Global Standards of Market Civilization

Brett Bowden, Leonard Seabrooke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134186655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Global Standards of Market Civilization brings together leading scholars, representing a range of political views, to investigate how global 'standards of market civilization' have emerged, their justification, and their political, economic and social impact.

Key chapters show how as the modern state system has evolved such standards have also developed, incorporating the capacity for social cooperation and self-government to which states must conform in order to fully participate as legitimate members in international society. This study analyzes their justification, and their political, economic and social impact. Civilization is a term widely used within modern political discourse its meaning, yet it is poorly understood and misused.

• part I explores the idea of a 'standard of civilization', its implications for governance, and the use of such standards in political theory and economic thought, as well as its historical application
• part II presents original case studies that demonstrate the emergence of such standards and explore the diffusion of liberal capitalist ideas through the global political economy and the consequences for development and governance; the International Monetary Fund's capacity to formulate a global standard of civilization in its reform programs; and problems in the development of the global trade, including the issue of intellectual property rights.

This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars in wide range of fields relating to the study of globalization including: international political economy; international political theory; international relations theory; comparative political economy; international law; historical sociology; and economic history.

Part I
Conceptual history

2 Civilization, standards, and markets

Brett Bowden

This chapter elaborates on the key concepts, issues, and themes foreshadowed in the Introduction. Each of these concepts and issues are unique in their own way but they are also necessarily interrelated; and each serves as an all-important foundation stone of the very nature of this collection. I will begin by outlining the ideal of civilization, giving some background to its origins and exploring its contested meanings and (mis)usages. Following this is an account of the concept of standard of civilization; a concept that in good part arises out of the very nature of the term civilization and the ideals it invokes. Finally, the chapter looks at the historical and contemporary relations between the ideal of civilization and markets, paying particular attention to the notion that markets play a civilizing role in and between societies.

The ideal of civilization

In recent years the terms ‘civilization’ and ‘civilizations’ have regained some of their lost prominence as tools for describing and explaining the workings of various fields of the social sciences. Both of these terms continue to be interpreted and applied in a variety of manners and different contexts; or, in some cases, misinterpreted and misapplied. Throughout its history the ideal of civilization has been imbued with a normative component, whereby self-governing socio-political collectives – civilized society – are established as the standard to which less civilized societies should aspire if they are to join the ranks of the civilized ‘family of nations’. This is an aspect that is often overlooked or goes unacknowledged in the contemporary – and sometimes confused – use of both terms. Also unacknowledged in many recent appeals to ‘civilization’ are the consequences that stem from its promotion as ‘ideal type’: to be an uncivilized society is to be a less than fully sovereign society, which brings with it the increased likelihood of external intervention by fully sovereign, civilized societies. And this is precisely what this book is about: how modern states are intervened in, either directly or indirectly, through modern market-based standards of civilization.

The first task here is to give a brief review of the circumstances under which the word civilization entered into French, English, and German usage. These languages are the most significant for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that they are the three languages that dominated European diplomacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when civilization entered European thought. The significance of civilization as both a word and an idea, and the key role the three prominent Western European languages played in shaping both, are captured in Emile Benveniste’s statement: ‘The whole history of modern thought and the principal intellectual achievements in the western world are connected with the creation and handling of a few dozen essential words which are all the common possession of the western European languages’ (Benveniste 1971: 289). Civilization is one of the words.

For much of the twentieth century, a century in which two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Holocaust all served to undermine the very idea of civilization, it seemed as though it was more the case that it was one of those words. Despite this, the middle years of the century did produce a number of comprehensive studies of the rise and fall of major civilizations. The 1980s also saw the publishing of a major study on the standard of civilization in international society (Gong 1984), but this too was a largely historical study and by century’s end these styles of investigation had become scarce. One of the contemporary works that has captured imaginations in the revival of ‘civilization studies’ as a legitimate or worthwhile field of study is Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis (Huntington 1993, 1996). The airing of this thesis and the post-Cold War-cum-war on terrorism international political climate into which it was born has generated extensive and ongoing debates that have helped to re-popularize the term civilization(s); nowhere is this more so than in the study of international politics. Despite being a noted contributor to this revival, Huntington offers an oversimplified history and definition of the term, stating that the ‘idea of civilization was developed by eighteenth-century French thinkers as the opposite of “barbarism”’. Simply put, ‘To be civilized was good, to be uncivilized was bad.’ Huntington does acknowledge that out of its origins evolved a distinction between the usages of civilization in the singular and ‘civilizations in the plural’. But this development is also oversimplified to the point that the arrival of the latter merely marks the ‘renunciation of a civilization defined as an ideal, or rather as the ideal’ (Huntington 1993: 40–1). The study of the plural variant, or ‘civilizations as fact’, however, is not as readily divorced from a concern with ‘civilization as ideal’ as Huntington suggests. Rather, as Fernand Braudel notes, the triumph of one over the other ‘does not spell disaster’ for it, because out of necessity they are tied together in ‘dialogue’ (Braudel 1980: 213).

French origins

In late eighteenth-century France, the term civilization was imbued with a plurality of meanings. Serving as something of a ‘synthetic’ or ‘unifying concept’, civilization was used to describe both a process through which individual human beings and nations became civilized, and the cumulative outcome of that process. As Jean Starobinski states, ‘The crucial part is that the use of the term, civilization, to describe both the fundamental process of history and the end result of that process established an antithesis between civilization and a hypothetical primordial state (whether it be called nature, savagery, or barbarism)’ (Starobinski 1993: 5; emphasis in original).

Apart from the distinction between civilization as process and the condition resulting from that process, there is a further distinction between civilization as ‘fact’ and civilization as ‘value’ or ‘ideal’. In the former sense it is largely a descriptive term used to identify what are thought to be quantifiable values held in common by a distinct group of peoples. In the latter sense civilization is a ‘normative concept on the basis of which it was possible to discriminate the civilized from the uncivilized’ (Starobinski 1993: 7–8). What is elsewhere described as civilization as fact is referred to by Lucien Febvre as its ‘ethnographic’ usage:

In the first case civilization simply refers to all the features that can be observed in the collective life of one human group, embracing their material, intellectual, moral and political life and, there is unfortunately no other word for it, their social life. It has been suggested that this should be called the ‘ethnographical’ conception of civilization. It does not imply any value judgement on the detail or the overall pattern of the facets examined. Neither does it have any bearing on the individual in the group taken separately, or their personal reactions or individual behaviour. It is above all a conception which refers to a group.

(Febvre 1973: 220)

But even this definition is more than just descriptive. It too has an (unacknowledged) normative component. Civilization is not usually used to describe the collective life of just any group, as culture sometimes is; rather it is reserved for collectives that demonstrate a degree of co-operation, urbanization, and organization. This normative assumption is evident in the fact that Febvre’s ethnographic markers all relate, either directly or indirectly, to a group’s sociopolitical organization. Following this ‘ethnographic’ account of civilization Febvre gives a definition of civilization as an ideal or value:

In the second case, when we are talking about the progress, failures, greatness and weakness of civilization we do have a value judgement in mind. We have the idea that the civilization we are talking about – ours – is itself something great and beautiful; something too which is nobler, more comfortable and better, both morally and materially speaking, than anything outside it – savagery, barbarity or semi-civilization. Finally, we are confident that such civilization, in which we participate, which we propagate, benefit from and popularize, bestows on us all a certain value, prestige, and dignity. For it is a collective asset enjoyed by all civilized societies. It is also an individual privilege which each of us proudly boasts that he possesses.

(Febvre 1973: 220)

Clearly, the former usage is used to describe distinctive civilizations across time and place, while the latter signifies a benchmark for the civilization – that is, it represents the ideal of civilization – by which all other societies or collectives are compared to and measured against. While the former have been subject to much comparative historical analysis, it is the conception of civilization as ideal that is more the concern here. The reason for focusing on the value-laden dimension of civilization begins to reveal itself when looking into further accounts of civilization, such as that of Comte de Volney’s in Éclaircissements sur les États-Unis, published in 1803 after his travels in the United States. Reflecting the general principles of social contract theory, but, just as importantly here, the criteria of requiring a capacity for self-government, Volney wrote:

By civilization we should understand an assembly of the men in a town, that is to say in an enclosure of dwellings equipped with a common defence system to protect themselves from pillage from outside and disorder within . . . the assembly implied the concepts of voluntary consent by the members, maintenance of their right to security, personal freedom and property: . . . thus civilization is nothing other than a social condition for the preservation and protection of persons and property etc.

(quoted in Febvre 1973: 252)

The demand for a nation or people to have the capacity to organize into a cooperative society with the capacity for self-government is central to the very idea of civilization. The identification of different collectives as civilizations on the basis of their capacity for social co-operation and self-government has really only served to distinguish them from other human collectives. Noteworthy is that it is not just about a people organizing and governing in any fashion that counts. Rather, it is about governing in accordance with certain standards – first set by Europe and later by the West more generally – that determines a society’s approximation to the idealized standard of civilization.

English origins

Adam Ferguson’s declaration in An Essay on the History of Civil Society that ‘Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood, but the species itself from rudeness to civilization’ (Ferguson 1966: 1) is thought to be the first use of ‘civilization’ in English. As Duncan Forbes states in his introduction to the 1966 edition of the Essay, what Ferguson was looking for was a ‘true criterion of civilization’ (1966: xx). And as Ferguson clearly states in the Principles of Moral and Political Science, that criterion was some degree of socio-political organization. He writes in the Principles that:

success of commercial arts . . . requires a certain order to be preserved by those who practice them, and implies a certain security of the person and property, to which we give the name civilization, although this distinction, both in the nature of the thing, and derivation of the word, belongs rather to the effects of law and political establishment, on the forms of society, than to any state merely of lucrative possession or wealth.

(Ferguson 1975, Vol. I: 252)

From these passages and from the general theme of Ferguson’s Essay it is apparent that, like the French, he too uses the term civilization to describe both a process and a condition.

As indicated by both Volney’s and Ferguson’s respective accounts of civilization, it becomes increasingly the case that socio-political-legal organization is inherently and inextricably linked to the ideal of civilization. An example of this is John Stuart Mill’s essay of 1836 titled ‘Civilization’. Mill, like others before him, notes that ‘The word civilization . . . is a word of double meaning’, sometimes standing ‘for human improvement in general, and sometimes for certain kinds of improvement in particular’ (Mill 1962: 51). For the purposes of his essay, however, Mill is referring to civilization as an ideal condition, or what he calls ‘civilization in the narrow sense: not that in which it is synonymous with improvement, but that in which it is the direct converse or contrary of rudeness or barbarism’. And he is not talking here just about the condition of the individual, but ‘the best characteristics of Man and Society’ (Mill 1962: 51–2).

The presence, or otherwise, of the institutions of society that facilitate governance in accordance with established (Western) European traditions was widely believed to be a hallmark of the makings of, or potential for, civilization. Mill was representative of this belief in his assertion that ‘In savage life there is little or no law, or administration of justice; no systematic employment of the collective strength of society, to protect individuals against injury from one another.’ Despite the fact that similar institutions performed similar functions in the non-European world, the absence of institutions that resembled those of the ‘civilized’ nations of Europe meant that much of the world beyond its borders was deemed by ‘civilized’ Europe to fall short of meeting Mill’s necessary ‘ingredients of civilization’. For as Mill stated, ‘We accordingly call a people civilized, where the arrangements of society, for protecting the persons and property of its members, are sufficiently perfect to maintain peace among them’ (Mill 1962: 52–3).

The requirement of a capacity for socio-political organization and the role of society are reaffirmed in Mill’s declaration that ‘There is not a more accurate test of the progress of civilization than the progress of the power of co-operation.’ For it was widely held that ‘It is only civilized beings who can combine’, and ‘none but civilized nations have ever been capable of forming an alliance’, whereas savages on the other hand are characterized by an ‘incapacity of organized combination’. The reasoning behind this belief was that ‘All combination is compromise: it is the sacrifice of some portion of individual will, for a common purpose’, and as such it was argued that ‘the whole course of advancing civilization is a series of such training’ (Mill 1962: 55–6).

For Mill, civilization was marked by the ‘sufficient knowledge of the arts of life’; the ‘diffusion of property and intelligence’; the ‘sufficient security of property and person’; and the ‘power of co-operation’ in society so as to ‘render the progressive increase of wealth and population possible’ (Mill 1962: 53–7). But the maintenance of civilization did not come cheaply, for Adam Smith argued that increase in wealth and population was in fact a prerequisite for the discharge of the ‘first duty of the sovereign’ of civilized societies, that of protecting the society from external ‘violence and injustice’. And according to Smith it was ‘only by means of a standing army . .. that the civilization of any country can be perpetuated’, an exercise that becomes increasingly expensive the larger a society grows and the more a ‘society advances in civilization’ (Smith 1910, Vol. II: 196–7). Here we have the makings of a concept of market civilization; based on the notion that those who can self-organize politically and not be a burden on others – including the defense of property rights and contracts – are able to create continuous growth.

German origins: Kultur versus Zivilisation

While the evolution of the word civilization ran along roughly parallel lines of thought in French and English, in German language and usage Zivilisation stood for something quite different and was altogether subordinate to the concept of Kultur. While still useful, Zivilisation is a term of ‘second rank’ that really only deals with superficialities such as external appearances; Kultur on the other hand is a term that is said to be representative of Germany’s self-understanding of national pride and sense of achievement – its sense of being. Furthermore, the French and English conceptions of civilization generally refer to political, social, economic, religious, scientific, and/or moral issues; the German term Kultur on the other hand is essentially reserved for expounding intellectual, artistic, and religious facts or values. Moreover, the German concept of Kultur is inclined to include a distinct divide between these more valued concerns on the one side, and subordinate political, social, and economic issues on the other (Elias 2000; Schäfer 2001).

Some of the reasons behind the distinctions between the French/English concept of civilization and its German counterpart Kultur have been set out by Norbert Elias in The Civilizing Process. In short, Elias argues that the differences are a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Civilizing markets through global standards
• Conceptual history
• Civilization, standards, and markets
• Civilizing peoples through state citizenship and democracy
• Civilizing market standards and the moral self
• Civilizing the global economy Racism and the continuity of Anglo-Saxon imperialism
• Civilizing the bad Ethical problems with neo-liberal approaches to corruption
• Contemporary cases
• Civilizing techniques Transparency International and the spread of anti-corruption
• Civilizing international monetary systems
• Civilizing labor markets The World Bank in Central Asia
• Civilizing through transparency The International Monetary Fund
• Civilizing global capital markets Room to groove?
• Civilizing tax havens The OECD and the harmful tax practices initiative
• Civilizing drugs Intellectual property rights in global pharmaceutical markets
• Civilizing global trade Alterglobalizers and the 'Double Movement'
• Conclusion
• Civilizing global market standards Double-edged discourses and their policy implications
• Bibliography
• Index