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the Doha Round of trade liberalization negotiations
through the World Trade Organization, which commenced in 2001, reveal just
how fragile and contingent the bases of supra-national institutional authority
can be in the absence of consensus anlong leading national governments about
appropriate direction for future development. Even in cases where national
governments choose to adopt \m0 guidelines, as China did as a condition of
entry in 2001, there is evidence that this is as much to achieve domestic policy
objectives - such as the desire to establish an enforceable copyright regime for
the benefit of local creative producers - as it is to be a 'good global citizen'
(Fewsmith, 2001; Zhu, 2003; Fitzgerald and Montgomer); 2005).
Fifth, the claim that contemporary globalization is without historical precedent
has been questioned, most notably by 'globalization sceptics' such as
Hirst and Thompson (1996). Hirst and Thompson argued that, while there
has been a sustained and significant increase in international integration since
1970, it followed the historical period 1945-70 where international integration
was relatively lowv, and the period 1914-45 where it actually declined.
They make the point that, as measured in levels of international trade, investment,
and indeed the movement of populations, the volumes of international
transactions in the period from 1970 to the mid-1990s were in fact less than
those of the IA belle &poqlre period of international capitalism from 1890 to
1914. Moreover, there is the argument that much of what is presented as globalization
through raw figures on global trade and investment flows may in fact
be regionalization, or expansion of corporate operations within well-established
potential regions of operation. Rugman (2000) has argued that much
of the empirical data that is taken as evidence of globalization in fact points
to regionnlization - the expansion of in'ternational trade and investment
within defined geo-regional zones, such as the NAFTA region of North
America (USlCanada/Mexico), the European Union, and the East Asian
regional zone, led by Japan. There is certainly a need for caution in equating
overseas expansion with globalization, as the entry of a US-based corporation
into Canada, or a German corporation into Britain, does not indicate their
repositioning as a fully fledged transnational corporation.
Sixth, Hirst and Thompson join other 'globalization sceptics' such as
Cordon (1988), Boyer and Drache (1996) and Glyn and Sutcliffe (1999) in
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62 Understanding Global Media
questioning what they see as a pre-emptive write-off of the reforming capacities
of the nation-state through globalization discourse. Hardt and Negri
represent a particular Marxist variant of this discourse - albeit one with a
long history - but it has been put by representatives of more neo-liberal positions,
such as the first Director-General of the World Trade Organization,
Renato Ruggieri, who argued that 'globalization [is] a reality which overwhelms
all others', or the Australian Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer,
who proposed that 'whether people fear globalization or not, they cannot
escape it' (quoted in Flew and McElhinney, 2005, p. 290). On both the neoliberal
and neo-Marxist ends of the political spectrum, the 'talking up' o