128 World politics and the future of politics
A comprehensive, well-documented and unbiased history of globalisation is still to
be written. In the sense of the widening dimension of knowledge and exchange
among humans, it
has always existed, with leaps forward in the Mediterranean area
in Roman times and in all of Europe and beyond at the time of early capitalism,
as a world market was created.
1
But we are here only interested in its last chapter,
which began in the 1970–80s and for the first time in history made the planetary
dimension easily available to everybody every day (I
can read every morning the
newspapers published everywhere, buy stocks on any stock exchange on the planet
in real time and fly anywhere, whenever I wish – granted I have enough money and
own the appropriate passport). The specificity of the present
globalisation wave is
undeniable, whereas all insistence on globalisation being a constant in human his-
tory and therefore hardly a novelty is of little help – more interesting is the study of
retreating or waning globalisation in periods such as the early Middle Ages.
On the one hand, the modern push to globalise was and is inscribed in the
logic of capitalism since
the creation of a world market, and now particularly in
the presence of technological leaps forward and a favourable environment as it
was created by the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT 1947, which
became in 1995 the World Trade Organization, WTO). In this sense, a
new wave
of globalisation at the conclusion of what the French call
Les Trente Glorieuses (the
thirty glorious years of reconstruction, growth, full employment and rising welfare
between 1945–1975) was to be expected and inevitable. On the other hand, the
new wave was also the result of policies devised by the Bretton Woods institutions,
such as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, and entangled in
cultural if not policy coordination with the US Department of the Treasury in the
framework of the so-called
Washington consensus.
2
This
was a mix of common sense
directives and neoliberal dogmas (trade liberalisation, privatisation of state proper-
ties, deregulation), whose massive and uncritical application in developing coun-
tries created much economic and social havoc and made globalisation the target of
protest
movements around the world; they were later reunited in the World Social
Forum, originally held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001 as a counter-event to the
mainstream World Economic Forum, organised every year in Davos/Switzerland.
But even critics do not reject globalisation altogether and rather propose an ‘alter-
globalisation’, which would change its rules and goals.
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