Globalisation and Development

Abstract

With the collapse of the Soviet Union’s development model and that of the national developmental states, the 1990s saw the emergence of neoliberal globalisation as a dominant development paradigm. Its advocates promised A Flat World where all economic differences would disappear as the magic of the market created a convergence of living standards. One Marxist reaction was to deny that globalisation was any different from imperialism, but others embraced this brave new world on the basis that it would hasten the ultimate demise of capitalism. We examine here both the promise of globalisation and its outcome from a critical cultural political economy perspective. Some radical critics of globalisation posited that those countries and regions that were left out of the vortex of globalisation would become Black Holes. We examine in this section the way in which globalisation has impacted the development in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. While the outcome was not the smooth world that was promised, it is different I would argue and more complex than classical imperialism in many ways. Finally, we turn to Development Futures based on what we have learnt from the two sections above and from the ‘rise of China’. Is Chinese development since the 1990s a simple illustration of Marx’s theory of primitive capital accumulation? Can China (and India and Brazil) now finally ‘develop’ and ‘catch up’ with the originally industrialising countries? We stress the uneven and combined pattern of development as outlined in the Marxist classics. We return to the contradictions of capitalist development. Finally, in an era where ‘sustainable development’ is becoming an ever more urgent concern, we reconsider the relevance of post-development and indigenous approaches to development.