Globalization And Social Change

I. Background: Global Financial Crisis and the Emergence of the Alternative Globalization Movement in the 1990s Sources of Opposition

II. The Organizational Infrastructure of Globalization

• The Bretton Woods Institutions: World Bank and the IMF. GATT and the WTO

• The United Nations

IV. Amartya Sen Article

Global Financial Crisis and the Emergence of the Alternative Globalization Movement in the 1990s

Excerpts from The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the Global Economy (Part 3, Chapters 12, 15-16, 18)

Pictures from Seattle protests

Bretton Woods Conference, 1944

• A commitment to multilateralism

• 44 nations

• Laid foundations for the Bretton Woods institutions: the IMF, World Bank, and (eventually) the WTO

International Monetary Fund

• Example: Colombia and coffee

• focus on liquidity

• lender of last resort

• Conditionality: balanced budgets (cuts in social spending) and free markets

• “IMF riots”

• “Adjustment with a human face?”

World Bank Group

• International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the International Development Association (IDA), the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and the Multilateral Insurance Guarantee Association (MIGA)

“World Bank” generally refers to IBRD and IDA combined

World Bank (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA)

• Focus on providing capital for long term development

• Historically: Infrastructure and economic growth

• A growing emphasis on poverty reduction

• Controversies over structural adjustment policies—generally in conjunction with the IMF

• The problem of aid and debt

Film link

World Trade Organization

• Grew out of GATT

• Established 1995

•What should the rules be?

• Should environmental and labor standards be included?

• The issue of product and process

• Free trade or fair trade?

Security Council

• Permanent Members: France, Russian Federation, United Kingdom, United States, China

• Plus 10 temporary members who hold two-year terms

• The need for reform—and the difficulty of achieving it (a missed opportunity)

Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan

January 2007

Amartya Sen, “How to Judge Globalism”

• Does “globalization” equal “westernization”?

• What does Sen say about how globalization should be judged?

• What is his overall judgment? What does he mean in his last paragraph?