Liberation from Liberalization: Gender and Globalization in Southeast Asia (review)

A virtually unshakable faith in the virtues of worldwide private entrepreneurship is an essential, core belief of globalization, an economic doctrine and policy prescription that has been promoted enthusiastically in the West since the early 1980s as a panacea for reducing, even eliminating, persistent poverty in third world countries. Globalization is an evolution of modernization, an economic development theory that emerged in the 1950s and dominated the approach of the United States and its allies to the so-called LDCs (less developed countries) until the late 1970s. However, whereas modernization theory relied on a strong state to intervene in regulating the market and providing various forms of social security for citizens—classic economic liberalism—proponents of globalization perceive state intervention in the economy as inevitably negative and thus seek a dramatic reduction in the regulatory powers of the state. Globalization thus is a new form of economic liberalism, or neoliberalism; because its superpower patron is the United States and its institutional promoters are Washington-based international financial institutions (the International Monetary Fund and World Bank), it often is referred to as the Washington consensus.

The market is supreme for neoliberal advocates of globalization, a market that they envision as operating free of government interventions such as environmental, production, and trade regulations; taxes; tariffs; and minimum-wage laws. This devotion to the free market, writes Roksana Bahramitash, author of the book under review, may be called "market fundamentalism" (see chap. 1, 19–32). Market fundamentalism does bring great wealth to a small minority of investors in countries that adopt free trade polices, but far from alleviating poverty and income inequality, which it is supposed to do through a trickle-down effect, there exists a compelling body of economic evidence demonstrating neoliberalism's record of exacerbating the economic problems of low-income groups, which collectively comprise the majority of people in most third world countries. Furthermore, women make up a disproportionately large share of the poor. In effect, the poor, especially poor women whose work generally is undervalued and mostly unrecorded in official statistics, pay for market fundamentalism, the benefits of which accrue to only a tiny minority (43–44; 53–57).

Bahramitash's objective is to demonstrate how neoliberal economic policies actually lead to a deteriorating status for the poor. The reasons why such policies disadvantage low-income groups, particularly women, are complex and intertwined, but an essential reason relates directly to neoliberalism's staunch opposition to any state role in the economy. Governments that had followed the classic liberal model generally implemented diverse interventionist programs, including ones such as food and fuel subsidies that helped the poor. But neoliberals called for extensive government retrenchment, and in many third world countries the International Monetary Fund actually made the reduction or even elimination of subsidies (among other measures) a condition for obtaining necessary credit to finance development projects. Subsidies comprise only one form of the social welfare functions abandoned by states embracing neoliberalism; in most cases, these functions are transferred to private organizations, especially to women's groups created in response to the international interest in gender consciousness (61).

Bahramitash supports her argument about female impoverishment through an analysis of three countries in which she conducted field research on women and employment during the 1990s: Indonesia, the Philippines, and Taiwan. She supplements her own data with official statistics from governments and international organizations. And she shows how each of these island nations has had a unique colonial experience and history of women in the labor force. Of the three case studies, Indonesia is interesting for several reasons. First, its population is predominantly Muslim (87 percent), and with some 200 million adherents of Islam, it is the largest of the fifty-plus Muslim majority countries. Second, it was under the colonial rule of the Netherlands for three centuries, a period during which its economy was developed for the production of export crops on specialized agricultural plantations; peasants were forced to work on these estates, which the Dutch...