• Read Steger (2004: Chapter 12 [153-164])

NOTES:

Traditional concept of development:  national, spacial boundaries.

Globalism:

• international, cross-national, network.
• Spacial boundaries (e.g., of nation-states) don't matter so much because of the mobility of capital.
• However, they can be used for population control:
  • vulnerable illegals
  • no mass workers movement (ideological control of human contact, e.g., no travel to Cuba, no U.S. visas issued to Cuban speakers)
  • workers not as mobile as capital

So is the nation-state irrelevant?

• import substitution strategy (economic & political isolation) seems to have failed.
• race to the bottom?

But we (even the proponents of the globalism ideology) still need states, Dirlik claims.  Population control is all very well, but we need legitimacy.

Unfortunately, legitimacy is threatened:

• states are bifurcating:  rich vs. poor (including slave labor), rich vs. poor areas, rich vs. poor economic sectors (e.g., urban-rural, or modern-traditional).  If this continues, it runs the risk of another peasant revolution!  (Note that Dirlik studies China and so uses it as his main example, but his argument applies globally.)
• ecological damage, even for the wealthy.

How to meet this problem, this "continuous crisis" as Dirlik calls it:  Dirlik's "wish list":

1. Reject the ideology of developmentalism, i.e., of the identification of "development" with "greater consumption".
2. Hold states accountable for the welfare of their citizens.
3. Hold multinationals accountable to every location where they do business, not just to stockholders or management.

Dirlik admits that this seems utopian, but it may be the only solution.  And after all, if things get bad enough, desperation can push people beyond "politics as usual".

I show below an email that I sent to Prof. Dirlik trying to paraphrase (and extend) his argument.  In response to the first question I posed, Prof. Dirlik wrote back that he did think the email paraphrased his argument accurately.  He will respond to the third later.

Dear Prof. Dirlik,

You may recall that I wrote you & Prof. Steger a few weeks ago about your chapter, "Globalization and National Development". I've been thinking about the quandary for the state that you pointed out: on the one hand, losing power to the cross-national forces of globalism and losing legitimacy because of the growing inequalities within countries;  on the other hand, unable or unwilling to dissolve itself, both for its own reasons and because the same forces of globalism need the state to keep workers in line -- and perhaps also to serve some residual, rudimentary sense of social justice and responsibility. Or so I paraphrase your essay. I'm writing to ask two questions:  first, is that an accurate paraphrase; and second, have you written on this more extensively elsewhere?

I also have a third question. At the end of the chapter you talk about your "wish list" re. how to resolve these tensions. You refer to the alternative as "catastrophic", and I'm wondering what exactly you mean by that, because I'm thinking that there's an awful but non-catastrophic alternative: for the state to become both smaller and more repressive -- something that is happening within the United States already. In essence, the world would have the states acting as local police forces, self-financing as much as possible but also able to call on an intenational police force when localities need support. Or so it seems to me. Does this perspective seem reasonable to you?

One thing that this perspective requires is an international governance system able to set policy directions to maintain itself.  This need not look like a state in our current sense of a nation-state; all it requires is that policies be agreed upon and implemented by the people/forces/classes whose interest they serve and whose dominance they perpetuate. And perhaps the so-called "Washington consensus" and our current international institutions (plus the might of forces like the "coalition of the willing") are already in place....

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