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207 7 CONCLUSION With globalization both besetting and blessing the planet, the issue of the respective roles of the state, the proletariat, and the new forces driving the world economy has been a critical one for scholarship for several decades to date. Taking it as a given that workers are losers, which one of the other two actors comes out on top, many observers have queried? What is the status of the state at the start of the new century? Does labor have any leverage at all in the interplay? And which is it—domestic or international politics and economics—that sets the agenda? This book addresses these large concerns. Using entry into supranational economic organizations as a proxy for the forces of the global market, I grappled with these problems. My method was to examine similarities and differences in the interrelationships among these three types of players in three seemingly quite disparate countries, China, France, and Mexico, as theirelitesoptedtoentertheglobaleconomyinforceaftermanydecadesof eschewing it, to greater or lesser degrees. In the course of the research, I sought propositions to address what happened in these places with respect to this drama. I set my study at a time when politicians around the world urgently maneuvered in response to external events. In my story the leaderships in ostensibly unlike domains managed to follow the same sequences of policy choice and action toward their macroeconomies and their place in the world economy. The three countries I chose represented different,broad categories,each emblematic of a distinctive economic developmental model and regime type. Clearly, East Asia’s China, Western Europe’s France, and Latin America’s Mexico appear at a glance to vary in a multitude of ways. As of the early 1980s, when the crucial shifts in them all took place, we find one a democratic, one a semi-authoritarian, and one a post-totalitarian 208 STATES’ GAINS, LABOR’S LOSSES state; one each practicing a capitalist, a mixed, and a socialist economy; and one each a multi-party, a one-party-dominant, and a one-party system. Despite these contrasts, the three places all traveled pathways that were remarkably alike both before and after the year 1983, by which time all three of them had decisively shifted course. By that point, all were in the midst of turning from the inward-oriented, worker-friendly, supernationalistic states they had been as of 1979 (and for some decades before) to the outward-directed,worker-rejecting,and internationalist entities they had irrevocably become by 2000. I showed how and why this came to be the case. Most simply, they all suffered from capital scarcity by the early years of the 1980s, as their former, generically analogous tracks had led each one of them into collision with the new workings of the economy outside. In their search for foreign funds to make up their shortfalls, a changed political elite in each of them—one disposed to dive into the waters of the world’s exchange—opted to enter extranational economic organizations. Following that decision, these leaders found their subsequent policy choices dictated either by the desire to belong to (or by the demands of the other members in) these organizations . One critical, and common, corollary of that large choice was to jettison the labor allies who had long bolstered their regimes. For this first portion of the story I emphasized the similarity of both their old pathways and the clash between those paths and changed global forces; I also showed how the regimens and strictures of the organizations they joined constituted the main reason behind this abandonment. Thus once these countries’ congruous, accustomed developmental trajectories all ran up against new international economic modalities, it was the supranational economic organizations that these states’ officials entered and, in particular, the stylized rules of these bodies, that drew what were apparently divergent countries onto a common road. As is generally the case in political research, I took up a puzzle. What was it that made the ensuing dynamics among relevant domestic players in each polity so disparate, one from the next? Why were the results—in labor activism and in statedispensed welfare—so dissimilar among them? For what transpired was that civil unrest burst out with a vengeance and rose exponentially only in post-totalitarian China, where, in return, the government rather quickly came up with a great deal of cash and several brand-new welfare programs.Meanwhile,occasional outbreaks of discontent called forth only tinkering at the governmental level in...

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