What is Globalisation?

What is Globalisation?

A summary Of  Ulrich Beck

The class question in the nineteenth century is now the globalisation or transnationally active enterprise in twenty first century.
  Why does globalisation mean politicisation? globalisation policies and orchestrated global scare are intended to get rid of the remnants of organised labour the national state and national politics and a minimal state and minimal interventionism.  There is a wide range of transnational actors infiltrating   national state politics through corporate and vested interests. The downward pressure of the welfare state  is combined of dwindling resources and high costs at a time when most really needed as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, therefore it seems modernity failed and individualisation prevailed and that universalism and human rights was nothing but voices now of old dead white men of the enlightenment period. This is sub politics is gaining power beyond the political systems. This assumption still has to be scientifically analysed and politically challenged.

Defining the terms  :Beck gets rid of the sceptre of globalisation making distinction between globalism on one hand and globality and globalisation on the other.

Globalism:  The world markets eliminate or supplant political action reducing it to single economic unit and that a complex society and its culture and policy can be run in the way of a company. Along with affirmative globalism there is negative globalism which takes refuge in various forms of protectionism, conservative, green and red protectionism.

Globality: living a long time in a word society. Closed of spaces is an illusion. Not culturally or nation bound. Not a real but a perceived or reflexive world society of difference multiplicity without unity. But how can this be empirically turned into and analysis?

Globalisation: the processes through which sovereign national states are  crossed and undermined by transnational actors with varying prospects of power, orientations, identities and networks

One distinguishing feature between the second and first modernity is the fact the new Globality cannot be reversed. This means that the various autonomous logics of globalisation-the logics of ecology, culture, economics, politics and civil society exist side by side and cannot be collapsed into one and another.  Each must be independently decoded  These are:  geographical expansion, finance, corporations, and trade networks information and communications technology universal demands for human rights images from global culture growth of post national polycentric worked politics with transnational actors growing world poverty global environment destruction transcultural conflicts  in one and the same place therefore  nothing in the planet is limited to the local.

The concept of Globality may be distinguished from the concept of globalisation process which is a dialectical (a dialectical process) in 3 ways extension in space, stability over time and social density of the transnational networks, relationships and image flows. This means defining what is different with contemporary globalisation in comparison to capital world systems that was under construction from the age of colonialism.

Therefore world society is not one mega-national society but a world horizon of multiplicity and non-integration that opens out when it is produced and preserved in communication and action.

What is new is everyday life and integration across national frontiers in dense networks with a high degree of multi dependence and obligation. Also new is the transnational perception (mass media, consumption and tourism, place ness community capital and labour and global ecological dangers.  (Others in one’s own life) globalisation also means no world state without world government. Disorganised capitalism as economic development escapes the control of national states

Globalisation in this scenario means de nationalisation. And causes a nationalism shock

This lack of nationalism can shock central Europe Australia, Switzerland France Italy and Germany who have an economic nationalism also because they have extensive social commitments

It is a misused word and there is a need to distinguish a number of dimensions of globalisation. A list would include: communications technology, ecology, economics, work organisation, culture and civil society not just economic globalisation. Not just globalisation therefore but of internationalisation which undermines trade relations.

Then there is the question of when globalisation began.  

Wallenstein’s capitalist world system date it the 16^th century.  Others to the emergence of international corporations or the ending of fixed   exchange rates or the collapse of the eastern bloc. However the first modernity with fixed boundaries and national borders seem now to less relevant.

Anthony Gidden: 
“acting and living together over distances, across the apparently separate worlds of national states, religions, regions and continents. Therefore it calls into question what A D Smith called the first modernity ‘methodological nationalism’

So how might we study this new modernity?

Modern sociology used the container theory of society. This theory proposed by J, Agnew and S , Corbridge,  where societies both politically and theoretically presuppose ‘state control of space’  so that the concept of the political is associated not with society but the notion of a state with a society. On the inside these are broken down into collective identities, religious and ethnic groups, gender, and these are then inserted into the supposedly autonomous worlds of economics, politics, law, science, family each with its own distinctive logics and codes. Internal homogeneity is essentially a creation of state control. Therefore the categories of the states self –observation become the categories of empirical social science so that sociological definitions of reality confirm those of bureaucracy. Therefore society and sociology is caught in the territorial trap of equating society with a nation state so a rethinking of this paradigm is needed by breaking out of the axiomatic of the national state and replacing them with units of analysis.

Intended or unintended action

In all analysis spaces of transnational action arise in one way or another because actors set out to achieve them. In the theory of world risk society the category of the unintended consequences appears in place of the basic unity of purposive action. It is global risks their social and political construction and various ecological crisis that bring about new kinds of world disorder and turmoil.

In cultural theory research the linearity assumption of the either –or is replaced by both-and postulates. All are messily complex and intertwined. Therefore for instance in transnational civil society all units become visible by a one world model, a globalisation from below. a new world citizenship. Here the axiomatic that equate modernity with non-political individual societies break down. A world society without a world state means a society not politically organised, where new opportunities for action and power arise for transnational actors that have no democratic legitimisation.  This means a new transnational space of the moral and the sub political is opening up. So what is transnational space? i.e.) Africa is not a fixed geographical space but a transnational idea and the staging of that idea. Transnational spaces cancel the local associations of community that are contained in the national concept of society. The figure of thought at issue joins together what cannot be combined: to live and act both here and there.

The logic dimensions and consequences of globalisation.

1)      One dominant logic of globalisation.

2)      Complex set of causes

3)      Often contradictory meanings

We see the historical divergence of the sociology of globalisation repeating the historical divergence between Marx and weber. Between the view of the dominance of the economic and theoretical pluralism involving the economic, social and cultural approaches.  Cultural theory: Robertson Appaurai, Albrow, Featherstone, Lash, Urry strongly opposing the mc donaldisation insisting the world is not becoming culturally homogenous. Rather a process of glocalisation is taking place.

Tran’s nationalisation therefore comes from the inventiveness that people create and maintain life worlds.  Something in this is often illegally blended together which seriously hinders national states and their claims to exercise control and order.  These systems are impure. Not either –or. In Wallenstein’s world systems theory  replaces the image of separate individual societies with and everything –everything must insert and assert itself within a single division of labour and world economic profit maximisation system and the appropriation and exploitation  of surplus labour not between two classes but three layers the central areas the semi periphery and the periphery.

Risk and crisis comes about because while European capitalism has been forming a universal economic space or world market humanity has remained divided into national states and identities. Whilst it produces riches it also produces poverty into these periphery areas a division that integrates the world system upon a conflict basis. This conflict causes restruction which again intensifies conflict until its collapse. The criticism of this theory is 1 difficult to specify and test the historical-empirical content, 2 said to have begun with Columbus discovery and subjugation of the New World and is not specific to the 20^th century and does not allow us to identify what is new about transnational. All the dialectics are linear.

Post international politics Roseneau, Gilpen, Held

Roseneau:  breaks with nationally centred thinking. He does not replace national states with a world systems theory but distinguishes between two phases of international politics. He also believes humanity has left behind the age when national states dominated or monopolised the international scene. In an age of post international politics national players have to share the global arena and global power with international organisations transnational concerns and transnational social and political movements. The passage from the national to the post national has to do first with conditions within the international political system and second with the fact that the monocentric power structure of rival national states has been be replaced by a polycentric distribution of power Poly centric world politics:  in place of a single world market system there is a poly centric world politics where everyone competes to have a say. Gilpen says that national states are more than ever linked. That globalisation only comes about through certain conditions of international politics. That is it the product of permissive global order. It presupposes the tacit consent of national states hegemonic power structure. Held argues National politics is losing what used to be the core of its power, sovereignty. World risk society: economic globalisation as forced politicisation.Threat from human decision making. The fragility of civilisation produced by the experience of a common destiny.  The ecological shock is arousing a cosmopolitan consciousness. The unintended consequences of decisions. One must not exaggerate the independence of ecological crisis within a mono causal and one dimensional view of global society. There is however a special kind of involuntary politicisation the risk conflicts bring.

Why the thesis of donaldisation of the world is wrong: paradoxes of cultural globalisation.

Kevin Robbins argues that cultural globalisation and cultural transformation through the development of the world market and its corporate manufacturing of cultural symbols. Many writers have adopted the convergence of global cultural thesis with the keyword mc donaldisation. The increasing convergence of cultural symbols. As the last niches are integrated into the world market. What emerges is one world where images of oneself and others are pluralist and cosmopolitan not as a multiplicity of openness. People are defined by a symbol and its ideology by what they can or cannot buy so when purchasing power ends so does social humanity. Exclusion begins for those who fall outside ‘being equals design’. This is achieved through the opening up of spaces through the world-wide technology information and media services, through the infiltration of memes and marketing systems planting American corporatism across the world to shape ideologies and cultures. Therefore globalisation does not mean de location but relocation.  They must be able to develop worldwide strategies; local connections so global must also mean Trans local.

Glocalisation: Roland Robertson.

‘Awareness of the world as a single place ‘has become part of everyday reality. Therefore globalisation of the contemporary world and consciousness globalisation reflected in the mass media are two sides of the same process.  So what must be analysed is how the world opens up in the cross-cultural production of meaning and cultural symbols. I.e.) travel for work, cultural images and media, migration and bi cultural partnerships.

Jürgen Habermas ‘new obscurity’ and Zygmunt Bauman ‘the end of clarity’ Robertson, the local must be understood as an aspect of the global or glocalisation. Glocalisation underlines the main claims of cultural theory.  ‘ Global culture cannot be understood as a static phenomenon but only contingent and dialectical process which is not economically reducible to someone sided logic of capital in accordance with a modal of glocalisation in which contradictory elements are  conceived and deciphered in their unity.  Therefore globalisation can become empirically possible only as a glocal investigation of its infiltration on all areas of private socio political life.

1 universalism and particularism human rights are presented as universal rights but are locally presented in other ways

2 connection and fragmentation globalisation compels bonding with emerging transnational and transcontinental ‘communities’ living and working in separate places, transnational corporations and transnational communities. Not only do this fragment but it also undermines the control of the nation state over information and taxes etc…

3 centralisation and decentralisation: national states may cut themselves of but may also adopt an active orientation towards it relocating and redefining their politics and identity in the context of mutual relationships

4 Conflict and balance.  The glocal as a world disintegrating into conflicts.  Conflict appears in the place of local ties and communality. Exclusion by poverty. Yet it also produces as communality through cultural worldwide symbols such as Coke Disney land and the ecological worry.  Fukuyahama end of history was countered by Howard Perlmutter and the beginning of global civilisation that’s reflexive ‘world society’ but this presupposes experiences of common destiny

5. Excurses: two modes of distinction. Exclusive (either-or) and inclusive modes of distinction. Inclusive mobile co-operative concept of ‘borders’. Here borders arise not through exclusion but but through ‘double inclusion’ i.e.) a person may be part of a large number of circles and is circumscribed by that. For the paradigm of exclusive distinction, globalisation must appear as the peak of development that cancels all distinctions and establishes the UN differentiable in its place. For the paradigm of the inclusive distinction, by contrast, there is a paradigmatic research argument that it alone makes possible the sociological investigation of Globality.

The power of imagining possible lives

Following on from Robertson, Arjun Appadurai discusses ethnoscpaes or ‘landscapes of people’ and other groups on the move which mark the unsettled world we live in…migration, asylum, tourists, exiles etc… He also identifies: Technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes.  These flows call into the question of the distinction between the periphery and the centre. A, D Smith the emerging global cultures are tied to no place or period. A true melange of disparate components drawn from everywhere and nowhere. Imagination gains a special kind of power in people’s lives says Appadurai. And a central source of this is mass media. The spectacle of images to even the most hopeless brutal life of the spectator.  Local lifestyles are diluted and stirred around with models that’s social and spatial origins lie somewhere altogether different.

Global Wealth, local poverty: Zygmunt Bauman Globalisation and localisation are not two only two moments or aspects of the same thing but also the driving force and expression of the new polarisation and stratification of the world population into a globalised rich and localised poor and a redistribution of privileges and depravations of wealth and poverty, of resources and importance of power and powerlessness of freedom and constraint.

1)      Emergent hierarchy of mobility

2)      The world of the locally tied.

The residents of the first world live in time; space does not matter for them. Or Jean Bruliiards ‘hyper reality’ the residents of the second world are confined to all-to-real space the localised poor who can only kill time. Bauman does not explain why globalisation destroys even a modicum of community between rich and poor.  So we ask the question is work disappearing.

Capitalism without work.

Baumants minima moralia the poor as our poor the rich as our rich. Habermas ‘cosmopolitan solidarity’.  Creating closeness between seemingly separate worlds not only out there but also here and now. . :” in a crucial sense (to take up Appadurai, for example) it is even questionable whether the second modernity the cultural production of ‘possible lives’ –which literally includes or ‘locks in’ the richest and poorest alike- allows any group to be excluded.”  This new possibility for example can be seen in Rio where the homeless occupy the rich streets at nightfall.  Capitalism is doing away with work.  Marx and Webers contracts class and structural functionalism and verstehen may be out dated. So a new model for a different social contract is needed. This question is not fully addressed because of assumptions like:

1.       Everything is too complicated to analyse

2.       The service sector will save work

3.       We have only to drive down wage costs for unemployment to disappear.

Transnational civil society: how a cosmopolitan vision is emerging.

Why in what sense does globalisation force us to distinguish between a 1st and 2^nd modernity? The first being the ‘methodological nationalism’ and its quai –essentialist identities and way of life. This idea collapses in the course of economic, political, ecological, cultural and biographical globalisation. The second we are dealing not with a rule-governed but a rule –changing politics/ a Meta politics. It’s also cancelled by the symbolic world of global cultures and societies.

A small number of well-educated globally interchangeable people produce more goods and services. However an owner occupied capitalism which aims to increase profits, taking no account of employees, the welfare state and democracy undermines its own legitimacy. They withdraw both jobs and fiscal revenue from more expensive countries and burden others with the cost of unemployment and developed civilisation.  (2 chronic sets of poverty) and yet the public and private purses are still to continue financing the luxuries that the rich enjoy through way of infrastructure development.  What is at stake is all the collectivism of the ‘labour democracy.’ The welfare state was not a social favour to be dispensed with when money gets tight but the answer to the experience of fascism and a challenge to communism.  How will democracy exist without the securities of the work society? (Could be bring new forms of anarchy with the disenfranchised)

Multiplicity without unity.

This becomes distinguishable with two concepts of culture.

1)      Essentially territorial.

2)      Cultures in plural. Non-integrated, non-separated

Where the citoyen is still trapped in a national state framework the bourgeois acts in a cosmopolitan manner which means he does not have to stick to national loyalties.

A build-up of supra national and sub national regionalisms come into being.

Symbolically staged mass boycotts: cosmopolitan initiatives and global sub politics.

Mass citizen boycotts, round the globe alliances, pressure groups, and the boycott can become active direct democracy on a world scale. However this pre supposes those with purchasing power and excludes those without.  Other areas i.e.) global ecological dangers 1) we are all responsible. Transferability 2. Moral outcry 3. Political 4 simple alternatives.  5) The selling of ecological indulgences.

Place polygamy: towards globalisation in personal life.

Mixed lives a hybrid human, culturally mixed, the ozone layer is not globalisation out there but within human lives.  Not always reflexively chosen but often coerced and enforced on us. But when the concept of place is ambiguous what do multi location and Tran’s nationality mean?

On the possibility of inter cultural critique

Neitchze replaces sympathy and compassion with laughing together an opening up of spaces for a simultaneous reduction and expansion of moral standards and demands.  An individualisation of ideals. Individuals become legislators of themselves.  He understands that a universality standpoint is compatible with self-limiting self-legislation.  Lessing: the claim to truth is disposed of to open up creativity and a mutually beneficial way forward.   Neither is totality as a yard stick to measure everyone else by.  But reject the either –or for the more inclusive distinctions.

1 Universalist universalism totalising feature 2 Universalist contextualism or relativism totalising features 3 contextual universalism 4 contextual contextualism Old white sceptres the voices of men from the enlightenment period and scientific empiricism. The same can be said of totalising contextualism (relativism) the unintended irony of the incommensurability thesis is that it is the spitting image of an essentialist view of the world. It leads astray to a postmodern quasi- essentialist view of the world.  Both argue a change of perspective is impossible and that things are just as they are because they are. In the end absolutised contextualism and relativism are blind to the truths of others.  Universalist contextualism is a fancy way of saying non-interference.  Perpetual (none) peace of perpetual relativism to be left and leave others in peace i.e.) the trenches in cultures can never be crossed.

Contextual universalism is the mirror image. Non-interference is impossible. Any attempt to escape into separate worlds is ridiculous and false so an acceptance of glocal living comes about. It signifies neither pre-established ignorance nor self-righteousness. That is a paradoxical result of neither absolutised relativism nor the presumed certainty without any trial or experience. The first attempt at inclusive distinction comes down to a direct integration of the contextual into the concept of the universal. Either a single universalism- or no – universalism or many universalisms and no sacred objects. I.e. human rights are universal but bought into context in different ways around the world as civil and or political rights as well.

Contours of world society: Rival Perspectives:

Globalisation- lays stress upon the transnational process.  The intensification of transnational spaces, events, problems and biographies. Should not be understood as linear, total or all-encompassing only contingent and dialectical-as glocal and be clear if we employ inclusive distinction in the analysis. We the have to consider the degree, density and extent.  Then glocalisation can be empirically analysed.

Globality –it signifies world society. As multi-dimensional, polycentric, contingent and political

Globalism- neo liberal ideology of world markets. Third cultures or global civil society? Cosmopolitan democracy, capitalist world society, World risk society, Global society without democratic politics, prospects for a transnational state.

Capitalist world society.

Neo Marxist considers the idea of cosmopolitan democracy devoid of reality. Since the collapse and integration of the eastern bloc into world market basic aspects of the capitalist dynamic were covered up in western welfare capitalism.  1) Transnational integration and national disintegration. Transnational corporations have an interest in weak states, the social welfare states of continental Europe are caught in a downward spiral, replacement of labour by knowledge, and capital, the twofold relativity of poverty, and contradictions of self-organised glocal life operate as criteria of exclusion. Capitalism without work is matched with Marxism without utopia.

World risk society: the meltdown of modernity. An awareness of global ecological threat throws many into fatalism. However those areas that were previously de politicised are now publically politicised and opened up discussion in a wider arena. This awareness gives rise to a self-critical society. The contours emerge of a utopian ecological democracy the essence of a responsible MODERNITY. A redefining of truth universality and science. (Trans disciplinary) this would require a second enlightenment that opens our eyes to the immaturity of the first modernity. When we talk of risks we talk about that which hasn’t happened, might happen if no immediate change of direction is made. (Reflexive modernisation)

Global society without democratic politics

What is a stateless world society? Not different epochs but different understanding of society three concepts state, location and functional differentiation.  Irrevocable Globality, erosion of the state and its tasks but also the transformation of its underlying premise. A politicisation through the DE politicisation of states.  Transnational and underground players with the state ambiguous. Multi local world society not anomic but an extension of dialogue and knowledge (knowledge society) Luhmanns communicative codes. Also if global economy does not recognise state power how should economy and economics be perceived? The same should be true of all functionally differentiated spheres, politics, law, culture, family and civil society. No longer a class crisis but crisis.

Prospects for a transnational state.

The end of the national state therefore democracy? Mental block of lack of alternatives.  A third way, no need to hide or resist or make oneself as mobile as possible therefore catastrophes and cosmopolitan societies are possible.  So recognition of world society and its dynamic, transnational cooperation, from national-national to global-local provinces of world society, clearly defined diversity centralisation and decentralisation opposite numbers for transnational corporation’s inclusive sovereignty a new medievalism.