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Globalisation and resistance: struggles over common sense in the global political economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2010

MATTHEW STEPHEN
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Abstract

This article develops and applies the role of ‘common sense’ in a Gramscian theory of transnational counter-hegemony. Building on recent interpretative literature on the alter-globalisation movement, it applies this framework to then evaluate empirically the impact of the alter-globalisation movement on the realm of global ‘common sense’ understandings of the world in the period 2002 to 2007. It shows that there is little empirical support for the notion that the alter-globalisation movement effected a legitimation crisis for neo-liberalism as a hegemonic project on a global scale. Instead, a more ambivalent and potentially reactionary situation amongst collectively held norms is revealed. This indicates the shortcomings of the alter-globalisation movement as a coalition of social forces capable of mounting an ideological attack on neo-liberalism and forging a new intellectual-moral bloc.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , January 2011, pp. 209 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2010

Introduction

Many neo-Gramscian authors have been criticised for neglecting articulations of resistance to globalising capital in the current era.Footnote 1 The neo-Gramscian concern for counter-hegemonic tendencies has been described as merely ‘lip service’,Footnote 2 and for depicting the world economy as ‘a place of absolute, unilateral power’.Footnote 3 Similarly, it has been argued that counter-movements are either neglected or seen as ‘overwhelmed by the power of global capital’.Footnote 4 In fact, it is not hard to find similar criticisms amongst neo-Gramscian scholars themselves.Footnote 5 This is despite the particular importance that Robert Cox, the first to apply Gramsci's concepts to the study of International Relations, attaches to resistance to globalisation.Footnote 6

However, increasing attention has begun to be paid, particularly since the rise to prominence of a heterogeneous ‘alter-globalisation movement’,Footnote 7 to cases of resistance in the global political economy. Early attempts in this direction were undertaken by Mark Rupert, Stephen Gill and Adam David Morton.Footnote 8 More recently, a spate of attempts to overcome the under-investigation of articulations of opposition to globalising capital have been made. Examinations have been made of the relationship between traditional organised labour and the ‘new’ social movements that coalesced at the European Social Forum in Florence in November 2002,Footnote 9 the counter-hegemonic potential of the social movement organisation ATTAC,Footnote 10 the prospects of anti-war activism inside the US,Footnote 11 and the nature of the anarchist strain and influence of the ‘alter-globalisation movement’.Footnote 12 Meanwhile, critical attention has also been directed to neo-Gramscian treatments of trans-border activist agency,Footnote 13 and more sceptical assessments of the Social Forum process and Stephen Gill's ‘postmodern Prince’ have been advanced.Footnote 14

Much of the attention directed to sources of resistance has focussed on the diverse and heterogeneous ensemble of groups marshalled under the rubric of the ‘alter-globalisation movement’. So far, neo-Gramscian assessments have varied. Mark Rupert's analysis of anti-war mobilisations inside the US ends by gloomily looking to the long-run,Footnote 15 while Stephen Gill is yet to repent his enthusiasm in the months after the Seattle protests and later.Footnote 16 Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton's study of the 2002 European Social Forum concluded with cautious optimism.Footnote 17 Craig Murphy's conclusions have been accurately described as agnostic on this point,Footnote 18 while Robert Cox is similarly tentative.Footnote 19 For Gill, the movement approximates an incipient ‘postmodern Prince’, after Gramsci's vision for a revolutionary organism modelled on the Jacobin functions of Machiavelli's Prince. At a perhaps more optimistic time Gill claimed that ‘the recent protests in Seattle and the meetings in Porto Alegre have begun to demonstrate a counterhegemonic and planetary challenge to capital’,Footnote 20 something which could develop into a new form of political agency ‘giving a coherence to an open-ended, plural, inclusive, and flexible form of politics and thus create alternatives to neoliberal globalisation’.Footnote 21 Meanwhile, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have seen what they refer to as the ‘globalisation movements’ as, ‘[a]long with the most progressive governments of the global south’, ‘the most promising existing forces that can orient a project of renewal, creating an alternative to the failed unilateralist regimes and posing the bases for a new Magna Carta’.Footnote 22

It is this broader need to re-think political agency which seems to be at the heart of this celebration of the forces of alter-globalism. As Malcolm Bull points out, ‘Almost all the agencies through which political change was effected in the twentieth century have either disappeared or been seriously weakened.’Footnote 23 Communist and social democratic parties both have been implicated in the failure to stem the rising tides of neo-liberal globalisation and exclusionary populism. It is in this context of the ongoing crisis of democratic agency that attention has turned to what appeared, for a time, to be the greatest social movement since the collapse of historical communism.

The aim of this article is to investigate the impact of what I will call the ‘alter-globalisation movement’ on the realm of global ‘common sense’ understandings of the world, something to which the political theorist Antonio Gramsci attached great importance. It is incumbent upon a critical theory of International Relations/Global Political Economy (IR/GPE) to seek out and theorise prospects for change in historical structures of world order. In doing so, it is important not to idealise the alter-globalisation movement. This task has been taken up by many others. For example, it has been suggested that we can accept ‘an idealized vision of the “movement of movements” accentuating the positive and innovative aspects’ on the grounds that this ‘does not constitute naivety, but rather helps strengthen our unity in the face of neoliberalism’.Footnote 24 In fact, an idealised portrayal of anything is an invitation to naïveté. In many ways, alter-globalism seems to have fallen into the trap that the editors of the New Left Review warned of several years ago, that is that ‘[i]nflation of the scale or achievements of an embryonic movement is of no more service than indifference or neglect’.Footnote 25 Understanding the possibilities for change is of course important, but not at the expense of political realism. This, at least, would be my interpretation of a ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’.

This article proceeds in three parts. The first part outlines a transnational theory of social transformation based on the thinking of Antonio Gramsci and his key followers in the field of IR/GPE. Gramsci, as a leading and intellectually diverse theorist of an earlier praxis, posed a series of telling questions pertaining to the struggle for social transformation which can help us to understand the possibilities and limitations of the alter-globalisation movement. In particular, we are interested in the role of common sense in Gramsci's revolutionary praxis.Footnote 26 This serves as the point of departure for conceptualising the counter-hegemonic potential of social forces opposed to globalisation as a hegemonic project. The second part of the article examines to what extent the aspects of popular common sense are pro-hegemonic and to what extent the alter-globalisation movement has been able to impact common sense in the direction of counter-hegemonic contestation. It seeks to examine empirically the ideological aspects of the construction of an alternative, counter-hegemonic consciousness. This is done using a review of survey data gathered by the Pew Research Center in the period from 2002 until before the financial crisis of 2007. To pre-empt the conclusions, the evidence examined here contradicts the view that neo-liberalism or the international financial institutions were suffering a legitimation crisis in the years of the peak of the alter-globalism movement. Instead, a more ambivalent and potentially reactionary situation amongst collectively held norms is revealed. This points to the shortcomings of the alter-globalisation movement as a coalition of social forces capable of mounting an ideological attack and forging a transnational intellectual-moral bloc.

Counter-hegemony and common sense in the global political economy

Gramsci's strategy for revolutionary social transformation has been extrapolated, with varying degrees of interpretation and conceptual reconfiguration, to the realm of the global political economy.Footnote 27 Something that is striking about these diverse treatments, though, is the relative neglect of Gramsci's theoretical and strategic considerations of how to build what we can call a ‘counter-hegemony’.Footnote 28 This is particularly conspicuous given that any reading of Gramsci will quickly reveal that he was engaged, primarily and above all else, in the revolutionary activity of constructing sufficient intellectual basis for the construction of such a counter-hegemonic force. What follows is an outline of a neo-Gramscian approach to counter-hegemonic resistance, with a view to evaluating the counter-hegemonic credentials of the alter-globalisation movement. Gramsci's programme for social transformation retains its force when applied globally to conceptualise the counter-hegemonic potential of social forces positioned in opposition to globalising capital.

I take it that neo-liberal globalisation represents the latest in a series of hegemonic projects fostered by dominant social forces operating through the global political economy.Footnote 29 Neo-liberal globalisation represents a bid for transnational hegemony constituting an historical structure of dominant material capabilities, ideas and institutions.Footnote 30 Emerging out of the economic crisis of the 1970s, the rise of neo-liberalism as an alternative hegemonic project was associated in its early phase with politically forceful, coercive strategies designed to reassert capital's control over social life and to accommodate for the rise of the transnational fraction of finance and investment capital. The 1990s witnessed the entrenchment and expansion of neo-liberalism, undertaken without the open inter-class hostility of the 1980s. Since then the dominant configuration of forces came to be consolidated into a nascent transnational historical bloc predicated on transnational capitalist social forces, neo-liberal forms of state and a conception of world order as a technocratically managed order designed to solve the problems of interdependence – world order as ‘global governance’. These interrelated processes then constitute what can be called the hegemonic project of neo-liberal globalisation. The result has been a global regime of accumulation that exacerbates global inequalities while threatening the environmental basis of industrial society. Stability largely relies on popular quiescence generated by the discrediting of historical alternatives to capitalism and a general resignation to the status quo. This aspect of globalisation therefore needs to be understood as a hegemonic project.

Of course, hegemony is part of an historically dialectical process of struggle and renegotiation between social forces set apart by the alienations endemic to capitalism. The quest for supremacy embodied in a hegemonic project implies the existence of subaltern groups whose consent is necessary for the consensual exercise of hegemonic control; hence, hegemony is susceptible to disruption, disorder and organised challenges. The internationalisation of production, finance, civil society and political organisations under conditions of globalising capital and technological innovation poses the question of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic contestation at the global and transnational, as well as national, levels.Footnote 31 The creation of a counter-hegemony implies the creation, within the bounds of the old society, of a new society.

If Gramsci posed an analytical distinction, by way of military analogy, between three broad categories of resistance (wars of movement, wars of position, and guerrilla warfare, but also possibly a ‘commando tactics’), he also noted that political struggle is ‘enormously more complex’.Footnote 32 The distinction between wars of movement (frontal assaults) and wars of position (akin to siege warfare) was developed to take account of the differing state-society relations prevailing in the ‘contender state’ of Tsarist Russia by comparison with the countries of the capitalist ‘heartland’ of Western Europe.Footnote 33 Gramsci saw that the permeation of the institutions of ‘civil society’ by hegemonic social forces transformed civil society into a mechanism for stability and control, even in the face of unprecedented structural crises.Footnote 34 For Gramsci the only way to overcome the entrenched and diffuse patterns of bourgeois power that characterise hegemonic social formations is to construct, within civil society, a long-term and broadly based counter-hegemonic movement, modelled on the strategic requirements of the war of position. The project to construct an alternative society envisions a form of socio-political struggle that requires the construction, within the confines of the old, of a new political organisation capable of mobilising all subordinate strata into a coherent whole, one capable of replacing the coercive apparatus of the bourgeois state.

Just as hegemony relies on the consent generated by the prevalence of ideology conducive to prevailing power relations, so a successful counter-hegemonic challenge requires the de-reification and critique of hegemonic ideology which constrains the exercise of collective self-determination. For Gramsci, every person is an intellectual, in the sense that every person contains within them a conception of the world that is contained in the everyday common sense understanding of the world that is the result of a host of historical residues and contending views of the world, and therefore takes ‘countless different forms’.Footnote 35 Common sense is therefore ‘a syncretic historical residue, fragmentary and contradictory, open to multiple interpretations and potentially supportive of very different kinds of social visions and political projects’.Footnote 36 These become embedded in social practices and become ‘objective’ by mediating collective agency.

For Gramsci, ‘ideologies are anything but arbitrary; they are real historical facts to be fought and unmasked in their nature as instruments of domination […] in order to render the governed intellectually independent of the governors, in order to destroy one hegemony and create another, as a necessary moment in the overturning or reversal of praxis’.Footnote 37 Gramsci saw the disabling effects of hegemonic self-representations as operating over the collectively held norms and normative ideas summarised by the term ‘common sense’.Footnote 38 This is not to imply idealism. For Gramsci, ideas only assume a role within an historical structure if they are socially embedded as ‘organic ideologies’,Footnote 39 that is, when they ‘connect with a particular constellation of social forces’.Footnote 40 Ideology then serves to unify the dominant social forces and lend coherence and legitimacy to their social power. The purpose of the philosophy of praxis is to transform common sense, a collection of intersubjective norms and normative structures, into something that can be conducive to the construction of a new state and society. As the ideological aspect of the war of position, Gramsci likened this to a reciprocal siege.Footnote 41 Thus, for Gramsci, the development of a counter-hegemonic historic bloc is co-dependent on the active contestation of the hegemonic ideology. The construction of an alternative ideological culture will change the way in which people think and act, because ‘it is on the level of ideologies that men become conscious of conflicts in the world of the economy’.Footnote 42

It appears that the political struggles over common sense have taken on a global dimension. The story of globalisation has been the ascendancy of a transnational strata of managers and owners spearheaded by multinational corporations.Footnote 43 Based on their decisive influence in the sphere of material production,Footnote 44 globalisation has been accompanied by the growing power of this transnational strata, tending towards the emergence of a ‘transnational capitalist class’.Footnote 45 Neo-liberalism has operated as the hegemonic ideology of this strata which operates over multiple state-society complexes, and works by de-politicising the economic sphere and thereby increasing the structural power of capital relative to labour.Footnote 46 This task has been assisted both by political leaders allied to the interests of capital and intellectuals ‘organic’ to that class. Under this process of globalisation these elites have been able to occupy key positions throughout an incipient global civil society, concentrated in positions consisting of international organisations, private associations and epistemic communities. International institutions have tended to provide managed outlets for dissent while adjusting their ideological claims to represent the universal interest, assuming as common sense the basic assumptions of liberalism and technocratic management. In this way neo-liberalism has embedded itself in the historical structure as an organic ideology and is connected to the dominant social forces of transnational production.Footnote 47 The material impacts of neo-liberalism as an ideology lend weight to Gramsci's concept of the social ‘myth’ ‘which suggests how apparently normative forces may have the social power normally associated with “material forces” (such as technology, the forces of production)’.Footnote 48

International institutions have played a crucial role in fostering this new way of thinking about economic matters – and have thereby assisted in influencing common sense at the international level. Politicians in various states can then rely on or contest with institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Bank of International Settlements, and the Financial Stability Board which tend to formulate policy frameworks conducive to neo-liberal ideas. While this may be seen as an elite phenomenon relatively obscure to most people, it nonetheless confronts them ‘as an external political force, an element of cohesive force exercised by the ruling classes and therefore an element of subordination to an external hegemony’.Footnote 49 The World Economic Forum, long the ultimate bogey-man of the alter-globalisation movement and described by van der Pijl as ‘a true International of capital’,Footnote 50 fosters this process of hegemonic integration by bringing together business, politicians, Think Tanks and media, thereby assisting in incorporating neo-liberal ideas into common sense.

The construction of an alternative, ethical hegemony begins with the task of deconstructing the ideological hegemony of dominant social forces and constructing an historical bloc of subordinate classes united under an alternative hegemonic ideology.Footnote 51 The new hegemonic ideology would have to be capable of transcending what Gramsci called the ‘economic-corporate’ level of consciousness, and cohering into an ideology expressed in universal terms. For this to be possible requires the transformation of prevailing ‘common sense’ assumptions about the world into a coherent counter-hegemonic consciousness, taking the form of a new ‘good sense’. A successful challenge of hegemonic power depends on the construction of ‘new popular beliefs, that is to say a new common sense and with it a new culture and a new philosophy which will be rooted in the popular consciousness with the same solidity and imperative quality as traditional beliefs’.Footnote 52 This would depend on a process of popular education assisted by the subaltern classes' organic intellectuals. Organic intellectuals are socially attached to a particular class, whose role is ‘to change, correct or perfect the conceptions of the world that exist in any particular age and thus to change the norms of conduct that go with them; in other words, to change practical activity as a whole’.Footnote 53 This amounts to no less than the construction of an alternative counter-culture, conceived by Gramsci as nothing short of a ‘modern popular reformation’.Footnote 54 In this sense, the radical transformation of society begins, for Gramsci, in the realm of ideas.

The extent to which ideological structures constitutive of the neo-liberal conception of world order are facing challenge from social forces articulating an alternative world view should then become a central line of neo-Gramscian enquiry. This would be expressed by the extent to which popular common sense can dereify the market and ‘demonstrate the fundamentally social and, therefore, public nature of economic relations’.Footnote 55 The articulation of an alternative hegemonic ideology capable of transforming ‘common sense’ into ‘good sense’ and thereby terminating popular assent to subaltern status would, hopefully, result in an ethical counter-hegemony. An ethical hegemony of subordinate social forces relies on the voluntarily given consent of the governed, in which leading social groups perform an historically progressive role in which a reciprocal internal relationship of teacher-pupil, leader-led causes the material and cultural elevation of subordinate groups: in which ‘the social group [exercising hegemony] puts the end of the State and of itself as the goal to be achieved’.Footnote 56 The remainder of this article seeks to evaluate the balance of forces operating over this crucial terrain of social struggle.

The reciprocal siege: challenging the supremacy of market ideology?

The ideological power of neo-liberal globalisation is embodied in the frameworks of thought that circumscribe human intervention in the market and raise capitalist social relations beyond political challenge. In this sense, we begin to see in renewed form what Marx would have identified as fetishism, the attribution of spiritual and magical powers to the ‘global market’ as the Chief Good of all human action; the creation of a new deity of the ‘market’, to which human communities attribute great social power and to which in times of volatility great human sacrifices must be made.Footnote 57 The reliance of dominant groups on the popular consent generated by ideological suasion translates into a practical need to de-reify hegemonic ideologies as a pre-condition for the successful overturning of dominant social relations. This is reflected in battles over common sense. For Gramsci, every person is an intellectual, in the sense that every person contains within themselves a conception of the world that is contained in the everyday common sense understanding of the world. The purpose of the philosophy of praxis is to transform common sense into something that can be conducive to the construction of a new historical structure, one capable of replacing a society founded on multiple exclusions and oppressive social relations. This invests critical importance to whether popular common sense perceives economic and relations to involve the socially consequential exercise of power, whether alter-globalist forces have been able to make in-roads in the hegemonic conceptions of world order sustaining neo-liberal market relations.

After all, the main slogan of the movement was ‘Another World Is Possible’, a clear challenge to a series of neo-liberal ideological appeals initially expressed in the Thatcherite aphorism that ‘there is no alternative’. (The neo-liberal consensus was transmitted into policy prescription by the ‘Washington Consensus’ and reached new heights in Fukuyama's thesis that [neo-]liberal democracy represented the teleological, quasi-Hegelian ‘end of history’.) The role of the alter-globalisation movement in challenging neo-liberal ideological representations and proffering an alternative way of thinking has already been emphasised. Roland Bleiker has written that ‘[…] the actions in Seattle and other cities are not quite as ineffective as they appear at first sight. Even without engendering immediate institutional transformations, traces of these protest events continue to influence the struggle over global values – and thus over the direction of politics’.Footnote 58 The images of radical contestation circulated by the media, though usually preoccupied with petty vandalism or with sniggering references to ‘anti-globalist protesters’, serve to open to contestability elements of the ‘neo-liberal consensus’ that perpetuate citizen passivity. Furthermore, Chris Nineham has claimed that the basic critiques of what he calls the ‘anti-capitalist movement’ have ‘gone mainstream’. ‘Walk into any bookshop in the world and you will find a shelf of popular books putting the case against corporate power and the neo-conservative warmongers. Few now believe that privatisation delivers better services, that the international financial institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and IMF are there to help the people of the developing countries, or that the occupation of Iraq has anything to do with liberation.’Footnote 59 Moreover, protests in one part of the world can now have global repercussions through the transmission of the modern mass media – the battle over global values takes on a universal character as the local/global dichotomy breaks down.

It is an assumption of the following empirical section that mass opinion surveys tell us something useful about what Gramsci referred to as common sense. This view does not go uncontested. The ‘post-positivism’ of much critical IR scholarship may seem at the outset to forbid the use of such a methodologyFootnote 60 – although it should perhaps be pointed out that one of Adorno's major studies was in fact a quantitative, survey-based project.Footnote 61 Nonetheless, the limitations and shortcomings of the use of quantitative survey methods to ascertain prevailing mental images can be readily acknowledged. David Held has expressed the sort of reservations Adorno himself expressed, in which surveys ‘through the fixed selection of questions put to the individual or through the very generality of the questions, opinions where they do not exist and an artificially limited range of responses. Frequently these opinions are then treated uncritically as “objective accounts” of subjective attitudes. The structure of the object is neglected in favour of what is taken as a general objective method. In this way opinion research both produces its own object and hypostatizes the results.’Footnote 62

However, to say such methods have no value would be equally misleading, as any politician who monitors their approval rating would have to acknowledge. Rather it would be better to proceed with a healthy understanding of the limitations of opinion surveys, but only with a view to extracting all that we can through the critical appraisal of such made facts. It is important to stress that ‘common sense’, like public opinion, is not something ‘out there’ to be impartially discovered – it is the internalised opinions and beliefs of numerous individuals that are instantiated through the act of responding to the social researcher.Footnote 63 It is continually made and reproduced in the minds of innumerable individuals whose actions are mediated by the collective force of these ideational representations, and thereby become an ‘objective’ force. Responses to set questions are likely to reflect, rather than constitute, common sense.Footnote 64

The following discussion is based on the survey results commissioned by the Pew Research Centre under its Global Attitudes Project. The Pew Research Centre describes itself as ‘a nonpartisan “fact tank”’Footnote 65 capable of delivering ‘independent and unbiased measures of public attitudes’.Footnote 66 It is designed more or less explicitly to help American foreign policy elites, and their reports tend to exhibit a world view in which liberal democracy and the free market are the highest aspirations of humanity. Their 2003 report explicitly links market economies to ‘individual freedoms’,Footnote 67 and the 2007 survey counter-poses ‘basic needs’ to ‘basic rights’, and concludes that in Africa, ‘basic human needs trump democratic principles’, as if fulfilling the essential material conditions of human life is separable from a democratic project.Footnote 68 However, despite the questionnaires of the Pew Global Attitudes Project being designed to reflect the interests and values of members of the US foreign policy elite, the data can also be used, cautiously, to assess the aspects of popular perceptions with a potentially subversive democratic intent. In typically dialectical fashion, the surveys can reveal an image of common sense which can assist in the construction of an alternative, counter-hegemonic project. In essence, we can begin to investigate the state-of-play in this global battle over common sense.

The data used here are drawn from a series of mass surveys based on telephone and in-person interviews. The samples of public opinion in each country are broadly representative, although the samples in many of the developing countries contain an urban bias.Footnote 69 The discussion that follows is drawn primarily from the two biggest surveys conducted by the Pew Centre, examining popular perceptions of the US, globalisation and phenomena associated with globalisation, and attitudes towards liberal political and economic systems. The first involved opinion surveys conducted in 46 languages and 17 dialects in 44 countries between July and October 2002, with a supplementary sample of 16,000 people in 20 countries conducted between April and May 2003 specifically to gauge reactions to the US invasion of Iraq in February 2003.Footnote 70 The second Pew report was released in 2007 and was based on surveys of popular opinion in 47 countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. In total 45,239 interviews were conducted.Footnote 71 If we accept that it is possible to usefully generalise about social consciousness based on survey data, it is possible to examine some of the results.

The coercive turn in global hegemony embodied in the invasion of Iraq occasioned a stark reshuffling of American ideological pretensions: the pre-emptive use of military force in order to preserve American supremacy was a new ideological claim that was difficult to legitimate. It has been a basic element of the post-war order that America would always attempt ‘to ensure that force will appear to be based on the consent of the majority’Footnote 72 by acting in such a way as to appear to be upholding certain universal values. While the ‘War on Terror’ has attempted to absorb the traditional legitimating pillars of American foreign policy – human rights, democracy, freedom – these were never really central to its ideological appeal, which was rooted more in traditional American chauvinism. This is reflected in the almost total lack of support displayed for the invasion of Iraq revealed by the Pew surveys. The alter-globalisation movement's massive anti-war demonstrations of February 2003 (the largest in world history)Footnote 73 appear to be congruous with a world-wide legitimation crisis for the US' militarisation of its relations with the world. According to Pew data, ‘The [Iraq] war has widened the rift between Americans and Western Europeans, further inflamed the Muslim world, softened support for the War on Terrorism, and significantly weakened global public support for the pillars of the post-World War II era – the UN and the North Atlantic alliance.’Footnote 74 The political relevance of the UN General Assembly has been marginalised, with full majorities in nearly every country surveyed expressing the view that the UN was less important.Footnote 75 According to the report, ‘the bottom has fallen out of support for America in most of the Muslim support’, with solid majorities or minorities in five Arab countries expressing support for Osama bin Laden.Footnote 76 A similar poll conducted for the BBC in 2007 found that views of the US have been steadily deteriorating since 2005, with 52 per cent saying the US has a mainly negative role in the world, and nearly three-quarters saying they disapprove of the US government's handling of the war in Iraq.Footnote 77 The invasion itself and the ongoing effects of the revelation of a systematic ‘torture culture’Footnote 78 in the War on Terror have critically undermined the legitimacy of US power in global common sense understandings.

Still, the near absolute failure of America's neo-imperial pretensions to garner legitimacy is offset by the ongoing legitimacy of the key tenets of globalisation as a hegemonic project. It would appear that the linking of an anti-war message to the broader socio-economic causes of alter-globalism by educated members of the European leftFootnote 79 has not permeated into the views of the populations whose participation is a pre-requisite for mounting a counter-hegemonic challenge. Whereas the coercive aspect of neo-liberal hegemony attracted wide condemnation, the lack of a widespread conception of imperialism failed to link the military-strategic implementation of globalisation with globalisation through socio-economic processes. Although the connections between the two were seen as part of the same processes by many at the elite level, this failed to penetrate into popular consciousness and contributed to the rapidity of the collapse of the anti-war movement after 2003. Consequently, the 2003 study referred to above reported also that ‘Globalization, the free market model and [liberal] democratic ideals are accepted in all corners of the world.’Footnote 80 This indicates a significant failure in the alter-globalisation movement's political project.

This is reflected also in widespread support or assent to those epitomic symbols of globalisation, multinational corporations (MNCs) and the international financial institutions.Footnote 81 The survey revealed that, paradoxically, it is those in the core developed capitalist states that had the least support for MNCs (only one in ten people in North America and Western Europe think MNCs ‘very good’, with barely half giving good marks overall), while support was highest in the states of Asia, Africa and Latin America (excluding Argentina).Footnote 82 The IMF, World Bank and WTO also command widespread legitimacy: ‘In most developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America [except Argentina and Brazil] and the Middle East, majorities think such international institutions have a good influence on their societies. Nearly six in ten people in North America, Western Europe and Japan agree.’Footnote 83 However, the social basis of the organised alter-globalisation movement was always the international NGO nébuleuse,Footnote 84 and support for NGOs appears to be widespread, with three-quarters of people in North America and Europe (except Bulgaria) supporting NGOs, while in other countries support was always in the majority. Unions, fumbling for an alternative to outright capitulation to neo-liberalism but not always ready to join the alter-globalisation movement, also enjoy widespread legitimacy and approval.Footnote 85 Despite repeated attempts by alter-globalists to draw attention to the role of the global governance institutions in perpetuating the power of dominant strata of global society, they and multinational corporations continue to command legitimacy and thwart counter-hegemonic consciousness formation.

More specifically, there is now data available to quantify the popular perceptions of alter-globalisation protesters. Unfortunately for the street warriors, in their 2003 survey Pew found that ‘people generally have a negative view of anti-globalization protesters’.Footnote 86 Indeed, in the homeland of revolutionary struggles, the French gave more favourable views of multinational corporations than of the protesters! Majorities or pluralities of people in all the Western European countries, as well as Canada and the USA, offered negative views of the protesters.Footnote 87 While this represents a great setback to those who would argue, as Nineham does, that the movement's critiques have ‘gone mainstream’, there is significant minority support for the protesters in several countries. Many in France appear not to have extinguished all sympathy with the spirit of 1968, where 44 per cent of people rated the protesters positively. The same proportion of positive responses was recorded in South Africa and Guatemala, while in Honduras (46 per cent) and Bolivia (47 per cent) nearly half of the respondents held favourable views.Footnote 88 Outside the developed countries (where most of the protests took place), majorities did not know enough to offer an opinion or declined to offer a view of the protests. Hence, the report concludes, ‘To a considerable degree, anti-globalization protesters have simply failed to register on the public's consciousness.’Footnote 89

A more recent (2007) survey reveals the ongoing resilience of neo-liberal hegemony in the face of repeated ideological attack by the alter-globalisation movement. Although there was a slight dent in the enthusiasm of those in the developed countries for international trade and transnational corporations, this could not shake the broad acceptance of the key tenets of economic globalisation. Significantly, the largest fall in popular support for trade was inside the US, where support between 2002 and 2007 fell 19 percentage points, to only 59 per cent.Footnote 90 This compares to near universal support for international trade amongst the heirs-apparent to the title of central locus of capital accumulation, China and India. Where the disciplinary powers and material incentives of Fordist accumulation and consumption may be waning in the European heartland of capitalism, the social-psychological crisis of ‘post-material values’ has certainly not penetrated the periphery, where newly found prosperity is generating renewed consent. Where Fordist consumption once upheld the ‘Free World’, increasingly, it underpins the social stability of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. Latin America and Eastern Europe also reported significant increases in support for capitalism, while support for the free market and foreign corporations declined since 2002 in Western Europe (in France, a majority in 2007 said that MNCs are a bad influence, while support has fallen significantly elsewhere).Footnote 91 Despite a slight tempering of support for the avatars of neo-liberal globalisation, ‘Overwhelmingly, the surveyed publics see the benefits of increasing global commerce and free market economies.’Footnote 92

Surveys also indicate something more ambiguous lurking under the surface of the globalising political economy. While people ‘endorse free trade, multinational corporations and free markets’, they are also ‘concerned about inequality, threats to their culture, threats to the environment and threats posed by immigration. Together, these results reveal an evolving world view on globalization that is ‘nuanced, ambivalent, and sometimes inherently contradictory’.Footnote 93 This lends support to Gramsci's understanding of common sense as ‘not critical and coherent but disjointed and episodic’, ‘an ambiguous, contradictory and multiform concept’.Footnote 94 In fact these global findings conform to the contradictory nature of popular consciousness found in other studies, highlighting the ambiguity of the popular responses this can elicit.Footnote 95 As Gramsci was keenly aware, common sense is able to lend support to wildly different social projects, which implies that the fragmentation of social identities and the material insecurity accompanying neo-liberal globalisation can be exploited as easily for reactionary as for progressive social causes.

This darker side to common sense interpretations of globalisation is illustrated by the social anomie leading to the vast support throughout the world for greater restrictions on immigration and stronger borders.Footnote 96 This is despite the emerging norms of transnational solidarity and international reciprocity nurtured by the alter-globalisation movement. The uncertainties and volatilities of a neo-liberal form of globalisation are also evident in the socio-political forces that lead people to ‘worry about losing their traditional culture and national identities, and they feel their way of life needs protection against foreign influences’.Footnote 97 This uneasiness generated in the minds of people in different parts of the world by the destabilising impacts of globalisation opens to way to the possibility of an inward-looking, potentially authoritarian reaction to the neo-liberal project of globalisation. The World Economic Forum in 2002 commissioned a Gallup International poll of public opinion in forty-seven countries which revealed ‘increasing lack of trust of citizens towards their political representatives and institutions’. Half held little or no trust in parliaments, which shared the category of ‘least trusted institutions’ with political parties, governments and MNCs. Perhaps more disturbingly, by contrast, 69 per cent of people had ‘a lot’ or ‘some’ trust in the armed forces to ‘operate in society's best interest’.Footnote 98

Despite the latent potentiality for reconstructing popular common sense in an emancipatory, egalitarian direction, the evidence revealed by these surveys indicates the failure of the alter-globalisation movement to occupy the positions opened up by the destabilising impacts of globalisation, which are more readily going over to regressive social forces. Alter-globalist ideological constructions remain fragmented and analytically diverse, while hegemonic conceptions have stabilised in post-Washington Consensus and Third Way forms. Despite the efforts of those associated with the movement, the writings of Klein, Monbiot, Chomsky, Pilger and Fisk appear to be having less of an impact on common sense as those of Brzezinski, Fukuyama, Huntington, Luttwak and Friedman. As Anderson argues, the latter writers ‘unite a single powerful thesis with a fluent popular style, designed not for an academic readership but for a broad international public’.Footnote 99 Though Iraq may have significantly dented America's imperial legitimacy, the evidence points to the ongoing efficacy of neo-liberalism and its governance mechanisms as the new hegemonic concept of world order. While this situation is liable to change, especially in light of the economic crisis beginning in 2007, this seems to have little to do with the efforts of alter-globalist activists.

Systemic transformation will be dependent on the creation of an ideology and culture of resistance to neo-liberalism and on promoting global linkages in order to sustain progressive change in multiple state-society complexes. A basic element of hegemony implies ‘both a factual condition of powerlessness and a representation of oneself as an impotent hostage in the hands of an ineffable destiny’.Footnote 100 The failure so far to significantly disrupt the consensual aspects of neo-liberal hegemony reveals the shortcomings of the alter-globalisation movement as a coalition of social forces capable of mounting an ideological attack and forging a new intellectual-moral bloc on which to cement and unify a counter-hegemonic historical bloc. Hegemonic ideology remains supreme, successfully undermining the formation of counter-hegemonic consciousness. The view is still widespread that the status quo is ‘natural’, and ‘that it could not do otherwise than exist, and that however badly one's attempts at reform may go they will not stop life going on, since the traditional forces will continue to operate and precisely will keep life going on’.Footnote 101

Discrepancies and tensions in global common sense

Although it would not appear that there has been much success at overcoming the ideological power of market ideology in the global political economy, it is incumbent on a critical theory of IR to point to areas of tension or broader developments conducive to the overcoming of hegemonic domination and its replacement with a more egalitarian, emancipatory global political economy. As globalisation draws ever more aspects of human life and diverse communities from around the world into a world-wide system of market relations, the extent to which this represents the hegemonic project of specific strata of global society directs attention to the reactions we can expect as people look to secure their livelihoods from the vicissitudes and exploitations of market-based capitalist relations. How is this reflected in the views expressed by those surveyed here?

One line of differentiation of potential significance is the extent to which American common sense is diverging from its European antecedents. It would appear that there is more ready material from which to construct an egalitarian counter-hegemony in the common sense prevailing in Europe than in the US. The homogenising and materially satiating impact of consumer capitalism appears to be on the wane in a Europe increasingly enmeshed in a EU founded on national diversity and respect for transnational regimes and institutions, whereas the cultural convergence embodied in the ‘American dream’ continues to define a US founded on a messianic faith in ‘exceptionalism’ and self-declared Hobbesian inter-state competition.

This extends to the common sense orientation of many inside the US, where material wealth continues to define self-realisation (the ‘American way of life’) and where people continue to think that ‘most people who fail in life have themselves to blame, rather than society’.Footnote 102 The core defining features of neo-liberalism have also permeated American common sense far more effectively than elsewhere: Americans tend to think it is more important to have ‘freedom to pursue personal goals’ than for government ‘to guarantee that no one is in need’. This is a stark departure from the views of those in most other parts of the world.Footnote 103 The trans-Atlantic intersubjective tension is also reflected in a sharp division in popular attitudes to religion: 59 per cent of Americans deem religion ‘very important’ to their lives, while barely half that number in Canada or Europe would agree.Footnote 104 The psychological certitudes of monotheism in the US may carry over to a widespread feeling of cultural superiority.Footnote 105 Considerations such as these lead Robert Cox to suppose that ‘it would seem that western Europe and the USA are moving in different directions regarding the way people perceive the world and understand its problems’.Footnote 106 Europe and the US have diverged in their collective images of world order and associated cultural forms.Footnote 107

Furthermore, popular attitudes towards the current mode of economic development are more ambivalent than they may appear at first sight. For the most part, during the period of time in which the alter-globalisation movement represented a dynamic factor of world politics, people around the world have come to think that life has deteriorated in many ways.Footnote 108 Practically no people believe that what they attach to the word ‘globalisation’ is ‘very good’ – the vast majority prefer to describe it more ambiguously as ‘somewhat good’.Footnote 109 Strong majorities in nearly every wealthy country believe the next generation will be worse off – including 60 per cent of Americans and British, 73 per cent of Germans, 69 per cent of Italians and 80 per cent of French.Footnote 110 Furthermore, growing international trade was seen in 2007 as ‘very good’ by only 14 per cent of Americans (the third lowest of any country).Footnote 111 Significantly, between 2002 and 2007 support for ‘trade with other countries’ fell by 19 per cent in the US, to reach only 59 per cent.Footnote 112 The largest drops in enthusiasm for international trade occurred in the countries of the developed core. Meanwhile, the percentage of people saying foreign companies are having a positive effect in their countries is below 50 per cent in every Western country surveyed in 2007, down somewhat from 2002, while the rest of the world continues to hold mostly positive views of multinational corporations.Footnote 113

Increasing insecurity and socialisation of the costs of financial and economic deregulation are also reflected in a general belief that it is more difficult to get a good-paying job compared with five years ago.Footnote 114 Furthermore, most people think that working conditions for ordinary workers have gotten worse. This is especially true in the ‘transitional’ zones of global capitalism – Latin America and post-Communist Europe and the ex-Soviet sphere.Footnote 115 There is a widespread perception that inequality has increased. There remains an egalitarian element of popular common sense which is reflected in a virtual consensus that ‘the government should take care of the very poor who cannot take care of themselves’.Footnote 116 So while the alter-globalist critique does not appear to have struck roots among the consciousnesses of its key audience, the latent potential for a progressive response is manifested in the democratic impulse of a dual consciousness. When related to concrete circumstances of life and work, a dissatisfaction and frustration with the effects of neo-liberal globalisation are revealed, but when posed in terms of abstract principles and liberal institutions the dominant ideology continues to command assent. While the alter-globalisation has thus far failed to foster a coherent counter-hegemonic critique, the ambivalence of the dual consciousness lends support to the continuing necessity for a ‘critical pedagogy’Footnote 117 in order to transform these intuitive responses into a ‘higher level of one's own conception of reality’.Footnote 118

Conclusion

The argument outlined above indicates the extent to which the alter-globalisation failed to radically contest the hegemonic ideology of neo-liberalism in the global political economy. While, in their search for an agent capable of constructing alternative futures to neo-liberalism, Gramscian IR scholars have avoided the worst excesses of naïveté and uncritical celebration of alter-globalisation practices and the inherent emancipatory potential of a ‘global civil society’, more attention needs to be directed towards those people of global society not directly involved in the political battles over international financial institutions or ensconced in the internal debates of the social forums. If common sense truly forms the basis for the construction of a counter-hegemony to that of the transnational fraction of capital, the point of departure must begin with the popular beliefs of those masses of people on whose passivity the hegemony of neo-liberalism ultimately depends. The failure of the attempt by American state managers to garner legitimacy for the coercive armour of global hegemony is revealed in the overwhelming public opposition to the invasion of Iraq and the popular revulsion towards the imperial pretensions of American power. Offsetting this is the fact that none of this popular reaction has been carried over to the ‘dull compulsion of economic relations’ underpinning the social power of capital. This is exhibited in the ongoing legitimacy of the international financial institutions, multinational corporations and open markets. The fact that ‘anti-globalisation protesters’ are viewed negatively by majorities in every developed country surveyed, while barely registering in most developing countries, indicates a disconnection between the movement and the lives of the masses and the lack of an organic basis on which to articulate a counter-hegemony.

The material insecurity of a deregulated liberalism is widely felt but has so far failed to translate into support for transnational solidarity and democratic reconstruction. Instead the social corrosion and immiseration of globalisation is expressing itself in a reassertion of statist and exclusionary identities and a distrust of liberal democratic institutions. The hegemonic project of neo-liberalism seems to be undermining that cosmopolitan element of liberalism which constitutes the progressive element of globalisation. Gramsci's personal biography reminds us of the perils of such developments, and reinforces the pressing need to bridge the gap between the masses and those rather more traditional vehicles for working-class agency, trade unions and political parties. The extension of alter-globalism to such institutions would assist in the acquisition of institutional and material power and alleviate the distance between protesting elites and the popular element.

The forgoing considerations suggest a general situation characterised more by the discrediting of historical alternatives and general acquiescence to the status quo rather than any active or spontaneous attachment to hegemonic world views. But far from neo-liberal globalisation entering a moment of ‘openly declared “contestation and resistance”’,Footnote 119 the situation revealed in this analysis is of further, though inherently unstable, ‘consolidation’Footnote 120 in popular common sense, despite the counter-hegemonic efforts of the alter-globalisation movement and the ideological exposure of the momentary coercive rupture represented by the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is possible that the financial crisis that began in 2007, as it penetrates the real economy and foments a global economic and social crisis will cause a rupture between dominant representations and the material facts of living experience for most people. This could open up new ground for the alter-globalist critique, but it will not organise its social forces or ‘endow them with fighting spirit’.Footnote 121 The crisis could equally be co-opted into a discourse of ‘creative destruction’ or give way to dirigiste impulses seeking to defend the privileges of the owners and restore the profitability of capitalism. In either case, in the effort to construct a counter-hegemony ‘the starting point must always be that common sense which is the spontaneous philosophy of the multitude and which has to be made ideologically coherent’.Footnote 122 In the mean time, neo-liberal globalisation as a hegemonic project remains resilient.

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100 Urbinati, Nadia, ‘From the Periphery of Modernity: Antonio Gramsci's Theory of Subordination and Hegemony’, Political Theory, 26:3 (1998), pp. 370–391 at p. 370CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

101 Gramsci, , Prison Notebooks, p. 157Google Scholar .

102 Pew, , Views of a Changing World: 2003, p. 8Google Scholar .

103 Ibid.

104 Pew Global Attitudes Project, Among Wealthy Nations … America Stands Alone in its Embrace of Religion (Washington: Pew Research Centre, 2002), p. 1Google Scholar . Available at: {http://pewglobal.org}, accessed on 26 May 2008.

105 Pew, , World Publics Welcome Global Trade – But Not Immigration, p. 44Google Scholar .

106 Cox, ‘Beyond Empire and Terror’, p. 316.

107 Gramsci touched on some of the themes here, though with differing conclusions, in ‘American and European Civilisation’. Cf. Gramsci, , Prison Notebooks, pp. 316–318Google Scholar .

108 Pew, , Views of a Changing World: 2003, p. 79Google Scholar .

109 Ibid., p. 85.

110 Pew Global Attitudes Project, Global Opinion Trends 2002–2007: A Rising Tide Lifts Mood in the Developing World (Washington: Pew Research Centre, 2007), p. 4Google Scholar . Available at: {http://pewglobal.org}, accessed on 26 May 2008.

111 Pew, , Views of a Changing World: 2003, p. 13Google Scholar .

112 Ibid., p. 14.

113 Ibid., p. 10.

114 Ibid.

115 Ibid., p. 79.

116 Pew, , World Publics Welcome Global Trade – But Not Immigration, p. 5Google Scholar .

117 Rupert, ‘Globalising Common Sense’, p. 186.

118 Gramsci, , Prison Notebooks, p. 333Google Scholar .

119 Bieler and Morton, ‘Another Europe Is Possible’, p. 319.

120 Overbeek, Henk, ‘Globalization and Britain's Decline’, in English, Richard and Kenny, Michael (eds), Rethinking British Decline (London: Palgrave, 1999), p. 249Google Scholar .

121 Gramsci, , Prison Notebooks, p. 235Google Scholar .

122 Ibid., p. 421.