1.3
Market Globalism
Market globalism is the dominant ideology of our time. For the past years, globalization's study focused on globalization as a product of economic innovations carried out by people in the course of history. Yet, one has to note that globalization's development also involves cultural and political spheres. The global circulation of ideas across various national territories manifests that globalization is not only about economics. It includes almost all aspects of human lives.
Ideologies show a clear view of the world not only as it is, but also what it ought to be. So what then is ideology? Steger (2014) defines ideology as a system of widely shared ideas, patterned beliefs, guiding norms and values, and ideals that are accepted as truths by a certain group of people. An example of this is the ideology of communism espoused by Karl Marx, based on the following principles. 1. There should be a classless society. 2. There should be a destruction of private property to attain a classless society. In this case, the state owns everything. 3. There should be a dictatorship of the working class. 4. Each according to ability, each according to needs. In contrast, the ideology of democracy is based on each person's enjoyment of freedom and the majority rule. People disagree on what is the best ideology there is in the world today. This is not a surprise since people are rational and see things in different ways. Yet, according to the French Philosopher Paul Ricoeur, ideologies distort, legitimize, and integrate (Steger, 2014).
With this, one must be careful of the global circulation of ideas and their impacts on the rapid extension of social interactions and interdependence across time and space. With the advancement of information technology as an offshoot of modernity, ideas freely traverse national boundaries. Even if ideas are prohibited from entering into a country's territory, there are ways in which such ideas seep into the minds of those prohibited. This applies to one's notion of globalization. With the concept of globalization infiltrating almost every aspect of human life today, Manfred Steger (2014) claimed that "Market Globalism" is construed as the dominant ideology of the present times. It absorbs and re-arranges established ideologies. It aims to integrate itself with new concepts. It is designed to preserve established power structures that are geared towards neo-liberalism. For Steger (2014), market globalism contains an ideological dimension filled with a range of norms, claims, beliefs, and narratives about the phenomenon itself.
A recent example of the influence of information technology concerning the spread of ideology is the "Arab Spring" that overthrew some of the leaders of some countries in the Middle East. Arab activists who are seldom given opportunities to freely and openly air their voices make use of technology as a venue to express their sentiments across the globe. Using Facebook, tweeter with gadgets in their hands, young protesters defy risks and go to the streets in open protest to give pressure on their tyrant leaders to vacate their seats (Heather Brown, 2019). The power of the internet facilitated ideas to roam around the world. It has positive and negative influences on people. Yet, the fact that borders are already more accessible for ideas to infiltrate confirms that globalization is not all about business. It is also about the rapid and almost unfettered spread of culture and political views.
Hence, to understand changes brought about by globalization, it is necessary to understand the connection between political ideologies and social imaginary. What makes an ideology political is that it claims select, privilege, and constrict social meanings related to the exercise of power in society. Social Imaginary refers to deep-seated modes of understanding that provide the most general parameters within which people imagine their communal existence. Drawing on Benedict Anderson's (2006) account of an imagined community of the nation, Charles Taylor (2004), as mentioned by Steger (2014), argued that social imaginaries are neither theories nor ideologies. They are implicit background understandings that make possible communal practices and a shared sense of their legitimacy (Taylor, 2004). An example of this was the illustrados' concept of being "Filipinos" when they were studying in Spain during the times of Spanish colonization. Though there was no legal independent or autonomous Philippine state at that time, they construed themselves as Filipinos because of their similar shared cultures and places of origin.
Moreover, social imaginary also consists of interrelated and mutually dependent narratives, visual prototypes, metaphors, and conceptual framings. This gives rise to the emergence of nationalist movements across the globe, like communism, fascism, Nazism, liberalism, and conservatism. For instance, the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany after Germany's bitter defeat during the First World War was a result of the German People's hope of redemption. The Germans saw Hitler as a charismatic person that could bring Germany back to its pre World War I glory. This is accompanied by a strong sense of nationalism that unites people into a shared consciousness.
After the Second World War (the second half of the 1940s onwards), new ideas, theories, and materials produced in the public consciousness a sense of rupture in the past that had occurred during the time of the French Revolution. New technologies facilitated the speed and intensity with which new ideas and practices infiltrated the national imaginary. Images, people, and materials circulated more freely across national boundaries. This, in a way, destabilized identities that are based on national membership (Claudio, 2016).
The 1990s: Globalization Took Center Stage to Cater to the Agenda of the Global Social Elites.
The 1990s saw the era of the emergence of a movement that espouses the creation of a global free market and the expansion of consumerist values around the globe. The movement is not just about the free exchange of material things. It also influenced people's attitudes and values. It aimed "to shrink" the world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, power social elites in developed nations strived to sell their version of globalization.
According to Steger (2014), the power social elites consisted chiefly of corporate managers, executives of large transnational and multinational corporations, corporate lobbyists, high-level military personnel, influential journalists, and intellectuals writing to a large public audience, state bureaucrats, and prominent politicians. These social power elites popularize the neo-liberal framework of globalization: deregulation of markets, liberalization of trade, privatization of state-owned enterprises, and very recently, the global war on terror.
Five Core Claims of Market Globalism
According to Manfred Steger (2014), there are five core claims of globalization. They are the following:
1. Globalization is about the liberalization and global integration of markets. This articulates globalization's goal of spreading free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world. One of its sad effects is that it paved the way to many governments' "HANDS OFF" attitude towards the interest of large transnational and Multinational Corporations. An example of this is mentioned by Fernandez et al. (2018). The late Environment Secretary Gina Lopez lamented on the government's policy of allowing large mining companies to overexploit the natural environment for profit. According to Gina Lopez in her press conference after the CA opted not to confirm her appointment as DENR Secretary:
"This is the only country in the world that gives tax holidays to large mining companies for seven years. Our government allows them to exploit our water for free. When we drink, we pay for our water. But those mining companies are freely using our water."
2. Globalization is inevitable and irreversible. Market globalist perspective: Globalization reflects the spread of irreversible market forces driven by technological innovations that inevitably make global integration of global economies inevitable.
3. Nobody is in charge of globalization.
The claim is based on the classical concept of the "self-regulating" market. According to Friedman (1999), today's global marketplace is an "electronic herd" of often anonymous stock, bond, and currency traders and multinational investors connected by screens and networks. With this, we ask the question: Where is one's social responsibility?
4. Globalization benefits everyone...in the long run.
This claim relates to the idea of economic growth and prosperity. There may be adverse social effects in the short run, but it will have a more significant positive impact in the long term.
5. Globalization furthers the spread of democracy in the world.
A globalist naturally treats freedom, free markets, and democracy as synonymous terms.
From Market Globalism to Imperial Globalization and Back
In the 1990s, the social power elites of industrialized countries use the soft language "market globalization" to define their imperial activities. But after the September 11th attacks, the power elites saw a legitimate challenge to globalization ----- terrorism. In response to this, the social power elites' response was the use of "military might." This paves the way for claim 6 of globalization: you need a war on terror to market globalization's discursive arsenal. One observation by many scholars of globalization is that globalization is the Americanization of McDonaldization of the world.
The Three Regions of the World in the Era of Globalization
The era of globalization divides the world into three regions. They are as follows:
1. Core – globalized nations with dense networks and connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, yielding countries featuring stable democratic governments, transparency, and rising standards of living. These refer to the US, European Union, Australia, New Zealand, and a small part of Latin America.
2. Non-Integrating Gap. Refer to nations where globalization is thinning or absent. These nations are characterized by repressive political regimes, regulated markets, widespread poverty and diseases, mass murder, and breeding grounds of terrorists. These nations refer to the greater part of Africa, the Balkans, Central Asia, many parts in the Middle East, and many places in South East Asia.
3. Seam States. Nations that lie the non-integrating gaps' bloody boundaries. These nations refer to Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
What are the Objectives of the US in dividing the globe in this manner? These are reasons:
1. To increase the Core's immune system.
2. Work on the seam states to firewall the core from the gap's worst exports such as terror, drugs, and pandemics.
3. Shrink the non-integrating gap.
The withdrawal large-scale military presence from Iraq and Afghanistan slowly shifted the return from imperial globalization to market globalism.
Conclusion
This chapter concludes that the cultural and political aspects of human lives also played a role in the workings of globalization. The advancement of science and technology makes it easy for ideas to transcend national boundaries. Western culture, accompanied by Americanization and McDonaldzation, blurs the national identities of many of the current world citizens and enable them to look at themselves as not belonging to a certain nation but belonging to the whole world. Nevertheless, the five core claims of globalization manifest that the cultural and political aspects of globalization bolster the hegemony of economic globalization to the world. Yet, after the US September the 11th attacks, terrorism made its presence felt as a direct challenge to globalization.