This chapter re-examines the so-called three waves of globalization theory: the hyper-globalization position, the sceptical position and the transformationalist position. In many respects, this is an old debate that has been covered many times, but the focus will be distinctive in that it will discuss how conservative populism links to these debates and, partly for this reason, we examine globalization and culture as well as political economy. The hyper-globalization position and the sceptical position are therefore examined in the first two sections, both generally and in relation to culture and to conservative populism. The third wave of globalization is slightly more complex because it can refer to two different approaches. First, the transformationalist or post-sceptical position contends that globalization should be seen less in terms of quantitative measures around trade or capital flows, and instead as a system of transformations. This includes increased capital flows, global value chains, financialization, multinational companies, systems of regulation that transcend nation states, the growing importance of international organizations, and so on (see Held et al. 1999; Holton 2005). Descriptively this is a perfectly acceptable contention (even if the empirical arguments do rest too much on the hyper-globalization thesis), but it has been subject to a powerful critique by Justin Rosenberg (2005), which questions globalization's status as both theory and history. While accepting his theoretical critique, the chapter is less convinced by his historical critique, and we argue that recent changes in global capitalism are central to understanding the reality of actually existing globalization and conservative responses to it, and, in particular, we need to understand the reality of neoliberal globalization.

It is at this point that we can usefully introduce a second way of understanding the third wave, namely Hay and Marsh's (2001) focus on how real changes have occurred in the international order, but specifically how these have been interpreted and constructed discursively. This is where the analytical account of globalization crosses over into a normative account, particularly in wider political discourse beyond the academy, for the discourse of globalization was increasingly adopted from the 1990s onwards by politicians associated with the third way (Clinton and Blair above all) to argue that globalization represents a new context in which politics operates,