PROFMEX-Consorcio Mundial para la Investigación sobre México

For my friends:
Carlos Alberto Torres and Cristina Pons,
With whom I share poetry and essays.
Their ingenuous enthusiasm,
over the new destiny, blinded them.

Augusto Roa Bastos

Hijo de hombre

Abstract: The article summarizes the main problems found in globalization studies, from the changes in perceptions and social representations produced by the developmetn of the media to the contemporary information revolution that has introduced a new dimension into the perceptions of time and space present throughout the modern period and based on the social categories of State and national society. It analyzes the social and political effects of deregulation, the degree of autonomy of financial flows, the neo-liberal theory that underpinned the attack on the welfare state and the growing importance of the symbolic sphere in the reproduction of cultural relations.

The Social Effects of the Speed of Change

One of the principal effects of the speed of social change is the gap between the use of words and the analytical content of categories for naming the new state of things. The content of old categories that describe a status quo that has already been surpassed, filters like a theoretical substrate and logical context into the new words with which the new social reality is described.

During the first stages of change, the analytical apparatuses involving the categories that name the new social phenomena are constructed. This conceptual change occurs as much in the work sphere of social scientists as in that of the technical and political orchestrators directly involved in the change.

The timing of the cultural assimilation of the contents of the categories that name the new phenomena are directly linked to ideological management and to the technical needs and particular interests of actors involved in social interaction. The assimilation of the conceptual content of what is new also depends on the links that each actor has between the sphere of change and forms part of the language that lends identity to each one of them.

The first conceptual change in the discourse concerns the nominal principle: change is mentioned through a neologism, which in the everyday use of political language becomes an adjective, even though it is not given the content of an analytical category. What is new is mentioned, although not named as such. Political, colloquial discourse is, in the majority of cases, hollow and nominal, until the content of the categories with which the general, constitutive elements of social change are based on the conceptual horizon of the collective imagination.

This cultural fact occurs fairly often in history; political actors’ nominal reductionism of social categories returns today under the category of globalism. The latter forms part of the common use of discourses and emerges to classify current social conditions, over which politicians have lost control.

Globalism is currently an essential word that portrays the politician as an up-to-date character who, faced with a public opinion that is in the same state of ignorance as himself, is able to describe the society in which he carries out his activity and power and whose problems he promises to solve.

The global phenomenon is used in discourse as a substitute for modern international order that implies the ability of sovereign national states to handle their economic, political and cultural relations. Within this international order, relations between these States were governed by links of sovereignty and interventionism. This logic changed radically and is no longer unique and determinant, but shares the sphere of international and national relations of each country with global logic.

As a result of globalism, the international sphere has stopped being foreign as opposed to native, while sovereignty is no longer the only possible horizon for defending the identity of social groups that formed modern societies and gave them their contents.

Today, we are on the threshold of an era in which sovereignty is no longer the principal resource in the internal handling of government’s political power, vis-a-vis members of their national societies.

Territorial borders and their symbolic-identity content are being transformed in some respects and paradoxically reiterated in others. The contradictions in which modern society fluctuated between the internal and the external, what is one’s own and what is foreign, were dissolved in the contents of globalism and no longer exclude each other. They co-exist uneasily, revealing the paradoxical development that is open to the contemporary world. This aim of this reflection is to explore the content of these paradoxes that globalism removed from their historical channel and traditional limits.

The current international phenomena that provide the contents for the global situation arose from the demise of the status quo, created during the period after the Second World War. These phenomena have opened up the frontiers that once divided the world, displacing both the State that ruled planned economics, and the welfare state, that was its correspondent in the Western bloc. Like the cold war itself, they were both dissolved in globalism.

For over thirty years, the welfare state was the capitalist institutional and ideological construction, in both its central and peripheral versions, in the dispute over world hegemony vis-a-vis the communist ideology of the totalitarian States and the leftist groups and movements of Western democracies,

Nowadays the global era constructs the new terms of international integration on the basis of the world’s new distribution into regions, blocs and organizations, forms of organization that constitute constant, necessary referents for explaining the political behavior and actions of the actors in societies and national States.

Globalism is a phenomenon of worldwide simultaneity of information flows that has become generalized throughout all sectors of social activity, and has been produced by a technological revolution that involved the shift to the numerical system of sounds, texts and images transmitted at the speed of light through a single code, radically transforming production, work, education, free time, private activities and, in extreme cases, even the personal relations of all those connected to the Internet.

This phenomenon of world simultaneity characterizing the information society occurred together with the deregulation of central controls of the economies, institutions and forms of organization of the States and national societies, creating a process of fragmentation and internal rupture within them.

Deregulation has made the economy more autonomous and created a new phenomenon that, at the current stage of globalization, emerges as an economy without a society and as a reaction to the latter, a political power without an economy, expressed in the impossibility of designing rational, predictable public policies. Globalization has created a new mass phenomenon of economic and civic exclusion in the world. According to the October 1998 World Bank report, 1,300 million people throughout the world subsist on less than a dollar a day.2 In short, globalization has transformed the components of the international scene, shifting them from the institutionalized integration of the State to a new situation of interdependence between the national economies.

The phenomenon of communication has resignified the role played in liberal democracies by the cohesion of social institutions as the basis of a country’s civic identity. Communication is depicted as a condition for social action, as well as the meaning of the latter. Culturally, the function of communication appears to regulate social and interpersonal conflict. The idea of communication becomes ideology, a referent of identity raised to the status of the controller of interaction between individuals.

Nowadays, communication is said to be able to solve everything, especially conflicts within a couple, the family, schools, factories, firms or even the State. The new culture of communication has constructed a metaphor of social interaction, in which there are no longer exclusive and therefore irreconcilable differences between the interests of members of society, merely a lack of communication between its members. Nowadays, communication creates a new identity, serving as a leveler between individuals who come into contact through it.

The breakdown of large aggregates and corporate organizations into social units that are able to communicate with each other, in other words, groups that make communication between their component members viable, forms part of the new logic of social aggregation that constitutes the basis of the new proposal for organizing conflict management. The institutionalization of differences is limited to factories, schools, firms and political parties, creating an image in which conflict can only be managed and resolved through communication techniques.

The worldwide spread of communication, together with the loss of social and political centralities, has created new forms of power in which information, capitals and merchandise, as well as individuals, freely cross borders through informatics, which produces new forms of deterritorialized, nomadic, fragmented identity, free from closed national traditions.

But this very condition, which divides up the contents of national identities, constructs the diffuse contents of global identity and produces the social and political conditions to enable individuals and groups to attach themselves to various types of collective identity, including those that the ideologues of development once regarded as traditional, characteristic of an identity that is conceived of and regarded as the dead weight of modernization in peripheral, underdeveloped societies, such as ethnicity, religion, language, region, race.

There has been an increasing weakening of the social and cultural controls established by States, churches, families and schools. This phenomenon of transgressing the axiological assumptions of national traditions has produced a phenomenon of acceptance of social behaviors in which the borders built by national cultures, between the normal and the pathological, the permitted and the forbidden, have lost their sharp edges. We live in a globalized, world society that invades and expands, through a phenomenon of communicative transculturation, every sphere of private and public life.

One of the central features of the global era, which followed the world’s disintegration into blocs following the collapse of the Second World, is the process of hybridization and blending of meanings, symbols and practices, which are no longer either original or authentic, but rather a sort of amalgam. The contents of globalization penetrate and restructure local cultures and economies, at the same time as these cultures and local practices exert an influence over the characteristics of our global condition.

The global era is also characterized by a paradox that combines trends that lead to a world without borders, going beyond the territorial and political limits imposed by the States, with other conflicting borders, involving the segmentation of national societies that erect new community limits, separating the social contents of the political circumscription of established borders. The phenomenon of global economic change and the increasing power of agencies, organizations, transnational companies and the high degree of autonomy of international financial circuits is being matched by community, linguistic and religious identities and the emergence of ethno-regional cultures.

We live in an era characterized by the increasingly frequent signs of fragmentation of the order created by the last stage of modernity: centrifugal social forces and the creation of local and private identities that are the opposite of the integration and standardization of the world at the global level. Unity and differentiated diversity are the terms that construct the paradox of regionalizing globalism at the end of the 20th century.

The social effect of the technological revolution of communications, which forms the basis of globalism 3 has been to compact spatial and temporal dimensions: what was once distant has moved closer while the past has dissolved in the present.

Development has moved away from its ascending, successive linearity, as posited by theoreticians at the end of the Second World War. The principle governing social time is no longer diachrony but synchrony. The series of stages through which a society emerges from traditional underdevelopment and arrives at modern development has lost its heuristic value and representative consistency. The simultaneity of economic and cultural phenomena has ended up casting aside the unpleasant evolutionary aftertaste, present in the cellars of social disciplines for over a century.

Nowadays, everything is mixed up together: space and time are compressed and synchrony succeeds diachrony and the notion of process in the structuring of history. The importance of simultaneity has been expressed in the symbolic extreme of positing the possibility of the end of history, in an attempt to delimit the enlightened burden of the modernity of globalism.4 This intellectual attempt to resignify the present as a global condition and the past as historical dead weight reconstructs the problem of nostalgia as a direct effect of the human global condition.5

Globalism has a dual dimension: scope, in other words, extent, and intensity,6 or the speed of its own phenomena. This dual characteristic is reflected in its profound effect on the various levels of social processes and in the changes that have taken place in the national State comprising the global system. Both processes are the result of a new resignificance of the acceleration of the time of modernity.7 In globalism, simultaneity is essentially the dominant temporal mode.

This synchronic process of globalization is caused by the multiple contents of the links and connections between the actors of societies and States that constitute the world system and is essentially a historical phenomenon in which the events, decisions, and activities that take place in one part of the world have a virtually simultaneous and significant effect on individuals and communities located a great distance away.

In the contemporary world, social relations and interaction do not depend on “real, simultaneous presence in a specific place, since the structures and organizations of modern societies planned by simultaneous communication, foster intense relations between Absent others.8” Likewise, globalization may appear as an articulator of this overlapping of presence and absence, through the systematic interlinking of the local and the global.9

This re-signification of contemporary events makes the causal visibility of events that have repercussions on the everyday life of individuals disappear, and makes all possible rationality in policy design and foreseeable behaviors emerge as subject to a new form of randomness: global randomness.

In one of its meanings, globalism implies the compacting of the political processes and cultural activities that extend throughout the world, and in another, the intensification of the levels of interaction and interdependence between the States and societies that constitute the world community.

One of the distinctive features of globalization is the emergence of what one might call an awareness of the global connection: intellectual and valuational activity reinforced by the electronic media, that are able to draw the public’s attention immediately to events that have taken place in distant places, creating a sense of belonging and a new collective imagination, that has given rise to a planetary culture of masses, whose principal feature is the loss of fixed, one-dimensional referents.

This new world culture, that has been increasingly mediated by electronic communication, has produced new sensitivities and assessments based on the acceleration of time, which has resignified the present in relation to the past and the future as an omnipresent temporality. The here and now are the coordinates of social and political behavior that lend value to individual activity and collective action, in a new secularization in which social meaning no longer forms part of a historical project.
Nowadays, the media occupy a key place in the vital time of individuals and in social life, of which television is the most important. Through them, private life and global reality are directly linked.

Television reaches a wide range of audiences, enabling them to share in social or private acts that elicit shared emotions. This form of media is able to construct world events by creating world audiences and giving certain events, despite the importance that they are given by the global public, the condition of global importance, creating a symbolic communion of millions of individuals of every race, culture and nationality in suffering or happiness.

The power of the media in global society has a powerful self-referential component: they construct their power in the basis of their ability to influence a public that has been diluted in the conception of rating and measured by its own instruments as an image received10 It is on the basis of these scales of reception that the media compare themselves with each other and reproduce their own forms of identity.

Participating in the global audience means forming part of major events in our time, in a world where access to information has created the informatic myth of inclusion. Today, individuals from every nation have shared informatic and television experiences as the basis for emotions and opinions that have been standardized throughout the world.

Television images are created using a dominant format that has been globally designed by advertising agencies, whose world interconnection, authority and power in the “media” technically standardize design and the way the contents of messages are structured, as well as the rhythms and times of the intellective processes of the receiver, constructing a new version of what is credible through truth as seen on television.

Television eliminates mediations and produces a direct symbolic relationship between the individual facing the screen and humanity in the abstract. This relationship decontextualizes messages, and produces a new socialization on the significance of events. Viewers are no more committed when they watch world dramas than when they observe violence in films or in television programs, The Gulf War proved that what at one point in the history of culture was one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, is now the possibility of a show that sold the thitherto most expensive minute of advertising in history in the same way as the most important Super Bowl, the final game between the major leagues, the funeral of a princess of who died in the middle of an affair or that of the most saintly Western nun in the 20th century.

Part of us bathes in world culture, while the other part, deprived of the public space in which social norms are formed and applied, closes in on itself, either in the form of hedonism or in the search for immediately experienced belonging. We live together, fused yet separated.11

The predominance of the image in the contemporary world has replaced the importance the written word once had in modernity and consequently, the value of discursive argumentation as the legitimate foundation of rational authority. Discourse today is impregnated with the condition of transitoriness provided by the importance of the market culture; the flash and the video-clip. The effectiveness of the message lies in its ability to have an impact and to be compact and direct. This importance of image and the new argumentative condition have subsumed political action within the new advertising condition of political news, which has destroyed the meaning of its importance and lent it the quality of immediacy, and of the disposable daily consumption that trivializes it.

However, the fact that the media have concentrated all their power on information provides them with potential instruments for undertaking vast disinformation campaigns, based, in principle, on a process of selection and prioritization of information which appears to be hierarchically arranged with ranks of national and international importance.12

One of the most important elements that has transformed the information flow on national and international events is the creation of the Internet, that has revolutionized the structuring and broadcasting of news and increased the degree of openness to all kinds of information on an event, and virtually eliminated the checking of information sources.

The creation of the Internet constitutes a change in terms of the way existing journalism operates, and serves as an informatic instrument that resists any type of state or political control over the broadcasting of news and information and even over the invention of news or at least part of them. So far, at least, it has proved impossible to regulate these information flows.

The new global culture of masses is based on the technological advances of developed Western societies, particularly those of the United States. This why the new world culture has chosen English as the universal language which, without replacing other languages, exerts its hegemony over them and uses them.13

The presence of the constitutive symbolic elements of globalization in the everyday life of national societies has destroyed the link between culture and national territory that defined tradition and modernity, creating a new electronic cultural space without a specific geographical locus.14

Nowadays, minimalist expectations in politics constitute an element that conditions the meanings of the differences and identities that found the feelings of the tribe to such an extent that the very notion of society tends to disappear.

The most important feature of mass world culture is its ability to homogenize forms of global identity without dissolving national, ethnic and regional cultures but by operating rationally through them, using market research strategies that absorb the differences in values and representations that sustain a lifestyle that is predominantly identified with Americanization.

The situation of belonging to a global culture and to a global imagination simultaneously posits the issues of national, regional, local and even individual matters, where global does not mean the end of cultural differences but rather the instrumental handling and rationalized manipulation of the dialectic between the global and the local, from the political and ideological sphere to the manipulation of ethnic territories in the global image.

The characteristics of globalization mean that the growing importance of the symbolic exerts a determinant influence on the direction of political action and delimits the spheres of governments’ decisions in the exercise of State institutions, subjecting them to new forms of legitimacy, produced by globalized cultural intensity and the transgression of the national referents and particular histories of each nation-state.

The symbolic content of each country’s histories, constructed by the historiography of each State and socialized by nationalistic education, were filled with dates and heroes who are now losing their capacity for cultural and mythical support of the government’s present actions. The ritualization of national policies is increasingly being surpassed and resignified by the homogenization of the new symbolic contents produced by the media of global masses.

The excess of liberalism of a mediatic world that is not governed by public interest has spawned the worst excesses of populism.15

Contemporary populism recaptures the idea of poverty without the notion of development and ignores the State’s obligation concerning the common good. This neopopulism is based on the limits imposed on the social policies of the national States by the loss of government autonomy and is underpinned by asymmetrical social relations, inherent in the characteristics of the market, thereby creating contingents of a new class of socially marginalized persons, who emerge as the dead weight of growth.

The economic policy of the market has created the ideological rationality of exclusion, based on the idea of efficiency and the elimination of those who are unable to compete.

The new marginalized classes are not only, as they were before, social contingents excluded from development and inscribed in the forms of reproduction of traditional society but nowadays constitute the social mass of the future, unlike the marginalized classes of the development period, who were individuals who were potentially incorporated into the social benefits produced by the distribution of the growth of national economies.

Authoritarian regimes with restricted participation, traditional political systems based on the power of corporations and a high degree of state articulation, are being replaced by the global tendency towards openness and broad, differentiated social participation, of an individual, civic nature, whose aim is the “demassification” of captive, corporate clienteles, characteristic of the national States consolidated during the Latin American postwar period.

The political paradox produced by globalization is based on the irreconcilable differences between participation and exclusion: on the one hand, the growing “civic” mobilization produced by the destruction of the social networks of representation and containment of modern society demands the openness and diversification of party systems and participation through intermediate social organization, while on the other, it creates a process of exclusion based on the increasingly elite nature of economic power of decision, that is exclusive to a global, self-referential technocracy, based on ultraliberal rationality and on the high degree of autonomy of the economic system.

In Latin America, the contradiction between the political representatives of parties in open, competitive systems and the growing tendency to expand the social representation of politics, and the closed, autocratic nature of the technocratic direction of economic policy arises as a result of the social composition and professional characteristics of its members in both types of representation, whether political or technocratic.

The difference in the composition of governments between traditional politicians and technocracy is based on and justified by the rationality produced by the growing autonomy of functions and the power of the members of this new internationalized class of economists and the control they exert over the globalized institutions of the national State. Politicians’ power is based on national social bases, whereas that of technocrats is based on the instrumental capacity of global power. Both have contradictory discourses that emerge as complementary to the rationality of the market.

The system of economic policy design is restricted to an ultraliberal, technocratic elite, which bases its national power on belonging to a global social class that uses the same axiological, intellectual and technical-discursive horizon concerning society and the role that the economy plays in the latter. The main source of its power is its capacity for dialog within national States and societies with multilateral, economic agencies (IMF, WB, OECD).

The political event that based social credibility on technocracy, at the same time as it replaced lawyers and traditional state politicians, was technocrats’ ability to use highly efficient economic policies to control the inflationary processes that created a climate of uncertainty from the mid-1970’s to the late 1980’s in Latin America. It was within this context of inflationary unpredictability that technocrats acquired an immense political prestige on the collective horizon, creating an image of efficiency as governors, on the basis of their capacity for economic instrumentation.

This social class founded its political legitimacy on an increasingly open, competitive party system, based on those who demanded social benefits and were the heirs to the view of an intervening State that regulated the market’s private interests.
The contradiction between the openness of the social base of politics and the closed nature of the ruling sector of the economy was expressed in the growing difference and subordination of politicians, in parliaments, cabinets and parties, vis-a-vis the technocratic ruling elites of the national economy and members of the circuits of the global economy. This growing difference between the functions of the politician and the technician is partly due to the different sources of power through which they justify the legitimacy of their functions in the State, although primarily to the growing degree of autonomy of the economic sub-system whose functioning is conceived in accordance with the self-regulating laws of the market in contrast to the organic solidarity of the social system.

The expansion of the world of the possible, consisting of the diversification of the new responses by social actors, is another of the political effects of globalization and is essentially expressed in the disintegration of the behavior patterns established as the legitimate rules of the political game vis-a-vis governments actions.

The diversity of the new forms of response of the political actors leads increasingly to the limitation of the actions of the State and its forms of legitimacy, opening up the world of the possible to new forms of political relationship that break with the established parameters of behaviors determined by the rules of authoritarian systems with restricted participation. This situation has created widespread paralysis of the State’s political decision-making bodies that are, in most cases, subject to the old legitimizing logic of institutions in the nation-state regimes, based on the networks of defunct political relationships and representation.

The policies of stabilization and structural adjustment, begun simultaneously, were implemented and financed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 1982, when the Mexican government announced it was unable to continue servicing its debt.

The aim of stabilization policies was to reduce the fiscal and trade debt, meaning that their intrinsic short-term objectives were to reduce inflation, lower the fiscal deficit and achieve equilibrium in the balance of payments. These policies were initially designed by the International Monetary Fund.

Structural adjustment policies were designed on a more long-term basis, and sought to restore economic growth, improve the distribution of resources and enhance their efficiency. The World Bank would supply funds through loans to implement this economic program.

At the same time, the World Bank demanded that the International Monetary Fund implement a stabilization program as a condition for supporting the structural adjustment program. Each of the national states16pledged, through a letter of intent, to implement the demands imposed by both international institutions as part of their national economic policy. This is why it is impossible, at the beginning of this process, to undertake a separate analysis of the two institutions in their application of both programs.

The first major effect of the stabilization and structural adjustment policies in the countries incorporated into these programs was the beginning of a set of austerity measures and the elimination of the subsidies and supports that formed the basis of social policies, regarded as characteristic of the welfare state and classified as populist measures by technocrats. These measures were complemented by the privatization of state firms, which were held responsible for the fiscal deficit and the State’s indebtedness following the 1973 oil crisis.

The privatization of the social assets deposited in the State as public assets and accumulated by societies over a period of more than 40 years, led to the concentration of income and the emergence of a new, economically dominant class with instruments for the rapid accumulation of capital, linked to speculation on the stock exchange and a high degree of corruption in the privatization of national companies.

This accumulation through speculation on the stock exchange ended a cycle of international monetary reforms begun in 1971, when, in order to finance the Vietnam war, Richard Nixon unilaterally abandoned the floating parity system and the gold standard as the universal standard of monetary reference, established in 1947 in Bretton Woods.

The initial condition was exacerbated in 1991 as a result of the “new world order” promoted by George Bush and the exponential explosion that it produced with “invisible accounting” through the creation of hedge funds which, together with free exchange convertibility, and the instantaneous exit and entry of capitals, moved 143 billion dollars (or trillion dollars in US usage) annually, equivalent to over five times the GDP of the global economy and over 1.5 billion dollars daily. Eighty-five per center of the movement of this mass of global capital involved parity speculation while 15% involved the actual exchange of goods and services. This growing tendency towards inducing investment in financial capital-as a result of the breaking of the international monetary agreement-over direct investment has reached a ratio of 80%:20%, fuelling the speculative trend that triggered the current crisis.

The loss of instruments for the State to regulate national economies and the lack of the latter in multilateral organizations for regulating the world economy, together with the composition of international investment and informatic acceleration, which depend on stock markets, have flooded the world with speculative pyramidal documents, to the detriment of the real economy and have become the main contributors to the fragility of national economies. These economies are linked to the mobility of financial global investment which is based, albeit temporarily, on national stock market spheres, in their rapid movement through markets. This is one of the essential features of contemporary financial globalization.

At present, financial globalization, speculation and the extreme corruption fostered by the latter posit legal regulations and legislative practice as one of the main problems of the contemporary world. In the center, between the economy and politics, lies a modern, national and international law, constructed within the limits and assumptions of the national State. Redefining the global sphere of law implies modifying it within national states and the relationship within them, as well as in international law, which should incorporate the changing terms of sovereignty. Nowadays, one of the principal demands of the global social order is the construction of a new regulatory system that will go beyond the opposition of states, national States and the international State.

The strategy of stabilization and structural adjustment, was used to impose the values of markets and openness which, from the 1980s onwards, simultaneously regulated the scope of economic and public policies in sixty-seven countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia (see Table 1).17

This fact, which established globalization, created the institutional conditions in sixty-seven countries in the peripheral world for transferring the centrality of the national State in the direction of social development and in economic relations to international organizations that operated as agencies for implementing key decisions in national economic policy.
The measures taken by multilateral organizations emerged as a rational alternative to the crisis of the 1970’s caused by the unmanageable external debt, rapid inflation, unstable exchange rates, and fiscal, balance, trade and payment deficits. The contents of the crisis were interpreted by multilateral financial institutions as key evidence of the decline of the State’s centrality in social development, regarded in generic terms as the “welfare state.” Thereafter, attempts were made to reduce its importance in the national economy and to adjust it to the logic of the internationalized market, by determining the possible margins for its action and internal development.

TABLE 1

SUMMARY OF STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT IMPLEMENTED BY THE WORLD BANK AND ITS SECTOR. ADJUSTMENT LOANS PER REGION

Adjustment countries or territories Countries or territories not included in

Africa

Algeria, Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic Chad, Congo, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, São Tomé e Príncipe, Senegal, Sierra Leona, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Tunis, Uganda, Tanzania, Zaire, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

Botswana, Cabo Verde, Comoro, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland.

NORTH AND CENTRAL AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

SOUTH AMERICA

Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Jordan, Republic of Korea, People’s Democratic Republic of Lao, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, Korea.

Afghanistan, Bahrain, Bhutan, Cambodia, Cyprus, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Yemen.

The new conception of the State, characteristic of global relations, has neoliberalism as its ideological basis, and has been implemented in a parallel fashion in the world’s periphery and part of Europe, through the economic transformations known as Thatcherism18 in the United Kingdom and in the US through the policies introduced by President Reagan.

The global view of the market economy is based on the interpretation by contemporary ultraliberals Friedrich August von Hayek and Milton Friedman of classic economics, propounded mainly by Adam Smith, to underpin their view of freedom as the assumption of the market economy. Unlike classic liberals, ultraliberals cite the maximization of freedom as the supreme criterion. In their eyes, institutions are good or bad, desirable or reprehensible to the extent that they increase or reduce the total amount of freedom, the ultimate objective by which social institutions can be judged.19

According to Hayek, market economy is a self-regulating system (a galaxy according to one of the celestial metaphors that this author uses) that does not require public intervention in order to be able to function harmoniously. According to this author, market economy, left to its spontaneous mechanisms, obtains better results than mixed economies with an active economic policy.20

Milton Friedman has made several contributions to economic theory, including the concept of “permanent income” and he is well known among economists for having resuscitated the “quantitative theory of currency,” which created a fashion for monetarism which-in the early 1980’s-inspired the governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

However, Friedman is known by the public for his crusade against State intervention in economics, education, health, etc. He holds that it is better to leave all these sectors entirely in the hands of private enterprise, an opinion he developed in a series of ten television programs called Free to Choose21 which had a great impact in the 1980’s in the United States and England when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were in power.

Neoliberalism is characterized by the combined importance which it gives to private over public property, to market over regulated relations and to State intervention and possessive individualism over collective assets. The neoliberal conception of development was initially imposed most forcefully in the peripheral countries, through the implementation of adjustment and structural reform programs: devaluations, price increases for producers and the reduction of salary costs, freezing salaries, reducing the purchasing power of salaries, increasing the flexibility of work and eliminating subsidies and privatization. During the 1980’s, the key concepts of economic and social policy were; trim, differentiate, reduce and discipline.22

Nowadays, the vision imposed by technocrats of the world’s global condition has been reduced to the inevitability of the neoliberal conception of the historical imposition of the logic of the self-regulated market, as a form of universal social relations vis-a-vis the State. In neoliberal rhetoric, these elements become assumptions in the epistemic sense and immutable principles in the valuational sense.

The implementers of the proposals for the self-containment and deregulation of the State originally emerged as technical elements, who did not embrace any ideology, in contrast to the different visions held at that time, particularly Keynesian views and those of ideologized politicians.

In 1992, ten years after the implementation of the stabilization and structural adjustment programs, the development of globalization was sanctioned by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The OECD report for that year stated that “Western politicians have realized that solutions to the national problems they have to deal with are increasingly linked to the economic and institutional functioning of other societies.” According to the report, this created a new sphere for mutual understanding and synergy between the politicians of donor governments, in which development would be dealt with as part of a global agenda.23

Now that the neutrality of the invisible hand of the market has become the vices of the hidden hand of speculation and in which the social advantages of economic deregulation virtually carry out the Keynesian prediction that “in the long run, we’ll all be dead” in the short run and now that, in the world economy, “the light at the end of the tunnel is the light of an incoming train,” the reduction of the historical condition of globalization to the restricted neoliberal view has even come under discussion within the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The early 1980’s saw the beginning of the structuring of the set of social and political relations that constituted the social and economic basis for the characteristics of the national State, created after the Second World War One of the key identifying features of globalization is the shift from the centrality of the State in social development to the centrality of the market.
In Latin America, the new perception of the State’s role in a globalized world is designed to shift the canonic conception of the Welfare state which, through the promotion of economic development, the creation of an internal market and the regulation of private interests for the benefit of the common good, took on the enormous burden of creating modern society.
The metropolitan proposal of the welfare state was consolidated during the period after the Second World War and was immersed in the ideological climate of European reconstruction, Latin American development to counter the consolidation of the communist bloc in eastern Europe and the war of contention of its military advances in Asia, a geopolitical situation complemented by the growing importance of leftist ideologies in the western world, within both intellectual circles and low-income social organizations.

The welfare state was the principal pacifying formula for capitalist democracies for the period following the Second World War. Its structural components are:

Firstly, the explicit obligation assumed by the state apparatus to provide assistance and support (in money or in kind) to needy citizens exposed to the specific risks of industrial society. This assistance is provided by virtue of the legal rights granted to citizens.

Secondly, the welfare state is based on the recognition of the formal role for trade unions as the legitimate economic and political representatives of work, in both collective negotiation and the elaboration of public plans. Thus, trade unions became the social forces that achieved compulsory insurance, laws for the protection of employment, minimum salaries and the expansion of health and education services as well as state-subsidized housing programs.24

Both structural components of the welfare state limit and administer social conflict, seeking to balance the asymmetric power relationship between capital and work. In essence, the welfare state was constructed as a political solution for overcoming the contradictions and social struggles characteristics of liberal capitalism. If it is possible to speak of the logic of the welfare state, then the latter can only be understood through the principle of compensation. This is the compensation for the disadvantages caused to each person as a result of a specific life system.25

The welfare state was constructed in Western democracies as a recourse of political legitimacy in the competition between parties that drew together national and international currents, included under the ideological principles of social democratic reformism, Christian socialism, or Latin American populists and proponents of development.

The process that constructed and maintained the welfare state can only be explained on the basis of the existence of the communist bloc and the confrontation of alternative political projects that are viable for social basis, within democracies, in opposition to proposals put forward for the latter through traditional communist parties or leftist groups in each national state.
The neoliberal view of the state and its functions in society assumes an individualistic conception of social self-regulation, the collapse of organic solidarity and the disintegration of the constitutive elements of social cohesion. This conception of the State is the antithesis of the view created during modernity, as the political entity of society, the depository of sovereignty and the guarantor of the common good through the regulation of private interests that interfere with public interests.

A key feature of the welfare state in the Latin America, since the 1970’s, has been the growing deficit of public finances that was subsidized using resources from internal and external public debt to maintain the public service sector, basic industry and the State industrial sector.

For over thirty years (1945-1980), the ruling coalitions used the services of State companies as resources for the specific clienteles of the governments of the moment: they were also a growing source of the corruption of the state bureacracies that administered firms in the public sector, with an enormous personal and familial influence on the development of local bourgeoisies, subsidized and protected by the nationalism of international competition. In many cases, the handling of the intervening State’s institutions by the ruling parties constituted a source of immense private fortunes and in others, the rapid accumulation of great entrepreneurial fortunes was achieved on condition of exempting government officials and businessmen from their public obligations. In either case, impunity as a condition for exempting certain persons from legality and as a source of public corruption, appeared under the guise of the development and protection of industry and national investment.

The irrational use of the public sector’s economic resources, together with the promotion and subsidization of a protected private enterprise that was doubly expensive for both local consumers and public finances led to an unmanageable deficit for the welfare state that produced a significant change in its composition and in the direction and regulatory scope of social development.

The economic collapse of the welfare state during the 1980’s led to the increasing privatization of public firms and a change in the hegemonic composition of State governments. There was a shift from the traditional politicians who used the State’s economic assets as resources to regulate social conflict, to technocrats, a social class that was capable of introducing the regulation of the global market into national economies and of destroying the protectionism of national industries and markets, created by development-based bureaucratic centrality.

A common feature of both clientelist politicians and neo-liberal technocrats is the degree of corruption of both in their handling of State assets. The former handled their private businesses using public assets while the latter made public assets their private business. Metaphorically, one could say that some robbed the State, while others stole the State.

The national State is subject to the limitations imposed by a changing global order in which the functions traditionally defined in economic policy have lost their capacity for direction in social development and have made it highly vulnerable by creating ruptures that are incapable of producing a national public policy that is both well-directed and rational.

However, the component parts of international economy turn the national state into an entity that pays the highest political and economic costs of the disorder caused by the impossibility of creating instruments to regulate global financial flows and speculative movements involving national economies.

Within this deregulated global environment, technocracy, ensconced in its extreme view of laissez-faire, has become the functional instrument of government in national economies for world speculative accumulation.

One of the first component parts of globalization that destroyed the regulatory parameters of national economic policies comprises the contemporary content of investment. The latter is no longer subjected to geographical limitations, is essentially private and moves at great speed. Money goes to wherever there are good opportunities.

The global phenomenon of investment crosses borders and imposes the terms of competition on national society, standardizing opportunities for investment. By repealing the legislation created during the welfare state and subordinating national social interests to global demands, to create the so-called quality of opportunity for investment, whose labor paradigm are the authoritarian, disciplined oriental societies, the latter establish new parameters vis-a-vis the societies of Western Europe and the United States of America, which for decades measured their social development in terms of the quality of life with which they were able to provide their citizens.

Until the 1980s, the flows of transborder financial resources occurred mainly between governments or between an international loan agency and a government.26

A second component feature of globalization is caused by the transformations that have taken place within the industrial structure inherited from the cold war period after the Second World War. Industry today has a more global orientation than it did during the 1980s. The current strategies of multinational corporations are no longer conditioned by reasons of State but rather by the need to gain access to markets and attractive resources, wherever these may be.

The importance of the States that received industrial displacements is declining as an investment criterion. The administrative revolution triggered by the reduction of the State’s demands and the increased efficiency in reducing limits for investments, inherited from protectionism, constitute a global fact that determines the action and view of efficiency of technocratically-oriented State bureaucracies, charged with opening up borders to the free circulation of forms of industrial capital.

The rapid industrial shift caused by information technology enables a company to have current assets, technology, and knowledge of management and to operate simultaneously in various parts of the world, without having to set up a complete entrepreneurial system in each of the countries where it has operations. This has enormously reduced the barriers to participation and transborder strategic alliances. It is no longer necessary to transport an army of experts or to create an army of workers. Capacity can be stored in the Internet and made available to anyone who needs it, virtually anywhere and whenever it is required.

The new forms of industrial integration, together with the re-organization of global production chains mean that this process is incompatible with existing forms of work organization and the legislation that guarantees workers’ fixed contractual rights, obtained after a century of workers’ struggles. The current type of working conditions has been transformed by the so-called work flexibility, whose characteristics are contrasted in the following table:

Table 2

• Collective contracting
• Contracts for an indefinite period of time
• Restrictions on sub-contracting
• Severance pay
• Specific job per worker
• Pay for full day.

• Paid seventh day, vacations and other benefits.

• Freedom regulated by changes in labor organization.
• Set work schedules
• Promotions based on seniority
• Previous authorization required to modify collective working conditions.
• Conflicts solved by union

• Individual contracting
• Temporary contract
• Absolute freedom to sub-contract and farm out work.
• Firing justified for reasons of production with no severance pay.
• Worker free to move around the firm, as the boss requires.
• Pay based on productivity and by hour. Salary decreases in accordance with the firm’s conditions.
• No pay, since it is not time that has effectively been worked.

• Total freedom to organize firms’ work.
• Schedules based on firm’s needs.
• Promotion based solely on ability.
• Boss free to modify conditions according to his needs.
• Solutions worked out directly between boss and worker.

The widespread elimination of borders has directly influenced the contents of consumers who constitute the markets that now adopt a globalized approach to consumption, based on information on lifestyles throughout the world.

The creation and development of both the internal market and national industry are no longer the central objective of States’ economic activity, however, the financial crises produced by the globalization of monetary flows and the collapse of national financial systems continue to be the responsibility of the national States, which transfer the costs of speculation to taxpayers in each country through those that are left and public debt.

In short, the paradox caused by economic globalization is framed in the following terms today. On the one hand, as a result of technocratic governments, the national State has lost the ability to direct national development, as an entity that regulates private interests, through intervention for the benefit of society’s general interest. On the other hand, the State has to pay the costs, as if it were a welfare state, of the crisis caused by the impossibility of rationalizing the economy and the limitation of global speculation caused by the centrality of the market.

Global pressure on the structure of national States also has an internal version in the growing process of the disintegration of the centrality of national State institutions and the decentralization of power into federal State apparatuses.

Decentralization is one of the internal forms of external global pressure. Added to this fact is the loss of the national state’s capacity for coercion and cohesion regarding the various regional groups, which produces movements and confrontations between local and federal powers or the influence and power of transnational economic groups over local political actors. This set of multipolar relations constitutes the basis of new conflicts between local groups and the governments of national states.
The State’s decentralized functions are also a way of renewing and diversifying information resources concerning the aspects of a country’s social and political problems as well as their possible solution. Today, as Clause Offe would say, the formulation of the problem and the policies for its solution are in themselves a negotiable problem.

However, it should be added that although the restriction of the nation-state’s functions and the weakening of its institutions are a fact of the globalized world, so too is the fact that the pressures and evaluation of organizations with global decision and influence (IMF, WB, OECD), or of the United States and Europe continue to be exerted on the basis of the idea of a national state. One only has to think of events such as the certification of the fight against drug trafficking, an international and national event that goes beyond and forms part of the political and economic life of both the certifying country and the country it certifies.

The loss of State sovereignty produced by globalism has not only taken place in relation to the other States, economic blocs or international agencies but also in relation to the very source of legitimacy and sovereignty, which has proved increasingly incapable of constructing the representation of civil society in national state institutions and in the inability of institutional State instruments to regulate pressures and design economic policy strategies for dealing with financial flows with a minimum of programmatic rationality.

Nowadays, the disintegration of national institutional representation is affected by the multiplicity of civil organizations of an intermediate nature (of which non-governmental organizations are the best known), whose interaction and force respond to forms of multiple, ubiquitous organization. Its members do not display a definite, unilateral assignment; instead, they act in various spheres and within a radius of action and influence that is not attached to a single political organization or to a single social organization, or circumscribed by a single geographical specificity.

One only has to think of the role played by non-governmental organizations in dealing with the conflict in Chiapas and in the status that these organizations have achieved as mediators between the State and guerrillas, as new instruments of political, internal or global legitimacy.

These forms of civil organization are global, national, regional and local networks and represent new forms of interest and pressure groups, whose influence and ability to express another version of what happens in national states is becoming increasingly significant.

1 I am grateful for their comments on their text to Judit Boxer, Julio Cotler, José Ramón Cossío, Jorge Dettmer, Julia Flores, Donnal Freeber, Gilberto Giménez, Sara Gordon, Julio Labastida Martín del Campo, Claudio Lomnitz, Juan Manuel Ortega, Cristina Pons, Andrea Pozas Loyo, Martín Puchet, Julio Ríos, Carlos Alberto Torres and members of the Seminario Institucional de Estudios de Educación y Decentralización of the National University of Mexico’s Institute for Social Research and its coordinator, Aurora Loyo. Mailing address: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Circuito Mario de la Cueva, Zona Cultural, Ciudad Universitaria, CP 0410, Tels: 622 74 18 and 622 74 19, Fax; 665-24-43, e-mail: [email protected]2 The news summary of the World Bank report appeared in the press on October 7, 1998.
3 An enormous amount has been written on the issue of global communication based on the technological revolution. We suggest, among other texts, that of Manuel Castells, which recapitulates the problem from the tradition of urban sociology, based on the sociology of action and social movements: Manuel Castells, 1998, La ciudad informacional, tecnologías de la información, re-estructuración económica y proceso urbano-regional, Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 503 pp.
4 See F. Fukuyama, 1980, The End of History and The Last Man? Free Press, New York.
5 Freed Davis, 1974, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, Free Press, New York. pp. 122-123.
6 The issues of the scope and intensity of the social phenomena produced by the process of globalization are developed in A. McGrew, 1992, “Conceptualizing Global Politics,” in A. McGrew, P.G. Lewis et al. (comps.) Global Politics, Polity Press, Cambridge, pp. 1-2.
7 “Separation of space and time: this is the condition for the articulation of social relations in broad spheres of time and space, until they eventually include universal systems.” Anthony Giddens, 1991, Modernity and Self-Identity, Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Polity Press and Basil Blackwell. There is a Spanish version: Anthony Giddens, 1995, Modernidad e identidad del yo: el yo y la sociedad en la época contemporánea, Editorial Península, Barcelona, 300 pp.
8 David Slater, 1996. “La geopolítica del proceso globalizador y el poder territorial en las relaciones Norte-Sur: imaginaciones desafiantees de lo global,” in Miguel Angel Pereyra, Globalización y decentralización de los sistemas educativos: fundamentos para un nuevo programs de educación comparada, Ediciones Pomares-Corredor, Barcelona, p. 64.
9 Anthony Giddens, 1990, The Consequence of Modernity, Cambridge Policy Press.
10 See Patrick Champagne, 1990, Faire l’opinion, le nouveau jeu politique, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris.
11 Alain Touraine, 1997, ¿Podremos vivir juntos? Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, p. 13.
12 Philippe Breton, 1995, L’Utopie de la communication; le mythe du “village planetaire,” Editions la Décuverte, Paris, p. 6.
13 Jorge Larrain, 1996, Modernidad, razó e identidad en América Latina, Ediciones Andrés Bello, Mexico, 270 pp.
14 K. Robins, 1991, “Tradition and Translation: National Culture in its Global Context,” in J. Coner and S. Harvey (comps) Enterprise and Heritage, Routledged, London.
15 Philippe breton, 1995, op. cit.
16 See World Bank, 1998, Adjustment Lending, An Evaluation of Ten Years of Experience, World Bank, Washington D.C. p. 11.
17 World Bank Summary of structural adjustment.
18 James Douglas, 1989, “The Changing Tide-Some Recent Studies of Thatcherism,” British Journal of Political Science, vol. 19, part 3, July. These policies were not only developed in the United Kingdom, but also by the Socialist government of France, Spain and New Zealand.
19 Milton Friedman, 1982, Capitalism and Freedom, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p. 12.
20 For the conception of this author, see Friedrich von Hayek, 1976, The Constitution of Liberty, London and Henley Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
21 See Milton Friedman, 1986, Free to Choose, Penguin Books, London. This author argues against the provision of the service of education by the State: “It is not necessary: in the United Kingdom, schooling was virtually universal before government financing existed (p. 197) and in the United States, it was virtually universal before the government took it over” (p. 187). According to Friedman, provision of the service of teaching by the Sta te is not only useless but harmful.
22Slater, David, 1993, “The Political Meanings of Development: in Search of New Horizons,” in F. Shuurman (ed.), Beyond the Impasse-New Directions in Development Theory, Zed Press, London.
23 OECD, 1992, Development Corporation, Report, Paris, pp. 7-49.
24 Claus Offe, 1994, Contradicciones en el Estado del bienestar, Alianza Universidad, Spain, pp. 135-137.
25 Niklas Lummann, 1994, Teoría política en el Estado de Bienestar, Barcelona, Alianza Editorial, p. 32.
26 Keniche Ohmae, 1995, The End of the Nation State, McKinsey & Company Inc. There is version in Spanish: Kenichi Ohmae, 1996, El fin del Estado-nación, Editorial Andrés Bello, Santiago de Chile, p. 17, The author states that: “There was always a capital and an army of government officials, at least for the extremes of the operation. But it’s not like that any more. Since nowadays, most of the money that crosses borders is private, there is no reason for government to participate in either of the two extremes. The only thing that matters is the quality of the investment opportunity. Money will go to wherever there are good opportunities.