IS GLOBALIZATION GOOD FOR WOMEN?
IS
GLOBALIZATION GOOD for women? The answer to this question obviously depends on
what one means by “globalization” and by “good” and which “women”
one has in mind. After explaining briefly what I mean by “globalization” and
“good” and indicating which women I have in mind, I intend to argue that
globalization, as we currently know it, is not good for most women. However,
I’ll suggest that the badness of the present situation is not due to
globalization as such, but rather to its specific neoliberal mode of
organization. I’ll identify some of the questions that globalization urgently
raises for political philosophy and end by sketching one vision of an
alternative form of globalization that could be very good for women—as well as
for children and men.
I. Terms of discussion
What is globalization?
The term “globalization” is currently used to refer to the rapidly
accelerating integration of many local and national economies into a single
global market, regulated by the World Trade Organization, and to the political
and cultural corollaries of this process. These developments, taken together,
raise profound new questions for the humanities in general and for political
philosophy in particular.
Globalization in the broadest sense is nothing new. Intercontinental travel and
trade, and the mixing of cultures and populations are as old as humankind; after
all, the foremothers and forefathers of everyone of us walked originally out of
Africa. The contemporary form of globalization did not appear de novo in 1989,
with the collapse of so-called communism. It did not even originate in 1945 at
Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, where the major institutions to administer the
global economy were established, including the International Monetary Fund (the
IMF), the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT),
which was the precursor to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Rather than being
an unprecedented phenomenon, contemporary globalization may be seen as the
culmination of long-term developments that have shaped the modern world.
Specifically, for the last half millennium intercontinental trade and population
migrations have mostly been connected with the pursuit of new resources and
markets for the emerging capitalist economies of Western Europe and North
America.
European colonization and expansion may be taken as beginning with the onslaught
on the Americas in 1492 and as continuing with the colonization of India,
Africa, Australasia, Oceania and much of Asia. History tells of the rise and
fall of many great empires, but the greatest empires of all came to exist only
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1815, Britain and France together
controlled over one third of the Earth’s surface, and by 1878 they controlled
over two thirds. By 1914, Britain, France and the United States together
controlled 85% of the Earth’s surface. It was primarily in consequence of
European and U.S. expansion that the world became—and remains—a single
interconnected system. European and U.S. colonialism profoundly shaped the world
we inhabit today. It produced the neoliberal philosophy that provides the rules
for the war game currently known as “globalization,” and it landscaped the
highly uneven terrain on which that game is played.
Neoliberalism is the name given to the version of liberal political theory that
currently dominates the discourse of globalization. Neoliberalism assumes that
material acquisition is the normal aim of human life, and it holds that the
primary function of government is to make the world safe and predictable for the
participants in a market economy. Although its name suggests that it is a new
variety of liberalism, neoliberalism in fact marks a retreat from the liberal
social democracy of the years following World War II back toward the non-redistributive
laissez-faire liberalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.