Abstract
The literature on globalization is vast and uneven. It is hard to keep up with it, as intellectuals across the planet contribute to its enormity each day. Millions of words have already been typed trying to define the process called globalization, with little agreement in sight. That is perhaps as it should be. The very idea of globalization is deeply inflammatory. For those firmly in the neo- liberal camp, globalization captures their commitment to the breaking down of barriers to trade and finance, to economic activity that does not include the movement of people. A ‘flat world’ is both their goal and their description of the world as it is today. Others who are less enthused about the process portray globalization as a feint to strip ordinary people of their means to well-being. In the first case, globalization is seen as a universal project, and in the second as a class project to benefit a small number of people. Between these two opposed positions reside a number of descriptions and theories of the current conditions. It is hard to bifurcate or synthesize such diametrically opposed epistemologies, but that does not stop intellectuals from making the attempt.
William Robinson comes at globalization from another track. His interest is in the operation of the elite, whether in his earlier work on the democracy industry (polyarchy) being foisted on the ordinary peoples of the world from Washington, DC or in his newer work on the convergence between the elites of the world against the multitudes. Refreshingly, Robinson comes at his theory with considerable empirical analysis, and at the same time with a close adherence to the theoretical literature on global flows and global blockages. A first pass at some of these ideas comes in his ‘Globalisation: nine theses on our epoch’ (1996). Here Robinson listed the overwhelming data on the North-South divide and yet pointed us in another direction: ‘Given the accelerated creation under globalization of lakes of wealth in Third World countries and seas of poverty in First World countries, it makes more sense to see the world as increasingly divided along class, rather than national, lines.’ Class has overwhelmed Nation, and a vision of the world divided along national lines might miss the convergence of class allegiances across borders. The figure of this convergence is Davos Man. What Robinson’s work now edges toward is a theoretical ethnography of Davos Man.
Reading ‘Global capitalism theory and the emergence of transnational elites’ (in this issue) is uncanny: one feels that one knows this or that point not because it is commonplace in the literature, but because it reflects the real social processes. A transnational elite has emerged, Robinson argues, based on ‘transnational circuits of accumulation’ but this does not mean at all that there is a world government. What we have instead is a new form of power, ‘the ability to issue commands and have them obeyed, or more precisely, the ability to shape social structures, shifts from social groups and classes with interests in national accumulation to those whose interests lie in new global circuits of accumulation’.
While I agree with a number of assertions in Robinson’s essay, I do have some misgivings. I have raised these as three questions.
Is our planet structured by new global circuits of accumulation, or is ‘semi-globalization’ a better description of social reality?
Pankaj Ghemawat’s World 3.0 points out that the champions of globalization (Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat, for instance) promote a ‘chimera, dangerously exaggerating actual flows across borders’ (Ghemawat, 2011). The data shows that 80 percent of global stock-market investment takes place in companies that are based in the nation-state of the investor, and that exports make up only a quarter of the world’s economy. More dramatically, less than a fifth of internet activity takes place across national borders, and only 2 percent of students leave their home country for university. What we have, Ghemawat argues, is a form of semi-globalization, with the nation-state or regional containers fundamentally important as zones of economic and political activity. There is certainly a national bourgeoisie whose total economic and political lifeworld is captured within the confines of a nation-state, whereas there are sections of this bourgeoisie that have found means to enhance their economic and political power by connections across borders. But the divide between these two fragments of the bourgeoisie might not be as dramatic as we assume. In India, for example, the more precise divide is between the regional bourgeoisie (confined to a state in the country, such as Tamil Nadu) and the national bourgeoisie which also has transnational ambitions (such as the large conglomerates, Tata, Birla and Reliance). The transnational accumulation strategies of these conglomerates are as yet a miniscule part of their portfolio, even as they exaggerate them to gain more power in the domestic market and political arena.
Is Davos Man truly global or is this new evolutionary development a mask for G7 Man?
Davos, Switzerland is the home of the World Economic Forum (WEF), begun in 1971 but reshaped in 1987 as a space for corporate executives to network with each other and with politicians as well as opinion makers. By the late 1990s, the WEF broke out of its European confines and increasingly politicians, journalists and corporate titans from across the Atlantic world and Asia began to be seen at this remote Swiss retreat (far fewer business and political leaders from Africa came to Davos). The WEF has proposed itself as a global retreat: Davos Man became a metaphor for the creation of the new global transnational elite. However, a study from 2002 found that three-quarters of the participants at the WEF that year came from Europe and the USA. The regions that sent these large numbers account for only 17 percent of the world’s population. On the other hand, while 60 percent of the world’s people live in Asia, only 8 percent of WEF delegates came from that continent. Because of the overemphasis on oil in the world’s economy, Middle Eastern delegates came in large numbers (five times as many as the populations in their states warranted). Just over 13 percent of the world’s peoples live in Africa, and yet only 5.1 percent of the delegates came from that continent. The study from which these numbers are extracted (Public Citizen, 2002) found that the delegates are ‘overwhelmingly from the wealthiest nations’, with Europe, the USA and the Middle East in the lead. This remains the face of Davos Man. These numbers confirm that there is a convergence of elites in the domain of the G7, with a smattering of important figures from outside there who either work intimately with European or USA-based transnational firms or who would like to join them in some ventures.
Are the contradictions that divide the locomotives of the South from the G7 real?
Among the nations of the South, the ‘locomotives’ (India, Brazil, South Africa) have joined up with Russia and China to produce a serious political challenge to the G7 states: they call themselves the BRICS countries, and have held two summits to firm up their political platform. The BRICS dynamic draws from the IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) process that began in 2003 and before that from the G-15 formation of the Non-Aligned Movement. These countries see some great differences from the G7 states in economic and political developments. Their national bourgeoisies provide them with full support for this struggle with the G7, largely because the struggle has mercantile benefits for this domestically oriented, but transnationally aspiring, class fraction. The economic fights manifest themselves in the WTO rounds, so that at Cancún, Mexico in 2003, these countries led the fight to scuttle the trade negotiations. The main contradiction was against the subsidy regime for agriculture in the North. The political fight is in the demand by these locomotives for more democracy in the international institutions, such as the United Nations Security Council, the IMF and the World Bank. These Southern blocs have posed themselves as a counter to the G7-NATO formation that they see as in its autumn phase. It is of course the case that the class contradictions within the Southern locomotives are sharp, and getting sharper still. But that does not minimize the contradiction between the BRICS and the G7, as can be seen over their disagreements on Libya (where the BRICS propose multi-polarity rather than human rights imperialism) and on the credit crisis (where the BRICS propose concessionary financing for stability rather than austerity) (Prashad, 2012a; Prashad, 2012b). The national bourgeoisie is no longer a capable ally for the working people inside the South, but it nonetheless has ambitions that exceed a simple comprador alliance with the Davos crowd.