Understanding Globalization

Tony Schirato, Jen Webb

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780761947943, 9780761947936
• eBook ISBN: 9781446236109
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Globalization is a highly debated term, and struggles over its meaning are played out in a variety of ways, from academe and the media to the streets of Seattle, Melbourne and Genoa.

This book provides a welcome introduction to the discourses, practices and technologies that have been grouped together under that term. It outlines the historical contexts of globalization, and addresses the politics of naming that are so central to the reproduction of the narratives and patterns of globalization.

The authors examine specific sites that are being transformed by globalization such as capitalism, state governments, the media and cultural identity, and explore the notion of a post-globalization world.

This will be a valuable book to undergraduate and MA students on communication, media, cultural studies, sociology, politics and development courses.

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The Idea of Globalization

What’s in a name?

Globalization is the ‘name’ that is often used to designate the power relations, practices and technologies that characterize, and have helped bring into being, the contemporary world. What it in fact means, though, is less than precise. Armand Mattelart refers to globalization as:

one of those tricky words, one of those instrumental notions that, under the effect of market logics and without citizens being aware of it, have been naturalized to the point of becoming indispensable for establishing communication between people of different cultures. (2000: 97)

He argues in the same place that globalization has a hegemonic role in organizing and decoding the meaning of the world. In a similar vein, John Beynon and David Dunkerley, in their general introduction to Globalization: the Reader, make the claim that ‘globalization, in one form or another, is impacting on the lives of everyone on the planet … globalization might justifiably be claimed to be the defining feature of human society at the start of the twenty-first century’ (2000: 3).

Certainly, struggles over its meanings, its effects and its origins are played out in a variety of ways and sites, from academe and the media, through governments and corporations, to the streets of Seattle, Melbourne and Genoa. For some, globalization means freedom, while others see it as a prison. For some it means prosperity, while for others it guarantees the poverty of the developing world. And though the word itself has been in use only since the early 1960s, some writers see it as dating from the empires of the ancient world, while for others globalization is coterminous with the modern era and the processes of modernization, or even of postmodernization. It seems everyone has a stake in its meaning, and is affected by its discourses and practices, though there is no straightforward or widely accepted definition of the term, either in general use or in academic writings.

Globalization and the politics of naming

The intensity of debates over its meanings and applications can be understood if we take into account the importance of naming in the establishment of ‘reality’. Mattelart points to this in his Networking the World, where he opens a chapter devoted to a critique of the politics of globalization by quoting the French philosopher Albert Camus’s comment that ‘Naming things badly adds to the misfortune of the world’ (Mattelart, 2000: 97). At the time we commenced writing this book there was clearly a considerable amount of misfortune to be found globally. Wars were being waged in Palestine, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Algeria, Sri Lanka, Angola, the Sudan and in other places long forgotten, or never covered, by CNN. The number of people in the world living in poverty – which the World Bank defines as US$1 a day or less – was over 1.19 billion in 1998 (PREM, 2000), and increasing or at best remaining the same in Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Central Asia (Nye and Donohue, 2000: 184). Crime and the management of crime contribute to this generalized misfortune: Pierre Bourdieu points out that ‘California, one of the richest states of the US’ spends more on its prison budgets than on the budget of all the universities combined, and that ‘blacks in the Chicago ghetto only know the state through the police officer, the judge, the prison warder and the parole officer’ (Bourdieu, 1998a: 32). Unemployment too continues to impact on people’s lives across the globe: in the week following the 11 September attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, over 100,000 airline employees in the United States, and many more around the world, were made redundant, with little prospect of regaining their jobs in the short to medium term. Clearly these are, in Camus’s terms, ‘bad things’, which increase the level of misery for many people. But how their status is weighed and valued in the public imagination and in the eyes of power brokers varies tremendously according to how they are named, and to the contexts of their reportage.

We saw an extreme expression of this politics of naming in the media responses to the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001, the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers, the assault on the Pentagon, and the loss of thousands of lives. In the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, the media networks ran virtually non-stop coverage of the event, with other programming effectively suspended. All other news (about politics, economics, entertainment, or sport) was virtually ignored, or treated peripherally, rating a serious mention only if it could somehow be connected with the attacks. International politics, for instance, was represented by stories of British Prime Minister Tony Blair pledging to support the United States; finance news dealt with the market collapse, seeing it as a consequence of the political uncertainty surrounding American President George W. Bush’s response to the attacks. Entertainment was covered in stories about musicians like Celine Dion ‘singing for the victims and their relatives’; and sports news was reduced to depictions of baseball teams ‘playing for’ America and/or New York.

The Western media were clearly of the opinion that something groundbreaking had taken place; as CNN put it, this was ‘a day of unfathomable death, destruction and heartbreak’ (CNN, 2001b). Comparisons were made with historical events such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor, though most media commentators followed President George W. Bush in characterizing the attacks as the first twenty-first-century war. Newspaper articles employed apocalyptic headings (‘One with the world at last’; ‘Our charmed life has gone forever’) and lamented that ‘On September 11, the world changed’ (Goodman, 2001: 31). This change supposedly involved the loss, for Americans, of their innocence and security; although as Slavoj Zizek observed, ‘when a New Yorker commented on how, after the bombings, one can no longer walk safely on the city’s streets, the irony of it was that, well before the bombings, the streets of New York were well-known for the dangers of being attacked or, at least, mugged’ (Zizek, 2001).

The significance of the event and the media’s response for the wider story of globalization is that it worked as a profound instance of the politics of naming. What was, effectively, an appalling but localized disaster became international news – for a time, almost the only international news. And the language used in the reportage, and in statements by politicians and other world leaders, signals the efficacy of naming in bringing things into social reality, and in foreclosing, or shutting out, other ‘realities’. Shocking as these events were, the 11 September attacks did not involve particularly high fatalities compared with many contemporary wars and acts of violence. The attacks on New York and the Pentagon resulted in the loss of what was initially reported as 6,500 lives (later reduced to around 3,000). By contrast, tens of thousands of people died in Russia’s two invasions of Chechnya; some 19,000 Eritrean soldiers were reported as killed in the two-year war with Ethiopia (Afrol News, 2001); CNN reported that war-related deaths in east Congo were estimated to have reached 2 million by June 2001; and many hundreds of thousands have lost their lives in conflicts in Cambodia, the Balkans, East Timor, Iraq/Iran, Somalia and Ethiopia/Eritrea. But the reportage of these events came nowhere near the treatment of 11 September, possibly the most widely publicized event since World War II.

The response to the 11 September attacks, and the ideas and actions mobilized by the responses, are exemplified by Jean-Marie Colombani’s article ‘After this act of terrorism we are all Americans’ in the Guardian Weekly of 20 September 2001 (initially published in Le Monde). Colombani’s article, which more or less encapsulates the reactions of the Western media, required that ‘we’ (the CNN audience, the readers of Western newspapers) repress any doubt both as to who we are, and to what the attacks meant:

At a moment like this, when words fail so lamentably to express one’s feeling of shock, the first thought that comes to mind is that we are all Americans, all New Yorkers … As during the darkest hours of French history, there is absolutely no question of not showing solidarity with the United States and its people, who are so close to us, and to whom we owe our freedom. (2001: 33)

This necessarily denies the possibility that his readers might identify with anyone but the United States, and collapses multiple forms of marking and identification into a tub of Americana. Colombani continues:

The US, isolated because of its unrivalled power and the absence of any counterweight, has ceased to be a pole of attraction. Or, to be more accurate, it seems to attract nothing but hatred in some parts of the world. … In today’s monopolistic world a new and apparently uncontrollable form of barbarity seems poised to set itself up as a pole of opposition. (2001: 33)

There are a number of things happening here, the most obvious of which is the editing out of other contexts for the 11 September attacks. Colombani also fails to identify other contemporary misfortunes, such as the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims in Srebenica, as having comparable weight or significance; he would not and could not have declared, then or now, that ‘after this we are all Bosnian Muslims’. But perhaps most significantly, he sets up a dichotomy, with ‘us’ opposed to them – the uncontrollably barbarous. The reason behind this is what Bourdieu (1998a: 19) refers to as the ‘false universalism of the West’, which he describes as a claim to universalism which is ‘no more than a nationalism which invokes the universal (human rights, etc.) in order to impose itself’. The attacks and deaths in the United States can move Colombani to call for Europeans to identify with Americans not just because of shared historical links, but more importantly because American society and its way of life are understood as standing in for ‘universal’ qualities or characteristics – humanity, reason, freedom, human rights, democracy and the ‘good of mankind’ – as opposed to the monstrosity, barbarity, madness and intolerance of its enemies.

This editing out of one broad spectrum of social issues, perspectives and values, and editing in of another as the only valid reality, is associated with the principle of foreclosure. Foreclosure is usually associated with psychoanalytical theory: Freud uses it with regard to the Oedipus complex, whereby a male child is required to repress desire for his mother and foreclose that aspect of his identity and desire as a requirement of his entry into ‘normal’ (patriarchal) society. Judith Butler refers to it in her discussions of the way in which ‘normative heterosexuality’ is understood as the basis and condition of subjectivity, and other possibilities of sexuality/subjectivity are foreclosed. So foreclosure can be understood as a process whereby certain feelings, desires, ideas and positions are both unthinkable with regard to, and simultaneously constitutive of, an identity. Foreclosure is also at the basis of the politics of naming, as we can see from Colombani’s article (‘After this act of terrorism we are all Americans’), because the process of fore-closure requires that ‘we’ (the CNN audience, the readers of Western newspapers) repress any doubt both as to who we are and as to what these attacks meant. The politics of naming thus simultaneously creates one reality, and forecloses another.

How is it possible to name one set of values as universal and foreclose another set while still holding to the notion of a globalized world predicated on such principles as freedom and democracy? Cultural theorists such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Claude Lefort have written, apropos of democracy, that it functions, theoretically, as an ‘empty set’ which allows no single group (a class, an ethnicity, a gender, a religion) to ‘fill it up’ or inflect it with their particularities. What Colombani’s article points to is the process whereby the universal, supposedly a non-inflected set just like democracy, is already filled with content – in this case, Western and/or American values, institutions and politics. And it is this inflection that allows Colombani to give the attacks on the United States a universal weight or meaning while denying a similar weight or meaning to the experiences of Bosnian Muslims or Afghani refugees.

The name of globalization

Much the same can be said, of course, about the ‘empty set’ that is globalization. Despite the obvious difficulties in understanding what is meant by ‘globalization’, we can identify a number of positions that seek to explain and describe it. The many definitions in the literature range from the purely economic (interest rates, exchange rates, mobility of finance) and the rate of human movement (refugees, migrants, mobile professionals) to the effects of power (the collapse of nation-states, technological surveillance, ‘action at a distance’). But the many ways of thinking and writing about globalization can be collapsed into a small number of categories, which we will outline in a very broad brushstroke approach here.

The writers David Held and Anthony McGrew identify two main groups or ‘sides’ in the debate, whom they name the ‘globalists’ and the ‘sceptics’. Globalists, they argue, are believers, in the sense that for them ‘globalization is a real and significant historical development’ (2000: 2) – the effect of real structural changes in the past few centuries. The sceptics, on the other hand, consider that what we are experiencing at present is simply a continuation of trends that developed in the period of European colonial expansion, peaked during the period 1870-1914, and were interrupted by the two great wars and the ‘cold war’ of the twentieth century; so, for them, globalization is principally ideological, present more in the discourse than in reality.

Both sides in the debate, however, keep the market economy central to how globalization is viewed, and how it proceeds. Andreas Busch offers a very similar classification, identifying writers on globalization as either ‘liberals’ – who start from the premise that globalization is unquestionably real, and move on to insist that it brings only benefits to all – or ‘sceptics’ – for whom global tendencies necessarily have negative political and economic outcomes (Busch, 2000: 30–1). He adds a third category, though: the ‘moderately optimistic’. This group breaks with the other two (and, therefore, with Held and McGrew’s globalist/sceptic division) by imputing considerably less importance to the economic sphere. At the same time, the ‘moderately optimistic’ category straddles the views of the other two groups by generally agreeing that there are globalizing tendencies which can be identified and measured, but that they are not as all-encompassing as the literature might imply; and nor are they operating without resistance, and without exceptions (Busch, 2000: 33).

In the chapters that follow, we will outline these ideas about what globalization means and for whom it takes on its meanings, and offer a critique of the central ideas and practices associated with it. In the process we will develop our own explanation for globalization, and trace its trends, patterns and movements across a number of domains, including history, technology, nationality, identity, media, the public sphere and economics. We start by considering the Marxist approaches of Immanuel Wallerstein, and Hardt and Negri, and draw on their ideas to discuss the relationship between history, ideology and globalization. Then we depart a little from this established category by examining a second strand of thought which comes from theorists we could designate Neomarxist, such as Mattelart, Castells, Baudrillard, Virilio and Appadurai. Their examination of the processes of globalization centres around the extent to which technological developments have brought about a change in the way societies, states, cultures and individuals function and understand themselves. The third perspective which informs our discussion of globalization is exemplified by the work of writers such as Pierre Bourdieu and Zygmunt Bauman. These writers work in the tradition of Neomarxism, and give more emphasis to the cultural than to the economic aspects and effects of globalization. While they share the notion that globalization has a history, and that technological developments have dramatically affected everyday life, they stress that these changes are explicable in cultural terms, specifically in terms of the politics of naming. That is, they argue that the changes are located within, and can be evaluated in terms of, powerful discourses that shape everyday life; discourses which simultaneously name, and thus help bring into being, what they are supposedly designating or describing.

‘The global’ and its meanings

Most analysts accept the importance of the technological, economic, cultural and political changes associated with the term ‘globalization’, but very few agree as to what these changes mean or if, taken together, they add up to something that ‘really exists’ for everyone – as access to technology, as a world view, or simply as an instrumental name and set of discourses. In order to address the question, we first have to qualify it with two additional questions: for whom is globalization ‘real’, and in what ways? For the S11 (anti-globalization) demonstrators who protested in Seattle, Melbourne and Genoa, there was no doubt that globalization existed and was responsible for most of the misfortunes of the world, from environmental degradation and vandalism, to the worldwide exploitation of workers. For them it was a reality which had changed the world, with negative consequences for their lives.

But to what extent are these consequences a result of globalization, or of the set of processes, values, technologies and politics associated with it? The protesters might well define it in terms of the power and influence of global capitalism, embodied in the practices of transnational corporations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF); or characterize it as the various political, economic and cultural ways in which American hegemony has imposed itself upon the world; or point to the ways in which the IMF and the World Bank, operating as de facto arms of American free-trade policies, have effectively undermined the sovereignty of developing nations. But the politicians who were the targets of the demonstrations would have had a very different understanding of the word ‘globalization’, an understanding shared, by and large, with spokespersons of the media, bureaucracies and business. When George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi dismissed the protesters in Genoa as selfish malcontents who didn’t understand the benefits globalization was bringing, particularly to the poorest and most underprivileged of the world’s peoples, they were effectively repeating a discourse that was constitutive of Bill Gates’s dream of ‘frictionless capitalism’, or Ted Turner’s prophecy that the spread of CNN would eliminate war from the world: ‘With CNN,’ he announced, ‘information circulates throughout the world, and no one wants to look like an idiot. So they make peace, because that’s smart’ (Mattelart, 2000: 95). Globalization may or may not be ‘the defining feature of h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 The Idea of Globalization
• 2 Globalization: History and Ideology
• 3 Technology, Informationalism and Space/Time
• 4 Global Capitalism
• 5 The State and Sovereignty
• 6 The Global Subject and Culture
• 7 The Public Sphere and the Media
• 8 Globalization, Counter-memory, Practice
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index