Hans Löfgren - The Politics and Culture of Globalisation: India and Australia

The globalisation concept is a label often used for a wide range of phenomena and is not a theory or explanation. Globalisation can be conceived of as the complex, emergent product of many different forces operating on many scales (Jessop 2008: 179). As such, globalisation does not point to an intrinsic logic that inexorably drives societies along or towards a single path of economic and political development. Admittedly, there is a correlation between the rise of globalisation since the 1980s and both neo-liberal public policy and neo-liberalism as a doctrine of the free market. This doctrine holds that the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market (Harvey 2005a: 3).

Neo-liberalism was diffused universally in the period after the collapse of communism, gaining influence not only in the countries of Anglo-American capitalism and in the developing world, but also in coordinated market economies with a social democratic or corporatist orientation, such as Germany and Sweden. Indeed, as Perry Anderson sees it, no systematic rival outlooks remained as neo-liberalism emerged as the most successful ideology in world history (2000: 17). But the past decade has seen an upsurge of doubt and critiques and a renewal of interest in state regulation. Oppositional movements and alternative interpretations of globalisation have proliferated. These alternative perspectives do not necessarily reject globalisation, understood as global interconnectedness. Hardt and Negris analysis of Empire (2000) is but one of a number of oppositional interpretations of globalisation that point to globalisations potentiality for human emancipation.

Neo-liberal policies have brought havoc to prior institutional arrangements, notably the embedded liberalism of Keynesianism and social democracy. But resistance, and economic, social and environmental crises, such as climate change, make the minimal state of neo-liberal orthodoxy only one of a range of possible outcomes, and a highly unstable one at that. That globalisation is compatible with different governance arrangements is the premise of the models of capitalism literature (Hall & Soskice 2001). In this perspective, notwithstanding a history of strong state promotion of national development, Australia belongs today within the category of liberal market economies, as distinct from the coordinated systems of countries like Germany or Japan. India does not readily fit into this categorisation, which is employed to capture the diversity of advanced capitalism. If anything, India presents a unique though unstable model of its own. It has experienced the strong inroad of neo-liberalism since 1991, but this process is uneven, contested and volatile.

Many of the chapters in this volume critically interrogate the neo-liberal form of globalisation; others examine the search for alternative forms of governance. With social life infused by the global, several contributors employ the notion of cosmopolitanism as a framework for thinking about governance and political community. In this perspective, human beings everywhere belong to a single moral realm in which each person is equally worthy of respect and consideration (Held 2003: 470).

In the neo-liberal perspective, there is little scope for alternative social and economic arrangements, notwithstanding the centrality of liberty and choice in its discourse. Nevertheless, Geoffrey Stokes identifies a shift in the climate of ideas in Australia from a widespread acceptance of the inevitability of neo-liberal globalisation to a discourse of doubt. He points to growing anxiety within economic, political and media elites that this form of globalisation may be derailed. In India, elite apprehensions are of a different complexion. Here the concern is with the impediments to the full-scale implementation of neo-liberal restructuring. In particular, the vibrancy of electoral politics and widespread poverty in the rural hinterlands obstruct the consistent application of neo-liberal policy prescriptions. The acute tensions and growing insecurities associated with full-scale integration of India into the global capitalist system are examined in the chapter by B. Ramesh Babu, which highlights the failures of a state that is at the same time too big and too small. The vision of small government bears no relationship to the historicalempirical reality of the Indian state almost twenty years after the neo-liberal turn. Yet this state, according to Babu, remains strikingly ineffective in dealing with a multitude of external and domestic challenges.