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GLOBALISM AND THE SELLING OF GLOBALIZATION In his celebrated address to a joint session of Congress nine days after the terrorist attacks on September 11, President George W. Bush made it abundantly clear that the deep sources of the new conflict between the “civilized world” and terrorism were to be found in neither religion nor culture but in political ideology. Referring to the radical network of terrorists and governments that support them as “heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century ,” Bush described the sinister motives of the terrorists: “By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they [the terrorists] follow the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism . And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history ’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.” There are two remarkable pieces of information that stand out in this passage of the president’s speech. First, by omitting any reference to communist ideology, the president chose to put political expediency over ethical principle , presumably not to alienate China. In other words, his silence on the horrors of communism makes sense within the administration’s overall strategic framework of putting together the broadest possible alliance against terrorism . Second and more important, Bush’s reference to the birth of a new totalitarian ideology runs counter to the idea of a “de-ideologized world” that dominated the post-Soviet intellectual landscape in the West. Advanced by social theorists such as Francis Fukuyama more than a decade ago, the “end of ideology” thesis postulated that the passing of Marxism-Leninism marked nothing less than the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution,” evident in the total exhaustion of viable ideological alternatives to Western liberalism. Fukuyama explicitly downplayed the significance of rising religious fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism in the “new world order” of the 1990s, predicting that the global triumph of the “Western idea” would be irreversible and that the spread of its consumerist culture to all corners of the earth would prove to be unstoppable. Globalism The New Market Ideology Manfred B. Steger 341 Bush’s emphasis on the continuing significance of ideology also runs counter to the popular thesis of the “clash of civilizations” suggested by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington in the mid-1990s. Arguing that the fundamental source of conflict in the new world order would be neither ideological nor economic but “cultural,” Huntington identified seven or eight selfcontained “civilizations,” of which the conflict between Islam and the West receives the most attention. Though seemingly pertinent to the current situation , it is precisely this large-scale scenario of clashing cultures and religions that the president rejected when he insisted that America’s new enemy was not Islam per se but “those who commit evil in the name of Allah” and thus “blaspheme the name of Allah.” Indeed, in a recent newspaper interview, Huntington himself admitted that the current crisis does not fit his model, since the former appears to be based not on a wholesale civilizational paradigm but on extremist political ideas within Islam. In short, ideology is alive and well. Given the resilience of ideas, values, and beliefs as the source of major conflicts , I submit that we are currently witnessing the beginning of a new ideological struggle over the meaning and the direction of globalization. If global terrorism constitutes one extreme protagonist in this struggle, then neoliberal globalism represents the other. It is my purpose here to explore the main features of the latter position. At the outset of the new century, it has already become a cliché to observe that we live in an age of globalization. Although it may not be an entirely new phenomenon, globalization in its current phase has been described as an unprecedented compression of time and space reflected in the tremendous intensification of social, political, economic, and cultural interconnections and interdependencies on a global scale. But not everybody experiences globalization in the same way. In fact, people living in various parts of the world are affected very differently by this gigantic transformation of social structures and cultural zones. Globalization seems to generate enormous wealth and opportunity for the few, while relegating the many to conditions of abject poverty and hopelessness. The public interpretation of the origin, direction, and meaning of the profound social changes that go by the name of globalization has fallen disproportionately to a powerful phalanx of social forces located mainly in the global North. Corporate managers...

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