Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

The East Asian miracle: Economic growth and public policy: By the World Bank. (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993. 389 pp. $19.95, paper.)

From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century Thomas L. Friedman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 Thomas Friedman is a widely-acclaimed journalist, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, and author of four best-selling books that include From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989). His eminence as a journalist is clearly demonstrated in the way he prepared for The World is Flat. He traveled throughout the world, interviewing in depth the political and business leaders who have the most direct, hands-on knowledge of the truly incredible developments occurring in the business structures and technology of globalization. Only a journalist who moves freely at the highest levels could interview the likes of Sir John Rose, the chief executive of Rolls-Royce; Nobuyuki Idei, the chairman of Sony; Richard Koo, the chief economist for the Nomura Research Institute; Bill Gates of Microsoft; Wee Theng Tan, the president of Intel China; David Baltimore, president of Caltech; Howard Schultz, founder and chairman of Starbucks; Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys in Bangalore - and many others, each of whom gave him the inside story of how, specifically, the barriers of time and space separating economies, workforces, sources of capital, and technical abilities are crumbling. The result of this unfolding story, already far along but with much farther to go, according to Friedman, is that "the world is flat." With some notable exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic swathe, everything is connected with everything else on a horizontal basis, with distance and erstwhile time-lags no longer mattering. Friedman describes in detail the galloping globalization that has unfolded in even so limited a time as the past five years. Under the impetus of a worldwide network of interconnectivity, the world economy is much-changed from what it was at the turn of the century a mere half-decade ago. Friedman quotes the CEO of India's Infosys: "What happened over the last [few] years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables," while (Friedman paraphrases him) "computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of software - e-mail, search engines like Google, and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore, and one part to Beijing...." Microprocessors today have 410 million transistors compared to the 2800 they had in 1971. And now, "wireless is what will allow you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere." The effect on productivity is revolutionary: "It now takes Boeing eleven days to build a 737, down from twenty-eight days just a few years ago. Boeing will build the next generation of planes in three days, because all the parts are computer-designed for assembly." The most strikingly informative aspect of this book, however, is not about technology. Most especially, Friedman explores the rapidly evolving global business systems, each constantly regenerating itself to keep ahead of the others. These are systems that span the continents seeking the lowest-cost providers of everything from expert scientific and engineering work to the lowliest grunt work. Friedman points out that India produces 70,000 accounting graduates each year - and that they are willing to start at $100 a month. It is no wonder that Boeing employs 800 Russian scientists and engineers for passenger-plane design when "a U.S. aeronautical engineer costs $120 per design hour, a Russian costs about one-third of that." Friedman describes a call center in India where outbound callers sell "everything from credit cards to phone minutes," while operators taking inbound calls do "everything from tracing lost luggage for U.S. and European airline passengers to solving computer problems for confused American consumers. …

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

David Harvey's adaptation and redeployment of Marx's notion of ‘primitive accumulation’–under the heading of ‘accumulation by dispossession’–has reignited interest in the concept among geographers. This adaptation of the concept of primitive accumulation to different contexts than those Marx analyzed raises a variety of theoretical and practical issues. In this paper, I review recent uses and transformations of the notion of primitive accumulation that focus on its persistence within the Global North, addressing especially the political implications that attend different readings of primitive accumulation in the era of neoliberal globalization.

Primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, accumulation by ‘extra-economic’ means

State power beyond the `territorial trap': the internationalization of the state

Recent work by geographers has highlighted attempts by local groups to ‘jump scales’ in their efforts to contest the power of global capital. Sometimes such ‘scale jumping’ is also seen as part of an effort to bypass the nation-state. This paper explores a particular case of scale jumping, which illustrates some of the complexities of the process. Building on the anticorporate globalization momentum generated during the ‘battle in Seattle’ and the demonstrations during the February 2000 United Nations Commission on Trade and Development meetings in Bangkok, local antidam activists from Ubon Ratchathani province in Thailand scaled up their activities during 2000, utilizing various international connections to improve their visibility and strengthen their prospects for success. Rather than simply bypassing the nation-state, however, they have had to use both local and international resources to try to combat the policies of the nation-state, a project in which they have had real but still contested success....

From Seattle (and Ubon) to Bangkok: The Scales of Resistance to Corporate Globalization

The literature on global production networks (GPNs) has made important contributions to our understanding of globalization, overcoming much of the state-centrism of other kinds of political economic approaches. It has also extended effectively beyond the relatively narrower focus of its predecessors, the global commodity chains and global value chains approaches, to analyze not only the direct process of production but also various social activities that are crucial to the overall process of commodity (and value) production. Yet in spite of opening a potential space for interrogating political processes as integral aspects of production, most work on GPNs has avoided the discussion of political issues that speak to the messiness, contestation, and violence that often accompanies globalization. This article shows that GPN approaches can and should encompass geo-political aspects of the production process that range from labor struggles to inter-state competition and even war. As examples from South Korea show, a geo-political economy approach to GPNs that includes examination of war and geo-politics can extend our understanding of the process of globalization.

The Geo-political Economy of Global Production Networks

DOI: 10.1355/ae28-lg Bounding the Mekong: The Asian Development Bank, China, and Thailand. By Jim Glassman. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010. Pp. 208. Jim Glassman has written a well researched book on the economic, political and socio-cultural integration of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). Since the GMS entered into the realm of useful knowledge in 1992, a series of studies have been conducted in regards to the evolution of this subregion, most of which focus mainly on the success of cooperation among members of the GMS, the progress of its regionalization and how the GMS has slotted in so perfectly with the ongoing trend of globalization. The study by Glassman, however, represents a major departure from the available literatures on the Mekong subregion. Glassman's objective is ambitious. He sets out to debunk the myth of the GMS as being calculatingly constructed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB). To the general understanding of many, the GMS is seen as another kind of representative of regionalization. In reality, unlike other regional organizations of the world, such as the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) which were born out of governments' initiatives that intended to bring institutional coherence to their transnational processes, the GMS was arbitrarily "manufactured" by numerous publications of one specific institution - the ADB - to which member countries owe the definition of the GMS. Divided into seven chapters, the book begins with how to best approach the GMS. Glassman lays out an argument that includes recognition of the importance of institutions that regulate regionalization and discursive processes that produce the object of regulation and knowledge about it (p. 15). His argument is best explicated in Chapter 3, while the author deals with the manufacturing process of the GMS. Terms like "strengthening GMS cooperation for economic growth and mutual benefit" and "the river links six countries", according to Glassman, are misguided simply because they inaccurately portray the dynamics of the actual regionalization processes that are taking place in the GMS. Glassman boldly argues that rather than being based in complementarities and the spatial proximity of countries within the GMS, the GMS integration process is indeed driven by more global, but highly uneven, capitalist investment, production, and trade, leading less to the integration of the GMS per se than to the integration of GMS countries into a much larger East Asian regional system (itself embedded in broader global processes), albeit in quite differential - and differentially advantageous - ways (p. 37). In other words, what has been the driving force behind the GMS is neither the comparative advantage nor naturally existing proximity as often claimed by the ADB, but rather competitive profit seeking by different investors, inside and outside the subregion, who are in search of exploiting economic benefits, such as cheap labour and natural resources, offered by countries of the GMS. Thus, the notion of a win-win situation and mutual benefit gained from the cooperation through the GMS is at times illusory and fails to reflect the realities in the Mekong subregion. It also proffers false hope for poorer nations participating in the GMS of a certain degree of fairness. Glassman points out that while various opportunities are emerging for smaller players to play roles in regionalization, the opportunities are not necessarily equitable or winwin; and in some cases particular groups of less empowered actors may be seen as definite "losers" in the process (p. …

Jim Glassman

Papers

Primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, accumulation by ‘extra-economic’ means

State power beyond the `territorial trap': the internationalization of the state

From Seattle (and Ubon) to Bangkok: The Scales of Resistance to Corporate Globalization

The Geo-political Economy of Global Production Networks

Bounding the Mekong: The Asian Development Bank, China, and Thailand