3.

The Economics of Globalization

Is Globalization a matter of winners and losers? The perception is certainly there.
And there are, in developed countries, quite a number of jobs that have been lost
to free trade. Guillermo de la Dehesa recounts that “lower-skilled workers in
developed countries will have a very high probability of being net losers, given
that they encounter difficulties in adapting to new technologies and productive
internationalization and will be forced to accept lower productivity and lower
wage jobs, if their labor markets are flexible. Or alternatively, they may become
unemployed if their labor markets are rigid or if they work for low skill labor-
intensive firms, which have to compete with firms in developing countries
(…)”.  Donald Trump should be credited with having had the political flair to
15

appeal to some of those displaced by delocalization in Michigan or Pennsylvania,

for example, and win their electoral votes. It is paradoxical that a billionaire
whose trademark was coined in the vanities of the 80s has been able to become
the conduit for the lament of those left-behind by globalization. Petras and
Veltmeyer argue that “the world ascendancy of globalist classes has provoked a
serious social crisis affecting wage workers, peasants, employees, and the self-
employed throughout the world. The growth and penetration of globalist policies
have engendered a significant increase in inequality between the minority within
the globalist loop and those exploited by it”.  The US President, a member of
16

these ‘globalist classes, has become the spokesman for those affected by
globalization in the developed world, not unlike the Perons of the 1940s in
Argentina.
On the other hand, there are those such as Bhargava and Gurkan who argue
that globalization is a system of exploitation of the planet and of the
dispossessed. “The global compacts adopted by the international community in
recent years have created a historic common ground for setting clear and
measurable international development goals. (…) As the developing countries
see it, the proposals put forward by the rich nations have failed to correspond to
the developing countries’ central demands in agriculture, on which two-thirds of
the world’s poor depend for their livelihood”.
17

Brecher, Childs and Cutler distinguish between two kinds of globalization: the
one from above, exploitative, and the one from below where the ordinary man
exercises power for the good. “Globalization-from-above extracts resources from
the natural world and from local communities in order to increase the wealth and
power of the wealthy and powerful. (…) Globalization-from-below, in contrast to
globalization-from-above, aims to restore to communities the power to nurture
their environments; to enhance the access of ordinary people to the resources
they need; to democratize local, national, and transnational political institutions;
and to impose pacification on conflicting power centers”.  This binary vision of
18

bad vs. good globalizations is somewhat simplistic and rather than an

explanation of what globalization is, it presents a call to agency for grassroots
groups and possible social movements to counter the ill effects of globalization.
Theodore Panayotou indicates that “globalization brings with it potentially large
benefits as well as risks” and that “the challenge is to manage the process of
globalization in such a way that it promotes environmental sustainability and
equitable human development”.  The issue is that globalization is laden with
19

externalities. Some are good—lifting people out of poverty in developing nations,

some are bad—affecting the environment—and the response for those
concerned is to exercise agency and combat the ill effects.  Global warming, for
20

example, is anthropogenic and, as Judith Lean and David Rind have

demonstrated, is closely related to the last 150 years of human activity, a time
when two big waves of globalization have transformed the planet.  This global
21

life-threatening externality will not resolve itself. It will need decisive action from
governments and peoples to mitigate and adapt to its effects.
The Greening of Globalization
The biggest threat of globalization for future generations is the environmental
threat. Making the world richer and creating large middle classes in China and
India implies an expansion of unsustainable Western style consumer patterns in
new parts of the world. Kaplinsky asserts that all of the global sourcing “is at a
cost to the environment. Some of this is a direct outcome of global transport, as
in the case of the Exxon Valdez oil-spillage in Alaska during the 1990s. But the
bulk of this negative environmental impact is indirect, particularly through the link
between increased energy consumption and global warming”.  Is there a 22

remedy? Can we reap the benefits of globalization and at the same time protect
the environment? Only a holistic approach will do. Dale Colver is clear that “it is
legitimate to incorporate environmental provisions in trade agreements as one
means to prevent environmental degradation and to contribute positively to
environmental improvement. However this approach should not be conducted in
isolation from other endeavors to improve environmental conditions, including the
multilateral environmental agreements, domestic environmental laws and private-
sector approaches, including NGOs, corporations and private citizens”.  Neither
23

market forces nor international organizations alone can resolve the

environmental problems posed by globalization. Only a concerted and sustained
effort of sovereign states, in the framework of transnational agreements, aided by
strong activism and engagement from large social movements among the
populations can expect to be—relatively—successful in this endeavor. In this
respect it is remarkable that in China, where dissent is deeply restricted, fearless
environment demonstrations have occurred. 24

New Protectionism in Developed Nations.

NAFTA is being renegotiated. The United States is no longer a partner in the
TTP that could not enter into force, although it does not rule out joining the new
Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. The
closed-doors TTIP negotiations suffer criticism and misgivings on both sides of
the Atlantic. The fashionable new protectionism in Western nations embodied by
Trump’s campaign promises and those of the Marine Le Pens of Western Europe
—those same nations that were the core countries promoting the post World War
II order encompassing the Bretton Woods institutions, the GATT and later the
WTO—might have dire consequences if pursued emphatically. Indeed, Krugman
warned early that “if the West throws up barriers to imports out of a misguided
belief that they will protect Western living standards, the effect could be to
destroy the most promising aspect of today’s world economy: the beginning of
widespread economic development, of hopes for a decent living standard for
hundreds of millions, even billions, of human beings” and that “the view that
competition from the Third World is a major problem for advanced countries is
questionable in theory and flatly rejected by the data”.  The World Bank in its
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well-known study Globalization, Growth and Poverty: Building an Inclusive World

Economy of 2002 corroborated Krugman’s predictions but also warned of
winners and losers in both the developed and the developing world: “while
integration has on average been a positive force for growth and poverty reduction
in developing countries, there are inevitably specific winners and losers,
especially in the short run. This is true in rich and poor countries. The firm-level
evidence shows that much of the dynamic benefit of open trade and investment
comes from more "churning" of plants—less efficient ones die, and new ones
start up and expand. With this comes more labor market churning as well
probably the key reason why globalization is so controversial. It raises wages on
average in both rich and poor countries, but there are some significant
losers”.  In spite of the protests of the anti-globalists, the wider consensus in the
26

political community up to Trump’s victory has been one that has given validity to
the data that showed globalization having a positive effect on poverty alleviation
and income growth at the world level. If this is true, liberals, who favor
democracies, should be avid supporters of globalization. Carles Boix has
concluded, in an analysis of sovereign countries going back to the beginning of
the nineteenth century that “per capita income is statistically associated with the
process of democratization” and that “development has a causal effect on
democracy”. 27

Some scholars, like Robert Hunter Wade. are more cautious in their
assessments of the positive effects of globalization. Although he asserts that “it is
plausible, and important, that the proportion of the world’s population living in
extreme poverty has probably fallen over the past two decades or so, having
been rising for decades before then,” he is wary of the large margin of error that
affect World Bank numbers and make the trend look rosier than it really is; he
also distinguishes the large effect that China has on measures of inequality: “one
combination of inequality measures does yield the conclusion that income
inequality has been falling—PPP-income per capita weighted by population,
measured by an averaging coefficient such as the Gini” but “ take out China and
even this measure shows widening inequality”. 28

4. The Politics of Globalization

Susan Strange links “a pace of change more rapid than human society had ever
before experienced” with the disillusion with national leaders whose peoples “no
longer believe them”.  Harold James posits that corruption scandals have
29

increased the disenchantment with politics and politicians: “it is no longer simply
a matter of corruption as a way of life in the peculiar circumstances of post-
Communist transition economies, notably Russia. In Western Europe, the end of
the Cold War broke some bands that had previously held political systems
together. Ideology became less important, and many people began cynically to
see in politics just a mechanism for distributing the spoils of political
power”.  Certainly, in relation to our beginning ex cursus on Catalonia, the sorry
30

state of affairs regarding corruption in Spain in general—and Catalonia not being

much different in this respect—must be factored in to understand the rise of new
political parties untainted by corruption and the appeal for the citizenry of political
solutions that imply a break with the past.
Although Susan Strange was right to acknowledge the doubts that citizens have
vis-à-vis politicians, it is difficult to agree with her overall argument that States
are retreating, if only because there does not seem to be an alternative to States.
Non-state actors such as NGOs, transnational corporations, or even cross-
boundary criminal and terrorist organizations play a large role in shaping policy
and state responses to new challenges, but the state is still the indispensable
component of world order.  Barrie Axford argues that “the persistence of the
31

nation-state form, and its enduring appeal to nationalist and separatist political
forces in this consciously ‘interdependent’ world, should not come as a surprise.
(…) Through its links with the most powerful myth of political identity in the
modern world, the narrative of nation, the state occupies a privileged place in the
institutional dimensions of modernity and, as a ‘system’ of states, still offers a
convenient shorthand for a world political system (Heller and Feher, 1988)”.  In 32

fact, what the strong Scottish and Catalan independent movements prove, rather
than the weakening of the State as the unit of reference, is the indispensability of
the State.  Moreover, in Western Europe where, in contrast with a century ago,
33

the welfare state is all-encompassing, what matters more even than the control of
legitimate violence, is the control of the purse which allows the State to set the
policy agenda, formulate it, adopt it, implement it and evaluate it in full. Beyond
the Imagined Communities of Benedict Anderson, --who explained the romantic
rise of nationalism in the XIXth century as a new creed—in a globalized world
where interdependence is queen, and especially in the context of European
integration, controlling the distributive side of economic policy gives a sense of
anchor to communities that, rightly or wrongly, feel dispossessed of elements of
sovereignty.  The positioning of both the Scottish and Catalan sovereignist
34

movements as embodiments of left-of-center distributive models vs. austerity

measures carried out by Britain and Spain highlight the fact that at least in
Europe, controlling the state has become a matter of choosing the economic
model of the state as an act of sovereignty facing the powers of globalization.
The different reactions of the British State and the Spanish State to the tensions
created by Scottish and Catalan nationalisms shed light upon the limits of
globalization as an explanatory phenomenon for the behavior of states. As
Robert Davies posits: “globalization matters. It creates new pressures for states
to confront and reinforces longstanding ones. Globalization does not, however,
determine how states will respond to those pressures. States’ domestic
institutions mediate their responses. These institutions create opportunities and
constraints on state action, affect the likelihood that states will reconstitute
themselves and influence policy success”.  Thus states and their institutions are
35

still central to the understanding of political events even when these events at
least partly are responses to the tensions created by globalization.
Non-Democratic Models
The idea of a globalized world of liberal values and democratic institutions
created expectations at the end of the cold war. The United States as a hegemon
spearheaded the 1948 universal declaration of human rights and the expansion
of democracy around the world, even if the actions of the hegemon did not
always agree with the regime model it wanted to represent.  It has been so long
36

since the global hegemon was a different one that we have forgotten that for
most of human history human beings have been governed by non-democratic
forms of government and that democracy is not the only model. With the rise of
China, where a successful market economy is allied with an authoritarian regime,
an alternative model of political organization for a globalized world has become
available, if not yet popular, since China is still lagging in projection of soft power
and culturally the global world is still almost entirely American. This
notwithstanding, Davies asserts that “China’s approach to the management of
economic growth is gaining in popularity and is seen by many as the only viable
and tested alternative to the Western economic formula, that is popularly called
the ‘Washington Consensus’”.  This same Washington consensus of the 1980s,
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favoring development through opening the economy and expanding the market,
which has been promoted by the IMF and the World Bank, has been used as a
miracle cure for all. However, Stiglitz reminds us that those countries that
controlled themselves the terms of engagement with the global economy, such
as those in East Asia, have fared much better than those who have not. “The
problem is thus not with globalization but with how it has been managed”  And 38

China has managed quite well and therefore has become an attractive economic
model and a political model as well.
On the other hand, another political alternative to Western style democracy has
been taking shape for a while and has even seduced voters in countries that are
member states of the European Union, such as the Hungary of Viktor Orbán.
Alexander Cooley argues that “it is clear that counternorms to liberal democracy
have taken root and are helping authoritarians to retain power”.  Today, Russia,
39

Turkey, the Philippines, and Hungary are all to a greater or lesser extent users of
the illiberal model. This illiberal model borrows from democracy the use of regular
elections and from non-democratic regimes the erosion of freedom of expression
and of the rule of law—eliminating viable political opponents through thuggish
means, and governing with recourse to populist excitement of the masses,
uniting them against predictable scapegoats.

5. Conclusion
This paper has surveyed multiple and often opposing interpretations of
globalization as descriptors of a constellation of late twentieth and early twenty-
first century phenomena. I have also argued that globalization has profoundly
morphed classical interpretations of capitalism, from both left and right. So too
models of nationalism have been at once dissolved and simultaneously
underscored by these same phenomena.
From this perspective, it is tempting to view debates on globalization as
theoretically unproductive, and globalization an object of analysis that obscures,
intentionally or not, classic objects of analysis for political science – namely
economics and the nation state. Yet such a dismissal of globalization is of course
one more “theory” of globalization – as a form of false consciousness. It is also to
dismiss the pressing questions that accompany debates concerning
globalization– questions of economic migration, of international (cyber) terrorism,
developed and developing countries, of industrial and service economies.
I have argued that globalization is multifaceted, and it is this very complexity that
makes it resist any simple definition. My analysis has been confined to two
central aspects of globalization: the economic and the political. In my analysis I
did not enter into the workings of economic globalization, but rather noted its
effects – both positive and negative. If the positive effect of globalization lies in
lifting the poor out of rural subsistence into urban productivity, the great negative
effect of economic globalization is environmental. Globalization has as terrible
externality in that it ravages the natural resources of the planet. To counter this,
the state must act, willfully to resolve these perilous depredations.
In economic globalization, there are winners and losers. The losers are the
workers in the de-industrializing developed nations, while the winners are,
apparently, the workers in the newly industrialized developing nations. Although it
seems there is a consensus that many people have been lifted out of poverty by
globalization, statistical analysis reveals how China has skewed the analysis, and
when we leave out China it is no longer clear that developing nations have
benefited from globalization. Thus the global economic benefits of globalization
become more muted.
Secondly I examined political globalization. Globalization seemed on the one
hand to be the extension, an avatar, of democratic liberalism as the triumphant
world model. Yet three decades after the fall of the Berlin wall we realize there
are other increasingly powerful non-democratic models – models that do not
participate in the liberal cultural model. Both China’s authoritarian state-run
capitalism and the illiberal models of Russia and Turkey are systems that appear
to thrive under globalization. Even as globalization creates a model that
supersedes the nation state, its inherent tensions and pressures revivify
nationalism. The complexity of any analysis – namely the case of Catalonia with
which I began this paper – lies in distinguishing “old” questions at once historical
and political – from these new questions of globalization as a formative pressure
to national identity.