The politics of globalisatio

From "new world order" to the "war on terror"

Globalisation didn't just happen. People made it happen: chief executives of major corporations and banks, leaders of multilateral organisations like the World Bank and IMF and key politicians.

Among the latter in the 1980s were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, architects of neo-liberalism who made a bonfire of any regulations that restricted the scope and movement of capital, who attacked trade union organisation so as to "liberate" employers from the need to pay decent wages or respect employment contracts.

While their contribution to the cause of globalisation expired as the 1980s came to an end, their policies helped create the collapse of Stalinism and the end of the USSR. With this the scene was set for a rapid expansion of capitalism into parts of the world from which it had been excluded for 40 or70 years.

The USA's victory in the second cold war reinforced the new phase of the imperialist epoch - globalisation. Neo-liberal policies had been in operation for over a decade in the advanced capitalist countries and in some of the semi-colonial countries of the "Third World". Henceforth they were to be unleashed on the entire planet.

It was not long before a new generation of pro-globalisation pundits came to dominate the think tanks, academic institutes and the columns of leading magazines.

The old era Kremlinologists and foreign policy "realists" were pensioned off in the 1990s to make way for the "globalists" whose job was simple: to celebrate.....

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