Free PDF Ebooks Files @AcrobatPlanet.Com

When in spring 2002 thousands of Argentineans protested against their government’s economic policy, their anger was directed against, amongst other issues, the economic liberalization of the 1990s. After decades of protectionism, the Latin-American state had followed the recommendation of the IMF, as its neighbors had done, and systematically opened its markets of goods and capital. Critics of globalization saw the Argentinean crisis as an conformation that their skepticism towards the “Washington consensus” and namely its emphasis on openness and deregulation was justified. According to their interpretation, economic integration intensifies socio-political conflicts because it is mainly the owners of capital and export industries that benefit from the renunciation of import substitution and other protectionist measures, whereas the working population and the import-competing sector are the losers of the new policy.

In this sense it could be expected that the “Rush to Free Trade” (Rodrik 1994), experienced by many developing countries within the last two decades, will be accompanied by an increasing social and political instability. Although this thesis plays a central role in the debate on globalization, it was not systematically tested until now. The majority of the economic literature deals with causes but not with the consequences of economic interdependence. The increasingly professional research on the causes of civil war refers only partially to economic conditions as being conducive to intrastate conflicts. Here the availability of natural resources deserves special mention (Collier 2001, de Soysa 2002); however, a state’s interlacing with the world economy is attributed with the exception of Gissinger et al. (2003) at the most the role of a control variable. This is in sharp contrast to the prominent role that the destabilization thesis played in the dependency school of thought (for a summary and discussion see Weede 1990).