Abstract
In the mid-eighties there were huge criticisms caused by the liberal policy carried out both by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. There were, especially in the United Kingdom, a lot of strikes and manifestations against the neo-liberalism. However, Margaret Thatcher, answering to an interview about these criticisms, asserted: “There is no alternative.” By these words, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom claimed that liberalism, a political doctrine “favouring individual liberty, free trade, and moderate reform” (www.askoxford.com), was the only political doctrine able to lead the countries and their economies. We can think that this sentence was said in a particular context in the eighties since at that time the Soviet Union (and communism) was still an enemy. Yet one decade later most of the developed countries economies are ruled by this kind of economy. Furthermore the main international institutions have applied neo-liberalism to the developing countries through the “Washington consensus”, which is a set of ten commands such as the liberalization of the market, the liberalisation of the financial market, privatizations and deregulation…As a consequence all the economies around the world are ruled by liberalism, and the phenomenon of globalisation has emerged from it. What is globalisation? It is hard to give a unique and complete definition because it is a very versatile word. I would like to concentrate on a more economical one: according to the Encyclopaedia Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org wiki/Globalisation), globalisation means a huge freedom of trade, increasing commercial and industrial links between the different parts of the world, a loss of sovereignty for the State concerning its economy and the spread of capitalism.
