"The regime of globalization promotes an unfettered marketplace as the dynamic instrument organizing international relations"
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Greider is naming globalization not as a neutral description of growing cross-border ties, but as a governing ideology with teeth. Calling it a "regime" frames it as a rule set enforced through institutions and norms, not an organic evolution of trade and technology. The word smuggles in coercion: regimes have beneficiaries, police, and dissidents. In that light, "globalization" becomes less a story of connection than a political project.
The sly pivot is "promotes". Markets don’t simply emerge; they are built, defended, and exported. Greider’s target is the way trade agreements, IMF conditionality, deregulation packages, and investor protections turn policy into a one-way ratchet: liberalize, privatize, open, repeat. "Unfettered" is doing moral work too. It suggests a market stripped of democratic friction - labor protections, environmental rules, industrial policy - the very "fetters" citizens might choose if they had real leverage.
The most consequential phrase is "organizing international relations". That’s a quiet indictment of what replaces diplomacy and sovereignty: price signals, capital mobility, and corporate strategy become the default language between countries. Subtext: when the marketplace becomes the organizing instrument, non-market goals (public health, inequality reduction, climate action, cultural preservation) are treated as distortions, and politics is downgraded to risk management.
Contextually, Greider writes from the late-20th-century arc of neoliberal triumphalism, when the Cold War’s end made "there is no alternative" feel like common sense. His intent is to puncture that inevitability, revealing globalization as a choice - and therefore something that can be renegotiated.
The sly pivot is "promotes". Markets don’t simply emerge; they are built, defended, and exported. Greider’s target is the way trade agreements, IMF conditionality, deregulation packages, and investor protections turn policy into a one-way ratchet: liberalize, privatize, open, repeat. "Unfettered" is doing moral work too. It suggests a market stripped of democratic friction - labor protections, environmental rules, industrial policy - the very "fetters" citizens might choose if they had real leverage.
The most consequential phrase is "organizing international relations". That’s a quiet indictment of what replaces diplomacy and sovereignty: price signals, capital mobility, and corporate strategy become the default language between countries. Subtext: when the marketplace becomes the organizing instrument, non-market goals (public health, inequality reduction, climate action, cultural preservation) are treated as distortions, and politics is downgraded to risk management.
Contextually, Greider writes from the late-20th-century arc of neoliberal triumphalism, when the Cold War’s end made "there is no alternative" feel like common sense. His intent is to puncture that inevitability, revealing globalization as a choice - and therefore something that can be renegotiated.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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