Globalization

Philip McMichael casts a critical eye on the process of globalization suggesting that it takes different forms across time and space. He specifies contemporary globalization as a discursive project, geared to institutionalizing corporate markets through multilateral and regional economic agreements driven by powerful states. From this perspective of depicting globalization as an exercise in power, he examines political countermovements to globalization. Global justice movements, he argues, are globalization’s “historical and relational barometer,” and they operate at various, but often interrelated, scales. Work- ing from Karl Polanyi’s “double movement” of implementation of and resistance to economic liberalism, McMichael questions the adequacy of Polanyi’s formulation for the elaboration of market rule in the twenty-first century. This question concerns the conventional interpretation of “sovereignty” as the centerpiece of nation-state formation, including the development of citizenship. Here, globalization is viewed through the lens of a sovereignty crisis, where corporate market rule compromises the social contract upon which the state/citizen relation is founded. The crisis is expressed differently across the world, as the impact of market rule generates alternative social movement conceptions of sovereignty, especially in the global south where corporate globalization is realized through a drastic intensification of social exclusion.