HIGH POLITICS AND LOW DATA 177globalization. These serendipitous juxtapositions led to several publications, to a course on popular
culture and international relations, and to an increasing attraction to the theories, concepts, and
methods of cultural studies, with its deep appreciation of the indispensability of “low data” and
its inextricable interrelations with “high data.”
❖❖❖Globalization is science fiction. Put slightly differently, globalization discourse,
which underpins and makes possible capital’s hegemonic project of global neo-
liberalization, is a self-fulfilling fantasy that derives its meaning, in part, from a
broader globalization/science fiction (SF) intertext. Seeing globalization thus, as
SF, renders suspect the neo-liberal project.
—Jutta Weldes (2001, 647–49, passim, and paraphrased)HIGH POLITICS VERSUS LOW DATA
In the research referred to above, I was interested in critically examining and challenging the
predominant meanings attached to the neoliberal notion of “globalization”—and especially its
claim to inevitability—espoused, among others, by the United States, the United Kingdom, and
international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World
Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). I was particularly keen to investigate the com-
mon-sense status assigned to the central claims of neoliberal globalization discourse. Why is it
widely taken for granted, for instance, that globalization means progress, that globalized markets
and technology are beneficial, and that a globalized world brings a liberal, pacific politics? And
why is TINA—the assertion that “there is no alternative” to this neoliberal project—so readily
accepted by many politicians and publics?
The answer I proposed was that “globalization is science fiction.” That is, I argued that the
taken-for-granted claims assigned to “globalization” gained both their meaning and their com-
mon-sense status (at least in part) from a larger intertext—the networks, conventions and expec-
tations through which a text is read and made meaningful—of which both the neoliberal
globalization discourse and techno-utopian American science fiction (SF), along with many other
aspects of popular culture, are a part. But how does one get to such a claim? What kinds of
evidence might allow us to reach this conclusion? What sorts of documents and other forms of
data can and should be explored?
“Mainstream” approaches to international relations (IR)^1 typically take a rather narrow view
of the kinds of evidence appropriate to determining the meaning of something like globalization.
In fact, the mainstream status of “the mainstream” is sustained precisely by establishing the bound-
aries of acceptable theory, methods, and data.^2 For many analysts, of course, the question of
meaning does not arise at all: We simply assume that we know what “globalization” means and
go on to ask questions about its extent, its consequences, and appropriate policy responses to it.
When the issue of meaning does arise, mainstream analyses tend to hunt it down in the policy
documents of government agencies, of international organizations, and sometimes even of non-
governmental organizations (NGOs), asking “What does the U.K. Department of Trade and In-
dustry, for instance, make of globalization?” “How is globalization defined by the WTO?” or
“Does the World Economic Forum offer a useful definition of globalization?”