Ideologies of Globalization

Journal of Political Ideologies (February 2005), 10(1), 11–30

Ideologies of globalization

MANFRED B. STEGER

Department of Politics and Government, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61790-4600, USA

ABSTRACT Taking issue with Michael Freeden’s sceptical assessment that ‘it is far too early to pronounce on globalism’s status as an ideology’, this article seeks to establish that globalism not only represents a set of political ideas and beliefs coherent enough to warrant the status of a new ideology, but also constitutes the dominant ideology of our time against which all of its challengers must define themselves. After drawing careful analytic distinctions between often-conflated terms involving the concept of ‘globalization’, the main section of this article relies on three criteria suggested by Freeden to assess the ideological maturity of globalism. It is proposed that its conceptual structure be disaggregated not merely into core, adjacent, and peripheral concepts, but—perhaps more dynamically— into a set of six core claims that play crucial semantic and political roles. With regard to semantics, this article argues that these claims absorb and rearrange bits and pieces of several established ideologies and integrate them with new concepts into a hybrid meaning structure of genuine novelty. Their political role consists chiefly in preserving and enhancing asymmetrical power structures that benefit particular social groups. The article ends with a short experimental ‘thought exercise’ designed to bring the insights gained from my critical analysis of globalism to bear on the necessary project of reclassifying conventional political belief systems.

Introduction

In a recent article on shifting ideological boundaries, Michael Freeden argues convincingly that the ‘current fragmentation of established ideologies and the revived uncertainty concerning whether ideology still exists’ have highlighted the difficulty of capturing the changing morphologies of political belief systems. In order to address this problem, the British political theorist proposes two fertile lines of inquiry: first, to question ‘the implicit holism in the notion of an ideological family’, and, second, to ‘query the dominant conventions of classifying and categorizing ideologies, with a view to establishing the degree to which they constitute useful clusters’.1 Examining the first line of inquiry more closely, Freeden briefly discusses ‘globalism’ as a possible ‘holistic contender’,

ISSN 1356-9317 print; ISSN 1469-9613 online/05/010011–20 q 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1356931052000310263

MANFRED B. STEGER

but quickly retreats to the sceptical view that ‘it is far too early to pronounce on globalism’s status as an ideology’.2 Pursuing the second line of inquiry, Freeden recommends imaginative ‘thought-exercises’ with the aim of providing ‘insight into some organizing feature according to which ideologies can be reclassified’.3 Indeed, he ends his editorial with an experimental reclassification design based on select features of human behaviour such as pride, fear, gregariousness, complacency, vulnerability, insubordination, and self-depreciation.

Freeden’s article possesses a number of virtues. First, it wisely reminds students of ideology that political belief systems are ephemeral constellations whose shifting morphologies demand periodic scholarly reassessments. Second, it challenges twenty-first century analysts of ideology to reappraise antiquated popular and conventional classification systems that might obscure more than they illuminate. This means that scholars must be willing to entertain the possibility of wholesale ideological transformations, and thus be prepared to rethink, revise, and perhaps replace outdated conceptual morphologies that no longer capture the dynamics of actually existing political belief systems. Third, it displays considerable intellectual imagination by calling for experimental thought-exercises designed to redraw old ideological boundaries and reclassify ideological systems.4

While sharing Freeden’s interest in changing ideological systems as well as sympathizing with his two proposed methodological lines of inquiry, I nonetheless must resist his brief assessment of globalism. Contra Freeden, this article maintains that it is not too early to pronounce on globalism’s status as an ideology. In fact, it will seek to establish that globalism not only represents a set of political ideas and beliefs coherent enough to warrant the status of a new ideology, but also constitutes the dominant political belief system of our time against which all of its challengers must define themselves.

I open my arguments by drawing careful analytic distinctions between often- conflated terms involving the concept of ‘globalization’. Following Freeden’s first line of inquiry, the main section of this article examines globalism’s morphology, with special consideration given to its ideological status. However, I propose to disaggregate globalism not merely into core, adjacent, and peripheral concepts, but—perhaps more dynamically—into a set of six core claims that play crucial semantic and political roles. With regard to semantics, I argue that these claims absorb and rearrange bits and pieces of several established ideologies and integrate them with new concepts into a hybrid meaning structure of genuine novelty. Their political role consists chiefly in preserving and enhancing asymmetrical power structures that benefit particular social groups. Merely touching upon Freeden’s second line of inquiry, I end with a short experimental ‘thought exercise’ designed to bring the insights gained from my critical analysis of globalism to bear on the necessary project of reclassifying conventional political belief systems.

I. Globalization: process, condition, or ideology?

As Michael Freeden points out in his editorial, the term ‘globalization’ denotes not an ideology, but ‘a range of processes nesting under one rather unwieldy epithet’.5

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In part, its conceptual unwieldiness arises from the fact that global flows occur in different physical and mental dimensions, usefully divided by Arjun Appadurai into ‘ethnoscapes’, technoscapes’, ‘mediascapes’, ‘finanscapes’, and ‘ideos- capes’.6 Moreover, as I noted elsewhere, since its earliest appearance in the 1960s, ‘globalization’ has been used in both popular and academic literature to describe a wide variety of phenomena, including a process, a condition, a system, a force, and an age.7 Given the different meanings of these concepts, their indiscriminate usage invites confusion. A sloppy conflation of process and condition, for instance, encourages circular definitions that possess little explanatory power. For example, the often-repeated truism that globalization (the process) leads to more globalization (the condition) does not allow us to draw meaningful distinctions between causes and effects.

I use the term globality to signify a future social condition characterized by thick economic, political, and cultural interconnections and global flows that make currently existing political borders and economic barriers irrelevant. Yet, it should not be assumed that ‘globality’ refers to a determinate endpoint that precludes any further development. Rather, this concept points to a particular social condition destined to give way to new, qualitatively distinct, constellations. For example, it is conceivable that globality could eventually be transformed into something we might call ‘planetarity’—a new social condition brought about by the successful colonization of our solar system. Moreover, we could easily imagine different social manifestations of globality: one based primarily on values of individualism and competition, as well as on an economic system of private property, another embodying more communal and cooperative social arrangements, including less capitalistic economic relations. These future alternatives expose the fundamen- tally indeterminate character of globalization.

In my view, the term globalization should be confined to a set of complex, sometimes contradictory, social processes that are changing our current social condition based on the modern system of independent nation-states. Indeed, most scholars of globalization have defined their key concept along those lines as a multidimensional set of social processes that create, multiply, stretch, and intensify worldwide social interdependencies and exchanges while at the same time fostering in people a growing awareness of deepening connections between the local and the distant.8 At its core, then, globalization is about the unprecedented compression of time and space as a result of political, economic, and cultural change, as well as powerful technological innovations.9 The slogan ‘globalization is happening’ implies that we are moving from the modern socio-political order of nation states that gradually emerged in the seventeenth century toward the ‘postmodern’ condition of globality. Indeed, like ‘modernization’ and other verbal nouns that end in the suffix ‘-ization’, the term ‘globalization’ suggests a dynamic best captured by the notion of ‘development’ or ‘unfolding’ along discernable patterns. Such unfolding may occur quickly or slowly, but it always corresponds to the idea of change, and, therefore, denotes the alteration of present conditions. This crucial focus on change explains why globalization scholars pay particular attention to shifting temporal modes and the reconfiguration of social and geographical space.

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While ‘globalization’ has, indeed, remained a rather ‘unwieldy epithet’ in the academic world, it was successfully decontested in public discourse during the late 1980s and 1990s.10 With the collapse of Soviet-style communism in Eastern Europe, loosely affiliated power elites concentrated in the global North stepped up their ongoing efforts to sell their version of ‘globalization’ to the public.11 Seeking to make a persuasive case for a new global order based on their beliefs and values, these ‘globalists’ constructed and disseminated narratives and images that associated the concept of globalization with inexorably expanding ‘free’ markets. Their efforts at decontesting the master concept ‘globalization’ went hand in hand with a rising political belief system I have referred to as globalism. It endows the buzzword ‘globalization’ with norms and values that seek to cultivate consumerist identities in billions of people around world.12

By the mid-1990s, large segments of the population in the both the global North and South had accepted globalism’s core claims, thus internalizing large parts of an overarching normative framework that advocated the deregulation of markets, the liberalization of trade, the privatization of state-owned enterprises, the dissemination of ‘American values,’ and, after 9-11, the support of the global War on Terror under US leadership. A comprehensive University of Maryland poll conducted in 2004 in 19 countries on four continents found that even after five years of massive, worldwide demonstrations against ‘corporate globalization’, 55 percent of the respondents believed that globalization was positive for them and their families, while only 25 percent said that it was negative (20 percent were unsure). Surprisingly, popular support for globalization was especially high in poor countries of the global South.13 Representing what Pierre Bourdieu and Zygmunt Bauman call a ‘strong discourse’, globalism has proven to be difficult to resist because it relies on the power of ‘common sense’, that is, the widespread belief that its prescriptive program ultimately derives from an objective description of the ‘real world’.14 Moreover, as Judith Butler notes, the constant repetition, public recitation, and ‘performance’ of an ideology’s core claims tend to have the capacity to produce what they name.15

Having drawn the necessary analytic distinctions among three key terms involving ‘globalization’, we can now turn to the morphological analysis of globalism with a critical eye toward its ideological status.

II. Six core claims of globalism

When does a rising political belief system warrant the holistic designation ‘ideological family’? What criteria should be used and what characteristics must pertain to upgrade a conceptual ‘module’ or ‘segment’—contained in a broader ‘host ideology’ and thus limited in its ambition and scope—to the status of ‘ideology’?16 Political and social theorists frequently cite blurred ideological boundaries, ideational dependencies, historical continuities, unavoidable concep- tual overlap between two or more ideologies, and methodological differences in the study of ideologies17 as the main reasons for the considerable difficulties involved in determining the precise stage of emerging political belief systems.

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At the same time, however, researchers have scarcely hesitated to put forward a host of criteria and characteristics for separating ‘thin’ ideational clusters from ‘thick’ ideologies. Terry Eagleton, for example, insists that full-blown thought systems typically contain ‘six meanings’; Goran Therborn (influenced by Louis Althusser) defines them in terms of ‘three fundamental modes of interpellation’; Teun van Dijk emphasizes their comprehensive cognitive functions; and John Thompson associates mature ideologies with ‘five operational modes’.18

Committed to a philosophical-conceptual approach to the study of ideology, Michael Freeden suggest that mature ideologies display unique features anchored in distinct conceptual morphologies. Resembling well-furnished rooms containing various pieces of furniture uniquely arranged in proximity to each other, conceptual units ‘pattern’ an ideology and thus permit its categorization.19 Held together by conceptual cores sufficiently fertile to bear the weight of adjacent and peripheral concepts, mature thought systems exhibit a full spectrum of responses to issues (as understood at the time and place) that political systems need to address. In addition, their morphologies must be broad enough to encompass the spread of conceptual decontestations characteristic of mature ideological families.20 Thus, Freeden provides researchers with three useful criteria for determining the status of a particular political belief system: first, its degree of uniqueness and morphological sophistication; second, its context-bound responsiveness to a broad range of political issues; and, third, its ability to produce effective conceptual decontestation chains. Scoring high on these criteria, a conceptual cluster might earn the designation ‘ideology’; ranking low on one or all of them, however, it would probably be classified as a mere ‘module’. I will use Freeden’s three criteria in my own assessment of globalism.

With regard to the third criterion, it is important to note that Freeden considers ‘decontestation’ a crucial process in the formation of thought systems because it specifies the meanings of the core concepts by arranging them in a ‘pattern’ or ‘configuration’ that links them with other concepts in a meaningful way. As he puts it:

This configuration teases out specific conceptions of each of the concepts involved. Its precision of meaning, while never conclusive, is gained by the specific and constricted interaction among the concepts it employs. An ideology attempts to end the inevitable contention over concepts by decontesting them, by removing their meanings from contest. ‘This is what justice means’, announces one ideology, and ‘that is what democracy entails’. By trying to convince us that they are right and that they speak the truth, ideologies become devices for coping with the interdeterminacy of meaning . . .. That is their semantic role. [But] [i]deologies also need to decontest the concepts they use because they are instruments for fashioning collective decisions. That is their political role.21

Effective decontestation structures can thus be pictured as simple semantic chains whose conceptual links convey authoritative meanings that facilitate collective decision-making. Their interconnected semantic and political roles suggest that control over political language translates directly into political power, that is, the power of deciding ‘who gets what, when, and how’.22 Assembled and nurtured by

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specific groups in society, these semantic chains—I refer to them as ‘ideological claims’—endow thought systems with specific meanings that benefit particular social groups. Successful conceptual clusters manage to thicken in their ideational density and sophistication by building effective decontestation chains. Enhancing their ability to respond to a wide array of political questions, they appeal to broader segments of the population. As a result, the political potency of a rising thought system—and that of various groups associated with its claims—is vastly enhanced.

Given the crucial importance of mass appeal for the ascendancy of an ideational cluster, it is not primarily in the academic arena, but in the public realm that its core claims acquire political gravity and vie for implementation as ‘public policy’. The greater the ability of a rising thought system to produce appealing decontestation chains, the more developed or ‘thicker’ it becomes. In fact, as the early history of socialist thought bears out, emerging clusters are perfectly capable of achieving ideational dominance or ‘hegemony’ in a relatively short period of time. Once ideologies reach maturity, they speak to their audiences in convincing stories and cajoling narratives. Their core claims confer meaning, persuade, praise, condemn, delegitimate, distinguish ‘truths’ from ‘falsehoods’ and separate the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’. They enable people to act politically, while at the same time constraining their actions by binding them to a circumscribed worldview.

In what follows below, I identify six core claims of globalism, that is, six particular ways in which globalists decontest their master concept ‘globalization’. I will also offer a critical analysis of the political role of these authoritative semantic chains as they absorb, alter, and rearrange ideas imported from established ideologies. But such reconceptualization and absorption of conventional ideational elements should not be confused with ideological immaturity. Rather, as Freeden notes, holistic contenders commonly employ such methods in their attempt to escape existing logical and cultural constraints and thus transform the conventional ideological landscape.23 Ultimately, I hope to show that the morphological uniqueness and sophistication, political responsive- ness, and strong decontestation capabilities of globalism’s core claims leave no doubt as to its mature ideological status.

Claim one: globalization is about the liberalization and global integration of markets

Examining the utterances, speeches, and writings of influential advocates of globalism, my previous work on globalism suggests that ‘globalization’ and ‘market’ constitute its twin core concepts.24 ‘Market’, of course, also plays an important role in two established ideologies: the libertarian variant of liberalism (often referred to as ‘neoliberalism’) inspired by the ideas of Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, and the late-twentieth century brand of Anglo-American conservatism (‘neoconservatism’) associated with the views of Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan. While globalism borrows heavily from both ideologies, it would be a mistake to reduce it to either.

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Moreover, neoliberalism and neoconservativism should not be seen as ideological opposites for their similarities sometimes outweigh their differences. In general, neoconservatives agree with neoliberals on the importance of ‘free markets’ and ‘free trade’, but they are much more inclined than the latter to combine their hands-off attitude toward big business with intrusive government action for the regulation of the ordinary citizenry in the name of public security and traditional values. In foreign affairs, neoconservatives advocate a more assertive and expansive use of both economic and military power, although they often embrace the liberal ideal of promoting ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ around the world.25

What gives globalism its uniqueness and morphological sophistication, then, is not merely its ability to absorb and rearrange ideas from conventional ideologies. Three additional factors must be taken into consideration: the centrality of the concept ‘globalization’ (no other ideology is centered on the notion of shrinking time and space); the conceptual shift of ‘market’ from its adjacent or peripheral location in liberalism and conservatism to globalism’s conceptual core; and the formation of six highly original ideological claims (decontestation chains).

Embracing the classical liberal idea of the self-regulating market, Claim One seeks to establish beyond dispute ‘what globalization means’, that is, to offer an authoritative definition of globalization designed for broad public consumption. It does so by interlocking its two core concepts and then linking them to the adjacent ideas of ‘liberty’ and ‘integration’. The following two examples illustrate this process.26 The first is a passage taken from a leading Business Week article published in the late 1990s: ‘Globalization is about the triumph of markets over governments. Both proponents and opponents of globalization agree that the driving force today is markets, which are suborning the role of government’.27 The same claim is made over and over again in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman’s best-selling book on globalization. Indeed, a number of commentators have argued that Friedman’s writings provide the ‘official narrative of globalization’ in the United States today.28 At one point in his narrative, the award-winning New York Times columnist insists that everybody ought to accept the following ‘truth’ about globalization: ‘The driving idea behind globalization is free-market capitalism—the more you let market forces rule and the more you open your economy to free trade and competition, the more efficient your economy will be. Globalization means the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world’.29

By forging a close semantic link between ‘globalization’ and ‘market’, globalists like Friedman seek to create the impression that globalization represents primarily an economic phenomenon. Thus, unburdened from the complexity of its additional non-economic dimensions, ‘globalization’ acquires the necessary simplicity and focus to convey its central normative message contained in further semantic connections to the adjacent concepts ‘liberalization’ and ‘integration’: the ‘liberation’ of markets from state control is a good thing. As Joan Spiro, US Undersecretary of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs in the Clinton administration, put it, ‘One role [of government] is to get out of the way—to remove barriers to the free flow of goods, services, and capital’.30

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In fact, globalists often condemn even moderate democratic control of markets as harmful ‘interference’—a nefarious ‘caging’ of markets, which deprives people of their salutory effects.

Conversely, the notion of ‘integrating markets’ is draped in the mantle of all- embracing liberty, hence the frequent formulation of Claim One as a global imperative anchored in universal reason. Thus, decontested as an economic project advancing human freedom in general, globalization must be applied to all countries, regardless of the political and cultural preferences expressed by local citizens. As President George W. Bush notes in a key document of his administration, ‘Policies that further strengthen market incentives and market institutions are relevant for all economies—industrialized countries, emerging markets, and the developing world’.31

Upon deeper reflection, however, one might wonder how such ideological efforts insisting on a single economic strategy for all countries can be made compatible with a process alleged to contribute to the spread of freedom, choice, and openness in the world.

Finally, the semantic chain ‘globalization-market-liberty-integration’ serves to solidify as ‘fact’ what is actually a contingent political initiative. It persuades large segments of the public that its account of globalization represents an objective diagnosis of the ‘real world’ rather than a claim contributing to the emergence of the very conditions it purports to describe. To be sure, globalists offer plenty of ‘empirical evidence’ for the liberalization of markets. But does the spread of market principles happen because there exists a natural connection between globalization and the expansion of markets? Or does it occur because the globalists’ control of language has resulted in enhancing their political power to shape the world largely according to their ideological claim?

Claim two: globalization is inevitable and irreversible

The second mode of decontesting ‘globalization’ turns on the adjacent concept ‘historical inevitability’. In the last decade, the public discourse on globalization describing its projected path was saturated with adjectives like ‘irresistable’, ‘inevitable’, ‘inexorable’, and ‘irreversible’. For example, in a major speech on U.S. foreign policy, President Bill Clinton told his audience: ‘Today we must embrace the inexorable logic of globalization .... Globalization is irreversible. Protectionism will only make things worse’.32 Frederick W. Smith, chairman and CEO of FedEx Corporation, proclaimed that ‘Globalization is inevitable and inexorable and it is accelerating .... Globalization is happening, it’s going to happen. It does not matter whether you like it or not, it’s happening, it’s going to happen’.33 Social elites in the global South often faithfully echoed the determinist language of globalism. For example, Manuel Villar, the Philippines Speaker of the House of Representatives, insisted that, ‘We cannot simply wish away the process of globalization. It is a reality of a modern world. The process is irreversible’.34

At first glance, the attempt to decontest globalization in such determinist terms seems to be a poor strategy for a rising thought system that borrows heavily from

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neoliberalism and neoconservatism. After all, throughout the twentieth century, both liberals and conservatives criticized Marxist socialism for its devaluation of human agency and its contempt for individualism. In particular, leading neoliberals like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman attacked the Marxist notion of history as a teleological process in accordance with ‘inexorable laws’.35 And yet, as sociologist Ulrich Beck points out, ‘In a way, neoliberal globalism thus resembles its archenemy: Marxism. It is the rebirth of Marxism as a management ideology’.36

How does one explain globalism’s import of an adjacent concept that causes serious ideological contradiction? Let me suggest three possible reasons. First, as Michael Freeden points out, philosophical inconsistencies and semantic tensions are the result of unavoidable logical and cultural constraints, and, therefore, are bound to creep into any political belief system.37 Unable to bypass these contradictions, all ideologies—especially fledgling ones—must develop effective mechanisms to cope with them.

Second, the tension between determinism and conservative ideology may be less severe than it appears at first sight. After all, the belief in extra-human, ‘natural’ origins of social order and the related idea of ‘organic change’ independent of human will constitute two core concepts of conservatism.38 Theologian Harvey Cox argues lucidly that the globalist claim of inevitability in market terms bears a striking resemblance to conservative and religious narratives. Christian stories of human origins and the fall from grace, as well as doctrines of original sin and redemption often find their contemporary expression in globalist discourses about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of the global free market. According to Cox, both narratives are sustained by a belief in an inner meaning of human history determined by the unalterable will of a transcendental force. Endowing it with the divine attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, globalists assign to ‘The Market’ a ‘compre- hensive wisdom that in the past only the gods have known’.39 At the same time, however, it must be conceded that Claim Two diverges from conservative ideology by asserting that the inexorable trajectory of ‘providence’ is, in principle, accessible to human reason.

Third, there is a political reason why globalism puts a fundamental illiberal idea in close proximity to its core concepts. Regardless of how the early twentieth century leaders of German Social Democracy really felt about the alleged ‘inevitability’ of socialism, every single one of them acknowledged the tremendous political potency of this idea. August Bebel, the legendary leader of the party, believed that the belief in socialist inevitability was a key element in organizating the German proletariat.40 Likewise, presenting globalization as some sort of natural force, like the weather or gravity, makes it easier for globalists to convince people that they have to adapt to the discipline of the market if they are to survive and prosper. Thus, suppressing alternative discourses about globalization, Claim Two undermines the formation of political dissent. Public policy based on globalist ideas appears to be above politics; leaders simply carry out what is

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ordained by nature. Since the emergence of a world based on the primacy of market values reflects the dictates of history, resistance would be unnatural, irrational, and dangerous. No doubt, the dangerous gamble of globalists to align seemingly incompatible concepts drawn from conventional ideologies around their key concept, ‘globalization’, has the potential to produce an immense political payoff.

In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, however, Claim Two came under sustained criticism by commentators who read the al-Qaeda attacks as exposing the ‘dark side of globalization’. Some proclaimed the imminent ‘collapse of globalism’, worrying that the terrorist attacks would usher in a new age of cultural particularism and economic protectionism.41 Noted neoliberal economists like Robert J. Samuelson argued that previous globalization processes had been stopped by similar cataclysmic events like the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.42 And yet, the unfolding War on Terror allowed for the semantic intermingling of military and economic inevitablity. For example, Christopher Shays, Republican Congressman from Connecticut and Chair of the House Subcommittee on National Security, argued that the ‘toxic zeal’ of the terrorists would eventually be defeated by the combination of military and market forces— ‘the relentless inevitability of free peoples pursuing their own enlightened self- interest in common cause’.43 Thus, globalism’s ability to adapt to the new realities of the post-9-11 world gives ample proof of its responsiveness to a broad range of political issues—Freeden’s second criterion for ideological maturity.

Claim three: nobody is in charge of globalization

The third mode of decontesting globalization hinges on the classical liberal concept of the ‘self-regulating market’. The semantic link between ‘globalization- market’ and the adjacent idea of ‘leaderlessness’ is simple: if the undisturbed workings of the market indeed preordain a certain course of history, then globalization does not reflect the arbitrary agenda of a particular social class or group. In other words, globalists are not ‘in charge’ in the sense of imposing their own political agenda on people. Rather, they merely carry out the unalterable imperatives of a transcendental force much larger than narrow partisan interests.

For example, Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, emphasized that, ‘The great beauty of globalization is that no one is in control. The great beauty of globalization is that it is not controlled by any individual, any government, any institution’.44 Likewise, Thomas Friedman alleged that ‘the most basic truth about globalization is this: No one is in charge . . .. We all want to believe that someone is in charge and responsible. But the global marketplace today is an Electronic Herd of often anonymous stock, bond and currency traders and multinational investors, connected by screens and networks’.45

After 9-11, however, it became increasingly difficult for globalists to maintain this claim. While a number of corporate leaders still reflexively referred to the ‘self-regulating market’, it became obvious that the survival of globalization— conceived as the liberalization and global integration of markets—depended on

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the political leadership of the United States—‘that “indispensable nation”— wielding its power’.46 Having concealed their country’s imperial ambitions behind the soft language of market globalism during the 1990s, many American globalists took off their gloves after 9-11, exposing the iron fists of an irate giant. The attacks changed the terms of the dominant discourse in that it enabled certain groups within the globalist camp to put their geopolitical ambitions explicitly before a public shocked by ‘terrorism’. Indeed, their open advocacy of American global leadership spawned raging debates over whether or not the United States actually constituted an ‘empire’.47

However, the replacement of Claim Three with a more aggressive pronouncement of global Anglo-American leadership should not be read a sign of globalism’s ideological weakness. Rather, it reflected its ideational flexibility and growing ability to respond to a new set of political issues. Indeed, like all full- fledged political belief systems, globalism was increasingly bearing the marks of an ‘ideational family’ broad enough to contain the more economistic variant of the 1990s as well as its more militaristic post-9-11 manifestation.

Claim four: globalization benefits everyone (. . . in the long run)

This decontestation chain lies at the heart of globalism because it provides an affirmative answer to the crucial normative question of whether globalization represents a ‘good’ phenomenon. The adjacent idea of ‘benefits for everyone’ is usually unpacked in material terms such as ‘economic growth’ and ‘prosperity’. However, when linked to globalism’s peripheral concept, ‘progress’, the idea of ‘benefits for everyone’ taps not only into liberalism’s progressive worldview, but also draws on the powerful socialist vision of establishing an economic paradise on earth—albeit in the capitalist form of a worldwide consumerist utopia. Thus, Claim Four represents another bold example of combining elements from seemingly incompatible ideologies under the master concept ‘globalization’.

At the 1996 G-7 Summit, the heads of state and government of the world’s seven most powerful industrialized nations issued a joint communique ́ that exemplifies the principal meanings of globalization conveyed in Charge Four:

Economic growth and progress in today’s interdependent world is bound up with the process of globalization. Globalization provides great opportunities for the future, not only for our countries, but for all others too. Its many positive aspects include an unprecedented expansion of investment and trade; the opening up to international trade of the world’s most populous regions and opportunities for more developing countries to improve their standards of living; the increasingly rapid dissemination of information, technological innovation, and the proliferation of skilled jobs. These characteristics of globalization have led to a considerable expansion of wealth and prosperity in the world. Hence we are convinced that the process of globalization is a source of hope for the future.48

In addition, globalists often seek to cement their decontestation of globalization as ‘benefits for everyone’ by coopting the powerful language of ‘science’ which claims to separate ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’ in a ‘neutral’ fashion, that is, solely on

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the basis of ‘hard evidence’. And yet, the two most comprehensive empirical assessments of changes in global income distributions in the last decade have arrived at sharply conflicting results.49 Even those globalists who consider the possibility of unequal global distribution patterns nonetheless insist that the market itself will eventually correct these ‘irregularities’. As John Meehan, chairman of the US Public Securities Association, puts it, ‘episodic dislocations’ such as mass unemployment and reduced social services might be ‘necessary in the short run’, but, ‘in the long run’, they will give way to ‘quantum leaps in productivity’.50

The al-Qaeda attacks of September 11 only seem to have added to the fervor with which globalists speak of the supposed benefits accruing from the liberalization and global integration of markets. Defending his view that the benefits of globalization must be defended at all costs, President Bush asserted that, ‘Free trade and free markets have proven their ability to lift whole societies out of poverty—so the United States will work with individual nations, entire regions, and the entire global trading community to build a world that trades in freedom and and therefore grows in prosperity’.51

Claim five: globalization furthers the spread of democracy in the world

The fifth decontestation chain links ‘globalization’ and ‘market’ to the adjacent concept of ‘democracy’, which also plays a significant role in liberalism, conservatism, and socialism. Globalists typically decontest ‘democracy’ through its proximity to ‘market’ and the making of economic choices—a theme developed through the 1980s in the peculiar variant of conservatism Freeden calls ‘Thatcherism’.52 Indeed, a careful discourse analysis of relevant texts reveals that globalists tend to treat freedom, free markets, free trade and democracy as synonymous terms.53

Francis Fukuyama, for example, asserts that there exists a ‘clear correlation’ between a country’s level of economic development and successful democracy. While globalization and capital development do not automatically produce democracies, ‘the level of economic development resulting from globalization is conducive to the creation of complex civil societies with a powerful middle class. It is this class and societal structure that facilitates democracy’.54 Praising Eastern Europe’s economic transition towards capitalism, then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton told her Polish audience that the emergence of new businesses and shopping centers in former communist countries should be seen as the ‘backbone of democracy’.55

Fukuyama and Clinton agree that the globalization process strengthens the existing affinity between democracy and the free market. However, their neoliberal argument hinges on a limited definition of democracy that emphasizes formal procedures such as voting at the expense of the direct participation of broad majorities in political and economic decision-making. This ‘thin’ definition of democracy is part of what William I. Robinson has identified as the Anglo- American ideological project of ‘promoting polyarchy’ in the developing world.

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For Robinson, the thin concept of polyarchy differs from the thicker concept of ‘popular democracy’ in that the latter posits democracy as both a process and a means to an end—a tool for devolving political and economic power from the hands of elite minorities to the masses. Polyarchy, on the other hand, represents an elitist and regimented model of ‘low intensity’ or ‘formal’ market democracy. Polyarchies not only limit democratic participation to voting in elections, but also require that those elected be insulated from popular pressures, so that they may ‘govern effectively’.56

This semantic focus on the act of voting—in which equality prevails only in the formal sense—helps to obscure the conditions of inequality reflected in existing asymmetrical power relations in society. Formal elections provide the important function of legitimating the rule of dominant elites, thus making it more difficult for popular movements to challenge the rule of elites. The claim that globalization furthers the spread of democracy in the world is thus largely based on a narrow, formal-procedural understanding of ‘democracy’. The promotion of polyarchy allows globalists to advance their project of economic restructuring in a language that ostensibly supports the ‘democratization’ of the world.

After 9-11, Claim Five became firmly linked to the Bush administration’s neoconservative security agenda. The President did not mince words in ‘Securing Freedom’s Triumph’—his New York Times op-ed piece a year after the attacks: ‘As we preserve the peace, America also has an opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom and progress to nations that lack them. We seek a peace where repression, resentment and povery are replaced with the hope of democracy, development, free markets and free trade’.57 Fourteen months later, he reaffirmed his unwavering ‘commitment to the global expansion of democracy’ as the ‘Third Pillar’ of the United States’ ‘peace and security vision for the world’.58

This idea of securing global economic integration through an American-led military drive for ‘democratization’ around the globe became especially prominent in the corporate scramble for Iraq following the official ‘end of major combat operations’ on May 1, 2003. Already during the first days of the Iraq war, in late March 2003, globalists had suggested that Iraq be subjected to a radical economic treatment. For example, Robert Mcfarlane, former National Security Adviser to President Reagan and current chairman of the Washington, DC-based corporation Energy and Communication Solutions, LLC, together with Michael Bleyzer, CEO and president of SigmaBleyzer, an international equity fund management com- pany, co-authored a prominent op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal bearing the suggestive title, ‘Taking Iraq Private’. Calling on ‘major US corporations, jointly with other multinationals’, to ‘lead the effort to create capital-friendly environ- ments in developing countries’, the globalist duo praised the military operations in Iraq as an indispensible tool in establishing the ‘political, economic and social stability’ necessary for ‘building the basic institutions that make democracy possible’. In their conclusion, the two men reminded their readers that ‘the US must demonstrate that it is not only the most powerful military power on the planet, but also the foremost market economy in the world, capable of leading a greater number of developing nations to a more posperous and stable future’.59

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In what amounted to another clear demonstration of their political resonance, these globalist ideas translated almost immediately into collective decisions. For example, Ambassador Paul Bremer, the US head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, pressured the Governing Council to let Order 39 take effect, permitting complete foreign ownership of Iraqi companies and assets (apart from natural resources) that had hitherto been publicly owned, total remittance of profits, and some of the lowest corporate tax rates in the world.60 Likewise, in his speeches at economic conferences on the Middle East attended by hundreds of American and Arab–American business executives, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the development of a US–Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) within a decade. Linked to the adminstration’s 2002 ‘US – Middle East Partnership Initiative’, the new project also included programs to send Arab college students to work as interns in American corporations.61

Claim six: globalization requires a global war on terror

Like the previous claims, this final decontestation chain attests to globalism’s political responsiveness and conceptual flexibility. It combines the idea of economic globalization with openly militaristic and nationalistic ideas associated with the American-led global War on Terror. At the same time, however, Claim 6 possesses a somewhat paradoxical character. If global terror were no longer a major issue, it would disappear without causing globalism to collapse. In that case, it seems that Claim 6 is a contingent one and thus less important than the previous five. On the other hand, if the global War on Terror turns out to be a lengthy and intense engagement—as suggested by the current American political leadership— then it would become actually more important over time. No wonder, then, that some commentators who favor the second option have claimed to detect a dangerous turn of globalism toward fascism.62

To be sure, throughout the 1990s there had been sinister warnings on the part of some cultural theorists that globalization was actually ‘Americanization’ or ‘McDonaldization’ in universalist disguise.63 But the perceived US unilaterism and belligerence in the wake of 9-11 appeared to be a much more serious manifestation of the same phenomenon. In fact, the problem of globalism’s turn toward nationalism was as much conceptual as political. After all, decontesting globalization through its proximity to the idea of a necessary ‘global War on Terror’ created serious logical contradictions. First, the globalists’ reliance on the coercive powers of the state to secure their project undermined both the idea of the ‘self-regulating market’ and the claim of historical ‘inevitability’. Second, the belligerent vision of enforcing ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ at gunpoint conflicted with the common understanding of liberty as absence of coercion. Third, the Anglo-American nationalist undertones emanating from the ‘War on Terror’ seemed to contradict the cosmopolitan, universal spirit associated with the concept ‘globalization’. In short, Claim 6 was running a considerable risk of causing irreparable damage to the conceptual coherence of globalism.

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Instructive examples of the logical inconsistencies inherent in Claim 6 abound. Take Thomas Barnett’s article ‘The Pentagon’s New Map’, first published in the March 2003 issue of Esquire magazine, and subsequently expanded into a bestselling book bearing the same title.64 Barnett, a professor of military strategy at the US Naval War College, also serves as the assistant for strategic futures in the Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformations. In this capacity, he has been giving his briefings regularly to the US Secretary of Defense, the intelligence community, and to high-ranking officers from all branches of the US armed forces.

In his much-debated article that later turned into a best-selling book, Barnett argues that the Iraq War marks ‘the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization’. He breaks the globe down into three distinct regions. The first is characterized by ‘globalization thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security’, yielding nations featuring stable democratic governments, transparency, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than by murder (North America, most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and a small part of Latin America). He calls these regions of the world the ‘Functioning Core’ or ‘Core’. Conversely, areas where ‘globalization is thinning or just plain absent’ constitute a region plagued by repressive political regimes, regulated markets, mass murder, and widespread poverty and disease (the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, China, the Middle East, and much of Southeast Asia). The breeding ground of ‘global terrorists’, Barnett refers to this region as the ‘Non-Integrating Gap’, or ‘Gap’. Between these two regions, one finds ‘seam states’ that ‘lie along the Gap’s bloody boundaries’ (Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia).

For Barnett, the importance of 9-11 is that the attacks forced the United States and its allies to make a long-term military commitment to ‘deal with the entire Gap as a strategic threat environment’. In other words, the desired spread of globalization requires a War on Terror. Its three main objectives are: ‘(1) Increase the Core’s immune system capabilities for responding to September 11-like system perturbations; (2) Work on the seam states to firewall the Core from the Gap’s worst exports, such as terror, drugs, and pandemics; and, most important, (3) Shrink the Gap . . .. The Middle East is the perfect place to start’. The third point is particularly important, because ‘the real battlegrounds in the global war on terrorism are still over there’. As Barnett emphasizes, ‘We ignore the Gap’s existence at our own peril, because it will not go away until we as a nation respond to the challenge of making globalization truly global’.65

This celebration of globalization in American nationalist terminology invites the kind of conceptual contradiction that may eventually prove to be fatal to globalism. On the other hand, if the political issues of our time indeed call for an ideology that boldly arranges seemingly conflicting pieces of various conventional political belief systems around the novel concept ‘globalization’, then globalism might actually achieve a level of ideological dominance unprecedented in his- tory. While Islamism, nationalist populism, new forms of global egalitarianism,

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and other competing thought systems appear to make the prospect of globalism’s undisputed hegemony highly unlikely, their unrelenting focus on countering the claims of their ideological nemesis highlights globalism’s semantic and political power.

Conclusion: reclassifying ideologies

Relying on Michael Freeden’s three criteria for assessing the maturity of political belief systems, this article has argued that globalism deserves to be recognized as a separate ideological family. I have come to this conclusion by subjecting its six core claims to a critical morphological analysis, which attests to globalism’s conceptual sophistication and its ability to respond to a broad range of political issues. Absorbing miscellaneous ideational elements of established ideologies and realigning them around its core concepts ‘globalization’ and ‘market,’ this new thought system sustains asymmetrical power structures in society that benefit a loose, heterogeneous, and often disagreeing global alliance of those political and economic forces I have referred to as ‘globalists’. Taking advantage of the rapid descent of conventional ideologies largely caused by such cataclysmic events as the information revolution, the collapse of Soviet-style communism, the 9-11 attacks, and the ensuing US-led global War on Terror, globalism managed to achieve discursive dominance in less than two decades.

To be sure, my assessment of globalism’s ideological status requires further scholarly collaboration. First, as Freeden points out, whether an ideational cluster should be categorized as ‘an ideological pretender or a new ideological family is ultimately an empirical question that must be resolved by the manner in which its discourse is institutionalized and broadly adopted, and the degree to which it can provide satisfying answers to basic political questions’.66 My previous inquiries into the ideological dimension of globalization have begun to explore these matters, but much more work needs to be done. In particular, I believe that the study of globalism would benefit from creative interdisciplinary research designs and methodologies that combine both qualitative and quantitative approaches.

Second, the evaluation of globalism’s stature raises broader methodological and political issues linked to the analysis of any ideology. Assessments of ideologies always take place in a specific ideological context, meaning that the activity of the researcher does not occur in a political vacuum. Thus, I would argue, contra Freeden, that morphological analysis can hardly be separated from recommending political action.67 Given their inescapable normative involvement in the political context of their time, students of ideology bear an ethical responsibility to suggest political action against what they identify as oppressive practices tied to particular ideational systems. As Alan Scott emphasizes, a separation of analytic concerns from political matters harbours the danger that the ethos of scientific detachment and value neutrality might unintentionally serve politically motivated attempts to provide ‘people with persuasive arguments to the effect that little can be done in the face of these enormous economic, political and social developments [of our time]’.68

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Seen in this light, the researcher’s necessary task of identifying and classifying political ideas must retain a critical posture toward existing social relations of domination. Perhaps the clearest recent formulation of this critical approach comes from the pen of Pierre Bourdieu. Challenging the ‘famous “axiological neutrality” that is wrongly identified with scientific objectivity’, the late French social theorist argues that ‘Today’s researchers must innovate an improbable but indispensable combination: scholarship with commitment, that is, a collective politics of intervention in the political field that follows, as much as possible, the rules that govern the scientific field’.69 In my view, such a commitment to critique applies particularly to the evaluation of emerging conceptual clusters.

Having acknowledged these important caveats, I end this article with a brief ‘thought-exercise.’ If globalism indeed constitutes a new ideological configuration that dominates today’s ideational landscape, then what does this mean with regard to the crucial task of reclassifying political belief systems? Most importantly, I believe, it would mean that students of ideology could no longer rely on the outdated categories of the last two centuries to make sense of current ideological dynamics. And yet, virtually all contemporary scholarly surveys of political ideologies remain wedded to conventional categories such as ‘socialism’, ‘conservatism’, ‘liberalism’, ‘anarchism’, and so on. The authors of these major texts address the widening gap between their antiquated typology and actual ideological phenomena merely by dedicating a few pages at the end of each chapter to a discussion of ‘current trends’ or ‘twenty-first century develop- ments’.70 What would happen if we were to reclassify ideologies on the basis of contemporary relevance?

It seems to me that we would have to introduce a new classification scheme that divides the ideological landscape into three regions. At the center, we would find the ideological family of globalism with its two main variants, namely, pre-9-11 market globalism and post-9-11 imperial globalism. Oppositional ideological families on the political Right and Left would take up the remaining two con- ceptual areas.71 Challengers of globalism on the Right might include national- populism, new localisms, and various religious fundamentalisms with strong political inclinations. Oppositional ideologies on the Left might include global feminism, international-populism, and various ideational clusters associated with ‘global social justice’ movements. Whether these thought systems constitute full- blown ideologies or merely rising ‘modules’ would remain, of course, subject to further research. Such a novel classification system would be interested in the historical significance of conventional ideologies, but its primary focus would be on tracing their conceptual influence on current political belief systems rather than making them main players on the contemporary ideological stage.

The tumultuous opening years of the new century have been a powerful reminder of the ancient Greek adage—attributed to Heraclites—that ‘everything flows and nothing stays fixed’. For students of ideology, this means that the reality of change must find its way into their traditional analytic models and typologies. In our era of globalization, we must be prepared to step outside familiar conceptual terrain and re-evaluate the utility of conventional ideological boundaries and long-held

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categories. Our efforts may not always lead us to new insights, but our complacency would surely condemn us to political and theoretical irrelevance.

Notes and references

• 1. M. Freeden, ‘Editorial: ideological boundaries and ideological systems’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 8.1 (2003), pp. 3 – 4. However, as Michael J. Shapiro suggested to me in a personal conversation, the very concept of ‘ideological family’ might require rethinking. Shapiro suggests that one might analyze political ideas by making analytic distinctions between (1) the level of discourse, constituting extensive political imaginaries such as narratives of arrival and macro-mappings of political space, and (2) the level of ideology, containing discrete belief systems operating within these overarching discursive imaginaries.

  2. Freeden, ibid., p. 5. He also identifies ‘welfarism’ as another possible ‘holistic contender’. For the purpose of this article, I will limit my discussion to globalism.

  3. Freeden, ibid., p. 9.

  4. Freeden, ibid.

  5. Freeden, ibid., p. 5.

  6. A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of

     1. Minnesota Press, 1996).

  7. M.B. Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 7.

  8. The literature on globalization is vast and rapidly growing. Some of the most influential definitions of

• • 1. globalization have been offered by D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (London: Polity Press, 1990); D. Held and A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraton (Eds), Global Transformations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); R. Robertson, Globalization (London: Sage Publications, 1992); J.H. Mittelman, The Globalization Syndrome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); M. Albrow, The Global Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); M. Waters, Globalization, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2001); and J.A. Scholte, Globalization (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

• 9. For a magisterial analysis of these changes, see M. Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996–1998).

  10. However, over the last few years, there have also been some emerging points of agreement among globalization scholars. For a discussion of these points, see M.B. Steger (Ed), Rethinking Globalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004), pp. 1–4.

  11. These power elites consist chiefly of corporate managers, executives of large transnational corporations, corporate lobbyists, high-level military officers, prominent journalists and public-relations specialists, intellectuals writing to a large public audience, state bureaucrats and influential politicians. It is questionable whether these social elites actually constitute a coherent ‘transnational capitalist class’ (in a Marxist sense), as Leslie Sklair suggests. In my view, Mark Rupert’s concept of a ‘transnational historic bloc of internationally oriented capitalists, liberal statesman, and their allies’ seems to come closer to an accurate description of the loose, heterogeneous, and often disagreeing global alliance of political and economic forces that I have in mind. See L. Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2001); and M. Rupert, Ideologies of Globalization: Contending Visions of a New World Order (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 16 – 7, 154.

  12. Benjamin Barber famously referred to it as ‘McWorld’. See B. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Ballantine, 1996).

  13. Poll released by the Center on Policy Attitudes and the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland (June 4, 2004). ,www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Global_Issues/ globescan_press-06_04.pdf . . For an analysis of antiglobalist counter-discourses and their corresponding social movements, see M.B. Steger, Globalism: The New Market Ideology (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002), Chapters 4 and 5.

  14. See Z. Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 28–29; and P. Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 95.

  15. J. Butler, ‘Gender as performance’, in P. Osborne (Ed), A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals

• • 1. (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 112.

• 16. These are terms employed by M. Freeden in Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University

• • 1. Press, 2003), p. 98.

• 17. J.B. Thompson has offered a useful distinction between ‘two types’ of conception of ideology held by

• • 1. researchers. ‘Neutral conceptions’ are those which purport to characterize ideas and beliefs as ideology or ideological without implying that these phenomena are necessarily misleading, illusory, or aligned with the

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interests of any particular group; ‘critical conceptions’ are those which convey a negative, critical, or pejorative sense, implying that these distorted meanings serve to establish and sustain relations of domi- nation. See J.B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 52–6.

• 1. T. Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 28–30; G. Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1980), p. 18; T. van Dijk, Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach (London: Sage, 1998), pp. 313 – 315; and Thompson, op. cit., Ref. 17, pp. 60 – 7.

  2. M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 86–7.

  3. Freeden, ibid., pp. 485–6.

  4. Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 16, pp. 54–5.

  5. H.D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When and How (New York: Meridian Books, 1958).

  6. Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 19, p. 485.

  7. Steger, op. cit., Ref. 13, Chapter 3.

  8. See A. Wolfson, ‘Conservatives and neoconservatives’, The Public Interest (Winter 2004), , http://www.the

     1. publicinterest.com/current/article2.html . . See also M. Lind, ‘A tragedy of errors,’ The Nation (February

     2. 23, 2004), pp. 23–32.

  9. For many more textual examples of these six core claims, see M.B. Steger, Globalism: Market Ideology

• • 1. Meets Terrorism, 2nd edn (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005), Chapter 3.

• 10. BusinessWeek (December 13, 1999), p. 212.

  11. W. Bole, ‘Tales of globalization’, America 181. 18 (December 4, 1999), pp. 14–6.

  12. T. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar, Strauss and

• • 1. Giroux, 1999), p. 9.

• 13. J.E. Spiro, ‘The challenges of globalization’, Speech at the World Economic Development Congress in

• • 1. Washington, DC, September 26, 1996, ,http://www.state.gov/www/issues/economic/960926.html . .

• 14. G.W. Bush, National Security Strategy of the United States (2002), ,http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/print/

• • 1. nssall.html . .

• 15. W.J. Clinton, ‘Remarks by the president on foreign policy’, San Francisco, February 26, 1999, , http://www.

• • 1. pub.whitehouse.gov/urires/12R?urn:pdi://oma.eop.gove.us/1999/3/1/3.text.1.html . .

• 16. F.W. Smith cited in ‘International finance experts preview upcoming global economic forum’, April 1, 1999,

• • 1. ,http://www.econstrat.org/pctranscript.html . .

• 17. M. Villar, Jr., ‘High-level dialogue on the theme of the social and economic impact of globalization and

• • 1. interdependence and their policy implications’, New York, September 17, 1998, ,http://www.un.int/

    2. philippines/villar.html . .

• 18. See F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1994 [1941]); and

• • 1. M. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1962).

• 19. U. Beck, What Is Globalization? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000), p. 122.

  20. Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 16, pp. 55–60.

  21. Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 19, p. 334.

  22. H. Cox, ‘The market as God: living in the new dispensation’, Atlantic Monthly (March 1999), pp. 18–23.

  23. See M.B. Steger, The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Social Democracy

• • 1. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

• 24. J. Gray and S. Roach cited in ‘Is it at risk?—globalisation’, The Economist (February 2, 2002), p. 65.

  25. R.J. Samuelson, ‘Globalization goes to war’, Newsweek (February 24, 2003), p. 41.

  26. C. Shays, ‘Free markets and fighting terrorism’, The Washington Times (June 10, 2003).

  27. R. Hormats, ‘PBS interview with Danny Schechter’ (February 1998), ,http://pbs.org/globalization/

• • 1. hormats1.html . .

• 28. Friedman, op. cit., Ref. 31, pp. 112–3.

  29. R. Kagan, ‘The U.S.-Europe divide’, Washington Post (May 26, 2002).

  30. The post-9/11 literature on ‘American Empire’ is vast and rapidly growing. See, for example, C. Johnson, The

• • 1. Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); C. Boggs, The New Militarism: U.S. Empire and Endless War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004); E. Todd, After Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); G. Soros, The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2003); M. Mann, Incoherent Empire (London: Verso, 2003); and D. Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003). Michael Walzer, for example, suggests that the post-9/11 American Empire constitutes a ‘new beast’ characterized by ‘a looser form of rule, less authoritarian than empire is or was, more dependent on the agreement of others’. At the same time, Walzer concedes that ‘George W. Bush’s unilateralism is a bid for hegemony without

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compromise; perhaps he sees America playing an imperial—perhaps also messianic—role in the world’. See

M. Walzer, ‘Is there an American empire?’, Dissent (Fall 2003), pp. 27–31.

• 1. Economic Communique ́, Lyon G7 Summit, June 28, 1996, ,http://library.utoronto.ca/www/g7/96ecopre.

     1. html . .

  2. Columbia University economist Xavier Sala i-Martin argues that his evidence shows that inequality of

• • 1. individuals across the world is declining; but according to World Bank economist Branko Milanovic, global

    2. inequality has risen. See L. Secor, ‘Mind the gap’, The Boston Globe (January 5, 2003).

• 3. J.J. Meehan, ‘Globalization and technology at work in the bond markets’, Speech given in Phoenix, AZ,

• • 1. March 1, 1997, ,http://www/bondmarkets.com/news/Meehanspeechfinal.html . .

• 4. G.W. Bush, National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002), ,http://www.whitehouse.

• • 1. gov/nsc/print/nssall.html . .

• 5. Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 19, p. 392.

  6. See Steger, op. cit., Ref. 28, Chapter 3.

  7. ‘Economic globalization and culture: a discussion with Dr. Francis Fukuyama’, , http://www.ml.com/woml/

• • 1. forum/global2.html . .

• 8. H. Rodham Clinton, ‘Growth of democracy in Eastern Europe’, Speech in Warsaw, October 5, 1999, , http:/

• • 1. www.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/First Lady/html/generalspeeches/1999/19991005.html . .

• 9. W.I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge, UK:

• • 1. Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 56–62.

• 10. G.W. Bush, ‘Securing freedom’s triumph’, New York Times (September 11, 2002).

  11. G.W. Bush, ‘Transcript of his Address in London on Iraq and the Middle East’, New York Times (November

• • 1. 19, 2003).

• 12. R. Mcfarlane and M. Bleyzer, ‘Taking Iraq private’, The Wall Street Journal (March 27, 2003).

  13. S. Williams, ‘The seeds of Iraq’s future terror’, The Guardian (October 28, 2003).

  14. C. Powell cited in J. Treaster, ‘Powell tells Arab-Americans of hopes to develop Mideast’, New York Times

• • 1. (September 30, 2003); and A. Olivastro, ‘Powell announces U.S.-Middle East partnership initiative’, The Heritage Foundation (December 12, 2002), ,http://www.heritage.org/research/middleeast/ wm179. cfm . .

• 15. R. Falk, ‘Will the empire be fascist?’, The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research Forum (March 24, 2003), ,http://www.transnational.org/forum/meet/2003/Falk_FascistEmpire.html . .

  16. See, for example, S. Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); and G. Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation Into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993).

  17. T.P.M. Barnett, ‘The Pentagon’s new map’, Esquire (March 2003), http://www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulessets/ ThePentagon’sNewMap.htm . ; and The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century (New York: Putnam, 2004). For a similar illustration of Claim Six, see R.D. Kaplan, ‘Supremacy by Stealth’, The Atlantic Monthly (July/August 2003), ,http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/07/kaplan.htm . .

  18. Barnett, ibid.

  19. Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 8.

  20. Freeden argues that, ‘While the function of ideologies is to guide practical political conduct, the analysis of

• • 1. ideologies. . .is not geared to directing or recommending political action. Its purpose is to explain, to interpret,

    2. to decode, and to categorize’. Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 19, p. 6.

• 21. A. Scott (Ed.) The Limits of Globalization: Cases and Arguments (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 2.

  22. Pierre Bourdieu, Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2 (New York: The New Press, 2003),

• • 1. pp. 18, 24.

• 23. See, for example, L.T. Sargent, Contemporary Political Ideologies: A Comparative Analysis, 12th edn

• • 1. (New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 2004); T. Ball and R. Dagger, Political Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal, 5th edn (New York: Longman, 2003); and A. Heywood, Political Ideologies: An Introduction, 3rd edn (London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003).

• 24. While conceding that the conceptual line dividing the political left and the right always has been shifting with changing historical circumstances, the Italian thinker Norberto Bobbio recently defended the significance of this distinction—anchored in two fundamentally different perspectives on equality—for our era of globalization. See N. Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).

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