication that the global production capacity for vaccines has been reduced as well, with some major manufacturers phasing out the production of traditional vaccines or abandoning the vaccine market altogether and evidence of dwindling of the excess capacity or stockpiles of routine vaccines to points of shortfall (McKinney and Jarrett 2002; Leading Edge Editorial 2004; Plahte 2005; Milstien et al. 2006). In short, current vaccine production and trade is an ideal site to examine the interplay of factors that define the global trends in healthcare and an opportunity to examine the issue of ‘transnational governance’ (Gereffi 2005) in the area of global health. Neoliberal reform, WTO and the intellectual property rights The 1995 inauguration of the WTO included signing of a smaller and a controversial ‘side deal’ – the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement. Among the stated objectives of TRIPS was enforcement of intellectual property rights, which ‘should contribute to the promotion of technological innovation and to the transfer and dissemination of technology’ while tightening international patent law (WTO 1995:323). TRIPS agreement essentially required the WTO member governments to pass national legislation which would guarantee patent terms of 20 years for pharmaceuticals and would disallow issuing compulsory licenses1 which trumped patents. This meant that countries with no or insufficient manufacturing capacity could not import generic versions of patented medicines (Oxfam 2006). To comply with TRIPS, countries considered as ‘developing’
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Page 109 or ‘least developed’ were to introduce appropriate national patent laws by 2005 (WTO 1995; Chaudhuri et al. 2003).2 Implementation of TRIPS was lauded by the WTO as the virtual guarantee that research and development (R&D) in the global South and for neglected diseases will become more vigorous. Proponents of TRIPS argued that harmonization of patent laws globally would prevent pharmaceutical piracy, help the industry recover substantial costs of R&D, while simultaneously encouraging R&D on diseases endemic in the global South and stimulate both foreign direct investment and technology transfer to the developing countries (Chaudhuri et al. 2003). According to the critics, however, one of the biggest repercussions of TRIPS was its projected effect on availability of affordable medicines. Strong intellectual property protection is one of the main mechanisms of maintaining high prices for medicines, which in turn, is one of crucial impediments to access to essential medicines (t’Hoen 2003). Arguably, strong patent protection for medicines increases the number of new drugs that remain out of reach for the poor, and negatively affects local manufacturing capacity while removing a source of generic quality drugs (Médicins sans Frontières 2001). There was a safeguard provision in TRIPS, which in principle at least, allowed for member states to take special measures to protect public health. But in practice, the interpretation of this provision proved contentious and precipitated much controversy. Two instances in particular put the contentious nature of TRIPS in stark relief and prepared the ground for the future Doha Declaration. In 1997, South Africa passed the Medicines Act to ensure access to affordable medicines. In 1998, 40 multinational pharmaceutical companies and the South African Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association brought a suit against South African government, arguing that the Medicines Act violated TRIPS. Although the suit was initially backed by the USA and the EU governments, the standoff created such a public controversy that by 2000 the pharmaceutical companies could no longer rely on the support of their respective governments and in 2001 the case was dropped unconditionally (Oxfam 2006; t’Hoen 2003). Another highly visible case involved Brazil’s very successful AIDS care program, which since the mid-1990s has offered comprehensive AIDS care, including universal access to locally produced antiretroviral drugs. Furthermore, Brazil has also successfully used a threat of compulsory licensing for antiretroviral drugs to negotiate lower prices and has offered a cooperation agreement for technology transfer for production of generic antiretrovirals to other countries. In 2001, the USA brought a dispute against Brazil before WTO, claiming that Brazil’s practices violated TRIPS. The resulting pressure from international civic-sector and NGOs was fierce enough to prompt the USA to withdraw the complaint (t’Hoen 2003).3 Finally, in 2001, facing a potential anthrax threat, both the USA and Canada threatened to override patent protection held by the German pharmaceutical Bayer in order to secure sufficient supply of anti-anthrax
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Page 110 drug Cipro at low cost (Farlow 2003). This, of course, revealed the hypocrisy of the more powerful countries’ position, given the fact that a similar interpretation of TRIPS to insure public health was denied countries in the global South. The WTO Doha Round expresses these controversies. For example, in the summer of 2001, the ‘African Group’ of WTO member countries produced an official statement urging the TRIPS Council to confront the issues of access to medicines and for the first time opened up a formal discussion of intellectual property issues as they relate to public health (t’Hoen 2003). Spearheaded by the global South country officials and NGOs, 2001 Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health offered an interpretation of TRIPS which would allow the WTO member countries to put public health concerns before intellectual property rights. In part, the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health states: ‘Each Member has the right to grant compulsory licenses and the freedom to determine the grounds on which such licenses are granted … [and] the right to determine what constitutes a national emergency’ (WTO 2001: para. 5b,c). The declaration did not, however, resolve the issue of compulsory licenses for countries with no or insufficient manufacturing capacity. It was not until August of 2003 that the WTO’s General Council ruled that compulsory licenses for imports from another country could be issued if there was a need to address public health problems (namely HIV/ AIDS, TB, malaria and other epidemics) (UNCTAD/WTO 2005). Together, the TRIPS Agreement and the Doha Declaration embody the tug of war between the states confronting public health problems and business interests of the pharmaceutical industry. As far as legal codifications of this rift go, TRIPS tilted the scale in favour of protecting intellectual property rights of the private capital, and Doha Declaration seemed to have balanced it out by ensuring that countries should not be prevented from protecting public health. So how did these global shifts in the meaning attached to the global governance of health and trade affect the structure of vaccine production and trade? Methods, data, and findings International trade and network analysis Because network analysis aims to uncover structure by examining patterns of relations, it is a particularly fitting technique for analyzing international trade. Studies employ it to reveal the theoretically specified hierarchical structures in the world system (Snyder and Kick 1979) or to confirm the persistence of structural inequality and the unequal division of labour in the global economy as well as to assess structural change and mobility (Smith and White 1992; Mahutga 2006). One unique aspect of applying network analysis to various types of international flows is that it considers the ‘interaction system of countries’ (Bornschier and Trezzini 1997) in its entirety, allowing not only for empirical assessment of the various countries’ positions and
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Page 111 mobility, but of the underlying structure. An actor’s structural position within the network translates into real and measurable consequences, be it power, centrality, isolation or mobility. I follow this basic premise in assuming that by documenting the structure of global vaccine trade as a whole, I can uncover structural features of the networks, as well as begin to assess the politico-economic reasons for and consequences of occupying specific positions within the networks for the different actors. Moreover, mapping vaccine trade over time allows an understanding of changes in the industry since the onset of TRIPS in 1995. I identify some structural features that characterize the networks of trade in vaccines between countries, such as density, centrality, and hierarchy (Wellman 1983; Hanneman and Riddle 2005; Wasserman and Faust 1994). Measures of density allow an assessment of how tightly-knitted the networks are, while measures of centrality identify countries more prominent as exporters of vaccines and allow an estimation of the hierarchy of exporters as well as changes overtime. Data I begin by presenting two networks of vaccine trade between countries4 in 1996 and 2004. Raw data on trade between countries was extracted from the UN Statistical Division Commodity Trade Statistics Database (COMTRADE 1996–2004), which is compiled annually, and manipulated in SPSS and Pajek. Vaccines are a subcategory of the pharmaceutical products and are defined as ‘vaccines for human medicine’, Standard International Trade Classifications code 300220. In the two networks, each vertex represents a country and each arc an instance of trade in vaccines between two country-partners for years 1996 and 2004. I focus here on the absence/presence of a link between countries rather than the amounts of import/export flows. While volume of trade in US dollars is a telling characteristic and I later report the total volume of trade for both years, US dollars amounts are not very reliable as trading partners often report different amounts, and even more importantly, the practice of tiered-pricing of vaccines as commodities renders the volume of import/export flows a less relevant characteristic for the purposes of comparing countries and establishing the structural hierarchy. COMTRADE also contains partial information on the units of export/import, unfortunately reported by only a fraction of trading countries and even that – in weight rather than doses, which, again, renders comparison rather meaningless. I thus focus on the link between two trading partners, and to minimize missing data I cross-reference records for both exporters and importers. Even in an instance when a country does not report its’ trade statistics to the UN, its’ links to other countries can be established by cross-referencing with reported imports.5 The two networks document trade in vaccines among 188 and 209 countries for the years 1996 and 2004, respectively.
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Page 112 Findings Network structure The first characteristic of trade in vaccines that I consider here is extent of trade, operationalized as the number of trading partners for each country, specifying exports and imports of vaccines separately. Although the extent of imports in vaccines is a crucial attribute to consider when investigating countries’ immunizations rates for example, in this project I focus on exports, as a measure capturing a country’s relative weight in the global network of vaccine trade, underscoring the precarious nature of a network that is highly centralized, where relatively few massive exporters provide vaccines to the rest of non-exporting countries. Exports of vaccines serve as a reliable indicator of industrial capacity for manufacturing pharmaceuticals, and from 1996 to 2004 the proportion of countries exporting vaccines to at least one trading partners rises slightly from 44 per cent to 49 per cent. Over half of the countries, thus, have little or no manufacturing capacity for vaccine production, and need to rely on imports. Table 6.1 lists top exporters and documents the change from 1996 to 2004 in the number of their importing partners. For example, France remains the biggest exporter, with the number of partners increasing from 166 to 179 from 1996 to 2004, while Hungary ‘loses’ 52 trading partners in the intervening years, bringing the number of exports from 64 in 1996 to 12 in 2004. From just considering the instances of trade between countries, it is evident that vaccine trade network exhibits a marked hierarchical structure, with a small number of vaccine manufacturing countries occupying dominant positions and trading with large number of partners. Yet, the network structure is highly centralized even as there is some re-shuffling of players. To assess the network cohesion, I next calculate the network density (as a proportion of actual links between the trading partners to total possible links). The network density remains at a stable 0.047 for both networks (or at less than 5 per cent of all possible ties). As a point of reference, one study reports the network density of 0.30 for all commodities in 1996 between countries (a total observed number of ties divided by total possible number of ties between trading countries in all commodity categories), exhibiting a more tight, cohesive network (Kim and Shin 2002:454). In other words, as reported in the above study, data for 1996 trade indicates that across the various commodity categories, trading partners included in the sample actualized 30 per cent of all possible ties. To give these numbers some context, I estimate network density for trade in all pharmaceutical products in the years of 1996 and 2004.6 For the network of global trade in pharmaceuticals, network density measure increases from 0.059 (or 5.9 per cent) in 1996 to an impressive 0.143 (or 14.3 per cent) in 2004, showing a marked increase in the volume of trading ties between countries. Corresponding measures of volume of trade in US dollars capture the
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Page 113 Table 6.1 Changes in number of importing partners and degree centrality for top vaccine exporters, 1996–2004 Country Importing partners Percentage change Degree centrality 1996 2004 1996 2004 France 166 179 7.8 0.88 0.86 Belgium 159 163 2.5 0.85 0.78 Italy 116 124 6.9 0.62 0.60 UK 107 87 −18.7 0.57 0.42 Switzerland 101 93 −7.9 0.54 0.45 Canada 94 71 −24.5 0.50 0.34 Germany 92 95 3.3 0.49 0.46 USA 89 99 11.2 0.48 0.48 India 77 136 76.6 0.41 0.65 Netherlands 66 93 40.9 0.35 0.45 Denmark 64 101 57.8 0.34 0.49 Hungary 64 12 −81.2 0.34 0.06 Japan 48 72 50 0.26 0.35 Croatia 44 15 −65.9 0.23 0.07 S. Korea 37 102 175.7 0.20 0.50 Bulgaria 33 41 24.2 0.18 0.20 Austria 32 32 0 0.17 0.15 Sweden 29 41 41.4 0.15 0.20 Australia 23 48 108.7 0.12 0.23 S. Africa 16 50 212.5 0.09 0.24 Ireland 15 15 0 0.08 0.07 Russia 14 14 0 0.07 0.07 China 13 11 −15.4 0.07 0.05 Singapore 13 13 0 0.07 0.06 Spain 12 41 241.6 0.06 0.20 Source: UN Statistical Division Commodity Trade Statistics Database. increase from 52 billion dollars in 1996 to approximately 230 billion dollars for the whole of pharmaceuticals, which is a more than 450 per cent hike in 8 years. Trade in vaccines, meanwhile, grew from estimated 1.4 billion dollars in 1996 to 3.7 in 2004, increasing more than 250 per cent. And while in 1996 global trade in vaccines accounted for 2.69 per cent of all pharmaceutical sales in US dollars, by 2004 that proportion is reduced to only 1.6 per cent. So while both the pharmaceutical and the vaccine trade grow in volume, the rates of these industries’ growth are dramatically different, with trade in vaccines not keeping up the pace of growth of the pharmaceutical industry overall. And even as network density of trade in pharmaceuticals grows, thereby reflecting the changing extent of cohesion, density for the trade of vaccines remains stagnant. Considering that rising density reflects rising connectivity between trading partners, which in many ways is the very definition of economic globalization (Mahutga 2006), and comparing the two trends of increased density of trade in pharmaceuticals and non-changing density of
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Page 114 the vaccine trade, we can conclude that in the years between 1996 and 2004, the vaccine trade network has not become more tightly bound, nor are the trading partners more interconnected, but instead it remains highly centralized. For a commodity like vaccines, such a loosely bound network might mean increased dependence of trading partners on a limited number of suppliers, which, of course, renders such a network highly unstable, where a disruption in services at one site ripples through the network with magnified force – as in the 2004 case with Chiron’s bacterial contamination of a plant in Liverpool, which rendered its’ stockpile of Fluvirin (a flu vaccine) unusable, and sent quite a number of trading partners scrambling to meet the demand.7 Regional trade In order to assess the geo-political patterns of trade in vaccines I next examine interand intra-regional trade by grouping the trading countries for both 1996 and 2004 in five ‘regions’: North America/Europe, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, Africa.8 Calculated as a proportion of all exports, intraregional trade accounts for 36 per cent of all trade in 1996 and rises to 38.5 per cent in 2004. To arrive at a measure comparable across regions, I calculate the average exports for each region as a proportion of total exports to total number of countries in the region. Averages are rounded to the first decimal point and those less than 0.1 are reported as 0 in Tables 6.2 and 6.3. As is reported in Table 6.2, for each region in 1996, exports to other countries within the region are higher than exports to other regions. North America/Europe is the largest exporter to all other regions, and, for each of the trading regions, is also the largest importer except for Oceania, which exports as much to North America/Europe as it does to Asia. By 2004, with the exception of Oceania, intraregional trade in vaccines increases in each trading bloc (Oceania, having ‘doubled’ in size in the 2004 sample, thus shows a lower average). As in 1996, intra-regional trade remains Table 6.2 Inter/intra-regional vaccine trade: average number of export/import ties per country in each region, 1996 Exporting region Importing region Europe/N. America Asia Oceania Latin America Africa Europe/N. America 9.4 7.2 0.6 5.5 7.1 Asia 0.9 2.1 0.2 0.7 0.8 Oceania 1.1 1.1 2.2 – 0.3 Latin America 0.1 0.1 – 1.4 – Africa – – – – 0.6 Source: UN Statistical Division Commodity Trade Statistics Database.
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Page 115 Table 6.3 Inter/intra-regional vaccine trade: average number of export/import ties per country in each region, 2004 Exporting region Importing region Europe/N. America Asia Oceania Latin America Africa Europe/N. America 10.6 7.8 0.9 5.0 5.9 Asia 1.4 2.9 0.4 1.7 1.7 Oceania 0.7 1 0.9 0.2 0.3 Latin America 0.3 0.2 – 2.3 0.3 Africa 0.3 0.3 – – 0.9 Source: UN Statistical Division Commodity Trade Statistics Database. largest for each region. Average exports from Europe/North America increase to Asia and Oceania but decrease to Latin America and Africa, while average exports from Asia and Latin America increase across the board. In 2004, North America/Europe remains the largest exporter, but is no longer the largest importer of vaccines from other regions, while Asia now exports more on average to Latin America and Africa. Overall, the changes in geographic patterns of trade in vaccine are consistent with the reports of the changing balance of power between the global North and global South in the prominence of vaccine manufacturers, and the reported divergence of product lines, along the same geopolitical divide (Milstien and Candries 2002; McKinney and Jarrett 2002). Centrality and mobility The vaccine trade networks exhibit a stable structure but some countries experienced considerable mobility and I next consider measures of centrality in order to assess this feature of the network. First, I calculate here actor degree centrality for each country, again, considering only their exports. Wasserman and Faust (1994) offer a number of centrality indices which quantify the prominence of individual actors embedded in the network. A trade network ties actors together via directional ties, as each link between trading partners originates with the exporting country and is received by the importer, and each individual country can have vastly different measures of centrality for exports and imports. I focus only on exports and thus assess each country’s measure of centrality as an exporter of vaccines. For each country, I calculate out-degree centrality (of ties going out, or exports) using the following formula.
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Page 116 where C ′ is actor out-degree centrality index standardized to be independent of group size. This is calculated for each year separately by dividing each country’s out-degree (a tie going out, or an export) by network size (total number of all trading partners in that year) minus 1. This index ranges between 0 and 1 and is, therefore a measure comparable across networks of different sizes (or years 1996 and 2004 in this case). Table 6.1 reports these changes in centrality in the last two columns for each country from 1996 to 2004. For example, France, having retained the largest number of partners, still shows a slight decrease in its centrality from 0.88 to 0.86, as the measure captures its relative position to other countries’ shifts as well.9 To capture these changes graphically, I have plotted these actor centrality indices for countries that exported vaccines to more than one partner in both 1996 and 2004, in Figure 6.1. The X-axis represents actor degree centrality measure for 1996 and the Yaxis for 2004. Data points appearing in the right hand upper quadrant represent countries with higher measures of centrality for both years and the ones in the lower left, obviously, with lower scores. Movement up or down on the centrality index measurement is graphically depicted by deviation from the central line dissecting the graph (the ‘no change’ line), and data points in the upper half represent countries whose centrality measure increased, while lower half of the graph contains the ones whose centrality measure declined from 1996 to 2004. Again, France, with the
Figure6.1 Changes in centrality as vaccine exporters for countries exporting to more than one partner, 1996–2004. (Names of significantly mobile exporters are underlined.) Source: UN Statistical Division Commodity Trade Statistics Database.
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Page 117 highest centrality index measure appears in the upper right quadrant, but below the diagonal, as its centrality index decreased slightly from 1996 to 2004. For the whole system of vaccine trade, there is a high degree of continuity from 1996 to 2004, as the hierarchical structure of vaccine exporters remains pronounced. The correlation of 0.880 between country centrality as exporter indices in 1996 and 2004 suggests that overall the structure of vaccine trade network remained highly stable. Within this highly stable system, however, some countries experienced upward as well as downward mobility, as is evident from the scatter-plot. Significant deviation from the expected measure in 2004 yields a list of vaccine exporters that exhibited significant mobility: Brazil, Denmark, India, Republic of Korea, and South Africa gain in centrality, while Croatia and Hungary experience downward mobility.10 Discussion Case study In order to highlight some of the patterns that emerged in this examination of trade in vaccines, I will focus on just one case study: India. In the years between 1996 and 2004, India gained 59 trading partners to supply vaccines. Its centrality measure increased from 0.41 to 0.65 and it ‘joined’ the highest-ranking cluster of vaccine exporters. In the network that showed a high degree of structural stability, India was one of the few countries exhibiting significant mobility. If my goal were to only uncover signs of development, convergence or gains for the pharmaceutical industry, I could have identified India as a successful case in point. But at this point in my project, I aim to untangle the various actors involved, and locate these changes which took place in less than a decade within a world historical context. Historically, it was India’s public sector that spearheaded research and development in vaccines and produced the final products. In the past 10 to 15 years however, a small but growing number of private pharmaceutical companies was able to capitalize on the existing infrastructure and process capacities (Srinivas 2004; Madhavi 2005). The shift occurred gradually but intensified after India adopted an economic liberalization program in 1991. Meanwhile, facing the changing vaccine market outlook in the global North, major international procurement agencies (such as the WHO and UNICEF) sought to supplement the dwindling number of traditional vaccine suppliers by creating special incentives for the Indian (among other developing countries) vaccine manufacturers, which insure, once a manufacturer passes a series of prequalifications, multi-year purchasing arrangements, in effect manufacturing a stable demand for vaccines (UNICEF 2004). India currently exports over 60 per cent of its vaccine products, a large portion through international procuring agencies, to other countries in the global South (Srinivas 2004).
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Page 118 And yet India’s emergence as world leader in vaccine production took place in defiance of TRIPS. India was staunchly opposed to the introduction of TRIPS at the 1994 Uruguay Round and (with Brazil) was the co-architect of the Doha Declaration on TRIPS (Chaudhuri et al. 2003). India did not recognize pharmaceutical product patents (many products available were under patent in the USA) until 2003, when the amendment to its patent legislation in accordance with TRIPS finally took effect. Moreover, India did not sign any TRIPS-plus agreements (although it was pressured to do so).11 In other words, India sought to circumvent aligning its patent laws with the neoliberal trade regulations that would disadvantage its domestic pharmaceutical industry. In fact, only in August 2007 did the Madras High Court rule against the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis in a longstanding suit challenging a provision in Indian patent law which stipulates that modifications of known medicines cannot be patented unless they make the drug significantly more effective (Mathrani 2007). Had it not, this would have set a precedent for practice known as ‘evergreening’ – or incremental changes to known medicines, which allows them to remain under patent and keeps the price high. Reportedly, however, since the 1990s, public health services, including immunization coverage, have been deteriorating in India. In fact, as one indicator, measles immunization rates have dropped from 81 per cent in 1996 to 67 per cent in 2004.12 This reversal is striking in the context of worldwide reduction of deaths from measles by 39 per cent between 1999 and 2003 (WHO 2005). In fact, the 2005 UN Human Development Report explicitly faults the Indian government for falling behind on many public health goals, as immunization rates plummet, while infant mortality rates keep rising. This discrepancy between the apparent success of the Indian pharmaceutical industry as a manufacturer and global supplier of vaccines and the failings of the public health system underscores the rift between the logic of the market and the provision of public goods. As the Indian case above underscores, the major limitation of country level data is that it obscures the various actors engaged in the complex process of trading in a commodity such as vaccines. Thus, speaking of ‘India’ conflates the Indian state and the Indian pharmaceutical industry, not to mention leaving out the Indian citizen who ultimately is the end-consumer of the vaccines. This does not detract from the validity of considering the network of country-level trade in its own right, but rather establishes a baseline for a more nuanced investigation of the role that other supraand sub-national level actors play in the global governance of vaccine production and distribution. Conclusion This analysis reveals that global trade in vaccines exhibits a stable hierarchical structure which persists from 1996 to 2004, with a small cluster of
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Page 119 countries occupying dominant positions as exporters of vaccines. One remarkable feature of this network is actually the stability of its structure. The fact that the majority of countries do not export vaccines at all hints at very limited capacity for production and, consequently, high dependence on imports. Evidence suggests that TRIPS (and Doha) failed to create conditions for R&D that encourage innovation and build-up technological capacity in vaccine production for the vast majority of countries. It could be argued (and it often is, by proponents of neoliberal trade reforms) that Doha offers a provision for compulsory licensing which would allow a country with limited manufacturing capacity to import medicines while bypassing patent protection in case of a health emergency. Astonishingly, this provision under Doha is not used . According to the WTO’s own progress reports on TRIPS, although the national patent law exists in most countries, compulsory licenses are seldom granted (UNCTAD/WTO 2005). In fact, it is the industrialized countries of the global North, namely the USA and Canada (and to a lesser extent the UK, France, and Germany), have used compulsory licenses in the past, but ‘few developing countries or transition economies have experience with compulsory licensing’ (UNCTAD/WTO 2005:2). On the other hand, a threat of using compulsory licensing has been used effectively by some governments (e.g. Brazil) as a negotiating tool for price cuts (t’Hoen 2003). But no qualified non-manufacturing WTO member has made use of the compulsory license provision, according to Oxfam (2006), most likely due to the complexities of the process, lack of technical capacity, and fear of reprisals. In fact, at time of writing, neither importing nor exporting WTO members have made use of the option of issuing a compulsory license under the provisions of Doha Declaration on TRIPS. The WTO Secretariat set up a website where importing and exporting Members are to file official notifications to the WTO, stating the intent to use the compulsory licensing provision and specifying the names and expected quantities of the products needed. In either category – exporting or importing, the website announces, ‘no notifications have been made so far’.13 To put it simply, the intent of the Declaration notwithstanding, no country with no or insufficient capacity to produce pharmaceuticals has yet utilized the option of compulsory licensing in order to address a domestic public health problem. What is known as the ‘paragraph 6 solution’, permission for manufacturing countries to export generic versions of patented medicines to other countries with insufficient manufacturing capacity in order to tackle a health crisis – is not working. TRIPS agreement remains one of the most contentious deals struck at the Uruguay Round, as it attempted to harmonize and tighten the global patent regime which would be upheld by all WTO members. It was the result of relentless lobbying of the Reagan administration by powerful US software, pharmaceutical, and chemical companies, which all sought to increase protection for their intellectual property related goods and services in the global markets. Devised and propelled into existence by the Intellectual Property
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Page 120 Committee of US-, EU-, and Japan-based industry association (which was founded by Pfizer and IBM), TRIPS was designed to protect the interests of select industries and companies. In fact, former CEO of Pfizer and trade advisor for the Reagan administration Edmund Pratt, who was TRIPS’ chief architect, admitted that ‘our combined strength enabled us to establish a global private sector/government network which laid the ground for what became TRIPS’ (quoted in Buckman 2005:94). It appears that as far as production and trade of vaccines go, the status quo was indeed preserved, and the alliance between hegemonic powers was able to put forth and enforce an agreement which is not conducive to systemic changes which would ensure a more stable access to vitally needed medicines. The claim that intellectual property protection and the resulting monopoly profits encourage innovation remains debatable, and although historically strong intellectual property protection followed industrial development, it is doubtful that the reverse will also occur (Médicins sans Frontières 2001; Oxfam 2006). As such, the network of global trade in vaccines also exhibits relatively low density in volume of trade when compared with trade in pharmaceuticals, and a much slower rate of growth as a market share. In other words, trade in vaccines is not globalizing on par with the rest of the pharmaceutical industry. Regional patterns of trade suggest a tendency towards regionalization and geographic segmentation of the market, and hint at a growing trend towards divergence of product lines, further segmenting the market. These trends render the network rather precarious, with a high potential for disruptions of trade flows for a commodity that is essential to maintaining adequate health services worldwide. If, as the data suggest, geographic segmentation is a growing trend, it is conceivable that in the future more vaccines will not be able to ‘cross’ some borders, as they are increasingly tailored to specific populations. It is evident that exclusive focus on trade obscures more complex mechanisms that define the networks of global vaccine production and consumption. In the context of fairly recent and persistent trends toward market liberalization and privatization of healthcare worldwide, the industry is being re-shaped. Many pharmaceutical manufacturers are withdrawing from the vaccine market in the face of relatively low profit margins and mounting regulatory pressures. Meanwhile, the states face competitive market pressures while the non-state actors – such as the international procurement and financial organizations – increasingly act on behalf of private capital, often as guarantors of demand for vaccines. In order to gain a better understanding of the complex facets of transnational governance, it is necessary to consider the roles that all of these actors play as they collide, collude, compete and struggle to maintain power and control in the arena of global public health, and this study makes the first step towards such an examination.
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Page 121 Acknowledgements I am grateful to Yıldız Atasoy, József Böröcz, Paul McLean, Philip McMichael, Anna Sher and the anonymous reviewer for many valuable suggestions and comments on the earlier drafts of this chapter. Notes 1 Compulsory licenses allow governments to override a patent and authorize production of generic copies of medicines. 2 The date was renegotiated at Doha and an extension to 2016 was granted to the least developed countries. 3 Over the years, a number of international and national NGOs as well UN agencies were involved in campaigns aimed at improving access to and affordability of essential medicines, including organizations such as Oxfam, MSF, Consumer Project on Technology, Health Action International, the South African Treatment Action Campaign, Act Up Paris, and the Health Gap Coalition. 4 It is important to point out that at this initial stage of my analysis that I am not distinguishing between various actors within state borders. So the term ‘country’ here conflates the state as both a provider of health services and procurer of medicines (vaccines), and a private/public manufacturer/seller of vaccines, as well as the ‘collective’ of the population characterized by indicators such as GDP per capita or immunization rates, and finally, country as a host, donor or executor of supra-national initiatives aimed at providing vaccinations. At this stage, I need to understand the configuration of the two networks rather than individual countries’ positions within them, but as the next step in my investigation I will begin to disentangle the various actors contained within the state borders as well as cross-border entities. 5 For example, even if Cuba does not report its trade in vaccines in 1996, by crossreferencing with other reporting countries, I can establish that it exported vaccines to Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Columbia, Chile, and Mexico and imported from Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Russia, Switzerland and the UK. This technique minimizes missing cases country-level, but might underestimate the volume of trade with other non-reporters. 6 Data on trade in pharmaceuticals extracted from COMTRADE, Standard International Trade Classifications code 30. These numbers are possibly underestimating the density of trade in pharmaceuticals, as I estimate the trade links between countries without the cross-referencing the reporters’ records in order to impute missing data, as I do for vaccines. Density of trading ties in the category of pharmaceuticals, thus, should be even higher in actuality. 7 See for example FDA’s Acting Commissioner Lester M. Crawford’s testimony on November 17, 2004 at: www.fda.gov/ola/2004/vaccines1117.html 8 I use UN Statistics Division Standard Country Classification into geographical regions as a guide to assign countries in my sample to one of the five ‘regions’. See: http://unstats.un.org.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin. htm. While some placements of countries in particular regions may be disputed and the classification into only five categories is necessarily crude, it aids in capturing a broad pattern of intra/inter-regional trade in vaccines. = 0.88 and for 2004, C ′ D (ni ) = = 0.86 9 For 1996, C ′ D (ni ) = 10 The list of outliers is produced by considering individual observations with absolute values of residuals greater than three standard deviations. Reducing standard deviations to two adds the following countries to the list of significantly mobile exporters: Australia, Netherlands, and Spain as upwardly mobile and Canada
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Page 122 and the UK as demonstrating significant downward mobility (underlined in Figure 6.1). 11 WTO’s TRIPS agreement codifies minimal standards of intellectual property protection, while TRIPS-plus refers to bilateral pressures (trade agreements, R&D deals, FDI or developmental aid) that more powerful countries impose on the less powerful ones in order to ensure more stringent protection for the property rights’ holders. 12 I use Human Development Reports data for proportion of 1 year olds fully immunized against measles. According to the WHO, measles coverage is one of the ‘selected critical indicators to monitor the progress toward the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal’ of reducing child mortality (WHO 2005:190) and is generally regarded as an indicator of immunization coverage. 13 See: www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/public_health_e.htm (accessed: August 2007). References Arhin-Tenkorang, D. and Conceicao, P. (2003) ‘Beyond communicable disease control: health in the age of globalization’, in I. Kaul, P. Conceicao, K. Le Goulven and R. Mendoza (eds) Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalization , New York: Oxford University Press. Archibugi, D. and Bizarri, K. (2005) ‘The global governance of communicable diseases: The case for vaccine R&D’, Law & Policy 27(1): 33–51. Barlow, M. (2002) Profit is not the Cure: A Citizen’s Guide to Saving Medicare , Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Basu, S. (2003) ‘Patents and Pharmaceutical Access’, Znet. Online. Available: www.countercurrents.org/glo-basu300503.htm (accessed: 20 July 2007). Batson, A. (2005) ‘The problem and promise of vaccine markets in developing countries’, Health Affairs 24(3): 690–3. Biehl, J. (2006) ‘Pharmaceutical governance’, in A. Petryna, A. Lakoff and A. Kleinman (eds) Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices , Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bornschier, V. and Trezzini, B. (1997) ‘Social stratification and mobility in the world system: different approaches and recent research’, International Sociology 12(4): 429– 55. Buckman, G. (2005) Global Trade: Past Mistakes, Future Choices , London and New York: Zed Books. Busfield, J. (2003) ‘Globalization and the pharmaceutical industry revisited’, International Journal of Health Services 33(3): 581–605. Cabalerro-Anthony, M. (2006) ‘Combating infectious diseases in East Asia: securitization and global public goods for health and human security’, Journal of International Affairs 59(2): 105–27. Chaudhuri, S., Goldberg, P. K. and Jia, P. (2003) ‘The effects of extending intellectual property rights protection to developing countries: a case study of the Indian pharmaceutical market’, Columbia University Department of Economics Discussion Paper No: 0304–08. Online. Available: http://digitalcommons.libraries. columbia.edu/econ_dp/65 (accessed: 20 July 2007). Farlow, A. (2003) ‘Costs of monopoly pricing under patent protection’, presentation at Access to Medicines and the Financing of Innovations in Healthcare. Online. Available: www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/cgsd/accesstomedicines_papers.html
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Page 123 Gereffi, G. (1983) The Pharmaceutical Industry and Dependency in the Third World, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gereffi, G. (2005) ‘The global economy: organization, governance and development’, in N. J Smelser and R. Swedberg (eds) The Handbook of Economic Sociology , Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press and Russell Sage Foundation. Hanneman, R. A. and Riddle, M. (2005) Introduction to Social Network Methods, Riverside, CA: University of California, Riverside. Online. Available: http://faculty. ucr.edu/~hanneman/ (accessed: 1 February 2006). Hardon, A. and Blume, S. (2005) ‘Shifts in global immunization goals (1984–2004): Unfinished agendas and mixed results’, Social Science and Medicine 60: 345–56. International Forum on Globalization (IFG). (2002) Report: Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Kaul, I. and Faust, M. (2001) ‘Global public goods and health: taking the agenda forward’, Bulletin of the World Health Organization 79(9): 869–74. Kim, S. and Shin, E. (2002) ‘A longitudinal analysis of globalization and regionalization in international trade: a social network approach’, Social Forces 81(2): 445–68. Kunitz, S. J. (2007) The Health of Populations: General Theories and Particular Realities, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kremer, M. and Snyder, C.M. (2003) National Bureau of Economic Research working paper series. Working paper 9833. ‘Why Are Drugs More Profitable than Vaccines?’, Online. Available: www.nber.org/papers/w9833.pdf (accessed: 26 February 2007). Labonte, R. (2004) ‘Globalization, health, and the free trade regime: assessing the links’, in R. Harris and M. Seid (eds) Globalization and Health, Boston, MA: Brill Academic Publishers. Labonte, R. and Torgenson, R. (2005) ‘Interrogating Globalization, Health and Development: Towards a Comprehensive Framework for Research, Policy and Political Action’, Critical Public Health 15(2): 157–79. Lakoff, A. (2006) ‘High contact: gifts and surveillance in Argentina’, in A. Petryna, A. Lakoff and A. Kleinman (eds), Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices , Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Leading Edge Editorial (2004) ‘Where have all the vaccines gone?’, Lancet Infectious Diseases 4(4): 187. McKinney, S. and Jarrett, S. (2002) WHO Research Paper: ‘Update of Vaccine Security’, Online. Available: www.who.int/immunization-supply/introduction/en/ (accessed: 26 February 2007). McMichael, P. (2004) Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective , 3rd edn., Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Madhavi, Y. (2005) ‘Vaccine Policy in India’, PLoS Medicine 2(5): 0387–91. Mahutga, M. C. (2006) ‘The persistence of structural inequality? A network analysis of international trade, 1965–2000’, Social Forces 84(4): 1863–89. Mathrani, S. (2007) ‘Novartis loses battle against patent law’, The Economic Times 7 August, Mumbai. Médicins sans Frontières (2001) Report by the Access to Essential Medicines Campaign and the Drugs For Neglected Diseases Working Group: Fatal Imbalance: The Crisis in Research and Development for Drugs for Neglected Diseases . Online. Available: www.msf.org/source/access/2001/fatal/fatalshort.pdf (accessed: 26 February 2007). Milstien, J. and Candries, B. (2002) Economics of Vaccine Development and Implementation: Changes Over the Past 20 Years , Jordan Report Twentieth Anniversary:
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Page 124 Accelerated Development of Vaccines 2002, Online. Available: www.who.int/ vaccinesaccess/supply/economics_vaccineproduction.pdf (accessed: 26 February 2007). Milstien, J., Kaddar, M. and Kieny, M.P. (2006) ‘The impact of globalization on vaccine development and availability’, Health Affairs 25(4): 1061–9. Oxfam. (2006) Briefing Paper 95: Patents versus Patients: Five Years after the Doha Declaration . Online. Available: www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/health/downloads/bp95_patents.pdf (accessed: 16 August 2007). Plahte, J. (2005) ‘Tiered pricing of vaccines: a win-win-win situation, not a subsidy’, Lancet Infectious Diseases 5: 58–63. Smith, D. and White, D. R. (1992) ‘Structure and dynamics of the global economy: network analysis of international trade 1965–1980’, Social Forces 70(4): 857–93. Snyder, D. and Kick, E. L. (1979) ‘Structural position in the world system and economic growth, 1955–1970: a multiple-network analysis of transnational interactions’, American Journal of Sociology 84(5): 1096–126. Srinivas, S. (2004) Demand Policy Instruments for R&D: Procurement, Technical Standards and the Case of Indian Vaccines , BCSIA Discussion Paper 2004–09, Harvard University: Kennedy School of Government. Stern, A. M. and Markel, H. (2005) ‘The history of vaccines and immunization: familiar patterns, new challenges’, Health Affairs 24(3): 611–21. t’Hoen, E. F. M. (2003) TRIPS, Pharmaceutical Patents and Access to Essential Medicines: Seattle, Doha and Beyond . Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health Topic Papers. Online. Available: www.who.int/intellectualproperty/topics/ip/tHoen.pdf (accessed: 16 August 2007). United Nations (UN). (1948) Universal Declaration of Human Rights , Online. Available: www.un.org/Overview/rights.html (accessed: 16 August 2007). United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) (2004) Annual Report 2004, Online. Available: www.unicef.org/publications/files/UNICEFAnnualReport2004_eng.pdf (accessed: 25 February 2006). United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database (COMTRADE) (1996–2004) Online. Available: http://comtrade.un.org/ (accessed: 19 February 2008). United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)/World Trade Organization (WTO). (2005) Progress Report: Implementation of the Decision on Paragraph 6 of the Doha Ministerial Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health. Online. Available: www.intracen.org/mts/dda/dda_doc/ para6_sept05.pdf (accessed: 16 August 2007). Wasserman, S. and Faust, K. (1994) Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wellman, B. (1983) ‘Network analysis: some basic principles’, in R. Collins (ed.) Sociological Theory , San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. World Bank (WB). (1993) World Development Report: Investing in Health, New York: Oxford University Press. WHO (1996) State of the World’s Vaccines and Immunizations , Geneva: World Health Organization. WHO (2001) ‘Report of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health’, Macroeconomics and Health: Investing in Health for Human Development , Geneva: World Health Organization. WHO (2005) The World Health Report 2005: Make Every Mother and Child Count, Geneva: World Health Organization.
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Page 125 WTO (1995) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights , Online. Available: www.tripsagreement.net/documents/Agreement/TRIPS_ English.pdf (accessed: 20 July 2007). WTO (2001) Doha WTO Ministerial 2001 Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health. Online. Available: www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/minist_e/ min01_e/mindecl_trips_e.htm (accessed: 20 July 2007).
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Page 126 7 The human right to food ‘Voluntary guidelines’ negotiations Julian Germann This chapter examines the limits and possibilities of the human right to food as a source of resistance against neoliberal globalization. Enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights , the human right to food reflected the promise of the post-Second World War project of international development to secure basic human necessities and welfare on a global scale. Its contemporary significance derives from the failure and abandonment of this project in favour of a more disciplinary form of capitalist development that subjects the provisioning of basic necessities to market principles (Gill and Bakker 2003). The idea of food as a human right reveals a fundamental contradiction of neoliberal socioeconomic arrangements: the widespread persistence of hunger alongside unprecedented material abundance and productive capacities. The scale of the problem is difficult to grasp. Worldwide, an estimated 854 million people are undernourished (FAO 2006:8), and 6 million children die annually out of hunger and malnutrition (FAO 2005a: 18). The over-whelming majority of the world’s hungry live in rural areas as smallholding peasants, landless families, pastoralists, fisherfolk and people depending on forests for their livelihoods (UN Millennium Hunger Task Force 2003:14–34). They suffer hunger not as a consequence of food scarcity, but because of a lack of access to available food or productive resources (UN Millennium Hunger Task Force 2003: ix). Despite repeated pledges to address this morally outrageous and politically indefensible state of affairs, international efforts have made very little headway. The 1974 World Food Conference solemnly proclaimed to end hunger within a decade. More than 30 years later, even the more modest target of the Millennium Development Goals to halve the proportion of hungry people by 2015 is faltering. World hunger has, of course, a long and complex history that defies simple explanation. In an era in which ending hunger has for the first time become a material possibility, understanding its persistence requires a closer look at the constitution of the global political economy. From this vantage point, the failure to put an end to hunger since the 1970s is related to a policy shift away from a nationally oriented project of development to the market-centred, outward-looking project of neoliberal globalization. This shift has served
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Page 127 principally to extend the scope and influence of global capital at the expense of the livelihoods of rural, poor, and food-insecure segments of society (Riches 1997; Gill and Bakker 2003; McMichael 2003). Under structural adjustment programmes administered by the Bretton Woods institutions and the WTO’s 1995 Agreement on Agriculture, many developing countries have deregulated their agricultural sectors. Export-oriented cash-crop production has been prioritized over domestic food production and local food needs – the most recent and particularly disturbing example of which is the vastly increasing conversion of food crops into automobile ‘agro-fuels’ amidst starvation. On the whole, the social consequences of trade liberalization have been severe. Many small and medium-sized farmers have been unable to compete with large-scale commercial producers and highly subsidized food and agricultural imports from OECD countries. Although largely silent on the quantitative extent of the problem, a number of FAO case studies confirm a general trend towards the concentration of land ownership and control over productive resources, the displacement of rural populations, and the further marginalization of nutritionally vulnerable population groups such as smallholding peasants, landless workers and poor women and children (FAO 1989, 2003a; Harmon 2006:75–6). Under WTO-style intellectual property rights agreements, the global ‘enclosure movement’ of capitalist development that drives 20–30 million rural people annually into the urban centres of developing countries has reached new frontiers (Araghi 2000). The privatization of genetic resources such as seed varieties by agroindustrial corporations threatens to dispossess rural populations not only of their means of subsistence but also of their cultural heritage (McMichael 2003:182–5). The purpose of this chapter is to assess the actual and potential contribution of the human right to food to organizing resistance against these impositions. After a short overview of the major advances in this direction, the chapter sets out to conduct a textual analysis of the 2003/2004 multistakeholder negotiations of a set of ‘Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Food’ (FAO 2005b).1 These negotiations constitute a decisive moment in the ideological struggle over the human right to food between subordinate indigenous, landless, and peasant forces contesting neoliberal globalization and dominant capitalist forces opposed to the idea of a ‘right to food’. Analyzing the content of these negotiations, I demonstrate that beyond outright opposition, the human right to food is tacitly aligned with the neoliberal project of globalization. This discursive incorporation reveals the limits of the human right to food, and human rights discourse more generally, as a source of resistance against neoliberal globalization. A Gramscian perspective on ‘global civil society’ Organizing social movements involves attempts to get as many people as possible to participate in determining their own future. The type of strategy
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Page 128 adopted to pursue this goal depends in large part on how the organizational space of social movements, both within and across the territorial bounds of state power, is conceptualized. Archibugi and Held (1995) define such attempts in terms of a movement for ‘cosmopolitan democracy’ that seeks to extend popular participation in the political process to the global level. A more democratic reorganization of the interstate system, according to them, requires the creation of global rules and institutions that regulate state behavior. This vision forms the basis of the now classical liberal internationalist concept of ‘global civil society’. In order to clarify my own perspective, as different from what this conception entails, I elaborate on a Gramscian understanding of global civil society. The Gramscian concept diverges from the liberal interpretation of ‘civil society’ in two crucial respects. Whereas the liberal view casts civil society as the private sphere outside the state, Gramsci considered it an integral part of the modern state at large (1971:12). Second, while liberals tend to consider civil society as a realm of civic virtue and popular participation, Gramsci saw the institutions of civil society – schools, churches, political parties, trade unions, business associations, and the media – as fundamental to the organization of consent to capitalist class rule. From a Gramscian viewpoint, then, what makes civil society ‘global’ is not its location above and beyond the purview of state power. Instead, the prefix is to denote that certain agents and institutions of civil society are bound up with international structures of authority. Global civil society in the Gramscian sense constitutes principally an institutional feature of global governance, not a space for global democracy movements. Rather than celebrating global civil society as an emancipatory force of democracy and human rights, we need to critically examine its function of legitimating a world system of domination and exploitation (Amoore and Langley 2004). Only in the second instance does it refer to a strategic site where the hegemony of capitalist class forces, their moral, intellectual and political leadership, can be challenged by counter-hegemonic forces in an ideological and political ‘war of position’ (Gramsci 1971:229–39). The idea of a human right to food is an object of contention within the force field of ‘global civil society’. Although it appears to constitute a challenge to neoliberal globalization, the human right to food is at once subject to a process of co-optation or trasformismo which ‘absorbs potentially counter-hegemonic ideas and makes these ideas consistent with hegemonic doctrine’ (Cox 1983:137). In the hands of agrarian social movements, the idea of food as a fundamental right has the potential to politicize the ‘problem’ of hunger, cast critical light on neoliberal globalization, and subject the market to the primacy of human rights. However, as I demonstrate below, any such challenge has been pre-empted, countered and silenced in the course of the Voluntary Guidelines negotiations.
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Page 129 The human right to food: a counter-hegemonic challenge? The idea of food as a fundamental right appeared in the 1990s at the fore-front of political struggles against the neoliberal restructuring of agriculture in the global South. It has been used by social movements such as La Vía Campesina, the Seed Satyagraha Movement, the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) and Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement to buttress and gather support for an alternative model of agricultural development known as ‘food sovereignty’ (see McMichael, this volume). ‘Food sovereignty’, introduced in 1996 by La Vía Campesina, encompasses the individual and collective right to food and the means of its production. Food sovereignty conceptualizes hunger not as a problem of means but of rights (Starr 2005:57). References to the right to food abound in political statements and declarations and serve to reinforce the demands for agrarian reform, agricultural biodiversity, agro-ecological production, and local markets (Windfuhr and Jonsén 2005). Within the framework of ‘food sovereignty’, the right to food undergirds the right of social groups to determine their own food and agricultural policies (IPC 2004). Linked up with the principle of self-determination, the idea of a fundamental right to food holds out the potential for constituting new political communities (Patel 2007; McMichael, this volume). Framed in the language of rights, the struggle of agrarian social forces has received support from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and UN agencies working at the emerging nexus of human rights and development. Since the early 1990s, NGOs such as the FoodFirst International Action Network (FIAN), the World Alliance for Nutrition and Human Rights (WANAHR) and the International Jacques Maritain Institute, in cooperation with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) and the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), have pushed for a more precise legal interpretation of the human right to food in the fight against hunger. Gathering broad-based support for an international code of conduct on the right to food at the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS), the coalition in 1997 developed a draft code of conduct that translates the human right to food into norms and principles that bind the behaviour of international financial institutions, transnational corporations, and states – the original yet ultimately frustrated idea behind the Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Food. Far from a strictly legal exercise, UN human rights agencies such as the SubCommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food have used socioeconomic rights and the human right to food in particular to highlight the adverse impact of neoliberal globalization and open up valuable international political space for resistance (Eide 2005:20–1). Appointed Special Rapporteur by the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) in 2000, Dr Jean Ziegler, for instance, has called hunger a human rights violation and taken a critical view
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Page 130 on the relationship between the human right to food and the world economic order. In his analysis, the system of global governance is fraught with profound internal contradictions…. On the one hand, the UN agencies emphasise social justice and human rights…. On the other hand, the Bretton Woods Institutions, along with the Government of the United States of America and the World Trade Organisation oppose the right to food, prefering [sic] the Washington Consensus, which emphasises liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, and the compression of State domestic budgets. (quoted in Rosset 2002) The potential of the human right to food ‘to change the macroeconomic conditions of development’ (ECOSOC 2001: para. 67) has been augmented by the emergence of a ‘human rights-based approach’ within the international development community in the late 1990s. Under the auspices of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the recently established Right to Food Unit, most notably, the human right to food has been promoted as an alternative to the vague concept of ‘food security’. Whereas food security describes a desirable state in which ‘all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to safe and nutritious food’ (WFS 1996: para. 61; objective 7.4), the human right to food turns the attainment of this policy goal into human rights obligations of immediate effect (cf. Windfuhr and Jonsén 2005:21–3). The problem with food security is that it is ‘agnostic’ as to the specific policy measures taken to achieve this goal (Patel 2007:90). It has thus lent itself to neoliberal cooptation and redefinition in terms of a good to be delivered by an integrated world food market (McMichael 2003:171–2). By contrast, the human right to food emphasizes human dignity as the measure against which to assess and design economic and social policies. Broadly understood as a fundamental legal, political and moral claim, the idea of a human right to food has emerged as a key point of contact within ‘global civil society’ between agrarian social movements, human rights NGOs, and segments of the UN system. The alliance between La Vía Campesina and FIAN, and the international peasant movement’s appraisal of the FAO as providing ‘a unique international space in which the right to food and food sovereignty can be considered beyond the constricting limits of the rules of the market’ (IPC 2004), raise hopes that a counterhegemonic force may be in the making. Opposition against the idea of a human right to food has been fierce. The 1996 WFS marks the most prominent instance of the articulation of the human right to food as a solution to world hunger. At the same summit, however, the US delegation issued an interpretative statement holding ‘that the attainment of any “right to food” or “fundamental right to be free from hunger” is a goal or aspiration to be realized progressively that does not give rise to any international obligations’ (FAO 1996, part I, annex II). Although
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Page 131 in general taciturn about the question of human rights, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and business associations such as the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) or the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) have expressed similar reservations. Concerned about possible disincentives for growth and investment, they argued that economic, social and cultural rights are ‘more aspirational or programmatic’ (CBI 2004) and caution that ‘the debate about the “right to food” must be careful to define what specific entitlements such “right” actually brings to the poor’ (Blommestein and de Macedo 2001). These two diametrically opposed articulations of the ‘right to food’ – as a fundamental entitlement, on the one hand, and a mere aspiration, on the other – set the poles of the ideological struggle over the human right to food. Analyzing the voluntary guidelines negotiations The process of elaborating a set of Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Food is a key instance in the ideological struggle over the human right to food. Organized by the FAO as ‘multi-stakeholder’ negotiations between March 2003 and November 2004, it brought together the representatives and allies of agrarian social forces as well as the agents of dominant states and global capital. A grouping of social movements including the All African Farmers’ Network, the South Asian Peasants’ Coalition and the World Forum of Fisher Peoples, human rights NGOs such as FIAN and the Brazilian Action for Nutrition and Human Rights (ABRANDH), development organizations such as the International Movement for Catholic Agricultural and Rural Youth (MIJARC), and agricultural institutes such as the Centre for Rural Studies and International Agriculture (CERAI), seized the opportunity to promote the human right to food as a fundamental challenge to neoliberal globalization. International institutions supportive of the idea of a human right to food such as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the Standing Committee on Nutrition (SCN) also submitted text proposals and engaged in the negotiation process. Relevant participants which were opposed to the human right to food included the USA, Canada, Japan, the UK, the Netherlands, and Sweden as well as the European Commission (Oshaug 2005:274). A parallel international conference intended to make recommendations to the Voluntary Guidelines negotiations also included participants from IMF, World Bank and OECD – international institutions which have notoriously fended off claims of economic, social and cultural rights directed at them (Skogly 2005). The proposal for a code of conduct that would specify obligations under the human right to food had first been introduced at the 1996 WFS but had failed because of American opposition. Although substantially watered down by the efforts of the USA and the UK, the proposal came to be
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Page 132 included at the follow-up summit in 2002. A compromise paragraph invited the FAO Council to establish an intergovernmental working group (IGWG) ‘to elaborate, in a period of 2 years, a set of voluntary guidelines to support Member States’ efforts to achieve the progressive realization of the right to adequate food in the context of national food security’ (FAO 2002: appendix, para. 10). The IGWG commenced its work on the Voluntary Guidelines in March 2003 and, after a second session in October as well as an additional meeting held in February 2004, ended on 10 July 2004 without having reached consensus on the final text (Oshaug 2005). Controversies surrounding the questions of international trade and assistance were expected to be resolved subsequently in a ‘friends of the chair’ meeting in parallel to the 30th Session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), where the Voluntary Guidelines were endorsed and submitted to the FAO Council for final approval in November 2004. Commentators have emphasized that the Guidelines mark the first time that one of the human rights enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) has been negotiated outside the UN human rights system (Oshaug 2005:259, 276). On the other hand, fierce opposition to human rights language and the weak and discretionary provisions of the Guidelines have been criticized by participating NGOs, such as FIAN in a joint statement (NGO Caucus 2004). The prospects of failure to elaborate a set of guidelines loomed large during the process, and NGOs at one point came close to walk out on the negotiations. At its most visible, the discursive struggle involved the question of how the ‘right to food’ should be defined or referred to in the Voluntary Guidelines document. A Norwegian delegate to the Guidelines process in his private capacity notes that ‘[s]ome countries insisted that there should be […] no use of human rights language and no indication of human rights principles’ (Oshaug 2005:266). Some argued that the ‘right to food’ is an ‘emerging rather than existing right’ (ISHR 2002:2), and favoured formulations such as ‘food related rights’ (Bureau of the IGWG 2003a: 6, 11) and ‘implementing the Guidelines’ instead of referring to the human right to adequate food and its implementation (e.g. Bureau of the IGWG 2003b: 1). The first US submission (USA 2003:1) constitutes a most blatant attempt to literally replace the ‘right to food’ with ‘food security’. It appears that while the difference of the two terms is recognized, they are used interchangeably in the negotiations in order to dilute the human rights character of the ‘right to food’ (see Special Rapporteur 2003:2). These systematic and largely successful efforts to water down the language of the Guidelines relate to the fact that, as a representative of the European Commission notes, to speak of a human right to food is to endow the associated policy recommendations even within a document of an expressly voluntary nature with an undesirable legal, political and moral authority (EC 2003c: 2). The Guideline negotiations show that it is precisely this authority which agrarian social forces and those supportive of their cause evoke in order to
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Page 133 contest neoliberal globalization. Their central claim is that food is not simply a commodity but inherent to human dignity, and that hunger amidst plenty constitutes a denial of a fundamental right. A joint contribution by human rights and development NGOs and agrarian social movements contends that small farmers, landless people, agricultural workers, the precariously employed and unemployed, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, pastoralists, and poor women and children ‘regularly face violations of the right to adequate food’ (FIAN et al. 2004: annex 1). Poverty and hunger are seen as essentially political matters, rooted in exclusionary processes at both local and global levels that deprive these groups of their means of subsistence (Special Rapporteur 2004:5). The present world economic order and neoliberal policies of market liberalization are thus indicted for having failed to alleviate hunger and are held accountable for its persistence (Garcés 2003:3). The WTO and the Bretton Woods institutions are accused of having undermined the human right to food as they insist on trade liberalization and structural adjustment of national economies to market principles (MIJARC 2003:5). Corporations are blamed for violating the right to food through ‘[low] wage policies, […] forced evictions [from land], the destruction of land and water resources of individuals or communities living in the surrounding of the company site’ (FIAN et al. 2004:8). In short, agrarian social forces base their claims on the legal, moral and political supremacy of human rights in order to extend human rights obligations and redefine ‘global governance’ issues beyond the purview of states and the regulatory scope of existing international institutions. The assertion that human rights take precedence over any other international legal obligations such as trade liberalization and debt servicing carves out a political space in which local communities can determine their own livelihoods (cf. Patel 2007:91). In this sense, the political project of food sovereignty and the normative discourse of a human right to food are mutually constitutive. Those opposed to the idea of a human right to food favoured an interpretation of hunger and poverty as a developmental rather than distributional problem. Thus defined, it could be solved through the more thorough application of neoliberal policies. The contributions by the United States and the European Union to the IGWG, for instance, emphasize the benefits of international trade and of integrating the poorest countries in the global economy (Bureau of the IGWG 2004a: 36). In these statements, we frequently see such arguments that ‘a healthy market economy’ is the ‘best defense against chronic hunger’ (FAO 2003b: 3). Policy recommendations put forward in the Guidelines negotiations and reflected in the final text also include the promotion of sustained economic growth and trade liberalization (USA 2003:4), taking ‘advantage of new market opportunities’ (FAO 2005b: guideline 4.8), and ‘expanding farmers’ commercial opportunities’ (USA 2003:4). It is further worth noting that some recommendations regard hunger not so much
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Page 134 morally intolerable as economically dysfunctional. Most strikingly, it is noted that ‘Chronically undernourished persons are unable to make any meaningful contribution to economic growth. Reducing hunger today is an investment in growth tomorrow’ (FAO 2003b: 4). Appeals to this kind of rationality set out a context in which any ‘right to food’ is confined to economic instrumentality – thus setting the stage for aligning the ‘right to food’ with the neoliberal project of globalization. The remainder of this chapter examines the discursive mechanisms through which this is achieved. I argue that these mechanisms indicate larger social processes of cooptation that are likely to frustrate attempts to construct a counter-hegemonic movement around the idea of a human right to food. Beyond opposition: incorporating the human right to food By themselves, efforts to dilute human rights language and promote neoliberal policies as a solution to hunger and poverty do not differ from earlier attempts to sideline the conceptual development of the human right to food. A closer look at the Guidelines negotiations, however, reveals that this strategy is employed to redefine the human right to food as a policy goal, a policy approach , and the economic freedom of the individual . A carefully worded compromise that predates the Guidelines negotiations, the final version of the Guidelines adopted in 2004 frames the human right to food as the ‘progressive realization of the right to adequate food in the context of national food security’. In conjunction with the synonymous use of ‘food security’ and ‘right to food’, and the exclusion of much of the human rights content,2 we can speak of a rearticulation of the ‘right to food’: no longer is the ‘right to food’ defined as a legal and moral entitlement which specifies duty-bearers and from which policy emanates as part of their obligations (FIAN et al. 2004:4). Instead, the ‘right to food’ is understood as a policy goal, along the same lines as the concept of food security. This redefinition serves the neoliberal project of globalization in two respects. First, it reinforces the neoliberal conception of economic and social rights as mere aspirations. Second, it opens up the possibility of constructing the ‘right to food’ as achievable through policies which may otherwise be challenged as having either no relation to or indeed a negative impact on the enjoyment of this human right. Such a reinterpretation, for instance, makes possible the argument that free agricultural trade strengthens ‘an enabling environment for the progressive realization of the right to adequate food’ (FAO 2005b: part III, para. 10). Although this feature becomes most apparent in the context of the Guidelines negotiations, an interpretation of socioeconomic rights as goals to be achieved, rather than human rights systematically violated, has been used by organizations such as the World Bank, IMF and ICC in the past to divert criticism of their neoliberal agenda (Skogly 2005:162). The World Bank’s ominous appraisal of the ‘right to food’ as ‘an important new narrative of the international development discourse’
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Page 135 (Lovelace 1999:28) suggests that a ‘human rights-based approach’ may be subject to a similar discursive incorporation. Within the international development community, a number of rights-based approaches have been developed in recent years to achieve a range of policy objectives such as hunger eradication, food security, poverty reduction, or development more generally (Cornwall and Nyamu-Musembi 2004). The key difference is that the realization of a human right gives way to the application of abstract human rights principles, geared at achieving ‘something else to which there may be other “approaches”’ (Künnemann 2002:4). Indeed, in the Guidelines negotiations, both a food security approach and a rights-based approach make an appearance. Some argued that the Guidelines should propose a combination of the two, and one also finds the argument that ‘[i]n some areas food may not be dealt with through a rights-based approach – there are many different ways to deal with it’ (Bureau of the IGWG 2003b: 5). Such readings clearly de-centre the ‘right to food’ and reduce it to a means of achieving food security. With the Guidelines suggested to be a collection of best practices and promoted in the final text as a ‘human rightsbased practical tool’ (FAO 2005b: Preface, para. 2), the meaning of the ‘right to food’ is constructed as part of a means–end relationship, its value depending on its capacity to propose efficient and effective solutions to fix the ‘problems’ of hunger and poverty. This again subjects the ‘right to food’ to the prevailing economic rationale, and points to a process of co-optation. What is even more striking is that the ‘human rights-based approach to food security’ contained in the final Guidelines is not set in any direct relationship with the human right to food. The idea that the ‘right to food’ in itself is a human right to be taken into account in such an approach does not appear in the final version of the Guidelines (cf. FAO 2005b). Instead ‘the achievement of food security’ becomes ‘an outcome of the realization of existing rights [my italics]’ (FAO 2005b: Part I, para. 19). Yet the rights listed as the key principles of such an approach – i.e. the ‘right to take part in the conduct of public affairs, the right to freedom of expression and the right to seek, receive and impart information’ (FAO 2005b: Part I, para. 19) – are those civil and political rights commonly associated with good governance. Thus what seems at first to place the ‘right to food’ in the centre of policy considerations in the end serves to exclude the human right to food from informing a rights-based approach – a point most aptly demonstrated in a later paragraph where a ‘humanrights based strategy for the progressive realization of the right to adequate food’ (FAO 2005b: guideline 3.1) is evoked. Phrases such as ‘rights-based markets’ and a ‘rights-based growth strategy’, proposed by a speaker from the OECD at a side event to the Guidelines negotiations, are further indications of a discursive incorporation of the right to food that glosses over tensions between human rights and the dominant understanding and prevailing practice of development (FAO 2003b: 3). Even
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Page 136 if one holds that the right to food can stand at the centre of rural development and agricultural policy-making, the Guidelines negotiations raise concerns about a strategy of co-optation that André Drainville (2005:889) has aptly described as ‘cutting off social forces and organizations willing to work within a global market framework from other social contexts’. Organizations that seek to engage with governments and international agencies on these terms are likely to be divorced from agrarian social movements that rally around the human right to food as a fundamental challenge to neoliberal globalization. Under pressure to demonstrate the ‘added value’ of a policy approach, a human right to food is likely to give way to practical preoccupations with operationalization of the concept – to what Dean (2006:5) has described as a depoliticized and technocratic process for reducing hunger and realizing the ‘right to food’. The fact that the rights-based approach inscribed in the Voluntary Guidelines is promoted as an instrument to achieve the Millennium Development Goals target of halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger by 2015 is a sobering example. Besides the fact that the time-bound reduction of hunger to more acceptable levels is far from being achieved, it ‘very clearly does not announce that freedom from […] hunger is an inalienable human right’ (Dean 2006:4). This exemplifies how the human right to food, rather than contest or at least critically appraise the neoliberal restructuring of world agriculture, is put to work in the management of food security in the conventional sense. A third and final mechanism can be discerned by dissecting the particular conception of socioeconomic ‘rights’ that informs the lukewarm commitment of some participants to the Voluntary Guidelines. In an insightful paragraph, the European Commission (EC) notes that: A major obstacle to the recognition of economic and social rights was a general misunderstanding that such rights had to be guaranteed by the State and that this guarantee would constitute an unacceptable interference in market activity and impose unreasonable burdens on State budgets. It is, however, now widely recognized that the individual is the active subject, not the object of economic and social development. The main obligation for States in this context is to provide a supporting environment to facilitate their implementation [my italics]. (EC 2003a: 1) This interpretation not only helps us to understand much of the opposition against the human right to food, but also provides insights into a more subtle redefinition of socioeconomic rights along neoliberal lines. It is important to note just how much the above statement draws on key elements of mainstream human rights discourse which, for instance, espouses the human rights principle of ‘empowerment’ and the idea of the individual as active rights-holder rather than passive charity-recipient. Human rights discourse also holds that enabling people to feed themselves in dignity as fully
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Page 137 participating members of their community is what makes the difference between mere food security and the full enjoyment of the human right to adequate food (FAO 2003c: 3). A qualitative difference does exist, however, between the two approaches: one which views ‘the satisfaction of people’s basic needs as a matter of right’ (Bureau of the IGWG 2004b: 13) and the other which views ‘the individual’s right [not] to food as such but to effective government policy’ (EC 2003b: 1). Contrary to what is suggested in the paragraph from the EC report quoted above, in human rights discourse the individual is indeed said to hold a legal entitlement vis-à-vis the state which most evidently is considered the primary, ultimate, and fundamental ‘guarantor’ of economic, social and cultural rights. This may indeed require states to regulate or intervene in the economy. Second, the emphasis on an active rights-holder is not owed to a rejection of ‘welfare’ as such. Rather, it results from the recognition that the provision of welfare remains discretionary unless tied to human rights obligations. The ideas expressed in the EC paragraph correspond to what Richard Falk (2000:47) calls the ‘minimization of the social role of government’ in neoliberal discourse. It reflects the rejection of social and welfare provisions in favour of economic activity of the ‘active subject’ free from government interference. Such re-articulation cuts across neoliberal and human rights discourse, affirms the primacy of the former, and – as the USA has repeatedly expressed and again referred to in their final statement to the IGWG – reduces the human right to food to the right of the individual to the ‘opportunity to secure food’.3 Though absent from the final text of the Guidelines, this understanding of the ‘right to food’ as the ‘freedom for the individual to pursue economic activities in order to produce and procure food’ (Vidar 2003:14) amounts to the complete incorporation of the socioeconomic rights into the neoliberal project and raises serious doubts about the counter-hegemonic potential of human rights discourse in general. Beyond the voluntary guidelines: limits of the human right to food and strategies of resistance The discursive struggle over the right to food did not end with the formal adoption of the Voluntary Guidelines by the FAO Council in November 2004. The Guidelines’ provisions as well as the meaning of the right to food ‘fixed’ therein are open to continuous reinterpretation by agrarian social forces and their allies. The policy recommendations on land reform, social safety nets and vulnerable social groups for instance have been further seized upon by agrarian social movements and human rights NGOs such as FIAN and La Vía Campesina (e.g. Suárez 2006). The final text of the Guidelines, however, obliterates any link between these policies and the human right to food (e.g. Oshaug 2005:277). Indeed, formulations such as ‘[s]tates may wish to adopt measures to ensure that the widest number of individuals and communities, especially disadvantaged groups, can benefit from opportunities
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Page 138 created by competitive agricultural trade’ (FAO 2005b: guideline 4.6) do more to reaffirm neoliberal orthodoxy than to actually recommend policies. Against reservations regarding an undesirable interference in the market (FAO 2003b: 3), Margret Vidar from the FAO Legal Council assures that ‘[t]here are numerous instruments for ensuring the realisation of food rights that do not conflict with market liberalisation and deregulation and the principles of efficiency’ (2003:14). The chapter concludes that, recast as a policy goal, instrumentalized in terms of a policy approach and proposed as the economic freedom of the individual , the human right to food is stripped of its critical potential and aligned with the neoliberal project. This is best captured in terms of Richard Peet’s description of neoliberalism as ‘moving to a reflexive developmentalism that incorporates its own critique into ever more refined but basically unchanged versions’ (2002:65). Cox argues that international institutions which for a time may provide political space for subordinate social forces are ‘vulnerable to the monopolistic tendencies of dominant power in the realm of ideas’ (1994:102). The pending reorientation of the FAO mandate from small-scale rural development project towards the macromanagement of agricultural liberalization as well as growing tensions between the organization and La Vía Campesina indicate that the room for manoeuvre for agrarian social movements is shrinking. Potential disagreements may also arise between the far-reaching calls of agrarian social movements which associate the human right to food with food sovereignty and the more careful legal formulations put forward by non-governmental and UN human rights organizations (Windfuhr and Jonsén 2005:24). The successful cooperation between La Vía Campesina and FIAN on agrarian reform suggests that political demands and legal claims can be complimentary strategies. However, one also find appeals to prudence from within the ‘NGO community’ in terms of the political demands that can be attached to economic, social, and cultural rights without risking their marginalization (Windfuhr 2005:29). Through a strictly legalist interpretation of economic, social, and cultural rights, mainstream non-governmental human rights organizations and UN agencies may become implicated in excluding more radical demands that lack a firm basis in international human rights law (see Stammers 1999:990–2). Global civil society, in the words of Louise Amoore and Paul Langley, ‘simultaneously holds out the potential for resistance, while it closes down, excludes, controls and disciplines’ (Amoore and Langley 2004:100). These developments suggest that the international political space carved out by agrarian social movements and non-governmental human rights organizations is likely to recede and that a counter-hegemonic movement around the idea of a human right to food has come up against the limits of the immediately possible. Having sketched out the lines along which the incorporation of oppositional forces into established power structures might proceed, the final question regards the counter-hegemonic potential of
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Page 139 human rights more generally. Critics have argued that the language of rights falls short of advancing the claims of subordinate forces. Rights-based strategies confront the paradox that the principal duty-bearer may itself be subject to the discipline of global capital or a key agent of neoliberal restructuring. With the state as the central point of reference, human rights may thus serve to reify that which social movements oftentimes seek to transcend (cf. Baker 2002:941). While it is true that the institutionalization and legal codification of human rights have legitimated social relations of power, this should be understood as a historically contingent outcome of social struggles and pressures from below (Stammers 1999:996–7). A more optimistic reading of the discursive struggle over the right to food holds that the focus on the state in human rights discourse is a remediable bias rather than an inherent defect. The extension of human rights obligations to core international institutions or transnational corporations, in conjunction with broader rights claims under the banner of food sovereignty, proves that the language of rights is indeed capable of transcending the traditional relationship between citizen and state. Ideas of human rights, from the rights of citizens to the right to collective selfdetermination of peoples, have served to demystify prevailing power relations and embodied the collective aspirations for building a new political order (Uvin 2004:134– 5). Rather than affirming existing structures of authority, the combination of the human right to food and food sovereignty holds out the potential for reconstituting state power from the bottom up (cf. Patel 2007; McMichael, this volume). The pitfalls of human rights discourse lie above all in a dangerous liaison between human rights and neoliberal ideology. The Guideline negotiations suggest that with their human rights content largely suppressed, reframed as the outcome of neoliberal policies and moulded into a blanket policy approach, even socioeconomic rights could be cast as the economic freedom of the individual. In order to prevent such cooptation and preserve their critical potential, human rights need to be grounded in an alternative political project – a project that, in the context of the politics of food and hunger, the idea and political praxis of ‘food sovereignty’ come closest to embody. Notes 1 The exact title of the 20-month negotiations is ‘Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Food in the Context of National Food Security’; hereinafter referred to as ‘Voluntary Guidelines’ or ‘Guidelines’. 2 In particular here, the minimum essential level to be free from hunger that would form the complete legal argument on ‘progressive realization’: ‘[A] State in which any significant number of individuals is deprived of essential foodstuffs … is, prima facie, failing to discharge its obligation’ (CESCR 1999). 3 As expressed in the interpretative statements made by the USA at the 1996 and 2002 WFS and referred to in the statement the USA made at the final session of the IGWG (CFS 2004: annex 2).
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Page 140 References Amoore, L. and Langley, P. (2004) ‘Ambiguities of global civil society’, Review of International Studies 30: 89–110. Araghi, F. (2000) ‘The great global enclosure of our times: peasants and the agrarian question at the end of the twentieth century’, in F. Magdoff, J. B. Foster and F. H. Buttel (eds) Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat To Farmers, Food, And The Environment , New York: Monthly Review Press. Archibugi, D. and Held, D. (1995) Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order, Cambridge: Polity Press. Baker, G. (2002) ‘Problems in the theorisation of global civil society’, Political Studies 50: 928–43. Blommestein, H. and de Macedo, J. B. (2001) ‘Reducing poverty under global finance’, paper presented at the international seminar ‘The right to food: a challenge for peace and development’, September. Online. Available: http://docentes. fe.unl.pt/~jbmacedo/oecd/food.html (accessed: 4 January 2008). Bureau of the IGWG (2003a) ‘Voluntary Guidelines’: draft prepared by the Bureau, IGWG/RTFG 2/2, FAO, Rome, 2 October. Online. Available: www.fao.org/ righttofood (accessed: 4 January 2008). Bureau of the IGWG (2003b) ‘Summary report of issues raised during the second session’, FAO, Rome, November. Online. Available: www.fao.org/righttofood (accessed: 4 January 2008). Bureau of the IGWG (2004a) ‘Report of the Chair’, IGWG/RTFG 4/2, FAO, Rome. Online. Available: www.fao.org/righttofood (accessed: 4 January 2008). Bureau of the IGWG (2004b) ‘Compilation of Text Proposals’, IGWG/RTFG3/ REP2, FAO, Rome, 2–5 February. Online. Available: www.fao.org/righttofood (accessed: 4 January 2008). CBI (2004) ‘Submission to UN Consultation on Business and Human Rights’, 4 August. Online. Available: www.business-humanrights.org (accessed: 4 January 2008). CFS (2004) ‘Report of the 30th session of the Committee on World Food Security: Supplement: Final report of the Chair’, CL 127/10-Sup. 1, FAO, Rome, 23 September. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) (1999) ‘General Comment 12: The Right to Adequate Food’, E/C.12/1999/5, 12 March. Cornwall, A. and Nyamu-Musembi, C. (2004) ‘Putting the “rights-based approach” to development into perspective’, Third World Quarterly 25(8): 1415–37. Cox, R. (1983) ‘Gramsci, hegemony and international relations: an essay in method’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 12(2): 162–75. Cox, R. (1994) ‘The crisis in world order and the challenge to international organization’, Cooperation and Conflict 29(2): 99–113. Dean, H. (2006) ‘From poverty reduction to welfare rights: a social policy perspective on human rights’, paper presented at the conference ‘Crossing the boundaries: The place of human rights in contemporary scholarship’, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, 24 March. Drainville, A. (2005) ‘Beyond altermondialisme: anti-capitalist dialectic of presence’, Review of International Political Economy 12(5): 884–908. EC (2003a) ‘Issues paper: the right to adequate food’, paper prepared for an expert consultation organized by the European Commission, Brussels, 14 January 2003.
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Page 141 EC (2003b) ‘Elaboration of Voluntary Guidelines on the right to adequate food’, report of an expert consultation organized by the European Commission, Brussels, 14 January 2003. EC (2003c) ‘Mission Report: 1st Session of the IGWG’, Rome, 28 March. ECOSOC (2001) ‘Report by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Mr Jean Ziegler, submitted in accordance with Commission on Human Rights Resolution 2000/10’, E/CN.4/2001/53, 7 February. Eide, A. (2005) ‘The importance of economic and social rights in the age of economic globalisation’, in W. B. Eide and U. Kracht (eds) Food and Human Rights in Development: Volume I: Legal and Institutional Dimensions and Selected Topics , Antwerpen: Intersentia. Falk, R. (2000) Human Rights Horizons: The Pursuit of Justice in a Globalizing World, London: Routledge. FAO (1989) ‘Effects of stabilization and structural adjustment programmes on food security’, FAO Economic and Social Development Paper 89, Rome: FAO. FAO (1996) ‘Report of the World Food Summit’, 13–17 November, Rome. Online. Available: www.fao.org/documents/show_cdr.asp?url_file=/docrep/003/w3548e/ w3548e00.htm (accessed: 4 January 2008). FAO (2002) ‘Report of the World Food Summit: five years later’, Rome, 10–13 June. Online. Available: www.fao.org/DOCREP/MEETING/005/Y7106E/ Y7106E09.htm (accessed: 4 January 2008). FAO (2003a) WTO Agreement on Agriculture: the implementation experience: developing country case studies , Commodities and Trade Division. Rome: FAO. FAO (2003b) ‘Summary of papers presented to and discussions held at the following conference organized to contribute to the drafting of voluntary guidelines towards the progressive implementation of the right to food: “The right to food and the costs of hunger,”’ note to file, FAO, Rome, 27 June. Online. Available: www.fao.org/righttofood (accessed: 4 January 2008). FAO (2003c) ‘Voluntary Guidelines: draft prepared for consideration by the Bureau’, FAO, Rome, 27 July. Online. Available: www.fao.org/righttofood (accessed: 4 January 2008). FAO (2005a) The State of World Food Security in the World, Rome: FAO. FAO (2005b) Voluntary Guidelines to Support the Progressive Realization of the Right to Food in the Context of National Food Security, Rome: FAO. FAO (2006) The State of World Food Security in the World, Rome: FAO. FIAN, WANAHR, International Jacques Maritain Institute, CFSI (2004) ‘Voluntary Guidelines for the implementation of the right to adequate food: a joint North-South civil society contribution’, submission to the IGWG, FAO, Rome, 24–26 March 2004. Online. Available: www.fao.org/righttofood (accessed: 3 May 2006). Garcés, V. (2003) ‘La soberania alimentaria en tiempos de globalización’, submission by CERAI to the IGWG, FAO, Rome, 24–26 March. Gill, S. and Bakker, I. (2003) Power, Production and Social Reproduction , New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith (eds), New York: International Publishers. Harmon, T. (ed.) (2006) Trade Reforms and Food Security: Country Case Studies and Synthesis , Rome: FAO. IPC (2004) ‘Beijing Declaration: NGO/CSO regional consultation: from agenda to
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Page 142 action: follow-up to the NGO/CSO forum on food sovereignty’, Beijing, 15–16 May. Online. Available: www.foodsovereignty.org (accessed: 4 January 2008). ISHR (2002) ‘FAO: World Food Summit: five years later’, Human Rights Monitor Report , Rome FAO, 10–13 June. Online. Available: www.ishr.ch/About%20UN/ Reports%20and%20Analysis/WFSfyl-contents.htm (accessed: 9 September 2005). Künnemann, R. (2002) ‘Food security: evading the human right to food?’, FIAN Magazine 1: 3–4. Lovelace, J. C. (1999) ‘Will rights cure malnutrition? Reflections on human rights, nutrition, and development’, SCN News 18 July: 27–30. McMichael, P. (2003) ‘Food security and social reproduction: issues and contradictions’, in S. Gill and I. Bakker (eds) Power, Production and Social Reproduction, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. MIJARC (2003) ‘Submission to the IGWG, FAO, Rome, 12 February’, Online. Available: www.fao.org/righttofood (accessed: 4 January 2008). NGO Caucus (2004) ‘Final evaluation: no masterpiece of political will’, statement issued at the fourth IGWG, Rome, 10 July. Oshaug, A. (2005) ‘Developing Voluntary Guidelines for implementing the right to adequate food: anatomy of an intergovernmental process’, in W.B. Eide and U. Kracht (eds) Food and Human Rights in Development: Volume I: Legal and Institutional Dimensions and Selected Topics , Antwerpen: Intersentia. Patel, R. (2007) Transgressing rights: La Vía Campesina’s call for food sovereignty. Feminist Economics 13(1): 87–93. Peet, R. (2002) ‘Ideology, discourse and the geography of hegemony: from socialist to neoliberal development in postapartheid South Africa’, Antipode 34(1): 54–84. Riches, G. (1997) First World Hunger: Food Security and Welfare Politics , London: Macmillan. Rosset, P. (2002) ‘US opposes right to food at World Summit’, Online. Available: www.foodfirst.org/archive/media/opeds/2002/usopposes.html (accessed: 4 January 2008). Skogly, S. (2005) ‘The Bretton Woods institutions: have Human Rights Come in From the Cold?’, in M. Windfuhr (ed.) Beyond the Nation State: Human Rights in Times of Globalization , Uppsala: Global Publications Foundation. Special Rapporteur (2003) ‘First submission to the IGWG, FAO’, Rome, 28 February. Online. Available: www.fao.org/righttofood (accessed: 1 May 2006). Special Rapporteur (2004) ‘Fifth submission to the IGWG, FAO’, Rome, 5–9 July. Online. Available: www.righttofood.org (accessed: 28 April 2006). Stammers, N. (1999) ‘Social movements and the social construction of human rights’, Human Rights Quarterly 21(4): 980–1008. Starr, A. (2005) Global Revolt: A Guide to the Movements Against Globalization , London: Zed Books. Suárez, S. M. (2006) Access to Land and Productive Resources: Towards a Systematic Interpretation of the FAO Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Food . Heidelberg: FIAN. UN Millennium Hunger Task Force (2003) ‘Halving Global Hunger: background paper of the Millennium Project Task Force on Hunger’, Online. Available: www.unmillenniumproject.org/documents/tf02apr18.pdf (accessed: 1 December 2007). USA (2003) ‘Submission to the IGWG, FAO’, Rome, 28 February. Online. Available: www.fao.org/righttofood (accessed: 4 January 2008).
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Page 143 Uvin, P. (2004) Human Rights and Development , Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Vidar, M. (2003) ‘The right to food in international law’, paper prepared by the FAO Legal Office for the conference ‘Critical issues in realising the right to food in South Africa’, University of the Western Cape, Tygerberg, South Africa, November 2003. Windfuhr, M. (2005) ‘State obligations for economic, social and cultural rights in times of globalization’, in M. Windfuhr (ed.) Beyond the Nation State: Human Rights in Times of Globalization , Uppsala: Global Publications Foundation. Windfuhr, M. and Jonsén, J. (2005) Food Sovereignty: Towards Democracy in Localized Food Systems, London: ITDG Publishing. WFS (1996) ‘World Food Summit Plan of Action’, Rome, 13–17 November. Online. Available: www.fao.org/documents (accessed: 4 January 2008).
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Page 145 Part III Reconfiguring states and the economy The fragile diversity of neoliberalism
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Page 147 8 The divergent roles of political and economic elites in NAFTA countries Malcolm Fairbrother Two key aspects of economic globalization – the growth of international trade and direct investment as shares of economic production – have been fostered primarily by neoliberal public policy changes, often in the form of new international agreements. Existing research has identified two main actors driving these free market policy shifts: political and economic elites. In other words, the circumstances, preferences, and behaviours of elected politicians, unelected rulers, bureaucrats, and the owners and top managers of private firms have figured large in explanations of the recent rise of globalization and neoliberal international agreements. While agreeing about the centrality of these actors, this chapter argues that the existing literature has not acknowledged key differences in how they have contributed to pro-globalization policy changes in different countries. This oversight has been a function of the research designs used to study these policy changes. Many studies have examined single country cases (Chorev 2007; Dreiling 2001; McBride 2001). Others have compared a small number either of developed countries (Campbell and Pedersen 2001) or developing countries (Haggard and Kaufman 1992; Teichman 2001). Some research has attempted to cover the whole world or a large sample of countries at once, through large-N statistical analyses (Simmons and Elkins 2004), more theoretical discussions (Harvey 2005; Sklair 1995), or studies of international institutions (Woods 2006). But there has been almost no research based on qualitative comparisons of First and Third World cases. This chapter, in contrast, will use precisely this approach to examine the distinction between globalization processes in the Global North and South.1 Reviews of the literature on developing countries’ pro-globalization policy changes have remarked on the lack of initiative taken by domestic business (Haggard and Kaufman 1992; Ravenhill 2004). In contrast, studies of pro-globalization policy changes in developed countries have specifically emphasized the influence of business mobilization (on European integration, see Van Apeldoorn 2002). Yet neither set of arguments has specified clear scope limits: the bounded range of countries for which each set of arguments applies. And the distinction challenges existing explanations of why globalization has happened, especially those that have generalized across the whole
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Page 148 world at once and have thereby implied that pro-globalization policy changes have unfolded similarly everywhere. Just as Carroll’s contribution to this volume demonstrates enduring national segmentation in the organization of global capitalism, the analysis here illuminates national specificities in its formation. Empirically, the chapter uses the case of North American free trade – that is, the establishment of the 1989 bilateral Canada–USA free trade agreement (CUFTA) and the 1994 trilateral (Mexico, USA, Canada) North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).2 For the purposes of this chapter, NAFTA’s usefulness lies in its spanning the global North and South, permitting a comparison of the two contexts. North American free trade also warrants consideration insofar as its establishment led to substantial economic transformations in the three economies involved. Figure 8.1 illustrates how trade as a share of total production expanded substantially for Canada and Mexico, and to a lesser extent for the USA, as a result of CUFTA and NAFTA. The first part of the chapter will describe the different roles of economic and political elites in the three countries’ pathways to North American free trade. The second will discuss three likely reasons for the systematic difference between developing and developed countries. First, I argue that a country’s level of development shapes its private sector’s policy preferences with respect to globalization. Second, a lower level of development makes a country more likely to suffer an economic crisis and become dependent on foreign creditors and the major international financial institutions (IFIs). And third, a country’s level of development conditions the character of domestic state – capital relations generally, including the balance of power between public and private elites.
Figure8.1 Trade as a share of GDP, 1950–2004. Source : Heston et al. 2006.
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Page 149 The empirical claims made in this article rest on three types of data: first, 114 semistructured interviews conducted by the author, mostly with political and economic elites; second, a range of documentary evidence (government and interest group publications, transcripts of legislative debates, public opinion data, news accounts); third, the large existing research and policy literature on CUFTA, NAFTA, and these countries’ neoliberal policy changes in the 1980s and 1990s more generally.3 The case of North American free trade: three pathways to globalization This section describes the three distinct pathways by which Canada, Mexico, and the USA arrived at North American free trade. In the late 1970s, the USA was the first country of the three to support the idea of continental free trade. At that time, however, both the Mexican and Canadian governments, with the support of their respective private sectors, made it clear that they were opposed to the idea and not interested in discussing it.4 To variable extents, both countries had been restraining their economic integration with the USA for decades. The subsequent establishment of a North American free trade zone was therefore a much clearer policy reversal for Canada and Mexico than for the USA. Nevertheless, Canada’s pathway subsequently became more like that of the USA. In both the USA and Canada, when North American free trade became a publicly contentious issue and its political viability was in question, business played a substantial role in organizing societal consent. In contrast, in Mexico, business was more ambivalent and less active in publicly promoting free trade. Furthermore, the Canadian state’s support for free trade followed from changes in the policy preferences of the country’s major business associations. In Mexico, in contrast, the state proposed NAFTA without much consultation with the private sector, and with much less previous mobilization by capital. In that sense, the Mexican case is one of state-driven globalization, while Canada’s is one of business-driven globalization. The US pathway embodied policy continuity – since the USA had long advocated deeper regional integration, with strong support from capital. Table 8.1 summarizes these key distinctions and similarities among the three countries’ pathways. Table 8.1 Three pathways to North American free trade State-driven Business-driven Policy change Mexico Canada Policy continuity USA
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Page 150 United States Although strong and specific proposals only emerged in the late 1970s, the USA had long advocated more economic integration than its neighbours wanted. That was true at the global level as well; the USA being the world’s primary advocate of international economic liberalism in the post-Second World War period (Krasner 1977). The first explicit and high-profile references to the idea of intensifying North American economic integration emerged in 1979, from early contenders for both the Democratic and Republican nominations for US president. Most notably, Ronald Reagan discussed the idea of a ‘North American accord’ at some length in the speech formally announcing his intention to seek the Republican nomination (on 13 November 1979).5 As discussed above, the Canadian and Mexican governments of the time released a joint statement expressing their mutual opposition to ‘current informal proposals for trilateral economic cooperation among Canada, Mexico and the United States’ (Weintraub 1984:183). Given this initial reception, in subsequent years, US politicians, officials, and businesspeople spoke little of North American integration, while they waited for Canada and Mexico to change their stance on the idea. When Canada (in 1985) and Mexico (in 1990) did eventually change their views, the US state and private sector were quick to embrace them. Support for North American free trade was a consistently uncontroversial policy within the US federal executive branch. Approval for NAFTA, however, was much more contentious. Unlike in Canada and Mexico, the US executive could not count on the automatic support of the legislative branch.6 Given the opportunity to defeat NAFTA in the USA, opponents of the agreement from all three countries – including organized labour, environmentalists, family farm organizations, and Third World development NGOs – concentrated their efforts in Washington DC (Kay 2005).7 This challenge in turn prompted a concerted effort on the part of US business to win the ratification vote. A corporate coalition called USA*NAFTA, largely organized by the Business Roundtable (an association of CEOs from large firms), promoted NAFTA to the US public and to legislators (Dreiling 2001; Rupert 2000). The available evidence confirms that American business, particularly large associations like the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, devoted substantial resources to promoting the agreement (Center for Public Integrity 1993; Dreiling 2001). Without this strong, active support by both specific industries and encompassing business associations, NAFTA might well have been defeated by federal US legislators under pressure from labour and a range of civil society groups.8 As one US business association interviewee put it: ‘That water was carried by the business community. It wasn’t the Clinton Administration who got it done, it was the American business community that got it done. Because it boiled down to a bare-knuckle fistfight between labour, environment, and business.’9
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Page 151 Business representatives also participated extensively in the formulation of US objectives for the CUFTA and NAFTA negotiations. On the one hand, that participation led American officials to push for the inclusion of disciplines on investment and intellectual property (Cameron and Tomlin 2000). A US business association interviewee explained that American business people ‘didn’t want Mexico to backslide on any of the openness and liberalization efforts that [Mexico had already adopted]. Mostly on investment, but also in terms of trade openness. And they wanted to get better protection on IPR [intellectual property rights], and better protection on investment’. Without such pressure from large US firms, and the willingness of US officials to represent them internationally, the controversial investment and intellectual property provisions in NAFTA would never have come to be.10 To summarize the US case, insofar as the USA waited for the decision to pursue free trade to be made in Canada and Mexico, American business did not contribute much to the launching of negotiations. But American business was both a proactive and important influence on the negotiations and a forceful, decisive advocate for free trade. Canada The Canadian state decided to negotiate a bilateral free trade agreement with the USA in the fall of 1985.11 This decision reversed Canada’s previous policy of restraining the country’s economic relationship with the USA. Ever since the enactment of a protectionist ‘National Policy’ in 1879, Canadian trade policy had sought to foster the development of indigenous manufacturing, a sector generally considered incapable of withstanding open competition from the USA. Canada’s tariff wall both protected domestic firms from outside competition, and encouraged foreign – mostly American – firms to establish branch plants in Canada to serve the domestic market. As a result, Canada’s economy became highly penetrated by foreign, mostly American, capital.12 Despite its ambivalence about integration with the USA, Canada participated actively in the GATT from the moment of its creation in 1947, and in the post-Second World War period, Canada’s economic policies were open enough to allow for high levels of trade relative to GDP (see Figure 8.1). The moderately protectionist stance of Canadian business on economic relations with the USA changed little from mid-century through the start of the 1980s (Hart 2002). As one Canadian business association leader put it, Canadian manufacturers were ‘always sort of dragging their feet’ with respect to trade liberalization at the GATT, ‘and that was true very much until the recession of the early 1980s’. A 1981 report by the New Yorkbased Conference Board found that, among 167 business executives surveyed in the three North American countries, ‘any increase in economic and political dependence on the USA is viewed as a disadvantage by most respondents from both Canada and Mexico’ (Cook 1981: B1). A subsequent change in the trade policy preferences of Canadian business
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Page 152 led the Canadian state to begin supporting free trade. Organizationally, business mobilization for free trade was led by the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI), an association of 150 corporate CEOs established in 1976 and partly modelled on the US Business Roundtable (Langille 1987:67). The other organization whose support was critical was the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association (CMA). The CMA had historically, and even recently, resisted trade liberalization. A change in the trade policy preferences of both the CMA as a whole and of its individual members contributed to the changing position of Canadian business in general. As one Canadian business interviewee stated, ‘the manufacturing sector adopted a position fully and aggressively supporting the free trade negotiations, which was diametrically opposed to the historical position of the association’. In the end, not only the BCNI and CMA, but also the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Quebec Chamber of Commerce, Canadian Federation of Independent Business, and the Canadian Exporter’s Association all called for a comprehensive trade agreement with the USA (Doern and Tomlin 1991:310; Langille 1987:68). Despite this mobilization for free trade by business, however, support from the Canadian state took time to emerge. Brian Mulroney, the prime minister who made the decision to negotiate in 1985 and who strenuously championed free trade thereafter, had previously avoided the issue. He did not mention it in the 1984 election campaign that brought him to power, and by some accounts he had even criticized it before that – as late as 1983 (Ayres 1998). Many observers believe that, politically, Mulroney initially perceived free trade as a losing, unpopular idea. There is little reason to believe, then, that the enthusiasm for free trade originated with Canada’s elected politicians. Rather, their support for free trade followed that of business. As for the bureaucracy, federal officials began recommending bilateral free trade before the Tory government embraced the idea (Doern and Tomlin 1991; Golob 2003), but only once the preferences of business had already swung around in support in 1983. After the Canadian state had made its decision to pursue an FTA, Canadian businesspeople participated heavily in the negotiations over the terms of the agreement, like their American counterparts. The primary objective of Canadian business was broad and secure export access to the US market. The investor and intellectual property protections sought by large American firms were a minor concern (interviews with Canadian business association staff). From the point of view of the Canadian private sector, the greatest attractions of CUFTA were US market access generally, and restrictions on the use of countervailing and anti-dumping measures more specifically. The recession of the early 1980s had produced a small burst of these measures in the USA, and their threats to market access worried exportdependent Canadian producers. As in the USA, North American free trade became highly controversial in Canada. Organized labour and a variety of civil society groups (feminist
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Page 153 organizations, ecumenical social justice organizations, cultural producers, and others) began mobilizing against free trade in Canada in 1985 (Ayres 1998). During the CUFTA negotiations in 1986 and 1987, opposition mounted. In 1988, two of the country’s three major political parties at the federal level declared themselves opposed to the initiative, and free trade became the top issue in the fall 1988 federal election campaign. A loss for the incumbent Progressive Conservative government would mean the end of agreement. To contribute to the victory of the pro-CUFTA governing party, the Canadian business community – under the leadership of large firms and the BCNI – established a Canadian Alliance for Trade and Job Opportunities (CATJO), aimed at influencing public opinion about free trade. Much like the USA*NAFTA coalition in the USA, which sought to shape US public opinion ahead of the US congressional ratification vote in 1993, CATJO organized a large-scale public promotion campaign to influence the federal election in 1988. In the end, the popular vote leaned against free trade: the incumbent party received only 43 per cent of the popular vote, well short of a majority. But because the two opposition parties split the anti-CUFTA vote, the Progressive Conservatives were returned to power with another parliamentary majority, and they were able to enact CUFTA at the start of 1989. As in the USA, the public mobilization of private enterprise saved the project of globalization from the threat of civil society opposition.13 Mexico The Mexican state entered the 1980s subscribing to nationalist and mildly autarkic economic policies, and exited subscribing to neoliberalism. Prior to the 1980s, the Mexican state pursued a strategy of import substitution industrialization, and declined to join the GATT, in an effort to foster an indigenous manufacturing sector (Story 1986). At that time, the state also obliged foreign investors to meet a wide range of performance requirements, thereby knowingly dissuading many from participating in the Mexican market at all. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, this development model succeeded in growing Mexico’s GDP per capita in impressive fashion.14 In the mid- to late-1970s, the discovery of large oil deposits in Mexico redirected public policy somewhat towards the establishment of an energy-based economy. On the assumption that oil wealth would soon prove abundant, the state borrowed heavily on cheap international credit markets. That profligate borrowing quickly proved disastrous, however, as interest rates rose and oil prices fell in the 1980s (Thacker 2000). The world entered into a recession in 1982, and Mexico became the first of many developing countries to suffer a serious debt crisis. Mexico’s real GDP per capita was no higher at the end of the 1980s than at the beginning, ensconcing it in Latin America’s ‘lost decade’. Following the 1982 crisis, Mexico dismantled many of its restrictions on international trade and investment and joined the GATT in 1986 (Lustig 1998). Late in the 1980s, the Mexican state began promoting
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Page 154 foreign investment, particularly by rewriting the regulations associated with the country’s previously restrictive 1973 foreign investment law (Amigo 1991). It privatized hundreds of state-owned enterprises, including major industries and enterprises such as airlines, telecommunications, and eventually the banks in 1990–91 (Teichman 2001).15 Lastly, Mexico enacted a new intellectual property law in 1991. All of these policy changes facilitated the decision to negotiate a free trade agreement with the USA. One Mexican official said that the technocrats’ goal was to transform Mexico’s economy in a ‘fundamental’ way: ‘Not just the surface paint. We should really go into the core, and redo the foundations, and retrofit this economy, really, and not just paint the outside.’ Mexico’s neoliberal policy changes were above all the consequence of changes in the professional identities of the bureaucrats and politicians running the Mexican state. From the 1970s through the late 1980s, a new generation of free market technocrats took over, as US-trained economists replaced older officials with more traditional – nationalist and statist – policy preferences (Golob 2003). In 1988, the inauguration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the holder of a PhD in political economy and government from Harvard, only demonstrated the extent of this transformation. All of Salinas’ economic cabinet ministers and many high-level staff in the Mexican bureaucracy at that time held PhDs from prestigious US economics departments (Thacker 2000).16 Unlike in Canada, Mexican business was little involved in the Mexican state’s decision to pursue free trade. The composition of the Mexican private sector changed substantially in the 1980s, the years after the 1982 economic crisis witnessing most notably the emergence of a number of large, internationally competitive and exportoriented conglomerates (Flores Quiroga 1998). The economic weight and political influence of smaller, domestically oriented manufacturers declined, while the composition of Mexico’s exports evolved away from oil and towards manufactures. Some of the business leaders affiliated with the large and growing export-oriented firms began calling for continental economic integration in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the Mexican private sector as a whole never mobilized in support of regional integration, and over the course of the 1980s the Mexican state ignored what private sector calls there were for an FTA.17 Despite his and his team’s neoliberal background, Salinas initially shied away from the idea of free trade. He says that was because he wanted to focus on other issues (Salinas de Gortari 2000). Many observers in Mexico believe he feared the political challenge of winning public support for the initiative – much like Mulroney before 1985. As late as 1989, senior Mexican officials were openly rejecting the idea of free trade (see Noyola and Serra 1990:87). Either way, Salinas eventually decided to pursue an agreement because he felt that doing so was the only way to attract the foreign direct investment (FDI) that he and his advisors considered essential for longterm growth and employment in Mexico (Espinosa Velasco and Serra Puche 2004). Unlike in
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Page 155 the Canadian case, Salinas’ decision to negotiate an FTA was made very fast, with no public discussion ahead of time. One American business association interviewee confirmed that, before Salinas suddenly decided to pursue an agreement, US business people had not anticipated that he would do so. Mexico’s objectives in the NAFTA negotiations reflected the top priority of attracting FDI. When US negotiators voiced the demands of American big business for strict investor rights and intellectual property protections, the Mexican negotiators – after feigning some resistance, in hopes of using the issue as a bargaining chip – happily agreed (interviews with Mexican and US negotiators). They believed that the inclusion of such measures would only increase the attractiveness of Mexico to foreign investors, both in the USA and elsewhere. Nevertheless, there were many sceptical businesspeople about foreign investment, since foreign firms represented additional, stiff competition that they would have to confront in their home market. In order to win the support of sceptical businesspeople the Mexican state established a large private sector representation structure, and in that sense Mexican business was involved in the process in the same way as American and Canadian business (Fairbrother 2007). But the Mexican private sector included a much larger number of business people sceptical about free trade, and so the influence of domestic business on the negotiators’ positions was more defensive in Mexico than in the other two countries.18 Given Mexico’s political system at the time, there was almost no chance of the initiative being defeated. Nevertheless, public contention about the initiative was vibrant, and the issue of NAFTA prompted the formation of a large coalition of labour and civil society organizations, eventually known as RMALC (Red Mexicana de Acción frente al Libre Comercio, or Mexican Action Network on Free Trade). RMALC developed strong ties to NAFTA opponents in the USA and Canada (Ayres 1998; Kay 2005), even though most Mexican critics sought a different kind of North American integration (more social democratic, regulated, and European in style), whereas opponents in the other two countries tended to be more critical of any and all forms of integration. Just as the character of the civil society opposition differed in Mexico, with critics less opposed to increased integration in general, and with Mexican business associations less actively supportive, nothing like USA*NAFTA or CATJO emerged in Mexico. Development, state–capital relations, and cross-national differences As discussed in the introduction, existing research has implicitly identified a general pattern: business has tended to play a small role in pro-globalization policy changes in Third World countries, and a larger role in First World countries. The previous section’s comparative analysis of NAFTA supports this view. This section now discusses reasons for it, based on three key differences between the two First World countries and the one Third World
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Page 156 country involved in North American free trade, as well as between countries of the Global North and South more generally. First, especially starting in the 1950s, many developing countries sought to industrialize behind a protective tariff wall. Many businesspeople in developing countries stood to lose out from integration into international markets, and not surprisingly their preference was usually to maintain protection instead.19 The preferences of First World capital differed. The wealthy industrialized countries all joined the GATT upon its creation in 1947, and they participated in successive rounds of multilateral trade liberalization thereafter, signalling their greater support for international economic liberalism.20 Nevertheless, even First World countries retained many restrictions on trade and investment, often because of private sector concerns about foreign competition from other First World countries. But by the 1980s, First World business support for international integration had increased. In the case of North American free trade, then, business in the USA had long supported more regional integration, and Canadian capital moved towards support over time (prompting changes in the preferences of Canadian politicians, as discussed above). Mexican business people, on the other hand, were collectively never so confident. Second, if business drove First World states to globalize, but Third World capital did not play a similar role in developing countries, what motivated Third World states to make similar pro-globalization policy changes? The existing literature on both Mexico specifically and countries of the global South more generally is emphatic: With the rise of global finance in the late twentieth century, and as a result of profligate lending and borrowing, many developing states grew heavily indebted to foreign creditors, and eventually found themselves dependent on private creditors and the major international financial institutions (IFIs) – the IMF and World Bank (Babb 2001; Thacker 2000; Woods 2006). These new external relationships reshaped developing countries’ political and economic circumstances, and ultimately led states in developing countries to support economic opening. In contrast, no First World state has been subjected to IFI dependency since the UK (relatively mildly) in 1976. In Mexico, the IMF and World Bank recommended neoliberal policies and endorsed Mexico’s subsequent policy changes. But Mexico actually went beyond what the IFIs demanded, meaning that it would be inaccurate to say that the IFIs imposed neoliberalism directly by making loans conditional on specific policy changes (Thacker 2000:6). Nevertheless, existing accounts show that Mexico’s dependence on the IFIs – as well as on private foreign creditors – contributed to the selection of the technocrats who then implemented Mexico’s free market reforms in the 1980s and 90s, including NAFTA (Woods 2006). Having to negotiate with external financial actors made neoliberal officials with prestigious technical credentials an attractive asset to the Mexican state, leading those officials to win promotions and posts from which they were gradually able to take complete control of the
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Page 157 policymaking apparatus. In the North, technocratic takeovers such as this have not occurred. Third, even if business wanted globalization in the First World, and states wanted it in the Third World, why were they able to get what they wanted? Domestic business might not want globalization because of concerns about additional competition, while states might not want to pursue proglobalization policy changes because of the political risks. In Canada, for example, the Progressive Conservatives that negotiated both CUFTA and NAFTA paid a severe price in the federal election of 1993, being reduced to two seats in the federal parliament (out of 295). In the view of one Canadian business interviewee, Mulroney ‘took what was generally seen as a political risk for the country as a whole. But it certainly was not a political risk in terms of being in tune with the business community. In fact, quite the opposite’. In the USA, many federal legislators feared the consequences of supporting NAFTA in 1993, when labour, environmental organizations, and other civil society grounds were mobilizing public opinion against the agreement. Even in Mexico, with its authoritarian state only minimally constrained by voters, political elites feared a backlash against free trade, insofar as they believed that any turbulence in Mexico would reduce the chances of NAFTA’s passage in the US congress. In the absence of prior mobilization by business, states have independently decided to pursue globalization in precisely those countries where they have more economic, political, and social autonomy from, and power over, the private sector. Conversely, domestic capital has mobilized for international economic integration in precisely those countries where its political power vis-à-vis the state is greater. More concretely, in the case of NAFTA, Canadian capital shared American capital’s dominant position with respect to their respective states, despite their different positions in the world economy, while Mexican capital was more internally subordinate. There are at least three facets of state – capital relations that varied across the three countries, and which vary between developed and developing countries more broadly. First, at an economic level, Mexico was home to much more state ownership of industry than the other two countries, making the Mexican state less dependent on the private sector. Table 8.2 illustrates the relative weights of Table 8.2 State-owned enterprises Gross capital formation of SOEs (% of total gross SOE share of GDP (%, capital formation, 1975–1979 average) 1978–1991 average) Canada 15.7 * Mexico 26.1 11.6 USA 4.7 1.2 Sources: OECD 1985; World Bank 1995. *SOE share of GDP was not available for Canada.
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Page 158 public enterprise in each country. As noted by Thacker (2000), public enterprises give states more autonomy from business, and thus variation in the public share of total investment reveals variable levels of public vis-à-vis private power. Accurate comparative measures of public investment and public enterprise are hard to come by, especially comparisons spanning the First and Third Worlds. Nevertheless, the figures here allow for some comparison, insofar as the table illustrates the much greater role of public enterprise in Mexico’s economy in the years prior to its decision to negotiate NAFTA, relative to Canada and even more so the USA. One Mexican technocrat interviewee expressed his feelings about the Mexican private sector in this, somewhat exaggerated, fashion: ‘We had just begun opening up the Mexican economy. Mexican business depended basically on government give-aways, on government contracts, government permissions to import, government permissions to export. So Mexican business and businessmen didn’t exist!’ These differences among the NAFTA countries are representative of broader differences between developing and developed countries generally. Developing states’ efforts to industrialize, especially starting in the 1950s, led them to replace many private firms with state-owned enterprises, much more so than First World countries (Evans 1985). As a consequence, relative to First World states, developing states grew less economically dependent on and more autonomous from private enterprise (Table 8.3). The disparity in public ownership between First and Third World countries therefore demonstrates a general asymmetry in the economic position of the state. Second, politically, among the three countries involved in NAFTA, Mexico stands out as a case of highly centralized authority, with little democratic accountability, and a historically marginalized domestic business community. From the 1920s to 2000, Mexico was governed by a single party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI). The PRI ruled using a mix of state corporatism, frequent recourse to revolutionary rhetoric, patronage, corruption, populist economic policies, occasional repression, and crooked elections. Under the PRI, incumbent presidents handpicked their own successors and controlled not only the executive branch, but also the legislative and judicial branches, sub-national governments, and to a large extent even the PRI itself. Elections were held, but they were a mere formality. In addition to their economic weakness, then, Table 8.3 State-owned enterprises SOE share of gross domestic investment SOE share of GDP (%, (%, 1978–1991) 1978–1991) Developed 7.7 4.9 countries Developing 24.1 10.7 countries Source: World Bank 1995.
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Page 159 private business people in many developing countries have also been more politically marginalized than their counterparts in wealthier societies.21 As part of its consolidation, the PRI formally incorporated workers, peasants, and ‘popular sectors’ (selected professionals). Business people, however, were never included in the same way. As Schneider aptly summarizes: ‘The avenues usually available to business elsewhere for open and formal political participation through parties and top government positions were systematically closed to Mexican business’ (Schneider 2002:81). This power of the state in Mexico, and its concentration of authority in the hands of one person at a time, set it apart from the state in Canada and even more so the USA. Canada’s parliamentary system unites the federal legislative and executive branches, but the country has a very decentralized federal system, with strong and autonomous provincial governments. The US federation is not quite so decentralized, but the US state is still typically characterized as ‘weak’ because of its division of power between the executive and legislative branches and the low level of party discipline (Ikenberry et al. 1988). Third, in Canada and the USA, public and private elites have historically been more united through informal social networks, whereas in Mexico they have been two distinct groups. On the basis of his noted biographical research, Camp (1989) argues that economic and political elites in Mexico have long come from clearly distinct social networks. This finding suggests that the Mexican state has been more insulated from business influence than in countries with more formal and informal social network ties spanning the public and private sectors, and/or where elites move easily from one sector to the other over the course of their careers. Contrast Camp’s analysis of Mexican elites with Clement (1977) on Canada and Mills (1956) on the USA: the latter document extensive personal (e.g. familial) ties between corporate and state elites. Such ties were much less common in Mexico under the PRI, further contributing to the state’s willingness to impose its preferences on business. Conclusions This chapter has addressed variation in how pro-globalization policy changes have occurred in different kinds of countries – and more specifically the variable roles of political and economic elites in encouraging and making those changes. Studies of First World countries have frequently emphasized the decisive power of private economic elites, while studies of proglobalization transitions in Third World countries have typically argued that the initiative of political elites has been primary and that business has not played a major role. The existing literature has not recognized this substantial difference between the two contexts, nor offered much of an explanation for it. Three cases discussed here have illustrated the range of pathways by which
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Page 160 countries can come to embrace globalization. The one developing country, Mexico, exemplifies the state-driven pathway to globalization, with neoliberal public officials organizing the support of domestic business (and the rest of society) for rapid international integration. In the other countries, Canada and the USA, the domestic business community was an active participant. Canada’s switch from nationalist to neoliberal and export-oriented economic policies reflected the evolving character and preferences of domestic capital. In both countries, neoliberal policy changes prompted aggressive, committed collective action on the part of the private sector. In Mexico, no such mobilization occurred. This analysis suggests that policy shifts to globalization in First and Third World countries are substantially different processes – made for different reasons and driven by different actors. That said, one significant commonality across the three cases was the heavy involvement of business in the formulation of each country’s objectives for the negotiations. Nowhere was the private sector any less than a major contributor in that regard, despite its variable roles in instigating and promoting the policy shift to free trade. The less variable participation of domestic capital in the international negotiations suggests that states face similar incentives to satisfy business priorities at that stage, despite important crossnational differences in political institutions and in business priorities – a potential issue for further political economic investigation. Notes 1 To avoid repetitiveness, given the focus of the chapter, I will use the terms developed, First World, and global North interchangeably, and the terms developing, Third World, and global South interchangeably. 2 The bilateral CUFTA was subsumed under the trilateral NAFTA when the latter went into effect. 3 Using these three distinct sources allowed me to cross-check the validity of my claims. Interviewees (37 Canadians, 39 Mexicans, and 38 Americans) spoke to me on condition that their names would not be connected to specific quotations or statements, but a full list of their names and positions is available from the author. I use the interview data sparingly, given the chapter’s focus on macro-processes and very large collective actors (largely states and national business communities) rather than micro-processes and individual people. Interviewees were politicians, bureaucrats, diplomats, business leaders, business association staff, legislative staff, academics, and various kinds of critics of North American free trade. 4 See Cook 1981; ‘Mexico rejects Reagan’s plan for a North American common market’, The Wall Street Journal 27 May 1980. 5 The US Trade Agreements Act of 1979 also directed the president to ‘study the desirability of entering into trade agreements with countries in the northern portion of the western hemisphere’ and report back to the appropriate congressional committees (USITC 1981:1). In early 1980, the US National Governors Association called for trinational talks on the formation of a North American common market (Globe and Mail 27 February 1980:12, ‘US governors call for forum on common market possibility’, Associated Press). 6 Canada’s parliamentary system and its tradition of party discipline meant that a majority government in that country could count on support in the legislature.
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Page 161 Mexico, at the time of NAFTA’s creation, was governed by a dominant party with strong majorities in both houses of the federal congress. In that country, like in Canada, legislators from the governing party were sure to vote with the executive branch. In the USA, in contrast, low party discipline and the greater autonomy of the legislative branch meant that the president could not count on support even from legislators belonging to his own party. 7 In each country, opposition to continental integration sometimes took on a nationalist character – complicating efforts to build transnational solidarity. There were even some strongly right-wing opponents of NAFTA in the USA (Rupert 2000), unlike in Canada and Mexico. 8 The AFL-CIO, the major US labour confederation, campaigned vigorously against NAFTA. Some 300 grassroots environmental organizations and public interest groups expressed their opposition to NAFTA (Hogenboom 1998:221). And earlier the same year, Public Citizen, Friends of the Earth, and the Sierra Club had tried to stall NAFTA’s ratification with a legal challenge saying the US government was obliged to prepare an environmental impact assessment before NAFTA could be sent to the congress for approval. 9 The Bush Administration negotiated NAFTA (between 1990 and 1992), but it was the Clinton Administration that promoted its congressional approval in 1993. 10 Some scholars have criticized the strict intellectual property rights included in agreements like NAFTA as costly burdens on developing countries (Shadlen 2005), while NAFTA’s investment chapter has come under fire for being a gift to corporations at the expense of democratic governance (Barenberg and Evans 2004). 11 Bilateral free trade with the USA had been proposed in Canada many times before, starting in the mid-nineteenth century (Hart 2002). However, free trade was considered a very politically risky policy even by its advocates, given that a Liberal government was soundly defeated in an election in 1911 largely because of its support for free trade. Until September 1985, no government was publicly willing to endorse the idea. 12 By 1980, Canada’s inward stock of FDI was 20.4 per cent the size of its GDP. To set that figure in context, for the world as a whole FDI was 5.3 per cent of GDP; for the USA it was 3 per cent at that time. Among the developed countries, only Ireland was host to more inward FDI relative to GDP (UNCTAD n.d.). 13 Subsequent to the implementation of CUFTA in 1989, the opposition of the previously critical Liberal Party began to decline. By late 1993, the newly elected Liberal government of Jean Chrétien quietly ratified NAFTA as negotiated by the Tories, despite previously promising to renegotiate it instead. 14 Between 1960 and 1981, Mexico’s GDP grew 6.9 per cent a year, compared with 4.4 per cent for the world as a whole (World Bank n.d.). 15 Mexico had 1,155 state-owned enterprises in 1982, and only 433 by 1988 (Aspe 1990:125). Other major industries and enterprises, including the telephone service, the airlines, and the banks, were privatized in the early 1990s. 16 Economists made political inroads in many developing countries, especially in Latin America (see Teichman 2001; Woods 2006). But, with the possible exception of Chile, the rise of economists was most striking in Mexico. In 1990, at the time of the decision to negotiate free trade, Mexico’s secretaries for budget, finance, and trade and industry all held economics PhDs from the USA, as did the undersecretaries of trade and industry (two Yale, two Chicago, one MIT). In contrast, the equivalent officials in Canada had only one graduate degree in economics among them (a PhD from McGill and Cambridge). 17 Salas-Porras (2005) provide some general evidence of Mexican business support for free market policy changes. The president of the Consejo Empresarial Mexicano para Asuntos Internacionales (Mexican Business Council on
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Page 162 International Affairs) called for free trade in February 1989 (Proceso 2 April 1990:7). 18 Flores (1998) and Thacker (2000) describe how Mexico’s postwar ISI development model generated a large number of small and medium-sized domestically oriented manufacturing enterprises dependent on government contracts and subsidies and on continued protection from foreign competition. Their policy priorities differed substantially from those of the newer, larger, and more internationally integrated conglomerates. 19 This statement must be qualified, however, insofar as not all Third World countries pursued import substitution industrialization in the postwar period. Some, especially very poor and small countries, remained focus on exports of agricultural and other primary goods. Their distinctive political trajectory to globalization could be the subject of future research. In Latin America specifically, however, trade protectionism had been extremely high ever since independence from Spain (Coatsworth and Williamson 2004). 20 Some developing countries joined GATT early on, but many did not, and those that did join won ‘special and differential treatment’ excluding them from many of the GATT’s obligations. 21 There are of course exceptions, particularly very poor countries where the state has little autonomous capacity and minimal insulation from outside influences. The globalization of countries in such circumstances may have proceeded differently, a possibility which warrants further investigation. References Amigo Castañeda, J. (1991) ‘Regulación y proyectos de inversion extranjera en México’, El Mercado de Valores 7: 3–7. Aspe, P. (1990) ‘Mexico: foreign debt and economic growth’, in D. S. Brothers and A. E. Wick (eds) Mexico’s Search for a New Development Strategy , Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Ayres, J. M. (1998) Defying Conventional Wisdom: Political Movements and Popular Contention against North American Free Trade , Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Babb, S. (2001) Managing Mexico: Economists from Nationalism to Neoliberalism , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Barenberg, M. and Evans, P. (2004) ‘The FTAA’s impact on democratic governance’, in A. Estevadeordal, D. Rodrik, A.M. Taylor, and A. Velasco (eds) Integrating the Americas: FTAA and Beyond , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cameron, M. A. and Tomlin, B.W. (2000) The Making of NAFTA: How the Deal Was Done, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Camp, R. A. (1989) Entrepreneurs and Politics in Twentieth-Century Mexico , New York: Oxford University Press. Campbell, J. L. and Pedersen, O. K. (2001) The Rise of Neoliberalism and Institutional Analysis, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Center for Public Integrity (1993) ‘The trading game: inside lobbying for the North American Free Trade Agreement’, Washington DC: The Center for Public Integrity. Chorev, N. (2007) Remaking US Trade Policy: From Protectionism to Globalization , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Clement, W. (1977) ‘The corporate elite, the capitalist class, and the Canadian state’,
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Page 163 in L. Panitch (ed.) The Canadian State: Political Economy and Political Power, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Coatsworth, J. H. and Williamson, J. G. (2004) ‘Always protectionist? Latin American tariffs from Independence to Great Depression’, Journal of Latin American Studies 36: 205–32. Cook, P. (1981) ‘Executives still wary of free trade’, Globe & Mail , 15 June: B1. Doern, G. B. and Tomlin, B. W. (1991) Faith and Fear: The Free Trade Story , Toronto: Stoddart. Dreiling, M. (2001) Solidarity and Contention: The Politics of Security and Sustainability in the NAFTA Conflict , New York: Garland. Espinosa Velasco, J. E. and Serra Puche, J. (2004) ‘Diez años del Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte’, in P. García Alba, G. Torres Ramírez, and L. Gutiérrez (eds) El Nuevo Milenio Mexicano, Tomo I: México y el Mundo, México DF: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Azcapotzalco and Ediciones y Gráficos Eón. Evans, P. B. (1985) ‘Transnational linkages and the economic role of the state: an analysis of developing and industrialized nations in the post-World War II period’, in P. B. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer, and T. Skocpol (eds) Bringing the State Back In, New York: Cambridge University Press. Fairbrother, M. (2007) ‘Making neoliberalism possible: the state’s organization of business support for NAFTA in Mexico’, Politics & Society 35: 265–300. Flores Quiroga, A. R. (1998) Proteccionismo Versus Librecambio: La Economía Política de la Protección Comercial en México, 1970–1994, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Golob, S. R. (2003) ‘Beyond the policy frontier: Canada, Mexico, and the ideological origins of NAFTA’, World Politics , 55: 361–98. Haggard, S. and Kaufman, R. R. (1992) ‘Introduction: institutions and economic adjustment’, in S. Haggard and R. R. Kaufman (eds) The Politics of Economic Adjustment: International Constraints, Distributive Conflicts, and the State , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hart, M. (2002) A Trading Nation: Canadian Trade Policy from Colonialism to Globalization , Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism , Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heston, A., Summers, R. and Aten, A. (2006). ‘Penn World Table Version 6.2’, Center for International Comparisons of Production, Income and Prices at the University of Pennsylvania, September. Online. Available: pwt.econ.upenn.edu/php_site/ pwt62/pwt62_form.php (accessed: 16 February 2008). Hogenboom, B. (1998) Mexico and the NAFTA Environmental Debate: The Transnational Politics of Economic Integration , Utrecht: International Books. Ikenberry, G. J., Lake, D. A. and Mastanduno, M. (1988) ‘Introduction: approaches to explaining American foreign economic policy’, International Organization 42: 1–14. Kay, T. (2005) ‘Labor transnationalism and global governance: the impact of NAFTA on transnational labor relationships in North America’, American Journal of Sociology 111: 715–56. Krasner, S. D. (1977) ‘US commercial and monetary policy: unraveling the paradox of external strength and internal weakness’, International Organization 31: 635–71. Langille, D. (1987) ‘The Business Council on National Issues and the Canadian state’, Studies in Political Economy 24: 41–85.
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Page 164 Lustig, N. (1998) Mexico: The Remaking of an Economy , 2nd edn, Washington DC: Brookings. McBride, S. (2001) Paradigm Shift: Globalization and the Canadian State , Halifax: Fernwood. Mills, C. W. (1956) The Power Elite , New York: Oxford University Press. Noyola, P. and Serra, J. (1990) ‘Rebalancing government direction and market guidance’, in D. S. Brothers and A. E. Wick (eds) Mexico’s Search for a New Development Strategy , Boulder, CO: Westview Press. OECD (1985) The Role of the Public Sector: Causes and Consequences of the Growth of Government , Paris: OECD. Ravenhill, J. (2004) ‘Trade politics in east Asia’, in B. Hocking and S. McGuire (eds) Trade Politics , 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Rupert, M. (2000) Ideologies of Globalization: Contending Visions of a New World Order, New York: Routledge. Salas-Porras, A. (2005) ‘Changing the bases of political support in Mexico: probusiness networks and the market reform agenda’, Review of International Political Economy , 12: 129–54. Salinas de Gortari, C. (2000) México: Un Paso Difícil a la Modernidad , Barcelona: Plaza & Janés Editores, S.A. Schneider, B. R. (2002) ‘Why is Mexican business so organized?’, Latin American Research Review 37: 77–118. Shadlen, K. C. (2005) ‘Exchanging development for market access? Deep integration and industrial policy under multilateral and regional-bilateral trade agreements’, Review of International Political Economy 12: 750–75. Simmons, B. A. and Elkins, Z. (2004) ‘The globalization of liberalization: policy diffusion in the international political economy’, American Political Science Review 98: 171–89. Sklair, L. (1995) Sociology of the Global System , 2nd edn, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Story, D. (1986) Industry, the State, and Public Policy in Mexico , Austin: University of Texas Press. Teichman, J. A. (2001) The Politics of Freeing Markets in Latin America: Chile, Argentina, and Mexico , Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Thacker, S. C. (2000) Big Business, the State, and Free Trade: Constructing Coalitions in Mexico , New York: Cambridge University Press. UNCTAD (n.d.) FDI On-line , New York and Geneva: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Online. Available: http://stats.unctad.org/fdi (accessed: 1 December 2007). USITC (1981) ‘Background study of the economies and international trade patterns of the countries of North America, Central America, and the Caribbean’, report on investigation no. 332–119 under Section 332 of the Tariff Act of 1930, USITC publication 1176, Washington DC: United States International Trade Commission. Van Apeldoorn, B. (2002) Transnational Capitalism and the Struggle over European Integration , London: Routledge. Weintraub, S. (1984) ‘US-Canada free trade: what’s in it for the US?’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 26: 225–44. Woods, N. (2006) The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank, and their Borrowers , Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.
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Page 165 World Bank (1995) Bureaucrats in Business: The Economics and Politics of Government Ownership , New York: Oxford University Press. World Bank (n.d.) World Development Indicators Online , Washington DC: World Bank. Online. Available: http://devdata.worldbank.org/dataonline (accessed: 1 December 2007).
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Page 166 9 Islamic engagement with European universalism State transformation in Turkey Yıldız Atasoy This chapter investigates the articulation of Islamic cultural politics with neoliberal capitalism in order to understand state transformation in Turkey. It focuses on a particular kind of Islamic politics that has emerged as the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and other Islamic groups cultivate a ‘public ethos of engagement’ (Connelly 1999:5) between European and Islamic ways of thought, morality, and norm creation. Conflicts over how Islamic sensibilities interact with conceptions of secular modernity, the rule of the state in Turkey, and the supranational polity of the EU, offer important insights into the specific meanings of an Islamic ‘marriage’ with neoliberalism. My analysis of the cultural-political process reveals a context in which the general material and discursive conditions of global capitalism are incorporated into particular cultural frames of action that steer state transformation in certain directions. In pushing the question of a re-articulated discourse of state transformation further, this chapter aims to re-conceptualize Islamic politics from a perspective that takes seriously the importance of ideas, culture, and public narratives in relation to their complex entanglements with market capitalism. Accordingly, I will first examine current political conflicts. Shifting political currents After winning the July 22, 2007 national election in Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) secured another 5-year term in government. The AKP increased its popular vote to 46.7 per cent, up from 34.28 per cent in the 2002 election when it formed the first ever ‘pro-Islamic’ majority government in Turkish history. During the 2007 elections, the notoriously ‘secular’ Republican People’s Party (CHP) formed an alliance with the Democratic Leftist Party (DSP) in an effort to unite the centre-left. They received a combined 20.87 per cent of the vote. The far-right National Action Party (MHP) gained 14.3 per cent of the popular vote. The AKP adopted a more ‘liberal’ ideological orientation in its election platform, while the centre-left CHP-DSP coalition and the far-right MHP took a statist, nationalist stance. The position of the CHP-DSP and the MHP reflected their opposition to AKP policy on Turkey’s accession to the European Union (EU). They perceived
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Page 167 EU membership requirements as an offense to national ‘dignity’ and sovereignty. The CHP-DSP and MHP also blamed the government for being too ‘soft’ to defend Turkey’s territorial integrity, particularly in the face of recent increased conflict between the Turkish army and the outlawed Kurdish separatist organization, the PKK. Moreover, the women’s headscarf issue was a point of contention for many on the centre-left who saw the headscarf as an affront to secularism. However, this issue was not in the forefront for the MHP, whose ideological position is a blend of Islamic values and Turkish nationalism, often referred to as the ‘Turkish-Islamic synthesis’. Regardless of their differences, both the CHP-DSP and the MHP have promoted a nationalist ideology in response to AKP policies that support liberal democratic norms and practices. The statist, nationalist discourse of the CHP-DSP and the MHP turns around the indelible mark left by Kemalism as the official state ideology. Since the formative years of the republic in the 1930s, Kemalism has remained deeply embedded in the Turkish Constitution. With their strong commitment to Kemalism, these political parties embody the dream of national sovereignty – a state-led economic developmentalism which conceives questions of economic policy and growth in national terms, and a particular kind of secular nationalism known as laiklik . For the AKP, on the other hand, Kemalism, by institutionalizing a restrictive understanding of laiklik , has contributed to the fragmentation of cultural space into laik and the Islamic sphere, each with a competing claim and discourse of state making and culture formation. This brings the AKP into conflict with the defenders of the Kemalist project of modernity, notably civil and military high bureaucrats, who subscribe to a state-imposed territorial logic of cultural homogeneity that can only be achieved through laiklik . The AKP, in contrast, aims to integrate a Muslim cultural orientation with Euro-American normative standards and reconfigure society through territorially specific power struggles. For the CHP-DSP and the MHP, however, state regulatory control over the national territorial space assumes the utmost importance. This brings them into conflict not only with the ‘Islam-sensitive’ AKP but also with Kurdish nationalists who wish to reorganize place according to an ethno-cultural political imaginary. The source of conflict for these players is the territorial homogeneity in cultural practices and the statist logic of developmentalism – all played out in relation to Turkey’s integration into the economic and political frameworks of the EU. For the AKP, the ideological persistence of Kemalist nationalism has, because of its statism, not allowed liberal-democratic principles to be fully implemented in Turkey. At the same time, continuing adherence to national developmentalism offers little help for Turkey in promoting market-led competitive growth and participation in the global economy. The AKP supports a market-driven neoliberal economic model, greater integration into the world capitalist economy, and Turkey’s membership in the EU through transnationalization.
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Page 168 The future trajectory of the Kemalist state At stake in this ideological controversy is the future trajectory of the Kemalist state. The AKP currently poses a liberal democratic challenge that is directed toward ensuring the political participation of certain groups who identify with modes of social experience that transcend traditional Kemalist cultural boundaries of citizenship. In its push for EU membership, which, according to Prime Minister Erdogan (2002), represents the most important project for Turkey since the establishment of the republic in 1923, the AKP raises the possibility of a mutable Kemalist frame. The prospect of EU membership directly confronts the authoritarian base of the state which supports that frame. The secular nationalism of Kemalist laiklik aimed to reorganize the public space of the state for politics and re-craft the private space of the home and family for religion and faith. Although liberal ideology permeates the history of such separation in Europe, Kemalism did not entail a separation between state and religion, but a disciplinary bureaucratic vigilantism for reconfiguring society and political culture. In its creation and management of a territorially homogenous culture, the state assumed key agency in controlling the production and dissemination of religious knowledge. Grounded in the authoritarian state-ruling practices of civil-military bureaucrats, the Kemalist project created a cultural hierarchy between a privileged few – consisting of an un-elected bureaucratic elite – and a segment of the general population whom Kemalist bureaucrats have questioned in regard to their cultural suitability for modernity. The July 2007 election played out this hierarchy in favour of the AKP’s liberal challenge. The AKP called the election to resolve a crisis which emerged from the actions of General Yasar Buyukanit, the military’s high commander whose intention was to interrupt the democratic process and strengthen the Kemalist base of state power. The military high bureaucracy opposed the election of ‘pro-Islamic’ Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdullah Gul as president merely because his wife wears the turban , a form of headscarf worn by Muslim women. This opposition was expressed in an e-mail posted on the Chief of General Staff website, known as the e-memorandum of April 27. The e-memorandum included a warning on the importance of protecting ‘the fundamental founding principles of the state of the Republic of Turkey, most importantly the laiklik principle’. The General Staff affirmed that ‘the Turkish Armed Forces is one of the parties in the laiklik discussions and its absolute defender’. It added that the armed forces value ‘loyalty to the Republican regime not on the surface but in essence, and that this loyalty must be demonstrated through action’ (Genelkurmay Baskanligi, April 27, 2007). Following the e-memorandum, the CHP-DSP coalition parties organized the so-called ‘republican rallies’ in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir in April and May. These rallies were supported by what I refer to as the neoKemalists , a group of middle class, urban CHP devotees, as well as some
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Page 169 MHP nationalists. This group was presented in the media as the manifestation of the will of the ‘people [who] had claimed the secular republic, [demanding that] the government had to obey the nation’s will’ (Yayla 2007). Banners carried at the rallies read ‘Full Independence for Turkey’, ‘ Turban [headscarf] – a Reactionary Flag’, and ‘No to Fanaticism’. The upper bureaucracy of the judicial system, notably the Constitutional Court, further contributed to the tension. Through the procedural decision-making process, judges had intended to interrupt and replace the legislative power of parliament in the presidential election (Ozbudun 2007). Judicial intervention and political manoeuvring failed to prevent the election of ‘proIslamic’ Gul as president. In fact, it further increased general cultural resentment against the authoritarian core of the Kemalist state. However, despite the landslide victory of the AKP and the democratic election of Gul to the presidency, Chief of General Staff Buyukanit continued to challenge Gul’s election. He declared that the views of the Turkish Armed Forces ‘do not change from day to day … We are fully behind what we said in April …’ (quoted in Falk 2007:14). It is now widely acknowledged that the election victory of the AKP partly reflects citizens’ reaction to bureaucratic intervention in the democratic political process in the name of protecting laiklik . That so many Turks found this interference unacceptable reflects their commitment to entrusting the institutions of the state to the civilian rule of the elected, thereby further challenging bureaucratic tutelage over politics (Saribay 2007). The state-bureaucratic elite fears that the AKP wants to Islamize the state. This is due to the fact that the AKP’s leadership cadre and founding members had their political upbringing in the pro-Islamic national view movement, which shaped Islamic politics in Turkey for more than 30 years beginning in the late 1960s. With a strong attachment to the dream of national sovereignty, the national view program had popularized the theme of Western imperialism. It argued that structural imbalances generated by Western political and military dominance in the operation of the world economy induced powerlessness in the Turkish state and undermined its capacity to produce effective and autonomous social policy. In an effort to find a remedy, the national view advocated a decoupling from Western dominated structures of power and a rapprochement with Muslim states. It also envisaged a politically strong state able to cultivate Islamic moral principles and spirituality in the national consciousness (Atasoy 2005: Ch. 5). The AKP clearly differentiates itself from the national view ideology of the pro-Islamic political parties. The AKP’s Islam-sensitive orientation allows political renegotiation of the Kemalist political order through an Islamic re-signification of cultural issues around EU membership. This challenges the authoritarian fundamentals of the laiklik system, but without being overtly religious and without shattering the Kemalist bedrock of the modernity project. Nonetheless, it grafts the Kemalist dream of national sovereignty and development onto a transnationalized political space. The AKP defines itself as a pro-Western political
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Page 170 party representing the ‘societal centre’ (Erdogan 2007). It envisages a novel type of political-coalition building based on a wide range of people and interests. This includes newly rich Anatolian- and Istanbul-based capitalists, rural-urban small producers, Kurds with ethno-cultural claims, women with issues surrounding the headscarf ban, members of the left disillusioned with the state-nationalist and secular rhetoric of the CHP-DSP, as well as some Islam-sensitive nationalist MHP supporters. The AKP is establishing a more ‘inclusive’ form of politics that incorporates these economically, culturally, and regionally divergent groups into a neoliberal political imaginary that is being filtered through an EU inspired process of transnationalization. This undermines the pro-Islamic national view ideology, which still maintains that Western cultural norms and practices have a corrupting influence. The AKP project also complicates the Kemalist vision of modernity as total cultural ‘westernization’ (Kahraman 2005) by challenging Kemalist authoritarian ideology. There are three contentious issues which are deeply implicated in the AKP’s Islamic re-signification: The wearing of the headscarf by Muslim women in schools and staterun offices, the role of imam-hatip schools (for prayer leaders and preachers) and Koran schools in the educational system, and the Kurdish issue. By tying each of these areas to norms of democracy, personal freedom, human rights, and cultural expression (Duran 2004:134), the AKP is reworking the thinking and ethos fostered by Kemalism. This entails a change in the Kemalist state but one that is not opposed to secularism. An important question now arises: How does an Islamic cultural politics that is specifically tied to Turkey’s EU membership articulate with neoliberalism? Islam’s engagement with ‘European universalism’ In Prime Minister Erdogan’s own words, an Islamic orientation in Turkey refers to: ‘… the reproduction of our own authentic value systems on the basis of our own deeply rooted ideational tradition along with the universal standards adopted within a conservative political orientation’ (Akdogan 2004:13; my translation and emphasis). For Erdogan, implementation of the Copenhagen political criteria which define the requirements for EU membership will enable Turkey to combine ‘authentic’ value systems with the ‘uni versal’ standards of Western liberal thought. By frequently evoking an image of European standards positioned around a categorical universality, Erdogan argues that Turkish national culture should embody the principles of liberal democracy, human rights, and individual freedoms. Both Said (1979) and Žižek (2001:152) would argue that such a statement elevates European local traditions to the status of universality. From this perspective, the embodiment of EU standards within national culture firmly ties the reproduction of authenticity to a symbolic identification with historically globalized particularities of European ways, which Žižek defines as ‘false universalism’. For Erdogan, however, what is at stake is not the falsity or genuineness of the
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Page 171 distinction between authenticity and universalism, but a redefinition of meanings in terms of the reproduction of cultural values and normative standards through the embodiment of European ways. This indicates a process whereby European practices are recast as a universal ‘norm-setting context’ within which Islamic reframing is anchored. The translatability of European particularities to a norm-setting position is clearly not a trans-historical phenomenon, but a historically contested negotiation and reconfiguring of knowledge cultures and political economy. Influenced by ‘Lockean liberalism’, European contestation involves ‘bracketing off the economy from the sphere of political choice’ (Van der Pijl 2006:29). An Islamic cultural orientation acquires a distinctive meaning within this context. It fosters a particular outlook around a neoliberal imaginary of market-led competitive growth and participation in global capitalism, refigured as a ‘democratic’ reordering of the Kemalist state’s assertive control. The reconfiguration of Islam in this way involves a contentious process of transforming politics and political institutions. Erdogan redefines the ‘authentic’ to allow a place-specific struggle over cultural renegotiation of neoliberal values and market-oriented reforms. This struggle can take place within the territorial space of the nation-state but is constituted by the incorporation of global processes. Erdogan aims to re-signify Muslim cultural values and practices by ‘denationalizing’ policy agendas set up and maintained by a strong, authoritarian state. This requires a shift in the form of state regulatory authority and a nation-state frame of reference for organizing political life and cultural meanings. It is still envisioned as a national project of state restructuring, however, rather than ‘the boundary-transcending practices’ of post-nationalist politics - which have been under stood ‘as part of the epochal perspectival shift of globalized modernity’ (Beck and Grande 2007:113-14). It is unclear just what Erdogan’s ‘search for an authentic culture through denationalization’ signifies. Domestically, it presents a counterclaim to the discursive dominance of Kemalist state-secularism. Of course, this does not mean a denouncement of Kemalism, which remains constitutionally insured, although constitutional debate is currently underway. The search for authenticity does symbolize a gradual shift in citizens’ loyalty away from certain state institutions such as the military and the judiciary, as the July 2007 elections have clearly demonstrated. This can be seen as ‘a reworking of the idea of civic nationalism’ (Calhoun 2007:16). At the same time, the very idea of the ‘contingent content’ of the political reframing of an Islamic orientation in reference to ‘European universalism’ (Wallerstein 2006) demands close examination. Žižek (2000:313) argues that in politics, ‘universality’ is asserted when an agent posits itself as the direct embodiment of universality against all others within the global order. From this perspective, the agent of universality consists not only of international drivers of market-oriented policy reforms, but also publicly invisible members of the ‘symbolic class’ (Žižek 2000:322).
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Page 172 Empirical research on ‘international coercion’ – defined as the exertion of international pressures for policy imitation among countries (Henisz et al. 2005) – focuses on the role of dominant states (Kogut and Macpherson 2003) and multilateral organizations (Rude 2005) in affecting policy results. I am convinced that it is not only the EU, the USA, the IMF, and the World Bank that exert pressure on policy as agents of international coercion. Members of the symbolic class also play a significant role – from within, especially. The symbolic class includes religious groups, academics, scholars, journalists, and others whose domain of work involves the production of a world-view or symbolic universe. In the Turkish context, this includes Sufi orders and religious communities such as the Fethullahcilar, Islamic intellectuals, writers, poets, and journalists. These individuals and groups are actively making history by creating cultural repertoires and steering ideological frames of action in a certain direction. The epistemic privilege of globalization and democratization The dominant policy orientation which frames the EU’s enlargement criteria has been a market-driven neoliberal capitalist economy model and a wider process of state transformation in line with liberal democratic principles (Keating 2004; Van der Pijl 2006). In this respect, the EU acts as an ‘agent of international coercion’ (Henisz et al. 2005:875). When membership is conditional to the adoption and implementation of reforms, its coercion is direct. When it influences a shift in domestic coalition politics in favour of a political faction which supports a given policy, the coercion is more indirect. There is of course also a threat of direct or indirect punishment if reforms are not implemented. In this case, the threat includes the rejection of membership or a long delay in membership negotiations, or the imposition of further reforms which again may alter domestic coalition politics and policy struggles in favour of a specific approach to policy making. The AKP has adopted policies for the integration of Turkey into the EU on the basis of the Copenhagen political criteria, which sets membership requirements according to the Copenhagen European Council of 1993, and the Charter of Fundamental Rights (Negotiating Framework for Turkey 2005). The EU accession negotiations begun in October 2005 may take a decade or more, and Turkey may never become a full member. In this sense the EU exercises direct coercion on Turkey’s policy-making, which has led to a nationalist-statist response as formulated by the CHP-DSP and the MHP. This also gives rise to rival definitions and high-stakes policy orientations competing for power to control the direction of change. This is most evident in the unfolding trajectory of laiklik , where EU-induced policies may facilitate a shift from the Kemalist path by affecting state-citizen relations and bargaining between different classes and political groups. The AKP’s efforts to integrate Turkey into the EU may transform state-centrism in Turkish politics. Here, the international coerciveness of the EU is indirect and constitutes the
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Page 173 greater source of contention in terms of the democratization process in Turkey. Interestingly, the neoliberal market economy model does not constitute a major area of controversy as it has been a dominant policy perspective since the 1980 military coup. From that time onward, governments have pursued a complex mix of policies to actually implement neoliberal market capitalism. ‘Democratization discourse’ places European policy ideas on a liberal democratic foundation. It describes criteria common to a process of governing and political participation in most of Western Europe and North America (Macpherson 1977). These criteria include: the principles of liberty, the rule of law, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for and protection of minorities against intrusion by the state, and the stability of institutions guaranteeing the overall process of democracy (Negotiating Framework for Turkey 2005). These principles neither constitute sufficient conditions for democracy nor aggregate into an idealized model of the democratization process. Nonetheless, they point to a process of change in the context of public politics within which a shift in state-citizen relations can occur toward greater and more equal citizen participation, enhanced citizen control over governance, and extended citizen protection from arbitrary action by government (Tilly 2004). Democratization also becomes a struggle for a more limited state. This may have more positive effects on citizenship rights within states, but it essentially reduces democracy to ‘liberalism’ (Wood 1995:234) and does not significantly affect new power dynamics and inequalities created by the neoliberal global market economy. John Locke’s arbitrary separation of the economic sphere of the market from the political sphere of the state allowed democracy to be redefined within the framework of liberalism, thereby liberating the market from a constraining state. Lockean liberalism continues to hold its epistemic and normative privilege in the context of neoliberal restructuring. Why is it that ‘democracy’ has been treated as a singular normative ideal to be replicated around the world, such that its widespread diffusion is even called the ‘globalization of democracy’ (Diamond 2000)? And how is it that the global expansion of the market economy is associated with the triumph of ‘liberal democracy’, as Fukuyama (1992) asserts in his The End of History and the Last Man? This can be better understood if we briefly consider Samuel Huntington’s ideas on ‘democratisation in the late twentieth century’. Huntington (1991) views the worldwide expansion of liberal democracy as an ideal to be embraced everywhere. For him, the world history of democratization consists of three waves, each with its own distinctive characteristics of growth, consolidation, and reversal. The nineteenthcentury experience in Western Europe and the United States constituted the first wave, followed by a second wave from the 1950s to the early 1960s which occurred in parts of Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The third wave occurred in southern Europe in the 1970s and Latin America in the 1980s, with the expectation by Huntington that former Soviet Bloc countries would follow in the 1990s.
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Page 174 Huntington published The Third Wave in 1991 when the Cold War was coming to an end. It was written in an optimist tone suggesting that liberal democracy has won out over other national experiments. Presumably, this is why Huntington did not describe the ebbing of the ‘third wave’ in this book. However, as evidenced by the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia and the first Gulf War in Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ‘third wave’ did not produce a safe democratic haven but great uncertainty in global politics. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations , published in 1996, seems to have been written to describe the ebbing of democracy’s third wave in the late twentieth century. For Huntington (1997:6), the ‘great achievement of the “third wave” has been to ensure the universality of democracy in Western civilization and [to] promote its manifestations in other civilizations’. But late twentieth-century democratization has not enveloped the entire world. Huntington suggests that the end of the Cold War saw the proliferation of ethnic, nationalist, and religious conflicts expressed in ‘civilizational’ terms. The waning of democracy is seen as resulting from the failure of non-Western societies to emulate the normative standards of Western civilization. And Islam represents an antithesis to the universalist standing of Western democracy and a challenge to Western cultural structures, institutions, and ideas. ‘Democratization discourse’ assumes a single path to democracy and generates meaning over its replicability across widely diverse social settings in the world. However, as Markoff (1996) has shown, democracy is not a natural system; it is historically constructed in different ways in different places. And, as Molnar (2005) argues, society-wide interpretive struggles over ideology surround the incorporation of global trends into national contexts. Therefore, we are confronted with the question of democracy’s elevation to a dominant, worldwide discursive structure, and its entrance into the reframing of national ideational stances by means of local interpretive processes. Reforms undertaken by the AKP government to speed up the process of Turkey’s EU membership have elevated neoliberal ideas and democratization discourse to the status of ‘epistemic privilege’ (Somers and Block 2005:265). However, the ascendancy of ideas into a dominant position can only be achieved if those ideas make sense in relation to the lived experience, cultural values, and moral injunctions that certain social groups embody (Mahmood 2005). This is a highly contentious process as various groups and movements struggle for the power to interpret reality, represent society, reshape culture, and position themselves in history (Tilly 2004). It appears that current conflicts between ‘secularists’ and ‘Islamists’ represent a discursive ‘framing contest’ over a social change trajectory (Gamson and Modigliani 1989 cited in Fiss and Hirsch 2005:30). The AKP’s position in the tangled political terrain of Turkey is proving instrumental in generating cultural meanings for the framing of EU-oriented
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Page 175 changes around ‘individual rights and freedoms’ discourse. A pertinent question that follows from this observation is: How is EU membership linked to the rise of competing ideas, public narratives, and explanatory systems? This question requires us to account for the connections between ideas and policy outcomes. Toward that end there is an emerging new perspective known as the ‘sociology of ideas’ (Camic and Gross 2001). By questioning assumptions made in the ‘sociology of knowledge’ (Mannheim 1929/1986) about ideas as mediating structural influences, social-class or market positions, this perspective outlines an analytically distinct field of inquiry into ideas that cognitively embed policy outcomes (DiMaggio 1994; Fiss and Hirsch 2005; Somers and Block 2005). There is no doubt that the pro-Islamic AKP has a distinctive cognitive, cultural orientation. Yet an Islam-sensitive orientation does not inexorably lead the AKP to pursue an EU-oriented political stance. The question of how a pro-Islamic orientation is being reproduced in such a way that its meaning is tied to Turkey’s EU membership as a dominant policy goal is an empirical question that demands close scrutiny. I argue that the links between policies related to Turkey’s EU membership and the production of moral claims are contingently centred on the organization of a neoliberal market political economy. Since the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberal ideas articulated around ‘globalization’ and ‘democratization’ discourses have been immensely powerful in the recreation of what Polanyi (1944) calls a market society on a global basis. In terms of EU-integration policies, national policy debates are positioned within the neoliberal discursive context. But it is not an easy task to explain how an Islamic orientation plays a culturally constitutive role of change around the neoliberal discursive mode of argument. The AKP ‘Globalization discourse’ centres policy ideas on the neoliberal principles adopted to ‘liberalize’ domestic economies and restore an open world market economy. It generates deep faith in the triumph of the self-regulating market across the global political economy (Somers and Block 2005). In Turkey, the neoliberal market economy model has been dominant since the military coup of 1980. With the adoption of the January 24 measures in the same year, Turkey shifted its economy from a statedominated and protectionist model to a neoliberal market-oriented one. In the last three decades, various governments have pursued a complex mix of policies to actually implement neoliberal market capitalism in Turkey, including the AKP. Among the principal supporters of the market-driven model are large business groups organized around TUSIAD, pro-Islamic business groups represented by MUSIAD, many professionals, and members of the symbolic class, most notably the Fethullahcilar community. These groups and individuals struggle to reposition themselves in the market economy and engage competitively with global
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Page 176 markets through structural change in the national economy (Atasoy 2003/ 2004). How is it that a market-economy model has been constructed as a dominant policy idea for the Islam-sensitive AKP? With a broad electoral base, the AKP receives support from both the prosperous and disadvantaged segments of society. It draws on deepening inequality and outright mass dissatisfaction with neoliberalism, promising to reduce poverty, unemployment, and the informal economy (AKP 2007). At the same time, it builds on the dominant neoliberal themes of privatization of public corporations, liberalization of trade, entrepreneurship, and private investment. The AKP’s ability to bring disadvantaged groups together with large, globally competitive firms rests on its promise to realign state-society relations and restructure politics (Atasoy 2007:122). The AKP’s coalition building towards political restructuring is explicitly premised on the idea of ‘a new social contract that facilitates an engagement between society and the state on the basis of universal justice and human rights principles’ (AKP 2002:21; my translation). As specified in its 2007 election campaign (AKP 2007:21), the new social contract rests on democratic principles: ‘[W]ith a human-centred understanding of politics and with regulations and practices adopted towards an effective manifestation of the national will, [the AKP] will deepen participatory democracy’. The promise of democratization also includes changing the 1982 Constitution adopted after the military coup. For the AKP, democratization is the basis for a course of integration between the neoliberal market economy and a citizen-empowerment politics, at the centre of which is trust . The AKP wants to rebuild politics in a way that citizens will entrust the state to serve them while also including them in the decision making process and responding to their demands (AKP 2007:150–61). At the ontological level, the AKP’s emphasis on trust based in reciprocal moral obligations indicates a shift in the conception of the state from an exclusionary, distant entity towards a more inclusive, responsive one – by linking policy with normative, cultural commitment. Trust, as a delineation of culturally embedded action in terms of the reciprocity of expectations, loyalty, and solidarity (Sztompka 1999), culturally frames the AKP’s cross-class coalition around neoliberalism. The AKP’s human-centred approach is expressed in its Development and Democratization Program, which ties the embodiment of European norms to a discursive reference to human capital growth (AKP 2002:20–7). The program argues that ‘combining world economic and European democratic normative standards with Turkish cultural values and moral precepts can produce an ethics that would apply in all aspects of the economy as a precondition for permanent and perpetual growth’ (AKP 2002:34; my translation). For the AKP, the attainment of human capital growth requires the removal of state-imposed political, cultural and administrative constraints. Specifically, this involves combining Islamic moral principles as a means for asset building in human capital with the transformation of the authoritarian Kemalist
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Page 177 tradition to achieve greater social solidarity (Atasoy 2007:123). This is similar to Schumpeterian ‘methodological individualism’, which assumes that ‘in the discussion of certain economic transactions you start with the individual’ (Schumpeter 1908, in Smelser and Swedberg 1994:5). In their Transition to a Strong Economy in Turkey document, the AKP explicitly outlines a neoliberal program for redefining development as participation in the world market. This program differs little from what was originally prepared by the previous government as an economic crisis-management agreement in 2001. That agreement with the IMF accompanied its US$8 billion bailout in 2001, on top of an existing US$11 billion loan package (Blustein 2001). Most notably, the agreement included provisions for the wide application of financial discipline to the ‘informal sector’, the marginalized, and impoverished elements in Turkish society. After promising to implement such policies, the AKP government has received an additional US$26 billion from the IMF since 2002 (IMF 2007; BBC News 2002; Property Frontiers 2004; Atasoy 2007:123). The AKP supports the principle that the state should remain outside the sphere of economic activity. They have continued the policy of privatizing public companies adopted by previous governments since 1984. Approximately 170 of these public companies have since been completely privatized. State shares have been sold off in 240 mixed companies (www.tusiad.org), including the telecommunications, petrochemical, and energy-related industries. Given that the benefits of privatization are minimal – only US$9.5 billion in income has been generated (TOBB 2005:87–91) – the most important outcome of privatization appears to be the creation of a context for regulatory depoliticization and a reduction in the political domination of bureaucrats (Atasoy 2007:124). Other pro-Islamic groups such as MUSIAD and the Fethullahcilar also emphasize human capital growth in generating business spirit, particularly among Muslims from smaller Anatolian cities and towns. Again, this is supported through the development of a neoliberal free-market economy and adherence to liberal democratic principles. The association of independent industrialists and businessmen (MUSIAD) MUSIAD is a civil society based umbrella business organization founded in 1990 by a group of young businessmen. MUSIAD represents both large and small Muslim business interests, generally from smaller cities in Anatolia who have very weak ties to the state. Since the mid-1980s the most successful pro-Islamic groups have joined the ranks of big capital. Some are located in Istanbul, although they still maintain strong family ties to Anatolian towns and villages. However, it is no longer possible to align a pro-Islamic business orientation with those who have an Anatolian regional background. Nevertheless, the political legacy of Kemalist developmentalism (which historically
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Page 178 marginalized Anatolian small capitalists) has a continuing ideological effect on the current reproduction of differences between large Istanbul and small Anatolian capitalists, due to the cultural signification of a ‘Muslim other’ (Atasoy 2007:124). MUSIAD claims to represent Muslimness as a political category for those marginalized from the cultural hierarchy of the Kemalist state (Atasoy 2005:174–5), yet many of its leading companies refrain from referring to Islamic symbols in their activities (Atasoy 2007:126). Initially, MUSIAD was not in favour of the idea of Turkey’s EU membership. It promoted closer economic ties with Muslim countries from North Africa and Southeast Asia, as well as Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, with the goal of instituting a large Muslim free-trade zone (MUSIAD 1996:18). However, after the February 28, 1997 military-induced resignation of the pro-Islamic-led coalition government, MUSIAD altered its Euro-sceptic approach and adopted a different strategy emphasizing the compatibility of Turkish-Muslim cultural values with EU standards. It now supports membership requirements as being instrumental in reducing the abuse of state power by the bureaucracy. MUSIAD’s membership exceeds 4,000 firms, the majority of which are exportoriented, small and medium-sized businesses employing fewer than 50 workers. Istanbul still has the highest number of members (523 in total), but most of them are dispersed throughout smaller Anatolian cities (Atasoy 2007:126). Also called ‘Anatolian tigers’, the founders of these firms are generally from modest Muslim-family backgrounds and include the children of Anatolian rural migrants who dwelled in gecekondu (shantytown) neighbourhoods in large cities. MUSIAD members insist that the state-led economic developmentalism which followed the earlier years of the Turkish republic carried a certain urban, large industrial capital bias and discriminated against them in the distribution of economic benefits by ruling bureaucratic cadres. For them, it is the ruling bureaucratic elite that has largely been responsible for identifying rural populations, peasants, working-class people, and small Anatolian capital groups as lacking the cultural prerequisites for Kemalist modernity. As a result, these groups have articulated a class-based resentment politics around cultural issues while seeking to successfully establish themselves and their children in the economy through the cultivation of a strong Islamic work ethic, personal discipline, and technical achievement in higher education. The entrepreneurial spirit of these new classes is rooted in building human capital on the individual level. Rather than relying on state support, MUSIAD commits itself to the competitive engagement of civil-society in the market economy through the expression of individual autonomy and human rationality. The foundation for human capital creation is an Islamic ethic which holds that ‘Allah requires only those individuals with reason, intelligence, and freedom to fulfil their religious duties’ (Ozdemir 2006:162). MUSIAD further contends that there is a need for humans to be free from political and administrative constraints in order to realize their full potential and talents in
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Page 179 life. Neoliberalism is represented as a means to that end, and a viable vehicle for entry into the economy as a culturally distinct fraction of capital. The religious education that MUSIAD members generally receive from private Koran schools in their towns of birth and from family members also plays an important role in the incorporation of Muslim values into a strong entrepreneurial work ethic. Combined with higher education in technical fields, moral and religious instruction equips these individuals with a cultural endowment that is conducive to easier entry into private business. Moreover, MUSIAD situates an Islamic ethos within a technoscientific world-view and thereby ‘associates high morality and ethical values with modern technology’ (Ozdemir 2006:73). It also positions that ethos as a precondition for capital accumulation. Muslims in business are urged by MUSIAD to strive for the greatest possible success in the marketplace. This is regarded as a form of worship carried out in the service of God. MUSIAD often reinforces this through statements attributed to Prophet Muhammed such as, ‘poverty is close to heresy’ and ‘God loves those who earn’. The importance of wealth creation for Muslims is further promoted through MUSIAD’s publications. These include: Homo-Islamicus (1993–97) and Cerceve , a Research Reports series, a newsletter called MUSIAD in Press, and an internet-based Information Bank . The Fethullahcilar The Fethullahcilar is a mass-based civil society movement made up of thousands of activists in Turkey and abroad. It was established in the late 1960s by Fethullah Gulen (1941–), a retired state-Imam formally trained in state schools for higher Islamic learning (Latif Erdogan 1998). His work follows on the teachings of Said Nursi (1876– 1960) – an Anatolian Kurdish Islamic intellectual. Said Nursi reinterpreted the Koran to demonstrate the congruity of Islam with formal rationality and scientific knowledge. He argues that the Koran reveals the laws of nature as the work of God and their discovery can be made through rationalist interpretation. In this way, Islam comes to be seen as consistent with the idea of material development and progress. The Fethullah Gulen cemaati follows the modernist Islamic thinking of Said Nursi, and believes that an Islamic brand of modernity can emerge from an imaginative blending of Islamic values and European standards based on modern science and technology. The Fethullahcilar have been greatly influenced by the ideas of Ziya Gokalp, a wellknown Ottoman-Turkish sociologist who wrote extensively on Turkish nationalism and the role of religion in society. Kemalism in Turkey has long regarded Islam as functional in strengthening social cohesion and harmony in society – as long as it is kept under state control. The Fethullahcilar builds on this legacy and argues that Islam, as a religion of self-development, contributes to the moral integrity of society and the nation. This brings the Fethullahcilar close to the MHP-style ‘Turkish-Islamic synthesis’ ideology,
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Page 180 but the Fethullahcilar maintains an apolitical stance with regard to Kemalist principles. This helps the movement grow with little bureaucratic intrusion into its hizmet (service) work. To a large extent, this is also because Fethullahci activism is believed to contribute to the reworking of ‘civic nationalism’ by strengthening the ideological fundamentals of the state. The Fethullahcilar are committed to the mental and spiritual development of the individual through education and active engagement with the world, in accordance with the moral values and normative standards of Islam. Civil society involvement with the economy is encouraged as an integral component of the ethical orientation promoted by the Fethullahcilar. This orientation is advanced, and group solidarity strengthened, through a distinctive web of micro-communities. The nur evleri (light houses) are illustrative of this. They are small, sex-segregated apartment flats usually rented out to university students in a location close to their schools. Nur evleri function as local ‘invisible schools’, inculcating moral and spiritual precepts that become the basis for the communal order of the cemaat (community). The ethical education which occurs within the informal networks of thousands of nur evleri , as well as in study circles, summer camps, and hizmet schools in Turkey and abroad, is integral to the wealth creation strategy of the Fethullahcilar. In all of these contexts, the study of modern science and technology is embraced as an important foundation for Muslim economic development. The Fethullahci cemaati is among the fastest growing capital groups in Turkey, with about 500 affiliated firms. Many within the cemaat have become wealthy and fully integrated into the market economy. In relation to the importance given to ethical engagement with the market economy, the Fethullahci worldview parallels Adam Smith’s position on the normative regulation of economic activity – that the pursuit of self-interest must be restrained by morality (Smith 1759/1976). For the Fethullahcilar, the righteous individual should not refrain from commerce but pursue it harmoniously (Atasoy 2007:132). Attention to both the spiritual and material world is vital in establishing behaviour that reflects an enlightened rationalism. [N]eglect of the intellect would result in a community of poor, docile mystics. Neglience of the heart … would result in crude rationalism … It is only when the intellect, heart and body are harmonized, and [man] is motivated towards activity in the illuminated way … that [he] can become a complete being and attain true humanity. (Gulen 2000:105–6) According to Gulen, Islam promotes the rule of law and rejects the oppression of any segment of society, but it does not offer a totalizing ideology nor a blueprint for a specific, unchangeable form of the state (Atasoy 2007:131). Gulen further argues that:
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Page 181 the Koran is a translation of the book of the universe, an interpretation … [and] explanation of the reflections of the divine names on earth and in the heavens … reducing it to political theories or forms of the state is a great disrespect [to the spirit of Islam]. (Gulen 2005:456) For Gulen, Islam complements ‘democracy’, yet leaves it to the people to decide the form of government according to time and circumstance. The struggle against injustice requires complete devotion by those people who ‘… place their knowledge and understanding at humanity’s service’ (Gulen 2001:2–3). Further, the individual’s attainment of righteousness becomes the most important criteria, greater than the establishment of an Islamic state. ‘The second quality is to overflow with … a deep love for humanity and creation’ (Gulen 2002:2). The enlightened individual who has achieved a synthesis of mind, logic, and consciousness will review and reevaluate the established views of humanity and provide direction for change toward greater justice, happiness, and human freedom (Gulen 2002:4). For Gulen (2003), there is no this world/that world or mind/heart dichotomy, for the believers’ emotions and reason are united … we need whole comprehensive minds … Such people must be in constant contact and interaction with the atoms, molecules, and particles of the people, just as the mind is in constant contact with the body…. By conveying the messages of their soul to all and elevating them to the level of people who have knowledge, skills, and genius for the future, they will present them for the common good and society’s benefit … [my emphasis] It is clear that Gulen regards Islam as a crucial epistemic resource for Muslim individuals in re-configuring social relations and frames of reference. However, this does not tell us how Muslims confront changes in their day-to-day activities. How do they experience contentious issues of inequality based on social class, gender, and ethnicity? Gulen’s Islamism attempts to reconfigure a culture of individual responsibility that enlarges the scope of civic engagement into the publicness of the political sphere. The most significant aspect of his approach is the re-signification of an Islamic orientation and its attachment to key norms also found in Western liberal thought – democracy, justice, and individual freedoms (Atasoy 2007:132). Conclusion In this chapter, I have presented a unique approach to state transformation in Turkey. It examines the conjunction between meaning-driven schemas on the state and economy, and the globalized frames of neoliberal capitalism and liberal democracy. Framing Islamic resignification by reference
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Page 182 to Turkey’s EU membership allows us to move beyond a territorialized conception of cultures as homogeneous and nations as monolithic embodiments of these cultures. It also allows us to expand our understanding of the global beyond essentializing models of global politics that view Islam in reified terms as an abstract, self-evident category. The point of historical analysis should be to grasp world historical contingency, to demonstrate that ‘in history there are divergent manifestations of a singular process’, and to perceive the unity in diversity without reifying either (McMichael 1990:396). Pro-Islamic groups in Turkey reconcile their participation in the discursive and material conditions of the neoliberal global market economy with their nationally conceived moral/cultural claims. An interesting dialectic emerges from the dual character of an Islamic perspective: its embeddedness in the epistemically privileged status of both liberal democratic and neoliberal capitalist ideas emanating from the EU, on the one hand, and the Islamic narrative of the righteous individual seeking to establish an ethically grounded society, on the other. Active engagement with the discursive framework of the EU helps Islamic politics embody a normative authority that embeds a trajectory of change within the state but beyond national frames. The methodology employed here demonstrates the significance of an epistemological assumption that incorporates ideas and institutional processes into a contextualized understanding of neoliberal restructuring. Islamic cultural politics ‘marries’ a multiplicity of cognitive standards, expressive and institutional patterns in a way that ‘gives birth’ to a certain symbolic configuration. That configuration fosters interpretive meanings and moral stances that are conducive to a neoliberal outlook. Groups such as the AKP, MUSIAD, and the Fethullahcilar are in fact power players of neoliberal capitalism. Closely linked to a contextualized imagery of neoliberal restructuring is the spatial location of the context where ideas are produced. The sociology of ideas perspective (Camic and Gross 2001) emphasizes local contexts and institutional settings as the foci of epistemic judgment. But, linking contextually specific interpretive phenomena with the discursive framing of a neoliberal perspective alters the very meaning of spatiality within and across states. This, as argued by Sassen (2007) in a different context, opens institutional denationalization inside states. It certainly does not imply that a clear-cut case has been made for reversing the priority given in much of social theory to the national state/society in favour of the global. What is important to recognize is that in place of the territorially unified state, the contextually specific politics of neoliberalism opens a multiplicity of spatial domains within the state. This situates the state within a different set of boundaries and notions of social space, which in turn implies a radical recasting of the spaces of the political (Cameron and Palan 2005). An analysis of Islamic reconfiguring of state transformation in relation to an EU membership that expresses the material and discursive conditions of neoliberalism helps to
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Page 183 historicize our existing conceptual categories beyond an epistemic logic of the state as a reified institution. From this perspective, an Islamic cultural politics is best understood as relational, generating meanings, producing ideas, and interpreting circumstances for configuring the concrete institutional and policy frameworks of neoliberal capitalism. It is precisely because of its embeddedness in social relations that Islamic valuations and judgments make neoliberal values meaningful and morally acceptable. This has implications for constituting power and imagining multiple meanings of citizenship, solidarity, and participation that go beyond the legally constructed, categorical notion of the state and citizenship. References AKP (2002) Development and Democratization Programme , Ankara: AKP. AKP (2007) Guven ve Istikrar Icinde: Durmak Yok Yola Devam , Online. Available: www.akparti.org.tr/beyanname.pdf (accessed: 16 February 2008). Akdogan, Y. (2004) AK Parti ve Muhafazakar Demokrasi, Istanbul: Alfa. Atasoy, Y. (2003/2004) ‘Cosmopolitan Islamists in Turkey: rethinking the local in a global era’, Studies in Political Economy 71/72: 133–61. Atasoy, Y. (2005) Turkey, Islamists and Democracy , London: I. B. Tauris. Atasoy, Y. (2007) ‘The Islamic ethic and the spirit of Turkish capitalism today’, in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds) Socialist Register 2008: Global Flashpoints , London: Merlin Press. BBC News (2002) ‘IMF Hands Over Turkey Loan’, 16 April. Online. Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1932261.stm> (accessed: 16 February 2008). Beck, U. and Grande, E. (2007) Cosmopolitan Europe , Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Blustein, P. (2001) ‘Stopping the bailout buck here: O’neill taking a tough stance on IMF loans to countries’, The Washington Post Service , 5 June. Online. Available: www.jubileeresearch.org/finance/stopping_bailout_bucks_here.htm (accessed 16 February 2008). Calhoun, C. (2007) Nations Matter, London: Routledge. Cameron, A. and Palan, R. P. (2004/2005) The Imagined Economies of Globalization [Electronic Resource], London, UK: Sage and Palo Alto, CA: Electronic reproduction. ebrary, 2005. Camic, C. and Gross, N. (2001) ‘The new sociology of ideas’, in J. R. Blau (ed.) The Blackwell Companion to Sociology , Malden, MA: Blackwell. Connelly, E. W. (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Diamond, L. (2000) ‘The globalization of democracy’, in F. J. Lechner and J. Boli (eds) The Globalization Reader, Malden, MA: Blackwell. DiMaggio, J. P. (1994) ‘Culture and economy’, in N. J. Smelser and R. Swedberg (eds) The Handbook of Economic Sociology , Princeton, NJ and New York: Princeton University Press and Russell Sage Foundation. Duran, B. (2004) ‘Islamist Redinition(s) of European and Islamic identities in Turkey’, in M. Ugur and N. Canefe (eds) Turkey and European Integration , London: Routledge. Erdogan, L. (1998) Fethullah Gulen Hocaefendi, Istanbul: Ad Yayincilik.
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Page 184 Erdogan, R. T. (2002) ‘Kesinlikle AB’den Yanayiz’, Hurriyet Newspaper , 5 June. Erdogan, R. T. (2007) ‘Tesekkurler Turkiye: Nice AK Yillara’, Milliyet Newspaper , 29 July. Falk, R. (2007) ‘The real meaning of the Turkish elections I’, Today’s Zaman , 14 August. Fiss, C. P. and Hirsch, P. M. (2005) ‘The discourse of globalization: framing and sensemaking of an emerging concept’, American Sociological Review 70(1): 29–52. Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Avon. Genelkurmay Baskanligi (2007) ‘Basin Aciklamasi’, No. BA-08/07, 27 April. Gulen, F. (2000) Prophet Muhammad (A. Unal, trans.), Fairfax, VA: The Fountain. Gulen, F. (2001) ‘An Ideal Society’, Online. Available: http://en.fgulen.com/content/ view/909/10 (accessed: 2 April 2007). Gulen, F. (2002) ‘What We Expect from the Righteous Generation’, Online. Available: http://en.fgulen.com/content/view/1073/10 (accessed: 2 April 2007). Gulen, F. (2003) ‘Toward Tomorrow’, Online. Available: http://en.fgulen.com/content/ view/1233/10 (accessed: 2 April 2007). Gulen, F. (2005) The Statue of Our Souls, Somerset, NJ: The Light Inc. Henisz, J. W., Zelner, B. A and Guillen, F. M. (2005) ‘The worldwide diffusion of market-oriented infrastructure reform, 1977–1999’, American Sociological Review 70(6): 871–97. Huntington, P. S. (1991) The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century , Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Huntington, P. S. (1997) ‘After twenty years: the future of the third wave’, Journal of Democracy 8(4): 3–12. IMF (May 2007) Turkey: Fifth Review and Inflation Consultation Under the Stand-By Arrangement , IMF Country Report No. 07/161. Kahraman, H. B. (2005) ‘The cultural and historical foundation of Turkish citizenship: modernity as westernization’, in E. F. Keyman and A. Icduygu (eds) Citizenship in a Global World, London: Routledge. Keating, M. (2004) ‘European integration and the nationalities question’, Politics and Society 32(3): 367–88. Kogut, B. and Macpherson, M. (2003) ‘The decision to privatize as an economic policy idea: epistemic communities, palace wars and diffusion’, paper presented at the International Diffusion of Political and Economic Liberalization conference, October 3– 4, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. McMichael, P. (1990) ‘Incorporating comparison within a world-historical perspective: an alternative comparative method’, American Sociological Review 55(3): 385–97. Macpherson, C. B. (1977) The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy , Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mahmood, S. (2005) Politics of Piety , Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mannheim, K. (1929/1986) Ideology and Utopia, New York: Anchor Markoff, J. (1996) Waves of Democracy , Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Molnar, V. (2005) ‘Cultural politics and modernist architecture: the tulip debate in post-war Hungary’, American Sociological Review 70(1): 111–35. MUSIAD (1996) ‘Basbakan Necmettin Erbakan’in Dogu Asya Gezisi ve MUSIAD’, in Bosna-Hersek Gezisi Raporu , Istanbul. Negotiating Framework for Turkey (2005) Online. Available: www.abhaber.com/ images/0629155928_001.pdf (accessed: 8 August 2005).
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Page 185 This page intentionally left blank. Ozbudun, E. (2007) ‘Anayasa Mahkemesi ve Demokrasi’, Zaman Gazetesi, 3 May. Ozdemir, S. (2006) MUSIAD, Ankara: Vadi Yayinlari. Polanyi, K. (1944) The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press. Property Frontiers (2004) ‘Turkey: Economic Overview’, Online. Available: www.propertyfrontiers.com/countries/turkey/economy.html (accessed: 16 February 2008). Rude, C. (2005) ‘The role of financial discipline in imperial strategy’, in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds) Socialist Register: The Empire Reloaded, London: The Merlin Press. Said, W. E. (1979) Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books. Saribay, A. Y. (2007) ‘AKP Tek Basina Iktidar Olmadi’, Radikal, 30 July: 6. Sassen, S. (2007) A Sociology of Globalization, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Smelser, N and Swedberg, R. (1994) ‘The sociological perspective on the economy’, in N Smelser and R. Swedberg (eds) The Handbook of Economic Sociology, Princeton, NJ: Russell Sage Foundation. Smith, A. (1759/1976) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, New York: Oxford University Press. Somers, M. and Block, F (2005) ‘From poverty to perversity: ideas, markets, and institutions over 200 hundred years of welfare debate’, American Sociological Review 70(1): 260-87. Sztompka, P. (1999) Trust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (2004) Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650-2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. TOBB (2005) Ekonomik Rapor, 2004, Ankara: Aydogdu Ofset. Van der Pijl, K. (2006) ‘A Lockean Europe?’, New Left Review 37: 9-37. Wallerstein, I. (2006) European Universalism, New York: The New Press. Wood, E.M. (1995) Democracy Against Capitalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yayla, A. (2007) ‘From Republican Meeting to General Elections’, Today’s Zaman 15 August: 14. Žižek, S. (2000) ‘Holding the place’, in J. Butler, E. Laclau and S. Žižek (eds) Contin gency, Hegemony, Universality, London: Verso. Žižek, S. (2001) On Belief, New York: Routledge.
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Page 186 10 Privatization and corporate reforms in post-Soviet Tatarstan Anna Sher From a historical perspective, the joint-stock corporation – as a central institution of modern capitalism – has been the focal point of complex relationships of ownership and control. The question of who controls large corporations and how the organization of control affects private and public interests has been a central concern in the literature. Since the 1990s discussions on corporate governance have been centred on a shift from concentrated systems of corporate control (German and Japanese models) to a market- and shareholder-centric model (Anglo-Saxon model) (Crouch and Streeck 1997; Soederberg et al. 2005; Overbeek et al. 2007). This has been the case in many countries in the world, including those of East-Central Europe (Vliegenthart and Overbeek 2007). In Russia, as in other post-state-socialist countries, corporate reforms were extensive in scope and implemented with the assistance of the international financial institutions, private foreign investors, and American legal and business specialists. These reforms gave rise to a so-called ‘oligarchy’ model, one which was organized differently from both the Anglo-Saxon model of shareholding and the German and Japanese models of concentrated corporate control. The oligarchy model presents a form of corporate governance established through political ties of private business with state bureaucrats (Gourevitch and Shinn 2005). It has often been viewed as an outcome of the opportunism and greed that flourished among elites during the dissolution of the Soviet system. This chapter investigates the process of restructuring ownership and control in some of the largest Soviet industrial conglomerates in the 1990s. The empirical foundation consists of original data collection and analysis carried out within the framework of social network studies of economic power in the largest financial and industrial companies (Mintz and Schwartz 1985; Stokman et al. 1985; Carroll 1986). By conducting an in-depth structural analysis of previously unexamined data, I aim to substantiate an argument that goes beyond explanations of the Russian transformation in terms of oligarchic corporate formations. My empirical account focuses on Tatarstan, one of the most powerful regions in the Russian Federation. While Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiev’s ability to strengthen the Tatarstan government vis-à-vis Moscow
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Page 187 and other states has received a fair amount of scholarly attention (Matsuzato 2001, 2004), the dynamics of corporate reform carried out by Tatarstan elites have not. By focusing on a complex route taken by regional elites, I show that economic restructuring in Tatarstan has neither led to the institutionalisation of the dominant Anglo-Saxon model of corporate governance nor challenged global market expansion.1 Instead, it resulted in a specific form of concentrated corporate control. In his analysis of the rise of a market economy in the nineteenth century, Polanyi identified two constitutive principles: (1) market expansion through laissez-faire and free trade policies that had devastating effects on people’s welfare, natural resources, and even the capitalist organization of production itself, and (2) a social-protective response against market expansion in order to protect society and the economy through state policies (Polanyi 2001:138). The latter was not an ideological protest against market economic principles; rather, it was a pragmatic approach to solving concrete problems by various regulations, protective legislation and other forms of intervention (Polanyi 2001:153). In the contemporary context, the same dynamics have been identified by Block’s (2007) analysis of the US economy. From what he calls a neo-Polanyian perspective, Block demonstrated that even the US government has never fully adhered to the ‘market fundamentalism’ it preached to other countries. As Block (2007) pointed out, Polanyi’s key thesis emphasized that markets are impossible without government involvement in one form (legislation) or another (repression). This thesis undermines the conventional argument that Russian reforms, despite their radical implementation, did not produce sufficient separation between the government and business, and therefore the reforms were improperly carried out (World Bank 2004). By drawing on Polanyi’s analysis, I argue that market reforms in Russia were not about separating politics and the economy; they were about reconstituting the relationship between the government and industry leaders on the new terms and conditions created by the Russian economy’s shift towards privatization and corporate market reforms. I analyze this by focusing on the rise of a specific form of concentrated corporate control in post-Soviet Tatarstan. The institution of the corporation and models of corporate control The institution of the large corporation occupies a central place in the history of industrial capitalism in general, and in the neoliberal development project in particular. It is a key institution shaping society’s power structures: the corporation enables concentration of wealth, provides employment for millions of people, and thus shapes and is shaped by the political power and social structure of capitalist society (Scott 1997; Roy 1997; Perrow 2002; Prechel 2000). Historically, ownership of large corporations has varied along a continuum
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Page 188 between dispersed shareholding and a concentrated (blockholding2) structure. In the second half of the twentieth century, the concentrated blockholder model emerged as a dominant form in continental western European capitalism, in countries with traditions of civil law and a stronger state role in the economy (Scott 1997). Concentrated ownership has also been part of stateled industrialization in East Asian countries. The concentrated blockholding ownership has supported a ‘stakeholder’ model of corporate governance that attempts to balance the interests of different groups such as creditors (including shareholders), labour, and the state. Germany is considered one of the prime examples of the stakeholder approach with formal representation of employees on company boards (Streeck 1997; Vitols 2001; Menz 2005). According to the principle of ‘co-determination’, one half of board seats were allocated to the representatives of labour and the other half to large shareholders. The largest banks have traditionally held large stakes in industrial companies and dominated the German economy. Another prominent example of concentrated blockholding ownership is found in modern Japanese business groups. Here the inter-corporate ties between companies and banks are sustained via cross-ownership when companies mutually hold blocks of shares in other companies within their group (Gerlach 1992). This arrangement is associated with long-term investment, a low incidence of hostile takeovers, and lifelong employment in Japan compared with the more volatile US environment of shortterm credit, low employment protection, and hostile takeovers. Despite a competitive edge, economic growth, and the stability achieved by German and Japanese corporations, by the late 1980s blockholding models in general lost their ideological credence to the Anglo-Saxon dispersed shareholding model. Dispersed ownership historically emerged in countries with an emphasis on a weak state, the common law tradition, and market mechanisms for corporate control (Scott 1997). Found in the UK and USA, dispersed share-holding is associated with a ‘shareholder-value’ model – an approach to corporate decision-making that emphasizes shareholders’ interests above all. With the shift to the neoliberal form of global capitalism, the shareholder-centred model became the dominant form promoted among advanced capitalist countries (Soederberg 2004). The end of the Cold War coincided with the institutionalisation of a market-centred model of economic development in the state-socialist countries of Eastern Europe. It specifically aimed to reduce the regulatory role of the state in the economy. Contrary to the reformers’ expectations, however, a reduction in state power and corporate reforms in Russia and East-Central Europe did not lead to the development of a model similar to either the German, Japanese, or Anglo-American model (Sher 2008; Vliegenthart and Overbeek 2007). The emergent model was based on concentrated ownership but without stakeholder representation and bank ownership of industrial firms.
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Page 189 The post-state-socialist context As an essential part of systemic change from state socialism to market capitalism, the implementation of corporate reform in Russia did not proceed in an ideological and institutional vacuum. Large-scale industrial production was a foundation of the Soviet economy and urban development in the Russian regions (Kagarlitsky 2002). Geared towards maximization of output, rather than profit, Soviet enterprise management was based on production targets negotiated between the party bureaucracy and enterprise managers, while the latter directly supervised meeting these targets by workers (Mandel 2004). This organization of the economy relied on a hierarchical structure of authority and rewards, and subjected labour to party-bureaucratic discipline. As Mandel has argued, Soviet workers had ‘no control over the wealth they produced nor any real say in the organization and goals of production’ (2004:8–9). As part of the enterprise administration, labour unions worked with management to ensure that production targets were met, and dealt primarily with workers’ concerns in areas such as safety standards and distribution of consumer goods, housing, etc. (Mandel 2004). The systemic changes of the 1990s have altered the organization of ownership and control in the large industrial enterprises in Russia. In the early 1990s the Russian federal government, led by Yegor Gaidar, implemented the ‘standard’ neoliberal package of reforms, which included financial and trade-related liberalization as well as large-scale privatization. Western governments, economists, legal specialists, and investors offered their advice, endorsement, and technical/financial assistance (Åslund 2001). In addition to the vast amounts of capital loaned by international financial institutions steering domestic policy negotiations (Nesvetailova 2005), American legal scholars in fact wrote the new Russian corporate laws with the aim of replacing the Soviet system of industrial organization (Black and Kraakman 1996). In order to understand how these corporate reforms worked out in Russia, I have elsewhere analyzed the formation and structure of governance among the largest 100 industrial companies and largest 50 banks in Russia (Sher 2008). In the framework of structural research on intercorporate relations in capitalist economies, I examined inter-firm networks formed by interlocking directorates – a mechanism of corporate governance established by directors holding seats on two or more companies’ boards (Mintz and Schwartz 1985; Stokman et al. 1985; Carroll 1986). Based on a comprehensive cross-national analysis, I found that in Russia as elsewhere, directors and managers of large industrial firms and banks created a network of social relations to manage capital relations and information flows.3 Unlike the bank-dominated, extensive intercorporate networks in Germany or Japan, the emergent network in Russia was decentralized and fragmented into relatively small clusters (four to six firms) formed around each of the largest oil and other natural resource extracting and export-oriented companies. One of these clusters was centred on an oil company located in Tatarstan, and became the subject of
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Page 190 the present empirical analysis. The cluster was isolated from all the companies outside Tatarstan (except for one interlock) and controlled by the regional government and managerial elites. This finding suggested that a specific Russian form of corporate ownership is emerging. This form brought several companies and banks under the same corporate leadership and succeeded, as in the case of Tatarstan-based companies, in protecting them from outsider corporate raiders. Cross-national studies of corporate systems by Scott (1997) and, more recently, Gourevitch and Shinn (2005:190–2) have included short accounts of the Russian corporate organization, which they see as an example of the ‘oligarchy’ model. Although it is usually associated with the onset of industrialization, in the Russian case this model emerged in the context of a state-socialist industrial economy undergoing privatization. These authors’ analysis of the Russian case underscores that the new capital owners not only managed to control the largest companies but also wielded substantial political influence over the federal government. The formative process is self-explanatory: ‘a handful of oligarchs (many former apparatchiki) with access to political power obtained assets cheaply in the great wave of “privatization” under Yeltsin and then Putin’ (Gourevitch and Shinn 2005:190). In more formal terms, the rise of the blockholder model of corporate governance in Russia has been attributed to weak democracy combined with the political power and greed of managerial and political elites. Without disputing the crucial role of elites and weak democratic institutions in the formation of the new corporate structures, I argue that it is an oversimplification to attribute the rise of a new form of concentrated corporate control in Russia to the elites’ greed and opportunity. This process was part of the larger social transformation to a market-based economy during which the government and industry elites were forced to adopt new forms of ownership and control and had to deal with larger issues affecting the Russian society as a whole. Specifically, they faced the challenges presented by the old regime’s disintegration, and the immizeration of the working class, the new principles of corporate control, and the imperatives of the current global environment at the same time. These dynamics, I argue, accompanied the shift to a market-centric development captured in Polanyi’s (2001) notion of the ‘double movement’. Tatarstan elites and the challenges of transformation Tatarstan is a region within the Russian Federation, where regional elites succeeded in building a powerful semi-autonomous state (Graney 2001).4 It presents a unique analytical opportunity to examine how ex-communist party officials and industrialmanagement elites approached corporate reform independent of Russia; and how they built a regionally based state-business relationship in implementing market reforms. An integral part of the Soviet Union’s economy, the Tatarstan region was
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Page 191 industrialized in a balanced way: it had petro- and chemical industries utilizing Tatarstan’s natural resources (especially oil reserves) as well as manufacturers of heavy duty trucks, aircraft, and mechanical-engineering equipment. In 1990, prior to market reforms, energy- and chemical-related enterprises accounted for 40 per cent of Tatarstan’s industrial output while the machine building industry accounted for another 40 per cent (Khakimov 1999a, cited in McCann 2005:20). By 2003 the energy- and chemical-related industries accounted for almost 60 per cent of the region’s industrial output while machine-building enterprises contributed 25 per cent (Tatarstan Government 2004). Oil exports (primarily to Europe) accounted for 63 per cent of all Tatarstan exports in 2001, while 67 per cent of imports consisted of industrial machinery and vehicles. Thus the economic restructuring of the 1990s transformed the regional economy: it became increasingly dependent on oil and chemical-related enterprises. Although regional elites have had a weak position in the political hierarchy of both the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, some regional leaders, most notably Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiev, have gained considerable political influence in Moscow (Matsuzato 2001). Since the late 1980s, Shaimiev, a former leader of the Tatarstan communist party, vigorously lobbied former Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin for special autonomous status for Tatarstan within the Russian Federation (Matsuzato 2001). This was achieved in 1994 with the signing of a power-sharing treaty between Tatarstan and Russia. In 1991, Yegor Gaidar, head of the federal government, began implementing economic ‘shock therapy’, starting with price liberalization, the elimination of centrally planned production targets and capital investment, and mass privatization. President Shaimiev did not disagree with Gaidar’s market-centric approach to reform but he advocated special policies for Tatarstan: ‘Even though I did not accept the shock therapy method as a policy suitable for Tatarstan, I always supported Gaidar’s decisions. We took a less costly route but we also tried to use the positive factors of radical economic reform’ (Shaimiev 1999; my translation). Economic restructuring presented regional elites (both state bureaucrats and enterprise managers) with an opportunity to gain autonomy from the federal government. Nevertheless, a perception of the market as a formidable threat to the autonomy of Tatarstan has also remained central to President Shaimiev’s attitude towards global economic expansion. In the aftermath of the 1998 financial crisis, he emphasized that Tatarstan companies’ struggle to gain access to foreign markets was tantamount to a struggle for one’s life (Shaimiev 1999). In 2007 he described the impending WTO membership, which was to increase the region’s largest companies’ exposure to global competition, as finally ‘going to war’ for the survival of Tatarstan as an autonomous region (Shaimiev 2007). With mass privatization outside its control, the Tatarstan government could not predict whether the new ownership structure would take the form of dispersed or concentrated control by outside owners, and how this change
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Page 192 would affect Tatarstan’s industry. The possibility of outside control was particularly troubling since it could conceivably impair Tatarstan’s autonomy vis-à-vis the Russian federal government and Moscow business elite. After extensive negotiations, the 1994 power-sharing agreement named the Tatarstan government the legal owner of the oil, chemical and petrochemical industrial complexes located on its territory and granted it full authority over their privatization. Each of these enterprises was a major contributor to the regional and city budgets. Thus, their economic survival directly or indirectly affected urban residents, who constituted about 73 per cent of Tatarstan’s population. The 1994 agreement was an important political victory for President Shaimiev, allowing him to establish an autonomous property committee to carry out privatization in the region. It also allowed him to introduce a series of measures to reduce the uncertainty of the outcome by preventing the dispersion of shares and the appearance of an outsider-blockholder. Shaimiev achieved this goal by (1) making the Tatarstan government a large blockholder with approximately 30 per cent stakes in each of the largest companies, (2) granting the government the ‘golden share’, i.e. the right to override board decisions, and (3) modifying one of the two privatization plans (options) offered by the federal government to large enterprises. The first, more radical option, allocated to employees a minority fraction of non-voting and voting shares free of charge and at a discount, respectively. Because Gaidar’s team of reformers limited the amount of voting shares available to employees to 10 per cent and to senior management – to 5 per cent, this option did not gain wide public support (Plekhanov 1995). In contrast, the second, more popular option, offered up to 51 per cent of voting shares to all employees, but without any discount. President Shaimiev increased popular support for the first option by decreeing that under this option, as many as 30 per cent of voting shares could be distributed to employees. As a result, all four major companies in Tatarstan were privatized according to the first option, offering a sizable (but not controlling) block of shares to workers. At the early privatization stage, this effectively led to a reduction of the fraction of shares potentially available to outsiders without handing over the control of the vital enterprises to employees. Once mass privatization began, more policies were introduced to closely monitor the public circulation of shares in Tatarstan. Beginning in 1992, the federal government issued checks or ‘vouchers’ to all citizens of the Russian Federation, including those residing in Tatarstan. Each voucher signified a citizen’s entitlement to a share in the national wealth and was intended to be exchanged for several shares in large industrial companies or investment funds (Appel 2004). When privatization in Tatarstan began in 1994, President Shaimiev issued a decree restricting the exchange of vouchers in the key Tatarstan companies to residents of the republic. He feared that these companies might otherwise be taken over by outside businessmen from Moscow and other regions.
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Page 193 In the aftermath of mass privatization, the continuing decline in production and real wages made the option of selling shares to private investment firms increasingly appealing to workers and residents. In 1997, Shaimiev issued an order imposing a moratorium on the sale of shares that were obtained either in exchange for privatization vouchers or through discount purchase. This moratorium lasted until 2001 and applied only to individual shareholders who held stock in key industrial companies. Thus, workers-turned-shareholders had only one way to divest their stock – by selling it back to the company. At the same time, Tatarstan government elites were determined to take advantage of global capital markets (but without losing the state-owned 30 per cent stockholding). The state still had the remaining shares that were not distributed during mass privatization. In fact, the remaining shares in the Tatneft Oil Company that were still formally owned by the Tatarstan government were marketed on a foreign stock exchange before any other large company in the Russian Federation. In December 1996, these shares were listed on the London Stock Exchange, followed by listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 1998. Moreover, the Tatneft Oil Company was also the first to obtain multi-million dollar loans without guarantees from the government – either that of Tatarstan or Russia (Tatneft Oil 1999). The actual outcome of voucher privatization and special sales to employees was evident in the ownership structure of the Tatneft Oil Company (2003). As of May 2003, Tatneft Oil’s employees, including management, held only 2.4 per cent of nonvoting shares and 4.5 per cent of voting shares. Foreign investors held voting shares in the amount of 17 per cent of the Tatneft Oil Company’s charter capital. The dynamics of the ‘double movement’ were evident in Shaimiev’s government’s decision to embrace the idea of privatization, but not without taking special measures to control the transition to a new structure of ownership and control. The shareholder model of corporate governance allowed Tatarstan’s elites to limit workers’ formal access to representation on company boards in accordance with their new status as shareholders; it provided no legal basis for the possibility of the co-determination principle of the German model. In response to the threat of outsider control under the conditions of an economic downturn, the government placed restrictions on the circulation of shares acquired by the public (workers and other residents) in these companies. The government allocated a blockholding to state ownership, while it prepared to list the companies’ shares on foreign stock exchanges. Thus, a historically weak position of labour vis-à-vis both management and the Soviet state was reproduced in the new structures of corporate power. Nevertheless, insider control did not prevent the access of Tatarstan’s companies to foreign stock markets. As Cai and Treisman (2004:832) have argued, Shaimiev’s extensive lobbying to avoid federal taxes increased these export-oriented companies’ profitability and thus their attractiveness to foreign investors. In sum, concentrated control was the Tatarstan government’s
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Page 194 response to the challenges of privatization and a new, market-oriented approach to corporate governance. But this response was consistent with the demands of the neoliberal transformation. Intercorporate ownership and control The federal privatization program intended to decentralize state control. As a result of its application in Tatarstan, the major four industrial companies were privatized as separate entities, despite their technological interdependence. However, the Tatarstan government managed to create one of the few special situations in the Russian Federation, where the regional state remained the dominant shareholder with an approximately 30 per cent stake in each of three major industrial enterprises (that is, until 2002). Table 10.1 shows the state’s stockholdings in the first row. During the 1990s the Tatarstan government transferred only one of its holdings (34 per cent) in tire manufacturing to the oil company. Two large banks – Bank Bars and Bank Zenit – have been closely affiliated with the petrochemical industry of Tatarstan. These banks were relatively large in the context of the Russian Federation: in terms of their capital, Bank Bars and Bank Zenit ranked 19th and 26th, respectively in 2001 (Expert 2002). The Tatarstan government and the Tatneft Oil Company held relatively large stakes in Bank Bars, while the government had indirect control of Bank Zenit via its stockholding in the Tatneft Oil Company. The latter remained one of the key institutional shareholders since the bank’s inception in 1994. Nevertheless, as Table 10.1 shows, the government of Tatarstan did not allocate any significant stakes in the industrial companies to the two major banks. Instead, throughout the 1990s, the Tatarstan government and the Tatneft Oil Company remained the key shareholders in the region. At the time of privatization, the government of Tatarstan had set up two investment companies (in Table 10.1, Investment firms 1 and 2). State-owned shares in the oil, chemical, petrochemical and tire companies were used to establish ‘Investment Firm 1’ in 1993.5 The second holding, ‘Investment firm 2’ had a different ownership structure and a different trajectory. Named ‘Tatar-American Investments & Finance’ or TAIF, it was set up as a joint venture between the Tatarstan government and a US registered firm (the name was undisclosed). Each side in the venture held a 50 per cent stake. Whereas TAIF became a minority shareholder in the oil, petrochemical and chemical companies, these companies themselves had no ownership stake in the firm. Among individuals who were invited to manage the company on Tatarstan’s side were the managers with ties to the Tatarstan government and the President’s family (Shigabutdinov 2005). Through these personal ties, TAIF had a privileged access to export oil and benefited from differences between domestic and world oil prices. In addition to the profit made from oil sales, the firm also used Tatarstan state-granted tax relief for 3 years. As
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Page 195 Table 10.1 Interlocking shareholdings (%) in the largest industrial and financial companies and banks of Tatarstan, 2001 (shareholders are listed in rows, and the companies where they owned shares in columns) Companies TatneftPetrochemical Chemical Tire Bank Bank Invest Invest firm Total n Oil (NKNK) (KOS) Bars Zenit firm 1 2 (TAIF) of firms Tatarstan 31.3 35.2 26.6 0.4 15.5 50 used to 6 Government own 50 Tatneft Oil 34.6 10 51 13.1 4 Petrochemical 11 1 (NKNH) Chemical 11 1 (KOS) Tire 4.3 Bank Bars Bank Zenit Investment 3 3.5 5.3 3 firm 1 Investment 5.2 10 5.2 3 firm 2 (TAIF) Total n of 2 3 3 3 2 1 5 1 firms Sources: Tatneft Oil (2001); NKNH (2001); KOS (2001); Tire (2001); Baranov and Yacheistov (2002).
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Page 196 soon as the 3 years expired in 2001, TAIF changed its profile to operations with stock and bought out the state-held stake (thus divesting itself of state ownership). Subsequently, TAIF became the most prominent financial company in Tatarstan and began to transform government control of corporate capital in the region. I will discuss this as a key development later in the chapter. The evidence presented so far suggests that the Tatarstan government proceeded to adjust to new corporate forms of control and a market economy by consolidating private ownership of industrial and financial firms. The government, however, did not allow banks to own large stakes in major companies, which would lead to crossownership. As I explained in the section on corporate models, stable corporate groups, most notably those found in Japan, tend to be based on ownership of large blocks of shares mutually held by industrial companies and banks (Gerlach 1992). The mutual holding of equity protects the companies from hostile takeovers and thus creates a more favourable environment for long-term investment and redistribution of capital within the corporate group (Gerlach 1992). Both stability and financial monitoring within the systems of concentrated corporate control are realized by granting bankers membership on major companies’ boards (Stokman et al. 1985). The absence of bankers on the industrial boards in Tatarstan may be explained by the fact that while industrial companies generated capital from their exports, they drew credit primarily from foreign banks which were not permitted to own a large amount of company shares. Despite the volatile economic environment and widespread hostile takeovers in Russia, neither cross-ownership nor bank ownership of industrial companies were established by the Tatarstan government. Instead, a distinct arrangement between top government officials and industrial managers – Tatarstan’s ‘power elites’ (Domhoff 1996) – characterized the boards of principal industrial enterprises (Table 10.2). Some top industry managers and high ranking government officials held two to four board memberships, allowing them to coordinate the strategic decisions of regional industrial giants and large banks.6 For example, a special arrangement was made in 1997 between the Tatneft Oil Company, whose shares were sold on foreign stock exchanges, and the petrochemical company of Tatarstan: Tatneft Oil was to supply about 30 per cent of its oil production at a low price without prepayment to the petrochemical, and in turn would receive (through barter) higher-priced petrochemical products. Even though this arrangement negatively affected Tatneft Oil’s profitability, this action allowed the government to support the struggling petrochemical industry in Tatarstan.7 Also, in 2001 the government reached an agreement to build the first oil refinery in Tatarstan, a major industrial project jointly financed by Tatneft Oil (with 63 per cent of shares) and petrochemical companies (with 25 per cent of shares). This concentration of control by elites in the absence of cross-holding ownership ties rendered two of the four largest industrial companies – the
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Page 197 Table 10.2 Supervisory Board composition (%) by directors’ primary employment, 2001 Board members Companies Tatneft Petrochemical Chemical Tire Bank Bank Oil (NKNH) (KOS) Company Bars Zenit Tatarstan 26.7 23.5 38.5 15.4 50.0 6.7 Government Managers of the 46.7 35.3 38.5 15.4 11.1 6.7 company Managers of other Banks 13.3 11.1 firms in Tatarstan Industries 6.7 5.9 53.8 16.7 26.6 TAIF 11.8 7.7 7.7 5.6 Other 6.7 11.8 7.7 7.7 Outside of 11.8 7.7 5.6 60.0 Tatarstan Total n of directors 15 17 13 13 18 15 Sources: Tatneft Oil (2001); NKNH (2001); KOS (2001); Tire (2001); Baranov and Yacheistov (2002).
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Page 198 chemical and petrochemical companies – open to a major change in their structures of control in the 2000s. In other words, President Shaimiev’s careful embrace of the market principles led to significant government control of the economy, but it was based on an ownership structure open to further transformations. These transformations, however, did not come from outsiders as the World Bank had predicted (Gray 1996). Rather, they arose from the insider power elites. The rise of a private financial company Throughout the 1990s the overall economy and industry in Russia and Tatarstan were impaired by the economic crisis (including the 1998 financial crush), and foreign direct investment tended to be concentrated in Moscow (Iwasaki and Suganuma 2005). State-run investment programs ceased to exist. The 2000s opened a new era with the election of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the reestablishment of centralized federalism, and the rise in world oil prices. A potentially unstable and contentious situation between President Putin and Shaimiev regarding Tatarstan’s autonomy was resolved due to their shared belief in concentrated political power and investment in industry (Matsuzato 2004). At the same time, continuous attempts by the largest gas and oil corporations in Russia to obtain control over Tatarstan’s companies made the latter vulnerable, especially because their protection largely rested on Shaimiev’s personal influence. Starting in 2001, a privately owned financial company (TAIF) began to play an increasingly central role in Tatarstan’s economy. Its management used various mechanisms (including legal procedures) to acquire the newly built oil refinery in Tatarstan which processed oil produced by Tatneft Oil. It also succeeded in obtaining a controlling block of shares (47 per cent) in the largest chemical company in Tatarstan. And finally, it received the right to manage the state-owned block of shares (28.6 per cent) in Tatarstan’s largest petrochemical corporation, in addition to its own 25.6 per cent shareholding (NKNH 2005a). By 2005, in addition to the petrochemical, oil-refining, and chemical conglomerates, TAIF managed companies in telecommunications, construction, finance and investment, as well as other services (TAIF 2005). Table 10.3 shows the relative size of TAIF’s influence not only in Tatarstan’s economy but also in the entire Russian Federation. The sales and ranking data for industrial companies comes from a Russian business-rating agency, The Expert , which did not include TAIF in its ‘top companies’ rankings. The numbers reported by TAIF managers in the 2005 Annual Report allowed me to estimate that TAIF would be in the 27th position in the 2005 ‘Expert Top 400’ rating. Substantial even in comparison to large business structures in the Russian Federation, TAIF has become second only to the Tatneft Oil Company in the Tatarstan economy. The rise of TAIF as a blockholder altered the structure of ownership and control in these companies. Table 10.4 shows that the most significant change
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Page 199 Table 10.3 Sales, profits, and ranking of the largest companies in Tatarstan (in millions of RUR), 2003–2005 Sales (Ranking in the Top 400 firms) Profit (after taxes) 2005 2003 2004 2005 Tatneft Oil 116,632 (14th) 150,793 (18th) 169,944 (18th) 36,563 TAIF 85,200 (27th) 12,700 Petrochemical 24,961 (41st) 38,229 (50th) 48,069 (50th) 925 Tire 10,260 (111th) 12,386 (136th) 14,919 (159th) −51.3 Chemical 8,935 (130th) 11,788 (149th) 13,421 (176th) 2002 Sources: Expert (2002–2005); TAIF (2005). was the increased presence of TAIF directors on the petrochemical and chemical companies’ boards (cf. Table 10.2). Bankers from Bars and Zenit had disappeared from the boards of the four industrial companies. The increased presence of TAIF managers on company boards changed the structure of intercorporate governance in the region. Figure 10.1 shows the ties between Tatarstan companies created by interlocking directorates in 2001 and 2005. The arrows point in the direction of control: the sending company’s executive officers hold seats on the supervisory boards of the receiving firm. The thickness of the arrows is proportional to the number of executives involved in each tie. The thick arrows also highlight significant ownership relations between companies: the sending company holding a controlling/blocking amount of shares in the receiving companies. As evident in Figure 10.1, between 2001 and 2005 the network structure has changed from unipolar (Tatneft Oil-dominated) to bipolar, with TAIF emerging as a second pole. Importantly, there were no longer any direct formal ties between these two dominant companies. Thus, structural network analysis shows the increased role of private capital concentrated in TAIF, the company that by 2005 had established a sphere of influence relatively independent from the state-controlled Tatneft Oil. In contrast to the hasty privatization deals of the mid-1990s between the federal government and Moscow business elites, Tatarstan elites took more time to transfer control of industrial wealth from the state to private capital. The emergent model of concentrated ownership without stakeholder representation has not only enabled specific government-business leadership to establish its control over capital flows in the region but also allowed it to use public power to support the struggling enterprises in times of crisis. Conclusion This analysis shows that the Tatarstan government adopted a careful approach to market transition which, in itself, did not question the primacy of market
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Page 200 Table 10.4 Supervisory Board composition (%) by directors’ primary employment, 2005 Board members Companies Tatneft Petro chemical Chemical Tire Bank Bank Oil (NKNH) (KOS) Company Bars Zenit Tatarstan 40.0 11.8 23.1 21.4 35.3 6.7 government Insider managers 40.0 35.3 23.1 21.4 17.6 13.3 Managers other Banks firms in Tatarstan Industries 23.5 7.7 42.9 29.4 40.0 TAIF 11.8 38.5 5.9 Other 11.8 7.7 7.1 5.9 Outside of 20.0* 5.9 7.1 5.9 47.7 Tatarstan Total n of 15 17 13 14 17 15 directors Sources: Tatneft Oil (2005); NKNH (2005b); KOS (2005); Tire (2005): Bank Bars (2005); Zenit (2005). *Two board members represented foreign financial firms, and one was a member of the Russian Independent Directors Association.
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Figure10.1 Networks of ownership ties and interlocking directorates created by top managers of Tatarstan’s industrial and financial companies, 2001 and 2005. principles and private capital ownership. I argue that the trajectory of corporate transformation in Tatarstan is best understood in terms of Polanyi’s (2001) notion of the ‘double movement’, which suggests that a transition to a market model involves both adherence to market principles and some protective measures aimed at bringing stability to social relations and providing for collective welfare. As Figure 10.2 shows, the radical reforms of the early 1990s exposed and exacerbated the existing inequalities and dependencies in Tatarstan and Russia: the collapse of the centralized economy severely undermined workers’ economic security while financial liberalization wiped out their savings prior to mass privatization (Nesvetailova 2005). Enterprise management and local party elites also found themselves in a vulnerable position since the reforms targeted the structure of ownership and control rather than the improvement of the largest enterprises’ industrial capacity. Although enterprise managers could neither reject nor radically alter the
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Figure10.2 Economic indicators of Tatarstan, 1960–2000: bread production (in kg/ person), oil production (in 100 million tons), and an annual relative change in consumer price index. Source : Tatarstan State Statistical Committee 2001. content or sequence of large-scale reforms, managerial and party elites were in a structurally more powerful position to organize their efforts and use the reforms and new institutions to their advantage. The Tatarstan elites pursued a strategy of concentrated corporate control and intercorporate coordination yet their policies diverged from the internationally well-established practices of concentrated ownership as government involvement in corporate management of companies continues to be significant. Nevertheless, partial state ownership does not present obstacles to further privatisation. This has allowed me to argue against the ‘oligarchy model’ often conceptualised as a special case of elites’ political opportunism and greediness. What is emerging instead is a politically managed form of corporate control in building a market economy in the post-state-socialist context. This trajectory toward the concentrated form of corporate control without stakeholder representation reconstituted the relations between government and business elites on the new terms. These new terms reproduced Soviet hierarchical relations between management and labour, on the one hand, to the exclusion of the latter from corporate governance. The new structure of control, on the other hand, opened domestic enterprises to foreign investment
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Page 203 and control by financial firms. This outcome suggests that the Soviet legacies of state managerial control are combined with the principles of the corporate shareholding model in a particular way that does not undermine market expansion. Acknowledgements For their insightful comments on this chapter, I am grateful to Yıldız Atasoy, Michael Schwartz, Anna da Silva, and an anonymous reviewer. The research for this chapter was in part supported by the Mildred and Herbert Weisinger Dissertation Fellowship, Stony Brook University. The University of California Santa Cruz Professional Development Grant covered part of travel expenses allowing me to present an earlier draft at the 2007 conference ‘Hegemonic Transitions and the State’, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. Notes 1 One study available in English examined Tatarstan’s economic development in the 1990s but found little evidence of globalization’s impact on the region (McCann 2005). My analysis differs from McCann’s study in several aspects: I focus specifically on changes in the formal corporate organization, use different data and a different analytical approach. For example, McCann considered the lack of convergence with the dominant western models as the evidence of globalization having no impact on Tatarstan. I argue that globalization’s impact is evident in the process of corporate change rather than strictly in the convergence of outcomes. 2 A blockholder is an individual, family, or an institution that owns a significantly larger amount of shares than other shareholders and whose voting rights exceed those of others. The precise percentage that constitutes a ‘blockholder’ varies relative to the overall concentration of ownership. It is usually considered to be at least 10 per cent and as much as 40 per cent or more to speak of a blockholding structure of governance. 3 I utilized the standard criteria of interlock research to identify firms to include in the study (Stokman et al. 1985). The largest industrial companies were selected based on annual sales (Expert 2002). Banks were selected based on their assets (Baranov and Yacheistov 2002). More information can be obtained from the author. 4 Although the region’s name Tatarstan ends in ‘-stan’, etymologically evoking a notion of a sovereign country, it is located in the European part of Russia, about a two-hour flight to the east of Moscow. According to the 2002 Census, 3.8 million people resided in Tatarstan, which was comparable to the population of such small sovereign states as the Republic of Ireland and Lithuania. 5 The full name of this holding was Tatneftehiminvest. 6 The institutional reform included an adoption of a two-tier system with the supervisory and the executive board. The latter became occupied by top managers, an arrangement closely resembling the soviet managerial board, which used to make operational decisions in enterprises. Since strategic planning decisions were made at the level of government industrial ministries, the supervisory board as such did not exist in the soviet enterprise. 7 It was understood as a temporary arrangement during the demonetization of the
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Page 204 Russian economy. According to a business daily, Tatneft Oil managers were interested in continuing support of the petrochemical company but only if the latter became a subsidiary of the Tatneft Oil Company (Pechilina 1998). References Appel, H. (2004) A New Capitalist Order: Privatization & Ideology in Russia & Eastern Europe , Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Åslund, A. (2001) Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bank Bars (2005) ‘Annual Report’. Online. Available: http://www.akbars.ru/about/ free_inf/annual_reports/ (accessed: 24 August 2006). Baranov, G. and Yacheistov, K. (2002) The Largest Banks and Their Owners: A Guide to Russian Banks , Moscow: Kommersant Alpina. Black, B. and Kraakman, R. (1996) ‘A Self-Enforcing Model of Corporate Law’, Harvard Law Review 109: 1911–82. Block, F. (2007) ‘Understanding the diverging trajectories of the United States and Western Europe: a Neo-Polanyian analysis’, Politics & Society 35: 3–33. Cai, H. and Treisman, D. (2004) ‘State corroding federalism’, Journal of Public Economics 88: 819–43. Carroll, W. K. (1986) Corporate Power and Canadian Capitalism, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Crouch, C. and Streeck, W. (eds) (1997) Political Economy of Modern Capitalism, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Domhoff, G. W. (1996) State Autonomy or Class Dominance? Case Studies on Policy Making in America , Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Expert (2002–2005) ‘The Annual Ratings of the Top Firms in Russia’. Online. Available: www.raexpert.ru/ratings/ (accessed: 19 February 2008). Gerlach, M. L. (1992) Alliance Capitalism: The Social Organization of Japanese Business, Berkeley, CA: University of California. Gourevitch, P. A. and Shinn, J. (2005) Political Power and Corporate Control: The New Global Politics of Corporate Governance , Princeton: Princeton University Press. Graney, K. E. (2001) ‘Ten Years of Sovereignty in Tatarstan: End of the Beginning or Beginning of the End?’, Problems of Post-Communism 48: 32–41. Gray, C. W. (1996) ‘In search of owners: privatization and corporate governance in transition economies’, The World Bank Research Observer 11: 179–97. Iwasaki, I. and Suganuma, K. (2005) ‘Regional distribution of foreign direct investment in Russia’, Post-Communist Economies’, 17: 153–72. Kagarlitsky, B. (2002) Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: Neo-liberal Autocracy , Sterling, VA: Pluto Press. KOS (Kazan Organic Synthesis JSC) (2001) ‘A Quarterly Report of the Equity Securities Issuer (the 3rd quarter)’. Online. Available: www.kazanorgsintez.ru (accessed: 27 October 2003). KOS (Kazan Organic Synthesis JSC) (2005) ‘A Quarterly Report of the Equity Securities Issuer (the 3rd quarter)’. Online. Available: www.kazanorgsintez.ru (accessed: 27 June 2003). McCann, L. (2005) Economic Development in Tatarstan: Global Markets and A Russian Region , New York: RoutledgeCurzon.
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Page 205 Mandel, D. (2004) Labour after Communism: Auto Workers and Their Unions in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus , New York: Black Rose Books. Matsuzato, K. (2001) ‘From Ethno-Bonapartism to centralized Caciquismo: characteristics and origins of the Tatarstan political regime, 1900–2000’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 17: 43–77. Matsuzato, K. (ed.) (2004) Vladimir Putin’s Phenomenon and Russia’s Regions: An Unexpected or Expected Victory? , Moscow: Materik. Menz, G. (2005) ‘Auf wiedersehen, Rhineland model: embedding neoliberalism in Germany’, in S. Soederberg, G. Menz and P.G. Cerny (eds) Internalizing Globalization: The Rise of Neoliberalism and the Decline of National Varieties of Capitalism , New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mintz, B. and Schwartz, M. (1985) The Power Structure of American Business, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nesvetailova, A. (2005) ‘Globalization and Post-Soviet Capitalism: internalizing Neoliberalism in Russia’, in S. Soederberg, G. Menz and P.G. Cerny (eds) Internalizing Globalization: the Rise of Neoliberalism and the Decline of National Varieties of Capitalism, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. NKNH (Nizhnekamsk Petrochemical JSC) (2001) ‘A Quarterly Report of the Equity Securities Issuer (the 3rd quarter)’. Online. Available: www.scrin.ru (accessed: 16 October 2003). NKNH (Nizhnekamsk Petrochemical JSC) (2005a) ‘Annual Report’. Online. Available: www.nknk.ru/year_rep.asp (accessed: 12 November 2007). NKNH (Nizhnekamsk Petrochemical JSC) (2005b) ‘A Quarterly Report of the Equity Securities Issuer (the 3rd quarter)’. Online. Available: www.nknk.ru/ qrep.asp (accessed: 17 July 2007). Overbeek, H., van Apeldoorn, B. and Nölke, A. (eds) (2007) The Transnational Politics of Corporate Governance Regulation , New York: Routledge. Pechilina, G. (1998) ‘The Tatneft Oil Company does not want to be a milk cow’, Kommersant-daily , January. Perrow, C. (2002) Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Plekhanov, S. (1995) ‘The road to employee ownership in Russia’, in J. Logue, S. Plekhanov, and J. Simmons (eds) Transforming Russian Enterprises: From State Control to Employee Ownership , Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Polanyi, K. (2001/1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd edn, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Prechel, H. (2000) Big Business and the State: Historical Transitions and Corporate Transformation, 1880s–1990s , Albany, NY: SUNY. Roy, W. G. (1997) Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scott, J. (1997) Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes , New York: Oxford University Press. Shaimiev, M. (1999) ‘Press Conference with Tatarstan President’, Federal News Service, Official Kremlin Int’l News Broadcast, June 10 Shaimiev, M. (2007) ‘Large Companies are Crucial for Tatarstan’s Economy’. Online. Available: old.intertat.ru/index.php?cat=e&bigoffset=0µoffset=0&id= 106529 (accessed: 13 July 2007). Sher, A. (2008) ‘Geometry of corporate control: axioms and outcomes of the
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Page 206 neoliberal state approach to corporate restructuring and class power in Russia’, unpublished thesis, SUNY Stony Brook. Shigabutdinov, A. (2005) ‘An interview with Albert Shigabutdinov’, The Chemical Journal 6: 36–8. Soederberg, S. (2004) The Politics of the New International Financial Architecture: Reimposing Neoliberal Domination in the Global South , New York: Zed Books. Soederberg, S., Menz, G. and Cerny, P. G. (eds) (2005) Internalizing Globalization: The Rise of Neoliberalism and the Decline of National Varieties of Capitalism , New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stokman, F. N., Ziegler, R. and Scott, J. (eds) (1985) Networks of Corporate Power: A Comparative Analysis of Ten Countries , Cambridge: Polity Press. Streeck, W. (1997) ‘German capitalism: Does it exist? Can it survive?’, in C. Crouch and W. Streeck (eds) Political Economy of Modern Capitalism: Mapping Convergence and Diversity, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. TAIF (2005) ‘Annual Report’. Online. Available: www.taif.ru/tech/af2005.pdf (accessed: 12 November 2007). Tatarstan Government (2004) ‘Program for the oil-gas-chemical industrial complex, 2004–2008’. Online. Available: prav.tatar.ru/rus/complan.htm?pub_id=368 (accessed: 14 January 2008). Tatarstan State Statistical Committee (2001) ‘The Statistical Report of Tatarstan 1920– 2000’, Kazan: 67, 69, 239. Tatneft Oil JSC (1999) ‘Annual Report’. Online. Available: www.tatneft.ru/buh/ archive.htm (accessed: 12 November 2007). Tatneft Oil JSC (2001) ‘A Quarterly Report of the Equity Securities Issuer (the 3rd quarter)’. Online. Available: www.tatneft.ru (accessed: 27 October 2003). Tatneft Oil JSC (2003) ‘Form 20-F filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission’. Online. Available: sec.edgar-online.com/2003/06/30/0000950168-03002263//Section11.asp (accessed: 8 August 2006). Tatneft Oil JSC (2005) ‘A Quarterly Report of the Equity Securities Issuer (the 3rd quarter)’. Online. Available: www.tatneft.ru/info/archive05.htm (accessed: 8 September 2006). Tire (NizhnekamskTire JSC) (2001) ‘A Quarterly Report of the Equity Securities Issuer (the 3rd quarter)’. Online. Available: www.shina-kama.ru (accessed: 27 October 2003). Tire (NizhnekamskTire JSC) (2005) ‘A Quarterly Report of the Equity Securities Issuer (the 3rd quarter)’. Online. Available: www.shina-kama.ru (accessed: 17 July 2007). Vitols, S. (2001) ‘Varieties of corporate governance: comparing Germany and the UK’, in P. A. Hall and D. Soskice (eds) Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage , Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press. Vliegenthart, A. and Overbeek, H. (2007) ‘Corporate governance regulation in East Central Europe: the role of transnational forces’, in H. Overbeek, B. van Apeldoorn and A. Nölke (eds) The Transnational Politics of Corporate Governance Regulation , New York: Routledge. World Bank (2004) ‘The Memorandum on Economic Development in the Russian Federation: From Transition to Development’. Online. Available: web.worldbank. org (accessed: 8 January 2005). Zenit Bank (2005) ‘Annual Report’. Online. Available: www.zenit.ru/info/report/ annual/ (accessed: 7 July 2007).
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Page 207 Part IV Paradoxes of citizenship The recomposition of social solidarity networks
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Page 209 11 A cultural turn in politics Bourgeois class identity and white-Turk1 discourses Sedef Arat-Koç Since the 1980s, similar to many other countries around the world, Turkey has experienced a major restructuring of its economy along the lines of neoliberal economic principles. Initially being introduced by the military government after the military coup of 1980, the neoliberal project has not faced any significant, mass-scale political contestation even after the return to electoral democracy in 1983. This chapter suggests that among other factors, a shift in the grammar of Turkish politics towards culturalism has contributed to the hegemony of neoliberalism. One of the central elements in the ‘cultural turn’ in Turkish politics since the mid1980s is what Atasoy (2007) calls a ‘politics of resentment’, which is often articulated in terms of a tension between Islamism and secularism. It is possible to identify two main sources for the culturalism prevalent in the politics of the recent decades. One major source has been Islamism. Socially and politically, Islamism represents a resistance both to ‘Kemalist developmentalism with its class bias in favour of large Istanbul-based industrialists’ and to a rigid notion of secularism ‘embodied in the authoritarian homogenizing culture of civil-military state bureaucrats’ (Atasoy 2007:122). Especially since the 1990s,2 Islamism has been effectively articulating a ‘cosmopolitan’ discourse on the compatibility of Islam with neoliberal capitalism (Atasoy 2003/2004, 2005, 2007). The cosmopolitan version of Islamism has been effective in providing material, social, and ideological bases for a cross-class alliance between the newly emerging Muslim bourgeoisie and the urban poor. This chapter focuses on the second major source for the culturalism dominating Turkish politics, which I identify as beyaz Türk (literally, white Turk) discourses. Articulated by secularized sections of an urban bourgeoisie who express strong identification with European modernity and a lifestyle of glamour, these discourses associate the urban poor with Islam, Kurdishness and/or rural or provincial parochialism. The identification of the urban poor with what the beyaz Türk discourse defines as cultures of backwardness contrasts significantly with the class-based discourses characteristic of the 1970s, when issues of distribution and social justice were prominent. To make sense of the hegemony of neoliberalism in the Turkish context, it is useful to analyze the intersections of political economy and culture. Such
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Page 210 analysis needs to be located within general patterns of neoliberal restructuring commonly experienced in different parts of the world, as well as identifying developments that are historically specific to different countries. Hegemonies in the era of neoliberal capitalism The nature of hegemonies, the way dominant classes relate to subordinate and marginalized classes in society, have been transformed significantly in a period of neoliberal restructuring of capitalism. The post-Second World War notion and promise of ‘development’ as a universal trajectory and as an inclusive project to benefit everyone has died. As McMichael argues, ‘(d)evelopment, once a public project’ started to become ‘redefined as a private, global project’ (McMichael 2004:152), it became increasingly limited in offering a hope of upward mobility for the majority of the world’s population. Writing about the African context, James Ferguson (2005) suggests that in the era of globalized capitalism ‘modernity’ has turned from a ‘telos’ to ‘status’. Unlike the post-war developmentalist project which promised socioeconomic convergence with the First World, globalized capitalism does not involve a universal expectation of prosperity. Other scholars confirm this observation. Dirlik argues that despite their optimistic faith in globalization, ‘even globalizers concede in our day that not everyone, not even the majority of humankind will share in the fruits of global capital’ (Dirlik 2002:37–8). The implications of the disappearance, even of the ideological promise, of convergence is that one’s: location in the hierarchy no longer indexes a stage of advancement, [In the imagined continuum of development] but simply a rank in a global political economic order … [R]anks … become not stages to be passed through, but nonserialized statuses, separated from each other by exclusionary walls, rather than developmental stairways. Modernity in this sense comes to appear as a standard of living, a status, not a telos. (Ferguson 2005:176) Similarly, McMichael argues that modernity under the globalization project is ‘less a national property expressed in citizenship and more a global property expressed in consumption’ (McMichael 2004:154). In this new era, as the universalism in the ideological promise of ‘development’ disappears; as the majority of the world’s population starts to be seen as superfluous to the functioning of globalized capitalism; as the redistributive role of the state – as in welfare states or import-substitution regimes – has been abandoned, the nature of hegemonies has changed. As the promise of development as a collective project has been abandoned, more universal and inclusionary hegemonic strategies have been replaced by more exclusionary ones. In this context, Ferguson suggests, the understanding of the nature of the relationship between the global rich and the global poor gets transformed: ‘in a world of
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Page 211 nonserialized political economic statuses, the key questions are no longer temporal ones of societal becoming (development, modernization), but specialised ones of policing the edges of a status group’ (Ferguson 2005:179). In this political economic climate, culturalism has become central to the hegemonies of neoliberalism. Culturalism tends to present/represent those impoverished and marginalized to globalized capitalism not as victims of an inherently unequal and unjust order, but rather as having failed due to a culturally ingrained inability to adopt. The diversion of political discourse from those emphasizing class and uneven development to those emphasizing incommensurable, irreconcilable, cultural differences has had enormous implications in shifting the gaze from capitalism to the poor themselves as the source of the problem. The military coup of 1980 and changes in the political climate in Turkey Turkey started the 1980s with horrendous political repression. The brutal military coup of 1980 resulting in closing of political parties, two out o the three major trade union confederations, many political organizations (23,667 organizations), newspapers; changing of the constitution, re-writing of legislation on universities – removing their autonomy, banning of publications, films, arrests of journalists, arrests and/or dismissal of teachers and academics; and widespread arrests, imprisonment, torture and disappearance of people. According to official figures, in the immediate years that followed the military coup of 1980, close to 1 million people were detained; 230,000 tried; 7,000 tried with potential death sentence; 517 received death sentences; 49 death sentences were actually executed; 171 died in torture; and 43 died after they were claimed to have committed suicide under detention or in prison. In the same period, 388,000 people were banned from obtaining passports; 30,000 managed to leave the country as political refugees; and 14,000 subsequently lost their Turkish citizenship (official figures cited by TMMOB 2006). While the use of force has been central to the implementation of new economic policies in Turkey, it was far from being the only hegemonic strategy. According to Nurdan Gürbilek (1992), the 1980s witnessed two different cultural strategies sharing the same political space. On the one hand, there was enormous use of overt force and repression. On the other, emerging was a more modern, constructive strategy that aimed at ‘transforming instead of banning, incorporating instead of erasing, and provoking instead of suppressing’ (Gürbilek 1992:8). On the one hand, there was a Turkey, ruled by force and fear, a society where the right to speak was banned and silenced and, on the other, a ‘talking Turkey’, a society with a new appetite to talk, a country where there was an explosion of new discourses, discourses about matters and identities – ethnic, local, cultural, sexual – people never talked about before. Whereas references to class inequality and injustice were first
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Page 212 banned from political discourse during the military rule and then became unfashionable, public space was now full of new issues and new voices. The simultaneous existence of this silence and inflation of speech meant that the seeming promise of freedom offered by this ‘explosion of discourses’ could not be realized. Even though many people talked about many different issues, they were not necessarily talking to one another to debate, challenge and to transform notions of the collective good. Characterizing this contradictory environment – which involved a simultaneous silence about some issues and a discourse explosion on others – with the shrinking of public space, Gürbilek argues that missing was a public space where the newly defined/created identities could meet, speak to and transform each other. Instead, public space was turning into a space of collective indifference (Gürbilek 1992:8–9). In the explosion and celebration of talk about anything and everything, what has remained conspicuously absent, even long after the end of the military regime in 1983, have been meaningful debate and engagement with issues of class, inequality, and political repression that radically transformed political space and political discourse. Beyaz Türk identity and discourse: class and culture among sections of the urban bourgeoisie3 I consider beyaz Türklük (white Turkishness) to be directly related to the emergence of a transnational bourgeois class identity and a worldview among sections of the urban middle classes. Beyaz Türk discourses are articulated by one of the main social actors of neoliberal global capitalism in Turkey, a laik 4 urban, new middle class. In addition to capitalist investors succeeding in the new economy of neoliberal globalized capitalism, the term has been used to refer to professionals in those sectors of the economy which gained new significance or priority: banking, finance, the ‘information sector’, marketing, advertising and the media (Keyder 2000; Kozanoğlu 1992, 1993; Şimşek 2005). It is important to stress the simultaneously global and local nature of this class identity. On the one hand, their privileged status in a globally connected economy makes them appear as part of a global bourgeois class. On the other hand, as Sassen (2007) argues, the new stratum of transnational professionals and executives actually ‘remain embedded … in thick localized environments’ (2007:169–70). They may, therefore, be more properly con- sidered ‘partially denationalized rather than global’ (Sassen 2007). The terms beyaz Türk and beyaz Türklük emerged in the early 1990s and were first used by journalists in Turkey. Interestingly, oblivious to the critical and even sarcastic uses of the term, some right-wing newspaper columnists adapted the term for themselves with pride, boasting about their distinguished tastes and lifestyles and complaining about threats to their lifestyle from other Turks (Bali 2002:324–6; Mert 1998a). The term beyaz Türk is used to refer to an urban – preferably Istanbulite – segment of society defined as ‘modern’ and ‘Western’ in the Orientalist
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Page 213 binarisms in which these terms are commonly used. It is a critical term to describe the lifestyle or the political affiliations of the new middle classes.5 Beyaz Türk identity clearly excludes the newly emergent Muslim bourgeoisie which has flourished since the 1980s (Atasoy 2003/2004, 2005, 2007). Even though Beyaz Türk discourses and the popular media identify beyaz Türklük with an Istanbulite identity,6 the Muslim bourgeoisie is perceived as having provincial roots and conservative life-styles. Beyaz Türklük represents old and new at the same time. On the one hand, elements of this identity and worldview represent a continuation of the elitism and Orientalism which have characterized the approach taken by Istanbul-based laik , urban elites towards Anatolian populations since the late Ottoman period. On the other hand, however, there is something new to beyaz Türklük as it relates to socioeconomic, cultural, political, and geopolitical developments directly related to the specific conjuncture in Turkish history since 1980. This period corresponds to Turkey’s fullscale immersion in an increasingly globalized capitalism and implementation of neoliberal policies. Significantly, it also corresponds to the death – both literally and symbolically – of the political left in Turkey through the military coup of 1980 and the political environment that took shape in its aftermath. What I identify as beyaz Türk discourses are shaped by neoliberalism, proWesternism, and culturalism – more specifically, Orientalism – in formulating a presentation of Turkish society, Turkish politics, and Turkey’s place in the Middle East and the world. Whereas some elements of this discourse have a very long legacy in Turkey, others are rather new. To identify the specificity of a beyaz Türk discourse, it is important to remember that the ‘old’ element of Orientalism gains new meanings and dimensions as it articulates with neoliberalism and the geopolitics of the post-Cold War period. Orientalism of the elite goes back to the westernization project of the late Ottoman Empire. Identifying Islam and other dimensions of Ottoman culture as the main sources of the decline of the Ottoman Empire, this project shaped the very characteristic of the modernizing reforms undertaken during the early years of the republican period during the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to the long history of Orientalism among Turkish elites, neoliberalism dates only to the post-1980 militarycoup period. I would like to suggest that under neoliberalism, Orientalism has gained new dimensions and meanings along a beyaz Türk discourse. Whereas the modernization project of the Kemalist ruling elite articulated westernization with nationalism and ideals of political and economic national independence, the present beyaz Türk position dismisses the politics of national independence as irrelevant to the new realities in the world. Rather, it stresses global integration and aspires for Turkey to achieve a respectable global status, specifically with a membership in the European Union (Atasoy, this volume). Even though neither globalism nor the pro-EU position are uniquely beyaz Türk positions, the beyaz Türk versions of these positions can be distinguished by their cultural identification with Western supremacist notions of ‘the West’. Continuing the Orientalist
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Page 214 tradition, beyaz Türk discourses develop an ideological presentation of Turkey which attempts to distance and distinguish it from its Middle Eastern neighbours as a more ‘civilized’, European country.7 As laying cultural claim to identity construction, beyaz Türklük simultaneously involves identification and differentiation. The primary identification is with Europe, the USA and a certain conception of ‘the West’ assumed to be at once the centre of ‘civilization’ and the centre of global capitalism. Inseparable from this identification is a tendency to distinguish, differentiate and distance the beyaz Türk self from others in Turkey who are seen to be standing in the way of connecting with ‘the West’ and interfering with the possibilities of transforming Turkish cities into ‘global’ ones. What makes this differentiation different from earlier elitist discourses in Turkey which were articulated with nationalism is that the beyaz Türk discourse involves not just an arrogant but also an explicitly hostile approach to the ‘other Turks’ who do not fit into their vision of a new Turkey (Arat-Koç 2007:40). I would like to suggest that culturalization of its others has been central to Beyaz Türk discourses. This chapter focuses on two main types of culturalization prevalent in these discourses. The first will be the discourses used in discussions of development policy, whereby any questions, reservations or challenges to globalism are addressed not in economic, social, political or ideological terms, but rather dismissed in culturalized, or specifically, Orientalized, accusations of ‘Third Worldism’ or ‘populism’. The second set of discourses are those through which class inequalities are characterized in terms of their assumed cultural differences in terms of their urban vs. peasant ways, values; their ethnicity; and religious affiliation and/or observance. Beyaz Türk hegemonic strategies: culturalization of development debates Making of neoliberal capitalist globalization ‘common-sensical’, its presentation a narrative of an inevitable and inescapable development pattern with no alternatives, has been a class project that has required intensive political and ideological work. Globalist discourses in Turkey have often simultaneously used positive and negative rhetorics. On the one side, there have been promises: for prosperity, development, unprecedented levels of consumption, raising Turkey to the ‘first league’ and making the twenty-first century ‘a Turkish century’ (Bora 1995). These have often been supplemented with fear tactics employed to warn of a ‘return’ to the political instability preceding the military coup of 1980; of economic protectionism characterized with lack of economic opportunities for entrepreneurs; and severe commodity shortages for the general public (Kozanoğlu 1992:21). What is interesting about the neoliberal globalist discourses is that, on the one hand, they seem to exhibit a confidence and super-determinism, claiming that ‘there is no alternative’, that this is the necessary, irreversible direction of history. On the other hand, when we look at the discourses in which neoliberal
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Page 215 ideologues address their critics, we find difficulties and a level of hostility incompatible with self-assured confidence. Most critiques – even the mildest, most indirect and partial ones – are addressed not in terms of rational economic or political discourses, but through dismissal and mockery. Critics are dismissed and mocked as unrealistic, utopian, or as old-fashioned, even conservative, dinosaurs. Starting with Thatcherism, such dismissal has been typical to neoliberal discourses around the world. In Turkey, however, neoliberal discourses also involved a culturalization, specifically an Orientalization of opposition. In addition to dismissing or attacking critics of neoliberalism and globalism as ‘whiners’ suffering a ‘left wing disease’ that involves a ‘victim culture’, a ‘loser culture’ or an ‘excuse culture’,8 it has been common for prominent newspaper columnists and other organic intellectuals of the neoliberal order to dismiss critiques of, or simply reservations about globalism as Third Worldist. The term ‘Third Worldism’ is used in pathological as well as Orientalized ways. Aiming to strip the term of its political content, associated with anti-imperialism, national selfdetermination, or possibly an anti-globalization position, the neoliberal globalist use of the term culturalize it, associating it with the wrong civilizational choice, with a corrupt, reactionary, anti-modern, anti-Western politics; being paranoid about Western governments or corporate agendas, and turning inward and therefore being irrelevant to the world.9 Also associated with the term Third Worldism, are references to populism, defined in relation to corruption, cheap appeals to the poor or common folk, or coercion, tyranny, and dictatorship. When the possibilities of EU membership emerged in the horizon in the late 1990s, many political issues – democracy, labour rights, human rights, minority rights – started to become debated in an East/West axis. They were discussed not as political issues of what the people of Turkey would want for a better society for themselves, but rather in terms of Turkey’s image in ‘the West’, of ‘how it would be seen by Europe’ if it moved in this direction. With the EU process underway, Turkey has started to ‘live on a window display’10 with assumed European mirrors and cameras placed everywhere. As they saw their success in global markets increasingly in terms of the future of Turkey’s relationship to Europe, the globalized Turkish bourgeoisie has also developed a hyper-consciousness about ‘how Europe sees us’. In this climate, the anxiety regarding EU membership has been turned inward, into the country, towards those classes and groups deemed not to fit into the image Turkey wants to present to Europe. The projection of this anxiety involves a reconfiguration of already existing Orientalism – or rather, self-Orientalism – persistent in Turkey since the nineteenth century with new aspirations concerning Turkey’s place in global capitalism and new anxieties concerning Turkey’s belonging in Europe.
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Page 216 Culturalization of inequalities: the blackening of the ‘other’ Turkey Articulated by the elitism and specific biases of the class culture of sections of the urban middle classes, Beyaz Türk discourses focused on the character and use of urban space, expressing concerns over these in cultural terms. Using a very public, a very audible, an overtly abrasive and aggressive language on recent rural migrants and the urban poor, these discourses blamed them for being a blemish on the landscape of modern Turkish cities otherwise on their way to representing ideal images of a global capitalist modernity or even becoming ‘global cities’. One could argue that these discourses actually represent an all-out class war expressed in cultural terms. While they exhibit a complete indifference to the class conditions of those marginalized, they involve an intense gaze on and obsession with describing and pathologizing the presumed culture and cultural differences of those defined as outsiders to globalized capitalist modernity. Produced mostly by the spokespeople of the new middle class in corporate media, there is a genre of writing in this period that obsesses in great detail in the urban culture, urban values, and refined tastes and lifestyles of sections of the urban middle classes and juxtaposing these with those of Kurds, Muslims, or peasants not deemed fitting into the image or lifestyles of a ‘global city’ such as Istanbul. With the opening of the Turkish economy to the world markets in the 1980s, the urban elite intensified their efforts to turn Istanbul into a ‘global city’. Istanbul was redesigned in order to restore the grandeur it had lost during import-substitution industrialization. It gradually became a leading regional centre for business and tourism (Keyder 2000). Parallel to the development of global cities elsewhere, this meant an increasing spatial and social fragmentation among urban residents. On the one hand, the urban elites created for themselves exclusive urban neighbourhoods and sophisticated social and cultural spaces which would reflect refined tastes of an urban culture. Istanbul experienced the development of gated communities and middle-class suburban communities as well as gentrification of select down-town neighbourhoods.11 Spatial and social fragmentation was coupled with rapid privatization of previously public services. The period since the 1980s witnessed the emergence of private universities for the first time in Turkey, as well as a significant increase in the number of private schools, hospitals and clinics. There have been other private spaces such as beach clubs, and even privatized streets! In Istanbul, entertainment, culinary and shopping alternatives multiplied, with the city often cited in tourism guides as one of the most exciting sites in Europe. On the other side of the equation, the aspiration to become a global city has meant that there have been significant increases in the ranks of the urban poor and the recent rural migrants who could not even count on the more tolerant approach to squatters and the social and municipal services that characterized an earlier period. In this environment, the attitude of the middle classes towards the urban
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Page 217 poor changed to increasing anxiety with and hostility towards those considered unsuitable to the global ideal of the city. This is not surprising given the expectations about what urban spaces represent in the so-called global cities. The ideal of the global city is based first and foremost on concerns about an architectural and touristic aesthetic … The global aestheticised city is [thus] made beautiful to attract others rather than to make its local occupants feel at home within it … More so than any of its predecessor cities the global city has no room for marginals … In the dominant modes of representation the poor become primarily like pimples, an ‘aesthetic nuisance.’ They are standing between ‘us’ and the yet-to-land transcendental capital. They ought to be eradicated and removed from such a space. The aesthetics of globalization is the aesthetics of zero tolerance. (Hage 2001:19–20) Whereas the previous modernization mission of the laik republican elites involved a hope and attempts to ‘enlighten’ the Anatolian mainland and to Istanbulize it,12 this project experienced a frustration in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to economic forces, the civil war in the South-east with separatist Kurdish forces and the forced evacuation of villages in this region by the Turkish army led to an intensification of migration to the cities in the 1980s and 1990s. The poverty of the rural migrants, combined with the growth of Islamist politics in the squatter districts of cities led to the frustration among the laik elites that they had failed in their mission project of modernizing and westernizing the country. Instead of success in Istanbulizing the country which they had hoped their modernization mission would achieve, what they perceived as happening was rather an Anatolianizing of Istanbul (Bali 2002:359). Their disillusionment with the ‘outsiders’ of modern Turkey turned into increasing anger towards these groups and a tendency, on the part of the elites, to now see/treat them as threatening and disposable. Several groups were disqualified as Istanbulites and considered unsuitable for urban public spaces: Kurds, the poor and those who – due to their appearance or lifestyle – were considered Islamists. What makes the cultural beyaz Türk discourses effective, in my opinion, is the way they have articulated fears and anxieties of different social groups and class sections and brought them together. Beverley Skeggs argues that ‘(r)epresentation works with a logic of supplementarity, condensing many fears and anxieties into one classed symbol’ (Skeggs 2004:117). In the beyaz Türk discourses, we see how this logic of supplementarity works through the chain of equivalences unleashed by the specific cultural symbols used. What is provocative about the symbols chosen and the associations made is that they do not simply or only evoke the class elitism of the most privileged sections of the bourgeoisie. Rather, they work by evoking middle class sensibilities which may appear to have nothing to do with class: legitimate
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Page 218 feminist, secular, environmentalist sensibilities. As I demonstrate later, this involves a class strategy similar to one observed by Haylett (2001) and Skeggs (2004) in the British context whereby projecting no-longer-respectable or legitimate positions such as sexism, racism, and ultra-nationalism on to the poor and to the economically and the ethnically marginalized, enables middle classes to claim themselves free of these biases and tendencies. To the degree that they create a resonance with these sensibilities, the effectiveness of beyaz Türk discourses go far beyond a narrow constituency of a globalizing bourgeoisie. They are even able to articulate some of the concerns of those who do – or used to – identify with left-wing politics. From gecekondu to varosş By the 1990s, a change in the term used to describe the urban neighbourhoods occupied by rural migrants was heavily symbolic of the growing hostility of the urban middle classes towards those they now considered as outsiders to the cities. The earlier term used for squatter settlements was gecekondu which literally meant ‘built overnight’ to describe the speed at which this type needed to be completed on public land in order to avoid demolitions. Whereas the term gecekondu was associated with some sympathy for the poverty, marginality and precarious conditions of recent rural migrants, the newly invented and popularized term varosş represented fears and anxieties of the urban middle class elites. Some beyaz Türk intellectuals articulated these urban tensions and anxieties in a discourse of oppression of the elite. In defining beyaz Türks, for example, Sıtkı Süküren, a journalist writing in the paper Gözlem in Izmir, emphasized that beyaz Türks were those whose urban culture was being destroyed by ‘peasant values’ and ‘arabesque tastes’. Arguing that the silent tolerance of urban people to such destruction since the 1960s, in the name of democracy, was a critical mistake, Süküren lamented that the the varosş had created a situation whereby the urban people have now become prisoners to the culture of ‘the other’ as the latter has now come to define the dominant culture of the cities (Süküren cited in Bali 2002:326). In 1997, Oya Baydar, otherwise known as a left-wing intellectual – who had to live in exile in Europe following the Turkish military coup of 1980 – published an article under the title ‘Istanbul as Defeated by the Other’. Using the term varosş – instead of gecekondu, as squatter settlements have been commonly called for decades – she decried that these settlements were not just destroying the natural environment through their cancer-like growth in masses of concrete, but that they were also destroying the historical heritage of the city and its very urban culture. Baydar legitimized the characterization settlements occupied by rural migrants as ‘other’ by declaring that these settlements were ‘separated from the cities through psychological, social and cultural boundaries’ (Baydar 1997:78). Arguing that the cultural identity of the city is being nearly erased by the ‘other Istanbul’, Baydar declared that
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Page 219 the main social conflict in Istanbul is not any more a class struggle, but rather a cultural conflict between an ‘urban culture’ and a ‘rural reaction’ (Baydar 1997:79). From Cezayir sokağı [Algeria street] to Fransız sokağı [French street] In the summer of 2004, a formerly working-class neighbourhood in Istanbul ‘opened for business’. Situated near Beyoğlu13 in the city centre, which had itself recently gone through urban renewal, Cezayir Sokağı [Algeria Street] underwent a renewal project. A developer not only purchased or rented all apartments on the street to turn them into upscale bars, restaurants, boutiques, and art galleries, but also privatized the street by installing security equipment at the entrance. In addition to gentrification, privatization, and spatial segregation, the new space embodied ‘whiteness’ in a heavily symbolic, significant way which demonstrates what term beyaz Türklük signifies: The developer changed the name of the street from Cezayir Sokağı [Algeria Street] to Fransız Sokağı [French Street]! In the controversy that followed the opening of the street for business, several newspaper columnists not only praised the new face of the street but also defended the change of name, arguing that there was clearly no need to discuss the choice of France over Algeria when the only association Algeria would evoke was reactionary, fundamentalist politics. Kırıkkanat’s column A regular columnist in one of the Turkish dailies, Radikal, Mine Kırıkkanat, has been especially notorious in the ways she has fused culturalist references with overtly and conventionally racist ones. For years, Kırıkkanat has mocked parts of Turkish society calling it Islamistan’, and complained frequently of its ‘Arabization’. In an article published in the summer of 2005 which became highly controversial, Mine Kırıkkanat complained ferociously about the cultural, social and visual pollution of Istanbul by groups which she had earlier labelled kara kalabal1klar (the dark crowds or the dark masses) (cited in Günal 2001:72). Her choice of the term dark crowds is interesting, as it is clever. Its effectiveness is based on the way it can bring together an older Orientalism of sections of the Turkish elite with new, neoliberal fears and anxieties that verge on racism. On the one hand, the dark in the term stands as a metaphor for reactionary politics, evoking the more historical but ongoing fears of the Kemalist urban, laik, educated elites of unenlightened, ignorant masses, assumed to be easy recruits for anti-modern, or even fun damentalist politics against modernization/Westernization reforms of the Turkish Republic. The term ‘black crowds’ also evokes the secularist sens ibilities and fears and anxieties of Kemalist middle classes in the way it goes beyond metaphor and reminds them of women in black veils. In addition to
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Page 220 the culturalism and the political connotations involved, however, there is a more overtly racist and Eurocentric tone to Kırıkkanat’s choice of the term ‘dark crowds’. As Istanbul, as an aspiring global city gets increasingly fantasized as a European space, the term resonates with the exclusionary tendencies of sections of the laik middle classes against those from Eastern Turkey, Kurds and peasants, all seen both as darker, and associated with cultures considered incompatible with a European one. In the article that also became highly controversial, after expressing her pride in the modern and civilized image of Turkey the Atatürk Airport in Istanbul presents – as confirmed for Kırıkkanat by her French friend who compared it with Cairo Airport – Kırıkkanat engaged in a comparison of this image with a crudely racist mockery of the weekend outing habits of people she considered to be ‘invading’ parts of the urban coast and interfering with the enjoyment of the same space by ‘true’ citizens of these urban spaces. Referring to the invaders as short legged, long armed, dark, and hairy people with carnivorous barbecuing habits, Kırıkkanat also utilized some of the gender stereotypes of rural migrants increasingly common among the urban middle classes: of men who ‘lie half-naked on the grass, while their headscarfed or veiled women prepare the barbecue, get the tea ready, and take care of the kids’ (Kırıkkanat 2005). Even though the explicitness of the language she used in this article finally cost Kırıkkanat her job as a columnist with this particular newspaper – she subsequently did get another column in another newspaper, Vatan – what has been interesting in the reactions to her piece has been the fact that she has had as many supporters among readers and other columnists. Siding with Kırıkkanat, some of the responses by the readers argue that Kırıkkanat is right as the people – especially the men – she writes about are guilty of everything from sexual harassment to domestic violence, to pollution of the urban spaces. What is interesting is that while some of the supporters have expressed their support in a pseudo-progressive tones as secular or feminist concerns, their language has simply repeated the typical middle class stereotyped biases about gender relations among migrants, Kurds and ‘Islamists’, and the moral panic about what the tolerance of these groups would imply for the future of Turkey.14 Popular culture, cartoons and the gaze on the body of the other Aysşe Öncü (2000, 2002) and Ali Şimşek (2005) have studied depictions of the urban poor and marginal in cartoons, a very popular medium of popular culture in Turkey. Şimşek argues that cartoons in Turkey have changed from providing a critical gaze on the dominant groups in the 1960s and 1970s, to representing a growing intensity of gaze of the new middle class on the poor and marginal groups. Öncü finds that the character of maganda ,15 widely and popularly used in cartoons since the 1980s, provides a ‘total and totalizing other’. Often drawn as a very grotesque figure, maganda represents a racialized and classed
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Page 221 masculinity. He appears as a rude and vulgar figure, dark, hairy, an over-sexed, animal-like, socially and morally repugnant creature, especially abusive to women. His social and moral repugnancy is clearly inscribed in his body. Even though explicit ethnic references are avoided, Şimşek regards maganda as a code word for Kurds, or those from Eastern Turkey, and from specific class positions. Very important in the image of maganda is that this image lacks, or deliberately avoids, any references to poverty and marginality and rather focuses on presumed cultural and gender attributes of men from marginalized or specific ethnic backgrounds. According to Şimşek, another important feature of the cartoons popular among the new middle class in the 1990s was parodying of Turkishness . Not simply a critique of official nationalist ideology, this involved an intense self-Orientalization, a gaze on everyday life in Turkey through what was imagined as the European lens. Once again, the images were specifically a parody of the daily habits, patterns, mannerisms, the habitus of those sectors of the population not seen to be fitting into Turkey’s aspirations to become part of Europe or aspirations for Istanbul to become a global city. The gaze on the male bodies of the other: the obsession with moustaches Along with the extraordinary amount of attention to urban aesthetics and lifestyles, beyaz Türk discourses were preoccupied with the bodies of others in Turkey. Part of this preoccupation involved an obsession with moustaches. What is interesting about the obsession with/against moustaches is that this obsession demonstrates the condensing of the several different dimensions of neoliberal cultural politics together. The banning of the moustache among state employees started with new regulations placed on the minds and bodies of civil servants after the military coup. For the military, this was partly a typical disciplinary symbol, a practice of subjecting larger parts of society to military discipline. It was also a way of erasing – at least among civil servants – some of the signs of political divisions that had preceded the coup, when different styles of moustache were associated with different political affiliations. What started out as a more vulgar disciplinary regime associated with the state was soon adopted by the private sector, whereby several firms and corporations refused to employ or keep on the job employees who insisted on wearing a moustache. Iİshak Alaton, a prominent businessman, called the moustache a form of environmental pollution (cited in Bali 2002:184). At the same time, some of the newspaper columnists started a campaign discouraging politicians from wearing the moustache or kissing each other in public, both representing Oriental looks and mannerisms.16 The private sector campaign against the moustache has simultaneously involved elements of the military’s reasoning – erasing any potential resonance of past political symbols, especially among leftists – and reconfiguring it with Orientalist readings of the moustache re-defined, re-pronounced with aspirations of
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Page 222 belonging in Europe and in the West. As the moustache came to be read as associated with a Middle-Eastern look, it was seen as a potential impediment to the new image Turkey was expected to project in order to gain acceptance in Europe and to play in the ‘first league of nations’. Why culturalism? How does it serve as a hegemonic strategy? Culturalism is significant in helping the organic intellectuals of the trans-national bourgeoisie to popularize and naturalize the new order. With the end of the Cold War, and the disappearance of alternative paths of development, there is a belief in the inevitability of capitalist development, and specifically, neoliberal, capitalist globalization, thus, a common sense naturalization of it. In this environment, culturalism/racialism helps to pathologize both resistance/rejection to and failure in the system. As neoliberal hegemonies exclude theories which demonstrate failure as central and integral to the functioning of capitalism and inevitable in it; when social, economic and historical explanations for failure are excluded from hegemonic discourses, culture (as a reductionist, essentialized, shrunk, caricatured version of what term otherwise could mean) becomes the only accepted explanation in mainstream discourse. The dismissal, mockery and Orientalization of questioning of or challenges to globalism as well as the parody of the poor, marginal and those struggling under the new economic regime help construct neoliberal globalism as the absolute and inevitable reality, dismissing any potential or real opposition as reactionary, out of place, out of date, and irrelevant. Discourses that culturalize inequalities conveniently displace characterization of inequalities and tensions in terms of class and class conflict. As they do, they help naturalize the new economic order by attributing social, cultural capital to the new middle class; and justifying the inequalities suffered by those losing or marginalized by globalism as having to do with their culture, lifestyle choices and wrong values. The constitution of the poor and marginalized as outside the modern nation and a globalized modernity discourages, disables, or invalidates claims to entitlement. As it politically marginalizes any potential opposition, culturalization undermines possibilities of any potential identification and alliances among classes/groups negatively affected by globalism. Even though sections of urban middle classes in Turkey have hardly benefitted from globalism and therefore live in a state of social/economic insecurity and anxiety, rather than identifying with others sharing their sense of insecurity, they rather project their anxieties to the cultural others of urban areas. How can beyaz Türk culturalist discourses, so blatantly exclusionary, be hegemonic beyond a very small section of society? It is important to recognize that the resonance or the effectiveness of beyaz Türk discourses go far beyond the group which may produce it or may be its immediate constituency. One group where the discourses of culturalization find resonance is among sections of the middle class not benefitting or seeing themselves as benefitting
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Page 223 from neoliberal globalism, but living in a general state of insecurity and anxiety. In addition to tensions around sharing urban space with people from different class or ethnicity, beyaz Türk discourses sometimes resonates with and provides easy answers and targets for their sensibilities around certain issues such as gender relations, the environment, secularism or the architectural aesthetics of the city. It is important to remember that there is a long affiliation of urban middle classes in Turkey to Orientalism as a way to interpret and approach Turkish society. Historically, this has produced a paternalistic style of politics whereby educated, ‘enlightened’, and laik urban middle classes could take on a civilizing role in relation to the rest of the population. I would suggest that a very exclusionary discourse such as the beyaz Türk one can be hegemonic, even as it may be resented and overtly rejected by the majority. It is important to recognize how, as class identities have largely disappeared from the political scene, local, and sometimes fundamentalist identities are constituted, not independently, or in a vacuum, but also in response to how certain individuals and collectivities are defined by dominant discourses and situated in society. Beyaz Türk discourses can be hegemonic even among the very groups othered by the discourses. They can be hegemonic to the degree that its logic might be accepted even as it may get inverted. They may be hegemonic to the degree that political subjects are constituted and constitute themselves in cultural terms – rather than as oppositional class subjects. They may be hegemonic in the sense that its culturalist logic may become constitutive of the identities of the excluded groups as it encourages these groups to ‘fiercely enclose, defend and magnify’17 their attributed differences. Most importantly, however, culturalization becomes hegemonic to the extent that it undermines solidarity among groups to challenge neoliberal globalism and to provide alternatives. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Yıldız Atasoy for her meticulous work in editing this piece. Her constructive comments helped me clarify my arguments. Notes 1 The term beyaz Türk literally translates as white Turk. Even though I have used the translated version of the term in a different paper on the topic (Arat-Koç 2007), I have opted for the original Turkish term here. As the subtleties in the meaning and connotations of ‘whiteness’ in a non-European context may not always be clear to readers not familiar with the Turkish context, it is better to use a term which will invite curiosity rather than set assumptions. 2 Mert (1998b,c) argues that in the early 1990s there were alternative Islamist discourses and politics among young Islamist activists as well as some in the Islamist Refah Partisi addressing questions of social alienation of the poor and focusing on issues of social justice.
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Page 224 This page intentionally left blank. 3 Parts of this section are based in an earlier publication (Arat-Koç 2007). 4 The direct English translation of laik is secular. I have chosen to use the Turkish term originally adapted from French and closer in practice to the French model of secularism. Laicism in Turkey has been associated with the authoritarian and homogenizing practices of state control over religious institutions, rather than simply a separation of church and state (Atasoy 2007:122). At an individual level, laik people have identified closely with these state practices and with Kemalist principles of modernization and westernization. 5 In recent years, the term white Turk has been used in very different ways, com pletely contradictory to the critical spirit and meaning of its original use. A book that came out and swiftly climbed the best-seller lists in 2004 defined white Turks in racist and anti-Semitic terms to refer to the elite descendants of Jewish converts to Islam. The book alleges that the converts constitute a tight-knit secret society ruling the economy and politics of Turkey (Yalçn 2004). Subsequently, there has grown a whole genre of non-fiction books applying the same conspiracy theories to understanding Turkish politics. Despite the popularity of these books, however, many of those using the term still use it in the original critical sense. 6 This identity is based on an ascribed status for some, whose families have been living in Istanbul for generations. For others, however, it involves a claim to a status achieved through a modern secular urban lifestyle and urban values. Even though some of the Muslim bourgeoisie also claim an Istanbulite identity, they do so by contesting the representations of Istanbul as a modern secular European city. As Tuğal (2002:64) points out, there are some Muslim bourgeois articulations of exclusionary arguments used against the urban poor, analogous to the beyaz Türk discourses. As these do not seem to have been commonly uttered or become very public discourses, however, I will not elaborate on them. 7 There is, however, no necessary correspondence between this ideological repre sentation and actual relations with Middle Eastern countries. Even though economic relations with Middle Eastern countries were minimal until the 1980s, they grew significantly in this period, under the neoliberal Motherland Party government. 8 The terms are used by Ismet Berkan, the editor and a daily columnist in the daily Radikal (Berkan 2001). 9 As an example, Berkan’s critique of the mild reservations expressed by a top general over globalization (Berkan 2003). Also see the reaction by Özkök, the editor of another major daily, Hürriyet, to the statement by the Turkish president Sezer, before the then US Foreign Secretary Powell’s arrival in Turkey, that Turkey did not want the USA to hit Iraq (Özkök 2001). 10 Here, I have applied to a different context a term I am borrowing from Nurdan Gürbilek’s famous book Vitrinde Yaşamak. 11 The attempts to transform Istanbul into a world-class global city involved clearing some historically poor inner-city neighbourhoods to make room for an international business district and building thoroughfares throughout the city and major new bridges across the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn (Keyder 2000). 12 Anatolia is the Turkish mainland. In popular use, the juxtaposition of Anatolia and Istanbul emphasizes Anatolia’s rural, provincial and parochial – as opposed to cosmopolitan – and still not-yet-modernized or not-yet westernized character. 13 As Beyoğlu was a district populated and frequented mostly by Christian minorities and Europeans in the late Ottoman period, its renewal symbolized nostalgia for what was seen as the European past and hopes for the European future of Istanbul. 14 The daily Radikal’s internet site lists the responses sent to Kırıkkanat as well as her critics. Some of these responses attack the critics saying that they are being populist defending the uncivilized people Kırıkkanat has rightfully – and
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Page 225 as a true intellectual working for social change - critiqued. For examples of these responses, see: http://www.radikal.com.tr/yorum.php? yorumno=407578&haberno2=160372&yss=0 (accessed: 30 November 2006);
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Page 226 This page intentionally left blank. Gtirbilek, N. 1992. Vitrinde Yaşamak: 1980’lerin Killtilrel Iklimi [To Live in a Window Display: the Cultural Climate of the 1980s], Istanbul: Metis. Hage, G. 2001. The Shrinking Society: Ethics and Hope in the Era of Capitalism, Sydney: The Evatt Foundation. Haylett, C. (2001) ‘Illegitimate subjects?: abject whites, neoliberal modernization, and middle class multiculturalism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19(3): 351-70. Keyder, Ç. (2000) ‘Arka Plan’ [The Background], in Ç. Keyder (ed.) İstanbul:Küresel ve Yerel Arasında [Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local] , İstanbul: İletişim. Kırıkkanat, M. (2005) ‘Halkımız Egleniyor’ [Our people are having fun], Radikal July 27. Online. Available: www.radikal.com.tr/haber.php?haberno=159792 (accessed: 28 November 2006). Kozanoğlu, C. (1992) Cilah İmaj Devri [The Era of Polished Images], Istanbul: İletişim. Kozanoğlu, H. (1993) Yuppiler, Prensler ve Bizim Kuşak [Yuppies, Princes and OurGeneration], Istanbul: İletişim. McMichael, P. (2004) Development and Social Change: A Perspective Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Mert, N. (1998a) ‘Hayat Tarzı Yazarlan ve Zamanm Ruhu’ [Life-style writers and the spirit of the times], Virgül 5: 27-8. Mert, N. (1998b) İslam ve Demokrasi: Bir Kurt Masah [Islam and Democracy:A Wolf Story], Istanbul: İz Yay1nc1l1k. Mert, N. (1998c) ‘ “Yerlilik”: Seffaf Bir Maske’ [“Nativism”: a transparent mask], Birikim July/August: 111/112. Öncü, A. (2000) İstanbullular ve Ötekiler: Küreselcilik Cagmda Orta Sınıf Olman1m Küresel Kozmolojisi’ [Istanbulites and the others: the global cosmology of middle classness in an age of globalism], in Ç. Keyder (ed.) Istanbul: Kilresel ve Yerel Arasında [Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local], Istanbul: İletisim. Öncti, A. (2002) ‘Global consumerism, sexuality as public spectacle, and the cultural remapping of Istanbul in the 1990s’, in D. Kandiyoti and A. Saktanber (eds) Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey, London: I. B. Tauris. Özkök, E. (2001) ‘Üçüncü Dünyahliğ1m1z Yine mi Depreşiyor?’ [Is our Third Worldism returning?], Hilrriyet, 5 December. Online. Available: http://hurarsiv.hurriyet.com.tr/> goster/haber.aspx?id=40835&yazarid=10 (accessed: 16 November 2006). Sassen, S. (2007) A Sociology of Globalization, New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Şimşek, A. (2005) Yeni Orta Sınıf Istanbul: L&M (Leyla ile Mecnun) Yay1nlar1. Skeggs, B. (2004) Class, Self, Culture, London: Routledge. TMMOB (Türk Mühendis ve Mimar Odalan Birliği) [Union of Turkish Chambers of Engineers and Architects] (2006) ‘Odalardan 12 Eylül Askeri Darbesinin Yıldönümüyle Ilgili Açiklamalar’ [Declaration by the Chambers on the Anniversary of the September 12 Military Coup]. Online. Available: www.tmmob.org.tr/ modules.php? op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=147 (accessed: 2 November 2006). Tuğal, C. (2002) ‘Hakim Kentin Ötekileri: Enformalitenin ve İslamcihğin Kenti Yeniden Kuruşu’ [The others of the sovereign city: the reconstruction of the city by informality and Islam], Birikim February: 154. Yalçm, S. (2004) Efendi: Beyaz Türklerin Büyük Strrt [Master: The Big Secret of the Beyaz Türks], Istanbul: Dogan Kitapçil1k.
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Page 227 12 The permanent state of exception International administration in Kosovo Besnik Pula Kosovo has recently returned to the attention of the global media, as negotiations for the future political and legal status of the entity were underway for most of 2007. The negotiations are intended by its diplomatic patrons – which include the ‘Contact Group’ consisting of the USA, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Russia, and the UN – to end the UN administration in Kosovo and institute some form of self-rule yet under international supervision. Interestingly, while the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was a topic of much debate among Western policy-makers, pundits, legal scholars, and public intellectuals, the post-intervention international rule in Kosovo received scant attention and even less analysis.1 Debates on NATO’s intervention against the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) were primarily centred around the question of whether a military alliance has the moral, political and/or legal right to violate the sovereignty of a state that is accused of massive violations of human rights. Traditional concerns with legal questions of state sovereignty trumped over the broader political implications of the intervention, in which critics from the Left paradoxically joined those from the Right in assuming positions that only too easily dismissed the Kosovo Albanian independence movement as a criminal and terrorist plot, and turned a dictator like Slobodan Milosevic into a champion of the resistance against globalization and/or the traditional defence of national sovereignty. Such analyses were primarily concerned with intentions, legalities, and strategic questions, and as such, missed the broader political changes that were ushered in during the post-conflict era of Kosovo’s international administration, including the unique form of UN rule that was introduced there. What is necessary for proper analysis of the political implications of the NATO intervention and its aftermath is to juxtapose the system of international administration in Kosovo with a critical analysis of the contemporary global order, and examine in the form of international rule in Kosovo the outlines of an emergent system of direct political administration exercised by multilateral institutions and legitimized through the doctrines of humanitarian interventionism and liberal democracy-building. To be sure, the NATO intervention in Kosovo and Western interventions in the Balkans throughout the 1990s have been largely overshadowed by
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Page 228 the events after September 11, 2001, and the ensuing US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Part of my goal in this chapter is to shed some light on the political parallels of Western interventions in the Balkans, Africa, Central and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East by focusing on the political treatment of territories and populations that are captured, occupied, and subjected to a myriad of international humanitarian and political institutions and mechanisms, ranging from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). As the postCold War world enters a phase of growing political uncertainty, it is global instruments that are increasingly seen as the proper means for restoring order and reconstituting societies. What is less clear, however, is the political basis upon which such instruments of global order operate, including the political status of those subject to their authority. My chapter is concerned with the transforming nature of sovereignty as non-state entities engage in the business of rule. The case of international administration in Kosovo creates the opportunity to analyze the structure and effects of the changing nature of global power in the context of the rise of interventionism as a paradigm of global politics. In addition to military action to which it is usually (and erroneously) circumscribed, interventionism also includes humanitarian, political, and various other institutional forms that seek to use resources and organization in core societies to address specific ‘issues’ of societies in the global periphery.2 My goal in this chapter is to argue that the form of rule that has emerged in places like Kosovo is both indicative and symptomatic of the changing nature of the instruments of power and legitimacy in the contemporary global order. This transformation involves not only, as is commonly argued, the alleged weakening of the state against the increasing globalization and de-territorialization of capital, but a transformation in the entire chain of global institutions of power. More specifically, the problem is that of sovereignty: where does sovereignty lie? Who or what is the sovereign in the global order? I will suggest that with the generalization of what Agamben calls the ‘state of exception’, sovereignty has not merely dissipated and been replaced by decentred networks of empire (as suggested by Hardt and Negri 2000), but it has become a nameless force no longer residing within the nation-state, but has become, particularly in the periphery, embodied in a generalized structure of power which is not limited to the traditional imperial reach of state authority. Imperialism is thus today no longer merely a state practice – it includes a variety of corporate, multilateral, and public and private humanitarian and charitable organizations which engage in biopolitical practices and, in cases like Kosovo, have captured the right to the traditional exercise of sovereign power. And yet, at the same time, such capture by non-state entities of the practice of sovereign power may be indicative not of sovereignty’s resurgence, but its deep crisis. Nowhere is this logic more clear than in cases of what is commonly termed ethnic conflict. Ethnic conflicts, such as those experienced
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Page 229 in the Balkans throughout the 1990s, as well in Africa, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and other post-colonial peripheries signify a crisis of sovereignty precisely because they challenge the existing distribution of sovereign power among states. The experience of the Balkans has demonstrated this quite clearly. While ethnic conflict is commonly denounced by Western political leaders and public commentators on moral grounds (giving way to cries for respect for the ethnic Other and an embrace of the values of liberal multiculturalism), the deployment of Western military power and the use of political, economic and other sanctions against ethnic politics and combatants is not framed by questions of morality or an ethical concern for victims of violence. Instead, what appear to be more important politically are questions of Western security and social stability and the reconstitution of sovereign power in places where it has come under threat. In 2002, the then chief of the UN administration in Kosovo, German diplomat Michael Steiner, played into the growing anti-immigrant sentiments in western Europe urged EU member states to ‘fight crime at its source’, referring to Kosovo and the Balkans more generally as the ‘source’ of Europe’s criminality. While the West, according to Steiner, had intervened in Kosovo for the high values of humanitarianism and human rights, the intervention was not driven by altruism but what Steiner called ‘enlightened self-interest’. Steiner directly linked international rule in Kosovo with questions of immigration and social stability in western Europe, suggesting that the ‘social equilibrium of European societies is especially imperiled when immigrants become associated with a perceived rise in crime’ (UNMIK 2002). Seemingly, threats to ‘social equilibria’ in the West require new forms of liberal imperialism in the periphery, in order to prevent the flood of criminality and other evils from invading Europe. While this imperialism is primarily directed at recreating well policed, ‘multiethnic’, and liberal market societies out of the ashes of communities torn by conflict, they are fundamentally, as Steiner’s insistence on the problem of crime shows, tied with the problem of re-establishing sovereign order. And the state of exception is the ready instrument which offers itself to liberal sovereignty as the means to restore order when that is seen to come under threat. Hardt and Negri (2000) dub Empire an historically new configuration of power constituted on the basis of decentred networks, but this perspective fails to acknowledge that contemporary networks of power continue to operate within classical paradigms of sovereignty. Hardt and Negri suggest that the old system of Westphalian sovereignty has been replaced by ‘imperial sovereignty’, a structure which includes the international organizations which they call the system of ‘supranational right’ (2000:183–204). This describes a new form of sovereignty centred around the USA, but whose logic of expansion is quite different from that of classic imperialism. The new imperial order, according to Hardt and Negri (2000:201), is exercised through diffuse transnational financial, military, and humanitarian organizations, multinational corporations as well as nation-states. The new imperial order thus
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Page 230 . implies forms of subjection by a complex array of state and non-state, public and private networks and mechanisms which expand and deepen the reach of Empire through a system of ‘incorporation, differentiation, and management’. I follow Hardt and Negri in their proposition that an understanding of power at the global level must detach itself from a juridical perspective of sovereignty. However, instead of following an argument whose logic leads to the conclusion that a new decentralized imperial system has displaced the primacy of the nation state, I would argue that practices of domination must be examined within the legal regimes which legitimize them. Such regimes continue to be premised upon the existence of sovereign power held by a territorialized state (Weiss 1998). On the other hand, analysis must not be confined to the nation state and the classic model of national sovereignty, but must also examine the mode of operation of sovereignty and its regulatory effects at the global level. As Dean (2001) suggests, we can conceive of the system of international states to constitute a system of international government, whose end is to ensure the reproduction of conditions that permit the practices of sovereignty. As Dean argues (2001:49), ‘[t]he existence of a system of sovereign states has as its condition a form of governmental regulation of the international order’. Sovereignty has emerged and can exist only within a system of sovereign organization, and not as something given to individual states (Tilly 1990). I propose that interventionism must be analyzed as a component of sovereign power, given that it is more often than not linked to state apparatuses. It is, moreover, in actual practice, an ethico-political claim over the power over life and death – of what Foucault (2003:234–72) termed biopower. The purpose behind understanding the politics of interventionism is to analyze the articulations between interventionism’s micro-politics and emerging macrolevel forms of legal and political orders. As Hardt and Negri suggest, it is a conceptual understanding of the emerging macro-level organization of power that is one of the pressing issues for present critical social analysis. But in their own analysis, the diffuse and networked nature of power in Empire still contains a particular orderliness that governs the system and gives it a systemic quality. My thesis instead suggests that the problem of the presentday global order is the profound lack of a systemic quality underlying the global order. It is precisely due to the lack of a systemic quality that contemporary sovereignty has a certain slippage about it – sovereignty is no longer an automatically guaranteed element of a territorialized world of states, but requires vigilant guarding from predations of all kinds: immigration, crime, terrorism, ethnic conflict from without, and revolts of the poor and marginalized from within. It is in this light that Agamben’s work on the ‘state of exception’ is particularly illuminating in historicizing sovereignty’s historically ‘built-in’ defence mechanism – a mechanism made visible only when the radical rupture between legality and the enunciation of sovereign authority becomes apparent.
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Page 231 Agamben’s (2005) recent theoretical elaboration of the state of exception defines it as a juridical mechanism for states to centralize executive control and make the legal order partly or wholly subject to suspension in the interest of the preservation of sovereign power. The state of exception is a political mechanism used by the state to declare an attack from an external enemy, an insurrection, or any combination of threats, thus requiring extraordinary powers to preserve state power. Agamben observes a troubling increase in the use of the state of exception by governments to suspend parliamentary laws and legal rights, especially in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001. This has no doubt been the case recently in the USA and a number of European states, with the quest for an ‘Imperial Presidency’ in the USA freed from legislative oversight in areas of security and defence, as well as the broadening of surveillance and detention powers available to law enforcement, spying and military agencies. Yet, such measures based on the principle of the exception are not recent inventions but have a notable past in the history of liberal government, as Agamben points out in his discussion. I use the case of the international administration of Kosovo here as an example in support of Agamben’s argument for the growing relevance of the state of exception in contemporary political practice. However, I extend Agamben’s perspective in several ways. Agamben sees the state of exception as a political practice which increasingly challenges the legal and democratic basis of states in the West, threatening to divide citizenries by producing new categories of politically undesirable subjects (whose citizenship status and legal rights are subject to suspension and abrogation). I suggest that the state of exception is being adopted as technique of power not only at the domestic, but also at the level of international governance. Projects of intervention and political engineering in Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere are turning the state of exception increasingly into a paradigm of multilateral global governmentality, normalized in the ideology of liberal humanitarian interventionism, and thereby producing entirely new subjects of juridical domination.3 An historical comparison is useful to illustrate this point. Whereas late European imperialism sought to ensure control in colonized societies by the direct colonial annexation and domination of subject populations by colonial states, extending, in some cases, legal subjectivity to colonial subjects (Osterhammel 1997), in what Fearon and Laitin (2004) have dubbed ‘postmodern imperialism’, domination and control becomes increasingly reliant on international and multilateral institutions to provide the groundwork and bureaucratic means for such an end. Moreover, under ‘postmodern imperialism’, outside intervention is more heavily reliant on policing techniques, rather than traditional forms of military action (Dean 2006). What one witnesses in places like Kosovo since 1999 is a generalization of the exception at the global level, moving beyond the jurisdictional level of the sovereign state as the state of exception becomes a feature of multilateral institutions and other non-state actors in their assumption of the position of sovereign, ruling authorities.4
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Page 232 I here first discuss the state of exception as a political paradigm and its relevance in the context of global politics. I then shift attention to Kosovo, where I analyze the juridical constitution of the international administration in Kosovo, and the ways in which Kosovo’s international administration is premised on a permanent state of exception. I conclude the chapter by drawing the implications of the increasing normalization of the state of exception as a paradigm of rule, and what it means for populations that find themselves as part of quasi-state authority practiced under a claimed normative order that invokes the exception as a means to its actualization. Agamben and the state of exception as state practice Agamben’s ‘state of exception’ includes a series of situations that the state (and particularly the executive) determines to be exceptional, thus requiring extraordinary measures that are not provided by the existing public law. These measures permit the state to partly or wholly suspend the existing legal order. Agamben’s state of exception draws heavily on Carl Schmitt’s classic discussion of sovereignty. According to Schmitt, the sovereign is not the one who rules in the everyday, ordinary proceedings of the legal order, but the one who ‘decides on the exception’ (Schmitt 1985:5). The exception presents sovereignty’s key paradox. As Nyers (2006:27) points out: The state of exception describes a central paradox of modern political life: that is, that the law can be suspended for the purpose of preserving the state and its system of law from some grave internal or external danger. In essence, the law is suspended in order for the law to be defended. Law and violence are indistinguishable during the state of exception. At the limit, law does not reflect shared norms of a society, but the will and, above all, the authority of those who can ensure the order that allows for the law in the first place. Agamben argues that the state of exception has become a normal feature of modern politics. Pointing out how modern totalitarian regimes, such as the Third Reich, were almost entirely based on the centralization of sovereign power grounded in the exception, the practice has, in Agamben’s view, now become ‘normalized’ to the point where the exception need not be explicitly declared. According to Agamben, as a technique of government, the state of exception ‘appears as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism’ (2005:2–3). While regimes such as the Third Reich or fascist Italy used the state of exception to establish despotic totalitarian rule, liberal states may equally suspend rights and engage in extra-legal actions when the state determines that its own existence is at risk. In examining the history of the state of exception, Agamben (2005:5) points to the French Revolution and argues that ‘the modern state of exception is a creation of the democraticrevolutionary tradition and not the absolutist one’. For him, the exception
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Page 233 has been gradually removed from wartime situations ‘to be used as an extra-ordinary police measure to cope with internal sedition and disorder, thus changing from a real, or military, state of siege to a fictitious, or political one’ (Agamben 2005). Agamben’s characterization of the exception points to a space occupied by the sovereign which is simultaneously internal and external to the law.5 This, in my view, is key to identifying and understanding the operation of the exception. As Agamben puts it, by drawing on Schmitt’s Political Theology : The sovereign, who can decide on the state of exception, guarantees its anchorage to the juridical order. But precisely because the decision here concerns the very annulment of the norm, that is, because the state of exception represents the inclusion and capture of a space that is neither outside nor inside (the space that corresponds to the annulled and suspended norm), ‘the sovereign stands outside of the normally valid juridical order’, and yet belongs to it, for it is he who is responsible for deciding whether the constitution can be suspended in toto . (Agamben 2005:35) It is, hence, the delimitation and maintenance of a space of decision outside the law that, in essence, defines the exception. As the state of exception comes to constitute entities other than juridically recognized states, a new space for sovereign decision is elaborated which demarcates and differentiates the nexus between sovereign power and the law. But the case in consideration in this chapter shows an additional element, not adequately explored by Agamben, whose perspective remains confined to the nation-state. That is that the threat to the Hobbesian sovereign in our era defined by perceptions of sub-state threats implies that sovereign order may require introduction from the outside, and by means other than classic state power, including non-state actors and multilateral institutions. Here we depart from the realm of the state to enter into the organization of power at the global level, in which the nation state no longer emerges as the comfortable sinew linking citizenry and sovereign power, but other transnational, nonstate actors claim the right of exercising sovereign decision against entirely new juridical subjects. The production of new juridical subjects of domination is what the case of Kosovo allows us to observe. More specifically, Kosovo under international rule represents a case when a territory is expelled from the international legal order to become a non-state entity that is nevertheless under the custody of a legal authority. Kosovo also represents one of the most elaborate cases when international and multilateral institutions, such as the UN and the EU, capture the right to exercise sovereign decision in the Schmittian sense of the term.
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Page 234 International rule in Kosovo: the legal embodiment of the exception During the Kosovo conflict that lasted through the winter and spring of 1999, Serbian security forces expelled over 800,000 Kosovo Albanians from Kosovo (Human Rights Watch 2001). In addition to having Albanians physically removed from Kosovo, the Serbian regime employed a corresponding policy, whose evident purpose was to ensure that those Albanians expelled would never again return to Kosovo. Thus, as convoys of Albanians gathered at Kosovo’s border with Albania and Macedonia, Serbian border personnel would confiscate and destroy any identity papers that escapees had on them. Cars were not spared either, as license plates were removed and confiscated by the authorities. The purpose of the policy was clear – to render those expelled permanently identity-less and, hence, stateless. Stripping Kosovo Albanians of legal citizenship reduced those expelled to what Agamben (1998) calls bare life , or what Arendt (1958) recognized as the peculiar status of refugees: natural beings whose lack of political relation to a state turns them into individuals who lose not only the rights once nominally afforded by their state, but who have no rights anywhere . After Serbian military and police forces began withdrawing from Kosovo in compliance of the peace agreement signed between Milosevic and NATO, Kosovar refugees began a massive return to their homes, in a development that impressed Western officials and relief agencies aghast. What most Kosovars were unaware of at the time, was that their return to Kosovo, did not represent a reversal of their political fortune as a rights-bearing collectivity, but rather a paradoxical institutionalization of their collective status as refugees, or, rather, the transformation of the refugee status into a permanent legal form. Kosovars were not returning to Kosovo to become (as Western media tended to report) the ‘masters’ of Kosovo, to reclaim the citizenship they had been stripped of and become the constituents of a new political community, but rather returning to a Kosovo that, under UN rule, was itself turning into what can metaphorically be described as a massive refugee camp. Kosovars carried their refugee status into what was becoming a space in which the political status of refugee was transformed into a normal part of the ensuing, post-conflict legal order. What I describe above follows strictly from the legal and political structure of Kosovo’s international administration, which produced an entirely new political entity in Kosovo (Pula 2003). This entity, though performing some of the classical functions of a state, was, in essence, a non-state.6 Existing, paradoxically, both within and outside of the legal international order (being under UN rule but prohibited from gaining any representation in the organization, and ruled in the name of an ‘international community’ from which it itself had been effectively banished), and basing its power on the sovereign state of exception while expounding an ideology of humanitarianism, multi-culturalism, and human rights, the non-state entity that emerged in Kosovo
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Page 235 lacked the recognition as and the structure of a traditional state while exercising traditional state power. Yet, the subjects of such power can only be analogically compared, juridically and politically, to the status normally held by refugees. This is not to claim that there was no difference between people residing in Kosovo and ‘real’ refugees (including those that were forced out after the 1999 conflict), but that at a juridical level, the status of refugee in post-conflict Kosovo was universalized and made permanent. As Arendt’s argues in her powerful discussion on ‘The Decline of the Nation State and End of the Rights of Man’ (1958:267–302), the refugee is that peculiar figure of political modernity whose being brings to light the disquieting contradiction between the nation state and modernity’s burgeoning language of rights. Statelessness for the refugee entails rightlessness, as the state, as Arendt notes, remains the primary framework which provides and guarantees rights. The physical and biological ‘saving’ of refugees (such as their accommodation in camps or other facilities and their supervision by aid agencies) does in no way improve the political situation of the victims of war, famine, or whatever other calamity. The refugee is thus the epitome of Agamben’s (1998) homo sacer, her life is sacred (thus, it is offered protection by international treaties and conventions on human rights), but deprived of her political being (the refugee remains a political outcast, even if her physical safety is ensured). As Arendt argues, ‘[n]either physical safety … nor freedom of opinion changes in the least their fundamental situation of rightlessness. The prolongation of their lives is due to charity and not to right, for no law exists which could force the nations to feed them; … and their freedom of opinion is a fool’s freedom, for nothing they think matters anyhow’ (1958:296). For Agamben, the status accorded to refugees signals a deeper contradiction within the structure of modern sovereignty itself. In Agamben’s analysis, refugees disrupt ‘the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality , [and thereby] put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis’ (1998:131). Kosovo’s international administration evades the use of the legal category of ‘citizen’ while defining the inhabitants of Kosovo as ‘residents’. This definition of legal subjectivity approximates to a daunting degree what Agamben defines as bare life. While being guaranteed ‘human rights’, under UN rule Kosovo’s population bore no relation to a state and thus could claim no rights of citizenship. Yet, UNMIK did not relinquish its own claim to being a mechanism of sovereign rule, even while setting up local elected authorities whose authority UNMIK superseded and who – including the Assembly and Government of Kosovo – operated on UNMIK’s legal concession. What McMichael (this volume) terms the ‘paradox of sovereignty’, in which the increasing opportunities for citizenries to elect their political representatives is accompanied by an increasing powerlessness of those representatives to decide on collective issues, is in this case taken to its logical conclusion: sovereign order trumps any set of political, civil, or social rights, premised on securing the effectiveness of sovereign order and ensuring the opportunity for
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Page 236 the exercise of a biopolitical power freed from juridical constrains.7 Simultaneously, by being rendered rightless and without citizenship – that is, by being guaranteed ‘human rights’ but not proper political rights – the subjects of sovereignty are reduced to a form of bare life, sacred but ontologically devoid of political worth. Rights formally exist but are retractable and revocable at any time by sovereign power, whose existence is situated permanently in a space beyond the legal order. A similar structure of rule has formed in post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina since the end of the conflict in 1995, where an internationally-appointed official reserves the right to exercise special powers even in the face of democratically elected Bosnian authorities (Bose 2002; Chandler 2000). But while such institutional arrangement has been critiqued as one that has established a regime that perpetuates ethnically-based politics while violating liberalism’s principles of self-government which international authorities claim to be introducing in the post-conflict Balkans (Mujkic 2007), such forms of rule may not at all represent deviations from the liberal tradition as some argue but the very enacting of liberal principles. According to Valverde (1996), the liberal tradition relies on the notion that the existence of the political subject of rights requires the possession of a certain ‘maturity of the will’ not found among certain social and cultural groups, while building such maturity may require education through the exercise of biopolitical measures and even despotic government, such as was historically practiced in European colonies. Dean points out that liberal government has historically developed upon a series of categorical exclusions of populations from the exercise of rights based on the lack of certain attributes, and who are ‘therefore subjected to all sorts of disciplinary, bio-political and even sovereign interventions’ (Dean 1999:134). Disciplinary interventions at the biopolitical and sovereign level in Kosovo (and Bosnia) thus need not look outside of the liberal tradition for their ethical basis, and such is indeed the case: international rule in Kosovo (and Bosnia) is commonly legitimated by the invocation of liberal principles. In Kosovo, furthermore, the exercise of sovereign power based on a permanent state of exception is further transformed into (and thus neutralized as) an administrative function carried out under the umbrella of the technocracy of neoliberal development (Ong 2006).8 Political decisions, including those such as the privatization of Kosovo’s pension fund and its management by private Western equity firms, are described by international officials to the Kosovo public as purely technical and pragmatic decisions not driven by any political or ideological inclinations. Kosovo: the non-state of sovereign power In June 1999, the UN Security Council (UNSC) adopted Resolution 1244, the founding document of what is officially called the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). This document has been the foundation of international rule in Kosovo since the end of the war in June 1999. In an
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Page 237 exercise of an institutional multilateralism diverse in its makeup and penetrative in its reach, the civilian and military components of the international rule in Kosovo are made up by the UN, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and EU, and NATO.9 The resolution authorizes the creation of a UN administration which will, as the resolution manifestly states, ‘provide an interim administration for Kosovo under which the people of Kosovo can enjoy substantial autonomy within the [FRY], and which will provide transitional administration while establishing and overseeing the development of provisional democratic self-governing institutions’ (UNSC 1999:3). While the Resolution was seen at the time as a temporary solution ending the conflict between NATO and FRY, UN rule in Kosovo has stretched for nearly one decade. In the present juncture, the EU envisions UN rule to be replaced by an ‘International Civil Representative’ and UNMIK to be replaced by an EU mission (UNOSEK 2007). While UN Security Council (UNSC) authorized the establishment of an international civilian administration in Kosovo, UNMIK established its authority in what can be truly called an act of self-creation. That legal act is Regulation No. 1999/1, which established that ‘all legislative and executive authority with respect to Kosovo, including the administration of the judiciary, is vested in UNMIK and is exercised by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General’ (UNMIK 1999:1). Through a single act, from that moment onward, UNMIK monopolized all political and juridical power in the territory of Kosovo.10 The category of the exception is embedded within the legal structure of Kosovo’s international administration, no longer requiring separate enunciation by the sovereign. UNMIK’s founding documents (and, consequently, its subsequent edicts, known as regulations) include the principle of the exception, though it is not explicitly stated. It is not by declaration, but by its very form, that UNMIK embodies the exception.11 Kosovo is legally defined as a ‘territory’, avoiding more problematic terms such as ‘trusteeship’ and ‘protectorate’. But even such seemingly neutral terms have a history. As Schmitt (2003) shows, as early modern European states developed the body of rules of the jus publicum Europaeum (laying the foundation for the contemporary practice of international law), there emerged a nomos which divided the European and the non-European world in terms of the legal status of territory based on a division between sovereign and non-sovereign space. European states recognized each other’s colonial sphere of rule under the principle of dominion, that is, as lands possessed through title by a prince that could be seized by another prince through a challenge of war. The extra-European world represented a world of territories, a frontier-land in which the rules of the jus publicum Europaeum of treaties, land appropriation, the bracketing of war, and mutual recognition, did not apply. Both the legal concepts of protectorate and trusteeship emerged in the course of European imperial expansion, as ways to normalize European control of extra-European territories and extend a second-order international law to
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Page 238 the extra-European world, particularly as the jus publicum Europaeum and its corresponding legal order faced a major crisis with the entry of new, non-European sovereigns into the system beginning in the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, as Schmitt puts straightforwardly, until after the outbreak of the First World War, ‘[colonial] or protectorate soil was not considered to be the same as state territory in international law’ (2003:230). The legal inscription of the world by European colonialism thus founded an order based on the division between two distinct entities, that of a community of civilized, progressive, constitutionally ordered, and equal sovereigns, and its Other, an order-less field to be inscribed and appropriated by sovereign power. It is the spectre of such a juridical order that resides in the interstices of UNMIK’s revival of the concept of ‘territory’ in Kosovo. The exclusion of the terms protectorate and trusteeship from UNMIK’s terms of reference has meant a paradoxical return to the pre-colonial status of territory, that of a terra nullius standing in an open relation of appropriation to the outside. But in its new usage, the legal designation no longer refers to a seemingly uninhabited zone open for conquest, but to a space excluded from the normal regime of international law, even if it is part of the international order. The re-appropriation of ‘territory’ as a legal concept may signify the normalization of a space of exclusion from legality, a feature that is becoming a growing characteristic of the present-day world order, including the internal politics of liberal democratic states (Gross 2006; Nyers 2006). In a highly indicative fashion, it was very difficult for the international Ombudsperson of Kosovo, the authority charged with monitoring human rights in the territory, to define Kosovo’s international administration in proper legal terms. The Ombudsperson, a position served for a number of years by a Polish lawyer and longtime human rights activist, continually pointed out the contradiction between the notions of democracy and human rights propagated by UNMIK and its completely undemocratic structure of rule, including its functioning as a state while not existing as such in international law. He settled on the rather imprecise term ‘surrogate state’ to define UNMIK, and also identified UNMIK, to the constant displeasure of its chiefs, as the main violator of human rights in Kosovo.12 Conclusion It seems like a proper way to conclude the discussion here is to return to the moral debates surrounding the question of humanitarian interventionism, which continue to inform much thinking on how to best reconstitute global order in the post-Cold War era (Chandler 2006). In this sense, in light of McMichael’s (this volume) critical problematization of human rights, it is useful to recall the use of the ideology of human rights not only as a justification for NATO’s intervention in the former Yugoslavia but more fundamentally as the normative basis of Kosovo’s ‘international’ post-conflict
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Page 239 administration. The use of human rights to legitimize new practices of subjection have turned the notion of ‘human rights’ into a curious concept of the post-Cold War era. Some critics, such as Wallerstein (2006), have seen human rights as a hegemonic Eurocentric ideology imposed on the rest of the world. Other, liberal critics suggest that human rights are good and fine in content, but that they remain essentially useless in form as long as they remain globally unenforceable. And yet it is in Kosovo where human rights became imperialistic, and precisely at the moment when they became enforceable. Humanitarian intervention in the case of Kosovo has meant not only military intervention from the outside to end repression and abuse by state power, but also a ceaseless administration of a population according to the principles of rule symbolized by the refugee camp. This may represent the very exclusionary basis of the supposedly humanitarian universalism of humani- tarian intervention: claiming to save victims, it needs them to continue to remain victims, as Žižek (1999) argues. The ideology of human rights, armed with interventionism, have come together in Kosovo to institutionalize the right to bare life of the refugee - truly producing the ‘useless rights’ that Rancière (2004) has spoken about. In contemporary practice, humanitarian intervention is intended to save victims at the cost of ensuring that they remain non-political in their being. Here, I believe, lies the questionable side of the present day articulation of the so-called ‘responsibility to protect’, which has recently emerged as the cornerstone of UN policy (ICISS 2001), i.e. the right of other states to intervene in cases of evident attempts at genocide and mass murder by governments. Certainly, the problem is not the right of supranational bodies to violate the sovereign rights of individual states in cases of mass murder and genocide and to intervene militarily to prevent or stop such developments. The problem is what happens after state sovereignty has been revoked through intervention or by the acts of supranational bodies, and who comes in to act the sovereign in place of the state. Such a position should not necessitate the rejection of the politics of human rights, but its radicalization to the degree which it embodies the effects of what Agamben calls ‘constituting power’. Human rights can continue to serve as a continuing liberatory and emancipatory project if and only if they provide the possibility of a subject position to enunciate a universality that serves to politicize, and not to normalize, relations of power. As Žižek (2005) argues, ‘human rights’ maintain their progressive role not when interpreted as a petrified system of ‘freedoms’, but when they are taken up as a space of politicization, that is, when they are understood to mean ‘the right to universality as such’ (Žižek 2005:131). It is in this precise region, in the contradiction between the universality of human rights and the state of exception that is invoked to enforce them, where lies the political space for challenging the petrification of political power demanded by sovereignty. It is under those conditions that one may recover the possibility for what Agamben calls the ‘pure political act’, one that is capable of going
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Page 240 beyond the depoliticizing and dehumanizing human rights of humanitarian interventionism. Notes 1 On the debates on the NATO intervention in Kosovo see in particular the collection of essays published in Le Monde Diplomatique in 1999, including such well known USA and European public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Vaclav Havel, and Günter Grass. See, www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cahier/kosovo. 2 See Ignatieff (2005) for an example advocating the interventionism I describe here. 3 On the ‘normalization’ of the exception in the case of the USA, see Gross (2006) and Steinmetz (2003). 4 Fearon and Laitin (2004) provide interesting data on the levels of internal strife within states and growth of UN peacekeeping operations in the period from 1945– 2002. They note the significant spike in the number of UN interventions from 1989 onwards. On the changing nature of UN missions, in which they are increasingly called forth to perform traditional political functions, see Ratner (1995). 5 Some critics have pointed to problems with Agamben’s handling of historical evidence (Mesnard 2004). However, this does not detract for the relevance of Agamben’s analysis of the exception and its invocation by modern states. 6 On this matter, see also discussion by Nilsson (2004). 7 To complete this picture, it is worth adding that international personnel administering Kosovo are also afforded full legal immunity against prosecution in Kosovo. 8 The justification for such authority in Kosovo has operated chiefly through the mobilization of the category of ethnicity to situate UNMIK as a ‘neutral’ peacekeeper between ethnically defined communities in conflict. This means that for UNMIK authorities, all political demands are filtered through the lens of institutionalized categories of ethnicity (for an analysis, see Blumi 2003). UNMIK’s claims to administrative neutrality have no doubt also been facilitated by the ideological dominance of neoliberalism, in which, as Ong (2006) points out, questions of government and policy are commonly reduced to questions of technical expertise, calculation, and management. 9 Under the new arrangements, whose planning is underway, during the writing of this chapter, the UN is to be replaced by a police and security mission of the EU, headed by an ‘International Civil Representative’ with broad powers of control over Kosovo authorities. 10 Since its establishment, UNMIK has gone through a number of institutional iterations and reorganizations, leading to its possible dissolution and transformation into a different body during the course of 2008. However, the purpose of this chapter is not to analyze the UNMIK’s internal institutional organization, since such analyses have been done elsewhere (Pula 2003; King and Mason 2006; Di Lellio 2005). The analysis here instead focuses on instances of the exception that are embedded within Kosovo’s international administration and will continue to be in the foreseeable future. 11 I am making a distinction here between the use of special powers claimed by UNMIK and the juridical structure of UNMIK itself. Among these special powers is the executive privilege of effecting the indefinite, extra-legal detention of individuals who are deemed to represent ‘threats to security’, effective veto power over legislation adopted by the elected Kosovo Assembly, and the ability to undo court decisions, among others. My claim is that the exception is not only found in the range of UNMIK’s special powers, but that UNMIK’s very legal structure as an entity that assumes the role of a sovereign ruling an effectively stateless
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Page 241 population represents the exception embodied within the institution itself. The very fact that UNMIK can claim and effect such special powers illustrates its very juridical foundation as an entity that exists not only outside the framework of procedural democracy, but outside normal legality, i.e. a sovereign in the Schmittian sense. As for UNMIK’s special powers, they have been used in several instances. To mention but a few prominent cases: in 2000, Afrim Zeqiri, under suspicion of having committed an ‘ethnic crime’, was detained and held without trial for over one year under executive orders by UNMIK’s chief. Zeqiri was later tried and found not guilty by a panel of international judges (Ombudsperson Institution in Kosovo 2003). In 2000 and 2005, UNMIK chiefs issued executive orders which designated territories around the properties of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo as ‘protected sites’, thereby suspending existing legal regula tions governing the use of private property in these areas and effectively establish ing a distinct legal regime for these zones. In 2007, UN judges employed various legal measures to indefinitely detain political activist Albin Kurti for nearly one year for organizing an anti-UNMIK rally (Marquand 2007). For UNMIK’s spe cial punitive and disciplinary powers over the Kosovo media, see Di Lellio (2005). 12 The Kosovo Ombudsperson’s reports are available at: www.ombudsperson kosovo.org References Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2005) State of Exception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (1958) The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Meridian Books. Blumi, I. (2003) ‘Ethnic borders to a democratic society in Kosova: the UN’s identity card’, in F. Bieber and Ž. Daskalovski (eds) Understanding the War in Kosovo, London: Frank Cass. Bose, S. (2002) Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Interven tion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chandler, D. (2000) Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton, London: Pluto Press. Chandler, D. (2006) From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and Inter national Intervention, London: Pluto Press. Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society, London: Sage. Dean, M. (2001) ‘ “Demonic societies”: liberalism, biopolitics, and sovereignty’, in T. B. Hansen and F. Stepputat (eds) States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explor ations of the Postcolonial State, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dean, M. (2006) ‘Military intervention as “police” action?’, in M. D. Dubber and M. Valverde (eds) The New Police Science: The Police Power in Domestic and International Governance, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Di Lellio, A. (2005) ‘Empire lite as a swamp’, Transitions 45: 63-80. Fearon, J. and Laitin, D. (2004) ‘Neotrusteeship and the problem of weak states’, International Security 28: 5-43. Foucault, M. (2003) ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, New York: Picador. Gross, O. (2006) ‘What “emergency” regime?’, Constellations 13: 74-88. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Human Rights Watch (2001) Under Orders: War Crimes in Kosovo, New York: Human Rights Watch.
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Page 242 This page intentionally left blank. ICISS (2001) The responsibility to protect: report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. Online. Available: www.iciss.ca/report2-en.asp (accessed: 19 January 2007). Ignatieff, M. (2005) The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. King, I. and Mason, W. (2006) Peace at any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo, London: Hurst. Marquand, R. (2007) ‘In Kosovo, a critic who just won’t quit’, Christian Science Monitor, December 10. Online. Available: www.csmonitor.com/2007/1210/p06s02woeu.html (accessed: 10 December 2007). Mesnard, P. (2004) ‘The political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben: a critical evalu ation’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5: 139-57. Mujkic, A. (2007) ‘We, the Citizens of Ethnopolis’, Constellations 14: 112-28. Nilsson, J. (2004) ‘UNMIK and the ombudsperson institution in Kosovo: human rights protection in a United Nations “surrogate state,” ’ Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights 22: 389-411. Nyers, P. (2006) ‘The accidental citizen: acts of sovereignty and (un)making citizen ship’, Economy and Society 35: 22-41. Ombudsperson Institution in Kosovo (2003) Registration No. 86/00: Afrim Zeqiri Against the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, Prishtina, Kosovo: Ombudsperson Institution in Kosovo. Online. Available: www.ombudspersonkosovo.org (accessed: 11 December 2007). Ong, A. (2006) Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Osterhammel, J. (1997) Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener. Pula, B. (2003) ‘The UN in Kosovo: administering democratization?’, in F. Bieber and Ž. Daskalovski (eds) Understanding the War in Kosovo, London: Frank Cass. Rancière, J. (2004) ‘Who is the subject of the rights of man?’, South Quarterly 103: 297-310. Ratner, S. (1995) The New UN Peacekeeping, New York: St Martin’s Press. Schmitt, C. (1985) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, C. (2003) The Nomos of the Earth, New York: Telos Press. Steinmetz, G. (2003) ‘The state of emergency and the new American imperialism: toward an authoritarian post-Fordism’, Public Culture 15: 323-46. Tilly, C. (1990) Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. UNMIK (1999) ‘Regulation No. 1999/1: On the authority of the interim administra tion in Kosovo’, July 25. Online. Available: www.unmikonline.org (accessed: 19 January 2007). UNMIK (2002) ‘Fight crime at its source’, UNMIK press release, June 1. Available: www.unmikonline.org/press/2002/pressr/pr747.htm(accessed: 19 January 2007). UNOSEK (2007) ‘The comprehensive proposal for Kosovo status settlement’, Online. Available: www.unosek.org (accessed: 30 November 2007). UNSC (1999) Resolution 1244, Online. Available: www.un.org (accessed: 19 January 2007). Valverde, M. (1996) ‘ “Despotism” and ethical liberal governance’, Economy and Society 25: 357-72.
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Page 243 This page intentionally left blank. Wallerstein, I. (2006) European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power, New York: The New Press. Weiss, L. (1998) The Myth of the Powerless State, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Žižek, S. (1999) ‘Against the double blackmail’, New Left Review I/234: 76-82. Žižek, S. (2005) ‘Against human rights’, New Left Review 34: 115-31.
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Page 244 13 Left-indigenous politics in Bolivia The constituent assembly and Evo Morales Jeffery R. Webber Radical mobilization of left-indigenous social movements was the defining feature of Bolivian politics between 2000 and 2005. These movements brought down two neoliberal presidents: Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2003 and Carlos Mesa in 2005. They were also the necessary backdrop for Evo Morales’ successful bid for the presidency in the December 2005 elections as leader of the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism, MAS). Morales won an unprecedented 53.7 per cent of the popular vote and became the first indigenous president of the republic. This was a very important development given that 62 per cent of Bolivians self-identify as indigenous (INE 2001). The popular mobilizations which set the stage for Morales’ ascension to the presidency congealed behind two strategic objectives: (1) the nationalization of the hydrocarbons industry; and (2) the formation of a Constituent Assembly in order to eradicate economic and racial oppression of the indigenous majority by the ruling white- mestizo (mixed race) elite, the most powerful section of which is grounded in the agro-industrial and natural gas economies of the eastern lowlands, or media luna (half moon) departments of Pando, Beni, Santa Cruz, and Tarija.1 This chapter focuses on the Constituent Assembly (henceforth, CA) against the backdrop of the shifting balance of class forces in Bolivian society over the last few decades. Such a focus is important politically because so much of contemporary debate in Bolivia is wrapped up in the meaning and significance of the assembly; it is crucial theoretically because much of the existing literature on constitutional reform in Latin America is narrowly occupied with institutional questions of the internal apparatuses of the state, excluding analysis of the wider balance of social forces in society at large. After the election of Evo Morales, the MAS government did set in motion a CA. Leftindigenous movements had envisioned a revolutionary CA which would replace the authority of the existing executive, legislative, and judicial apparatuses of the state and be defined by the organic and direct participation of the most important popular organizations of society that led the rebellious cycle between 2000 and 2005. However, the assembly introduced by the MAS distorted the transformative vision of the popular movements by
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Page 245 preventing their autonomous participation in the process. Participation of these groups was channelled through the MAS party structure which had always been more moderate and reformist than most popular movement organizations. The CA accomplished virtually nothing during its entire first year in session (August 2006–August 2007), necessitating a deadline extension for the close of the assembly to mid-December 2007.2 It is virtually impossible to imagine that by that date the foundations will have been laid for the radical re-foundation of Bolivia.3 It will be surprising if the CA does not simply implode under the pressure of a seemingly intractable stalemate between a far-right bloc representing the bourgeois forces of the eastern lowlands – primarily represented through the new political party, PODEMOS, and an indigenous-reformist bloc located in and around the MAS. As will be explained in detail, the MAS obtained a majority of the assembly seats, but the far-Right won a sufficient number to wield effective veto power within the assembly. This chapter examines the seemingly paradoxical derailment of popular left-indigenous visions of radical change after the election of a party which describes itself as the embodiment of left-indigenous social movements. It argues that only by understanding the shifting balance of social class, regional, and ethnic social forces and the relationship of the MAS party to these forces can we unpack the underlying reasons for the failure of the CA process to fundamentally transform the Bolivian economy, society, and state. After the election of the MAS government, leftindigenous social movements have been weakened and fragmented relative to the peak of their strength in 2003 and 2005; right-wing forces, representing the elite of the agro-industrial and natural gas sectors and based in the media luna departments, have begun to reconstruct some of their former political power by establishing control of departmental ‘civic committees’ and prefectures (or governorships) of those departments, and articulating demands for more departmental autonomy for Pando, Beni, Santa Cruz, and Tarija within the Bolivia republic;4 finally, the MAS has facilitated both of these dynamics by, on the one hand, encouraging the demobilization of left-indigenous movements and channelling their energies into the moderately reformist MAS agenda, and, on the other, adopting a politics of elite negotiation with the social forces of the political right. This chapter is structured in three parts. First, it examines some of the basic features of Bolivia’s social structure and the trajectory of the bourgeois social forces of the eastern lowlands since the 1970s. Second, it explains the counter-trajectory of leftindigenous social forces between 1990 and 2005. Finally, it explores the period since the MAS was elected into office and the contours of the Constituent Assembly in light of the balance of social forces in society and the character of the new administration.
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Page 246 Social structure and the trajectory of bourgeois social forces Bolivia’s class structure and shifting geographies of capitalist accumulation have always been intertwined with the apartheid-like domination of the country’s indigenous majority. This domination has in turn spawned different waves of indigenous resistance since the 1780–1 anti-colonial insurrection led by Tupaj Katari until the most recent wave (Hylton et al. 2005). Bolivia’s indigenous population is comprised of at least 37 distinct groups. The Quechua and Aymara nations, concentrated in the western highlands, are the largest by far, followed by the Guaraní of the eastern lowlands. As Table 13.1 indicates, the media luna departments of Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz, and Tarija have the lowest proportion of indigenous people. This is an important part of the explanation for the racist component of the bourgeois autonomist movement of the eastern lowlands which tends to pit the idea of a lightskinned camba nation (comprising the white- mestizo elite of the media luna departments) against the colla nation (predominantly Aymara and Quechua) of the western highlands. In the 1970s, a pattern of concentrated growth in the department of Santa Cruz accelerated under the dictatorship of Hugo Bánzer (1971–8) (Mayorga 1978). Agroindustry (with billions of dollars in capital siphoned through the state at concessionary interests rates to large capitalists), finance, commerce, hydrocarbons (natural gas and oil), construction, and later, cocaine, were all sectors that experienced growth in this period. In terms of agriculture, cotton, sugarcane, soybeans and cattle were the four principal growth sectors (Gill 1987:50). The worldwide significance of the OPEC decision to increase oil prices in 1973–4 (Kiely 2007:67–9) also carried over into Bolivia. For much of the 1970s, higher oil prices provided revenue to the Bolivian state. However, Bolivia’s limited deposits were also rapidly depleted, so that ‘by the end of the decade proven oil reserves were all but gone and the nation threatened with the possibility of becoming an oil importer’ (Malloy 1988:100). Table 13.1 Indigenous self-identification, 2001 Department Total aged 15+ Total indigenous 15+ % Indigenous Beni 202,169 66,217 32.75 Chuquisaca 308,386 202,204 65.57 Cochabamba 900,020 669,261 74.36 La Paz 1,501,970 1,163,418 77.46 Oruro 250,983 185,474 73.90 Pando 30,418 4,939 16.24 Potosí 414,838 347,847 83.85 Santa Cruz 1,216,658 456,102 37.49 Tarija 239,550 47,175 19.69 Total/average 5,064,992 3,142,637 62.05 Source: Van Cott 2005:51.
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Page 247 Endowed with abundant arable land and natural gas and oil (among other natural resources), and uniquely characterized by weak traditions of peasant and worker radicalism, Santa Cruz was a natural selection for the geographical fulcrum of Bánzer’s state capitalist development project (Dunkerley 1984:201–48). Bánzer focused on building an export sector in response to the commodity boom of the early 1970s. Large-scale commercial agriculture was promoted through the distribution of massive concessionary credit and grants of frontier land to capitalist entrepreneurs (Gill 1987:50–3). While initially making their fortunes in the commercial agricultural boom of the early 1970s, large agrarian capitalists subsequently reinvested their capital in urban businesses. Some also established new banks in the lowlands and made fortunes in real estate (Eckstein and Hagopian 1983:82). Still others took advantage of the proximity of railroads to Argentina and Brazil to stake out control over contraband trade in everything from automobiles to cigarettes (Gill 1987:175). This buoyant economic power translated increasingly into local, regional, and national political power. In response to a dual crisis in cotton and sugarcane production in the late 1970s, some of the agro-bourgeoisie turned to soybeans or cattle-ranching as alternatives. Many others responded by shifting to cocaine which was experiencing a ferocious spike in value on the world market by the mid-1970s (Gill 1987:182–3). Demand was soaring in Europe and North America and Santa Cruz was uniquely positioned to benefit. Cocaine profits in the late 1970s were deposited in untraceable offshore bank accounts or laundered through legitimate businesses in Bolivia, substantially blurring the line between legal and illegal capitalist enterprises in the process. ‘By the end of the decade’, writes anthropologist Lesley Gill, ‘returns from cocaine sales were estimated to be nearly double the annual value of all Bolivian exports …’ (1987:187). In sum, the Bánzer regime fuelled the dramatic growth of a new bourgeoisie in the eastern lowlands. The bourgeoisie’s private riches helped to concentrate land in Bolivia and created a new enclave oligarchy which focused primarily on legal and illegal basic commodity export. Throughout the period of neoliberal restructuring (1985–2000) the traditional neoliberal political parties – the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, MNR), the Acción Democrática Nacionalista (Nationalist Democratic Action, ADN), and the Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement, MIR) – acted as veritable channels of power for the cruceño bourgeoisie.5 Cruceño elites occupied key ministerial positions that defined the political economy of that period, and filled central positions in the leadership of all three major neoliberal parties (Chávez and García Linera 2005). A period of relatively uncontested neoliberal hegemony was installed in the country under their leadership (Kohl and Farthing 2006). When vast new deposits of natural gas were discovered after the privatization of the hydrocarbons industry in the late 1990s – both in Santa Cruz and Tarija – the status of Santa Cruz as the most dynamic area of Bolivian
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Page 248 capitalism was solidified even more deeply (McGuigan 2007). However, the Brazilian and Argentine financial crises in 1999 and 2001, president Hugo Bánzer’s catastrophic coca eradication campaign, and the loss of state revenue from the privatization of the state-owned natural gas and oil company, YPFB sent the Bolivian economy into crisis. GDP growth plummeted to 0.43 per cent in 1999, rose only to 2.28 per cent in 2000, and declined again to 1.51 per cent in 2001. As a consequence, between 1999 and 2002 the poverty rate in the country increased from 62 to 65 per cent (World Bank 2005:1, 3). This situation helped spur the left-indigenous insurrectionary cycle against neoliberalism. The cruceño bourgeoisie saw their ties to the state diminish with the 2002 electoral decline of the three neoliberal parties, and the rise of the MAS to second place behind the MNR. The October 2003 Gas War, and in particular the widescale appeal of the demands for the nationalization of hydrocarbons and a radical CA, set off alarm bells for the cruceño elite. During Mesa’s administration they developed a ‘January Agenda’ to counter the left-indigenous ‘October Agenda’ (Webber 2005a).6 In lieu of occupying the central sate apparatus, the bourgeoisie of the media luna departments united behind the banner of departmental autonomies. Autonomy, in this sense, consisted of three components: (1) regional control over natural resources (e.g. land, timber, gas, and oil), (2) the right to retain control over two-thirds of all tax revenues generated in the department, and (3) authority to set all policies other than defence, currency, tariffs, and foreign relations (Eaton 2007:74). The various organizations representing the different fractions of the department’s capitalist class – the Cámara Agropecuaria del Oriente (Eastern Agricultural Chamber, CAO), the Federación de Ganaderos (Cattle Ranchers’ Federation), the Cámara de Hidrocarburos (Hydrocarbons Chamber), and the Cámara de Industria y Comercio (Chamber of Industry and Commerce, CAINCO) – set aside their differences and worked together through the Federación de Empresarios Privados de Bolivia – Santa Cruz (Federation of Private Entrepreneurs of Bolivia – Santa Cruz, FEPB-SC). The FEPB-SC, in turn, acted as the core organizer and financial backer of the principal institutional tool in the media luna ’s autonomist movement, the Comité Pro Santa Cruz (Pro Santa Cruz Committee, CPSC) (Eaton 2007:86–9). The fact that the January Agenda focused on the struggle for autonomy in the four media luna departments rather than for control of the central state apparatus should be understood, in historical perspective, as a retreat of bourgeois social forces from their dominant political position throughout most of the neoliberal period. The weakness of the right – as evidenced by the decline of right-wing political parties and civil society organizations since the 2002 elections and their inability to stem the rising tide of radical protest – was well-understood by the indigenous-left just as the latter increasingly recognized its own potential social power. This balance of social forces in Bolivian society facilitated the envisioning of a revolutionary CA to fundamentally overturn the existing social relations of capitalist exploitation
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Page 249 and racial oppression. However, because the material economic base of the bourgeoisie in the eastern lowlands was not eroded during the first year of the MAS government (Orellana Aillón 2006), their capacity for rearticulating political power steadily increased with the passage of time. One major outlet for right-wing political power has been the conscious, consistent, and effective sabotage of the CA process. The counter-trajectory of left-indigenous social forces, 1990–2005 The Indigenous March for Territory and Dignity in 1990, led by lowland indigenous movements from the department of Beni in the northern Amazon, was the first mobilization to demand a CA. This demand began to take on revolutionary content between 2000 and 2005 during the latest left-indigenous cycle of insurrection in Bolivia’s long history of popular struggle. The left-indigenous insurrectionary cycle of the early twenty-first century can be broken up into four critical conjunctures. With each conjuncture the popular movements gained confidence in their collective power and developed their emancipatory visions of change; the significance of the CA demand correspondingly deepened and evolved. The first critical spark for the wave of rebellion came with the rural and urban struggle against the privatization of water in the city of Cochabamba in 2000. The Cochabamba Water War was important in part because it represented the first left-indigenous popular victory after 15 years of relative quiescence (Assies 2003). An umbrella social movement organization, the Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida (Coordinator for the Defence of Water and Life, Coordinadora ) brought together a multi-class coalition and managed to reverse the privatization of water in the city (Spronk 2007). Popular classes and indigenous people of Bolivia were perceived to have won, if perhaps only temporarily, a battle against the neoliberal state, the World Bank, and a transnational water consortium led by the American corporation Bechtel. In the midst of this first moment of left-indigenous radicalization Oscar Olivera, the most important spokesperson for the Coordinadora , made the following argument in defence of a CA: The Constituent Assembly … should be understood as a great sovereign meeting of citizen representatives elected by their neighbourhood organizations, their urban and rural associations, their unions, their communes. These citizen representatives would bring with them ideas and projects concerning how to organize the political life of the country. (Olivera 2004:136, 137, 139) This radical formulation of fundamental change resonated widely and informed subsequent calls for a CA in the uprisings that followed. For Olivera,
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Page 250 such a CA was a way of aggregating to the national level rural and urban workers’ collective self-government and self-organization: It is a question of organizing working people … and having them take into their own hands the control, use, and ownership of collective and communal wealth … And they must do so through assembly-style forms of self-organization at the neighbourhood, regional, and national levels. (Olivera 2004:156–7) The second conjuncture in the protest cycle arose out of state threats to further entrench the commodification of indigenous communal properties and privatize water in the altiplano (high plateau) of Oruro and La Paz, as well as the northern valleys of the latter department (Gutiérrez and García Linera 2002). In April and September– October 2000, as well as in June–July 2001, the Aymara peasantry in these regions, organized through the peasant union confederation CSUTCB, orchestrated a widescale mobilization with massive road blockades. The militancy, political consciousness, and strength of this regional movement marked an historic re-emergence of the Aymara peasantry, which had not made a political intervention of this magnitude since the rural component of the 1979 struggles for democracy (García Linera 2005). The June 2002 elections in which Evo Morales ran as the presidential candidate of the MAS marked the third turning point in the cycle of rebellion. The results can be read as a sign of increasing resonance of the anti-neoliberal left-indigenous street protests within the halls of liberal institutional politics. The MAS, together with the radical indigenous party Movimiento Indígena Pachakuti (Indigenous Pachakuti Movement, MIP), captured 27 per cent of the vote. Morales, as the MAS presidential candidate, received the second largest number of votes, coming within 1.6 per cent of the victorious Sánchez de Lozada of the MNR who received 22.5 per cent and became president. The main neoliberal parties – the MNR, ADN, and MIR – attracted only 42.2 per cent of the popular vote. The ADN was crushed, winning only 3.4 per cent. Rejection of neoliberalism through the ballot box was slowly catching up to the rebellions in the streets. Ironically, these elections helped to set off a conservative turn inside the MAS, as it began to move away from its radical past in an effort to present a more moderate face to the urban middle class. The party leadership now saw a real possibility of winning the next presidential elections, which were scheduled to occur in 2007. The MAS’s shift to moderate reformism prevented it from playing a meaningful role in the subsequent massive uprisings in La Paz-El Alto, uprisings which brought the insurrectionary cycle to its apogee over the next 3 years. The fourth conjuncture in the insurrectionary cycle includes the Gas Wars of October 2003 and May–June 2005. The epicentre of each of these uprisings was the metropolitan area of La Paz-El Alto, with waves of rebellion
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Page 251 irradiating unevenly across the rest of the country in response. Beginning in September 2003, the Aymara peasantry of the western altiplano, organized primarily through the infrastructure of the CSUTCB, began a series of road blockades which were met with immediate state repression causing several deaths (Mamani Ramírez 2004). From here the mobilization extended to the impoverished city of El Alto, which sits above the valley containing the capital La Paz. In the last census, 82 per cent of the 800,000 alteños , as residents of El Alto are known, self-identified as indigenous, and the vast majority of them constitute the most rebellious sector of Bolivia’s new working class. The Federación de Juntas Vecinales de El Alto (The Federation of Neighbourhood Councils of El Alto, FEJUVE-El Alto) and the Central Obrera Regional (Regional Workers Central of El Alto, COR-El Alto) were the central social movement organizations bringing together the insurrectionary neighbourhoods of the city. The uprising of alteños was steadily reinforced by state-employed miners who marched from as far away as Oruro to join the rebellion in El Alto and La Paz. The Central Obrera Boliviana (Bolivian Workers Central, COB) also played a significant role in radicalizing social demands and bringing the multifaceted social forces together in a more unified front (Spronk and Webber 2007). Then-president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada resorted to naked repression. The armed forces killed 67 people and wounded over 400 others mostly during a series of militarized assaults on the unarmed residents of El Alto, the working class neighbourhoods of La Paz, and eventually the gathered masses downtown in the capital. The repression galvanized a further radicalization of the popular movement. The various rural and urban left-indigenous sectors coalesced around three demands: the nationalization of hydrocarbons; the convocation of a CA; and the immediate resignation of Sánchez de Lozada. In mid-October over 300,000 protesters occupied La Paz, and by 17 October 2003 Sánchez de Lozada had left the presidency and fled into exile in the USA. ‘The revolution, however, did not materialize’, as noted by Petras and Veltmeyer (2005:196). Rather, Carlos Mesa, vice-president under Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, became the new president, promising to fulfil the central popular demands in what had come to be known as the October Agenda. Petras and Veltmeyer point out: ‘Lacking a clearly defined political project, the diverse social forces combined in struggle fragmented, creating space and conditions for a “constitutional solution”’ (2005:196). Central to the constitutional exit was the role of the MAS in supporting this path as well as supporting the Mesa government for over a year after it entered office. It quickly became evident that Mesa was not committed to reforming, much less overthrowing, the neoliberal model. This was particularly clear in Mesa’s outright refusal to consider the nationalization of the hydrocarbons industry (CEDLA 2004). With the October Agenda unfulfilled, and the collective memory of 67 martyrs and 400 injured still fresh, protests erupted
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Page 252 again in the city of El Alto beginning in January 2005 and grew to a crescendo in May and June of that year. The same basic social sectors that led the October movement arose again shutting down much of the Western part of the country for three weeks (Webber 2005b). The new urban indigenous working class of El Alto repeated its vanguard role. The three mobilizing objectives echoed those of October: the nationalization of hydrocarbons; the immediate convocation of a CA; and the resignation of Carlos Mesa. By 6 June 2005, half a million people occupied the capital and Mesa was the second neoliberal president forced to resign in less than two years. Yet a revolutionary outcome did not come to fruition, as elections were rescheduled from 2007 to December 2005, the masses demobilized, and the MAS pushed to centre stage as the only coherent political entity with a left-indigenous visage capable of contending in the forthcoming elections. The popular movement bases voted en masse for Evo Morales in December, despite the MAS’s conspicuous absence in the street battles of October 2003 and May–June 2005. What is important to distil from the cycle of rebellion between 2000 and 2005 is how the call for a CA increasingly acquired a revolutionary character as the strength of left-indigenous social forces grew and consolidated. The Bolivian popular classes and oppressed indigenous nations began to mirror a process Marx identified as ‘revolutionary practice’ (Lebowitz 2006:19–20). In their struggle to satisfy their needs, the rank-and-file of the left-indigenous movements came increasingly to recognize their common interests and become conscious of their own social power; through their self-activity they came to see themselves as subjects capable of altering the structures of Bolivian society as well as changing themselves in the process through self-organization and self-activity from below.7 This was conveyed in a visceral way at an emergency general assembly of FEJUVE-El Alto in late May 2005, two weeks into a general strike in La Paz-El Alto, and just before the final ousting of Carlos Mesa. Gualberto Choque, general secretary of the Federación Departamental Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de La Paz ‘Tupaj Katari’ (Departmental Federation of Peasant Workers of La Paz – Tupaj Katari, FUTCLP-TK), took the stage and delivered the following message to thunderous applause: where is this Constituent Assembly going to come from? There is no longer going to be a parliament. There is no longer going to be a government…. Brothers, we think that we will convene ourselves in a Constituent Assembly where there will be workers, peasants, carpenters, shoe-shiners, women and men…. We will need to define what kind of country we want, what kind of economy we want … we are going to do these things … after a pachakuti, as the Aymaras and Quechuas say, after a grand revolution, as socialists and Marxists say…. In our federation we’ve said if one has an old shoe, what should one do, save it or throw it out? Obviously, throw it out brothers. This system is an old shoe,
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Page 253 rotten and full of corruption, Therefore, brothers, we need to throw out this old shoe, this old society. We have to destroy it once and for all, so that a new system can be born in its place8 The MAS Government and the constituent assembly In the 2005 election campaign the promise of a CA was central to the MAS platform. On March 6, 2006 the MAS government superficially fulfilled this pledge, passing the Law of Convocation of the CA which scheduled assembly elections for July 2, 2006. The fact that the government simultaneously passed the Referendum Law for Departmental Autonomies, though, demonstrated just how compromised was the MAS’s commitment to transformative change. The CA was an historic demand of the exploited and oppressed; departmental autonomies were the counter-revolutionary response of the oligarchy of the eastern lowlands to that popular demand (Chávez and Mokrani 2007:115). According to the MAS’s two new laws, the departmental autonomy referendum and the election of deputies to the CA would occur on the same day. This immediately challenged the plenipotentiary nature of the CA; that is, a victory in the departmental autonomy referendum provided the bourgeois forces of specific departments with a basis from which to argue that the authority of the referendum on autonomy superseded whatever decisions were subsequently made in the CA (CEDIB 2007:2). In addition to this basic contradiction at the outset, the CA was debilitated by the convergence of four separate factors: (a) the MAS did not win a majority in the Senate in the 2005 elections and thus was confined to negotiation with the principal right-wing party, PODEMOS, insofar as it restricted its political strategy to the domain of parliamentary institutions; (b) the MAS immediately demonstrated an eagerness to negotiate with right-wing social forces of the media luna at an elite level while encouraging social movements to refrain from direct action in the streets and countryside; (c) left-indigenous social movements found themselves unable to mobilize autonomously from the MAS party with any effect (Stefanoni 2007b: 54–5), often in spite of the scepticism they maintained with regard to MAS tactics and political positions; and (d) to the extent that there would be popular participation in the CA, the MAS was determined to channel that participation through the MAS as a party, rather than through the organic left-indigenous social movements, communities, neighbourhood councils, and unions that had led the insurrectionary cycle in the first place (Tapia 2007:62–3). The law made it prohibitively difficult to run for a position as an assembly deputy without becoming a member of an established political party or a recognized ‘citizen group’, the latter of which were predominantly right-wing. According to the electoral law on the CA there would be 210 assembly deputies elected from 70 electoral districts, with another 45 elected on a departmental basis, providing five of these for each of the nine departments.
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Page 254 In total, then, the CA was to have 255 elected deputies. It is important to point out that one critical ‘minority protection’ clause in the electoral law ensured disproportionate representation of the far-right in the CA and the impossibility, therefore, of embarking on serious reform from the start. In each of the 70 electoral districts the party that received a relative majority could win only two of the three representative seats. In other words, even if a party secures over 75 per cent of the votes in its district, as long as one of the minority parties receives more than 5 per cent, this latter party will get the ‘third’ minority representative. This clause assured … representation for a small minority of ad hoc right-wing organizations with some local clout. (Mokrani and Gutiérrez 2006:1) The new draft of the constitution would require the approval of two-thirds of the 255 assembly deputies followed by 51 per cent approval by the Bolivian people in a national referendum. Because of the minority protection clause, even if the MAS were to win a majority in all of the districts the party could attain a maximum of 158 seats in the CA, short of the 170 needed to possess a two thirds majority and impose a transformative agenda against the wishes of the reactionary minority – the agroindustrial and natural gas capitalists of the eastern lowlands (La Razón 2006). The MAS won 137 of the 255 seats, or 53.7 per cent in the 2 July 2006 elections. With the rules stacked in their favour, the main far-right parties won 86 seats, or 33.7 per cent of the assembly, just enough to veto any serious reform content introduced into the Constitution – MNR (eight seats), MNR-A3 (two seats), MNR-FRI (eight seats), PODEMOS (60 seats) and UN (eight seats) (ICG 2007:3). Concerning the departmental autonomy referendum, 57.6 per cent of the voting populace opposed departmental autonomy at the national level, but the referendum passed with strong majorities in the departments of Tarija, Santa Cruz, Beni, and Pando (Mokrani and Gutiérrez 2006:3). This institutional edifice of right-wing veto power and the autonomists’ growing extraparliamentary mobilizational capacity in the media luna departments, coupled with the moderate reformism of the MAS and the relative demobilization of social movements, set the stage for a prolonged deformation of the CA process. As the CA ground to a halt on various occasions due to right-wing obstructionism over the next year, the rhythm of Bolivian politics was increasingly determined by autonomist social forces of the eastern lowlands, followed by defensive responses by the MAS government and its social movement allies. The cycle of popular insurrection from below was largely replaced by a cycle of impotent reformism on the part of the MAS, and right-wing rearticulation and advance (Viaña and Orozco 2007). Violent clashes in the streets precipitated by social forces on the right sought to destabilize the Morales government and make it impossible for the
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Page 255 CA to proceed. The response of the government has been to continue to negotiate with the autonomist forces and to discourage radical remobilization of left-indigenous forces, despite occasional rhetorical outbursts to the contrary. Almost immediately after it commenced in Sucre on 6 August 2006, the CA tumbled headlong into a seven-month morass of procedural debates designed to guarantee a glacial pace of progress if not outright collapse. As mentioned, the law that initiated the assembly determined that the final draft of the new constitution would have to be approved by two thirds of deputies in the final plenary sessions. However, right-wing opposition groups inside and outside of the CA – led by PODEMOS and the civic committees of the media luna departments – interpreted the law to mean that each article and every procedure developed in the process of writing the CA – rather than simply the completed final draft – must have the backing of two-thirds of assembly deputies (La Razón 2006). It was obvious to most analysts that such an interpretation of the law would signify the veto power of the far-right at every step in the process and virtually ensure that the CA would encounter insurmountable obstacles, blocking the creation of a new and viable constitution within one year. The disputes inside the assembly quickly spilled over into the streets and endured – with periodic bouts of heightened intensity – for the next seven months, shutting down the CA (Olivera et al. 2007:13–14). In late December 2006 and January 2007, during one of the most important periods of violence and instability directly related to the CA, the epicentre of contention shifted to the city of Cochabamba. On 15 December Cochabamba’s right-wing prefect Manfred Reyes Villa announced that there would be a new referendum on departmental autonomy for Cochabamba despite the fact that 63 per cent of the department’s electorate had rejected departmental autonomy in the 2 July 2006 referendum. Reyes Villa’s actions were widely interpreted as a move to bring Cochabamba into the media luna bloc of right-wing forces seeking to destabilize the MAS government and sabotage the CA. Left-indigenous social movements – some explicitly allied with the MAS government and others to the left of the Morales administration – began to mobilize against the Cochabamba prefect. The prefects and civic committees of Beni, Pando, Tarija, and Santa Cruz began openly to support Reyes Villa and denounce the Morales administration. Right-wing counter-mobilizations grew in the city of Cochabamba and by the second week of January street clashes exploded, fuelled by a potent mix of class struggle from below in the form of indigenous peasants and urban formal and informal workers, and racist class warfare from above in the form of proto-fascist youth groups, and upper and middle class mobs of Cochabamba’s white- mestizo elite. One person on each side was killed while hundreds of others were seriously injured before the city was eventually pacified through military occupation. The underlying causes of the convulsion in Cochabamba, however, continued to ferment just beneath the surface (Webber forthcoming).
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Page 256 The two-thirds dilemma was eventually resolved on 17 February 2007 in a plenary session of the CA. The MAS agreed with opposition parties that each article of the constitution would be approved by two thirds of assembly delegates by 2 July 2007; if they were not approved by two thirds by that date they would be passed on to the Comisión de Concertación (Cooperation Commission); finally, if no consensus could be reached in the commission the articles would be submitted to a popular referendum after the close of the CA in August 2007 (ICG 2007:4). With this agreement in place, the CA functioned comparatively smoothly for a period of two months (Olivera et al. 2007:14). Delegates working in the twenty-one thematic commissions that had been established to focus on different subject areas began to travel around the country meeting with civil society organizations and gathering their proposals (ICG 2007:4). It became evident during this period of relative calm that the most contentious issues being discussed in the CA turned on the following: indigenous rights; the unitary versus ‘plurinational’ character of the state; departmental vs. indigenous autonomies; natural resource management and control; land and territory; the institutional structures of a new state, including the issues of presidential re-election and direct indigenous group representation in Congress; the structure of the economy and property rights; and the relationship between the armed forces and the national police (CEDIB 2007; Stefanoni 2007a,b). The deceptively harmonious interlude soon came to an end with a new series of conflicts and disputes. Given how little had been accomplished by the beginning of August (when the assembly was scheduled to finish), it was agreed in congress to extend the CA until 14 December 2007. Just as the assembly was being extended, the city of Sucre descended into its own version of the December–January conflict in Cochabamba. The new clashes in Sucre pivoted around a demand for the restoration of ‘full capital’ status for the city. Prior to the Federal War in 1899 Sucre had been the capital of Bolivia, but since the war had only retained its status as judicial capital with the executive and legislative branches moving to La Paz. As early as July 2007, pro-Sucre proposals were being circulated by right-wing representatives in various thematic commissions. In Sucre, the proposal was backed by the mayor, who is a member of PODEMOS, the right-wing InterInstitutional Committee, the Sucre civic committee, and right-wing student organizations from local private universities. Outside of Sucre, the demand quickly garnered support from the autonomist movement of the media luna . Left-indigenous movements and the MAS government argued that the new claim for Sucre was a distraction dreamt up by the far right in an effort both to redirect attention in the CA away from substantive issues of real concern to the population, and eventually to provoke yet another collapse of the process altogether. On 15 August 2007, a resolution was brought forward in a plenary session of the CA to remove the capital issue from debate on the assembly floor; the resolution passed with a majority vote. For the next two weeks Sucre was
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Page 257 launched into a chasm of right-wing protests. Racist physical attacks and threats were carried out against indigenous assembly deputies. Some MAS deputies were evicted from their homes and apartments. Hunger strikes by upper and middle class supporters of the right were launched in various cities. Autonomist social forces from the eastern lowlands threatened to converge on Sucre from one side, while the radical indigenous organization Ponchos Rojos , of the Achacachi province in the department of La Paz, the cocaleros of the Chapare region, and other left-indigenous forces, threatened to march on Sucre from the western highlands. At the end of August fist fights broke out in congress between MAS deputies and those of the opposition (Olivera et al. 2007; Stefanoni 2007a: 15–17). By early September tensions reached a peak and the CA initiated yet another recess in its proceedings. Sucre was deemed by many deputies too unsafe to continue to host the assembly. By the end of September the MAS convened a ‘Political Council’ which was mediated by vice-president Álvaro García Linera and included representatives of all the major political parties. The objective of this elite council was to build consensus around various issues in order to salvage the CA. At the time of writing, this political council was the primary tool through which the CA was receiving ongoing life support. The MAS went out of its way in September and October 2007 to stress the moderation of the government’s plans, shifting its discourse from the ‘refoundation’ of Bolivia to the consolidation of what had been achieved thus far under the Morales administration (Stefanoni 2007a). If the regular CA had abandoned the revolutionary propositions of the left-indigenous forces during the insurrectionary cycle of 2000–2005, the new Political Council even more closely resembled the despised ‘pacted democracy’ of the period of neoliberal hegemony (1985–2000). Conclusion One influential thesis on the current conjuncture in Bolivia maintains that a ‘catastrophic stalemate’ has persisted in the country since 2003 in which no sociopolitical force wields sufficient power to impose its vision of society on all the others; and, furthermore, that in this scenario of intractable balance the most important socio-political forces have also been unwilling to negotiate compromised exits (Stefanoni 2007a). In my view, this thesis suffers from a fatalistic and reified interpretation of the objective balance of social forces in society. The politics that flow from this theoretical perspective excuse the elite negotiations between the MAS and the far right as necessary and realistic given the objective conditions. The stalemate thesis exaggerates the strength of the bourgeois social forces and underestimates the potential for rearticulation of powerful left-indigenous struggle from below. Because adherents of the catastrophic stalemate thesis profoundly underestimate the revolutionary potential of the left-indigenous insurrectionary cycle prior to the election of Evo Morales, they see no reason to explore what political failures on the left
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Page 258 may have precipitated the quick contraction of revolutionary horizons and the relative counter-advance of the right since the MAS came to office. Proponents of the thesis resign themselves unhappily to the present state of affairs: an inevitable, if catastrophic, stalemate. The evidence advanced in this chapter suggests rather that it was the demobilization of social movements in the wake of the December 2005 elections, the ambiguity and moderate reformism of the MAS, and the calculated political offensive of the autonomist right to destabilize the government and shutdown the CA that has contributed to the illusion of an inevitable stalemate. The recent demobilization of social movements and their failure to intervene in national politics to the extent they did during the cycle of rebellion is what has allowed the CA to take on its current form. The MAS’s discourse and practice of class compromise and its willingness to evade open confrontation with the bourgeoisies of the eastern lowlands have made the autonomist right-wing bolder and more effective, articulated through the departmental civic committees and prefectures of Pando, Beni, Santa Cruz, and Tarija, as well as the political party PODEMOS. In large measure, the belief in a catastrophic stalemate has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. More important even than the demands that were raised by the popular movements in rebellion during the Cochabamba Water War and the La Paz-El Alto Gas Wars were the very forms of self-organization, popular assembly formation, and neighbourhoodcouncil organizing that gave life to alternative forms of doing politics from below (Chávez and Mokrani 2007:111–13). These politics were an expression of democratic insurgency rooted in struggles for proletarian emancipation and indigenous liberation. The CA, given its trajectory to date, could very well collapse entirely. In such a scenario, a rebirth of contention from below – at least relatively autonomous from the MAS party – would be one possible channel through which a new shift in the balance of power in Bolivian society, favourable to the oppressed and exploited, may occur. In such a scenario, the thesis of a catastrophic stalemate might be revealed as little more than a paralyzing distraction. Democratic insurgency could once again take centre stage and reopen the horizons to fundamental transformation of society, state and economy. In his contribution to this volume, Philip McMichael argues that neoliberalism has provoked a multifaceted crisis of traditional sovereignty whereby processes of privatization, accumulation by dispossession, and the militarization of whole societies have resulted in horrific outcomes for human life and the environment. Yet, for McMichael, these processes of dispossession have also provoked novel forms of resistance that offer ‘seeds of hope’. Multifaceted sites of resistance have contributed to an emerging crisis in the ruling class political project of neoliberalism across the globe. Social revolt in Latin America has been at the forefront of the countermovement McMichael describes, and Bolivia has been at the centre of rebellion in that
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Page 259 continent. Left-indigenous insurrection in Bolivia in the opening years of the twentyfirst century has been an inspirational model of popular emancipation, resonating with movements of the oppressed and exploited around the world. While the momentum of this cycle has been tamed temporarily by the electoral ascension to government of the moderately reformist MAS party, the persistent and belligerent opposition of the autonomist right to even modest proposals to change the economic and political model could very well spur a reawakening of the popular classes and indigenous nations in the not-too-distant future, strengthening the counter-movement against neoliberal capitalism in Bolivia, Latin America, and the world stage. Notes 1 Bolivia has nine departments, or states. The four departments of Pando, Beni, Santa Cruz, and Tarija are referred to as the ‘media luna’ because their geographical locations together constitute a ‘half moon’. 2 The law convoking the CA stated that it would begin in August 2006 and would last for no less than six months and for no longer than one year. 3 This chapter was written in October 2007. 4 As will be elucidated in more detail, the central aspect of this right-wing demand for departmental autonomy is the notion of maintaining private control by agroindustrial and petroleum capitalists in this region over the hydrocarbons industry. 5 Residents of Santa Cruz are known as cruceños. 6 The details of the October Agenda will be explored in a subsequent section. 7 Over 70 interviews conducted with social movement, indigenous, and labour activists in El Alto and La Paz in 2005 support the foundations of this thesis on revolutionary practice. 8 I tape-recorded Choque’s speech from the edge of the stage. References Assies, W. (2003) ‘Davis versus Goliath in Cochabamba: water rights, neoliberalism, and the revival of social protest in Bolivia’, Latin American Perspectives 30: 14–36. CEDIB (2007) Por un balance de la Asamblea Constituyente, Cochabamba: Centro de Documentación e Información Bolivia. CEDLA (2004) Economía y Sociedad Boliviana después de Octubre de 2003: Análisis de un año de gobierno de Carlos Mesa , La Paz: CEDLA. Chávez, P. and Mokrani, D. (2007) ‘Los movimientos sociales en la Asamblea Constituyente: Hacia la reconfiguración de la política’, OSAL 8: 107–17. Chávez, W. and García Linera, A. (2005) ‘Rebelión Camba: Del dieselazo a la lucha por la autonomía’, El Juguete Rabioso January. Dunkerley, J. (1984) Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia, 1952–1982, London: Verso. Eaton, K. (2007) ‘Backlash in Bolivia: regional autonomy as a reaction against indigenous mobilization’, Politics and Society 35: 71–102. Eckstein, S. and Hagopian, F. (1983) ‘The limits of industrialization in the less developed world: Bolivia’, Economic Development and Cultural Change 32: 63–95. García Linera, A. (2005) ‘Indianismo y marxismo: El desencuentro de dos razones revolucionarias’, Barataria 1: 4–14.
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Page 260 Gill, L. (1987) Peasants, Entrepreneurs and Social Change: Frontier Development and Lowland Bolivia, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gutiérrez, R. and García Linera, A. (2002) ‘El ciclo estatal neoliberal y sus crisis’, in R. Gutiérrez, A. García Linera, R. Prada and L. Tapia (eds) Democratizaciones plebeyas, La Paz: Muela del Diablo. Hylton, F., Patzi, F., Serulnikov, S. and Thomson, S. (eds) (2003/2005) Ya es otro tiempo el presente: cuatro momentos de insurgencia indígena, 2nd edn, La Paz: Muela del Diablo. ICG (2007) Bolivia’s New Constitution: Avoiding Violent Confrontation , Brussels: International Crisis Group. INE (2001) Anuario estadístico , La Paz: Instituto Nacional de Estatística. Kiely, R. (2007) The New Political Economy of Development: Globalization, Imperialism, Hegemony, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kohl, B. and Farthing, L. (2006) Impasse in Bolivia: Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Resistance , London: Zed Books. La Razón (2006) ‘Evo instruye aprobar reglas de la Asamblea por mayoría absoluta’, Online. Available: www.la-razon.com (accessed: 24 September 2006). Lebowitz, M. A. (2006) Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century , New York: Monthly Review Press. McGuigan, C. (2007) The Benefits of FDI: Is Foreign Investment in Bolivia’s Oil and Gas Delivering? , La Paz: CEDLA. Malloy, J. M. and Gamarra, E. (1988) Revolution and Reaction: Bolivia, 1964–1985, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Mamani Ramírez, P. (2004) El rugir de las multitudes: La fuerza de los levantamientos indígenas en Bolivia/Qullasuyu, La Paz: Aruwiyiri. Mayorga, R. A. (1978) ‘National-popular state, state capitalism and military dictatorship in Bolivia: 1952–1975’, Latin American Perspectives 5: 89–119. Mokrani, D. and Gutiérrez, R. (2006) The Hidden Politics of Bolivia’s Constituent Assembly Process , Washington, DC: International Relations Center. Olivera, L., Orellana, A. and Whitesell, L. (2007) Re-Founding Bolivia: A Nation’s Struggle Over Constitutional Reform , Cochabamba: The Democracy Center. Olivera, O. (2004) Cochabamba!: Water War in Bolivia, Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Orellana Aillón, L. (2006) El Gobierno del MAS no es nacionalista ni revolucionario: Un análisis del Plan Nacional de Desarrollo , La Paz: CEDLA. Petras, J. and Veltmeyer, H. (2005) Social Movements and State Power: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador , London: Pluto. Spronk, S. (2007) ‘Roots of resistance to urban water privatization in Bolivia: The “New working class”, the crisis of neoliberalism, and public services’, International Labor and Working-Class History 71: 8–28. Spronk, S. and Webber, J. R. (2007) ‘Struggles against accumulation by dispossession in Bolivia: the political economy of natural resource contention’, Latin American Perspectives 34: 31–47. Stefanoni, P. (2007a) ‘“Empate catastrófico” en Bolivia’, Le Monde Diplomatique, October. Stefanoni, P. (2007b) ‘Siete preguntas y siete respuestas sobre la Bolivia de Evo Morales’, Nueva Sociedad 209: 47–65. Tapia, L. (2007) ‘Una reflexión sobre la idea de Estado plurinacional’, OSAL 8: 47–63.
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Page 261 Van Cott, D. L. (2005) From Movements to Parties in Latin America: The Evolution of Ethnic Politics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Viaña, J. and Orozco, S. (2007) ‘El cierre de un ciclo y la compleja relación “movimientos sociales”-gobierno en Bolivia’, OSAL 8: 119–29. Webber, J. R. (2005a) ‘“Agenda de Octubre” or “Agenda de Enero?” The rebellion in Bolivia’, Against the Current 115: 13–16. Webber, J. R. (2005b) ‘We’re not crazy! The days of May and June in Bolivia’, New Socialist 53. Online. Available: http://newsocialist.org/newsite/index.php?id=488 (accessed: 4 October 2007). Webber, J. R. (forthcoming) ‘Dynamite in the mines and bloody urban clashes: contradiction, conflict and the limits of reform in Bolivia’s movement towards socialism’, Socialist Studies . World Bank (2005) Bolivia Poverty Assessment: Establishing the Basis for Pro-Poor Growth , Washington, DC: World Bank.
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Page 262 14 The Brazilian landless movement Mobilization for transformative politics Abdurazack Karriem [Neoliberal globalization], while propagating throughout the world the same system of domination and exclusion, has created the conditions for counter-hegemonic forces, organizations and movements located in the most disparate regions of the globe to visualize common interests across and beyond the many differences that separate them and to converge in counter-hegemonic struggles embodying separate but related emancipatory projects. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos, cited by Shamir 2005:93–4) Brazil, relative to most Latin American countries, began its neoliberal revolution late, and at a time when opposition to the Washington Consensus was already evident elsewhere in the world. President Fernando Collor commenced the liberalization of the Brazilian economy in 1990, but it was President Fernando Henrique Cardoso who fully enforced the neoliberal agenda in the mid-1990s. Cardoso aggressively liberalized trade and agriculture, deregulated the economy, and privatized public enterprises. While the victory of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva and the Workers Party (PT) in the 2002 presidential elections generated hopes for a shift away from neoliberalism, Lula continued and deepened Cardoso’s neoliberal reforms. The Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) spearheaded counter-hegemonic struggles against neoliberalism by linking corporatist struggles for land to a range of popular mobilizations against agricultural liberalization, privatization of public enterprises, and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (Colleti 2002; Martins 2000). In this chapter, I analyze the MST’s mobilizations and, contrary to analysts who ascribe the movement’s prominent actions to favourable ‘political opportunities’, I posit that the MST’s agency is crucial in driving popular struggles against neoliberalism. First, I outline the theoretical considerations underpinning this paper, arguing that social movement theory has limited utility in explaining the MST’s mobilizations. Instead, I employ a Gramscian political economy approach to explicate MST struggles. I then describe the MST’s origins, principles, and strategies, thus providing a backdrop to the discussion of its struggles. Subsequently, I analyze the Lula government’s neoliberal turn and
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Page 263 its implications for MST mobilizations. I then evaluate the MST’s agro-ecological alternative and participation in the Via Campesina and World Social Forum, showing the mutually constitutive nature of local-global struggles. Before concluding, I evaluate the factors that explain MST actions against neoliberalism and contend that its organizational praxis, the promotion of political education and ideals of solidarity are key factors in sparking popular mobilizations. Social movements and collective action Social movement analysis is largely informed by new social movement theory and resource mobilization theory (RMT).1 In this chapter, I focus on RMT since it is utilized to analyze MST struggles. RMT is based on Olson’s (1965) rational actor model, which holds that without selective incentives, individuals will not contribute their resources or time to collective action (CA). That is, given the cost of participation, it is rational to ‘free-ride’ and profit from the mobilization of others without incurring any cost. Cost–benefit analyses, however, cannot explain why MST members continue to participate in the movement. McCarthy and Zald’s (1977) organizational-entrepreneurial model resolves the free-rider problem by providing monetary incentives to professional organizers, thus rationalizing their participation. However, the entrepreneurial model is too economistic and its focus on professional organizations ignored the rise of grassroots movements. The political process or political opportunity structure (POS) approach advances on the entrepreneurial model and posits that a movement not only requires resources, it also needs an opportunity to act. Thus, the availability of a top-down opening or POS in the political system is fundamental to the process and outcome of protest (Tarrow 1994). While political opportunities can certainly enable or constrain movement actions, I contend that the POS approach is too formulaic in that movements require an opportunity to act. In my analysis of MST struggles, I illustrate how factors such as ideology and human agency can, through bottom-up mobilizations, open up space in the political system. Moreover, since I posit that the MST engages in counter-hegemonic struggles, a Gramscian political economy approach offers a more appropriate perspective from which to analyze MST struggles. Gramsci, hegemony, and counter-hegemonic struggles A movement that seeks to install a counter-hegemonic project first has to understand the hegemonic group’s basis of power. In this regard, Gramsci (1971:161) argues that the dominant group’s power or hegemony is not based on force alone, but on a combination of consent and coercion. Gramsci further suggests that ideological leadership is not simply imposed; instead, subaltern classes consent to or are persuaded to accept dominant ideas as ‘common sense’. Thus, subaltern movements like the MST have to contest the
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Page 264 dominant group’s hegemony as common sense and challenge its leadership role in civil society. When power is centralized in an authoritarian state, it may be possible to seize power through a frontal assault or ‘war of movement’. Where power is diffused across civil society, as in liberal democracies, a protracted strategy – the ‘war of position’ – is the mechanism through which counter-hegemonic forces organize to construct an alternative hegemony (Gramsci 1971:238–9). How do subaltern groups or classes organize and become counterhegemonic? For Gramsci, critical self-consciousness means, historically and politically, the creation of an elite of intellectuals. A human mass does not ‘distinguish’ itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest sense, organising itself; and there is no organization without intellectuals, that is without organisers and leaders. (1971:334) Here Gramsci argues that a subaltern movement seeking to construct an alternative hegemony must acquire the necessary political consciousness to do so. The organic intellectuals are key agents in promoting the political consciousness of movement members so that ideas can become a material force in CA. This does not mean that intellectuals drive a war of position. Transformative politics is based on mass participation and the continuous formation of new layers of organic intellectuals and leaders. A movement aspiring to construct an alternative hegemony must also move beyond narrow corporatist interests and incorporate and support the demands of other groups and classes. The leaders of popular movements have the important task of overcoming the corporatist impulses of such movements and building alliances with other excluded groups, thereby engaging in joint actions to construct an alternative hegemony. As the introductory quote by Santos illustrates, the challenge is to envision common interests that transcend the differences that separate movements, and to unite in struggles for an alternative hegemony. Furthermore, constructing an alternative hegemony requires the ‘revival of a spirit of solidarity’ since the advance of neoliberalism has weakened and fragmented the bonds of solidarity and hence the disposition for CA (Cox 1999:27). For example, the neoliberal shock therapy Cardoso unleashed led to rising unemployment and informalization of work. According to data from the national statistics institute, 7 million Brazilians lost their jobs between 1994 and 2000 (Borges 2006). In this context, the Central Workers Union federation, leftist parties, and popular movements were placed on the defensive (Boito 2002). The rekindling of a spirit of solidarity is thus crucial in transcending the demobilization of popular forces and ensuring participation in struggles at local and global levels. Furthermore, a strong spirit of solidarity can counter the individualizing tendencies promoted by
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Page 265 neoliberalism, whereby individuals are expected to participate freely in the market, rather than organize as collectivities to change their marginal status. Finally, a counter-hegemonic movement must do more than simply resist the dominant model; it must develop alternative forms of production and reproduction (e.g. MST agricultural cooperatives). While still relatively small-scale, these alternatives provide a powerful means through which to envision and develop more participatory, cooperative, and redistributive models of production and reproduction. Methodology This chapter draws on 18 months’ field research (2004–2006) which entailed participant observation and open-ended interviews with MST members in land-reform settlements and land encampments in the southern and north-eastern states of Rio Grande Sul and Pernambuco, respectively, and MST leaders in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Brasília.2 This research also draws on primary MST documents, newspaper reports, and secondary material. The Brazilian landless movement: origins, principles, and strategies The MST’s origins can be traced to successful land occupations in southern Brazil in 1979.3 The MST gradually grew into the largest nationally based social movement in Brazilian history and is regarded as the most organized, dynamic, and influential mass movement in Latin America (Furtado 1999; Branford and Rocha 2002). As a sign of its growing strength, 80 delegates representing 13 states founded the MST in January 1984; 23 years later, in June 2007, the movement celebrated its 5th National Congress with 17,000 delegates (and supporters) representing 24 states. Through its strategy of mobilizing the landless to occupy idle agricultural land, the MST has pressured successive governments into redistributing over 7 million hectares of farmland on which 400,000 families farm, almost 1.5 million MST members (Rosseto 2005). The MST committed itself to build a nationwide movement. It maintains its autonomy from political parties, trains its own leaders, forms alliances with urban movements in Brazil, and builds ties with peasant organizations in Latin America (MST 1989; MST 2001). In addition to fighting for agrarian reform, the MST aims to build an egalitarian society. These objectives were based on an analysis of past rural struggles that were mostly localized, spontaneous, and isolated. In the 1960s, social movements united localized struggles, but they were still regionally based (e.g. the Peasant Leagues in the north-east and MASTER in the south). The MST adopted the Peasant League proposal that agrarian reform was only possible by transforming social relations, but avoided the centralized structure that tended to privilege intellectuals as leaders (Silva 2004; Stedile and Fernandes 2001).
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Page 266 The MST’s originality and strength lie in merging the struggle for land with the struggle on the land. In so doing, the movement brings together into one organization landless families fighting for land and land reform settlers demanding public policies to remain on the land. Landless families join settlers in pressuring the government to provide credit and infrastructure. The settlers, in turn, provide material (food, tents, etc.) and practical support by recruiting and participating in land occupations with landless families. This active solidarity between the landless and settlers is an important factor in the MST’s organizational cohesion and national growth. The land occupation strategy does not only lead to the spatial conquest of land; it also results in the diffusion of an organizational praxis that promotes political socialization, values of solidarity, and active participation in the movement. For example, José4 and his comrades participated in various land occupations before settling in the Campanha region of the state of Rio Grande do Sul in 1989. From this base, they recruited other landless families, went on more land occupations and, in a praxis that was successfully repeated, pressured the government into establishing 56 settlements comprising 47,000 hectares in the region by 2004. I asked José why he continued to participate in the MST. He responded: I cannot close myself in the four corners of my plot. I have to have a vision that behind me there are another 20, 30, 40, 50 that also need a piece of land. So this is a large battle that we have as a Movement so that people can have a house to live, better education, so that their children can have a perspective of life. José describes the role of land occupation in the MST’s territorial expansion and in forging a wider collective consciousness which situates the quest for land in struggles for broader social rights. Prior to an occupation, landless families undergo a lengthy period of political socialization to orient them on the politics of land reform, the MST’s principles, and to forge organizational cohesion – all key ingredients ensuring group solidarity and cooperation during and after the occupation. The MST emphasizes education as central to personal and broader societal transformation. MST leader Adelar Pizetta states, ‘we want an education that contributes to the process of change, that sparks indignation and calls for participation in the construction of a new society, socialist and revolutionary’ (Glass 2005). The MST’s pedagogical relationships are active and reciprocal ones in which members draw on their life experience to inform discussion and arrive at collective decisions.5 This participatory collective culture, which draws on Paulo Freire’s (1993) critical Pedagogy of the Oppressed , is especially important in the neoliberal era if citizens are to enhance their capacity for active participation in the political arena. In contrast to its early history, the MST has moved beyond corporatist struggles for land to engage in actions for broader social change. It has
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Page 267 well-defined goals and an organizational praxis that encourages its members to develop actions against the policies of institutions, such as the IMF, WTO, and World Bank. It is committed to fighting for the non-payment of external debt and actively participating in initiatives that represent the construction of a popular project for Brazil.6 The MST and popular struggles against neoliberalism When Collor narrowly defeated the PT candidate, Lula, in Brazil’s first postdictatorship elections in late 1989, he initiated a broad agenda of neoliberal reforms. However, popular opposition and Collor’s impeachment for corruption stalled these reforms, and it was Cardoso, a former leftist intellectual, who fully enforced the neoliberal agenda. Cardoso signalled the resolve with which he was to introduce market principles by proclaiming that he would to put an end to state-driven development (Borges 2006). He radically liberalized trade by reducing tariff levels from 32.2 to 14.2 per cent, deregulated the economy, privatized public enterprises (Rocha 2002), and, like Thatcher in Britain, intimidated the labour movement into submission by sending in the army to force petroleum workers to work at gun point when they threatened strike action (Almeida and Sanchez 2000). The liberalization of the agricultural sector led to a flood of cheap, subsidized food imports that adversely affected small and medium farmers. Since the government actively supported the expansion of the agribusiness sector, agro-export agriculture underwent capital intensity during the 1990s, resulting in the elimination of agricultural posts and the expulsion of smallholders (Pereira 2003). Paradoxically, it was during Brazil’s neoliberal revolution, when most popular movements and left parties were placed on the defensive, that the MST represented the ‘principle centre of resistance to the neoliberal project’ (Colleti 2002:50). The MST increased the scale of land occupations across Brazil, pressuring the administration to settle 584,000 families between 1995 and 2001, although the MST, other movements, and the media claimed these figures were inflated (Scolese 2005). The movement also increased its collective actions by blocking highways and occupying public banks to pressure the government into providing credit to land reform settlers. These actions faced opposition from landowners, and the media, who portrayed the MST as undermining the rule of law. While the government used the repressive state apparatus to criminalize the movement and its land occupation strategy, landlords utilized hired guns to inflict violence on landless families. In a climate of rising land conflicts, the military police killed 19 MST members and wounded 69 on 17 April 1996, while on a march at Eldorado dos Carajas.7 The MST used the media attention and public outrage against the massacre to push the landlords onto the defensive and force the government to treat rural violence and land reform as national priorities.
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Page 268 After the massacre, the government sought to isolate the MST. The movement went on the offensive, with 1,000 MST members embarking upon a two-month, 1,500 km national march for ‘Land Reform, Employment and Justice’ to the federal capital, Brasília. The reference to employment was directed at Cardoso’s neoliberal policies that forced tens of thousands of family farmers off the land, to the job losses associated with the privatization of state enterprises, and the high interest rate policy which bankrupted small enterprises.8 In its focus, the march took up the demands of the urban working class and sectors of the national bourgeoisie, thus grounding contestations for land and human rights in the larger struggle against neoliberalism.9 When they arrived in Brasília, the marchers were welcomed by 100,000 people. The two-month-long march represented a form of ‘mobile property’ (Geisler 2005) that galvanized popular opposition to neoliberal policies that impacted social classes across the rural-urban divide. The march represented the ‘first victory’ by popular forces over the neoliberal policies implemented by the Brazilian state (Almeida and Sanchez 2000:23). And, as a MST member noted, the march: ended up transforming itself into the first big mobilization of opposition to the [Cardoso] government and that the MST ended up being the bearer of the desires of various sectors of society. So the arrival of the march in Brasília did not belong to the MST, this is important.10 The march was a good example of a mass contestation of neoliberal ideas. Following the introduction of a new agrarian policy called O Novo Mundo Rural , the government implemented a World Bank market-oriented land reform programme based on the willing-buyer, willing-seller principle. Instead of redistribution of land, the landless now had to take out loans from the Land Bank to purchase land. The plan, however, met with immediate resistance from the MST, left political parties, the Church, academics, and other movements who united under the Fórum National pela Reforma Agraria e Justica no Campo (FNRA). The FNRA articulated with international organizations and the speed and scale of opposition surprised the government and the World Bank withdrew from the project. The government later scaled down the programme, heralding an important victory by popular forces against the government’s neoliberal reforms (Medeiros 2002; Martins 2004). The MST increasingly engaged in mobilizations that linked corporatist struggles for land to a diversified range of popular actions against neoliberalism. The originality of the movement resides in taking these actions to urban centres of political and economic power: the rural town, state capital, national capital and, as I will show, the global arena. In ‘occupying’ centres of power, the MST managed to break the isolation of rural struggles, build alliances, and broaden its support base. This sample of actions gives an idea of the MST’s participation in counter-hegemonic struggles:
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Page 269 • April 1999: The MST, the Catholic Church, and popular movements co-organize the Tribunal on Foreign Debt. • April 2000: MST members join indigenous movements in their campaign against the government’s celebration of ‘500 Years of the Discovery of Brazil’. • September 2002: The MST co-organizes a national plebiscite on the FTAA. In joining forces with indigenous movements against the high-profile celebration of 500 years of the ‘discovery’ of Brazil, the MST demonstrated solidarity with indigenous struggles and historicized the struggle for land by showing that Brazil’s economic development was founded on violent struggles of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003). Participation in the Tribunal on Foreign Debt not only signalled a concern with the billions of dollars that Brazil pays to service its debt, but also with the financialization of the economy under neoliberal globalization. In this regard, Stedile and Fernandes note: ‘today, the hegemony, the centre of economic accumulation, is finance capital. In this model [family] agriculture is marginalized’.11 In publicly contesting debt payment, the MST ideologically challenged the market logic that payment is ‘necessary’, arguing that debt has been repaid many times over, and that the government should be spending these billions of dollars on resolving Brazil’s long-standing ‘social debt’ to its marginalized population. According to the Institute for Applied Economic Research, 53.9 million Brazilians are considered poor, earning US$37/month (in 2003 dollars), with poor defined as those who earn less than half a monthly minimum wage of US$37/month. Of this group, 21.9 million are indigent and earn a quarter minimum wage or US$18.5/month (IPEA 2005). Furthermore, 1 per cent of landowners with properties exceeding 1,000 hectares own 45 per cent of all farmland (Petras and Veltmeyer 2003:95). The MST joined forces with other movements to organize a national plebiscite on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). While Cardoso’s government was discussing the contours of the FTAA behind closed doors, the campaign opened up a public debate. The campaign, as one MST member states, ‘arose as an idea for conscientizing the population about the dangers of the FTAA and [the MST] presented the proposal of a pedagogic debate, the realization of a plebiscite to hear the [views of the] population’.12 A series of workshops, lectures, and house-to-house visits in rural and urban areas were held to discuss the FTAA. Ten million Brazilians from all walks of life voted on 1–7 September 2002, with 90 per cent voting against signing the FTAA (Osava 2002). The plebiscite was an exemplary case of grassroots movements disputing the naturalization of free trade and neoliberal principles as imperative for the welfare of society. The plebiscite took place on the eve of the 2002 presidential elections in which the MST and other movements enthusiastically campaigned for Lula, the PT candidate. There was great local and international excitement as
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Page 270 Lula’s victory seemed to offer alternatives to neoliberalism. The Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, asserted: ‘the PT’s [and Lula’s] victory is one of the few events at the beginning of the 21st Century that gives us hope for the rest of the century (Hobsbawn cited by Branford 2003:7)’. The Lula government and the worker party’s conservative turn The Lula government was popularly elected to undo a decade of neoliberal rule, but once in power, it continued and deepened Cardoso’s policies. It voluntarily increased the primary budget surplus target of 3.75 per cent of GDP (initially agreed to with the IMF) to 4.25 per cent to gain the confidence of the markets.13 To meet this selfimposed target, the Finance Ministry drastically curbed public spending. Preoccupied by repaying debt, the administration encouraged the expansion of agribusiness to generate foreign exchange. Instead of promoting mobilizations in support of a transformative agenda, the Lula government called on popular movements to be patient, arguing that the Brazilian state could not be transformed overnight and that the conservative economic policy was temporary. In practice, however, the government demobilized popular forces while simultaneously reinforcing the ‘liberal ideology of private property and the business class as the principal protagonists of society’ (Almeida 2005). The speed with which the PT, the hegemonic force in Brazilian leftist politics for two decades, moved to the political centre caught most movements by surprise. The MST was among the first movements to assert its autonomy and challenge the government’s conservative turn.14 In late 2003, the MST and other rural movements marched on Brasília to demand the launch of the National Plan for Agrarian Reform (PNRA). The government agreed to settle 400,000 families, instead of the original target of one million (Stedile 2007). In 2004, when the agrarian reform budget was cut, the MST embarked on a month-long national campaign, which the media dubbed abril vermelho or Red April in an attempt to conjure images of disorder and lawlessness that needed to be repressed. The MST incorporated abril vermelho into its lexicon and occupied 127 unproductive farms throughout Brazil, which led to the government releasing US$350 million to the Ministry of Agrarian Development. In May 2005, the MST mobilized a broad rural-urban coalition comprising 12,000 activists to embark on a 17-day, 230 km march from Goiania to Brasília to protest the government’s policies. The march document (Proposals of the MST, the Via Campesina, and the Social Movements to the Lula Government ) strongly criticized the government’s economic policy and demanded that the primary budget surpluses be invested in education, healthcare, agrarian reform, and housing to meet the Brazilian people’s needs rather than pay bankers. While the march united popular forces and publicly disputed market policies, the government continued to privilege agribusiness and the neoliberal model (see Karriem 2005).
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Page 271 The MST has confronted massive structural changes in Brazilian agriculture that have increased the concentration of land and undermined family agriculture. According to Stedile (2007:198), in the last ten years land and agriculture has come under the sway of neoliberalism: both were subsumed within the scope of the process of accumulation of large transnational enterprises and big financial capital. All around the world financial capital started to penetrate firms and economic units working in agriculture. For the MST, these structural changes call for a new agrarian reform programme that: • democratizes access to land for the 20 million people who remain landless; • develops technologies which conserves the environment; • reorganizes production from a multinational dominated monoculture agribusiness model that favours agro-exports to a family farm model that promotes biodiversity and produces for the internal market; • provides education geared to the needs of the countryside. Opposition to neoliberalism and agribusiness is fundamental to the success of the new programme (Stedile 2007). The MST is aware that Lula will not change his economic policy and that it must broaden and strengthen alliances with other social forces. MST leader, Gilmar Mauro, acknowledges the weakness of popular forces, stating that: ‘our confrontation with neoliberalism will be a class confrontation. We do not have the political force to change the model adopted by the government, but this confrontation … depends on articulations [with other movements]’ (Glass 2006). To this end, the MST co-founded the Coordination of Social Movements (CMS) to organize and unite popular struggles against neoliberalism. To ensure autonomy from political parties, the CMS only allows movements to participate in its structures, thus challenging the PT’s hegemonic role in left politics. The CMS has led the campaign against government proposals to reform the pension system, flexibilize labour laws, and weaken environmental legislation. These are essentially defensive struggles, but as Gilmar Mauro argues, ‘we cannot separate the demand for rights from the political struggle. [It] is part of class struggle and, therefore, of the struggle for hegemony’ (Brasilino 2006). The MST is a major participant in the Popular Assembly (PA) in which mass movements, concerned with the political direction and institutionalization of left parties, debate a popular project for Brazil.15 The PA’s seeks to overcome the crisis of values, practice, and ideology facing the left, thus attempting to instil what Gramsci (1971) calls ‘intellectual and moral reform’. The PA promotes a long-term popular project of social transformation that is
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Page 272 not dictated by electoral politics. The MST has also taken the fight against neoliberalism to the global level. Linking local-global struggles, contesting dominant ideas The MST has recognized that, in addition to domestic constraints, it has to confront larger structural forces that undermine rural livelihoods. Thus, the MST and other movements in the North and South have formed a global peasant movement, the Via Campesina, which has spearheaded rural struggles against WTO negotiations on agriculture and food from Seattle to Cancún. The MST and Via Campesina oppose agricultural liberalization, stating that ‘food is a basic human right’ that can only be attained in a system where food sovereignty is guaranteed. According to the Via Campesina: food sovereignty is the right of each nation to maintain and develop its own capacity to produce its own basic foods respecting cultural and productive diversity. We have the right to produce our own food in own territory. Food sovereignty is a precondition to genuine food security (Desmarais 2002:104) Food sovereignty thus opposes the commodification of food by agribusiness and WTO policies that prevent the attainment of food security. The Via Campesina and MST are not against trade; rather, they hold that communities should first produce food to ensure their own social reproduction. In other words, food is first and foremost a ‘source of nutrition’ and only ‘secondarily an item of trade’ (Desmarais 2002). Analyzed in the context of the dumping of heavily subsidized Northern agricultural products in the South, food sovereignty is a revolutionary concept that resists and provides alternatives to corporate control over agriculture. The MST has also mobilized against growing control over and commodification of seeds by transnational corporations (TNCs). The introduction of genetically modified (GM) ‘terminator’ seeds requires a ‘technological’ package of fertilizers and pesticides that undermines the attainment of food sovereignty. In line with the Via Campesina campaign of ‘Seeds as the Patrimony of Humanity’, in March 2006, the MST and the Via Campesina-Brazil occupied Syngenta Seeds’ (a Swiss TNC) experimental station near Iguacu National Park, where GMO experiments contaminated an area rich in biodiversity. The action forced the Brazilian environmental agency, IBAMA, to fine Syngenta US$500,000 for contravening environmental laws prohibiting the planting of GMOs within a 10 km radius of national parks. The MST-Via Campesina transformed the station into an agro-ecological training centre and planted creole or native seeds. The Syngenta occupation received the support of scientists and over 300 international organizations, but instead of enforcing the fine, the Lula government sought to amend the law to enable Syngenta to continue GMO experiments legally (MST 2007).
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Page 273 The MST has not remained at the level of protest; it promotes practical alternatives by implementing agro-ecological methods of agriculture on its settlements, and produces seeds that maintain biodiversity. Bionatur, the MST seed cooperative, markets 63 varieties of agro-ecological seeds with an output of 22 tons (Ponce and Engelmann 2006).16 Bionatur’s Marino de Bortoli states: We work from the perspective of confronting the current agricultural model imposed by the multinationals, which controls the market for seeds in Brazil and the world. The Bionatur network is guided by the production of healthy food, free from agrotoxins and transgenic seeds, which is the basis for the food sovereignty of the people.17 The shift toward agro-ecology is thus crucial in promoting alternatives to and ensuring independence from agribusiness, and it suggests how the MST foresees the construction of a future society–nature relationship that is not based on dominating the environment. The MST also serves on the convening body that organizes the World Social Forums (WSF), which an MST member described as an instigator of an alternative hegemony: ‘we recognize the Forum as a very important space among [progressive] forces of the world against the established order. We see it as a space of articulation … against imperialism’.18 In allying itself with the growing anti-corporate globalization movement worldwide, the MST exercises an important role in helping build a global counter-movement and a new politics of ‘globalization from below’. How do we understand the MST’s participation in such diverse actions, such as those of indigenous movements, the tribunal on debt, its role in founding the CMS, and participation in the WSF, Via Campesina, and AP? Gramsci notes that a social force fighting for a popular hegemony needs to move beyond ‘economic-corporate’ demands and combine its interests with those of other groups in order to create a popular collective will. This requires ‘a “cultural-social” unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world’ (Gramsci 1971:349). The MST’s organizational praxis has clearly moved in the direction of uniting dispersed wills as part of building alternative conceptions of the world. What explains the MST’s counter-hegemonic actions? Some analysts attribute the MST’s prominent mobilizations to conjunctural factors or favourable political opportunities. The Brazilian sociologist, Zander Navarro (1997:121; 2002), argues: The supposed force of the MST and its acceptance by society is merely
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Page 274 circumstantial and conjunctural – the result of a simple ‘moment,’ in which conjunctural factors converged, the geographic localization of its principal ‘field of struggle’ and, also, the relative weakening of rural employer organizations in the recent period. Navarro (1997:119–20) proceeds to state that the ‘ostensive presence of the Movement in the Brazilian social and political agenda today owes itself less to its militants’ and more to the ‘discovery of the “Pontal de Paranapanema”.’19 Bernardo Sorj also suggests that ‘it was the profound crisis of the opposition, of the parties as much as of labour unions … that took the MST to the prominence that it came to occupy in the Brazilian political imaginary in recent years’ (Sorj cited by Colleti 2002:79). The conservative magazine, Veja (1997:35), makes a similar point: ‘Two years after [Cardoso] took office we’ve witnessed the collapse of the labour movement, of opposition from the left … to his government. What was left as opposition was the MST’. Ondetti (2006) draws on the POS approach to explain the intensification of movement actions, arguing that the Corumbiara and Carajas massacres offered an ‘opportunity’ for the unleashing of MST struggles. These analyses, however, have limited explanatory power. Sorj and Veja’s focus on the crisis among opposition forces as the reason for the MST’s elevated status in national politics is plausible, but fails to elucidate why the MST itself was not in crisis. Navarro’s favourable conjuncture thesis and Ondetti’s focus on the massacres as propelling the MST onto the national stage are similarly tenable; yet, they too cannot explain why movements other than the MST were unable to take advantage of enabling conjunctural factors or exploit the opportunities opened by the massacres. These analyses follow the POS approach which holds that movement mobilizations require a political opportunity to act. In other words, the availability of a top-down opening or POS in the political system is fundamental to the outcome of protest or, as a leading exponent of the POS approach, Sidney Tarrow (1994:85) writes, a POS refers to those ‘dimensions of the political environment that provide incentives for people to undertake collective action by affecting their expectations for success or failure’. I contend that these analysts ignore the subjective factor or agency of the MST and its members. We cannot understand the MST’s ability to organize simultaneous mass actions in Brazil’s major cities, its ability to recruit large numbers of landless families, and to organize massive land occupations without accounting for its organizational praxis. I argue that the MST’s organizational praxis, the agency of its militants, and the promotion of a consciousness of global ambition are vital in understanding its struggles. Moreover, analysing MST actions historically shows that its activism is not simply due to the emergence of favourable political opportunities. For example, during its early years, MST militants responded to calls to territorialize the movement throughout Brazil. Joao, from Santa Catarina state, describes his contribution:
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Page 275 At the end of 1986 I was invited to help the movement in the northeast…. We initiated the movement in Bahia, afterwards Maranhao, Alagoas, Paraíba, and now Pernambuco. Since 1992, we are in Pernambuco where we accompany the movement more directly.20 Another interviewee from Rio Grande do Sul volunteered three years during the late 1990s to help build the movement in other regions of Brazil.21 In addition to promoting solidarity and the territorialization of the movement, the MST’s philosophy of praxis engenders a consciousness of global ambition among its members who come to see the fight for land not in corporatist terms, but as part of a larger project of change. José explains: I entered into the MST out of necessity [for land] [but] the movement taught us to have a larger vision, to have a vision that it is not enough to struggle for yourself, for a piece of land for yourself…. The movement gives you conditions to understand the whole of society, the way in which it is structured, and who it is that orders in the country today.22 I contend that these acts, inspired by ideals of solidarity and global vision, are vital to understanding the MST’s actions against neoliberalism. José illustrates what Harvey (1996) calls the move from a localized ‘militant particularism’ to ‘global ambition’ and the interconnectedness of local-global struggles. Moreover, these accounts show that an active and conscious collective militancy can, through grassroots mobilization, fashion bottom-up openings in the political system and successfully pressure the state to deliver resources. A movement’s strength, moreover, is not only related to how it acts in an enabling environment, it should also be analyzed in terms of its resilience in withstanding adverse conjunctures. A movement need not remain a powerless actor in an adverse political environment. For example, the March for Land Reform, Employment and Justice transformed a climate of political isolation into a more favourable one by taking up concerns that mattered to most Brazilians, viz. , human rights abuses, informalization of work, and high unemployment engendered by neoliberal reforms. There is a strongly held belief among MST members that they can challenge neoliberalism through their own version of a popular common sense. Monica, an MST leader, captures this counter-hegemonic sentiment: ‘We have always been told that agrarian reform is a good idea in principle, but the conjuntura , or present moment, isn’t right. Well, we make the conjuntura right’ (Branford and Rocha 2002:65).23 On first reading, this sounds like extreme voluntarism; however, read in the context of the Thatcherite injunction that ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) to market forces, or Cardoso’s declaration that land reform is a nineteenth-century demand, Monica’s statement is a firm affirmation that the landless will not passively accept their marginal status or submit to the TINA syndrome. Contrary to declarations of the ‘end of history’, MST members practically affirm themselves as active subjects shaping
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Page 276 their own history. However, MST militants are under no illusion as to the difficult task they face, as Vilmar notes: ‘[The] struggle for land is very difficult because it is more than a demand. It is a dispute with the essence of capitalism which is private property, so it is a permanent struggle’.24 The POS approach leaves little room for ideals of solidarity and the role of ideas in driving mobilizations. Solidarity has been central in motivating MST struggles as well as in supporting struggles of other movements. Furthermore, the focus on political socialization shows the attention the MST has given to ideology as the terrain from which its members can ‘move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle’ (Gramsci, cited in Mouffe 1979:185). The resource mobilization and political process theorists’ focus on the availability of political opportunities and resources limits their ability to give sufficient attention to subjective factors in driving collective action. I do not suggest that structural openings are unimportant; rather, resources and political opportunities are insufficient in explaining movement mobilizations.25 A Gramscian political economy approach provides a richer framework from which to comprehend MST struggles. The importance that Gramsci attaches to class, ideology, solidarity, and strategy in driving movement mobilizations and his belief in the agency of ordinary people to make their own history, all resonate with the MST’s praxis. However, this praxis also moves beyond a Gramscian perspective which sees the ‘modern prince’ or party as the leader of ‘moral and intellectual reform’. As the PT became institutionalized and moved away from its leftist roots, the MST has taken on a leading role in uniting movements in the struggle for a popular hegemony. Conclusion I have analyzed the MST’s counter-hegemonic actions against neoliberalism and questioned POS analyses which ascribe these struggles to enabling political opportunities. While structural openings can indeed enable or constrain movement activity, they do not necessarily determine movement mobilization or outcomes as the POS approach suggests. In contrast, I have shown that the MST’s organizational capacity, its ideological outlook, and the agency of its members are crucial in driving its struggles across local-global scales. I have also stated that the MST’s strength rests not only in merging the struggle for and on the land, but in generating popular support for agrarian reform, strengthening alliances, participating in the WSF and the Via Campesina, and building a global counter-movement. The MST does not simply resist neoliberalism, it proposes alternative modes of organizing production in which seeds are promoted as a collective good rather than a commodity for generating profit; where land is more than a simple commodity, but one containing history, culture and a means to livelihood; and, where the relationship to the environment is not predatory, but one of stewardship. The MST has made many gains, but also faces difficulties. In occupying
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Page 277 agribusiness operations, it has been criticized for undermining a ‘dynamic’ sector of the economy. Taking on powerful actors has opened up a fresh set of challenges, probably the most serious since its founding. The MST’s philosophical outlook is a crucial component of its praxis whereby, following Marx, it does not merely seek to interpret the world; rather, it seeks to both interpret and, in alliance with other social forces, transform Brazil through a protracted war of position – one marked by advances, retreats, and the gradual accumulation of forces at local-global levels to construct alternatives to neoliberal hegemony. Whether the MST and other popular forces succeed in installing a popular project is an open question. What is certain is that the MST has asserted itself as a prominent counterhegemonic actor against neoliberalism. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Yıldız Atasoy for her helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. Comments by an anonymous reviewer are also acknowledged. I thank Ariana Vigil and Mohammed Seedat for commenting on previous drafts and I bear sole responsibility for the chapter as it appears. Notes 1 For a full explication of RMT, see Tarrow (1994) and Beuchler (2000). 2 I have used fictitious names to protect the identities of interviewees. 3 For the early history and national growth of the MST, see Fernandes (2001) and Morrisawa (2001). 4 Interview #58, 24 October 2004. 5 The MST’s pedagogical relationships resemble Gramsci’s (1971:350) formulation that ‘every teacher is always a student and every student always a teacher’. 6 Resolution from the 4th National Congress in 2000 (Morrisawa 2001:166). By a popular project, the MST means a democratic socialist alternative. 7 Violence and oppressive social relations have long been features of Brazil’s rural landscape. Since the mid-1980s, approximately 1600 individuals have been killed in land conflicts by the military police and hired gunmen, with many more wounded (Payne 2000; CPT 2004). 8 During the 1994 Mexican financial crisis, interest rates were hiked to 63 per cent and during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, interest rates jumped from 22 to 43 per cent (Rocha 2002; Amann and Baer 2000). 9 For more on the march, see Branford and Rocha (2002) and Stedile and Fernandes (2001). 10 Interview #76, 21 January 2005. 11 Stedile and Fernandes (2001:139). 12 Interview #76, 21 January 2005. 13 The IMF-imposed primary budget surpluses are generated to service interest payments on Brazil’s debt. During Lula’s first term of office (2003–2006), the government paid almost US$300 billion to service debt payments (Sicsú 2007). 14 While the MST maintained its autonomy from the Lula government, Webber (this volume) argues that popular movements in Bolivia were unable to assert their autonomy from the Morales government.
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Page 278 15 On the Assembleia Popular, see Rede Jubileu Sul Brasil (2006). 16 The MST runs many agro-ecology schools and is a key participant in the Escola Latinoamericana de Agroecologia which partners with five federal universities. 17 Bortoli, cited in Bionatur realize terceiro Encontro National. Online. Available: http://www.mst.org.br/informativos/minforma/ultimas1917.htm accessed 12 September 2006). 18 Interview #79, 12 July 2005. 19 The Pontal de Paranapanema is located in Sao Paulo state, where Brazil’s industrial, financial, and media elites are based. The MST had great success in the midst of violent conflicts over land in the Pontal (Fernandes 1996). 20 Interview #51, 17 August 2004. 21 Interview #17, 31 May 2004. This militant was seconded by his land reform cooperative to work as a full-time, paid activist. In a settlement in Piratini, Rio Grande do Sul, three members (two of them women) were also seconded to work full-time for the MST (Interview #59, 25 October 2004). 22 Interview #58, 24 October 2004. 23 Original emphasis. 24 Interview #71, 13 January 2005. 25 Otero (2004) makes a similar argument in analysing indigenous struggles. References Almeida, J. (2005) ‘O PT, o governo Lula e os movimentos sociais’. Online. Available: www.ivanvalente.com.br/CANAIS/02/artigos/arts_det.asp?id=409 (accessed: 22 April 2005). Almeida, L. F. and Sanchez, F. R. (2000) ‘The landless workers’ movement and social struggles against neoliberalism’, Latin American Perspectives 27(5): 11–32. Amann, E. and Baer, W. (2000) ‘The illusion of stability: The Brazilian economy under Cardoso’, World Development 28(10): 1805–19. Beuchler, S. M. (2000) Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism: The Political Economy and Cultural Construction of Social Activism , New York: Oxford University Press. Boito, A. (2002) ‘Apresentacao’, Idéias 9(1): 7–11. Borges, A. (2006) ‘A regressao do trabalho na “era FHC”,’ Online. Available: www.espacoacademico.com.br/016/16col_borges.htm (accessed: 15 December 2006). Branford, S. (2003) ‘Introduction’, in S. Branford and B. Kucinski (eds) Politics Transformed: Lula and the Workers Party in Brazil , London: Latin American Bureau. Branford, S. and Rocha, J. (2002) Cutting the Wire: the Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil, London: Latin America Bureau. Brasilino, L. (2006) ‘Despertar a sociedade para um enfrentamento de classes’, Brasil de Fato, November 2. Colleti, C. (2002) ‘Ascencao e Refluxo do MST a da Luta pela Terra na Década Neoliberal’, Idéias 9(1): 49–104. Cox, R. W. (1999) ‘Civil society at the turn of the Millennium: Prospects for an alternative world order’, Review of International Studies 25(1): 3–28. CPT. (2004) Conflitos no Campo, Goiania: Comissao Pastoral da Terra. Desmarais, A. (2002) ‘The Via Campesina: Consolidating an international peasant and farm movement’, Journal of Peasant Studies 29(2): 91–124.
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Page 279 Fernandes, B. M. (2001) A formacao do MST no Brasil, 2nd edn, Petropolis: Editora Vozes. Fernandes, B. M. (1996) MST: Formacao e Territorializacao em Sao Paulo , Sao Paulo: Hucitec. Freire, P. (1993) Pedagogy of the Oppressed , New York: Continuum. Furtado, C. (1999) Seca e Poder: Entrevista com Celso Furtado, 2nd edn, Sao Paulo: Perseu Abramo. Geisler, C. (2005) ‘Hidden in plan view: The property rights of mobile people’, Paper presented at the 50th Anniversary of Queen Elizabeth House , 3–5 July, Oxford University, UK. Glass, V. (2005) ‘MST forma educadores e tecnicos a pede apoio do governo na CPMI da Terra’, Carta Maior , 18 November. Glass, V. (2006) ‘Lema para Segundo mandato sera “nenhum direito a menos”, diz lider do MST’, Carta Maior , 1 November. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith (eds), New York: International Publishers. Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference , Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism , New York: Oxford University Press. IPEA. (2005) Radar Social: Principais Iniciativas do Governo Federal, Brasília: Instituto de Pesquisa Economica Aplicada. Karriem, A. (2005) ‘“Marching as to war”: A letter from Brazil to South Africa about landlessness, agrarian reform and social movement struggles against neoliberalism’, Revista Nera 8(6): 1–13. McCarthy, J. and Zald, M. (1977) ‘Resource mobilization and social movements: A partial theory’, American Journal of Sociology 82(6): 1212–41. Martins, M. D. (2000) ‘The MST challenge to Neoliberalism’, Latin American Perspectives 27(5): 33–45. Martins, M. D. (ed.) (2004) O Banco Mundial e a Terra: Offensiva e Resistencia na América Latina, África e Ásia, Sao Paulo: Viramundo. Medeiros, L. S. (2002) Movimentos Sociais, Disputas Politicas e Reforma Agrária de Mercado no Brasil, Rio de Janeiro: CPDA/UFRRJ e UNRISD. Morrisawa, M. (2001) A Historia da Luta Pela Terra e o MST, Sao Paulo: Expressao Popular. MST (1989) Normas Gerais do MST, Sao Paulo: MST. MST (2001) ‘Fundamental principles for the social and economic transformation of rural Brazil’, trans. W. Robles Journal of Peasant Studies 28(2): 153–61. MST (2007) ‘Os Crimes da Syngenta Seeds – Nota do MST sobre o assassinato do Keno, Letraviva’, MST Informa 5(144). Mouffe, C. (1979) ‘Hegemony and ideology in Gramsci’, in C. Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Navarro, Z. (1997) ‘Sete teses equivocadas sobre as lutas no campo, o MST e a reforma agrarian’, in J. P. Stedile (ed.) A Reforma Agraria e a Luta do MST, 2nd edn, Petropolis: Editora Vozes. Navarro, Z. (2002) ‘“Mobilizacao sem emancipacao” – as lutas sociais dos sem-terra no Brasil’, in B. Santos (ed.) Produzir para Viver: Os Caminhos da Producao na Capitalista, Rio de Janeiro: Civilizacao Brasileira. Olson, M. (1965) The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Page 280 Ondetti, G. (2006) ‘Repression, opportunity, and protest: explaining the takeoff of Brazil’s landless movement’, Latin American Politics and Society 48(2): 61–94. Osava, M. (2002) ‘10 million Brazilians vote against hemisphere’s FTAA’, IPS , September 18. Otero, G. (2004) ‘Global economy, local politics: Indigenous struggles, civil society and democracy’, Canadian Journal of Political Science 37(2): 325–46. Payne, L. (2000) Uncivil Movements: the Armed Right Wing and Democracy in Latin America , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pereira, A. (2003) ‘Brazil’s agrarian reform: Democratic innovation or oligarchic exclusion redux?’, Latin American Politics and Society 45(2): 41–65. Petras, J. and Veltmeyer, H. (2003) Cardoso’s Brazil: A Land for Sale , Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Ponce, R. and Engelmann, S. (2006) ‘Brasil nao tem politica para agroecologia’, Online. Available: www.mst.org.br/informativos/minforma/biblioteca/entrevistas/ tardinagroecologia.htm (accessed: 10 September 2006). Rede Jubileu Sul Brasil (2006) O Brasil que Queremos: Assembléia Popular Mutirão Por Um Novo Brasil, São Paulo: Expressão Popular. Rocha, G. M. (2002) ‘Neo-dependency in Brazil’, New Left Review 16: 5–33. Rosseto, N. (2005) ‘Outro mundo se faz com terra para todas as pessoas’, Democracia Viva 25: 4–7. Scolese, E. (2005) A Reforma Agraria , Sao Paulo: Publifolha. Shamir, R. (2005) ‘Corporate social responsibility: A case of hegemony and counterhegemony’, in B. Santos and C. A. Rodriguez (eds) Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sicsú, J. (2007) ‘Vitamina contra o nanismo estatal’, Folha de Sao Paulo , 5 October. Silva, E. (2004) Formacao e Ideário do MST, Sao Leopoldo: Editora Unisinos. Stedile, J. P. (2007) ‘The class struggle in Brazil: The perspective of the MST’, in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds) Socialist Register 2008: Global Flashpoints: Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism , London: Merlin Press. Stedile, J. P. and Fernandes, B. M. (2001) Brava Gente: a Trajetoria Do MST E a Luta Pela Terra No Brasil. Säo Paulo: Editora Fundacao Perseu Abramo. Tarrow, S. (1994) Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics , New York: Cambridge University Press. Veja (1997) ‘A Longa Marcha: Diante da camimhada dos sem-terra, a pior escolha é ficar de bracos cruzados’, Veja 30(15): 34–5.
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Page 281 Author index Adams, Jason 36 Agamben, Giorgio 228, 230, 231, 232–3, 234, 235, 239 Alexander, C.J. 10, 16 Archibugi, Daniele 128 Arendt, Hannah 29, 234, 235 Arrighi, Giovanni 1, 2, 3, 5, 73, 90 Baker, G. 139 Baldwin, D.A. 6 Barlow, M. 105 Baydar, Oya 218–19 Beck, Ulrich 10–11, 24, 171 Bora, T. 214 Boswell, Terry 35, 73 Bové, J. 34–5 Buckman, G. 120 Calhoun, C. 11, 171 Callinicos, A. 61 Cameron, M.A. 151, 182 Camic, C. 175, 182 Connelly, E.W. 166 Cox, R. 128, 138, 264 Craig, D. 14, 16 Davis, Mike 7, 26, 34 Desai, Radhika 45 Dicken, P. 43 DiMaggio, J.P. 175 Dufour, F. 34–5 Engels, Friedrich 43 Evans, P. 158 Falk, Richard 137, 169 Fennema, Meindert 48, 51 Ferguson, James 6, 9, 38, 210–11 Florini, Ann 78 Foucault, M. 230 Freire, Paolo 266 Gereffi, G. 105, 108 Gill, Stephen 8, 12, 31, 36, 93, 126, 127 Gokalp, Ziya 179 Gowan, P. 3, 92 Graber, Robert Bates 69 Gramsci, Antonio 36, 93–4, 128, 263–5, 272, 273, 276 Greider, W. 88 Gulen, Fethullah 179–81 Gürbilek, Nurdan 211–12 Hardt, M. 1, 3, 4, 39, 228–30 Harvey, D. 6, 7, 23, 24, 33, 38, 59, 88, 91, 147, 269, 275 Held, David 30, 128 Helleiner, E. 88, 96–7 Hibou, B. 6 Hilferding, Rudolf 51 Hobsbawm, Eric 74, 270 Huntington, Samuel 173–4 Hymer, Stephen 44
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Kaldor, Mary 76–7 Kautsky, K. 59 Keohane, R.O. 3, 6 Keynes, John Maynard 78 Kırıkkanat, Mine 219–20 Krasner, D.S. 9, 150 Lacher, H. 60 Leite, José Corrê 37–8 Leys, C. 4, 6, 7 Locke, John 173 Mahmood, S. 174 Mann, Michael 58, 75
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Page 282 This page intentionally left blank. Markoff, John 25, 35, 174 Marx, Karl 43, 252, 277 Modelski, George 67 Monbiot, George 37, 78 Moore, Barrington 26 Moore, Jason 46 Navarro, Zander 273–4 Negri, A. 1, 3, 4, 39, 228–30 Olesen 24, 29, 30, 31, 32, 60 Öncü, Ayse 220–1 Ozdemir, S. 176, 179 Palan, R.P. 182 Panitch, L. 4, 23, 94 Patel, R. 18, 25, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 129, 130, 133, 139 Patomäki, Heikki 35, 37 Pauly, L.W. 88 Polanyi, K. 7, 18, 39, 175, 187, 190, 201 Porter, D. 14, 16 Rist, Gilbert 27 Robinson, William 10, 11, 44–7, 48, 74 Rosenberg, Justin 6, 8–9, 23 Rossi, I. 2 Rugman, A.M. 58 Rupert, M. 150 Sabean, David 37 Sachs, Wolfgang 25–6 Sanderson, S.K. 80 Sassen, Saskia 9, 14, 16, 46-7, 48, 60, 65, 74–6, 182, 212 Schmitt, Carl 232, 233 Schumpeter, Joseph 177 Shiva, Vandana 27 Silver, B. 5, 71 Şimşek, Ali 220–1 Sklair, Leslie 3, 44-5, 48, 49, 147 Smith, Adam 180 Soederberg, S. 4, 7, 12, 14, 16, 25, 59, 99, 186, 188 Somer, M. 10, 174, 175 Starr, Amory 28, 32, 36, 129 Stedile, Soao Pedro 33, 265, 269, 270, 271 Stokes, Doug 46 Süküren, Sıtkı 218 Taagepera, Rein 67 Taylor, P. 80 Teivainen, Teivo 35, 37 Tilly, Charles 77–8, 173, 174, 230 Van der Pijl, Kees 46, 55, 60, 171, 172 Verbeke, A. 58 Wallerstein, Immanuel 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 29, 171, 239 Woods, N. 8. 13, 147, 156 Žižek, S. 170, 171
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Page 283 Subject index
Acción Democrática Nacionalista (Nationalist Democratic Action; ADN) 246, 250 accumulation by dispossession 6, 7, 24, 258, 269 Afghanistan war 174 Age of Extremes 74 ‘agency capture’ 90 agentic creolization 28 ‘agrarian citizenship’ 32 agricultural ‘multifunctionality’ 30 ahistorical population pressure model of political integration 69 AKP 15, 166, 167–70, 172, 174, 175–7, 182; Development and Democratization Program 176; Transition to a Strong Economy in Turkey 177 ALBA 30, 60 All African Farmers’ Network 131 allocative power in global capitalism 49 ‘alternative multilateralisms’ 35 American militarism 3 anarchy 3, 5–6, 7, 72 ‘Anatolian tigers’ 178 Anatolianizing of Istanbul 217 Anglo-Saxon model 186–8 Asian financial crisis (1997) 49, 51, 58, 89, 90, 99 Asian Monetary Fund 89 asset building 176 Bank Bars 194, 199 Bank for International Settlements 99, 100 Bank of China 50 Bank Zenit 194 Bánzer, Hugo 246, 248 bare life 234 Basel II framework 100 Bechtel 248 Beyaz Türklük 212–14 biofuels 8 Bionatur 273 biopower 230 biotechnology 4 Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) 30, 60 Bolivia, Left-indigenous politics in 244–59 Bolivian Constituent Assembly 17, 244–59 Bolivian Movement Towards Socialism see Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) ‘boundary transcending practices’ of post-nationalist politics 171 bourgeoisie 43, 60, 209, 212–14, 215, 217–18, 222, 247–9, 258, 268 Brazilian Action for Nutrition and Human Rights (ABRANDH) 131 Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) 17, 18, 262–78 Bretton Woods institutions 12, 74, 105, 127, 130, 133 BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) 60 British to US world hegemony, shift from 5 Bush, George W., administration 45, 46, 48, 100 Business Council on National Issues (BCNI) 152, 153 Business Roundtable 150 business-driven globalization 149 Buyukanit, General Yasar 168, 169
Cámara Agropecuaria del Oriente (Eastern Agricultural Chamber, CAO) 248 Cámara de Hidrocarburos (Hydrocarbons Chamber) 248 Cámara de Industria y Comercio (Chamber of Industry and Commerce, CAINCO) 248
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Page 284 Canada, free trade in 151–3 Canada–USA free trade agreement (1989) (CUFTA) 148–9, 151, 152, 153, 157 Canadian Alliance for Trade and Job Opportunities (CATJO) 153, 155 Canadian Chamber of Commerce 152 Canadian Exporter’s Association 152 Canadian Federation of Independent Business 152 Canadian Manufacturers’ Association (CMA) 152 ‘capital flight’ 93 Cardoso, President Fernando Henrique 262, 267–70, 275 ceilings 66–8 cemaat (community) 180 Central Obrera Boliviana (Bolivian Workers Central, COB) 251 Central Obrera Regional (Regional Workers Central of El Alto, COR-El Alto) 251 Central Workers Union 264 centralization 65, 232 Centre for Rural Studies and International Agriculture (CERAI) 131 China Construction Bank 50 Chinese hegemony 3 Choque, Gualberto 252 CHP-DSP 167, 170, 172 Citigroup 90 citizen-empowerment politics 176 citizenship paradox 207–80 ‘civic nationalism’ 180 ‘civil society’ 25 ‘civil sphere’ 16 Clinton, Bill, administration 48, 99, 150 Coalition of Service Industries (USA) 105 Cochabamba Water War 248, 258 ‘co-determination’ 188, 193 coercion 3, 4, 9, 72–3, 93, 172, 215, 263 Cold War 1, 31, 174, 188, 213, 222, 228, 238–9 collective action (CA) 263, 264 Collor, President Fernando 262, 267 colonial 3, 25–8, 59, 60, 65, 68–70, 73, 75, 79, 229, 231, 237–8 Comisión de Concertación (Cooperation Commission) 256 Comité Pro Santa Cruz (Pro Santa Cruz Committee, CPSC) 248 Committee on World Food Security (CFS) 132 commodification 6, 7, 26, 39, 272 ‘community as discourse’ 37 ‘comparative advantages’ 23 competition 5, 6, 11, 59, 62, 72, 90, 91, 108, 151, 155–7, 191 concentrated blockholding 188 concentrated corporate control 186–7, 190, 196, 202 Concert of Europe 74 Confederation of British Industry (CBI) 131 consent 3, 4, 8, 93, 128, 149, 263 container theory of society 11 contending states 60 ‘cooperative advantage’ 30 co-optation 128, 135, 136 Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida (Coordinator for the Defence of Water and Life) 248 Coordination of Social Movements (CMS) 271 Copenhagen European Council (1993) 172 corporate control models 186, 187–8 corporate elite 47–9, 53, 55, 59, 60 corporate globalization 38 corporate networks 48, 49, 57–8, 189 corporate power 49–50, 193 cosmopolitan/cosmopolitanism 10, 16, 25, 30, 36, 39, 53, 128, 209 cost–benefit analyses 263 crisis 5, 6, 8
CSUTCB 250, 251 culturalism as hegemonic strategy 222–3 cycle of hegemonic rise and fall 68, 77, 80 cycle of popular insurrection 254 cycle of rebellion 250, 252, 258 de-territorialization 46 decentralization 65 decolonization 27, 29, 65, 69, 70–1 democracy 2, 10, 12, 15, 16, 26–7, 31, 35–8, 39, 128, 170, 173–4, 176, 181, 190, 209, 215, 218, 232, 238, 250, 257 Democratic Leftist Party (DSP) 166 ‘democratization discourse’ 173, 174, 175 ‘denationalization’ 9, 16 developing countries’ pro-globalization policy changes 147–8 development project 23, 25, 27, 107, 138, 187, 247 diaspora 25, 27 dignity 29 discipline of capital markets 96 dispersed shareholding 188 Doha Declaration 109, 110, 118, 119
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Page 285 dominion, principle of 237 ‘double movement’ 190, 193, 201 Dutch to British world hegemony 5 ‘earth-centred economies’ 27 economic freedom of the individual 138 ‘economic globalization’ 3, 6, 11 economic opportunity promotion 14 economic pauperization 7 economic power 5 Ecuador, the ‘Intercultural University of Indigenous Nationalities and Pueblos’ ‘globalization project’ 28 Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) 30 ‘embedded neoliberalism’ 14 e-memorandum 168 empire 1, 3–4, 6, 11, 23, 24, 59, 65–6, 67–70, 72–5, 79, 228–30 ‘empire of civil society’ 23, 24 ‘empowerment’ 14, 136 engaged universals 10 Enlightenment-based modernity 11 entitlement 29 epistemic crisis 6 ‘epistemic privilege’ 172–5 Erdogan, Prime Minister 170 ethical universalism 10, 29 ethnic conflicts 228–9, 230 ethno-nationalism 27 European Commission (EC) 131, 132, 136 European Enlightenment 72, 76 European Renaissance 72 European Services Network 105 European Union 3, 30, 80, 133, 167, 172, 237; Charter of Fundamental Rights (Negotiating Framework for Turkey 2005) 172 ‘European universalism’ 15, 166–83 ‘false universalism’ 170 Federación de Empresarios Privados de Bolivia – Santa Cruz (Federation of Private Entrepreneurs of Bolivia –Santa Cruz; FEPB-SC) 248 Federación de Ganaderos (Cattle Ranchers’ Federation) 248 Federación de Juntas Vecinales de El Alto (Federation of Neighbourhood Councils of El Alto; FEJUVE-El Alto) 251, 252 Federación Departamental Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de La Paz ‘Tupaj Katari’ (Departmental Federation of Peasant Workers of La Paz – Tupaj Katari, FUTCLP-TK) 252 Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) 227, 237 Federal Reserve 90 Fethullahci cemaati 180 Fethullahcilar 172, 177, 179–81, 182 ‘fictitious capital’ 91 finance capital 51 financialization of the US economy 91 ‘first modernity’ 25, 29, 32, 33 ‘food related rights’ 132 ‘food security’ 30, 130, 132, 134, 135, 272 food sovereignty 10, 13, 24, 30–5, 129, 133, 138–9, 272–3 FoodFirst International Action Network (FIAN) 129, 130, 131, 132, 137, 138 ‘formal citizenship’ 27 Fórum National pela Reforma Agraria e Justica no Campo (FNRA) 268 ‘free trade’ 23 free trade agreements (FTAs) 8 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) 262, 269 free-rider problem 263 French Revolution 232
G5 Plaza Accord (1985) 58 G7 59, 105 G-7/G-8 12, 74 G20 99 Gaidar, Yegor 189, 191–2 Gandhian vision 36 García Linera, Álvaro 257 Gas Wars 248, 250 gecekondu 218–19 General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 74, 151, 153, 156 Glass-Steagall legislation (US) 91 Global 500 49–51, 52 ‘global apartheid’ 24 global authority 14, 17, 18, 85–144 ‘global cities’ 46, 216, 217 global citizenship 10, 23–40 global city network 48 ‘global civil society’ 11 12, 76, 77, 127–8, 130 ‘global consciousness’ 9 ‘global constitutionalism’ 3 global corporate-interlock network 51–7 ‘global democracy’ 10, 12, 24, 35–8, 65–81 ‘global fascism’ 18 global financial system 87–103 ‘global governance’ 11, 12, 13, 45, 59, 65, 69, 77–80, 104–8, 110, 118, 128, 130, 133
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Page 286 global health 104–6, 108 global North 2, 44, 115, 117, 119, 147–8, 156 global power 1, 2, 8, 13, 14, 21–84, 228 global South 1, 24, 35, 44, 89, 99, 104, 109–10, 115, 117, 129, 147–8, 156 ‘global state’ 11, 12, 65–81 globalization 2, 4, 10, 45; of finance in the post-Bretton Woods era 88–9 ‘globalization’ discourse 1751, 175 ‘globalization of democracy’ 173 ‘globalization project’ 65, 105 globalizing bureaucrats 44 global-rule 6 Goldman Sachs 90 Gorbachev, President Mikhail 191 governance 14, 24, 25, 35–6, 51–2, 55, 58, 59, 65, 69, 106, 135, 173, 186–8, 189– 90, 193–4, 199, 202; global 11, 12, 13, 45, 59, 65, 69, 77–80, 104–8, 110, 118, 128, 130, 133 Gramscian perspective 127–8, 262, 263, 276 Great Depression 94 Gul, Abdullah 168 Gulf War, first 174 hegemonic decline 4, 8, 23, 68, 71, 90 hegemony, theories of 2–4 historical population pressure model of political integration 69 hizmet schools 180 homo sacer 235 human capital growth 176 human right to food 126–39 ‘human rights-based approach’ 135 hunger 13, 32, 126, 128–30, 133–6, 139 Hussein, Saddam, regime 46 IBAMA 272 IBM 120 imam-hatip schools 170 immunization 104 ‘imperial overstretch’ 77 ‘imperial sovereignty’ 229 ‘inclusive neoliberalism’ 14 India’s Planning Commission 8 Indigenous March for Territory and Dignity (1990) 248 ‘individual rights and freedoms’ discourse 175 informal economy 176 information technology 4 integral state 93, 94 Intellectual Property Committee (US) 119–20 intellectual property rights 8, 12, 28, 108–10, 127, 154 intercorporate ownership and control 194–8 Interest Equalization Tax 96 interlocked corporate directorates 47 interlocking directorates 47 internalization of neoliberalism 14 International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) 131, 134 ‘International Civil Representative’ 237 ‘international coercion’ 172 International Court of Justice 34 International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) 126, 132 international financial institutions (IFIs) 148, 156 International Forum on Globalization (IFG) Report (2002) 107 International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) 129 International Jacques Maritain Institute 129 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 8, 11, 12, 59, 74, 88, 89, 99, 105, 131, 134, 156,
172, 177, 228, 267 International Movement for Catholic Agricultural and Rural Youth (MIJARC) 131 international peasant movement 130 International Postal Union 76 ‘international society’ 72 international trade 110–11 interventionism 230 intra-regional interlocking 53 ‘investment strike’ 93 investor capitalism 51 Iraq wars 174 Islamic engagement with European universalism 166–83 Islamic ethic 15, 178 Istanbulites 217 Istanbulizing 217 January 24 measures 175 jus publicum Europaeum 237 justice 12, 18, 25, 30, 34–5, 77, 79–80, 130, 153, 176, 181, 209
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kara kalabalıklar 219 Kemalism 171, 179 ‘Kemalist developmentalism 209 Kemalist state, future of 168–70 Kırıkkanat, Mine 219–20 Kookmin Bank 50 Kosovo, international administration 227–41 La Paz-El Alto Gas Wars 258 La Vía Campesina 30, 129, 130, 137, 138 laik 16, 219, 220, 223 laiklik 167–9, 172 Land Bank 268 land laws, India 8 Landless Workers’ Movement (Brazil) 129 Latin America 23, 76, 114–15, 153–5, 173, 244, 258–9, 262, 265 Law of Convocation of the Constituent Assembly 253 League of Nations 69, 74 legitimacy 8, 13, 27, 31, 73, 228 liberal democracy 173 liberal humanitarian interventionism 231 ‘liberalism’ 173 liberalization 7, 8, 88, 89–90, 91, 96, 98, 100, 105, 117, 120, 127, 133, 138, 151–2, 156, 176, 189, 191, 201, 262, 267, 272 ‘life economy’ 39 ‘localization of the global’ concept 9, 14 Lockean Heartland 60 ‘Lockean liberalism’ 171, 173 Louvre Accord 92, 97 Lula da Silva, Luis Inácio 262, 267, 270 Lula government 270–2
maganda 220–1 March for Land Reform, Employment and Justice 268, 275 market economy 7. 10, 12, 14–16, 18, 133, 173, 175–8, 180, 182, 187, 196, 202 ‘market fundamentalism’ 187 market state 6 marketization 71 MASTER 265 Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit (M-LEC) 101 Mauro, Gilmar 271 Medicines Act (South Africa) 109 Mesa, Carlos 244, 251–2 ‘methodological individualism’ 177 Mexican Action Network on Free Trade 155 Mexican free trade 153–5 militarism 4, 5 military 2, 3–4, 5, 12, 26, 30, 46, 68, 71, 75, 90, 167–9, 173, 175–6, 178, 209, 211– 14, 221–2, 227–9, 231, 233, 234, 237, 239, 255 Millennium Development Goals 126, 136 Milosevic, Slobodan 227, 234 Mobilization for transformative politics 262–78 modernity 10; reconstitution of 23–40 Morales, Evo 17, 244–59 moustaches 221–2 Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism, MAS) 17, 244, 248, 250, 252, 253–7, 268 Movimiento Indígena Pachakuti (Indigenous Pachakuti Movement, MIP) 250 Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement, MIR) 246, 250 Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, MNR) 246, 248, 250, 254;
MNR-A3 254; MNR-FRI 254 MST 17, 18, 262–78 Mulroney, Brian 152, 154 ‘multilateral global governance’ 79–80 multiple sovereignties 23–40 multipolity interstate system 65 MUSIAD 175, 177–9, 182 NAFTA 15, 99, 105, 147–65 nation state 3, 9, 10, 11, 24, 37, 45, 47, 65, 72, 171, 228, 229–30, 233, 235 National Action Party (MHP) 166, 167, 169, 170, 172 National Association of Manufacturers 150 national interlockers 53, 54 national interlocking 53 national linkers 55 National Plan for Agrarian Reform (PNRA) (Brazil) 270 national self-determination 25 national state 7, 9, 11–12, 14, 16, 18, 47, 65, 69, 73, 74–8, 80, 94, 106, 182 national view ideology 170 NATO 227, 234, 237 neo-Kemalists 168 neoliberal capitalism 12, 210–11 neoliberal market economy 176 neoliberal reform 108–10 neoliberal restructuring 7–8, 14
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Page 288 neoliberalism 1, 14, 23, 25, 138 network analysis 110–11 ‘New Financial Architecture’ 99 New Social Movement Theory 263 Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) 89 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 25, 76, 129, 131, 132 North American free trade 149–55 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 15, 99, 105, 147–62 ‘northern transatlantic economic system’ 46 nur evleri 180
O Novo Mundo Rural 268 ‘oligarchy’ model 186, 190, 202 Olivera, Oscar 248 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 96, 131, 135 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) 237 organizational-entrepreneurial model 263 ‘organized capitalism’ 48 organized hypocrisy 9 Orientalism 213–15, 219, 223 ‘paradox of sovereignty’ 6, 8–9, 235 parodying of Turkishness 221 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party; PRI) 158–9 ‘path dependencies’ 48 pax Americana 3 pax Britannica 3 Peasant Leagues 265 peasant way 30, 32, 214 Pfizer 120 pharmaceuticals 104–20 Pizetta, Adelar 266 PKK 167 planet of slums 7, 24, 34 Plaza Accord 92, 97 PODEMOS 245, 253, 254, 255, 256, 268 policy approach 138 policy continuity 149 policy goal 138 political economy of global public health 105–8 political globalization 73–7 political opportunity structure (POS) approach 263, 274, 276 politics of alternatives 2 politics of resentment 209 ‘polycentrism’ 35 Ponchos Rojos 257 Popular Assembly (PA) (Brazil) 271 ‘populism’ 214 ‘postmodern imperialism’ 231 poverty 8, 14, 16, 27, 31, 77, 133–5, 176, 179, 217, 218, 221, 248 PRATEC 27 private enterprise 6 privatization 6, 7, 23, 24, 38, 89, 105, 120, 127, 176, 177; in post-Soviet Tatarstan 186–203; of the state 6, 248 pro-Islamic national view movement 169 pro-market re-regulation 14 Putin, President Vladimir 198 Quebec Chamber of Commerce 152 Reagan, Ronald 150 realist theory of international relations 5
Referendum Law for Departmental Autonomies 253 regional configurations of corporate power 49 regional free trade agreements 105 regionalization 46, 58 religious organizations 76–7 Republican People’s Party (CHP) 166 resource mobilization theory (RMT) 263 Reyes Villa, Manfred 255 ‘right to food’ 12 ‘rights-based growth strategy’ 135 ‘rights-based markets’ 135 rivalry 3, 5, 11, 59, 65, 71, 76–7, 79 RMALC (Red Mexicana de Acción frente al Libre Comercio) 155 Russian Federation 16, 187, 189, 190–3, 194, 198 Said Nursi 179 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos 154–5 Sánchez de Lozada, Gonzalo 244, 250, 251 second modernity 25, 29, 32, 33, 35, 36 Seed Satyagraha Movement 129 self-determination 129 self-regulating market 7, 60, 175 ‘semi-globalization’ 58 semiperiphery 73, 79 September 11, 2001 1, 26, 49, 228, 231 Shaimiev, President Mintimer 186, 191, 192–3, 198 ‘shareholder-value’ model 188 Slow Food 36
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Page 289 social and economic security 14 social contract 38 social embeddedness of neoliberalism 14 social movement organizations (SMOs) 77 social neoliberalism 14, 16 ‘sociology of ideas’ 175 ‘sociology of knowledge’ 175 South African Pharmaceutical Manufacturers’ Association 109 South American Community of Nations 30 South Asian Peasants’ Coalition 131 sovereign 3, 4, 9, 16, 17, 70, 228–39 sovereignty 3, 4, 8–10, 13, 23–40, 58, 167, 169, 227, 228–30, 232, 236, 239, 258; food 10, 13, 24, 30–5, 129, 133, 138–9, 272–3; ‘imperial’ 229; state 3, 4 Soviet Union, collapse of 174 ‘special relationship’, US–UK 56 specifismo 36 ‘stakeholder’ model of corporate governance 188 state autonomy 6 state-centric perspective of human history 4 state-driven globalization 149, 160 ‘state of exception’ 230–1 state restructuring 171 state sovereignty 3, 4 state transformation 15, 166–85 states as agents of social change 4–7 statist logic of developmentalism 167 Steiner, Michael 229 ‘strategic diversity’ 29 structural adjustment programmes 127 ‘structural power’ 87, 93–4 subsidiarity 31 Sufi orders 172 ‘supranational right’ 229 Syngenta 272 ‘systemic anarchy’ 3 systemic cycle of accumulation 5, 73 ‘Tatar-American Investments & Finance’ (TAIF) 194, 196, 198, 199 Tatarstan elites 190–4 Tatneft Oil Company 193, 194, 196, 199 territorial 3, 5, 9, 10, 11, 18, 33, 37, 47, 59, 65–7, 74–5, 88, 94, 128, 167–8, 171, 266 territorialization 46, 60 territory 9, 72, 192, 233, 237–8, 256, 272 Thatcher, Margaret 267 Thatcherism 215 ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) to market forces 275 Third Reich 232 ‘Third Worldism’ 214, 215 three pathways to globalization 149 ‘total capitalism’ 7 trade in vaccines 12, 104–22 trade liberalization 7 Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement 12, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111, 118, 119, 120 ‘transnational activists’ 77 transnational capital circuits 48 transnational capitalist class (TCC) 3, 11, 43–62 ‘transnational civil society’ 11 transnational corporations (TNCs) 23, 25, 43, 45, 272 transnational interlockers 55
transnational interlocking 48, 52, 53 transnational interlocks 57 transnational linkers 56 transnational non-governmental organizations 76 transnational organizations 1–2 transnational social movements 76, 78 transnationalization 167, 169–70; of capital 3, 4 trasformismo 128 ‘Triadisation’ 58 Tribunal on Foreign Debt (Brazil) 269 Trilateral Commission 12, 74 trust 176 Tupaj Katari 246 Turkey: accession to the European Union (EU) 15, 166–7, 168, 170, 174, 175, 178, 182, 215; military coup (1980) 211–12, 218; state transformation 166–83 Turkish-Islamic synthesis 167, 179 Turkish Justice and Development Party 15 TUSIAD 175 two modernities 10, 24, 25, 29 ultra-imperialism 59 unitary-rational agency 6 United Nations 12, 69, 74, 227, 254 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) 106, 107, 117, 228 United Nations Commission on Human Rights (CHR) 129 United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) 129, 131
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Page 290 United Nations Convention on Food Sovereignty and Trade in Food and Agriculture 34 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 130, 131 United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) 129, 131 United Nations Human Development Report (UN) 118 United Nations intergovernmental working group (IGWG) 132, 133, 137 United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) 17, 235–8 United Nations Millennium Declaration 106 United Nations Right to Food Unit 130 United Nations Security Council (UNSC) 78, 236, 237 United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food 129, 131 United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition (SCN) 131 United Nations Statistical Division Commodity Trade Statistics Database (COMTRADE) 111 United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights 129 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNUDHR) 106 United States, free trade in 150–1; government debt 94–6 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) 24, 29, 76, 126 universal ontological insecurity 7 universal states 73 upward sweeps 66–70 Uruguay Round 118, 119 US Business Roundtable 152 US Chamber of Commerce 150 US Treasury 12, 87–102; Bretton Woods era 96; Exchange Stabilization Fund 99; post-Bretton Woods era 96–101; Wall Street–Treasury relationship 91–2 USA 2–6, 8, 11, 13, 15, 23, 26, 45, 55, 56, 59, 65, 71, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 87–103, 150–1, 159, 187 USA*NAFTA 150, 153, 155 US–China Strategic Dialogue 100 vaccine trade, global 12, 104–22 varos 218–19 Via Campesina 263, 272, 274, 276 Voluntary Guidelines on the Right to Food 12, 128, 129, 131–4, 136–7 Wall Street–Treasury relationship 91–2 Wall Street/Treasury/IMF complex (WTIC) 89–91 ‘war of movement’ 264 ‘war of position’ 264 ‘war on terror’ 8, 100 Washington Consensus 58, 89, 130, 262 Westphalia, Treaty 69 72 Westphalian 8–10, 24, 27, 34, 35, 39, 229 Westphalian system 9, 39 white- mestizo 244, 246, 255 white-Turk discourses 16–17, 209–25 Workers Party (PT) 262 World Alliance for Nutrition and Human Rights (WANAHR) 129 World Bank 8, 11, 12, 16, 33, 44, 59, 74, 89, 105, 131, 134, 156, 172, 198, 248, 267, 268; World Development Report 107 World Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Food Sovereignty 34 World Economic Forum 12, 47 World Food Conference (1974) 126 World Food Summit (WFS) (1996) 129, 130, 131 World Forum of Fisher Peoples 131 World Health Organization (WHO) 105, 106, 117; Expanded Programme on Immunization 105–6
World Social Forum (WSF) 35, 37, 38, 60, 263, 273, 276 World Trade Organization (WTO) 8, 11, 30, 34, 59, 60, 74, 78, 105, 108–10, 130, 133, 267; Agreement on Agriculture (1995) 127; TRIPS Agreement 12, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111, 118, 119, 120 World War I 59 Yeltsin, Boris 191 YPFB 248 Zapatista Network 60 Zenit 199
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