Conceptualizing Politics

PART I
Globalisation and global governance

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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.