Page 70 - Culture Society and Economy

Robotham-04.qxd 1/31/2005 6:23 PM Page 63

GLOBALIZATION AND RISKS

holds for the world. This is a very British sensitivity to the dangers of
globalization, born, I would argue, out of the historically disastrous effects
which a previous era of globalization had for British economy and society.
It is incontestable that the restoration of Free Trade in capital and
currency under the conditions of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century
monopoly capitalism imposes a nearly uniform fiscal and monetary
policy on all nations (except the United States) who do not wish to see
their currencies devalued and who do not wish to experience massive
capital flight and economic collapse. That this was so for the most devel-
oped as well as least developed of economies was one of the brutal
lessons of the 1992 Swedish financial crisis as well as of the later Asian
crisis. This fundamental fact of global capitalist life also sharply con-
strains the left-wing regime of Ignacio ‘Lula’ da Silva in Brazil. However,
this vulnerability of the developed economies is not new. In many ways,
it is the story of the decline of the British economy during the last part of
the nineteenth century which the restoration of Imperial Preference in
1932 was designed, unsuccessfully, to halt. All British social scientists are
only too familiar with the ultimately disastrous effects of this previous
era of globalization – the loss of Britain’s monopoly position on the world
market – and all the attendant social and political consequences which
reverberate to this day.
This loss of a manufacturing monopoly as a result of the export of
capital and the rise of manufacturing competition elsewhere in the world
are today being repeated in the United States. As was the case in Britain
at the end of the nineteenth century, a similar anxiety is beginning to grip
American policy-makers. Giddens understands this history and these
processes only too well. He affirms the inevitability of the new Free Trade
era but with some hesitancy, especially as to its social and personal and
even, ultimately, some of its economic consequences. Free Trade in con-
ditions of monopoly capitalist competition on a global scale, while offering
new opportunities for British capital, without doubt also carries enor-
mous economic and political ‘risk’. This emphasis on ‘risk’ – increasingly
the main theme in Giddens’s writings – creates the impression that the
level or ‘risk’ for developing societies is no more than that faced by devel-
oped societies – that there is a level playing field of ‘risk’, as it were.
‘Risk’ becomes an abstract metaphysical quality inhering in and pervading
‘late modernity’.
But it can hardly be said that developed and developing countries are
on the same footing in global capital or currency markets or in the global
merchandise or service markets. Giddens mentions but does not dwell
on this point – that the consequences of the restoration of Free Trade for

63