Nailing the narrative

In July 2001, the anti-globalization protests reached their pinnacle during the G8 meeting in Genoa, culminating in the tragic death of the 23-year-old Italian Carlo Giuliani, who was shot by a police officer. His death marked a tragic point in the anti-globalization protest movement. To this day he is commemorated on murals in cities around the world with the inscription “Carlo Vive!” (Carlo lives!). 

Fast forward to 2016 and the Western world was shocked by two seismic election results, the Brexit vote leading to the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union and Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections. Both winning camps were rallying against economic globalization. 

To understand why so many people across the world have a critical view of globalization, while the same development has lifted around a billion people out of poverty, the book Six Faces of Globalization makes an important contribution. The authors Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp, lecturers at universities in Australia and Canada, respectively, look at economic globalization from six different perspectives and create narratives around these issues, in order to later overlap these perspectives like a kaleidoscope and offer an outlook on the challenges the world is facing. 

The book treats each narrative and perspective with appropriate seriousness and diligence and offers a dialectical reading of globalization. With this approach they try to correct a deficit that the former World Bank lead economist Branko Milanovic noted as early as in 2003: “The prevailing view of globalization represented only one positive face of globalization, while entirely neglecting the malignant one.” 

The six different narratives discussed in Roberts’ and Lamp’s book are the establishment narrative, the left-wing populist narrative, the right-wing populist narrative, the corporate power narrative, the geostrategic narrative and the global threats narrative. Building on these narratives, the authors create a multi-faceted view by highlighting issues and policies where these narratives overlap and where they differ. 

They treat economic globalization as a complex system that means “different things to different people in different contexts, places and networks,” and show that, just like in any complex system, looking at the issues at hand from just one perspective does not lead to any solutions. Although the authors are by their own acknowledgement no experts on developing countries, they raise important points about climate and development justice and offer interesting thoughts about global inequality. 

The book’s structure offers readers a broad understanding of the “uneven and combined development” (a concept first formulated by Leon Trotsky) of interdependent world economies. One view of globalization points to the growth of aggregate wealth “as the market is the most powerful institution for raising living standards,” exemplified by the fact that around 1 billion people were lifted out of poverty in East Asia in the past 40 years. At the same time this development eroded communities in the United States Rust Belt or the North of England, where decisive votes were cast in 2016, or a race to the bottom for wages and corporate taxes in developing countries to stay competitive. 

The rules of globalization as laid down in treaties have at their core and origin the free flow of capital across the globe. This provides incredible bargaining power to corporations in their pursuit of profit, while they are at the most ambiguous about the fate of left behind communities and the identity of the consumers. 

While the establishment narrative would point out that affected communities have the chance to advance from lower to higher productivity jobs in rising sectors, and at the same time enjoy cheaper consumer goods, such structural changes take time and during that period these job losses have knock-on effects. For instance, on local businesses which are dependent on income from people who suddenly can no longer find jobs at home. 

As a result, they will move away, further undermining the already shaky foundations of local economies. This development also erodes the tax base, which leads to underfunded public schools, rising health care costs and severe impacts on the housing market. Furthermore, the condition and wellbeing of humans are not defined by numbers and excel sheets but by a sense of community, self-worth and also the jobs they do. Far-right parties have learned better than their competitors to feed off these fears. 

A potential win-win-scenario turns out to be a lose-lose disaster. 

However, in recent years the COVID-19 pandemic has made governments aware of the importance of self-reliance and sovereignty in the supply chain of essential products. Geopolitical developments also highlighted that energy sovereignty and data protection are matters of national and regional interest. Tariffs are bandied around especially by protagonists of free markets. Certain countries are happy not to play along the rules they are asking everyone else to follow. 

This leads to a big question for the Global South and the developing world, how to face the challenges posed by globalization. Multilateral trade regimes have benefited Asian countries with sectoral advantages such as pliable labour, low wages and rent, driving out manufacturing jobs also from Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time they flooded markets with cheap imported products which benefitted mainly the upper middle class and elites in those countries, in some regions like West Africa by design. 

As the authors point out, this led to deindustrialization in many countries of the Global South before they even had a chance to reap the benefits of industrialization. The lack of manufacturing and technological foundation is obvious and institutionalizes the dependency on imports and global supply chains. 

The proverbial elephant in the room is the question of distributive justice in the sustainability narrative related to climate and development. The nonwestern perspective is that developed countries are responsible for the largest share of global emissions since the Industrial Revolution, while developing countries are carrying the largest burden when it comes to the impacts of climate change. To make matters worse, in this perspective the advanced economies are also not contributing their fair share in extending financial support or technology transfer. As the authors put it tellingly: The discussions between the advanced and emerging economies are similar to someone having enjoyed a full three course meal and then asking his neighbor to come over for tea and split the bill. 

Technology transfer, by the way, turns out to be anything but a silver bullet. Scientists are warning against “data colonialism” as developing countries become data providers for Big Tech and AI investments, while these nations are turned into mere consumers of their own resources, similar to previously exporting petroleum and importing fuel due to a lack of refineries. 

The book does not provide a solution on how to solve the issues raise by globalization. But no book can offer this. Instead, the book presents an empathetic and vivid account of different perspectives within an overarching framework. It helps readers to get a better sense of the effects of economic globalization and its ramifications. This in itself is a solid groundwork for developing policy responses that are responsive to the concerns of diverse and sometimes competing parties.