This chapter examines in detail the ways in which globalization as a discourse conflated the logic of necessity and that of desirability, and in doing so became a normative project. This was associated with revised social democracy and the third way, above all in the US and UK but also in other parts of the world, both developed and developing, such as Germany, Brazil and France. In particular it was argued that globalization amounts to a “logic” to which nation states must respond (Giddens 1998; Blair & Schroeder 1999), which in many respects represents a continuation and extension of neoliberal principles – in terms of trade and investment liberalization, financial liberalization and public-sector reform, which made public bodies act in ways more consistent with (imagined) market principles. But unlike the neoliberalism of the 1980s, led by the New Right and conservative social policy, in some respects this was associated with a new social liberalism that (selectively) championed progressive social policy including women's rights, gay rights and anti-racist policies so that these groups could properly participate in the “free market”. This was sometimes associated with a new, progressive capitalism in which these policies are socially just and economically efficient (Florida 2002).

This era of globalization can be linked closely to the long “1990s boom” of 1992 to 2007 (Schwartz 2009). This enhanced a number of wider claims made about the benefits of globalization, related to the rise of a post-industrial information economy in the developed world, and manufacturing and poverty reduction in the developing world. Central to these claims was the wider one that we are increasingly living in a globally interdependent world and that many of these interconnections are to be welcomed. These include the development of new skills, entrepreneurship and positive sum interactions between individuals, regions and countries, and the development of a cosmopolitan human rights culture enforced by liberal global governance. As part of this post-Cold War world, liberal multiculturalism was enhanced by migration, and humanitarian intervention promoted the integration of the developing world into the liberal zone of peace.

The rest of the chapter examines these issues in four sections. First it examines third way claims made about the “new economy” in the developed world, and second the issue of poverty reduction and liberal intervention in the developing world.