What Is Globalization?

Ulrich Beck

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745621265, 9780745621258
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This important new book offers an engaging and challenging introduction to the thorny paths of the globalization debate.

PART I

Dimensions, Controversies, Definitions

The counter-revolution fails At the time when the Soviet empire was falling apart, Boris Yeltsin – who was then President of the Russian Federation – addressed the people of Moscow in a spirited speech against the Communist putschists from the top of an armoured car, a speech broadcast not by Soviet Radio (which was in the hands of the old Communists) but via CNN satellite. At that decisive moment in history, the spectacular significance of a global information network, symbolized by satellites, became readily discernible as national sovereignty over information ceased to apply as a part of political sovereignty. National states can no longer cut themselves off from one another; their army-patrolled frontiers are full of holes, at least as far as their insertion in the space of global communications is concerned: informational globalization

Toxic penguin meat Much earlier, in the 1960s, biologists found in penguin meat in Antarctica high concentrations of toxins which, somehow or other, had found their way from the products and chimneys of the chemical industry into the farthest, seemingly untouched corner of Nature. At the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 this experience of global ecological crisis gave rise to the political formula and demand for ‘sustainable development’. Even if the actual interpretation of this principle differs from group to group around the world, and even if the follow-up conference in New York in 1997 confirmed how few practical consequences such summits usually have, there is now a yardstick (however contradictory and in need of political negotiation) with which to measure and criticize what all social players do everywhere in the world, in every domain from consumption through production to architecture, transport, municipal politics, and so on. This is the yardstick of ecological globalization.

Financial jugglers A few years ago, a young money-juggler whose métier was half-permitted, half-forbidden transnational speculation managed to ruin a venerable old English bank by losing close to a billion pounds in a trice. A new virtual economy has sprung up in the jungle of the world market, and its money-flows dissolve in a haze of data and information that are less and less connected to any material substratum. The new speculative dangers resulting from this escape the control of national states, and indeed rob national economies of their foundations without offering any framework for the regulation of transnational or global economies, of the process of economic globalization.

A Berlin-California airport announcement It is ten o’clock in the evening. At Berlin’s Tegel Airport a slick-friendly voice informs the weary passengers that their flight to Hamburg is ready for boarding. The voice belongs to Angelika B., who is sitting in front of a console in California – for after six p.m. Berlin time Tegel’s announcement service is provided online from California. The reasons are as simple as they are understandable: in California, no extra payment has to be made for late working because it is still daytime; and indirect labour costs for the same activity are considerably lower than in Germany. Telecommunications have made this possible by removing what used to seem an inescapable part of the labour system of industrial society: that is, the need for people to work together at a certain place to produce goods or services. Jobs can now be exported, while employees ‘cooperate’ across countries and continents or provide services through ‘direct’ contact with faraway recipients and consumers. In theory, then, just as one could organize a world trip to experience springtime in every continent, the labour and production processes could be distributed across the globe in such a way that the lowest wage was paid at every hour of the day yet the requisite cooperation was always secured. This would be globalized labour cooperation or production.

Khaled, king of rai In February 1997 Aicha, the latest hit by the exiled Algerian ‘rai king’ Khaled, was selected as the best song of the year in France. It was already remarkable that a song in praise of an Arab girl should be playing on the turntables of all the main French radio stations (not only of the Arabic pirate radios); it meant that North African immigrants had been accepted into the (pop) culture of the French nation. Seen from abroad, Khaled even represents France. His music captivates people in countries as different as Egypt, Israel and even conservative Saudi Arabia, with local versions coming out in Hebrew, Turkish and Hindi. Khaled plays his instrument against the West’s Arabophobia. His person and his music prove that globalization does not have to be a one-way street, that regional musical cultures can acquire world stages and a global significance. This is cultural globalization.

Globalization has certainly been the most widely used – and misused – keyword in disputes of recent years and will be of the coming years too; but it is also one of the most rarely defined, the most nebulous and misunderstood, as well as the most politically effective. As the above-mentioned cases show, it is necessary to distinguish a number of dimensions of globalization: any list of these would have to include, without making any claim to completeness or rigour, the dimensions of communications technology, ecology, economics, work organization, culture and civil society. Especially if we take the dimension that is nearly always at the centre of public debate – namely, economic globalization – the fog by no means clears. Is it a question of direct investment abroad by German firms, or of the international operations of large corporations? Is it denationalization of the economy that is involved, and hence the fact that national brand-names are becoming as fictitious as national economies, so that the prosperity of a ‘national’ industry no longer coincides with the prosperity of (national) citizens? Are we talking of that ‘virtual economy’ of monetary and financial flows which appears detached from any material substratum of use-value production? Or is the real point the much more banal one that the German economy is under pressure from cheaper production elsewhere in the world?¹

This last tendency is often overstressed, especially in Germany. For the facts do not really support any idea that globalization, in the sense of a transfer of jobs from Germany to countries with lower wage costs, is already a fait accompli. For a long time now, this form of globalization has not been a major cause of unemployment.² It is true that, in some sectors, low-skill, low-pay jobs have been hard hit by competition from Eastern Europe or the Asian ‘tiger states’. But such problems resulting from adjustments in the international division of labour affect only 10 per cent or so of jobs, and can hardly be projected onto the economy as a whole. Besides, German exports to these countries have also risen by above-average amounts in recent years. A massive transfer of jobs, not offset by additional export demand, has not been demonstrated.³ In fact, many speak in this context not of globalization but of internationalization, to underline that trade relations still mainly take place between highly industrialized countries within the great economic areas of Europe, America and the Pacific Basin.⁴

And then there is the truly thorny question of when globalization began. Many date the ‘capitalist world-system’ (Immanuel Waller-stein) back to the beginning of colonialism in the sixteenth century; others to the emergence of international corporations. Still others consider that globalization started with the ending of fixed exchange-rates or the collapse of the Eastern bloc…⁵

This may be why the concept and discourse of globalization are so fuzzy. To pin them down is like trying to nail a blancmange to the wall.

Is it not possible, however, to extract a common denominator from the various dimensions of globalization and the associated disputes? It is indeed. One constant feature is the overturning of the central premiss of the first modernity: namely, the idea that we live and act in the self-enclosed spaces of national states and their respective national societies. Globalization means that borders become markedly less relevant to everyday behaviour in the various dimensions of economics, information, ecology, technology, cross-cultural conflict and civil society. It points to something not understood and hard to understand yet at the same time familiar, which is changing everyday life with considerable force and compelling everyone to adapt and respond in various ways. Money, technologies, commodities, information and toxins ‘cross’ frontiers as if they did not exist. Even things, people and ideas that governments would like to keep out (for example, drugs, illegal immigrants or criticisms of human rights abuses) find their way into new territories. So does globalization conjure away distance. It means that people are thrown into transnational lifestyles that they often neither want nor understand – or, following Anthony Giddens’s definition, it means acting and living (together) over distances, across the apparently separate worlds of national states, religions, regions and continents.⁶

The overcoming of distance has the following consequences: ‘The world’s spatial matrix no longer contains any blank areas, and in principle it enables anyone to orient themselves regardless of the point on the globe at which they find themselves. Thanks to modern means of communication and transport, globalization is […] in principle possible without any effort.’ It is becoming a matter of everyday experience, of ‘provincial behaviour’, so to speak.

An odyssey or Robinson Crusoe’s desert island are today unimaginable artistic modes of perceiving the world, because heroes such as Odysseus or Crusoe would cut an absurd figure when German-American school exchanges are routine events and protests by European MPs against French nuclear tests are organized in a global sphere that Captain Cook would have had to spend a whole lifetime covering. […] The many times in the many regions of the world are being drawn together into a single standardized and standardizing world-time, not only because the simultaneity of non-simultaneous events can be ‘virtually’ produced by modern media (so that any non-simultaneous, merely local or regional occurrence becomes part of world history), but also because synchronous simultaneity turns into diachronous non-simultaneity in such a way that artificial cause-effect chains can be generated. A ‘temporally compact globe’ is coming into being. Events from different parts of the world and with varying significance can now be relocated on a single temporal axis, instead of many different ones. […] When the currency and stock exchanges open in Frankfurt, the closing rates in Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong are already known, and when the day begins in Wall Street dealers already know how rates have been shaping up on the European exchanges. Things are simpler still when foreign-exchange dealers are present twenty-four hours a day on the world’s marketplaces, able to carry off the slightest arbitrage profits. […] Economically, then, the earth is no longer big and wide and no longer has far and distant lands; it is dense and small and close, with (money) markets linked to one another by telecommunications. For the costs of overcoming space, and the time expenditure necessary to achieve it, are so small that they scarcely count.⁷

Globalization calls into question a basic premiss of the first modernity: the conceptual figure that A. D. Smith calls ‘methodological nationalism’,⁸ according to which the contours of society largely coincide with those of the national state. With multidimensional globalization, it is not only a new set of connections and cross-connections between states and societies which comes into being. Much more far-reaching is the breakdown of the basic assumptions whereby societies and states have been conceived, organized and experienced as territorial units separated from one another. Globality means that the unity of national state and national society comes unstuck; new relations of power and competition, conflict and intersection, take shape between, on the one hand, national states and actors, and on the other hand, transnational actors, identities, social spaces, situations and processes.

1

The World Horizon Opens Up: On the Sociology of Globalization

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations. […] In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.¹

This quotation is not from some neoliberal manifesto of 1996 but from the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, first published in February 1848. It shows a number of things: first, that the authors of the Communist Manifesto already eulogized the revolutionary role of the ‘bourgeoisie’ in world history; second, that the debate on ‘exploitation of the world market’ goes back much further than the short-term memory of public discussions would care to admit; third, that ironically the neoliberal and original Marxist positions share the same basic assumptions; and fourth, but not least, that the national vision which still holds the social sciences captive was already being questioned when it first emerged in the maelstrom of rising industrial capitalism.

Sociology as the power to create intellectual order: the container theory of society

‘Modern’ sociology is defined in its typical textbooks as the ‘modern’ science of ‘modern’ society. This both conceals and helps to gain acceptance for a classificatory schema that we might call the container theory of society.

1 According to this theory, societies both politically and theoretically presuppose ‘state control of space’ (J. Agnew and S. Corbridge), so that sociology here aligns itself with the regulatory authority or power of the national state. This is expressed in a vision of societies as (by definition) subordinate to states, of societies as state societies, of social order as state order. Thus, both in everyday life and in scientific discourse, one speaks of ‘French’, ‘American’ or ‘German’ society.

Furthermore, the concept of the political is associated not with society but with the state – which has not always been the case, as M. Viroli has shown.² Only in this conceptual and institutional framework do ‘modern’ societies become individual societies separate from one another. They really are held in the space controlled by national states as in a container. At the same time, it is part of the very concept of ‘modern’ societies that they are unpolitical, whereas poli...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Dimensions, Controversies, Definitions
• PART II: Perspectives
• Conclusion
• Further Reading
• Notes
• Index