What’s next?

This is an automated message. By the time you read it I will have handed in my dissertation and as such, will have finished my master’s. Like Vince Lombardi said:

any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle – victorious.

Overdramatic, perhaps. But it has been a long slog and I am pleased to say that my dissertation not only reflects my genuine views (my essays rarely do this), but it also has practical proposals, which at least makes me feel that I’ve contributed something tangible and meaningful, even if only about five people are ever going to read it.

Books issued from university library: 400*

No. cups coffee/tea: 1460 (approx)

Blog posts: 151

Blog views: 9,697

Essays: 8

All-nighters: 2

No. of dissertations: 1

The future is unclear – I’ll keep you posted.

* Not quite sure how this happened. That’s more than one per day…

Coffee, aid and trade

Whilst I am still working on various projects before the end of formal teaching, my thoughts have begun to turn to my dissertation, which will address the topic of trade justice – what it means, how it works and so on. If that sounds vague, that’s because (at this stage at least) it is. This video should give you some idea of what I might be looking at and why I’m going to be looking at it: because trade is more important than aid.

If that piques your interest, you can find out more and take action at the film’s website.

A G20 roundup

The London Summit

Alex Evans at Global Dashboard is reporting on the current state of negotiations at the summit and all-round good egg Adam Groves interviews Mr Billy Bragg in the City of London. While just about every respectable politician in the world is sounding off about the importance of avoiding protectionism (with their fingers crossed), a contrarian Noreena Hertz in The Times calls for protectionism. Though, on that note, prospects for Doha are predictably bleak.

The crisis and the developing world

Jeremy Seabrook thinks Gandhi had the right idea (he really didn’t).The FT has a nice supplement on the the financial crisis in Africa and the UK is boosting foreign aid (a bit).

Global governance

There’s some big academic thinking from Saskia Sassen at oD about a world economy powered by finance. Stiglitz et al. at the UN are arguing for the G20 to be replaced by a Global Economic Council, while the Sec-Gen is afraid of total meltdown. On the subject of disaster, we should apparently be expecting a ‘”perfect storm” of food energy and water shortages’ sometime before 2030. More broadly, Timothy Garton Ash highlights the G2 (US and China) in the light of the EU’s failure to work cohesively. The New Statesman, on similar lines, believes that ‘no-one rules the world’ and CEPR welcomes us to a truly multi-polar state of affairs.

Some personal reflections on academia and belonging

I’m reading (skimming, actually) Benjamin Cohen’s International Political Economy: An Intellectual History, partly to better understand my field and partly to seek inspiration for my upcoming dissertation proposal. The book is leading me to reflect upon myself within my discipline and I’m pleased to note that I am beginning to feel that I do—in some intrinsic way, both intellectually and temperamentally—belong in this field. The more collegial nature of study and debate at the postgraduate level—in my university at least—makes a big difference.

Yesterday I wrote that ‘the role of the politics department is to constantly remind the economics department than life just isn’t that simple’. Cohen writes that ‘theorists of every stripe face a fundamental trade-off between parsimony and detail—between the deductive simplicity required for theoretical generalization and the inductive description required to assure external validity. Mainstream economists favour deductive simplicity…’ I was also speaking to my colleagues at the workshop and telling them that I felt that as students of politics we have an inferiority complex in relation to economists. I’m somehow gratified to find that Cohen reports that both these phenomena are common hallmarks of bona fide international political economists.

Reading Cohen’s chapter on the British School (not to be confused with IR’s English School), I find myself more aware than ever how firmly I place myself in that camp, as opposed to the American School. Perhaps that’s inevitable, given my academic history thus far, but as suggested in this post’s title, being able to associate myself with something like that does provide a strong feeling of belonging. I’ve also been pleased to find a description of the birth of the International Political Economy Group (now part of BISA), under the auspices of Susan Strange. I am today a member of IPEG and reading of its creation gives me a pleasing sense of history and continuity.

G20 ‘wishlist’ toy

For those of us following the lead-up to the G20 summit on 2 April (sadly, my workload means I probably won’t be going to any of the peripheral events after all), the FT has a rather exciting ‘interactive’ gadget which outlines the interests and conflicting preferences among the Group’s members that will largely determine the outcome of the summit. Incidentally, discussing the meeting with colleagues today, I was interested to note that—like me—everyone was profoundly agnostic as to whether the summit will result in anything very substantive, or any radical change. That’s not to say we’re doubting it, but rather that we really have no idea at all…

Financial crisis, macro-adjustment and poverty workshop: a few thoughts

Yesterday I attended the ESRC World Economy & Finance Research Programme workshop on the financial crisis, macro-adjustment and poverty. This was the first time I’ve attended an academic conflagration of this kind and  I enjoyed it greatly, especially the free food.

The best thing about an event like this is the interdisciplinary nature of the discussion – the event was attended by economists, ‘politics people’ (as they called themselves), development professionals and lawyers. (For interdisciplinary, read political scientists scholars like myself laughing at economists with all their silly models…) It’s also a bit embarrassing to hear middle aged academics refer to ‘the poor people’. Something about that turn of phrase just makes me cringe.

I was particularly interested to hear from a member of IMF staff in attendance. I should make it very clear that he was speaking in a personal capacity and was not representing IMF views or policy. Once he got into algebraic equations I became a bit lost. I could understand what he was trying to do – to explain the rationale behind conditionality decisions – but surely this kind of methodology, which included an attempt to operationalise the degree to which governments care about the views of their citizens on a scale of one-to-ten is going to yield a  somewhat rigid and reductionist explanation (see comment above re. silly models). Over the course of the day I came to the opinion that the role of the politics department is to constantly remind the economics department than life just isn’t that simple. Of course, there’s a place for both approaches. However, when the speaker began to invoke pi I could no longer cope. How could pi possibly have a bearing on this? It’s beyond me. I’m trying to find out from a mathematician friend, who may be able to shed some light.

Another point that bothered me – and which I was going to chase up, but was beaten to it – was the suggestion that special interest groups ‘distort’ governments’ economic policies. This is a perfect example of what’s wrong with the IMF’s mindset – the assumption that there exists some kind of ideal, neutral, objectively correct policy positon, from which everything else is a deviation.

Anyway, despite calls – which even I considered somewhat alarming – for the nationalisation of the entire financial sector, I had a very informative and thought provoking day.

D’oh

Two out of two ain’t bad.

Adventures in ideology

More of a personal post this time, please bear with me. So far on this course, I have found that I have been pushed more than ever before to consider my own political beliefs. Perhaps this is due to the fact that I am more in control of what I study, perhaps because I now have the intellectual tools to really reflect on the bases of my own beliefs.

So for the first time in a while I find myself in a state of political confusion. For example, my recent work on (neo)Gramscianism has made me increasingly sceptical of liberalism, as a naive, depoliticising, triumphalist and actually quite a conservative school of thought. On the other hand, to some extent, I feel that Gramscianism’s conspiracy theorising is itself rather naive, childish and simplistic.

Similarly, increasing engagement with post-development and postmodernism has made me sceptical of liberal western ideals of ‘progress’ and the whole patronising project of ‘development’, in material, spiritual and ecological terms. But than again, see this, from Richard Peet’s Theories of Development:

to concede “progress” to the mindlessly optimistic is to give up on an idea held by the seriously optimistic at that level of belief that still finds reasoning, science, technology and democracy to be potentials that could make possible a better life for all people. And while a better life, in terms of material sufficiency may be easily denigrated by those who already lead lives of abundance, it is a dream full of hope for those who have never known security of existence.

Comments and observations welcome.

Tales from the classroom

Today’s seminar included the question (it looked like a trick question to me, right off the bat) ‘is globalisation good or bad?’. I’ve learnt to be suspicious of anything that simple. Anyway, the answers given were quite interesting.

The Brits, perhaps due to experience – or fear – of British academic caprice, hedged their bets and said both. The Nigerian, the Turk and the Pakistani said globalisation was good. The tutor asked if anyone in the seminar believed that globalisation was bad. At this point, the Frenchman got vocal.

That’s all you need to know about globalisation, right there.

Dani Rodrik on the welfare state

In a 1997 article in Foreign Policy[1], Dani Rodrik discusses the implications of the impact of globalisation upon the relationship between states, markets and society. He points out that globalisation can undermine traditional social bargains, creating a backlash.

Interestingly, social insurance and welfare schemes have become larger and more significant since World War II, even as market economics have called for the rolling back of the state. Government spending as a proportion of GDP has actually increased. For Rodrik, ‘the social welfare state has been the flip side of the open economy’. As economies have opened up to the global market, the social impacts of this have required states to increase the range and strength of their safety nets.

However, according to Rodrik, the balance is shifting. Governments now (bearing in mind that the article was written in 1997) are finding it more difficult to fulfil these expectations. Globalisation and the global market economy first force social welfare programmes, then gradually make it impossible to carry them out. This dilemma is a fault line for the anti-globalisation backlash.

Rodrik also looks into other social arrangements: long-standing balances of power between worker and employer are being undermined by the fact that capital and corporations are more footloose than individual employees. Workers can also be more constrained than business in other ways – for example, where a company is free to relocate to the country with the cheapest workforce, individual workers are not able (in many developed democracies at least) to price themselves below the minimum wage, or to offer to work longer hours than the legal maximum.

What Rodrik is getting at is that globalisation is both empowering and disempowering, for states and individuals. The intricate ways that these ties play upon national policymaking are causing damage to social contracts everywhere. Rodrik calls for ‘greater breathing room’, though what this would entail in practice remains unclear.

It seems to me that in essence, this is a global governance problem. Indeed, imagine an integrated and truly global government existed. Why, then, these problems would disappear. Whilst I am not arguing in favour of global government, the problems many societies are undergoing today are related to the fact that piecemeal political globalisation is lagging behind rampant economic globalisation. From where I’m sitting, it seems that our lifetimes look likely to be a period of transition and instability as this gap either widens or closes. If we want to decrease the gap and the damage it causes, we need first of all to rebalance the relationship between our states, our markets and our societies.

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[1] Dani Rodrik, ‘Sense and Nonsense in the Globalization Debate’, Foreign Policy, No. 107, (Summer) 1997.