ABSTRACT
The study of globalization as a conceptual tool for the understanding of our modern global system has been increasingly greeted with criticism from a multitude of directions-and rightly so. Originating in French and American writings in the early 1960s, the term globalization has been used to capture everything from the rise of global financial markets to the fall of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. The development of globalization-defined as the process of increasing width and depth of interaction and interdependence among social units in the global world system-as a theoretical construct, however, with accompanying testable models, has been rather slow and laden with difficulties. Out of a small number of global system development frameworks that have been put forward recently, this chapter employs a new, world historically based and interdisciplinary framework for the study of global system development, the extended evolutionary world politics (EWP) framework.1 This chapter uses the EWP framework to study current transitions and the development of a ‘post-Fordist’ or new global socioeconomic system as an evolutionary process with a special focus on the world city system development. It argues that the rise of the Phoenician maritime commercial system provided an important nucleus for the evolution of a global maritime-based external network system, which is currently transforming into an external network system based on digital communication networks. Combining frameworks of political geography (world city and network analysis) with a long-term oriented International Relations and international political economy framework, further evidence is provided for the emergence of an informational network economy, global in extent, cyclical in occurrence and evolutionary in nature. The focus on networks and the re-emergence of global cities as central nodes in the world economy highlight the need to add data beyond the state as the level of analysis for studies of the international system. At the same time, however, it makes evident the need to view these nodes as an embedded part of a state-based international system.
