The word “globalization” was first popularized in the business press in the 1980s
Originally it referred only to economic processes
It has come to mean much more: cultural globalization, state decline, Americanization, cultural imperialism, immigration, regional political integration (EU), global political integration (UN)
Globalization theories are, I think, gradually transforming “nation-state sociology” and other social sciences
Sociology developed with the development of the modern nation-state; its stated purpose was to provide knowledge useful for solving social problems, mainly urban problems: crime, racial and ethnic conflict, poverty, disease
Yet today, it seems that sociology and the other social sciences are in some ways lagging behind the actual world
e.g. immigration, the internet and satellite television, and global trade are evolving more quickly than are theories that can explain these changes
One purpose of this seminar, as I see it, is to put you “ahead of the curve” at this early stage of your life and career.
What is “globalization”? Here is a preliminary list:
1. increasing volume and speed of global trade and financial interactions (“financial flows”)
2. increasing global interconnectedness of personal communications – long-distance phone calls and email
3. media globalization – satellite television and the internet
4. increasing migration and changes to citizenship
e.g. Mexican laborers in the
dual citizenship
5. easier international travel, cheaper flights, more people with passports
6. weakening of states, decline of state sovereignty, privatization of state functions
7. strengthening of transnational corporations
8. evolution of global networks of non-governmental organizations
Some of the above are not entirely new, but much of it is relatively new, occurring mostly after the 1970s
Everything in this course will be about global and transnational processes. We will study nations mainly as examples of global processes
So to start the course, we should have a sense of how the world works. What are the fundamental processes at work in the world today? (what a question!)
DAVID HELD, INTRODUCTION TO “A GLOBALIZING WORLD?” (OPTIONAL)
Held is a well-know British political scientist
The world in the Middle Ages, before industrialization: most people live in isolated villages connected to market towns
villages near each other often couldn’t understand each others’ spoken language
gradually agriculture, technology, trade, cities, military campaigns tie the world more closely together
from the late 16th century onward: the nation-state, then democracy
today we see the decline of states under conditions of globalization
3 main theoretical positions in the study of globalization
1) globalism: globalization is weakening states
positive and negative versions
2) traditionalists: globalization is nothing new
3) transformationalists: no simple unidirectional change, but globalization is transforming societies, cultures, and the nation-state system
The nation-state has been taken for granted as the basis of political authority for 300 years
N-Ss have power and sovereignty over a specific geographical area defined by its borders
Globalization forces are forces that ignore borders, or bring them into question, such as multinational corporations, global trade, communications technology, diseases, global environmental problems, terrorism, and organized crime
Held defines globalization this way:
1. growing global interconnectedness
2. exercise of power at a global scale
3. interactions between global and local processes
4. multi-dimensionality: economic, political, cultural
5. can be seen positively or pessimistically
Held uses the following metaphors to help describe globalization processes:
1. “stretched social relations” across national borders
2. “regionalization” of groups of nations
3. “intensification of flows” of capital, people, and information
4. “interpenetration” of different cultures and societies in daily life
5. “global infrastructure” of the global economy (e.g. stock markets and banks), travel, an communications, and “global cities” like New York and Tokyo
SAMUEL HUNTINGTON, THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
This book has become a classic of our time, though a very controversial one. What is SH’s argument? How does he see the world?
He is a Harvard political scientist, and he wrote this book as the Cold War ended in the early 1990s.
His intended audience was mainly scholars who were trained during the CW, and especially triumphalist scholars who saw the end of the Soviet Union as one big step in a global expansion of democracy, liberal capitalism, human rights, and equality (for women, for different races and religions)
SH disagrees with this kind of optimistic, Western, liberal teleology. He sees it as naïve, dangerous, and historically inaccurate. This liberal triumphalist view ignores deep cultural differences between East and West.
The West is one “civilization,” and what happens within it does not necessarily translate to non-Western societies: e.g. the rejection of communism, embrace of human rights and freedoms for women.
For SH, wars within Europe, and the Cold War, were “Western civil wars”
After colonialism, non-Western countries will enter history as active players rather than as passive, dominated colonies.
For SH, the world is made up of 7 or 8 “civilizations”: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and African
But what about globalization? Isn’t the world becoming more integrated? For SH, globalization weakens nations and national identities, and religion provides compensation. He refers to these trends as desecularization and of course fundamentalism.
For SH, the West ends basically where it did in 1500:
West: Finland, Baltics, Catholic Belarus and Ukraine, Transylvania, Croatia and Slovenia, the former Hapsburg Empire
East: Russia, Orthodox Belarus and Ukraine, the rest of Romania, the former Ottoman Empire and Tsarist Russia
West: democratic, rich, stable, peaceful, equal, universalist ambitions and ideas, dominant and superior
East: weak, inferior, authoritarian, divided, unstable and violent, unequal, poor, particularist, and only successful in so far as they copy Western political, economic, and military models (Japan and Turkey), though it is much harder to adopt Western culture
The West was and is economically, politically, and militarily dominant: colonialism, the Gulf War, Afghanistan war, Iraq war, the IMF and World Bank, the United Nations
Now and in the future the West will have to deal with modernized societies with non-modern values, with fundamentalisms and other reactionary and anti-modern movements
Criticisms? SH’s arguments are uncomfortable for many people. They criticize him for being too simplistic in drawing lines between East and West. They see him as ethnocentric. They argue that he blames the victims of colonialism and general Western dominance.
IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN, “THE CAPITALIST WORLD SYSTEM”
Like Huntington, IW is responding to liberal Western modernizers
Unlike SH, IW’s focus is economic, not at all cultural
For IW, the world is now, and has been for 500 years, an economically interdependent system
Historically, the world has been run by world economies and world empires
World Economies: Napoleonic France, the British Empire
World Empires: China, Egypt, Rome
Today we have the “modern world economy” which emerged in 16th-century Europe. This is capitalism, and it does not evolve into a world empire, though it is sometimes described as an American empire
Northwest Europe became the center or “core” of the modern world economy because it was able to diversify its agricultural production through technological innovations, and to develop cities and eventually strong states that allowed for stable economic transactions.
Mediterranean and Eastern Europe were in the “semi-periphery”. The colonies and the rest of the world were in the “periphery”, exporting cheap raw materials and importing expensive goods and services.
These inequalities are reinforced and perpetuated by “unequal exchange” between core and periphery. The core almost always wins.
Both poor and rich nations are almost locked into their positions in the world economy. The basic structure of the world economic system is stable and static.
Criticisms of IW? IW pays almost no attention to culture – values, beliefs, religion, traditions.
Is his view of the world too static? What about countries like South Korea that have changed their positions?
BENJAMIN BARBER, “JIHAD VERSUS MCWORLD”
BB is a political scientist at Rutgers University in the US. This chapter was from his 1995 best-seller.
Like Huntington and Wallerstein, he has an argument about the basic structure of the world after the Cold War.
He starts by referring to the popular press. On most days, the front pages of major newspapers will have articles about Muslim violence (Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza, Bali, Madrid, London, Holland). In the same newspaper, the business section will discuss, every day, new forms of global economic integration and cooperation and high technology: multinational companies buying one another and merging, new tools for communications, business, and entertainment.
The contrast here is striking, although we tend to get used to it.
Like SH and IW, BB, along with most globalization theorists, criticizes Western modernizers and secular liberals. For BB, large-scale globalization processes produce both division and integration:
1. “Jihad” – division, retribalization, desecularization, racialization (e.g. former Yugoslavia)
2. “McWorld” – homogenization, global capitalism, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, MTV
Jihad and McWorld are in some ways technically interdependent, though they define themselves partly by contrast with the other.
Both Jihad and McWorld weaken states, and both are undemocratic
The two trends go together in any case
Criticisms? Simplistic? Too focused on headlines? Are fundamentalist movements nearly as important as global capitalism?
Martin Albrow, “Travelling Beyond Local Cultures”
Like a large number of globalization scholars, Albrow is interested in the “penetration” of globalization processes into everyday life, specifically into the daily lives of quite ordinary people (not cosmopolitan elites, not immigrants).
For Albrow, this kind of study can recast many of the theories and ideas of “nation-state sociology”
Some important ideas in Albrow’s analysis:
1. globalism – thoughts about the state of the world penetrating the daily lives of ordinary people
2. globality – images, information, and commodities from around the world are available in people’s local lives. global events impince on people’s lives.
3. time-space compression – an idea developed most famously by David Harvey – “direct” social relations can occur over any distance across the world
4. disembedding – people can move across national borders while maintaining their lifestyles and routines (food, furniture, television)
Empirical Study: Wandsworth (inner London)
Wandsworth is a fairly conservative neighborhood
What kind of “local culture” is there in the Wandsworth neighborhood?
Older sociology suggests that in the absence of a strong local culture, i.e. local community and traditions, there will be “anomie” or social disorganization (Marx, Weber, Tonnies…)
E. J. Hobsbawm “The World Unified”
Until the 18th and 19th centuries, regions of the world are mostly independent.
E.g. China has almost no interaction with Europe.
Almost no one in Europe knew what was happening in Japan.
Even in 1848, the best European maps have large white spaces for much of Africa, Central Asia, South and parts of North America, Australia.
There was not really “one world”
In the 18th and 19th centuries long-distance trade begins to increase very rapidly.
transportation and communications technology – telegraph, steam engine, train
e.g. in 1872 it was possible to travel around the world in 80 days
in 1848 it would have taken at least 11 months
in the 1800s international cooperation in technology and government began
International Telegraph Union (1865)
Universal Postal Union (1875)
International Meteorological Organization (1878)
all of these survive today
attempts to create a global language
Esperanto in the 1880s
the technological and economic unification of the world that began in the 17 and 1800s left out large portions of the world, e.g. Latin America, Africa, most of Asia
Leslie Sklair “Sociology of the Global System”
A broad argument that provides an alternative to both Huntington and Wallerstein.
The key to understanding globalization is not Westernization and the rise of non-Western and reactionary movements, as in Huntington; nor is it a slowly evolving Western-centered world economic system, as in Wallerstein.
Rather, the new force we need to understand is a social class, the Transnational Capitalist Class
This is not Western only, it is a global class of people, partially a product of brain drain from poorer regions.
What members of the TCC share is a culture-ideology of consumerism
Capitalism is no longer inter-national but global
The culture-ideology of consumerism supports global capitalism, and the TCC are the main agents for spreading this culture-ideology
To expand successfully, global capitalism needs to expand the markets for its consumer goods, and therefore to create demand for consumer products
e.g. today even quite poor people in poor regions know about the differences between consumer products (products that they cannot possibly afford)
The TCC does not own the means of production (factories etc.)
They are pulled from all nations into jobs as executives, in media, as owners, as capitalist-inspired politicians and high-level bureaucrats
They see their job as convincing their countrymen of the merits of capitalism, free markets and consumerism
Shopping centers (malls) are the temples of the culture-ideology of consumerism
The TCC almost completely controls the world’s resources (“national” resources)
Without consumerism, i.e. without media (television, radio, newspapers, internet ads) this system could not survive
The TCC is transforming cities
Jan Nederveen Pieterse “Globalization as Hybridization”
Sklair’s argument on the Transnational Capitalist Class takes us away from Western-oriented perspectives toward more global theories of globalization. We will encounter this tension throughout the course, between center-periphery models of globalization and models of globalization as transnational “flows” of ideas, capital, and people.
In the last ten years or so, the trend has been away from center-periphery theories, although this trend is uneven.
Jan Nederveen Pieterse is well known for arguing against center-periphery models.
He views globalization as a very complex multi-dimensional process, fluid, indeterminate, and not unidirectional.
It is better, he argues, to think of globalization not in terms of standardization (homogenization) but in terms of hybridization.
Jan Nederveen Pieterse “Globalization as Hybridization”
Pieterse is our first writer to argue against theories of globalization-as-standardization, uniformity, homogeneity, mcdonaldization, coca-colonization, neo-colonialism…
We should think about globalization(s), in the plural, and in terms of multidimensional processes, some of which tend toward standardization, others toward differentiation and hybridity
Does globalization = Western modernity? Or Western capitalism?
No, there are theoretical problems with this approach. Globalization does not exactly equal Westernization.
This approach is not historically sound. Globalization implies an intensification of global interactions that already existed. Globalization is more like a stage of history.
For the nation-state, globalization erodes state sovereignty over national economies. And yet it encourages “absentee patriotism” among diasporic communities – Jews, Palestinians, Irish, Sikhs, Kurds…
“Glocalization” of local ethnic groups referring to universal human rights standards.
Supranational regionalism – e.g. the EU, ASEAN (Ohmae)
Sub-national regionalism – e.g. Northern Ireland, Quebec
This is all hybridization, not standardization
e.g. “hybrid sites” and neighborhoods, immigrant neighborhoods, border cities, global cities, Free Enterprise Zones
“structural hybridization” due to globalization increases the range of “organizational options” available to people
Sociology will have to change to accommodate the new realities of a globalizing world