Globalization

Malcolm Waters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415238533
• eBook ISBN: 9781134556113
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The constraints of geography are shrinking and the world is becoming a single place. Globalization and the global society are increasingly occupying the centre of sociological debates. Widely discussed by journalists and a key goal for many businesses, globalization has become a buzz-word in recent years. In this extensively revised and restructured new edition of Globalization , Malcolm Waters provides a user-friendly introduction to the main arguments about the process, including a chapter on the critiques of the globalization thesis that have emerged since the first edition was published.

1

A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE

Think global. Act local.

Theodore Levitt

Social change is now proceeding so rapidly that if a social scientist had proposed as recently as 15 years ago to write a book about globalization they would have had to overcome a wall of stony and bemused incomprehension. But now, just as postmodernism was the concept of the 1980s, globalization may be the concept, the key idea by which we understand the transition of human society into the third millennium. Curiously ‘globalization’ is far less controversial than ‘postmodernism’ (see Smart 1993). With the exception of the ‘civilization analysts’ who we shall mention elsewhere in this book most social scientists seem to accept that such a process is under way. Such controversies as there are appear to surround the issue of whether old Marxist or functionalist theories can be adapted to explain globalization or whether we need to construct novel arguments. This may be because theories of social change have almost always implied the universalization of the processes that they explain. The concept has therefore found instant appeal across a range of intellectual interests. It remains for social science to connect the concept with its own vital theoretical traditions. This short book seeks to contribute to this task.

Although the word ‘global’ is over 400 years old (OED 1989, s.v. global) the common usage of such words as ‘globalization’, ‘globalize’ and ‘globalizing’ did not begin until about 1960.¹ The Economist (4/4/59) reported ‘Italy's “globalised quota” for imports of cars has increased’ and in 1961 Webster became the first major dictionary to offer definitions of globalism and globalization. In 1962 the Spectator (5/10/62) recognized that: ‘Globalisation is, indeed, a staggering concept’ (OED 1989, s.v. globalism, globalization, globalize, globalized).

The concept certainly staggered or stumbled into academic circles. Robertson (1992: 8) informs us that it was not recognized as academically significant until the early or possibly the mid-1980s but thereafter its use has become, well, globalized. Although he says that its pattern of diffusion is virtually impossible to trace, it is beyond reasonable doubt that he is himself centrally responsible for its currency. The many items he has published on the topic include what is possibly the first sociological article to include the word in its title (1985), although he had used the concept of ‘globality’ somewhat earlier (1983). Overall, the number of publications which use the word ‘global’ in their titles has now probably reached five figures but the processual term ‘globalization’ was still relatively rare at the beginning of the 1990s. In February 1994 the catalogue of the Library of Congress contained only 34 publications with the term or one of its derivatives in the title. By February 2000 this number had risen to 284. None of these was published before 1987.

The definitions of globalization given in general dictionaries are often couched in such unhelpful terms as ‘to render global’ or ‘the act of globalizing’. Even if we delete the tautology as in ‘to render world-wide’ or ‘the act of diffusion throughout the world’ this is misleading because it implies intentionality. Many aspects of globalization are indeed intentional and reflexive, including both the increasing level of business planning for global marketing and action by the environmentalist movement to save the planet. However, many globalizing forces are impersonal and beyond the control and intentions of any individual or group of individuals. The development of Islamic fundamentalism as a response to the effects of Western modernization, or variations in the price of wheat are examples of just such effects.

The key figure in the formalization and specification of the concept of globalization is, then, Roland Robertson. His own biography might itself be seen as an instance of a link between what might be called trans-nationalization and global consciousness. He began his career in Britain where his initial studies sought to link the functionalist concept of modernization into an international context. At that time, like just about every other sociologist, he focused on the nation-state-society as the unit of analysis, but he identified the nation-state as an actor in an international arena. By the 1970s Robertson had moved to the USA where initially he pursued studies in the sociology of religion. However, his interpretation of religious developments was also essentially planetary in its orientation. Rejecting the prevailing commitment to secularization as the central social process, he became interested in developments in Islamic fundamentalism that indicated a link between religion and politics on a world scale. He was also interested in Weber's argument that Protestantism tended exactly to focus the consciousness on the material, as opposed to the spiritual world. He was thus able to return to his earlier interest in international society and his first general papers on globalization began to appear in the mid-1980s. By now the globe and its culture, rather than the nation-state, had become the primary concern. He had begun to untie the straightjacket of the concept of national society which had left social science out of touch with the big changes going on in the world and in which he had himself felt uncomfortable from the beginning of his career:

In an autobiographical sense my own perspective on this matter is undoubtedly to this day colored by the fact that one of my earliest, serious intellectual choices revolved around the question of whether I should study sociology or international relations as an undergraduate.

(1992: 4)

Robertson's definition of globalization runs as follows:

Globalization as a concept refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole … both concrete global interdependence and consciousness of the global whole.

(1992: 8)

The first part of the definition, global compression, resembles the arguments of theories of dependency and of world-systems. It refers to an increasing level of interdependence between national systems by way of trade, military alliance and domination, and ‘cultural imperialism’. Wallerstein (1974) tells us that the globe has been undergoing social compression since the beginning of the sixteenth century but Robertson argues that its history is in fact much longer. However, the more important component of the definition is the idea of an intensification of global consciousness which is a relatively new phenomenon.

There are some clear links between Robertson's definition and Giddens’ earlier one.

Globalisation can … be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa. This is a dialectical process because such local happenings may move in an obverse direction from the very distanciated relations that shape them. Local transformation is as much a part of globalisation as the lateral extension of social connections across time and space.

(Giddens 1990: 64, italics deleted)

This definition usefully introduces explicit notions of time and space into the argument. It emphasises locality and thus territoriality and by this means stresses that the process of globalization is not merely or even mainly about such grand, centre-stage activities as corporate mega-mergers and world political forums but about the autonomization of local lifeworlds. Globalization, then, implies localization, a concept that is connected with Giddens’ other notions of relativization and reflexivity. The latter imply that the residents of a local area will increasingly come to want to make conscious decisions about which values and amenities they want to stress in their communities and that these decisions will increasingly be referenced against global scapes. Localization implies a reflexive reconstruction of community in the face of the dehumanizing implications of rationalizing and commodifying.

The position taken in this book on the meaning of globalization is broadly consistent with the work of Robertson and of Giddens. In seeking to offer a comprehensive definition perhaps the best approach might be to try to specify where the process of globalization might end, what a fully globalized world will look like. In a globalized world there will be a single society and culture occupying the planet. This society and culture will probably not be harmoniously integrated although it might conceivably be. Rather it will probably tend towards high levels of differentiation, multi-centricity and chaos. There will be no central organizing government and no tight set of cultural preferences and prescriptions. In so far as culture is unified it will be extremely abstract, expressing tolerance for diversity and individual choice. Importantly territoriality will disappear as an organizing principle for social and cultural life; it will be a society without borders and spatial boundaries. In a globalized world we will be unable to predict social practices and preferences on the basis of geographical location. Equally we can expect relationships between people in disparate locations to be formed as easily as relationships between people in proximate ones.² We can therefore define globalization as: A social process in which the constraints of geography on economic, political, social and cultural arrangements recede, in which people become increasingly aware that they are receding and in which people act accordingly.

The concept of globalization is an obvious target for ideological suspicion because, like modernization, a predecessor and related concept, it appears to justify the spread of Western culture and of capitalist society by suggesting that there are forces operating beyond human control that are transforming the world. This book makes no attempt to disguise the fact that the current phase of globalization is precisely associated with these developments. Globalization is the direct consequence of the expansion of European culture across the planet via settlement, colonization and cultural replication. It is also bound up intrinsically with the pattern of capitalist development as it has ramified through political and cultural arenas. However, it does not imply that every corner of the planet must become Westernized and capitalist but rather that every set of social arrangements must establish its position in relation to the capitalist West – to use Robertson's term, it must relativize itself. It must be said that in increasing sectors of the world this relativization process involves a positive preference for Western and capitalist possibilities, but rejection and denial of Western capitalism is equally possible. But globalization is also highly Europeanized in another sense. The deterritorialization of social and especially of political arrangements has proceeded most rapidly in the Western part of that continent – borders are becoming disemphasized and varieties of supra- and infra-nationalism are proliferating. This means that the model of globalization that is being globalized is itself a European model, i.e., developments within the EU are widely touted as the example for global deterritorialization (e.g. see Lash and Urry 1994: 281–3; see Mann 1993 for counter-arguments).

One of the theoretical debates about globalization surrounds when it began. Three possibilities can be specified:

• that globalization has been in process since the dawn of history, that it has increased in its effects since that time, but that there has been a sudden and recent acceleration;

• that globalization is cotemporal with modernization and the development of capitalism, and that there has been a recent acceleration; or

• that globalization is a recent phenomenon associated with other social processes called postindustrialization, post-modernization or the disorganization of capitalism.

The position taken in this book is that some measure of globalization has always occurred but that until about the middle of the second millennium it was non-linear in its development. It proceeded through the fits and starts of various ancient imperial expansions, pillaging and trading oceanic explorations, and the spread of religious ideas. However, the European Middle Ages, in particular, were a period of inward-looking territorialism that focused on locality, a slump in the globalization process. The linear extension of globalization that we are currently experiencing began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the ‘early modern’ period. Technically, and if one assumes that globalization is at least partly a reflexive process, globalization could not begin until that time because it was only the Copernican revolution that could convince humanity that it inhabited a globe. More importantly, until then the inhabitants of Eurasia-Africa, the Americas and Australia lived in virtually complete ignorance of each other's existence. So the globalization process that is of most interest here is that associated with modernization.

GLOBALIZING SOLVENTS: THE CLASSICAL ACCOUNTS

Curiously, globalization, or a concept very much like it, put in an early appearance in the development of social science (Robertson 1992: 15–18; Turner 1990: 344–8). Saint-Simon noticed that industrialization was inducing commonalities of practice across the disparate cultures of Europe. Seeking to hasten the process he argued for a utopian internationalism that included a pan-European government and a new and universalizing humanistic philosophy. These ideas were promoted through a publication presciently called the Globe. Saint-Simon's ideas found their way through Comte to Durkheim, although the First World War led him to emphasize national rituals and patriotism. However, Durkheim's genuine legacy to globalization is his theories of differentiation and culture. To the extent that the institutions of societies become more specialized, commitment to such institutions as the state must be weakened because they are more narrow in their compass. In parallel, the national culture must progressively become more weak and abstract in order to encompass intra-societal diversity. All of this implies that industrialization tends to weaken collective commitments and to open the way for dismantling the boundaries between societies.

A similar comment might be made about Weber's contribution, except that he was even more bound up than was Durkheim in his own national politics. Just as Durkheim identified structural specialization (‘differentiation’), Weber identified rationalization as the globalizing solvent. He was fundamentally concerned with the success of rationalization, with its spread from the seed-bed origins of Calvinistic Protestantism to infest all Western cultures and to set up an ‘iron cage’ for all moderns. Rationalization implies that all cultures will become characterized by: ‘the depersonalization of social relationships, the refinement of techniques of calculation, the enhancement of the importance of specialized knowledge, and the extension of technically rational control over both natural and social processes’ (Brubaker 1984: 2). Although Weber did not recognise it, this implies a homogenization of cultures as well as that reduced commitment to such values as patriotism and duty of which he was acutely aware. But even this globalizing effect was restricted to Western Europe. Weber saw no prospect of the spread of rationalized cultural preferences to, say, India or China, which he regarded as inevitably mired in religious traditionalism.

Of all classical theorists, the one most explicitly committed to a globalizing theory of modernization is Marx. Globalization caused an enormous increase in the power of the capitalist class because it opened up new markets for it. Indeed, the discovery of America and the opening of navigation routes to Asia established a ‘world-market’ for modern industry (1977: 222–3). The bourgeoisie rushed into this opportunity with alacrity: ‘The need of a constantly expanding market for its products, chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere’ (1977: 224). But this development is cultural as well as economic, Marx argues, because it gives a cosmopolitan character not only to production but to consumption:

[National industries] are dislodged by new industries … that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. 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.

(1977: 224–5)

Nor is this process restricted to Western Europe. The bourgeoisie draws even ‘barbarian’ nations into its ‘civilization’ using the ‘heavy artillery’ of cheap commodities to batter down ‘all Chinese walls’. The bourgeoisie is, for Marx, recreating the world in its own image.

However, notice that territorial boundaries remain. Marx refers to the interdependence of nations and recognizes the continuing existence of the nation-state. There is a seed of destruction, however, even for this. In establishing itself as a world capitalist class the bo...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• GLOBALIZATION
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
• PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• 1 A world of difference
• 2 Trading places: the international economy
• 3 Open spaces: the globalizing economy
• 4 States of flux: international politics
• 5 Wither the state? Globalizing politics
• 6 Clashing civilizations: international cultures
• 7 New world chaos: globalizing cultures
• 8 Real world arguments
• REFERENCES
• INDEX