Sandra Halperin

Re-Envisioning Global Development: Conceptual and Methodological Issues

Abstract Most approaches to understanding contemporary development assume that industrial capitalism was achieved through a process of nationally organised economic growth, and that in recent years its organisation has become increasingly trans-local or global. However, this paper argues that capitalist development has, everywhere and from the start, involved not whole nations or societies but only sectors or geographical areas within states and territories. In fact, ‘dualism’ and other features associated with contemporary Third World ‘dependent’ development have been, until very recently, as characteristic of development in the countries of the so-called ‘core’ as it has of those of the ‘periphery’. These features should be understood as products of historically ‘normal’ capitalist development, a strategic dimension and outcome of the trans-local exchange by which elites have always sought to maintain themselves as an elite and contain the rise of new classes locally. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to shift analytically the axis of view from the ‘vertical’ (states, regions) to the ‘horizontal’ (classes, networks) and, in this way, bring into view the synchronic and interdependent development of dynamic focal points of growth throughout the world shaped, both within and outside Europe, by trans-local interaction and connection, as well as by local struggles and relations. La mayoría de los enfoques para entender el desarrollo contemporáneo asumen que el capitalismo industrial se logró a través de un proceso nacional de crecimiento económico organizado y que en los años recientes su organización se ha vuelto cada vez más translocal o global. Sin embargo, este capítulo plantea que el desarrollo capitalista tiene en todos lados y desde el inicio incorporados—no a naciones completas o sociedades—pero solamente a los sectores o las áreas geográficas dentro de los estados y territorios. Más aún, hasta hace poco, el desarrollo en los países llamados ‘núcleo’ o ‘periferia’ ha sido más símil que disímil. El dualismo y otras características asociadas con el desarrollo ‘dependiente’ del tercer mundo contemporáneo, debería entenderse como productos del desarrollo capitalista históricamente ‘normal’, una dimensión estratégica y el resultado del intercambio translocal a través del cual las élites siempre han buscado mantenerse como una élite y han hecho frente al auge local de nuevas clases. El objetivo de este capítulo, por lo tanto, es de cambiar analíticamente el eje de vista ‘vertical’ (estados, regiones) al ‘horizontal’ (clases, redes) y de esta manera traer a la vista el desarrollo sincrónico e interdependiente de puntos focales de crecimiento dinámicos por todo el mundo conformado, tanto dentro como fuera de Europa, por medio de interacción y conexión translocal, como por luchas locales y relaciones.

Effective Resistance to Corporate Globalization

Growing concerns about the lack of real democracy, increasing inequalities, re-colonization and ecological crises associated with what is called ‘globalization’ have focused attention on alternatives. Are forces of resistance to globalization emerging that are capable either of reversing it, or shaping it in less destructive ways?

Trans-Local and Trans-Regional Socio-Economic Structures in Global Development: A ‘Horizontal’ Perspective

This chapter explores the trans-national and cross-regional interactions and connections that, beginning in the late eighteenth century, brought about the development of dualistic economies within and outside of Europe; and how this circuit was reconfigured after the world wars by means of decolonization, nationalism, “first” and “second” world development, and globalization. What this perspective brings into view is a horizontal rather than vertical division of the world: the synchronic and interdependent development of dynamic focal points of growth throughout the world shaped, both within and outside of Europe, by trans-local interaction and connection, as well as by local struggles and relations of dominance and subordination.

Re-Envisioning Global Development : A Horizontal Perspective

1. Global Development 2. The Origins and Development of Capitalism 3. Industrialization and the Expansion of Capital: Core and Periphery Re-Defined 4. City States and Nationalism 5. The Imperial Historic Bloc of the Nineteenth Century 6. The System Unravels: Contraction, Conflict and Social Revolution 7. The Post-World War II Interregnum 8. Globalization Redux

Dynamics of conflict and system change: the great transformation revisited

Karl Polanyi’s analysis in The Great Transformation has played a prominent role in shaping our understanding of the nature and outcome of both globalization and the movements that have emerged to resist it. However, this article argues that Polanyi’s account of the rise and demise of Europe’s 19th-century market system is, in important respects, incomplete and misleading. Its central concern is Polanyi’s neglect of class structures and processes and how this leads him to mischaracterize both the international and domestic institutions of Europe’s 19th-century market system, and the central dynamic driving its development and ultimate collapse. The article critically reviews key features of Polanyi’s analysis. Based on this review, it then presents a re-reading of the history of Europe’s unregulated market system. Finally, it considers the implications of this alternative account for how we view the context and conditions for globalization and the ways it can best be resisted or shaped in less destructive ways.

The post-cold war political topography of the Middle East: prospects for democracy

Abstract The debate on democracy in the Middle East has generated many important questions but has, so far, answered few of them satisfactorily. This paper endeavours to understand the prospects and problems for democracy in the region by making visible the connections between this issue and one of the least explored and understood aspects of the contemporary Middle East: how the suppression of communist, socialist, and other leftist and reformist political movements in the region after World War II affected and continues to affect the regions economic and political development. It details the campaign in the 1950s and 1960s to eradicate not only communists and socialists but any element in the region calling for democratic government or land reform. The result of this campaign was to suppress liberal, reformist and progressive elements in the region that, in Europe and elsewhere, supported and encouraged the democratisation of national politics.

Modernity and the embedding of economic expansion

The nationally embedded and relatively broad-based economies characteristic of developed industrial countries are usually seen as the incarnation of a modern economy. These economies are largely internally oriented and are based, to a relatively great extent, on production and services based on local and national needs. Their provenance is generally assumed to have been processes of development that began in the sixteenth century and that, in the nineteenth century, accelerated with the expansion of industrial production and the growth of global trade. This article challenges that assumption. It argues that today’s modern economies represent, not the culmination of long-term processes, but a recurring phenomenon within capitalism. It argues that, in the history of capitalism, there have been phases of nationally embedded and global free market capitalism – periods when capital is relatively more, and relatively less, free from the regulation of nation state. Today’s nationally embedded economies represent, not a further point along a unilinear developmental trajectory, but a return to features of the moral economies that characterized both European and non-European societies before the nineteenth century.

Legacies of Empire: Imperial Roots of the Contemporary Global Order

1. Introduction: legacies of empire Sandra Halperin and Ronen Palan Part I. Incomplete Transitions from Empires to Nation-States: 2. Political military legacies of empire in world politics Tarak Barkawi 3. The second British Empire and the re-emergence of global finance Ronen Palan 4. Imperial city-states, national states, and post-national spatialities Sandra Halperin Part II. Legacies of Non-European Empires in Todays World: 5. The legacy of Eurasian nomadic empires: remnants of the Mongol imperial tradition Einar Wigen and Iver B. Neumann 6. The modern roots of feudal empires: the donatory captaincies and the legacies of the Portuguese Empire in Brazil Benjamin De Carvalho 7. Imperial legacies in the United Nations development program, and the UN development system Craig N. Murphy Part III. The Future Legacies of the American Empire: 8. Foreign bases, sovereignty and nation-building after empire: the United States in comparative perspective Alexander Cooley 9. Empire, capital and a legacy of endogenous multiculturalism Herman Schwartz 10. The assemblage of American imperium: hybrid power, world war and world government(ality) in the twenty-first century Ronnie D. Lipschutz 11. Conclusion Sandra Halperin and Ronen Palan.

Polanyi’s two transformations revisited: a ‘bottom up’ perspective

ABSTRACT In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi offers a ‘top-down’ analysis of the rise and demise of Europe’s unregulated market system. He assumes that changes in the organization of the international economy provide particular kinds of opportunities for states to act which, in turn, shapes the extent to which social forces will be able to influence state policy. Consequently, his analysis focuses, first, on the international institutions created by the self-regulating market system; then on the ‘liberal state’ which these made possible; and finally on how the system impacts ‘society as a whole’. The account which this analysis produces systematically underplays the social struggles which propelled and emerged from the rise of Europe’s nineteenth century system and which ultimately led to its demise. In revisiting the two periods that are the focus of Polanyi’s analysis, this article assumes that states and interstate systems reflect the interests of powerful social forces. Thus, working from the ‘bottom up’, it focuses on the class interests that produced Europe’s market system, the state and international structures which reflected and supported them, and the social struggles that ultimately brought about the collapse of the system. What this ‘bottom up’ account reveals is the centrality of a ‘double movement’, not of market expansion and a protective countermove on the part of ‘society as a whole’, but of dominant classes monopolizing economic opportunities from global expansion, and a rising ‘red tide’ of disaffected workers. This double movement, it argues, better explains the demise of the system and the changes that ensued from it.

The imperial city-state and the national state form: Reflections on the history of the contemporary order

This contribution argues, first, that pre-national forms of state were not displaced or supplanted by a new, national form. What we call the nation-state was not the successor to imperial or city-states but was itself a form of the European imperial city-states that had driven the expansion of capitalism in previous centuries. It argues, second, that national states emerged only after 1945 and only in a handful of states where, through welfare reforms and market and industry regulation, investment and production were made to serve the expansion and integration of national markets. Third, with the dismantling of Keynesian policies in these states, pre-national (pre-Keynesian) structures are resurfacing. What scholars describe as the emergence of ‘post-national spatialities’ and of ‘global cities’ and city regions represents the resurgence of a durable and historically dominant form of state: the imperial city-state form. The ‘re-scaling’ of nation-states and growing prominence of ‘global cities’ and ‘city regions’ are heralding the end of the brief history of actually existing nation-states and the re-deployment of the imperial city-state model.