Globalization as Evolutionary Process

Modeling Global Change

George Modelski, Tessaleno Devezas, William R. Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781135977634
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The term globalization has gained widespread popularity; yet most treatments are either descriptive and/or focused on changes in economic interconnectivity. In this volume the concept is seen in broader terms as leading international experts from a range of disciplines develop a long-term analysis to address the problems of globalization.

The editors and contributors develop a framework for understanding the origins and trajectory of contemporary world trends, constructing testable and verifiable models of globalization. They demonstrate how the evolutionary approach allows us to view globalization as an enterprise of the human species as a whole focusing on the analytical problem of global change and the rules governing those changes. The emphasis is not on broad-based accounts of the course of world affairs but, selectively, on processes that reshape the social of the human species, the making of world opinion and the innovations that animate these developments.

Chapters are clustered into four foci. One emphasizes the interpretation of globalization as an explicitly evolutionary process. A second looks at historical sequences of such phenomena as population growth or imperial rise and decline as processes that can be modeled and not purely described. The third cluster examines ongoing changes in economic processes, especially information technology. A final cluster takes on some of the challenges associated with forecasting and simulating the complexities of globalization processes.

This innovative and important volume will be of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences concerned with the phenomenon of globalization.

1 Introduction

A new approach to globalization

George Modelski, Tessaleno Devezas, and William R. Thompson

Focus and purpose

The seminar that led to this book was held at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, in April 2006, and was sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon. The seminar focused on the long-term process of globalization. The meeting showed several distinct features, including its wide scope and the participation of scientists from many different countries and areas of expertise: political science, anthropology, history, physics and engineering.

One can think of many reasons why it is important to understand the mechanisms and forces behind the phenomenon of globalization. One obvious reason is the use that decision-makers in public policy and industry can make of improved methods of forecasting. All of the participants in our meeting agreed on the fact that this phenomenon represents a worldwide transformational long-term process. As such, it is very difficult to describe globalization using a unifying model embracing all of its characteristics and peculiarities that have changed over time and created the modern world system as we now see it. Participants felt that, in spite of unresolved theoretical questions, we have to focus more on the applied side if any attempt at modeling global change is to prove of some utility to decision-makers in order to put the world on the road towards sustainable development.

In this book we assemble a selection of 17 papers prepared for the seminar, reflecting the wide range of disciplines represented by the authors, as well as the different perspectives shaped by their residence in a number of different countries. The papers, here presented as chapters, are grouped in four parts, in an attempt to replicate a number of sub-foci that emerged from the seminar. One cluster looks at globalization as an explicitly evolutionary process. A second group advances different interpretations developed for analyzing history as a set of processes, as opposed to history as description. The third cluster focuses on more contemporary affairs, with a special emphasis on changes associated with information technology. The last substantive section examines the prospects for forecasting and simulating globalization processes with the help of complex models. All four groups of papers are sandwiched between an introduction and a conclusion, which are designed to make sense of what these chapters represent in the aggregate. In brief, the collected papers constitute a multi-faceted scientific assault on modeling long-term globalization processes.

We are by no means the first to attempt such an effort.¹ However, the attempt here is distinguished by its explicit reliance upon evolutionary conceptualization in a number of the papers and/or the sophisticated empirical analysis underlying some of the contributions.

In the remainder of this chapter, we make a reasoned case for our collective approach to globalization and the processes associated with it.

The approach

Globalization is currently a preferred term for describing the post-cold war era in world affairs. It is the currency of contemporary economic and political debates and, at the start of the new millennium, it is a fashionable concept in the social sciences. A survey of recent library acquisitions shows that books published in the past few years and whose titles include “globalization” number in the hundreds. On the Internet, a Google search showed millions of results in response to that term. Globalization has taken hold rapidly in the first decade of the twenty-first century, because it evidently taps into the widespread feeling that far-reaching change is under way, and that such change needs to be better understood – if only because its effects are not just global but also national and local.

What is globalization?

One authoritative survey of recent debates declares: “no single universally accepted definition of globalization exists” (Held and McGrew 2000: 3). Given the wide-ranging nature of these debates, that is hardly surprising. But there is also widespread consensus on certain essential features that might be attributed to this phenomenon. For one, it is universally referred to as a process, that is as a sequence of events over time. Despite a strong showing in its economic aspects (economists tend to adopt a narrow concept, concerned basically with markets; see, for example, Bordo 2003 or Garrett 2000), it is also widely viewed as multi-dimensional; it is moreover held to be long-term in character, with a strong historical component; and finally, it is seen as clearly transformational.

For present purposes it suffices to define “globalization” as (the process of) “emergence of institutions of planetary scope.” By institutions, we also mean networks, so that in respect of global economic change we would focus on the rise of world (commodity, labor, and financial) markets as well as on the activities of transnational enterprises. In political restructuring we would trace the rise of nation-states, as well as the role of coalitions, and international organizations. Democratization and the impact of social movements might be viewed as establishing the potential for global community formation. The increasing salience of learning, knowledge, and information networks is laying the foundations for an informed world opinion (cf. Modelski 1999, 2000: 34). This makes it plain that globalization is a process of emergence that is multi-dimensional, and historically significant, and a term obviously basic to understanding global change.

Can we explain globalization?

While the literature on globalization is wide-ranging and profuse, much of it describes the characteristics and the consequences of that process. The problem of explaining globalization, on the other hand, is far from being resolved. What is more, an explanatory lag also makes it more difficult to forecast the future course of that process.

One line of explanation, associated with an early argument of Anthony Giddens, maintains that “modernity is inherently globalizing” (in Held and McGrew 2000: 92). This amounts to saying that “modernization causes globalization.” Seeing that we live in the modern age, the emergence of planetary arrangements would therefore seem to be basically unsurprising. Such a position might appear reassuring, and gratifying to supporters of this process, and those who regard it basically as “Westernization,” but its analytical power is limited and does not tell us much about “modernization” either. We need to know more about the conditions and mechanisms of these processes.

The other line of explanation privileges economic factors. It is more explicit about conditions and mechanisms and it is linked to world-systems analysis associated with the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein. It proposes that the modern “globalizing” world-system is the product of the “capitalist world economy” that arose in Europe in the sixteenth century and has now spread worldwide. In effect, “capitalism causes globalization.” That position sits more comfortably with the critics of globalization, and those who fear the workings of unfettered markets or the power of multi-national corporations and who advocate “alternative” world orderings. But it, too, posits a strong association between globalization and “Westernization.”

Both lines of explanation ask to be strengthened by way of modeling, testing, and/or simulation, and by being embedded in a larger framework. As one recent critic, Jan N. Pieterse (in Lechner and Boli 2000: 100–101; see also Hopkins 2002) pointed out that, in either conceptualization, be it centered on modernity or on capitalism, globalization emanates from Europe, and the West, and raises problems associated with Eurocentrism, and a “narrow window on the world.” In other words, it is associated with an approach that is historically “shallow.” If, as some view it, globalization is “an intensification of worldwide social relations,” then it also presumes the prior existence of such relations “so that globalization is a conceptualization of a phase following an existing condition of globality” and part of an ongoing process of the formation of world-spanning social connectivity. In Pieterse’s (2000) words: “The recognition of historical depth brings globalization back to world history.”

What we need for a better understanding of globalization is a deconstruction of the complex mechanisms that produce modernity (and/or capitalism), because we do not subscribe to the notion that these are unimportant questions that are better left concealed in the mists of time. We need to identify the processes of which globalization would be considered a phase.

An evolutionary approach

Given the plethora of books and articles currently being written, and having been persuaded that we are asking questions about a long-lasting shift in cultural orientations rather than a passing fad, what novel and valuable insights can we offer?

One promising line of inquiry, outlined in a recent paper by Devezas and Modelski (2003), relies upon evolutionary epistemology. It implies a vision of globalization as a manifestation (or phasing) of a multi-dimensional cascade of worldwide evolutionary processes. What might be the chief characteristics of such an approach?

1. The unit of analysis for the evolutionary study of globalization is the human species viewed diachronically, since the dawn of history (c.3500 BC), as a complex adaptive system, but also as a community of common fate that in the past millennium generated the process of globalization.
2. The metric of evolutionary time is the generation (or generational turnover-time) that computes the rate of global change. The emergence of the world system is the product of fewer than 300 generations.
3. The basic conjecture proposes that global evolutionary change is in form a nested and synchronized set of (logistic-type) learning processes composed of successive (“bolero”-like) iterations of a Darwinian-type algorithm (variation, selection, cooperation, amplification). These universal learning sequences are inherent in the shaping and reshaping of the social organization of the human species (this Dawkins/Plotkin “universal Darwinism” is distinct from, and must not be confused with, biological determinism).
4. Guiding such an inquiry is the “minimalist” insight that complex systems obey simple rules, and that learning algorithms might constitute a set of such rules because they involve both repetition and nesting.
5. A program composed of simple rules is fully compatible with a multidimensional view of world-system evolution, and of globalization in particular, as products of a cascade of evolutionary processes.
6. Predictions made on the basis of these conjectures need to be tested against real world evidence drawn from world history of the past 5,000 years (for instances of such testing, see Devezas and Modelski 2003; Modelski 2003b, and Devezas and Modelski, 2007, Part I of this book).

Please note two important implications of this evolutionary approach: first, there is reason to believe that an analysis drawing on evolutionary theory lends itself to modeling, simulation, and forecasting. Secondly, such an approach allows us to view globalization as an enterprise of the human species as a whole. This “big picture” approach to analysis highlights long-term perspectives; draws upon the history of the humanity; and selects, for analysis, certain identified processes, but it does not purport to depict, model, or simulate all of world history. It focuses on the analytical problem of global change and asks about the rules governing those changes. The emphasis is not on broad-based accounts of the course of world affairs but, selectively, on processes that reshape the social (including economic, political, and cultural) organization of the human species; processes such as urbanization, economic growth, political reform and world organization, and the making of world opinion; and the innovations that animate these developments.

More specifically, we believe that we can contribute to this burgeoning field in the following ways:

1. by encouraging the construction of models of globalization that aim at higher analytical power, depth in time, and working in the context of the study of complex systems;
2. by exploring the possibilities for simulation of these basic processes;
3. by essaying methods of forecasting global change.

Modeling, simulating and forecasting global processes

Modeling

As far as we can judge from our survey of the extensive literature, modeling global processes is not among the principal interests of recent scholarship on globalization. More familiar is the construction of dynamic accounts of, for example, the rise and fall of empires (most recently, the multi-dimensional model of Turchin, 2003). Most accounts of globalization are descriptions of recently observed phenomena, and the evaluation of their effects, favoring the narrow conception of this phenomenon (as in Garrett, 2000).

Simulating

There are two possible approaches to simulating global processes. The systems-dynamics approach is “top-down” in character (so-called because it views the system from above, as a whole) and uses differential and/or difference equations. Its dynamics (that is the study of the world system over time, or diachronically) is defined via the change in its organization (or “state”) as described by the system’s equations. Such top-down analyses are suitable for describing systemic regularities (such as four-phase collective behavior in Devezas and Modelski, 2003), or the system’s emergent properties.

The other approach (not so far used in global analysis) forms the new sub-field of “computational sociology” (also known as “artificial life”) that uses so-called “soft computing” models of complex systems that encompass several methods of simulation, and is best characterized as a “bottom-up” approach. Theoretically and methodologically, this makes possible the construction of models from the level of processes that are immediately and empirically observable, namely the local interactions of single units governed by local rules. Some experts view such models as better suited for modeling social change, but others argue that they need to work in combination with “top-down” models capable of capturing the emerging properties of systems of interacting units.

Formal mathematical models developed in the past two decades and most often used, are: cellular automata (CA), Boolean nets (BN), artificial neural nets (NN), evolutionary algorithms (such as the genetic algorithm, GA), and network analysis. We also have some recent models of multi-agent systems, using, for instance, replicator equations to simulate the dynamics of learning (Hofbauer and Sigmund, 1990; Sato and Crutchfield, 2002). In the present state of our knowledge, no one can be sure which method is best suited to the purpose of global analysis. We need to bear in mi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Forewords
• 1 Introduction: A new approach to globalization
• PART I Evolutionary models
• PART II Models of long-term change
• PART III Global change and the information age
• PART IV Forecasting and simulating globalization
• PART V Assessment