Literatures Of Liberalization

This book traces the global circulation of cultures and ideologies from the technological and democratic revolutions of the long nineteenth century to liberal and neoliberal modernity. Focussing on moments of coerced (colonial and postcolonial) and voluntary contact rather than national boundaries, the author draws attention to the global scope of literatures and geopolitical commodities as actants in world affairs, as in processes of liberalization, democratization, and trade, but also to the distinctiveness of each local environment at its moments of transculturation. Based in extensive experience in collaborative, multilingual, interdisciplinary networks, the book synthesizes existing theoretical scholarship, provides original case studies of world-historical Victorian and modern writers, and articulates a new interdisciplinary methodology for literary studies in a global context. It will be of interest to Victorianists, modernists, comparatists, political theorists, translators, and scholars of world literatures, world ecology, and globalization.

This book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, focusing on developments in three arenas - industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market policy. While confirming a broad, shared liberalizing trend, it finds that there are in fact distinct varieties of liberalization associated with very different distributive outcomes. Most scholarship equates liberal capitalism with inequality and coordinated capitalism with higher levels of social solidarity. However, this study explains why the institutions of coordinated capitalism and egalitarian capitalism coincided and complemented one another in the "Golden Era" of postwar development in the 1950s and 1960s, and why they no longer do so. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this study reveals that the successful defense of the institutions traditionally associated with coordinated capitalism has often been a recipe for increased inequality due to declining coverage and dualization. Conversely, it argues that some forms of labor market liberalization are perfectly compatible with continued high levels of social solidarity and indeed may be necessary to sustain it.

The so-called culture industries--film, television and radio broadcasting, periodical and book publishing, video and sound recording--are noteworthy exceptions to the rhetorical commitment of Western countries to free trade as a major goal. These exceptions threatened to derail such high-profile negotiations as NAFTA and its predecessor, the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, as well as the Uruguay Round of the GATT. Conventional wisdom did not foresee trouble from this source, because these established industries are not commercial national champions, nor are they particularly large providers of jobs. As Patricia M. Goff shows, the standard trade literature considers the monetary value but doesn't recognize the symbolic importance of cultural production. In Limits to Liberalization, she traces the interplay between the commercial and the cultural. Governments that want to expand free trade may simultaneously resist liberalization in the culture industries (and elsewhere, including agriculture and health care). Goff traces the rationale for "cultural protectionism" in the trade policies of Canada, France, and the European Union. The result is a larger understanding of the forces that shape international trade agreements and a book that speaks to current theoretical concerns about national identity as it plays out in politics and international relations.

This book examines the dynamics shaping the economic process of economic liberalisation in Indonesia since the mid-1980's. Much writing on the process of economic liberalisation in developing countries views economic liberalisation as the victory of economic rationality over political and social interests. In contrast, this book argues that economic liberalisation should not be understood in these terms, but rather in the way that political social interests shape processes of economic reform in both a positive and negative sense. Specifically, Rosser argues that economic liberalisation needs to be understood in terms of the extent to which economic crises shift the balance of power and influence within society away from coalitions opposed to reform and towards those in favour of reform. In the Indonesian context, the main coalitions that need to be examined in this respect are the politico-bureaucrats and the conglomerates who have generally opposed reform and mobile capitalists who have generally supported reform. Based on extensive original research, and providing much new material, the book considers the politics of economic policy-making in Indonesia in a range of sectors including the capital market, intellectual property law, the banking industry, and the trade and investment sectors. Analysing why the nature of economic policy in Indonesia has varied over time, this study argues that there is nothing inevitable about a transition to a fully-fledged liberal market order in Indonesia, and outlines possible future scenarios for the country's political economy.

This book analyses the discourses of economic liberalization reform in six Western European countries – Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria. It provides systematic empirical evidence that policy-related discourses are much more than noise; rather, they are detailed expressions of institutional complementarities and political struggles. The author posits that the more open a discourse, the broader the range of perceived interests, which, in turn, increases the intensity of conflicts. Similarly, the more public discourse centres on coordination, the more intense actors need to engage with opposite interests, which most probably intensifies political disputes as well. Moreover, Wueest argues that the formation of a consensus within the political mainstream has left a vacuum for outsider parties such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain to feed on the contentiousness of economic liberalization policies.

Why would sovereigns ever grant political or economic liberty to their subjects? Under what conditions would rational rulers who possess ultimate authority and who seek to maximize power and wealth ever give up any of that authority? This book draws on a wide array of empirical and theoretical approaches to answer these questions, investigating both why sovereign powers might liberalize and when. The contributors to this volume argue that liberalization or democratization will only occur when those in power calculate that the expected benefits to them will exceed the costs. More specifically, rulers take five main concerns into account in their cost-benefit analysis as they decide to reinforce or relax controls: personal welfare, personal power, internal order, external order, and control over policy--particularly economic policy. The book shows that repression is a tempting first option for rulers seeking to maximize their benefits, but that liberalization becomes more attractive as a means of minimizing losses when it becomes increasingly certain that the alternatives are chaos, deposition, or even death. Chapters cover topics as diverse as the politics of seventeenth-century England and of twentieth-century Chile; why so many countries have liberalized in recent decades; and why even democratic governments see a need to reduce state power. The book makes use of formal modeling, statistical analysis, and traditional historical analysis. The contributors are Paul Drake, Stephen Haggard, William Heller, Robert Kaufman, Phil Keefer, Brian Loveman, Mathew McCubbins, Douglass North, Ronald Rogowski, and Barry Weingast.

In Hungary, as in all of "new Europe," liberalization is troubled. Using Hungary as an in-depth case study, Korkut demonstrates that, in squandering popular goodwill, credibility, and favorable circumstances after 1989, liberal politicians have found themselves vulnerable to conservative populist politics and the global economic crisis.

Global supply chain integration is not only a rapidly growing feature of international trade, it is responsible for fundamentally changing trade policy at international and domestic levels. Given that final goods are produced with both domestic and foreign suppliers, Ka Zeng and Xiaojun Li argue that global supply chain integration pits firms and industries that are more heavily dependent on foreign supply chains against those that are less dependent on intermediate goods for domestic production. Hence, businesses whose supply chain would be disrupted as a result of increased trade barriers should lobby for preferential trade liberalization to maintain access to those foreign markets. Moreover, businesses whose products are used in the production of goods in foreign countries should also support preferential trade liberalization to compete with suppliers from other parts of the world. Fragmenting Globalization uses multiple methods, including time series, cross-sectional analysis of the pattern of Preferential Trade Alliance formation by existing World Trade Organization members, a firm-level survey, and case studies of the pattern of corporate support for regional trade liberalization in both China and the United States. Zeng and Li show that the growing fragmentation of global production, trade, and investment is altering trade policy away from the traditional divide between export-oriented and import-competing industries.