chun allen globalization critical issues

7/28/2019 Chun Allen Globalization Critical Issues

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CRITICAL INTERVENTIONSA Forum for Social AnalysisGenera Edi tor. Bruce Kapferer

Short and succinct, the essays presented in these volumes excitedebate on issuesof global moment that impact oneveryday livesindiverse regional areas and expose readers to information that isnotwdely available in the media.GLOBALIZATIONCritical IssuesEd ited byAllen ChunThe effectsof globalization have led to accentuated social inequalityinmost first-world countries, aboveall the US and UK . Internationaltradeand cap ital flows have tended toredlstribste income inways thataggravate inequality in advanced industrializednationswhere relativeincome levelsof the sa laried middle cl ass and theworking class arebeing eroded, resulting in adownward moblity of these classes. Atthesame time , unwaged forms of labor, including forced labor and slavery,in poorer reg ions more and mo re replace wage labor in developedco untries.Informed by an anthropological, humanistic perspective, thecontributorsin thisprovocative volume offer crtical analyses and alternative visonsContributors :AlenChun,WlliamH. Thornton, Chuang Ya-chung. Wa ng Horng-Iuen, ChuYuWai, JonathanFriedman , TerenceTurner.

"NAI o::::I

Critical Issues


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Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social AnalysisGeneral Editor: Bruce Kapfererl.blume 1THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND GLOBALCRISISCritical PerspectivesEdited by Bruce KapfererVolrune:?GLOBALIZATIONCritical IssuesEdited by Allen ChanVolwne 3CORPORATESCANDALGlobal Corporatism against SocietyEdited by John GledhillVolwne 4EXPERT KNOWLEDGEFirst World Peoples, Consultancy, and AnthropologyEdited by Bany Morris and Rohan BastinVolwne 5STATE, SOVEREIGNTY, WARCivil Violence in Emerging Global RealitiesEdited by Bruce Kapferer

GlobalizationCritical Issues~Edited byAllen Chun

~ergh",", Books


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Paperback edition published in 2004byBerghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com10 2004Berghahn Books

All rights reserved.Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in anyform or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval systemnow known or to be invented, without written permission of thepublisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataAC.I.P. catalogue record for this book isavailable from the Library of Congress.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataAcatalogue record for this book isavailable from the British Library.

ISBN 1-84545-001-9Printed in Canada on acid-free paper.

This volume ofCritical Interventions was originallypublished in Social Analysis, vol. 46

CONTENTS

~Civil Antiglobalism an d th e Question of ClassWilliam H. Thornton

1Re-Theorizing Social Movements in a Changing

Global SpaceChuang Ya-cliung

12Mind th e Gap: On Post-National Idea(l)s an d th e

Nationalist RealityWang Homg-luen

24Postcolonial Discourse in th e Age of Globalization

Chu Yiu-wai37

Champagne Liberals an d the N ew ' D an g er o us Classes':Reconfigurations of Class, Identity an d CulturalProduction in th e Contemporary Global System

Jonathan Friedman49

Shifting th e Frame fromNation-State to Global Market: Class an d Social

Consciousness in th e Advanced Capitalist CountriesTerence Thmer

83Notes on Contributors


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CIVIL ANTIGLOBALISM ANDTHE QUESTION OF CLASS~

William H. Thornton

In the wake of 9/ll and the 'war on terrorism; doubtsarose as to the staying power of the antiglobalist movement. Its future rested on a fragile "green and blue"alliance of environmental, labor and human rights activists(Bhagwati, 2002: 4)-and on the general tide of publicconcern.' The President's record-breaking approval ratingsafter 9/ll reflect an adverse turning of that tide, not onlyamong settled adults, but also the youth who comprise thebulk of every antiglobalist demonstration. Can this ostensibly Left movement maintain the momentum it achieved inSeattle, Prague, Quebec City, and Genoa? To what extentwill moderate and civil antiglobalism fall under the shadow of terroristic antiglobalism?Those answers are still pending, but it can at least besaid that not all the news is bad. Revulsion against violence-which is especially strong within the labor fac-


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4 William H. Thornton Civil Antiglobalism and the Question of Class 5

stunt. Nevertheless it flunks the TINA test; for these ideological magicians hold, in the name of postmodernism,that empirically grounded resistance has no place in aworld without metanarratives. That is to say, in the spirit ofTINA, that we are stuck with existing power structures; or,as Derrida reconstructs the Left in Spectres ofMarx, it is tosay that our only affirmative recourse is messianic (for anincisive critique of this Heideggerized Marxism, see Wolin1995: 231-39). Eitherway the result is radical inertia. For allpractical purposes the cultural Left, too, is on the Right.3The actual Left begins where TINA ends, with therejection of a determinism that insulates globalization fromcriticism even as globalization depoliticizes the publicsphere (Boggs 2000: 69-70). The resulting antipolitics, asBoggs calls it, freezes history in its present configuration ofwinners and losers. To accomplish this it is necessary tomute the hard-won democratic voice of the working classes. That this could be done without violence is an astonishing feat, requiring a highly saleable myth. Along withthe myth of TINA, that of free market 'trickle down'allowed for the neoliberal seizure of state power by democratic means, and the export of that hegemony worldwide.The idea, as Berry puts it, "is that what is good for the corporation will sooner or later .,. be good for everybody"(2001). By the time the working class and the nonglobalized middle class awoke to the social fictions of theNew Economy, neoliberalization had finished off the NewDeal and established itself as a national and increasinglyglobal Done Deal. Or so we are told. The deal is not entirelydone until all those who challenge globalization aresnuffed out or silenced-first the Taliban, then the turtles.Labor is not so easy to silence, but neither is it thecountervailing power that Galbraith once extolled. Thisstorm cloud, however, has a silver lining. No longer able tooperate as an independent political agent, labor is morewilling than ever to enter Seattle-style coalitions. These are

essential in the face of the emerging global coalition ofbusiness and government. The shrinkage of organizedlabor, combined with the fragmentation of liberal politics,cleared a path for uncontested globalization. The only surprising thing is that neoliberalism, as the consummate 'endof ideology' ideology, took so long in coming. It simplywasnot needed, thanks to the prevalence of a ubiquitous socialmyth: the middle class fantasy of its own organic filiationwith corporate interests. So long as the entire middle classthought in upwardly mobile terms, the working classeswere on their own, and the 'up yours' blatancy of neoliberalism was better left unspoken.Buoyed by the New Economy, the new global eliteoperated through the 1990s with little opposition. The middle classes hung in there, seduced by the myth of an endlessly growing piece of the pie. Those who could invest inNASDAQ got just enough trickle down to keep them in line,Others were cut from the herd, but ideological inertia pre- .!vented them from joining ranks with their de facto peers, \the now mostly non-unionized working classes. y:Neoliberalism could thus win its battles by default.Academics who should have sounded an alarm were eithersleeping on the job or, like the Third Way, were sleepingwith the enemy. It hardly matters which.

It was only with the Asian Crash and the related buttardy fall of the New Economy (delayed by the 1998 market rebound) that the rudiments of a new class consciousness began to take shape. This is part of the global shiftthat Paul Krugman calls "the return of depression economics" (1999: 154). Krugman's admonition looks all the morecredible after the Enron fiasco. As the middle class polarized into globally privileged and underprivileged orders,the flagginglabor movement stood to gain through an infusion of new talent and energy, as well as sheer bulk. Forthe first time in decades, a large stock ofwell-educated dissent was coupled with expanding working class unrest.


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6 William H. Thornton Civil Antiglobalism and the Question ofClnss 7

This class conflux is taking place, moreover, just as thelabor movement is embracing such postnational issues ashuman rights and environmental sustainability, causes thathad previously merged in the resistance efforts of suchdauntless figures as the late (murdered) Chico Mendes, thelate (executed) Ken Saro-Wiwa, and SubcomandanteMarcos, the Zapatista leader whose recent march onMexico City drew support from thirty democratic labororganizations ("Zapatista" 2001). Meanwhile this samestrategy (RAND Corporation analysts call it "Webwar" andtreat it as a social pathology) found a home in the globallymediated resistance of tribes such as the Kayapo of CentralBrazil.AsTerenceTurner (2001) points out, anthropologistsplayed a vital catalytic role in this mediation process.Getting the message, other Amazon peoples joined theKayapo in an unprecedented 1989 rally at Altamira againsta giant dam project backed by the World Bank. To the surprise of all concerned, the government and the Bank wererouted. Altamira became a model for local/global resistance(Turner 2001).Of course, there is always the danger that this andother progressive NSMs (new social movements) will gotheir separate ways, becoming as fragmentary and politically effete as the old liberalism is in the face of identitypolitics. Only a globally connected antiglobalism can holdout against the transnational capitalist class (TCC), whichowns and operates most of the world's means of production (Sklair 2001: 6). This connection was the signal contribution of Seattle ("Street" 1999). Its political success,however, will require much broader intellectual input thanit has so far received-the kind that propelled the antiwarmovement of the late 1960s and early 70s.But that formidable movement also failed to reach critical mass. The reason is telling. Along with GeorgeMcGovern's 1972 presidential candidacy, this momentous'Left turn' was doomed by the socio-political chasm that

divided intellectuals from flower children and both fromhard hats. What terrified WTO globalists at Seattle, shocking them into awareness of their own vulnerability, was theconvergence of former class adversaries, including theworking classes of the global North and South. Thisvolatile mix has already produced the world's most globally connected engine of resistance (Klein 1999). But againone vital engine part is missing. Whereas the workingclasses were estranged from the movement in 1972, themissing link in 2002is the main body of intellectuals. Theirindifference threatens antiglobalism as much or more thanthe threat of a reactionary rebound on the part of labor.

For two centuries bourgeois culture has nurtured theprivate at the expense of the public and especially the populist. It embraced the sublime as a kind of spiritual upwardmobility. That romantic conceit was matched by an upwardmaterial mobility, or at least an upward class identification,however fictional. Now, however, new class crises are forc-ing a large segment of the middle class to think downward.There is hard political significance in the sight of collegestudents marching beside union protesters in antiglobalistdemonstrations. Cultural Leftists tend to sweep this germinal politics aside, charging those who protest inhumaneworking conditions in third world countries with sordidnationalist motives. Even if most union demonstrators atSeattle were inspired by a kind of nationalism, it was hardly the fascist kind. Union advocacy of sanctions againstBurma, for example, enjoys support from four states, thirtyU.S. municipalities, and the one hundred and seventy-fivemember International Labor Organization, as well as AungSan Suu Kyi herself (Beeton 2000;"Burma" BOS; and "Ruin"2000).It is time to get out of the mental straightjacket of 1972,whereby a populist perspective is thought illiberal andatavistic by definition. That assumption dictated that toshow where labor stands on an issue is to know where not


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8 William H. Thornton Civil Antiglobalism and the Question of Class 9

to stand. A case in point is labor's push for human rights inChina, and the ancillary demand that China's MFN statusand WID bid be tied to human rights, or at least (as withClinton's initial policy) to human rights 'improvement: Toooften the case for cutting those ties rests on an ad hominemargument: that those who would link MFNto human rightsare acting on a crass nationalistic desire to slam developingcountries. Here the working assumption is that populismfoments nationalism and nationalism is by its very naturevile and corrupt.That blanket condemnation, coming at this of alltimes, serves the interests of those who would profit mostby the total eclipse of nationalism. In Jihad us. McWorld,Benjamin Barber removes all doubt as to the identity ofthose beneficiaries: "Jihad and McWorld have this in common: they both make war on the sovereign nation-stateand thus undermine the nation-state's democratic institutions. Each eschews civil society ... " (1995: 6). Thus, thereis no contradiction between civil antiglobalism and a certain mode of nationalism. So too the new communitarianism, as propounded by Etzioni on the centrist Right andRorty on the liberal Left, is rediscovering the positive elements in American nationalism-which emphatically isnot to deny its negative elements. The progressive side ofAsian nationalism, as an expression of nativist 'Asian values; is also being reconsidered along these dualistic lines:top-down versus bottom-up, as I argue in Fire on the Rim(Thornton 2002:passim). The point is that nationalism cantake many forms, only some of which are reactionary. It istime to stop lumping them all together.In a similar vein, Jonathan Friedman questions thesimplistic association of culturally rooted populism withreaction and globalist hybridity with liberation (2001: 1314). Approached in this way, the cultural Other remains asite of real difference as opposed to 'glocal' meltdown.Precisely for this reason, it can be a site of real dialogue

and translocal alliance. This political eclecticism makescivil antiglobalism an opportune site for North/Southunion as well as Left/labor reunion. This is what globalistsmost fear, for it explodes the notion that we have but twoglobal futures to choose between: McWorld and jihad.Rejecting the violence of both, civil antiglobalism offers agenuine Third Way.

NOTES1. As of 1999, polls showed that Americans had serious misgivingsabout international trade agreements such as NAITA, but thesereservations were rarely motivated by anxiety over the loss ofnational sovereignty. The public largely supported internationalenvironmental standards that equally weakened sovereignty.While Americans were indeed worried about wage cuts and joblosses, they were also very concerned about issues such ashuman rights. Wellaware of these polls, and clearly unnerved byprotests in the streets, President Clinton sent a shock wavethrough the November 1999 WTOmeeting in Seattle by callingfor trade sanctions in. support of labor and environment rights(see Kohut (1999); Satire (1999); and Sanger (1999)).2. It is typical of Giddens that he describes globalization as being"by no means wholly benign in its consequences." His more thansubtle implication is that globalization is mostly benign but simply in need of a little adjustment here and there (Giddens 2000:33).3. In that respect, it returns to its origins. Wolin traces many of itskey assumptions directly to German radical conservatism (1995:231-39).


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10 William H. Ttiortuoti Civil Antig/obalism and the Question of Class 11

BIBLIOGRAPHY"ActionAlert: Police Violence in Genoa-Par for the Course?"

FAIR:Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (July 26, 2001).Barber, B.R. Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalismare Reshaping the World. New York, 1995.Beeton, D. [of the Free Burma Coalition]. "Burmese NeedHelp." The New York Times Opinion (Nov. 18,2000),online: L18BUR.html.Berry,W. "Global Problems, Local Solutions." Resurgence,issue 206 (MayIJune 2001), online:www.gn.apc.org/resurgence/issues/berry206.htm.Bhagwati, J. "Coping with Antiglobalization: A Trilogy ofDiscontents." Foreign Affairs 81, no. 1 (Jan.IFeb.2002):2-7.Blair,J. et al. "Statement from Genoa Protesters." GuardianUnlimited (July 26,2001).Boggs,C. The End ofPolitics: Corporate Power and the Declineof the Public Sphere. New York, 2000."Burma Business." The Washington Post (March 19,2000),B05.Dirlik, A. After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism.Hanover, 1994.Friedman, J. Champagne Liberals and the New 'DangerousClasses': Recontigurations of Class, Identity and CulturalProduction in the Contemporary Global System, paperfor a conference on New Cultural Formations in an Era ofTransnational Globalization, at the Institute of Ethology,Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, Oct. 6-7, 2001, 13-14.Friedman, T. "Techno Logic." Foreign Policy (MarchiApril2002), online: www.forelgnpolicy.com/issue,marapr_2002/debate.html.Giddens, A.Runaway World: How Globalization is ReshapingOur Lives. New York, 2002.Kapstein, E. Sharing the Wealth: Workers and the WorldEconomy. New York, 1999.

Klein, N. "Rebels in Search of Rules." The New York TimesOp-Ed (Dec. 2, 1999), online:www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/daY/oped/02klei.html.

Kohut, A. "Globalization and the Wage Gap." The New YorkTimes Op-Ed (Dec. 3, 1999).Krugman, P. The Return of Depression Economics. New York,1999.Rorty,R. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Tuieruieth-Century America. Cambridge, 1998."The Ruin of Myanmar." The New York Times Opinion (Nov.19, 2000), online:

www.nytimes.com/2000II I I19/opinion/19SUN2 .html.Satire, W. "The Clinton Round." The New York Times (Dec. 6,1999).Sanger, D.E. "In Stormy Seattle, Clinton Chides World TradeBody." The New York Times International (Dec. 2, 1999),online: world/globaI/120299wto-talks.html.Sklair, L. The Ttansruuional Capitalist Class.Oxford, 2001.Thornton, W. Fire on the Rim: The Cultural Dynamics ofEast/West Power Politics. Lanham, 2002.Tiger, L. "TWQ Interview." The Women's Quarterly (winter2002), online:www.lwf.org/pubs/twq/Winter2002es.html.Turner, T. "Self-Representation, Media and the Constructionof a Local-Global Continuum by the Kayapo of Brazil."downloaded on Oct. 16,2001, online:www.uiowa.edu/ '" anthro/fulbright/abstracts/turner.html.

Wolin, R. Labyrinths: Explorations in the Critical History ofIdeas. Amherst, 1995."Zapatista Leader Supports Duro Workers." KCLabor (March21, 2001), online:www.kclabor.org/zapatista_leader_supports_duro_w.htm


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Re-Theorizing Global Movements 13

RE-THEORIZING SOCIALMOVEMENTS IN

A CHANGING GLOBAL SPACE~Ya-Chung Chuang

'"\

Recent political events, among other things, have accentuated the seminal relationship between globalization andsocial movements, as well as between globgl cultural formation and an emerging transnational activism. Manyscholars agree that, since the 1970s, the world has entereda new stage of capitalist expansion, and social movementshave become increasingly transnationalized. However, twoquestions bewilder students of social movements: What isthis new stage of capitalism? How can the new mode ofglobal collective action be theorized?Recent scholarship on social movements has attemptedto look at new world activism in the age of what is nowwidely called globalization. Carefully examining the burgeoning globalization literature generates many helpful

directions that social movements studies have already takenand can potentially take (Cohen and Rai 2000,Guidry et al.2000). However, the work done in this regard is still somewhat rudimentary. Scholars who have sought to view socialmovements in light of a newly emerging era of globalizationare still endeavoring to devise an appropriate theoreticalframework for analyzing global social movements that cancross national boundaries and connect people with diversecultures, identities, and interests.New social movements theory is clearly at issue.Touraine's theorization of new social movements (NSMs,hereafter) as the unification of social struggles in a postindustrial society (Touraine 1988) once represented a sophisticated theoretical attempt to deal with new social conflicts,but its Eurocentric thinking needs to be reconsidered froman anthropological perspective. The model of globalizationportrayed by space-minded theorists such as Harvey(1989a, 1989b), Massey (1995), and Castells (1996) hascast social movements in new light by challenging our theoretical understanding of "global" social movements. Thenotion of spatialization is essential, insofar as it begs us toencounter the worldwide basis of grassroots coalitions.This reconsideration ultimately reflects back on ideas of(class and culture, which are at the heart of Touraine's discussion of the "ties between social struggles and culturalmovements" that would effectively bring about themoment of social movements.New social movements theory, which some Europeanscholars put forward more than a decade ago, has dealt withnew social conflicts that emerged as society evolved into anew form. As society passed into what Touraine (1988)called a "programmed society" or what Alberto (1989)called a "complex society," social movements were moreabout the politics of meaning and identity than about theintervention in relations of production in traditional Marxistsenses. In this new battlefield, unlike the old militant labor


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14 Ya-chung Chuang Re-Theorizing GlobalMovements 15

movement, endowed with the primary goal of seizing centralized state power, new social movements sought to"increase the chances of integrating the various struggles"(Touraine 1988: 136). In what they saw as a particular development of historicity, resistance derived from the profounddilemmas of the system, erupting here and there in a disjuncture where industrialized welfare states began to losecontrol and became incapable of containing the excesses ofincreasing complexities. The aim of social movements wasthus to integrate this resistance in the processes of thereproduction of social relations and cultural patterns for thesake of the intervention of historicity, namely the strengthening of the capacity for self-representation.Touraine and Melucci propose in this regard a generalself-reflexive social movement characterized by the unification of various little struggles. The unification of thesestruggles, as Touraine has suggested, "can only be throughincreasingly closer ties between social struggles and cultural movements, because in a postindustrial society tpestake in the action of the rulers as well as in that of opposition movements is the management of this society'scapacity to act upon its members' behavior" (Touraine1988: 135). Melucci makes a similar point: "Systemic conflicts center on the ability of groups and individuals to control the conditions of their own action" (1989: 45). Ip otherwords, social movements are, by definition, dngoingprocesses for self-challenge and moral self-reflection: theactions taken are immediately contextualized. This isexactly the reason why Touraine proclaims that, "the unification of the struggles or their integration in a generalsocial movement can take place only through the reinforcement of their moral dimension, their will to apprehend and directly affirm the rights of the subject" (1988:135).Some scholars have proposed that NSMs will providebases for cooperation against global capital and states on a

world scale. Turner (in this issue) points out that new socialmovements, "provide bases for critically opposing andresisting political and economic policies of states and global capital alike ... They represent a kind of trans-nationalnemesis that the global capitalist system and its participating state regimes and corporations have raised up againstthemselves." However, before any conclusion can be elicited from NSMs theory regarding the idea of a transnationalgrassroots unity, there is a problem that must be addressedfirst. That is, if identity politics, in which the control of historicity is the main stake of social struggle, is only characteristic of certain advanced social forms, such as Westernpost-welfare consumer society, how can we theorize aboutnon-Western social movements searching for decolonization and alternatives to development?Escobar says the following about Touraine:

Touraine concludes that most forms of collective mobilization in Latin Americaare not socialmovements proper but rather strugglesfor the control ofthe process ofhistorical change and development ... The stake for socialactors is not historicity but greater participation in thepoliticalsystem.LatinAmericawould be in the processofacceding to a higher level of historicity-that is, becoming a truly modern society-through industrializationanddevelopment (1992: 71-72).Such a conceptualization of modernity makes it difficult to conceive of a self-reflexive social movement in thecontext of the Third World. Escobar has pointed to a certain Eurocentrism implicit in Touraine's notions of "levels

of historicity," in which "only postindustrial societies haveachieved the distancing that historicity requires (from God,tradition, the world as object)" (Escobar 1992: 84).Escobar further suggests that recent anthropologyoffers useful alternatives to these objectifying distinctions.


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16 Ya-chung Chuang Re-Theorizing Global Movements 17

Several now classic anthropological studies have presentedmany excellent examples regarding the reinterpretationand reappropriation of historicity that involve diverseencounters between colonizers and natives. WhenHawaiians greeted Captain Cook and his crew in the eighteenth century, it was an encounter between two culturalworldviews about to undergo a profound transformation.History and structure were mediated through symbolicpractices, and change was immanent in the attempt toreproduce cultural meanings (Sahlins 1985). As Taussig(I980) observes, when the devil was exercising poweramong newly made Bolivian proletarians-peasantsturned-mine workers-it was not a result of residualancient superstitions but the expression of a peasant modeof production and mentality returning to haunt and trouble modernity and capitalism.

If these and other anthropological studies have shownus that identity politics, over what Touraine calls "the management of the society's capability to act upon its members' behavior," are always embedded in struggles of spaceand time, how should recent economic, cultural, and technological transformations and their impact upon changingglobal grassroots mobilizations be accounted for? Howshould we reconsider the newness in so-called "new socialmovements?" More importantly, is it theoretically relevant,historically legitimate and practically effective to talk aboutnew social movements on a trans-national scale?A theory of globalization that accents the recentworldwide spatial division of labor helps us exposeTouraine's misapprehension of the postindustrial society,as defined in terms of national productivity. According.toMassey's study (1994) of the United Kingdom, the processof a spatial division of labor since the mid-1960s was madepossible and necessary in fact due to acute world competition. The relocation of productive forces-domestically aswell as globally-in the hope of reducing costs resulted in

new relations of production, where centralization wascalled into question in favor of a flexible accumulation. Inthe case of the United Kingdom, spatial relocation subsequently forced several major industrial cities into seriouscrisis and restructuring (Massey 1994: 25-49). Harvey'swork (1989) is also useful here. Addressing the world overaccumulation problem that started in the late 1960s,Harvey posits a fundamental transformation of urbanspaces after 1973. Urban regions seek to improve theircompetitive positions with respect to the international division of labor and consumption, to command functions, andto redistribution. This worldwide restructuring has thusopened up spaces within which new and more flexiblelabor processes can be more easily implanted (Harvey1989: 260). In discussing the "new economy," Castells toostresses the feature of a global network of linkages powered by a knowledge-based information revolution:

A new economy has emergedin the last two decades ona worldwide scale. I call it information and globalto identify its fundamental distinctive features and to emphasizetheir intertwining. It is informationalbecause the productivity and competitiveness of units or agents in this economy (be it firms, regions. nations) fundamentally dependupon their capacity to generate, process, and apply effi-ciently knowledge-based information. It is globalbecausethe core components (capital, labor, raw materials, management, information, technology, markets) are organizedon a global scale, either directlyor through a network oflinkagesbetween economicagents (1996: 66).By tracing the long history of capitalist expansion, thework ofMassey, Harvey and Castelis helps dismiss certainproblematic aspects of Touraine's theorization. Theirinsights globalize and spatialize Touraine's narrative of historical dialectics-turned-into-evolutionism. Complementing


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these discourses, Friedman's argument regarding regionalshift (in this issue) provides an image of the global with(spatial) dynamism: Turner (also in this issue) introduceswhat he calls "new chronotopes," or new senses of t ime/space that consolidate themselves with the formation ofthe global market (d. Harvey 1989). The above argumentshelp avoid the danger of assuming a spatial homogeneitythat is often implicated in traditional Marxist revolutionarytheory, social movements literature, and even globalizationstudies. In other words, in light of their efforts to respatialize the question of the development of capitalism,the problem is no longer about a postindustrial society,but about a postindustrial condition in the changing global space-that is, globalization over the past three decades.The stakes for social struggle are no longer just tied (i fthey ever were) to national productivity levels, as thoughbased on national economic histories. Rather, struggles forhistoricity in different settings can only be understood byseeing how local developments interconnect with transnational forces, and how place relates to space (cf. Buechler2000).These latter arguments help trans-nationalize and, atthe same time, de-nationalize NSMstheory: NSMs, definedby Touraine as efforts to regain capacity for selfmanagement by joining social and cultural struggles frommammoth management apparatuses in diverse realms ofsocial life, have actually emerged in the space of globalization. It is, therefore, within this space of the global-localnexus that NSMs theory can be reconceptualized so as tooffer bases for a world grassroots unity. However, thereconceptualization of NSMs in terms of the developmentof a global economy over the past three decades complicates what Touraine has attempted to theorize with regardto "the unification of social struggles."The question of class, the Marxist specter, may be agood point of departure in addressing this query of unifi-

cation, especially after so many anti-globalization ralliesare conducted during every WTO, World Bank, or IMFmeeting around the world. Both Turner and Friedman (inthis issue) have attempted to bring back the concept ofpolarization, a concept that has been largely ignored eversince the term class in its purely economic sense becameproblematic, even among Marxist scholars, not to mentionpost-structuralists. At its best, class is reconfigured according to its degree of access to culture, lifestyle, fame-in aword, consumption. The distinction between nationalbourgeoisie and proletarian is no longer the focus of attention, and antagonism is replaced by pluralism or hybridityin postcolonial terms.

These post-colonial or postmodern theorizations areseen by Turner as symptoms of the escapism of the disempowering national middle class or by Friedman as astrategy of distanciation chosen by the new cosmopolitanelites. Turner goes so far as to assume that globalization isactually a project of an identifiable class, or in Friedman'sterm, of a "liberated" middle class in opposition to previous national bourgeois "captured" within national borders.All these new conditions involve the transformation of thenation-state, the rise of a new cosmopolitanism, and theemergence of a global regime, making possible a newworld order along with lines of increasing cultural and ethnic fragmentation.Their observations, although falling short of illuminating the possibility of a transnational solidarity, bring us tothe intersection of class and culture. Many scholars, inaddition to Turner, have focused on the collaborationbetween transnational NSMs/NGOs and labor movements,which requires the production of a new consciousness. Inother words, culture matters, but the economy will notsimply vaporize. Nevertheless, it is not clear how numerous self-organized struggles for recognition can be linkedwith labor's concerns of economic security often associat-


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20 Ya-chung Chuang Re-Theorizing GlobalMovements 21

ed with the might of the state. What is to be done, if thiscoalition-making politics is to occur? Touraine's utopiannarrative of the unification of social struggles stresses amoment of passage to the level of social movementsthrough increasingly closer ties between social strugglesand cultural movements-t ies that would increase thecapacity for individuals and social groups to control theconditions of their own action. What do "cultural movements" of this kind represent in the space of globalization?Culture in recent scholarship is actually in serioustrouble. I realize that culture was largely created to conveya sense of homogeneity and coherence, a bounded sense oftotality. Culture in nationalism is often invented to guaran-. tee the existence of the nation, masked as a history-free,thing-like and homogeneous entity-a 'tradition.' Evenanthropologists endow culture with the attributes of stasis,thereby depriving it of history and dynamism. Certainlythis is not the kind of culture that we would like to adopthere.For more than a decade, critical anthropologists haveworked on deconstructing the notion of culture, positingconcepts such as flexible citizenship (Ong 1993) and traveling cultures (Clifford 1997) to go "beyond culture"(Gupta and Ferguson 1997), yet many of these scholarshave made little effort to examine attempts everywhere tofind 'connectivity' in the era of globalization-in otherwords, attempts to restore 'ethos' or the sense of community/place in the Habermasian sense of intersubjectivecommunication (Habermas 1984). It was this search for'connectivity' through political and social activism thatcharacterized what is called 'social movements.' With all itslimitations, here was a longing for reconnection toland(scape), people(hood), ethnicity, his(hers)tory, andplace in the era of post-Fordism, flexible-developmentalism,and globalization._...--

Resisting essentialism, this politics of cultural identitycrosscuts different forms of social struggle; these intersections in turn create bases for cooperation. Identity politicsof this kind intersects with the formative process of classconsciousness in the space of culture. Likewise, in the battle against the divide between nature and culture/history/humans, one has seen gender awareness being raised tothe extent that sisterhood is now about to change historyinto her-story. It is also because of the desire for belongingthat community-based mobilizations have occurred everywhere, and this identity politics in turn transforms common sense to good sense and creates organic intellectuals(d. Gramsci 1971). It is in this process that a force forsocial movements as a whole, or the unification of socialstruggle, might materialize and even prevail. A 'unitedfront' with organized strength, yet without hierarchy,would be ready to launch a war of position. It is also in thisprocess that a transnational connection or internationalistcooperation would gain ground, because people arebecoming aware that their local problems have global significance and vice versa and that the solutions reside intheir cooperation with each other.

This cultural, economic, and political awarenessinvokes a new imagination on social activism, whichreminds me ofTaiwanese labor activist KuoKuo-wen's military metaphor-namely , social movements as specialforces with capabilities of swift movement and intelligentresponse. In light of what I said about the unification ofsocial movements, the acquisition of these new capabilitiesdemands a reconceptualization of grassroots organizing inresponse to changing material conditions, a globally geopolitical restructuring, and the accompanying localresponses/resistances. The emergence of such specialforces. therefore, represents the form of struggle whichsocial movements grappling between the global/local,space/place, and economy/culture will most likelywork in


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22 Ya-chung Chuang Re-Theorizing Global Movements 23for the enhancement of connectivity. By recognizing this,social activists may be able to seize the chance to survive,struggle, and perhaps even claim partial victories.

BIBLIOGRAPHYBuechler, S. SocialMovements in Advanced Capitalism: The

Political Economy and Cultural Construction ofSocialActivism. Oxford, 2000.Castells, M. The Riseof the Network Society. Oxford, 1996.Clifford,J. Routes: Travel and Translocation in the Late7lventieth Century. Cambridge, 1997.Cohen, R. and S. Rai. Global SocialMovements. London,2000.Escobar, A. "Culture, Economics, and Politics in LatinAmerican Social Movements Theory and Research," inTheMaking of Social Movements in Latin America:Identity, Strategy, and Democracy, ed. A. Escobar and S.Alvarez. Boulder, (1992): 62-85.Gramsci, A.Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York,1971.Guidry, J. et al. "Globalizations and Social Movements," inGlobalizations and Social Movements: Culture, Power,and the Transnational Public Sphere, ed. J. Guidry et al.Ann Arbor, (2000): 1-32.Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson. "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity,and the Politics of Difference," in Culture. Power, Place:Explorations in Critical Anthropology, ed. A. Gupta and J.Ferguson. Durham, (1997): 33-51.

Habermas, J. The Theory of Communicative Action: VolumeOne Reasonand The Rationalization of Society.Boston,1984.Harvey, D. The Urban Experience. Baltimore, 1989.__ , The Condition of Postmodemity: An Inquiry into theOrigins ofCultural Change. Oxford, 1989.Massey, D.Spatial Divisions ofLabor: Social Stnu:ture and theGeographyof Production. Minneapolis, 1995.Melucci, A.Nomads of the Present:SocialMovements andIndividual Needs in Contemporary Society. Philadelphia,1989.Ong, A. "On the Edge of Empires: Flexible Citizenship amongChinese Diaspora." Positions 1, no. 3 (1993): 745-778.

Sahlins, M. Islands ofHistory. Chicago, 1985.Taussig, M. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in SouthAmerica. Chapel Hill, 1980.Touraine, A.Return of the Actor: Social Theory inPostindustrial Society.Minneapolis, 1988.


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Mind the Gap 25

MIND THE GAPOn Post-National Idea(l)s and the

Nationalist Reality'~Hortig-luen Wang

Asglobalization becomes a buzzword in the contemporaryworld, it is now fashionable to speak of 'transnational' or'post-national' idea(l)s. It is common to assert that nationstates are undergoing fundamental transformation, thatstate sovereignty is undermined in one way or another dueto supra-national (re)structuring of the world, that citizenship based on the national model is giving way to a postnational or 'de-nationalized' one, which has lesser or noreference to the nation-state, that national boundaries areblurred or that states' territories are becoming moreporous, that global governance is called for to cope withworld-level issues, such as environmental protections andglobal financial turbulences that are beyond the administrative capacity of any given nation-state, and that cosmopolitan democracy, along with the ideal of 'global/world

citizens; is regarded as a desirable paradigm for organizingpolitical life of all people around the globe. ' The laundrylist can go on and on, but does all this indicate a sea ofchange that leads us from a national toward a post-nationalera?That could be the case, but perhaps not at thismoment, and certainly not without any qualifications. Thepost-national idea(l)s of cosmopolitan sorts, which havebeen ardently advocated by inter-nationally renownedscholars such as Beck (1999), Held (1997) and Nussbaum(1996) in various manners, are surely admirable, but thereexists a wide if not often overlooked gap between the optimistic view of post-national models and the not-sooptimistic reality, which I characterize as the 'nationalistreality.' True, there is always a gap between ideals and reality, but we might stumble hard if we proceed unwittinglywithout paying heed to the widening gap on the ground.

It has to be made clear from the onset that what is atstake here is not the popularly evoked 'global vs. national'dualism. As I have made clear elsewhere, 'the global' and'the national' are two sides of the same coin that wenthand in hand in history (Wang 2000). What I intend totackle here, rather, is the idea(l)s pertaining to the 'postnational: which should not be quickly equated with ' theglobal.' The major problem with "post-national idea(l)s," itseems to me, resides in two areas. The first is concernedwith terminology, the second with the tendency to overlook the institutional reality of the contemporary world.Tobegin with, what is a 'nation' (or 'post-nation') anyway? Before one can speak of any ideas pertaining to ' thenational' and ' the post-national; one must be able to clarify what is referred to by these two terms. Students familiar with the literature on nations and nationalism knowimmediately how notoriously elusive the concept of nationis. Above all, there has been a hopeless conflation of'nation' and 'state,' observed not only in mundane usages


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26 Homg-luen Wang Mind the Gap 27

but also in academic discourse (Connor 1994, Oommen1997). As a result, the 'nation' will lose analytical precision, if used without any qualification. Totranscend chaos,an institutionalist approach to nations and nationalism,advocated by Brubaker (1996) and Meyer et al. (1997), hasproven more fruitful. From this perspective, then, thenation should be understood, neither as a substantial entity, nor as an aggregate of men and women tied to eachother in certain bonds, but rather as an ensemble of intersecting institutions that can be roughly classified into civicterritorial and ethno-cultural types.'In this light, the very notion of the 'post-national'appears particularly suspicious. In order to have something

to 'follow after' (as in the case of 'post-modern,' 'postcolonial' or 'post-structuralism')' the term 'post-national'seems to assume an essential , predetermined, or a prioriexistence of the nation. This, however, is not true. AsHobsbawm (1990) has rightly pointed out, nations canonly be identified a posteriori. By prefixing 'post-' to a termthat has no definite connotations and that can only beidentified a posteriori, the 'post-nat ion' appears to be noless elusive a concept than 'nation' is.Next is the problem of reality. All societies need somesort of common knowledge to organize themselves. This isthe Durkheimian legacy attributable to sociology, whichhas been reasserted by students in various social sciencedisciplines. As Bhaskar (1998: 48) has put it:just as a social science without a society is impossible, soa society without some kind of scientific, proto-scientificor ideological theory of itself is inconceivable (even if itconsistsmerelyin the conceptions that the agents have ofwhat they are doing in their activity).

This commonly shared knowledge, be it scientific, protoscientific, or ideological, further supplies members of soci-

ety with a sense of reality (d . Berger and Luckmann 1967).In the modern era, the common knowledge that has beenemployed to organize societies around the world is thenationalist ideology. I use the term in its singular ratherthan the plural form, because I am referring here not tonationalism of any particular nation-state but to the universalistic belief behind all nationalist doctrines-that is,the belief that the world is justifiably divided into severalmutually exclusive nations, each with its own character,destiny, and above all, political autonomy (Gellner 1983;Smith 1995).4Once the dominant organizing principle in the world,the nationalist ideology has been pursued and practiced literally in every corner around the globe. The total effects ofthis nationalist ideology, through its legacies and institutional devices, constitute what I call 'the nationalist reality.' By 'nationalist reality,' I refer to the reality that isdefined, reified, and reproduced by the institutions ofnation-states or their agents. In such a reality, two types ofinstitutions of the nation-namely, civic-territorial andethno-cultural ones-constitute the basic frame of reference of what Michael Billig (1995) has perceptively called"banal nationalism," which means "the ideological habitswhich enable the established nations [in the world] to bereproduced." In this light, we are not only heirs to nationalism, but are also practit ioners of "banal nationalism."Since notions of nationhood are deeply embedded in contemporary ways of thinking, banal nationalism manifestsitself in routine speeches of politicians, in daily newspapersand TV broadcast, and in the unsaluted flags waving infront of public buildings-all of which are termed by Billigthe continual "flagging" (reminding) of nationhood. Theomnipresent flagging in the recent frenzy of the World Cup,for instance, is merely one of numerous vivid illustrations.As the expansion of the interstate system has made institutions of nationhood ubiquitous, banal nationalism has


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become an endemic condition worldwide through inculcation of daily routines. Even the 'natural,' non-humanworld-the weather-has become nationalized too. Indaily newscasts, weather reports are primarily based on theintra- and inter-national administrative units that havebeen made by and for nation-states. To borrow Bourdieu'sterm, banal nationalism has become 'the global habitus' ofour t ime-a mechanism that articulates the relationbetween the subject and the world and a mental disposition that internalizes external structure, thus reproducingthe structure of the world.In light of the above two points, let us turn to an assessment of post-national models. Generally speaking, postnational models usually assume two things. First, the daysof the concatenated nations/nation-state/nationalism aregone, giving way to a post-national era. Secondly, nations,nationalism and nation-states are dark, reactionary forcesthat 'progressives' should cast aside as history. From aninstitutionalist perspective, however, the two assumptionsare untenable. As I pointed out above, the notion of 'postnational' states or identities seems to be an overly essentialist argument. The nation is institutionally defined, andits definition is strongly associated with the state. The institutional persistence of sovereign states offers little reason tobelieve that such states will be easily replaced, especially inthe near future, by an alternative structure for organizinghuman political life (Krasner 1988: 76). Moreover, nationsare defined and substantiated by states as an institutionalframework for social classification. Thus, unless there isonly one state in the world, there will be a plurality of political communities that can justifiably be called 'nations:however 'nation' is defined. In this light, nationhood is lessabout language, blood, ethnicity, or primordial traits butmore about insti tut ional arrangement-and its selfref lect ion-of 'what the world is made of.' As such, it isboth a modus operandi and opus operatum that constitute

the structuring cultural/cognitive map as well as the struc-tured political/territorial map. Therefore, as long as there ismore than one central administrative authority governingpeople's lives, it is unlikely that the notion of 'nation' willbe totally overthrown. For instance, is the 'queer nation' anation or post-nation? Is it a nation at all? If, one day, institutional arrangements are created to substantiate such apolitical organization, then chances are that it will remain a'nation: rather than a 'post-nation,' with the definition of'nat ion' merely being modified to accommodate thischange. The history of nation-states and nationalism hasshown one clear fact: the meaning of the nation has beenevolving from its ethno-cultural connotation to one thatleans more towards civic-territorial senses. If, followingauthors such as Soysal (1994) and Delanty (2000), onedefines 'post-national' as 'rights/membership by residence'instead of 'rights/membership by birth' (which is considered as the 'national' model), then it is implied that we havealready been 'post-national' for centuries, ever since theburgeoning of the national era!' In this sense, what's newabout being 'post-national' anyway?Secondly, is nationalism necessarily a bad thing thatshould be left behind? To be sure, the portrayal of contemporary nationalism as a dark, regressive force comes as nosurprise. The success of any nationalism necessarily entailsthe redrawing of boundaries over an existing political/territorial map, while nationalist politics almost completelyhinges on the approval of others (as does national identity). Understandably, there is a near international consensus that the established nation-states are generally hostileto polity-seeking nationalism today; otherwise our contemporary world will be much more fragmented than it istoday.But behind this mentality, there is a more profound butless manifested ideological habit - the global habitus ofbanal nationalism. If established states are hostile to polity-


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seeking nationalism, then why not those 'practitioners' ofbanal nationalism? Indeed, Billig pointed out perceptivelysuch a contrast: while the routine, daily 'flagging' of banalnationalism (of established nation-states) has gone unnoticed, 'nationalism' as a political issue and scholarly concern has been conceptualized in pathological terms as aproblem of 'others.' It is 'other people'-putatively in thenon-western world-who are practicing nationalism, butnot 'us.' Writing from the position of subaltern studies,Chatterjee (1986) offers a similar criticism. Nationalismnowadays is a pathology of non-western Others, which arethen characterized as primordial, irrational, and backward.For instance, in his last posthumously published work,Gellner,one of the foremost scholars on this topic, reiterated the "pathological nature" of nationalism, which "callsfor a more specific diagnosis and more specific remedies orpalliatives" (1997: 103). But why must nationalism needremedies and palliatives? How about the 'banal nationalism' of established nation-states that is practiced everyday?Does it need remedies too? I raise these questions not toencourage mutual finger-pointing. One forgets too easilythat nationalism has its historical roots in Europe, and thateven today we are still practicing it everywhere. In fact,there is nothing shameful about admitting to be a nationalist, provided that nationalism is properly understood.Insofar as we practice banal nationalism in our daily routines, we are all nationalists of one kind or another. 6In light of the institutional ubiquity of banal nationalism, therefore, the plausibility of post-national modelsmust be re-evaluated. As a descriptive idea, 'post-national'lacks the analytical precision to capture the reality of thecontemporary world; as a prescriptive ideal, it fails toacknowledge the resilience of institutions of the nation,'thus has few or no strategies to cope with an institutionally sustained nationalist reality. As I have argued previously,globalization does not take place in an institutional vacu-

um; rather, the seemingly amorphous flows of people, culture, capital and goods must still run through institutionalconduits of the nation-state (Wang 2000). Those who arequick to predict the decline of the nation-state seem tooverlook the persistence and resilience of institutions, inwhich nation-states and nationhood constitute the fundamental grids of social classification schemes by furnishingpolitical/territorial and cultural/cognitive maps of theworld. In addition, those who advocate 'transnational' or'post-national' features of our age also tend to neglect theconflation of nation and state. The state is said to be losingcontrol, but the nation as an institutionalized form is stillquite alive. As a matter of fact, whether the state is reallylosing control is also questionable. Since the importance ofinstitutions overall has been neglected, the monolithicargument that globalization will lead to the waning significance of nation and nationhood overlooks the promiscuityof institutions. Global restructuring does not necessarilyweaken the nation-state. Some may weaken it, but somemay reinforce and enhance it by granting institutional prerogatives to the nation-state. Thus, the sphere of transnational civil society is not as autonomous as theorists oftenposit. While it transforms the political landscape in certainaspects (Kohler 1998), it can hardly escape the tyranny ofthe nation-state. The problem does not only involve accessibility of participation (as has been the focus of mostprevious discussions) but also deeper ontological and cognitive issues.Similarly, the ideal of cosmopolitan democracy facessome fundamental limits, when viewed in this light. Itdepends too much on the presumption of universal 'worldcitizens; while the definition and classification of these citizens, ironically as it may seem, hinges on the institutions ofthe nation-state system. Moreover, the regulative bases tocope with transnational issues, such as environmental protection and health promotion, still rest very much on the


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institutional foundations of nation-states. In such circumstances, nation-states can easily exercise their influences oneither transnational society or cosmopolitan democracythrough a variety of institutional means.Banal nationalism, in its institutional form, hasbecome the framework of our 'global taxonomy; whichenables us to name, classify, and recognize the reality ofthis world. Institutions of the nation-state system, as aworld-level modus operandi, have provided the ontologicaland cognitive foundation upon which we conceive of the'social reality' of the entire globe. Thus, far from being'post-national: the 'social order' of contemporary worldsociety still rests on an entrenched nationalist reality. I amnot arguing here that nation and nationhood are essential

sine qua non in the modern world, nor am I defendingstate-centered politics in the least. The Leviathan of themodem nation-state, which has sprawled across the worldover the last two to three centuries, is both gigantic andmonstrous. But ignoring it does not mean that it does notexist. Worse yet, if we never learn how this Leviathan livesand operates, we will have little chance to combat it. Thisis precisely why we need to take heed of the widening gapbetween post-national idea(l)s and the nationalist reality. Ifwe sit back contently, thinking that we are simply movingfrom a national to a post-national era, it is not only wrongbut also dangerous. To be 'realistic: institutional reformsthat aim at cosmopolitan ideals should confront the nationalist reality and go deeper to the ontological and cognitivelevel. If one hopes to realize cosmopolitan ideals, it isessential to transcend the ongoing, taken-far-grantednature of the nationalist reality.

NOTES1. I wish to thank Allen Chun for his comments and help, whichmade this essay possible. Part of the argument in this essay was

presented at the conferences on New Cultural Formations in anEra of Transnational Globalization, Insti tute of Ethnology.Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, October 6-7, 2001; andCosmopolis: Dernocrat is ing Global Economy and Culture.Helsinki 2-4 June 2000.2. The body of literature on related topics has grown too vast forany comprehensive review. For a selection of studies, one mayrefer to Appadurai (1996); Archibugi, Held and Kohler (1998);Falk (1994); Jacobson (1996); Lipshutz (1996); Roche (1992);Sassen (1996), Smith (1998), Soysal (1994); Walzer (1995);Wapner (1995). By juxtaposing these authors side by side, however, I do not imply that they share a common theoretical groundwith each other, nor do I intend to erase the differences andnuances between the arguments made by these authors. What iscommon in this body of literature, it seems to me. lies in theirtendency to conceive of a world that is no longer organizedaround the principle of the nation-state. Explicitly or implicitly,they also assume the organizing principle of the world is shiftingfrom a national towards a post-national paradigm.3. Due to space limitations in this paper. I will not be able to elaborate the institutionalist theory in detail. For a full account, seeWang (1999).4. Nationalism is often considered to be exemplary of particularism,as opposed to universalism. This, however, is quite misleading.As many scholars have pointed out, nationalism is an embodiment of the dialectical process of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism (ef. Robertson(1992,1991) and Wallerstein (1991)).5. Naturalization and rights granted to immigrants are barely newto our era, while the civic-territorial model of nation has paralleled the ethno-cultural one since the first cases of nation-stateswere born (ef. Brubaker 1992).

6. 1Woprominent scholars in this field have endeavored to defendnationalism in this global ear. Smith (1995), on the one hand.defends the nation by its functional necessities, while Anderson(1998), on the other hand. argues for the "goodness of nations"


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34 Homg-lueti Wang Mind the Gap 35

with some human touches.Myargument here shares no normative bearings with the previous two authors, but it may wellcomplement their argumentsby supplyingan alternativeinstitutionalistpoint of view.

BIBLIOGRAPHYAnderson, B.The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism,

Southeast Asia and the World. London, 1998.Appadurai, A. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis, 1996.Archibugi, D. et al. Re-imagining Political Community:

Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy. Stanford, 1998.Beck, U. "Democracy Beyond the Nation-State: A

Cosmopolitical Manifesto." Dissent Winter (1999): 53-55.Berger, P.L. and T. Luckmann. The Social Construction of

Reality. New York, 1967.Bhaskar, R. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical

Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. London,1998.Billig, M. Banal Nationalism. London, 1995.Brubaker, R. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and theNational Questions in the New Europe. Cambridge, UK,

1996.__ , Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany.Cambridge, 1992.Chatterjee, P. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: ADerivative Discourse. Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1986.Connor, W. Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding.Princeton, 1994.

Delanty, G. Citizenship in a Global Age. Buckingham, UK,2000.Falk, R.A. On Humane Governance. Cambridge, UK, 1994.

Gellner, E. Nationalism. Washington Square, NY, 1997.__ , Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY, 1983.Held, D. "How to Rule the World." New Statesman, 29August (1997): 28-30.Hobsbawm, E. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780.Cambridge, UK, 1990.Jacobson, D. Rights across Borders: Immigration and theDecline of Citizenship. Baltimore, MD, 1996.

Krasner, S.D. "Sovereignty: An Institutional Perspective."Comparative Political Studies 21, (1988): 66-94.

Kohler, M. "From the National to the Cosmopolitan PublicSphere," in Re-imagining Political Community: Studies inCosmopolitan Democracy, ed. D. Archibugi et al.Stanford, (1998): 231-251.Lipschutz, R.D. and J. Mayer. Global Civil Society and GlobalEnvironmental Governance: The Politics of Nature fromPlace to Planet. Albany, 1996.Meyer, J.w. et al. "World Society and the Nation-State."American Journal of Sociology 103, (1997): 144-81.

Nussbaum, M.e., and J. Cohen. For Love of Country:Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Boston, MA, 1996.Oommen, T.K.Citizenship, Nationality and Ethnicity:

Reconciling Competing Identities. Cambridge, UK, 1997.Robertson, R. Globalization: Social Theory and Global

Culture. London: Sage, 1992.__ , "Social Theory, Cultural Relativity and the Problem ofClobality," in Culture, Globalization and the WorldSystem: Contemporary Conditions for the Representationof Identity, ed. A. King. London, (1991): 395-411.Roche, M. Rethinking Citizenship: Welfare, Ideology andChange in Modern Society. Cambridge, UK, 1992.

Sassen, S. Losing Control? New York, 1996.


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36 Homg-luen Wang

Smith, A.D.Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era.Cambridge, UK, 1995.Smith, J. "Global Civil Society?Transnational Social

Movement Organizations and Social Capital." AmericanBehavioral Scientist 42, (1998): 93-107.Soysal, Y.N. Limitsof Citizenship. Chicago, 1994.Wallerstein, I. "The Construction of Peoplehood: Racism,Nationalism, Ethnicity," in Race, Nation, Class:

Ambiguous Identities, ed. E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein.London, 1991.Walzer, M. ed. Towarda Global Civil Society. Providence, RI,1995.Wang,H-L. In Want of a Nation: State, Institutions and

Globalization in Taiwan. Ph.D. dissertation, University ofChicago, 1999.-- , "Rethinking the Global and the National: Reflectionson National Imaginations in Taiwan." Theory Culture &Society 17, (2000): 93-117.Wapner, P. "PoliticsBeyond the State: Environmental

Activismand WorldCivicPolitics." WorldPolitics47,(1995).

POSTCOLONIAL DISCOURSEIN THE ACE

OF GLOBALIZATION~Chu Yiu Wai

In the 1980s, the academy witnessed the advent of post-colonial discourse. Numerous academic conferences, booksand journals on postcolonialism appeared one after anoth-er. In the academic periphery, many viewed postcolonialdiscourse as a site of resistance against Western culturalhegemony. With the rise of the discourse of globalizationin the 1990s, postcolonial discourse, no longer riding onthe whitecaps of the latest critical wave, seemed to havelost much of its currency and critical energy. On the face ofit, many central issues of postcolonial discourse, such ascolonizer/colonized, East/West and center/margin turnedout to be no longer applicable to the global era, whennational borders blurred. Yet in the new global/local para-digm, the above binaries continued to cast a shadowy


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38 Chu Yiu Wai Postcolonial Discourse in the Age of Globalization 39

specter. Many academic journals focusing on postcolonialism, such as Interventions: International Journal ofPostcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Jouvert: AJournal of Postcolonial Studies (online) were born in thelate 1990s. In a sense, there appears to be an intricate relationship between the discourses of postcolonialism andglobalism. Simon During pointed to their "dialectical" relationship (During 1998) and Arif Dirlik tried to relate thetwo by asking the question "When exactly ... does the'postcolonial ' begin?" (Dirlik 1997: 52). One might thenask, is postcolonial discourse becoming less relevant in anage of globalization?The influence of postcolonial discourse on other formsof discourses is too profound to be easily dismissed. "Asthe domain of the postcolonial has expanded," Dirlik(2000: 1) notes, "postcolonial criticism has infiltrateddiscourses that have origins quite independently of postcolonialism, and in turn has been infiltrated by those discourses, so that it is quite impossible in our day to saywhat may be specific to postcolonialism." Instead of tryingto outline the complex transformation of postcolonial discourse, this short essay attempts to interrogate the postcolonial from another perspective by offering a different

understanding of the same old conflicts and struggles inthis formative context of globalization.The recent wave of anti-globalization has demonstrated an urgent need to take stock of a politics of resistancearound the globe. While "[tjhe recent anti-World Bank andanti-WTO demonstrat ions do seem to mark a promisingnew departure for a politics of resistance to globalizationwithin the US," as Jameson (2000: 65-66) asserts, "it ishard to see how such struggles in other countries can be

developed in any other fashion than the nationalist." Inthis special context, postcolonial discourse seems to beparticularly pertinent in acting as a site of resistance for thepowerless. Since its introduction into mainstream acade-

mia back in the late 1970s, postcolonial discourse hasbecome a popular voice for evoking the "subaltern."However, it undergoes a peculiar transformation, when it islegitimized by the center. Once it is institutionalized, itstarts losing most if not all of its oppositional imaginaryand becomes another kind of professional discourse. 'ThirdWorldisrn,' for instance, was once conceived as a site ofresistance. But as Dirlik (1997: 157) noted, it "has abandoned its earlier goals of national liberation to turn intoneo-Fascist reifications of national cultures and, rather thanprovide alternatives to the capitalist structuring of theworld, not only legitimize capitalism but also contribute toa resurgence of Fascism globally." 'Third Worldism' hasbecome a professional discursive label that spreads thefalse promises of social liberation, so to speak. AlthoughDirlik's critique of the complicity of postcolonial discoursewith global capitalism is not unproblematic, his constructive skepticism towards postcolonial discourse as a wholehas sounded an important alarm for postcolonial critics. Heis thus right to argue that "[tjhe problem with postcolonialcriticism ultimately is not that it has turned its back on itsradical origins but that, in doing so, it also has becomeoblivious to these circumstances, and the possibility ofimagining a world beyond the present" (Dirlik 2000: 16).Yet the real problem continues to haunt us: how do wereconfigure postcolonial discourse as a critical mode ofimagination in a world altered now by global capitalism?Critical conceptual vocabularies brought forth by orrelated to postcolonial discourse, such as hybridity, thethird space, critical localism and cosmopolitanism, are inone way or another being used in a new framework foracademic reflection. Yet, the institutionalization and professionalization of postcolonial discourse in the academy ina global era has ironically stifled their ideal potentialitiesand made these concepts meaningless professional labelsmore than tools for imagining the future. Take, for exam-


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pIe, the concept of hybridity. A seminal concept in postcolonial discourse, hybridity has been widely debated.Homi Bhabha, one of the most vocal theoreticians to advocate hybridity as a kind of tactic to subvert hegemonic discourse (Bhabha 1994), holds that hybridity can pointtowards a new cosmopolitanism that can engage differentpossibilities of cultural agency. Meanwhile, different challenges to the concept of hybridity can also be found (suchas Young 1995, Dirlik 1997). After taking into considerationboth positions, Pheng Cheah offers a brief assessment ofthese discussions. In Cheahs (1997: 172-173) view,although cultural hybridity may bring about cosmopolitanism, it is really a kind of "closet idealism," since themotivation of the meaning and symbols of neocolonial culture "via economic and political institutional structures inan unequal global order means that they cannot be translated, reinscribed, and read anew in the ways suggested bytheories of hybridity. This brings us to the potential problem resulting from the uncritical celebration of hybridity,which has surfaced most clearly in debates on identity politics, one of the important agendas related to hybridity."Notions such as "emergent community" (Chow 1998A:162-167), "flexible citizenship" (Ong 1999: 1-26) and"identity as multimedia spectacle" (Canclini 2000: 89-96)are all paradigmatic identities that attempt to go beyondsimple hybridity. Converging on the notion of "cosmopolitanism," they fail to go into this issue more in depth. AsDipesh Chakrabarty (2000: 653-654) rightly argues, hybridity and cosmopolitanism should really be seen as "expressions that remind us of particular strategies" formulated inthe course of the struggle for a middle ground between universalism/relativism binary. But recent discussions on cosmopolitanism, as Bruce Robbins has noted, have notadequately engaged the importance of "(re)attachment,multiple attachment, or attachment at a distance" (Cheahand Robbins 1998: 3). This also explains in part the per-

sistent forms of binaries, despite conscious efforts againstsimple dichotomized thinking.Patriotism and nationalism are two phenomena thatare usually viewed in opposition to cosmopolitanism. Thepatriotism-cosmopolitanism binary has led to the commonfallacy that patriotism is the antonym of cosmopolitanism.Kwame Anthony Appiah (1997) has shown us convincingly that cosmopolitanism and patriotism do not necessarilyexclude each other and that their spurious opposition willsimply suppress the critical energies of hybrid cosmopolitanisms. A similar fallacy relates to the nationalismcosmopolitanism opposition. In the age of globalization,the nation-state seems to be declining, and nationalism isbelieved to be an obstacle to cosmopolitanism. Contrary tocommon belief, Cheah has found it more appropriate, toconsider statism instead of nationalism to be the antonymof cosmopolitanism (Cheah and Robbins 1998: 22). Theactual success or failure of nationalist discourse is in thisregard a less relevant issue than the over-simplistic conception of nationalist discourse itself. The false belief thatnationalism has been completely outmoded in the newglobal order will lead only to a non-reflexive mode ofenquiry. Robbins claims that in the United States, forinstance, there arises a kind of nationalism "that does notknow itself as such-a nationalism that sees itself as civicrather than ethnic, hence not really nationalism at all"(Cheah and Robbins 1998: 13). Uncritical cosmopolitanismwill simply lead to a statist and closed model of analysisthat uses 'cosmopolitan' to replace 'nationalist.'Cosmopolitanism and associated notions, such as multiculturalism, can be regarded as vigorous heterogeneousdiscursive spaces opened up by postcolonial discourse,among other things. We must bear in mind that grandlabels like cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism are noguarantee of an investigative open model of analysis withdiversities and possibilities. Slavoj Zizek (1998: 1008) has


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in this sense warned us that" [m]ulticulturalist opennessversus a new fundamentalism is thus a false dilemma: theyare the two faces of today's postpolitical universe." Worsestill, multiculturalism might be "a disavowed, inverted,self-referential form of racism": "it 'respects ' the Other'sidentity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed'authentic'community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universalposition" (Zizek 1997: 44). In short, the deceptive neutrality of multiculturalism is used to mask its underlying complicity with hegemonic Eurocentrism. It is in effect nothingmore than, to borrow Zizek's words, "the cultural logic ofmultinational capitalism." The most annoying problem isthat "[tjhe abstract principle of multiculturalism, as expression of liberal open-mindedness and progressive tolerance,much too often stands in for an alibi to exonerate the existing privileged, inequities, and class differences" (Miyoshi2000: 44). Critics are indeed not unaware of the problemsinherent in concepts like multiculturalism. In the early1990s, the Chicago Cultural Studies Group had alreadyunderlined the dangerous situation that transnational corporations might manipulate multiculturalism to function asan empty slogan for market development. They proposedin this regard the term "critical multiculturalism" to distinguish corporate multiculturalism from the multiculturalismthat truly crosses cultural and disciplinary boundaries(Chicago Cultural Studies Group 1992: 550). The prefixesattached to "critical multiculturalism," "critical postcolonialism" (During 1998) and "critical localism" (Dirlik 1997)tell us the same lesson. Such terms highlight the dangersposed by institutionalism that can stifle the critical vitalityof multiculturalism and postcolonialism. "Critical" discourses must be revitalized through deconstructive readingby other "critical" efforts. Only then can they be activelyfor, rather than merely about, the ideals that they espouse.

"The Fourth World" is in this sense another criticalattempt to imagine beyond the given discursive frameworkof global knowledge production and to locate another siteof struggle, among indigenous peoples. Manuel Castells(1998: 70-165) maintains that we have already entered theage of "the Fourth World," which is made up of "multipleblack holes of social exclusion throughout the planet." In asimilar vein, ArifDirlik (1997: 146-160) argues that the former division of First, Second and Third Worlds no longerexists in the age of global economy. Unfortunately, it doesnot mean that problems of inequality and social exclusionhave been resolved; on the contrary, the powerless indigenous people are further marginalized within the globaleconomy, and the problem of injustice becomes more rampant. Lest being trapped by the professionalized label ofThird World, Dirlik (1997: 159) would rather direct hishope to "the Fourth World," a form of local struggles ofindigenous people that "may have a paradigmatic role toplay within this new historical situation." Perhaps in thislight we can understand why Zizek (1998: 1007) aptlyclaims, "the true opposition today is rather between globalization (the emerging global market new world order)and universalism (the properly political domain of universalizing one's particular fate as representative of globalinjustice)." Appadurai puts forward "globalization frombelow" as a tactic for the Fourth World, claiming thatthrough grassroots globalization transnational advocacynetworks can be built up to resist global capital. He (2000:15, 17) also believes that it is important to "recognize thatthe word globalization, and words like freedom, choice,and justice, are not inevitably the property of the statecapital nexus." This suggests that globalization does notnecessarily mean globalization of corporate capital fromabove. It can also refer to the globalization of oppositionfrombelow. That is to say, the Fourth Worldcan set its ownagenda that in effect incorporates the discursive energies of


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postcolonial discourse into the resistance of the FourthWorld on the one hand and reconfigures postcolonial discourse per se on the other.The sweeping generalization above would appear too

optimistic or even naive without a reconsideration of theaporia faced by oppositional discourse: its inevitable complicity with the institution. When the Fourth World tries tolook for new theoretical ideas for its own articulation, itmust at least to a certain extent be confined to given conventions of knowledge formation. The old Spivak (1988)question "Can the subaltern speak?" will come to the forewhen oppositional discourse faces the inevitable problemof legitimation/ institutionalization/ professionalization.Appadurai has also noticed that globalization from belowmust be accompanied by a redefinition of "research"(Appadurai 2000: 8-15). This argument is reasonable, but itis not easy to see how it can be achieved in Western academia, let alone the academic periphery, as the Universitycan scarcely be used as a site of resistance in the age ofglobal capitalism (see, among others, Miyoshi 2000. Chun2000). The editors of the journal Postcolonial Studies openlyadmit in the introduction to the first issue their "complicity as academics in the Western academic market system."Their solution is to recognize that postcolonialism itselfmust keep moving to remain disruptive: "momentarilyupset[ing] the disciplinary'apple cart' and offer[ing] portents of other ways of seeing and doing" (Sanjay et al.1998: 10). Robert Young (1999: 33), the editor-in-chief ofInterventions: International Journal ofPostcolonial Studies,goes further to state that the journal "intends to develop asa forum for advancing theoretical debate, with an emphasis on the development of radical and innovative conceptualizations and analytic instruments." In a slightly differentvein, David Harvey (2000: 560), in his brilliant account ofcosmopolitanism, concludes that a meaningful cosmopolitanism (from the perspective of geography) is "a principle

of intervention to try to make the world (and its geography) something other than what it is." All these statementspoint one way or another to the necessity of retaining academic vitality and looking for new possibilities of knowledge formation. Likewise, Rey Chow (1998b: 166) statesthat identity politics "should be recognizedas having made a substantial contribution to fundamentally reshaping our assumptions about knowledge."Postcolonial and global/local discourses remind us that,besides the now common recognition that identities are infact not being but becoming, knowledge formation is alsoa similar process of becoming.

Yet to contemporary intellectuals the most difficultproblem is exactly, as Edward Said (1994: 90) lucidly notes,"to represent what you profess through your work andinterventions, without hardening into an institution, or akind of automaton acting at the behest of a system ormethod." Said thus thinks an intellectual should be a "traveler" rather than a "potentate" who keeps on traveling andresisting hardening into an institution. These argumentsare fully justifiable, but one must ask why such points arerepeatedly raised but seldom discussed, let aloneanswered. It would appear that any discourse. even antihegemonic ones, inevitably harden, once it is institutionalized and professionalized. The double bind remains afterall: "I f the subaltern can speak then, thank God, the subaltern is not a subal tern any more" (Spivak 1990: 158).Stuart Hall (1991: 39) once remarked in the early 1990sthat in the new global order, "we have, in entirely newforms which we are only just beginning to understand, thesame old contradictions, the same old struggle." Thisreminds me of my favorite old story in Zhuang Zi, a bookfull of wisdom about power and resistance. In the chapter"Discussion on making all things equal" there is a shortstory about monkeys: "When the monkey trainer washanding out acorns, he said, 'You get three in the morning

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Chu Yiu Wai Postcolonial Discourse in the Age of Globalization 47and four at night: This made all the monkeys furious.'Well, then; he said, 'you get four in the morning and threeat n ight: The monkeys were all delighted. There was nochange in the reality behind the words, and yet the monkeysresponded with joy and anger" (Watson 1968: 41; myemphasis). Said's critical response to the post-9/ll revivalof Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" can be borrowed here as a footnote to this story: "Labels, generalizations and cultural assertions are inadequate, " and it isimportant "to reflect, examine, sort out what it is we aredealing with in reality." The point is that "[i]t is bet te r tothink in terms of powerful and powerless communities, thesecular politics of reason and ignorance, and universalprinciples of justice and injustice, than to wander off insearch of vast abstractions that may give momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis"(Said 200l). A decade has passed, but Hall's words are stillapplicable to the new global order. These old problemshave not disappeared, as Hall notes with Vision, and global ization will not eradicate them either. One must be vigilant towards the " three in the morning and four at night"and "four in the morning and three at night" analogy. If weadopt the definition of the field of postcolonial cultural

studies by Interventions as "one tha t focuses On contemporary forces of Oppression and coercive domination thatoperate in the world today" (Young 1999: 34), this poin twill always remain valid in the conceivable or imaginablefuture.That said, one could conclude that postcolonial discourse should be increasingly relevant with the rise ofglobalization. In this age of globalization, it must continually reconfigure itself to confront new and ongoing chal

lenges.

BIBLIOGRAPHYAppadurai, A. "Grassroots Globalization and the ResearchImagination." Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 1-19.Appiah, K.A. "Cosmopolitan Patriots." Critical Inquiry 23,nO.3 (1997): 617-639.Bhabha, H. Location of Culture. New York and London:Routledge, 1994.Canclini, N.G.Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and

Multicultural Conflicts. Minneapolis and London, 2000.Castells, M. End ofMillennium. London, 1998.Chakrabarty, D. "Universalism and Belongingin the Logicalof Capital." Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 653-678.Cheah, P. "GivenCulture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical FreedomIn Transnationalism." Boundary 224, no. 2 (1997): 157197.Cheah, P. and B. Robbins eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and

Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis and London,1998.Chicago Cultural Studies Group. "CriticalMulticulturalism."Critical Inquiry 18, no. 3 (1992): 530-555.Chow, R. Ethics after Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity,Reading. Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1998A.__ , "The Postcolonial Difference: Lessons in CulturalLegitimatlon." Postcolonial Studies 1 no. 2 (1998B): 161169.Chun, A. "The Institutional Unconscious; or, The PrisonHouse of Academia." Boundary 227, no. 1 (2000): 51-74.Dirlik, A. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in theAge of Global Capitalism. Boulder, 1997.__ , Postmodettiitv's Histories: The Past as Legacy andProject. Lanham, Boulder,New York, Oxford, 2000.

During, S. "Postcolonialism and Globalization: A DialecticalRelation AfterAm" Postcolonial Studies I, no. 1 (1998):31-47.

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Hall, S. "The Local and the Global: Globalization andEthnicity," in Culture, Globalizalion and the WorldSystem, ed. A. King.Minneapolis (1991): 19-39.Harvey, D. "Cosmopolitanism and the Banality ofGeographical Evils." Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 529564.

Jameson, F. "Globalization and Political Strategy." New LeftReview 4, 2nd series (2000): 49-68.Miyoshi, M. "Ivory Tower in Escrow." Boundary 227, no. 1(2000): 7-50.Ong, A. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of

transnanonauiv. Durham and London, 1999.Said, E.Representalions of the Intellectual. London, 1994.__ , "The Clash of Ignorance," Znet,

http://www.zmag.org/saidclash.htm (2001).Sanjay, S. et al. "Postcolonial Studies: A Beginning."Postcolonial Studies 1, no. 1 (1998): 7-11.Spivak, G.C. The Post-colonial Critic: Interview, Strategies,Dialogues. London, 1990.- - , "Can the Subaltern Speak?" inMarxism and the

Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg.London: Macmillan (1988): 271-313.[Zhuang Zi]The Complete Works ofChuang Tzu, trans. B.Watson. New York and London, 1968.Young, R.J.C. Colonial Desire:Hybridity in Theory, Cultureand Race. London and New York, 1995.

- - , "AcademicActivism and Knowledge Formation inPostcolonial Critique." Postcolonial Studies 2, no. 1(1999): 29-34.Zizek, S. "Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logicof

Multinational Capitalism." New Left Review 225 (1997):28-51.-- , "ALeftist Plea for 'Eurocentrtsm'." Critical Inquiry 24,no. 4 (1998): 988-1009.

CHAMPAGNE LIBERALS ANDTHE NEW 'DANGEROUS

CLASSES'Reconfigurations of Class, Identity and

Cultural Production in the ContemporaryGlobal System~

Jonathan Friedman

This is an era of millenarianism. The millennium is here,the twenty-first century is here. It has been advertised asthe new globalized world, that for many we have finallyachieved. This is a world that will be characterized byopenness. I sit here watching the talk show, Jenny Jones,this time (10-4-00) dealing with racism. An AfricanAmerican intellectual talks about openness, against otherAfrican Americans in the studio who express strong criticism toward immigrants. A man replies angrily: "you cansay that flying around in your airplanes and living on top


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50 Jonathan Friedman Champagne Liberals and the New 'Dangerous Cla.sses' 51

of your hotels." Jones breaks off the discussion. Theenlightened are truly higher in this world, they are the elitein a way that concretizes the metaphor of globalization. Upthere, above the masses, delighting in a new found mobility, consuming the world. This is striking in the reactionsto EU, to say nothing of larger international organizations.The populism of the people and the elitism of the elites areever more marked in this era-to-be.

Globalization and the Global SystemThere is no doubt that the current period of world historyis one of globalization. Capital accumulation has decentralized geographically at an accelerating rate since the1970s. There is no need to repeat the well-known statisticsof this phenomenon. Capital has not, however, flowedequally to all corners of the globe. East Asia has been themajor recipient along with a number of regions, albeit to asignificantly lesser degree. These include, India, Brazil,Chile, and Mexico. Thus, a view once common in international circles, in the 1960s and 1970s that equated development with increasing underdevelopment in the ThirdWorld, has been largely abandoned, although the world'spoorest regions are still in 'the South: The world hasindeed changed, and I recall an interesting debate that wewere engaged in at the time in this pre-globalization era.We had written a number of arti

chun allen globalization critical issues

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