ABSTRACT
Resolution of the crisis of neoliberal capitalism suggests two possible outcomes. The first points towards a reversal of globalization as growth in emerging market economies slows and the volume of world trade declines, leading to a fragmentation of the global economy and a return to economic nationalism. This outcome is possible, but unlikely, for four reasons. In the first place, although the momentum towards global economic integration has slowed during the global recession, IMF forecasts suggest that growth in emerging markets will average 5.0 per cent in 2015 – compared with 2.2 per cent among G7 nations (IMF 2014).1 Indeed, long-term forecasts suggest emerging market economies will continue to grow by an average of 6.7 per cent annually between 2013 and 2030, and will eventually account for around 75 per cent of exports (Roland Berger Consulting 2011), although this – as suggested in Chapter 5 – may not prevent Western economies attempting to ‘steal’ growth through competitive devaluation. Second, emerging economies are likely to remain attractive destinations for FDI despite the slump in global trade in the period 2010-14. Third, it is clear that in the new economic geography of regionalism corporations in emerging economies have the potential to reduce operating costs by locating labour-intensive stages of production in low-wage spatial units (Buckley & Ghauri 2004), while benefiting from rising consumer demand as developing economies experience intensive urbanization and growing affluence. Finally, it is clear that emerging market economies have the option of reorienting their commercial strategies to take greater advantage of regional trading blocs aimed at facilitating a free flow of corporate investment between states within regional spatial contexts – exemplified by the growing importance of ASEAN in South-East Asia or the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in the MENA region. Regional organizations of this type are not counterhegemonic in any explicit ideological sense, given their political and commercial ties to the US and EU, which actively promote Western corporate interests by lobbying regional organizations in a formal or informal capacity – for example, the campaign to deny India full member status of APEC because this might tip the balance of power within
the organization towards Asia (Sahoo 2012). Yet, regional organizations are multilateral in structure and outlook, seeking to facilitate corporate investment and drive economic growth across their respective regions rather than advance the sovereign interests of any single (proto-)hegemonic state actor. A second outcome is more probable, therefore, namely a posthegemonic
resolution of the crisis leading to new forms of capital restructuring and economic rebalancing in favour of emerging market economies, compensating for (yet potentially accelerating) the decline of the EU and North America as Western economic power is undermined by devaluation, rising debt, unemployment and capital flight. This may or may not herald a new post-Eurocentric ‘global modernity’, as Dirlik (2001) believes – particularly in view of the continuing dependence of China on the US and EU consumer markets (cf. Westra 2012). However, there is evidence to support the view that a recovery of global trade over the next two decades – and thus a continued globalization of capital – is contingent less on a recovery of the West to its former status than on the further penetration of and entanglement of households in emerging market economies by financial instruments and products as capital moves forward to escape its existing spatial and historical limits outside the advanced capitalist states of North America, Japan and Western Europe (Bryan 2012: 173; cf. Harvey 1982).2
