Globalization

A Critical Introduction

Jan Aart Scholte

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780333977026
• eBook ISBN: 9781350311596
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This highly-acclaimed, bestselling textbook, quickly established itself as one of the leading texts on the subject worldwide in its 1st edition. Now substantially revised and updated, Scholte provides students with a comprehensive introduction to globalization and questions why this phenomenon has occurred, to what extent it changes the world, and whether it is a force for good or ill. Accessibly written by a leading authority both as an academic researcher and a policy consultant, this second edition draws on the author's research in more than 20 countries over 5 continents. Split into 3 parts, the text first outlines a critical framework for understanding globalization, before exploring its impact on society, and the key debates surrounding its normative impact. Exploring questions such as what globalization is, how it has emerged and what effect it has had on society, this text is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students seeking a thorough study of globalization. New to this Edition:
- A broader perspective on all the dimensions of globalization
- Makes use of the extensive new data and research findings since the first edition was released Draws more widely from other fields such as Business Studies, Law and Economics

Part I
Framework of Analysis

Since everything concerning globalization is deeply contested, nothing about it can be taken for granted. Each account of the issue has to make its starting points explicit and clear. A lengthy first part of this book must therefore carefully establish a general framework for analysing globalization.

To this end Chapter 1 sets the scene of debate with a survey of the many points of disagreement about globalization. Chapter 2 examines various notions of globalization and particularly specifies the definition that guides the analysis in this book. Chapter 3 elaborates a chronology of globalization that corresponds to this conception. Chapter 4 then considers different explanations of globalization and presents the account that informs the present book. With the framework of analysis thus developed in hand, the consequences of globalization can be systematically explored in Parts II and III.

Chapter 1

Globalization Debates

Main points of this chapter

Where to start?

Continuity or change?

Liberation or shackles?

What to do?

Conclusion

Main points of this chapter

•globalization is a thoroughly contested subject

•many of the disputes relate to starting premises regarding the definition, measurement, chronology and explanation of globalization

•other debates concern the ways and extents that globalization has or has not changed society, including its primary structures of production, governance, identity and knowledge

•additional arguments centre on normative evaluations of globalization, namely, whether it enhances or undermines human security, social equality and democracy

•further disagreements revolve around policy responses to globalization, in particular between neoliberalist, rejectionist, reformist and transformist strategies

Along the road between Iganga and Mbale, a crew heaves pickaxes to lay fibre-optic cable that will connect peripheral districts of eastern Uganda into global telecommunications networks. In New Delhi, taxi chauffeurs ask their foreign passengers how many hours’ flying away they live. To mark post-Soviet times, a billboard in Moscow directs consumers to a ‘Super Shop’ called ‘Global USA’, located down the street from Lenin’s tomb. Another sign, rising above the favelas of São Paulo, urges passing drivers to ‘Globalize Jesus!’, while an Islamist in Tehran celebrates global governance as the coming of the Mahdi, the twelfth Imam. In the Nile Delta a transborder company’s local buyer of potatoes for the fryers of Europe adorns life with mobile phone, fashion spectacles, satellite television and sports utility vehicle, all the while dressed in traditional galabeyya. A boutique in Portland, Oregon, sells ‘global clothing’, while a restaurant on London’s Brompton Road peddles ‘global food’. From Beijing to Johannesburg, from Davos to Porto Alegre, a stream of world summits and world forums discuss the implications of globalization for human security, social equality and democracy.

These snapshots relate just a few of the countless occasions – across continents, age groups, classes, cultures, races, sexes, and urban and rural settings – when the present author has encountered ‘global-ness’ while writing (and now rewriting) this book. No doubt all readers can assemble their own collection of such incidents, if perhaps not as scattered as the above examples. It is today pretty well impossible to avoid the issue of globalization. ‘Global-speak’ has become standard fare among journalists, politicians, managers, advertisers, bankers, entertainers, officials, computer experts, activists and researchers across the planet. The vocabulary of ‘globalization’ has entered almost all of the world’s major languages. Daily life now brings continual references to global communications, global finance, global health problems, global markets, global migration, and global justice.

‘Globalization’ has also become a heavily loaded word. People have linked the notion to pretty well every purported contemporary social change, with arguments about an emergent information age, a retreat of the state, the demise of traditional cultures, and the advent of a postmodern epoch. In normative terms, some people have associated globalization with progress, prosperity and peace. For others, however, the word has conjured up deprivation, disaster and doom. No one is indifferent. Most are confused.

To begin to bring some order to this analytical disarray, the present opening chapter maps the many claims and counterclaims that have been made about globalization. At the same time the following pages locate the arguments advanced in this book within those debates. From this discussion readers can obtain both a survey of existing globalization research and a preview of the particular perspective taken between these covers.

The first section notes the highly diverse starting points that people have adopted when they examine globalization. In other words, these paragraphs foreshadow the issues that are addressed in detail in the rest of Part I. The second section of the chapter surveys various affirmations and denials of social change that analysts have connected with globalization. These paragraphs thus introduce the questions treated more fully in Part II. The third section assembles multiple plaudits and denunciations of globalization, while the fourth section lays out the broad spectrum of policy lines that can be advocated in respect of globalization. These last two sections thereby review the matters that are handled at length in Part III.

Of course the diversity of published arguments about globalization must not be exaggerated. After all, most research on the subject has emanated from countries of the North and is published in English. Moreover, most studies of globalization have come from a limited social base of urban-based, white, professional, Judaeo-Christian, middle-aged men. Given these biases, the existing literature – however wide-ranging it may be – does not adequately cover many experiences of globalization.

Where to start?

Many debates about globalization never get past disputes over starting premises regarding definition, scale, chronology and explanatory framework. On definition, people have often conceived of globalization in radically different terms, thereby talking past each other from the outset. On scale, people have made widely varying assessments of the extent of globalization. At one end of the spectrum certain observers claim that today’s world is fully globalized; at the opposite pole ultra-sceptics deny that any globalization whatsoever has occurred. On questions of chronology, some accounts trace globalization back to ancient history, while others date its origins back only several decades. Regarding explanations, analysts have identified widely differing cultural, economic, political and/or technological dynamics of globalization. With such contrasting starting points, many globalization debates have been foredoomed to deadlock.

What’s in a word?

Disputes and confusions about globalization often begin around issues of definition. Indeed, many people invoke notions of globalization without indicating explicitly what they mean by the term. For example, various commentators have described globalization as ‘a stage of capitalism’ or ‘late modernity’ without specifying the content of such phrases. Or authors have made unfocused remarks that globalization is ‘a new way of thinking’. Circular definitions are not much help either, with statements like ‘globalization is the present process of becoming global’ (Archer, 1990: 1). In these and other ways, ‘globalization’ has frequently become a label to cover whatever strikes the fancy. Little wonder, then, that critics have decried the emptiness of ‘global babble’. As early as 1943 a US congresswoman complained that it was all ‘globaloney’ (Luce, 1943).

Yet such wholesale rejections are unfair. After all, many key notions in social analysis can be used loosely and vaguely. How often does one find airtight conceptualizations of ‘class’, ‘culture’, ‘money’, ‘law’, ‘development’, ‘international’, etc.? Moreover, some usages of ‘globalization’ are considerably more illuminating than loose globe talk. A serious academic literature on the subject has developed over the past two decades.

All the same, confusion persists because the more specific ideas of globalization are often highly diverse. At least five broad conceptions can be distinguished. These definitions are in some ways related and to some extent overlapping, but their emphases are substantially different.

One common notion has conceived of globalization in terms of internationalization. From this perspective, ‘global’ is simply another adjective to describe cross-border relations between countries, and ‘globalization’ designates a growth of international exchange and interdependence. In this vein Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson have identified globalization in terms of ‘large and growing flows of trade and capital investment between countries’ (1996: 48). Evidence of such ‘globalization’ is purportedly also to be found in enlarged movements between countries of people, diseases, messages and ideas.

A second usage has viewed globalization as liberalization. Here ‘globalization’ refers to a process of removing state-imposed restrictions on movements between countries in order to create an ‘open’, ‘borderless’ world economy. On these lines one analyst suggests that ‘globalization has become a prominent catchword for describing the process of international economic integration’ (Sander, 1996: 27). Evidence for such ‘globalization’ in recent decades can be found in the widespread reduction or even abolition of regulatory trade barriers, foreign-exchange restrictions, capital controls, and (for citizens of certain states) visas.

A third conception has equated globalization with universalization. Indeed, when Oliver Reiser and Blodwen Davies coined the verb ‘globalize’ in the 1940s, they took it to mean ‘universalize’ and foresaw ‘a planetary synthesis of cultures’ in a ‘global humanism’ (1944: 39, 201, 205, 219, 225). In this usage, ‘global’ means ‘worldwide’, and ‘globalization’ is the process of spreading various objects and experiences to people at all corners of the earth. We could in this sense have a ‘globalization’ of automobiles, Chinese restaurants, decolonization, cattle farming, and much more.

A fourth definition has treated globalization as westernization or modernization, especially in an ‘Americanized’ form (Spybey, 1996; Taylor, 2000). Following this idea, globalization is a dynamic whereby the social structures of modernity (capitalism, rationalism, industrialism, bureaucratism, individualism, and so on) are spread the world over, normally destroying pre-existent cultures and local self-determination in the process. ‘Globalization’ in this sense is sometimes described as an imperialism of McDonald’s, Hollywood and CNN (Schiller, 1991; Barber, 1996; Ritzer, 1996; Gowan, 1999). Martin Khor has similarly declared that ‘globalization is what we in the Third World have for several centuries called colonization’ (Khor, 1995; see also Biel, 2000; Ling, 2000).

A fifth approach – one that is developed in this book – has identified globalization as respatialization. Following this interpretation, globalization entails a reconfiguration of social geography with increased transplanetary connections between people. On these lines, for example, David Held and Anthony McGrew have defined globalization as ‘a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions’ (Held et al., 1999: 16; also Massey, 1994; Short, 2001; Rosenau, 2003). In particular, some authors have associated contemporary globalization with a tendency towards deterritorialization, so that social space can no longer be wholly mapped in terms of territorial places, territorial distances and territorial borders (Ó Tuathail, 2000). In this vein the present book highlights the rise of supraterritoriality in contemporary globalization.

Each of these five conceptions can generate an elaborate and in one or another way revealing account of contemporary history. However, in spite of some overlap between these various notions, their respective foci are significantly different. Thus, for example, people who identify globalization as internationalization and people who approach it as respatialization develop very different understandings of the problem.

Fact or fantasy?

Both when they agree and when they disagree on the general definition of globalization, people have often held widely differing assessments regarding the extent of the development. On the one hand, analysts who might be characterized as ‘globalists’ claim that contemporary social relations have become thoroughly globalized. Globalists also tend to regard globalization as the single most important fact of contemporary history. In contrast, ultra-sceptics have dismissed any notion of globalization as myth. Between these extremes, other analysts have treated globalization as a significant trend, but one that coexists with other important developments and is far from finished. These more measured accounts have often also stressed the uneven incidence of globalization among countries, classes, and other social groupings.

Globalist pronouncements about the ubiquity and all-importance of globalization have issued both from gung-ho supporters of the trend and from its implacable opponents. The promoters have included a number of corporate consultants and champions of new technologies. For example, management gurus like Kenichi Ohmae and John Naisbitt have created bestsellers with their praises of a ‘borderless world’ (Ohmae, 1990; Naisbitt, 1994). Much of the business press has heralded ‘the stateless enterprise’ that maximizes efficiency and profits by operating freely across a global field (Holstein et al., 1990). Similarly, many Internet enthusiasts have regularly overstated the number of online connections and the scale of electronic commerce. Many advertisers, journalists, politicians and others prone to hyperbole have also celebrated the present as a thoroughly globalized world.

Some critics of current directions of globalization have also made strong claims about the scale of the process. For instance, a number of civil society activists and dissident academics have suggested that global corporations now rule the world (Barnet and Cavanagh, 1994; Brecher and Costello, 1994; Korten, 1995; Berger et al., 1998–9; Barlow and Clarke, 2001). On similar lines many of the same circles have denounced global governance agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the WTO for usurping power from states and local governments (Barker and Mander, n.d.; George and Sabelli, 1994; Burbach and Danaher, 2000). Meanwhile a number of religious revivalists and reactionary nationalists have protested that a deluge of globalization is erasing traditional cultures. In this vein the National Front leader in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has railed against his country being sent to the ‘abattoirs of Euro-globalization’ (Globe and Mail, 3 May 2002: A7).

Whether as supporters or as critics of globalization, globalists have regarded the trend as holding foremost and overriding importance in contemporary history. In this vein several writers have taken the current growth of global communications to be as significant as the spread of printing presses 500 years ago, the invention of writing 5,000 years ago, or the development of human speech 40,000 years ago (Ploman, 1984: 37; Gates, 1995: 8–9). For his part the former President of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, has affirmed that the implications of global consciousness are as great for the present day as was the Copernican revelation, five centuries ago, that the earth revolved about the sun rather than vice versa (Cardoso, 1996).

At an opposite extreme to globalist pronouncements, ultra-sceptics have denied the existence of any such thing as globalization. For these analysts, all globe-talk is empty jargon, fad, hype, myth and rhetoric. Claims concerning globalization are greatly exaggerated, if not utter fantasy. Doubters have dismissed talk of ‘globalization’ as new-fangled vocabulary for age-old conditions of world politics. Studies of this phantom subject are therefore a waste of time. Shut this book!

From the sceptics’ standpoint, much that is said about the so-called ‘global’ economy is mythical (Zysman, 1996; Hirst and Thompson 1999: 2, 6; Helliwell, 2000). Purportedly ‘global’ companies are in fact deeply embedded in their respective home countries, and their actions are thoroughly enmeshed in the logic of interstate relations (Kapstein, 1991–2; Ruigrok and Van Tulder, 1995; Doremus et al., 1998). Indeed, for these analysts ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Boxes
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Framework of Analysis
• Part II: Change and Continuity
• Part III: Normative and Policy Issues
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index