ABSTRACT
This chapter is intended to grasp the relationship between neoliberal capitalist economics and neo-imperial geopolitics in reproducing the structures of advantage and disadvantage, domination and subordination, of global political economy today. A world economy that is structured by unregulated inter-capitalist competition is inherently unbalanced, and hence potentially dangerous and unstable politically, as well as ideologically volatile. “Globalization”, of course, has become all the rage in business studies and the social sciences since the 1990s, at least at the level of economic processes. Starting with international trade, globalization theorists are right that the period has witnessed an enormous expansion in the volume of world trade. Indeed, this has been especially the case since the 1990s, when so-called globalization really accelerated. Neoliberal-driven capitalist internationalization has thus also driven a worldwide merger-and-acquisitions boom, the majority of which in the developing world have been acquisitions.
