The Geography of Power (2000)

‘Seattle’ managed to establish ‘globalisation’ as an important, and contestable, issue on the political agenda. That debate must be kept going, but has to avoid being fossilised into static oppositions that are difficult to get out of and which finally anyway lead nowhere. The question of globalisation should not be posed as one of local versus global ‘ Local’ may be good or bad, depending on your politics. The peasant farmers in India, being invaded by multinational companies armed with genetically modified products and bits of paper claiming patent rights over plants and seeds, are ‘local’, fighting to defend ‘local rights’. But then so are the proponents of Fortress Europe, or those in California who vote for propositions banning ‘illegal’ Latin Americans from access to public services. The arguments against ‘global’ multinational capital’s ability to roam the world, playing one group off against another, are certainly appealing. But then so are the arguments for more cultural exchange between countries and peoples. ‘Going global’ can be attractive or pernicious. There has been a tendency on the left to treat the ‘global’ level with a degree of suspicion, partly because there is a feeling that nothing can be done about it. But this acquiesces to the dominant rhetoric – that globalisation is inevitable and we just have to work out the best ways of adapting to it. But globalisation we see at present is not inevitable, it is a project. One example of the duplicity of this rhetoric of inevitability concerns the nation state. We are constantly being told that individual countries are powerless in the face of multinational capital, and it would be foolish to deny the changes in the relationship between capital and nation states. But many governments (and most particularly those of the USA and the UK) are active participants in the promotion of the current form of globalisation. It was the governments, not the companies, that signed up to the Uruguay round of world trade negotiations. Who gathered inside the splendid halls in Seattle for the World Trade Organisation meeting? Who began the process of nations giving away foreign-exchange control? (Margaret Thatcher, the supposed great defender of our sovereignty, as it happens.) We must not cede the global level of politics to the right.

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