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2Market GlobalismManfred B. StegerINTRODUCTION: THE IDEOLOGICALDIMENSION OF GLOBALIZATIONFrom its beginnings in the early 1990s, the fledgling field of global studies was domi- nated by accounts focusing primarily on the economic and technological aspects of glo- balization. To be sure, a proper rec...

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2 Market Globalism Copyright 2014. SAGE Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

Manfred B. Steger

INTRODUCTION: THE IDEOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF GLOBALIZATION From its beginnings in the early 1990s, the fledgling field of global studies was dominated by accounts focusing primarily on the economic and technological aspects of globalization. To be sure, a proper recognition of the crucial role of integrating markets and new information technologies should be part of any comprehensive understanding of globalization, but it is equally important to avoid the trap of technological and economic reductionism. As Malcolm Waters (2001) observes, the increasingly symbolically mediated and reflexive character of today’s economic exchanges suggests that both the cultural and political arenas are becoming more activated and energetic. And yet, despite the burgeoning recent literature on crucial cultural and political aspects of globalization, researchers have paid insufficient attention to the global circulation of ideas and their impact on the rapid extension of social interactions and interdependencies across time and space.

Save for a few notable exceptions (Rupert, 2000; Sklair, 2002; Mittelman, 2004; Steger, 2008, 2009), globalization scholars have been surprisingly reluctant to enter the misty realm of ideology. Bucking the trend, this chapter explores the ideological dimension of globalization with particular attention to its important discursive features. After a general overview of the role and function of political ideologies within an overarching ‘global imaginary’, I suggest that the dominant ideology of our time – market globalism – consists of a set of five core claims that play crucial semantic and political roles. With regard to semantics, I argue that these claims absorb and rearrange bits and pieces of several established ideologies and integrate them with new concepts into a new global political belief system whose role consists chiefly of preserving and enhancing asymmetrical power structures that benefit particular social groups wedded to the tenets of neo-liberalism (Steger, 2010). I end the chapter with a short discussion of how, during the years of President George

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W. Bush’s administration (2001–9) market globalism was ‘toughened up’ into what I call ‘imperial globalism’ only to return its original economistic articulation in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis (2008–9) and the ongoing European Debt Crisis.

POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES AND THE GLOBAL IMAGINARY Following Michael Freeden’s (1996, 2003) and Lyman Tower Sargent’s (2009) suggestion that political belief systems serve as cognitive maps that chart crucial dimensions of the political world, I define ‘ideology’ as a system of widely shared ideas, patterned beliefs, guiding norms and values, and ideals accepted as truth by some groups. Ideologies offer individuals a more or less coherent picture of the world not only as it is, but also as it ought to be. In doing so, they help organize the tremendous complexity of human experience into fairly simple, but frequently distorted, images and slogans that serve as guide and compass for social and political action. Each ideology is structured around core claims which set it apart from other ideologies and endow it with a specific conceptual form or ‘morphology’. As Freeden (1996: 77) puts it, ‘Central to any analysis of ideologies is the proposition that they are characterized by a morphology that displays core, adjacent, and peripheral concepts.’ What makes an ideology ‘political’ is that its claims select, privilege, and constrict social meanings related to the exercise of power in society. Ideologies speak to their audiences in stories and narratives whose claims persuade, praise, cajole, convince, condemn, and distinguish ‘truths’ from ‘falsehoods’. Ideologies enable people to act, while at the same time constraining their actions by binding them to a particular set of ideas, norms and values. The term ‘ideology’ was first coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy in the late eighteenth century. The Enlightenment thinker sought to establish a positivistic ‘science of ideas’ employing the empirical tools of natural science to map

systems of thought. In the Napoleonic era, however, ‘ideology’ acquired the pejorative meaning of ‘falsehood’ or ‘deliberate distortion’ that it has retained in public discourse until our time (Steger, 2008). French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1986) identified the historical elements and functions of ideology. Drawing on the insights of the Marxist tradition, he characterized the first functional level of ideology as distortion, that is, the production of contorted images of social reality. Most importantly, the process of distortion hides the contrast between things as they may be envisioned in theory and things as they play themselves out on the plane of material reality. Indeed, all ideologies assemble a picture of the world based on a peculiar mixture that both represents and distorts social processes. Yet, Ricoeur disagreed with Karl Marx’s notion that distortion explains all there is to ideology. For the French philosopher, distortion was merely one of the three main functions of ideology, representing the surface level of a phenomenon that contains two more functions at progressively deeper levels. Inspired by the writings Max Weber (Gerth and Mills, 1946) and Karl Mannheim (1936), Ricoeur identified legitimation as the second functional level of ideology. Two main factors were involved here: the claim to legitimacy made by the ruling authority, and the belief in the authority’s legitimacy granted by its subjects. Accepting large parts of Weber’s explanation of social action, Ricoeur highlighted ideology’s function of mediating the gap between belief and claim. For Mannheim, it was the task of the intelligentsia capable of rising above their class and historical context to provide objective explanations of the discrepancy between the popular belief in the legitimacy of the ruling class and the authority’s claim to the right to rule. Ricoeur’s analysis was completed in his description of integration, the third functional level of ideology. Drawing on the writings of the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973), who emphasized the symbolic structure of social action, Ricoeur claimed that, on the deepest level, ideology plays a mediating or integrative role. It provides society with

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MARKET GLOBALISM

stability as it creates, preserves, and protects the social identity of persons and groups. In its constructive function, ideology supplies the symbols, norms, and images that go into the process of assembling and holding together individual and collective identity. Thus, ideology assumes a conservative function in both senses of that word. It preserves identity, but it also wants to conserve what exists. Such rigid forms of resistance to change contribute to turning beliefs and ideas into a dogmatic defense of dominant power structures. Suggesting that subordinate groups often give their spontaneous consent to the social logic of domination that is embedded in a ‘hegemonic’ ideology, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1971), too, emphasized the integrative role of ideology. He noted that dominant groups frequently succeeded in enticing the working class into embracing a collective identity that ran contrary to their interests, allowing power elites to maintain a favorable social order without having to resort to open coercion. In this chapter, I contend that ‘market globalism’ is a hegemonic system of ideas that makes normative claims about a set of social processes called ‘globalization’. It seeks to limit public discussion on the meaning and character of globalization to an agenda of ‘things to discuss’ that supports particular political objectives. In other words, like all social processes, globalization contains an ideological dimension filled with a range of norms, claims, beliefs, and narratives about the phenomena itself. After all, it is chiefly the normative question of whether globalization ought to be considered a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ phenomenon that has spawned heated debates in classrooms, boardrooms, and on the streets. To understand the fundamental changes brought about by globalization and affecting the ideological landscape of the twenty-first century, it is necessary to grasp the connection between political ideologies and their overarching ‘social imaginary’. Constituting the macro-mappings of social and political space through which we perceive, judge, and act in the world, social imaginaries are deep-seated

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modes of understanding that provide the most general parameters within which people imagine their communal existence. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s account of the imagined community of the nation, Charles Taylor (2004, 23–6) has recently argued that social imaginaries are neither theories nor ideologies, but implicit ‘background understandings’ that make possible communal practices and a widely shared sense of their legitimacy. The social imaginary offers explanations of how ‘we’ – the members of a particular community – fit together, how things go on between us, the expectations we have of each other, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie those expectations. This background understanding is both normative and factual in the sense of providing us both with the standards of what passes as common sense. Much in the same vein, Pierre Bourdieu (1990, 54–5) notes that the social imaginary sets the pre-reflexive framework for our daily routines and social repertoires. Structured by social dynamics that produce them while at the same time also structuring those forces, social imaginaries are products of history that ‘generate individual and collective practices – more history – in accordance with the schemes generated by history’. Human thought is mostly unconscious and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. Indeed, most of human reasoning is based on mental images that are seldom explicit; usually they are merely presupposed in everyday reasoning and debates. Thus, all social imaginaries consist of a series of interrelated and mutually dependent narratives, visual prototypes, metaphors, and conceptual framings. Despite their apparent intangibility, however, social imaginaries are quite ‘real’ in the sense of enabling common practices and deep-seated communal attachments. Though capable of facilitating collective fantasies and speculative reflections, they should not be dismissed as phantasms or mental fabrications. In my previous work on the subject (Steger, 2008), I have suggested that ideologies translate and articulate the largely

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pre-reflexive social imaginary in compressed form as explicit political doctrine. This means that the grand ideologies of modernity that were deeply colored by a national framework of community gave explicit political expression to the implicit national imaginary. Indeed, we ought to treat the national not as a separate ideology but as the background to our communal existence that emerged in the northern hemisphere with the American and French Revolutions. The national gave the modern social imaginary its distinct flavor in the form of various factual and normative assumptions that political communities, in order to count as ‘legitimate’, had to be nation-states. To be sure, each ideology deployed and assembled its core concepts – liberty, progress, race, class, rationality, tradition, community, welfare, security, and so on – in specific and unique ways. But the elite codifiers of these ideational systems pursued their specific political goals under the common background umbrella of the national imaginary. Liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism, and Nazism/fascism were all ‘nationalist’ in the sense of performing the same fundamental task of translating the overarching national imaginary into concrete political doctrines, agendas, and spatial arrangements. In the decades following World War II, however, new ideas, theories, and material practices produced in the public consciousness a similar sense of rupture with the past that had occurred at the time of the French Revolution. For example, novel technologies facilitated the speed and intensity with which these ideas and practices infiltrated the national imaginary. Images, people, and materials circulated more freely across national boundaries. This new sense of ‘the global’ that erupted within and onto the national began to undermine the sense of normalcy and self-contained coziness associated with the modern nation-state. Identities based on national membership became destabilized. By the mid-1990s, a growing chorus of global social elites was fastening onto the

new buzzword ‘globalization’ as the central metaphor for their political agenda – the creation of a single global free market and the spread of consumerist values around the world. Most importantly, they translated the rising social imaginary into largely economistic claims laced with references to globality: global trade and financial markets, worldwide flows of goods, services, and labor, transnational corporations, offshore financial centers, and so on. But globalization was never merely a matter of increasing flows of capital and goods across national borders. Rather, it constitutes a multidimensional set of processes in which images, sound bites, metaphors, myths, symbols, and spatial arrangements of globality were just as important as economic and technological dynamics. The objective acceleration and multiplication of global material networks occurs hand in hand with the intensifying subjective recognition of a shrinking world. Such heightened awareness of the compression of time and space influences the direction and material instantiations of global flows. As Roland Robertson (1992) has emphasized time and again, the compression of the world into a single place increasingly makes ‘the global’ the frame of reference for human thought and action. Thus, globalization involves both the macro-structures of community and the micro-structures of personhood. It extends deep into the core of the self and its dispositions, facilitating the creation of new identities nurtured by the intensifying relations between the individual and the globe (Elliot and Lemert, 2006). Like the conceptual earthquake that shook Europe and the Americas more than 200 years ago, today’s destabilization of the national imaginary affects the entire planet. The ideologies dominating the world today are no longer exclusively articulations of the national imaginary but reconfigured ideational systems that constitute early-stage translations of the dawning global imaginary. Hence, I suggest that there is, in fact, something new about today’s political belief systems: a new global imaginary erupts with

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increasing frequency within and onto the familiar framework of the national, spewing its fiery lava across flattening geographical scales. Stoked, among other things, by technological change and cultural innovations, this global imaginary destabilizes the grand political ideologies codified by social elites during the last two centuries. Thus, our changing ideational landscape is intimately related to the forces of globalization, defined here as the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world time and world space. As the national and the global rub up against each other in myriad settings and on multiple levels, they produce new tensions and compromises. Putting the analytic spotlight on the changing ideational structures not only yields a better understanding of current globalization dynamics, but it also helps us make sense of the shifting conceptual and geographical boundaries that (re)shape individual and collective identities. Although globalization unfolds toward an uncertain future, the first attempts to translate the rising global imaginary into concrete political agendas are currently undertaken by new ‘globalisms’.

THE FIVE CORE CLAIMS OF MARKET GLOBALISM The term ‘globalization’ gained in currency in the late 1980s. In part, its conceptual unwieldiness arose from the fact that global flows occur in different physical and mental dimensions, usefully divided by Arjun Appadurai (1996) into ‘ethnoscapes’, ‘technoscapes’, ‘mediascapes’, ‘finanscapes’, and ‘ideoscapes’. The persistence of academic divisions on the subject notwithstanding, the term was associated with specific meanings in public discourse during the 1990s. With the collapse of Soviet-style communism in Eastern Europe, loosely affiliated power elites concentrated in the global north stepped up their ongoing efforts to sell their version of ‘globalization’ to the public in the ideological form of ‘market globalism’.

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These power elites consisted chiefly of corporate managers, executives of large transnational corporations, corporate lobbyists, high-level military officers, prominent journalists and public-relations specialists, intellectuals writing to a large public audience, state bureaucrats and influential politicians. By the mid-1990s, large segments of the population in both the global north and south had accepted globalism’s core claims, thus internalizing large parts of its overarching neo-liberal framework that advocated the deregulation of markets, the liberalization of trade, the privatization of state-owned enterprises, and, after 9/11, the qualified support of the global ‘War on Terror’ under US leadership. Indeed, the comprehensive University of Maryland Poll (2004) conducted in 19 countries on four continents found that even after five years of massive, worldwide demonstrations against neo-liberal globalization, 55 per cent of the respondents believed that globalization was positive for them and their families, while only 25 per cent said that it was negative. Seeking to make a persuasive case for a new global order based on their beliefs and values, these neo-liberal power elites constructed and disseminated narratives and images that associated the concept of globalization with inexorably expanding free markets. Their efforts at de-contesting the master concept ‘globalization’ went hand in hand with the rise of market globalism. Ideological ‘de-contestation’ is a crucial process in the formation of thought systems because it fixes the meanings of the core concepts by arranging them in a pattern or configuration that links them with other concepts in a meaningful way. As Michael Freeden (2003: 54–5) puts it: An ideology attempts to end the inevitable contention over concepts by decontesting them, by removing their meanings from contest. ‘This is what justice means,’ announces one ideology, and ‘that is what democracy entails.’ By trying to convince us that they are right and that they speak the truth, ideologies become devices for coping with the interdeterminacy of meaning … That is

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their semantic role. [But] [i]deologies also need to decontest the concepts they use because they are...