William H. Thornton

Mapping the 'Glocal' Village: The political limits of 'glocalization'

It is often said of the late Octavio Paz that he explained Mexico to the world. More precisely, he explained Mexico as a world. He was, moreover, determined to keep it that way. He made enemies on both the Right and Left by rejecting the whole panoply of modernization theoryÐfast-track strategies that would purchase development at the price of native values and identity. `Third World’, he insisted, `is an expression that there is good reason to abolish. The label is not only inexact: it is a semantic trap. The Third World is many worlds, all of them different’ (Paz, 1985. p. 80). Paz is not alluding to the entertaining aura of difference that attracts tourists to exotic places or occupies poststructuralists in their theoretical play. He refers to the far more elemental particularism that, without theoretical elaboration, `just says no’ to globalization. Only rarely, when passive resistance turns violent, does any part of that message get outside coverage, and even then it is usually reinscribed in global terms. Such a case erupted on New Year’s Day, 1994, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, when armed Zapatista rebels suddenly arrived under cover of darkness to confront government troops and disrupt holiday celebrations in the small town of San Cristobal de las Casas. As Joel Kahn points out, early efforts to explain the Chiapas rising in terms of universalistic language failed to dispel its mystery. Some interpreters, such as The Christian Science Monitor, saw the whole affair as an ideological implant by outside subversives; whereas socialists tended to view it as a protest against economic conditions; and liberals took it as a call for democracy and basic human rights (Kahn, 1995, pp. 18±19). Each interpretation, that is, took the form of an ideological mirror image, while the affair itself remained an enigma. The 1997 Christmas week massacre of 45 Chiapas peasants was far less enigmatic. Investigations pointed directly to local PRI (the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party) of®cials (New York Times, 1998). But, as was the case with the Tlatelolco massacre of October, 1968, just prior to the Mexico City Olympic Games (see `A massacre’), the deeper roots of the affair remain shrouded in mystery. The more the media has focused on the issue, the more alien Chiapas seems to be. This is not because the territory has been ignored in academic studies. Quite the contrary; Kahn notes the paradoxical fact that few indigenous cultures anywhere in the world have been subjected to more intense anthropological scrutiny in recent times. Nor, in Kahn’s view, can the mystery of this mystery be explained simply by the fact that few people read anthropological monographs. Rather, Kahn blames the anthropologists themselves for walling Chiapas off by `exoticizing’ or `othering’ it (Kahn, 1995, p. 21). Kahn refuses to consider the possibility that part of that Otherness was not the invention of the anthropologists. His dismissal of Chiapas as the Other is, in fact, the ̄ip side of his contention that:

The Price of Alignment

While the new Asian balance of power is increasingly divided along Sino-Indian lines, nuclear parity shifts competition to the economic sphere. The question is whether this will be another GDP ‘race to the bottom,’ marked by an even greater spread between haves and have-nots, or will democracy give Indo-globalization a Senian (‘development as freedom’) advantage over Sino-globalization? To tap that advantage India will have to rediscover its Gandhian heritage of the common good. Its success or failure in this effort could profoundly impact the global outlook on whether democracy will count as an asset or liability in 21st century development.

Back to Basics: Human Rights and Power Politics in the New Moral Realism

The end of the Cold War offered unprecedented opportunities for human rights diplomacy, but was also the triumphant moment of neoliberal globalism. For four decades the realist suppression of idealism had been justified in terms of Cold War exigencies. Now, once again, liberal “basics” were expelled in the name of a specious realism. Less doctrinaire realists, however, are starting to integrate human rights and power politics in accord with Joseph Nyes concept of “soft power.” To sacrifice this moral realism on the altar of neoliberalism would be, in soft power terms, to lose the world by conquering it.

Sino-globalization: Politics Of The Ccp/tnc Symbiosis

This article critiques the “Beijing Consensus” that Joshua Ramo proposes as the ideal model for the entire developing world. The political dynamics of Sino-globalization have been given too much of a free ride by neoliberals. For investors with the right guanxi, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been a guarantor of profitability in an almost mercantile sense. The fact that the CCP is also an instrument of monumental oppression is not just incidental to this arrangement. The specifically anti-democratic nature of CCP authority is in fact its strongest recommendation, since this power is on loan to transnational corporations (TNCs) for the right price. Not only has the CCP made the “trains run on time,” but, more to the point, it has given the TNCs an inside track. They in turn have become de facto lobbyists for Beijing in Washington. The TNC/CCP symbiosis that defines Sino-globalization has resulted in a worst-of-both amalgam that has taken China from one of the lowest income differentials in the world to one of the highest. The unrest this spawns will eventually erode one of the main sources of Chinas globalist appeal: its presumed political stability. By then, however, Sino-globalization will have migrated to other cheap labor reservoirs. It is the model itself, rather than the PRC, that poses the greatest threat to liberal democratization in coming decades.

India in Search of Itself: The Crisis and Opportunity of Indo-Globalization

The benefits of todays Indo-globalization have bypassed those most in need: the nearly 70% of the workforce that remains in agriculture. Only about 1.3 million of the total workforce have a tangible stake in Indias vaunted New Economy. While that globalized sector lifts the aggregate economy toward nearly double digit growth, there will be little of Chinas labor-intensive industrialization to take up the slack as 70 million Indians enter the workforce over the next five years. This is a country with more indigenous billionaires than any except the US, yet one in three of the 1.1 billion population subsists on less than

The politics of literary historiography

1 per day. These are not the wages of substantive democracy, or even sustainable plutocracy. Globalized India will sink or swim by how well it negotiates its coming clash between haves and have-nots. Talk of a “Shining India” almost always omits reference to the rising scourge of Naxalism in the derelict countryside. The rural meltdown has reached such a scale that the usual Naxalite question must be reversed. Instead of asking how the movement became so widespread, we should ponder why it is not wider still. There is no doubt that the Other India will fight back against globalization on these terms. The only question is whether this resistance can be brought into the fold of mainstream Indian politics, thereby producing a uniquely democratic Indo-globalization.

The Contest of Rival Capitalisms

This article gives a critical overview of the development of literary historiography, “hard pressed between literature and history proper”. It stresses the catalytic impact of realism on historiogr...

Russia Turns East

A new authoritarian order is taking shape, this time within rather than against the capitalist world order. Globalization, in short, is shedding its liberal cloak. Post–Cold War triumphalism was premature in the funeral it staged for the Second World, defined in terms of its autocracy rather than communism. The capitalist character of the new Second World lulls Western globalists into moral as well as geopolitical (hence moral realist) indifference. For many in high places, it is still inconceivable that global capitalism could be a house divided. “Globalization” turns out to be anything but the steadfast ally of democratization it purports to be. It is in fact the greatest gift to a new breed of authoritarian capitalists. The case of China alone is enough to dispel the notion that capitalism and democracy are two sides of the same globalist coin. But Sino-globalization is only unique in that it makes no pretense about its authoritarian ends and means. To revitalize democratization as a global force, a radically different mode of globalization will have to be fostered. We call this the Global Third Way, but what it amounts to is People Power without borders.

Korea and East Asian exceptionalism

As the crucial Eurasian swing state, Russia is fast emerging as the twenty-first century ‘decider’. Early globalists took it as a foregone conclusion that Russia would swing toward the West. But increasingly it has ‘turned East’, striking a fate-ful alliance with China and other authoritarian regimes by way of a resuscitated ‘Second World’. By buttressing Putinism, globalization is helping to perform what amounts to a democratic abortion. Yet these policies are not set in stone. This study holds that another globalization is possible, and another Russia as well. To prevent the consolidation of a new Second World, every effort must be made to convince Russian leaders that democracy, far from being Russias nemesis, could be its best geopolitical ally.