Globalization

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Description

Peter Taylor:

"Globalization comprises a bundle of processes that originated in the 1970s with:

1. the rise of multinational corporations culminating in “global reach” (a popular book of that name appeared in 1973) producing a new international division of labour; and

2. the collapse of Bretton Woods fixed currency arrangements in 1971 culminating in a new worldwide financial market (transcending national control); both based upon

3. computing/communication enabling technology that made such worldwide organization possible.


The concept of globalization has been applied to all spheres of social activity – global civil society, global governance, global culture, and global economy – but it has been the latter that has dominated the discourse. This is because globalization has been closely associated with the rise of neo-liberalism, the dismantling of state mechanisms of economic protection and redistribution built up throughout the twentieth century. With its privileging of market processes, proponents of globalization favour, indeed famously proclaim, a borderless world.

The discourse of globalization is largely a product of the 1990s. There were three key political challenges that globalization proponents were trying to overcome. This politics was about making all the world attractive to capital:

In the “second world” through the incorporation of the USSR and its sphere of influence with the end of the Cold War;

In the “third world” through structural adjustment programmes to reduce social expenditure in the new “unipolar world” (the “Washington consensus”);

In the “first world” through cutting back on the welfare state provisions (Reaganomics, Thatcherism, TINA – “there is no alternative).

Generally, this involved the privatization of state assets, and “opening” state economies to foreign investment and trade. The end-result was to move from “three worlds” to “one world” = GLOBALIZATION.

Globalization is truly a keyword of our times, overwhelming all other conceptions of macro-social change in the 1990s. Today it is a hugely contested concept both empirically and politically. My position is as follows:

Empirically, I accept the evidence for contemporary social change being truly distinctive, in part, because of the intensity of its global operations;

Politically, I reject the globalization mantra that “there is no alternative”; globalization does not have to be regressive."

(https://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/12292)


Defining Globalization as Multidimensional

George Modelski & Tessaleno Devezas:

“Globalization, finally, is also multidimensional. That is, it has no simple recipe for identifying “stages of world history,” such as slavery or capitalism. As generally recognized, it comprises not just the spectacular expansion, under the banner of free trade, of world commerce and of capital movements, with the large array of transnational enterprises, and the elaborate body of rules and regulations governi ng all of these. Globalization also concerns the rise of global social movements, and worldwide cultural trends, and the emergence of world opinion as conception of common interest, but most particularly in the context of this article it has a political dimension.”

(http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gwof20)


Typology

Christopher Chase-Dunn on Types of Globalization:

"The discourse about globalization has used this term to mean several different things. For some globalization means a new stage of global capitalism that is qualitatively different from a prior stage that recently ended, though the ways in which it is alleged to be different vary from author to author. I will distinguish between two main meanings of the term ‘globalization’:

· international integration, and

· the political-ideological discourse of global competitiveness.

Globalization as international integration needs to be further unpacked as international economic integration, international political integration and international cultural and communications integration. Of course each of these subtypes has many aspects. But the point here is that the question of international integration is an objective problem of the extensiveness and intensity of links in a set of global networks of interaction. We can determine empirically how economically integrated were the societies on Earth in the late nineteenth century and how ‘economically globalized’ the world economic network is now (Chase-Dunn, Kawano, and Brewer 2000). This is a question that is separable from the consciousness that people have about their linkages with one another. The question of consciousness regarding linkages (social cosmology) also needs to be studied, and this second main type of globalization will also be considered below.


Globalization as Ideology

Since the 1980s the term ‘globalization’ has been used to describe allegedly recent and important changes in the world economy. It generally refers to changes in technologies of communication and transportation, increasingly internationalized financial flows and commodity trade, and the transition from national to world markets as the main arena for economic competition. These ostensible changes have been used to justify economic and political decisions such as deregulation and privatization of industries, downsizing and streamlining of work forces, and dismemberment of the welfare services provided by governments. The expansion of the global economy has also been painted as the victory of progressive and rational capitalism over the anachronistic ideologies of socialism and communism. People naturally want more and bigger and faster commodities, and global capitalism is alleged to be the most efficient feasible system for providing these.

This discourse about globalization is itself a phenomenon worthy of social science research. The emergence of neo-liberal political ideology is the topic of Phillip McMichael's (1996) analysis of the ‘globalization project’. This phenomenon emerged with Reaganism and Thatcherism in the 1980s and has swept around the world as a justification for attacking and dismantling welfare states and labor unions following the demise of the Soviet Union. How did this somewhat revised and expanded rendition of the private property version of the European Enlightenment become the global hegemonic ideology at the end of the twentieth century?

While political commentators have dubbed this collection of aphorisms about the magic of the market ‘the Washington Consensus’, the term I prefer for this turn in global discourse is ‘neo-liberalism’. The beginning of worldwide decline of the political left may have predated the revolutions of 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union, but it was certainly also accelerated by these events. The structural basis of the rise of the globalization project is the new level of integration reached by the global capitalist class. The internationalization of capital has been an important part of the trend toward economic globalization for centuries. And there have been many claims to represent the general interests of business before. Indeed every modern hegemon has made this claim. But the real integration of interests of the capitalists in each of the core states has reached a level greater than ever before in the most recent wave of economic globalization.

This is the part of the model of a global stage of capitalism that must be taken most seriously, though it can certainly be overdone. The world-system has now reached a point at which both the old interstate system based on separate national capitalist classes, and new institutions representing the global interests of capitalists exist and are powerful simultaneously. In this light each country can be seen to have an important ruling class fraction that is allied with the transnational capitalist class.

Neo-liberalism began as the Reagan-Thatcher attack on the welfare state and labor unions. It evolved into the Structural Adjustment Policies of the International Monetary Fund and the triumphalism of the ideologues of global corporations after the demise of the Soviet Union. In United States foreign policy it has found expression in a new emphasis on ‘democracy promotion’ in the periphery and semiperiphery. Rather than propping up military dictatorships in Latin America, the emphasis has shifted toward coordinated action between the C.I.A and the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy to promote electoral institutions in Latin America and other semiperipheral and peripheral regions (Robinson 1996). Robinson contends that the kind of ‘low intensity democracy’ that is promoted is best comprehended as ‘polyarchy’ – a regime form in which elites orchestrate a process of electoral competition and governance that legitimates state power and undercuts more radical political alternatives that might threaten the ability of national elites to maintain their wealth and power by exploiting workers and peasants. Robinson (1996) convincingly argues that polyarchy and democracy-promotion are the political forms that are most congruent with a globalized and neo-liberal world economy in which capital is given free reign to generate accumulation wherever profits are greatest.


Structural Globalization

Human societies are composed of interaction networks and the institutions and forms of consciousness that make various kinds of interaction possible. The world-systems perspective asserts that interaction networks have been importantly intersocietal since at least the emergence of cities and states, but comparative studies reveal important intersocietal interaction networks even in systems composed entirely of nomadic hunters (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997).

While the institutional nature of interaction networks has undergone major transformations with the evolution of social complexity and hierarchy, one important aspect of interaction networks has always been their spatial scale and the relative intensity of smaller and larger nets. Comparative research reveals that all world-systems small and large have exhibited the phenomenon of ‘pulsation’ in which exchange networks alternately expand and contract. For the modern world-system I will conceptualize globalization as, in part, changes in the intensity of international and global interactions relative to the local or national networks. If both national level and global networks increase in intensity at the same rate, this approach does not see an increase in the globalization of interaction. Globalization in this structural sense is both integration and interdependence2.

Different kinds of interaction have long had different spatial attributes. Most world-systems are multicultural in the sense that important political/military and trade interactions link groups with very different languages and cultures. The modern world-system is mainly composed of national cultures, though the most powerful countries have long been able to impose, sell or diffuse their cultural characteristics widely, and there may now be emerging a truly global culture that is more than just the cultural reach of the most powerful national states (Meyer 1996; Boli and Thomas 1997).

Structural economic and political globalization are conceptualized here as the differential density and power of larger vs. small interaction networks and organizations. Though we do not contend that politics and economics are separate realms that can be independent objects of scientific inquiry, we do find it convenient to distinguish between political and economic forms of globalization.

Economic globalization means greater integration in the organization of production, distribution and consumption of commodities in the world-economy. We are all aware that our breakfasts have been increasingly coming from distant locations. Sugar has importantly been a global commodity for centuries, in the sense that intercontinental market forces and the policies of competing states have massively affected both its conditions of production and consumption. But fresh grapes have only become global commodities since jets started transporting them between the southern and northern hemispheres. If you do not eat sugar or grapes for breakfast, no matter. The energy that was used to produce whatever you eat has long been a global commodity as well, though there have been important changes in the nature of energy production, the organizational structures and ownership of energy-producing firms and the impact of state policies on energy production and consumption (Podobnik 1999).

Political globalization is here conceptualized as the institutional form of global and inter-regional political/military organizations (including ‘economic’ ones such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund), and their strengths relative to the strengths of national states and other smaller political actors in the world-system. This is analogous to the conceptualization of economic globalization as the relative density and importance of larger versus smaller interaction networks.


Economic globalization is both a long-term trend and a cyclical phenomenon

If we calculate the ratio of international investments to investments within countries, the world economy had nearly as high a level of ‘investment globalization’ in 1910 as it did in 1990 (Bairoch 1996). Similarly, if we estimate the degree of trade globalization, there has been both a long-term trend and three waves of globalization – one in the last half of the nineteenth century, a small one from 1900 to 1929, and a large upswing from 1950 to the present.

...

The point here is that globalization as international economic integration needs to be understood as part of a long-term set of processes that have characterized the world-system for centuries. This model of the structural constants, cycles and secular trends specifies the basic and normal operations of the system, and I argue elsewhere that this basic schema continues to describe the system in the current period of global capitalism (Chase-Dunn 1998)."

(https://www.sociostudies.org/journal/articles/140481/)


History

George Modelski & Tessaleno Devezas:

“Globalization is a process in time, and therefore it also is a historical process in that its understanding requires tracing it back to its beginnings. These beginnings may arguably be traced i.a. to the Silk Roads across Eurasia, and the projects of World Empire, most prominently pursued by Genghis Khan and his Mongol successors in the 13th century, but more clearly seen in ocean-based enterprises of succeeding centuries. Similarly we cannot expect it to assume final form for possibly another millennium. It also is a historical project in that there is only one instance of it in the experience of the humankind. We cannot generalize about it (in the sense of summing up a number of instances) except by trying to trace that one instance of it that we know, but also by reducing it to a set of constituent processes and elements.

Globalization is transformational-institutional because it traces successive steps in what we might call the development of a planetary constitutional design. Where one millennium ago, the human species was recognizably organized in some four or five regional ensembles, with basically minimal mutual contact, and no organization, common rules, or knowledge, today information is abundant and low-cost, contacts have multiplied, and organization and rules dealing with collective problems are no longer exceptional. The institutions whereby human relate to each other have been undergoing a transformation at the planetary, but also at local, national, and regional levels.”

(http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gwof20)


Globalization in the Ancient World

By: Brian Spooner:

"Globalization began in the Middle East. It is the story of larger and larger numbers of people connecting and interacting with each other over greater expanses. But it would not have happened without climate change and population growth. Around 10,000 BCE, adaptation to climate change allowed some to settle. As the climate continued to change, people began to farm. Increasing aridity brought populations down to the major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, where they could irrigate their crops. Cities began to form in Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq) in the 4th millennium. Irrigation increased the production of food, which increased the rate of population growth, and accelerated the growth of cities; this also occurred on other rivers that flowed through the arid zone, from the Nile in North Africa to the Oxus and Jaxartes in Central Asia to the Yellow River and the Yangtse in China.


When it was no longer necessary for every family to produce its own food, some began to develop new skills and produce commodities. The cities reached out for trade and formed an inter-urban trade network from the Middle East westward to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and eastward to the Pacific and Japan. By the end of the 4th millennium, writing began to be adopted to record transactions, and in the following millennium it became a tool of administration. Cities became city-states. City-states became empires. And each empire grew bigger than the one before, from the Sumerians in the 4th millennium to the Persian empires (the Achaemenians, the Parthians, and the Sasanians) starting in the 6th century BCE, followed by the growth of ISlamic civilization in 7th century CE.

Islam spread along the trade routes east and west from the Middle East because it provided a legal system for the organization of society and trade. But since it did not provide a model for administration or government, each major city continued to function in the same way, with Persian, now written in the Arabic script, as the language of administration. By the 9th century Persian and the culture it carried was becoming the standard language of public affairs for the eastern half of the Islamic world. The process was intensified by the arrival of paper from China. The area from Baghdad to China and India became the largest culturally homogenized part of the world until the height of the colonial period in the 19th century.

Since the Middle East is at the center of the world’s largest landmass — Africa, Asia, and Europe — it be-came a global crossroads, the center of world trade and all globalizing developments through the ancient and medieval periods. Not only commodities but cultigens and cultural practices moved across Asia, between China, India, and the Middle East: walnuts, peaches, apricots, spinach, eggplant, and olives; tea and silk; paper, printing, paper money, gunpowder, and models of government; as well as more exotic products such as jasmine, henna, and indigo. This was long before similar exchange began between America and Europe.

Globalization is the evolutionary triumph of collaboration over competition."

(https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/globalization-and-the-ancient-world/)


The Globalization of the 16th Century

Peter Turchin:

“Most people assume that the current period of global connectivity is a unique and unprecedented development in human history. Although the breadth and depth of the globalization that began after World War II is indeed unrivaled, in the past humanity has experienced other periods of heightened long-distance connectivity that resulted in massive long-distance movements of goods, people, ideas, genes, cultivars, and pathogens (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997; Gills and Thompson 2006). One example of a previous “globalization” is the Age of Discovery of the sixteenth century, during which all major population centers of the world, both in Afro-Eurasia and the Americas, were connected by trade and conquest, which resulted in a massive interchange of cultural elements, genes, and pathogens, known as the Columbian Exchange (Crosby 1972). The globalization of the sixteenth century was followed by the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, which was also truly global in nature. The wave of state collapse rolled over the whole of Eurasia (with the possible exception of South Asia). Populations declined in such far-flung regions as Spain, Russia, and China. But the demographic catastrophe was even greater in the New World – the Native American population may have declined to perhaps ten percent of the pre-Columbian level. So massive was the world’s population collapse that we can detect it in the decline of global emissions of greenhouse gasses (CO2 and CH4), which even then were affected by anthropogenic activities. According to at least one theory, this decline in greenhouse gas concentration may have caused the Little Ice Age of the eighteenth century (Ruddiman 2005).”

(https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203937297-19/modeling-periodic-waves-integration-afro-eurasian-world-system-peter-turchin?context=ubx&refId=103f1974-d455-4a78-adca-383ff1262410)

Discussion

Political Implications of the World-System Perspective

Christopher Chase-Dunn:

Thus class struggles and anti-imperial movements have been important shapers of the institutional structures of modern capitalism for centuries. The waves of globalization of capitalism in the twentieth century were stimulated in important ways by the challenges posed by the Leninist parties and the Communist states. Contrary to the view that history has ended, anti-capitalist movements will continue to emerge in response to expanding and intensifying capitalist development. The most recent wave of transnational economic integration and the political ideology of neo-liberal restructuring, down-sizing and ‘competitiveness’ is provoking workers, peasants, women, indigenous groups and defenders of the biosphere to mobilize. Some of the resulting movements may employ localist and nationalist organizational structures to protect against market forces and transnational capital, but retreat into xenophobic nationalism might be a recipe for another round of world war. The only effective response will be to organize ‘globalization from below’ – transnational social movements with the goal of building an Earth-wide collectively rational and democratic commonwealth.

The age of U.S. hegemonic decline and the rise of post-modernist philosophy have cast the liberal ideology of the European Enlightenment (science, progress, rationality, liberty, democracy and equality) into the dustbin of totalizing universalisms. It is alleged that these values have been the basis of imperialism, domination and exploitation and, thus, they should be cast out in favor of each group asserting its own set of values. Note that self-determination and a considerable dose of multiculturalism (especially regarding religion) were already central elements in Enlightenment liberalism.

The structuralist and historical materialist world-systems approach poses this problem of values in a different way. The problem with the capitalist world-system has not been with its values. The philosophy of liberalism is fine. It has quite often been an embarrassment to the pragmatics of imperial power and has frequently provided justifications for resistance to domination and exploitation. The philosophy of the enlightenment has never been a major cause of exploitation and domination. Rather, it was the military and economic power generated by capitalism that made European hegemony possible.

To humanize the world-system we may need to construct a new philosophy of democratic and egalitarian liberation. Of course, many of the principle ideals that have been the core of the Left's critique of capitalism are shared by non-European philosophies. Democracy in the sense of popular control over collective decision-making was not invented in Greece. It was a characteristic of all non-hierarchical human societies on every continent before the emergence of complex chiefdoms and states (Bollen, and Paxton 1997). My point is that a new egalitarian universalism can usefully incorporate quite a lot from the old universalisms. It is not liberal ideology that caused so much exploitation and domination. Rather, it was the failure of real capitalism to live up to its own ideals (liberty and equality) in most of the world. That is the problem that progressives must solve.

A central question for any strategy of transformation is the question of agency. Who are the actors who will most vigorously and effectively resist capitalism and construct democratic socialism? Where is the most favorable terrain, the weak link, where concerted action could bear the most fruit? Samir Amin (1990, 1992) contends that the agents of socialism have been most heavily concentrated in the periphery. It is there that the capitalist world-system is most oppressive, and thus peripheral workers and peasants, the vast majority of the world proletariat, have the most to win and the least to lose.

On the other hand, Marx and many contemporary Marxists have argued that socialism will be most effectively built by the action of core proletarians. Since core areas have already attained a high level of technological development, the establishment of socialized production and distribution should be easiest in the core. And, organized core workers have had the longest experience with industrial capitalism and the most opportunity to create socialist social relations. I submit that both ‘workerist’ and ‘Third Worldist’ positions have important elements of truth, but there is another alternative, that is suggested by the structural theory of the world­system: the semiperiphery as the weak link.

Core workers may have experience and opportunity, but a sizable segment of the core working classes lack motivation because they have benefited from a nonconfrontational relationship with core capital. The existence of a labor aristocracy has divided the working class in the core and, in combination with a large middle stratum, has undermined political challenges to capitalism. Also, the ‘long experience’ in which business unionism and social democracy have been the outcome of a series of struggles between radical workers and the labor aristocracy has created a residue of trade union practices, party structures, legal and governmental institutions, and ideological heritages which act as barriers to new socialist challenges. These conditions have changed to some extent during the last two decades as hyper-mobile capital has attacked organized labor, dismantled welfare states and downsized middle class work forces. These create new possibilities for popular movements within the core, and we can expect more confrontational popular movements to emerge as workers devise new forms of organization (or revitalize old forms). Economic globalization makes labor internationalism a necessity, and so we can expect to see the old idea take new forms and become more organizationally real. Even small victories in the core have important effects on peripheral and semiperipheral areas because of demonstration effects and the power of core states.

The main problem with ‘Third Worldism’ is not motivation, but opportunity. Democratic socialist movements that take state power in the periphery are soon beset by powerful external forces that either overthrow them or force them to abandon most of their socialist program. Popular movements in the periphery are most usually anti-imperialist class alliances which succeed in establishing at least the trappings of national sovereignty, but not socialism. The low level of the development of the productive forces also makes it harder to establish socialist forms of accumulation, although this is not impossible in principle. It is simply harder to share power and wealth when there are very little of either. But, the emergence of democratic regimes in the periphery will facilitate new forms of mutual aid, cooperative development and popular movements once the current ideological hegemony of neoliberalism has broken down."

(https://www.sociostudies.org/journal/articles/140481/)


More information

For more, see the book: Globalizations and the Ancient World