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An Overview of Globalization Research in Venezuela

Rita Giacalone, Grupo de Integración Regional (GRUDIR) and Universidad de Los Andes (ULA), Mérida, Venezuela


Introduction

Any attempt to explore a research theme usually needs to establish clear concepts and a vocabulary in order to limit what to include and what to leave out. Also, concepts need to be built into logical or rational systems of ideas, and there should be some level of agreement among those involved regarding the method (or methods) to be used (Sartori 1984). Obviously, concepts and vocabulary, systems, and methods may change over time, and not be equally accepted by all researchers. But, in the field of globalization, there is not only little agreement on concepts, vocabulary, and methods, but also a recognition that no single discipline can cover everything that globalization implies. This makes the possibility of cumulative research on globalization a difficult and complex task. It is with these shortcomings in mind that I approach this overview of globalization research in Venezuela.

I start from the premise that globalization implies at least two levels of analysis: 1) the market phenomenon promoted by technological changes that speed the movement of goods, services, people, and information, and 2) the policy agendas, or political responses, that surround the first phenomenon, usually supported or attacked with a normative overtone. Venezuelan analysts have done work on both levels, so it is possible to find a corpus of literature on globalization. This is discussed in the first section of this paper with an aim to make explicit what is being studied and by whom. This analysis does not pretend to be exhaustive but care has been taken to include examples of the different lines of research on the matter. The books and articles reviewed are written in Spanish and have been published over the last ten years.1 The first section ends with a short list of centres, institutes, and research groups where relevant research about globalization is being done. In the second section, I discuss key themes (expressed as keywords) associated with globalization, which appear both in academic research and in political discourse, to facilitate a better understanding of the concept and describe the experience of globalization in Venezuela, before summarizing my conclusions.

Research on Globalization

Most research about globalization in Venezuela can be grouped according to the following categories:

  1. Discussions of the evolution of aspects of the global economy such as global finance and global production, and their perceived or expected effects upon Venezuela, Latin America, or developing countries in general
  2. Efforts to present and circulate in Venezuela the concepts and interpretations of academics of the developed world (Ohmae, Rosenau) or of other developing nations (De Sousa Santos, Ianni), with the aim of establishing parameters for global governance
  3. Discussions of other forms of globalization — cultural, environmental, technological — and their effects.

Of the three types of research, the first produced the most publications during the 1990s, but, by the second half of the decade, works dealing with the role of the state and of public policy within globalization also gained pre-eminence. Thus, the central disciplines involved were economics, international relations, and political science, and the main questions were "How can we (as a nation or as a region) respond to perceived changes at the international level?" and/or "Do we have the capacity to influence it?" So, globalization was approached from a rather practical angle — the need to understand the phenomenon in order to attempt to tame it.

Efforts at conceptualizing globalization are few, and sometimes they are supplanted by an overview of positions in the specific field as an introduction to studies that deal with its perceived effects on developing nations (see, for example, Linares 2006; Chapín 1998). Some conceptual perspectives appear in works by del Búfalo (2005a and 2005b), Córdova (1998), and Añez, Boscán and Useche (2000). In general, these authors support the notion that globalization is a new word to describe an old phenomenon, and that it is part of a change in political discourse within the developed nations. In this sense, globalization is considered "a hegemonic concept," and a stage in the development of capitalism. As most of them consider globalization to be just another stage in capitalism, brought about by the end of the bipolar world and accompanied by a productive transformation inspired in a new technological paradigm, their views are influenced by the way in which each author conceptualizes capitalism and, also, how he or she assesses its expansion.

Among the authors who appraise globalization negatively (Hernández 1998; Montserat 1998), the ideas echoed are those of Chomsky, Ianni, Ferrer, Wallerstein, Urriola, and Tomassini. They see it as a strategy of the developed nations — that is, as a policy agenda of the North, aimed at counteracting the slowdown in their economic growth, productivity, and financial capacity by way of the elimination of trade barriers (by means of the World Trade Organization); reducing the role of the nation-state in development, monetary and fiscal policies; and the imposition of a new international division of labour. A subgroup of authors (Blanco 1998; Simancas 1998) is inspired by the ideas of Samir Amín and Lenin, and their attention focuses on the phenomena of transnationalization, understood as a risk for the nation-state, and, sometimes, of regional integration, perceived as the preferred way to counteract the negative effects of globalization.

For another group, however, globalization is a historical phenomenon marked by enhanced international economic integration, brought about by the sum of a number of technological changes, which have generated deep radical changes in economics, politics, international relations, labour, culture, and so on. Changes were originally unintentional, but later they gave birth to divergent political and social projects (see, for example, Valecillos 2001; Levy and Alayón 2002).2 Valecillos discusses the historical nature of globalization and its economic and political impact from a critical perspective before considering its main effects within pre-1998 Venezuela such as a decline in investment and employment and less confidence in democracy. However, he recognizes that these effects differ according to the stage of the capitalist economic cycle in each nation, so the negative impact of globalization is partly a sequel of the stage of development and of the policies followed before. For Levy and Alayón as well, globalization is a historical process with different and mixed impacts. They stress the diverse speeds of change in nations and actors that contribute to a developing feeling of chaos and uncertainty, and accept that globalization has been reified and blamed for everything. In the introduction, they point out the contradiction of calling globalization both an historical process of formation and the present stage. They specify that its impact is not equal throughout the world because economic and social relations established over its history are at the root of many of its problems, and only a clear reading of this co-responsibility could lead to a better insertion into a global world.

Some authors interested in the question of governance have made globalization from above and globalization from below the core areas of their research (Jacome 2004; Moneta 1994; Serbin 2002). They have concentrated on the political and social problems that globalization creates in the configuration of one-world politics or global politics and in developing nations. Globalization from above became equated with the spread of a world order preferred by the North, while globalization from below was expected to produce a global civil society based on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) interested in the environment, gender issues, ethnic minorities, and so on. Forces from below were also expected to contribute to regionalization processes "in response to the homogenizing mechanisms of globalization" (Serbin 1998, 5-8). Luis Ugalde (1998) and others have emphasized poverty as the central focus of their research within this line.

Another group of academics took an international relations approach to the subject of globalization — that is, a strictly disciplinary perspective — and echoed the debate between the Anglo-Saxon and European (mainly French) interpretations of globalization. Some argued in favour of specific interpretations, such as that of Rosenau and attempted to build on them by developing concepts such as "fragmegration" and "intermestic" (Vilma Petrash). This approach proved a short-lived phenomenon of the 1990s that attracted few analysts. Most of the authors remained within the tried and tested line of the dependency school of international relations (Ianni) and of interdependence (Wallerstein).

Within the perspective of culture, Daniel Mato (1996; 2003) minimized the dichotomy between economy and culture, and emphasized the intercultural conflict between hegemonic modernity and interculturality, with its two possibilities — the defense of cultures of resistance or the negotiation of differences. In general, those that make culture the axis of their reflection are concerned with the interplay between homogenization and diversity. Within this perspective, some have stressed the difficulty of constructing a scientific approach to study globalization, considered a necessity in order to develop mechanisms of global governance. To this end, Carlos Delgado Flores (2006) has developed a systemic model which incorporates all global actors and their implications in an effort to construct a useful tool for planning, calculating impacts, and generating policies. César J. Burelli Valero (2000) takes as his starting point Marcuse's notions about the expansion of consumption at the global level, in order to discuss ideological forms of domination that are facilitated by globalization and their philosophical implications.

Since the beginning of the 2000s, there has been a decrease in the number of studies about globalization in Venezuela. This decrease may have been affected by the fact that a number of the authors interested in globalization moved from the academy to positions in government (Ronald Blanco, Franklin González, Francisco Simancas, Kaldone Newhead), while another group left Venezuela for other countries (Serbin, Moneta, Petrash). The first movement also influenced the position on globalization taken by the present Venezuelan government as the academics moving into government support the radical arguments of Samir Amin and Lenin, among others, regarding globalization as a policy agenda of the North in defense of its interests.

The remaining Venezuelan research on globalization has followed two divergent paths: 1) one group of researchers became more empirically oriented, relying less on the discussion of concepts and more on hard data; and 2) a second group attacked globalization as the source of most evils and became less analytical in their work, echoing only authors mentioned by the government, without a thorough reading of those arguments. The latter group holds a negative view of globalization, seeing it to be responsible for every fundamental problem (poverty, insufficient food production, cultural dependency, lack of transparency in the judiciary, corruption, global warming). In summary, for them globalization has become a scapegoat, rather than an area of research.

Empirical research with some conceptual overtones is being done by the CENDES (Centro de Estudios del Desarrollo-Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas). In 2005 it published a collective book, gathering together chapters about globalization from Heinz Sonntag (2005), Sergio Aranda (2005), and Luis Mata Mollejas (2005), representing more empirical studies on the effects of globalization on territorial and social asymmetries in the periphery of Caracas (compare with Cariola and Lacaban 2001; 2003; Agosto, Lacabana, and Cariola 2003). Also from CENDES is García Guadilla's (2005) paper "Complejidades de la globalización e internacionalización de la educación superior." A good study of the perceived effects of financial globalization upon the Venezuelan banking system, and which sees globalization as an economic historical phenomenon, is by Armando León Rojas (2001). These studies are alike in that the effects of globalization are detected through empirical substantive research, without critical examination of those effects and with no attempt to replicate their findings in other contexts. In GRUDIR (Research Group on Regional Integration, Universidad de Los Andes-Mérida), globalization is approached by means of empirical studies, also with some conceptual overtones, but along different lines of inquiry. These lines of inquiry are:

  1. The interplay of regionalization and globalization, especially as this has affected the politics of inter-regionalism (Giacalone 2006; 2007a)
  2. The possibility of developing a regional currency in a global context (Mora 2008)
  3. The role of Latin American transnational actors in globalization (Giacalone 2007b)
  4. The effects of the opening of trade on trade flows, food production, and agribusiness (Toro and Ruiz 2005).

It is difficult to summarize what is being studied in Venezuela about globalization, but the published literature suggests that presently less attention is being paid to concepts, theories, and methodologies and more is being given to empirical studies. The latter have become more analytical, though normative assessments and even prescriptions about globalization as an economic phenomenon, a political project, and a social process still abound.3 Emphasis is on the analysis of the effects of globalization upon developing nations, Latin America and/or Venezuela.

Finally, I could not find outstanding readings on globalization made by Venezuelan authors, but, according to published work on the subject, a map of research centres that conduct meaningful research on globalization can be drawn. In terms of quantity, most studies seem to come from the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV, Caracas) and have been done in three centres:

Outside the Universidad Central de Venezuela, there are two other centres doing relevant research on globalization:

Research Themes: Keywords

While looking at the academic literature on globalization, I found that globalization also figures in academic work dealing with other topics, such as research on management, business, and emerging markets by IESA (Instituto de Estudios Superiores en Administración) in Caracas (see for example, Francés (2006)). Words that are associated with the terms "globalization," "global," and "globalizing" in Venezuelan academic studies which do not specifically deal with globalization are: "governance," "market economy," "civil society," "democratization," "regionalization," "regionalism," "transnational," "new actors," "investments and capital flows," "socialization," "social development," and "cultural diversity."

Regarding keywords important to understanding the meaning of globalization in Venezuela, I offer the following ones:

World order and world system imply changes in forms of global governance. For example, NGOs and academics doing research about them expect NGOs to be the builders of a world power arrangement, by means of new or reformed institutions at the global level.

Regionalization is also expected to be the cornerstone of a new world system but mainly developed by the actions of governments and/or economic actors (transnational business and labour). Thus the determinants of performance within globalization are more domestic and regional than external.

Transnationalization usually alludes to market restructuring at all levels (local, national, regional, and global) and its economic effects on the local and national economy, and on their capacity to participate in an enlarged (global) economy.

Hegemonic crisis and neo-liberalism are expressions employed by both academics and politicians, which mark a preoccupation with globalization understood as the last stage of capitalism.

Interculturality, transnational identity, and culture and development emphasize the possibility of multiple forms of development and/or cultures co-existing within globalization (or a reformulated form of this process).

Obviously, these keywords do not pretend to encapsulate all the meanings of globalization in Venezuela or any other country, given the complexity of the concept, but are the ones usually found in academic and political discourse. In the first two, the main concerns are how globalization is changing the world and which actors can influence the changes — civil society at large, NGOs, or governments and other economic actors. The third keyword emphasizes market forces and their impact. The fourth one is clearly related to a specific and lineal view of the historical process, while the last group of expressions opens up a broad variety of angles from which to explore globalization.

Identifying keywords in non-academic discourse poses still more difficulties, because the word globalization has become part of the general language of politicians and journalists since the 1990s. The first difficulty derives from the fact that general use of the word sometimes collides with and sometimes superposes in different and contradictory ways academic concepts. A second difficulty relates to the tendency to incorporate moral considerations — regarding globalization as eminently good or bad — into the analysis of the phenomenon. And a third is the very ambiguity of a concept that has multiple levels of analysis and is, as Scholte (2004) has stated, not one but many. Thus, the plurality of the phenomenon, the moral overtones of its use, and the general public's use of the word tend to obscure the picture of how globalization is viewed or approached in non-academic discourse.

Outside the Venezuelan academy, globalization has not attracted much attention from the general public. Regarding the official discourse of the Venezuelan government (1999-2008), since 2001, this has incorporated the arguments and the language of the most radical antiglobalization movements (Saguier 2007; Giacalone 2008). In general, the government uses the term globalization in a negative and derogatory sense, or embodied into other words. The most usual ones are "empire" and "the North" (in reference to the United States) or "savage capitalism" and "neo-liberalism." Globalization is seen as a process associated with the last stage of a situation that will disappear because political, economic, and cultural hegemony will be changed by the development of a multi-polar world.4 This is consistent with a government vision of the global world predicated upon security concepts. Accordingly, the external context is presented as a threat for Venezuela due to the geopolitical hegemony of the United States, the geo-economics of globalization, and the political risks of neo-liberalism (Cardozo 2006, 63).

This government activism may have had a direct effect on the lack of public debate about globalization over the last years, because it has been argued that, in Venezuela, "there are people to debate [topics such as globalization] but there is no debate because the government does not want it" (Carlos Romero, UCV, Caracas, 28 September 2003). This quotation summarizes the feeling that the government has monopolized discourse on globalization and on other themes related to external relations because it does not want other voices to be heard. For this reason, it also seems uninterested in technical or empirical analyses of the Venezuelan possibilities within globalization. Among the public, there is little interest in globalization and, sometimes, if there is any idea about it, this seems to be determined by the position of the government, due to the polarized political situation in Venezuela.

Conclusion

In Venezuela there is little debate on the subject of globalization, and the concept has left the forefront of public attention in the present decade. This may seem paradoxical because the political discourse of the present government employs the terms more than previous governments, albeit only in a negative way. So it may be assumed that general debate about globalization and other international matters in Venezuela is limited because the government has monopolized it and imposed its own antiglobalization stance.

This illustrates an important risk of research on globalization. When Appadurai (2000) claims that scholars need to take up the study of globalization from below, his expectation is that this will democratize the flow of knowledge about globalization and he presupposes that scholars will assume the voice of the powerless and help them to be heard. Unfortunately, in the process, some scholars (like some governments) may end up considering themselves to be the sole voice of the dispossessed and the holders of the "sacred truth" about globalization. This has two important consequences: it creates a new version of globalization from above and it inhibits a plural debate about co-operative solutions to globalization problems.

The attempt to survey what is being studied in Venezuela under the name globalization highlights that:

Within this situation there is not only room for, but also the need for, more research on globalization in Venezuela. An Internet portal, established by the North-South Dialogue project, may help to surmount some of the limitations and shortcomings pointed out above, by allowing the free expression and interaction of ideas among disciplines, among academics and non-academics, and among people from the South and the North.

Works Cited

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Añez, Carmen, Boscán, Roberto and Useche, María. 2000. Estrategias globalizados. Tendencia histórica del capitalismo. Economía Nueva Etapa 16: 7-33.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2000. Grassroots globalization and the research imagination. Public Culture 12 (1): 1-19.

Aranda, Sergio. 2005. Globalización y América Latina. In Venezuela. Una visión plural, ed. S. Aranda, 75-90. Caracas: CENDES.

Blanco, Ronald. 1998. Globalización y fronteras. In Globalización y regionalización, ed. R. Alvarez de Flores and M. Bustamante, 89-101. Mérida: Universidad de Los Andes, Consejo de Publicaciones.

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Notes

1. With exceptions, the term "globalization" did not come into general use among Venezuelan researchers until the mid-1990s.

2. Though both were published in the early 2000s, they are the result of research conducted prior to then.

3. In this classification, I follow Scholte (2004).

4. In government discourse there are similarities between the treatment of globalization and the way in which pre-1998 Venezuela is presented, as a "sick body," "destroyed building, and "ship without compass" (Molero de Cabeza 2002, 309).

Contents



Glossary Terms