Does Globalization Breed Ethnic Violence?

Georgi Derluguian,
NorthWestern University,
Chicago, Il.

No, it does not. Globalization serves the all-encompassing locution of the contemporary political discourse which refers to the revived teleology of market-driven economic progress. Its analytical use is dubious. In particular, the rhetoric of globalization optimistically misrepresents the consequences of the debacle suffered in the 1980s-1990s by the erstwhile socialist and nationalist industrializing states. In these locales the waning of developmentalist hopes, the erosion of central governance, the introduction of competitive elections and marketization unleashed principally two reactive strategies. Their combinations, embedded in historical contexts, largely account for the outcomes registered across the re-emerging peripheries. First strategy, pursued by the bureaucratic elites and the ascendant political interlopers, is corrupt patronage that relies on privatizing the state offices. It is conducive to compradore oligarchies, defeated civil societies, and state degeneration. The second reactive strategy seeks to mobilize the ethnic and religious solidarities (rather than merely identities). Objectively, it is directed against what Polanyi, referring to the previous wave of globalization, called the market destruction of the substance of local societies. But subjectively, the evocation of traditional communities tends to scapegoat the competing ethnic communities, weak governments, and, increasingly, the American "plutocracy". Such sentiments can be mobilized as political identities both in popular movements and in the official efforts to shore up the erstwhile developmental states.