The Blackwell Companion to Globalization

Chapter 3

The Cultural Construction of Neoliberal Globalization

ROBERT J. ANTONIO

Honey, … I think the world is flat. (Friedman 2005a: 5)

Globalization is a multi-sided process, but the most intense debates over it have stressed its connections to a new global political economic regime with a distinct ‘American template’ – neoliberalism (e.g. Barber 1996; Gray 1998). Neoliberals champion free-market policy, deregulation and tax cuts. They seek to minimize health, education, welfare and other social spending, and they contend that limited government, free trade and global capitalism offer the only road to reduced poverty and increased prosperity. They hold that neoliberalism is the main engine of globalization per se and that the process’s progress can be furthered only by fuller global implementation of their programme. Social Darwinism has been an important part of US political culture for more than a century; it has been reconstructed during major technological and financial bubbles. Neoliberals have revived it again (Foner 1998; Phillips 2002). They do not identify as social Darwinists, and their views usually lack the nineteenth-century version’s racially tinted Malthusianism. They combine their highly optimistic claims about exceptional wealth creation, global opportunity and hybrid culture with emphases on the free market, unrestricted property rights, and self-reliance and opposition to welfare and redistribution. This chapter will explore the work of the highly influential ...