Globalisation and Ideology in Britain: Neoliberalism, free trade and the global economy

Introduction

Globalisation and British politics

The concept of ‘globalisation’ has become ubiquitous in British politics, as in many countries of the world. The main political parties all subscribe to the view that globalisation is happening and that it matters. Gordon Brown’s speech to the Labour Party conference in 2008 – amid a worldwide financial crisis originating on Wall Street and intense political pressure on his position as prime minister – proclaimed that

each generation believes it is living through changes their parents could never have imagined – but the collapse of banks, the credit crunch, the trebling of oil prices, the speed of technology, and the rise of Asia – nobody now can be in any doubt that we are in a different world and it’s now a global age. (Brown, 2008)

Such statements are extremely common in British politics – particularly it seems among New Labour leaders. The five concerns attributed here by Brown to the ‘global age’ can be added to a very long list of events and processes that have been linked to globalisation and its conceptual relatives. The globalisation concept can be deemed to have given rise to a relatively distinct and novel ‘globalisation discourse’ in British politics, defined in a broad sense as political dialogue concerning the nature and effects of globalisation, and including within it appeals to a process of globalisation by political actors as the context of – and rationale for – their actions and decisions.

Crucially, while globalisation discourse in Britain is invariably associated with the late 1990s and the rise of New Labour under Tony Blair, Brown’s statement suggests that it is surviving and perhaps evolving. If its deployment continued despite the onset of a financial crisis which threatened to undermine the perceived efficacy of an integrated world economy, then the evidence mounts that the idea of globalisation, rather than going out of fashion, has become entrenched in the ideological landscape of British politics.

It is precisely this ideological landscape that this book surveys. The survey is conducted through the empirical lens of foreign economic policy. While there are few policy areas which have been insulated from the spread of globalisation discourse, it is arguably in the area of foreign economic policy, where Britain’s relationship with the global economy is forged, that the idea of globalisation has had greatest purchase and therefore received most attention.

Although rules on international trade are a central feature of this policy area, foreign economic policy encompasses but extends beyond what has traditionally been conceived as ‘trade policy’ – perhaps because of the role of globalisation in blurring the international/domestic dichotomy. In terms of its empirical focus, therefore, the book can to some extent be seen as a sequel to the historian Frank Trentmann’s Free Trade Nation (2008), which surveys the British polity’s traditional attachment to ‘free trade’. Trentmann demonstrates how support for free trade evolved from a predominantly left-wing campaign to a mainstay of centre-right perspectives. Albeit using a different analytical framework, this book updates Trentmann’s analysis by documenting the impact of globalisation and the rise of ‘global governance’ mechanisms on the status of free trade, and its traditional alter-ego ‘protectionism’, within British political debates on economic policy. Clearly, as Trentmann intimates, the rise of neoliberalism has transformed the context of British trade policy, and it remains to be seen whether the idea of globalisation is a continuation of or departure from this recent trend.

The book deals with the period from 1997 to 2009. In political language, it covers the period from the election of New Labour, which heralded a new era in British politics, to the recent recession, where the various premises of globalisation discourse came under public scrutiny. However, it is not simply about New Labour, but rather, the political and discursive contexts of the New Labour era. While it will examine New Labour’s perspective, and as such its foreign economic policy practices in government, it also looks more widely at an array of other political actors who contributed to the ideological contours of foreign economic policy as an issue area in British politics during this period.

This wider scope is important for several reasons. It is too easy to rationalise post hoc that, because globalisation now appears to be a dominant concept in debates on British foreign economic policy, its emergence as a dominant concept was somehow inevitable. But why globalisation and not some other idea or some other term? While certain influential figures helped to cement its place in Britain’s and the world’s political consciousness, the concept was not invented by Tony Blair or indeed by Anthony Giddens, Bill Clinton or Kenichi Ohmae. We need to look more widely to extant traditions of thought and discourses to discover why globalisation resonates in British politics. It is also only through this wider inquiry that we can more fully appreciate the meaning of globalisation as an idea. Often, because it is associated with certain policy prescriptions, its meaning is inferred through an implicit and highly unscientific process of reverse engineering. Yet different actors will employ the concept in different ways in different political contexts. Its multidimensional identity has to be appreciated before we can establish what it really means. It may be, for instance, that the idea of globalisation leads actors like New Labour to neoliberal policy outcomes, rather than vice versa.

Globalisation and ideational analysis

As suggested above, and discussed at length in Chapter 1, insofar as political economists have examined the idea of globalisation in any detail, they tend to view it as a mask or shorthand for neoliberalism (whether depicted as an ideology, a doctrine, an episteme, a governmentality etc.) or the social forces associated with this worldview. Even within this school of thought, however, opinion varies between those that argue the globalisation concept refers to actual changes brought about by neoliberal economic policies (see Gill, 1995) and those that argue globalisation has not occurred or is highly exaggerated by political elites in order to justify neoliberal policies as a response to change (see Hay & Marsh, 2000).

This book does not intend to directly challenge such analysis. It does not question whether the real-world material changes supposedly referred to by globalisation have occurred and does not deny that the (perceived) interests of powerful political and economic actors are complicit in the terms of political discourse and ideological debate. Yet it upholds that we cannot understand the idea without looking directly at it. Moreover, we fail to fully understand neoliberalism and its status in British politics if we neglect to consider the meaning of the language through which it is supposedly expressed.

It must be acknowledged that it is Colin Hay’s work on New Labour’s globalisation discourse which creates the analytical space for this book (see Hay, 1997, 1998; Hay & Rosamond, 2002; Hay & Smith, 2005; Hay & Watson, 1998). Hay’s work will be discussed in more detail in Chapters 1 and 2. While the book eschews the orientation of Hay’s earliest work in this regard, that is, that globalisation discourse is used (often duplicitously) to mask the Labour Party’s accommodation with Thatcherism, it builds upon Hay’s analysis in three key regards: firstly, by inquiring into how ideas about globalisation shape apparent ‘responses’ to the process; secondly, by relating globalisation discourse to particular actors, therefore relating ideas about globalisation to particular policy agenda; and finally, by demonstrating that a variety of understandings of and approaches to globalisation are possible and discernible.

Yet it introduces into this analytical agenda the concept of ideology, used only superficially by Hay. Although ideology, as an analytical concept, is not alien to political economy, its use here owes more to the way it is understood in political theory. Chapter 2 will discuss ideology in more detail, in particular the work of Michael Freeden. By way of explicating the book’s theoretical framework, it is worth noting from the outset the key elements of how ideology is understood and used here. An ideology is treated as a relatively coherent collection of concepts which provide a guide to what the world is like (ontology), what the world should be like (ethics), how the world can be made better (agency) and, finally, who is and is not included in one’s ideological cohort (identity). These elements are what Matthew Festenstein and Michael Kenny (2005) call the four ‘structural or syntactic features’ of all ideologies. Together they provide a bridge between the essential contestability of reality and the need for human beings to act upon their reality politically in meaningful ways. Some concepts are intrinsic and foundational to the ideology, whereas others are more peripheral or ephemeral and derive their meaning from the ineliminable core.

It should be recognised, however, that ideology is used here as an analytical device. There are other concepts through which ideational analysis can be conducted in political economy. Although many real-world political actors see large ideological families (such as liberalism, social democracy and anarchism) as themselves actually existing ‘things’, this is inevitable due to the inherent reflexivity of political thought – contemporary politicians are equally likely to present their beliefs and ideas as unideological. In this study, it is firmly upheld that ideology is not the only analytical lens through which to study ideas – although it is a particularly good one.

Much analysis of globalisation by political economists, as will be argued in Chapter 1, is overtly materialist and structuralist. It is posited here, however, that only by looking at the ideas about globalisation upheld by actual political actors can the nature of globalisation as a material phenomenon, and the course of structural formation and transformation, be fully understood. While this book is not alone in such arguments, it argues that, as an analytical concept, ideology is uniquely able to contribute such a perspective to the study of globalisation. For both political economists and real-world actors, globalisation is a term which refers to change in the material circumstances of social reality. The understanding of ideology upheld here is designed to show how agents’ perceptions of reality are intertwined with their views of what the world should be like and how it should be acted upon etc. Furthermore, ideologies are traditions of thought: the way that agents interpret change is influenced by the ideological meanings within which their political consciousness is situated.

Finally, the concept of ideology allows the book to demonstrate that – contra Hay’s analysis – while the globalisation concept can be employed in multiple settings in variable ways by different political actors, this does not mean that it is entirely malleable. Like every influential political concept, its core may be multidimensional and not easy to place on a left/right ideological spectrum – but nevertheless it is a source of meaning which colours almost every utterance of the term.

Key aims

A disclaimer: this book is not centred on the question ‘Is globalisation an ideology?’. While ostensibly an interesting question, this would undervalue the strength and flexibility of ideology as an analytical concept and in fact would provide for a narrow and probably fruitless empirical inquiry. Instead, the book investigates the ideological character of globalisation discourse. This broader focus encompasses the narrower question while recognising that ideas about globalisation can influence and be influenced by a range of ideological perspectives without being established as a distinct perspective in its own right.

However, the book is interested in whether globalisation can be said to have an ineliminable meaning. If so, it will be possible to ponder whether the concept of globalisation stands alone in ideological terms or instead is dependent on meanings conferred on it by other ideological perspectives. Related to this, the book is interested in the genealogy and evolution of globalisation as an ideational phenomenon: from which traditions of thought does it spring, how is their influence on globalisation manifested, and is the concept now on its own evolutionary path?

The book also aims to determine whether the globalisation concept is employed differently at different points on the traditional left/right ideological spectrum – and if so, why? This is essential to establishing the role of the idea of globalisation in reshaping the ideological landscape of British politics. More specifically, the book aims to reflect on the relationship between globalisation discourse and neoliberalism. In order, therefore, to set up the empirical inquiry that follows, the nature of neoliberalism as it is understood here requires further exposition. ‘Neoliberalism’ is understood as an ideological perspective which prescribes limited state intervention in the economy. It therefore favours privatisation of state-owned enterprises, deregulated labour markets and the use of the private sector or market mechanisms to deliver public services. Most crucially for foreign economic policy, it favours liberalisation of barriers to international economic activity, in terms not only of trade in goods, but also services, and capital flows. It can of course be conceived as an ideology, and as such is often likened to classical liberalism, given its emphasis on the individual as the primary unit of human organisation, the efficiency and moral primacy of markets, the importance of economic freedoms and of course free trade (see Gamble, 2001).

It is impossible to fully equate one particular agent or political programme with an ideology, but in Britain the rise of this perspective, at least on economic policy, is associated with Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative government elected in 1979. Given that globalisation discourse is most associated with the New Labour era, it may be possible to divorce neoliberalism and the idea of globalisation analytically. The growing importance of the globalisation concept may indeed represent a left-wing response to neoliberalism – although we must be careful not to assume any idea is wholly functional rather than constitutive of agency in its own right. It is precisely for these reasons that an empirical scope which extends beyond New Labour is necessary – as such the book examines the ideas of actors ranging from supposedly diehard neoliberals to those on the far left that share an ideological ancestry with the Labour Party.

The book argues, then, that the globalisation concept inherently connotes the notion that the spatial foundations of human organisation have been transformed – in particular that we are experiencing the emergence of one-worldness. This connotation may be said to be logically implied by the term itself – yet it has been largely overlooked in the existing literature. The second main meaning inherent in globalisation discourse is that the nation-state has become anachronistic. This is not necessarily logically implied by the term, but rather is conferred on globalisation by its genealogy and its ideological context. Although much of the existing scholarship has identified the second meaning in some form, it has usually only done so by reducing to the idea to neoliberalism. This book will demonstrate that, for some groups, scepticism about the state’s viability or efficacy is based on the notion of spatial change, as well as or instead of neoliberal assumptions. Crucially, the idea of globalisation contains major elements that have traditionally enjoyed positive associations on the left, complicating the ideological significance of the decline of the state in the British political imaginary. It is worth reiterating, however, that the ostensible focus on foreign economic policy partially qualifies these findings.

Before discussing methodology, a final disclaimer: answering theoretical questions is not one of the book’s chief aims. It asserts that ideas matter and that agents matter. While the discussion in Chapters 1 and 2 is intended as a contribution to ontological, epistemological and disciplinary debates, the main purpose of these chapters is to explicate the book’s theoretical framework in more detail. It is hoped that readers can find some value in the primary research even if they do not agree with this framework. That said, it is also hoped that through the book’s empirical analysis the importance of ideational analysis and of ideology as an analytical concept can be demonstrated.

Methodology

Case selection

The book presents five case studies of actors engaged in making and contesting foreign economic policy in Britain (although what this issue area means differs according to the group in question). The cases are:

• New Labour

• International Financial Services, London (IFSL)

• The Liberal Democrats

• Oxfam

• The Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP).

The cases were selected to represent a broad spectrum of opinion of foreign economic policy. Clearly, there are a number of methodological issues that need to be addressed. Firstly, these groups vary in power, size and popularity. Therefore, it could be said that some have significantly more sway than others over the ideological meanings replete in globalisation discourse. Secondly, these groups comprise a mixture of governmental, party, business and campaigning organisations which may not be commensurate. Thirdly, many of these groups are not unitary actors with a single ‘corporate’ voice.

In response, it must be pointed out that in general the five case studies should in fact be treated as a single study. These groups will house multiple discursive trends which overlap as much as they conflict. The case studies were prepared and are presented separately for mainly logistical reasons and, although comparison is a useful analytical tool, the research does not systematically employ comparative analysis. Similarly, the cases are not deemed to ‘represent’ distinct ideological perspectives. These groups inevitably house various currents of thought which have come together for political, historical and institutional reasons as well as ideological reasons. Therefore, while individual chapters will address the above concerns where relevant and they will be taken into account when conclusions are presented, they are not insurmountable obstacles.

New Labour (Chapter 3) is the most important case study, given that the Labour government was responsible for determining and implementing British foreign economic policy during the period in question. The Labour Party’s move to ‘the right’ is of course one of the most important changes in the ideological landscape of British politics in recent years. What role have ideas about globalisation played in this transformation? The policy focus will be on the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and its main successor the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), and to a lesser extent the Department for International Development (DfID), as the bodies responsible for foreign economic policy. Inevitably HM Treasury, in setting the framework for economic policy in general, will also feature. Yet this focus is contextualised by an examination of the thoughts and views of New Labour leaders. IFSL (Chapter 4) is obviously closely associated with neoliberal ideology. It is a membership organisation for financial service providers – the focus here is on its leadership and secretariat. IFSL is strongly committed to trade liberalisation and valorises an open global economy. Is there evidence that this orientation is due to the ideological resources of globalisation discourse rather than, or as well as, neoliberalism?

The Liberal Democrats (Chapter 5) case study enables inquiry into whether liberalism in general, rather than its neoliberal offspring, is a stronger influence on globalisation discourse. Again, the focus is on its Westminster-based national leadership. Oxfam (Chapter 6) occupies an ostensibly similar intellectual territory but was chosen precisely because it upholds the importance of transnational political action, and because its core campaigning focus is international trade rules. Related to this, it appears to maintain a stronger commitment to Kantian or cosmopolitan values than the other cases. The SWP (Chapter 7) is arguably the most politically marginal group studied in this book. However, it enables insight into how far from the centre of British politics the dominant meanings of globalisation discourse have travelled. Moreover, despite Labour’s rightwards shift, the SWP’s discourse is born to some extent of the same ideological gene pool as its social democratic relations. As such this contrast will also enable insight into globalisation’s relationship with left-wing staples such as the state.

Before discussing methods, it is necessary to justify why the Conservative Party has not been included in this study. In addition to the limitations of space and resources, there are two specific reasons: firstly, there is little evidence that, in the period 1997–2009, the Conservative Party offered a distinctive approach to foreign economic policy within British politics. There existed significant, or even absolute, consensus between the party and the Labour government in this regard. This is not to say, of course, that the Conservative Party discourse on globalisation around its foreign economic policy position did not contain meanings more or less absent from New Labour discourse. However, it is fair to say that the Conservatives ostensibly conformed to neoliberal ideology in this issue area. Crucially, the IFSL chapter enables a comparison between New Labour and an ostensibly neoliberal group. Moreover, given that, unlike the Conservatives, IFSL is primarily focused on foreign economic policy, the comparison in this regard will be much more clinical. Secondly, it was deemed important that the study contained several different types of political organisations. There are three political parties among the cases studied; it was therefore necessary to ensure that groups involved in other forms of political activity were included, to better reflect the varied nature of British political life.

Methods and sources

By necessity the study adopts qualitative methods. To reiterate, its research subject is globalisation discourse. This means the way that politicians present in public their views on globalisation and related issues. As such, it examines communicative rather than coordinative discourses (see Schmidt, 2007), that is, the way that politicians present their ideas and policies, and justify and debate their decisions, rather than the language or vocabulary by which policy is made. Both forms of political discourse are important, but it is in communicating with wider audiences that political actors’ discourse is most usefully understood as ‘ideological’ (hereafter ‘globalisation discourse’ and terms such as ‘communicative discourse of globalisation’ are treated as synonyms). As such, the book’s originality in analysing globalisation discourse lies in its treatment of communicative discourse, that is, in seeking to indentify the ideological meanings replete within discourse. This means looking for the role played by political concepts in discourse and how these concepts are defined in relation to each other. In this sense, discourse is treated as more than simply argument or rhetoric, and as more than a functional representation of power relationships and material interests. These things certainly matter in accounting for the content and purpose of political discourse, but the focus here is on how Festenstein and Kenny’s ‘structural or syntactic’ features of ideology serve to dictate the terms of political discourse. Some forms of discourse analysis assumes that discourse simplifies political thought; on the contrary, it is assumed here that discourse houses manifold complexities, not least ideological compromises between competing objectives and conflicting values. The act of simplification for the purpose of communication is a highly ideological act.

The study’s main sources are therefore documents: white papers, manifestos, media articles, monographs, websites, pamphlets, reports etc. These types of public documents are, generally speaking, the main forms of publicly consumable output for the groups studied here. Crucially, they provide a forum for political actors to outline their approaches in the greatest detail. This does not mean they are perfect sources for identifying ideological meanings – but they are the best available. Individual chapters evaluate specific issues arising from the use of certain documentary sources. The book also utilises a small number of politicians’ speeches – necessary for connecting the strategic leadership of collective political actors to their policy-related documents, especially in complex cases such as New Labour.

The primary research also involved a large number of interviews with representatives of the groups adopted as case studies. In all cases interview data are secondary to documentary data. They were conducted primarily to facilitate a deeper understanding of an actor and its political action, to enable more clinical documentary analysis. However, it is also the case that interviews were able to supplement analysis of the documents, where documentary evidence on particularly pertinent issues was not available or sufficiently detailed, for various reasons. It is fair to say that most of the interviewees treated the interview as a public performance so could be said to have been contributing to their group’s communicative discourse on globalisation. However, given the mediating role of the interviewer, they have to be treated as at most semi-public. They are therefore incorporated into the case studies in a qualified manner. Individual chapters evaluate specific issues arising from the selection, undertaking and use of certain interviews. The research also involved a small amount of participant observation, although the data generated has not been utilised directly.

References

Brown, G. (2008) ‘Speech to the Labour Party conference’, 14 October 2008, accessed at www.labour.org.uk/gordon_brown_conference on 15 October 2008.

Festenstein, M. & Kenny, M. (2005) (eds) Political Ideologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Freeden, M. (2003) ‘Ideological boundaries and ideological systems’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 8:1, pp. 3–12.

Gamble, A. (2001) ‘Neo-liberalism’, Capital and Class, 75, pp. 127–34.

Gill, S. (1995) ‘Globalization, market civilization and disciplinary neoliberalism’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 24:3, pp. 393–422.

Hay, C. (1997) ‘Anticipating accommodations, accommodating anticipations: The appeasement of capital in the modernisation of the British Labour Party’, Politics and Society, 25:2, pp. 234–56.

Hay, C. (1998) ‘Globalisation, welfare retrenchment and the logic of no alternative: Why second-best won’t do’, Journal of Social Policy, 27:4, pp. 525–32.

Hay, C. & Marsh, D. (2000) ‘Introduction: Demystifying globalization’, in C. Hay & D. Marsh (eds), Demystifying Globalization (Basingstoke: MacMillan), pp. 1–20.

Hay, C. & Rosamond, B. (2002) ‘Globalization, European integration and the discursive construction of economic imperatives’, Journal of European Public Policy, 9:2, pp. 147–67.

Hay, C. & Smith, N. J. (2005) ‘Horses for courses? The political discourse of globalisation and European integration in the UK and Ireland’, West European Politics, 28:1, pp. 124–58.

Hay, C. & Watson, M. (1998) ‘The discourse of globalisation and the logic of no alternative: Rendering the contingent necessary in the downsizing of New Labour’s aspirations for government’, in A. Dobson & J. Stanyer (eds), Contemporary Political Studies, Vol. 2 (Nottingham: PSA), pp. 812–22.

Schmidt, V. (2007) ‘Trapped by their ideas: French elites’ discourses of European integration and globalization’, Journal of European Public Policy, 14:7, pp. 992–1009.

Trentmann, F. (2008) Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

1

Globalisation studies, the materialist bias and the ‘third wave’

In surveying globalisation discourse, this book’s main purpose is to analyse the idea of globalisation and its invocation by real-world political actors. As such, the term itself is appraised as an ideological concept. However, the idea of globalisation has a second life; that is, in the less-real world of academic research. In the social sciences, globalisation functions as an analytical concept, whether as shorthand for something discovered in the socio-economic universe, or as something that must itself be sought, tested, theorised and so on. This has given rise to what has been termed narrowly as ‘globalisation theory’, more broadly as ‘globalisation studies’ or more diplomatically as ‘the globalisation debate’. It is arguable whether this book falls within any of these analytical realms; indeed, there are ideational analyses of globalisation which engage reflexively with this body of work, constructing a ‘wave thesis’ to demonstrate theoretical progression.

Yet the purpose of engagement here is not simply to valorise this book’s approach. Instead, the main aim is to explain why the ontological foundations of globalisation studies curtail the analysis of ideas in political economy through a bias towards materialist and structuralist explanations. And even