The global cultural commons after Cancun: identity, diversity and citizenship

The cultural politics of global trade is a new and unexplored terrain because the public domain of culture has long been associated with national sovereignty. States everywhere have invested heavily in national identity. But in an age of globalization, culture and sovereignty have become more complex propositions, subject to global pressures and national constraints. This paper argues three main points. First, new information technologies increasingly destabilize traditional private sector models for disseminating culture. At the same time, international legal rules have become more restrictive with respect to investment and national treatment, two areas at the heart of cultural policy. Second, Doha has significant implications for the future of the cultural commons. Ongoing negotiations around TRIPS, TRIMS, GATS and dispute settlement will impose new restrictions on public authorities who wish to appropriate culture for a variety of public and private ends. Finally, there is a growing backlash against the WTO’s trade agenda for broadening and deepening disciplines in these areas. These issues have become highly politicized and fractious, and are bound to vex future rounds as the global south, led by Brazil, India and China flexes its diplomatic muscle

Canada’s Resource Curse: Too Much of a Good Thing

Canada has been both blessed and cursed by its vast resource wealth. Immense resource riches send the wrong message to the political class that thinking and planning for tomorrow is unnecessary when record high global prices drive economic development at a frenetic pace. Short-termism, the loss of manufacturing competitiveness ('the Dutch disease') and long term rent-seeking behavior from the corporate sector become, by default, the low policy standard. This article contends that Canada is not a simple offshoot ofAnglo-American, hyper-commercial capitalism, but is subject to the recurring dynamics of social Canada and for this reason the Northern market model of capitalism needs its own theoretical articulation. Its distinguishing characteristic is that there is a large and growing role formixed goods and non-negotiable goods in comparison to the United States even when the proactive role of the Canadian state had its wings clipped to a degree that stunned many observers. The article also examines the uncoupling of the Canadian and U.S. economies driven in part by the global resource boom. The downside of the new staples export strategy is that hundreds of thousands of jobs have disappeared fromOntario and Quebec. Ontario, once the rich "have" province of the Confederation, is now a poor cousin eligible for equalization payments. Unlike earlier waves of deindustrialization, there is little prospect for recovering many of these better paying positions. Without a focused government strategy, the future for Canada's factory economy is grim. The final section addresses the dynamics of growing income polarization and its lessons for the future. With a global slowdown or worse on the horizon, Canada's unique combination of mixed goods and orthodox market-based policies is likely to be unsustainable in its current form. For countries with a similar endowment, the Northern model is unexportable.Canadá ha sido tanto bendecida comomaldecida por la vasta riqueza de sus recursos. Tal riqueza envía el mensaje erróneo a la clase política de que pensar y planear para el mañana es innecesario cuando los precios globales, que se han elevado a niveles récord, llevan al desarrollo económico a un ritmo frenético. El hecho de que el sector corporativo considere los asuntos a corto plazo, junto con la pérdida de la competitividad manufacturera (la enfermedad holandesa) y el comportamiento de buscar una rentabilidad a largo plazo se han convertido en el estándar de la política práctica. Este artículo plantea que Canadá no es sólo una rama del capitalismo hípercomercial angloamericano, sino que es el sujeto de las dinámicas recurrentes del Canadá social y, por esta razón, el norteño modelo de mercado capitalista necesita su propia articulación teórica. Su característica particular es que los bienes mixtos y no negociables tienen un importante papel creciente en comparación con Estados Unidos, incluso cuando el rol proactivo del Estado canadiense ha plegado sus alas hasta el grado de asombrar a varios expertos. Este artículo también examina la disparidad de las economías estadunidense y canadiense, ambas arrastradas en parte por el boom de los recursos globales. El aspecto negativo de la nueva estrategia de exportación (the new staples export strategy) es que han desaparecido cientos de trabajos desde Ontario hasta Quebec. En el primer caso, la que alguna vez fue la provinciamás rica de la confederación ahora es el primo pobre elegible para la igualación de pagos (equalization payments). Adiferencia de las olas anteriores de industrialización, en la actual es poca la perspectiva de recuperar una mejor situación de pagos. Sin una estrategia gubernamental enfocada a ello, el futuro de la economía industrial de Canadá resulta sombrío. La sección final del artículo aborda la polarización de las dinámicas de crecimiento del ingreso y sus lecciones para el futuro. Con una desaceleración económica global, o incluso con algo peor en el horizonte, como la combinación económica única de Canadá de bienes mixtos con una política de mercado ortodoxa, el modelo no es sustentable en su forma actual. Para países que tienen una dotación similar de recursos, el modelo del norte no es exportable

Globalization: is there anything to fear?

Globalization in its many different forms is the last grand narrative of the 20th century. It evokes a universal vision of frictionless adjustment, endlessly innovative corporations, infinite progress and unlimited abundance for all through the power of the world market. What is particular about the latest tidal wave ‘where all are interrelated through the global market' is that it is not a popular force capable of mobilizing millions in the way working class internationalism once did. It is not a foregone conclusion that the global economy will come undone and crash but what is clear is that financial deregulation has gotten out of hand. Despite the triumphant nature of markets in Anglo-Saxon economies that have irreversibly altered the fundaments of economic and social policy management in many jurisdictions, there are still strong grounds for claiming that the world price system does not automatically build a level playing field across nations as its rhetoric claims. So far, the price mechanism has not produced the expected convergence between social market, laissez-faire, developing economics and Asia-Pacific. Governments ought to be highly vigilant in times of speculative booms, quick fixes that turn bad and too much easy money flowing across borders. Significantly, they have misunderstood the importance of the regulatory need to organize the market. The collapse of the miracle economies (once touted to last for decades) -- Mexico in the early 80s and more recently the Asian Tigers along with the former Eastern Bloc countries -- underlines the fragility of the existing order. What the paper demonstrates is that divergence at all levels is increasingly becoming more important as a feature of globalization despite the powerful authority of elite international institutions to move the global agenda towards the market end of the spectrum. The bottom line is that stability at any cost is simply the wrong target. The paper argues the political market for social protection -- jobs and a higher standard of living -- promises to be a more potent force than the most arduous tenants imposed by the dynamics of a laissez-faire globally-directed free trade regime. The question is, can governments and policy experts learn to think in a reasoned and critical way about the limits of global free trade? Or, will they continue to fear what they do not understand, engage in unnecessary risk-taking and be unable to react strategically to such complex changes in the international economy

The political economy of dissent: global publics after Cancun

This paper examines the realignment of forces that derailed the Cancun meeting to broaden and deepen the WTO’s world trade agenda held in September 2003, which according to conventional wisdom was supposed to be a done deal. The growing disjuncture between global cultural flows of people and ideas, and the rules and practices of globalization has created a highly unstable environment with many opportunities but at the same time significant political costs. Regardless of what EU and US may admit in public, at Cancun global dissent and its publics acquired visible agenda-setting power. The growth in influence of the ‘nixers’ and ‘fixers’ has contributed to a tectonic shift in the international economy that has immediate and far-reaching consequences for destabilizing globalization and its narrow economic agenda. The second argument is that global cultural flows of ideas, texts and wealth have deepened the global environment of dissent at the WTO. Many of these flows are the consequence of free trade itself. They have accelerated as economic barriers have fallen facilitating the movement of ideas, people and texts driven by new technologies and the appetite for mass culture. Increased trade has increased cultural interaction globally. These concentrated movements of peoples and ideas beget other flows triggering a cyclical movement of dissent and are highly disjunctive for the goals of economic globalization. When these global cultural flows function as catalysts for change, they become both a conduit and channel for the global movement of social forces. They set new agendas and, it is this agenda-setting capacity that challenges state authority globally no less locally. So far there is no single over-riding vision that addresses the collective problem of diversity at the global level. Nonetheless, the global dissent movement intends to have a prominent role in defining public culture and in shaping it in inherently democratic ways

Reform at the top: What’s next for the WTO? A second life? A socio-political analysis

A fundamental change is taking place in the global economy, and the standoff in the Doha Round has raised many questions about the World Trade Organization’s troubled architecture (Khor, 2009). So far, the quest for renewed policy coherence in the rules-based multilateral system has produced stalemate rather than reform. The analysis that follows explores the proposition that, without the metaphoric ‘knife at its throat’ to shock it to its senses, the WTO will continue in the short term to be trapped by its existing architecture. There is no coherent reform-minded movement supported by a critical number of states to instigate a change in the way the WTO does business. The paper looks at the following idea: with many states pursuing new policy frames to enhance their strategic interests, the second life of the WTO will be dramatically different from the present configuration. A lengthy trade pause is a certainty. Four options of what the WTO will become are examined. The conclusion is that as a governance body the WTO faces gradual and likely irreversible decline. It will have a smaller remit, be prone to mini-multilateralism and have to learn to live with a proliferation of regional trade agreements

The short but significant life of the International Trade Organization: lessons for our time

Along with the World Bank and the IMF, the International Trade Organization (ITO) formed the centrepiece of new kind of international organization in the late 40s. At the time, what was particularly novel about the Havana Charter was that it was not simply or mainly a trade organization like the WTO, its latter day descendent. At its core, the countries of the world rejected the idea that it was possible to maintain a firewall between trade, development, employment standards and domestic policy. Its most distinctive feature was the integration of an ambitious and successful program to reduce traditional trade barriers, with a wide-angled agreement that addressed investment, employment standards, development, business monopolies and the like. It pioneered the idea that trade disputes had to be settled by consultation and mediation rather than with legal clout. Further it established an institutional linkage between trade and labour standards that would effect a major advance in global governance. Finally it embedded the full employment obligation, along with "a commitment to free markets" as the cornerstone of multilateralism. Despite these accomplishments, the US Congress refused to ratify the Havana Charter even though it had signed it. As a direct consequence, the ITO's collapse represented a significant closure of the full employment era internationally. In the end, it's demise made possible the rapid return of the free trade canon that increasingly, would impose its authority and ideology on all international organizations and on the practice of multilateralism. As this essay concludes, its history compelling because whatever its apparent shortcomings, governments, economists and ordinary people demanded that trade, employment goals and developmental needs should reinforce each other in the world trading system

The New Fordism in Canada: Capital\u27s Offensive, Labour\u27s Opportunity

The breakdown in the links of mass production and mass consumption poses problems throughout the advanced industrial world. In each nation-state the ensuing struggles will take different forms. In postwar Canada, the link between mass consumption and mass production did not lead to the same kind of trade union participation in decision-making as it did in much of Europe. Workers were unable to establish embedded rights of worker participation. What was known as the fordist model in Europe did not have deep roots in Canada. Canadian workers are now being attacked by employers whose bargaining powers were never seriously blunted, aided by a state which has never had to accord even a junior partnership role to organized labour. The arrival of the new technologies is not likely to lead to more enriching work or better pay conditions for much of the workforce given the logic of the imperatives of an export-led growth economy in which state planning takes the form of encouraging private ordering. This paper concludes by looking at some ways by which Canadian workers may be able to resist the downward pressure on wages and working conditions created by employers seeking to take advantage of their newfound power

Back to Basics: A Post Crisis View of Globalization

States respond to globalization pressures in such different ways that there is no single rationality evident despite the power of markets to decenter governments everywhere. Three decades ago the great globalization narrative entered the popular mind as an over-deterministic belief that it was principally an economic phenomenon. A more realistic view is that globalization had overlapping multiple dimensions. Its trajectory began with the globalization of finance and capital, and then extended..

The European Debt Crisis: Incremental Reform, Austerity, and Institutional Failure

This article focuses on the way a crisis needs an institutional actor and champion. Through painfully slow intervention and muddling through, the European Central Bank (ECB) created new policy space for a European financial and banking system that was on the point of collapse. However, the institutional commitment to austerity and deep cuts to state spending have pushed the goal of a stronger federal union farther away than ever. This article examines the strengths and limitations of institutional “ad hocery” of making policy on the go. It also has a comparative examination of the Canadian experience with policy ad hocery during Canada's long-running constitutional wars between 1960 and 2000. In the end, Ottawa's strategy left the Canadian federal union decentralized and much more fragile. It makes the case that despite the accomplishment of keeping European capitalism afloat with massive and repeated bailouts of public money, the worst-case scenario facing the Eurozone of some kind of collapse in the near future is still on the table