Globalisation and the Consolidation of the World
Burning Pyre
The world is shrinking; it is being compressed by technological and economic forces into a single society – if not politically or culturally, then certainly as an idea. This is essentially the thesis propounded by, among others, McLuhan (1962), Harvey (1990), and Robertson (1992). I propose to examine the causes of the world’s shrinking and, of the consequences of this process, [to] provide an elucidation of the antagonistic dialectic that has developed between globalisation’s ethic of integration and its opponents, whose views are perhaps best expressed in the poet Valéry’s cynical remark (quoted by Robertson 1992, 49): ‘Nothing will be done anymore, without the whole world meddling in it.’
It would be impossible to trace comprehensively and step-by-step the origins and trials of the progress of machine technology to the point where global consciousness could arise. This, at any rate, presupposes that globalisation is the outcome of a linear process intended to bring about globalisation (unity) of the world’s disparate locales (distinctions). There are certainly important precedents, and among them some of the most important are political developments – for instance the Treaty of Versailles 1919 is seen by Giddens as ‘effectively the first point at which a reflexively monitored system of nation states came to exist globally,’ (Robertson 1992, 55). But the causes of World War One that lead to Versailles peace did not arise because of any explicitly ideological movement towards or against ‘globality’ as such. Versailles and the creation of the League of Nations was but the first (and a failed) attempt to regulate the diplomacy of civilised nation states in the aftermath of an unexpectedly nihilistic war between them. Nihilistic wars, if one takes nihilism to mean great destruction for little or no gain, are nothing new, if we recall the fate of Carthage (circa 146BC) and of the cities and states reduced by the Mongols across Asia and eastern Europe in the thirteenth century. What makes Versailles the culmination of disparate tendencies in world events into a precedent for a kind of integrated political ‘world-system’ is, following Harvey, the ‘compression of space-time’ (1990, part III) that was caused by the advent of radical forms of transportation and communication. The horse and the sail ship were the superior, i.e., swiftest, methods of transport from the beginning of human culture until the Europe’s industrial age many millennia hence, and with no improvement – such as the stirrup or quinquireme – so revolutionary as the actual abandonment of these methods in favour of machine-engines. Steam-engines and -ships drastically reduced the time taken to negotiate a distance; even more so the development of aeroplanes and jet aircraft. The world’s shrinking – its compression as such – is a process of the mastery of its distances and of the organisation of time into which more spaces than was formerly possible can be traversed (Lyotard calls this man’s ‘obsession with controlling time’; 1991, 73); objectively, of course, there is no such shrinking or compressing of the earth’s aspect, according to the Newtonian-Kantian schema. Robertson calls attention to the global idea that such organisation of time and space has given rise to:
‘Globalization as a concept refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole … [and] increasing acceleration in both concrete global interdependence and consciousness of the global whole in the twentieth century,’ (Robertson 1992, 8).
By no means does the compression of personal space and time necessarily lead to the consciousness of global unity. The easier travel became for people, the more restrictive were the national laws and preconditions for travel imposed upon individuals. Immigration quotas were brought into effect for the first time in America in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was augmented by 1924’s National Origins Act. The experience of the greater part of the globe in its ‘globality’ was limited to diplomats and the very wealthy. However, the possibility for unprecedented long-distant migrations was there, as the exclusionist legislation suggests. Still, the idea of the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ is presupposed by such acts of exclusion, of the partitioning of the world into discrete, geographically-demarcated spheres of interest. What is original in the phenomenon of ‘globalisation’ is the increasing co-determination of the ‘here’ and ‘there.’ The causality of the world’s actors has revealed itself gradually [and incrementally] to be patterns of a single image. Robertson calls attention to the way in which, for example, [the dissemination of] McLuhan’s ideas on the globality of world have influenced the move towards such a globality: ‘There can be little doubt that McLuhan both reflected and shaped media trends, so much so that in time we have come to witness (self-serving) media attempts to consolidate the idea of the global community,’ (Robertson 1992, 8-9). Globalisation, far from being a mere series of technological and political ‘accidents,’ is revealing itself to be a conscious attempt to forge the globality of the world.
A parallel process which lends itself to a theory of the chance origins of globalisation is the development of international finance. Even if, as some (like Eric Hobsbawm) have done,[1] one argues that nations are a development of industrialism’s uprooting of land-tied peasants, it is impossible to argue against the fact of the influence of credit banks, and the faith governments, governors and despots alike have had – and continue to hold – in them. Holton emphasises the function finance has played in developing the co-determination of geographically-disparate locales (our ‘here’ and ‘there’):
‘Banking and trading have for much longer [than the one hundred years since 1900], exhibited a transnational character, connected in part with diasporic groups such as Jews, Lombards, and the Chinese. In the past two centuries, private international bankers, for example, have periodically influenced the terms upon which nations responded to fiscal or military crisis by conditions placed on credit, whether in France in 1870-1 or Britain in 1931,’ (Holton 1998, 84).
The Great Depression of the nineteen-twenties and -thirties affected the industrialised nations of North America and Europe in tandem. National economies revealed themselves to be at the mercy of a complex, international system of labour, production, investment and regulation that was not necessarily tied to any specific locale. In addition, the growth of trade between nations and its fostering of greater global interdependence – the like of which Robertson refers to in our quote above (1992, 8) – has, particularly since colonial times, brought the causality of world affairs together into a kind of single network of international, or interregional, relations. The interdependence brought about by international trade links, and the technological ‘compression’ of the world, are further augmented by rapid population growth permitted by the complex economic structures. The Encyclopaedia Britannica claims that the ‘agricultural revolution’ of prehistoric man could support at most between five and ten million people;[2] today there are over six billion people in the world. If, after Harvey, one takes the earth’s space-time dimensions in terms of the ‘compression’ and ‘depression’ of distances, and includes the distance between urban areas and other human settlements, then the world is yet still ‘globalising’ itself into a society where, for need of space, indeed, nothing will be done anymore without the whole world’s ‘meddling in it.’ Rather than minimise the effect of an individual’s actions, which seems to be the more obvious corollary of a population explosion, the ‘international division of labour’ (Robertson 1992, 141) [foreseen by Marx and Engels as early as their penning The German Ideology], coupled with the increase of persons per square foot in the world, accentuates the demand made by individuals in one part of the world upon the conditions of other individuals in another part. The demands of specific parts of the world for goods or armaments now directly affect the industry, customs and living conditions of the other parts of the world. Perhaps most telling of this process is China’s new status as the ‘factory of the world,’ upon which formerly self-sufficient nation-states now depend for many of their manufactured wares.
This shrinking process, at once financial, political, and geographical, bespeaks a standardisation (Watson 2003) that is the essence of a ‘meddling’ in individual world affairs. ‘Organic,’ that is to say: internally-developed, systems of practice are eschewed in favour of an internationally-cognisant and artificially-contrived single body of law. We have suggested that the League of Nations was an incidental attempt to standardise political diplomacy between states – a standardisation that has national consent as its basis. In marked contrast, the post-Communist drive to standardise world economies has a specific logic and a prearranged goal of its own. To use a term of Giddens’s, this standardisation is ‘self-reflexive’ in that it knowingly transcends its origins as a merely incidental response to a particular set of world events to become an event itself. According to the German nationalist thinker Reinhold Oberlercher, political globalisation is a process that chips away at the autonomy of land-rooted communities for the purpose of promoting a society modelled upon the gesellschaft of the United States – a theory that is echoed by Robertson (1992, 12; 73), who sees globalisation as the transition from gemeinschaft (folk-community) to gesellschaft (cosmopolitan-society). Writes Oberlercher, ‘The unification of currency for all world capital funds and the universal right of suffrage for all citizens of the world are the logical end-stage of the capitalistic-democratic way of thinking,’ (Oberlercher 1992). Oberlercher sees America as the prototype of a ‘global nationality’ – a single world-nation in which peoples form regional societies for the sole purpose of guaranteeing contractual security for their private property, and who have as their cultural maxim, ‘Ubi bene ibi patri' [3] (Oberlercher 1992). But Robert Holton insists that international financial regulation, if not political regulation, is a necessary reaction to the pliability money now enjoys thanks to the possibility of instantaneous, electronic, cross-border transfers: ‘Although finally closed by the combined efforts of regulators in 1991, BCCI[4] had for twenty years capitalised on both the inability of nationally-based regulators to co-operate effectively and the existence of lax regulatory standards in a number of jurisdictions,’ (Holton 1998, 82). International regulatory boards – including, for instance, Interpol – guard individual nations from exploitation and ensure that the possibilities for travel and trade are balanced by provisions that prevent their abuse. In this sense the sovereignty of nations is upheld. However, the regulations themselves can impinge upon national or regional independence, whereupon the ‘globality’ of the world takes precedence over the local or national customs of a community. The globalisation of our private lives, here meant politically – though I shall also examine it culturally – depends at present on the extent to which ‘organic,’ national regulations are forfeited for the sake of the imposition of international laws ‘from above’. Globalisation thus conceived is the push-pull relationship between the needs of discrete communities and the needs of the globally-interdependent whole. Such a relationship is embodied by, for example, the resistance of local grocers to EU regulations on metric measurement. But the EU itself is not ‘international law’ – it is merely one among a number of economic-political blocs that comprise the world community.
The networking between constituents of the world community, whether we consider them in their local, national, or international contexts tends to the question of the globality of our lives. This networking, as with the development of international trade and geopolitics, is to a very significant degree the result of modern machine-technology. The ability to communicate instantaneously with parts of the world has homogenised, or at least synchronised, local and national agendas. Watson (2003, ‘“Davos” culture’) draws our attention to Huntington’s analysis of an international ‘jet-set’ that is aloof from ‘mere’ national and local trends and is influenced only by its own values, which, following Watson, are the pursuit of market economics, individualism, and democracy. They are in part responsible for the rise to power of media conglomerates like Viacom, and global financial authorities such as the World Bank. The ‘triumph’ of Greenwich Meantime as the standard world clock for most business districts of the world has improved the networking possibilities for financiers and ameliorated the processes of stock speculation, acquisitions, and mergers. In contrast to the networking of the global elite – which we must designate as a homogenising tendency, in its regulation and standardisation of law, labour and media –there are world-wide populist movements that are sympathetic to the ‘synchronising’ of distinct cultures and communities.[5] These movements are themselves often international, and they certainly transcend regional concerns, but, in marked opposition to Huntington’s elites, have as their common goal resistance to the consolidation of power in the hands of an apparently self-serving minority of rich and influential individuals. Such is the worldwide ‘anti-globalisation’ movement we see today. What is sought by the populists in resisting globalisation is not a share of the ‘spoils’ of globalisation, but the preservation of distinct communities that are imperilled by international cosmopolitanism. The populists, often themselves members of communities threatened by global trends, synchronise their activities with members of other communities for the purpose of mutual survival. The ‘globality’ of the world-as-whole is not denied by such actions; on the contrary, it is affirmed. Where once regional cultures existed with a minimum of outside influence that did not originate in geographically contiguous areas, now many locales, particularly those easily accessible to popular modes of transport and communication, are now threatened by homogenising, standardising trends. This resistance on the part of ‘organic’ cultures to the modernising influence of globalisation has lead to what Robertson calls the ‘museumization’ – that is to say, the artificial preservation – of folk customs and traditions; indeed, ‘The museumization of the premodern is a major feature of (post)modernity,’ (Robertson 1992, 153). Nature conservation, the encouragement of neglected or once-forbidden national culture (as for instance the revival of Gaelic in the Irish Republic), the preservation of sites of historical interest (at which the Americans excel)[6], et cetera, all involve the creation of intellectual or physical boundaries, from which the reach of global culture is excluded. The world, according to such a regimen, consists thus of a number of socio-cultural reservations, in which community (as gemeinschaft) can maintain itself against the overarching influence of global gesellschaft.
But what exactly is this ill-defined, but as a notion generally-accepted, ‘global culture’? It would not be presumptuous of us to suggest that global culture is largely a product of the original globalising nations of the West. What interests me is not that a species of cosmopolitan-Western culture has become the global culture, but that global culture is effectively the genuine culture that elicits a protectionist reaction in almost every other organic culture in the world. So-called ‘world federalism’ (Robertson 1992, 82), far from being an inauthentic culture of market economics, in fact provokes the organic culture to an artificial maintenance that looks to insulate itself from all forms of development. The development of all so-called organic cultures involved the creation of new, or the adaptation of existing, cultural traditions; the attempt by communities and states to insulate their traditional culture and customs from foreign and global influence presupposes that they are somehow ‘posthistorical’ phenomena. Indeed, a posthistorical preservation of national and regional culture is perhaps the only means of perpetuating the diversity of world cultures; the world of globalisation is a world in which the ‘here’ is rapidly beginning to resemble the ‘there,’ where commerce, regulation and technology hold sway. Holton, quoting Anthony Smith, contends that socio-political preservationism is a direct response of in-groups to encroachment from without: ‘Nationalism emerges where social groups face profound threats, be these from warfare or some other social and spiritual crisis,’ (Holton 1998, 146). What the global con-federates want, as nationalists or as conservationists, is the right to their own affairs and the ability to set their own agendas, agendas which do not necessarily coincide with the global aims of regulatory institutions like the United Nations or the International Monetary Fund. As technologies become even more streamlined, transport faster and more accessible to all, media more effectively co-ordinated across continents, and the world’s spaces yet further compressed, it remains to be seen how successful the synchronicity of the global confederacy will be in preserving the world’s biodiversity from the effects of compression, regulation, and homogenisation that globalisation embodies. Whatever their reaction, their lives are surely as global as those they oppose.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990
Holton, Robert J. Globalization and the Nation State. London: Macmillan, 1998
Oberlercher, Reinhold. ‘The Nature and the Fall of America,’ trans. R. Belser & M. Haberkamp, www.deutsches-kolleg.org/
Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992
CD-Rom
Watson, James L. ‘Globalization,’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica 2003
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