The Global Age

State and Society Beyond Modernity

Martin Albrow

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745665580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Globalizzazione

Many authors who discuss the idea of globalization see it as continuing pre-established paths of development of modern societies. Post-modernist writers, by contrast, have lost sight of the importance of historical narrative altogether. Martin Albrow argues that neither group is able to recognize the new era which stares us in the face. A history of the present needs an explicit epochal theory to understand the transition to the Global Age.

When globality displaces modernity there is a general decentering of state, government, economy, culture, and community. Albrow calls for a recasting of the theory of such institutions and the relations between them. He finds an open potential for society to recover its abiding significance in the face of the declining nation state. At the same time a new kind of citizenship is emerging.

This important book will provoke both radicals and conservatives. Its scholarship ranges widely across the social sciences and humanities. It is bound to promote wide cross-disciplinary debate.

1

Resuming the History of Epochs

The most decisive event in inaugurating the Modern Age was the ‘discovery of America’ in 1492. Similarly epoch making was the event which signalled its impending termination, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. In between, the story of modernity was of a project to extend human control over space, time, nature and society. The main agent of the project was the nation-state working with and through capitalist and military organization. It gave a distinctive shape to people’s lives and the passing of generations. But the culmination of the project in the unification of the world was also its dissolution. With the end of the epoch, postmodern disorientation became widespread even as markers were laid for the coming new age. It was just not recognized at first for what it was. The Cold War, the Three Worlds, the human landing on the moon in 1969, the electronic ‘global village’, triumph of the United States with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and finally global warming were not triumphant modernity but signs of the new globality. In the 1980s ‘globalization’ became the keyword. In the 1990s came the general recognition that the Modern Age was at an end and that the Global Age had already begun.

Anon. AD 2050

1.1 Refusing to be Modern

Why there is an alternative to the forced choice between everlasting modernity and the end of history

The account which heads this chapter will strike some as odd, even self-contradictory. Its anonymous author may be in school now and yet writes like a rather conventional, somewhat old-fashioned historian. It reads like a modern narrative and yet announces the end of the Modern Age. Does this not undermine the basis for the account? We are left feeling discomfited by a history of our own time written in the way it has been done for past eras.

Yet I would contend that the narrative makes good sense. The difficulties which arise stem not from its self-contradictions, but from the wider and current confusions in contemporary accounts of modernity and postmodernity. It ought to be entirely possible to write of the end of the Modern Age and the beginning of a new one, if that is indeed what has happened. But we haven’t even been able to contemplate the possibility of such an account. Modernity has kept a tenacious grip on the imagination of intellectuals, even after it has lost its hold on the world.

Our difficulties have arisen because accounts of the Modern Age have sought to find some foundation for it in a philosophical ‘modernity’. Then, as the Modern Age passes away, they assume that the foundations are crumbling and with them the possibility of making any sense of our time. To this extent the proponents of modernity and postmodernity share a common assumption, namely that without founding principles the world makes no sense. They disagree only on whether such principles exist.

Yet epochs, cultures, civilizations have no more arisen out of ideas and principles than religion out of theology, or society from sociology. In contrast, our fictional narrator writes of the epoch as a unique constellation of human striving, impersonal forces, underlying processes and key events at a level of the highest generality. She or he references a configuration of our time, not as a theory or principle, but as real constraints. The talk is of power blocs, of nuclear warfare, of threats to the body. In contrast to the much noticed contemporary proliferation of histories of any and every thing, this is ‘grand narrative’.¹

This book arises out of the discourse of a new epoch. It is bound to reopen issues of the past, because it is in the past that we can identify the growth of the distorted sense of the present. So although our direct concern will be with the transformation since the end of the Second World War, we are bound to take issue with accounts of a much longer past, the Modern Age. We can no longer see modernity as an irresistible movement. For it hasn’t turned out that way. We will therefore be seeking both to identify the Global Age, but also to achieve recognition of the Modern Age as a transitory epoch with its peculiar features, which has given way to another.

The new age is not the postmodern, even if it comes after the modern. From Wolfgang Welsch’s viewpoint (1993: 6) the postmodern is only the latest radical form of modernity. To John Gray (1995: viii) postmodernity is the self-undermining of modernity. In both cases postmodernity is the expression, however self-destructive, of modernity. The modern retains its hold on the intellectual imagination.

We have to listen to the language of the new age in a wider discourse. It resounds most in ‘global’ and all its variations: ‘globalization’, ‘globalism’, ‘globality’ and others. They are labels for new perspectives, styles, strategies, forces, interests and values which do not necessarily make novelty a virtue and which in numerous ways replace the directions of modernity. They signal the comprehensive transformation which is what historians have recognized as a change of epoch.

We have not learned truly to write the history of the present. This failure arises from the way modernity survives sufficiently to impede our recognition of historical change in our own time. Most seriously it means that even those who recognize globalization as a profound contemporary transformation seek to assimilate it to modernity. We can see a representative example in one of the most important books of the 1980s, Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society.

He opened his book (1986/1992: 9) with the statement that the prefix ‘post-’ had become the key word of our times. He found it was a symptom of a historical break, but yet he located it still within modernity. It expressed a new kind of reflexive modernization beyond industrial society, in which the production of risk became more important than the production of wealth. Even where the risks encompassed the globe as a whole, which is where Beck introduced the idea of globalization, it appeared that modernity could continue its reflexive path.

Yet this misses the limits to reflexivity which the global reference highlights. Reflexivity in any sphere ultimately terminates in the non-reflective, the obstacle or the decision which represents the end of analysis, the time to act. Confronting the globe as a whole is just such a point, where there is such a check to expansive modernity that a real transformation takes place.

Modernity has so transfixed the intellectual imagination that the prospect of its end even promotes the idea of the end of history as such (Fukuyama 1992), or at least the end of the writing of history as the story of humanity (Lyotard 1979, Vattimo 1988). But these famous paradoxes arise from modernity’s claim to monopolize novelty. If everything new is by definition modern then it cannot grasp its own end as the beginning of a new epoch. Far from modernity giving history its full dignity, it deprives the past of any meaning except as a prelude to itself, and cannot imagine the future except as its own continuation, or else chaos.

The many announcements of the end of the Modern Age should encourage us to bring questions of historical periodization to the fore again. The problem is, however, that without a new beginning the announcement of the ‘end of’ a period sounds like the end of all we have loved.² For even in their quest for the new, the sense of being at one with the past is what bonded modern people together. In the introduction to the Cambridge Modern History, which acquired at the beginning of the twentieth century widespread authority in defining the Modern Age, we can hear its authentic voice, this self-understanding of modernity:

It is this sense of familiarity which leads us to draw a line and mark out the beginnings of modern history. On the hither side of this line men speak a language which we can readily understand; they are animated by ideas and aspirations which resemble those animating ourselves; the forms in which they express their thoughts and the records of their activity are the same as those still prevailing among us. Any one who works through the records of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries becomes conscious of an extraordinary change of mental attitude, showing itself on all sides in unexpected ways. (Creighton 1902: 1–2)

The author was writing of what was often called at the time a ‘consciousness of kind’. Modern people ‘resemble ourselves’ and that reference extended in both time and space, back to the fifteenth century but also only to Europe and North America and all that came under their sway. Modernity dominated thought to the extent that it became impossible to gain detachment from it. It was about ‘us’ and all to which we aspired. And ‘we’, the smaller part of humanity, represented ourselves as being at the ever advancing cutting edge of History. The Modern Age was no passing phenomenon, it rolled forward relentlessly and triumphantly.

The resumption of historical periodization is only possible if we find a way of writing about our own time as a new period. In other words we have to be as confident as Creighton was for the Modern Age that we can find a vantage point for today that separates us from him. At the same time, and this will become clear in the course of the book, this depends on treating all humanity as equal in the light of the Global Age. We already have intimations of this new recognition of our time. So Fernandez-Armesto’s (1995) treatment of the last millennium in the histories of the Americas, Africa and Asia, where they are equal in salience to Europe’s for understanding the present, is one which prepares us for the dramatically different vantage point of a new age. He concludes by reflecting on the possible future courses of the new global culture, oscillating between universality and diversity (p. 710), and although he does not challenge the conventional characterization of modernity he effectively relativizes it.

Such an account of the new globality is an implicit invitation to go beyond the postmodern sense of an end of an age and to announce the beginning of a new one, the Global Age. It encourages us to think, not of the way modernity has outstripped all other times and cultures, but, on the contrary, the way in which any appreciation of our own place in historical time must be prepared to give precedence to ideas from other times and other cultures. In this way we demonstrate our appreciation of the significance of the limits of the Modern Age. We show that we see it for what it was, a passing historical episode, without denying its world-historical significance as the expansion of the West. Yet this is still difficult for us to do, and to make it easier we need to understand how modernity laid claim to exclusive rights on the course of history.

1.2 From Universal History to the People’s Epic

How the grand narrative ceased to be a divine story and celebrated the self-creation of the Modern Age

The Oxford historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1946: 49–52) attributed the invention of the idea of historical periodization to the early Christians. They had to see history as universal, working according to God’s will, divided by a divine event, Christ’s coming, and then further divided into periods by epoch-making events. Against that background we can see what the Modern Age did. It turned history into an instrument for the rulers of emerging nation-states. Later it was to represent the nation-state as the achievement of all the people. First it had to instruct the princes who could direct events.

When the seventeenth-century Bishop of Meaux, J.-B. Bossuet, wrote his ‘discourse on universal history’ for the benefit of the young heir to the throne of France, he began: ‘While history might be of no use to other people, princes have to read it’ (1681/1887:1), and presented him with a panorama where the ruler, with the oversight of a nation, surveyed a field where potentially anything in the world could become a matter of concern and cause for action. Far below him was the milieu of ordinary people, protected from the greater perturbations.

The scale and the distance, detail and generality of Bossuet’s account provided the logical ground for administrative and social hierarchy. As the concerns of the higher orders extended over an ever widening area of territory, the only logical culmination was a conception of a world order with a single ruler.

The idea which guided his historical narrative equally underpinned the whole of the modern period; namely human control had to expand to take in the whole world.³ Universal history required the creation of a unified field of human discourse, providing a single frame of events, making one world. This was the Modern Project and universal history was its record, its accompaniment and its achievement. But it was the record of human, not God’s, deeds.

The supreme rationalist Voltaire (1694–1778) acknowledged the Christian bishop’s method and took it forward in a new exemplary manner. In his The Age of Louis XIV he praised Bossuet’s narrative art: ‘He applied the art of oratory to history itself, a literary genre which would seem incapable of admitting it’ (Voltaire 1751/1926: 360–1). Universal history had to be the grand narrative, along with the ordering of time into epochs.⁴ Moreover he brought them up to his own time, which meant the potential was there to record new beginnings in the present.⁵

Self-description as a time of new beginnings was a mark of the new age. Already in 1470 ‘modern music’ was being dated as beginning in 1430. There was ‘modern’ painting in the mid-sixteenth century (Burke 1987: 17). The Modern Age began with a sense of many beginnings, of both innovation and discovery. It was carried especially in references to a ‘new world’. Later to be a cliché, at the time it was coined by Amerigo Vespucci in an open letter to Lorenzo de Medici it reflected the conjuncture of two distinct spheres, novelty and earthly existence, which hitherto had inhabited different fields of thought (Ginzburg 1982: 82).

For a world itself to be new meant a challenge from the outside, novelty not simply out of self-directed development in the arts and sciences, but from other human beings who presented real-life alternatives to what had been assumed to be the world. The ‘new world’ rapidly became an image which opened up the possibility of a new social order, of realizing Utopia on earth. Not just works of art but institutions and ways of life could potentially be otherwise.

Discovery of ‘unknown’ worlds disturbed the thoughts of ordinary people, like the miller Mennochio (1532–99) from a Friulian village, whose recurrent speculations around dangerous themes of alternatives to the present order, stimulated on his own admission by reading the travels of Sir John Mandeville, made him so uncomfortable to the Church of his time that he was burnt at the stake (Ginzburg 1982: xiii).

The discovery of the ‘new world’ was a dramatic intensification of the stimulus which contact with foreign lands had already given to European culture. For an intelligent peasant, mayor of his village, the result was ‘heresy’ and death. For the educated Mayor of Bordeaux, Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), it prompted reflection on the decline of the old world and the corruption it was introducing into the new (Montaigne 1580/1842: 421). For him the simplicity of the new world surpassed the aspirations of the philosophers in demonstrating what a pure Utopia could be like (p. 89). It threw into relief the arbitrariness of one’s own country and its customs. It strengthened his conviction about the educational worth of travel. The child should learn against a background of the diversity of the whole world (p. 63).

Reports from the newly named ‘America’ were already a stimulus to the reflections of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516/1970), and they inspired, as well as Montaigne, a tradition of libertarian speculation and radical reformers including Rousseau and Thomas Paine (Weatherford 1988:117–31). It was also a new world to be conquered, to be subjected to the artifices of European forms of government, to be converted to Christianity, to become the arena for the most self-conscious effort yet to create a new civilization, freed from the incubus of the old. The ‘new world’ was to become later the United States, where modernity has been able to develop with the least encumbrance from the past.

This sense of continual innovation held the age together. It was the continuing basis of its self-narrative. In 1895 Lord Acton began his brief but brilliant tenure of the Chair of Modern History in Cambridge with an inaugural lecture on the study of his subject by declaring that: ‘The modern age did not descend from the mediaeval by normal succession, with outward tokens of legitimate descent. Unheralded, it founded a new order of things, under a law of innovation, sapping the ancient reign of continuity’ (1906: 3). It continued this way up to his own time. This for him was the main point of its study: ‘it is a narrative told of ourselves, the record of a life which is our own, of efforts not yet abandoned to repose, of problems that still entangle the feet and vex the hearts of men’ (p. 8).

This sense of contemporary newness has also become the main defence erected by modern ways of thought against the demise of modernity. Can there ever be another epoch when the modern claims to be the ever new? Does it make sense to think of ourselves as anything other than modern? On the face of it, it ought to be easy. If the Modern Age is a period in history, surely like any other it can end. But, to counter that, if the modern is the new, it seems to have the secret of perpetual self-renewal. For modernity, men (much more than women, who only give birth) become gods. To solve this conundrum we have to sift the ingredients of the unique mix of narrative art and scientific theory which enabled modernity to have its cake and eat it too, to found a new historical epoch and...