|
GLOBALIZATION Can Africa Learn From East Asia Globalization and African Economies on the verge of the 21 st Century Introduction
n recent years the term globalization as assumed discursive hegemony, eclipsing terms like internationalization and trans-nationalization. Increasingly used by scholars, artists, politicians, businesspeople, and the media to refer to a wide range of complex and contradictory processes and phenomena, it has become a powerful but malleable descriptive vessel that accommodates widely divergent theoretical, empirical, and ideological paradigms, positions, and possibilities. To its triumphalist supporters it is celebrated as inevitable and progressive, indeed, it is seen as marking the ‘end of history,” while its detractors accuse it of reinforcing global economic inequalities, political disenfranchisement, and environment degradation. This paper examines Africa’s encounter with globalization since the 1960s to the present. It is divided into three parts. The first part looks at debates about globalization and the experience of various regions with liberalization and globalization. The second focuses on Africa’s encounter with globalization by examining the patterns African economic development and maldevelopment from the turn of the 1970s when many economies began experiencing recurrent recessions. Specifically, the paper analyzes the emergence of the debt crisis, the imposition and impact of structural adjustment programs, and the politics of resistance against SAPs, which played such a major role in galvanizing struggles against authoritarianism and failed developmentalist paradigms and for democracy. The last part examines the possibilities of constructing democratic development al states in Africa, and Africa’s prospects for economic, political, and social advancement in the face of continuing processes of globalization. Anatomies of Globalization
ebates on globalization have centered on how to characterize and date it, and on delineating its development, impact, and trajectory. Too many writers on the subject, globalization represents and reflects the emergence of an interdependent world generated by the dynamic, technologies, and consciousness of what David Harvey (1989) calls time-space compression and Anthony Giddens (1989) calls time-space distantiation. This brave new world is created by the emergence of new transnational information and computer technologies which tear asunder the spatial-temporal divides and distances of the past and shrink the world into a global village. Globalization, like beauty, seems to mean different things to different beholders. Jeffery Hart and Aseem prakash (1995) isolate five meanings attached to the idea of globalization: existence of a global infrastructure; global harmonization of or convergence of economic policies; borderlessness; global diffusion of initially localized phenomenon and geographical dispersion of core competences. Globalization is seen, variously, as implying the growth of a new global economic, political, and cultural order. Those who focus on its economic dimensions emphasize the development of a new international division of labour. The components of economic globalization are, however, in serious dispute. Conventionally, three key economic indicators are used to demonstrate the increasing globalization of the world economy; the expansion and spread of world trade, foreign direct investment through multinational corporations, and of international capital flows and their unprecedented pattern of integration. The result is that, Gary Gereffi (1997:53) asserts since the 1960s “the world economy has undergone a fundamental shift toward an integrated and coordinated global division of labour in production and trade. Today the most dynamic industries are organized in transnational production systems. . . As almost every factor of production-money, technology, information, and goods-moves effortlessly across border, the very idea of distinct U.S., Japanese, or German economies is virtually meaningless. “Also, the Fordist system of mass production has increasingly been replaced by flexible production in which the organization of work process, labor markets, consumption, education, savings and pensions, and even identities are subject to the unsettling demands of flexibility and its accompanying social insecurities. Globalization, then, is characterized by financial deepening, flexible accumulation, and the emergence of a global market discipline.
ut critics have pointed out the while trade has indeed grown faster than world output since the Second World War, the rate of growth is lower than that experienced between 1880-1913. In fact, today world trade, estimated at 31% of world output, is below the level reached in 1913, which stood at 33%. The relative share of the developed and developing regions has also not changed significantly since the 19th century despite periodic fluctuations and shifts in inter-group trade. Similarly, the proportion of international direct investment as a proportion of international trade does not represent a significant departure from the pattern before the Second World War period. And as James Mittelman (1997:229) reminds us, “the compression of time and space is limited because flows of capital and technology must eventually touch down in distinct places.” The main changes in terms of international trade, argues Ankie Hoogvelt (1997:75), has been towards “a modestly thickening network of economic exchanges within the core, the graduation of a small number of peripheral nations with a comparatively small population base to ‘core’ status, but above all to a declining economic interaction between core and periphery, both relative to aggregate world trade and relative to total populations participating in the thickening network.” There has also been a geographic redirection of foreign direct investment “away form the periphery and into the core of the system” (Hoogvelt, 1997:77). Today, 91.5% of all foreign direct investment goes to only 28% of the world population. What is really new about the financial system is that financial markets have become more integrated. Also, financial speculation has risen to staggering proportions. As the South Center (1995:52) notes wryly, “In 1992, for example, world GDP was $ 64 billion a day, world exports were $10 billion a day and foreign exchange transactions totaled a daily $ 900, billion. “Most of the international financial flows consisted of fictitious capital based on debt and exponential debt creation. Thus, according to these critics globalization does not entails the unprecedented expansion of trade and direct foreign investment and dominance of transitional corporations in world production and trade, let alone the integration of real territorial economies world-wide, rather the integration of global financial markets and the hyper-mobility of speculative capital. Comprehensive analyses of globalization ought to go beyond measuring the flows of trade and capital, and include the flow of other factors of production, such as labor, land in the form of international real estate investments, entrepreneurship, and intellectual property. These flows should be examined at five distinct but interconnected levels: the globe, the international regions, the countries, the industries, and the firms (Hart and Prakash, 1995:16-26). Such analyses will clearly reveal glaring globalization mismatches across factor flows, thus demonstrating the unevenness, incompleteness, and contingent nature of current globalization processes, which may be subject to sudden cessation or even reversals. Some of the debate on globalization centers on the extent to which a new global political and military order has emerged. Few now talk confidently of president Bush’s “New world Order” proclaimed in the heady days immediately following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and fewer believe in Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) hasty declaration that history had ended. Now the voices which were drowned by western triumphalism which cautioned that the new order had not yet been born from the death of the old, are listened to more attentively especially in the aftermath of the East Asian economic meltdown, the Russian implosion, and the stubborn trail of bloodshed, violence, and civil conflicts from Bosnia to Rwanda, all of which have proved impervious to the regulatory capacity of the lone superpower, the United States, or the United nations, or the international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization.
nrepentant neo-Marxists and “Third World” nationalists have long maintained that globalization would lead to global disorder and chaos because of its failure to develop new forms of political and social organization going beyond the nation state; to reconcile the growth of industrialization in parts of the Asian and Latin American periphery with pursuit of global growth; and to develop a relationship, rather than an exclusionary one, with the African periphery with the pursuit of global growth; and to develop a relationship, rather than an exclusionary one, with the African periphery. “This crisis,” argues Samir Amin (1997: 2) “is visible in all regions of the world and in all facets of the political, social and ideological crisis.” Thus instead of encouraging peace and security and international interdependence, globalization is reinforcing inequalities, polarizations, chauvinisms, and conflicts within and among nations. It encourages a widespread but uneven tendency toward decomposition of civil society which, states Robert Cox (1997:27), “is accompanied by a resurgent affirmation of identities (defined by, for example, religion, ethnicity, or gender) and an emphasis locality rather than wider political authorities.” Those who focus on the cultural dimensions and dynamics of globalization seek to map out the cartography of migrations of peoples and cultures, institutions, ideas and imaginations, visions, values, and vices. Largely inspired by cultural studies and postcolonial studies, the discourse on cultural globalism chronicles the emergences of what Appadurai (1996) call ethnoscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes. In these analyses cultural formations is invested with the same flexibilities of post-Fordist production, and so the contingency of contemporary social identities is underlined. The champions of the new era even celebrate the erasure of all essentialisms before the emancipatory propensities of hybridization (Zeleza, 1997). All too often, however, focus is on the spread of northern cultural fads or on the migration of exotic southern tastes to the Northern metro poles. One represents a coca colonization view of cultural globalization and the other an Indian curry veraion of global multiculturalism. Dating globalization has proved particularly vexing. What’s really new about globalization? Is it a polite way of saying imperialism, or the world capitalist system, or western modernization, in these neo-liberal times? Are we dealing with “the old enemy in a new guise? Asks Stuart Hall (1991:30) to neo-Marxists and dependistas, globalization smells too much like the expansion of the age-old world capitalist system, with its insatiable capacity for conquest, domination, exploitation, and the production of inequality, disorder, and crises. But even the skeptics often admit that the world has entered a new phase in the historical process of world capitalist development. This latest stage in capital accumulation began to emerge following the collapse of the Fordist model of production and social welfare in the industrialized countries of the North, the demise of Sovietism and national liberation in the South, and the realignment of regional politics and social systems. So the debate has increasingly centered on the causes and consequences of the transformations encapsulated by the term globalization. Samir Amin(1997:34) believes “globalization is responsible for the erosion of the three subsystems that formed the basis of postwar growth (the national welfare state in the West, the national bourgeois project of Banding in the Third World, and Sovietism in the Eastern bloc.”
lobalization should be understood as a set of processes, whose trajectory is continuous, uncertain, and unpredictable, not the culmination of some predetermined phenomenon. As such, it is premature to talk of a global economy, or global society, although there are ever growing and thickening circuits of globalization. As Sakia Sassen (1998:34) puts it, “we cannot take the existence of a global economic system as a given, but rather we need to examine the particular ways the conditions for economic globalization are produced. “It is a myth to assume that globalization” embodies teleology, or a predetermined logic with an imputed final state – a global village, a worldwide economy, a world government, and so on,” maintains Mittelman (1997:233). It is certainly not “an ineluctable trend, a juggernaut rolling into a new millennium.”
t is often said that there are at least three new elements in the world system: the disappearance of the auto-centered nation-state committed to national development; the disappearance of the auto- centered nation-state committed to national development; the evaporation of the old divide between the industrialized centers and non-industrialized peripheries; and the emergence of new dimensions of integration and polarization based on technological, financial, ecological, media, and military monopolies. The notion that globalization has led to the undifferentiated diminution of state power must be taken with large calabashes of salt. Says Peter Wilkin (1997:24): “The idea that all governments are necessarily powerless to control the forces of capitalism serves only to mystify and mythologize the workings of the world system and to reify the restructuring that has taken place. As is well recognized, it is the South that has suffered the most severely from the global discipline.” It has become common to posit the thesis that the so-called Third World and the cleavages between the developed and under developed countries have decomposed. To quote Hoogvelt (1997:145), “core-periphery is becoming social relationship and no longer a geographical one.” For Gereffi (1997), the simple fact of the matter is that “the classic core-periphery relationship in which the developing nations supplied primary communities to the industrialized countries in exchange foe manufactured goods is outdated.” According to Carline Thomas (1997:3-4), the reason to remap global economic divisions in social rather than territorial terms is that the old North-South formulation “fails to tell us anything about internal entitlement and distribution within these societies … it fails to highlight the existence of a growing South in the ‘North’ . . . Similarly, we are seeing the enrichment of certain classes within the ‘Third world’ countries, and the increasing marginalization of others.” While Gereffi believes the prospects of industrial development for countries in the south are good if they can narrow the productivity gap through attracting foreign investment, local innovation, promotion of triangle manufacturing, and integration into global commodity chains, Hoogvelt is less sanguine. She believes that globalization entails the implosion, not expansion of capitalism, in which the spatial centers of capitalist integration are narrowing and deepening while at the same time large parts of the “Third World” exploitation, though debt peonage, lunched since the late 1970s for the structural irrelevance of these countries. If they were that irrelevant perhaps they would have been left alone. It would appear that central and peripheral places in the spatial economy of global capitalism are being reconfigured, not disappearing, intersecting the new formations with older spatial divisions and hierarchies of accumulation. Hoogvelt’s (1997: Chapter 8) argument that globalization’s pursuit in Africa is exclusion and the containment of anarchy echoes the pervasive western moral condemnation of the South, especially Africa, which “is linked to a retrospective vindication of colonialism,” as Frank Furedi (1997:78) has argued so persuasively.
his lends credence to Tade Aina’s (1996:18-23) contention that much of the discourse on globalization is Eurocentric in that it privileges a particular positioning or understanding which undervalues, ignores or rejects non-European, non-Northern visions and knowledge. Baked by the very global power being studied, these discourses succeed in imposing on the rest of the world, particularly the South, their outlines of the visions and imaginations of the globe. “Consequently, contemporary issues of western intervention in the South are ignored, just as struggles against, and alternatives to the neo-liberal global agenda are often dismissed out of hand, based on the TINA doctrine, that there is no alternative. By Paul Tiymabe Zeleza, Professor of History and African studies, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USATO BE CONTINUED IN THE NEXT ISSUE (African Economist No. 37) CAN AFRICA LEARN FROM EAST ASIA From the 1960s to mid 1990s, East Asia has a remarkable record of high and sustained economic growth, it become a model of development to other developing regions at a length of time. However, a financial crisis hitted East Asia in 1997, and its economy had lashed in a varying degree. It had not break away from the crisis yet. In facing to the big contrast of “unprecedented historical Success” and surprise attack by the crisis, the success of Eastern Asia come under suspicion, even denying the basic experiences of it. Should other developing country still can learn from East Asia, it attracts broader concern by international community now. At the beginning of the 1950s, the economic development level was universally low in Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea. There per capita GNPs were less than US $ 100. Even worse were their shortages of natural resources and capital. Three decades passed, and they experienced fundamental changes. Most of them raised income standards to a medium level, with a few even standing shoulder to shoulder with the developed countries. We can approach their economic successes from the following angles: A continuous and swift increase of output from 1960 to 1990, the annual economic growth rates were as high as 8 percent on average in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan of China. Economic structures experienced fundamental changes. During the transition from a traditional agrarian society to a modern society, the key change in economic stricter is the lowering proportion of agricultural production in the national economy. Agriculture has historically occupied a very important status in the economies of East Asia. But the transition has been completed more quickly in this region than in other developing regions. In 1995, agriculture accounted for 41 percent of gross output in East Asia. This figure dropped to 22 percent in 1988. Accordingly the proportion of labour devoted to agriculture experienced a universal downsizing. Exports increased swiftly and the structure of exported items experienced changes. In 1965, countries and regions in East Asia accounted for 8 percent of world trade exports. In 1990 their share rose to 18 percent. Finished products saw a rising proportion. Education and vocational training were elevated a great degree in terms of quantity and quality. Native experts and technical staff are staffs are created through education. Economic success in East Asia can be attributed to a variety of reasons. However, one key factor is that these countries and areas have adopted development strategies suited to their unique situation and keep the fundamental policies correct. Following correct development strategies after gaining political independence. Third World countries faced the task of choosing correct ways of developing their economies. In order to eradicate poverty as soon as possible, many developing countries turned to the strategies of accelerating industrialization, which
In contrast, the development strategies adopted in East Asia represented another choice. They gave full consideration to their own resource conditions, and by taking advantage of ample labour resources the resulting low labour costs, they developed labour intensive industries as a means of economic take-off. Meanwhile, they adjusted their industrial structures in light of the changing of situations so that achieved good results in their economic development.
Consequently they could control inflation and both domestic and foreign debts to a certain degree. At the same time, they ensured the correctness of their basic policies to enhance the stable rise of agriculture production. At the start of the economic development, many countries transferred surplus resources from agriculture into the development of industry. This was a common practice in East Asia, with the only difference that it was realized under the direction of financial and fiscal systems. Such transfers were placed under limits so that they would not suppress an agricultural growth. Thus they avoided restraining the development of agriculture and also allowed agriculture to play an active role in pushing forward economic growth as a whole.
ver the last three decades, a group of Eastern Asia economy had created a true achievement of economic growth. However, with regard to social and economic development, three is no models were perfect in every way at any time. The imperfect of a system, the faults of policies, guide lines will inevitable result in complications and fluctuates, even cause to a crisis in the process of development and bring along serious failure of economic development. Certainly this is a bad thing; however it reveals issues that need to think about deeply, such as the role of government, the importance of orderly operation and effective financial system for the healthy economic growth, etc. Thus it can be seen that the financial crisis which broke out in Eastern Asia provides with experiences form another angle which is useful for reference to all of us and leads to a more comprehensive understanding about the economic development in East Asia. These experiences are of great value as well. The sustainable and swift economic growth in East Asia has attracted wide attention in Africa, and they believe the successful experiences of East Asia should be followed to development African national economy vigorously.
ver the last three decades, although the development strategies in Africa have been different in forms and under different names, on the whole they were adopted in an excessively fast manner. To seek rapid economic growth, many countries adopted an over-all control policy. Most African countries placed industrial development at the center of their economic development strategy and dismissed agriculture as a minor sector. So far as the allocation of resources is concerned, priority was given to industry, with agriculture being ignored. Such choices, which were not based on their own advantage of resources, have certainly produced contradictions between the shortage of productive elements and the efforts to realize the strategies.
nce a development strategy is chosen, the appropriate policy systems will certainly be formed. So the result of economic development is, to a great degree, decided by whether chosen developmental strategies are correct or not. If only the macroeconomic environment and government policies are considered, never bothering to analyze the good and bad points of the development strategy, an overall ideal of where problems lie is impossible. Adjustment plans thus raised can hardly resolve problems existing in the economies of Africa. In fact, since the 1970s, Africa nations have continuously explored and re-assessed their development strategies, so as to seek out with a unique development pattern suited to Africa. This exploration is still underway. In this regard, African country can give some ideas from the experiences of East Asia. A favorable macroeconomic policy environment is needed to support the practice of comparative advantage development strategies. For this purpose, productive factor markets and finished products markets, which are feasible and fully competitive, must be established, so as to conform to the smooth operation of the market mechanism. Some African countries are making efforts in this direction while adjusting their structure. Meanwhile they should pay special attention to adjusting policies. Agricultural policy since agriculture remains the mainstay of the economy in most African countries, the support of the agricultural in East Asia have shown that with the right agricultural policies and measures, agricultural plays an important role in pushing the national economies forward. Many African countries have improved, to differing degree, in price and the circulation of goods, as will as agricultural tax policies. But there is a long way to go. Improving the management of state assets and raising profits inmost African countries. State enterprises play a significant role in production and employment. However, poor profits and large losses have become an emergent problem facing economic development. Many countries have proposed the privatization of State enterprises. So far, the process has made little progress and has had little effect. In this aspect they still need to explore new methods of reform. Defining government functions either under the marketing economy of the planned economy, government plays a very important role in economic development, only differing in its functions. The experiences in East Asia have indicated that the government should intervene only in the fields where it is needed, leaving markets to operate freely. Only in those fields, such as developing human resources, constructing and protecting infrastructure, environmental protection and so on. Where markets are not able to operate, will the government need to intervene? This will create a stable, sustainable and fair environment for the operating of market mechanisms. Choosing suitable development strategies and forming correct policies, this is a precondition for achieving favorable results, but not the full condition for ideal development. An effective and powerful government is a basic guarantee for the realization of the development aim.
uring the past three years, the African economies have continually risen and the overall situation has been improved. But the adjustment of strategies and improvements in external conditions require time. Africa will be able to step on the path of continuous economic growth only if it undertakes long-term efforts and carries out suitable economic reforms. Q U O T E S Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation.Vladimir Ilyich Lenin The three sources and Three Constituent Parts of Marxism 1913 The corrosive effects of inflation eat away at ties that bind us together as a people. Jimmy Carter Time Mar 26, 1979 |
