Globalization

We live in a world where the economic and technological imperatives of mega-corporations, which have recently been given special sanction by transnational treaties such as NAFTA and GATT, are increasingly confronting the obsolescence and impotence of the cultural and political structures built up during the past millennium by citizens under the city-states, which in legal theory govern the global order. In the months and years ahead we are going to be hearing a lot more about the conflicts between the "right" of the "global gladiators" to engage in free trade and the free flow of information, and the ancient democratic powers and aspirations of the global peoples.

"Globalization" is the new metaphor around which this stupendous set of conflicts will be worked out. What will be its guiding purpose? Will citizens of the city-state be relegated to the status of abstractions, as the new global power elites cut their deals restructuring the new civilization in secret to serve their narrow self-interests?

Much of what "globalization" purports to explain was called "interdependence" in the 1970s, and was discounted then by people who said it was nothing new. More helpfully, people noted that interdependence was a condition not a force. It was not something that policymakers could or should encourage, and it had little explanatory value. The same comments apply to globalization. It is not new, some of the phenomena might have had even more dramatic impacts in the past and it is better called "internationalization" because the phenomena of interest rarely operate at planetary scale--but the phenomena do exist. And we do not call it interdependence any more because of the perception that recent changes in transportation and communication have made possible a pace and level of integration qualitatively different than what went before, even if the changes in any one part of the package seem only incremental. Firms and states and yet other organizational entities are responding to these structural changes. Small increments can lead to major transformations.

The increasingly critical claim being made my many theorists of globalization, that we are witnessing the end of the nation state and the evolution of a new world system which is no longer based on relations between sovereign states.

There are two related areas of concern. In the first place, if there is truth in the claims of these theories of globalization, then the discipline of International Relations with its distinctive claims and its contribution to the social sciences would be open to question: the separation of the pacifying sovereignty of the state domestically and the compulsive logic of anarchy externally could no longer be sustained. Second, if these theories of globalization are wrong or need qualification to the extent that in one way or another the sovereign state can be upheld as intrinsic to international relations, the implications are equally profound: the normative qualifications of sovereignty and intervention contained in this contested debate, would represent a step backwards - to a world order of imperial empires and colonies replete with inequalities but informed by an interventionist moral imperative - what I am preferring to refer to as a new imperialism.

In this sense, the ill-defined, mainly descriptive character of much of the globalization discussion. While it is the case that many of these theories of globalization offer important insights into how the contemporary world has changed, they contain a number of related problems. These can be summarised as follows:

1) Despite the fact that these theories claim to be dealing with important changes at the global level, they fail to account for change itself. Causality and significance are never explicitly discussed and remain unresolved in descriptions of newly discovered areas of interactions. A proliferation of levels, '-scapes' or meanings, on their own, tell us very little and serve instead to mystify rather than clarify these phenomena. As a result, the complex relationship between change and continuity is obscured. Change can be interpreted equally well as representing the erosion of sovereignty and the disintegration of states or as states adjusting to new environments, depending upon the viewpoint of the investigator;

2) The concentration upon globalization as the form in terms of which the world is 'united' introduces a real confusion concerning the content of sovereignty and the critical question of the role of the state itself. The counterposing of new transnational and social processes to the state which is often presented as proof of how the state has been overtaken or marginalised, makes it extremely difficult to establish what the relationship between the two actually is. The privileging of form above content introduces an implicit teleology, which ironically relies more upon a realist conception of sovereignty, rather than empirical evidence, to validate the claims made.

3) The concentration upon form in the absence of any theory of change finally obscures the critical question of the power relations underlying the phenomena these theories enumerate but fail to explain. Globalization is presented as a process with multiple causes and influences from various localities. It is held that the roots of some events are so complex that their causes are unlikely to be known. In this respect, 'globalization' becomes a kind of chaos theory for the social sciences: causation exists; but since it may consist of so many elements, conscious and unconscious, the outcomes are likely to be unintentional. As a result, the relationship between cause and effect, significance and triviality, remain shrouded in the wonderful world of information technologies or the frightening nether world of global environmental risk and chaos. Yet, despite the contingent character of the phenomena seized upon by these theorists, even a cursory glance at the contemporary world reveals that the process under discussion is reproducing the structural inequalities of international society. At the very least, this needs serious investigation and more importantly, its relationship to 'globalization' needs elaboration.