ABSTRACT
At one remove globalization is a simple concept embracing two processes that are sometimes, but not always, related. These processes are interconnectivity and institutionalization. Of course, there is also the little matter of consciousness: the awareness by actors of global constraints and, as Roland Robertson (1992) rather delicately puts it, their propensity to “identify with” the global condition in one way or another. For the most part other literature concurs. Thus, John Tomlinson talks about the “complex, accelerating, integrating process of global connectivity … (a) rapidly developing and ever densening [sic] network of interconnections and interdependencies” (2003: 270). He later uses the telling phrase that global flows and structures have become “ubiquitous in everyday experience” (2007: 30). These words carry a powerful charge, reminding us of the importance of the quotidian in making contested globality. The sense of globalization as intensive and extensive connectivity abounds and can be found
in work with quite different theoretical and ideological pretensions (Held et al. 1999). Jan-Aart Scholte’s anthem to globalization as supra-territoriality is a prominent example (2005; see also Held et al. 1999), while Hardt and Negri’s treatise on Empire (2000) and Manuel Castells’s monumental trilogy on The Information Age ([1996] 2000, [1998] 2000, [1997] 2004) both traffic the image of a networked, de-centred and de-territorialized world of capitalism as a rejection of orthodox Marxism and state-centric models of international political economy. In all these accounts globalization appears as a form of intensified and increasingly extensive exchange, and or a process involving the diffusion of worldwide institutional rules and standards or cultural scripts. George Modelski and his colleagues (2008) underscore the sense of globalization as the emergence of institutions and networks of planetary scope and, crucially, point to its multidimensional character. This insight also directs us to treat globalization in all facets of social life, within and across the realms of economics, politics and culture, and not just as an exogenous force sufficient to meld all identities. All of this is at a rather high level of generality and couched thus is quite anodyne. So too is
the notion of globalization as the process by which the world is being compressed through new constructions of space and time, in David Harvey’s neat encapsulation (Harvey 1989). Yet the real charge in Harvey’s idea is that social relations and identities are being reconfigured on a world scale and that such changes result in the growth of a modal global consciousness. In light of the subject matter of this volume, it is worth noting that consciousness may breed discontent,
including ethical objections and/or physical opposition to particular facets of globalization, or to the process in general. The very idea of globalization presumes integration, and this motif is especially visible in
so-called hyper-globalist accounts and in some of those conveniently summarized as transformationalist (see Held et al. 1999). To be sure, sceptical opinion remains doubtful about the world-integrative power of globalizing forces, even in the economic realm (Hirst et al. 2009), and there is now much talk of de-globalization, as global capitalism is buffeted by the extended financial and trading crisis. These days no one takes too seriously the idea that the process of global integration constitutes a neat teleology whereby borders and the identities tied to them have become nugatory, and territoriality as the organizational basis for much political and economic life is in demise. At the same time students of globalization still have trouble with the intuitively implausible notion that it is a contradictory process, one that does not even imply, let alone require, “uniformization”, in Francois Bayart’s inelegant, but still expressive description (Bayart 2007). Caricatured and otherwise jaundiced accounts of globalization cavil at the idea of globa-
lization as in some way indeterminate, because of the need to demonstrate homogeneity as a necessary outcome of the process. For in its absence, runs the sceptical argument, any globalization hypothesis must fail. To be sure, some critics of globalization do see an unremitting and explicitly regressive pattern of homogenization, damaging to diversity and locality, as well as being morally reprehensible when linked to patterns of deepening inequality and the failure of beyond-the-state governance to realize a more benign world order. But the balance of research findings tends to the counterintuitive and vaguely unsatisfactory conclusion that globalization implies and delivers the simultaneous production of sameness and difference. All of which makes the notion of global integration central to the narrative about to unfold,
but also one that is very difficult for the social-scientific observer. Difficult in that while it should muster as a purely empirical concept that is readable from a set of measurable indicators, it also carries a heavy normative burden. Moreover, the latter may be of greater weight in any reckoning of the impacts of globalization; especially in judgements about its progressive or regressive character. In this respect, it is not just a matter of weighing the consequences of variably intensive and extensive forms of global integration; it is also a judgement about how, or whether, globalization disrupts what Nancy Fraser (2008) calls “hegemonic frames” and, of especial interest in a book on global ethics, whether such changes alter both the quality of justice available to diverse actors and the sites at which it is meted out. Fraser is exercised mainly by the question of how and for whom justice is served. Is another,
better world of global justice possible, and is it being forged? She contends that in a period of intensive global integration, at the very least, the mapping of political space is more contested than ever and the hegemonic frame of the international system of states and national economies in some disarray. With this in mind, her own interests lie in the framing of social justice, where the issue of which mapping of political space is truly just and who counts as a bona fide subject of justice – citizens of territories or transnational “communities of risk”, as she has it – are the key questions for analysts (ibid.: 4). These are indeed important questions, even if one does not support a transformationalist
position on globalization. Current signs all seem to suggest a world at once more interconnected and interdependent and yet in woeful turmoil. We are living through a crisis that is certainly economic and increasingly one of legitimation. The United States seems trapped in political deadlock and its position as the guarantor of liberal internationalism and Western modernity feels distinctly shaky. Europe (at least the EU) is in parlous financial health and in
some danger of fragmentation. China and the other BRICs are on the rise, and the balance of world economic power is undergoing a seismic shift. The crisis, however construed, is itself a measure of the trammels of interdependence; of risks
without boundaries, and thus of globalization (Beck & Sznaider 2006). Beck and Sznaider write quite convincingly about the raft of “interdependency crises” that both threaten and are the product of a more integrated world. They include the aforementioned crisis in the global financial economy, and also global warming, terrorism, pandemics and over-population. Because of these hazards – though still counterintuitively – crisis phenomena may reinforce the sense of unremitting global integration, or else highlight its effects, albeit in pathological guise. The very speed of contagion heightens the awareness of risks incurred through globalization (World Economic Forum 2011). But in historical perspective, is the real narrative of the era actually the reverse; not epochal
change and dislocation, but stability; in other words is there a secular integrative tendency, and what does that mean? To address these and other issues we need to interrogate the currents and trends in global integration more fully and begin to identify some of their normative implications. Implicit in what follows is a set of antinomies that make up the dialectic of globalization. These include the tension between networks and borders that lies at the heart of globalization as an integrative process; the playing out of convergence and divergence as forces shaping world (dis)order; the extent of stability or continuity versus evidence of dislocation; and finally, the matter of consciousness – whether the global is now the primary frame of reference for both situated and mobile actors. The extent and intensity of global integration will be examined by way of eight trends, each
of which is no more than a catch-all for a set of cognate issues and themes. The trends – each contestable – are:
closer integration of the world economy; crisis in the liberal global order; the transformation of production systems and labour markets; the cultural economy of speed; the media revolution and consumerism; the spread of democracy as a global script; the changing quality of global governance; and finally, the making of world society and global consciousness.
