that is enabling individuals, corporations
and nation-states to reach around the
world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper
than ever before. The driving idea behind
globalization is free-market capitalism – the
more you let market forces rule and the
more you open your economy to free trade
and competition, the more efficient and
flourishing your economy will be.There is both a historical irony and a logical
paradox in this sort of argument.
The irony is that while Friedman and others
hype the new-ness of globalization to promote
free market capitalism, they forget that in the
middle of the nineteenth century global eco-
nomic integration was depicted in very similar
ways as a prelude to advancing a defiantly
anti-capitalistCommunist manifesto. In their
famously lyrical account of the globalizing
activities of the capitalist business class (the
‘bourgeoisie’), Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels argued thus that:
The need of a constantly expandingmarket
for its products chases the bourgeoisie over
the entire surface of the globe It must nestle
everywhere, settle everywhere, establish
connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie
has, through its exploitation of the world
market, given a cosmopolitan character to
production and consumption in every coun-
try. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it
has drawn from under the feet of industry
the national ground on which it stood. All
old-established national industries have
been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.
They are dislodged by new industries,
whose introduction becomes a life and
death question for all civilized nations, by
industries that no longer work up indigen-
ous raw material, but raw material drawn
from the remotest zones; industries whose
products are consumed, not only at home,
but in every quarter of the globe. In place of
the old wants, satisfied by the production of
the country, we find new wants, requiring
for their satisfaction the products of distant
lands and climes. In place of the old local
and national seclusion and self-sufficiency,
we have intercourse in every direction, uni-
versal inter-dependence of nations. (Marx
and Engels, 1998 [1848], p. 38)Marx and Engels saw these interdependencies
forged by capitalist globalization as leading ul-
timately to a global revolution by the workers
of the world. By transcending local loyalties,
increasing competition and intensifying exploi-
tation, globalized capitalism would, they
thought, create a globally united working
class that would eventually revolt. This global
revolution has still not happened, but the lo-
gical steps in the argument made by Marx and
Engels were clear. By contrast, the contempor-
ary argument that globalization is inexorable
and yet necessitates reform is paradoxical.
Global integration cannot be inexorable
exactly if politicians and pundits have to keep
promoting neo-liberal policies as the only way
for it to function effectively. Nevertheless, this
is precisely what they have been doing from
the late 1970s onwards (see Harvey, 2005).
‘There Is No Alternative’ to free market
policies, argued the British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and, follow-
ing her lead, TINA-touts the world over have
endlessly repeated the mantra that globaliza-
tion is inevitable and that it necessitates neo-
liberal policy-making (e.g. Bhagwati, 2004;
Wolf, 2004; Friedman, 2005). In the context
of this instrumental use of globalization
in creating ataken-for-granted worldfor
policy-makers, there have been four main
academic responses.
The first and most sceptical scholarly
approach to globalization has been to argue
that it is nothing but hype. Hirst and
Thompson (1996) have suggested in this way
that globalization is a myth, and that the pic-
ture of integration proceeding farther, faster,
deeper and cheaper than ever before is empir-
ically unsound. Against the claim that global-
ization is new, they highlight how significant
forms of globe-spanning economic integration
existed in the first decades of the twentieth
century as a result ofimperialismand the
other nineteenth-century economic develop-
ments noted by Marx and Engels. Against
the claim that corporations have become state-
less engines of border-crossing enterprise, they
show how even largetransnational corpor-
ationsremain shaped by national supports
and norms. And against the TINA-tout pro-
motion of free market fundamentalism, they
argue that policies that are not neo-liberal can
still provide successful models of national de-
velopment. However, in attempting to counter
the hype, Hirst and Thompson miss many of
the ways in which new networks have
expanded and deepened global interdepend-
ency from the 1970s onwards.
Charting the development of global net-
works over time has in turn been the basis
of the second main academic approach to glob-
alization. Perhaps the most exhaustive examin-
ation available defines globalization thus inGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_G Final Proof page 309 2.4.2009 6:30pmGLOBALIZATION