Making Global Rules: Globalisation or Neoliberalisation?

A. Tickell and J. Peck
lboro.ac.uk/gawc/rb/rb1029

INTRODUCTION: GLOBALISATION OR NEOLIBERALISM?

Globalisation and neoliberalism are both perplexingly ubiquitous phenomena. The orthodox understanding of globalisation is based on a notion of increasingly borderless market extension, an apparently all-encompassing ‘condition’ in which market rules and competitive logics predominate, while the political leverage of nation-states recedes into insignificance. Meanwhile, the political project of neoliberalism represents a parallel attempt not only to visualise a free-market utopia, but to realise these self-same conditions, as the downsizing of nation-states enlarges the space for private accumulation, individual liberties, and market forces. Perhaps not surprisingly, globalisation and neoliberalism are often elided and entangled. Advocates of both tend to emphasise the need for corporations, governments and social actors to adjust to the new ‘realities’ of global competition; both envisage the role of markets in terms of apolitical, largely benign and integrating forces; both portray governmental bureaucracies and social collectivities as impediments to economic progress; and both actively anticipate world-wide processes of upwards convergence—a ‘race to the top’—culminating in the establishment of a new orthodoxy or ‘era’.

Globalisation and neoliberalisation are often elided, both historically and analytically: historically, because they are both held up to be creatures of the latter third of the twentieth century, and analytically, because both processes are typically ascribed a kind of ubiquitous causal agency by both celebrants and critics alike. Furthermore, because these ways of envisioning the world economy can be regarded as ‘scripts’ or discourses, the slippages between them are often telling. So, neoliberal politicians will often invoke globalisation, as a signifier of powerful and in many respects unstoppable market forces, in order to advance the case for government sell-offs and privatisation, financial and labour market deregulation, trade liberalisation, welfare cutbacks and so forth. Simultaneously, critics of these policies and opponents of free-market globalisation will often pointedly label all such phenomena as evidence of a creeping neoliberal (or sometimes American) hegemony. What the former are trying to depoliticise the latter seek to repoliticise—and the use of the label ‘neoliberal’ suits the latter because it is they who wish to underline the political origins and character of the program.

The economic narrative of globalisation and the political script of neoliberalism are both, in a sense, compellingly simple. They describe a new world order of untrammelled markets and competitive freedoms, in clean lines and uncompromising terms. Implicitly or explicitly, they portray countervailing interests as unrealistic and outmoded. There are, of course, always alternatives to liberal political projects, just as there is a vast array of possibilities for organising and regulating the global economy. Yet it is one thing to recognise the limitations and silences of the scripts of neoliberal globalism, quite another to move beyond these in a way that is conceptually sound and empirically informed. Economic geographers, in particular, have long opposed ‘flat earth’ conceptions of neoliberal globalisation, based on unmediated market hegemony, cultural homogenisation, institutional convergence and the associated assertion of a ‘one best way’ in corporate governance, economic regulation and social policy. As Peter Dicken’s work has conspicuously demonstrated, globalisation tendencies are very much ‘real’ ones in legal, material and discursive terms, but they neither produce unitary outcomes nor do they erase local and national differences in business culture, corporate strategy or government policy (Dicken, 1994, 1998). Globalisation, in other words, produces its own geography, the resultant unevenness reflecting more than simply residues of ‘pre-global’ social formations, but an array of politically mediated forms of integration into a complex and changing global economic system. More than this, the ‘outcomes’ of globalisation are politically negotiated and mediated; they are not predetermined by some ‘hidden hand’ of international market forces.

A parallel set of arguments can be marshalled in the case of the global political project of neoliberalism. Despite having become the ideological ‘commonsense’ of the times (see Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2001), and contrary to its casual elision with ‘Americanisation’, neoliberalism is far from a monolithic, undifferentiated project. It too has a geography, with its centres of discursive production (in places like Washington, DC, New York City and London), its ideological heartlands (like the United States and the United Kingdom), its constantly shifting frontiers of extension and mediation (such as South Africa, Eastern Europe, Japan and Latin America) and its sites of active contestation and resistance (think of Seattle, Genoa, Cuba, …). Neoliberalisation, like globalisation, should be thought of as a contingently realised process, not as an end-state or ‘condition’. It can therefore be conceived both in terms of a spatially differentiated ‘map’ of political-economic projects and in terms of a network of interconnections and flows.

Adequate conceptions of neoliberalism must be attentive both to its ‘local’ mediations and institutional variants and to the ‘family resemblances’ and causative connections that link these together. Just as there are no ‘pure’ markets, only markets shaped by different configurations of legal frameworks, social conventions, power relations, institutional forces and such like, so also there is no ‘pure’ form of neoliberalism, only a range of historically and geographically specific manifestations of neoliberalisation-as-process. Neoliberal politics, by the same token, are always hybrid politics—reflecting the balance of local political forces, sources of active resistance and institutional legacies, amongst other things—even though they will often appeal to ostensibly universal concepts like market efficiency and individual freedom.

While it is necessary to explore the character of neoliberalism as a utopian political ideology, it is just as important to interrogate the concrete forms of ‘actually-existing neoliberalism’ in different institutional, spatial and temporal contexts (Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Cheru, 2001; Coleman & Skogstad, 1995; Doctor, 2001; Gowan, 2001; Guano, 2002; Hamann, 2001; Job, 2001; Kjœr & Pedersen, 2001; Klak, 1998: Larner & Walters, 2000; Laurie & Bonnett, 2002; Moore, 2001; Patomaki & Teivainen, 2002; Roberts, 2002). In fact, the analytical project of unpacking neoliberalism might usefully be conceived as one involving recursive movements between these relatively abstract and more concrete constructions of neoliberalism. In a parallel fashion to that body of work that has sought to deconstruct the project of globalisation (see Amin, 1997; Cox, 1997; Dicken, Peck, & Tickell, 1997; Kelly, 1999), the overlapping and intersecting project of neoliberalisation also needs to be subject to critical scrutiny (see Bond, 2000; Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Larner, 2000; Mitchell, 2001; Peck, 2001; Peck & Tickell, 1994, 2002; Peet, 2002; Swyngedouw, 2000). This chapter represents a contribution to this latter strand of work, which is at a much earlier stage of development than the now ‘mature’ critiques of globalisation.

Complementing an earlier paper on the spatiality of neoliberalism (Peck & Tickell, 2002), our objective here is to develop a schematic account of the historical development of the neoliberal project. This begins in the 1970s, when the neoliberal credo was initially stitched together from diverse strands in free-market economics, individualistic philosophy and anti-Keynesian politics. These subsequently mutated into a series of state projects and restructuring programmes during the 1980s, most notably in the form of ‘structural adjustment’ initiatives in developing countries and various ‘national neoliberalisms’ in the United States, New Zealand, Great Britain and elsewhere. Most recently, during the 1990s and beyond, there has been a period of consolidation and extension, marked by the ascendancy of the ‘Washington consensus’ as an hegemonic policy fix and the further morphing of the project itself into a range of socially ameliorative and socially authoritarian forms. Our goal here is not to present an ‘end of history’ account of the remorseless rise of neoliberalism to a position of global dominance, but instead to provide a sketch of its uneven ascendancy that draws attention both to its historically/geographically differentiated nature and to its complex evolution in response to internal and external pressures. Finally, in the conclusion to the chapter, we reflect on the political and theoretical integrity of the neoliberal project, within which deep contradictions and systemic vulnerabilities coexist with what, for many, is a perplexing degree of political adaptability, institutional durability and organisational creativity.

To read complete essay, and for source citation, click on website link above.