Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity

FIVE Development and Globalization: Toward a Feminist (Re)Vision

FIVE Development and Globalization: Toward a Feminist (Re)Vision The taken-for-granted status of the national economy as a relatively selfcontained object of regulation, as seen in previous chapters, was a central feature of post–World War II development economics. Through processes of discursive construction the economy was made legible within the space of the nation; an imagined community of economic agents was called forth, and notions of agency, including national sovereignty, were narrated through these imaginings; and economies were regulated through national models and practices of development. The status of this object, however, has been called into question since the late 1970s. The focus is now on the globalization of the world economy, and for many analysts, this signals the demise of the nation-state. But just as the national economy was a process of discursive construction , naturalization, and renegotiation during the twentieth century, so too is the global economy today. The development industry is a major consumer and producer of this new discursive order. As a consumer of globalization discourse, it has by and large accepted the story of an interconnected world marketplace. As a producer of this discourse, it is also actively authoring this narrative of inevitability through processes of knowledge construction (World Bank reports, IMF country studies, and academic articles in development journals) and policy. Development policy prescriptions emanating from the World Bank and IMF, for instance, presume that all countries must conform to the so-called realities of the global economy . As the World Bank states in its 2000 World Development Report, “In a World where ‹nancial markets continue to ‘go global,’ developing countries need to work toward becoming good homes for long-term foreign 140 investment” (7). Meanwhile, the World Bank and IMF are actively creating these realities through structural adjustment programs and other policies intended to make these countries into “good homes.” A World Bank study on El Salvador calls for an enhancement of “global competitiveness” through the following aims. First, El Salvador should “promote domestic and foreign investment and incorporate the country into the global production chain by lowering the costs of operating in the country.” Second, the World Bank suggests that El Salvador “reduce the size of the State through accelerated privatization, while strengthening the public sector’s role as facilitator of private sector development” (cited in Ruccio 2003, 76).1 The World Bank and IMF pressure countries to pursue policies such as privatization, liberalization, and openness. As Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, once put it, “Globalization can be thought of as a giant wave that can either capsize or carry them forward on its crest” (cited in Medley and Carroll 2003, 148). But certainly the World Bank is contributing to this by portraying it as an unstoppable force while actively dismantling some of the forces that might resist it. Accounts of globalization as an irresistible force that results in the declining power of the nation-state are not limited to the discourse of the World Bank and IMF. Many commentators Right and Left have suggested that the integration of the world into one economic space through the internationalization of goods, capital, and money markets is more often than not inevitable and irreversible. Triumphalist accounts that celebrate the victory of the global market over all other economic forms produce such descriptions. But so, too, do globalization’s critics, who tend to emphasize the dark side of the new world order. While these accounts of globalization have been persuasive, their ›aws are also increasingly apparent. They are globalocentric in assuming the existence of a power structure in which global capital dominates its Others. They are disempowering in their insistence that this force determines all outcomes. And their tendency to articulate only technical and abstract economic processes contributes to a “narrative of eviction” that excludes the stories, forms, and practices that tend to disrupt globalization’s presumed order (Sassen 1998, 82). This chapter examines the ways that conventional representations of globalization participate in the narrative of eviction identi‹ed by Saskia Sassen, with an emphasis on how they affect the ability of feminist economists to imagine how local communities and feminist social movements can resist globalization’s effects. The focus of the analysis is on representations of globalization in the broader political economy literature that develDevelopment and Globalization 141 opment economists draw upon to make their pronouncements. Contemporary thinking about globalization is not, of course, limited...