(1) Globalisation and the Case for Economic Liberalisation.
Early understandings of globalisation, especially economic ones, were primarily 'process' or 'flow' definitions--identifying the increasing mobility of factors such as capital, labour, information and technology brought about by liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation. Initially identified by Polanyi,4 these activities are not historically 'new'. Rather, it is their volume, scope, depth, speed and clustering that is unprecedented. Market reform and the retreat of the state may have occurred in pervious historical eras, but not in combination with a rapid growth of FDI, multilateral institutions and the spread of a single ideology. A corollary of this definition is that globalisation leads to convergence, through market pressures that emphasise 'best practices.'5.
While there is empirical evidence to demonstrate major changes in the international economy over the last several decades, especially in the deregulation of global capital markets the degree of convergence of macroeconomic policy around a single neo-liberal model is overstated. Analysts are now groping towards an understanding of globalisation which rejects any notion that it is has merely one singular dynamic and rather see it as set of complex and contingent processes that lack uniformity and that may even be generating the seeds and sites of their own resistance. .
Early definitions also demonstrated an optimistic, progressive, modernist teleology exemplified in Kenichi Ohmae's McKinseyesque cartography of a borderless world in which the nation state becomes increasingly irrelevant.6 Globalisation becomes a 'normalising discourse' of power conditioning the policy responses of governments to the perception, if not always the reality, of global market integration. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in those analyses that see a revolution taking place not only in relations between the state and the economy, but also within civil society.
