UC Davis

This paper presents an explanation for globalization centred around a relatively-novel area of inquiry in the study of the phenomenon: American foreign policy. We trace the transformation in how American foreign policy makers approached globalization from the late 1960s to the early 1990s; from a multilateral strategy called ‘Trilateralism’ in the 1970s, to a strategy called ‘Enlargement’ in the early 1990s, based around American dominance. Where proponents of Trilateralism sought to build a global political-economic architecture to govern markets, proponents of Enlargement supported economic liberalization as a means of fostering democratization. We show that, rather than being purely a story of market liberalization, globalization was in large part a product of this shift in American foreign policy. This argument has implications for the contemporary political backlash to globalization, which we argue represents the continued rejection of multilateralism in American foreign policy.