Globalization

North-South Perspectives

John Glenn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415250962
• eBook ISBN: 9781134530984
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Rather than claim that there exists a common concept of globalization that all parties can agree to, this book seeks to examine some of the conceptions and the way in which they render different interpretations of particular aspects of globalization.

The last two decades have witnessed an explosive proliferation of academic writings on the subject of globalization, which has been accompanied by a high level of interest in the media and widespread usage of the term. This has inevitably resulted in the meaning of the concept broadening to include a whole host of issues, running the attendant risk of losing any conceptual focus it had.

John Glenn examines five issue areas affected by globalization:

• the economy
• sovereignty
• civil society
• governance
• communication.

In so doing, the book aims to articulate certain questions within each area, which will allow for some judgment to be made concerning the differing perspectives on globalization.

Globalization will be of interest to students of international political economy and politics and international relations in general.

1Introduction

The world is becoming one at last is it not? Pleasant thought, or is it? Ah well, soon it will be a fait accompli and no concern of ours.¹

The last two decades have witnessed an explosive proliferation of academic writings on the subject of globalization. Unusually, this has been accompanied by a high level of interest in the media to the extent that, in almost no time at all, globalization has become an accepted term in a vast number of languages throughout the world. As Jan Aart Scholte has pointed out, the term first appeared in a dictionary in 1961 and the terms ‘globalize’ and ‘globalism’ were coined in the forties.² Yet, in but a blink of an eye, the term has come into such common usage that it is difficult to imagine that just two decades ago most regarded it as a neologism. However, such widespread usage has inevitably resulted in the meaning of the concept broadening to include a whole host of issues, running the attendant risk of losing any conceptual focus it had.

It is no coincidence that the upsurge of interest in globalization in the nineties occurred simultaneously with the end of the Cold War and the full development and implementation of the Internet. In the ‘heartwarming afterglow of the breaching of the Berlin Wall’ it looked as if, in ideological terms at least, the world would finally be unified.³ The simplicity of the Internet and its high utility meant that its spread occurred at such a breakneck speed that the world became electronically connected seemingly overnight. With the advent of the Internet and fibre optics, information not only about things but other parts of the world could be transferred, literally at the speed of light, giving us knowledge of remote places and events that are occurring elsewhere as they unfold – ‘we can acquire a sense of the world without moving very far at all. We can travel vicariously through the “electronic highways” which now encircle the globe, and through them garner a level of knowledge about the rest of the world which would surpass that of even the most seasoned nineteenth-century traveller’.⁴ Under such conditions, talk of the world finally becoming a ‘global village’, a new imagined community going beyond the nation-state's borders – to paraphrase Benedict Andersen – a village in which people rarely meet each other face to face but know each other through remote contact, was therefore understandable. ⁵

However, the broad application of globalization to a host of modern phenomena has given further grist to the mill of those sceptics that question whether globalization is happening and of those that argue that if it is happening, then it is not something of recent origin but has been occurring for a very long time. True, much of the interest in the subject can be attributed to the usual fin de siècle desire to identify the moment as a unique watershed in human history. Certainly, many of the processes associated with globalization have been identified in earlier generations. As the quote at the beginning of this chapter indicates, the idea of a unified world had already gained currency by the fifties and by the beginning of the sixties the idea that we lived in an era of the ‘global village’ had been proposed by that most prescient of authors, Marshall Mcluhan.⁶ At a much earlier stage, in the twenties, we can also find resonance of the much talked about rapidity of modernity. George and Ira Gershwin's Fascinating Rhythm (1924), originally titled Syncopated City, reflected the new society that was in continual motion and the impact of this hustle and bustle of city life on the individual,

Oh, how I long to be the man I used to be!

Fascinating rhythm,

Oh, won't you stop picking on me?

Just as we are able to identify the terminology in earlier generations, we can identify much of the phenomena related to globalization with much earlier developments. In fact, it is the argument of this book that several of the processes associated with globalization have been around for centuries, indeed, where trade is concerned, we may speak of millennia. Today's globalization should be regarded as a particular epoch with some constitutive elements similar to previous periods and other constitutive elements that are rather different. Although many of the transformations associated with globalization can be attributed to the continuing repercussions of capitalism, there are many changes that are particular to the contemporary period, such as: the end of the Cold War; the re-emergence of neoliberalism on the political stage; and the communications revolution. Therefore, just as continuities can be identified, so too can changes. The logic may be that of capitalism, but each historical epoch has a grammar all of its own. Such changes are grounds enough for regarding the study of globalization as an enterprise worth pursuing.

In recognizing that globalization encapsulates both changes and continuities, the following section identifies underlying and proximate causes. In addition, it identifies certain facilitating factors that have enabled globalization to occur as quickly as it has done. It is argued that, on the one hand, capitalism and technology represent the main underlying causes of globalization. American hegemony, the end of the Cold War and the emergence of neo-liberal ideology, on the other hand, all represent proximate causes. This classification could of course be challenged. If American hegemony continues for several more centuries and it continues to support the international financial institutions and free trade regime that it played a central role in founding, then there would be a strong argument in favour of describing the United States’ international policies as an underlying cause. Similarly, rather than regarding the influence of neo-liberal economic policy as a fairly recent phenomenon, one could argue that ‘embedded liberalism’ and the Keynesian Welfare State represented a temporary hiatus; that liberal economic policies are the norm rather than the exception. Although this may be true, the manner in which these policies manifest themselves in neo-liberalism and the extent to which they are implemented across the world lend support to the argument that it should be regarded as a proximate cause.⁷

Underlying causes

Technology

One change that is most commonly associated with globalization is the revolution in technology. The impact has been so great, many now refer to the microprocessor technology that enabled these changes as the ‘third revolution’, thereby implying that the micro-chip will have as deep an impact on our societies as the harnessing of steam and electricity did for industrial purposes.⁸ Yet the seeds of this ‘third revolution’ were planted in earlier decades. The replacement of vacuum tubes by the semiconductor transistor at the Bell Laboratories in 1947 paved the way for the huge advances in the miniaturization of electronic devices that we are still witnessing today. By 1965, progress in miniaturization was such that it led the co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore, to speculate that computing capacity would double every 18 months or so (or more precisely the number of transistors and resistors that could fit on the same size silicon chip would double in density). This guesstimate has proven to be relatively accurate over time and thus what was a rough and ready rule of thumb has become known as Moore's law.⁹ The late sixties witnessed a further breakthrough, as much conceptual as technological, with the invention of the microprocessor. Rather than designing several physically separate devices, the microprocessor brought them together in one integrated circuit. Although the first project using a microprocessor was started in 1968 to be used in the F-14A Tomcat, it was the mass production of such devices by Intel in 1971 that would eventually lead to the development of IBM's personal computer range first launched in August 1981.

Similarly, the Internet has its origins in the US Defense Department's desire in the sixties to establish a digital communications network that would survive a Soviet nuclear attack. By 1969 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) had created the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) which would eventually evolve into the Internet. Even by the mid-eighties the use of this network was limited to a privileged few – the military, scientists, librarians, engineers, etc. However, the creation of the World Wide Web by a team at CERN in Switzerland and its eventual release in 1991 led to the easy to use, publicly available Internet that we now know.

The advent of personal computers, the Internet, electronic mail, the mobile phone, etc. have altered the way in which millions conduct their daily affairs. Our world seems to be shrinking before our very eyes as new communication technologies have led to time–space compression whereby ‘space is annihilated by time’. Today, space is traversed electronically in a finite amount of time giving the appearance of simultaneity, so that, ‘it is now feasible to contact a remote area regardless of distance and the time delay is negligible’.¹⁰ This perception that we are living in an ever shrinking world has been reinforced not only by new technologies but also by increases in more traditional technologies, such as air travel which currently conveys 1.6 billion passengers per year.¹¹ Similar advances have occurred in the shipment of goods; for example, the first container ships held just under sixty containers whereas the latest versions can hold 9,000 and it is future projected that in the future the cargo of one ship alone will be enough ‘to fill a line of trucks 68 miles long’.¹² With such large increases in capacity come vast decreases in per unit transport costs, spurring the globalization of production. As David Held et al. have pointed out, technology has thus facilitated the density, reach and speeding up of contemporary communications in all spheres (or as they put it, the velocity, intensity and extensity).¹³

Box 1.1Underlying causes of globalization

Technology

The impact of recent technology has been so great, many now refer to the microprocessor technology that enabled these changes as the ‘third revolution’, thereby implying that the micro-chip will have as deep an impact on our societies as the harnessing of steam and electricity did for industrial purposes. The advent of personal computers, the Internet, electronic mail, the mobile phone, etc. have altered the way in which millions conduct their daily affairs. Our world seems to be shrinking before our very eyes as new communication technologies have led to time–space compression allowing us to span the world in the blink of an eye.

Such technology has also changed the nature of the supply chain. It has enabled manufacturers to move to flexible production techniques that allow for far greater variety and far less wasteful stockpiling of materials through the application of the ‘Just in Time’ philosophy. Although this idea had been applied prior to the advent of EDI and EPOS, these innovations have led to the development of ultra efficient supply chains. As a result, companies are increasingly moving away from the idea of the vertically integrated organization encompassing all of the activities relating to a product. Increasingly, companies prefer to outsource much of the production activity to external suppliers – ‘organizations are now focusing on their “core business” – in other words the things they do really well and where they have a differential advantage. Everything else is “out-sourced” – in other words it is procured outside of the firm. So, for example, companies that once made their own components now only assemble the finished product’.¹

Capitalism

Capitalism is understood here as an economic system that arose from a confluence of factors around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This included the mass detachment of labour from the land which may have ‘freed’ many from bondage and servitude but also dispossessed them of, what was at the time, the dominant means of production, leaving them with nothing but their labour-power to sell. The means of production became privately owned thus producing a new form of economic relations with production facilities owned and controlled by the few, employing wage labourers to produce the goods to be sold. These changes also involved a move to a full market economy with goods being produced in order to be exchanged rather than for direct consumption. The new mode of production was such that producers could no longer meet their own needs from their own economic activities, thus creating a complex market based economic system through which producers were bound together by the exchange of their products among one another. But the development of a market economy also introduced competition between the various producers of similar goods leading to pressures to either innovate (producing higher quality or new variations of the product in question) thereby temporarily increasing profits or to reduce input costs of material or to reduce their labour costs. In accomplishing the latter, the owner of the means of production extracts further surplus value from workers through various means, such as, extending their hours, reducing their wages or deriving greater efficiency from the hours worked.

But, similarly, there is continuity and change in this sphere. In fact, the phrase ‘space is annihilated by time’ was originally coined by Marx a century and a half ago.¹⁴ As one author has pointed out, the emphasis on speed has been exaggerated – the actual increase in speed of electronic transmission between remote computers is not actually that great when one compares it to the advent of the telephone and the telegraph.¹⁵ However, the volume of information that can be transmitted has increased exponentially. This increase in volume capacity is a result of fibre optic cable and microprocessors. Compared to the copper telephone wire that could transmit one page worth of information in a second, a single strand of fibre optic can carry ‘90,000 volumes in a second’.¹⁶ Microprocessors allow for this information to be broken up into packets that are actually physically transmitted along different lines and then recompiled by the end user's computer, thereby increasing the volume of information transmitted at any given time. However, in spheres other than communication, the continual improvements in computing have led to incredible advances in processing speeds and storage capacity introducing efficiency improvements in a whole range of activities. What used to take a week to do by a roomful of computers in the fifties can now be done in a fraction of the time by a single mainframe computer. Although it is therefore important to distinguish between improvements in volume and speed in relation to communications, in other areas we are indeed witnessing a revolution in both the speed of data processing and storage capacity for that processed information.

These technological advances have not only brought about a quantitative change in our ability to monitor and analyse but also a qualitative change in the social sphere as well. It has been argued that the heightened ‘speed’ and frequency of long distance interactions have led to a new imagined community, the ‘global village’, a village in which people rarely meet each other face to face but communicate with each other through remote contact.¹⁷ Such interactions can be of a material kind in which economic transactions are conducted to deliver goods from elsewhere but also personal communications have become faster and more frequent especially since recent advances in electronic media. The nature of this contact has also changed from a one-to-many relationship to a many-to-many relationship. A particular interest group can not only ‘narrowcast’ their agenda to those concerned through their web site but can also communicate between themselves and to other groups with an unparalleled ease. Once again change and continuity can be identified. Transnationalism – ‘contacts, coalitions, and interactions across state boundaries that are not controlled by the central foreign policy organs of governments’ – is not new.¹⁸ However, such transnational relations now involve an unprecedented multiplicity of groups and intensity of interaction, both of which are likely to increase even further as time goes by.

There is also another new aspect to this revolution in technology. The content of information has also changed radically. It is not only possible to send and receive text and numerical data but also to transmit images, thus enabling us to obtain knowledge of remote places and events as they unfold – ‘[W]e can acquire a sense of the world without moving very far at all. We can travel vicariously through the “electronic highways” which now encircle the globe, and through them garner a level of knowledge about the rest of the world which would surpass that of even the most seasoned nineteenth-century traveller’.¹⁹ Once again, this is not as unusual as it first appears. Television broadcasting and, before that, cinema newsreels provided us with similar indirect experiences. However, the sheer volume and specific nature of Internet-based information, the shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting, enables the user to gain a particular and detailed knowledge of almost anything or anywhere. Certainly, the ability actually to carry out complex tasks remotely using a combination of state of the art communications and robotics as demonstrated by the case of transatlant...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of boxes
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Globalization: myth or reality?
• 3 How global is globalization?
• 4 Trade liberalization and economic growth
• 5 Globalization and the reconfiguration of the state
• 6 Patterns of global poverty and inequality
• 7 Global governance: is more better?
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index