ABSTRACT
In the economic sense, globalization is the drive of the capitalist system toward becoming a well-integrated, though internally diversified and unequal, planetary system. A new division of labor and a new allocation of goods take place, across and within nation-states, with a decreasing intervention and diminishing effect on the part of nation-state governments—with the exception of a few governments and a few policies that aim to facilitate this specific “free market” outcome. A new political economy thus emerges, in which the multiple nationstate political units correspond no more (or less than hitherto) to the single global economic unit. In this new global capitalism, the old liberal objective of separating politics and market obtains more than ever before. Whereas the public remains to a great extent a matter of the distinct national arenas, the market turns out to be thoroughly transnational. The economic is thus effectively secluded from the political, at least insofar as the political means a democratic, or publicly driven, intervention. As Seyla Benhabib puts it, the result of neo-liberal globalization is “the formation of a world proletariat, participating in global markets but lacking a demos” (Benhabib 2004, 23). This new structure of relationships between market, state, and society sets the stage for one of the more conspicuous results of globalization—the rise in inequality and economic gaps between rich and poor, included and excluded, and winners and losers of globalization.
