ABSTRACT
One of the unintended, long-term casualties of the US invasion of Iraq may be the ideology of globalization that presents global capitalism as an inevitable process that is beyond the control of states. The war revealed one of the principal contradictions of capitalism: the contradiction between the global scope of capitalist economic forces and the more spatially and politically limited boundaries of the nation-state. Calls from US foreign policy officials and intellectuals for a new American imperialism, in which no threats to US power will be tolerated (Foster 2003; Research Unit for Political Economy 2003), seem to violate the basic tenets of globalization, with their emphasis on US political-military might. After all, if globalization is truly an inevitable and irreversible process emerging from the logic of markets, a process that necessarily brings the benefits of prosperity and democracy to all, what need is there for coercive state power to impose this system? The contemporary politics of global capitalism are defined by neoliberalism: market
liberalization, state deregulation, and privatization (Tabb 2001; Teeple 2000). All nonmarket forces that might challenge the hegemony of the market risk being either marginalized or absorbed through commodification. At the same time, subordinate social forces are disciplined by legal restrictions on union activity, punitive reductions in social welfare provision, and the extension of institutional social control. In addition to these concrete policies, an essential component of neoliberalism is the ideological argument that capitalist globalization is an inevitable process that operates independently of human agency (Steger 2002). One important expression of this ideological argument is the suggestion that global capitalism has led to the supersession of the nation-state. The political authority of the nation-state is seen as inadequate to limit the transnational movement of capital, and so the best that state officials can do is make their national territories more competitive to attract hypermobile capital (Friedman 1999). Peripheral regions have, of course, always been subordinated to the needs of capital; thus, the disciplinary power of the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment policies or the World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) liberalization of trade rules are contemporary expressions of a centuries-long pattern of capitalist development. What is new, it is argued, is that core regions have increasingly been subjected to the same disciplinary power. Mainstream
claims of political powerlessness have been rightly criticized as disingenuous (Hirst and Thompson 1996; Weiss 1998). Core states have served as agents of the internationalization of capital, not its passive victims. A consistent feature of mainstream political debate, the argument that the nation-state
has been increasingly marginalized by global capitalism, has also found expression in more critical social science circles. Teeple (2000), for example, argues that neoliberal policies are “the last national policies to be promulgated, the final act of the independent nation-state” (81). A post-Fordist system of production has simultaneously dispersed and integrated production globally, accompanied by the rise of “a relatively coherent multiplicity of supranational agencies and organizations, dominated by the US state, that oversee the broad reaches of the global economy in the interests of corporate private property” (157). Sklair, in his outline of global systems theory, makes a similar argument. Global systems theory offers “a decisive break with state-centrism” by examining transnational practices, “practices that cross state borders, but do not originate with state agencies or actors” at three interrelated levels. Political transnational practices are institutionalized in a transnational capitalist class consisting of “globalizing bureaucrats, politicians, and professionals” (2001: 4, 16; 2002: 10); economic transnational practices are institutionalized in transnational corporations, which provide the material base for the transnational capitalist class; and cultural/ideological transnational practices are institutionalized in the dominance of consumerism as a value system. Hardt and Negri argue that the globalization of markets and production has been accompanied by a transformation of political power. The power of nation-states, which can no longer regulate global economic and cultural flows, has been replaced by a network of national and supranational institutions referred to as “Empire.” They define this new form of global sovereignty, as “a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanded frontiers” (2000: xii). Proponents of transnational historical materialism, grounded in the Gramscian theory
of hegemony, have made perhaps the most important contribution to this discussion. Gramsci argued that the dominance of the ruling class is not simply based on economic power or political-military coercion, but is also a function of its ability to provide cultural and moral leadership (1971: 57-58). In this context, a class is hegemonic to the extent that it offers an integrated system of
values and beliefs that support the established social order and which project a particular set of class interests as the general interest. Hegemonic power is not imposed on subordinates, but, instead, is a negotiated process. Within the dominant coalition of capital, state managers, and organic intellectuals and in their relations with subordinate social forces, dominant groups must negotiate with subordinate groups in order to secure the latter’s consent to their rule. This process of negotiation, which Gramsci referred to as trasformismo or “passive revolution,” can make some accommodation to the economic interests of subordinate groups and may even appropriate their symbols and discourse, but will not question fundamental social relations (Boggs 1976; Showstack Sassoon 1987). Transnational historical materialists argue that a hegemonic bloc of transnational capi-
tal, political officials from core capitalist states and multilateral economic institutions, and global intellectuals has emerged and is exercising power through its construction of a consensus for capitalist globalization. An important part of this hegemonic power has been the fundamental reorientation of the nation-state toward supporting global rather than national capital accumulation, a process that Cox (1987, 1996) refers to as the internationalization of the state. Cox explains that this is defined by the conversion of the
state “into an agency for adjusting national economic practices and policies to the perceived exigencies of the global economy” (1996: 302). The nation-state now serves to facilitate global capital accumulation as well as insulate
new supranational economic institutions from democratic accountability from below. It helps to secure a generalized acceptance of globalization as a “common-sense” description of an uncontrollable, inevitable, and, ultimately, desirable process. Because hegemony is a negotiated process in which the consent of subordinate social forces is essential, the ideology of globalization plays an important role in the internationalized state’s efforts to win the consent of its population to neoliberal policies. The continued US war in Iraq provides an opportunity to reevaluate these arguments.
These critical theories of global capitalism overstate the absorption of the nation-state into the processes of transnational capital; national political structures and cultures and the needs of national capitals continue to play a major role in global capitalism. By emphasizing the hegemonic nature of neoliberalism, these theories overlook the significance of nation-state militarism in shaping the contours of global capitalism.
