II. Views of Globalization

Perhaps the most prominent theorizing on this subject is an approach that sees in globalization an extension—one hundred years later—of the Hobson-Lenin theory of imperialism.²

In direct contrast to this hegemonic-colonial hypothesis, the economist Philippe Legrain in a new work claims that the theory of globalization has been entirely misrepresented. It does not eliminate local affairs or make governments irrelevant. On the contrary, the return to protest groups and street politics only complicates the need to address globalization as a serious element in the international economy. In this view, globalization is a positive good for modernization, a mechanism whereby all major factors in the economic equation—workers, companies, governments, national economics, industry and agriculture, patents and profits, money and finance—are free to choose a future course of action that maximizes benefits for all on a world stage. There is the broad assumption among economists that post-national capitalism, or economic globalization, encourages everything from healthy competition to regional alignments and shared standards.⁴

The polarization of opinion on globalization has inclined many outstanding economists and social scientists to “navigate a position between the polar alternatives” of a dark vision at one end and an upbeat world at the other. The fine economist and policy advisor Murray Weidenbaum exemplifies this middle ground. While arguing the virtues of globalization, especially the rise of a competitive environment, Weidenbaum recognizes the problems that have been created as well: unfair competition from low-cost sweatshops, increased pollution of the environment caused by transportation of goods over long distances, and the starvation of entire populations in the midst of the opulence that exists in the relatively few advanced societies. His solutions tend toward the standard set offered by economists in the policy field: reform of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the creation of new jobs for those put to pasture as a consequence of technological unemployment, and the strengthening of the International Labor Organization (ILO) as a means for establishing worldwide standards on labor laws and regulations. At a more informal level, globalization makes possible giving ordinary people a greater voice in decision making through the Internet. Citizens can expect more information from authorities, and there is a growing independence of the communications system from reliance on government.⁵

The problem with these sorts of palliatives, and with Weidenbaum's final recommendation—that the number of conflicts around the world could be diminished by holding global summits—is that these recommendations are simply national policies writ large, on a global scale. They presuppose a common framework of legal and moral relations that people throughout the world hold in common. Of course, it is precisely the issue of what people hold in common, whether there is an acceptance or rejection of globalization, that requires careful review. In a universe of terror bombings, suicide attacks, and indiscriminate hostility to Western values, one is hard put to prove the case for modest policy measures that might have trouble working even within the confines of a Midwest U.S. community. In short, while Weidenbaum and other economists are correct to note that the anti-imperial and pro-rational arguments are not particularly new, neither is the middle-way option especially persuasive or compelling.

Extremists and centrists alike are looking through a crystal ball into an indeterminate future and seeing either what they dislike or what they like. My own thinking leads me to believe that globalization as a political-economic force is an ongoing process that aims to create common world standards in the electronics and communications industries. To a large extent, this process is well underway, with the United States, Germany, and Japan taking the lead, and other nations such as the United Kingdom, India, China, and South Korea functioning as active participants. Even such thinking has become something of a platitude, however. Differences that arrive at the level of economic rationalization reflect attitudes toward the marketplace as such, and reflect little dispute as to the actual nature of the changes involved.

However, globalization as a political culture is a realm unto itself. To see globalization as an imperfect equilibrium (or for that matter, as an unsteady equation) between the international economy and the national state systems, is to miss the central point of the process well underway—and that point is the radical transformation in the cultural climate ushered in with the new century. This is best illustrated by a globalization of terrorism, its fusion of well-trained insurgents with manifestly criminal elements. This political culture puts on display a vivid fusion of well-financed organizations, well-trained operatives, cross-national groups that are united in language and theology rather than nationalism and ideology, and groups trained in the use of weapons of mass destruction. Globalization provides for a political culture with an extralegal set of rules and regulations.

Nor should this new political culture be seen as necessarily or uniformly violent or in opposition to the economic system. Even the most placid variety of new tendencies can be described by the cultural and social phenomenon of globalization: a new classicism in music, with “world-class styles” at its core; simplified modes of personal dress that stress private comfort over status identification; automobile styling that again reflects an international standard of everything from owning a factory to driving a vehicle; currency reforms that pose transnational options to older nation-grounded currencies; and above all, standards of performance identified with specific corporate responsibilities—responsibilities for providing service, repair, and innovation in one fell swoop. In some curious ways, members of the younger generation that attacks globalization as an ideology of imperialism are the ones who have most strongly embraced its benefits: cellular telephones, high-speed messaging and traveling, and a fierce move to overcome ethical, legal, and national obstacles to the assertion of personal desires. The political culture is one in which claims of rights are unfettered while statements of obligations are often muted and barely heard above a whisper.

The emergence of globalization changes political equations, since traditional extreme Left and Right both rely heavily upon cultural styles based on folklorist (volkish) lifestyles. With the rise of world-class systems comes the emergence of world-class cultures, and that signifies the early collapse of inherited modalities based on the folk song or the jazz tune. Traditional cultural formations are easily absorbed and taken up and incorporated into the new music. Similar patterns are underway in painting, dance, and architecture. With regard to architectural projects, competitions for new designs are now increasingly international, entered into by individuals who may have roots far removed from the country where the project will be built. Not only are designs becoming universal, so too are reviewing committees with professional competence to judge submitted designs. In short, the struggle between civilizations, and within societies, involves an acceptance of globalization as a fact and of modernization as a consequence. The choice between the acceptance and the rejection of globalism and modernity has become the alpha and omega of the present cultural struggles between Western secular societies and Middle Eastern religious cultures.

III. Rationalization

There are two distinct ways of understanding the concept of rationalization and what it means with respect to globalization. A system may be rationalized when some rule of reason is imposed on the system as a whole: for example, through the establishment of a bureaucratic or administrative apparatus. This is a top-down imposition of order. Alternatively, one can understand the free market as a rational process in that it makes possible efficient resource allocation, and conveys information rapidly and accurately. This might be viewed as a bottom-up characterization. While it might be desirable for both meanings to be tightly wrapped, the fact is that many varieties of political systems and economic arrangements are compatible with rationalization in the first sense. Global interchanges require common standards in everything from electrical grids to automotive emissions; as a consequence, the rationalization process is a requirement for all nations wishing to partake in and derive advantages from the international economy.

Because so much writing on globalization comes from the pens of social scientists and economists, these actual technological trends on the ground are neglected or sorely reduced in importance. The path of globalization seems to be rooted more in past struggles between the free market and the controlled market environments of post–World War II Europe than in a realization of just how radically transformed the new integration of communication, culture, and economy has actually become. The issue of globalization is not resolved by policy mandates issued by the WTO or the ILO, or even constraints on international trade, but by the wide recognition that changes in culture already indicate and presage what is in store. To study culture as a local or national trait, and then ignore the same factors in examining the world at large, is a dangerous form of intellectual myopia—one to be avoided at the policy level. This brings me to the essential core of my own position on globalization as the expression of a fusion of culture and economy.

The automobile industry may offer the best illustration of this near inexorable tendency toward technological rationalization. The automobile is arguably the most singular pragmatic and aesthetic product that involves members of every social and economic class. Despite tremendous nationalist pressures in the United States to “buy American” after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the very concept itself dissipated in the face of global realities. Treaties such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) just about mandate that transnational companies may design and develop a car in one country, set up assembly lines in another country, and then build the car from components sourced from yet other countries. A company's sales efforts may be directed toward the market of yet another country, while multinational banks finance the company's loans. In addition, ownership arrangements have become part of a world system. Daimler-Benz owns Chrysler; Nissan of Japan is controlled by Renault of France; Rolls-Royce, the former symbol of British upper-class good living, is built by BMW. The Swedish Saab is a subsidiary of General Motors.⁶

Specific automobiles are themselves globalizing. Dodge Caravans carry Mitsubishi motors; Saab upscale cars carry Volkswagen downscale parts; and components from air-conditioning to radio packages are exported from Mexico to Japan. While national differences are revealed in everything from emission standards to actual exterior designs, these differences have been steadily reduced over the years. Auto manufacturers have been forced to merge and to forge alliances to limit overlapping costs and to share technology. The same desire to reduce costs and rationalize products has permitted Honda, Toyota, Mazda, Subaru, and Isuzu to set up shop in Ohio. German and Korean automakers are now profitably ensconced in Alabama. The impact on American auto manufacturers has been to sharply improve production and product to match the level of quality of imported automobiles in every detail. The J. D. Powers Quality Survey now ranks Buick, Cadillac, and Mercury at the same level as Lexus, Infiniti, and Acura. In addition, an industry that in an earlier era was dominated by American cars has now had to allow for nonunion workers in its midst. The estimates are for one in four automobile workers to be outside the fold of the United Automobile Workers, with many of these nonunion personnel employed in newly created positions.⁷

Preferences in automobiles are thought to reveal national differences: for example, Americans generally are thought to prefer larger cars with greater horsepower, and Japanese smaller cars with lesser horsepower. Yet even this is rapidly changing. Asian and European automobiles are clearly appealing to an American audience, and the desire of Asians and Europeans for bigger cars seems to be growing. Nearly every major auto manufacturer provides a full range of autos to maximize audience appeal with respect to size, styling, comfort, and electronic accessories to assist drivers. Indeed, the technological demands for uniformity of standards often lead to sociological demands for greater stylistic differentiation. And while globalization severely limits nationalism, it also may serve as a stimulant to design uniqueness as a selling tool. Once all of these elements are taken into account, it becomes evident, or at least it should, that globalization is to imperialism what music is to martial tunes—a distant cousin. When Nissan becomes the local car of choice in Mississippi, it is hard to sustain hoary arguments predicated on an American octopus. Beyond that, in old and new industries alike, one witnesses a cross-fertilization of firms that requires us to distinguish globalization from Americanization. For example, in publishing, of the ten largest firms in dollar volume in the United States, nine are owned by European conglomerates (especially conglomerates based in Germany, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom). If the twentieth century was defined as the American Century, it might well be that the twenty-first century will become the Asian and/or European Century. One might say that we have a case of old wine in new bottles, but it is no less a case of new wine in old bottles. Behemoth exists, but in terms that easily and readily move beyond the old nation-state.⁸

IV. Modernization

Why, then, should globalization have become the centerpiece of bitter contention? My own response, and one that I believe is verified by the evidence, is that globalization represents modernization as such. There is a fear of the new—the rejection of a highly secularized environment, one in which both religious fanaticisms and political ideologies have very little compelling power—that sustains the social movements that now abound. Indeed, the attractiveness of products that range from automobiles to computers to high-definition television both competes with and limits the potency of traditional political environments. It serves to remind the mullahs of all sorts that globalization carries with it secularization. Some nations, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, face a series of quandaries that make them vulnerable on all sides. Their leaders derive oil revenues from the sale of commodities, but also lend their support to religious fundamentalism as a way of life. So many new products and technological innovations appeal to the individual and the family, without requiring support or approval from theological and/or political leaders. Such demands for personal satisfaction do not easily square with collective celebrations or pilgrimages. And the Middle East in particular is faced with globalization as an ideology and not just a series of new products and innovations.

Modernization is less a system than a process. It has a near-infinite variety of formations. Taken as a whole, however, it opens up prospects for change that cannot easily be bottled or contained. The ferocity with which the enemies of modernization have responded to these processes is well exemplified in the Middle East. By the same token, the enthusiasm with which these same modernizing tendencies have been embraced by many Asian nations—even those with ostensibly anticapitalist political regimes—indicates that nations that wish to compete (or at least participate) in the modern world system find themselves virtually compelled to accept modernization as a fact on the ground if not a theorem in the realm of theological and ideological disputation.

V. Standardization

The problem of modernization is an old one, involving the difficulty of reconciling contemporary and traditional lifestyles and social values. But globalization also entails a search for common or universal standards in a cacophony of national differences. In certain areas, such as the provision of electricity, a modus vivendi has been reached, where three or four different outlets and two types of currents are widely if not universally utilized. However, once we move beyond the engineering of goods into the conveyance of services, the problem of globalization becomes thorny.

One admittedly small, but nonetheless significant, illustration of this problem is the controversy over governmental regulation of mental-health professionals in France. It is a problem that exists in nearly every advanced society and relates to the impact of regulation on the cost and quality of services. In this particular case, the French government wants to institute regulations for professional conduct in the treatment of patients and wants to root out what it considers to be unlicensed charlatans. The psychoanalysts—some twenty thousand strong—hold that such a move is an assault on private practice and that it amounts to regulation of what shall be considered proper treatment. It is the French version of the struggle between chemical treatment and couch treatment of those in need of mental-health services. Within a single nation this is a difficult issue, but at least manageable. When it becomes a matter of globalization, then the issue of culture itself becomes implicated in settling both economic and ethical claims.

As those who have studied the social regulation of professional practice have pointed out, if the European Union now mandates uniform standards for the licensing of physicians so as to insure portability across national boundaries, this mandate may have a range of unexpected consequences. For example, it may require that Italy “create” an independent profession of dentistry (whereas previously dentistry was carried out by licensed physicians). Similarly, what implications does the French proposal to regulate mental-health professionals carry for the development of a licensed profession of psychoanalysis in, say, Germany or Ireland? One can multiply such hypothetical situations to near infinity: from modes of dress in public places, to the languages to be used in conducting official transactions. If globalization can be seen as a set of universals, a form of rational imposition across borders, the same view can hardly be advanced for the cultural realm—a terrain in which distinctions of language, folk traditions, religions, and ethnicity continue to loom large.

VI. Old Cultural Wine in New Ideological Bottles

The close of the Cold War, or more positively, the triumph of the free market (with or without a corresponding move to democratic rule), brings with it its own compelling reasons for a desire on the part of peoples everywhere to become part of a new power equation. The emergence of the United States as the unique superpower, paralleled by the growth of the European Union, also compels a reluctant acceptance of globalization, even on the part of those smaller nations that have few such ambitions. Backwardness may be a fine situation for a society that sees its future bound up with inherited religious and cultural traditions. But in an epoch of aggressive development—economic as well as political—the attack on globalization carries huge risks to the internal stability of societies. Young people in particular—the very individuals most likely to protest globalization—are the ones most caught up in the process of embracing styles from Milan, cellular phones from Helsinki, airbuses from Paris, sneakers from Jakarta, jeans from San Francisco, electric shavers from Munich, and so on over a huge range of products that define a culture. Moreover, this process occurs with little notice paid to repetition or even quality control, much less to the source of the goods being absorbed.

The dissolution of the bipolar world of the United States and the USSR, and the imagined emergence of a unipolar world in which the United States emerges culturally dominant, intensifies uniform standards and, even more, a sharing of the product innovations that flow from market developments. Over the past half-century, in one part of the world after another, U.S. influence has moved into the vacuum left by the Soviets and other departing powers. The drive to share in new systems of communication and transportation overwhelms even the most profound faith in traditional mores. Often with reluctance (as in the Middle East), not always with success (as in Vietnam), but in any case as the preeminent option among several alternatives (as in South Korea, Singapore, and Kuwait), smaller nations and economies link their future with globalization as a process rather than linking their future with any larger nationalist aspirations.

What America shares with earlier empires is an insufferable sense of mission. What distinguishes it is the total conviction that it is a force for good in world affairs. Any force for change, good or bad, presents a challenge to an existing order, and brings resentment with it. That would be enough to raise hackles. But America represents a special type of challenge to the world. That challenge has been recognized, feared, resented, and finally hated by those less favored in world affairs. From a frontier era, when it appeared to be an ungovernable land with an inhospitable climate; to the nineteenth-century European conceit that America was a failed society, racked by vices obsolete in Europe (like slavery); to the triumph of American economic expansion and military power, the success of what is now the world's sole superpower has caused anti-American resentment to become a frontal assault against globalization. The actual reduction in American power that results from globalization is disguised by the visible signs of that power—from fast-food franchises to electronic systems.

America as a new society, pioneered by the huddled masses of other nations' teeming shores, aggregating the energies of its mixed population and outperforming all others in virtually every branch of modern human endeavor, is less acceptable than a new imperium. America's early critics thought its people would grow malnourished and weak. Later critics thought its racial divide would be its undoing. Others doubted its capacity for concerted action, viewing it as a nation to be despised rather than feared. Add to this a popular culture—replete with junk food and a surfeit of popular movie fare that leaches like a solvent at aristocratic, landed cultures—and the discontented in many lands will see a mortal threat to their way of life.

That some multinational goods and services may be marked “made in the USA” might be an irritant to some purists, but for the most part, children wearing sweatshirts that say Dallas Cowboys in a language unknown to the wearer, see such garb as liberating—as an identification with the idea of personal freedom rather than with a political system. Seen in this way, as an offshoot of the dominant cultural representations, globalization's friends best view it as a fusion of culture and economy in an era of advancement in the technologies of production, distribution, and communication. At the same time, it is viewed by its enemies as a fusion of industry and culture in an era of latter-day imperialism.

It is significant to point out that the forces of the traditional culture, the values of family and community, and the practice of identifying the political system with religious fervor, will not dissolve easily. It is not simply that theocratic systems of backward nations will move to rally about the state as a source of resistance to globalization; in less overt ways, so too will democratic systems of advanced nations see the state as a mechanism to preserve adhesion to the sacred values of the political community that give the idea of nationhood its compelling force. Indeed, in such advanced states, places where appeals to religion and to national, regional, and parochial values are becoming increasingly ineffective mechanisms of social solidarity, the state will become the focal point of the struggle against globalization—that is, against the new economy coming into being worldwide, with little regard to national boundaries or organic solidarities.

The essential contradiction of the new millennium is shaping up as a struggle to control the culture as such. For without such control, economic forces in search of development are likely to flounder and falter. By the same token, the political forces that tend toward the preservation of continuity are also likely to be swept aside if they mindlessly embrace globalization. The dilemma is clear enough: the power of the state derives from the strength of the economy, from the revenues it provides to make war and finance welfare programs (and hence maintain loyalty). The state cannot simply stand in opposition to globalization. What it can do is establish a system of controls (not unlike those proposed by the economic centrists mentioned earlier) to contain, to bridle, the most rapacious features of change—without applying a stranglehold. At the same time, the forces of the global economy can and will continue to develop mechanisms that make the state seem irrelevant, such as worldwide networks of communication that sweep away national boundaries and cultural constraints.

What we are left with is old wine in a new bottle. We have returned to well-trodden areas of controversy over what really matters: community or civilization, personal choice or public necessity, and yes, the bureaucratic state or the freewheeling economy in search of becoming a law unto itself. Whether those young people carrying placards denouncing globalization realize that they are the representatives of convention and tradition, the carriers of the ancient traditions of law and order, is itself a type of high irony. That the demands of “radicals” should lead down the primrose path of conservative values of law, order, and folk traditions is not quite as strange as it may first appear. After all, the twentieth-century totalitarian political movements, such as Nazism, Fascism, Communism, and the like, revealed the capacity of the state to mobilize its forces, and even modernize them, in an effort to hold back destabilizing tendencies toward unbridled behavior and unsanctioned belief.

This is now well appreciated. Less well understood is how the state assumes a monopoly over the legal process as well as the political process—and how, in that capacity, the state can, when necessary, use this power to bite the bourgeois hand that feeds its own insatiable appetite for control over economic growth. The state must regulate not only competing economic forces, but also distinct sectional groups and ethnic rivalries. But the prize in this struggle of modern titans is nothing less than the culture itself. In that sense, the pathetic protests and parades against globalization may well be the last hurrah of those for whom the culture is a free-floating entity in its own right. While the outcome of these multifaceted struggles remains hard to predict, one thing is certain: there are new permutations and combinations of allies and enemies being forged in this struggle to define and delimit the nature of globalization.

VII. A Post-Marxian Postscript

It is interesting to return to the works of Marx and Lenin, since my thesis on the fundamental schism between the state and the bourgeoisie was both anticipated and rejected in the writings of the communist sages. For his part, Marx (in The German Ideology) well understood that “[t]he bourgeoisie itself, with its conditions, develops only gradually, splits according to the division of labor into various fractions, and finally absorbs all propertied classes it finds in existence.” Marx makes the point that such schisms cease “only insofar as they [i.e., members of the bourgeoisie] have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors.” The instrument by which internal divisions yield to the larger struggle against the revolutionary classes as such is nothing other than the state: “The State is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomized.”⁹

The forces of what Marx liked to call “real” (as opposed to “abstract”) history have not been kind to the old master of communism. Divisions of mental and physical labor have dissolved under the impact of new technologies; the great divide of rural and urban life has all but disappeared in post-industrial society; and the legal scaffold of the state has served more to level differences than to accentuate them. The pessimistic predictions of the diminishing relevance of labor have also fallen by the wayside. It is precisely the capacity of the state to serve civil society as a whole that has enabled it to bridle the bourgeoisie. The opponents engaged in the struggle may be evenly matched, but it is by no means a struggle that dissolves in the presence of revolutionary factions. Indeed, these factions themselves take refuge on either side of the cultural divide: as the mass base of a state seeking to preserve classical values or as the elite vanguard of the global economy. In short, the state, the very mechanism that Marx saw as the balance wheel of civil society, is itself in a full-fledged struggle for its centrality in a globalized economy.

Lenin, for his part, valiantly sought to defend Marx from the charge of obsolescence. In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin sets forth the thesis that differences between capitalist countries “only give rise to insignificant variations in the form of monopolies or in the moment of their appearance.” Lenin held that the start of the twentieth century corresponded with the shift from industrial capitalism to international banking, a time when “[c]ompetition [became] transformed into monopoly.” It was a shift from “the domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital.” Lenin spoke at considerable length of monopoly capitalist associations, cartels, syndicates, and trusts—elements of what is now referred to as globalization. He also appreciated the degree to which new developments, such as electrification, brought about new forms of cooperation between major nations, or simply new levels of “the economic division of the world.” In short, “imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.” Lenin refined and embellished this definition to include ample space for “the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves.”¹⁰

Oddly enough, Lenin breaks off the analysis at this point and does not explain how the state mediates these various international bourgeois claims. Only in his polemical essay The State and Revolution does he offer even a rudimentary coming to terms with the state “as an instrument for the exploitation of the oppressed class.” As a consequence, Lenin deals with the relation between the two mighty forces of economic class and political power only in the most abstract terms. Puzzling out the nature of this relation became a task for post-Marxians such as Georges Sorel, Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca, Ferdinand Toennies, and, above all, Max Weber. Once Lenin denied the state a role as an agent of reconciliation, and reaffirmed only its antagonistic social characteristics, the problem remained how the global capitalism envisioned in Imperialism was to be arranged or by whom. The effort to study the state became clumsy the more the polemics of repression substituted for analysis of the economic system as such. The study of the state became a matter of the “practical politics” of arranging the dictatorship of the proletariat for the revolutionary process. The issue of the modern economy, however, was lost in this political shuffle by Lenin.

The problem lies in locating the contemporary discourse within a Marxist framework—determining how an instrument such as the state, which drives inexorably toward absolute national control, can accommodate the international economy. The latter, too, drives toward absolute control. This essay is not intended as an exercise in general socialist theory, but rather to show how the ideological tradition that harbored such theorizing failed precisely to explain the relationship of the forces that it took as its starting point. One is left with two giant forces (the state and the economy) that coexist in separate realms, with presumably similar aims (the oppression of the working people), and yet with little evidence of interaction. I submit that the reason for this is that to have developed such a model of state-economy competition would have reduced the theory of proletarian revolution to sheer ash; the system of stratification would have led to class alignments within the economy (proletariat) and also within the nation-state (bureaucracy) that would have highlighted the struggle between the public and the private sectors. To have done this would have brought Marxism closer to reality but would have left it farther removed from its goal: world revolution.

This remains the problem with those who advocate a mindless end to globalization. Apart from the emptiness of the slogan, there is the vacuity of the attempt to install a social contract that could scarcely move beyond old-fashioned anarchist doctrine—a world without state or administrative power. This approach ignores the fact that, as the social philosopher Steven Grosby reminds us, globalization in the form of empires is a long-standing tradition.¹¹