’Globalisation’ is a hotly contested terrain. It evokes a bewildering
variety of views and opinions as regards its meaning, implications,
prospects and desirability. While the term itself gained currency in
the eighties, it became very much a part of the common vocabulary with
the path breaking massive protests against globalisation led by a wide
spectrum loose coalition - comprising anarchists, socialists,
feminists, environmentalists, trade unionists, rights activists
fighting for gay-lesbians, homeless, migrants, indigenous peoples and
so on and so forth from all over the world, in Seattle on November 30,
1999, when protesters blocked delegates’ entrance to WTO meetings. The
protests forced the cancellation of the opening ceremonies and lasted
the length of the meeting until December 3. To tackle the protesters
the city was put under curfew. The Seattle protests were preceded by a
string of similar protests on the preceding June 18 in a number of
cities around the world, particularly London and Eugene, Oregon. But
Seattle was unmatched in terms of scale, the element of surprise and,
most of all, dramatic effect. Consequently it is the Seattle 1999,
which brought both ’globalisation’ and ’anti-globalisation’ to the
centre stage of popular discourse.

Many analysts have tried to present globalisation, rather bland and
decontextualised, as essentially a process of global integration, just
not economic but also cultural and political, led by higher and higher
levels of international trade and facilitated by the recent upsurge in
communication technology - in the process lowering down the political
barriers erected by the nation states coming in the way. Claims have
been made that globalisation commenced, in fact, centuries back. Seen
from this angle, some have traced it to antiquity. A section of the
anti-globalisers have also fallen for this line. For many of them,
however, Christopher Columbus is the first globaliser.

Any meaningful exploration of ’globalisation’ must, nevertheless,
examine it in its relationship with its dialectical opposite
’anti-globalisation’. Otherwise the defining specificities of
’globalisation’, or the current phase of globalisation - if one so
pleases, get either missed out or severely understated. Globalisation,
for that reason, needs to be viewed also in relationship with the rise
and rise of neo-liberalism through the eighties to hegemonic heights
and the consequent decline of the welfare states along with the
foundational creed - Keynesianism - which had arisen as the grand
response to the Great Depression, the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the Warsaw Pact by early nineties and, of course, the emergence of the
WTO in the mid-nineties as the tailor made instrument to radically
revise/upgrade the rules of the game for its unobstructed onward
march. While the radically expanded and expanding operations of the
TNCs and hugely augmented volumes of finance capital flowing across
national borders constitute two of the fundamental markers of the
process, the giant strides made in the recent years in the fields of
information technology and communication systems have played a vital
role in shaping up the things the way they are. In the specific Indian
context, ’globalisation’ remains inextricably intertwined with
’economic reforms’, which made its tentative entry as the acknowledged
official creed in the mid-eighties under the premiership of Rajiv
Gandhi - the self-proclaimed harbinger of the ’twenty first century’,
and picked up inexorable momentum in the early nineties, in the wake
of the severe balance of payment crisis, under Narasimha Rao and
Manmohan Singh, goaded and monitored by the IMF and World Bank. This
symbiotic intimacy is perhaps best captured in the fairly popular
acronym, LPG - Liberalisation, Privatisation, Globalisation.

The volume under review is, as it appears, virtually the verbatim
reproduction of the proceedings of a four-day symposium, held in 2001,
on ’Globalisation and South Asia’ organised by the Academy of Third
World Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia in collaboration with the Indian
Social Institute, New Delhi. The first two sessions covered the
economics of globalisation, in the case of India, and took the form of
panel discussions involving speakers both supportive and critical. The
remaining sessions dealt with all other aspects led by one
introductory speaker and followed by an open floor discussion. The
main speakers were: Arvind Virmani, Arun Kumar, Sanjay Baru, Prabhat
Patnaik, Bibek Debroy, Jayati Ghosh, I mukherjee, P Sahadevan, C.P.
Chandrasekhar, Abhijit Sen, Praful Bidwai, Mahesh Rangarajan, Mohan
Rao, Krishna Kumar, Harish Khare, Ritu Menon, Rajeev Bhargava, Sumit
Sarkar, and Achin Vanaik. Closing remarks were delivered by Mushirul
Hassan and Father Louis Prakash. Consequently the style is free
flowing and conversational. The book is avowedly meant to serve as a
basic text for the college and university teachers and students. It is
to cater also to the broader readership engaged with the issue. As a
sort of affirmation of the informal style, it does not contain any
bibliography, references or footnotes. Nor there is any formal and
elaborate introduction to the subject itself by the editor.

While India, for very understandable reasons, remains the central
focus, the impact of globalisation on other major constituents of
South Asia viz. Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh have also
been dealt with. The most remarkable aspect of the design of the book
is that it covers an extremely wide range of topics, just not the
economic ones, in order to explore the implications and impacts of
globalisation. The array of speakers, representing again a wide range
of ideological positions, is, it goes without saying, highly
impressive. It is this very impressiveness, however, makes one take
note of the absence of Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy.

The first session, with the first four speakers on the panel, went
into ’The New Economic Reforms’ in India. It was quite a lively and
informative one with intense interactions between the audience and the
panellists. Virmani, the first speaker, quite forcefully pitched for
’reforms’ and globalisation based on a brief survey, linked to our
real life experiences, of the major failures of India’s economic
performance and governance since Independence. His policy
prescriptions included downsizing of government, dismantling of PSUs,
increased (economic) competition - both internal and external, and,
rather interestingly, enactment of a law ensuring right to information
to the citizens. He also made out that FDI does not mean only capital;
it comes bundled with technology and management practices as well,
which casts a positive spell on the whole economy through the process
of diffusion. Radically raised level of economic growth focused on
productive employment generation, for him, holds the key to salvation.
Evidently, hardly anybody would quarrel with the goal of faster
economic growth or employment generation - at least publicly. So it is
not the goal but the means that remained the bone of contention. Of
the other three speakers, Sanjay Baru was generally supportive of his
line, while Arun Kumar and Prabhat Patnaik countered. Kumar made a
couple of interesting points. He equated commencement of globalisation
with the onset of colonisation. He also claimed that the black market
transactions constitute a very large part of Indian economy makes it
specifically vulnerable to the allurements and pressures of
globalisation. In an unregulated, or ’free’, market - where one dollar
has one vote, he made out that the marginalized get more marginalized
to the advantage of the wealthy and hence powerful. Patnaik pointed
out that free flow of finance capital, or more specifically ’hot
money’ in the form of speculative capital, is a major characteristic
of the globalisation process. And it is the prospect of sudden flight
of this capital, huge in quantum, with the attendant prospects of
economic collapse make the ’national’ governments, willy-nilly, toe
the line dictated by foreign capital. According to Patnaik, if
national sovereignty is the major casualty of globalisation, then
defence of the nation state has got to emerge as the rallying point
for the fight against globalisation. Both Kumar and Patnaik pointed
out that pre-Independence India, with virtually no tariff barrier,
registered a measly growth rate of about 1.5% per annum. But the array
of official statistics, cited during the deliberations, indicating an
impressive rise in growth rate, and also reduction in poverty level,
since eighties, and more particularly nineties, evidently put them on
the back foot. Patnaik, however, tried to extricate himself by
expressing his scepticism regarding the official data. While the
exchanges that followed were extremely lively and enlightening, what
strikes one in the face is that no one for once referred to HDI in the
course of assessing the impacts of globalisation and reforms on the
Indian economy. Even granting that there will always be a phase gap
between an economic measure and its impact translated in terms of HDI,
the total silence on this score on all sides remains, however,
somewhat baffling.

The opening speaker for the next session dealing specifically with the
WTO was Bibek Debroy. He gave a very elaborate and comprehensive
presentation on the history and the rather complex functioning of the
WTO. He quite lucidly brought out how the WTO was brought into being
as the successor to the GATT with a far enlarged domain, and as an
institution as against mere agreements, through and as the culmination
of the Uruguay Round of negotiations. He made out a strong case that
while bullies will remain bullies, a multilateral institution like the
WTO is any time much preferable for the weaker players as compared to
any bilateral dealings. The other speaker Jayati Ghosh differed on
this score. She claimed that the WTO agreements, and for that matter
the whole system, are intrinsically loaded against the weaker nations.
However, on the question of whether India should walk out there was no
clear-cut answer. Ghosh suggested that India should make use of such
threats as a bargaining chip. On the issue of South-South cooperation
also the two panellists differed. Debroy denied that there was any
homogenous South, or for that matter, North. Hence alliances or
blocks, within the WTO, have to be issue specific cutting across
imagined borders. However, not all were convinced that such transient
blocks can effectively serve Indian interests. The overwhelming
sentiment remained that in spite of internal heterogeneity the divide
between the South and the North is a real one and needs to be properly
recognised as such. Jayati Ghosh suggested that further rounds of WTO
negotiations, where the underdeveloped nations are by and large hardly
any match for the developed ones, must be blocked. The hope of gaining
advantage by the weaker countries through renegotiations, as regards
agriculture and garments trade in particular, is only a mirage. In
response to the question whether the WTO would enhance the prospects
for foreign investments, Ghosh pointed out that the total value of
remittances in the nineties were three times the total value of all
foreign capital inflow put together. No one, however, addressed the
question why the developed nations take the initiative when the WTO is
preferable to bilateral dealings from the point of view of the weaker
nations.

The next four sessions, each led by a single main speaker, dealt with
in good details in a broadly similar fashion the cases of India’s four
major neighbours - Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh. While
presentations on Nepal and Sri Lanka, by I Mukherjee and P Sahadevan
respectively, concentrated almost exclusively on these two countries,
with references to India only for the purpose of comparison, both C P
Chandrasekhar, on Pakistan, and A Sen, on Bangladesh, straddled the
larger canvas of South Asia as a whole and, to an extent, the globe.
Chandrasekhar remarked that accumulation of large surpluses, deposited
in the international banking system, as an outcome of the oil shocks
of 73-74 and 78-80 played a major role in initiating the commencement
of globalisation, characterised by large flows of finance capital. He
also brought out that the liberalisation-globalisation for these
countries was broadly a two-phased process. The first phase commenced
in the eighties, with the gradual elimination of quantitative
restrictions on imports. It is only during the second phase, in the
nineties, the tariff barrier was radically brought down. Sen, in his
presentation, also underscored the basic similarities in the
globalisation pattern of these countries with significantly raised
rates of growth since the eighties in sharp contrast with the rest of
the world. However, in the nineties the increments in growth rates
over the previous decade were rather small. Pakistan was the sole
exception, which suffered very substantial fall in growth rate during
the nineties. Sahadevan had earlier pointed out that in Sri Lanka the
process had been initiated in the seventies. Notwithstanding these
broad similarities, however, all these four countries have their own
specificities, which were brought out by the speakers. Sen made a
number of interesting points. He brought out that market
liberalisation by and large improved the terms of trade in favour of
agriculture. He, the first among all the speakers, talked of HDI. Sen
also drew attention to the much larger roles played by the NGOs, aided
by international funding organisations, in the economic development of
Bangladesh.

In what can be termed as the third section of the book, the rest of
the speakers, each eminent in one’s own field, dealt with the impacts
of globalisation/liberalisation in the fields of science and
technology; environment; health; education; media; feminist
publishing; culture; communalism and international relations. The
format remained the same. The presentations made by Bidwai, on science
and technology, and Rangarajan, on environment, demand special mention
for being extremely well informed. And Sarkar, on communalism, and
Vanaik, on international relations, stand out for their treatments of
certain fundamental issues and concepts. Sarkar points out that there
is a strong but extremely complex relationship between communalism and
globalisation. This is by no means a straightforward, simple, linear
one despite certain evidences of congruence. He also quite
emphatically brought out the retrograde face of nationalism,
specifically in the Indian context with reference to the North East
and Kashmir. Vanaik claimed that transnationalisation of economic and
social relations is an integral element of capitalism itself and
thereby capitalist globalisation as well. He also traced the emergence
of the modern nation states to very substantive separation between
politics, and ideology, and economy as a defining aspect of capitalism
as contrasted to all pre-capitalist forms requiring direct coercive
intervention by the state for extraction of economic surpluses from
the labouring classes. Hence, he claims that transnationalisation and
nation states are the two faces of the selfsame capitalism operating
on a global scale based on the principle of combined and uneven
development. So there is no withering away of the states. If the
economic functions of the states have been undermined to an extent
then their political/coercive functions have been strengthened to push
ahead the globalisation/ liberalisation agenda. He also posited here
the quite remarkable thesis of five elements of security, of which
international relations is one, and seven fundamental problems, global
in nature, confronting the humankind.

It is this third section going beyond the restricted realm of
economics and delving deep into the various related fields covering a
wide spectrum has added a unique dimension to this volume. Another
unique feature is the very valuable contributions made by the
participants from the floor. All in all, the book provides a truly
multidimensional perspective, exploring various facets from different
angles and bringing together both protagonists and antagonists of
globalisation and liberalisation of considerable eminence. It cannot
but both broaden and deepen our understanding of the processes and
impacts of globalisation and, more importantly, propel us towards
further exploration with an open and enriched mind. This remarkable
volume, however, definitely deserved a more thoroughgoing and rigorous
editing.

Despite some passage of time the book, however, remains as relevant
and enlightening.