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GLOBALIZATION AND RISKS

The balance of economic and thus of political forces between different
centers of capital regularly changes, as the market rewards now this center
of capital and now another. The political need to regularly re-divide the
world to realign it with the changing balance of forces arises as a constant
element in international relations. During periods of relative stability
(when the balance is more or less fixed) international law can prevail
within the boundaries of power politics. During periods of change in the
balance of forces such as now, international law necessarily is disre-
garded as force is used to establish a new balance. Hence the inescapable
instability of national and international relations under monopoly capi-
talism and imperialism. To attempt to grasp this extremely unstable situ-
ation by the term ‘risk society’ is to remain at the level of symptoms
without getting to the root causes of the ‘risk’. It expresses a determina-
tion not to address these root causes but to remain at the level of antici-
pating, containing and restraining the symptoms.
In what is perhaps the most comprehensive account of shifts in the
contemporary global economy, Dicken calls our attention to the condi-
tions of volatility – the ‘risks’ – which prevail in the world economy
today:

Rates of growth during the 1980s were extremely variable, ranging from the
negative growth rates of 1982 through to two years (1984 and 1988) when
growth of world merchandise trade reached the levels of the 1960s once
again. Overall, growth—albeit uneven growth—reappeared. But then, in the
early 1990s, recession occurred again. In 1994 and 1995, strong growth
reappeared, especially in exports. A similarly volatile pattern characterized
the last years of the century. 18

He goes on to point out that transnational corporations (TNCs) now
operate on an enormous global scale, accounting for two-thirds of
world exports of goods and services, much of which is intra-firm trade
which does not even enter market relations – a most interesting form
of the abolition of commodity relations under highly developed capi-
talism. 19 In the United States, the model for this relative abolition of
commodity production within capitalism is the massive retail chain
Wal-Mart. In many ways, especially in their electronic data manage-
ment systems which have an international reach across the borders of
nation–states, they are, ironically, models of socialism in a purely eco-
nomic sense. While the United States leads in the erosion of market
relations in distribution and retailing, the iron link between banking
and industrial capital has clearly gone furthest in Japan. The Japanese
keiretsu system has far surpassed anything J.P. Morgan could have

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