Page 99 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

One cannot comment in detail here on these extremely controversial
propositions which, in some respects, could be interpreted as legitimizing
the intervention of stronger states – those who control the UN Security
Council (but not, of course, the General Assembly!) – in the internal
affairs of weaker states. The issue is not that such processes are not occur-
ring or that they are of little significance. On the contrary, one would have
to be blind indeed not to see that very powerful global forces have been
unleashed in the world today across wide areas of social, economic, cul-
tural and political life which put all nation–states – developing and devel-
oped at ‘risk’. One only has to consider the current enormous growth of
protectionist sentiment in the United States – grossly under-estimated in
Europe and around the world. There is a very strong souring on global-
ization in key sections of the American political elite due to the effect of
globalization in undermining their hegemony over American society. Severe
political setbacks threaten the social position of key allies of this elite
(especially in the Southern and Midwestern United States) as 1.5 million
manufacturing jobs have been lost from the national economy since 2000
and as their current account and budget deficit soars to unprecedentedly
high levels. Because the political hostility to globalization is most intense
at the State rather than the Federal level, the intensity of the hostility to
globalization among broad social strata in the United States is not per-
ceived. Yet at least eight states (Indiana, Michigan, Washington, South
Carolina, Delaware, Nevada, Minnesota, Missouri) have either passed or
are considering the passage of ‘Job Protection Acts’ and many more are
likely to follow. The aim of these acts is to make it illegal for jobs funded
by state funds to be outsourced overseas. The issue of the loss of jobs to
China, India and Mexico is likely to be one of the most important issues
in the Presidential elections of 2004.
As I write these lines, the estimated budget deficit for the financial
year is $521 billion or about 4.5 percent of the gross domestic product of
the United States. It now turns out that, as was the case with Britain at
the end of the nineteenth century, the assumptions that the benefits of
globalization would simply ‘flow’ to the United States were unfounded.
One can expect that American equivalents of Joseph Chamberlain – Free
Trade and Pro-Imperialism politicians who suddenly reverse themselves
and become vociferous protectionists – will emerge at any moment. This
entirely new and unexpected but perfectly predictable tendency is,
indeed, what the turn from neo-liberalism to neo-conservatism portends.
It has become so marked that Giddens and his colleagues have found it
necessary to invent a new term to capture it. ‘Regressive globalizers’ is the
new term coined for these newly-founded anti-globalizers from the political

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