A total of 2,389 people participated in the 2009 IPSA World Congress of Political Science in Santiago, Chile. The 21^st triennial version of the event was held from July 12 to 16 at the University of Chile and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Members of IPSA research committees and individual members of IPSA from 70 countries organized over 600 panels, for a busy academic program that often included up to 35 simultaneous sessions. Thanks in great part to the success of the World Congress, IPSA’s membership has now reached over 3,500 individual members! IPSA is working hard to create even more opportunities for interaction and mutual benefit among our members. To become a member, click the red “Become a Member” link at the top of this page. To sign up for the IPSA monthly e-newsletter and find out about upcoming events and Calls for Papers, click on the Newsletter link at the top of this page.

Opening Remarks by Fernando Henrique Cardoso for the 21st IPSA World Congress

“The world has changed”, said the former President of Brazil. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in a video taped with his message for the XXI IPSA World Congress of Political Science. Unfortunately, personal health reasons prevented Mr. Cardoso from joining us in Santiago. Still, he took the time to prepare some remarks, in which he thanked the past President of IPSA, Lourdes Sola, and touched on the importance of IPSA celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2009.

President of Brazil from 1995-2003, Mr. Cardoso was sorry he could not be part of the Opening Ceremony, as scheduled, with his colleagues Ricardo Lagos –former President of Chile- and Lionel Jospin –former Prime Minister of France. In his message, he spoke about “the first crisis to have a global impact”, and about the particularities of the recent economic downturn. At the core of his comments was the need for democratization, not only of financial instruments but of the financial institutions themselves.

(Higher quality non-streaming video downloads are available.)

2009 World Congress Theme 

GLOBAL DISCONTENT?
Dilemmas of Change

The term “global discontent” sums up many of the challenges of our times. Globalization, while old in origins, has come to dominate our lives during the last couple of decades. If technological change has been the driving force, the collapse of the bipolar world system has opened the floodgates for it to reach all corners of the world. Internationalization as a phenomenon has been with us for a long time. As communication and transportation systems around the world improved, we were constantly told that the world was becoming a smaller place. But globalization as a process is of more recent vintage. It refers not only to the speed with which information, money and goods travel around the world but also to the reorganization of the world economically and politically in ways that were not possible before. Finally, globalization has become an ideology. Its proponents perceive the world through this cognitive framework and mobilize it in their efforts to shape how the world system operates and where it should be going.

    Globalization continues to be employed casually as an umbrella category. It covers the economic and financial integration of emerging market societies into the world system as well as the social and political implications of the “information era.” The latter includes technological developments making possible e-government and e-politics on a worldwide scale. Such richness of meaning has encouraged the evolution of many conceptual frameworks and analytical trends. Thus, more recently, “global processes” has been offered as an alternative to “globalization” to permit greater specification of the dimensions involved and to avoid some of the ideological undertones of the term. We face, as political scientists, both an opportunity and a challenge to advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of the phenomenon that we have loosely referred to as globalization.

Globalization influences politics in numerous ways, directly and indirectly. As the removal of barriers to movement of capital, goods and information has gained ground, the nation state, the primary unit of human political organization since 1648, has come under challenge. One response has been the emergence of multi-level governance with the state redefining the space it occupies so as to reinvigorate itself and with new or strengthened entities forming at the regional and global levels. Some argue that states are increasingly constrained in the exercise of their sovereignty by multi-national corporations, international financial institutions and international organizations, both governmental and non-governmental.  The nation state, in striving to bring prosperity to its citizens appears these days to rely less on its coercive powers and more on securing the consent of independent economic actors. The so-called “enabling state” has become more accommodating to the wishes of such actors in marked contrast to earlier times when economic actors had to persuade the nation state to be understanding of their needs and preferences.

One way the nation state has tried to meet the challenge of globalization, as already indicated, has been by forming regional unions and/or establishing multi-level governance. The European Union is the most complex example of a regional union since it aims for political union while others tend to limit their domain to trade. All share a similar intention, however: to form a bloc that can influence and give direction to globalization-derived developments so as to minimize their negative and maximize their positive outcomes. Similarly, nowadays, institutions of multi-level governance are proliferating throughout the world.

The re-formation and possible weakening of the nation state has invited the resurgence of sub-national groups who demand acknowledgement of their existence, recognition of cultural and sometimes political rights. Integration has returned as a central concern of national governments. Some countries, for historical or cultural reasons, may possess attitudinal and institutional frameworks that facilitate coping with such challenges while others do not.  Nowadays, however, most countries face these challenges, as people discover forgotten origins, identities and cultures. The search for new formulae for holding societies together is continuing, frequently accompanied by violence.

Globalization produces a variety of trends, some convergent, others contradictory. A marked trend, for example, is the one toward democratization of societies, a global process harboring many challenges. In the emergent “market democracies”, economic integration goes hand in hand with populations clamoring for constitutional democracy. Elected politicians and government elites face unprecedented new challenges when striking a balance between two distinct constituencies and two distinct set of policy goals. The expectations and the changing moods of domestic and international markets and the perceptions and the demands of the electorate are rarely in harmony. Policymakers have little room to maneuver, yet they are under pressure to satisfy both constituencies. Is that an impossible task?

Those societies that have a greater role in shaping the globalization process are projecting their political and economic values to the world. Having an operating market economy and democratic government seem to be the main elements of this ideological movement. Yet, there are doubts as to how well democracy has recently been working in its original habitat. Furthermore, the application of democratic forms in societies that have previously been ruled by other systems has often produced outcomes that are problematical. The integration of protected national economies into the international market economy, similarly, has frequently had destabilizing consequences. Rationalization of economies, privatization of state enterprises, reduction or termination of food and fuel subsidies have generally worsened the lot of the already downtrodden and swollen their ranks. Interestingly, those who have defended the rewards of the free movement of goods and capital have been adamant in instituting ever-new barriers to the free movement of labor. There is much debate on whether the economic distance between the rich and the poor both within and between countries is widening. The disadvantaged are demanding changes to the current international economic order so cherished by the international markets and sometimes euphemistically called the “new financial architecture”. Yet no new international arrangement capable of establishing basic rules for a new international order has come to replace the Bretton Woods system, a situation that generates instabilities in the developing nations. Indeed, the WTO Doha round designed as a “development round” has encountered serious difficulties and been suspended.

Economic despair and frustration have proven to be fertile ground for a set of negative developments. Turning to terrorism is one such outcome. The spread of organized crime is another. Criminal networks organized globally are engaged in the drug trade, people smuggling, prostitution, internet fraud, the arms trade and the dissemination of the weapons of mass destruction. A third outcome is the movement of unauthorized labor across boundaries. Some citizens in the rich world find this labor economically threatening and culturally inferior. They seek to arrest the inflow and turn to ideologies that justify driving foreign elements out of their societies. The incoming workers, on the other, hand enjoy only an uneasy and marginal existence. They are usually ignored and their presence is not acknowledged in politics. They can neither make its presence felt nor communicate their needs and frustrations except through unorthodox means, involving occasional outbreaks of violence.

At least in its initial stages, there is a widely shared feeling that at the international level globalization is working to the advantage of the already developed and industrialized countries. At the national level, on the other hand, it is thought to favor those that are already well off at the expense of the middle and the less well-endowed layers of society. In historical perspective, these judgments may prove to be too harsh or even inaccurate. China and India as well as a number of other countries, after all, are enjoying levels of growth and overall prosperity they have never enjoyed before. Yet many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, feel deprived of the benefits globalization is supposed to bring and yearn for a new world order which serves their interests better. A few have even turned to employing low-cost instruments to challenge the existing order. Some of the so called rogue states are suspected of extending support to terrorist movements, of trying to develop and export weapons of mass destruction and of using proxies to intervene in the politics of other countries. Such policies have on occasion invited retaliatory acts, including military intervention, on the part of the major actors in the global system.  

Globalization has brought with it global problems of environment, producing climatic change seen by many to be threatening the survival of societies. Politics has failed to bring about a solution. Developed societies work to insure a safer environment for themselves while exporting some of their problems to the less developed. The poor find it difficult to devote their limited resources to environmental problems. Globalization also results in the increased trafficking of women, both for prostitution and for domestic work - part of the new global care economy in which care in rich nations are increasingly supplied by migrant women.

Globalization has produced a redistribution of power both within societies and within the world.  Like any other major transformative process, it produces winners and losers. As the process moves on, it generates its own discontents, its critics, its opponents.  It produces politics of resistance as well as politics of compliance in which both states and NGOs take part. At this critical juncture, we believe that the globalization process and its outcomes constitute critical topics of study for all political scientists. We propose that global discontent constitute the central theme at our 21st World Congress. The broad framework of globalization offers opportunities to participate in a grand intellectual enterprise to analyze, criticize and evaluate the prevalent phenomenon of our times whether students of international relations, comparative politics, political economy, political thought, public policy, political change and development, politics of the environment, gender politics, ethnic politics, urban politics, local government, politics of resistance or of reaction.