Globalisation is an essentially contested concept, Alex Callinicos points out, whether considered from the normative or the explanatory point of view.
There are those who welcome and approve its presumed core explanatory assertion: an irreversible shift has occurred in the direction of global economic, political and cultural integration, whose tendency is to abolish borders and make nation-states irrelevant. And there are those who condemn it.
Likewise there are those who dispute this assertion: globalisation has not gone that far at all, it is much more contingent and reversible - and, considered historically, the last period of the 19th century saw a greater expansion of international trade and investment compared to national income than the most developed parts of the world have experienced in the last 25 years. Globalisation has been largely a phenomenon affecting the most developed parts of the world and their selected peripheries. Its promise of worldwide growth and equality has not been delivered upon - and nation-states retain substantial regulatory power which they ought to use.
The normative dimension is not the same as the left-right one. Both left and right-wing accounts of globalisation differ on its extent and acceptability - partly because of their differing attitudes to the neo-liberalism commonly assumed to be the main ideological driving force involved in deregulating financial and investment flows and policing them through the World Trade Organisation. But as Lori Wallach, a formidable American trade lawyer, puts it: "Neo-liberalism doesn't work. They tried it - it tanked. They promised a lot - they didn't deliver . . . We must build a demand for real change across the world, and we must build a consensus about what we're for."
It makes for a confusing debate, founded on deeply contested definitions and evidence. But the need for proper tools to analyse and judge these contemporary trends is acknowledged on all sides, as the increasingly vast literature on globalisation attests.
These books come decidedly from the left of the political spectrum, largely from activist critics of these international trends whose voices have been boosted by the succession of protests against G8, WTO and EU summits in Seattle, Genoa, Prague, Gothenburg, Nice and elsewhere since 1999.
This is not to say they are "anti- globalisation". On the contrary, each author is anxious to stress his internationalism and, in varying degrees, globalisation's liberating potential if it is organised differently to meet basic human needs. There is a global alternative, they insist, to the existing (mal-)distribution of wealth and power in a world where 2.8 billion people exist on less than two dollars a day. In 1960, the top fifth of the world's population had 30 times the income of the poorest fifth, whereas today it has 74 times as much. And growth, life expectancy, child poverty, education and literacy made less progress in the globalisation decades of 1980-2000 than in the previous two decades of Keynesian demand management. Such figures taken from recent World Bank and other studies pepper these books. Their authors' passion and commitment must be taken seriously, because the movement they represent has undoubtedly arrived.
"Our movement is at a turning-point," says Lori Wallach. "They label us 'anti' - we have to shake off the label. We're for democracy, for diversity, for equity, for environmental health, They're holding us to a failed status quo; they're the antis."
A different world is possible, as Kingsnorth, a journalist with Ecologist magazine, puts it. His book is a vivid, illuminating piece of reportage from around the remarkable worldwide movements that have developed over the last decade. We meet, first, the Zapatista indigenous rebels in Chiapas, Mexico, whose slogan "ya basta" ("enough is enough"), pitched against the North American Free Trade Agreement, was taken up by millions elsewhere "as a collective cry of No! from these many different people and groups, in many different places".
This theme of capitalist homogenisation and injustice rejected in the name of diversity and equality gives him his title and is central to his book. We go on to meet demonstrators at the July 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, participants in the hugely successful Porto Alegre teach-ins, a People's Global Action meeting in Peru, community opponents of water and utility privatisation in South Africa, West Papuan guerrillas fighting against Indonesian occupation, a Brazilian landless movement and several lively anti-consumerist and anti-corporate movements in the US. Kingsnorth observes correctly how under-reported they are in mainstream media. He draws the strands together in a radical conclusion calling for a very different world order based on democracy, diversity, decentralisation, sovereignty and access.
Derber covers a lot of the same ground more thematically. His central purpose is to set out the case for "global democracy" as an alternative to the present system dominated by corporate globalisation - "the struggle to reinvent globalisation will be the dominant issue of the coming century", which he defines as a "global constitutional moment" similar to those that accompanied the French and Russian revolutions. The top 200 companies dominate the world economy, with sales bigger than the economies of 180 of the 190 nation-states, accounting for 25 per cent of world output, holding 90 per cent of its patents. Their interests are fundamental to the new definitions of legality and property rights extended around the world through the WTO - "a legal corpus that is the beginning of a constitution for the world economy".
He sees a continuity in US corporate legality, from the 19th-century robber barons through the development of US federal regulation in the 20th century and its subsequent extrapolation to the rest of the world. US power and influence accumulated over the last 100 years has become the central political reality of our age. The US is inescapably dominant, its power based on its consequent role as an umpire which simultaneously fields its own team of interests. This is globalisation's "basic contradiction". It is "torn between transnational global governance and US global superpower", between umpire and empire.
Derber's most interesting and original proposals have to do with creating a global democracy based on a transformation of world governance, citizen-controlled national government, publicly accountable global business, local community reinvigorated with citizen participation and a new international community that limits the power of even the strongest nation by creating collective security.
"This new politics is in its earliest stages of development, but it has already created shock waves among the world's elite and brought new hope for change."
Derber, a professor of sociology from Boston well-known in the US movement, says this is creating a major political crisis about how globalisation functions as window-dressing for an American view of the world. His book is refreshingly US-centred, reminding European readers that anti-Americanism misses the point that this is a global and not a territorial movement. Interestingly, he sees the EU's experiments in cross- national politics as a potential model for other parts of the world - unlike much of the new European left.
Hanahoe's book, by an Irishmember of that left, looks in detail at how US dominance is organised through a globalisation that suits its interests, concentrating on elite networks such as the Rockefeller family and the Council on Foreign Relations. He concludes that US unilateralism leaves it vulnerable to resistance and isolation.
Callinicos offers a critique and classification of political attitudes to globalisation, seen as attitudes towards the capitalist "logic of exploitation and competitive accumulation" which drives it. They range from reactionary anti- capitalists such as Ross Perot or Jean-Marie Le Pen; through bourgeois critics who want to reform the market system, such as Noreena Hertz or Joseph Stiglitz; localist and fair trade ones such as Colin Hines and Deborah James; structural reformists such as Susan George, Walden Bello and the Tobin tax movement; autonomist critics such as Naomi Klein and Tony Negri; to socialist critics, including his own International Socialist Tendency.
Reform or revolution runs through his book as a major contemporary theme. It bears out his case that social critique has undergone a major renewal based on the failure of neo-liberal globalisation and its apologists such as Francis Fukuyama to deliver on the worldwide growth and equality promised during the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War.
Nigel Harris, also writing from a Marxist perspective, welcomes the contemporary separation of capital from the nation-state as a return of cosmopolitanism after a long and reactionary nationalist interlude. His book argues that globalisation "offers an immense vision of hope for the world - to escape from the domination of states and their preoccupation simply with national power and, in the past, war".
The sheer diversity of views at play, reviving anarchist, libertarian and radical democratic beliefs as well as those based on new social resistance movements, must surely affect mainstream politics in due course. They are exuberantly released from old Stalinist and social democratic models of the left, celebrating networks and sudden swarms of activity using the Internet.
Despite the predominance of young educated westerners, there is a genuine new internationalism involved,based on personal contacts between many different types of people and struggles for justice. In Derber's book there are moving examples of contacts between young Bangladeshi, Indonesian and Chinese textile workers and American activists building a solidarity movement to reject the Gap and Nike clothes made there. He quotes a Bangladesh garment worker: "Our lives have been stolen. We are treated like animals, and any workers who attempt to get together a union are fired immediately and may be blacklisted. We feel we have been born only to serve the needs of others."
There are sharp cross-currents of political argument. Kingsnorth has little time for Callinicos's Socialist Workers' Party. It is hopelessly mired, he says, in the manipulative old vanguard left, from which the new movement is trying to escape. Derber believes, however, that this global democracy movement is reaching a critical stage when it must learn how to organise more effectively, overcoming the anti-doctrinal instinct so characteristic of its first phase: "The real task of building a sustainable and effective movement occurs through the education and political work that happens in and between protests."
He and Callinicos emphasise the importance of linking labour and human rights groups if a genuine new international movement is to be built.
Each of these three authors concludes with a catalogue of radical demands. They vary, but include abolition of the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank; cancellation of Third World debt; a global minimum wage; introduction of the Tobin tax on finance capital; restoration of capital controls; recreation of the United Nations; defence of public utilities and the global commons. They cut right across conventional wisdom, but demand a political response.
Kingsnorth quotes Gandhi: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win."
In the light of these books one can imagine Gandhi saying about globalisation, as he said when asked what he thought of western civilisation, that "it would be a good idea".
One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement. By Paul Kingsnorth The Free Press, 355pp, £10.
People Before Profit, The New Globalisation in an Age of Terror, Big Money and Economic Crisis By Charles Derber Souvenir Press, 324pp, £9.99
An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto By Alex Callinicos
Polity, 180pp, £13.99
Paul Gillespie is Foreign Policy Editor of The Irish Times