The ideational globalization thesis

Just as the complex globalization theorists have attempted to reclaim the concept of globalization, another group of authors have sought to question (or ‘demystify’) it (see in particular Hay and Marsh 2000).

Why then should we look at the role of ideas? Another way of looking at this issue is to ask: do we always have a perfect knowledge of the world in which we live? The answer is clearly ‘no’. This means that we have to interpret the world - our ideas about the world shape our behaviour. Consider, for example, the rise of the Soviet Union. The fact that leaders like Lenin believed in Marxist ideas shaped their actions, whether or not Marxism was actually true. In other words, ideas can play an independent causal role in shaping outcomes; ideas can have ‘material effects’.

This has important implications for the debate about globalization and the state. For Hay (2000), there has indeed been a policy shift towards neo­liberalism within and outside Europe. However, this does not mean that globalization actually exists, as complex globalization theorists assume. Rather, Hay (2004) agrees with the sceptics that there is little empirical evidence to suggest that the world has been ‘globalized’. He finds that European countries have actually been de-globalized in recent years in that geographical distance has become more rather than less important in terms of both trade and investment flows.

In this sense, globalization may be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. By behaving as if it were a reality, policy-makers may actually be making it a reality. For Hay, globalization is thus best understood as a (political) consequence rather than as an (economic) cause. This is crucial, for it opens up the potential for change. Conceived as a contingent outcome rather than as an external logic, globalization can ultimately be shaped, or perhaps even resisted altogether. As Hay and Marsh (2000: 14) write, we must ‘rediscover the capacity (that the rhetoric of globalization so frequently denies us) of shaping, steering and ultimately transforming the globalized world that we have made and which we must now inhabit’.

This ‘ideational’ approach is important because of its focus on the role of ideas, although it is not without problems. There is no doubt that the relationship between ideas, material relations and policy outcomes are insufficiently unpacked in the existing literature. As we saw, hyperglobalists argue that globalization leads to policy outcomes in a largely unmediated way. Both sceptics and complex globalization theorists argue that external economic processes are mediated by institutional factors in a given country and it is as mediated that they affect policy outcomes. However, they do not acknowledge the putative independent effect of the discourse(s) of globalization. In contrast, the ideational theorists see the discursive construc­tion of globalization as a, perhaps the, crucial explanatory variable in explaining policy outcomes. As we will discuss below, however, their approach also raises questions about how those ideas relate to the broader economic and political context in which they are constituted. Our argument here is that any full appreciation of the policy options available to, and pursued by, the state needs to consider: the external economic environment in which states are situated; the distinctive ways in which such pressures are mediated by existing institutional and cultural environments (not least at the national level); the discursive construction of those pressures; and, finally, the way in which such discourses are mediated by the broader context in which they are situated. In the following section we will discuss each of these issues in turn.