What Is Globalization

WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION? Four Possible Answers Simon Reich Working Paper #261 – December 1998

Simon Reich holds appointments as a Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. In fall 1997 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute. His publications include The Fruits of Fascism: PostwarProsperity in Historical Perspective and The German Predicament: Memory and Power in the New Europe (with Andrei S. Markovits) both published by Cornell University Press. His most recent coauthored book is The Myth of the Global Corporation (Princeton University Press, 1998). Reich has also published many book chapters and articles in journals such as International Organization, InternationalInteractions, The Review of International Political Economy, and German Politics and Society. He has received fellowships from the Sloan Foundation and the Kellogg Institute and was awarded an International Affairs Fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations. His current work is on the issue of the definitions and central propositions of globalization. This paper was written during my stay at theKellogg Institute. I wish to express my appreciation to the fellows and staff of the Institute for all their help on this project, notably to Scott Mainwaring who is now director of the Institute.

Introduction

The end of the Cold War provided a major shock for scholars of politics and policy in at least two respects. First, it provided a classic example of the limitations of both social andpolicy sciences predictive capacity. Few foresaw, let alone predicted, the tumultuous events that

marked the end of the decade. Second, those events simultaneously dislodged the organizing principle—the foundation—upon which much of the study of international relations was constructed in the postwar period.1 The parsimony and simplicity of bipolarity signaled the

hegemony of structuralarguments in international studies and a corresponding ascendancy of questions posed by security studies over those relating to international and comparative political economy. Scholars and policy analysts alike thus favored these approaches, employing theories such as deterrence, compellence, and modernization in political science, while policy analysts often subsumed critiques of American policy inthe Third World for the sake of strategic advantage over the Communist bloc. Faced with the intellectual vacuum caused by the end of the Cold War, it was only natural that scholars in international affairs should grasp for a new organizing principle around which to orient their work. Such efforts did not take long to bear fruit. Structuralism, with its rationalist underpinnings, came under attack inpolitical science from constructivists, and within a short period no professional conference or symposium was complete without a genuflection towards the attributes of ‘globalization.’2 What was the case at the beginning of the 1990s remains true towards the end of the decade, although the substance of the subjects studied under the rubric of globalization varies dramatically. This list includes,but was not confined to, the study of

democratization, development, market deregulation, privatization, welfare reform, new security
1

For early work in comparative politics predicated on addressing questions posed by the Cold War structure, see Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956); Daniel Lerner,The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958); Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). The extensive literature in this field in international relations is exemplified by the work of John Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy...