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Summary of 6 pages for the course Globalisation and Global Governance at School of Oriental and African Studies (Coursework material)
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GLOBALIZATION AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE - SUMMARYINTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF GLOBALISATION THEORY – Rosenberg (2000)
Globalization = truly basic social change – “the supplanting of modernity with globality”
Globalization has necessitated a “specialization of social theory” on the basis of the “retrospective
discovery” of the centrality of speed of communication in the constitution of social order
“Distance is a social product, it varies depending on the speed with which it can be overcome all other
socially produced factors of constitution, separation and the maintenance of collective identity
(state/cultural borders) seem to be secondary effects to that speed”
Globalization = central to social theory + key to understand the transition of human society into the third
millennium
THE GENERAL PROBLEM
Giddens’ definition: globalization = “the intensification of worldwide social relations”
Time-space compression = emergent property of today’s social relations
1. emergence of a single global space as the arena of social actions
2. geographical dimension of the process = new spatio-temporal problematic for social science
what presents itself initially as the “EXPLANANDUM” is progressively transformed into the “EXPLANANS”
- explanandum = globalization as the developing outcome of some historical process
- explanans = it is globalization that explains the changing character of the modern world
“if previously global integration in the sense of a growing unification and interpenetration of the human
condition was driven by the economic logic of capital accumulation, today it is the unification of the human
condition that drives the logic of further capital accumulation”
this leads us to a basic distinction between:
- a theory of globalization (this can be constructed out of anything presumed to generate the spatio-
temporal phenomena involved)
- globalization theory (this must derive its explanatory mechanisms within these phenomena = it
needs a spatio-temporal reformulation of social theory) this is the discourse of our interest
Temporality + spatiality socially constructed many times, in different ways, across times and cultures,
with highly consequential meanings for the constitution of social orders
Modern - Western mobilization of space and time “empty” + “scientific” conception as central in its own
cultural + social construction of space and time = constitutive condition of many dimensions of modern
social reproduction such as:
- bureaucratic organization
- historicist forms of consciousness
- bordered nation-states
the same question around why previous cultures have lived in such different spatio-temporal
worlds from that of modern Europe has to be asked around modernity.
Even ideas of “empty” space and time FULL of cultural and social determinations
SO, QUESTION: in what kind of society do “emptiable” ideas of space and time take place and why?
, All this underlines the importance of space and time in the construction of social reality.
The move to reverse the normal relation of explanans-explanandum is generally resisted.
No human ever experiences temporal or spatial determinants not mediated/constructed in particular socio-
cultural forms.
Different social worlds differently produce parameters of distance, proximity, duration…
But danger to over generalize the significance of space to understand space and time as empty and
attribute this to the objective character of space and time = theoretical mistake = general problem of
globalization theory (common fallacy in globalization theory)
Purpose NOT entirely negative!!!
Globalization theory has this virtue: it throws into the debate 2 issues:
1. the status of classical social theory (represented by Marx and Max Weber, and their conception of an
evolving historical reality) + in the end what unites is = common pursuit of a collective effort to understand
the social world
2. idea of the “international” as a significant + distinctive dimension of the social world of modernity
(sometimes dismissed by globalization theory)
‘INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS’ AND GLOBALISATION THEORY
“The divisions of the continents and of the globe as a whole” are breaking down not only the notion of
“society” as a territorially bounded entity
SO, also International Theory (=study of the interaction across, between and among these entities
of territorially bounded societies) must be subject to modifications – “methodological
territorialism” bound to the very definition of “inter-national relations”
“Supra-territorial” character of contemporary global challenges these are increasingly constituted not in
the territorial space of the Westphalian states-system BUT rather in the “distanceless space” promoted by:
- Modern financial markets
- Satellite communications
- Computer networks
According to Malcolm Waters international theory unable to move beyond a “proto-theory of
globalization”:
- WHY? Because a DUALISM remains as bottom line eventually in political science and international
relations versions/explanations/accounts of globalization
- WHY? Because attention to processes of transnational integration co-exist problematically with
continuing significance of the sovereign state
Anyway, in the globalization theory lit. proclamations of the “end of the Westphalian system” have
appeared already claiming:
- the organization of the world around and by a system of sovereign, territorial nation-states is
submerging beneath new kinds of non-territorial linkages
- the intensification of these linkages in turn is producing a new spatial + institutional configuration
of the social power
a “post-international system” abandoning the interstate model of orthodox International Relations
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