Globalization, Democracy and English Studies

Abstract

Globalization has been seen by both its promoters and detractors primarily as an expansion of global capital and money and commodity markets across national and regional borders, driving both capitalized and capital poor economies towards consumer-oriented production whose backward and forward linkages are determined _ indeed manipulated _ by developed economies of the West. In the process, traditional modes of production of weaker economies are neglected, which, in the end, lose out to high value production processes and products backed up by sophisticated technology and financial instruments. The deceptive investment portfolios from the West, described rather quizzically as "footloose capital," gain control of weaker economies and threaten to withdraw in the event of a government taking measures to protect its domestic business. The promotion of supply side and transnational economies has the ultimate goal of a market-led integration of global society. As Jurgen Habermas points out, "a state enmeshed in the transnational economic system would abandon its citizens to the legally secured negative freedoms of global competition, while essentially confining itself to providing, in business-like fashion, infrastructures that promote entrepreneurial activity and make national economic conditions attractive from the point of view of profitability" (78,79-80). Those opposed to globalization see in the power of the runaway markets -- and the involvement of the United States in World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations with governments to pursue market-friendly policies _ the inevitability of the loss of autonomy of national states, and an erosion of their decision-making abilities. Indeed globalization's war cry now is "more market, less state interventions;" its aim is to see a free market society along with a minimal state. In countries that are variously described as third world, less developed or of weak economies, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and their less well-off but equally high-handed cousin, the Asian Development Bank, work as allies of the forces of hegemonic globalization.