| Abstract: | Globalisation, in both the popular and academic vernacular, is presented as a non-negotiable external economic constraint, which must simply be accommodated. Consequently, it is a process whose content, nature and consequences are not amenable--either in practice or in principle--to political, far less democratic, deliberation. It is not at all surprising, then, that the invocation of globalisation should be associated with the logic of economic compulsion and the absence of political choice. This paper argues that the perception of the non-negotiable character of globalisation is both misleading and, at the same time, intimately connected to its depiction as a causal 'process without a subject'. For it is only by failing to specify the mechanisms of complex change, in which agents are necessarily implicated, that generic and agentless processes such as globalisation acquire their necessitarian, non-negotiable and apolitical character. Restoring subjects to the process of globalisation and assessing the extent to which their behaviour is informed by constructions of globalisation are urgent challenges for critical political analysts. They are crucial to the broader task of demystifying globalisation, of holding it open to democratic political scrutiny and, in so doing, of challenging its perceived logic of no alternative. If we are to do this, we must develop an account of globalisation capable of acknowledging and incorporating a dynamic understanding of the relationship between conduct and context, and the material and the ideational. In short, if the character, content and consequences of the process of globalisation are to be held to account, we must first restore agents to this process without a subject and politics to this logic of economic compulsion. |
