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The Handbook of Political Sociology

STATES, CIVIL SOCIETIES, AND

GLOBALIZATION

. Edited byTHOMAS JANOSKI

University of Kentucky

ROBERT R. ALFORD

ALEXANDER M. HICKSEmory University

MILDRED A. SCHWARTZUniversity of Illinois, Chicago

CAMBRIDGEUNIVERSITY PRESS

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Globalization1

Philip McMichael

Globalization is widely perceived as the definingissue of our times. Exactly what "globalization"means, however, is unclear. Some commen-tators argue that the world is not necessarilymore integrated now than at the turn of thetwentieth century (Hirst and Thompson, 1996),whereas others grant globalization only epiphe-nomenal significance in an era of transition toa postmodern world system future (Wallerstein,2002:37). Positive definitions can take severalforms, in which globalization is viewed as aprocess, an organizing principle, an outcome, aconjuncture, or a project. As a process, globaliza-tion is typically defined, in economic terms, as"the closer integration of the countries and peo-ples of the world . . . by the enormous reductionof costs of transportation and communication,and the breaking down of artificial barriers tothe flows of goods, services, capital, knowledge,and (to a lesser extent) people across borders"(Stiglitz, 2002:9). As an organizing principle, itcan be conceptualized as "deterritorialization"(Scholte, 2000:46), that is, as the explanans inaccounting for contemporary social change, as"the 'lifting out' of social relations from localcontexts of interaction and their restructuringacross indefinite spans of time—space" (Giddens,1990:21 ).2 Related to this is the notion of glo-

The author is grateful to Alicia Swords for back-ground research on the MST and to Dia Mohan, Raj"Mel, the editors, and reviewers for comments on ear-lier drafts.

For an extended and incisive critique of this theo-retical abstraction, see Rosenberg, 2000.

balization as the compression of time/space(Harvey, 1989; Castells, 1996; Helleiner, 1997),expressed for example in biopolitical disciplines(Hoogvelt, 1997:125). And there is the politicalangle, emphasizing the global transformation ofthe conditions of democratic political commu-nity, as "effective power is shared and barteredby diverse forces and agencies at national, reg-ional and international levels" (Held, 2000:399),challenging conventional, state-centered ac-counts of world order. As an outcome, global-ization is usually understood as an inexorablephase of world development, in which transna-tional economic integration takes precedenceover a state-centered world (e.g., Radice, 1998;Robinson, 2001).3 As a conjuncture, globaliza-tion has been viewed as an historically specificordering of post-Bretton Woods internationalrelations, structured by the "financialization"of strategies of capital accumulation associatedwith a posthegemonic world order (Arrighi,1994), or as a form of corporate managementof an unstable international financial system(Amin, 1997; Panitch, 1998; Sklair, 2001). Andas a project, globalization has been viewed as anideological justification of the deployment ofneoliberal policies privileging corporate rights(Gill, 1992; Cox, 1992; McMichael, 2004).

Any attempt to define the term, especially ina handbook such as this, needs to be clear about

3 See Block, 2001; Goldfrank, 2001; and McMichael,2001 for cautionary responses to Robinson's call for tran-scending a state-centered paradigm.

587

588 Philip McMichael

its orientation. The above distinctions representemphases, which are not unrelated to one an-other, and concern how to represent currenttransformations. How to do that is the key ques-tion, perhaps underlining the directional andcompositional indeterminacy of globalization,as a discursive reordering of the world. Global-ization has such institutional force as a discoursethat we need historical specification of why andhow this is so. Problematizing contemporaryglobalization as a form of corporate rule helpsto situate it historically and clarify its relationalpolitical dynamics. This requires two steps: first,understanding globalization as a general con-dition of the capitalist era (initiating world his-tory) and particularizing its contemporary form;4

and second, demystifying globalization's phe-nomenal, or empirical, forms (e.g., economicintegration measures) by examining it throughits political countermovements — as globaliza-tion's historical and relational barometer. Be-cause globalization is realized at various scales(global, national, regional, subregional), it canbe examined effectively through its multilayeredprocesses, registered in movements that operateon different (but often interrelated) scales.

This chapter attempts to capture the con-tradictory relations of corporate globalizationthrough an analysis of the movements that revealits politics, rather than its broad and everydaytrends. In order to demonstrate this fundamentalproperty of corporate globalization, I draw onKarl Polanyi's (1957) exemplary account of theformation of the modern nation-state. In inter-preting state formation through the prism of thedouble movement of political resistance to theinstitution of market relations, Polanyi providesa dual legacy. First, his method of distinguish-ing substantive from formal economics identi-fies the social dimension of such representations

4 Examples of the use of the method of histori-dzing forms of capitalist globalization include Arrighiand Silver et al.'s multifaceted analysis of a seriesof hegemonic/posthegemonic moments in the historyof world capitalism (1999); Arrighi's "systemic cy-cles of accumulation" associated with Dutch, Britishand U.S. hegemony (1994); and analysis of U.S.hegemony as a resolution to the crisis of British hege-mony (McMichael, 2000b).

of material relations. And second, Polanyi's usof this method to interpret the crisis of marketrule at the turn of the twentieth century cotiJceptualizes modern institutions as embedded inand ultimately subject to, political relations. ]&other words, the trajectory of an institution likethe market is only comprehended through aninterpretation of its cumulative social and poJlitical consequences. Beyond an economic proJcess, market construction is a historical proce^of governing resistances to social transformationvia conceptions of sovereignty and rights. Thjs|is also the case with corporate globalization, i'successor episode of instituting market relations:on a world scale. Polanyi provides a link belltween the two episodes, not only historically!but also methodologically, in his formulation oathe "double movement" of instituting and re-Ssisting market relations.

The link between the formation of the;European nation-state system and corporate,̂globalization is that the latter emerges in op-|position to the protective shell of the nationalstate — what economists term "artificial barriers","to material flows across national borders. The*ideology of corporate globalization champioBs|"free" exchange, the logic of which is to reducêthe historic frictions to global market relationŝin state regulations (sovereignty) and economic;*subsidies (rights). In this sense, corporate glotn jalization represents a sustained challenge to the,citizen state, rolling back the political and sor|cial gains of the countermovements of the lastcentury and a half (the "citizenship" bundle rf|economic, political, and social rights). The statfisitself is transformed, as an instrument ofpriva-gtization, and its evident complicity in decon||posing modern citizenship fuels an alternative-̂politics, informing a global countermovement. I

THE GLOBAL COUNTERMOVEMENT5

This chapter argues that the global counter-,movement both resembles and transcends tn

5 I use the singular "countermovement" to replic^Polanyi's usage, which portrayed the double moveW Ias instituting and resisting market rule, across the run nteenth and early twentieth centuries. As then, today

Globalization 589

janyian double movement of implementationf and resistance to economic liberalism. By em-hasizing the discontinuity with Polanyi's dou-

hie movement, I identify a distinctive dimensionof the politics of the global countermovement,namely the rejection of the universalisms ofthe project of modernity, that is, the linkingof the inevitability of progress to the neces-sity of science in the service of the industrialstate.6 The World Social Forum (WSF) sloganof "another world is possible" challenges theneoliberal world vision, but from the perspec-tive of strategic diversity. That is, another worldwould respect diversity, understood here as crys-tallizing through imperial relations constitutedby asymmetrical forms of power and differ-ential forms of exclusion (quite distinct from"development/underdevelopment'' relations).This variation, expressed in ethnic, class, gender,racial, and sexual relations of inequality acrossthe world, informs an overriding solidarity, asexpressed in the WSF. The WSF unifies those

countermovement is quite heterogeneous — in politi-cal goals, identities, scales, tactics, etc. — nevertheless itsmultiple networks, organizations, and movements in-creasingly harbor a sensibility of connection (throughstrategic diversity) to a common world-historical con-dition, as is evident in the politics of the World SocialForum and as is noted by participating activist/analysts,for example: "Whether located in obscure third worldcities or the centers of global commerce, the strugglesof the Global Justice Movements increasingly intersectbecause they focus on virtually identical opponents: theagencies and representatives of neoliberal capitalism —global, regional, national and local" (Bond, 2001:7; seealso Starr, 2000).

6 Although modernity is an unfinished project, itembodies the separations of nature and society andculture and society, reason, secularization, sovereignty,specialization, instrumental or functional rationality, ascientific imperative, bureaucratization, and so forth.Historically, these properties have come to define, or beidentified with, industrial capitalism. Early modernity'sidea of progress conceived of the possibility of domi-nation of nature and the desirability of rational changeversus traditional eternities and divine rights, but in themodernity of the age of high colonialism, progress assuch became inevitable. Given the context, the projectof modernity now became the imperative condition ofthe West and its colonial empire - all societies were tofollow the path of urban—industrial capitalism governed°Y nation-states legitimated by popular sovereignty7 anduniversal legal codes (see Araghi and McMichael, 2004).

diverse resistances to global empire, articulatedthus: "We are fighting against the hegemonyof finance, the destruction of our cultures, themonopolization of knowledge, mass media andcommunication, the degradation of nature, andthe destruction of the quality of life by transna-tional corporations and anti-democratic poli-cies" (World Social Forum, 200T).

The global countermovement nurtures aparadigm shift.7 Transcending the politics of"underdevelopment," it draws attention to thechoice facing the world's peoples: between apath of exclusion, monoculture, and corporatecontrol or a path of inclusion, diversity, and de-

• mocracy. Baldly put, this is a historic choice intwo senses. First, the discourse of diversity con-founds the universalisms of modernity throughwhich powerful states/cultures have sought tocolonize the world with their singular vision.And second, the historic attempt to impose thelogic and force of market rule on the world ap-pears to be reaching its apogee. A protectivemovement is emerging, viewing markets notsimply as objects of regulation but as institutionsof corporate rule and espousing alternative so-cial forms.

These alternative social forms draw on cul-tural and ecological traditions and radical in-terpretations of democratic politics. While em-bodying a vision of another world, these diversesocial forms are strategic in sharing their re-jection of neoliberalism. Whether the globalcountermovement adopts a political superstruc-ture remains to be seen (Wallerstein, 2002:37).

7 David Held, although unprepared to view thenation-state as an institution of Western hegemony,considers this turning point as an indeterminate transfor-mation of the question of sovereignty and rights: "glob-alization . . . has arguably served to reinforce the senseof the significance of identity and difference . . . Oneconsequence of this is the elevation in many interna-tional forums of non-Western views of rights, authorityand legitimacy. The meaning of some of the core con-cepts of the international system are subject to the deep-est conflicts of interpretation, as illustrated at the UNWorld Conference on Human Rights in Vienna (June1993)... If the global system is marked by significantchange, this is perhaps best conceived less as an end ofthe era of the nation-state and more as a challenge to theera of 'hegemonic states' - a challenge which is as yetfar from complete" (1995:94—5).

590 Philip McMichael

Ideally, a superstructure drawing on emergentWSF networks among grassroots movements,NGOs and unions, and respecting the princi-ple of multiple overlapping jurisdictions (Cox,1994; Held, 1995:137), would embody the dis-tinctive cosmopolitan sensibilities of counter-movement politics. These sensibilities reflect its•world-historical foundations and/or the grow-ing prominence of transboundary issues, creat-ing "overlapping communities of fate" where"the fortunes and prospects of individual po-litical communities are increasingly bound to-gether" (Held, 2000:400).

The connections among movements as di-verse as labor, feminist, peasant, environmen-talist, and indigenous oiganizations may not beimmediate, but the power of the movementslies in shared circumstances and reflexive di-versity. In this sense, corporate globalizationhas distinctive faces, places, and meanings, con-cretizing it as a complex, diverse, and contra-dictory unity conditioned by its multiplicity ofresistances. This relationship is evident in theWorld Bank's tactical embrace of social capitaland "voices of the poor" (Narayan, 2000), fuelsthe tensions within the Washington Consensus8

over the legitimacy or efficacy of globalization'spolicy apparatus (cf. Stiglitz, 2002), and leadsUN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to encour-age "globalization with a human face."

In short, this chapters specification of global-ization as corporate power highlights the processby which its contradictory relationships formit as an ongoing discursive project of marketrule. From this perspective, globalization is aformative (and thereby unresolved) process. Al-though analysis may not resolve the questionof what globalization is, it can usefully situatethis question diachronically and synchronically.Diachronic analysis considers globalizationscontextual (historical) dimensions, whereas syn-chronic analysis considers its compositional di-

8 The Washington Consensus refers to that collectionof neoliberal economic policies (trade and financial liber-alization, privatization, and macrostability of the worldeconomy) uniting multilateral institutions, representa-tives of the international arm of the U.S. state, and as-sociated G-7 countries enabling corporate globalizationand, arguably, U.S. hegemony.

mensions. Both aspects lend themselves to in.corporated comparison,9 which views forms ofglobalization as successively related instances ofan historic world ordering in the modern epoch(see note 4), and interprets corporate globaliza-tion as a product of its contradictory politicalrelations — in particular the historical dialecticof sovereignty and rights.

MODERNITY, RIGHTS, AND SOVEREIGNTY

As perhaps the touchstone of modernity, sov-ereignty is institutionalized in the process of̂nation-state formation and the construction ofcitizenship rights. The rise of the modern state ispremised on the emergence of civil society, therealm of private property and individual rights.How individual rights are translated into citi-zenship rights (and vice versa) and what thoserights entail depend on the transformation of"property relations and state trajectories. Thelclassic formulation of this evolutionary mod- jernist view of citizenship was that of T. H.Marshall (1964).

Marshall defined citizenship as comprehen-sive membership in the national community -a historical resolution of the tensions betweenpolitical equality in the state and economic in-equality in the marketplace. As the politicalexpression of the development of civil sod-1ety, citizenship derives from a process of for-malizing substantive rights in the state, frompolitical, through economic, to social rights.Political rights (as limited as they were to prop-ertyholders in the state) provided the precon-dition for economic rights (arising from labororganization), which enabled the instinational-ization of social rights in the twentieth-century

9 Incorporated comparison is geared to dereifying thesocial world as a relational process rather than a set ofcategorical constructs; collapsing the externalist catego-rization of social entities as discrete, independent casesto be compared; and collapsing metaphorical binarieslike global/local (McMichael, 1990). The comparativejuxtaposition of relational parts (such as rules and re-sistances) progressively constitutes a whole, as a forma-tive construct: here, a world-historical conjuncture, the"globalization project."

Globalization 591

welfare state (cf. Stephens, Rueschemeyer, andStephens, 1992).I0

f his interpretation of citizenship as the so-ial democratic achievement informed much of

the post-World War II political sociology liter-ature and its search for a progressive model inthe shadow of totalitarian regimes (cf. Polanyi,JQ57; Bendix, 1964; Moore, 1965). The keyshortcoming of this interpretation was its state-centered understanding of political outcomes,discounting imperial relations and their re-cursive impact on Western states and citizens(Cooper and Stoler, 1997). Remarking on the"institutionalized racism" in states in the post-colonial era, Bryan Turner notes that the rise ofcitizenship was intimately associated with na-tionalism, where citizenship involved "(1) aninclusionary criterion for the allocation of enti-tlements, and (2) an exclusionary basis for build-ing solidarity and creating identity" (2000:135,137), discriminating against traditional periph-eral cultures in Europe (cf. Hechter, 1975) andreproducing this inclusionary/exclusionary re-lation in colonial states.

Corporate globalization clarifies the world-historical and exclusionary dimensions of cit-izenship as it erodes social entitlements andredistributes people across national boundaries,complicating the question of sovereignty andcitizenship. As David Held remarks: "there is afundamental question about whether the rightsembodied in citizenship rights can any longerbe sustained simply within the framework thatbrought them into being" (1995:223). Newconceptions of citizenship have emerged: fromcosmopolitan citizenship (Held, 1995) throughmobility citizenship (Urry, 2000) to global citi-zenship (Muetzelfeldt and Smith, 2002), and inthe notion of the "multilayered citizen," wherepeople's rights and obligations to a specific state

ire mediated and largely dependent on theirmembership of a specific ethnic, racial, reli-

Marshall's legalistic conception of rights obscuresthe participatory dimension of citizenship, rooted in civilsociety discourses of rights and obligations (see Janoski,'998:17). These discourses inform the principle of au-tonomy (structured self-determination) that underpinsthe democratic project - whether in nation-states or incosmopolitan political arrangements (Held, 1995:147).

gious or regional collectivity, although they arerarely completely contained by it" (Yuval-Davis,2000:171).

The concept of global citizenship invokes thepossibility of a global civil society (cf. Cox,1999), and whether (and in what sense) move-ments aimed at containing global market ruleare today reproducing the Polanyian protectiveimpulse to secure social rights (cf. Bienefeld,1989; Bernard, 1997). Polanyi offers a world-historical understanding of the derivation ofrights: through the differential "discovery ofsociety" across Western states embedded withina world market managed by international fi-nanciers. Polanyi's account of the challenge tothe market ideology of economic liberalism re-mains state-centered. It is framed by the con-temporary belief in the instrumentality of thenation-state as the vehicle of social protections.In his (modernist) account, the question ofrights is overdetermined by the question of statesovereignty.

Corporate globalization generates the cir-cumstances in which the modern form ofsovereignty, although still relevant to counter-movement politics, is challenged by alterna-tive forms of sovereignty, referred to variouslyas "globalization from below" (Brecher et al.,2000), "the anticapitalist resistance," "globalsocial justice movements," or "democratic glob-alization." Many of these forms embrace,substantively, the idea of "subsidiarity," situat-ing decision-making power at the lowest appro-priate levels/loci, transforming sovereignty intoa "relative rather than an absolute authority"(Brecher et al., 2000:44). Although it is impos-sible to detail the range of such movements, thischapter draws on the examples of the regionalMexican Zapatista, national Brazilian Sem Terra,and transnational Via Campesina movements toidentify such alternative social forms practic-ing a politics of subsidiarity that is, significantly,cosmopolitan.

Explication of the tension between the con-ventional, Polanyian countermovement (reasse-rting national sovereignty against neoliberalism)and the emergence of a decentralized transna-tional, "network movement" (Brecher et al.,2000; Hardt, 2002) suggests a crisis in the

592 Philip McMichael

paradigm of modernity. While there is a vari-ety of reform and/or advocacy networks andnongovernmental organizations (from AmnestyInternational through Oxfam to Friends of theEarth), loosely defined as an emergent "globalcivil society" or an incipient organic "worldparliament" (Monbiot, 2003), we considerhere the discourse of three political move-ments, with active constituencies, that refor-mulate conceptions of sovereignty and rightsreflexively — that is, in critical relation toextant global power relations. Social scienceconventions may view these as "peripheral"movements, but I regard this designationinappropriate in a global economy whose foun-dations rest firmly on a dialectic of exploita-tion/marginalization of the world's majoritypopulation. I focus on two features of modernsovereignty addressed by these movements: first,the limits of formal sovereignty, institutionalizedin the liberal—modern binary of state/market(political/economic); and second, occlusion ofimperial relations as the historic crucible of themodern state.

LIMITS OF THE PROJECT OF MODERNITY

We begin with an account of Polanyi's contribu-tion, as it presages the politics of globalization.The Great Transformation (1957), constructedaround the process of the "discovery of soci-ety," locates the question of rights in the socialregulation of the market. Polanyi termed thecommodification of land, labor, and money afiction of economistic ideology, because thesesocial substances are not produced for sale -rather, they embody social relations. Their sub-jection to market relations is a political act. Thefictitious nature of these commodities was re-vealed in the overwhelming social reaction tothe rule of the market at the turn of the twen-tieth century. Landed classes mobilized againstthe pressures of commercial agriculture, work-ers organized against exploitation of their la-bor as a mere commodity whose price de-pended only on its supply and demand andwhose employment depended on business for-tunes beyond employee and employer control,

and whole societies struggled over the fmcial austerity imposed by the gold standardnational economies experiencing trade imK 1ances. These various mobilizations formed ah'toric countermovement to the idea of the V]fregulating market."

Under sustained popular pressure, governments intervened in the market, abandoned thegold standard (the mother of all commoditiesand the early-twentieth-century world resortedto socialism, fascism and New-Dealism. Out ofthese experiments, at the end of a period ofworld wars, the Cold War divided the indus-trial world between variants of social democracy(First World) and communism (Second World)While the former turned services like unem-ployment relief, health care, and education intopublic rights through a measure of decommod-'ification and as a complement to market society,the latter abolished the separation of economics Iand politics through central planning, reprc-:senting an "enormous political challenge to*the social form of the modern states-system"'.'._(Rosenberg, 2001:134).

For Polanyi, the movement of resistance*to the ideology of the self-regulating market̂turned on a public vision of society, based njfsocial protections, civil rights, and modern cit-*Jizenship. That is, the countermovements re-vealed the social character of rights and equalitjt;in the state. But Polanyi's conception of the greatT;transformation as the "discovery of society" be-r|trays an essentialism of modernity, in a primor-?".dial social interest recovered through the double.,movement, obscuring the class, gender, eth-rnic, and imperial relations constituting the state.5;State-sanctioned citizenship may be a universal.;ideal, but its historic practice has been marked;,by relational strategies of alterity, privilege, anojexclusion (Isin, 2002). Although the state is rep-|resented formally as the site of sovereignty (p"'1"tics), its substantive dimensions include the classand cultural politics of the relations of power,production, and consumption." That is, thê

11 The conventional understanding of the state asa one-sided and artificial "superstructure" ot politKSydistinguished from an equally artificial and dcpobB"cized "base" of economics, stems from the hW

Globalization 593

tate itse^ K> *n ParC' a relation of production/Saver, 1987) and reproduction (cf. Bakker andgill 2003) and therefore part of the constitutionfthe thought and practice of civil society.The modernity paradigm represents the state

js the realm of political sovereignty, linked tocivil society via national forms of citizenship, butjiistorically states were constituted within im-perial relations. That is, the substantive historyof the state system is embedded in a complexof global and regional, class, racial, and ethnicpower relations (cf. Wallerstein, 1974). Themodern states discriminatory modes of rulecontradict the rhetoric of European civility andmodernity (see, e.g., Davis, 2000). Racism wasintegral to settler states, formed through geno-cidal relations with indigenous peoples, andcolonial states — where, in Africa, exploitativeapparatuses were often based in state patronagesystems formed through artificial tribal hi-erarchies and land confiscation (Patel, 2002;Davidson, 1992:206, 257). With decoloniza-tion, independence formally abolished racialdiscrimination and affirmed civil freedoms, butit often divided power within the new nation-states according to the tribal relations (ethnic,religious, regional) established via colonial rule(Mamdani, 1996:17—20). Similarly, the statesin the Indian subcontinent -were constructedthrough the politics of partition in the mo-ment of decolonization, at the same time as thestate of Israel occupied and subdivided Palestine.Whereas the modernity paradigm proclaims for-mal equality in the state, assimilating minoritiesand deploying civil rights to correct historicinequities of access to the state and market,

surrounding exchange relations. Social relations amongpeople appear as exchange relations between commodi-ties, extinguishing the interdependence among peo-ple and elevating their dependence on "economy"(cf. Marx, 1967). The phenomenal independence of theeconomy is matched by the phenomena] independenceof the realm of politics. Polanyi's critique of the com-modity fetishism of economism as simply unnatural ac-cepts the ferishized social form of the state, occluding itsorigins in the property relation, precluding an historical(and cultural) understanding of the phenomenon of mar-ket rule, and perhaps obscuring the inevitable return ofwhat he referred to as "our obsolete market mentality"(1971).

most modern states embody historic tensionsbetween formal secularism and historical layer-ing of race, class, and ethnic political relations.

What is so distinctive about contemporaryglobalization is that it exacerbates these ten-sions through state transformation. Under theguise of formal sovereignty, states author thederegulation of financial flows and the privati-zation of public capacity, decomposing nationalpolitical-economic coherence (Chossudovsky,1997) and elevating ethnic and racial hierarchieswithin and across states. At the global level, his-toric north-south relations shape currency hi-erarchies and multilateral institutional power insuch a way as to distribute the costs of structuraladjustment to the weaker and more vulnera-ble states and populations (Cohen, 1998). Underthe resulting austere conditions, states becomethe site and object of class, ethnic, and religiousmobilizations based in regional or national pol-itics. The insecurities and forced deprivationsattending corporate globalization are expressedin myriad ways, from food riots through landoccupation to indigenous and fundamentalistmovements demanding rights in the state. Thesetensions express the historic inequalities withina global states system constituted through theuneven and incomplete project of postcolonialsovereignty and development, to which we nowturn.

MODERNITY AND DEVELOPMENT

Development emerged as part of the modernityparadigm, as a political response to the depre-dations of the market. Its centerpiece was theproblem of dispossession and displacement ofpopulations (both rural and industrial), throughthe consolidation of private property relations(in land or money—capital). As a result, "de-velopment" was reproduced on a broadeningscale as governments sought to accommodate(and discipline) the expropriated to paid la-bor systems within industrial capitalist relations(Cowan and Shenton, 1996). This interventioninformed, on a world scale, a discourse of in-ternational development in the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonization, targeting Third

594 Philip McMichael

World poverty (Escobar 1995), clearly enun-ciated by U.S. President Harry Truman onJanuary 20, 1949:

"We must embark on a bold new program for mak-ing the benefits of our scientific advances and in-dustrial progress available for the improvement andgrowth of underdeveloped areas. The old imperial-ism — exploitation for foreign profit — has no placein our plans. What we envisage is a program of de-velopment based on the concepts of democratic fairdealing" (quoted in Esteva, 1992:6).

The discourse of development, as a "fairdeal," offered a vision of all societies movingalong a path forged by the Western world —a path constituted by dispossession (cf. Davis,2000). It was liberal insofar as it rejected colo-nialism and promoted self-determination, envi-sioning a national popular mobilization in theproject of modernization and improvement ofliving standards. But it ignored the contributionof colonial peoples, cultures, and resources toEuropean development; it forgot that the post-colonial states could not repeat the Europeanexperience of development through colonial-ism (other than through further dispossessionof rural and minority peoples via internalcolonialism); and it denied the intrinsic meritof non-European cultures.

As an ideal, the development paradigm erasesthe relation between the rise of modern cit-izenship in Europe and the horror of slaveryand colonialism, and offers the world a sin-gle vision that flattens its diversity and spon-sors an increasingly unsustainable monoculturalindustrial system. The development paradigmembodies a contradictory logic: It offers self-determination at the same time as it sus-pends self-definition (Rist, 1997:79)- That is,it frames self-determination as a property ofthe nation-state: an imposed Western discipline(cf. Mitchell 1988). Here, "development" re-hearses the duality of modernity, which atonce celebrated the progressive Enlightenmentprinciple of self-organization but contained itthrough the device of state sovereignty (Hardtand Negri, 2000:74). Political sovereignty' wasthus constructed as a relationship of power,channeling citizen and subject sovereignties

through the state. In short, modernity is eJc_pressed in the state form, as a relation with njtional and international dimensions.

In world-historical terms, citizenship, demo-cracy, and development — all universal visionsimplying political, social, and economic rights-were forged, as attributes of states, within thecolonial relationship and its disorganizing im..pact on the non-European world. The colonialrelation conditioned these discourses, enablingtheir projection as universal conditions chart-ing the future of the non-European world (tfCooper and Stoler, 1997:37). Together they in-formed the post-World War II "developmentproject," a discursive vehicle for the orderingof world political—economy under U.S. hege-mony (McMichael, 2004). The U.S. strategy,representing development as a historic entitle-ment of the community of (new) nations, was.aj"Immanuel Wallerstein (1995) put it, New Deal-ism writ large. Development was instituted as aregime of "embedded liberalism," premised onthe deliberate organization of the world market:around national economic priorities (Ruggie,1982). In other worlds, it was a globally insti-tuted market, anchored in a now complete statessystem.

As the projection of the Anglo—Americanwelfare state into the postcolonial states system,the development project combined aid withresponsibility, especially adherence to the prin-ciple of the freedom of enterprise (Arrighi,1994:68; Karagiannis, 2004). But the devel-opment project was an unrealizable ideal inan asymmetrical world order. Its four pillars:combined national and international forms cferegulation. First, it responded to, and spon-sored, the completion of the nation-state systemvia decolonization and the institutionalizationof the principle of self-determination in theUnited Nations.12 Second, the 1944 BrettonWoods conference (creating the IMF and the

12 This principle anticipated the post-Westphalian in-clusion of individuals (rather than just states) as subjectsof international law and codification of human rig"Held, noting the potential paradigm shift, suggests *logical conclusion of this vision is to challengewhole principle that humankind should be orgaw2"as a society of sovereign states above all else" (I995-5"'

Globalization 595

World Bank) institutionalized the regulation ofmonetary relations on a world scale. Unlikerhe nineteenth century, when world moneywas produced through private financial houses,nost-World War II world money was producedthrough a combination of the U.S. FederalReserve (the U.S. controlled 70 percent of goldreserves) and an allied coalition of central banks(Arrighi, 1994:278), with an IMF/World Bankloan system designed to stabilize currency ex-changes (aided by capital controls) and to incor-porate postcolonial states into the developmentproject. Third, national political—economies,with considerable variation, regulated wagerelations with combinations of Keynesianmacroeconomic policy and Fordist strategies tostabilize expanding production and consump-tion relations. Fourth, the Marshall Plan andother foreign aid programs driven by ColdWar concerns infused the world economy withmilitary, technological, and financial relationsprivileging U.S. corporate and geopolitical in-terests. These four pillars instituted a world mar-ket within an ideal discourse of development,in which states were responsible for managingnational economic growth. Postcolonial statessought to transcend the structural dependencyof the colonial division of labor by pursuingstrategies of "import substitution industrializa-tion" to build domestic manufacturing capac-ity, financed by continued patterns of exportsof primary goods and/or by bilateral technicaland food aid and multilateral loans.

The development project, as an attempt touniversalize the model of the citizen state, re-mains unrealized. First, the nation-state wasessentially a West European institution (cf.Davidson, 1992). It has had a troubled historyin Eastern Europe and the postcolonial world,where state boundaries intersect cultural group-ings and where the in-migration of ex-colonialshas accelerated the erosion of civil rights associ-ated with neoliberal reforms. Second, geopoli-tics has conferred privilege on some states at theexpense of others. Industrialization of showcase,or strategic, states of the Cold War (e.g., SouthKorea, Taiwan, Chile, South Africa) served toconfirm the development project while mostof their erstwhile Third World partners have

been hard-pressed to replicate the First Worlddevelopment path (cf. Grosfoguel, 1996). Andthird, the institutional structure of the develop-ment project promoted transnational economicintegration through aid programs and foreigninvestment. Freedom of enterprise encouragedtransnational corporate activity and generatedan offshore dollar market that ballooned inthe 1970s with the recycling of petrodollars.A global money market arose, and, with rapiddevelopments in information and communica-tion technology, global banks gained promi-nence and an era of financialization ensued(Arrighi, 1994). Colin Leys (1996:7) capturesthe transition to the "globalization project":

By the mid-1980s the real world on which "develop-ment theory" had been premised had . . . disappeared.Above all, national and international controls overcapital movements had been removed, drastically cur-tailing the power of any state wishing to promotenational development, while the international de-velopment community threw itself into the task ofstrengthening "market forces" (i.e., capital) at the ex-pense of states everywhere, but especially in the ThirdWorld.

Ultimately, the globalization project repre-sents an attempt to resolve the crisis of devel-opment, which appears as the crisis of statesovereignty. This crisis was immanent in thecontradiction between the ideal of national de-velopment and transnational economic integra-tion (cf. Friedmann and McMichael, 1989).The development project premise, that stateswere supposed to organize national economies,was undercut by the geopolitical and corpo-rate relations ordering the "free world" as aninternational hierarchy of political and techno-logical relations. Transnational firms deepenedthe "material integration of social reproductionacross borders" (Rosenberg, 2001:134—5), com-pounding the differentials among Third Worldstates as global production chains fragmentednational economic sectors, preempting nation-ally driven forms of capital accumulation andwealth redistribution, and new forms of globalfinance exacerbated indebtedness among ThirdWorld states. These circumstances clarified theparadox of formal sovereignty: first, in the aus-tere conditions imposed on overexposed Third

596 Philip McMichael

World states via the debt regime of the past twodecades; and second, in the subsequent partici-pation of governments in implementing marketrule, via the institutions (WTO) and protocols(FTAs) of the globalization project.

GLOBALIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT:

RECYCLING THE DOUBLE MOVEMENT?

Arguably, globalization is the politics of institut-ing a corporate market on a global scale. Thereare two sides to this coin: the restructuring ofstates to facilitate global circuits of money andcommodities (conventionally termed "openingeconomies"), and the construction of multilat-eral institutions and conventions securing thisglobal "market rule." It involves a reconfig-uration of priorities and power within states,typically expressed in the ascendance of glob-ally oriented financial and trade interests overnational developmentalist coalitions rooted inlabor and peasant unions and institutionalizedin urban welfare, education, and agriculturalministeries (Canak, 1989). States are not disap-pearing; rather, they undergo transformation toaccommodate global corporate relations and therequirements of sound finance, as interpretedby the multilateral agencies. Thus the conditionfor the Mexican state signing on to the NorthAmerican Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) wasthe sale or dissolution of 80 percent of its 1,555public enterprises, the reduction of average tar-iffs on manufactured imports from 27 to 8 per-cent, wage reductions of up to 50 percent, ashift from husbanding a national agriculturaland food sector to encouraging foreign invest-ment in agro-exports, reducing rural credit andfood subsidies, promoting food importing, andliberalizing access to the financial and trans-port sectors for foreign investors (McMichael,2004:135, 192). In these ways and more, thetransformation of the Mexican state facilitatesthe global deepening of relations of social repro-duction. The paradox of sovereignty is exposedin the state's performance of its historic task oforganizing the (now global) market.13

13 In observing that financialization has reduced theoptions of even powerful nation-states regarding eco-

Formal political sovereignty enables the en.forcement of market rule. The management of.the debt crisis by the Bretton Woods institutionsillustrates this proposition. Bailouts of indebtedstates in the 1980s, and beyond, mandatedgovernment enactment of austerity measuresunder market-enabling conditions laid downby the IMF and World Bank crisis managersStructural adjustment loans require combina-tions of currency devaluation, wage reductions,removal of social subsidies, privatization ofthe state, and liberalization of foreign trade'iand financial markets. Whereas these measureswere implemented on a case-by-case basis inthe 1980s, they were institutionalized in the!1990s as universal rules applying to a collec-tive sovereignty, although not without some(continuing) resistance (Chossudovsky, 1997;,McMichael, 2000a).

With the collapse of the Cold War in 1991,the stage was set for a universal applicationof liberalization, under the leadership of the:United States and its G-7 allies. In theGATT Uruguay Round (1986—94), plans wereafoot for extending trade liberalization mea-sures from manufacturers to agriculture, ser-ivices, and intellectual property. A powerfulcomplex of transnational firms, includingGM, IBM, and American Express, formed amultinational trade negotiations coalition tolobby GATT member nations (New York Times,November 11, 1990). The outcome of the"Round was the creation of the World TradeOrganization (WTO) with over 130 memberstates. Unlike the GATT, a trade treaty only,:

the WTO has the power, through its disputesettlement body, to enforce its rulings ontomember states. Should states refuse to com-ply, the WTO can authorize the plaintiff totake unilateral action. The ambit of the disputesettlement mechanism is wide: covering trade,investment, services, and intellectual property.

nomic policy instruments, Held accentuates the ambi-guity of sovereignty: "While this alone does not amountto a direct erosion of an individual state's entitlement torule its roost — sovereignty — it leaves nation-states ex-posed and vulnerable to the networks of economic forcesand relations which range in and through them, recon-stituting their very form and capacities" (1995:134)-

Globalization 597

Member states can lodge complaints againstrates deemed in restraint of trade with theWTO, whose ruling holds automatically unlessevery other member state votes to reverse it.

Consistent with the moderns conception ofpolitical sovereignty, the role of the WTO isostensibly to enforce market freedoms, by de-politicizing the global economy. This impliesa general challenge to national laws and regula-tions regarding the environment, health, pref-erential trade relations, social subsidies, laborlegislation, and so on. Although the challengedoes not eliminate all laws, it seeks to harmonizeregulation across the state system and to lowerthe ceiling on democratic initiatives within thenational polity, especially those involving sub-national jurisdictions (Tabb, 2000:9). That is,instituting a self-regulating market on a globalscale reformulates and redistributes, rather thanremoves, sovereignty, simultaneously generatingresistances.

The current challenge to national laws — andcurrencies — invokes a second cycle of Polanyiancountermovements in a rediscovery of society.But instead of a historic movement, the discov-ery of society now appears to have been a his-toric moment rooted in the political history ofthe West. This was the moment of consolida-tion of the nation-state. The maturing of so-cial rights (and, therefore, of social protections)was conditioned by the maturing of movementsfor decolonization - ignored by Polanyi, but,arguably, just as significant in the process ofcompletion of the nation-state system. The sig-nificance of this conjuncture lay not only in theproliferation of new nations (and the creation ofthe United Nations), but also in the possibilityof a sovereignty crisis, contained in the terms ofthe development project. Here, while the post-colonial world of the UN enshrines the individ-ual sovereignty of states, the institutionalizationof a global states system occurs in a world struc-tured by an international division of labor anda hegemonic order premised on integration viacorporate, military, and financial relations.

The crisis of sovereignty is revealed throughJustin Rosenberg's concept of the "empire ofcivil society" (the formal duality of public andPrivate political realms across the modern states

system). He suggests that the public/privatedisjuncture "explains part of the paradox ofsovereignty: why it is both more absolute inits 'purely political' prerogatives than other his-torical forms of rule, and yet highly ambigu-ous as a measure of actual power" (Rosenberg,2001:131). Thus, the moment of consolidationof national sovereignty as a universal form via thedevelopment project simultaneously spawned apowerful counterpoint in the state-sponsoredcorporate integration of economic relations ona world scale. It is this dialectic that sparks de-bates about the fate of the state under globaliza-tion and underlies current tensions within theWTO, as the agency now responsible for insti-tuting the self-regulating market. And it is thistension that reveals the crisis of sovereignty.

The crisis of sovereignty is expressed for-mally in declining state capacity to protect (all)citizens as well as in the substantive challengeby countermovements to modern understand-ings of sovereignty, both spurred by corporateglobalization. As Charles Tilly (1984) suggests,historically capital inherited the state as a protec-tion racket, subordinating peoples and culturesacross the world to territorial administration andrefashioning the state via civic representation asa legitimizing and/or empowering relation withits subjects. Arguably capital now owns or seeksto own the state, via privatization and the dis-ciplines of deregulated monetary relations, andhas a diminishing need for substantive formsof democracy associated with the twentieth-century "discovery of society" (cf. Hardt andNegri, 2000). In the twenty-first century, thecitizen state is "de/reregulated" as a market statein the service of global capital circuits, unleash-ing a protective movement that is compelledto rethink the meaning of civil society and so-cial rights. That is, the significance of corporateglobalization lies in the trajectory of the stateand the related question of rights.

GLOBALIZATION AND ITS

COUNTERMOVEMENTS

In this era of globalization, we find a curioustension embedded in the discourse of universal

598 Philip McMichael

rights. Globalization, as a discursive corporateproject, portrays the world's future in singular,universalist, and abstracted terms - as movingtoward a market culture enabled by Western sci-ence and technology and promoting expandingfreedoms of capacity and choice. This is a partic-ular vision of the world, presented as a universal.However, after fifty years of development, only20 percent of the 'world's population has the cashor access to consumer credit to participate in thismarket, and the remaining 80 percent do notall necessarily aspire to Western consumerism(Barnet and Cavanagh, 1994:383). In fact, wefind a proliferation of social movements pro-claiming the universal right to be different.

Instead of a politics of participation in thecentralizing marketplace of development, coun-termovements pose alternative, decentralizedconceptions of politics governed by locality(place, network, diaspora) and/or situated iden-tity (where relations of class, gender, race,ethnicity, and environmental stewardship arespecified world-historically). This is not awholesale rejection of modern relationships(technical, financial, landed) so much as a re-formulation of the terms and meanings of theserelationships. The countermovements may seekto subsume market relations to their particularpolitics, but, "post-Polanyi," these alternativeforms of sovereignty are governed not by theuniversals of the states system but by the partic-ulars of locality/identity-based relations (whichmay inform global network organizations, suchas Fairtrade Labelling Organizations Interna-tional and Via Campesina). Although this poli-tics is distinguished as locality/identity-orientedpolitics, it is not postmodern in the sense of es-chewing a material politics. It is a politics bornof modern world-historical circumstances, ofcorporate globalization: It is only at the point atwhich national sovereignty is universally calledinto question that the artificial separation ofpolitics from economics is fully revealed, en-couraging alternative conceptions of political-economic sovereignty.

The unclothing of the "empire of civil so-ciety," so to speak, is precisely the momentof transition between the development projectand the globalization project, as the sovereignty

of the nation-state yields to the sovereignty ofmonetary relations.'4 This transition was ef-fected by two, related, world events. First, the1970s deregulation of financial relations subor-dinated all currencies and, therefore, states, tothe rationality of global money markets.'5 Thesecond transitional event was the puncturing ofthe "developmentalist illusion" (Arrighi, 1990)by the 1980s debt regime, preparing the groundfor the project of globalization. The devastat-ing devaluation of southern economies and so-cieties, imposed by the multilateral agencies onbehalf of finance capital, exposed the growingautonomy of global economic relations and thestructural and institutionalized necessity of state .sponsorship of these relations.'6

The potential erosion of individual nationalsovereignties was formalized in 1995 in the es-tablishment of the WTO. In redefining devel-opment as a global corporate project, the WTOcollectivizes the sovereignty of its member statesas a general vehicle of market rule (McMichael,2000a). Joseph Stiglitz confirms this in distin-guishing the WTO from the Bretton Woodsinstitutions thus: "It does not set rules itself;rather it provides a forum in which tradenegotiations go on and it ensures that its agree-ments are lived up to" (2002:16). The recom-position of sovereignty involves abstraction: Justas the global economy reduces production sitesacross the world to competitive replicates of one

14 For an extended discussion of this, see Arrighi,1998 and McMichael, 2000b. In this sense, Polanyi'sclaim that "the currency is the nation" was prescient.

15 Thus: "When interest and currency rates are nO->longer determined politically by legitimate institutionsof the nation-state but rather are formed by global mar-kets, the market dynamic can no longer be politicallyregulated according to directives which are incompati-ble with i t . . . Politics does not disappear, but its ratio-nality is synchronized with the economy" (Altvater andMahnkopf, 1997:463).

16 As Jeffrey Sachs observed of IMF management:"Not unlike the days when the British Empire placedsenior officials directly into the Egyptian and Ottomanfinance ministries, the IMF is insinuated into the innersanctums of nearly 75 developing-country governmentsaround the world.. . (which) rarely move without con-sulting the IMF staff, and when they do, they risk theirlifelines to capital markets, foreign aid, and internationalrespectability" (1998:17).

Globalization 599

another, so state organizations surrender theirparticularity to the competitive relations of theglobal money market.

In this recomposition of sovereignty, the cor-porate empire reveals that the economic ispolitical (and vice versa), spawning counter-movements no longer captured by the abstrac-tions of modernity, development, state, andeconomy. The global countermovement, in re-sisting privatization and the conversion of sociallife into the commodity form, reformulates thepolitical terrain in which reembedding of themarket can occur, producing a radical redefini-tion of political economy. This is not just aboutinfusing a moral economy into an existing po-litical economy of nation states, which, undermid-twentieth-century circumstances becamethe Polanyian realpolitik, for better or for worse(cf. Lacher, 1999). It is about reformulating con-ceptions of civil/human rights, the state, anddevelopment (cf. Mohan, 2004).

PROPERTY RIGHTS VERSUS THE COMMONS

When welfare systems and other public ser-vices are privatized, the meaning of citizenshipswitches from membership of the public house-hold with rights to social protections, to mem-bership of the market with rights to produce,exchange, and consume. Citizens are regardedincreasingly as "bearers of economic rational-ity" (Drainville, 1995:60), and access to goodsand services (some of which were once public) isdetermined less by need and more by merit. Asstates restructure, rights to public goods dwin-dle, replaced by uneven access to the market.Neoliberal policies accentuate the individual (asopposed to the civic) content of citizenship,subordinating social rights to economic rights,which enables corporate claims on the state: "anaggregation of economic rights... constitutes aform of economic citizenship, in that it em-powers and can demand accountability fromgovernment." Thus investors rather than cit-izens "vote governments' economic policiesdown or in; they can force governments totake certain measures and not others" (Sassen,1996:39).

The aggregation of economic rights is notso defining of this form of globalization as theattempt to institutionalize property rights on aglobal scale. Sheer size or scale may distin-guish the twenty-first-century corporation, butthe privileging of corporate rights over citi-zens' rights via institutional transformations ismore profound. Nowhere is this more dramaticthan in the participation of states in the elab-oration of global market rule. Citizens under-stand this threat — from the 146 IMF food riotsin thirty nine countries, protesting the auster-ity policies of the debt regime as social rightsto food subsidies shrunk (Walton and Seddon,1994), through broad civic protest over priva-tization schemes to the exploration of alterna-tive local forms of government (e.g., Argentina'sneighborhood assemblies).

The successful resistance to the attempt toprivatize Cochabamba's water system was aturning point for popular mobilizations in Bo-livia, formerly touted by the multilateral agen-cies as a model for other low-income countries(Farthing and Kohl, 2001:9). The corporateconsortium that purchased the city's water dou-bled prices and charged citizens for rainwatercollected on rooftops. Poor families found foodwas now cheaper than water. The depth of pub-lic outcry forced the city to resume controlof the water system. Citizen action thus de-commodified a public good. However, if theWTO's proposed General Agreement on Tradein Services (GATS 2000) had been in place,such a reversal would have been practicallyimpossible. GATS, described by the WTO as"the world's first international investment agree-ment," targets the privatization of basic servicessuch as health care, education, and water supply;infrastructures such as post, public transport,and communications; cultural services such asbroadcasting, films, libraries, and museums; aswell as finance and tourism. Whereas GATSmay exclude services provided "under the ex-ercise of government authority," it does apply ifservices have a commercial dimension or com-pete with the private sector, and, because gov-ernments can liberalize more, but not less, underGATS, an expansion of regulation or public assetsis ruled out (Coates, 2001:28).

6oo Philip McMichael

Privatizing public goods is also enabled bythe intellectual property rights protocol in theWTO, known as Trade Related IntellectualProperty Rights (TRIPs). As a relational fea-ture of corporate globalization, it is premised onthe elimination, or incorporation, of the com-mons and at the same time crystallizes resistancearound the protection of indigenous knowl-edges and practices. The intellectual propertyrights regime originated in stemming piratingof Western products such as CDs, watches, andso forth in the global south, but it now sanc-tions a reverse biopiracy on a disproportion-ate scale, threatening cultural rather than simplycommodity rights. Patenting microbiologicalorganisms, via TRIPs, protects monopoly rightsto seeds, plants, and plant products where theyhave been genetically modified. By appropri-ating plant varieties developed over centuries,TRIPs' protection of Western scientific innova-tion invisibilizes alternative sciences of indige-nous agriculture and biodiversity management(Shiva, 1997:8).

Within the WTO, the TRIPs protocol priv-ileges governments and corporations as legalentities and disempowers communities andfarmers whose rights to plant their crops aresubject to claims of patent infringement. Onemodel of resistance emerged in 1996 in theIndian village of Pattuvam in the southernstate of Kerala, when it declared its ownershipover all genetic resources within its jurisdiction(Alvares, 1997). This preemption of corporategenetic prospecting is protected by the Indianconstitution, which decentralizes certain powersto village-level institutions. By registering localplant species and cultivars in local names, thevillage claimed collective ownership of geneticresources, denying the possibility of corporatepatents applying to these resources and remov-ing the property from intellectual rights.'7 AsShiva observes: "The seed is, for the farmer,not merely the source of future plants and food;it is the storage place of culture and history"(1997:8).

The Pattuvam resistance exemplifies the sig-nificance of place in countermovement poli-

17 This notion comes from Raj Patel.

tics against the spatial abstraction inherent m>the commodity relation and the monocultureof modern scientific rationality. Vine Delorjj 1Jr.'s claim that modernity's obsession with time(as money) contrasts with the place-based epis-temology of nonmarket cultures (in Starr2000:189) echoes Marx's observation that thelogic of commodity circulation is the destruc-tion of space by time. Arguably, the global southoffers a multiplicity of examples of place-basedepistemology - whether ecologically and/orcosmologically driven peasant and indige-nous cultures. Attempts to revalue local spacethrough constructing alternative currency rela-tions or community-supported agricultures, es-pecially in the north, pursue a similar goal butwithin a different historical relationship to capi-talist modernity (cf. Hines, 2000). By extension,transnational networks, such as environmental,' •fair trade, human rights, unions, and farmers'movements, address concerns rooted in locali-ties that, together, unify their diversity. Coun-terposed to the uniform market culture ofcorporate globalization, resistance is heteroge-neous in time and space and yet well aware ofits world-historical context.

GLOBAL COUNTERMOVEMENT POLITICS

Corporate globalization generates a range of re-isistances, those highlighted here developing a :

counterhegemonic politics based in the right to Ilive by values other than those of the market.Grassroots movements assert cultural diversity:'as a world-historical relation and human right,embodying what Sachs calls "cosmopolitan lo- .calism" (1992:112). The antimarket rule move- ;ment is most evident in the global south, where Ithe tradition of the commons is more recent!and/or where the empire has no clothes.

Revealing the nakedness of empire is decid-edly postcolonial, in the sense that the crisis oi|development includes its (and the state's) de-ymystification. As the Zapatistas commented, inresisting the Mexican states embrace of NAFTA(1994):

"When we rose up against a national governmentwe found that it did not exist. In reality we weie^

Globalization 601

ajnst great financial capital, against speculationA investment, which makes all decisions in Mexico,well as in Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, the

Americas — everywhere" (quoted in Starr, 2000:104).

Having confronted the paradox of state sovere-ignty the Zapatista uprising significantly unset-tled regional financial markets, contributing to a10 percent devaluation of the peso at the end of1904. Arguably, the Zapatista political interven-tion revealed the contingency of development(as registered by Mexico's 1994 admission intothe OECD), implying that it was a confidencetrick of the globalization project:

"At the end of 1994 the economic farce with'whichSalinas had deceived the Nation and the internationaleconomy exploded. The nation of money called thegrand gentlemen of power and arrogance to dinner,and they did not hesitate in betraying the soil andsky in which they prospered with Mexican blood.The economic crisis awoke Mexicans from the sweetand stupifying dream of entry into the first world"(quoted in Starr, 2000:104).

The power of the Zapatista movement liesprecisely in its ability to situate its political in-tervention in cosmopolitan, world-historicalterms - relating its regional condition, throughnational, to global, relationships. This includeslinking the Mexican state's participation inNAFTA, which Subcomandante Marcos de-clared to be "a death sentence for indigenouspeople," to the historic colonization of Chiapas;and linking Zapatismo to resistance movementsacross the world: "we are the possibility that(empire) can be made to disappear. . . tell it(empire) you have alternatives to its world"(quoted in Starr, 2000:104-5).

The Zapatista uprising, timed to coincidewith the implementation of NAFTA, was reve-latory rather than simply programmatic (Harvey,1999:199). It linked a powerful and symboliccritique of the politics of globalization with thedemand for civil rights linked to regional au-tonomy. When the Mexican government triedappeasement through a National Commissionfor Integral Development and Social Justice forIndigenous People and injecting funds into Chi-apas, the Zapatistas rejected this as "just anotherstep in their cultural assimilation and economic

annihilation" (Cleaver, 1994:50). Zapatismo as-serted a politics of rights going beyond individ-ual or property rights to human and communityrights, resonating -with indigenous rights move-ments elsewhere. As Neil Harvey observes: "Ifcitizenship in Salinas' Mexico was contingenton the economic competitiveness of each indi-vidual, the indigenous had little hope of surviv-ing either as citizens or as peoples" (1999:200).That is, Zapatista politics are not about inclusionper se, but about redefining citizenship, callingfor: "A political dynamic not interested in tak-ing political power but in building a democracywhere those who govern, govern by obeying"(quoted in Harvey, 1999:210).

The durability of the Zapatista resistancestems from a lengthy process, undertaken byMarcos and a small cadre band, of blendingthe Zapatista critique of Mexican political his-tory with the "indigenous peoples' story ofhumiliation, exploitation and racism" (Harvey,1999:166). It exemplifies a world-historical sen-sibility in bringing a cultural politics to thequestion of civil rights. The more substantivenotion of collective rights grounds the civicproject in place-based mobilization, based on"historical memory, cultural practices, and po-litical symbols as much as on legal norms"(Harvey, 1999:28). As a regional movementagainst empire and its state form, the Zapatistasparticularize a universal notion of rights inblending ethnic, gender, and class relations intoa process, rather than a structure, of democracy.

The particularization of rights, in a self-organizing movement addressing and redressingtangible historical relations, is simultaneously auniversal claim to substantive forms of democ-racy, which I am arguing is the root of the globalcountermovement. The conception of rightsmakes no prior claim to content, as movementsand communities reserve the right to define forthemselves appropriate political and ecologicalrelations. Some movements consciously invertthe problematic of capitalist modernity, under-stood here as a European universal legitimiz-ing global empire. Contemporary indigenousmovements, from the Ecuadorian movement(CONAIE) to the North American Inuit, affirmcitizenship as a basic national and human right

6 0 2 Philip McMichael

but view it as the vehicle for respecting the dif-ferential rights of minorities, creating plurina-tional states with varying degrees of autonomy.Within the Zapatista movement, women havequestioned the premise of official indigenousstate policies that dichotomizes modernity andtradition, insisting on "the right to hold to dis-tinct cultural traditions while at the same timechanging aspects of those traditions that oppressor exclude them" (Eber, 1999:16). This involvesblending the formal demand for territorial andresource autonomy with the substantive demandfor women's rights to political, physical, eco-nomic, social, and cultural autonomy.

Another compelling social experiment crys-tallizing in the crucible of neoliberahsm is theBrazilian landless workers' movement, the Movi-mento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST).

The Cardoso governments neoliberal experi-ment (1995-2002) subordinated Brazilian po-litical economy to global financial capital ina late-twentieth-century context where 1 per-cent of landowners own (but do not neces-sarily cultivate) almost 50 percent of the land,while 4.8 million families are landless. Between1970-85, agricultural subsidies cost Brazil US$31 billion. Since 1985 they have disappeared,even as OECD member states' agricultural sub-sidies continue at US $360 billion a year. Asthe MST Web site claims: "From 1985 to1996, according to the agrarian census, 942,000farms disappeared, 96% of which were smallerthan one hundred hectares. From that total,400 thousand establishments went bankruptin the first two years of the Cardosogovernment, 1995—96." Between 1985—96 ruralunemployment rose by 5.5 million, andbetween 1995—9 a rural exodus of 4 millionBrazilians occurred. While in the 1980s Brazilimported roughly US $1 million worth ofwheat, apples, and products not produced inBrazil, from "1995 to 1999, this annual averageleapt to 6.8 billion dollars, with the importa-tion of many products cultivable . . . in Brazil"(www.mstbrazil.org/EconomicModel.html).

Since the mid-1980s, the MST has settled400,000 families on more than 15 million acresof land seized by takeovers in Brazil. The MSTdraws legitimacy from the 1988 Brazilian consti-

tution's sanction of the confiscation of unculti-vated private property, not performing its socialfunction. The method of direct occupation, m jwith state military and legal force, has exposedthe inequality of landed relations and the com-plicity of the state in the centuries-old Braziliansystem of landed rule. National polls confirmpopular support of seizure of unproductive landand government administrators have recognizedthat the cost of maintaining the same people iijurban favelas is twelve times the cost of legalizeing land occupation (Food First, Winter 2001},The priority given to producing staple foodsfor low-income consumers (rather than foodsfor affluent consumers in cities and abroad) ledto an agreement with the da Silva government,for direct purchase of settlement produce for thenational Zero Hunger campaign (Jardim, 2oo|f|

The power of the movement resides not onlyin its practice of securing landed "spaceaHhope," but also in its sponsorship of demon-strations, marches, occupation of government

• buildings, and negotiations through which it hasrmanaged to seize strategic moments in nationalpolitics. The MST pursues a program called"Project Brazil," using alliance-building to dejjvelop a national alternative to the global corpo-;?rate project. In articulating its agrarian strugglewith urban-based struggles (such as the Move-;ment of Homeless Workers and various favehot-*ganizations), the MST draws on several themes,in Brazilian political history: liberation theologf,;and Marxism, the "new unionism" of urban so-cial movements of the basic church communijities, and the Peasant Leagues. Through an initial;!;alliance with the church, "the only body thafcijhad what you might call a capillary organization!across the whole country" (Stedile, 2OO2:79/tjand its Pastoral Commission on Land (r975Hthe MST developed a national, but decentrakized, organization spanning twenty-seven stateŝ(concentrated among descendants of Europewimmigrants in the south and mestizos in tn«|northeast). Dispossessed farmers comprise tn£majority of its membership, but in the moreuf--ban south in particular the MST includes uneffl-,ployed workers and disillusioned civil servantsOriginally autonomous of the Worker's Paft?(PT), the MST has supported it electorally a"*;

Globalization 603

. veioped closer ties. Following the PT's recentccess in the presidential elections, President da

Silva created a new Ministry for Economic Soli-• rity, headed by an ex-seminary student activein liberation theology and in the founding ofthe MST and supportive of its agrariant agenda.

The formation of cooperatives (sixty by 2003)follows land seizures (large-scale for security).The MST Settlers Cooperative System differsJoin traditional cooperatives through social mo-bilization "transforming the economic struggleinto a political and ideological struggle." Overand beyond the (often unforgiving) task of set-tling hundreds of thousands of families on re-covered land, the political-economic noveltyof this movement lies in "linking up what itcalls the struggle for the land with the struggleon the land" (Flavio de Almeida and Sanchez,2000). The model of social appropriation in-cludes democratic decision making to developcooperative relations among workers and alter-native land use patterns, and participatory bud-geting, financed by socializing some settlementincome (Dias Martins, 2000). The social projectof the MST connects production and peda-gogy, informing its work and study method ofeducation.18

The MST's 1,600 government-recognizedsettlements include medical clinics and trainingcenters for health care workers; 1,200 publicschools employing an estimated 3,800 teach-ers serving about 150,000 children at any onetime. A UNESCO grant enables adult literacyclasses for 25,000, and the MST sponsors tech-nical classes and teacher training. Cooperativeenterprises produce jobs for thousands of mem-bers, in addition to foodstuffs and clothing forlocal and national (nonaffluent) consumption.

Joao Pedro Stedile, president of the MST, observes:Under the objective economic conditions, our pro-

posal for land reform has to avoid the oversimplificationof classical capitalist land reform, which merely dividesUP large landholdings and encourages their productiveuse. We are convinced that nowadays it is necessary toreorganize agriculture on a different social base, democ-ratize access to capital, democratize the agroindustrialprocess (something just as important as landownership),and democratize access to know-how, that is, to formaleducation" (Orlando Pinassi et al., 2000).

Although more recently the MST has linked itsprospects to the success of the PT, it continuesa regenerative political culture based in agro-ecology, continuous learning, and communityself-reliance. In a transitional moment such asthis, global justice movements reach beyond thenation-state to more complex, and uncertain,ideas of sovereignty, even as they position them-selves as transformative movements within thestates system.

MST politics exemplify the mushroomingmovement across the world for "food sover-eignty": a material and discursive counterpointto the concept of "food security," linked inthe 1980s to global agro-industries and bread-baskets supplying food through "free trade."19

Food sovereignty insists on cultural and eco-logical integrity, and food quality, counter-posed to the agro-industrial fetish of quantity,which has produced "scarcity in abundance,"expressed in the marginalization of local farm-ing on a world scale (Araghi, 2000). Marginal-ization is a by-product of the corporate pursuit,via WTO rules, of comparative advantages viafarm sector liberalization. This involves exploit-ing north/south asymmetries, where the aver-age subsidy to U.S. farmers and grain traders isabout a hundred times the income of a cornfarmer in Mindanao (Watkins, 1996). Conser-vative estimates are that between 20 millionand 30 million people have recently lost theirland due to the impact of trade liberalization(Madeley, 2000:75). Global food insecuritystems from the appropriation of land for theexports to affluent markets and by world mar-ket dumping of heavily subsidized but artifi-cially cheap food by the grain-rich countriesundermining peasant agricultures (McMichael,2003).

19 The trade principle justifying this global reconfig-uration of agriculture informed the 1995 WTO Agree-ment on Agriculture, enunciated by the U.S. delegationduring the Uruguay Round: "The U.S. has always main-tained that self-sufficiency and food security are not oneand the same. Food security — the ability to acquire thefood you need when you need it — is best providedthrough a smooth-functioning world market" (quotedin Ritchie, 1993:25).

6 0 4 Philip McMichael

The food sovereignty countermovementseeks to revitalize cultural, ecological, and demo-cratic processes in protecting local farming.It anchors its political—economy in alterna-tive, agro-ecological models producing substan-tially higher, more diverse, and more sustainableoutputs of food than high-input industrial agri-culture (Norberg-Hodge, Goering, and Page,2001:61). The Charter of Farmers' Rightsissued by the international Seed SatyagrahaMovement for biodiversity asserts the rights toland; to conserve, reproduce, and modify seedand plant material; to feed and save the coun-try from food insecurity; and to informationand participatory research (Nayar, 2000:21). Ex-pressing the global solidarities of this counter-movement, MST National Committee memberJoao Pedro Stedile claims:

"It's not enough to argue that if you work the land,you have proprietory rights over it. The Vietnameseand Indian farmers have contributed a lot to our de-bates on this. They have a different view of agricul-ture, and of nature — one that we've tried to synthesizein Via Campesina. We want an agrarian practice thattransforms farmers into guardians of the land, and adifferent way of farming, that ensures an ecologicalequilibrium and also guarantees that land is not seenas private property" (2002:100).

The several-million-strong transnational mo-vement, Via Campesina (the MST is one of itseighty-seven national members), asserts "Farm-ers Rights are eminently collective" and"should therefore be considered as a differentlegal framework from those of private property."Uniting landless peasants, family farmers, agri-cultural workers, rural women, and indigenouscommunities, Via Campesina claims that:

"biodiversity has as a fundamental base the recog-nition of human diversity, the acceptance that weare different and that every people and each indi-vidual has the freedom to think and to be. Seenin this way, biodiversity is not only flora, fauna,earth, water and ecosystems; it is also cultures, sys-tems of production, human and economic relations,forms of government; in essence it is freedom."(http://www.ns.rds.org.hn/via/)

Via Campesina privileges food sovereigntyover agricultural trade as the path to food secu-rity, noting that "the massive movement of food

around the world is forcing the increased move-"ment of people." The precondition of f00(jsovereignty, in this vision, is access to creditland, and fair prices to be set via rules negotiatedin UNCTAD, not at the W T O . And, as a polit-ical alternative to the current corporate regime"the active participation of farmers' movements:,in defining agricultural and food policies withina democratic framework is indispensable." The-specificity of these politics is that, while theSconsumer movement has discovered that "eat-ing has become a political act," Via Campesiruadds: "producing quality products for our ownpeople has also become a political act . . . thistouches our very identities as citizens of thisworld" (http://ns.rds.org.hn/via/).

Via Campesina enriches the Polanyian sensi-bility for agrarian reform, declaring not onlythat it is "an instrument to eliminate poverty andsocial differences," but also that "peasants' accessto land needs to be understood as a form of guar-antee of the value of their culture, autonomy 6 8community, and of a new vision of preserva-1tion of natural resources for humanity and fu-ture generations. Land is a good of nature thatneeds to be used for the welfare of all. Land is>not, and cannot be, a marketable good." Insteadof simply regulating land and food markets, thisperspective embodies the alternative principlesof autonomy, sovereignty, and political—ecologycommon to the global countermovement. Theenactment of this principle in communities (e.g.across Africa)20 or mass movements like the"MST21 emerges most dramatically in the global

20 Fantu Che ru documents the variety of "organized

struggles for subsistence" in Africa, where "peasants now

market their produce and livestock through their own :

channels, disregarding political boundaries and market-

ing boards," and self-organizing village development

groups create physical and educational infrastructures,

including cereal banks, gram mills and local pharmacies,

concluding that "Locally based co-operative movements

are the only ones that can realistically articulate an alter-

native vision of world order by creating new avenues or.'

social and political mobil izat ion" (1997:161—3).21 Settlers do not automatically embrace the vision

of the leadership (Caldeira, 2004). While movements

are never single-minded, the reflexive goals of thejj

global counte rmovement tend to consolidate the vision

(Wright and Wolford, 2003).

Globalization 605

tji where the complicity of the political in therporate empire has the starkest consequences.The ecological principle stems from two

ources: the critique largely from withinnorthern, market societies of the social andenvironmental devastation from economicmonocultures; and the critique largely fromsouthern cultures that practice principles ofbiodiversity and agro-ecology, through customand/or necessity. Insofar as the global counter-[novements' common object is to resist cor-porate globalization and state sponsorship ofcommodity relations that threaten human com-munities and habitats, it includes the tacticalgoal of social protection. However, in additionto regulating market relations, countermove-ments champion nonmarket polycultures andnew forms of subsidiary political representation,asserting a new strategic right to diversity, in andacross cultures.

CONCLUSION

As a discursive project of market rule, global-ization enlists the instrumentality of the mod-ern state in increasingly unaccountable policieswith profound, crisis-ridden consequences forthe politics of rights. This chapter argues thatthe crisis of sovereignty stems from three di-mensions of corporate globalization: first, theerosion of citizenship rights in modern statesvia broad strategies of privatization and disman-tling of social protections; second, the increas-ingly evident "citizenship gap" associated with,for example, more than 50 million political andeconomic refugees, displaced indigenous peo-ples, the 100 million unregistered domestic mi-grant workers in China, 1 million to 2 millionmodern-day slaves, and even subjects of south-ern countries in context of an exploding touristindustry (Brysk, 2002:3, 10—11); and third, therising political claims for participatory alterna-tives within the global countermovement.

In delineating these three dimensions, I drawattention to the temporal layering of politi-cal responses to globalization. The immedi-acy of responses to current abuses of rightsand human victimization ("globalization with

a human face") may be distinguished from themore visionary responses by movements to de-velop alternatives ("globalization from below").The first set of responses includes the "strug-gle to promote the subaltern discourse on hu-man rights," for example, to operationalize the"sleeping provisions" (Articles 25 and 28) of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights, whichlink rights to the elimination of poverty and tohumane governance of the social and interna-tional order. The 1990s saw several conferenceson environment, women's rights, development,population, and human rights address these con-cerns, culminating in the UN Social Summit of1995 (Falk, 2002:71). Because globalization isa power relation, we also find the multilateralagencies, the Davos economic forum, and theirspokespeople proposing to reform the G-7'smonopoly of financial power by imposing a"Tobin. tax" on cross-border financial trans-actions and adopting the language of povertyalleviation and improving transparency in gover-nance in an attempt to close the legitimacy gap(e.g., Stiglitz, 2002, Narayan, 2000). In otherwords, the double movement constitutes thepolitics of globalization.

As I have argued, the twenty-first-centurydouble movement is different and links imme-diate protective goals with transitional, vision-ary practices exemplified in the mass movementsof the global south. One such linkage is evi-dent in postcolonial politics, where the "AfricanAlternative Framework for Structural Adjust-ment Programs for Socio-Economic Recoveryand Transformation," adopted by the UnitedNations Economic Commission for Africa, cri-tiqued the neoclassical assumptions of the de-velopment paradigm and offered a participatorymodel of collective development goals rootedin the specificity of African political cultures(Ake, 1996:36—8). Although these institutionalresponses are vulnerable to the G-7 develop-ment establishment's disproportionate financialand discursive power to appropriate its crit-ics, nevertheless they register the participatoryand cosmopolitan politics maturing across globalcommunities in countless contexts, stimulatedby the political deficits and social depredationsof corporate globalization.

6o6 Philip McMichael

Many of these contradictory circumstancesstem from the crisis of development and itsglobal extension via the neoliberal project, pos-ing as a neutral market-driven solution. Inthis world-historical conjuncture, resistances re-veal capitalist modernity as an imperial project,privileging corporate rights and depending ongeopolitical and currency hierarchies. Contraryto the early-twentieth-century dress rehearsalfor global development, todays countermove-ments reach beyond the formula of nationalmarket regulation and wealth redistribution todevelop an alternative politics rooted in an eco-logical paradigm, rejecting modernity's sepa-rations of politics and economics, natural andsocial worlds, and rulers and ruled. Instead of thesingular worldview associated with the modernstate, this politics asserts the right to multipleworldviews regarding democratic organizationand the securing of material well-being throughcultural and environmental sustainability.

The specificity of corporate globalization isthat in universalizing a particular vision ona diverse world, it crystallizes that diversityin increasingly reflexive resistance movementsmarked by a strategic solidarity. More than aglobal process of integration, globalization is acontradictory set of relations conditioning itspolitics, and recurring crises, with no necessarylinear movement or outcome. The social exper-iments of the countermovements and the "cos-mopolitan project" (Held, 2000), exemplified inthe European Union, will continue in tensionwith a WTO increasingly hamstrung by the in-herent disorder of an asymmetrical states system

(e.g., the conflict between the United Statesand the EU regarding GMOs, the intractabil-ity of the question of agricultural reform) andthe global north's overbearing treatment of theglobal south. The collapse of the WTO Minis-terial in Cancun (2003) revealed this power dif-ferential. A renewed solidarity within the globalsouth (forming the Group of 21, led by BrazilIndia, and China) and a parallel solidarity amongglobal justice groups converged decisively tostall the meeting, exposing undemocratic WTOproceedings and unequal agricultural traderules, GATS, and TRIPs protocols.

Although grassroots movements will by ne-cessity develop their resistance, the short-termdirection of the world order is complicated bythe geopolitics of oil, U.S. unilateralism, and re-active terrorism (Achcar, 2002). In addition, the -1999 "global compact" (the "corporatization"of a financially strapped UN) and the politicsof the 2002 UN resolution on weapons inspec- ;tions in Iraq have deeply compromised the UN'sability to anchor an agenda of international law •dedicated to advancing social and human rights:

reflecting multilateral rather than unilateral in- jterests. For the foreseeable future, then, global-ization and its analysis will be overdetermined .by a resurgence of bilateralism and questionsconcerning the militarization of the corporateempire, the elevation of the rights of consumer-citizens in this new world disorder, and equa-tions of resistance with terror — sharpening andclarifying the contradiction between this worldand "another world" projected by the World ISocial Forum.