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Manfred B. Steger, a professor of Global Studies at the University of Hawaii and one of the leading experts on
globalization has introduced the Six Core Claims of Globalization in his article entitled Ideologies of Globalization. It
was his response to Michael Freeden’s article; Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach. Freeden
somewhat acknowledges globalism as a possible holistic contender but argues against its status as an ideology,
seeing it as too early to proclaim it as such.
Steger however, contradicted his idea and he intends to establish in his article that globalism is mature enough
to be pronounced as an ideology and Freeden was wrong with his brief assessment of globalism. For, according to
Steger, that globalism not only represents political ideas and beliefs coherent enough to warrant the status of a
new ideology.
Steger breaks apart globalism into six core claims that play crucial semantic and political roles.
First, we have the first core claim which states that: Globalization is about the liberalization and global
integration of markets.
This claim highly emphasizes the market or economic aspect of globalization, specifically to the free market.
It came from the liberal idea of the self-regulating market as the normative basis for a future global order. A
self-regulating market is a market in which the participants (buyers or sellers) create their regulations governing
that market. Liberalization in context refers to the state letting go of the market. Because of this, the
liberalization and global integration of the market will result in a more profound economic state.
Steger cites Thomas Friedman which perfectly summarizes claim one, which says “The driving idea behind
globalization is free-market capitalism.”
To conclude, Steger gives evidence of globalization as a new ideology and concludes it as such but maybe
for the wrong reasons. Globalization is not really exclusive as an ideology it specifically in a diverse world. It
seeps into the cracks of different ideologies and then suddenly becomes an unstoppable force that can
narrowly in the past decades to describe families of the pod. Globalization for all its openness and broadness
simply does not fit to have the description of ideology and may even have already transcended it.