Summary

This chapter seeks to contribute to the development of progressive political strategy by examining the role of crises in progressive imaginaries and by comparing the views of liberal and progressive social forces on globalization and global governance. It argues for the need to focus less on the potential for a large-scale crisis to create the political conditions for alternatives to neoliberalism to emerge and, instead, to develop a strategy for promoting significant, but nevertheless incremental, issue-by-issue, change. This, I argue, will help expand the political ‘limits of the possible’ for progressive forces by incorporating those elements of the liberal camp who are ill at ease with ‘disciplinary’ neoliberalism and new constitutionalism.

Introduction

This chapter examines the role of crises in progressive imaginaries as well as the views of liberal and progressive social forces on globalization and global governance in order to assess their implications for progressive strategy. In doing so, three main arguments are made. The first is that, in contrast to the Great Depression, which, in the 1930s, brought an end to the nineteenth-century utopian vision of free market globalization, a crisis with similar political impact is less likely today. As a result, rather than focusing on the potential for a large-scale crisis to instigate similar large-scale political change, progressives need to develop a more concrete strategy for promoting significant, but nevertheless more incremental and issue-by-issue, change that works to increasingly expand the political limits of the possible. To develop such a strategy, it further argues that progressives need to follow the example of election campaign strategy by identifying other social forces that might support moving in, at least, a more progressive direction as well as a broad method for doing so. In the former case, the second section argues that a potential exists for what I call the classical economic liberals to ally, perhaps in the short term, with progressive social forces. In the latter case, the third section argues that ‘progressive multilateralism’ is emerging as a broad method for expanding the political limits of the possible and that it may form a basis for common action among progressives and many classical liberals alike.