This paper seeks to problematize the construction of desire, subjectivity, and enjoyment in three recent Indian (Bollywood) films in relation to the spread of globalization in the subcontinent. Hegemonic expansion of globalization requires and is dependent on ideologically defining new sensibilities and cultures of living within a globalized universe. The fact that popular culture is complicit with this process is also well known. In what follows, I adumbrate this function and agency by focusing on the way this agenda is carried out within the domain of popular cinema in India. I argue that, Bollywood participates in the ideological construction of a globalized cultural subjectivity through the construction and privileging of a new ethics of globalized living; an ethics which is in opposition to established pre-global notions of cultural subjectivity. In considering the ideological dynamics of Bollywood as a discursive site for engaging with pre-globalized cultural mores, and for the production and dissemination of a new cultural ethics, I look at how the conflict between cultural discourses of pre- and present condition of globalization are staged, charted, and delineated for the purposes of reconstituting and popularizing socio-cultural and subjective sensibilities conducive to globalized living.

Jacques Lacan, in Seminar XVII (2007), defines discourse as ‘social link’ founded on language.

Introduction

Over the last few years, the concept of global governance, invoked as a useful tool to analyse certain institutional practices of governments, has acquired a preeminent level of popularity in the academic community as well as within the discourse of international cooperation. In the field of international cooperation, the term has also been recognized as an operative expression for analyzing the reform of the state. One of the main aspects of the term global governance is that it has established state management as characterized by an comprehensive approach, covering different elements of the management of the state, from private public service concessions (such as transportation) to the administration of justice. The main objective of this paper is to analyse global governance within the scope of multilateralism and international cooperation in terms of the reform of state, focusing on judicial reform in particular. It is our contention to establish that concrete analysis of the development and evolution of international aid backing judicial reform in different countries is a good means to represent certain aspects and develop general conclusions about global governance.

The origins of international aid that focuses on improving the law and judiciaries stems from the end of the Second World War. Two main aspects supported this phenomenon: (a) the increasing and constant interest in protecting human rights and (b) the creation of the international justice courts.

A little less than half-way into Rakesh Om Prakash Mehra's Rang de Basanti (Paint it Saffron, 2006), four young men – DJ (Daljit), Karan, Sukhi, and Aslam – are almost accidentally plucked out of their urbane, metropolitan, indeed remarkably privileged Delhi university environment to play the roles of the illustrious revolutionary quartet of Bhagat Singh (1907–1931), Chandrasekhar Azad (1906–1931), Hari Sivaram Rajguru (1908–1931) and Ashfaqullah Khan (1900–1927). As the young students begin to prepare for what is to be an amateur documentary on the lives of these martyrs to the cause of national autonomy, the visual diagram of their own contemporary lives comes into contact with the ‘quaint’ lives and times of Singh, Azad, Khan and Rajguru – boys who were themselves no more than twenty-three or twenty-four when their paths intersected in the most volatile of fashions through the manner in which they chose to die. While Karan, DJ, Sukhi, and Aslam awkwardly grapple with the effort to approximate the roles of men who seem remote from them, in their lives, in their deaths and in their passions, what we view on screen in the first half of Rang de Basanti is the hesitant and stuttering encounter between two distinct visual worlds, estranged from one another by what appears to be an insurmountable chasm.

It is welcome news that flights are resuming between India and Pakistan, and a pity this did not happen a few months earlier. I had to first fly for nearly four hours to Dubai, and then back three hours to Lahore.

As I gathered my bags in my Delhi apartment to leave for the airport, I must confess to a slight feeling of nervousness mixed with excitement. I was going to Lahore to give a lecture on globalization. An American economist who knows Pakistan well told me not to be too excited about the lecture because only half my audience would be professional economists; the other half a combination of Taliban without beards and CIA agents with.

Lahore International Airport at 2 a.m. does nothing to alleviate one's misgivings. Rundown, with cavernous hallways, the clanking sound of large, rusty luggage trolleys, and a slight medicinal aroma of detergents, it has the air of a police station. The immigration officer takes my passport and the special papers that Indians entering Pakistan are meant to carry, and looks puzzled. She has never ‘handled an Indian case’. and leans over to a colleague. They confer, send for the supervisor, and then in a short while I am out of the airport.

Pearl Continental Hotel, in the heart of the city, is all colonial splendour. When I check in at 4 a.m., a wedding party has just broken up.

Discussion about climate change and the management of CO2 emissions constitute a global debate for humanity. The causes and effects are the object of intense scientific study by experts who urge immediate and large-scale action. The conversation is largely expressed in terms of economics and development with little contemplation of the ethics of the present predicament.

Until now the proposed solutions have usually relied on the application of market instruments to the scarce capacity of the atmosphere – a global public good – to cycle greenhouse gases. Less discussed are the asymmetries among countries regarding excessive emissions and the consequences suffered. Almost absent is the perspective of political economy.

Into this scenario arrives The Economics of the Yasuní Initiative. It offers a fresh vision, holistic and substantiated, to the dilemmas of climate change. Ethics infuse every page and the tone is defiant. Official discourse is vigorously questioned and thermodynamics is shown to matter, indeed. Physics explains how the atmospheric sink was appropriated in the North and economics, how payment for foregoing petroleum extraction in the South can lead to both efficiency and equity.

The Yasuní-ITT Initiative emerges from Ecuador where the concept of buen vivir (good living) is forging a new relationship for government, society, nature and the market. The proposal finds itself in a milieu unimaginable just a few years ago: the conferring of rights to nature under the Ecuadorian Constitution of November 2008 – an earnest attempt to restore our environment.

When Manmohan Singh was Finance Minister of India, his critics pointed out that (a) his early writings had given the impression of his being a left-oriented economist who would wield his pen in favour of the underdog in any context, be it international politics or domestic policy debate; whereas, (b) once he became Finance Minister, he tried to liberalize the economy, encourage free trade, and make more room for market-based policies. To many, especially to the Indian Left, these facts seemed contradictory. They criticized Singh for not living up to his writings.

This was a mis-assessment. There is no real contradiction between (a) and (b). In fact, I supported Singh's reforms precisely because he combined both (a) and (b). Economic liberalization without concern for the disadvantaged gives rise to right-wing policies of the kind seen in Ronald Reagan's America and Margaret Thatcher's Britain—and to a certain extent even in India in the 1980s. I have no sympathy for it.

On the other hand, compassion without the ability to conduct clear-headed analysis can prove to be very costly. The world economy today is extremely complex; but there is also a large amount of analysis and statistical information available on this intricate organism. To ignore this information and to live by slogans and rhetoric is to court disaster. By failing to distinguish between Singh's reforms and rightwing economics, which ought to be abhorred, the Left has done us a great disservice.

Introduction

In this chapter, I argue for the global civil society as normatively and theoretically a new paradigm of global governance and also a possible emancipatory ‘cosmopolitan political project’ to the emerging challenges of democracy, justice and inclusive governance at the global level. Though global civil society is often perceived as a multilayered, contested and decentred space of associtionalism, I consider it an epic and irreversible ‘double movement’ of people seeking to transform hegemonic structures of global governance, protect human rights, minimize violence and increase the sphere of democratic life across the borderless world. And I suggest that this argument can be further explored, expanded and defended by offering at least four reasons.

First, I argue that globalization, benign or regressive, has created unique ‘political opportunity structures and processes’ rendering state-centric conventional theories of international relations and global governance completely irrelevant. Fuelled by the twin processes of associational and informational revolutions in the 1980s, global civil society has slowly and sturdily emerged as ‘a supranational sphere of social and political participation’ for a vast majority of people who have had not opportunity in the past to be heard in the hegemonic structures of international organizations. It is clear from the scope, reach and velocity of globalization that sovereignty of the modern nation-state has exhausted its imaginative power to continually secure the consent and allegiance of the population living under its shadow.

Introduction

In part I of this volume, it was argued that interactive learning in national systems of innovation (NSI) is strongly affected by the specific institutional set-up (chapter 2) and the specialisation in production structure (chapter 4). In chapter 3, the notion of user-producer interaction was introduced as a critical parameter for innovative success thus forming a micro-foundation for innovative industrial complexes and an important determinant for the performance of NSI's. The interaction between firms in user-producer relationships is not the only important type of interactive learning in innovative processes. In chapter 5 the interaction between various departments and functions within the firm were discussed.

Introducing now the notion of ‘industrial networks’, we set out to specify further, conceptually, the relationships between NSI's and industrial complexes/development blocks on the one hand and user-producer relationships on the other. The application of the network concept can serve as a qualitative as well as a quantitative specification of the micro-structure and micro-behaviour in NSI's.

However, the national level of systems of innovations will not be explicitly analysed in the present chapter. Its focus is on conceptual problems and on empirical illustrations mainly from Danish and Swedish industry. In this context, it should be mentioned that the concept of industrial networks also applies to international relationships (Imai and Baba, 1991). International industrial networks and inter-firm alliances will be discussed in chapter 13.

On the face of it there should be nothing contentious about the International Labour Standards (ILS) movement. It is meant to be a global effort to raise the working conditions and living standards of workers, primarily in developing countries. What is curious is that the biggest opposition to ILS has come from its alleged beneficiaries—to wit, Third World workers, unions, and governments. The fear in the South is that once such a global monitoring scheme is brought into existence, it will get diverted into an instrument of protection for the North. In the name of ILS, arbitrary and inflexible trade sanctions will be imposed on Third World countries. This fear gets heightened if the labour standards are imposed through the World Trade Organization (WTO), via a ‘social clause’ provision, which would allow the WTO to use trade sanctions against any nation that violates minimal labour standards. The other concern stems from the adjective ‘international’, which suggests a uniform global standard for all nations.

Recently, Archon Fung, Dara O'Rourke, and Charles Sabel have come up with an ingenious suggestion for international labour standards to get around some of these criticisms. They call their scheme ‘Ratcheting Labour Standards’ (RLS). They try to bring in flexibility by keeping labour standards away from formal global organizations.

Introduction

The acceleration of globalization in the 1980s began with the revival of classical liberal economics, as Keynesian policies reached their demise. Faced with the stagflation crisis of the 1970s and the first oil crisis, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher restarted economic growth by freeing trade and investment. They cut income taxes, especially for the wealthy, deregulated and privatized the economy, reduced the power of trade unions, weakened the welfare state and lifted barriers to trade and investment at home and abroad, therefore raising incentives for investment. Many underdeveloped countries faced similar crises at the time, especially those following import substitution models, and fell into debt through rising interest rates and oil prices. Essentially the same macroeconomic and growth policies were applied in underdeveloped countries, following what became known as the Washington Consensus (Williamson 1990). In addition, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the end of the Cold War created a global market economy. As free trade and investment treaties proliferated, globalization accelerated. In particular, foreign direct investment (FDI) increased worldwide at an average rate of almost 28 per cent a year from 1983 to 1998. Thus, freer markets and a reduced government role in both developed and underdeveloped countries released a fresh wave of globalization. The new schools of economic thought produced theories implying that free trade and FDI would lead to the equalization of growth rates and production levels across countries.

Abstract

Like many developing countries that liberalized their capital account, Turkey has been at the mercy of short term capital inflows accompanied by a continuous real appreciation of the domestic currency since 1989. Open foreign exchange positions and increasing foreign exchange related assets in residents' portfolios have been the inevitable side affect. The recent inflation targeting policy is claimed to have reversed this trend. However the currency substitution measure developed in this study suggests an alternative interpretation of the situation. Although the share of TL denominated assets in total monetary assets has been increasing relative to the share of foreign currency related assets, the liquidity services of TL denominated assets is in fact not increasing. In this study distinct measures of asset substitution and currency substitution, as opposed to the generic FCD/M2Y, are developed and the different degrees of liquidity provided by alternative monetary assets are distinctly measured. These AS and CS measures follow the conventional intuition as to their driving factors and suggest the existence of hysteresis in currency substitution in Turkey. From a policy standpoint, this provides evidence that targeting and decreasing the inflation rate alone may not be sufficient to overcome the structural problems of the economy that have been in the making for decades.

Keywords: currency substitution; asset substitution; Turkey; Divisia aggregates.

JEL Classification: E5, E6, F3.

Introduction

The widespread experience in most developing countries of the use of foreign currencies and foreign currency denominated assets has been an issue of vast academic interest since the 1970s.