Contents

Page No.
Introduction 3
Globalisation and European integration as contested discursive fields 3

Globalisation as discourse; globalisation as rhetoric 4

Globalisation as external economic constraint 5

Globalisation and European Integration 6

References 9

Word Count: 3153

 Management in the Wider Environment

Introductions

While studies of globalisation proliferate in the social sciences, we remain relatively under-
informed about discourses of globalisation and associated issues of power and knowledge.
These issues come to the fore in the light of the intensive deployment of particular rhetorics
of globalisation and European integration within policy-making, journalistic and corporate
communities. This tendency has been pronounced in Western Europe during recent years.
For example, it has become something of a popular truism that globalisation spells the demise
of the era of inclusive social provision in Europe. With increasing interdependence and
heightened competition amongst nations, it is frequently assumed that the welfare state of the
post-war period has been rendered an indulgent luxury. Similarly in European Union policy
circles, we find the argument that globalisation presents a series of devastating challenges to
established national modes of governance and moreover that a neoliberal variant of
integration is the most viable form of engagement with the new global economic imperatives.
While such assertions are manifestly vulnerable to empirical challenge, it is also evident that
forms of welfare retrenchment and market-driven expressions of integration and
‘Europeanization’ are continuing apace.

Within the European Commission, there is evidence to suggest that common understandings
of globalisation can be quite consistent with distinct conceptions of the capacity to exercise
meaningful agency as actors take up quite different ‘subject positions’ in relation to
globalisation (Rosamond, 1999; 2000b).

Globalisation and European integration as contested discursive fields

Thus far we have tended to assume that there is a single, hegemonic and largely unquestioned
conception of globalisation present and prevalent within contemporary Western Europe.
Whilst the essentially neoliberal and market-conforming conception of globalisation as an
external economic constraint is certainly the dominant one, it is by no means the only one.
Indeed, as Ben Clift has recently suggested, the future of the European social model may turn
on contested conceptions of “the implications of globalisation for social democratic

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egalitarianism (and in turn redistribution) and for the role of the state in the economy”
(2000a: 67). It is thus important that in the sections which follow we turn our attention to
alternative constructions of globalisation and, from those, to something already alluded to —
namely, the appeal to European integration (or ‘Europeanisation’) rather than globalisation as
an alternative and largely external economic constraint. We examine each family of
discourses comparatively, drawing on cases from current ESRC funded research conducted
under the One Europe or Several Programme.

Globalisation as discourse; globalisation as rhetoric

Thus far we have tended to look exclusively at ideas about globalisation as discourse. By this
we refer to way in which globalisation has come to provide a cognitive filter, frame or
conceptual lens or paradigm through which social, political and economic developments
might be ordered, narrated and rendered intelligible. To identify discourses of globalisation
is, then, to point to the existence of structured sets of ideas, often in the form of implicit and
sedimented assumptions, upon which actors might draw in formulating strategy and, indeed,
in legitimating strategy pursued for quite distinct ends (Hay 1999a). In this sense, discourses
of globalisation exist independently of the actors who draw upon them. They provide, as it
were, an ideational context — a repertoire of discursive resources in the form of available
narratives and understandings at the disposal of (here) political actors. Our use of the term
discourse refers, then, to the organisation of meaning through dominant forms of knowledge.
These are, in turn, linked to broader matrices of social practice. In developing a discourse
analytical approach, our concern is to understand how actors develop and draw upon
“interpretative schemes and shared worlds of meaning in the reproduction of discursive
structures and legitimation” (Jabri 1996: 94). As some other students of globalisation
discourse have noted: “discourses provide an arena within which people take up subject
positions and identities, create relations to one another and construct worldviews. From this
perspective, a major characteristic of discourses is their ability to map out what can be said,
though and done about different aspects of life – discourses generate ‘effects of truth’”
(Hansen, Salskov-Iversen and Bislev 2000: 5).

As this would suggest, an analysis which confines itself exclusively to discourses of

globalisation is overly structural, giving insufficient attention to the active and frequently
creative role of agents in the formulation of ideas which may become sedimented as
discourse. It is actors, after all, who fashion understandings and offer legitimations of their
conduct, even if they do so in discursive circumstances which are not of their own choosing.
Control over knowledge about globalisation is an issue of the highest stakes. This brings us to
discourse as rhetoric. By this we refer to the strategic and persuasive deployment of such
discourses, often in combination as means to legitimate specific course of action, policy
initiatives etc. (see also Rosamond 1999, 2000b). It is to the specific relationship between
discourses and rhetorics of globalisation that we turn in the following pages. We begin by
attempting to map the field of discourses of globalisation in contemporary Europe, albeit in a
somewhat stylised manner and at the risk of some simplification, by identifying four
alternative discourses of globalisation.

Globalisation as external economic constraint

This, as we have suggested throughout, is the dominant conception of globalisation today. It

associates globalisation with the near perfect mobility of capital (and, in some accounts, all
factors of production) and with a variety of attendant economic imperatives for state actors.
It implies and assumes a world of rigorous tax competition lubricated by flows of capital, of
an intense struggle for locational competitiveness secured principally on the basis of cost
reductions, welfare retrenchment, labour market flexibilisation and the removal of supply-
side rigidities “The economy is becoming ever more global. Trade is growing at twice the
speed of production. British Airways does its backroom work in Bombay, while a baker in
South Yorkshire is taking on fifty new staff because his baguettes are selling so well in
France. Yesterday’s solutions will not work for tomorrow” (speech to the Institute of
European Affairs, Dublin, 3 November 1997).

Globalisation as the threat of homogenisation

If the first (and still dominant) discourse presents globalisation as an opportunity for those
prepared to adapt themselves to its logic of economic compulsion, then the second presents
an altogether different image. Globalisation is again presented as an ongoing, indeed largely
inexorable, process of economic change. Yet where the first discourse concerns itself
primarily with the political consequences which, broadly speaking, it welcomes and

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enthusiastically embraces, the second associates globalisation with pervasive cultural flows
which threaten to dissolve national distinctiveness. Globalisation produces not diversity,
heterogeneity and the crossfertilisation of cultures liberated from spatial confines (as in some
triumphalist accounts), but precisely the converse — the tyranny of a largely American
cultural imperialism. Such a conception of globalisation as a colonising imperialism is
increasingly influential in France and has come to be associated with a distinctive anti-
globalisation movement, spanning sheep farmer, José Bové’s Confédération Paysannes,
Charles Pasqua’s new ‘souverainiste’ party of the right, the Ressemblement pour la France,
and a host of new social movements and antiglobalisation protesters whose intellectual
leadership comes from the likes of Pierre Bourdieu and Viviane Forrester. Yet, this discourse
is unlikely to remain on the margins of French political debate. For, due to its clear popular
resonances, such anti-American, anti-imperalist sentiment is increasingly being taken up by
both Jospin and Chirac who feel the need to woo the anti-globalisation movement in the long
run-up to a likely presidential election in 2002. The discourse itself is well-illustrated in Le
Monde which, in a recent editorial (entitled ‘Vive le Roquefort libre?’), entreated its readers
that “resistance to the hegemonic pretences of hamburgers is, above all, a cultural
imperative”, going on to note “McDonald’s red and yellow ensign is the new version of
America’s star-spangled banner, whose commercial hegemony threatens agriculture and
whose cultural hegemony insidiously ruins alimentary behaviour — sacred reflections of
French identity” (cited in Meunier 2000: 107).

Globalisation and European Integration

As the above discussion suggests, where external economic constraints are appealed to, these
are not always associated with globalisation. In a number of contemporary European
contexts, it is the process of European integration (often in the immediate form of the
Maastricht convergence criteria) which are (or have been) invoked as the proximate cause of
often painful social and economic reforms elsewhere legitimated in terms of globalisation
(Hay, Watson and Wincott 1999).11 Of course, whether to appeal to external economic
constraints (whether genuinely or disingenuously acknowledged) is itself a political choice.12
The clear benefit in so doing is to displace responsibility for otherwise unpalatable reforms.
These might be rendered more acceptable if presented either as a contribution towards a more
general and beneficial outcome (such as membership of the Single European Currency) or as
the very condition of continued economic growth in a harsh economic environment no longer
conducive to the social cohesion and political generosity of a bygone era (as in appeals to
globalisation).

In an obvious sense there are clear benefits for public policy-makers seeking legitimation for
potentially unpopular reforms in the rhetorical strategy of appealing to transnational
processes beyond their ability to control. Yet at the same time there are trade-offs, since
there is also clear political capital to be gained (or retained) from maintaining the perceived
capacity to shape political and economic processes (whether domestic or transnational). This
trade-off is particularly stark for economies, such as France, Germany and, possibly, Britain
whose governments might plausibly claim a capacity to influence, even to shape, the process
of European integration. In seeking to justify to their electorates reforms which are likely to
prove both politically contentious and socially divisive, do they invoke external economic
constraints (such as globalisation) over which they can legitimately claim no decisive
influence or do they appeal to constraints (such as European integration) in whose authorship
they would claim a key part?

This is, in the end, an empirical question. In the following paragraphs we explore the
rhetorical appeal to both globalisation and European integration as external constraints and as
contingent political projects in Britain, France, Germany and Italy in recent years. We
summarise and attempt to map schematically the use made of such rhetorical strategies.

The British case is, in many respects, the least interesting and certainly the one about which
most has been written. Even here, however, there have been important recent developments,
as alluded to above. Unremarkably, given Britain’s historical, enduring and pervasive
ambivalence about the process of European integration (spanning both major political
parties), external economic imperatives are invariably invoked in terms of globalisation and
not European integration. Indeed, arguably, New Labour’s modernising agenda — first for
the party, then for the nation — has been premised and publicly predicated upon a discourse
of the logic of economic constraint which globalisation is held to summon (Hay 1999b; Hay
and Watson 1998). This has been used to legitimate domestic reforms such as a series of
measures (ostensibly) designed to promote competence and transparency in monetary policy,
labour market flexibility, human capital formation and welfare-to-work. Yet increasingly it
has also motivated a concerted effort to export this ‘third way’ model to the continent such

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that it might in turn come to modernise the European social model, rendering it appropriate
for the new economic realities of a global information age. This, at least, is how the
government would wish to present the Lisbon Special European Council of March 2000 and,
indeed, the agenda carried forward to Stockholm. Whilst seeking to export the (perceived)
imperatives of globalisation to continental Europe in the form of the third way, the Blair
government has recently started to display a rather self-contradictory and Janus-faced
approach to globalisation. For, whilst powerfully and passionately presenting globalisation
as an inexorable and distinctly non-negotiable ‘logic of no alternative’ for both domestic and
European audiences, in a range of recent international fora it has increasingly felt the need to
defend the ‘benefits’ of what is now presented as a rather more contingent process from its
many detractors. The incommensurability of such rhetorics suggests a highly strategic appeal
to globalisation, as suggested above (see also note 16; Hay 2001c).
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