ABSTRACT
A globalization guru tells the following story. In 1988 a United States government official traveling to Chicago was assigned a limousine with a cellular phone. It was his first experience with the novelty, and he was so pleased to have a new communications option literally at his fingertips that he called his wife just to brag. Nine years later, in 1997, the same official was visiting a remote village in Côte d’Ivoire, in west Africa, that was accessible only by a dugout canoe. While he was there a Côte d’Ivoire official told him he had been asked to contact Washington, and handed him a cell phone for the purpose. And if the same story had occurred another decade later, the official’s own cell phone would have connected with the United States directly. The point is obvious, and obviously important: new communication
opportunities melted distance and time. People could reach each other, immediately, around the world. This made the experience of travel different from what it had been before – one could go a long distance and retain direct connection with family, friends and work, which meant that travel was less disruptive than ever before. The shrinking of communication gaps, at least technologically, made new types of collaboration possible: scientists for example could work on the same problem, in real time (impeded only by the intractable issue of different time zones), almost as if they were next door to each other. Connections among stock markets tightened as news could be exchanged instantaneously. Even student cheating took on new dimensions: students taking an Advanced Placement test in Egypt could use cell phones or email to tell friends in Los Angeles what was on the exam, hours before they actually had to take it – until the college board wised up and began preparing different versions of the exam for different international regions. The implications of new communication speeds were dazzling. Technology was not the only story. As early as 1946 the International
Labor Office, backed by powerful maritime unions in several parts of the world and their global federation, instituted an international minimum wage for all merchant seamen, regardless of nationality. Enforcement varied, of course, but shipping workers were able to extend the standard by refusing to handle ships from countries that defied the newminimum at national ports – so
the international wage did spread widely in this unusual industry. The idea of a single international wage level for an important category of workers would have been unthinkable just a few decades earlier, but now it quietly became part of global life. Policies and organizations, and not just technologies, were creating a new world community, and this also reminds us that the contemporary phenomenon of globalization probably predates some of the most striking recent inventions such as cell phones and the Internet, which were called into being by new global needs and were not just independent sources of new contacts. While historians did not invent the concept of globalization, we have
noted that a vigorous group of “new global historians,” including several leading scholars in the history discipline as a whole, have been using historical perspective to highlight how much is brand new about the global age of the past half century. Bruce Mazlish, for example, puts forth the idea that we should not just think of globalization as the most revolutionary development of the past several decades, but more grandly should accept the fact that we are entering a global epoch, as different from previous patterns as some of the great geological epochs earlier in the earth’s history had been compared to prior patterns in terrestrial development. This means, obviously, that globalization is quite new: Mazlish and the other new global historians naturally recognize that there were earlier developments in international contacts, but they don’t see them as coming close to the magnitude of contemporary globalization. If they are right, this also means that globalization is unusually sweeping in its implications for shaping human life, far beyondwhat is normally involved in defining a particular period of time. Seeking to flesh out this far-reaching novelty, the new global historians
offer a number of specifics, most of which are mutually compatible but which may also be subjected to separate evaluations. They see, for example, the global as a huge step beyond the mere “modern”: modern meant industrial, it meant a new kind of state, and while these were important shifts, they differ from the wider-ranging implications of the global and they are also less significant as sources of change. Another venture (which again can be challenged, given the range of developments after 1850 for example): earlier international contacts revolved mainly around trade, but globalization is far more encompassing, with far more facets than commerce or even capitalism alone. Even the economic aspect is transformed: while a world economy has existed for centuries, a “global economy is something different: it is an economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time on a planetary scale” (as Manuel Castells puts it). Yet another statement: globalization increasingly undermines both nation and state, for the process goes well beyond conventional politics; power shifts to more amorphous forces like communications networks or environmental impacts or to less fixed kinds of institution like multinational corporations or INGOs. The globalists point out that at least 52 of the richest entities in the world are multinational
corporations, not governments – which means that over 150 nation-states are dwarfed by these economic giants (and there are over 60,000 multinationals in the world today altogether). They note further, connected with this, that inter-regional relations have shifted from conventional state-to-state diplomacy to the broader forces that are encompassed by globalization. Anxieties are redefined – another striking claim about the newness of globalization – as people realize that they are surrounded by vast processes, and as risks spread to global levels, well beyond the ups and downs of individual regions. And the new global historians urge that unless we turn to the huge changes that globalization has brought to the human experience over the past half century, unless we accept that globalization is revolutionizing human life as no mere contact patterns had ever done before, we will not have an adequate basis for shaping policies and perspectives to deal with the world around us – it’s not just a matter of scholarly accuracy. Several of the historians, going beyond mere scholarly analysis, plead for new global ethics and humane standards to match and control the changes they see in organization and technology. This chapter lays out some of the major developments that have unques-
tionably accelerated globalization during the past six decades. In the process, it allows further assessment of the claims of dramatic novelty. That important changes have occurred is incontestable, even if the current period is seen as the latest phase of a longer process (which is the argument of others in the small band of historians who have taken up this topic, like Robbie Robinson who sees recent patterns as the “third phase” of a transformation that began in the 16th century). The question is how fundamental the transformation, how radical the new directions human societies have embarked upon. Four other preliminaries must be noted. First, even the most sweeping of
the new global historians acknowledges the importance of interrelating local reactions and conditions with the mounting global forces. Indeed, balancing the local and the global is something of a mantra in this approach to history. Globalization obviously affects and limits diversity, but it does not erase it. Some of the diversity, in turn, relates to continuities from earlier relationships with inter-regional contacts. New global historians express excitement about identifying the innovations
globalization entails, but not blanket approval of the consequences these same innovations bring. They fully grant that globalization creates new problems and worries, even outright protests, and while they do not see the process turning back they are not blindly optimistic. One can accept the idea of fundamental change, in other words, without assuming that the world is better as a result; or one can insist on greater continuities with earlier phases of global interactions, but again with open evaluation of the quality of the results. Potential debate might surface about exactly when the transformation (or
next phase) began, and while the issue is less important than the discussions
about the new period’s relationship to earlier stages in the emergence of inter-regional connections it could warrant attention. Hence a third preliminary. After all, pinpointing a decade in which new or additional processes began relates to identifying the major causes involved in launching them. Casual observers might opt for recency, around some of the most dramatic new technologies such as the Internet. Most historians, however, including the new global group, opt for the mid-20th century as the point at which changes in policy as well as technology began to emerge, only to accelerate further, of course, as additional developments like satellite communications or the Internet factored in. There is some complexity here: it was in the same mid-century decades that the Cold War took shape, dividing much of the world along ideological lines, and this is not exactly consistent with the general processes we usually associate with globalization. But many historians believe that basic globalization features developed alongside the Cold War, and they also note that both the “free world” and communist sides in that conflict thought in global terms, even as they disagreed about what world they wanted to create. The end of the Cold War in the 1980s accelerated globalization further, but it was in fact almost certainly already under way. Finally, the relationship of recent globalization to other commonly men-
tioned processes, notably Westernization or Americanization, deserves comment in advance. Americanization was a phrase much used in the 1950s – a French government official famously referred in that decade to the dangers of “Coca-colonization,” and some of the concerns about globalization more recently have involved other American staples like McDonald’s. American cultural as well as economic and military influence certainly plays a role in contemporary globalization. The broader process of Westernization must also be considered – one historian saw this as the central feature of the later 20th century, though he wrote before the globalization concept became current. Phenomena such as the global (though not uniform) spread of democracy owe much to ongoing Western influence. But the new global historians tend to downplay the role of this special type of regional outreach in the changes they identify, noting for example the increasing place of east Asian societies such as Japan, South Korea and now China in shaping many of the economic and cultural processes we associate with globalization. One of the new features of this globalization period, indeed, in contrast with the later 19th century, may well be the reduced hold of the West on the basic contours of change. After all, accelerating globalization occurred just as a host of regions freed themselves from Western colonial control – decolonization initially seemed to complicate globalization by introducing scores of new nations and new nationalisms, but this tension subsided. More recently, accelerating globalization has built on the rise of China, India, Brazil and other new manufacturing powers, reducing Western economic as well as political dominance in the world at large. Disproportionate Western influence
still has something to do with globalization, but amid important changes and complexities – and the new global historians avoid the conflation of a now-diminishing Westernization and ascendant global change. Here, certainly, is a set of issues to be tested along with the broader probes of global transformations themselves.
