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John G. Dale
“Transnational Legal Space, Globalization, and the Free
Burma Movement”
This paper presents a case study of the Free Burma movement to
demonstrate the potentially transformative movement politics of
transnational legal action. This movement forged through a series
of campaigns a transnationalist discourse that provides an alternative
to neo-liberal globalization. It presents an ethnography of the
“transnational legal space” and maps the contested
legal terrain over which the Free Burma movement has struggled
to get their alternative discourse into the mix of predominantly
neo-liberal arguments on globalization. Following the ruling military’s
violent repression of domestic “people power” opposition
in 1988, and the subsequently ineffective efforts of neo-liberal
international foreign policy to address the regime’s ongoing
abusive human rights conduct, the regime forged new economic partnerships
with transnational corporations and regional trading blocs. By
1994, Burma’s pro-democracy activists have forged their
own transnational networks with human rights, environmentalist,
labor, and other movements, and organized a series of transnational
campaigns deploying a combination of discourses on human rights
and corporate governance to target the relationship between the
ruling military and its corporate partners. This paper presents
three of these “Free Burma” campaigns: a selective
purchasing law campaign against all corporations conducting business
with the Myanmar Government; the campaign to revoke Unocal’s
corporate charter; and the ongoing Doe v. Unocal lawsuit, an attempt
to sue a transnational corporation for complicity in human rights
violations committed outside the United States. These campaigns
exploit the legal contradictions and disjunctures arising between
different spatial scales of market regulation, as the United States
has exercised a disproportionately influential role in constructing
institutional arrangements for global investment and trade. Each
campaign highlights a different dimension – legislative,
administrative, and judicial – of the processes through
which rules and institutional arrangements are produced to enable
and constrain global markets, to illustrate how they become embedded
in politics, law, and morality.
Christian DeBresson
“The Great Market Transformation of China Since Mao's
Death: Institutional Innovations and External Constraints -
Polanyian Questions”
This paper (first given as a PhD lecture at Tsinghua University
in 2002) starts by recapitulating the acceleration of institutional
changes leading to partial markets since 1976. We read these changes
through the lenses of Polanyi's The Great Transformation focusing
in particular on the 4 pre-condition this author saw as pre-conditions
of market creation. It then proceeds to point to a number of limits
and constraints to this transformation process in the new century
of the new millennium some hinted at by Polanyi, some very specific
to China's culture and social formation.
Pat Devine
“Reinstituting the Economic Process: (Re)embedding the
Economy in Society and Nature”
Polanyi argued that the project of creating a fully self-regulating
market was utopian, in the sense of impossible. However, movement
towards this utopia, the ever greater but never completed process
of disembedding the economy from both society and nature, creates
growing dislocations and tensions which call forth a counter movement.
This double movement may be thought of as successive changes in
the way in which the economic process is instituted. The focus
of the paper is on the meaning of embeddedness, the ways in which
the economy was reinstituted during the Great Transformation and
the subsequent counter movements. An approach to further reinstituting
the economy in ways that (re)embed it more firmly in society and
nature is then outlined. It is argued that prior to the creation
of the capitalist market the economy was organically embedded
in society and nature. However, the creation of separate economic
institutions, the institution of the economic process as a distinct
system with its own laws of motion, severed these organic links
and the economy came to dominate both society and nature. Here,
however, the symmetry between society and nature ends. Society
has the capacity for conscious, purposeful action; nature does
not. For the economy to be reinstituted in ways that create a
sustainable organic relationship with nature, it must first be
reinstituted in ways that bring it under social control.
Tim Di-Muzio
“Wall Street, Preventative War, and the New Economy
Of
Human In/security”
The theme for this conference is ‘coexistence’- an
apt title for our current conjuncture of uncertainty, human insecurity
and war. As the Bush administration continues to expand its ‘war
on terror’, and has mobilized the might of the US military
against the people of Iraq, there is a danger that the lessons
to be learned from the corporate governance scandals in the US
may fall increasingly into the background. Yet the American model
of capitalism and the current crisis of investor confidence reveals
a number of stark contradictions that have generally been ignored
by commentators. While many have speculated that part of Bush’s
hawkish foreign policy may serve to distract public attention
away from the imploding domestic economy and synchronized world
recession, few have noticed the interconnections between US foreign
economic and military policy on the one hand, and its particular
form of corporate governance on the other. Nor has there been
much attention paid to these two issues and the contradiction
between an emerging liberal legal regime that protects, secures
and expands the rights of capital on the one hand, and the grotesque
increase of human insecurity on the other. In a time of drastic
insecurity and war, this paper attempts to establish these interconnections
by advancing a number of suggestive hypotheses.
Our first hypothesis is that the American model of capital accumulation
rests upon widespread cronyism whereby the chief concern among
corporations and their owners is to increase financial or pecuniary
values by whatever means necessary. In this sense, military adventures
abroad – even in the guise of preventative war - are in
part, shaped and guided by the needs of Wall Street.
Our second hypothesis is that while large capital is gaining new
rights and protections (preventative war being only a manifestation
of this) the vast majority of the world’s people are suffering
from a new economy of human insecurity. This begs that question
of whether or not capital should be associated with production
for life or appropriation from life. Or in Polanyian terms, whether
or not the economy is embedded in society, or whether society
has been embedded in an economy concerned primarily with profit,
not human well-being.
Katherine
Donahue and Sheryl Shirley
“Nightmares of Globalization: Rural Legends of Baby-Snatching
in Guatemala”
One of Karl Polanyi’s key contribution was his clarification
of the cultural components of exchange systems (1968), specifically,
reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange. For Polanyi,
market exchange ranged from small, local central places, to
global markets for commodities and money. This paper argues
that global markets are constructed and imagined in various
ways, depending on the hegemony of economic and ethnic groups
as well as subordinates group access to and experience with
markets. The death of a Japanese tourist in a Highland Mayan
village of Guatemala was one of the latest in a series of
events triggered by increases in the international adoption
of Guatemalan babies, encouraged by the Guatemalan military,
and based in Mayan myth which has pre-Columbian roots. Recent
rumors of the sale of babies to Western and Japanese medical
institutions for organ harvesting may be based on fears of
an imagined international community in which the thing most
precious to an individual, family, or community could be taken
away for medical /technological purposes possible only in
the capital hegemonies of Europe, North America, and Japan.
The impetus for the recent lynchings lies in the connections
among military control, collective trauma from years of violence,
and globalization. The authors compare these acts with similar
events in societies such as Zimbabwe and South Africa which
have faced comparable impositions of trans-regional and trans-national
economic and political hegemony. The authors then discuss
the political and economic realities presently encountered
by Guatemalans caught in a global economy over which they
have little control. |
Nándor F.
Dreisziger
"Oscar Jaszi and Peaceful Co-Existence among Nationalities
and Nations”
Dear Oszi, Dear Karli C or, sometimes, Kedves jó Oszkárom!
Kedves Karlim! [My dear good Oscar! My dear Karli!] C began each
piece of correspondence between Karl Polanyi and his mentor and
friend Oscar Jaszi throughout much of their adult lives. Their friendship
pre-dated World War I and lasted till their old age (Jaszi died
in 1957, Polanyi seven years later). They had much in common. As
men of learning, they were both the products of the intellectual
ferment that had permeated turn-of-the-century Austria-Hungary.
They both had an ambivalent attitude to Marxism, the ideology that
had seduced so many of their contemporaries. Both were attracted
to it and saw promise in the "Soviet experiment;" however,
they found Marxism too deterministic and Bolshevik politics lacking
true democratic spirit. Both remained interested in the affairs
of Hungary C especially the older of the two, Jaszi, who by 1914
had developed an intense interest in the question of the peaceful
coexistence of the peoples of the Middle Danube Valley. Before 1919
this issue was largely a problem of the coexistence of the ethnic
groups that comprised the multinational historic Kingdom of Hungary,
and after that year it became the conundrum of the peaceful coexistence
of the small nations created by the post-war peace settlement in
that part of Europe. In my paper I plan to explore Jaszi's evolving
thoughts on this question from the pre-1914 period to the post-World
War II years, while I also hope to touch on his thoughts on what
impact the larger issue of relations between the capitalist West
and communist Russia might have on this problem. I will also examine
Jaszi's correspondence with Karl Polanyi and will try to determine
what influence they had on each others' opinions.
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