ABSTRACT
Twenty years ago, the politics of globalization were relatively straight-forward. At the time, capitalist democracy and the political coalition upon which it rested faced no serious challenges. The Soviet economic model, the Soviet Bloc, and even the Soviet Union itself had collapsed more than 10 years previously, taking with it the only serious post-World War II global rival to capitalist democracy. And as the Soviet model collapsed, capitalism spread to Eastern and Central Europe, into Central Asia and the Caucuses, and even into Russia itself. China had just joined the World Trade Organization and appeared well on its way toward the more gradual transition to a market-based and eventually fully capitalist economy. In the so-called Third World, inward-looking and state-led development strategies had been abandoned in Latin America, India, and Turkey. And though many developing countries found fault with some of the rules of the world trade system, their solution emphasized reform from within the structure of the system rather than a more profound restructuring or replacement. By the dawn of the millennium, global capitalism and its international institutional manifestationsthe World Trade Organization, free-trade agreements such as NAFTA and the EU, the International Monetary Fund-had appeared to have prevailed in the twentieth-century battle over global economic organization.
