Globalisation is ... Globalisation

There is more to the Australian government's policy on globalisation than this, but not much more. The high water mark in the Howard Coalition government's policy development in relation to globalisation was probably its 1997 white paper on foreign trade and investment, which acknowledged the effects of new technology, the increase in global financial flows and the growth of transnational corporations.² Other more informed and variegated official analyses of globalisation have been issued from time to time by, for example, the Commonwealth Treasury and the Reserve Bank, and there are also domestic contexts wherein the term has been officially invoked in ways which convey different kinds and shades of meanings. Yet none of these usages cuts across the central article of faith propagated in Tokyo. Globalisation primarily features in Australia's national policy as an expression of the classical economic theory of free markets and free trade: "globalisation", the prime minister re-iterated at the World Economic Forum in Melbourne on 11 September 2000, "is simply as extension of the tendency throughout human history towards increasing specialisation and trade".³

Unlimited economic competition, Australia's official theory holds - in an undistinguished domestic and international perspective - is the most effective way of weeding out inefficiently utilised resources in firms, industries, nations and the world, no less. Losses here will be the source of gains there, which will produce a better outcome all round. A 'balance of gain' will be produced from further specialisation within the national and international divisions of labour. The responsibility of governments, as the prime minister told Japan's business leaders in 1999, is to spread this good word among citizens, to lobby regional and international authorities in support, and to help people overcome difficulties they may have adjusting, at least to some extent. The prime minister concluded the substantial part of his 1999 Tokyo address by urging Japan "to accept its responsibility to show leadership in progressively opening up its economy and demonstrating faith in an open world system".

The official Australian perspective on globalisation is strikingly narrow. If we ignore the actual term 'globalisation', which is unquestionably novel, and, perhaps, leave aside the insistence that there is no other option, the prime minister could have been speaking not in Tokyo in 1999, but virtually any time since Australia was colonised in 1788, which was twelve years after the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.⁴ More trade will raise living standards, claims Howard, because, as liberal economic theory explains, resources scrapped as a consequence of competition will be reallocated to other more productive activities, and this will yield a net gain in production. Only two amendments need be made to the classical doctrine to accommodate the present. Firstly, free trade has been given a powerful, new, five-syllable name and, secondly, there is a notable absence of doubt, not only about the doctrine's verity but also its progress, which is compulsory, no less. Other policy extensions and embellishments can be found in the riddled landscape of government policy documents, and we may also imply various official stances from particular policies, or the lack of them. Governments are not geometric figures. An Adam Smith-style perspective is, however, Australia's 'core' policy.

The official Australian perspective on globalisation is deeply unsatisfying. Those with only a passing interest in the public debate on 'globalisation' will know that this is a term that harbours important issues that go well beyond the limits of even the government's most expansive policy statements: from globalisation's effects on the distribution of power, wealth and risk in society through to the endangerment of the world's languages and climate. And those who have become acquainted with the burgeoning, daunting literature on the subject will know that globalisation is nothing if not pregnant with important questions, demanding questions. The questions go to the usefulness of the nation-state as an instrument of economic policy to protect and improve living standards, to the future viability of national labour organisation, to the need for new public accountabilities to be placed on corporations, to the potential for different political and administrative forms of internationalism -- to the possibility that we are living through the construction of a qualitatively new or postmodern form of world capitalism and social life. This book brings together research, expertise and opinion on a selection of these issues.

Fleetingly consider only some of the questions that may be raised within even the narrow terms of Australia's July 1999 call for Japan to allow more international competition in the interests of an open world system. The presumption of a domestic gain from a more open Japan economy immediately begins to become problematic when we notice that six of the 15 largest firms which export goods from Australia are subsidiaries of Japan-based companies.⁵ The presumption of a local advantage becomes even more uncertain when we notice that these six firms are also among the world's largest transnational corporations, with a combined annual revenue of about $A740 billion, which is more than the value of the total capital listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, or about a third more than the gross annual value of the Australian economy's entire production.⁶ Theoretically, lower Japanese tariffs may well result in a measurable net increase in global wealth, but it is impossible to guarantee a benefit for 'our' economy in this context. The final result may be lower living standards for Australian labour ("to become more flexible and competitive globally"), higher dividend payments for international shareholders, and an exacerbation of the 'imbalance of gain' between social classes from globalisation around the world. This is an era when 'competition' is less between firms for nationally repatriated returns from a country's specific endowments, and more between denationalised firms for the highest rates of return based on corporate decisions determined in a globally organised financial, investment, production and distribution context. From this perspective, perhaps John Howard is right when he says that 'we' do not have the option of dropping out of the world economy. Perhaps 'we', in our capacities as governments or citizens of nations, have nothing at all to do with the options any longer. Perhaps our only remaining operational capacities are to labour and consume.

But this is to get ahead of this book's arguments. The point is that globalisation is a larger and more complex subject than is allowed, not only by the prime minister, but also by most contemporary Australian politicians. The dimensions of the questions that globalisation has prompted have resulted in a prodigious output of intellectual work. Even five years ago, the authors of a major book on the subject felt that they could partly excuse themselves from reviewing the literature "because it would be a never-ending enterprise given the scale and rate of publishing on the topic".⁷ There has been no sign of any slackening in the number of globalisation books appearing in the meantime, and several have become international bestsellers.⁸ Likewise, the term has exploded into general journalistic use. Indeed, to say today that writing on globalisation has itself become a global industry is to mouth a cliche. In contrast to the official Australian perspective, so vast and diverse are the questions raised in the literature that it is probably true to say that the only settled aspect of globalisation is the consensus that the word itself is still a new part of the language.

Recognising the newness of the word is not the same as saying that older anticipations of globalisation cannot be found. On the contrary, as Australia's official perspective implies, one of the sources of the sense of inevitability attached to the government's view is the fact that the idea of unlimited trade can be traced so readily from at least the time of Adam Smith. Although he recognised the significance of nations in practice, Smith directed his market theories precisely against nationally sealed economic policies, which he held to be self-defeating. Liberal economic theory was elaborated upon the idea of individual people and firms maximising their gains and minimising their losses in a market which had no necessary territorial dimension. We may impute to Smith a smaller, more comfortable sense of economic scale than exists today by referring to his own sensibilities, his national and social context, and the nationally based illustrations he used throughout his famous book. Yet his theory could not but imply, at its limit, a world market. "A merchant, it has been said very properly", wrote Smith more than 200 years ago, "is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country".⁹ More explicitly, and with the advantage of evidence from another 70 years of history, Karl Marx positively anticipated globalisation, fully expecting that the quest for constantly expanding markets would propel capitalism "over the whole surface of the globe". Marx's sense of the inevitability of this process was, of course, famously exceptional. "It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere", he and Fredrich Engels wrote of capital in The Communist Manifesto in 1848. All nations will be compelled to embrace capitalism, they forecast, "on pain of extinction". The progress of capitalism creates, they wrote so presciently over 150 years ago, "a world after its own image".¹⁰

Just as globalisation was anticipated in at least some theoretical senses by both Smith and Marx, so we can also readily trace anticipations in practice. In the 60 years between 1720 and around the time when The Wealth of Nations was published (and Australia was colonised), international trade more than doubled in value (as measured by the European statistics of the time).¹¹ In the ensuing 70 years, which covered the period of the Industrial and French Revolutions, and which take us up to the time when Marx and Engels wrote their famous pamphlet, the value of international trade increased another threefold. Within just 20 more years (1850-1870), trade increased more than another two-and-a-half times.¹² This last period - 'the Great Boom' - laid the foundations for an increasingly interdependent world economy, and was followed by a nearly continuous if less spectacular period of expansion and interaction that extended through to the eve of the Great War.¹³

During this time, almost all the globe became known to the expanding industrial powers, and the technologies that had facilitated the Great Boom - the railway, the steamship and the electric telegraph - were joined by the telephone, phonograph, cinema, motor vehicle and aeroplane. These innovations continued to shrink the world's time and space, while mass migration and urban population growth allowed for the establishment of the mass consumer market for mass production and the mass media. In this view, the two world wars and the Great Depression that fell between them, can be retrospectively reduced to temporary setbacks in the march of progress. Industrial economic development was marked from the beginning by fluctuations, recessions, depressions and upheavals, and the scale of the catastrophes between 1914 and 1945 was so unprecedented that world economic interaction stagnated and even regressed. Nonetheless, after World War II, the increasingly dense network of global flows quickly resumed its earlier growth path.¹⁴

Understandably, the readiness with which this history can be assembled as a continuous if uneven and periodically interrupted story of technological change, economic growth and interdependence, has encouraged the view that globalisation embodies little more than the continuing expansion and interlinking of the world economy - the official view proferred by Australia. Against this historical background, globalisation can be interpreted as having no inherently defining characteristics at all; as being no more than a currently fashionable term for continuing quantitative change of a longstanding kind. Indeed, so compelling can this history seem that a major sub-theme has emerged in the literature which is primarily concerned with limiting interpretations of globalisation, partly by making comparisons and drawing parallels with the 1870-1914 era. The conjunction of powerful theoretical anticipations and a lengthy, readily composed, compelling historical story has also led to many of the contemporary debates about globalisation becoming confused by the term itself. Ironically, it is now just as easy to find liberal and social democrats who are prepared to call globalisation a myth as it is to read of Wall Street bankers declaring that Marx was correct. John Howard will never declare himself to be a Marxist, but the penchant for vulgar economic determinism is now a pronounced characteristic of the political right.

What, then, is globalisation and what, if anything, should or can we do about it? Given that the debate is not just about more international trade, what does differentiate the present era from the past, and what are the social, environmental, economic and political implications of those differences? In what sense, if any, can globalisation be accepted as inevitable, and what should be the role and policies of government in relation to it? What have been or will be the consequences of globalisation for Australia, both as an empirically identifiable territory and as a coherent and effective nation-state? What are globalisation's Australian 'impacts'? This book does not pretend to supply definitive answers to these questions, but it insists that the questions are important. In raising them, the book's aim is to assist in broadening the Australian public debate about globalisation.

A major difficulty for a book that attempts to address questions like those posed in this one, and particularly for a book comprised of contributions from diverse authors, is that the issues involved in defining globalisation have become inextricably bound up with the problems it is trying to discuss. It may be useful at the outset, therefore, to reflect on the word 'globalisation' itself, which is at least one thing that is universally agreed to be relatively new about the present context. This is not to suggest that the word needs purifying. On the contrary, the point is to encourage readers to be aware of the range of meanings that 'globalisation' can and does contain, and to be conscious of the word itself as an element in the problem. Clarity on both these counts at the outset of this volume can not only help us feel more confident that we are 'speaking the same language'; it will guard against the appropriation of meanings which fit particular arguments by just excluding the inconvenient.

It is simplest to begin with etymology, since we can identify phases in the development of 'globalisation' which continue to carry meanings into present use. An early difficulty that still presses comes from the fact that both 'globe' and 'global' came into the English language from French, but the two words came with different meanings, neither of which - many may be surprised to find - were connected with the idea of the world or planet earth.¹⁵ Both 'globe' and 'global' came from the Latin globus, which meant a round body or mass, a ball, a sphere, etc. This meaning passed directly from the Latin through French and into English during the 16th century in 'globe'. The dominant original English meaning of 'global', however, was the related but quite different sense of 'pertaining to, or embracing, the totality of a number of items or categories', a meaning which also came to include 'comprehensive', 'all-inclusive', 'unified' and 'total' generally. Until at least World War II, 'global' as 'all-inclusive' or 'total' continued to be the word's main meaning. This definition is obviously no longer dominant, but it remains in use today when we speak of, for example, 'global budget limits'.

The dominant present meaning of 'global' - that is, 'pertaining to or embracing the world', or 'worldwide' - developed as a specialised use of the much earlier sense of 'globe' as a round body or sphere; a use that was to be transferred to 'global' from the separate development of 'globe' into a synonym for the world or planet earth. The original meaning of 'globe' as any round or ball-like shape was long dominant, and its strength continues to register in the fact that we still cannot use it to refer to the world without adding the definite article, even though this meaning has now become the word's major use. Indeed, in speaking of 'the' globe when we wish to mean the earth or world, we are using what is only a recent shortening from the more expansive and formerly common 'the globe of the earth', 'the globe of the world', 'the earthly globe' and so on, expressions that were pronounced acknowledgments of the then settled strength of the meaning in the origin of the word (a meaning that remains today in, for example, 'light globe'). We can see this history playing itself out in the anticipations of globalisation. When Adam Smith wished to refer to the production and consumption being undertaken in the world, he was not only unable to entertain 'global' in 1776, but felt it necessary to write "in the whole globe of the earth".¹⁶ In just the same way, 70 years later, Marx and Engels were not only still denied 'global' for their purposes in 1848, they had scarcely more confidence than Smith in the stand alone meaning of 'globe' when they (or their English translator) wrote "the whole surface of the globe".

By the end of the 19th century - which, not surprisingly, was also the end of the period of physically discovering and mapping the world - the new specialised sense of 'global' as 'worldwide' emerged, next to the then more general use of the word as a way of referring to a 'total'. The new geo-sense only appears to have progressed into broad use around the time of World War II, which, also not surprisingly, was the first war to be known at the time that it was happening as a 'world' war (it was, of course, only in retrospect that the Great War of 1914-19 became 'World War I'). We can see the broadening of the specialised use from the early 1940s, when American military authorities and commentators, for example, began to combine, or conflate, the older sense of 'total' with the newer 'worldwide' in the concept of 'global war'.¹⁷

The relevant point is that these difficulties with the word persist. Today, when we read 'global solution', for example, it is only by attending to the context that we can tell whether the expression means a solution to a 'total number of problems' in, say, an office or a system, or whether it means a solution 'pertaining to or embracing the world'. The confluence and subsequent tendency toward a conflation of the two meanings - 'all-inclusive' and 'worldwide' - helps to explain the present power and difficulty in the word 'globalisation', particularly when the term is used in conjunction with the idea of 'inevitability'. It is easy to agree with the two Australian authors who recently and rightly complained that globalisation "should not become an explain-all of recent economic change", but in attempting to draw limits we must also appreciate that this tendency is embedded in the history of the word.¹⁸ How else can one explain why a former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, who argued in Sydney in August 1999 that "there is no alternative", felt happy to call his address the otherwise nonsensical: "The implication of globalisation is globalisation"?¹⁹

The postwar period has layered the already ambiguous term with new complications. The use of 'global' as either 'worldwide', or as a conflation of 'total' and 'worldwide', did not become clearly dominant until it also became instantly popular in 1960 when Marshall McLuhan coined the concept of "global village". Yet McLuhan's intervention caused a second and more serious difficulty that also still presses itself onto present usage in complex ways. 'Global village' referred to the way in which communication technology had been developed to the point where events could be experienced simultaneously by everyone throughout the world. This continued and strengthened the conflation of 'total' and 'worldwide', but it also added elements that have complicated and weakened our later meanings, and to which we may briefly turn to bring this preliminary discussion to conclusion.

McLuhan's usage is scarcely important in its academic or intellectual senses, for his thesis was rapidly critiqued and disparaged in those circles. Rather, the significance of McLuan's intervention comes to us from the way in which 'global village' went into and remained in general popular use, and how amenable it became to extensions. The death of Princess Diana in 1997, for example, not only prompted the repeated widespread popular use of 'global event' in the McLuhanish sense, but also led to 'global funeral', 'global mourning', and so on. This reflected and reinforced the trend, evident since 1960, to describe any media subject or cultural phenomenon that did or conceivably could attract worldwide attention as 'global' - particularly phenomena associated with the concurrently emergent youth culture. It also, incidentally, demonstrated how potent the term quickly became - as a way of also implying 'something important' or 'of major significance' - once the advertising business got its hands on it. Underpinning this last usage, which has now run rampant, is, of course, the calculation of an event's ability to deliver worldwide consumers for the products of the media's corporate sponsors.

Of more interest, in retrospect we can see two aspects of the McLuhan sense of global that profoundly contradict, and which still tend to press against or neutralise, the subsequently developed present meanings of 'globalisation'. In the first place, the idea of a 'global village' did not necessarily contain any economic meanings, and these have now become central to the concept of globalisation, even if they are narrowly conceived.²⁰ In the second place, compounding this first absence, McLuhan's expression conveyed a positive sense of community, suggesting that the world had contracted to the extent that it had come to resemble a village where everything happened to everyone at the same time, and therefore everyone knew about and could participate in everything that happened the moment it happened. It is obvious that the comfort contained in the idea of a village directly contradicts a key present sense of globalisation - as a process of local and general community destruction, or at least a process involving 'difficult adjustments' which are 'creating deep social pain', as the Australian prime minister told Japan's business leaders in July 1999.

The acceptance of McLuhan's phrase marked the beginning of the dominant present use of 'global' to mean either 'worldwide' or a conflation of 'total' and 'worldwide'. The expression 'global village' itself also passed into and has stayed in popular use, and has its own novel meanings. These developments, together with the non-economic and community senses conveyed in 'global village', have complicated the treatment of the relationship between globalisation and the media, a relationship where major issues have emerged. These include the raging debate about the sense in which globalisation is understood as a process of cultural homogenisation, or the destruction of national and other geographically distinct senses of community by globally imposed and commercially sponsored patterns of culture through the media: the 'McWorld' problem. The issues here are partly specific to the media and communication-information technology, and partly joined to the more general economic and political issues that have now become central to globalisation, such as the denationalisation of ownership and power. On either front, however, the benign and non-economic meanings connected to the continuing popularity of 'global village' persist in colouring the general term with regrettable difficulties. Complicating these issues further is the central symbolic and practical place of the Internet in globalisation, since this has at once: given a boost to the development of the global market; introduced a form of communication that is uniquely seemingly beyond all ownership and control; joined with other advances to spawn a stream of technologically determined explanations for globalisation; and encouraged a concurrent characterisation of the present era as the 'Information Age'.

This brings us more or less up to the present and the conclusion of this opening line of inquiry. The salient points are that, after a long and ambiguous period of gestation, we can trace a broadening use of 'global' in its main present senses from the time of the World War II, and we can identify this use as both dominant and popular from 1960, after which 'global' was joined by 'globalism' and 'globalisation' itself, along with 'globally', 'globalise' and 'globalised' etc. The concept of a 'global' economy was quickly established in specialist areas of study, such as economic history, where it gained impetus when national controls on international movements of capital and currencies began to be relaxed in the mid-1970s.'Globalisation', itself did not begin to come into bnroad use, however, until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the rapid subsequent collapse of the bipolar world of capitalism and 'really existing socialism'. This dramatic conclusion to the Cold War opened the floodgates for the concept in academic and political literature generally. Noteably, ever since the floodgates were opened, the word has been used to denote an active process: this distinguishes it from, for example, a concept such as 'civilisation', which was originally used in an active sense but has now long been used to refer to a settled state.

Globalisation has, nonetheless, remained largely an elite, top-down term, which is the fundamental reason why the Australian prime minister feels that he can safely, selectively insist upon his own preferred meaning, as have other political leaders around the world, albeit not usually with such a narrow conception. The term only began to approach genuinely popular use after the economic crisis that erupted in Asia in 1997. The novelty of this history was captured in full-page advertisements placed by Merrill Lynch in the major American newspapers in October 1998, which was the height of the so-called 'Asian crisis'. "The World is 10 Years Old", announced the headline in the advertisement: "It was born when the Wall fell in 1989. It's no surprise that the world's youngest economy -- the global economy -- is still finding its bearings".²¹ By the same token, there should be no surprise that the debate about the meaning and effects of globalisation is also still finding its way. This book aims to help in the navigation of this debate.

Against this background, we can at least say that 'globalisation' refers to the increasing consciousness of the organisation of finance, investment, production, distribution and marketing in ways that pertain to or embrace the world, a phenomenon that has both reinforced and been reinforced by the wider, more longstanding but continuing history of technological developments that have reduced the significance of geographic space. Beyond this, it would be impossible to insist on limiting the word to a single 'proper' meaning. On the contrary, the important point is that the contemporary variations in usage are part of the present problem, as they point to real processes, active relationships and social conflicts that need to be studied in their own terms, which is, of course, one of the purposes of this book. 'Globalisation' is not a settled part of our language; it is an argument - where important ideas and strong feelings are in question - that is rushing to a destination that is still unknown. This book aims to make a contribution to this argument by critically examining a diversity of globalisation's characteristics and effects in relation to Australia at the end of the 20th century, and by exploring some of the limits and possibilities for policies that will help create a 'sustainable globalisation' early in the 21st century.

The book has been organised in accordance with a mixture of practical and systematic considerations. Each of the 14 substantive chapters can stand alone, representing a slice of the problem, as it were. At the same time, they have also been arranged with an eye to maximising the book's narrative continuity, with the position of each chapter, or group of chapters, determined according to the extent to which it can contribute to the depiction of a general context that enhances or unfolds into the next. To the same end, the book has also been divided into two parts. The first part contains chapters on subjects which would be defined within any serious conception as essential structural features of the Australian and global economies. The second part focuses on globalisation in connection with issues that go directly to the qualitative aspects of any modern society, whether globalised or not. The division between structural and qualitative considerations is convenient, but it should not be taken too seriously. As the diverse abundance of literature on globalisation testifies, there are innumerable ways of arranging this topic, and common themes run through many of the chapters, several of which would fit comfortably in alternate orders and either part.

The distinguishing feature of this book is that it is not just concerned with globalisation in general, which is the dominate form of the literature on the topic. Our aim has not been to present a systematic treatment of, or a unified thesis on, globalisation per se, but to make a distinctive contribution to the debate by unpacking and exploring the concept in relation to a broad range of contexts and issues that are important to the direction of public policy and the quality of Australian society. The aim articulates a conviction that there is a need to open up the Australian debate on globalisation; a need to get behind and go beyond the official tendencies to confine the topic to questions about trade, as important as these questions assuredly are.

The first chapter in Part One by John Quiggin (Chapter 2) is about financial markets. With a sweeping perspective that supplies a general economic context for a good deal of the rest of the book, Quiggin argues that 'globalisation' is a term that "obscures as much as it clarifies". He chooses instead to define financial markets against the framework that has effectively dominated the parameters of macroeconomic policy since the 19th century, which he calls the "impossible trinity". The primary issue is not the relevance of national borders, argues Quiggin, but "the balance of power between governments and financial markets at both the national and international levels".

The next three chapters plunge us into three other fundamental parts of the global economy's infrastructure. Peter J. Rimmer's chapter on transport (Chapter 3) examines and compares the trends in deep sea liner shipping and air passenger transport, both of which highlight the material processes of globalisation in a particularly stark way. In both transport modes, emergent global corporate alliances are progressively defining Australia as a cul-de-sac running off the globe's main east-west street, which is located in the northern hemisphere. The following chapter, by Ros Eason on telecommunications (Chapter 4), will also challenge all non-specialists who think they know what they are talking about, but particularly those who imagine that globalisation simply means free trade. In a context where globalisation is "now occurring at an unprecedented rate and on an unprecedented scale", her analysis of the contrary policy world of international telecommunication settlement and interconnection payments will upset everyone who likes to cast these issues into a simple technology-driven, nation-state versus global competitiveness paradigm.

Terry Flew and Stuart Cunningham's chapter on the media (Chapter 5) concentrates mainly, but not exclusively, on broadcast media, which is so often seen as uncoupling polity and culture within the nation-state, in a way that is analogous to the uncoupling of polity and economy associated with the rise of transnational corporations and global financial markets. The chapter rejects this view, which the authors argue is largely a Western European perspective that does not accommodate the circumstances of postcolonial and peripheral states, such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada. In a layered account, they also insist that the dichotomy between the idea of a global village of high-tech liberal humanism, on the one hand, and a homogenised and debased global mass commercial culture, on the other, does not take into account the determining power of audiences and public policy.

The last three chapters in Part One deal with more organised agents involved in the processes of globalisation. In Chapter 6, Michael Paddon surveys the extraordinary growth in the size and significance of transnational corporations, which now constitute one in three of the world's 30 largest economic entities, and which have become so concentrated that they can (and do) dictate the operation of market forces in many industries. Paddon also analyses the corporations in Australia's mining and service industries, including public services, and examines international attempts to establish codes of conduct as a means of redressing the bargaining power of the giant firms. Dovetailing with this perspective, in Chapter 7 Patricia Ranald outlines the pressures globalisation has placed on workers, and considers the response by unions. Against the background of an international historical analysis, she argues against 'business unionism' in favour of 'social movement unionism' and the 'organising model'. With another wide ranging perspective, in Chapter 8 Kevin Rudd completes Part One with a look at the architecture of regional governance. Comparing and contrasting the European Union with the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum, Rudd critiques both forms of regionalism.

Part Two begins with two chapters that are primarily concerned with separating ineluctable economic facts about globalisation from ideological fictions. In Chapter 9, Roy Green and Andrew Wilson directly confront the simplistic notion that globalisation means just free trade. In particular, they are critical of the way in which this perspective has been incorporated within the so-called 'Third Way'; this incorporation, they argue, serves only to excuse governments from having an effective industry policy. In Chapter 10, Clive Hamilton considers similar questions in the context of the relationship between environmentalism and globalisation. He argues that globalisation's triumphalism is ultimately based on the legitimising power of the universal, or near universal, belief in economic growth and consumerism are the sources of human wellbeing. The following two chapters extend the critique of globalisation's ideological connotations by looking at two services that are fundamental to the quality of any society. In Chapter 11, Terri Seddon and Simon Marginson examine the profound direct and indirect effects of globalisation on education. They paint a compelling picture of a multi-faceted crisis, given that education is expected to simultaneously pioneer global-era knowledge innovations and augment national economic competitiveness and adopt new conservative institutional imprints, all the while making do with less public funding. Similarly, Rai Small's chapter on health services (Chapter 12) not only looks at the way globalisation is bringing particular health issues to the fore, she also argues that the phenomenon's political and ideological underpinnings are having a major impact on health policy choices in Australia.

The book's three final substantive chapters are about three closely related areas where globalisation is often presumed to be having disastrous consequences: welfare, human rights and democracy. In Chapter 13 Deborah Mitchell addresses the contradiction between the perception that modern welfare states can no longer be afforded within the intensely competitive context of globalisation, and the fact that these self-same welfare policies are exactly what is required if 'governments are to help people through the process', as the prime minister told Japan's business leaders they should in July 1999. Mitchell argues for re-negotiating the social risks to be borne by individuals, the state and the market, presenting a critique of the Coalition government's recent review of social policy by the Welfare Reform Group (the 'McClure report'), and differentiating between risk reduction, mitigation and coping strategies.

In Chapter 14 Quentin Beresford explores competing conceptions of human rights and what he argues is a contradictory outlook presented by globalisation. He highlights Australia's shaky international record in an area where Indigenous rights is the deepest but not the only national stain, and where the Australian government's stance as a committed albeit narrowly conceived globaphile turns distinctly globophobe. In the last substantive chapter (Chapter 9), Lionel Orchard examines the difficult and complex relationship between democracy and globalisation. The chapter is primarily concerned with evaluating two broad views: the cosmopolitan-globalist view of morality, citizenship and democracy, and the liberal-communitarian defence of nationalism as the better foundation of citizenship and democracy. Orchard concludes that there is no necessary contradiction in simultaneously promoting a progressive nationalism and a progressive internationalism. To round off the volume, some of the main themes and conclusions of the book are discussed in a concluding chapter, and many of the references used throughout the book are consolidated in a select bibliography.

Three final introductory points are pertinent. Firstly, as readers will quickly discover, there is an important, intimate and complex relationship between globalisation and the ideology known throughout most of the world as neo-liberalism, but which is popularly referred to in Australia as 'economic rationalism'. Since the 1970s, the trends in the development of the global economy have become deeply entwined with neo-liberalism's ideological bias and, as George Soros has expressed it: "Bias and trend have been reinforcing each other ever since. It is a manifold process with various facets that are difficult to disentangle from each other".²² Not surprisingly, this relationship is an abiding concern of many of this book's chapters.

Secondly, an occupational hazard for a major study of such a large, complex and dynamic issue as globalisation is the rapidity with which the research can become outdated during the production process. Most chapters in this book were drafted, for example, well before the 2000 US presidential election, an election which went against the then dominant international trend toward centre-left governments in installing the Republican candidate, albeit in extraordinarily controversial circumstances.

Finally, this volume could not and does not pretend to be a comprehensive analysis of globalisation and its Australian impacts. Originally it was envisaged, for example, that the volume would also contain chapters about the international division of labour, the Bretton Woods institutions and the non-government organisations that have been so active around the issue. Chapters on defence, agriculture, poverty, the federation, sub-national governments, the major cities, local governments, sub-national regions and the idea of community generally were also contemplated. Some of these areas were ruled out as impractical early in the project, others were given up with a great deal of reluctance, and still others had substantial research undertaken on them before it was admitted that this volume had already reached the bounds of what might be reasonably included in a single book. No doubt there are many other topics that could also be studied to illuminate different aspects of both the phenomenon and its effects on the country. Yet to say this is only to re-iterate the problem to which this book is directed. Globalisation is a large and diverse issue of major significance to Australia, as it is to every other nation, and the Australian debate over its meaning and implications must be broad and vigorous. If this book contributes to stimulating this debate, it will have achieved its aim.

Read five more sample chapters from Globalisation: Australian Impacts:

• The Fall and Rise of the Global Economy: Finance, by John Quiggin
• Trade Wars in the Information Economy: Telecommunications, by Ros Eason
• Thank You Very Much and Good Luck: Media, by Terry Flew & Stuart Cunningham
• Managing the New Social Risks: Welfare, by Deborah Mitchell
• It Never Has Been Easy: Democracy, by Lionel Orchard

Read all 16 chapters: purchase your copy of Globalisation: Australian Impacts:

• Order books and papers from Evatt

Read more about Globalisation: Australian Impacts:

• Globalisation now available in reprint

Do you have a view? Send-a-Letter
If you would like to submit any commentary on the material published on this site for publishing in our letters section, please use our feedback form