Globalization East and West

Bryan S Turner, Habibul Haque Khondker

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781446242858
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

A wide-ranging, significant contribution.
- Göran Therborn, Cambridge University "A lively, well-informed, and accessible guide through the dynamics and complexities of globalization."
- Robert Holton, Trinity College, Dublin "This is an excellent text on globalisation. It is theoretically sophisticated, critically engaging, and empirically comprehensive... perfect for courses on globalisation within sociology programmes in particular."
- Andrew Kirton, Liverpool University

Do we confuse globalization for Americanization? What are the distinctive elements in the interplay of the local and the global?

This book examines globalization from the perspective of both the West and the East. It considers globalization as a general social and economic process, and the challenges it presents for Western social science. The meaning of a global perspective is explored through various concrete examples: religion, migration, medicine, terrorism, global disasters, citizenship, multiculturalism, media and popular culture. Introduced with a forword from Roland Robertson, the book is brimming with novel interpretations and fresh insights that will contribute to illuminating the practical realities of globalization.

1

INTRODUCTION: PROSPECTS FOR A NEW SOCIOLOGY OF GLOBALIZATION

INTRODUCTION

Over the last three decades, social scientists have taken the fact of globalization – the increasing interconnectedness of the world as a complex system – for granted. The processes of globalization, including its often negative consequences, have appeared to be inevitable and all-embracing. No society, however small and remote, could escape entanglement with such global cultural, political and economic processes. Any sociological analysis of a single society, region, city or village that did not take into account the global context was seen to be inadequate. Yet suddenly from September 2008 the unfolding of a global economic crisis that appeared to fan outwards from the problems in the American housing market to undermine the financial stability of whole societies such as Iceland brought into question many of our comfortable assumptions about the world and its economic foundations. There were rumours in the corridors of university social science faculties that the facts of globalization were perhaps not as secure as we had been led to believe. Why had economists in general failed to understand the fragility of the global financial system? Do we need as a result new perspectives on globalization? Will globalization as we know it come to an end? However, by the middle of 2009 the financial world appeared to have achieved some equilibrium and by September 2009 there were signs of a recovery in Europe and the United States which followed the recovery in Asia on the heels. A study commissioned by the United Nations (2009) revealed that there are deep and systemic problems with the global economy, the most important of which was social inequality. The Report recommended long-term solutions in addition to short-term stabilization measures. These questions about the economic character of globalization represent simply one dimension of our approach to globalization which we consider from the perspective of the East and from the West. Although the financial crisis has already brought misery to many thousands of families in the developing world, we see new democratic opportunities within this crisis, but we also detect the need for some major rethinking of the actual nature of globalization.

In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 which developed into a global economic crisis in 2009 with a bleak prognosis for the future (World Bank, 2009; United Nations, 2009),¹ many writers are understandably blaming globalization for our economic difficulties. The extreme turbulence in the global economy and the snowballing of the crisis from one country to another have indeed raised questions about the sustainability of the world economic architecture. Is globalization – viewed as the unbridled free market at play – to be replaced by a return to managed or state-centred economic systems? While some commentators recommend protectionism as the most appropriate strategy to stabilize the global economy, other economists suggest a comprehensive rearrangement of the global economic system as the only long-term solution. A leading economist, Jagdish Baghwati (2007), was confident that further economic globalization will in fact be the cure, but the challenges that the world faces are largely rooted in the gap between economic and political institutions. While the world has in economic terms become sufficiently global to emerge as a loosely integrated global economic system, the global economy is not matched by the institutional development of a global polity. Inadequate and ineffective coordination between the global economy and regulatory institutions has given rise to the possibility of a deep and prolonged economic crisis extending into the future, despite President Obama’s huge injection of funding into the American economy as a recovery strategy. Yet in both the diagnosis and the cure of the crisis, policy-makers, as well as large sections of the public, continue to equate globalization only with economic globalization. It is imperative that we broaden our perspective on globalization as a multidimensional process in which economic globalization is only one of the important factors.

Globalization, viewed as a macro-social process, inevitably gives rise to questions about its future. Do social processes come to an end, or do they change course according to newly emerging social and economic conditions? If we highlight the structural or systemic features of globalization alone, then the conclusion becomes inescapable. All systems – ecological and economic – are in a constant process of transformation and change. However, if globalization is seen as an all-encompassing social condition, the processes of globalization will continue to shape the lives of people in the foreseeable future both at the level of everyday reality and at the level of social systems. The globalization process must change and adapt to newly emerging conditions if we are to plan more effectively for global pandemics, financial crises, economic inequality and imbalances in population movements through migration. As various writers in the last decade of the twentieth century celebrated the coming of the age of globalization, they also stressed the plurality of the processes of globalization, and hence it was important to speak in the plural of “globalizations”. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, other critics have started to talk about the possibility of some disengagement from globalization, referring to new concepts such as “assemblage” and “re-assemblage” to describe the possibilities of disconnecting and disaggregating the components of global systems. In addition, it is well known that the processes of globalization do not preclude certain parallel processes such as regionalization and that in fact the two are interrelated (Therborn and Khondker, 2006). Disengagement from globalization, entailing the temporary repositioning and redirecting of trade flows, is often an aspect of the trading strategies of nations and regions, but these processes should not be seen as incompatible with globalization. Although globalization cannot be seen as an example of Max Weber’s irreversible “iron cage”, it is perhaps better described in the words of Ernest Gellner as a “rubber cage”. While nation-states have some degree of flexibility in relation to globalization, they cannot enjoy complete independence from global constraints.

Will a new global catastrophe make people want to return to the secure boundaries of the nation-state? We are sceptical about the openness of social systems – at least in the medium term. While the idea of a “borderless world” has become somewhat tired as a result of excessive overuse, we see the erection of walls and fences separating borders between nations as evidence that the porosity of state boundaries should not be exaggerated. The world is only borderless for the privileged few, but for the great majority of humanity it is a tightly bordered and highly regulated world. We see as a consequence of such “gated communities”, “gated” or “walled” countries, the emergence of what Bryan Turner (2007) calls the “enclave society”, characterizing modernity in terms of immobility in opposition to the claims supporting ideas about global mobility and “flexible citizenship” (Ong, 1999). With the growth of widespread urban terrorism from New York to Mumbai, we believe that the need for securitization by modern states will limit the possibilities for human mobility and porous state borders. We follow Roland Robertson (2007) in believing that transparency and surveillance are simply the opposite sides of the same coin of this global condition. Given these assumptions about the emphasis on security as a priority concern of the modern state, we need to ask whether some major catastrophe – environmental, political, or biological attack on a state or states – will bring an end to globalization as we know it. Such a catastrophe would not be confined to the developed world. Based on recent trends, most of the future pandemics of global scope would originate from the developing world.

The 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington and the fear of terrorism took a heavy toll on tourism and the travel industries but obviously did not halt global tourism. Soon after the attack, one commentator prematurely declared that globalization was over. Because of the physical impact on Wall Street in New York City, the financial market stalled temporarily but bounced back in full vigour in a matter of weeks. Yet 9/11 has become a template for understanding other acts of terrorism. The attacks in London in July 2005 were immediately labelled as the “7/7 terrorist attacks” and the Mumbai terrorist attacks on 26 November 2008 were equally quickly labelled as the “26/11” attack or “India’s 9/11”. The deeper processes of globalization did not rest for a moment as a result of such devastating attacks, despite the scale of the trauma, the collective sense of fear and the prospect of military conflict between India and Pakistan. The 9/11 attack itself could of course be seen as a global attack in its perceived causes, methods, and strategies as well as its consequences. Modern terrorism is a menace to the normal functioning of civil society, rather like “low intensity wars”, pestilence and pandemics, but the consequence so far has not been to halt or even necessarily to transform globalization. These disturbances are indeed the unpleasant underbelly of globalization that is often masked by the alluring world of global consumerism, tourism, popular culture and sport.

We are throughout this study struck by the deeply contradictory nature of globalization. In Chapter 4 we will argue that globalization points to the contradictory processes of wall removing and wall building. The modern world witnessed the dismantling of the Berlin Wall as part of the collapse of the Soviet system and at the same time there was the emergence a new ideological Berlin Wall – between the East and the West – as a negation of the historical transactions and exchanges between cultures and civilizations over the centuries. The international relations perspective of Samuel Huntington, who coined the phrase “the clash of civilizations” in which world-views, cultures and values remain incommensurable, has not been borne out either by recent history or by the opinion polls. A recent book based on Gallup surveys, where the authors analyzed 50,000 face-to-face interviews in 40 Muslim countries, found that only 7 per cent justified the 9/11 terrorist attacks in terms of political reasons. The study also found that what Muslims most admired about the West was its technological progress and its democratic politics. What both Muslims, and a large number of Americans, admired least about the West was its moral decay and the breakdown of traditional values (Esposito and Mogahed, 2008).

Although in everyday usage and in political rhetoric, as well as in some popular social science discussions, phrases such as “East versus West” and “the Christian world versus the Islamic world” are freely used, we argue that such simple binaries fail to capture the actual complexities of the contemporary world. One of the deeper consequences of globalization is in fact the obliteration of such differences. Although our study is called Globalization East and West, our main aim is to question such traditional geographical divisions. Contrary to other popular views, the world has not become flat; far from it. Globalization has rendered the world more complex and hence more difficult to understand, and therefore we need to abandon simple slogans about globalization such as “the world is flat”. In an interview on CNN’s chat show Global Public Square hosted by Fareed Zakaria and aired on 28 September 2008, the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, not only referred to Adam Smith’s The Causes of the Wealth of Nations as a guide to economic development, but also alluded to the Theory of Moral Sentiments in order to buttress the importance of ethical considerations in a market-driven world. He stressed moral questions and raised issues relating to social equity and justice. Whether Marxist idealism can coexist with market-driven capitalism is an issue that only the future of China’s development can settle. In fact one could see the spread and survival of the socialist ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and their continuing hold on the global, as a concrete historical example of globalization. However, Wen identified Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations rather than Marx’s Capital as the principal inspiration for his moral and ethical position. Surprisingly, he did not quote from either Confucius or Mencius. In fact the Chinese leadership is slowly abandoning references to Marxist-Leninism and favouring a restoration of neo-Confucianism as a state ideology with its powerful emphasis on respect for order and social peace. It is far from self-evident that globalization will bring about the hegemony of neo-liberal ideas as the necessary underpinning of a market economy.

Another feature of globalization is that the leadership of global processes is constantly changing. Several writers have, for instance, commented on the shifting centres of global economic power. In the theories of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), the core economies of the world system in the past were never permanent – their fates changed with historical circumstances. In the contemporary world, the economic powers of the twentieth century – North America, Europe and Japan as represented in the G7 and G8 (with Russia) – are increasingly being forced to take notice of the emerging BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). The rise of these new centres of economic power is illustrated by the fact that, of the 500 firms listed by the business magazine Fortune, 62 are from the BRIC countries (The Economist, 20 September 2008, p. 3). Some of these firms, such as Lenovo of China and Tata of India, have also displayed remarkable creativity and innovative styles.

CAN SOCIOLOGY EXPLAIN GLOBALIZATION?

While books on globalization grow like conceptual mushrooms, the quality of theories of globalization is often poor, and research often scanty and inadequate. In fact, is there a distinctly sociological perspective on globalization? Our answer is affirmative. However, most sociological theory deals with micro–macro relations but typically within the nationstate, the region or the city. There seems to be some difficulty in thinking analytically about global processes, despite the encouragement and example of a minority of sociologists such as Roland Robertson. The main exceptions showing how we might develop genuinely sociological perspectives are probably George Ritzer on McDonaldization, Ulrich Beck on the risk society and cosmopolitanism, Anthony Giddens on distantiation theory, and Manuel Castells on the network society. From each of these sociological viewpoints, they make important contributions to our understanding of some selective aspects of globalization but do not provide a complete or comprehensive picture. Castells’s work, however, makes significant strides in linking the role of communication in a networked society of capitalism and outlines several critical processes in which globalization can be challenged. Furthermore, he does not prematurely make a judgement about the outcome of globalization, because he sees the control and ownership of the global media as the outcome of endless struggles between various elites.

There is nevertheless a lot of theoretical speculation but little genuine research. For example John Urry (2000) talked about “sociology beyond societies”, but just how mobile are the majority of people? How many people globally make at least one international flight per year? How many have international holidays, own a holiday home, have a passport, migrate to secure a higher income, marry a foreign person, or send their children overseas for education? What little research we have suggests people have strong subjective ties to their local town, city or region and do not exhibit strong cosmopolitan values. This emphasis on locality in people’s lives was illustrated in Globalization and Belonging (Savage et al., 2005). What are the implications of high mobility for elites? How does this impact on the concept of the self? Under what conditions could we anticipate the emergence of cosmopolitan identities? Do only cultural elites qualify for cosmopolitan status? What about the underclass of globe-trotting, undocumented, casual workers? Is there a cosmopolitanism from below as well as from above? Against the processes of geographical mobility, the crisis of terrorism and the emergence of new wars – which are also genuine examples of globalization – have produced a new emphasis on security, surveillance and the sovereignty of the state. Unfortunately, the outbreak of a pandemic, which many public health officials believe is inevitable, would certainly place significant limits on human mobility. The swine flu pandemic of 2009 may be less severe than originally predicted, but it provides a clear if chilling example of how rapidly such infections would spread from society to society.

One might argue that the scale of the issues relating to globalization appears to be too large to undertake adequate social science research. Hence, most global studies are in fact comparative and historical rather than global in orientation. Most social scientists appear to work happily with old methodologies of single-sited research. We need new methodologies, innovative theories and almost certainly revised epistemologies to do good research on globalization processes. We do not pretend to escape from this criticism and we do not have ready-made answers to these various questions. Multi-sited, comparative and collaborative research will address some of these issues. However, it is ironic that at a time when the frontiers of methodological nationalism need a certain erasure, some social scientists are bent on reverting to a methodological parochialism under the guise of promoting indigenous social science.

Most sociological theories of globalization, despite the call from C. Wright Mills and the example set by sociologists such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Charles Tilly, remain historically shallow. It is naïve to suggest, for example, that globalization started with the rise of the modern media or with the spread of American consumerism. These claims ignore the historical role of the missionary work of the world religions or the role of trade and merchant cultures since the fifteenth century or the global reach of ancient empires. Many sociologists continue to employ crude explanatory models that are typically based on some form of technological determinism such as the rise of the Internet. Understanding globalization almost certainly requires a high degree of interdisciplinarity, but sociologists too frequently fail to reach outside their own disciplinary assumptions. Unsurprisingly, much of the most interesting recent work has been undertaken by human or social geographers such as David Harvey. Creative reconfigurations of the sociological discipline would be a timely step towards redesigning methods appropriate to understanding global processes.

Except perhaps in journalistic writings, little sociological attention is paid to Asian globalization or to the impact of Asian commodities and cultures on the modern shape of globalization. Much globalization theory is based on narrow Western assumptions, for example, that modernization and globalization inevitably produce secularization. In short, globalization is normally understood from the viewpoint of some Western issue, process or location. Little attention is paid to the impact of a Japanese aesthetic on car design or fashion or the impact of Korean film on global culture. These West-centric assumptions are still persistent despite the changing global circumstances that are consequences of the economic and political rise of China and India – two societies that account for one-third of the world’s population.

TRACKING CHANGES IN THE FIELD OF GLOBALIZATION STUDIES

THE SPATIAL TURN

Theories of globalization have been the dominant paradigm in sociology for at least two decades, but certain features of the globalization debate have been part of sociological discourse for much longer. In mainstream academic sociology, one of the earliest publications on the topic was W.E. Moore’s (1966) “Global sociology: the world as a singular system”. He argued that sociology was becoming a global science and that “the life of the individual anywhere is affected by events and processes everywhere” (Moore, 1966: 482). “Globalization” in this framework refers, then, to the process by which the “world becomes a single place” (Robertson, 1992), and hence the volume and depth of social inter- connectedness are greatly increased. Globalization can also be seen as the compression of social space...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Roland Robertson
• 1 Introduction: Prospects for a new sociology of globalization
• 2 Conceptualizing globalization
• 3 Structures and processes of globalization
• 4 Globalization and the nation-state
• 5 Globalization, culture and cosmopolitanism
• 6 World religions and fundamentalism
• 7 Migration and transnationalism
• 8 Medical globalization
• 9 New wars and terrorism: Globalization of militarism and violence
• 10 Globalization of disasters and disaster response
• 11 Globalization, citizenship and human rights
• 12 Multiculturalism, social diversity and globalization
• 13 Religion, media and popular culture
• 14 Conclusion: Perpetual peace or perpetual war?
• Bibliography
• Index