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Globalization
A contested phenomenon
Political, economic, social, cultural,
historical dimensions
Historical background
• The Roman empire
• The Middle Ages
• Pre-WWI period
In search of a consensus
• Idealist approach: identity, ideology,
invention as some of the chief causes
• Resulting theories: social constructivism,
postmodernism, postcolonialism
Still searching
• Materialist approach: production,
technology, laws, institutions
• Theories: liberalism, political realism,
social ecology
Further methodological approaches
• Individualist vs structuralist understanding
of globalization
• Social actors (businesspeople,officials,
politicians) decisive?
• Social forces/social order (capitalism, state
systems, nationalism) decisive?
Knowledge
• Objectivist position: (politically) neutral
knowledge
• Subjectivist position: knowledge
emanating from the experience of the
researcher
• Scholte attempts to reach a compromise in
all of the above cases
Analytical Framework
• These preliminary reflections provide a
necessary set of starting premises leading
to a series of attempts at defining
globalization
Definitions
• Circulation of people, goods, capital, ideas
• Accepting the vagueness of the concept?
(Failed) attempts at defining
globalization:
Internationalization
- mainly transactions between states
- border-crossing activities: global same as
international? Continuity?
Liberalization
• - removing constraints; abolishing
regulatory movements;
• Critics: increasing poverty, inequality,
ecological damage;
• - anti-globalization movement opposing
neoliberalism
Universalization
• - spreading products, experiences, ideas,
values round the world
• Resulting in standardization,
homogenization
• - earlier instances? ”global prehistory”;
world religions; transoceanic trade
Westernization
• Universalization on Western terms:
interpreted as colonization,
Americanization
• Modernization
• Counter-examples:
Buddhist/Confucian/Islamist globalizations
A fifth attempt
• Globalization referring to a ”shift in the
nature of social space”
• Globalization as ”growing transplanetary
connectivity”
New features
• Transplanetary connectivity leading to
supraterritoriality (transnational instead of
international dimension)
• ”transworld simultaneity/instantaneity”
(3000 cups of Nescafé supposedly being
drunk round the planet every second)
• Reconfiguration of space
The changing nature of
territorialism
• Methodological territorialism: economics,
politics, literature being perceived in terms
of national-territorial frameworks
• Non-territorialist premises
• Post-territorialist premises
Examples of globality
• Fields
• Activities
• Inadvertent effects
Opposites coexisting
• Territorial social space not excluding
supraterritorial social space
• The local not excluding the global (and the
other way round)
• Social space: ”an interrelation of spheres
within a whole”.
Multiple globalizations
• Competing (political) interests and values
• Understanding globalization ”as a
respatialization of social life”