Meaning, dimensions, and why it emerged

• Globalisation: the integration of societies, economies and cultures through technology, communications, trade, and flows of capital and people. The term gained currency in the 1980s, though its roots are older.
• Economic globalisation involves rising global trade, currency exchange, capital movement, technology diffusion, travel, migration and information exchange.

Reasons for emergence

• Technological advance in transport, communication and information technology.
• Liberalisation — post-war efforts including GATT (1947) and its evolution into the WTO.
• Multinational corporations expanding in search of global markets and production sites.
• An ideological shift toward market economies and free trade, seen in China and Eastern Europe.
• Cultural developments — global media, popular culture, and the spread of English (viewed by some as US cultural hegemony).

Neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus

• Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States led the turn to neoliberalism: free markets, deregulation, privatisation, and a smaller state.
• After the Cold War, neoliberal globalisation accelerated under US unipolarity, with the WTO, IMF and World Bank as the coordinating institutions.

The Washington Consensus Codified by John Williamson: liberalisation, privatisation, globalisation — enforced through IMF–World Bank conditionality.

Features of neoliberal globalisation: Trade liberalisation · Financial integration · Privatisation · Technological advance

• Trade liberalisation — lower tariffs, quotas and barriers.
• Financial integration — removal of capital controls, and the rise of global financial markets.
• Privatisation — transfer of public enterprises to private ownership.
• Technological advance — communication and transport gains enabling global supply chains and digital economies.

Views of scholars; winners and losers

• David Harvey (A Brief History of Neoliberalism): a project to restore class power, privileging the market over social needs and deepening income inequality and the exploitation of the Third World.
• Joseph Stiglitz (Globalisation and Its Discontents): it opened growth for some economies but isolated many developing ones, particularly through IMF-imposed structural adjustment.
• Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat): the optimistic reading — globalisation levelled the playing field across trade, technology and culture.
• Jagdish Bhagwati (In Defense of Globalization): India harnessed globalisation well, but its social and environmental costs must not be ignored.
• Samir Amin (Unequal Development): an extension of the neo-colonial accumulation strategy, keeping the periphery subordinate to the core.

Impact on the Global South

• Globalisation catalysed liberalisation and poverty reduction in countries like India and China, but also locked much of the South into a subordinate position dependent on Northern technology, finance and market access.
• Through the 1980s and 1990s, the IMF and World Bank required indebted countries to run Structural Adjustment Programmes — strict fiscal limits, cuts to public spending, privatisation and market opening — which widened social inequity in many nations.

2008, the backlash, and India

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis

• Triggered by the US subprime housing market and market deregulation, it showed that self-regulating markets could fail. Raghuram Rajan (Fault Lines) traced it to global imbalances, financial integration and income disparities.
• Susan Strange had earlier warned of “casino capitalism” and “mad money” — unregulated capital surging in speculative bursts, creating unsustainable bubbles.
• Deeper and more genuinely global than earlier crises and — unlike the Asian or dot-com crises — it originated in the heart of finance capitalism, the United States (Seabrooke and Tsingou).
• It produced political anger against globalisation, a renewed role for the state through stimulus and bank bailouts, and calls for a “new Bretton Woods.” The chief institutional result was the Financial Stability Board (April 2009), successor to the Financial Stability Forum, from the G20 London summit.

Backlash and the return of protectionism

• The 2010s saw a backlash fed by persistent income disparities and cultural and environmental strain.
• Protectionist politics rose with figures like Donald Trump in the United States and the Brexit movement in Britain.
• The US–China trade war (from 2018) challenged free-trade principles and global production networks.
• COVID-19 exposed the fragility of globalised supply chains and reinforced tendencies toward protectionism and self-reliance.

India and globalisation

• India’s integration dates to the 1991 liberalisation, which opened trade, investment and financial markets.
• Gains: high growth on the back of FDI and expanding exports, and a booming IT and software services sector that made India a leading technology and outsourcing hub.
• Exposure: vulnerability to global shocks, from financial downturns to the pandemic. Jagdish Bhagwati praised India’s use of globalisation for growth while warning against neglecting its social and environmental effects.

Challenges to the neoliberal order

• Climate change: neoliberal economics has often sidelined sustainability. Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom) argues for growth that includes environmental concern.
• Digital divide: globalisation has deepened the technological gap, leaving many developing countries struggling to catch up.
• Geopolitical rivalries: China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the rise of BRICS contest Anglo-Saxon globalisation.

Features of global governance — myth or reality?

The trend toward global governance is clearest in economic policy, where interdependence is deepest and the failure of cooperation causes the clearest damage. Andrew Heywood identifies its features:

Features: Polycentrism · Intergovernmentalism · Mixed-actor involvement · Multilevel processes · Deformalisation

• Polycentrism — multiple institutional frameworks rather than a single one.
• Intergovernmentalism — states retain influence; institutions favour consensual decisions and hold weak enforcement powers.
• Mixed-actor involvement — NGOs, TNCs and civil society join states and international organisations, blurring the public–private divide.
• Multilevel processes — municipal to global, with no single level predominant.
• Deformalisation — reliance on norm-based, informal regimes over formal legal bodies.

Myth or reality?

• The liberal case: an irresistible trend. The growth of international organisations both shows a greater willingness to cooperate and builds further cooperation, through trust and rule-governed habits. Heywood notes that, tied to globalisation, its salience may fluctuate but is likely to grow, since interdependence, once established, is hard to reverse.
• Against overstatement: it is more accurate to speak of an emerging governance process than an established system, and its norms are far better rooted in some regions than others. Cooper portrays Europe as the heart of a “postmodern” world for its success in pooling sovereignty — an exception, with much of the world still little affected by international rules, as “rogue” and pariah states show.

From embedded liberalism to neoliberal globalisation

The move from Bretton Woods to the WTO is often read as a shift from embedded liberalism to neoliberal globalisation — with real consequences for development strategy.

• The post-war order paired international cooperation with domestic policy space. Across the 1980s–90s, conditionality tightened and turned outward — fiscal austerity, trade liberalisation and privatisation, summed up as the Washington Consensus.
• Trade governance shifted too: GATT’s MFN and national treatment gave way to the WTO’s binding disciplines under GATS, TRIPS and the DSU. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye frame the result as a “cobweb of interdependence.”
• The development fallout is a trade-off: greater openness, thinner policy space. Keynesian welfare policies and protective tariffs became harder to sustain, and under SAPs the rollback of the state deepened class and regional inequalities.
• The task for development: secure the gains of integration while buffering the loss of policy space and the social costs that come with rule-bound openness.

Latin America and alternatives to the US-led order

Latin America has sought a larger role in a multipolar world, but its diverse economies and unaligned agendas have limited its collective weight.

• The region has long been overshadowed by US dominance. The Monroe Doctrine (1823) still informs US policy, now directed at Chinese investment and Russian ties with Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.
• Its assets — natural resources, cultural diversity, geographic advantage in an era of “nearshoring,” and the absence of inter-state war — are offset by weak governance, inequality, ideological divides and organised crime.
• Mello (2020) describes the OECD as a Western-led vehicle promoting a liberal economic agenda; a larger Latin American presence there is seen as important for engagement with the global economy.
• Rather than Fukuyama’s (1992) “end of history,” analysts describe a transition to a “hot peace” (Parsons, 1995) in which soft power matters amid weak leadership by states and organisations.
• Without a common voice, Latin American states have worked through existing multilateral instruments: the G20, Brazil’s leadership at COP30, Peru’s role in APEC, Colombia’s role in the biodiversity COP, and the Inter-American Development Bank’s coordination of multilateral development banks. The moment of relative multipolarity (Merino, 2016; Acharya et al., 2021) offers an opening to lead new alliances.
• Assessment: the counter-hegemonic push is partial and uneven — a bid for resilience and voice rather than a rupture with the US-led order.

The thread — four strands, one story

• Bretton Woods built the institutions. The CMEA offered an alternative that could not survive its own rigidity. The NIEO named the injustice of the order and pressed for structural change. Globalisation deepened both the gains and the grievances.
• Globalisation and neoliberalism drove the fastest integrated growth in history — and exposed recurring financial crises, environmental damage and widening income disparities that keep the demand for reform alive.
• The Global South is no longer only asking to be included in a system others designed. Through quota reform, alternative banks, and platforms like the G20, it is trying to rewrite the rules.
• The open question for India and the developing world: whether the gains of integration can be secured without bearing the full social and economic cost — a balance Joseph Stiglitz frames as the need to redesign globalisation so that it works for the many rather than the few.