Governing Globalization

Challenges for Democracy and Global Society

Edward A. Kolodziej

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783487646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The book develops globalization as the emergence of a global society; presents a theory of governance predicable of all human societies, revolving around competing OWL imperatives; and identifies fundamental flaws in the democratic solutions to global governance. To ensure that the democratic promise survives and thrives, the volume calls for fundamental reforms of the democratic project as prerequisites to deter and defeat formidable anti-democratic adversaries: authoritarian states, religiously informed regimes opposed to open societies; nihilistic social movements; self-styled terrorists, and vast transnational criminal networks. Either the democracies hang together or they hang separately.

I

The Rise of a Global Society

1

Globalization as the Rise of a Global Society

So oft in theologic wars,

The disputants, I ween,

Rail on in utter ignorance

Of what each other mean,

And prate about an Elephant

Not one of them has seen!

—John Godfrey Saxe, “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” The Poems of John Godfrey Saxe, 1868

How can, and should, globalization, a contested notion, be understood? There exists no shared notion of what globalization is, what its principal properties might be, or the implications for humankind of what forces, themselves in dispute, are driving its complex social processes. Observers tend to seize on one, albeit important, dimension of globalization rather than view globalization as a whole—that is, as enlarging webs of connections and interdependencies of humans and human communities across the full range of their most significant and salient concerns.1

These social webs, abstracted from the actors and agents ensnared and entangled in them—what Jean-Jacques Rousseau terms chains2—are what interest this discussion. These social chains, paradoxically, empower individuals to act and, simultaneously, to limit the possibilities of their choices and the prospects of their self-realization.3 These layers of ever enlarging and increasingly denser tissues of social exchanges create a global society. To avoid the “blind men and the elephant” problem, it is the elephant, as a metaphor of the global society, that we wish to view as a whole.

It is important to keep in mind that the democracies are suspended within larger and more confining webs of connectedness and interdependence comprising the global society. These webs embrace powerful antidemocratic states and peoples as well as criminal and terrorist organizations. These diverse actors, themselves divided against themselves, reject, some violently, the democratic solutions to OWL imperatives for global governance. Their multiple forms of pushback are delineated in succeeding chapters.

Connectedness: The Emergence of a Global Society

To anchor the priority of global governance as a central concern of democratic populations, we need to show that a global society exists. Since connectedness and interdependence are properties of all human societies, they are no less so with the emergence of a global society. What has fundamentally changed is the scope of these properties, entangling inhabitants of the globe in greater or lesser measure. These properties are deeply embedded in the ceaseless interactions of the world’s states and populations today. The totality of these countless and expanding interactions between and among democratic and nondemocratic peoples are the global society.

This conception of society departs from textbook or conventional understandings of society. For many scholars and observers, a society implies a community of like-minded, directed individuals. A typical textbook definition of society is a “group of individuals living as members of a community.”4 They are assumed to have developed over time “common ideas, interests, and techniques for living and working together. It is the sense of living together as a community that makes up a society.”5

This widespread notion of society, loaded with normative baggage, does not readily fit the reality of a global society more divided against itself than united around common purposes. To fit the notion of society to a global society, I mean a lot less and also a lot more by “global society” than the notion of a society as a tight, morally integrated community. At a global level, humans, as social evolution and historical processes have served them up to us, can scarcely be said to have “common ideas, interests and techniques for living and working together.”6 Fundamental, insurmountable differences abound. These are woven deeply into the web of humanly constructed social relations.

The connections and interdependencies engendered by globalization reinforce rather than reduce or diminish these clashes.7 The result is a global society of billions of people woven into a crazy-quilt of divergent and disputing identities, riven by tribal, ethnic, and national loyalties and contending cultural or religious values, and split even finer into clashing attributes of language, class, status, gender, and race. Yet, paradoxically, all are increasingly connected and interdependent in the pursuit of their divergent goals.

So when I use the term “global society,” I mean a lot less than prevailing notions of communal cohesion. Nor do I assume an eventual convergence of cultural and religious beliefs and practices of the world’s peoples. Much less, too, does this discussion assume some shared end point toward which humans are inexorably directed, yet to be discovered.

A Global Society: A Lot Less than a Traditional Society

The conception of a global society advanced here does not require meeting a test of internal coherence or cohesion.8 Connectedness and interdependence will do. In the extreme, a Hobbesian war of all against all is no less a society than the utopian societies that dotted western expansion in the United States, wherein the members of these societies shared the same values and adhered to the norms of the group. In the limiting case of a Hobbesian world, developed in chapter 3, the very survival of its members hinges not only on their wits and resourcefulness but also on the responsive actions of their rivals, and vice versa. At both extremes, the property of interdependence, radically different in form and outcome, makes for a global society divided against itself.

The conception of society used here includes and revolves around all human interactions taken as a whole. In its fullest representation, “society,” as Martin Shaw suggests, “is the totality or complex of social relations. Since social relations of all kinds are increasingly global, and all forms of social relations everywhere in the world are, at least in some indirect sense bound into global networks, society in this sense is now necessarily global.”9 In adopting Shaw’s perspective, our concern is focused primarily on that subset of “global networks” that are fashioned by free peoples. These webs are ensnared, in turn, within a more encompassing global society comprised of resistant antidemocratic webs of actors profoundly opposed to the democratic model of governance and its extension.

A global society can be characterized as a dense, intricately layered, and expanding matrix of enmeshed spider webs. The actors spinning these webs include empowered individuals,10 nation-states, tightly knit ethnic or tribal communities, multinational corporations, organized religions, social movements, terrorist organizations, and vast criminal enterprises. Included, too, are thousands of nongovernmental (NGOs), international nongovernmental (INGOs), and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs).

The diversity of the actors of the global society suggests that the point of departure in analyzing governance should be, as chapter 3 delineates, on the fractured and contesting OWL power structures that tenuously hold the global society together. This departure point also has the added merit of not entangling or reducing the analysis to the particular aims, interests, and values that might be attributed to the actors. A focus on power, as Michael Mann has shown,11 frees the analysis of the social forces driving societies from the particular circumstances of time and place in which communities and whole civilizations are nested.

A Global Society: A Lot More than Traditional Notions of Society

I also mean a lot more by society than shared norms within an integrated community. The multiplying forces unleashed by a global society, however refracted in their multifarious effects, exert a causal impact on human behavior that is far broader in scope, more compelling, and a lot less predictable than ever before on the lives of the world’s populations. Social outcomes of interdependence are attributable both to purpose and to process, a mix of causes and causal explanation that is not linear in its direction but subject to a bewildering array of yet to be fully understood circular feedback loops.12

The members comprising the global society, linked by widening, deepening, and accumulating connections and interdependencies, are unique among the animal kingdom. Among their distinctive properties are the endowments they share of unmatched conceptual and linguistic capacities relative to other species, superior and increasingly more powerful and innovative tool-making skills, and a remarkable capacity for social cooperation, whether consensually or coercively elicited.

In these senses, then, I mean a lot more about society, and specifically a global society, than the notion, held widely abroad, notably in much of contemporary economic theory, of a world of autonomous, rational actors, disconnected from the social bounds defining them. This perspective views only individuals as real. Social relations are viewed as radically conventional, fragile, and subject to individual preferences, defined by the relative moral values humans create and limited, objectively, by the cost, gains, and risks in the pursuit of their preferences.13 Notwithstanding these constraints, the capacity of individuals to achieve their preferences, trivial and profound, depends decisively on the preexistence of a supportive society and the social power actors can draw from this social setting to get what they want their way.

The notion of a global society we will be relying upon extends to humankind as a whole. It is the existence of this fluid system of actor relations that is the object of analysis. This whole is postulated not only conceptually but also as causally distinct from the actors comprising the global society. Specifically, as the discussion below adumbrates, the concern will be with a subset of this whole—namely, those social relations of free people that depend on their mutual cooperation, however achieved, to survive and thrive in a larger and resistant global society. The aim of the discussion is to show the causal connection between humans as social animals with what they have wrought—namely, a global society.

Connectedness, an indispensable and irreducible component of all human societies, does not by itself make a society. At the simplest level, it refers to an awareness of the existence of individuals and groups o...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The Rise of a Global Society
• Chapter 1: Globalization as the Rise of a Global Society
• Chapter 2: Properties of the Global Society
• Chapter 3: Toward a Theory of Global Governance
• Part II: Critique of the Democratic Solutions to Global Governance
• Chapter 4: The Global State and Its Rivals
• Chapter 5: The Market System I
• Chapter 6: The Market System II
• Chapter 7: Democratic Legitimacy Besieged
• Part III: Strengthening the Democratic Solution to OWL Imperatives
• Chapter 8: From Coalition to Concert ofDemocratic States and Peoples
• A Brief Note on Method
• Bibliography