A Tale of Contestation, Disciples, and Damned: The Lessons of the Spread of Globalization into Trinidad and Tobago

Abstract

Globalization has spread throughout the world, reaching into its remotest corners. At a world scale, the recent phase of this diffusion has been enhanced and enforced by a neoliberal global financial architecture. However, within many Third World countries, especially during recent decades when an integral component of their integration has been an agreement with the international financial institutions, the local acceptance of globalization has led to an intense contestation between those who win during incorporation and those who lose. In many Southern nations, the discord is muted, obstructed, or is masked; in others, though, the conflict is open and public. The author employs the voices of the winners and losers in an open and public conflict where the contestation was in fact published in the national press. His focus is the debate over the costs and benefits of international incorporation which occurred in Trinidad and Tobago with structural adjustment programmes. The country, with its democratic government and free expression, serves as a window into an otherwise murky process, for elsewhere this contest has often been unrecoverable and subterranean. Integral to the understanding of the spread of globalization into the Third World is the operation of the winners in a compradorial fashion—here, we learn how such disciples establish a national mindset which assists the international spread of globalization.