Search

Begin New Search Topic Globalization

951. Monetary Power and Political Autonomy: Exchange Rate Policymaking in Follower States

Author:
Louis W. Pauly
Publication Date:
03-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Common sense suggests that successful leaders need willing followers. Coercion can sometimes be effective, but even the most inexperienced parent soon learns the lesson that results achieved through unforced acquiescence tend to be better and more enduring than those achieved through the application of brute force. Political theorists typically focus on the concept of legitimacy when they evoke the quality that transforms raw power into something more acceptable to its target. Clearly implicated by that concept is another one, even more difficult to measure: respect for the ultimate autonomy of the target. In an era of rapid global transformation, when the exercise of great power is readily observable, research nevertheless proliferates on the meaning and nature of independence, of sovereignty, and of political autonomy (for an overview see Grande and Pauly 2005).
Topic:
Economics, Foreign Exchange, and Globalization

952. Reforming from the Top - A Leaders' 20 Summit

Author:
Andrew F. Cooper, Ramesh Thakur, and John English
Publication Date:
10-2005
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
This document is based on a forthcoming book that examines the feasibility of creating an institution known as the “L20”, a summit of twenty world leaders whose objective would be to break the international deadlock over some of the most pressing problems facing the world. In a climate of despondency over the achievements of existing global institutions such as the G7/8, the United Nations, the World Bank and others in dealing with these major issues—which include terrorism, HIV/AIDS, globalization and the “global apartheid” between the developed North and the developing South —this document asks what is new and unique about the L20 that might enable it to make the breakthrough where others are deemed to have failed. Is the L20 destined to be the defining institution of the 21st century, or is it doomed to remain merely an idea?
Topic:
Development, Globalization, International Trade and Finance, and United Nations

953. Towards a New Profile? Development, Humanitarian and Conflict-Resolution NGOs in the Age of Globalization

Author:
Tobias Debiel and Monika Sticht
Publication Date:
01-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for Development and Peace
Abstract:
Both the significance and the profile of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have undergone a fundamental transformation in the past twenty years. In development cooperation new fields such as ecological sustainability and the promotion of democracy have emerged besides 'traditional' issues like poverty reduction. Furthermore, confronted with the realities of war and state decline, developmental NGOs pay increasing attention to crisis prevention and the resolution of conflicts; even a new type of nongovernmental organization has appeared, conflict-resolution NGOs. The change has been particularly dramatic in the area of humanitarian aid: even before the end of the Cold War some NGOs – Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) at the head of all of them – freed themselves from the “straitjacket” of only conducting humanitarian operations with the permission of the (often illegitimate) local government; meanwhile the concept of sovereignty has been substantially redefined. NGOs, however, also con- formed to the imperatives of globalization and commercialization, and formed oligopolies on the market for humanitarian aid. At the same time, they are also confronted with their own “powerlessness” in conflict zones: actors of violence and power-holders successfully attempt to instrumentalize humanitarian aid for their own purposes, and western military forces threaten the independence of humanitarian work by demanding subordination to political and strategic goals.
Topic:
Globalization, Government, Humanitarian Aid, Non-Governmental Organization, Privatization, and Sovereignty

954. Regulating Multiplexes: The French State between Corporatism and Globalization

Author:
Graeme Hayes
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The development of multiplex cinemas has reinvigorated film exhibition and cinema attendance in France. Yet in the wake of the exception culturelle, multiplexes also stoked corporatist fears over the Americanization of French cinema, and in 1996 the state introduced a regulatory procedure for multiplexes modeled on the loi Royer. Regulation has not stopped subsequent multiplex development but rather protected the dominant market position of the major, vertically-integrated French exhibitors. The resultant economic concentration has undoubtedly increased the domestic and international competitiveness of French cinema, but at the price of industry polarization and a loss of cultural and economic pluralism.
Topic:
Globalization
Political Geography:
America and France

955. After GATT: Has The Revival of French Cinema Ended?

Author:
Jonathan Buchsbaum
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
At the time of the 1993 GATT battle, French cinema was in a period of steady decline. Ten years later, French cinema had rebounded. Yet tensions emerged during that time. The role of television in cinema's revival was changing, concentration tendencies were continuing, and globalization threatened the integrity of the industry. These tensions elicited a series of studies, by the CNC, parliament, academics and others. The paper examines the significance of these studies, concluding that the government will probably have to make radical adjustments to its cinema policies for the first time since the privatization of television in the 1980s.
Topic:
Globalization

956. French National Cinema and the Martial Arts Blockbuster

Author:
Charlie Michael
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
This article considers the ways in which a recent cycle of martial arts films challenges conventional notions of what a "national" French cinema might look like in the era of globalization. By tracing the industrial and critical contexts around changing production practices in the 1980s and 1990s, I argue that two of these films - Kiss of the Dragon (Chris Nahon 2001) and Le Pacte des loups (Christophe Gans 2001) - represent marked, stylistic countertendencies within an emerging strategy for exporting popular French genre films: one that mimics dominant Hollywood forms and another that seeks meaningful differentiation from them.
Topic:
Globalization

957. Eloquent Fragments: French Fiction Film and Globalization

Author:
Martin O'Shaughnessy
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
French (and Franco-Belgian) cinema has witnessed a return to the real since the middle of the 1990s and should thus successfully have pinned down the impact of the globalizing economy on the sociopolitical sphere. Yet neoliberal globalization is deeply resistant to representation within the frame of conventional fictions. Condemned to be a cinema of fragments by the shattering of the old leftist imaginary, has French cinema merely tracked globalization's local consequences, always letting systemic causes escape its grasp? Or has it identified successful strategies with which to restore eloquence to social struggle and suffering that otherwise seemed condemned to silence? Engaging with important films by the Dardenne brothers, Robert Guédiguian, Bertrand Tavernier, Manuel Poirier, Matthieu Kassovitz and others, this paper argues the latter. French film, it suggests, has found ways to make the fragments speak to the totality, to short-circuit neoliberal triumphalism and to interpellate a nation that no longer plays its erstwhile integrational role. While none of these strategies can provide totalizing systemic critique, they do show that cinema is playing an active role in the rebuilding of a radical oppositional imaginary.
Topic:
Globalization
Political Geography:
France

958. Le Réel à l'attaque: French Documentary and Globalization

Author:
Laurent Marie
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Amidst the success of the documentary genre in France, anti-globalization documentaries constitute a subcategory that has come to the fore since the mid-1990s. Akin to the post- 1968 wave of militant cinema, this new genre has nevertheless emerged out of an entirely different ideological, economical and political context. While the films benefit from a level of institutional support in terms of production, devising successful strategies of distribution and exhibition remains central to the political efficiency of this new wave of cinema engagé. As for the films themselves, they display a wide variety of approaches to globalization, from articulating the day-to-day activities of counterglobalization movements to representing the consequences of liberalism on different sectors of French society, not least the French working class. A few documentaries successfully tackle the international dimension of the globalization debate.
Topic:
Globalization
Political Geography:
France

959. Le référendum français de ratification du Traité constitutionnel européen du 29 mai 2005

Author:
Gérard Grunberg
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The 29 May 2005 referendum on the ratification of the European Constitution marks an important date for French political history since the beginning of the Fifth Republic. The widespread victory of the "no" vote requires an interpretation that takes into account the different dimensions of this event. One such dimension is the political context, which played a large role insofar as the referendum took place in a period when the government was particularly unpopular and when, more generally, the political class was suffering from the public's growing distrust. A second and key element was the deep division of the Socialist party, whose leadership was unable to wage a campaign offensive in favor of a "yes" vote. In general, the proponents of the "yes" vote--the major parties of the Right and the Socialist party, as well as the Greens--were incapable of offering voters a truly positive and convincing argument in favor of the Constitution. On the other hand, the proponents of the "no" vote, especially on the Left, succeeded in convincing voters that the social and economic crisis in France (particularly unemployment) was due to "liberal globablization" and that the European Union, far from combatting globalization's effects, was in reality an implicated actor. The campaign played a large role in a context where public opinion wavered right up until the end. The results underscored the massive "no" vote of the working classes, which poses a formidable problem for the principal pro- European parties. The "French no," which will have major repercussions on French political life, brought to an end the process of European political integration as it had developed over the last twenty years.
Topic:
Globalization
Political Geography:
Europe and France

960. Policy Space for Development in the WTO and Beyond: The Case of Intellectual Property Rights

Author:
Ken Shadlen
Publication Date:
11-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University
Abstract:
Global governance in intellectual property (IP) has changed dramatically in the last two decades, and these changes have profound - and worrying - implications for late development. What was once principally an instrument of national policy is now increasingly subject to international disciplines, as the world moves ever-closer to harmonization in the area of IP management. But moving toward harmonization and achieving harmonization are different matters, and it is essential to keep in mind that the former and not the latter describes contemporary arrangements: the trend is toward a reduction in policy space, a feature that many scholars and activists point to with great concern (Gallagher, 2005), but the outcome remains one where countries retain space for autonomous IP management.
Topic:
Economics, Globalization, International Trade and Finance, and Treaties and Agreements