Predatory Globalization: a Critique
Richard Falk
217 pages with index and notes
published in 1991

I got this out of the library together with John Gray's similar book, False Dawn to learn more about globalisation. Globalisation as it is used here means the expansion of global capitalism and the creation of one single global market, without oversight or regulation, as preached in neoliberal fremarket ideology.

In Predatory Globalization Richard Falk calls this process, "globalization from above". This as opposed to "globalization from below", which is a natural outgrowth of the ways in which technology and science has made the world come together. Falk focuses primarily on the political domain, the ways in which "globalization from above" changes politics, both national and international. He discusses the structures needed for this vison of a global free market as well as ways in which this process can be fought or migitated.

The central thesis of Predatory Globalization is the way in which the nationstate is changed by globalisation from above. In Falk's view the state no longer has freedom of action anymore, even if it utterly rejects globalisation. At the same time even the most enthusiastic defenders of the process, including the US, have only a limited range of freedom. All states have to conform to the neoliberal view of globalisation, in which the economy and the free market are sacrosanct or risk being outcasts. Which means that e.g. social democratic Western Europe will have to change, will have to give up its welfare systems. the natin state becomes a quasi-state, an agent of economic globalisation.

To oppose this process, according to Falk is not entirely useless. He puts his hopes on a truly global civic society, able to resist on a global level the worst effects of globalisation. He foresees that the same struggle for workers rights, social justice, protection of the public good etc which took place on a national level in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the twenty-first century will take place on a global scale. (One could make the argument that the establishment of the World Social Forum in Porte Alegre is one of the first signs of this global civic society)

If you read Predatory Globalization expecting a book like Naomi Klein's No Logo you'll be disappointed. This is not a rousing criticism of globalisation, this book is meant to give a formal overview of globalisation; it's a textbook, not a call to arms. As such it succeeds reasonably well even for somebody like me. I may be interested in politics, but only a layman in political science. It stays vague and general in its analysis and especially in its recommendations, which is no more then could be expected. Perhaps not the first book you should read about the subject, but certainly useful when you want to dig a little deeper.