The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
July 2004
Ronald Munck *
Globalization and Democracy:
A New “Great Transformation”?
Annals of the American Academy
Political and Social Science
581, May
2002, 10-21.
Index
Globalization versus Democracy
Globalization Facilitates Democracy
The relationship between democracy and development is (re)considered to
set the scene for the pressing contemporary issue of how globalization might
affect democracy and vice versa. To move
beyond simplistic binary oppositions, we turn to the work of Karl Polanyi who famously posited a dual movement of market
expansion on one hand matched by increasing social control over it on the other
hand. We see how globalization, at one
and the same time, creates a growing process of social exclusion within and
between nations but also the social movements that will contest it and seek to
democratize it.
* Ronaldo Munck is a professor of political
sociology and director of the Globalization and Social Exclusion Unit
(www.gseu.org.uk) at the University of Liverpool. He is a founding executive member of the
Global Studies Association (www.mmu.ac.uk/gsa), which
is committed to pursuing relevant research on globalization and its
discontents. He has written widely on
labor, development, and Latin American issues, including most recently the
collections Labour Worldwide in the Era of Globalization ( Palgrave), Critical Development Theory: Contributions
to a New Paradigm (Zed Books), and Cultural Politics in Latin America (coedited with Anny Brooksbank-Jones) ( Palgrave). He has recently published Marx @2000 (Zed
Books) and is now working on a study of how globalization has affected social
exclusion both within and between countries.
10
The
extent to which globalization has hindered or assisted democratization is a
major issue of the day, whether for social and political thinkers, policy
makers, or concerned citizens. The
various articles in this issue of The Annals address diverse aspects of
theory and practice, range from the general to the specific, and add up, I
hope, to a serious contribution to the debates. My own contribution here aims to provide an
overall theoretical context and raises some pertinent questions. In the first instance, I relate the
globalization and democracy debate to an earlier one on capitalism and
democracy (addressed in Munck 1994) that I believe is
still relevant today. In the second place,
I introduce the main arguments around globalization as a negative and as a
positive factor in relation to democratization. Finally, I turn to an old, yet increasingly
influential, argument by Karl Polanyi who, in his
postwar classic The Great Transformation (Polanyi
1957) argued that there was a “double movement” at work globally, of market expansion
on one hand and of social control of it on the other hand.
Development
and democracy are clearly two very slippery (labile) terms that are
crying out to be unpacked (deconstructed). They are words that take on different meanings
in conflicting political discourses. These
are words but also clearly sites of a discursive ambiguity. Precisely because of their centrality in political
discourse, their meaning and belonging are so contested. They are floating signifiers waiting to be
appropriated by different social and political forces that will give them this
meaning. Arjun
Appadurai, in his influential analysis of the various
“scapes” at play in the process(es) of globalization, referred to how the “globally
variable synaesthesia” (the stimulation of a mental
sense impression relating to one sense by the stimulation of another) of the
political and ideological “ideoscope” of democracy
“has clearly become a master term” (Appadurai 1996,
37). Thus, democracy can be seen to be
at the center of a whole variety of ideoscopes; for
example, we could argue the process now known as globalization. What Appadurai
directed us to is the complexity and fluidity of the globalization/democracy
interrelationships, the profusion of meanings, and what Appadurai
referred to as “ever new terminological kaleidoscopes” (Appadurai
1996, 37). Having established that the
theoretical terrain is not simple and unilinear, we
now need to move toward some clarification.
If
we turn to the empirical level, the relationship between democracy and
development seems relatively straightforward. In a recent major empirical survey of these
relationships, Adam Przeworski and colleagues did not
find “a shred of evidence that democracy need be sacrificed on the altar of
development” (Przeworski et al. 2000, 271). That is to say, the once fashionable notion
that dictatorships, or at least authoritarian regimes, were necessary to force
development now seems definitively disproven. Przeworski et al. went on to argue for “inde-
11
terminacy” with regard to the political context of
development: “Political regimes have no impact on the growth of total income
when countries are observed across the entire spectrum of conditions” (Przeworski et al. 2000, 270). Democracies do not receive any less investment
than nondemocracies even in poor countries. Yet this study does not argue either that
democracy is good for development. The
prognosis is a fairly pessimistic one, finding that there is little any
government can do to produce development in poor countries.
However,
at a conceptual level, the relationship between democracy and development is
anything but straightforward. While
there seems to be a certain elective affinity between democracy and
development, we must beware of what Guillermo O’Donnell (1973) called the
“universalistic fallacy,” which sees this positive correlation operating in all
places at all times. The
relationship between these two elements, democracy and development, remains
effectively a “black box” (Rueschemeyer, Stephens,
and Stephens 1992, 32) where the precise causal relationship remains unclear.
While the relationship is indeed a
contingent one, we could argue, as Francesco Weffort
(1990) did, that “democracy is the only path to modernity” (p. 39), at least if
the latter is taken to mean something more than simple economic growth. So from earlier debates about whether
development led to democracy, we have moved onto the terrain of democracy as a
prerequisite for modernization. While
there are no necessary or absolute correlations between democracy and development,
we can argue on a normative basis that democracy and development can constitute
a virtuous circle and should go hand and hand.
This brief excursus back to the democracy and development debates serves as an introduction to the theme of democracy and globalization. We can posit that globalization represents, if nothing else, a significant worldwide development of capitalism. The development project, which dominated post-World War II history of the “West and the rest,” at some stage of the 1980s gave way to what we can call the globalization project. As Leslie Sklair (2000) put it, “a transnational capitalist class based on the transnational corporations is emerging that is more or less in control of the processes of globalization” (p. 5). So if globalization is a sociopolitical project, what are its sociopolitical effects in terms of democratization? We should probably first have to accept that there is no simple one-to-one relationship; rather it should be seen as contingent and, probably, contradictory. There are, however, two main sets of arguments that we can consider separately for the purposes of presentation. On one hand, we have the arguments around globalization’s deleterious effect on democracy worldwide. On the other hand, we develop the argument that globalization may open doors as well as close them and, at least potentially, creates new prospects for democracy.
12
Globalization versus Democracy
There
now seems to be fairly widespread consensus that globalization (read economic
internationalization) undermines, subverts, or sets limits on democracy (read
liberal democracy). For Scholte (2000b), summing up a rather more nuanced argument,
the bottom line is that “globalization has undermined conventional liberal
democracy, with its focus on national self-determination through a territorial
state” (p. 261). We are referring here
to a particular, historical, and Western conception of liberal democracy,
national territory and sovereignty. For
Anthony McGrew (1997b), thinking along similar “transformationalist”
lines about globalization, “accelerating global and regional interconnectedness
poses distinct challenges to liberal democratic forms of governance” (p. 12). So here also the challenges of globalization
to democracy are seen as specific; in other words, what is being placed in question
by globalization is the traditional form of national territorial sovereignty. The new flows of globalization, be they those
of the financial markets or those of transnational crime syndicates, can easily
bypass the traditional national modes of regulation. In essence then, what globalization problematizes is the elective affinity between liberal
democracy and the sovereign nation state of the Westphalian
order.
It
is not hard to show, against the prophets of globalization as an irreversible
and positive advance for humankind, that the international extension of market
principles will not automatically foster democracy. Markets = democracy only in the simplest of neoliberal economics textbooks, and even their representatiives on Earth, such as the World Bank, now
recognize the limitations for capitalism of global free market liberalism (see
World Bank 2000). Growing consumer
choice (in the North) simply cannot be equated with democratic citizenship. It is now increasingly recognized that globalization
has not affected all equally and has, rather, led to an increase in social
exclusion both within and between nations (see Woods 2000). The notion that the new mass shareholders in
the privatized public utilities or the part-time amateur investors in the stock
market represent an extension of democracy is even more off the mark. Global
financial markets, as key participant observer George Soros
(1998) belatedly recognized, “are inherently unstable and there are social
needs that cannot be met by giving market forces free rein... the current state
of affairs is unsound and unsustainable” (p. xx). It is clear that it is what Soros called “market fundamentalism” that has rendered
global capitalism unsustainable. The
move beyond the so-called Washington consensus that has underpinned neoliberal globalization has already begun - albeit
hesitantly and to a large extent behind closed doors - in the corridors of power.
Another
area where globalization could be seen to further democracy is in relation to
the new electronic communications. On
the back cover of a recent book, Communities in Cyberspace, we read, “In
cyberspace,
13
communication
and co-ordination are cheap, fast and global. With powerful new tools for interacting and organising in the hands of millions of people world-wide,
what kinds of social spaces and groups, are people creating?” (Smith and Kollock 1999, back cover).
In brief, will the Internet lead to
self-governance, and does it represent a durable democratic revolution
worldwide? Even enthusiasts for the Net
find they must temper their arguments after the first flush of enthusiasm in
the 1980s. Whatever their origins (often
shrouded in myth), electronic communications do not today represent a simple
democratic project (notwithstanding its contestatory
potential) but, rather, a capitalist one. The very uneven worldwide spread of the
so-called World Wide Web might make us hesitant to embrace enthusiastic Northern-centered
arguments for it as vanguard of democracy. Essentially, if global communications (and the
new, if already faltering, e-commerce) are part of a global “free” market,
their democratic potential will necessarily be constrained.
We
may also consider a particular social group, namely, the world’s workers, to
consider whether globalization hinders or facilitates democracy. Charles Tilly (1995)
was nothing if not forthright in his article on the topic, titled
“Globalization Threatens Labour’s Rights” (p. 1). Tilly traces back
the origins of labor rights to the mid-nineteenth century in western
Europe. These rights were seen by Tilly to have been established through struggles with sovereign
states and came to be guaranteed by the modern nation-state through labor legislation
and so on. Both citizenship and
democracy came to depend on these rights, and in a real sense we can say that
democracy was in essence a labor democracy, so central was the worker question.
Now, from the mid-twentieth century
onward, economic internationalization has, for Tilly,
undermined nation-states and hence “their capacity to pursue effective social
policies, including the enforcement of workers’ rights” (p. 16). If democratic rights are embedded in states,
their decline inevitably undermines democracy. In brief, Tilly
argued that “globalization threatens established rights of labour
through its undermining of state capacity to guarantee these rights” (p. 4). The case is powerful but, I believe, one sided
and therefore not a basis on which to build a strategy for social
transformation.
As a
way of moving into the next section, I would like to argue against Tilly (1995) while accepting the gist of much of what he
said and, certainly, the spirit in which he argued. What I see in Tilly
is a seamless argument that does not allow any space for contradiction. I wonder whether we can really state categorically
that “as states decline, so do workers rights” or “almost everywhere, organised labour is in retreat”
(p. 21). In contrast to this view, however,
it is now widely recognized (see, e.g., Moody 1997) that the impact of
globalization on workers worldwide has brought about a profound process of
rethinking and reorganizing within labor on a global scale, with even the once
remote and conservative International Congress of Free Trade Unions advocating
such
14
radical
measures as a global social movement unionism to counter capitalist
globalization. Labor is not everywhere
in retreat, and worker’s rights, though undercut by neo-liberalism, are
continuously and vigorously fought for across the world. While on one hand it does not allow for
contradictory tendencies, Tilly’s analysis is also
itself ultimately contradictory as, for example, when he argued that “if
workers are to enjoy collective rights in the new world order, they will have
to invent new strategies at the scale of international capital” (p. 21),
because the argument remains an abstract one insofar as Tilly
can see no openings for democracy under globalization. It is also, in my view, ultimately contradictory
because the obvious strategic response in terms of his negative and inherently
nation-statist analysis would be to argue that the
various national labor movements should simply be seeking to strengthen their
respective nation-states so as to thus strengthen labor rights. My argument is simply that we should accept
that globalization may open doors for contestation as well as close off certain
more traditional avenues. Nor should we
forget that we cannot move back to a traditional terrain of struggle when
history has moved on.
Globalization Facilitates
Democracy
Today,
outside of the more fervent antiglobalization ranks,
few analysts would deny that globalization may have positive effects for
democratization as well as negative ones. Scholte
(2000a) noted cautiously in this regard that while “the new geography has to
date made governance less democratic,” on the other hand, “contemporary
globalization has [emphasis added] encouraged some innovations in
democratic practices” (p. 263, order of argument reversed). What we again see here is that it is the particular
form of globalization that has led to a democratic deficit. Thus, alternative or stronger modes of regulation
could conceivably make globalization more democracy friendly. Anthony McGrew (1997a) also argued the
positive case for globalization: “contrary to these developments [the negative
features of globalization discussed in the previous section] globalization is
also associated with processes of political empowerment and democratization”
(p. 238). This means that we cannot
really posit a unilateral or simple meaning to the globalization-democracy
relationships. All we can be certain of
is that the new concepts of a global politics and a global democracy draw into
question received notions of the economy, politics, society, culture, and
international relations.
In
Argentina, the human rights campaigners against the military dictatorship had a
slogan stating that “the defense of human dignity knows no boundaries” (cf. Beetham 1998). General
Pinochet found that national sovereignty was no defense when the British law
lords decided that he should answer abroad for abuses of human rights committed
in Chile. What is important to note, as
Anthony McGrew (1995) argued in relation to this topic, is that “the extent to
which the traditional
15
notions of sovereign
political space and political community are being reconstituted by the nature
of the international human rights regime and the activities of transnational
social movements in the human rights domain” (p. 46). The key word here is “reconstituted” because
nation-states are being reconfigured and not eliminated in the new global
democracy. There is now a transnational
democratic terrain infinitely more developed than when the United Nations was
formed (cf. Archibugi, Balduni,
and Donati 2000). Certainly this global democracy is uneven in
its extension across the world, and it would be naïve to argue for the
immediate coming of a new cosmopolitan democracy (cf. arguments in Archibugi and Held 1995 and the more critical piece by Zolo 2000). The
democratic terrain is simply more complex in the era of globalization.
One
of the most interesting debates to flow out of this new terrain is around the
nature, or even existence, of global civil society. It seems easier to define what civil society
is not - it is neither the state nor the market - than what it is, given the
proliferations of meanings and political intentions behind them. For Scholte (2000a),
“civil society exists when people make concerted efforts through voluntary
associations to mould rules - both official, formal, legal arrangements and
informal social contracts” (p. 175). Within
this diversity we find old bodies such as the International Red Cross, truly uncivil
elements such as transnational criminal syndicates, and the various
nongovernmental organizations, community movements, and pressure groups that go
under the label of “new social movements.” That these have acquired a grater
transnational prominence in recent decades seems incontrovertible - we need
only think of the international environmental movement(s). However, while not denying that global civil
society can lead to empowerment, we should not confuse wishes with reality and
should recognize that it is a fairly recent phenomenon and one not immune to
the democratic deficit critique itself.
In
relation to labor as transnational social agent, we can certainly note changes
in the past decade or so, which point in more optimistic directions than Tilly’s (1995) somber scenario. At every level from the suprastate
International Congress of Free Trade Unions to the local union, passing through
various regional and subregional levels, labor is
responding to the new transnational capitalism (see Munck
2002 for details). Albeit with a delay
of around a decade, labor is reconstituting as a social movement and seeking
more adequate strategies for the new dispensation as set by capitalist globalization.
While some strategists still seek to
prioritize the national level against the global level of action (surely the
two are not incompatible?), the transnational arena is becoming increasingly
important for this particular old/new social actor. What is of great significance is a recent move
toward understanding global as transnational but also as universal following Amartya Sen’s
16
(2000) clear defense of
global labor rights: “A truly global approach need not see human beings
only as (or even primarily as) citizens of particular countries... The
increasingly globalised world economy calls for a
similarly globalised approach to basic ethics and
political and social procedures.” (p. 127).
Even
if we cannot say that globalization is good for democracy (to the extent that
we can say it is bad for democracy), we can argue that is has transformed the
democratic terrain. While the realist
school of international relations may deride global democracy as impractical,
they cannot fail to address the growing issues around global governance. The growing buzzword, even in the corridors of
power, is the need for life “after competition” (see Group of Lisbon 1995). Global governance is based on national states
but accepts a terrain beyond them, the transnational space. This is a space dominated by the giant transnational
corporations but also populated by the growing transnational social movements. Democracy in the era of globalization must now
include a transnational element. At this
level, there is now a clearly perceived need to achieve a greater degree of
social (and political) control over the forces of economic
internationalization. Democratizing
global governance will, arguably, be one of the major tasks in the century now
opening up, and its impact will be felt at the global, national, regional, and
local levels because globalization impacts everywhere.
Karl
Polanyi (1957) wrote at the midpoint of the past
century about the great transformation that led to England’s industrial
revolution in the nineteenth century. Yet
it can also be argued (see Goldfrank 1990) that the
great transformation in fact referred to the cataclysmic institutional
transformation after the 1930s. In their
different ways, the New Deal in the United States, Nazism in Germany, and
Stalinism in the Soviet Union were examples of the double movement that Polanyi saw as the means whereby social control could be
established over unregulated market mechanisms. In terms of our object of analysis here - the conflictual and multidirectional relationship between
globalization and democratization - Polanyi’s problematic
of the 1950s may well inspire and provide direction (and historical context) to
our inquiries in the first decade of the new century. To begin with, we may start with Polanyi’s definition of the “double movement”:
It can be personified as the action of two organising
principles in society... The one was the principle of economic liberalism,
aiming at the establishment of a self-regulating market... using largely laissez-faire
and free trade as its methods; the other was the principle of social protection
aiming at the conservation of man and nature... using protective legislation,
restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention as its methods.
(P. 132)
In translating Polanyi from mid-twentieth century to early twenty-
17
first
century, we could begin with the notion of globalization, which if nothing else
represents the worldwide application of laissez-faire principles. Polanyi wrote for
the nineteenth century that “markets spread all over the face of the globe and
the amount of goods involved grew to unbelievable proportions” (p. 76); this is
doubly true today, even for those who believe that globalization is only a tendency
and that what we are witnessing is mainly internationalization. Yet - and this is why Polanyi
is so contemporary - the countermovement(s) through which society protects
itself are equally inevitable in the long term. Wherever there was, as with
the industrial revolution or now with the globalization revolution, “an
unparalleled momentum to the mechanism of markets,” there was also “a
deep-seated movement [that] sprang into being to resist the pernicious effects
of a market-controlled economy” (p. 76). As distinct from both liberalism and orthodox
Marxism, Polanyi argued that this double movement was
“the one comprehensive feature in the history of the age” (p. 76) and thus
opens up a new research agenda for the era of globalization and its discontents
we are living through now.
For Polanyi (1957), a major characteristic of the market
society was that it had become “disembedded”
socially; that is to say it was uprooted or divorced from its social and political
institutions. What a disembedded
and self-regulating market economy produces in people is insecurity and social
anxiety. Protective counter-movements by
society and the state must also seek to block the total disembedding
of the market through re-embedding it through state intervention and social
legislation. Of course, in the era of
globalization, that re-embedding will also occur at an international level to
be effective, even more than was the case in the 1930s. As well as re-embedding, what occurs, or
should occur, is decommodification of the factors of
production and in particular that peculiar commodity, labor. Polanyi revealed in
his seemingly naïve assumption that “labour is only
another name for a human activity which goes with life itself...
.The commodity description of labour... is
entirely fictitious” (p. 72), which he followed with the argument that to see
social legislation or trade unions as not having interfered with the mobility
of labor is “to imply that those institutions have entirely failed in their
purpose, which was exactly that of interfering with the laws of supply and
demand in respect to human labour and removing it
from the orbit of the market” (p.1771).
What
this argument is leading up to is a well-grounded understanding of
globalization and democracy in terms of a double movement akin to that
described and analyzed by Polanyi (1957). Stephen Gill (1995) has argued persuasively
that Polanyi’s double movement can be seen as a
metaphor for the “socio-political forces which wish to assert more democratic
control over political life” (p. 67). In
this way, Polanyi can be seen as a theorist of counterhegemonic movements, a tradition given its founding
statements by Antonio Gramsci and renewed today in
the critical globalization
18
studies.
Of course, this can take various forms,
from those who work mainly within the parameters of globalization to achieve
some degree of regulation (with many critical globalizers
now joining this camp), to the antiglobalizers in the
streets by Seattle, through the various permutations in between, where most of
the contributors to this volume are indeed situated.
The
double movement at the heart of the great transformation(s) points us toward
the issue of agency. Both orthodox
Marxists and the globalists tend to collapse
tendencies - toward self-regulating markets and globalization - into essences. The necessary countermovements
of regulation, decommodification, and re-embedding
provide us with a less necessitarian view of the
world. Contemporary countermovements
will, in all likelihood, not lead to a revival of the post-World War II
settlement and social contract, because the world has indeed gone through a
great transformation since the collapse of socialism and the acceleration of
capitalist globalization. Undoubtedly,
new global social modes of regulation will emerge. What is certain is that Polanyi,
as a precursor of the theory of radical democracy, would be looking to ordinary
people for democratic alternatives to current forms of globalization. Polanyi, judging
from his anthropological work (see Dalton 1971), would also be attuned to the
new politics of postdevelopment and its stress on
indigenous cultures and on the overriding need for sustainability as a
necessary criteria for any plausible development model, which an unrestricted
globalization project is clearly unable to meet.
In
conclusion, I believe that Polanyi (1957) helps us
get back to basics. We need to examine
coolly whether a global democracy is possible (see Gorg
and Hirsch 1998) and then whether it is desirable. In spite of sporadic enthusiasm for the United
Nations as potential world government, in the era of globalization, very little
indicates that this is a realistic option. We do, however, need to recognize that the
dynamics of globalization seem to be outstripping the ability of its political
shell to achieve stable governance. New
forms of governance at a global level are emerging and are likely to be
extended both horizontally and vertically. Nor should we ignore the very real potential
that globalization - as a social and cultural process as much as an economic
one - has to generate new relations and new forms of community at a
transnational level. This is likely to
be a more complex and messy process than a simple extension of liberal Western
democratic norms as seems implicit in the various calls for a cosmopolitan
democracy. The world is speeding up, but
the political process is now beginning to catch up.
Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity
at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Archibugi, D., S. Balduni, and M. Donati. 2000.
The United Nations as an agency of global democracy. In Global democracy:
Key debates, edited by B. Holden. London: Routledge.
19
Archibugi, D., and D. Held, eds. 1995. Cosmopolitan democracy.
Cambridge, UK Polity.
Beetham, D. 1998. Human rights as a model
for cosmopolitan democracy. In Re-Imagining political community: Studies
in cosmopolitan democracy, edited by D. Archibugi,
D. Held, and M. Köhler. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Dalton, G., ed. 1971. Primitive,
archaic and modern economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi.
Boston: Beacon.
Gill, S. 1995. Theorising the interregnum: The double movement and global
politics in the 1990s. In International
political economy: Understanding global disorder, edited by B. Heltne. London: Zed Books.
Goldfrank, W. 1990. Fascism and the great transformation. In The
life and Work of KarlPolanyi, edited byK Polanyi-Levitt. Montreal,
Canada: Black Rose Books.
Gorg, C., and J. Hirsch. 1998. Is international
democracy possible? Review of International Political Economy 5 (4): 585-615.
Group
of Lisbon. 1995. Limits to
competition. London: MIT Press.
McGrew,
A. 1995. World
order and political space. In A global world?
edited by J. Anderson, C. Brook, and A. Cochrane.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
1997a. Democracy beyond borders? Globalization and the reconstruction of democratic theory and practice.
In The
transformation of democracy? Globalization and territorial
democracy, edited by A. McGrew.
Cambridge, UK: Polity Press in association with The Open University.
1997b. Globalization and territorial democracy: An introduction. In The transformation of democracy? Globalization and territorial democracy, edited by A. McGrew. Cambridge, UK Polity Press in
association with The Open University.
Moody, K 1997. Workers
in a lean world: Unions in an international economy. London: Verso.
Munck, R. 1994. Democracy and development: Deconstruction
and debates. In Capitalism
and development, edited by L. Sklair.
London: Routledge.
2002. Globalization and labour: The new
great transformation? London: Zed Books.
O’Donnell, G. 1973. Modernisation and bureaucratic authoritarianism: Studies
in South American politics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Polanyi, K. 1957. The great transformation.
Boston: Beacon.
Przeworski, A., M. Alvarez, J. A. Cheibub,
and F. Limongi. 2000. Democracy and development: Political institutions and
well-being in the world 1950-1990. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Rueschemeyer, D., E. H. Stephens, and J. Stephens. 1992. Capitalist development and democracy. Cambridge, UK Polity.
Scholte, J. A. 2000a. Global civil society.
In The political
economy of globalization, edited by N. Woods. London: Macmillan.
2000b. Globalization: A critical introduction. London: Macmillan.
Sen, A. 2000. Work and rights. International Labour
Review 139 (2): 119-28.
Sklair, L. 2000. The transnational capitalist
class. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Smith,
M., and P. Kollock, eds. 1999. Communities in cyberspace.
London: Macmillan.
Soros, G. 1998. The crisis of global
capitalism. London: Little, Brown.
Tilly, C. 1995. Globalisation
threatens labor’s rights. International Labor and Working Class History 47
(spring): 1-23.
Weffort, F. 1990. A América errada. Lua Nova 21:5-50.
20
Woods, N., ed, 2000. The political economy of
globalization. London: Palgrave.
World
Bank. 2000. World development report,
1999-2000:Entering the 21st century. Washington,
DC: World Bank.
Zolo, D. 2000. The lords of peace: From the holy alliance
to the new international criminal tribunals. In Global democracy: Key debates, edited
by B. Holden. London: Routledge.
21
The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
July 2004