Plan de Desarrollo y Ordenamiento Territorial del Gobierno Autónomo

The processes of globalisation formed the basis of what Stuart Hall and others defined as the ‘new times’ that necessitated the modernisation of the Labour Party, and subsequently the birth of the New Labour project.14 However, it is out of this analysis that a sharp divide in the New Labour literature has emerged. There are those on the one hand who have argued that the Party retained, albeit in a modified sense, its commitment to social democracy in the light of these global pressures, and those on the other, who claim that New Labour simply capitulated to the ‘conventional wisdom’ of neoliberalism and its underlying support for global capitalism.

Michael Kenny and Martin Smith are among those broadly sympathetic to the constraints that the Blair government faced in terms of the international economy and the transformations that the British state had undergone in the preceding twenty years. In the light of these ‘new times’, policy now had to be:

…conceived and applied in the context of the globalisation of financial markets, fundamental reconfigurations of international economic power and a transformed macroeconomic environment in which interest rates, inflation and public sector borrowing are far more difficult to manage.15

For Kenny and Smith, this meant that a line had to be drawn between the policies of previous Labour governments and those appropriate to today’s conditions. Developing the

14

Drawing upon a Gramscian analysis of hegemony, Hall and Jacques (eds. 1989) attempted to account for the concomitant rise of the Right and decline of the Left in Britain, whilst mapping out the socioeconomic changes that had taken place.

15

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work of Swank, Lindblom, Przeworski and Wallerstein, Mark Wickham-Jones has argued that the Labour Party acted in a manner consistent with the theory of the structural dependence of the state upon capital in the way in which it set about making economic policy.16 The Party’s desire to retain investment, maintain economic prosperity and secure re-election meant prioritising the demands of global capital over some of its most cherished social democratic beliefs. Quite simply, as Driver and Martell suggest, the challenge of globalisation meant that the Left had to find new ways to deliver its traditional values.17

Responding to these assessments of New Labour’s ‘revised’ social democracy however, Colin Hay has argued that “this is an exceedingly dangerous, however well-intentioned, move”.18 According to Hay, the consequence of New Labour’s strategy merely served “to restrict the limits of the possible, the feasible and the desirable to that imaginable within the ascendant neoliberal worldview”.19 In his assessment of these ‘new times’, Alan Finlayson has gone further still. By treating globalisation as “an inevitable force” and allowing neoliberal theories of the market to “remain dominant”, Finlayson argues that New Labour took “the easy way out, failing to live up to its historic opportunity, [and] serving only to adjust us to a post-Thatcherite settlement”.20 This point is reinforced by Bob Jessop, who has suggested that although New Labour “invoked ‘the stakeholding society’, ‘the giving society’, ‘communitarianism’, ‘social citizenship’, ‘social capital’, ‘partnership’, and, of course, ‘the Third Way’ to distinguish its approach from Thatcherite neoliberalism”, these programmes in practice rarely threatened the neoliberal project.

16

Wickham-Jones (1995a). For an overview of the structural dependency literature see Swank (1992); Lindblom (1988); Przeworski and Wallerstein (1988).

17

Driver and Martell (2006: 49)

18

Hay (1999a: 11)

19_Ibid. 20

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Instead, New Labour “embraced the City agenda and neoliberalism” to “become the natural governing party of international capital”.21 In these accounts, New Labour’s acceptance of globalisation and the exigencies of free-market capitalism meant abandoning its social democratic credentials in favour of the existing neoliberal hegemony.

This, of course, is but a flavour of the much broader debate concerning the frequently contested, quadraphonic relationship between New Labour, globalisation, social democracy, and neoliberalism.22 It is nevertheless useful in providing a backdrop to my own analysis of the way in which globalisation was viewed by Party officials. Using a wide array of policy statements and speeches, the purpose of this particular section is to assess the precise way in which globalisation configured New Labour’s political economy both at home and abroad. What is abundantly clear from these speeches is that in spite of the wider conjecture surrounding the precise nature of globalisation, New Labour ministers were themselves convinced that such transformations were not only taking place but were an intrinsic part of contemporary economic and social relations.

What is arguably more important however – certainly insofar as the central claim of this thesis is concerned – is that for government officials, globalisation was integral in drawing together and blurring the previously distinct boundaries that had demarcated domestic and foreign policymaking. As Baroness Amos, during her time as Secretary of State for International Development remarked:

21

Jessop (2007b: 287)

22 _{See for instance Giddens (1998); Hirst (1999); Wickham-Jones (2000); Coates (2001); Clift (2002); Jacobs, Lent and Watkins (2003);}

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Globalisation is reinforcing the need for an integrated approach to policymaking. Policies no longer fit into neat sectoral boxes and the distinction between domestic and international policy is increasingly blurred. Most domestic policies, such as taxation, have international implications and most international policies, such as trade, have domestic implications.23

Similarly for the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, “domestic and international policy *was+ becoming ever more intertwined as a result of globalisation, travel and technological advance”.24 This understanding of globalisation underpinned the transmission of policy from the domestic to the international that I claim was evident in New Labour’s political economy. Therefore it is from these statements that my analysis unfolds. Since globalisation had rendered the lines between ‘the domestic’ and ‘the international’ indistinguishable, policies designed by government officials for consumption at home were tailored to meet the perceived realities and challenges of this new global economy abroad.

For Tony Blair, the new politics of ‘the Third Way’ sought to address the “radical” changes that were taking place in the new global economy.25 As Blair took this message of ‘the Third Way’ across the world, it provided the Prime Minister with several opportunities to discuss these perceived realities with a number of different audiences. Blair’s underlying message was consistent throughout: the “globalisation of the world economy is a reality”.26 He believed that “we are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not”,27 because “we have one economy, all of which is affected profoundly by developments in

23 _{Amos (2003b)} 24 Straw (2003) 25 Blair (1998a: 8) 26 _{Blair (1998c)} 27 Blair (1999)

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both technology and global markets”.28 For countries to be successful, the Prime Minister remarked, globalisation should be ‘accepted’,29 for it is “transforming the world economy”.30 For Blair, globalisation quite simply, was “a fact of life”.31

Gordon Brown too – both while he was Blair’s Chancellor and Prime Minister himself – spoke repeatedly of the challenges and opportunities presented by globalisation and the global economy. Like Blair, Brown argued that “globalisation has happened”, and the challenges that have arisen from it have done so “from our ever greater interdependence in an integrated global economy”,32 ”with its ever more rapid waves of innovation and its fast-moving and often destabilising capital markets”.33 At a social level, the Chancellor noted how “changes in the global economy *had created+ a worldwide culture: global communications and travel, global brand names, global music, films, and entertainments and global media outlets”.34 These changes meant that governments were “of course subject not just to national pressures, but to global pressures too”.35 That governments felt compelled to yield to these global pressures is striking as it illustrates the extent to which New Labour felt constrained to treat globalisation as an inevitable outcome, or as Watson and Hay have remarked, to pursue a distinct ‘logic of no alternative’.36

New Labour’s discourse of globalisation also featured heavily in the policy pronouncements of other senior cabinet officials. Given that the focus of the thesis is upon New Labour’s international development policies, it is appropriate that I begin with

28 Blair (2001f) 29 Blair (2003a) 30 Blair (2004b) 31 Blair (2006a) 32 _{Brown (1998g)} 33 Brown (1998h) 34 Brown (1999b) 35 _{Brown (2000f)} 36

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Clare Short, New Labour’s first Secretary of State for International Development. For Short, the fixed realities of globalisation meant that “it is not a question of whether people are for or against it”, globalisation was for “real”, as “part of history, just as industrialisation was *and+ as big a historical change as the industrial revolution”.37 Not only was globalisation an undisputed reality, it was, according to the late Robin Cook, as inevitable as sunrise. During his time as Foreign Secretary, Cook remarked, “it is a good thing that the sun rises every day, but I also know there is nothing I can do to stop it even if I wanted to”.38

During his first stint at the Treasury as its Chief Secretary, Alistair Darling offered a similarly fatalistic assessment of the strategic environment that faced New Labour and Britain. “We live in a global economy” Darling noted, and “we are moving towards a single global economy”.39 Indeed many New Labour figures shared this sense of inevitability towards globalisation. As the Labour peer, Lord McIntosh remarked, “I just take the view that it is a fact which we can do nothing about; we will not turn it back”.40 The Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon agreed. He, like both Blair and Brown, viewed globalisation as “a fact of life”.41 Echoing these remarks, the Leader of the House of Commons, Peter Hain argued that it was indeed “a fact of life” and that “we, in Britain, are part of a global economy”.42 This ‘fact’ could not, according to the Home Secretary Charles Clarke, “be un- invented”, it was simply “the realities with which we have to live”.43 As a result, globalisation was, in the terms of the Science and Innovation Minister, Malcolm Wicks,

37

Short (1997b)

38

Cook (2000) in Chadwick and Heffernan (eds. 2003: 259)

39 _{Darling (1998a)} 40 McIntosh (2000) 41 Hoon (2001) 42 _{Hain (2003)} 43 Clarke (2005)

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“here to stay”.44 New Labour’s last International Development Secretary, Douglas Alexander noted that “in our age, shaped as it is by the twin forces of globalisation and interconnectedness, to talk of one world is no longer to utter an abstract thought but to describe a concrete reality”.45

These statements are just a handful of the hundreds that were made throughout New Labour’s time in office to demonstrate the extent to which the ‘conventional wisdom’ of globalisation was appealed to by government ministers across Whitehall as a very fixed reality of the modern age. However, while these assessments are revealing both in this sense and in providing the rationale for the policy decisions that were subsequently reached, simply taken on their own, they give little indication either of how these discourses themselves were internalised by New Labour officials or how they went on to shape government policy. As Watson and Hay note, “that the Labour Party has chosen to deploy the rhetoric of globalisation is undeniable. It is crucial then that we establish on what terms it has done so”.46 While Watson and Hay focus purely upon the domestic sphere, I take this analysis a stage further by exploring the terms upon which globalisation was deployed within the realm of international development. I argue here that the terms upon which it did so were inconsistent, resulting in a paradox in New Labour’s political economy. Despite the apparent fixity and inevitability of globalisation, government officials believed that they could, either through prudent policy management or strategic manipulation of the realities of globalisation, negotiate its otherwise inexorable pressures, both at home and abroad.

44

Wicks (2007a)

45 _{Alexander (2007a)} 46

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The pattern to New Labour’s discourse of globalisation mirrors that one of what Bob Jessop has termed “strategic selectivity”.47 The various discourses of globalisation were used strategically by government officials to justify certain policy decisions within specific contexts, and to discipline expectations amongst the electorate and the wider polity concerning what was (or indeed, what was not) politically or economically feasible. As I demonstrate in the following section, the selectivity stemmed from globalisation as being understood by New Labour as both as a challenge and an opportunity. This Janus-faced view of globalisation was epitomised by the appeal made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself, Alistair Darling; the Minister for the Armed Forces, Bob Ainsworth; the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, Ed Balls and his predecessor, Ivan Lewis to “embrace” and “respond” to both “the challenges and opportunities presented by globalisation”.48