ABSTRACT
This volume is about ‘after the triumph’, a short-hand for a much larger and more powerful idea, namely, the return, reconstitution and redeployment of the public domain in a post-Seattle and post-Washington consensus world order (Williamson 1990, 1999). The emergence of the global economy with its predilection for market fundamentals, tough zero-inflation bench-marking, an unstoppable political dynamic of one worldism and silence on the need for an expansive notion of the public sphere is unquestionably the watershed event of our times. The meta-narrative of globalization has no rivals as the last grand political discourse of the twentieth century and if we understand anything about the endless capacity of the globalization narrative to reinvent itself in a new guise when conditions demand it, today is one of those defining moments. A new kind of state is emerging with its own particular institutions, practices and innovative forms (Held 1995; Castells 1996). Yet after the battle in Seattle, the future prospects of ‘market fundamentalism’ are increasingly troubled. A turning point has been reached in the debate over the rising costs and elusive benefits of globalization (Millennium 2000).
