Global Futures

This book provides a critical assessment of the 'globalization thesis' through sustained analysis of the nexus of processes underlying social and cultural relations. It examines, explores and teases out the many contradictions embedded within different discourses of globalization. Together, the various chapters in this collection offer a wide-ranging critique of those accounts which represent globalization primarily, if not exclusively, as the classic story of European modernity with its attendant narratives of ostensibly unfettered movement of people, unmitigated economic growth and social progress. The authors make a careful and thoroughgoing analysis of such key issues as the social inequities governing the internationalized market in labour migration; the global politics of environmental and ecological governance; the 'new orientalism' apparent in contemporary trade relations between the USA, Japan and East Asian NICs; the forms of 'othering' apparent at the heart of certain academic discourses of globalization which seem to repress the formative influence of colonialism in the constitution of European modernity; the airport as a symbol of the political economy of migration; the complex ways in which ethnic and linguistic ties form an integral part of trade, investment and migration in the Central European region; and the impact of exile on East European intellectuals in Britain. As such, the book places questions of power at the centre of global processes. This book is unique in its bringing together all these themes in one volume, and in establishing connections across theoretical policy-oriented and political debates which normally take place in separate arenas.