global studies paper

In a way, each of these works became prominent because they tried to capture in a single catchy thought “The One Big Thing,” the central moving part, the underlying motor, that would drive international affairs in the post–Cold War world—either the clash of civilizations, chaos, the decline of empires or the triumph of liberalism. . . . I believe that if you want to understand the post–Cold War world

you have to start by understanding that a new international system has succeeded it—globalization. That is “The One Big Thing” people should focus on. Globalization is not the only thing influencing events in the world today, but to the extent that there is a North Star and a worldwide shaping force, it is this system. What is new is the system; what is old is power politics, chaos, clashing civilizations and liberalism. And what is the drama of the post–Cold War world is the interaction between this new system and these old passions. It is a complex drama, with the final act still not written. That is why under the globalization system you will find both clashes of civilization and the homogenization of civilizations, both environmental disasters and amazing environmental rescues, both the triumph of liberal, free-market capitalism and a backlash against it, both the durability of nation-states and the rise of enormously powerful nonstate actors. . . . The publisher . . . Jonathan Galassi called me one day and said, “I

was telling some friends of mine that you’re writing a book about globalization and they said, ‘Oh, Friedman, he loves globalization.’ What would you say to that?” I answered Jonathan that I feel about globalization a lot like I feel about the dawn. Generally speaking, I think it’s a good thing that the sun comes up every morning. It does more good than harm. But even if I didn’t much care for the dawn there isn’t much I could do about it. I didn’t start globalization, I can’t stop it—except at a huge cost to human development—and I’m not going to waste time trying. All I want to think about is how I can get the best out of this new system, and cushion the worst, for the most people.

APPROACHES TO GLOBALIZATION

Paul James

There are many different approaches to the study of globalization, testifying to the diversity and vitality of the field of global studies. The diversity of these approaches is not easy to categorize, however, in part because of the intellectual climate in which most of the studies of

globalization have emerged. Studies of globalization and, more generally, studies in the broad and

loosely defined field of global studies did not become conscious of themselves as such until the 1990s; and by then the direct-line lineages of classic social theory had either been broken or segmented. The social sciences and humanities were in the midst of a retreat from grand theory. There was a growing suspicion, in part influenced by a poststructuralist turn, of any generalizing theoretical explanations of particular phenomena. This suspicion was paralleled by a claim made by some that the postmodern condition could be characterized by the end of grand narratives of all kinds: nationalism, socialism, liberalism, and by implication, globalism. Although in the past, approaches to any theoretical field could be comfortably organized according to three foundational considerations—theoretical lineage, scholarly discipline, and normative orientation—this was changing. By the end of the 20th and into the early 21st century, those kinds of considerations remained useful by way of background orientation, but the pattern of approaches was becoming less obvious and with more crossovers. There is an irony in this retreat from generalizing theory that is

important to note. It concerns a paradox that is yet to be explained. At the same time that generalizing theory lost its hold, a generalizing category of social relations gripped the imagination of both academic analysts and journalistic commentators—this, of course, was the category of “the global.” In this emerging imaginary, globalization was understood as a process of social interconnection, a process that was in different ways connecting people across planet Earth. Globalization as a practice and subjectivity connecting the (global) social whole thus became the standout object of critical enquiry. In other words, globalization demanded generalizing attention at the very moment that residual ideas that an all- embracing theory might be found to explain such a phenomenon was effectively dashed. This has profound consequences for the nature of globalization theory and how we might understand different approaches. . . .

EARLY APPROACHES TO GLOBALIZATION

Although there were some isolated articles across the 1960s to 1980s directly referring to globalization—with the most prominent of these being by Theodore Levitt on the globalization of markets in 1983—more elaborate academic approaches to globalization lagged by a decade or so. The burgeoning and dominant journalistic and business discourses of the

first wave of intense attention into the 1980s tended to be thin on analysis and thick on hyperbole. Most suggested that globalization was a completely new phenomenon symbolized by the triumph of the capitalist market. Levitt’s writing signaled the rise of the global corporation carried by a worldwide communications revolution. It took a sociologist of religion and a couple of anthropologists and

social theorists in the 1990s—scholars such as Roland Robertson, Jonathan Friedman, Arjun Appadurai, and Mike Featherstone—to write or edit the first major explorations of globalization-as-such, contributions that moved beyond hyperbole or thin description. Journals such as Theory, Culture and Society were in the vanguard of the new thinking of this second wave of attention. Earlier work, such as that of Immanuel Wallerstein and the world-systems theorists, or Andre Gunder Frank and the dependency theorists, had signaled a shift away from classic imperialism studies as the major carrier of work on globalizing relations. However, in relation to understanding globalization itself, this did not lead to significant developments in theory, except in the recognition that globalization was a centuries-old process. The work of Wallerstein in the discipline of international political

economy can here be used as an indication of the difficulty of coming to terms with issues of globalization. Instead of exploring the consequences of processes of globalization—economic, ecological, cultural, and political— for understanding the complexities of capitalism, Wallerstein reworked the verities of a world system’s understanding: namely, that capitalism had gone through two major overlapping cycles of development: from 1450, and from 1945 to the present, suggesting that capitalism was now entering a transition phase of terminal crisis. What others called globalization, he said, was just the epiphenomenon of the transition. Here the sophisticated critic of mainstream modernization theory thus reduced globalization to a reflection of the phases of capital. He limited its consequences to the domain of economics or the nexus between capital and everything else. Alternatively and more productively, the work of Roland Robertson took

a cultural turn. Like the critical political economists, Robertson recognized the long-term and changing history of globalization. However, unlike the dominant trend that for a time defined globalization in terms of the demise of the nation-state, perhaps most prominently surfacing in the writings of Arjun Appadurai and Ulrich Beck, Robertson recognized the complex intersection and layering of nationally and globally constituted social relations. One of his major contributions was to show how globalization across its long uneven history contributed to a relativization of social meaning and social practice, including the notion of a “world system.” His

work still stands up to scrutiny today, and he continues to be a major figure in the field. Another key figure of this time, Arjun Appadurai, also followed the

cultural turn, but instead of taking a critical modernist position on the changing order of things as Robertson did, he headed down the postmodern path to emphasize fluidity. The key contribution for which he is known is the notion of global “scapes,” unstructured formations with no boundaries or regularities. He distinguished different formations of what he called ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. This approach was avidly used for a period before it lost its standing as different writers realized that, apart from the categories of ethnoscapes and perhaps ideoscapes, his global landscape focused too narrowly on the cultural present and the recent past. Broader categories of analysis were needed to understand the unevenness of social continuities and discontinuities.

APPROACHES UNDERSTOOD IN TERMS OF THE DOMAIN OF ENQUIRY

A third wave of attention emerged across the turn of the century into the present. Journals such as Globalizations, Global Society, and Global Governance emerged as the number of publications exploded in number. One of the most important broader renderings of globalization came from a jointly written book called Global Transformations (1999) by David Held, a political philosopher; Anthony McGrew, an international relations theorist; David Goldblatt, a theorist of environmental politics; and Jonathan Perraton, an economist. Interdisciplinary studies had become the key. As signaled in the subtitle of the book, Politics, Economics and Culture, and extended in the chapter structure to include a focus on globalization and environment, this approach worked across the broad domains of economy, ecology, politics, and culture. Similarly Jan Aart Scholte worked across a broad series of domains. In his case, the domains were production, governance, identity, and knowledge. And, when Chamsy el-Ojeili and Patrick Hayden came to write their book Critical Theories of Globalization (2006), looking back on more than a decade of developing approaches to globalization they returned to the useful categorization of economics, politics, and culture. In all of these cases, however, there was no attempt to develop a theory of globalization as such. Rather these and other related writers—writers as diverse as James Mittleman, George Ritzer, Ulf Hannerz, and Heikki Patomaki—sought to explore the complexity of globalization across different domains. In the domain of culture, for example, a penetrating critique of the

dominant ideology of globalization by Manfred Steger joined with others in introducing the notion of “globalism.” In its midrange use, globalism can be defined as the ideologies and/or subjectivities associated with different historically dominant formations of global extension. Steger in his earlier writings from the early 1990s focused on globalism as neoliberalism, but as his analysis developed, he came to distinguish different kinds of globalism, including justice globalisms, imperial globalisms, and religious globalisms. He helped us to understand that globalism is therefore much more than the ideology associated with the contemporary dominant variant of globalism—market globalism and ideas of a borderless world.

APPROACHES UNDERSTOOD IN TERMS OF NORMATIVE ORIENTATION

Other ways to differentiate approaches to globalization include their normative or ethical orientation and their political descriptive stance. The most cited categorization of different kinds of approaches to globalization, which comes from Global Transformations, a book mentioned earlier, combines both of these categorizations and posits what it calls “three broad schools of thought”: the hyperglobalists, the sceptics, and the transformationalists. They are not actually schools at all but orientations. The hyperglobalizers include writers such as Kenichi Ohmae (a neoliberal) and Martin Albrow (a critical theorist) who argue that a wave of globalization is changing the world fundamentally and supplanting older national sovereignties. The sceptics include Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson who argue that with contemporary so-called globalization what we are witnessing is just another wave of internationalization. The transformationalists, including James Rosenau and Saskia Sassen, who suggest that while intensifying globalization is changing the nature of world politics, culture, and economy, the process is uneven.

APPROACHES UNDERSTOOD IN TERMS OF SCHOLARLY DISCIPLINE

With the realization in the 1990s that “the global” required direct attention, the taken-for-granted assumptions of fields of study such as international relations, politics, and sociology came under direct challenge. In international relations, the realist emphasis on nation-states as black- box entities in political inter-relation came under considerable pressure, as did the emphases of its critical counterparts, including even Marxism and rationalism that had long recognized the long reach of both material processes and ideas across the world. International relations as a

discipline had profound problems dealing with globalization, but into the new century, books started to come out by writers crossing the boundaries of the discipline, including international critical theorist Jan Aart Scholte and international political economist Mark Rupert. One discipline that saw a sea change in its approach was anthropology.

It maintained its classical emphasis on ethnographic depth, but it shifted its orientation from internally focused microstudies of remote locales to attempting to understand communities, whether they be remote or metropolitan, in terms of their place in a globalizing world. New subfields of history developed, including “big history” and “world history.” The field of global studies itself emerged during this period as an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relation between the local and the global across the domains of social life.

APPROACHES UNDERSTOOD IN TERMS OF THEORETICAL LINEAGE

A developing aversion to grand theory did not mean that the old theoretical lineages became completely irrelevant, although it did mean that approaches associated with the classical social theories of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber tended either to draw more loosely on those past writings or to work across them synthetically. Out of a critical reading of the Durkheimian–Weberian tradition came the work of such writers as Roland Robertson and American sociologist of global religion, Mark Juergensmeyer—although it should be said that Robertson was also influenced by an open version of neo-Marxist historical materialism. Out of the neo-Marxist lineage came the varied work of Paul Hirst, Mark Rupert, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Tony McGrew, and via Karl Polanyi, Ronnie Munck. Third, several writers explicitly set out to formulate a postclassical synthesis. The most prominent of these writers was British sociologist Anthony Giddens. He had been working across the 1980s and 1990s on a grand theoretical approach to the social called structurationism; however, by the time that he wrote in an elaborated way on globalization, his approach had become less theoretically integrated and more descriptive. His major point became that globalization is complex, shapes the way that we live, and is linked to the expansive dynamic of late modernity. Marxist writer Justin Rosenberg immediately took Giddens to task for

theoretical incoherence. In particular, he criticized a tendency in Giddens’s writing (and in many other writers on globalization) to treat globalization and the extension of social relations across world space as both the explanation and the outcome of a process of change. That is, he asked how if globalization involves spatial extension can it be explained by invoking

the claim that space is now global. The explanation and the thing-being- explained, he rightly says, are thus reduced into a self-confirming circle. Taking into account his critique, it is still legitimate to treat globalization as a descriptive category referring to a process of extension across a historically constituted world-space as we have been doing across this entry, but it is problematic to posit globalization as the simple cause of other phenomena, much less of itself.

CONCLUSION

Now, after three decades of writing on globalization, we have made some extraordinary gains in understanding. The historically changing and uneven nature of globalization is now generally understood. In the various scholarly approaches, much of the hyperbole has tended to drop away and the normative assessment of globalization has become more sober and qualified. Scholarly approaches have tended to move away from essentializing the phenomenon as necessarily good or bad. Similarly, at least in the scholarly arena, there has been a significant move beyond the reductive tendency to treat globalization only in terms of economic domain. On the other side of the ledger, our central weakness of understanding

goes back to the central paradox of globalization studies—the emergence of an aversion to generalizing theory at a time when the importance of a generalizing category of relations came to the fore. Globalization may simply be the name given to a matrix of processes that extend social relations across world-space, but the way in which people live those relations is incredibly complex, changing, and difficult to explain. Thus, we remain in search of generalizing methodologies (not a singular grand theory) that can sensitize us to those empirical complexities while enabling us to abstract patterns of change and continuity.

HOW GLOBALIZATION WENT BAD

Steven Weber

The world today is more dangerous and less orderly than it was supposed to be. Ten or 15 years ago, the naive expectations were that the “end of history” was near. The reality has been the opposite. The world has more international terrorism and more nuclear proliferation today than it did in 1990. International institutions are weaker. The threats of pandemic