Lecture 3b Globalization

Lecture 2b Globalization, governance and integration

The meaning of 'global'

3 accounts of the meaning of global that are implicated in recent debates about globalization:

used interchangeably with world and international simply to indicate areas of social life beyond the national level (loose meaning).
belonging to the globe, i.e. connected with the natural habitat of humankind, our global planet (environmental meaning).
the quality involved in the worldwide stretching of social relations (the time-spatial concept)

Globalization - 3 definitions in sense of the 'worldwide stretching' meaning of global

Anthony Giddens
The transformation of time-space relations means that social linkages are not merely spread over long distances but also intensified – leading to instantaneous worldwide connections. For him,

‘globalization can ... be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.’(The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 1990)

Jan Aart Scholte

What is also involved is the spread of a supraterritorial dimension of social relations, and he gives the following examples of supraterritorial trends in the world of the 1990s:

nearly 900 million telephone lines
1.8 billion radio sets
a billion television receivers
100 million Internet users
44,500 transborder companies with collective annual sales of $7 trillion
over 250 multilateral regulatory institutions
16,000 noncommercial, nonofficial transborder associations
thousands of globally marketed products
$35 trillion in annual transborder movements of securitised funds
several trillion dollars in offshore bank deposits
yearly foreign-exchange turnover of $450 trillion
1.3 billion commercial airline passengers per annum
17,000 strategic warheads
accelerated global warming
enormous reductions in biological diversity

(from Globalisation: Prospects for a Paradigm Shift in M. Shaw, ed. Politics and Globalisation¸ London: Routledge 1999)

David Held and Tony McGrew
Amplify the time-spatial concept in terms of power and inter-regionality:

‘Globalization refers to an historical process which transforms the spatial organization of social relations and transactions, generating transcontinental or inter-regional networks of interaction and the exercise of power.’ (article in Review of International Studies, special issue,1998; but see also their Global Transformations, Cambridge: Polity 1999)

The extra dimension
By global, we mean not just transformed conceptions of time and space but the new social meaning that this has involved. Thus I have proposed, in my own work, that we understand this as the development of a common consciousness of human society on a world scale. (Martin Shaw, Theory of the Global State, 2000, Chapter 1)

Dating globalization

Globalization in the 3rd sense is something that has only become strong in the last decade or two. Globalization in the 1st and 2nd senses may have developed over the whole of the modern era, i.e. hundreds of years.

The globalization debate - how far globalization has undermined or weakened the nation-state.

Held and McGrew (Global Transformations) identify three main camps:

hyperglobalists: According to some globalizers, some kinds of technology, market relations and standardized cultural forms have become so powerful that states – or even political actors generally – have been weakened and marginalized and borders have become, more or less, irrelevant. (e.g. Kenneth Ohmae, Borderless World, 1995: 5)

global-sceptics: According to some anti-globalizers, if it can be shown that states remain influential and borders significant, then the globalization thesis has been brought seriously into question, if not refuted. (e.g. Paul Hirst and Graham Thompson (Globalization in Question)

global transformationalists like Held and McGrew, also Scholte, believe that the debate between hyperglobalists and sceptics is a false debate: yes, they say, some important changes have taken place in the relations of states and markets, but no, these are not so much about undermining as about transforming states.

Note that Held and McGrew don't use globalization - too mechanical - preferring global transformation.

The issue agenda in the 'globalization' debate
Original globalization debate was mainly about economics and culture, global transformations also talk about political and military aspects of globalization.
The global and the international

According to some globalizers, international relations have been replaced by more fluid, global relations. Hyperglobalists and global-sceptics agree that global and international are radically opposed.

From a transformationalist point of view, global change involves transformations of national and international relations, and on the other, changed national and international relations go to make up much of what constitutes the global. So no radical opposition.

Global governance and international integration - transformationalist global debate in IR has converged largely around the question of global governance

Global governance

Governance is an old word,distinguished from government. It means how a society is governed.

IR scholars generally agree that there is nothing like a global government. However many agree that despite this, the world is effectively governed. Hence global governance exists in other forms.

There is a wide range of perspectives on how this happens. Some scholars argue only that there are a wide range of regimes, i.e. issue-specific international agreements, e.g. about trade, human rights, the environment and so on, and these need to be understood in terms of their own dynamics. Thus there is a plurality of issues, a plurality of regimes, and a pluralist approach will understand them.

Others argue that global governance is a more integrated matter, that the different issue regimes are linked through involving the same dominant states, and by the common interests that lie behind them. Although there is not a global government, dominant forces in world society like the Western powers are promoting a particular kind of global governance, tilted towards capitalism. (My own work: argues there is a Western-global network of state power.)