Limits To Globalization

This book examines the concrete manifestations of the globalizing forces operating in the world today. It unpicks the rhetoric of globalization in political analysis, cultural theory and urban and economic sociology.

This book summarizes how globalizing capitalism-the economic system now presumed to dominate the global economy-can be understood from a geographical perspective. This is in contrast to mainstream economic analysis, which theorizes globalizing capitalism as a system that is capable of enabling everyone to prosper and every place to achieve economic development. From this perspective, the globalizing capitalism perspective has the capacity to reduce poverty. Poverty's persistence is explained in terms of the dysfunctional attributes of poor people and places. A geographical perspective has two principal aspects: Taking seriously how the spatial organization of capitalism is altered by economic processes and the reciprocal effects of that spatial arrangement on economic development, and examining how economic processes co-evolve with cultural, political, and biophysical processes. From this, globalizing capitalism tends to reproduce social and spatial inequality; poverty's persistence is due to the ways in which wealth creation in some places results in impoverishment elsewhere.

In this exciting new book, Rieger and Leibfried argue persuasively for the need to understand developments in welfare and social provision alongside the processes of globalization. In the two decades following the Second World War, the massive expansion of the welfare state system arguably allowed Western governments to expose their societies to uncontrollable external risks associated with the deregulated global economic environment. The authors contend that the combination of changes in welfare and technological innovation provided the necessary conditions for globalization by limiting some of the more harmful effects of economic change. Today, the developed welfare state is in need of reform for various endogenous reasons. If such reforms are to work effectively, however, Rieger and Leibfried claim that governments must take into account the complex ways in which domestic social policy and external economic policy are interconnected. They maintain that the present climate provides a unique opportunity for policy-makers to engage constructively with globalization, warning that failure to think creatively about welfare in this context could result in governments falling back into an unhelpful and out-moded protectionist stance. Drawing on case studies from Germany and the United States, Rieger and Leibfried show how welfare reform has worked in practice in the Western world. Contrasting these findings with the experience of East Asian states, they go on to argue that whilst welfare systems may appear to be similar, they function in different ways depending on the cultural setting. These cultural differences may condition the way in which welfare state regimes are able to mitigate the effects of globalization upon particular societies and economies.

Both the force and the limitations of the globalizing forces operating in the world today can best be understood through an analysis of their concrete manifestations. Using examples from the people's art of Potsdammer Platz to the ways in which Western cultural icons are reinterpreted in Asian magazines, this collection of essays unpicks the rhetoric of globalization in political analysis, cultural theory and urban and economic sociology and exposes the myth of the global society as in many cases a dangerous exaggeration.

In the post-Cold War era, economic globalization has loomed, at least for some, as the world system's next crisis carrier, creating winners and losers and trampling on the distinctiveness of local cultures. Yet the liberal assumption is that if the market does its job, the poor will catch up to the rich via trade-driven growth and the economies of developed and less developed countries will gradually converge. Investigating the processes of economic globalization, this book explores whether it is truly a "global" process. It examines how globalization is experienced around the world, comparing its intensity and impact in both the global North and South. Using a world systems approach and developing a theoretical analysis that builds on the leadership long-cycle approach to global political economy, this book seeks to dispel some of the myths widely propagated regarding economic development. Through a focus on the issues of technological diffusion, debt, conflict, and democratisation, the authors demonstrate how and why the asymmetries that have characterized the global North and South in the past and present are growing more acute. This important book will be of interest to students and scholars of international political economy, globalisation, international trade and development.

"What is to be done? That is the issue political movements, social thinkers, economists, and governments all over the world must now confront. Without trying to propose specific policies, the author puts forward a highly suggestive set of principles and ideas."--BOOK JACKET.