ABSTRACT
The purported “global” dimension of social phenomena and processes has, over the past few decades, increasingly come to dominate discussions in policy circles as well as among scholars. In particular, with respect to the contemporary political-economic order, the discourse has focused on seemingly global issues. For instance, in the early 1990s, supporters of the East Asian model of development heralded the outward orientation of the Asian economies and argued that the policy of trade openness pursued by these countries would be a good example for other developing countries (World Bank 1993: 23-5; Ohmae 1996: 120-1). Likewise, after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, critics pointed at global developments – in particular, global capital flows – in their explanations of the vulnerability of the South East Asian economies (e.g. Bello et al. 2000: 12-16). Recently, so-called antiglobalists have rallied against what they consider to be the bulwarks of globalization, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, the Group of 8 (the main industrialized countries plus Russia), the European Council and the Davos-based World Economic Forum.
