Stranger Than Paradise：Reconceptualizing Globalization

Introduction: Why Post-globalization?

by Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao

Globalization was once touted as the end of everything backward and small-minded. Francis Fukuyama even predicted that after the end the neoliberal order will prevail forever. And gurus like Arjun Appadurai have announced that in the world of globalization every place and everyone will become postnational, which is a different way of saying a happy new order has arrived. The “living happily forever” scenario thus tacitly affirms the power of neoliberal globalization, which is based on free trade and advocates a culture featuring the “freedom” of everything from the capital to the human being.

But then all of sudden, the world has become neo-illiberal overnight! One of the symptoms is that protectionism seems to have increasingly become the rule rather than the exception in the American trade practice (and the EU is following suit) and the shadow of trade war looms large. More ominously, the rise of the far-right have become rampant in both the US and the EU. It is as if we had been flown back to future where everything has a tinge of déjà vu. The fall of the Berlin wall prompted Jean Baudrillard to speculate that, without a clear demarcation like the Berlin Wall between the West and the bad guys, the former would have to identify the latter within their own territory and would be dogged by an anxiety that the enemy is everywhere but nowhere to be found. Now they have finally identified the enemies.

What went awry with “globalization”? That which we have called globalization is actually neoliberal globalization, which however has been construed as if it was destiny for the world because for its supporters there did not seem to be a better alternative, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It would not only not end, but has no loopholes nor glitches because the market would regulate itself. The sense that rainy days will never come was due to the belief in “market fundamentalism,” which means as long as the West adheres to free trade, nothing would go wrong as it is the magic formula of neoliberalism.

However, the series of financial crises beginning with the Mexican Crisis in 1994, followed by the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, and culminating in the 2008 global financial meltdown showed that the neoliberal globalization was no longer the panacea that it claimed itself to be, but is itself the problem. The 2008 crisis especially caused the slowing down of cross-border finance and signaled the beginning of the end of economic globalization. Even though losers of neoliberal globalization are everywhere and anti-globalization movements covered all kinds of different ideologies, the most aggressive practice, which also happens to be the most reactionary as well, is surprisingly found in the first world countries, which had most ardently promoted neoliberal globalization. The populist backlash compelled the leaders of the neoliberal order to respond and resulted in the Brexit, and the protectionist policies of the Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s presidencies.

The reason that the West, especially the US, reacted so strongly to the malfunctioning of neoliberal globalization is that its smooth operation is premised on Pax Americana or American protection. In other words, the expansion of US power is at the heart of neoliberal globalization and therefore American interests cohere seamlessly with the neoliberal order. We can even go so far to say that major decisions that impact the neoliberal order were formed by IMF and the US Treasury. This is fully borne out by what George Soros was quoted as saying on June 11, 2002, less than four months before the first round of Brazilian presidential election, “In ancient Rome only the Romans voted. In the modern capitalist system, only the United States vote. The Brazilians don’t vote.” Thus, when the order continues to allow the 1% to see their wealth continue to accumulate and swell while the rest of the population did not groan, then Pax Americana is not challenged. But when it became clear that the tide was not able lift all the boats in the more globalized Western societies (let alone the less globalized ones), a populist backlash was bound to happen as the masses there felt the sting most acutely, being used to an affluent lifestyle and having the most to lose. As a result, for them enemies had to be found and fended off again.

But in fact for the leadership of the founding members of neoliberal globalization, the true worry is not the sufferings of the majority of the population, but the fact that the elites of the West can no longer stay on top of things and maximize their profit. When globalization is good for the West in general and the US in particular, then the world should be globalized at all cost. But when globalization puts the West at a disadvantage, then it becomes simply an easy conduit for the transmission of evil (“For make no mistake,” said Barack Obama concluding his speech after receiving his Nobel Peace Award in 2009, “Evil does exist in the world.”), not only evil ideas and evil products, but evil migrants that contaminate the noble blood of the white men. And these leaders unanimously believe that, rather than there being a systemic fault in the neoliberal order, all woes are being produced due to the fact that “evil” has infiltrated the nation: both the immigrants and China.

Thus, the sense of desperation revealed in these attempts to exorcise the Other has everything to do with the consistent decline of the West, most obviously seen in the downward spiraling brought about by economic globalization. The exorcism has become all the more urgent in view of the recent rise of China, with its technological breakthroughs and newly-gained economic prowess as shown in their domination in solar panels, EVs, batteries, ship-building, bullet trains as well as in many other areas and scrambled to cope with this new reality. But in fact, what the imagined China threat reveals is more of an unwillingness on the part of the West to share the world’s wealth with a new comer, one that is perceived to pertain to a lower cultural status to which à la Kant “hospitality” should not be extended. As a result, the failure of this current globalization seems ominously imminent.

But is neoliberal globalization really ending? Not just yet. For both the nations at the center of the neoliberal globalization networks and those on the margins have developed a tremendous dependence on these networks. Neoliberal globalization is almost like a narcotic drug for the elites of both parts of the world. With neoliberal globalization the former continues to siphon off massive profits via transnational business activities despite feeling uneasy about its “loopholes” while the ruling class of the latter cannot stop getting high on neoliberal bread crumbs. The general population everywhere gets a different kind of opium which is “lifestyle” whose seductions is irresistible due to its emphasis on “individual freedom” and has been successfully utilized by the elites of the developed nations as a magic button to rally the masses. That illusion of freedom was meant to cover over the lack of social justice and would continue to hold down the masses until the day when they no longer have the little resource they had to enjoy that “freedom.” Juding from the worsening gap between the haves and the have-nots globally, it would not be long before that day arrives.

In fact, the seduction of lifestyle to the general population is almost as strong as the seduction of money to the elites both in the developed countries and elsewhere. This new lifestyle came about with the “New York” counterrevolution in the 1970s where the idea of “individual freedom” was employed by the financial establishment to undermine the Left’s fight for “social justice.” What David Harvey calls the “long march” of neoliberal ideas through institutions such as the universities, schools, churches, and professional associations “created a climate of opinion in support of neoliberalism as the exclusive guarantor of freedom.” And the symptom of this climate was most clearly epitomized by New York’s “avant-garde” culture.

Even though avant-garde art was already making splashes in Europe before the WWI, it was stunted by the two consecutive wars and further sidelined by the Left after WWII. It however became “official culture” after being assimilated and gentrified by the New York cultural scene. This was because, in Harvey’s words, “Neoliberalization required both politically and economically the construction of a neoliberal market-based populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism.” The project led eventually to a “neoliberalization of culture” where there developed a semblance of avant-gardism which was famously called “delirious New York” by Rem Koolhas. This semblance of avant-garde culture became a vanguard for the then burgeoning neoliberal culture, later known as “postmodernism,” which was then disseminated all over the world and has been holding in thrall the masses everywhere. And it does not yet seem to have waned across the globe, compared to the economic globalization, which is being increasingly disrupted in actual practice by the governments of the West.

So far, the dominant conceptualization of globalization of culture has more or less assumed that the global (in fact Western-centric and in particular American-centric) culture’s domination will, as mentioned earlier, never end. And it therefore celebrates “hybridization,” “glocalization” or “creolization” of global culture and local culture almost unconditionally, believing that this is the only strategy of which local cultures can avail themselves. But what is lacking in this “global mélange”theory are two interrelated misconceptions: first, it assumes the global is universal whereas the local is particular; second, it turns a blind eye to the power relations between the metropolitan culture(s) and the marginal ones and sees the status quo as natural.

The mélange theory of cultural globalization and the perception of neoliberal globalization as destiny are two sides of one fiction concocted by the powers that be, the core countries riding on the flow of capital, with the US at the helm. With the help of institutions of neoliberal globalization such as WTO, the World Bank and IMF, this fiction was meant to subject the non-Western countries by means both of unchallenged economic superiority and cultural hegemony. As a result, though mindlessly celebrated as producing beneficial interbreeding of cultures, this kind of globalized culture tilts strongly toward American-inflected Westernization, what George Ritzer calls “McDonaldization,” which cannot but be understood as a new form of colonialism, coterminous with the Pax Americana, the guarantor of free trade.

It seems that the nonsynchronicity between this addiction to the lifestyle of neoliberal globalization and the failing of the neoliberal order has delayed the possibility of finding a substitute for neoliberal globalization. For the illusion created by the former manages to justify hanging on to the latter. But redressing the failure of neoliberal globalization cannot wait. If we look back at recent history, the failure of the first globalization, whose economic interdependence was believed to be a protective shield to wars, actually led to the two world wars, due to unabated competition for resources between the European powers. Would the collapse of the current globalization then lead to another war? James MacDonald insinuates such a scenario. And the facts on the ground seem to corroborate what he thinks.

But war is just one of the consequences of the doomed neoliberal globalization. When culture is left to the whims of the market (eulogized as “freedom”), it forms a conspiratorial relationship with neoliberal practices and help multiple its effects exponentially and eventually naturalize everything produced by it. The consequences are that there is little sense of ethics and morality left and it has become difficult to talk about accountability. The neoliberal lifestyle has been so seamlessly integrated with the flow of capital that it is contributing crucially to almost every current natural and socio-political ill in the Anthropocene and is pushing the world relentlessly closer to the Technocene.

Thus, we are in dire need of reforming the current understanding and form of globalization. First of all, a progressive transformation of the existing institutions and networks is imperative in order to relieve the world’s majority of countries of the “golden straightjacket” called neoliberal globalization, which does not deliver. But expunging the cultural opium provided by neoliberal globalization is perhaps even more fundamental. In other words, it has to be laid bare that the neoliberal lifestyle is not only just one possible route but one that is indeed neocolonial so that the zombie like moving forward of neoliberal globalization can be somehow halted and re-routed.

Thus, while admitting that cultures are constantly interacting and interbreeding with each other, adopting a laissez-faire attitude toward power relations in cultural globalization however is cultural suicide, which would in turn further hamper social as well as environmental justice. For without robust local cultures, which Walter Mignolo calls “exteriority of modernity” and identifies as the site of resistance to neoliberal globalization, the possibility of redressing its ills, and better still, ending its domination, would be tremendously reduced. While neoliberal globalization is a Western-centric and Capital-driven neocolonialism disguised as cosmopolitanism, the remedy to it is nothing but a new form of cosmopolitanism that can truly extend hospitality to all nations on earth. That is what Mignolo calls “critical cosmopolitanism” where all nations can carry out dialogues on an equal footing. Such a cosmopolitanism would have to rely on the “exteriority of modernity” for ways of thinking that could offer alternatives to neoliberal globalization and thereby help ameliorate the planetary catastrophes engendered by modernity and tremendously aggravated by its recent incarnation called neoliberal globalization, such as the threat of a new world war, the Anthropocene and maybe even an unwitting Technocene resultant from the unregulated development of AI.

The modest aim of this volume therefore is to critically reflect on the culture of globalization on all levels—existential, national and transnational, and from different disciplinary angles with a view to providing integrated perspectives on how neoliberal globalization could be redressed. It is divided into three sections which correspond to the three levels.

In the first section, Luis Oosterbeek leads us to look at global warming from a longue durée perspective where global warming and cooling alternated in human history and encourage us to avoid anthropocentric interpretations of climate change as well as excessively global responses to it. David Goldberg reflects on a profound sense of social unsettlement he calls “dread” that has recently seized us. what resulted in this odd feeling is among other things algorithmic technopticon that prevents one from having an “engaged being-, doing-, and achieving-in-common” (see p. 45). It can only be redressed by concerted efforts at reconstructing an ecology of caretaking in order to wrestle away from the control mechanisms of neoliberalism. Ian Buchanan reflects on the aquarium’s machinic quality in relation to its function to endear us to aquatic life and help with environmental conservation. Despite aquariums largely belonging in the private sector, it is imperative to develop a critical global discourse on the aquarium to counter the “responsiblization” of neoliberal globalization by means of which the operations of capitalism are hidden.

In the Second section, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee investigates how the Cold War distorted Korea’s reception of Jean-Paul Sartre and other Western thoughts and how that affected the course of literary development. Underlying this distortion was the global crisis of capitalism which drove the Western bloc to encourage the prioritization of national interests over international collaborations, thereby consolidating neoliberal globalization. Alain Brossat argues that Taiwan’s policy of “bilingualism,” which, albeit having partially adopted a rhetoric of linguistic progressivism in regard to domestic languages, was actually inspired by the cult of “Anglo-American hegemony,” a de-sinicizing project that intends to bind Taiwan to neoliberal globalization in a geopolitical gesture of submission. The policy’s utilitarian approach to English as a business tool overlooks its neocolonial baggage and stifles the potential of cultural dissent. Dana Powell and Earl Tulley examine the “syndemic” situation of the Navajo Nation where several disasters combine to afflict the indigenous people by highlighting how the indigenous plight was caused and is consistently aggravated by the entrenched settler-colonialist system, which is closely connected to “global imperial designs” implemented by transnational corporations.

In the third section, Galin Tihanov reflects on the phenomenon of resistance toward theory by highlighting the Western origins of the universal pretensions of the theories we have been using. His arguments centers on the need to position oneself at the margins to see that cosmopolitanism promoted by the West is but a “thinly disguised tool of Western culture, an instrument of domination and suppression of smaller cultures” (see p. 153). What needs to be done is to switch to a system of participatory knowledge where poetics could substitute theory as a pragmatic way of approaching literature. Camilo Pérez-Bustillo looks at the plight of Latin American migrants by driving home the point that the real problem is colonialism and its contemporary neoliberal expression. Created randomly and at the expense of the indigenous peoples by the colonial powers, the nation-states in Latin America have not treated the indigenous peoples as well as people of African descent as subjects. To tackle the phenomenon of migrants at its root, the system has to recognize and implement the “full range of indigenous people’s rights of autonomy and self-determination” (see p. 175). William Callahan presents his theorization about visual politics which emphasizes how a picture or any other multisensory presentation for that matter is rendered so that its affect elicits desired effects from the audience. Coming from a background in Chinese and Asian politics, his theory about visual politics also questions “Western universals” by disrupting “historically contingent accepted knowledge practices” (see p. 205).

Introduction: Why Post-globalization?

by Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao

Globalization was once touted as the end of everything backward and small-minded. Francis Fukuyama even predicted that after the end the neoliberal order will prevail forever. And gurus like Arjun Appadurai have announced that in the world of globalization every place and everyone will become postnational, which is a different way of saying a happy new order has arrived. The “living happily forever” scenario thus tacitly a...

Series Preface / Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao
Introduction: Why Post-globalization? / Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao

Part I　Surviving Globalization

From Global Warming into a New Ice Age? Climate, Adaptation and Examples from the Past / Luiz Oosterbeek
States of Dread / David Theo Goldberg
Towards A Global Aquarium Studies / Ian Buchanan

Part II　(Mis)Imagining the Nation

Existential Distortion: Korean Literature and the National Question / Alex Taek-Gwang Lee
The Dead End of "Bilingualism" / Alain Brossat
Climate Change in a Time of COVID-19: Living and Transforming the Syndemic in the Navajo Nation / Dana E. Powell with Earl Tulley

Part III　Re-encountering Transnationality

Exilic Inscriptions: Migration and the Resistance to (World) Theory / Galin Tihanov
Peoples in Movement: Migrants, Indigenous Peoples, and Transitional Justice
in Contemporary Latin America / Camilo Pérez-Bustillo
Visualizing International Relations: A Manifesto / William A. Callahan
Contributors

Series Preface / Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao
Introduction: Why Post-globalization? / Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao

Part I　Surviving Globalization

From Global Warming into a New Ice Age? Climate, Adaptation and Examples from the Past / Luiz Oosterbeek
States of Dread / David Theo Goldberg
Towards A Global Aquarium Studies / Ian Buchanan

Part II　(Mis)Imagining the Nation

Existential Distortion: Korean Literature and the National Question / Alex Taek-Gwang Lee
The Dead End of "Bilingualis...