Starting the Twenty-first Century

Sociological Reflections and Challenges

Gitta Tulea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351325189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Jrgen Habermas, speaking of postmodern society, remarked that extension of the means of communication not only allows a wide range of information, but it also encourages permanent connections between different peoples, cultures, and social discourses. It thus facilitates better general understanding, a clarifying of real or apparent contradictions. But this process becomes truly positive only when it is performed between equal members. Globalization of information does not minimize the possibility of conflict or terrorism, if fundamental social problems are not resolved or at least approached in an active way.

This volume examines the major upheavals of the twentieth century and views within the framework of these events and challenges implications for the future. "Values and Cultural Changes in the Postmodern World, " by Zygmunt Bauman explores the changing meaning of space in the globalizing environment; S.N. Eisenstadt analyzes the destructive components of modernity; and Irving Louis Horowitz draws attention to the classical values of the common universal culture. "Social Development and Policies in Contemporary Society, " by Michael M. Cernea, examines the importance of the applied and policy-orientated research, especially in the developing countries, and David Marsland stresses the positive role of sociology in pointing to the possibilities of improving healthcare in modern society. "Societies in Transition-Eastern Europe, " emphasizes transitions that have occurred in Eastern Europe. Rozalina Rjyvkina and Leonid Kosals provide an incisive study of the situation in Russia, while Jerzy J. Wiatr presents a comparative analysis of postcommunist societies, with special reference to Poland. "The Jewish World: Pre- and Post-Holocaust, " by Regina Azria, discusses the identity problems in the Diaspora confronting modernity; Eva Etzioni-Halevi considers the newly developed Israeli society from the point of view of the exercise and distribution of power; and a most interesting contribution by Annette Wieviorka concerns the material and spiritual effects of the Holocaust on the Jews of France.

Social historians and students of Judaica, as well as a general public interested in cultural pluralism will find this well-developed volume essential reading.

Part 1

Values and Cultural Changes in the Postmodern World

1

Space in the Globalizing World

Zygmunt Bauman

A bizarre adventure happened to space on the road to globalization: it lost its importance while gaining in significance. On one hand, as Paul Virilio insists (Virilio, 1999), territorial sovereignty has lost almost all substance and a good deal of its former attraction: if every spot can be reached and abandoned instantaneously, a permanent hold over a territory with the usual accompaniment of long-term duties and commitments turns from an asset into a liability and becomes a burden rather than a resource in the power struggle. On the other hand, as Richard Sennett points out, “As the shifting institutions of the economy diminish the experience of belonging somewhere special ... people’s commitments increase to geographic places like nations, cities and localities” (Sennett, 1999). On one hand, everything can be done to other people’s far-away places without going anywhere. On the other hand, little can be prevented from being done to one’s own place, however stubbornly one holds on to it.

This curious, confused, and confusing condition tends to generate equally ambivalent politics—and both are reflected in the notorious perplexities of the “globalization” debate. By its nature, all theory postulates a consistent and coherent reality, and so the glaring incoherence in the perception and treatment of space makes theorizing a truly daunting task.

To reduce the confusion somewhat, the conspicuously “uneven” or one-sided nature of the globalizing tendency needs to be admitted. The starting point of all sensible attempts to comprehend the condition brought about by that tendency must be the heeding of Jonathan Friedman’s (Friedman, 1999) word of caution: Globalization “does not mean unification or even integration in any other way than increased coordination of world market.” Globalization does not mean, for sure, the emergence of a global civil (or any other, for that matter) society, complete with the institutions of political representation and a shared code of laws and ethical rules; even less does it mean the appearance of a “global community” (coordination of world markets of money and commodities triggers, if anything, barrier building, boundary drawing, separation, and exclusion); and most certainly it does not mean a “global culture.”

The idea of the latter, the almost total consensus of intellectual “hybridity debates” notwithstanding, is hardly a reflection on extant or emerging realities of the great majority of the world population. The much talked-about “global culture” is, rather, a gloss on the new exterritoriality and “disembedment” of global elites, who draw freely from the global pool of styles and do-it-yourself, “now put on, now take off” identities yet resent the attachment, and even more the commitment, to any one of them in particular. “The frightening economic cosmopolitanism,” says Richard Rorty (Rorty, 1998), “has a by-product, an agreeable cultural cosmopolitanism.” That latter cosmopolitanism (theorized self-indulgently, yet misleadingly by many members of the elite as “hybridization”) is confined, in Rorty’s estimation, to no more than the richest 25 percent of Americans: in all probability, that percentage is smaller in countries with less “global clout” and quite negligible in those on the receiving end of global economics.

Such minority status only adds vigor to the proclamations of the emergent “globality of culture,” as one would expect in the case of a cultural model whose main function is to secure the self-distancing of the elite. One would not expect the “global” (or, more correctly, nonlocal) culture of the global elite to have any of the cultural anthropologists” “trickle down” effect that allegedly leads slowly yet unremittingly to the establishment of a universally shared culture. In Rorty’s vivid expression, having traveled to new breathtaking vast global expanses, the cosmopolitan elite “pulled up the drawbridge behind them.” As Robert Reich puts it in his Work of Nations, what has happened is the “secession of the successful,” and that secession, cutting off local ties and the lofty dismissal of the degrading preoccupations of hoi polloi with the “local issue” of survival, is itself a most solid guarantee that those left behind will not follow the newly emancipated into the realm of global freedom.

Times of Disengagement

The blatant discrepancy of scale between increasingly global financial and trade powers on one hand and politics and cultures—which stay local as before—on the other, does not seem to be a transient, short-lived condition that can be explained away as “cultural lag” or a temporary structural dislocation that will soon be rectified thanks to the self-equilibrating capacity of the emergent global system. Quite the contrary: it looks like a permanent, constitutive, and indispensable feature of the “global order”: one is tempted to resort to Talcott Parsons’ terminology and call it a “structural prerequisite” of the global system.

Following Norbert Elias, we could say that the “configuration,” that is, the network of dependencies, has already achieved a truly global (or, in Alberto Melucci’s terms, “planetary”) scale. However locally confined their origins and however local their ostensible purposes, actions tend to influence the global balance of power and resources and modify conditions in distant and apparently secluded parts of the planet. On the other hand, hardly any action can be undertaken locally without reckoning with the pressures or resistance of remote forces beyond control of the local agents and beyond their capacity for prediction. The network of dependencies is truly planetary in scale, but it is not matched by a similarly global, enforceable code of law nor a global network of political and juridical institutions. It is precisely this mismatch that allows global finances and trade a remarkable freedom of movement, which they have no intention of forsaking. “Equilibration” of the present-day world-wide economic system requires the perpetuation, not the rectification, of the discrepancy between the scale of economic dependencies, political control, and cultural comprehension: a permanent separation of “real power” from politics, and subordination of local decisional (that is, political) agencies to the rules of the global power game—rules which they have neither the power to legislate and enforce nor the ability to negotiate and more than marginally correct. To quote Rorty once more, “an attempt by any country to prevent the immiseration of its workers may result only in depriving them of employment.” The global freedom of financial and trade powers requires that the hands of political decision makers are short—and also, for better safety, tied.

At all times, space tends to have as much significance as has been invested into it by the ends and the means of human actions; and so in the power game of globalization, space has been stripped of significance. Following a sharp U-turn in the strategy of domination, the territorial conquest and annexation with the attendant awkward and cumbersome duties of day-to-day management, pattern maintenance, and policing came to be viewed as a liability that must be avoided at all costs. Imperialism and colonialism have lost their past allurements. Speed, acceleration, escape, avoidance, and cutting costs and losses have replaced normative regulation, surveillance, and discipline drill as principal instruments of domination. In short, in the globalizing world disengagement has replaced engagement as the paramount technique of power.

Power is a social relation. It is “enabling” on one side of the relationship, but only because it is disabling on the other. In a nutshell, those with untied hands dominate those who have their hands tied. The scope of empowerment and the degree of disempowerment are both measured by the range of realistic options, wide in the first case and limited in the second. The greater is the freedom of maneuver on one side of the relationship—the more constrained in their choices are those on the other, subordinate side of the relationship. With their freedom of choice limited, or better still abolished altogether, the conduct of the dominated becomes predictable and so no longer needs to be viewed with apprehension as an “unknown variable” in the dominant side’s calculations.

For the greater part of modern history the effect of “disablement” was pursued through the various applications of the Bentham/Foucault panoptical model of control by surveillance. The constitutive principle of panoptical arrangement was the asymmetry of visibility: the space occupied by the inmates of Panopticon was open to view, while the opacity of the space occupied by their supervisors forced the inmates to behave around the clock as if they were under continuous observation and could expect any deviation from the prescribed behavior to be swiftly spotted and punished. The inmates at the receiving end of panoptical surveillance were thus confined to routine, monotonously repetitive conduct; and so their responses, being fully calculable, could be safely left out of account in the managers’ plans. What kept the surveilled on track and away from mischief was the real or putative—but always assumed—presence of the supervisors. Routine was maintained by the threat of sanctions of a kind that could be administered only “on the spot,” by the managers and their hired agents.

In other words, in the panoptical arrangement both sides—the surveillors and the surveilled, the managers and the managed—are equally “tied to the place.” Both sides had to be “local” and stay such—the power relation would not survive their separation. Domination meant reciprocity of dependency and required mutuality of engagement. Divorce being out of the question and both sides doomed to each other’s company, frictions and skirmishes were inevitable, each side trying to gain more freedom for itself and to confine the liberty of the opposite numbers. But the negotiation of modus vivendi, seeking compromises and solutions to conflicts, and so hoping to ward off or at least limit the likelihood of future conflicts, was also imperative. The era of mutual engagement was the time of perpetual conflict but also an era of mutual accommodation. The powerful were, after all, as dependent on those they tried to strip of power as the powerless were on their superiors. Secession of the plebeians against which Mennenius Agrippa had to preach in Ancient Rome was unthinkable, but so was the secession of the patricians.

This is no longer true, or at any rate loses its credibility by the day. Not only do patricians find the way to secede whenever the space they inhabit proves too hot for comfort or too costly to keep in order, but in addition they have found in the stratagem of secession (and above all in their amply demonstrated freedom to secede, at short notice or without warning) an instrument of domination many times more convenient to handle, much cheaper and by far less troublesome than the old faithful but unwieldy, capital-, time-, and effort-intensive, panopticon. Patricians of the globalization era are, as before, the principal source of risk and uncertainty in the plebeians’ condition. But similar conditions do not apply in the reverse. Dependency is no longer mutual. And so there is no more need (let alone the “must”) of a long-term, lasting, “till death do us part” mutual engagement. Patricians can rely on the plebeians’ meekness, placidity, and submission without immersing themselves in the minutiae of day-by-day management and supervision or hiring people to do this at their behest. The threat of packing up and going elsewhere (of, to use the fashionable euphemisms, “downsizing,” “outsourcing,” “streamlining,” or “rationalizing”) will achieve the same effect at much less cost and much more radically.

The managers of today are, for all practical purposes, exterritorial. Their power lies in their wondrous capacity to make themselves inaccessible—to escape where the “nuisance-making power” of people whom they dominate and of whose labor they live matters no more. Firm grip over territory has been replaced by the facility of leaving the territory behind. The managers no longer draw their strength from their bulky possessions, but from the ability to travel light. In a short story, “Crocodile Tears,” A.S. Byatt describes one of them—a woman who decided to fly away from a sudden crisis she would rather not face:

She was an efficient woman, and she packed for a business trip—a nightdress, chequebooks, the usual pharmacopoeia, uncrushable trousers and tunics, slippers, washing things, make-up, lap-top, mobile phone, universal adapter, passport...

The idea that it was possible to vanish, that there was nothing ineluctable, necessary about her work, or her home, was a condition of her pleasure in those things...

She felt a light-headed pleasure in the fact that she did not know where she was going.

It could be nowhere at all, anywhere at all ...

The world was small now, which was good, you could move in it with ease...

The major worry of contemporary managers is not the management of people, but securing their own perpetual volatility, adaptability, and facility to move quickly where opportunity beckons. They are Italo Calvino’s “tree-jumping barons,” with whom the pleasant plodders down there, on the ground, will never catch up. Their own freedom to go on jumping trees is the only “normative regulation” that they demand from the world and which, once acquired, they would staunchly defend. The rest of the order-guarding worries they would gladly leave to the self-management of the “plodders,” the locals doomed to stay local—in the comfortable knowledge of the ultimate vanity of all “local self-management” efforts to constrain their own moves, and of the locals’ awareness that the attempts to arrest or slow down their movements are doomed to misfire and so could be undertaken only at the locals’ peril. The locals have lost much of their bargaining power; or rather, whatever power they may have is of little use unless both sides are under pressure to forge an agreement, and pressure is but one-sided if one of the sides is free to abandon the negotiating table at will and so the negotiating sides are not bound to stay together “for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health.” The constant and all-too-real threat of breaking out if conditions “are not right” casts the locals in a state of endemic precariousness and for this reason alone puts paid to the prospect of compromise. Surrender is the only option the sober and rational locals may take.

The Antiterritorial Wars

There is no need, therefore, for panopticon; and no point in wishing to invest in its construction and servicing. For the global elite the conquest of new lands has lost the luster it used to have in the times when “powerful” meant big and solid. The era of empires and imperialism, of the chase to fill up the remaining blank spots on the planetary map, of wars aimed at the redistribution of territorial sovereignties, is by and large over. In pursuing the ideal of free trade and the abolition of any spatial limits that might stand in its way—the direct involvement in the administration of a territory and the assumption of a direct responsibility for keeping it in order would be blatantly counter productive. That awkward task is better left to the “locals”: being burdened with that task would make the locals no match for the free-floating, exterritorial globals. The superiority of global elites consists in its exquisite lightness, absence of any exclusive—durable and solid—attachments to any particular space, freedom from the bonds imposed by possessions that cannot be moved, and virtual absence of chattels to be carried in case of moving home.

Little wonder, therefore, that for the global elites the “ground war” is an anathema: it would impose the kind of responsibility that global elites would more than anything else wish to avoid and avoid it they must—lest they forfeit their advantage over the “locals.” The wars promoting the globalizing cause are meant to “bomb the reluctant into submission,” not to expand the dominion over a territory. If new land conquests were the most coveted spoils of the age of empires, the territory phobia is the most conspicuous feature of the “globalizing” wars; in their effects and in their conduct alike they are meant to hammer home the message of the new unimportance of space. The armed expeditions meant to police local order are undertaken only as a last resort, and even then reluctantly. They are better “decommissioned” further down in the global hierarchy and ceded to the immediate neighbors for whom, much to their dismay, space still counts and the proximity to dangerous spots is a constant source of danger (like in the case of the Australia-led expedition to East Timor, prompted by the need to stem a new flood of “boat people,” or in the case of the intervention in Kosovo undertaken by the NATO coalition glued together by similar worries of the Union of asylum-seekers-wary Europeans). As Nik Gowing, the diplomatic editor for the British Channel Four News, reports (Gowing, 1996), one of the top officials of the United Nations compared the prospect of sending troops to Bosnia to that of “diving into an empty swimming pool.” In the end, when ground engagement proved for many reasons unavoidable, the “fundamental long-term strategy” of “ministers, diplomats and the military” was “to engage in low-risk, low-cost, minimalist policies which gave the impression of a full engagement when the political will was anything but that.” “Palliatives and alibis” were topmost priorities; only “pseudo-decisions for pseudo-actions” were taken.

At the still-distant, but no longer unattainable horizon loom wars of another style altogether: punitive operations that would exclude all physical contact with the adversary—not just the ground combat hopelessly outdated and out of fashion, but even the quite recent invention of hit-and-run bombing sorties or self-guided smart missiles. American scholars John Arquilla and David Ronfelt coined the names of “cyberwars,” “netwars,” and “neopolitics” to capture the nature of the imminent future wars (Pisani, 1999). The attackers won’t need to resort to the argument of weapons, nor would they have to dirty their hands while turning the enemy’s territory into a killing field. It would be enough to paralyze and incapacitate the enemies—disorganize the enemies’ power to resist (indeed, their capacity for consistent and cohesive action) by disrupting their networks of communication (in the author’s view, today’s equivalent of social structure) by feeding in false information or inundating the network with an unassimilable flood of messages. The measures undertaken under the aegis of the “cyberwar” would be an equivalent of the nerve gas, this time applied to the societal body. As Alvin and Heidi Toffle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Postmodernism and The Cunning of Reason
• Part 1 Values and Cultural Changes in the Postmodern World
• Part 2 Social Development and Policies in Contemporary Society
• Part 3 Societies in Transition—Eastern Europe
• Part 4 The Jewish World
• Contributors
• Index