göran therborn- globalizations

GlobalizationsDimensions, Historical Waves, Regional Effects,

Normative Governance

Gran TherbornSwedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Uppsala

abstract: Globalization is a plural phenomenon. There areat least five major discourses on it that usually ignoreeach other: competitive economics, social criticism, state(im)potence, culture and planetary ecology. The dimensionsof globalization include a number of substantial social pro-cesses as well as two different kinds of dynamics: systemicand interacting exogenous actors. Globalizations are not newphenomena. At least six historical waves, beginning with thespread of world religions, may be identified. An attempt ismade to systematize the effects of globalizations on differ-ent world regions and social actors. Issues of governance areraised, focusing on states and norms.

keywords: global history globalization governance world culture world system

Challenges of the Global

Globally speaking, there are so far five major topical1 discourses onglobalization. Each of them includes scholarly as well as ideological orjournalistic argumentation. One, arguably the most widespread andproactive, is competition economics, which focuses on intensified world-wide competition and its implications for firms, workers and states. Thebasic message is captured most briefly by a line of Bob Dylans: Youdbetter start swimming, or youll sink like a stone.2 But it also includesless apocalyptic versions that focus instead on the potentially benigneffects of increasing global exchange and economic mobility, providedthat all countries understand and accept the challenges of the structuraladaptations that are required (e.g. OECD, 1997).

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A second topic (from now on my listing order becomes rather arbitrary)is sociocritical, namely expressing a critical concern with, and often astrongly negative reaction against, the perceived social consequences ofglobalization as competitive economics. Socioeconomic critiques ofglobalization are often couched in religious and/or moral terms. An elo-quent example is a recent statement by Julio Terrazas, the archbishop ofSanta Cruz and the president of the Episcopal Conference of Bolivia thecountry where Jeffrey Sachs earned his spurs as a global economicsadvisor in the 1980s before being invited to post-Communist Russia. Theglobalizers of the economy will be treated with more severity than . . .Sodom and Gomorrah, which already is a rather strong threat to thosewho in their arrogance think that well-being is only for a few and excludethe rest forever (La Prensa, 1998).3

An important analytical contribution of this kind is a report on TheSocial Effects of Globalization to the World Summit for Social Develop-ment in 1995 by the UN Research Institute for Social Development(UNRISD, 1995). It should be noted that the starting-point and drive ofthis sociocritical discourse on globalization are not only Third World andleft of center. Versions of it may also be found among the First Worldright, particularly in the USA (e.g. Buchanan, 1998).

The third topic has a more ideological sweep and centrality than the firsttwo, and it is more concentrated in academia, which does not diminishthe heat of controversy. The topic is that of state (im)potence in the face ofthe global economy. The controversies here center around questions aboutthe extent that the state has lost or is going to lose the capacities to governand control. To some writers, we are living the end of the nation-state,whereas to others we are englobed by a myth of globalization insidewhich differential national developments are still the main determinantsof the world economy. Between these poles of controversy, say Ohmae(1995) and Weiss (1998), there are many interesting studies and debates onthe sovereignty and capacity of states in the contemporary world.

Whereas the three major topics of globalization so far all hover aroundthe world economy and its changes, their economic dynamics and lessons,their social or political consequences, there are two others that approachglobalization from quite different angles. One, the fourth in our column,is cultural. The spotlight here is on global or at least transnational culturalflows, on communications and encounters, and on their effects on sym-bolic forms, social images, cultural practices, on lifestyles and the de-territorialization of culture. A major issue of cultural globalization iswhether it leads to uniformity or new forms of diversity. Thoughthere are accounts that emphasize the threat of uniformity in theforms of Americanization, McDonaldization, CocaColonization, cul-tural imperialism and such like (Barber, 1992; Mattelart, 1983), the major

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thrust of anthropological and other discourse on the matter is an empha-sis on diversity, on creolization, hybridization and the globalized pro-duction of difference (e.g. Appadurai, 1996; Hannerz, 1992, 1996;Nederveen Pieterse, 1998).

Finally, there is an important discourse that explicitly focuses on glob-ality rather than globalization, on the implications and consequences ofthe former. It is a discourse of planetary ecology that studies and discusseshumankind and global society as part of a planetary ecosystem. It is inthis kind of discourse that an awareness of the globe as a whole tends tofind its most eloquent expression. Its focus and the key issues of con-troversy are the actual or potential self-destruction of human action onearth and the requirements of sustainable development. The first majormanifestation of this kind of discourse was the 1972 Club of Rome reporton The Limits to Growth (Meadows, 1972), sustained by the first UNenvironmental conference in Stockholm the same year that inaugurateda quarter of a century of UN conferences on human and environmentaldevelopment. But the establishment of global ecology as a programmaticand monitoring discourse occurred in the course of the 1980s. One sideof this topic turns on questions of human population, its size, age distri-bution and conditions of life; another on the interactions of humankindand nature, such as the UN Panel on Climatic Change or the GlobalNatural Resource Monitoring, also by the UN.4

Seldom do these discourses express an awareness of each other andrarely, if ever, an awareness of all the others, although it is true that theliterature does now contain a few wide-ranging and heavyweight con-tributions, such as those of Castells (19968) and Held et al. (1999).Globalization poses three kinds of challenges at the threshold to the 21stcentury and the third millennium. One is cognitive: calling for conceptualclarification, analysis, interpretation and explanation, and addressed,first of all, to scholars of the humanities and the social sciences. A secondone we may name civic; it concerns all inhabitants of the planet, whethercitizens or not. How to make practical sense of globalization? How to actwithin or in relation to it, including how to resist, in case one shouldwant to? Third, in its surpassing of states, globalization poses the chal-lenge of governance, of a new world order. Each of these challenges con-tains a set of substantial issues, of how to comprehend specific processes,how to act with regard to them and, eventually, how to govern or regu-late them.

Grasping Globalizations

Like so many concepts in social science and historiography, globaliz-ation is a word of lay language and everyday usage with variable shades

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of meaning and many connotations. Furthermore, scholars in non-paradigmatic disciplines by definition hardly ever agree on the meaningof the concepts they use. However, it does seem worthwhile to throw astone of conceptualization into the pond of academia, at least to see whathappens.

As a concept of social theory and analysis, globalization should meetthree criteria. It should have a precise meaning, preferably not a seman-tically arbitrary one. It should be usable in empirical investigations, andit should have a wide variety of possible applications. The third criterionmeans that the concept should be abstract, not containing any a prioristatements of concrete content. On the basis of these considerations, Ithink it fruitful to define globalization as referring to tendencies to a world-wide reach, impact, or connectedness of social phenomena or to a world-encom-passing awareness among social actors. This definition is close to theetymology of the word. It makes the concept into an empirical variable,the presence of which may be ascertained or refuted and, in principle,measured. And it is agnostic and wide open about the possible concretepatterns of globalization, as well as non-committal a priori to the ques-tion of whether globalization is good or bad.

As a variable, globalization can cover an infinite number of the aspectsof social life. It can vary in degree of extension, from multi-continentalonly to strictly planetary. And it can be driven by different dynamics. Insum, the concept refers to a plurality of social processes, and the wordhad therefore better be used in plural: globalizations.

Discourses on globalization mean a spatialization of the social. So doalso those on another topic in vogue these days, in Europe at least: Euro-peanization. Generally and literally put, spatialization means a flatten-ing of social processes. The complexity of qualities, issues of depth andshallowness, the dialectics of contradictions tend to get lost throughspatialization. Today, the complexity of active cultural forces in the world,postmodernist challenges to modernity and the latters bouncing back,and the question of the dialectics of contradictions in contemporary capi-talism all tend to be rolled over by globalization. In the EU, issues ofgrowth, competitiveness, employment, democracy and justice have beensubmerged under the carpet of the management of the Western Europeanspace, its internal links of Single Market and monetary union, its enlarge-ment to the east and a tightening of the borders to poor areas and theirpeoples.

To spatialize the social means to focus on the extension and connectiv-ity of the latter. Not on, say, its qualities or the growth or decline, the con-tradictions or the dialectic of the social. There is, of course, a legitimateconceptual division of labor in which spatial as well as temporal anddialectical concepts have their role. The problem is rather the frequent


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tendency to mono-conceptual discourses. Globalization has often fallenvictim to that.

On the other hand, ceteris paribus, a spatial extension of something socialalso means a wider vista, a broader view. Globalizations may thus giverise to new questions about a familiar space. Among the things this writerhas learned from a global perspective is the extraordinary uniculturalismof late medieval/early modern Western Europe.

Dynamics: The World as a System, as aStage or Both?

A central issue of interpretation and analysis of the world produced byglobalizations is whether it is a system or a stage. Is the world a systemshaping the actors in it and directing their strivings, or is it an arena,where actors who were formed outside act and interact? The fulcrum ofthe current debate is the world economy, but the issue is the same withregard to a number of other aspects of social life, to which we return later.The question is far from merely academic. It is of utmost relevance to theoptions and effective possibilities of civic action and governance.

In sociology there are several strong currents that argue the system-ness of the world. It was adumbrated in 1966 by a disciple of TalcottParsons the creator of sociologys neoclassical synthesis Wilbert Moore(1966). It was asserted a decade later, with great polemical verve andwide-ranging historical argumentation, by a militant anti-Parsonian,Immanuel Wallerstein (1976: 7, 229ff.). Since the 16th century, there hasbeen one world system, the capitalist world economy. States, classes andother social phenomena are elements of the world system, and as suchare explained by the evolution and interaction of the latter.

Sociologists have conceived of the world as a system in other ways, too.John Meyer and a group of associates (Meyer et al., 1997) portray theworld as an enactment of culture. Their baseline is a rationalized worldinstitutional and cultural order from which states get their models of sov-ereignty and purpose, help with policies, and from which subnationalactors for instance gays and lesbians get legitimacy.

Whereas Wallerstein and Meyer arrive at their world systems byempirical investigation, Niklas Luhmann, who might be labeled a highlyoriginal post-Parsonian, comes to a similar conclusion as a profound socialtheorist. According to Luhmann (1997: Vol. 1, Ch. X), we now have aglobal system as a single world society that can be described withoutany reference to regional particularities and which, on the contrary, shouldbe used as the starting-point for explaining regional inequalities.Luhmann conceives of social systems in terms of communication andsociety as the encompassing social system, and from an observation of


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global communication he comes to his conception of contemporarysociety as world society. The novel conceptualizations-cum-empiricalinvestigations by Wallerstein and other world system analysts, by Meyer,Boli, Ramirez and other associates, have enriched our understanding ofthe world, and so has the grand theoretical oeuvre of Luhmann. Empiri-cally, there is clearly a world system, which has shaped, most visibly, thestates, the economies and the societies of the New Worlds of the Ameri-cas and Oceania, which has transformed those of the ex-colonial zonefrom northwestern Africa to Papua New Guinea, and to which thethreatened countries of externally induced modernization, with Japan asthe vanguard, have had to adapt. Although Western European states andcapitalists once created it, neither they nor Eastern Europe have been unaf-fected by the world system. It is also undeniable that there is a worldculture, sustained by global communication, that provides a historicallydelimited repertoire of institutions and policies which nation-states tendto emulate, resulting in an impressive isomorphism of, for example, con-stitutions, educational systems and public policy orientations.

So, a world system exists, and in this context I refrain from entering thefray about the relative merits and significance of it as world capitalism oras world culture. (There are obviously strong arguments for the relevanceof both points of view, which are not necessarily incompatible.) But doesthat mean that the world cannot also function as a stage of actors withimportant characteristics and resources from outside the world system?As far as I can see, the answer is no. Neither author seems to havebroached the question of system-ness as a variable. There is also, in myview, an array of good arguments that can be marshaled in favor of seeingthe world as an arena where nationally determined actors meet, interactand influence each other.

Current issues of this sort were highlighted by the Single Marketproject of the European Community. This project was launched in the mid-1980s, about three decades after the constitution of the EEC by the Treatyof Rome (scheduled for 1992, but though duly inaugurated on time not fully realized yet). The Single Market aims at a full-fledged regionaleconomic system in a narrow sense and fully determines the regional div-ision of labor according to a socially somewhat-regulated capitalist logic.

To grand histories or battle canvases of the world system, this mayappear as marginal fine print. To an understanding of contemporaryglobalization it seems to be highly pertinent. If the EU still has some stepsto take to a fully functioning Single Market, the world economy is stillfar from fully systemized. Alongside the resources and constraints pro-duced by the global economic system, enterprises, entrepreneurs andworkers are also shaped by sub-global forces, be they cultural areas,nations, states or sub-state regions, and so on.


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For current observers and participants, the composition of the mix ofglobal system and exogenous actors in global interaction is crucial. Howmuch can the global system dynamic tell us about the rise of SoutheastAsia as a major manufacturing area of the world in the last quarter of the20th century, for instance? Or why the division of employment and non-employment has diverged between the USA and the EU, or why the genderdivision of labor has done so, say between Germany and Scandinavia?

Though argued somewhat differently, Paul Hirst and Grahame Thomp-sons (1996) distinction between a global (system) and an inter-national(arena) economy is pertinent here. Causal arrows on the world scene havealso been seen flying from the national to the global. John Zysman (1996:164), an experienced analyst of international relations, for instance, hasargued:

National developments have . . . driven changes in the global economy; evenmore than a so-called globalisation has driven national evolutions. It is thesuccess of particular countries, rather than some unfolding of a singular marketlogic, based on more and faster transactions, that has forced adaptations.

As far as nation-states and world culture are concerned, let me point totwo sub-global features. One is party systems: that is, the framing of politi-cal opinion and the channeling of political action. While there are similarparties in several other countries, both the individual parties after thedemise of the Communist International and the party systems are, aboveall, national. Another is social policy and institutions of social rights. Thisis probably the most studied policy area of all, and the conclusion fromall these studies is unambiguous. Social entitlement institutions and socialpolicies differ among nation-states, both in form and in size, and, althoughthere are certain evolutionary tendencies, there is little convergence, eitherin terms of rights or in terms of generosity or finance.

I think there is an answer to this question about the character of thecontemporary world, an answer which is not just eclecticism or diplo-matic compromise, but theoretical. No complex social system is fullyscripted, with actors only having to enact given roles. From the systemperspective, social actors are always indeterminate to a significant extent,an indeterminacy which might be seen as contingency or an effect ofsystem-exogenous determinations, in the case under discussion, forexample, by national constellations and developments.

In other words, the world may very well be both a system and a stage.To show the system-ness of the world is a great merit of world systemand world culture analyses. But a next step, it seems to me, would be totreat system-ness and stage-ness as variables. That is, to move beyond thecontroversies of whether a global social system exists or not into asking:how much system-ness is there, was there in the past, and how much is


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it likely to be in the future? How much interaction of regionally, nation-ally and/or locally formed actors is or was there and is there likely to beon the world stage?

A world stage of interacting national forces is a social phenomenon ofworldwide reach and impact and, as such, is also a feature of globaliz-ation, in the sense given earlier. Here we have one important ground fordistinguishing different kinds of globalization. There are more.

Taking Multidimensionality Seriously That is,Systematically

There is a strong tendency for globalization to be discussed in unidi-mensional terms, as in the five topical discourses mentioned earlier. Andeven when there is a commitment to multidimensionality, this may oftenremain limited and/or arbitrary, following from a neglect of any system-atic approach to the social.

The multidimensionality of globalization and the plurality of global-izations may be captured with the help of two axes. One refers to the char-acter of the global(izing) dynamic, which may be either world systemicor (inter)active on a world stage. The other refers to the range of socialphenomena. With regard to the latter, previous work (Therborn, 1995)has shown the heuristic value of structure or structuration as referring tothe external resources and constraints that actors can draw upon and haveto take into account and to culture or enculturation as actors have learnedinternal resources and constraints, the horizon of their knowledge, values,norms, orientations of identifications and their symbolic repertoire.

Putting these two axes together, the areas and the dynamics of global-ization may then be summed up as shown in Table 1.

It should be clear why globalization should be taken in plural, as glob-alizations, involving a number of substantive social processes and morethan one procedural dynamic. Globalizations are multiform processes.

A Historical Hypothesis: Six Waves ofGlobalization

In the sense of tendencies toward a global reach or impact, we may discernat least six or possibly seven5 major historical waves, and two momentsof surge.

The first wave was the diffusion of world religions and the establish-ment of transcontinental civilizations. It might have been delimited intime with regard to the most important processes of spreading, whichwere not the same as their beginnings or ends. From this perspective, it


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seems that the most crucial period was constituted by the 4th7th cen-turies of the Christian era.

In those years, Christianity became dominant in Europe through itsestablishment and officialization in the Roman empire, and it settled inEthiopia and Kerala. Hinduism spread to Southeast Asia from the south-ern parts of the Indo-Chinese peninsula to what is now the Indonesianarchipelago. Buddhism went to China from India in these centuries and,in the same period, spread from there to Korea and Japan. By the begin-ning of the 8th century CE, Islam ruled Spain, the Arab world fromMorocco to (current) Iraq, Persia, Kashgar on the Central Asian silk routeand Sind in todays Pakistan.

By about 700 CE, the world religions had established themselves astrans-tribal and trans-monarchical it would be anachronistic to talk oftransnational cultures, not strictly world encompassing, but stretched out


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Table 1 Dimensions of Globalization

Dynamics

Area (Inter)action on world stage System process

Structuring Sub-global actors World systemDivision of labor World trade World market

Interdependence World productionRights World influence Universal law/rightsCapital/income World impact World finance

World market determinationRisks/opportunity World impact World environment market

Enculturing Sub-global actors World culture (system)Identities Cross-continental Humankind identity or

identifications or role global categorical models identities

Planetary awarenessCognition World reference, world Universal knowledge,

comparison universal scienceWorld diffusion

Values World influence World religions or ideologiesNorms World influence Global rulesSymbolic forms Cross-cultural interchange, Universal language/

hybridization expressionsWorld art and architecture

Action Global interaction World concert/endemic conflict


widely across continents and oceans. These were cultures which were notonly a set of beliefs and ritual practices but also included a trans-tribal,trans-monarchical literary language Latin, Sanskrit, Pali or Arabic specific architecture and esthetics as well as social norms.

These centuries were also crucial to the rise of a Sinic civilization thatwas wider than the Chinese empire. The Chinese script, Confucian doc-trines and esthetic canons settled in Korea and Japan and, somewhatbefore our period, in northern Vietnam.

What brought together all these currents at about the same time hasstill to be unraveled. At least in Europe, it included major mass migra-tions (wanderings of peoples) of Germanic tribes moving south and west,Huns, Slavs, Avars and, later, Magyars entering Eastern Europe from Asia.

These early tendencies to cultural globalization were followed by aseries of developments in the opposite direction, perhaps best capturedas vernacularization (the development of particular languages out of acommon language area), as its most visible expression is linguistic withconcomitant cultural significance.6

Upon the spread of the world religions and their holy languages fol-lowed a rise of different vernacular high-culture languages often with theirown scripts. This movement of deglobalization seems to have had its mostvigorous and widespread impetus in the 12th16th centuries, although itstarted earlier. In the Sinic culture area, the Japanese developed a supple-mentary script and a vernacular literary tradition. Korea created its ownscript in the mid-14th century, and a domestic script emerged in Vietnamalthough with less success. Pali and Sanskrit receded before new vernac-ular cultures: Sinhala, Javanese, Marathi, Bengali and others. In Europe,Romance languages departed from Latin as high cultures in the 12th14thcenturies, after having emerged as vulgar speech from the first half ofthe 9th century onward (Hagge, 1996: 185ff.). The Slavs had an alphabetof their own, and Church Slavonic was still the high language of Ortho-dox Eastern Europe. In the 16th century, the Reformation meant an enor-mous boost to vernacular languages through Bible translations.

The cultural process of deglobalization was sustained by a consoli-dation of different polities within the same culture area. Islam was, inpart, an exception, with its reproduction both of vast empires and ofArabic as the high literary standard. But the most powerful Islamic rulers,the Ottomans and the Mughals, established Turkish and Persian, respec-tively, as languages of imperial rule; the latter also used Urdu below theirhighest echelons.

The second wave of globalization occurred through European colonialconquests in naval explorations that commenced in the late 15th century with its special Columbian moment in 1492 and continued at high,though decelerating speed for about a hundred years, with the Dutch and


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the British following upon the Iberian and the more limited French thrust.High-value trade (spices), plunder and extraction of precious metals andplantation slavery were key components of the new world system. Plan-tation slavery made sugar into a world commodity. For the first time sincethe prehistoric (still not certainly dated) entry of humans into Americaacross the Bering Strait, the Americas became part of a multi-continentalearth.

For two continents of the world, this was an epoch of full-scale disas-ter: the genocidal depopulation of the Americas and the opening up ofAfrica to a trans-Atlantic slave trade. It was also the time of the creationof the New Worlds in the Americas and the worldwide reach of the newEuropean empires. Of the latter, 16th-century Spain encompassing mostof both the Americas and the Philippines was the most logisticallyimpressive. And in the Philippines, Christianity met Islam, a frontier thatpersists to this day.

While the European colonial expansion of the second wave derivedfrom mercantile and other interests in the individual colonizing countries,with the competition and attempts at mutual monopolization of the latter,there was, third, a global thrust resulting from purely intra-Europeanpower struggles. This was the series of the first global wars, which pittedBritain and France against each other with shifting constellations of allies,not only in Europe but all over the world. These also occurred in NorthAmerica, the Caribbean, India and, through Dutch involvement withFrance, on the South African Cape and in Southeast Asia. Napoleon Bona-partes occupation of Egypt in 1798 brought the intra-European war rightinto the lands of the main Islamic empire, the previous power of whichhad pushed the Europeans to find ways of circumnavigating it. In Europe,where they were generated, these wars are usually known as the Wars ofthe Spanish, the Austrian Succession and the Napoleonic Wars, stretch-ing from 1700 to 1815, which culminated in the latter half of this period.The then colonial wars became wars between European states, deployinglarge naval and land forces of metropolitan Europe on theaters of waracross oceans and continents (cf. Fieldhouse, 1982: 94ff.).

The Franco-British world wars were followed by the concert of Europe,which brought a century of relative peace to Europe. But globalizationsoon gathered a new and different momentum.

This was the heyday of European imperialism which lasted from themid-19th century to 1918 as a fourth wave of globalization. It was drivenby bulk trade, involved voluntary trans-oceanic mass migration and wassustained by new and faster means of transport and communication. Thiswave began as the British forcibly opened China for international drugstrafficking, soon followed by their finishing off the Mughal empire, andas the Americans opened up Japan through the threat of naval force.


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Throughout most of Asia, the European screws were tightened, Africawas subjugated, and masses of migrants went out from Europe to theAmericas and to Oceania. The latter were repopulated after the cleans-ing of the natives. Chinese and Indian coolies dependent labor wereencouraged to migrate to the imperial labor markets, and millions did.World commodity markets were established, especially in grain, and aworld capital market emerged. The gold standard ruled over trans-national transactions, including finance.

The First World War and its immediate aftermath constituted the finalcrest of this fourth wave. The center of the conflict was in Europe, but thewhole British empire was enrolled, current or ex-, as in the case of theUSA, and the combat zones included German colonies in Africa, Chinaand the Pacific, as well as Ottoman West Asia. The aftermath of the warestablished the first global organization of states, the League of Nations,the International Labour Organization, and a set of ambitious but com-pletely ineffective global norms, of state behavior toward national minori-ties and mandated extra-European populations.

After the First World War, there followed a significant new period ofdeglobalization, of shrinking world trade, of national abandonments of thegold standard, of the reinforcement of states versus markets, of nationaland ethnic particularisms.

The Second World War and its immediate sequel was a second, specialsurge of globalization, this time beginning a new wave. Again the centerwas Europe, but the Pacific theater, between Japan and the USA, wasno sideshow. All Asia east of India was directly drawn into the war, aswere North Africa, Ethiopia and the Caucasus. Again the outburst ofglobal conflict was followed by a brief moment of peaceful globalization.This was characterized by the constitution of the United Nations and itsspecialized organizations, of the Nuremberg Trials and the UN Declar-ation of Human Rights.

Then there came, out of the Second World War, a fifth globalizationwave. The costs of communication and transport declined enormously,and the share of external trade began to pick up again. But the main thrustwas political, pitching the USA, its allies and clients versus the USSR, itsallies and clients, in a literally worldwide rivalry and conflict, less bel-ligerent but more ideologically high pitched than the long series of hotglobal wars between Britain and France about two centuries earlier. TheCold War had its origins in Europe, and it might be seen as a global pro-jection of the internal, deep ideological cleavages characteristic of Euro-pean modernity, but it entered everywhere into all parts of Asia, fromKorea and Japan to Arab West Asia, into sub-Saharan Africa, theCaribbean and South America. It brought dramatic and highly contro-versial Communist-hunting into Australia and New Zealand.


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Cold War globalization reached its peak in the decade from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s. The USA was always the richest and most powerfulcontestant of the Cold War. However, there was a time when the USAlooked vulnerable. That was after its defeat in the Vietnam War and beforethe self-acknowledged decay of the USSR.

Finally, there is the sixth, current wave in which the politico-militarydynamic of the Cold War has been overtaken by a mainly financial-cum-cultural one. This took off in the second half of the 1980s with the enor-mous expansion of foreign currency trading after the breakdown (in the1970s) of the international Bretton Woods currency system, followed bythe trading of derivatives and other new instruments of high-level gam-bling. This economic side was ideologically spurred by a new right-wingliberal current that asserted itself after the (partial) breakdown, in theeconomic crisis of the 1970s, of the post-Second World War socioeconomiccompromise in Western Europe and North America, a current furtherinvigorated by the collapse or forceful overthrow of Third World popu-lism and then again by the collapse of European Communism.

Institutionally, this neoliberal current has manifested itself in abolish-ing state controls of capital markets and opening up new financial worldmarkets, in the dismantling of tariffs, privatizations of public enterpriseand services, a breakup of national champion monopolies and in a generalencouragement of global competition.

Mass intercontinental and transnational migration is returning with thisnew wave and in new patterns. Reversing the streams of the fourth wave,mass migration now mainly proceeds from South to North from Latinto North America, from Africa and South Asia to Europe and from Westto East, that is from Asia across the Pacific to North America. These newdirections were opened by a labor shortage in the core capitalist countriesfrom their postwar boom and reproduced and expanded by the growingeconomic and demographic disparities between the sending and receiv-ing countries. New poles of migrant attraction outside the old routes havealso been established to areas like the Gulf region and parts of SoutheastAsia.

The new migration has changed the cultural landscape of the world.The earlier, largely Anglo-Saxon New Worlds are becoming more multi-cultural than ever before, with strong Hispanic and Asian elements.Western Europe, in modern history the most mono-cultural part of theworld, is now quite rapidly also becoming multicultural. Islam is finallyentering northwestern Europe, and so are, to a lesser extent, Hinduismand Buddhism. The new migrants have made all Europe, if by no meansall Europeans, multilingual.

Satellite broadcasting, a product of the 1980s CNN was set up in 1980 has made a global diffusion of information and expressive forms literally


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possible and effective. Mainly, the direction is from the USA and the UK,which send news, music and soap operas to the rest of the world. Butthere are also other significant mass communication exporters: Brazil,Mexico, Egypt, India and Hong Kong. Sometimes even more importantare the Southern broadcasts that are receivable in North America andWestern Europe by the new immigrants, who thereby can maintain theircultural roots in their new countries.

Another crucial technical invention, culturally more universalizing thandiffusionist, is the Internet, which has flourished internationally since themid-1990s. By cheap, personal electronic communication, people from allcorners of the world can meet and connect on an equal footing. It is justbeginning to create a new system of business transactions of global reach.

Throughout the 20th century English advanced as a global linguafranca, with resident worldwide or regional alternatives: Chinese in EastAsia, since the consolidation of European imperialism, although Man-darin is currently growing at the expense of Chinese vernaculars; Germanin Eastern Europe; Japanese in East Asia after the Second World War; andRussian after the split of the Communist movement and the collapse ofthe USSR. The possible threat to French as a world language appears tohave dawned upon the French for the first time at the Versailles Confer-ence while negotiating the peace after the First World War, when English,surprisingly to French linguists and academicians, was introduced asanother language of international diplomacy (Hagge, 1996: 272). TheSecond World War, the Americanization of Western Europe in the ColdWar period and the rise of a worldwide English-speaking mass culturehave since then cut down the transnational reach of the French language.

Outside the fields of finance and culture, the current wave has notpushed globalization much further. Politically, the end of the Cold Warmeant a deglobalization of political action, even if the USA occasionallyshows off its superpower muscles in other parts of the world. Somemodest advances toward concerted action have been made by the UNmachinery and its encouragement of global NGO networking, such as theimplementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Theglobal environment has at least been put on an agenda of concerted action,if little more. Much more substance is there in the global management offinancial crises, orchestrated by the IMF, operations which have the tan-gible advantage of protecting the interests of Northern bankers. There hasbeen a strongly revived interest in universal human rights, but whetherthere has been much change in the practical respect of them is less clear.The ideals of a global civil society or a cosmopolitan democracy (Held,1995) are still far away.

Anyway, globalization is neither a unique, recent phenomenon norsomething intrinsically irreversible. Globalization, like modernity


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(Therborn, 1995, 1999), is amenable not only to categorical interpretationsand ideological polemics but also to empirical, pluri-dimensional analy-sis, although it is neither solely cultural nor exclusively economic.

There is, as far as I can see, no evidence of anything properly cyclical inthe waves of globalization, but they do tend to have certain common fea-tures. They are all multidimensional, involving politico-military, economicand cultural forces and processes, while each has dominant dynamics.

The first wave was dominated by the diffusion of religion and ofreligion-related high culture, but that diffusion occurred via the victori-ous sword and migrant traders as well. Colonialism originated in ex-peditions in search of trade, but first of all, it was violent conquest. It hadenormous demographic, cultural and economic consequences as well. TheFranco-British conflicts of the 18th century and the Soviet-American onesof the 20th century were driven by a global dynamic of big power rivalrythat spread from a center in Europe, while significantly dependent oneconomic resource mobilization and sharpened by ideological differencesand controversies more shifting meanings in the Franco-British case andmore constant ones between the Soviets and the Americans. ClassicalEuropean imperialism, like the current wave, surged toward worldmarkets and opened intercontinental migration routes, while spawning apowerful, asymmetric cultural diffusion and including particularisticpower interventions draped in universalistic language.

So far, the rise of the waves has derived from autonomous actorsextending their influence and impact, not from an intensification of sys-temic processes. But each wave has tended to create a certain globalsystem-ness, be it of a world religious culture, an empire, a world marketor a system of world conflict. When the wave subsided, and even morewhen it was followed by a phase of deglobalization, this system-ness wasweakened, more seldom lost. In other words, a historical perspectiveseems to bring forth the coexistence and interaction of world system-nessand world stage-ness as developmental sequences.

All the waves, so far, have petered out after some time. They were fol-lowed by longer or shorter periods of deglobalization. But one wave didnot follow upon and from the other, which meant that the contraction ofone might coincide in time with the rise of another. Furthermore, a globalextension of some social phenomena may coexist with a contraction ofothers.

The collapse of the USSR meant a tendency toward deglobalization ofpolitics, particularly felt in Third World peripheries that were previouslyarenas of world conflict. In Southern Africa and in Central America thisalso made it possible to find local solutions. At about the same time,however, finance and mass communication reached higher levels of globalextension, building upon economic and technological developments


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coinciding with post-Second World War Cold War politics. The deglobal-ization in the 1920s and the 1930s was more general, but during thoseyears Japan and, somewhat later, the Soviet Union were constructingthemselves into new global powers, preparing for a quite new scenarioof global high politics in the Second World War.

The Franco-British global wars ended with the Vienna Congress, whichreinstated continental Europes position as the center of power, but notin command of the worlds oceans. The lapse before the next British reachfor the world was short. Alongside the thrust of European colonialism,the process of vernacularization and the fragmentation of the worldreligions continued, above all in the Europe of the Reformation.

Finally, all the waves of globalization raise questions about the impli-cations of our spatial conceptualizations of the social processes involved.While space is often, outside the specialty of geography, a neglected aspectin social science and in historiography, there are also limitations inviewing the social world primarily in spatial terms.

The logic of the Cold War tried to flatten all economic, social, and cul-tural and political issues into a global opposition between the Free Worldand the Socialist Camp. The open door and the civilizing mission ofimperialism discarded questions about who should open what doors atwhat time, and about the authenticity and the imposition of civilizations.Beneath the surface of the Franco-British wars on the seven seas forces gath-ered into the eruptions of the Industrial and the French Revolutions. In anon-spatial perspective, colonialism was hardly a discovery or conquestof new worlds, but it was an eco-demographic disaster of unequaled pro-portions in known human history. The wave of religious diffusion was notjust the spread of given cultural entities. It also involved, among otherthings, new articulations of religions with political institutions, such asChristianity with the Roman empire, Islam with the Persian monarchicaltradition and Buddhism with the imperial institutions of China and Japan.

Civic Challenges: Perspectives of Actors andChannels of Action

The challenges posed by globalization to existing, non-global forms ofcivic rights and collective action vary fundamentally along two axes withregard to position in the social structure and with location in the geogra-phy of globalization. Who you are and where you are make crucial differ-ences and give very different grounds and possibilities of action. Processesof globalization link with different sub-global tendencies in different partsof the world and, therefore, meet with different responses and differentkinds of resistance.

In this vein we had better look at different social and regional contexts,


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rather than the conventional globallocal nexus. Socially we may ask whowins and who loses from what kind of globalization? If we remember thatglobalization is not a unidimensional economic phenomenon then thequestions of winners and losers become complicated empirical questions.Here, however, we might at least hint at an analytical framework.

Globalizations can affect the social space of actors from two angles: bydirectly changing their given social location and by opening channels tothe rest of the world. Generally speaking, we may say that (for the fore-seeable term) the winners of globalizations are those for whom an openedworld is either an opportunity of action or a connection to resourcefulfriends. The importance of globalization to social actors, then, varies withthe size of the direct gains and losses or threats to the actors in their situ-ations and with the effects of mobility and connections. Opportunity, inturn, may be either in terms of vertical ascendance, becoming rich or atleast affluent or successful in some other way on the spot or, alternatively,in terms of horizontal mobility, getting a better life somewhere else. Itmay also mean access to sources of information, of values and of normsmore congenial to those prevailing at home, and link-ups with friends inother parts of the world. To the losers, globalization is a closure of oppor-tunities, of employment, of chances for decent wages or profits, and/ora cultural invasion that occupies the high ground of cultural communi-cation and subverts important values.

Who, then, are the winners and the losers? In order to approach thisquestion systematically, it might be useful to tabulate the main types ofalternatives.

The effects of globalizations run in different directions. The contestedevaluations of the phenomenon reflect a multifaceted reality. The impli-cations of Table 2 are, on one side, a tendency toward a polarization ofeffects and, on the other, a range of possibilities. Business elites tend togain both in their current business situation and from access to newopportunities, to international technology, to possibilities to move, to thesupport of global economic institutions, from capital to celebrations in thebusiness press. Non-competitive groups and localized traditionalists invalues and lifestyles, on the other hand, have nothing to gain. Threats,insecurity and losses tend to pile up around them.

But Table 2 also shows that individuals tend to have options, becausethe groups listed are not mutually exclusive. As a low-skilled worker youmay be an avid consumer of satellite television, and/or you may havethe possibility to migrate. As a member of an indigenous community youmay have your traditional ways threatened by the global drive for capitalaccumulation, but you may get support from friends in other countries,including some very resourceful ones. And there are, of course, as alwaysin human affairs, possibilities of change over time. Competitiveness may


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Table 2 Winners and Losers from Globalizations

World openings

PositiveSituational Negative effects Marginal Invasion Access Support Mobility

Threats Non-competitive Local traditionalistsbusiness,workers, professionals

Consumers Connected MigrantsProfessionals disadvantaged

groups

Opportunities Competitive Business elites Business elites Business elitesworkers andsmall business


be both learned and lost, traditions may be embraced or abandoned,connections may be established or lost, identifications can change, andthe doors of migration can widen or narrow.

The civic issues of globalizations cannot be captured in any simple for-mulae, be they of fundamentalism, localism or identity politics.

Globalization is Variably Globalized

Globalization takes place in different spatio-historical contexts, whichprovide very different meanings and implications in various parts of theworld. In order to concretize such a statement it might be useful to delin-eate these differences, however crudely and summarily. In addition tothe situational and opening effects discussed earlier, two more variablesare important in macroscopic regional comparisons. One is variation ofscale, of the size of the situational and opening globalization effects inrelation to a given starting-point or benchmark. The other is the percep-tion of the predominant shape of globalizing forces of change. Variationsalong these lines give rise to different receptions of and cleavages aroundglobalization.

This birds eye view of the implications of globalizations may be end-lessly elaborated. Here we confine ourselves to a few explications. Forbrevitys sake, the social outline of Table 3 is kept in the background andnot brought explicitly into this regional context.


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Table 3 Main Regional Effects of Current Globalization

Area Situation effect Opening Shape

Western Europe Secondary Marginal CompetitionImmigration

Eastern Europe Consumption Connections Transition to Europeand the West

Investment Cultural accessCompetition

USA Competition Market access Low-wage producersWorld marketWorld government

Third World Divisive Secondary World Bank, IMFAdjustment Connections Creditors, donorsInvestment Cultural accessCultural challenge

Southeast and Living standard Market access Own initiativeEast Asia Cultural challenge Cultural access


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In Western Europe there is a relatively minor situational impact, giventhe old tradition of open societies and economies and the overpoweringregional impetus of European integration. Europe still seems to over-shadow the globe, in spite of some business pleading and trend-conscioussociology to the contrary.

De facto, although usually not perceived under this name, globalizationin Western Europe appears most visibly and dramatically in the newpattern of world migration. In the early 1960s, Europe transformed froma continent of emigration to one of immigration, and in the 1980s and1990s European societies changed considerably, with a significant influxof non-European immigrants. This has led to considerable social frictionand has given rise to xenophobic movements and violence.

In Eastern Europe current globalization means both an opening of pre-viously relatively closed economies and cultures and entry into anothereconomic system, capitalism, apertures perceived as Europe and theWest a tremendous change, in other words, with a starkly differenti-ated impact on economic winners and losers. So far, most Eastern Euro-peans have lost economically, above all in the former Soviet Union andthe Balkans, although access to consumer goods has increased.

In terms of perception, globalization here mostly appears wrapped upin the transition problematic, namely the transitions to democracy, capi-talism, Europe, the West, or, as it is often put without the slightest self-irony, to normalcy.

The international agencies, the IMF and World Bank above all, which defacto govern many of the economic and social policies of post-CommunistEurope, seem so far to have received less attention as agents of globaliz-ation here than in other parts of the world where they are important.

In the USA, while the countrys political and economic leadership ispushing for wider opening of world markets, there is a surprisingly strongand widely spread (across the leftright spectrum) concern with and fearof the dangers of globalization, seen mainly as global competition, butalso as the threat of world government. To a non-American these reac-tions appear surprisingly strong for the worlds only superpower, and fora huge and rich economy that is little dependent on foreign trade. Ameri-can reactions against globalization seem to derive from three kinds ofreasons. One has to do with American history and identity and expressesitself in a continuous vacillation between splendid isolation and worldpower. The size, the wealth of the country, and its oceanic distance to anymajor potential enemy make its self-sufficient isolationist orientation andits local, special traditionalism understandable. They resemble somewhatthose of the Chinese empire before its decline.

Second, from the traditional self-sufficiency of the US economy, whereimports of goods accounted for only about 4 percent of the GDP in the


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1960s, the appearance of some foreign competition, most visibly in theform of Japanese cars, meant a dramatic change, and foreign importsincreased much more than exports.

Third, the modest opening of the US economy has coincided with a stag-nation of real wages since the oil crisis of the mid-1970s and with anincrease in relative poverty. This development, the most direct cause ofwhich is a uniquely successful corporate offensive against workers, is oftenseen or portrayed as following from low-wage competition from abroad.

In the Third World, from Latin America to Africa and, with some qualifi-cations, South Asia, globalization appears most tangibly in imposedliberalization, earlier known in Africa as structural adjustment policies,imposed by the World Bank and the IMF. Imposed liberalization entailsfiscal austerity by expenditure cuts, tariff reductions and privatizations,all paving the road for foreign, private investors. Even on its own econ-omic terms, the successes of imposed structural adjustments have beenfew, limited and short-lived. The winners of these measures have so farbeen very few and the losers many (Williams, 1994; Bird, 1996; Laurell,this issue, pp. 31314). The result has been a series of IMF riots, aboveall in Africa and the Arab world, and widespread popular wrath againstthe institutions of economic globalization, eloquently expressed by theBolivian archbishop quoted at the beginning of this article, who comparedthe latter to Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Third World tends to be religious, and post-colonial frustrations areoften expressed in religious terms (Westerlund, 1996), but the relationbetween religious fundamentalism and globalization is quite complex.Among Christians, opposition to or critique of globalization tends to comefrom sections of the established (non-fundamentalist) churches. Morefundamentalist Protestant Evangelical movements, often of US origin, onthe other hand, tend to be less concerned with worldly issues. One of thereasons for their spread in Latin America has been the failure of left-wingCatholicism to bring about any mundane social change (Vzquez, 1998).Islamic fundamentalism tends to be more directed against a secular nation-state experienced as a socioeconomic failure and seen as an alien import and appears, at least sometimes, more as an alternative globalizationthan a territorially delimited reaction against it. Hindu fundamentalismand militant Buddhism in Sri Lanka, on the other hand, thrive mainly fromcommunal conflicts within and around their respective states.

Seen from a multidimensional perspective, to the Third World, global-ization is irreducible to economic objectivation, be it from imposed liberal-ism, indebtedness, or dependence on aid or capital inflow. Processes ofglobalization have also widened the range of options to people in theThird World. In spite of all state border controls and attempts at exclu-sion, new intercontinental migratory chains have opened up from South


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to North and from East to West. Womens groups, street children, childlaborers, trade unionists and indigenous peoples have acquired resource-ful friends in the rich world through the UN machinery and otherwise providing political and economic support, publicity and advice. Trans-national satellite television and transistor radios have opened access toother patterns of consumption, entertainment and lifestyles and, occasion-ally, to other political information than those provided by the state regimeand the local culture. All this may be evaluated critically as a culturalinvasion or challenge as well as positively. Anyway, Third World dis-course on globalization is also strongly cultural, perhaps more so in, forexample, the Arab world, than in some other parts.7

In Southeast and East Asia, post-Second World War globalizations havebeen experienced neither as a threat nor as a brutal imposition from outsidebut, first of all, as a self-determined entry into world opportunities byaccess to universal technology, through export drives, and then, by the fore-runners, through forays into world finance. As one ASEAN writer put it:In Vietnam, as in the other Asean [Southeast Asian] economies, globaliz-ation was initiated by the government (Soesastro, 1998: 28). The Thai RoyalAcademy has translated globalization as lokapiwat, expanding globally,conquering the world (Chantana, 1998: 259). India in the 1990s, afterliberalization, appears to be located somewhere between China and therest of the Third World, but much less open to foreign trade and investment.

There has been relatively little incoming (non-East Asian) foreign directinvestment, and domestic consumer markets are still heavily dominatedby domestic firms. A global orientation here has hitherto been rewardedby a staggering growth of living standards for the large majority. In thedecade from 1985 to 1995, East Asia was also the main region of tradeunion growth in the world (ILO, 1997: 2, 2356).

The core countries of the region were never subject to western colonial-ism, and they have kept a distinctive, largely secular culture elite as wellas popular of their own, now, of course, affected by global cultural cur-rents. The cultural challenge appears to be primarily political, perceivedas undermining political authorities, but also as intrusive upon nationaltraditions.

In summary, globalizations are not globally uniform but regionally andnationally variable. The reactions they provoke and the actions theypromote differ strongly from one context to another.

Governance in a New Era

The rather recently resurrected concept of governance is vaguer and moregeneral than that of government. It is akin to the German concept ofSteuerung, and to the latters corresponding English Germanicism,


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steering, and it refers to giving direction to something (see Rosenau,1995). It has the advantage of not being tied to the state; whereas worldgovernment is (still) a utopia, world governance is an immediate practi-cal challenge.

. . . But Still in the Century of the StateCurrent discussions on challenges to and the decline of the state had betterkeep in mind that recent developments are taking place from the peak ofstate power and control. The second third of the 20th century, from theDepression until the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of fixedinter-state exchange rates, will probably be remembered as the zenith ofthe state, but until very recently the whole century has experienced anincrease in the significance of the state.

Economically, states grew in relation to markets, globally as well asdomestically. Domestically, this was the time of planning, of state mobiliz-ations of the countrys resources and, somewhat later, the establishmentof large-scale, state-guaranteed social entitlements. The share in thedomestic economy of state revenue and state expenditure took a leapupward. State control over its territory and its population increased enor-mously, with legal unifications, administrative growth and the develop-ment of technologies of registration and surveillance. Radio provided aneffective national mass medium. In terms of identifications, nationalismrose to new heights and spread further across the globe than ever before,expressed in the enthusiastic war mobilizations and in the vast anti-colonial movement. Whether through democracy or dictatorship, popu-lations were integrated into, and mobilized by a state they regarded astheirs, to an unprecedented extent.

Now, we all know that since the late 1970s, markets have grown fasterthan the state, financial markets explosively so in the last dozen years.The contradiction of capitalist development that Marx pointed outbetween private property and the increasingly social character of the pro-ductive forces was remarkably correct for 20th-century capitalism, up tillthe 1970s. Since then, there has been a reversal, with new means of privateresource mobilization and technology development via markets. This isundoubtedly an epochal shift. But how far has it taken us in changing thesignificance of the nation-state?

Not very far, yet, I argue. Most parts of the world are still more nation-state governed than they were in the first half of the 20th century. Thisclearly holds true for todays China, in comparison with the decayingempire of the Qing and with the fractured Republic; for India, in relationto the mosaic of British empire, princely states and local customs; for thesuccessor states of the Ottoman empire; for the whole of Africa; and forthe Eastern European post-First World War states, which were not legally


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unified until the 1940s. It holds for Latin America today as compared withthe pre-Second World War oligarchies or the convulsions of the MexicanRevolution. It holds for the USA, where the writ of the federal govern-ment and the US Constitution, including its 14th Amendment (on racialequality), are now valid across the whole territory of the nation, includ-ing the South. Western Europe is somewhat different, but not because ofglobal markets and local fragmentation. It is regional integration, organ-ized by the nation-states, that makes the difference.

Everywhere, except post-Communist Russia, a larger part of territorialeconomies is extracted and spent by nation-states than it was 50 or a 100years ago. Before the First World War, no state in high-spending Europespent as much as a fifth of the countrys GDP, usually one-tenth or one-seventh. Before the Second World War, general taxation extracted one-fifth or more of GDP only in Germany from 1936 on (Flora, 1983: 262, 264and Ch. 8). By 1950, all the OECD states extracted more than a fifth oftheir GDPs in taxes, the USA almost a fourth, but no one more than athird which France, Germany and the UK all did (Taylor, 1983: 262). By1997, the weighted average of general public expenditure in the OECDwas 39 percent of GDP and average receipts from taxes and other sourceswere 38 percent. No country, except recent member Korea, spent less thanabout a third of domestic economic resources (OECD, 1998: 2523).

In contrast to the three previous waves of globalization, the current oneis not at all state driven, but it starts from a peak of state power. A goodmany of the forces and processes which made the 20th century the centuryof the state are still at work. A great deal of the coming problems ofgovernance will derive from the continued existence and power of states.The world posing questions of governance seems to me still to be morean interactive pattern of exogenous actors than a self-determining system.

Issues of Global Norm Formation

In principle, one may think of world governance in terms of worldgovernment, world leadership and world norms. De facto, most of usprobably perceive a world government with hard global law as furtheraway than about a 100 years ago, when the French legal scholar EdouardLambert presented a proposal of a droit commun de lhumanit (a law of allhumankind) at an international legal congress simultaneous with the ParisWorld Exhibition in 1900 (Sousa Santos, 1995: 221).

The best prospects of global governance seem to reside in global normformation. That is, in the development of rules and regulations of whatis right and wrong that do not have the force of law backed by a quasi-monopoly of the means of violence (i.e. by a world state), but which aresomething both more and more complex than the inspiration or the Diktat


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of leadership. Studies of the formation of world norms will greatly enrichfuture social theory.

There are at least three main areas where a global normative approachwould not only be very important but could also be argued withoutnecessarily having to confront cultural diversity and cultural relativism.One concerns the planet Earth as an ecosystem. A second refers tohumankind as a species. The third may be logically more divisive, but acumulative effect of the waves of globalization has made it recognizedworldwide, if not universally. That is the conception of humankind as anaggregate of individuals of intrinsically equal worth, at least at birth.8

In each of these areas, processes of forming global norms are alreadyat work. According to one count, there were by 1992 more than 900 inter-national legal instruments dealing with the environment (Jacobson andWeiss, 1995: 119). The UN conferences in Stockholm (1972), Rio (1992) andKyoto (1997) have spawned or inspired a number of environmental pro-tocols and accords clearly with at least some significant environmentaleffect, for instance on ozone-depleting substances. The World HeritageConvention of 1972 laid foundations for a common human cultural heri-tage. Other attempts at a ius humanitais have so far been more contro-versial and opposed by the USA as interfering with private property. TheUSA has therefore not ratified the Law of the Sea Convention that stipu-lates the ocean floor and its subsoil a common heritage of humankind orthe similar Moon Treaty (Sousa Santos, 1995: 366ff.). The WHO and itsmonitoring of the health of humankind has been very successful in anumber of areas of disease. Population policies constitute another field ofrecent global concern, and the UN Conference on Population andDevelopment (in Cairo 1994) managed to introduce the normative conceptof reproductive rights into them. Individual human rights were solemnlyproclaimed in the Declaration of 1948. They became a frequently invokednorm in the second half of the 1970s and have generated several UN con-ventions with monitoring committees (see further Steiner and Alston,1996). The most significant of the latter appears to be the committeefollowing implementations of the convention against racial discriminationand, in particular, the one devoted to the Convention on the Rights of theChild (Banton, 1996; LeBlanc, 1995).

The actual course of global normativity looks like a meandering pathin the shadow of a towering continuous range of gross and massive vio-lations of the most elementary human rights, but with a far-reaching bluehorizon on the other side following from a rational argumentation in favorof the planet, the species and the fundamental equality of all individuals.The horizon is pointed to by Muhammed Bedjaoui, president of the Inter-national Court of Justice, referring to the Declaration of the Right toDevelopment, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1986,


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and proclaims as a species-right that: every human person and all peoplesare entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social,cultural, and political development. To Bedjaoui, the right to develop-ment . . . is the core right from which all the others stem (Steiner andAlston, 1996: 1117).

Human rights as a rallying cry has radical and far-reaching impli-cations. They may very well become a fulcrum of radical politics world-wide in the new century.9

Between the two poles of the reckless global capitalist and the con-cerned cosmopolitan citizen of the world or, alternatively, between thoseof boundless globalism and local fundamentalism, actual globalizationsoffer a range of courses of action. Governance by normative regulationmakes up an important part of this range of possibilities (see further Heldand Sassen, this issue, pp. 399413 and 37797).

Notes1. This is a different way of looking at these discourses than that of Robertson

and Khondker (1998), who use a rhetorical distinction rather than a topical one,singling out regional, disciplinary, ideological and gender discourses of global-ization.

2. A high-powered intellectual contribution to the genre is Thurow (1992). For animportant critique of this discourse from inside mainstream economics, seeKrugman (1996).

3. Cited from La Prensa (Buenos Aires) 6 July 1998: 13, translation from Spanishis mine.

4. The first UN monitoring report was Holdgate and El-Hinnawi (1982). Theprogrammatic report of the World Environment and Development Commis-sion followed in 1987. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Changebegan its work in 1988. In 1989 a workshop on Global Natural Resource Moni-toring and Assessment took place in Venice. The annual UN Human Develop-ment Report began in 1990.

5. The Mongol 13th14th century empire and the Mongols connecting theEurasian continent from Korea to Europe might also be seen as a mighty glob-alizing wave.

6. On this point I am indebted to an unpublished paper by Sheldon Pollock,Professor of Sanskrit and Indic Studies at the University of Chicago, and to hispaper (India in the Vernacular Hillennium) (Pollock, 1998).

7. I am here indebted to my (exiled) Iraqi collaborator, Thar Ismail.8. Article 1 of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights puts it: All

human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.9. Thar Ismail concluded in an overview of Arab perceptions of globalization:

One seldom finds today a thematization of the problem of imperialism, inde-pendence, identity, unity, socialism, etc. without due recourse to such globalvalues as human rights.


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Biographical Note: Gran Therborn is co-director of the Swedish Collegium forAdvanced Study in the Social Sciences at Uppsala, Professor of Sociology atGteborg University, and chair of the Globalizations Committee of the Swedishresearch council FRN. His latest books are Globalizations and Modernities


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Experiences and Perspectives of Europe and Latin America (Stockholm: FRN, 1999),and European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies 19452000(London: Sage, 1995).

Address: Gran Therborn, SCASSS, Gtavgen 4, S-752 36 Uppsala, Sweden.[email: [email protected]]


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thespread of world religions