ABSTRACT
By 1996 there were clear signs that the world’s most powerful social forces were getting worried. Why? Their agenda of global economic openness and integration via the free flow of trade and investment has been progressively realized over half a century. Over the postwar period world trade has grown more rapidly than output, and foreign investment has in recent decades expanded still more dramatically. In the early decades of this emerging global order, its architects could justify their project in terms of the manichean categories of Cold War ideology as well as the stories of generalized peace and prosperity associated with the classical liberal tradition. And indeed, American working people (or, at least, a substantial proportion of them) were integrated into a hegemonic global order through access to postwar prosperity and through the stark representations of Cold War politics (Rupert, 1995).
