Study title

Despite vigorous debates about the meaning and significance of globalisation, it is broadly agreed that there has been a recent trend for relatively closed economies and societies to open up and become more integrated/exposed. This project focuses on this narrower theme of economic and cultural openness. It will investigate public attitudes towards openness within selected developing / transitional countries in east Asia and east Europe. For the purposes of this research, support for openness is defined broadly to include accepting, tolerating, even perhaps welcoming and celebrating foreign ideas, foreign customs, symbols, capital, and personnel (including internationally mobile professionals and managers, rich tourists, foreign employers, poor immigrants and guest workers). The project will use survey/focus-group methods rather than the ethnographic methods which have been more conventional for research in this area. We regard these alternative approaches as complementary, but the balance has tilted so far towards ethnographic methods that the potential contribution of carefully designed surveys/focus-groups, along with their emphasis on the broad mass of the unorganised public, has been neglected. From a democratic perspective, public opinion in developing/transitional countries is important in itself. But it also constitutes the background against which elites and activists must operate. And it is also important for development, since public resistance to outside influences can affect political stability, thereby encouraging protectionism and discouraging inward investment. Even veteran critics of free-market forces now accept that there is no plausible alternative to the market economy. But there remains a consensus that opening-up economies has not so far helped the poor and weak as much as it should. It has spurred development in the short run, but in a form that threatens longer-term development. The increasing inequality and corruption associated...