Justin Rosenberg
The Follies of Globalisation Theory
Justin Rosenberg International Relations, University of Sussex j.p.rosenberg@sussex.ac.uk
Chapters 1 and 2 of the book, published by Verso (London, 2000) and reproduced here with their permission. This work is also available in pdf format.
Contents:
Chapter 1 The Problem of Globalisation Theory2000
first press
Chapter One:
The Problem of Globalisation Theory
‘Globalisation’, wrote Anthony Giddens in 1990, is ‘a term which must have a key position in the lexicon of the social sciences.’ If so, then by the time he rose to deliver the first of his Reith Lectures on the subject in 1999 he would have had considerable grounds for satisfaction. For the progress of that term in the intervening decade has been little short of spectacular. In academic writings and government policy statements, in the journalistic media and in popular consciousness, the claim that the world is becoming unified as never before seems to have established a powerful hold. Few expressions of this claim could compete with the International Herald Tribune, which startled its readers one October morning with the headline: ‘Globalization Vaults into Reality’. Yet in their own way the intellectual implications imputed to the idea in many academic writings have been no less dramatic. Globalisation is said to signal not only a truly basic social change – ‘the supplanting of modernity with globality’ – but also, as a result of this change, the redundancy of some of the founding ideas of classical social theory, extending even to the very concept of ‘society’ itself. Even more dramatically, globalisation has necessitated a wholesale ‘spatialization of social theory’ on the basis of a ‘retrospective discovery’ of the centrality of speed of communication in the constitution of social orders:
It suddenly seems clear that the divisions of the continents and of the globe as a whole were the function of distances made once imposingly real thanks to the primitiveness of transport and the hardships of travel… ‘distance’ is a social product; its length varies depending on the speed with which it may be overcome… All other socially produced factors of constitution, separation and the maintenance of collective identities – like state borders or cultural barriers – seem in retrospect merely secondary effects of that speed....
In short, for some writers – referred to below as ‘globalisation theorists’ – globalisation has now become ‘the central thematic for social theory’, and ‘a key idea by which we understand the transition of human society into the third millennium.’
(i) The General Problem
On any sober intellectual reckoning, this is a curious outcome indeed. For the very idea of globalisation as an explanatory schema in its own right is fraught with difficulties. The term ‘globalisation’ after all, is at first sight merely a descriptive category, denoting either the geographical extension of social processes or possibly, as in Giddens’ definition, ‘the intensification of worldwide social relations’. Now, since no-one denies that ‘worldwide social relations’ do indeed exist today in ways and to a degree that they never did before, there can be no objection to calls for a theory of globalisation, if that means an explanation of how and why these have come about. But such an explanation, if it is to avoid empty circularity, must fall back on some more basic social theory which could explain why the phenomena denoted by the term have become such a distinctive and salient feature of the contemporary world. (Globalisation as an outcome cannot be explained simply by invoking globalisation as a process tending towards that outcome.) Yet if that were so, and if, for example, time-space compression were to be explained as an emergent property of a particular historical type of social relations, then the term ‘globalisation’ would not denote a theory in its own right at all – instead it would function merely as a measure of how far and in what ways this historical process had developed. And the globalisation theorists clearly intend something more than this. By asserting that the emergence of a single global space as the arena of social action increasingly outweighs in its consequences other kinds of causality which have traditionally been invoked to explain social phenomena; by extrapolating the geographical dimension of this process into an alternative, spatio-temporal problematic for social science; and finally, by pitting this new problematic not simply against competing perspectives in the contemporary social sciences, but also against the classical foundations of modern social thought as a whole – in all these ways, they have raised their sights beyond any purely descriptive role for the concept. In the logical structure of their argumentation, what presents itself initially as the explanandum – globalisation as the developing outcome of some historical process – is progressively transformed into the explanans: it is globalisation which now explains the changing character of the modern world – and even generates ‘retrospective discoveries’ about past epochs in which it must be presumed not to have existed.
This inversion of explanans and explanandum cannot easily be rejected on purely logical grounds. After all, the consequences of a particular historical development may indeed go on to become significant causes in their own right, generating in turn further consequences which can no longer be derived from the original historical development. This is intrinsic to the nature of historical change. In this way, for example, Marx believed that the analysis of capitalist social relations had become fundamental to understanding modern societies, however much these relations were originally the product of other, necessarily pre-capitalist, causes. In fact, Marx also believed that the experience of capitalist society was an enabling condition of the intellectual formulation of the ‘materialist conception of history’, a new problematic, on the basis of which he too asserted the possibility of making ‘retrospective discoveries’ about the (pre-capitalist) past. This comparison suggests that the claims of globalisation theory cannot simply be dismissed a priori. But it also alerts us to the real character of these claims. As Ankie Hoogvelt puts it, in one of the milder formulations which nonetheless captures nicely the kind of intellectual shift involved:
…what is being argued here is that, owing to the present reconstitution of the world into a single social space, that self-same historical process [which produced globalisation] has now lifted off and moved into a new ballpark. If, previously, global integration in the sense of a growing unification and interpenetration of the human condition was driven by the economic logic of capital accumulation, today it is the unification of the human condition that drives the logic of further capital accumulation.
Within this shift we may identify the basic distinction which will be used in what follows, between a theory of globalisation and globalisation theory: the former might be constructed out of anything presumed to generate the spatio-temporal phenomena involved; the latter, by contrast, must derive its explanatory mechanism within those phenomena themselves: in short, it needs – even presupposes – a spatio-temporal reformulation of social theory itself. And it is this latter discourse of globalisation theory – an increasingly confident discourse within the literature – which will be interrogated in the pages which follow.
In order to appreciate what a curious development this is, it perhaps helps to remember that in the fields of sociology, anthropology, geography, historiography, philosophy and the history of ideas – to mention just a few – there have long existed rich literatures on the subject of space and time, some of them very extensive. The recognition that temporality and spatiality have varied across periods and cultures, that they have been socially constructed and mentally experienced in different ways, and that those different ways have themselves been highly consequential for the constitution of social orders – all this has been well and long established.
Equally established, though remaining subject to important scholarly debates, is the recognition that on any comparative review, the specifically modern, Western constructions of space and time which we might otherwise take for granted are thrown into sharp relief as historically exceptional, sociologically specific and culturally peculiar (in both senses of the word). The adjectives most commonly used to describe this peculiarity are ‘abstracted’, ‘linear’ and ‘empty’ or ‘emptiable’. And, once again, considerable literatures have grown up around the attempt to understand when, how and where this particular construction of ‘empty’ space and time originated, the part which it played in the emergence and spread of ‘modern’ societies (from the Renaissance to the present, both in Europe and outside), and its crucial role (both sociological and philosophical) in both the organisation of social power and the construction of cultural meaning in those societies today.
And yet, reading these literatures, one soon becomes aware – and this is surely the key point – that among the more serious contributions, nobody takes the word ‘empty’ literally. To be sure, they all recognise that at one level we can think of space and time as objectively contentless dimensions of existence within which human social (and other) processes are located and configured. Such processes can be analysed spatio-temporally – specifying how they mobilise the possibilities given ‘objectively’ as distance, proximity, duration, simultaneity, sequencing and so on. And imagining space and time as empty, homogeneous, uniform and abstract is an intellectual precondition for conducting such forms of analysis. These writers also all recognise that the peculiarity of the modern, Western mobilisation of space and time does indeed lie precisely in the fact that it uniquely posits this ‘empty’, ‘scientific’ conception as the central form of its own cultural and social construction of space and time – and that this in turn is a constitutive condition of many important dimensions of modern social reproduction: bureaucratic organisation, historicist forms of consciousness, bordered nation-states and so on.
But there it ends. For the kind of questions first applied to other periods and cultures in order to understand why it should be that the Nuer, the Tiv, the Algerian peasant, the Maya, the ancient Greek, the Balinese, the Chinese and so on have lived in such different spatio-temporal worlds from the modern European must equally be formulated for modernity itself. The apparent correspondence of ideas of empty space and time to the properties of a pre-social natural universe does not change the fact that those ideas too are ‘full’ of social and cultural determinations. It only makes those determinations easier to miss, and therefore more prone to naturalisation.
The simple way of avoiding that outcome is to insert the following question at the base of the analysis: in what kind of society (or culture) do the spatio-temporal dimensions of existence take on the historically peculiar forms of ‘emptiable’ space and time – and why? It is the methodological priority of this question which implicitly governs the logical structure of, for example, Robert David Sack’s treatment of space in Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History, or Donald Lowe’s analysis of temporality in A History of Bourgeois Perception – or indeed Nicos Poulantzas’ extraordinary analysis of what he called ‘the underlying conceptual matrices of space and time’. And far from minimising subsequent questions about the importance of space and time in the constitution of social reality, it is rather what enables them to be framed as properly sociological questions in the first place.
Thus, even (or above all) in the specialised study of space and time, where spatio-temporal phenomena loom largest, the move to reverse the normal relation of explanans and explanandum – to make space and time themselves into the fundamental basis of explanation – is generally resisted. Instead the characteristic first move is rather the sociological and phenomenological deconstruction of the emptiness of modern space and time, by reference to the specific social and cultural relations which produce and reproduce them in this form. In this way, the emergence of a spatio-temporal problematic per se is effectively ruled out. And one can readily understand why. Whatever Newtonian or post-Newtonian physics might tell us about the natural world, no human ever experiences spatial or temporal determinants which are not mediated or constructed in particular socio-cultural forms. Attempts, therefore, to construct a general nomenclature of spatio-temporal analysis may indeed be highly illuminating in the service of comparative analysis – enabling us to see how different social worlds differently produce the common parameters of distance and proximity, duration, simultaneity and sequence, and so on. However, if these categories are inserted too deeply into the logical structure of social explanation, they must lead to arguments which, as Sack diplomatically puts it, ‘over-generalise about the significance of space’. And there is a further danger, inherent in this over-generalising: that the properties of ‘empty’ space and time (which in fact derive from the social and cultural determinants of these modern forms) will be unwittingly attributed to the ‘objective’ character of space and time themselves – naturalising and thus rendering indecipherable the very phenomena whose effects have prompted the theoretical inflation of space and time in the first place. They will, in short, be reified. In this quite elemental theoretical mistake, it will be argued below, we can find both the ultimate source and the unavoidable destination of globalisation theory. This is its general problem.
‘Nature in you’, says Regan, addressing her increasingly deranged father,
…stands on the very verge
Of her confine: you should be rul’d and led
By some discretion that discerns your state
Better than you yourself.
The contemporary social sciences, it seems, in their aspiration to a spatio-temporal problematic, stand on the very verge of their possibility of coherence. In globalisation theory, we shall try to show, they overstep that verge.
In this book three separate instances of that overstepping will be analysed – in the works successively of Jan Aart Scholte, Rob Walker and Anthony Giddens. The first of these is a writer who embraces globalisation theory in the field of International Relations (IR); the second straddles the boundary between IR and political philosophy; the last occupies the field of ‘straight’ social theory, and is surely globalisation theory’s most eminent sociological exponent. By counterposing these three examples, each coming from a different intellectual direction (and none of the texts significantly cross-referencing either of the others), we can draw out the common fallacy which lies within the ambition of globalisation theory.
But the purpose is by no means entirely negative. Globalisation theory, for all its intellectual tribulations, has this virtue: it throws into new relief two things which are worth debating and defending. The first of these is the status of classical social theory – represented in these pages above all by Karl Marx and, secondarily, Max Weber – in the continuing enterprise of social science. Since this enterprise itself has meaning only in relation to an evolving historical reality, the question of whether and how far ideas developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century can still retain their relevance to the contemporary world is entirely legitimate. More, it is this questioning which compels adherents of what C. Wright Mills called the tradition of Classic Social Analysis to refresh and extend that tradition by trying to demonstrate how its methods and insights can illuminate an historical reality which might indeed seem to have moved decisively beyond their analytical reach. In this book that positive goal necessarily takes on a negative form: the critique of other writers. Yet hopefully, in the course of the critique, the value of what is being defended will also become more clear. However, if strong judgments are made about these other writers, that should not be read as an attempt to delegitimise their work. For the truth of the matter is that the present writer is indebted to them for stimulating him to draw out his own arguments the more carefully. The strongest of our disagreements remain therefore in the end subordinate to what surely unites us: the common pursuit of a collective effort to understand the social world.
The second issue which is thrown into new relief by the debate over globalisation is the idea of ‘the international’ as a significant and distinctive dimension of the social world of modernity. The sometimes rather extreme dismissal of this by globalisation theory forces us to take stock of the notion, and to clarify what, if anything, should be preserved within it. What is at stake here?
(ii) ‘International Relations’ and Globalisation Theory
If ‘the divisions of the continents and of the globe as a whole’ are indeed breaking down, and if the claims of globalisation theory are the legitimate theoretical implication of this, then it is not only the notion of ‘society’ as a territorially bounded entity which must give way to the emergent reality. International theory too – traditionally defined as the study of interactions across, between and among such entities – must also be subjected to fundamental modification. Thus Jan Aart Scholte holds that a ‘methodological territorialism’ is written into the very definition of ‘inter-national’ relations. This, he argues, blinds academics and policy-makers alike to the ‘supra-territorial’ character of contemporary global challenges. For these are increasingly constituted not in the territorial space of the ‘Westphalian states-system’ but rather in that ‘distanceless space’ promoted by modern financial markets, satellite communications and computer networks. Urgent intellectual rectification is now required: ‘it is arguably dangerous to give methodological territorialism further lease on life in a globalising world’.
The rectification of international theory has not proceeded as far or as fast as globalisation theorists in other disciplines would advocate. According to Malcolm Waters, international theory has proved unable so far to move beyond ‘a proto-theory of globalization’ in which attention to processes of transnational integration co-exist problematically with claims for the continuing significance of the sovereign state: this ‘dualism remains the bottom line for political science and international relations versions of globalization.’ Yet if the battle for globalisation theory has not yet been won in this field, still the tocsin has sounded. And a proliferation of books and articles has indeed appeared in recent years taking up the new nomenclature and proclaiming the end of the ‘Westphalian System’. In varying degrees and with differing nuances, these writings have claimed that the organisation of the world by and around a system of sovereign, territorial nation-states is gradually submerging beneath new kinds of (non-territorial) linkages. The intensification of these linkages is in turn producing a new spatial and institutional configuration of social power – a ‘postinternational’ system - whose shape corresponds less and less to the interstate model provided by orthodox International Relations.
In the discussion which follows below, two lines will be drawn in the sand concerning this matter. First, it will be argued that the prior existence of a ‘Westphalian System’, which serves as the crucial historical foil for the theoretical significance of contemporary claims about globalisation, is actually quite mythical. Defining the modern international system purely in terms of geopolitical norms of interaction between states, it derives in fact from the (sociologically) narrowest of international theories – political realism. And it has always stood in the way of a much richer understanding of the international derived from analysis of the wider historical process of capitalist world development – a process rendered invisible, or at any rate irrelevant, by the notion of a Westphalian System. Exactly why globalisation theory – that most forward looking of doctrines – should have made itself intellectually dependent on this most traditionalist of historical premises will be examined towards the end of chapter two.
Yet if the first line to be drawn points to a critique of the discipline of International Relations, the second, perhaps surprisingly, will cross over the first to mount an equally emphatic defense. For the merging in globalisation theory of the idea of ‘the international’ with the belief in a (now fading) Westphalian System passes all too easily into an outright denial of any remaining analytical determinacy to those general questions which are raised – in different ways in different historical epochs – by interrelations across, between and among human societies. It passes, that is, into the rejection of what might be called ‘the problematic of the international’, which is conventionally taken to compose the distinctive subject matter of international theory. This is a rejection endorsed, in his own complicated way, by Rob Walker in his book Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. And we shall therefore, in chapter three, use that work as a limit case for this argument, attempting to construct in critical counterpoint a defensible version of that ‘problematic of the international’.
International Relations, International Relations: why should anyone care about the academic discipline of International Relations? And why should any readers located outside its parochial and possibly superannuated disciplinary confines take any interest at all in such an arcane procedure as the one just proposed? The answer is that they may not be as far outside it as they think. In fact, they may not be outside it at all.
For we live today in a veritable ‘age of globalisation studies’, in which one academic discipline after another is gaily expanding its remit into the ‘global’ sphere and relocating its own subject matter in a geographically extended, worldwide perspective. This extension leads these other disciplines onto the intellectual terrain of IR, for which the existence of an increasingly worldwide ‘international system’ has always necessarily constituted the empirical object of study. The arrival of all these newcomers cannot fail to bring welcome enrichment to a field which, especially during the Cold War, often seemed condemned to a permanent intellectual poverty. At the same time, the question of whether the pre-existing incumbents had, for all their faults, identified anything of real significance actually matters a great deal for the newcomers themselves. If they had not – or if what they identified turned out to have been a purely local historical phenomenon (such as the Westphalian System), which they had never properly understood, and whose conditions were in any case now passing – then of course they can safely be ignored.
But a word of friendly advice: the newcomers should be careful. For if, on the other hand, the accumulated reflections of past international theorists were in fact clustered around intellectual problems of more general and enduring significance, then a quite different prognosis must be entertained for any newcomers unwary enough to discount this possibility. Either they will find themselves repeating the exercise of generations of liberal and other ‘idealists’ in this discipline, whose interventions against the realist orthodoxy have foundered on their inability to suppress the significance of these general problems. Or they will engage in a laborious process of unwittingly re-inventing the problematic of the international itself under a different name. Zymaunt Bauman is surely not alone in suffering this latter fate, but his example remains nonetheless a spectacular one:
The problem is… that sociology so far is poorly equipped to treat the social space beyond the confines of the nation-state as anything else but the analytically compressed ‘environment’.
It is only now that we begin to understand to what extent all major categories of sociology are dependent for their meaning and practical usefulness on their relatedness to the typically inner-societal space, different from all other imaginable social spaces by being held together by a universally (i.e. within that space) binding authority… I suggest that the elaboration of categories appropriate to the analysis of dependencies and interactions in the ‘non-societal’ social space, a space without ‘principal co-ordination’, ‘dominant culture’, ‘legitimate authority’, etc., is now a most urgent task faced by sociology. …the reality to be modelled is, both in its present shape and in its plausible prospects, much more fluid, heterogeneous and ‘under-patterned’ than anything the sociologists have tried to grasp intellectually in the past.
What Bauman ‘only now… begin[s] to understand’ has of course been the central, defining assertion of the orthodox study of IR for generations.
Thus to those coming from outside, for whom the theme of globalisation may well have offered a valuable means of transcending disciplinary boundaries elsewhere, and who therefore wonder why the discipline of IR looms so large in chapters two and three, the answer must be that the old adage may still apply: de te fabula narratur.
That said, however, the fundamental problem with globalisation theory lies not in the difficulties of its encounter with International Relations, but rather in the deeper contradiction already alluded to at the level of social theory itself: the attempt to construct ‘globalisation’ as an explanans leads to a conceptual inflation of ‘the spatial’ which is both difficulty to justify ontologically and liable to produce not explanations but reifications. And yet we have also said that this charge is impossible to substantiate a priori. How, then, should we proceed? The answer can only be that we must examine the outcome of these assumptions in the texts of the globalisation theorists themselves. Is it really true that globalisation theory makes its adherents dependent on such large theoretical claims about the significance of space? If so, how do they seek to ground those claims? And in any case, do these claims, in turn, really lie at the heart of the explanatory difficulties which they experience? We have to look and see.
If any one of the three key assertions we are making – the necessity to globalisation theory of the conceptual inflation of space, the impossibility of its grounding in an alternative problematic for social theory, the inevitability of its reificatory consequences for concrete explanations – is contradicted by the evidence we find, then our overall intellectual case against globalisation theory will fail.
If, on the other hand, they are all confirmed, then we may perhaps make the following prediction. The more vigorously and systematically the case for globalisation as an explanans is pursued, the more explicitly and disruptively those inherent problems will manifest themselves. In the end, the intellectual cost of this will prove so high that one of two outcomes must result. Either the claims of globalisation theory will be tacitly withdrawn, (after successive attempts at substantiation have failed), within the very process of the argumentation itself. This, we shall attempt to show in some detail, is what happens in Giddens’ Consequences of Modernity. Alternatively, those claims will be from the start the object of such powerful intellectual equivocations, that the authors will prevent themselves, perhaps wisely, from allowing them free rein. The consequence of this latter policy, however, strongly illustrated in the case of Jan Aart Scholte, is that no clear, definitive argument can be permitted to emerge at all. Prevented from reaching their full height, yet asserted nonetheless in some necessarily tumbledown form, these claims will come to resemble instead the intellectual equivalent of an architectural folly.
Yet if globalisation theory necessarily has this self-confounding quality, why take the trouble to subject it to a scholarly critique? Why not simply wait for it to collapse of its own accord? The answer is twofold. First, our suspicions and predictions remain at this stage only suspicions and predictions. They have yet to be substantiated. And second, the current fashionability of globalisation theory has not come without a price. For arguably the claims which it makes, if taken seriously, combine to exercise a kind of theoretical veto over other, more valuable resources for understanding both the contemporary world in general and its international politics in particular. Before we move on to the next chapter we should therefore pause to spell out what this veto comprises.
It seems to have three main elements. First, insofar as it represents the contemporary world as having moved decisively beyond the imaginative reach of classical writers such as Karl Marx and Max Weber, globalisation theory in fact jettisons a vital resource for understanding exactly the spatio-temporal phenomena which it deems so significant. Once cut off from the rich explanatory schemas of classical social theory, these phenomena are instead converted into irreducible causes in their own right – unavoidably renaturalising the very things which it was the achievement of those earlier writers to problematise and demystify. A central feature of this process is the systematic fetishising of spatial categories, a possibility latent in the term ‘globalisation’ itself, but fully activated only by the role which it is now called upon to play in the construction of social explanation. This in turn produces a paradoxical reduction in the explanatory claims of social science. For the deepest level of the classical interrogation of modernity – the one at which its most dramatic and counter-intuitive discoveries were made – is now increasingly sealed off anew by the progressive rehabilitation of old reifications in a new technical language.
Second, by conflating the general intellectual issue of relations between societies with a specific historical form of those relations, caricatured as ‘the Westphalian System’, globalisation theory mistakes a subsequent evolution in that form for the obsolescence of the problematic of the international itself. In this respect, far from achieving an advance on existing international theory, it simply abandons the field, and haplessly reproduces many of the fallacies of liberal idealism – thereby joining the latter in the particular ideological division of labour through which the realist orthodoxy has for so long secured its place. The ‘realist’ response, when it comes, will presumably be as devastating for globalisation theory as it has always been for alternative approaches which have left untheorised the terrain of geopolitics where the intellectual counter-attack traditionally mobilises.
Finally, by embodying nonetheless the dominant site of convergence today between sociological thought and International Relations, globalisation theory constitutes the latest, and in some ways the most disruptive obstacle so far to the great desideratum of this field: a genuinely social theory of the international system. And that, as already suggested, is no longer (if it ever was) a matter of concern to international theorists alone. Despite its origins in sociology and its attention to international processes, globalisation theory thus does neither credit to the one nor justice to the other.
Any one of these problems on its own would tell against the wisdom of embracing such an approach as ‘the central thematic for social theory’. In combination, however, and when added to the obfuscatory role which the term plays in public debate, they surely warrant a more active and critical diagnosis. And that is what this book seeks to provide.
(i) Introduction
‘I hope that the pursuit of foolhardy ambitions has nevertheless yielded a provocative argument.’ So writes Jan Aart Scholte in the Preface to Globalization: a Critical Introduction. Yet Scholte is anything but foolhardy. Although we shall certainly suggest that his understanding of ‘supraterritoriality’ is highly problematic, we shall also see that it has the real intellectual merit of trying to pin down an argument about globalisation in a clear and precise way. More to the point, Scholte is in some respects the most sober of globalisation theorists. He asserts no instant, overall transformation of everything, but draws attention instead to the ‘intricate interplay’ between the new forces of globalisation and the persistence nonetheless of the old world which they may or may not be in the process of transforming. Vast quantities of data are assembled to document the reality of these forces – yet equally telling statistics are also presented which undercut their significance. Theoretical claims which might elsewhere be built up into far reaching arguments are here deliberately prevented from rising to their full height. Thus, ‘globalization has rendered methodological territorialism obsolete.. and.. requires us substantially to rethink social theory’. And yet this same globalisation ‘has thus far shown few signs of bringing an end to the predominance of capitalism in production, bureaucratism in governance, communitarianism in community, and rationalism in knowledge.’ Rarely does one see such bold theoretical arguments being subjected to such sweeping empirical qualification by their own author in the very process of their formulation.
And it is to this particular feature of his work that the title of this chapter in fact alludes. For like the ‘follies’ of those nineteenth century enthusiasts, whose architectural fancies still decorate the countryside, Scholte’s argument about globalisation is somehow necessarily built as a ruin. At any rate, his better judgment seems again and again to tell him that the walls, whatever their occasional altitude, must be left incomplete; the flagstones, to prevent misunderstanding, should be laid cracked and irregular. Even the tower of definition, which supports the other parts of the argument and lends the whole its distinctive form, partakes of the general tumbledown effect.
To view this folly in all its craggy magnificence, one need only turn to pages eight and nine of the book where the argument is laid out helpfully in the tabular form of eight propositions and six sub-propositions. ‘Buts’, ‘althoughs’ and other qualificatory signals mark the points at which the structure has been deliberately left open to the elements. Thus, globalisation is a ‘transformation’, but one which augments rather than displaces pre-existing social phenomena. It has come into its own ‘since the 1960s’ – although it ‘made earlier appearances’ before that. Today it appears unstoppable, but it need not go on that way, though the chances of it slowing down ‘seem remote at present’. And so on. Clearly, this is a labour not of foolhardiness, but rather of meticulous care.
Aesthetic convention allows that an architectural folly, well executed, can achieve a real artistic integrity in its deliberate incompleteness. But does the same hold intellectually? Can an intellectual argument be built in the same way and escape judgment? Can the arguments for globalisation theory consistently be built in any other way? These are the questions which we must address to Scholte’s folly.
And what we shall find is as follows. First, it is indeed necessary for the very definition of globalisation to manifest these folly-like characteristics. For unless that definition can identify something not already explained by other concepts, it can make no contribution of its own to the work of the social sciences. And yet the more it is driven, in pursuit of this, to differentiate itself analytically and refine itself into a purely spatial category, the smaller the empirical remit becomes of what it can claim to explain at all. And there appears to be no way out of this problem – for it is rooted in the prior conceptual inflation of space which is intrinsic to globalisation theory itself.
This definitional dilemma, however, is as nothing compared with the enormity and implausibility of the historical assumptions which become necessary if the impact of globalisation is to be represented on the scale desired by its advocates. In order for the contemporary proliferation of transnational relations to acquire decisive historical significance, it must be believed that their ‘transborder’ character transgresses some basic ordering principle of the international system as it previously existed. And this need, secondly, and paradoxically, leads the globalisation theorists to endorse as their own model of the past the traditional realist idea of the Westphalian System. That model indeed portrays a world of sovereign political units, asserting absolute, inviolable jurisdiction over bordered territorial spaces. Compared with that model, the transborder flows identified by globalisation theory do indeed look revolutionary, and their significance does seem to rest on their reflection of a specifically spatial development – which Scholte will call the rise of supraterritorial space.
Yet even here, the folly must re-assert itself, for there is a problem. The period in which these ‘Westphalian’ conditions are held to have obtained runs apparently from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It is therefore bisected by the emergence in England of industrial capitalism at the end of the eighteenth century. And that event had two consequences which condemn the historical definition of globalisation to the same endless equivocations which we shall see attending its analytical definition. On the one hand, it led, as we shall see, to a proliferation of highly significant supraterritorial relations – at the very chronological centre of the supposedly territorial Westphalian Era. And on the other hand, it was also associated with a transformation in the nature of politics, as a result of which these supraterritorial relations could and did go on expanding without, however, contradicting the territoriality of sovereignty at all, (however much they might at times have complicated the exercise of political power).
Neither of these two consequences is visible to the Westphalian model, which implies instead a continuity of territorially defined geopolitics across the period as a whole. Yet each has empirical implications which unavoidably complicate the claims of globalisation theory. The eruption of supraterritorial relations in a period where they were supposed not to exist compels Scholte to acknowledge that the forces of globalisation which have so transformed the world ‘since the 1960s’ somehow ‘made earlier appearances’ inside the very Westphalian System whose negation they would later be interpreted as representing. Meanwhile, the corresponding transformation of the nature of sovereignty – described by Marx as ‘the abstraction of the political state’ – arguably stands behind what Scholte can only report as an inexplicable empirical outcome: namely, that even present-day globalisation mysteriously fails to deliver the truly epochal effects which, viewed through the lens of Westphalia, it seems so obviously to entail.
Several times in his book, Scholte credits Marx with being ‘prescient’ for ‘anticipating’ the rise of globalisation. Marx, however, hardly needed to be prescient. The social relations which actually constitute the phenomena which so impress the globalisation theorists were already at work in the industrial revolution in England. And by the 1850s at the latest, Marx had forged a sociological explanation for them which, applied to the international system today, would render the follies of globalisation theory unnecessary.
(ii) A Definitional Achievement
We remarked in the Introduction to this volume that in order for the concept of globalisation to begin its work as an explanans, two principal conditions must be fulfilled. On the one hand, in order to grasp anything determinate at all, the concept must be defined in a non-circular manner, avoiding such formulations as: ‘globalization is the present process of becoming global’. On the other hand, in order to prevent the concept reverting immediately to an explanandum, the phenomenon which it is claimed to grasp must be a feature of reality not already explained by other, pre-existing concepts. And we further speculated that, given the spatial resonance of the term, globalisation theory would end by seeking its explanatory mechanism in specifically spatial phenomena. Finally, we noted that this in turn would logically require (though not necessarily receive) an underlying justification for the resultant, sudden elevation of space as a starting point for social explanation.
This is indeed the logical sequence followed by Scholte. And it leads to exactly the outcome just described. Recognising the need to clarify a very confused debate, he starts by rejecting circular definitions such as the one cited above, and then moves immediately on to provide a list of five possible meanings for the word ‘globalization’: internationalisation, liberalisation, universalisation, westernisation/ modernisation and deterritorialisation. ‘Globalisation’ has been used, he says, to describe each and all of these phenomena. Yet many of them are phenomena of long standing, which therefore do not warrant the introduction of a new term. More importantly, if globalisation were simply, say, liberalisation, then it would already have been explained as an effect of ‘’free’ trade’. (It would be an explanandum.) For this reason, and in short order, each of the first four possible meanings is declared ‘redundant’ as the basis of an adequate definition. Only the last – ‘deterritorialization’ – can provide that basis. For, according to Scholte, it alone identifies something which is historically new, which has a real causal significance that is irreducible to the others, and which therefore merits the use of a new term.
The argumentation has been a little shaky at certain points. The assumption that the concept must after all have a real world object to justify its explanatory status leans quite heavily at this stage on an argument from linguistic usage: ‘when new vocabulary gains currency, it is often because it captures an important change that is taking place in the world.’ True enough, although the same argument is later prevented from lending any equivalent support to the concept of sovereignty: ‘persistent rhetoric of sovereignty is quite different from continued viability of sovereignty.’ But never mind. We have arrived at first base: having delineated by a process of elimination the significant content of the term, a preliminary definition is now available: ‘globalization refers to a far-reaching change in the nature of social space.’
Now, in order for such a claim to acquire real explanatory power, the significance of space must next be raised to (or rediscovered at) a higher level in the apparatus of social explanation more generally. Only then would it follow that ‘a far-reaching change’ in the nature of space would necessarily have correspondingly ‘far-reaching significance’ for social reproduction as a whole. Once again, Scholte has understood this, for his next move is indeed an attempt to consolidate that wider claim about the role of space. How then does he proceed?
At this point it pays to remember that the building under construction here is a folly. Nothing else can explain the strange manner in which the very cornerstones of the argument are about to be laid. On the one hand, some kind of claim must now be made to support the argument which is to follow. On the other hand, Scholte is too cautious to grant the outright analytical priority to space which globalisation theory really needs. Thus, in the seven-sentence paragraph on page forty-six where the general case for space is asserted, bold assertion and heavy qualification alternate with each other, almost on a sentence by sentence basis. Space is ‘a core determinant of social life’ – a status which, however it shares with a series of other ‘primary dimensions’ which include ‘culture, economy, politics and psychology’. With all of these, indeed, it is ‘on a par’. Spatial phenomena ‘strongly influence’ these other dimensions – and yet the same applies ‘vice versa’. Halfway through the paragraph we seem to be headed for a straight geographical determinism, in which ‘differences between the lives of desert nomads, mountain villagers and island seafarers are largely attributable to contrasts in the places they inhabit’. This however is immediately qualified by a reassertion of the ‘mutually constitutive’ relationship between geographical and other ‘primary dimensions’. The final sentence is then left to render what positive account it can from the preceding transactions: ‘If the character of a society’s map changes, then its culture, ecology, economics, politics and social psychology are likely to shift as well.’
As cornerstones go, this is not a premise that looks likely to carry the weight of any particularly heavy explanatory claims. Fortunately, it will not have to. For he has already told us, with appropriate caution, that globalisation, however far-reaching its significance, has in fact not yielded any ‘deeper transformations’ of the other primary dimensions of social life. Thus guarded, it is therefore a perfectly reasonable statement. Where then does he take the argument next?
Leaving behind the question of the general significance of space, Scholte now offers to specify exactly what this change is in ‘the nature of social space’ which globalisation comprises. In a nutshell, globalisation has brought about the end of ‘territorialism’. Territorialism refers to a social geography in which all the relationships through which people are interconnected can be ‘mapped on the earth’s surface and measured on a three-dimensional grid of longitude, latitude and altitude.’ Under such conditions, there are no ‘places’ whose location cannot be identified on this grid (even if they are not stationary); every location is separated from every other location by an absolute distance (however minute its extent or the time required to cross it); and every tract of space can be separated off from those around it by a single line. Territorialism, indeed, ‘implies that macro social space is wholly organized’ in terms of spatial units governed by these three territorial laws of position, distance and separation – with the further consequence that any relations among or across these units, governed as they must be by the same laws, are therefore properly described as ‘interterritorial’. ‘Until recently,’ Scholte says, in a sudden, breathtaking reconnection of these observations with world history, ‘social geography across the world had a territorialist character.’ At this point, then, the possibility of dramatic explanatory significance, wavering uncertainly during the earlier general discussion of space, returns with a vengeance. This portion of the folly has been built up to its full height.
And we soon learn why. For using this construction, Scholte is now able to produce a definition of ‘global’ phenomena and relationships which is of quite unexampled precision. He invites us to consider the phenomena of ‘telephone calls, electronic finance and the depletion of the stratospheric ozone’. The first two of these make the really significant point because they are media of social interaction. And the point is this: all previous surges of ‘time-space compression’ reduced (via accelerated communication) the impact of the laws of location, distance and separation without finally overturning them. But for telephone or computer communications, territorial distance is not simply of reduced significance: it is effectively of no significance at all. They are therefore ‘supraterritorial’. And the ‘[t]ransworld simultaneity’ which they unprecedentedly allow means that (some) social relations can now operate outside the laws of territorial space. Following Manuel Castells, Scholte argues that a new ‘space of flows’ now opens out alongside the old ‘space of places’.
Still, why call these supraterritorial interactions ‘global’? The remarkable answer is that the term ‘global’ will now be used to mark a precise limit, rather than referring, as it so often does, to an indefinite expansiveness. The technologies which achieve effective simultaneity for social relations on planet Earth would be unable to do the same beyond it. ‘Time again becomes a significant factor in respect of radio signals when they have to cover interplanetary and longer distances.’ Thus ‘global’ relations are those which, strictly within the planetary space of the globe and its orbiting communications satellites, are no longer subject to the laws of position, distance and separation. And these, says Scholte, are historically unprecedented: ‘New terminology is unavoidable.’
One has to admire the definitional achievement here. Scholte has taken one of the wooliest terms in current academic and other parlance, and he has specified for it a content of surely unbeatable exactitude. In fact, it is so exact that Scholte himself will be forced to loosen it almost immediately in order to avoid the extreme technological determinism which it would otherwise prescribe. Still, it is ingenious nonetheless. And enormous interest must now attach to the question of which social relations have taken on these new properties, and with what effect.
Before embarking on his survey of global activities, Scholte reiterates the precision he has laboured so hard to establish. Globalisation, understood as the rise of supraterritoriality, ‘is not the same thing as internationalization, liberalization, universalization or modernization.’ Indeed, ‘almost invariably’, skepticism about globalisation derives precisely from the failure to distinguish it from these four other phenomena.
The reader is therefore in for a shock. For as the survey of global activities gets underway, the same definition which had appeared, in its formulation, to be demanding in the extreme, turns out, in its application, to be possessed of a veritable Midas touch. All manner of things now start to gleam with the appearance of 'globality’ – nuclear missiles, confederations of trades unions, even the Teletubbies children’s programme. Jet aeroplanes somehow make it onto the roster of ‘supraterritorial connections’. ‘[T]ens of thousands’ of multinational corporations turn out to have been ‘imprecisely named’ – they are ‘global companies’. Their productive activities somehow count as ‘supraterritorial’ even though all that appears to be at work is the outweighing of one territorial consideration – costs of transport and cross-border movement – by another: ‘[d]ifferences in local [sic] costs of labour, regulation and taxation’. International organisations, (such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and so on) are now ‘global organisations’ because they ‘extend across the planet’. (Only a page earlier, this characteristic would have qualified them as ‘universal’, but emphatically not as ‘global’.: ‘Universality says something about territorial extent, whereas globality says something about space-time relations’.) A multinational bank syndicate, lending US dollars to a borrower in the Dominican Republic is in fact making a ‘global bank loan’ in a ‘global currency’. And this is despite the fact that money (of all things) would now struggle to meet the earlier definition of ‘supraterritoriality’. For the strongest claim Scholte is now prepared to make for money is that it ‘has become considerably (though of course not completely) detached from territorial space.’ Indeed, so capacious does the argument now become that it will admit anything which can show ‘an at least partly global character’. And sundry forms of environmental problem make it into this category on the grounds that ‘none of them can be territorially contained’.
Thus, one by one, the four additional meanings of globalisation, earlier discarded as ‘redundant’, are now allowed back into the concept. And one can understand why. After all, just how many phenomena – apart from telecommunications – could really satisfy that earlier definition in all its rigour? And even for those telecommunications, how much causality could really be squeezed out of the simple fact of their ‘globality’ – without reference, that is, to the (non-spatially defined) social character of the activities themselves which human beings were using these new media to pursue? And what would then become of the overall claim that globalisation itself, defined strictly as deterritorialisation, is of ‘far-reaching’ real-world significance? Analytical precision or real empirical weight – that was the choice that had to be made. And with 267 pages of the book still to go, who could blame any author for choosing empirical weight? This portion of the building, central as it is, must definitely be left open to the elements.
Yet what determinate claims can be made for globalisation, now that its meaning has loosened again? And how are they to be framed? The answer is that large historical claims are nonetheless about to be made. And they will be framed above all with implicit reference to the subject matter and the intellectual procedures of the academic discipline of International Relations.
(iii) When was the Westphalian System?
The subject matter of International Relations, as we have earlier noted, is an unavoidable destination for globalisation theory: for this discipline necessarily takes the world system as a whole for its object of empirical and theoretical investigation. How successfully it has discharged this distinctive vocation is debatable. The point is simply that it lies in the path of globalisation theory, and the latter cannot help bouncing off it at some point. In Scholte’s case, the encounter is generally more implicit than explicit, perhaps because he is part of a (not inconsiderable) traffic moving in the other direction. ‘As a sign of these times,’ he says, ‘I started this book while attached to an International Relations faculty and completed it in a Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation.’ The encounter is there nonetheless. What form does it take?
In an earlier published version of this chapter, the theoretical engagement with IR was more explicit. There he argued openly that globalisation ‘calls into question the adequacy’ of both IR and comparative politics as forms of social analysis. Territorialist assumptions were, he suggested, ‘[i]nherent in the concept of ‘inter-national’’. And the impact of globalisation gave ‘ample cause for a paradigm shift in social analysis’ towards what he called a ‘world system methodology’. By this he did not mean an embrace of the World Systems Theory approach associated with Immanuel Wallerstein – an approach which he charged with having ‘supplanted one type of territorialism with another’. Rather he meant that analysis should proceed by conceiving reality as an ‘interrelation of spaces’, themselves seen as ‘interconnected dimensions of ‘world’ space’, but with no assumption made in advance about the analytical priority of ‘any particular spatial framework’. And in this context, dropping the word ‘international’ in favour of ‘‘world’ would reflect a full-scale methodological reorientation’.
In the book version, references to the discipline of IR have mostly been removed. However, the historical claims about the nature of the international itself have been preserved almost untouched. And in line with just about every other critical engagement of globalisation theory with IR, they centre on that great bugbear of international theory: the Westphalian System.
The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 marked the formal end of the Thirty Years’ War, and with it the end too of the wars of religion which followed the Protestant Reformation. By asserting the prerogatives of the German princes against the Holy Roman Emperor, and of secular rulers in general against the interference of the Catholic Church, it registered a heavy decline of the hierarchical and ‘transnational’ principles which had been central to the medieval geopolitical organisation of Christendom. And it held its place as the major overall legal codification and territorial settlement of European geopolitics for the century and a half leading up to the wars of the French Revolution and the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
For international theory, however, (and to some extent in the fields of international law and political theory too) its iconic significance extends far beyond any historical term in which its detailed and highly complicated legal and territorial provisions might have continued to apply. Looking back from the twentieth century world of bordered, sovereign states, Westphalia appears instead as a turning point in world history: the point at which sovereignty (however embryonically conceived or unevenly implemented) began visibly to be consolidated as the organisational principle of a European states-system which would later expand across the planet. Viewed in this light, the Peace of Westphalia reappears as the originary dispensation of geopolitical modernity itself. And the present-day international system, composed as it still legally is of sovereign, independent states, is therefore often referred to as ‘the Westphalian System’.
This nomenclature has been sharply contested – both by those who argue that medieval practices lived on after and in spite of Westphalia, and by those who argue that its early modern conception of sovereignty differs fundamentally from the later, capitalist form which characterises the world of today. By contrast, some of the strongest attachments in IR theory to this idea of a Westphalian System have been formed on the one hand by ‘traditional’ thinkers (for whom sovereignty in the broadest sense of ‘constitutional separateness’ remains the most significant fact about international relations) and on the other hand… by globalisation theorists.
For example, in an article entitled ‘Globalization and the End of the Old Order’, David Held and Anthony McGrew identify the cross-cutting, overlapping territorialities of globalisation as ‘a unique challenge to a world order designed in accordance with the Westphalian principle of sovereign, exclusive rule over a bounded territory’. They claim that this challenge is already promoting ‘the emergence of a post-Westphalian world order’. And (in a formulation which expresses just how much of the international itself they believe would change with the passing of its Westphalian form) they assert their conviction that ‘through a process of progressive, incremental change, geo-political forces will come to be socialized into democratic agencies and practices’. In Global Transformations, Held and his co-authors go on to set out in seven-point detail the ‘model of Westphalia’ which will serve as the benchmark against which the transformations wrought by globalisation are to be measured. And they do this in the belief not that the historical Peace of Westphalia itself definitively established these norms of geopolitical regulation, but rather that what is conventionally called ‘the Westphalian System’ did in fact govern the nature of international relations until the new forces of globalisation began their work of dramatic transformation.
And so it is with Scholte too. Although the ‘folly’ will not extend with quite such confidence into the future, he appears to buy fully into the same historical assumptions which Held et al, in the company of ‘traditional’ IR theory, are willing to concede about the past. ‘After all,’ he says, ‘the Westphalian states-system that arose in the seventeenth century and spread worldwide by the middle of the twentieth century was quintessentially territorial.’ So much so, in fact, that so long as the Westphalian System obtained, ‘methodological territorialism’ itself, the greatest obstacle to understanding the world today, ‘offered a broadly viable intellectual shortcut’ for social enquiry. The point is rounded out into the wider argument about knowledge and society which it entails – and which links up in turn with the claims made earlier for the significance of linguistic usage. Pre-Westphalian thought was nonterritorialist because social life was not organised territorially: consequently, ‘no scholarly research [sic] undertaken a thousand years ago made reference to bounded territorial spaces’. During the Westphalian era, methodological territorialism was intellectually reasonable because it genuinely ‘reflected the social conditions of a particular epoch’. It is only now, after the erosion of these conditions by globalisation in the second half of the twentieth century, that it becomes necessary for us ‘to develop an alternative, nonterritorialist cartography of social life’.
Yet is this really plausible? The notion that there existed, up until the mid-twentieth century, an international system which was ‘quintessentially territorial’ is a very debatable one indeed – and that on both empirical and theoretical grounds.
Consider, for example, Gallagher and Robinson’s famous article of 1953, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’. The entire force of their argument there was devoted to explaining why the British Empire, from at least the early nineteenth century onwards, could not even be fully seen, let alone understood, using what Scholte defines as a territorialist method. ‘[I]t would clearly be unreal,’ they wrote, ‘to define imperial history exclusively as the history of those colonies coloured red on the map.’ Such a procedure would be equivalent to ‘judging the size and character of icebergs solely from the parts above the water-line.’ For already, they claimed, a new kind of international power was at work – ‘informal empire’ – which did not show up on any political map. Argentina, for example, was effectively integrated into the political economy of British capitalism by means which no territorial description could reveal. Indeed, in their account, not only was this non-territorial empire probably of greater material weight in Britain’s international power than was its colonial counterpart, which so dazzled contemporaries by its vast territorial extent; but also, with the exception of a few key sites such as India and South Africa, the conscious preference of successive British governments was more or less consistently for non-territorial over territorial forms of expansion: ‘British policy followed the principle of extending control informally if possible and formally if necessary.’
A very similar argument was later made by Gareth Stedman Jones (though hardly by him alone) about the nature of US overseas expansion. ‘The invisibility of American imperialism,’ he wrote, was above all attributable to ‘its non-territorial character’ – reinforced secondarily by its consequent ability to find legitimation through ‘a formally anti-imperialist ideology’.
Yet how far do these phenomena match the supraterritorial quality of globalisation? To find out, let us return to the British case and measure its earliest material sinew – King Cotton – against the territorialist laws of position, distance and separation. How would we identify the territorial location of the early nineteenth century cotton industry? We could certainly point to the African source of the labour force which was transported to the American South where the raw material was cultivated. We could look at the distribution and sale of the finished product in European countries and – increasingly importantly – in India and beyond. Or of course we could look at the Lancashire factories themselves where the cotton goods were produced by the growing army of wage-labourers drawn from the surrounding English countryside. But if territorialism refers to forms of social organisation which can be positioned on a map, and if, as Scholte insists, ‘the mercantile and industrial activity that dominated capitalism during this period operated almost exclusively in territorial space’, then the problem should be obvious: where on the map are we to position King Cotton? We cannot simply choose one place – say, Lancashire – for then we would not be seeing the social organisation as a whole. Yet nor can we really get round the problem by simply allowing that it occupied a number of separate sites – requiring only that we point to four or five places instead of one. For none of these would have existed without the others.
To come to the point, the reality of the early nineteenth century cotton industry cannot be described without identifying the way it related all these distant places to each other organically in a single division of labour. Its real (and in fact its only) existence lay in the social and ecological relations by which millions of human lives were interconnected both within these different places and across the vast distances which (territorially) separated them. There is no way of representing those relations as places on a map. If we wanted to give a spatial account of them, then we would have to refer instead to what Donald Lowe called ‘the new space of political economy’ which emerged towards the end of the eighteenth century – a space defined not by territory but by (inter)relations of production and exchange. And the distance-transcending character of this new space rested not on speed of communication, but rather on the peculiar social properties taken on by human interactions when mediated by the ‘exchange-value’ of things.
Yet if industrial capitalism generated supraterritoriality in this sense from the start, what about those other two of the latter’s defining features, ‘transworld simultaneity’ and the quality strictly defined as ‘transborder’? As to the first of these, we must again shake off the implicit reduction of this phenomenon to a mere function of speed of communication. For, causally speaking, the activity of the Lancashire factories was at every moment premised upon the continuing, simultaneous existence of the American (and other) plantations, and vice versa, irrespective of how long it might have taken for cargo vessels to cross the Atlantic. Indeed, for this reason, Marx – in a metaphor which surely expresses nothing if not wonder at the ‘transworld simultaneity’ which he was describing – argued that New World slavery had become the ‘pedastal’ for capitalist development in England, several thousand miles away. And as to the ‘transborder’ element of global relations, it is clear enough that political borders neither figure in ‘the new space of political economy’, nor did they place any ‘insurmountable constraints’ on the operations of King Cotton. In any case, Scholte himself comes (consistently enough) to the conclusion that this third element does not enjoy quite the same definitional standing as the other two. For he points out that many ‘intranational’ activities also ‘manifest supraterritorial qualities’, and therefore merit the designation ‘global’ even if they cross no borders.
From all this, we may perhaps draw the following preliminary conclusion. Sir Richard Arkwright, cotton-spinner extraordinaire, did not, it is true, invent the communications satellite. But then, the communications satellite, it now appears, did not invent supraterritorial space. We have some empirical grounds for supposing that supraterritoriality is not something which has happened to capitalism as the result of late twentieth century technological advances. It seems rather to be something intrinsic to capitalist social relations themselves. Would it be too much then to suggest that it is rather these social relations which ultimately lie behind the emergence of the commuciations satellite?
There is, however, a larger, more theoretical point to be drawn out here. On the wilder shores of globalisation theory, these supraterritorial properties and tendencies of capitalism have been taken to point to the ultimate crisis of the nation-state and the states-system. It is an old theme. ‘I believe,’ declared Richard Cobden, speaking for free trade in 1846, ‘that if we could be allowed to reappear on this sublunary scene, we should see, at a far distant period, the governing system of this world revert to something like the municipal system.’ This is not Scholte’s way. For him, globalisation ‘shows no sign of erasing the state’. And this is not simply because, having ‘unfolded mainly since the 1960s’, it needs more time to work its full effects. On the contrary, careful as ever, he has already earlier told us that globalisation, despite being defined as the rise of supraterritorial space, is nonetheless ‘not antithetical to territoriality…’ However, it has ‘transcended the territorialist geography that sovereignty presupposes’, and as a result it has ‘brought the end of sovereignty’. And as we saw earlier, this is not a small thing: 300 years of the ‘Westphalian System’ are now over. This is broadly Held’s position also, as well as that of other ‘transformationalists’ in the globalisation debate. We cannot therefore ascribe its apparent equivocations simply to indecisiveness in the mind of an individual author. How then should we explain it? More particularly, can we develop the preceding points about capitalism to explain why this apparent confusion arises as a necessary feature of the folly?
To see how this might be possible, it helps to recall that for Marx the phenomenon of the English cotton industry represented far more than the simple application, however unprecedented, of new technologies to the process of production. Nor could it be understood simply as the rise of an especially effective (or exploitative) mode of surplus appropriation and accumulation, newly released from previously existing social and political restraints. It was both of these things, to be sure. But they in turn were premised upon a deeper, wider and longer-term social transformation which only now, in the new industries, was starting to reveal the scale of its historical potential.
In what was perhaps the most pregnant of his many attempts to formulate clearly the overall nature of this transformation, Marx suggested that the new form of society which it produced could be distinguished from all previous ones in the most fundamental terms: the very ‘forms of social connectedness’ through which people related to each other, and through which society itself was daily reproduced, had undergone a truly basic shift. The historical norm had been for human societies to be organised and reproduced via ‘relations of personal dependence’ of one kind or another (benign or otherwise) such as kinship, tribute or even slavery. The Manchester cotton workers, however, whatever the wretchedness of their condition, were tied to each other, to their employers and to their society at large by a quite different form of social connectedness: ‘personal independence based on dependence mediated by things’.
The enormous role of American slavery in the rise of King Cotton bears ample witness to the historically, geographically and socially uneven nature of the process of transformation which Marx believed himself to have identified. But he was surely right to hold that in some essential way the future lay more with the generalising of the wage-labour relations emerging in its metropolitan heartlands than with the brutally intensified ‘relations of personal dependence’ generated at its geographical periphery. At any rate, he devoted by far the greater part of his intellectual effort to drawing out the sociological implications of this new form of human sociation. It was an effort increasingly dominated by a critical engagement with what he took to be the most important – even generative – dimension of this new world: its political economy. But we do well to remember the wider thrust of Marx’s argument – that capitalism involves an historical transformation of what Sayer neatly coins ‘the elementary forms of social life’: for this wider thrust also contains, alongside ‘the economics’, an argument about the sovereign form of the modern state which reveals how the endless perplexity of the issue of sovereignty for globalisation theory may derive ultimately from the insolubly problematic way in which the category of ‘the political’ is produced in this modern form of society.
Whatever else it is, capitalism is, like feudalism, a mode of surplus appropriation. And if we want to get to Marx’s analysis of sovereignty, we do have to start with this point. For the Marx claimed that the ambiguities of sovereignty are rooted in the historically peculiar form that surplus appropriation takes in a capitalist society. And what he thought was peculiar to this form was its organisation via contractual relations of exchange (most importantly of labour-power for wages) among formally legal equals. This was the expression, in the sphere of material relations, of personal independence based on dependence mediated by things. So long as sufficient numbers of people, having no alternative means of subsistence, are compelled by circumstances to sell their labour-power; and so long as those who purchase it are able to employ it profitably, meaning that the product (which they own) embodies a surplus (realised through its sale) over and above the costs which they have invested in its production – so long as these conditions apply, the specifically capitalist form of surplus appropriation is being accomplished. Marx’s analysis of capital reaches much deeper than this; and at those deeper levels – where the sociological theory of value is set out – his arguments remain hotly contested and widely rejected. Yet none of those contestations and rejections actually touches the simple descriptive points just made. And those points are already enough to establish the crucial contrast with all societies in which surplus appropriation is organised instead via ‘relations of personal dependence’. For in all those other cases, whether the rights of differential appropriation attached to locations in a kinship structure (father, wife, cousin, eldest son) or to positions in a ‘politically’ defined hierarchy (king, lord, serf) or (as was surely always the case) to some combinations of both of these with yet other forms of social differentiation – in all these cases, those rights and their exercise were always, according to Marx, ‘directly social’. That is to say, material claims upon others as individuals were organised and exercised via the explicitly differential social identities with which (for the purposes of social interaction) those individuals were merged.
This may appear at first sight to be an enormous generalisation. Yet for Marx it was an assertion not of some homogeneity of the precapitalist world (which was of course almost endlessly various) but rather of the singularity, within any wider historical review, of the modern capitalist form of society. For ‘directly social’ is the one thing that capitalist relations of production are clearly not. Here, material claims on others are exercised instead via ‘private’ ownership of the commodities (labour-power and money) which are exchanged and consumed. The dependence remains real enough, but it is mediated by (the exchange of) ‘things’. It has radically changed its form. And Marx believed that this was the key to an equally radical change in the very meaning of ‘the political’.
For so long as a society is organised via a ‘directly social’ differentiation of identities (i.e. via ‘relations of personal dependence’) the definitions of kinship, property and so on must themselves remain ‘directly political’. Consequently, Marx argued, there is in these cases ‘as yet no political constitution as distinct from the actual material state or the other content of the life of the nation’. And it was on the basis of this that he concluded, in 1843, that ‘[t]he abstraction of the political state is a modern product.’ By this he meant that the institutional differentiation of ‘the political’ itself, without which the modern idea of the sovereign state was unthinkable, required nothing less than ‘the dissolution of the old society,’ the abolition indeed of ‘the political character of civil society’. Or to put it the other way round, the reorganisation of social life around relations of contractual equality, which uniquely dissolves the traditional dependence of social orders upon legal and political inequality, has this consequence for the reconstitution of ‘the political’ as a dimension of social life:
It set free the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned and dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts of the political spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established it as the sphere of the community, the general concern of the nation, ideally independent of those particular elements of civil life.
Marx’s language here might seem to endorse a notion of modern politics as actually separate, a self-sufficient sphere comprehensible in its own terms, independently of the character of the society over which it presided. That, of course, was the last thing on his mind. For just as the royal hierarchies and Estates system of the Middle Ages were the ‘political’ embodiment and sanction of the ‘relations of personal dependence’ characterising that social order, so the same applies today: the abstract, sovereign form of the modern state which constitutes its citizens as legal and political equals, is the political embodiment and sanction of the new type of social connectedness characterising capitalism as an historical kind of society: personal independence based on dependence mediated by things.
But if this is what has happened, if the rise of modern sovereignty involved not just the growth of a centralised political apparatus but also, and more crucially, the abstraction of the political itself from its erstwhile role in constituting the ‘directly social’ relations of precapitalist societies, then the real question surely becomes: why should we expect that the transborder extension of any of the (correspondingly depoliticised) social relations of the new ‘civil society’ would undermine the sovereign form of the state? Would we not rather conclude the opposite: namely that here is an historical form of society in which uniquely it becomes possible even for relations of production to extend across political borders precisely without affecting the (sovereign) territoriality of the states involved?
If so, then understanding either the domestic or the international relations of the nineteenth century (let alone those of today) would certainly require a different model from that provided by the Westphalian system. To visualise aright our earlier example of the cotton industry, we would perhaps use a concept such as ‘social formation’ which is not defined in terms of the spaces of national states alone, and which could therefore embrace the actual transnational reach of the interrelations as a geographical whole. But this revisualising would not be purchased at the expense of a geopolitical analysis. For rather than assuming that the importance of transborder connections had dissolved the international moment of the process, we would have to examine how the states whose territories were traversed by these relations were drawn into closer interrelation and conflict by them. and this is exactly the model long ago formulated by Nicos Poulantzas:
The social formation, which is the nodal point of the expanded reproduction of social relations, tends to intersect the boundaries of the nation-State; and that uneven development which has marked capitalism since its beginnings tends to root itself in, and bring into interrelationship, the nation-States themselves.
Theoretically speaking, has globalisation theory really added anything at all to this formulation? Or has it simply generated a whole new set of confusions due to the Procrustean historical periodisation which its obsession with space has compelled it to adopt? For that is surely how its uncritical endorsement of the idea of the Westphalian System must now strike us.
Be that as it may, we now have enough material to make an initial application of the general hypothesis proposed towards the end of the last chapter. There we suggested that the embrace of ‘globalisation’ as a sociological explanans must generate insoluble intellectual difficulties. Specifically, it would require a conceptual inflation of ‘space’ which could neither be grounded in a plausible alternative ‘spatial problematic’ for social theory, nor prevented from reifying the very social phenomena which it was attempting to explain. And this, we hypothesised, would either imprison its exposition in intellectual equivocation from the start, or lead to a tacit withdrawal of its central claims by the end.
In Scholte’s case, the first of these outcomes is so marked that in a writer less committed to clear expression the intensity of equivocation might even have disguised the source of the problem itself. Yet so determined is he to impose an analytical precision on the concept of globalisation that the basic difficulty with which he wrestles remains visible at each step of the process. The initial need to find a distinctive meaning for the concept drives him to isolate its spatial content, under the heading of ‘supraterritoriality’. Once this dimension has been isolated, claims for its transformative impact on the real world become dependent on a conceptual inflation of space into a ‘core determinant of social life’ for which, however, only a half-hearted argument can plausibly be made. The brief and equivocal attempt to consolidate theoretically this inflated explanatory role for ‘space’ gives way almost immediately to an uncontrolled relaxation of the definition of ‘global’. And from that point on, any independent explanatory significance which the latter term intermittently displays is in fact dependent on an implicit reification of space: the impact of particular kinds of social relationship on the spatial organisation of societies is instead imputed to the social impact of the geographical laws of location, distance and separation – and their transcendence via increased speed of communication and transport.
The upshot of all this at the level of international theory is an endorsement of the currently fashionable idea that world politics is undergoing a transition to a post-sovereign, post-Westphalian system. Three points may perhaps now be made in conclusion about what a peculiar destination this actually is.
First, in order to argue that globalisation is a new process with radically transformative implications for the international system, it clearly helps to have a model of the past in which the inscription of that process in the very constitution of modern international relations has been rendered invisible. Such a model is indeed provided by the ‘realist’ conception of the Westphalian System, the whole force of which is to produce a definition of the international in terms of geopolitical norms of interaction between states without reference to the ‘domestic’ level of society, where the transnational relations operate. The ironic consequence of this is that globalisation theory, which prides itself on its intellectual transcendence of ‘methodological territorialism’ is compelled by the claims it wishes to make about the present, to buy into a quite unsustainably ‘territorialist’ reading of the past.
But this is only the beginning. For secondly, the penalty of this suppression of the standing of transnational relations in the past must necessarily be a misrecognition of their significance in the historical present.
If we work with Marx’s historical sociological definition of sovereignty, and the conception of the international system which Poulantzas drew out of it, then we would expect a proliferation of transnational relations from the start; we would expect these to grow very dramatically with the rapid material development and geographical spread of capitalism itself; and we would expect the temporally and spatially uneven rhythm of this historical process to generate periodic crises and adjustments in the politics and organisation of the sovereign states system itself, through which this process is collectively, if anarchically, managed. And this incidentally might help us to understand the events of imperialism, world wars, revolutions and the Cold War which have formed such a prominent feature of modern international history, and yet which do not significantly figure in Scholte’s global worldview. What we would not expect, however, is that the simple quantitative increase of these transnational relations, however far it extended, would necessarily signal an incipient transformation of the basic character of the international system itself. For as Poulantzas went on to say, perhaps a little formulaically, ‘[t]hese frontiers… become established as frontiers of the national territory only from the moment when capital and commodities are in a position to break through them.’
If on the other hand we really believed that the ‘Westphalian model’ once (say, before 1900) accurately described an international system which was ‘quintessentially territorial’, then of course we would find the ‘global’ statistics of the present day little short of mind-blowing. Nine hundred million telephone lines, two billion radio sets, four hundred and fifty trillion dollars in yearly foreign-exchange turnover, forty-four and a half thousand ‘transborder’ companies: ‘such a large accumulation of data,’ says Scholte after reeling off a list of sixteen such items, ‘surely suggests a significant trend away from territorialist social organization’. To which one can only respond by asking: why, if the data speak so clearly, do the conclusions of Scholte’s own work remain so stubbornly equivocal?
Perhaps though, thirdly, we already have the answer to this question. If he believes the Westphalian myth, he cannot fail to be impressed by the statistics. Yet if the Westphalian myth is as misleading as the arguments from Marx and Poulantzas suggest, then those statistics simply will not stack up to produce in the real world the kind of transformation they might seem at first to imply. Scholte’s own interpretation of this conundrum appears to waver between a quantitative interpretation – ‘much more globalization’ is needed to make territorial space finally irrelevant – and a theoretical qualification: ‘globalization is not antithetical to territoriality’. But we now have an alternative explanation for why he should find that ‘the rise of supraterritoriality shows no sign of producing an end to territoriality.’ If it is correct it would certainly confirm the wisdom of leaving the building of the argument necessarily unfinished. It would provide an answer to the riddle of Scholte’s folly.
Does all this mean that a spatio-temporal analysis is of no account for understanding the modern international system? Surely not. David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity provides one example of such an analysis which not only identifies the historical specificity of the modern capitalist form of space and time, but also, and more specifically, explores the role which bursts of time-space compression have played in the successive geographical reconfigurations of capitalism as a world system which have accompanied its intermittent crises.
Perhaps the most arresting example, however, is that of Poulantzas himself. In State, Power, Socialism he devoted a highly suggestive discussion to a comparative analysis of different ‘mechanisms of organising social space’. Poulantzas was insistent that ‘the historical changes they undergo are not variations on an intrinsic nature, for these mechanisms have no such nature’. Nonetheless, this did not prevent him from attributing considerable explanatory significance to different historical constructions of spatiality. In the case of the capitalist construction, he not only identified the general characteristics we have cited above, but went on to specify political phenomena which, he believed, could not be explained without reference to this new social construction of space. ‘Genocide,’ he argued, ‘is… a modern invention bound up with the spatialisation peculiar to nation states’ – a point he extended into a spatial analysis of ‘the roots of totalitarianism’.
But the difference should be clear. Although he chastised his fellow Marxists for assigning only ‘a marginal role’ to ‘transformations of space and time’, this did not point to a need for an alternative, spatio-temporal problematic for social theory. The spatial tendencies of different modes of production were indeed a crucial part of their very definition. But explanans and explanandum remained firmly in their traditional places: ‘In whichever way we approach the problem of space, we become aware that space matrices vary with the mode of production and that they are themselves presupposed by the forms of historico-social appropriation and consumption of space.’