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O V E RV I E W

Globalizations
Dimensions, Historical Waves, Regional Effects,
Normative Governance
Gran Therborn
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Uppsala
abstract: Globalization is a plural phenomenon. There are
at least five major discourses on it that usually ignore
each other: competitive economics, social criticism, state
(im)potence, culture and planetary ecology. The dimensions
of globalization include a number of substantial social processes as well as two different kinds of dynamics: systemic
and interacting exogenous actors. Globalizations are not new
phenomena. At least six historical waves, beginning with the
spread of world religions, may be identified. An attempt is
made to systematize the effects of globalizations on different world regions and social actors. Issues of governance are
raised, 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 on
globalization. Each of them includes scholarly as well as ideological or
journalistic argumentation. One, arguably the most widespread and
proactive, is competition economics, which focuses on intensified worldwide competition and its implications for firms, workers and states. The
basic message is captured most briefly by a line of Bob Dylans: Youd
better start swimming, or youll sink like a stone.2 But it also includes
less apocalyptic versions that focus instead on the potentially benign
effects of increasing global exchange and economic mobility, provided
that all countries understand and accept the challenges of the structural
adaptations that are required (e.g. OECD, 1997).
International Sociology June 2000 Vol 15(2): 151179
SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
[0268-5809(200006)15:2;151179;012872]

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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 a
strongly negative reaction against, the perceived social consequences of
globalization as competitive economics. Socioeconomic critiques of
globalization are often couched in religious and/or moral terms. An eloquent example is a recent statement by Julio Terrazas, the archbishop of
Santa Cruz and the president of the Episcopal Conference of Bolivia the
country where Jeffrey Sachs earned his spurs as a global economics
advisor in the 1980s before being invited to post-Communist Russia. The
globalizers of the economy will be treated with more severity than . . .
Sodom and Gomorrah, which already is a rather strong threat to those
who in their arrogance think that well-being is only for a few and exclude
the rest forever (La Prensa, 1998).3
An important analytical contribution of this kind is a report on The
Social Effects of Globalization to the World Summit for Social Development in 1995 by the UN Research Institute for Social Development
(UNRISD, 1995). It should be noted that the starting-point and drive of
this sociocritical discourse on globalization are not only Third World and
left of center. Versions of it may also be found among the First World
right, particularly in the USA (e.g. Buchanan, 1998).
The third topic has a more ideological sweep and centrality than the first
two, and it is more concentrated in academia, which does not diminish
the heat of controversy. The topic is that of state (im)potence in the face of
the global economy. The controversies here center around questions about
the extent that the state has lost or is going to lose the capacities to govern
and control. To some writers, we are living the end of the nation-state,
whereas to others we are englobed by a myth of globalization inside
which differential national developments are still the main determinants
of the world economy. Between these poles of controversy, say Ohmae
(1995) and Weiss (1998), there are many interesting studies and debates on
the sovereignty and capacity of states in the contemporary world.
Whereas the three major topics of globalization so far all hover around
the world economy and its changes, their economic dynamics and lessons,
their social or political consequences, there are two others that approach
globalization from quite different angles. One, the fourth in our column,
is cultural. The spotlight here is on global or at least transnational cultural
flows, on communications and encounters, and on their effects on symbolic forms, social images, cultural practices, on lifestyles and the deterritorialization of culture. A major issue of cultural globalization is
whether it leads to uniformity or new forms of diversity. Though
there are accounts that emphasize the threat of uniformity in the
forms of Americanization, McDonaldization, CocaColonization, cultural 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 emphasis on diversity, on creolization, hybridization and the globalized production of difference (e.g. Appadurai, 1996; Hannerz, 1992, 1996;
Nederveen Pieterse, 1998).
Finally, there is an important discourse that explicitly focuses on globality rather than globalization, on the implications and consequences of
the former. It is a discourse of planetary ecology that studies and discusses
humankind and global society as part of a planetary ecosystem. It is in
this kind of discourse that an awareness of the globe as a whole tends to
find its most eloquent expression. Its focus and the key issues of controversy are the actual or potential self-destruction of human action on
earth and the requirements of sustainable development. The first major
manifestation of this kind of discourse was the 1972 Club of Rome report
on The Limits to Growth (Meadows, 1972), sustained by the first UN
environmental conference in Stockholm the same year that inaugurated
a quarter of a century of UN conferences on human and environmental
development. But the establishment of global ecology as a programmatic
and monitoring discourse occurred in the course of the 1980s. One side
of this topic turns on questions of human population, its size, age distribution and conditions of life; another on the interactions of humankind
and nature, such as the UN Panel on Climatic Change or the Global
Natural Resource Monitoring, also by the UN.4
Seldom do these discourses express an awareness of each other and
rarely, if ever, an awareness of all the others, although it is true that the
literature does now contain a few wide-ranging and heavyweight contributions, such as those of Castells (19968) and Held et al. (1999).
Globalization poses three kinds of challenges at the threshold to the 21st
century and the third millennium. One is cognitive: calling for conceptual
clarification, analysis, interpretation and explanation, and addressed,
first of all, to scholars of the humanities and the social sciences. A second
one we may name civic; it concerns all inhabitants of the planet, whether
citizens or not. How to make practical sense of globalization? How to act
within or in relation to it, including how to resist, in case one should
want to? Third, in its surpassing of states, globalization poses the challenge of governance, of a new world order. Each of these challenges contains a set of substantial issues, of how to comprehend specific processes,
how to act with regard to them and, eventually, how to govern or regulate them.

Grasping Globalizations
Like so many concepts in social science and historiography, globalization is a word of lay language and everyday usage with variable shades
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of meaning and many connotations. Furthermore, scholars in nonparadigmatic disciplines by definition hardly ever agree on the meaning
of the concepts they use. However, it does seem worthwhile to throw a
stone of conceptualization into the pond of academia, at least to see what
happens.
As a concept of social theory and analysis, globalization should meet
three criteria. It should have a precise meaning, preferably not a semantically arbitrary one. It should be usable in empirical investigations, and
it should have a wide variety of possible applications. The third criterion
means that the concept should be abstract, not containing any a priori
statements of concrete content. On the basis of these considerations, I
think it fruitful to define globalization as referring to tendencies to a worldwide reach, impact, or connectedness of social phenomena or to a world-encompassing awareness among social actors. This definition is close to the
etymology 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 concrete
patterns of globalization, as well as non-committal a priori to the question of whether globalization is good or bad.
As a variable, globalization can cover an infinite number of the aspects
of social life. It can vary in degree of extension, from multi-continental
only to strictly planetary. And it can be driven by different dynamics. In
sum, the concept refers to a plurality of social processes, and the word
had therefore better be used in plural: globalizations.
Discourses on globalization mean a spatialization of the social. So do
also those on another topic in vogue these days, in Europe at least: Europeanization. Generally and literally put, spatialization means a flattening of social processes. The complexity of qualities, issues of depth and
shallowness, the dialectics of contradictions tend to get lost through
spatialization. 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 capitalism all tend to be rolled over by globalization. In the EU, issues of
growth, competitiveness, employment, democracy and justice have been
submerged under the carpet of the management of the Western European
space, its internal links of Single Market and monetary union, its enlargement to the east and a tightening of the borders to poor areas and their
peoples.
To spatialize the social means to focus on the extension and connectivity of the latter. Not on, say, its qualities or the growth or decline, the contradictions or the dialectic of the social. There is, of course, a legitimate
conceptual division of labor in which spatial as well as temporal and
dialectical concepts have their role. The problem is rather the frequent
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tendency to mono-conceptual discourses. Globalization has often fallen
victim to that.
On the other hand, ceteris paribus, a spatial extension of something social
also means a wider vista, a broader view. Globalizations may thus give
rise to new questions about a familiar space. Among the things this writer
has learned from a global perspective is the extraordinary uniculturalism
of late medieval/early modern Western Europe.

Dynamics: The World as a System, as a

Stage or Both?
A central issue of interpretation and analysis of the world produced by
globalizations is whether it is a system or a stage. Is the world a system
shaping the actors in it and directing their strivings, or is it an arena,
where actors who were formed outside act and interact? The fulcrum of
the current debate is the world economy, but the issue is the same with
regard 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 the
options and effective possibilities of civic action and governance.
In sociology there are several strong currents that argue the systemness of the world. It was adumbrated in 1966 by a disciple of Talcott
Parsons the creator of sociologys neoclassical synthesis Wilbert Moore
(1966). It was asserted a decade later, with great polemical verve and
wide-ranging historical argumentation, by a militant anti-Parsonian,
Immanuel Wallerstein (1976: 7, 229ff.). Since the 16th century, there has
been one world system, the capitalist world economy. States, classes and
other social phenomena are elements of the world system, and as such
are 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 the
world as an enactment of culture. Their baseline is a rationalized world
institutional and cultural order from which states get their models of sovereignty and purpose, help with policies, and from which subnational
actors for instance gays and lesbians get legitimacy.
Whereas Wallerstein and Meyer arrive at their world systems by
empirical investigation, Niklas Luhmann, who might be labeled a highly
original post-Parsonian, comes to a similar conclusion as a profound social
theorist. According to Luhmann (1997: Vol. 1, Ch. X), we now have a
global system as a single world society that can be described without
any reference to regional particularities and which, on the contrary, should
be used as the starting-point for explaining regional inequalities.
Luhmann conceives of social systems in terms of communication and
society as the encompassing social system, and from an observation of
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global communication he comes to his conception of contemporary
society as world society. The novel conceptualizations-cum-empirical
investigations by Wallerstein and other world system analysts, by Meyer,
Boli, Ramirez and other associates, have enriched our understanding of
the world, and so has the grand theoretical oeuvre of Luhmann. Empirically, there is clearly a world system, which has shaped, most visibly, the
states, the economies and the societies of the New Worlds of the Americas and Oceania, which has transformed those of the ex-colonial zone
from northwestern Africa to Papua New Guinea, and to which the
threatened countries of externally induced modernization, with Japan as
the vanguard, have had to adapt. Although Western European states and
capitalists once created it, neither they nor Eastern Europe have been unaffected by the world system. It is also undeniable that there is a world
culture, sustained by global communication, that provides a historically
delimited repertoire of institutions and policies which nation-states tend
to emulate, resulting in an impressive isomorphism of, for example, constitutions, educational systems and public policy orientations.
So, a world system exists, and in this context I refrain from entering the
fray about the relative merits and significance of it as world capitalism or
as world culture. (There are obviously strong arguments for the relevance
of both points of view, which are not necessarily incompatible.) But does
that mean that the world cannot also function as a stage of actors with
important characteristics and resources from outside the world system?
As far as I can see, the answer is no. Neither author seems to have
broached the question of system-ness as a variable. There is also, in my
view, an array of good arguments that can be marshaled in favor of seeing
the world as an arena where nationally determined actors meet, interact
and influence each other.
Current issues of this sort were highlighted by the Single Market
project of the European Community. This project was launched in the mid1980s, about three decades after the constitution of the EEC by the Treaty
of Rome (scheduled for 1992, but though duly inaugurated on time
not fully realized yet). The Single Market aims at a full-fledged regional
economic system in a narrow sense and fully determines the regional division of labor according to a socially somewhat-regulated capitalist logic.
To grand histories or battle canvases of the world system, this may
appear as marginal fine print. To an understanding of contemporary
globalization it seems to be highly pertinent. If the EU still has some steps
to take to a fully functioning Single Market, the world economy is still
far from fully systemized. Alongside the resources and constraints produced by the global economic system, enterprises, entrepreneurs and
workers 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 of
global system and exogenous actors in global interaction is crucial. How
much can the global system dynamic tell us about the rise of Southeast
Asia as a major manufacturing area of the world in the last quarter of the
20th century, for instance? Or why the division of employment and nonemployment has diverged between the USA and the EU, or why the gender
division of labor has done so, say between Germany and Scandinavia?
Though argued somewhat differently, Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompsons (1996) distinction between a global (system) and an inter-national
(arena) economy is pertinent here. Causal arrows on the world scene have
also been seen flying from the national to the global. John Zysman (1996:
164), an experienced analyst of international relations, for instance, has
argued:
National developments have . . . driven changes in the global economy; even
more than a so-called globalisation has driven national evolutions. It is the
success of particular countries, rather than some unfolding of a singular market
logic, based on more and faster transactions, that has forced adaptations.

As far as nation-states and world culture are concerned, let me point to

two sub-global features. One is party systems: that is, the framing of political opinion and the channeling of political action. While there are similar
parties in several other countries, both the individual parties after the
demise of the Communist International and the party systems are, above
all, national. Another is social policy and institutions of social rights. This
is probably the most studied policy area of all, and the conclusion from
all these studies is unambiguous. Social entitlement institutions and social
policies differ among nation-states, both in form and in size, and, although
there are certain evolutionary tendencies, there is little convergence, either
in terms of rights or in terms of generosity or finance.
I think there is an answer to this question about the character of the
contemporary world, an answer which is not just eclecticism or diplomatic compromise, but theoretical. No complex social system is fully
scripted, with actors only having to enact given roles. From the system
perspective, social actors are always indeterminate to a significant extent,
an indeterminacy which might be seen as contingency or an effect of
system-exogenous determinations, in the case under discussion, for
example, 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 system
and world culture analyses. But a next step, it seems to me, would be to
treat system-ness and stage-ness as variables. That is, to move beyond the
controversies 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, nationally and/or locally formed actors is or was there and is there likely to be
on the world stage?
A world stage of interacting national forces is a social phenomenon of
worldwide reach and impact and, as such, is also a feature of globalization, in the sense given earlier. Here we have one important ground for
distinguishing different kinds of globalization. There are more.

Taking Multidimensionality Seriously That is,

Systematically
There is a strong tendency for globalization to be discussed in unidimensional terms, as in the five topical discourses mentioned earlier. And
even when there is a commitment to multidimensionality, this may often
remain limited and/or arbitrary, following from a neglect of any systematic approach to the social.
The multidimensionality of globalization and the plurality of globalizations may be captured with the help of two axes. One refers to the character of the global(izing) dynamic, which may be either world systemic
or (inter)active on a world stage. The other refers to the range of social
phenomena. With regard to the latter, previous work (Therborn, 1995)
has shown the heuristic value of structure or structuration as referring to
the external resources and constraints that actors can draw upon and have
to take into account and to culture or enculturation as actors have learned
internal 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 globalization may then be summed up as shown in Table 1.
It should be clear why globalization should be taken in plural, as globalizations, involving a number of substantive social processes and more
than one procedural dynamic. Globalizations are multiform processes.

A Historical Hypothesis: Six Waves of

Globalization
In the sense of tendencies toward a global reach or impact, we may discern
at least six or possibly seven5 major historical waves, and two moments
of surge.
The first wave was the diffusion of world religions and the establishment of transcontinental civilizations. It might have been delimited in
time with regard to the most important processes of spreading, which
were not the same as their beginnings or ends. From this perspective, it
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Table 1 Dimensions of Globalization

Area
Structuring
Division of labor
Rights
Capital/income

Dynamics

(Inter)action on world stage

System process
Sub-global actors
World trade
Interdependence
World influence
World impact

Risks/opportunity World impact

Enculturing
Identities

Cognition

Values
Norms
Symbolic forms

Action

Sub-global actors
Cross-continental
identifications or role
models
World reference, world
comparison
World diffusion
World influence
World influence
Cross-cultural interchange,
hybridization
Global interaction

World system
World market
World production
Universal law/rights
World finance
World market determination
World environment market
World culture (system)
Humankind identity or
global categorical
identities
Planetary awareness
Universal knowledge,
universal science
World religions or ideologies
Global rules
Universal language/
expressions
World art and architecture
World concert/endemic
conflict

seems that the most crucial period was constituted by the 4th7th centuries of the Christian era.
In those years, Christianity became dominant in Europe through its
establishment and officialization in the Roman empire, and it settled in
Ethiopia and Kerala. Hinduism spread to Southeast Asia from the southern parts of the Indo-Chinese peninsula to what is now the Indonesian
archipelago. Buddhism went to China from India in these centuries and,
in the same period, spread from there to Korea and Japan. By the beginning of the 8th century CE, Islam ruled Spain, the Arab world from
Morocco to (current) Iraq, Persia, Kashgar on the Central Asian silk route
and Sind in todays Pakistan.
By about 700 CE, the world religions had established themselves as
trans-tribal and trans-monarchical it would be anachronistic to talk of
transnational cultures, not strictly world encompassing, but stretched out
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widely across continents and oceans. These were cultures which were not
only 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 that
was wider than the Chinese empire. The Chinese script, Confucian doctrines and esthetic canons settled in Korea and Japan and, somewhat
before our period, in northern Vietnam.
What brought together all these currents at about the same time has
still to be unraveled. At least in Europe, it included major mass migrations (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 a
series of developments in the opposite direction, perhaps best captured
as vernacularization (the development of particular languages out of a
common language area), as its most visible expression is linguistic with
concomitant cultural significance.6
Upon the spread of the world religions and their holy languages followed a rise of different vernacular high-culture languages often with their
own scripts. This movement of deglobalization seems to have had its most
vigorous and widespread impetus in the 12th16th centuries, although it
started earlier. In the Sinic culture area, the Japanese developed a supplementary script and a vernacular literary tradition. Korea created its own
script in the mid-14th century, and a domestic script emerged in Vietnam
although with less success. Pali and Sanskrit receded before new vernacular cultures: Sinhala, Javanese, Marathi, Bengali and others. In Europe,
Romance languages departed from Latin as high cultures in the 12th14th
centuries, after having emerged as vulgar speech from the first half of
the 9th century onward (Hagge, 1996: 185ff.). The Slavs had an alphabet
of their own, and Church Slavonic was still the high language of Orthodox Eastern Europe. In the 16th century, the Reformation meant an enormous boost to vernacular languages through Bible translations.
The cultural process of deglobalization was sustained by a consolidation of different polities within the same culture area. Islam was, in
part, an exception, with its reproduction both of vast empires and of
Arabic as the high literary standard. But the most powerful Islamic rulers,
the Ottomans and the Mughals, established Turkish and Persian, respectively, as languages of imperial rule; the latter also used Urdu below their
highest echelons.
The second wave of globalization occurred through European colonial
conquests 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 and
plantation slavery were key components of the new world system. Plantation slavery made sugar into a world commodity. For the first time since
the prehistoric (still not certainly dated) entry of humans into America
across the Bering Strait, the Americas became part of a multi-continental
earth.
For two continents of the world, this was an epoch of full-scale disaster: the genocidal depopulation of the Americas and the opening up of
Africa to a trans-Atlantic slave trade. It was also the time of the creation
of the New Worlds in the Americas and the worldwide reach of the new
European empires. Of the latter, 16th-century Spain encompassing most
of both the Americas and the Philippines was the most logistically
impressive. And in the Philippines, Christianity met Islam, a frontier that
persists to this day.
While the European colonial expansion of the second wave derived
from 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-European
power struggles. This was the series of the first global wars, which pitted
Britain and France against each other with shifting constellations of allies,
not only in Europe but all over the world. These also occurred in North
America, the Caribbean, India and, through Dutch involvement with
France, on the South African Cape and in Southeast Asia. Napoleon Bonapartes occupation of Egypt in 1798 brought the intra-European war right
into the lands of the main Islamic empire, the previous power of which
had pushed the Europeans to find ways of circumnavigating it. In Europe,
where they were generated, these wars are usually known as the Wars of
the Spanish, the Austrian Succession and the Napoleonic Wars, stretching from 1700 to 1815, which culminated in the latter half of this period.
The then colonial wars became wars between European states, deploying
large naval and land forces of metropolitan Europe on theaters of war
across 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 globalization
soon gathered a new and different momentum.
This was the heyday of European imperialism which lasted from the
mid-19th century to 1918 as a fourth wave of globalization. It was driven
by bulk trade, involved voluntary trans-oceanic mass migration and was
sustained by new and faster means of transport and communication. This
wave began as the British forcibly opened China for international drugs
trafficking, soon followed by their finishing off the Mughal empire, and
as the Americans opened up Japan through the threat of naval force.
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Throughout most of Asia, the European screws were tightened, Africa
was subjugated, and masses of migrants went out from Europe to the
Americas and to Oceania. The latter were repopulated after the cleansing of the natives. Chinese and Indian coolies dependent labor were
encouraged to migrate to the imperial labor markets, and millions did.
World commodity markets were established, especially in grain, and a
world capital market emerged. The gold standard ruled over transnational transactions, including finance.
The First World War and its immediate aftermath constituted the final
crest of this fourth wave. The center of the conflict was in Europe, but the
whole British empire was enrolled, current or ex-, as in the case of the
USA, and the combat zones included German colonies in Africa, China
and the Pacific, as well as Ottoman West Asia. The aftermath of the war
established the first global organization of states, the League of Nations,
the International Labour Organization, and a set of ambitious but completely ineffective global norms, of state behavior toward national minorities and mandated extra-European populations.
After the First World War, there followed a significant new period of
deglobalization, of shrinking world trade, of national abandonments of the
gold standard, of the reinforcement of states versus markets, of national
and ethnic particularisms.
The Second World War and its immediate sequel was a second, special
surge of globalization, this time beginning a new wave. Again the center
was Europe, but the Pacific theater, between Japan and the USA, was
no sideshow. All Asia east of India was directly drawn into the war, as
were North Africa, Ethiopia and the Caucasus. Again the outburst of
global conflict was followed by a brief moment of peaceful globalization.
This was characterized by the constitution of the United Nations and its
specialized organizations, of the Nuremberg Trials and the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
Then there came, out of the Second World War, a fifth globalization
wave. The costs of communication and transport declined enormously,
and the share of external trade began to pick up again. But the main thrust
was political, pitching the USA, its allies and clients versus the USSR, its
allies and clients, in a literally worldwide rivalry and conflict, less belligerent but more ideologically high pitched than the long series of hot
global wars between Britain and France about two centuries earlier. The
Cold War had its origins in Europe, and it might be seen as a global projection of the internal, deep ideological cleavages characteristic of European modernity, but it entered everywhere into all parts of Asia, from
Korea and Japan to Arab West Asia, into sub-Saharan Africa, the
Caribbean and South America. It brought dramatic and highly controversial Communist-hunting into Australia and New Zealand.
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Cold War globalization reached its peak in the decade from the mid1970s to mid-1980s. The USA was always the richest and most powerful
contestant of the Cold War. However, there was a time when the USA
looked vulnerable. That was after its defeat in the Vietnam War and before
the self-acknowledged decay of the USSR.
Finally, there is the sixth, current wave in which the politico-military
dynamic of the Cold War has been overtaken by a mainly financial-cumcultural one. This took off in the second half of the 1980s with the enormous expansion of foreign currency trading after the breakdown (in the
1970s) of the international Bretton Woods currency system, followed by
the trading of derivatives and other new instruments of high-level gambling. This economic side was ideologically spurred by a new right-wing
liberal current that asserted itself after the (partial) breakdown, in the
economic crisis of the 1970s, of the post-Second World War socioeconomic
compromise in Western Europe and North America, a current further
invigorated by the collapse or forceful overthrow of Third World populism and then again by the collapse of European Communism.
Institutionally, this neoliberal current has manifested itself in abolishing state controls of capital markets and opening up new financial world
markets, in the dismantling of tariffs, privatizations of public enterprise
and services, a breakup of national champion monopolies and in a general
encouragement of global competition.
Mass intercontinental and transnational migration is returning with this
new wave and in new patterns. Reversing the streams of the fourth wave,
mass migration now mainly proceeds from South to North from Latin
to North America, from Africa and South Asia to Europe and from West
to East, that is from Asia across the Pacific to North America. These new
directions were opened by a labor shortage in the core capitalist countries
from their postwar boom and reproduced and expanded by the growing
economic and demographic disparities between the sending and receiving countries. New poles of migrant attraction outside the old routes have
also been established to areas like the Gulf region and parts of Southeast
Asia.
The new migration has changed the cultural landscape of the world.
The earlier, largely Anglo-Saxon New Worlds are becoming more multicultural than ever before, with strong Hispanic and Asian elements.
Western Europe, in modern history the most mono-cultural part of the
world, is now quite rapidly also becoming multicultural. Islam is finally
entering northwestern Europe, and so are, to a lesser extent, Hinduism
and Buddhism. The new migrants have made all Europe, if by no means
all 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. But
there are also other significant mass communication exporters: Brazil,
Mexico, Egypt, India and Hong Kong. Sometimes even more important
are the Southern broadcasts that are receivable in North America and
Western Europe by the new immigrants, who thereby can maintain their
cultural roots in their new countries.
Another crucial technical invention, culturally more universalizing than
diffusionist, is the Internet, which has flourished internationally since the
mid-1990s. By cheap, personal electronic communication, people from all
corners of the world can meet and connect on an equal footing. It is just
beginning to create a new system of business transactions of global reach.
Throughout the 20th century English advanced as a global lingua
franca, with resident worldwide or regional alternatives: Chinese in East
Asia, since the consolidation of European imperialism, although Mandarin is currently growing at the expense of Chinese vernaculars; German
in Eastern Europe; Japanese in East Asia after the Second World War; and
Russian after the split of the Communist movement and the collapse of
the USSR. The possible threat to French as a world language appears to
have dawned upon the French for the first time at the Versailles Conference while negotiating the peace after the First World War, when English,
surprisingly to French linguists and academicians, was introduced as
another language of international diplomacy (Hagge, 1996: 272). The
Second World War, the Americanization of Western Europe in the Cold
War period and the rise of a worldwide English-speaking mass culture
have since then cut down the transnational reach of the French language.
Outside the fields of finance and culture, the current wave has not
pushed globalization much further. Politically, the end of the Cold War
meant a deglobalization of political action, even if the USA occasionally
shows off its superpower muscles in other parts of the world. Some
modest advances toward concerted action have been made by the UN
machinery and its encouragement of global NGO networking, such as the
implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The
global environment has at least been put on an agenda of concerted action,
if little more. Much more substance is there in the global management of
financial crises, orchestrated by the IMF, operations which have the tangible advantage of protecting the interests of Northern bankers. There has
been a strongly revived interest in universal human rights, but whether
there 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 nor
something intrinsically irreversible. Globalization, like modernity
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(Therborn, 1995, 1999), is amenable not only to categorical interpretations
and ideological polemics but also to empirical, pluri-dimensional analysis, although it is neither solely cultural nor exclusively economic.
There is, as far as I can see, no evidence of anything properly cyclical in
the waves of globalization, but they do tend to have certain common features. They are all multidimensional, involving politico-military, economic
and cultural forces and processes, while each has dominant dynamics.
The first wave was dominated by the diffusion of religion and of
religion-related high culture, but that diffusion occurred via the victorious sword and migrant traders as well. Colonialism originated in expeditions in search of trade, but first of all, it was violent conquest. It had
enormous demographic, cultural and economic consequences as well. The
Franco-British conflicts of the 18th century and the Soviet-American ones
of the 20th century were driven by a global dynamic of big power rivalry
that spread from a center in Europe, while significantly dependent on
economic resource mobilization and sharpened by ideological differences
and controversies more shifting meanings in the Franco-British case and
more constant ones between the Soviets and the Americans. Classical
European imperialism, like the current wave, surged toward world
markets and opened intercontinental migration routes, while spawning a
powerful, asymmetric cultural diffusion and including particularistic
power interventions draped in universalistic language.
So far, the rise of the waves has derived from autonomous actors
extending their influence and impact, not from an intensification of systemic processes. But each wave has tended to create a certain global
system-ness, be it of a world religious culture, an empire, a world market
or a system of world conflict. When the wave subsided, and even more
when it was followed by a phase of deglobalization, this system-ness was
weakened, more seldom lost. In other words, a historical perspective
seems to bring forth the coexistence and interaction of world system-ness
and world stage-ness as developmental sequences.
All the waves, so far, have petered out after some time. They were followed by longer or shorter periods of deglobalization. But one wave did
not follow upon and from the other, which meant that the contraction of
one might coincide in time with the rise of another. Furthermore, a global
extension of some social phenomena may coexist with a contraction of
others.
The collapse of the USSR meant a tendency toward deglobalization of
politics, particularly felt in Third World peripheries that were previously
arenas of world conflict. In Southern Africa and in Central America this
also made it possible to find local solutions. At about the same time,
however, finance and mass communication reached higher levels of global
extension, building upon economic and technological developments
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coinciding with post-Second World War Cold War politics. The deglobalization in the 1920s and the 1930s was more general, but during those
years Japan and, somewhat later, the Soviet Union were constructing
themselves into new global powers, preparing for a quite new scenario
of global high politics in the Second World War.
The Franco-British global wars ended with the Vienna Congress, which
reinstated continental Europes position as the center of power, but not
in command of the worlds oceans. The lapse before the next British reach
for the world was short. Alongside the thrust of European colonialism,
the process of vernacularization and the fragmentation of the world
religions continued, above all in the Europe of the Reformation.
Finally, all the waves of globalization raise questions about the implications of our spatial conceptualizations of the social processes involved.
While space is often, outside the specialty of geography, a neglected aspect
in social science and in historiography, there are also limitations in
viewing the social world primarily in spatial terms.
The logic of the Cold War tried to flatten all economic, social, and cultural and political issues into a global opposition between the Free World
and the Socialist Camp. The open door and the civilizing mission of
imperialism discarded questions about who should open what doors at
what time, and about the authenticity and the imposition of civilizations.
Beneath the surface of the Franco-British wars on the seven seas forces gathered into the eruptions of the Industrial and the French Revolutions. In a
non-spatial perspective, colonialism was hardly a discovery or conquest
of new worlds, but it was an eco-demographic disaster of unequaled proportions in known human history. The wave of religious diffusion was not
just the spread of given cultural entities. It also involved, among other
things, new articulations of religions with political institutions, such as
Christianity with the Roman empire, Islam with the Persian monarchical
tradition and Buddhism with the imperial institutions of China and Japan.

Civic Challenges: Perspectives of Actors and

Channels of Action
The challenges posed by globalization to existing, non-global forms of
civic rights and collective action vary fundamentally along two axes with
regard to position in the social structure and with location in the geography of globalization. Who you are and where you are make crucial differences and give very different grounds and possibilities of action. Processes
of globalization link with different sub-global tendencies in different parts
of the world and, therefore, meet with different responses and different
kinds 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 who
wins and who loses from what kind of globalization? If we remember that
globalization is not a unidimensional economic phenomenon then the
questions 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: by
directly changing their given social location and by opening channels to
the rest of the world. Generally speaking, we may say that (for the foreseeable term) the winners of globalizations are those for whom an opened
world is either an opportunity of action or a connection to resourceful
friends. The importance of globalization to social actors, then, varies with
the size of the direct gains and losses or threats to the actors in their situations and with the effects of mobility and connections. Opportunity, in
turn, may be either in terms of vertical ascendance, becoming rich or at
least affluent or successful in some other way on the spot or, alternatively,
in terms of horizontal mobility, getting a better life somewhere else. It
may also mean access to sources of information, of values and of norms
more congenial to those prevailing at home, and link-ups with friends in
other parts of the world. To the losers, globalization is a closure of opportunities, of employment, of chances for decent wages or profits, and/or
a cultural invasion that occupies the high ground of cultural communication and subverts important values.
Who, then, are the winners and the losers? In order to approach this
question systematically, it might be useful to tabulate the main types of
alternatives.
The effects of globalizations run in different directions. The contested
evaluations of the phenomenon reflect a multifaceted reality. The implications of Table 2 are, on one side, a tendency toward a polarization of
effects and, on the other, a range of possibilities. Business elites tend to
gain both in their current business situation and from access to new
opportunities, to international technology, to possibilities to move, to the
support of global economic institutions, from capital to celebrations in the
business press. Non-competitive groups and localized traditionalists in
values 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, because
the groups listed are not mutually exclusive. As a low-skilled worker you
may be an avid consumer of satellite television, and/or you may have
the possibility to migrate. As a member of an indigenous community you
may have your traditional ways threatened by the global drive for capital
accumulation, but you may get support from friends in other countries,
including some very resourceful ones. And there are, of course, as always
in human affairs, possibilities of change over time. Competitiveness may
167

Situational
effects
Threats

168
Opportunities

World openings

Positive
Negative

Marginal
Invasion
Access
Support
Mobility
Non-competitive
business,
workers,
professionals

Competitive
workers and
small business

Local traditionalists

Consumers
Professionals

Connected
disadvantaged
groups

Migrants

Business elites

Business elites

Business elites

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Table 2 Winners and Losers from Globalizations

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be both learned and lost, traditions may be embraced or abandoned,
connections may be established or lost, identifications can change, and
the doors of migration can widen or narrow.
The civic issues of globalizations cannot be captured in any simple formulae, be they of fundamentalism, localism or identity politics.

Globalization is Variably Globalized

Globalization takes place in different spatio-historical contexts, which
provide very different meanings and implications in various parts of the
world. In order to concretize such a statement it might be useful to delineate these differences, however crudely and summarily. In addition to
the situational and opening effects discussed earlier, two more variables
are important in macroscopic regional comparisons. One is variation of
scale, of the size of the situational and opening globalization effects in
relation to a given starting-point or benchmark. The other is the perception of the predominant shape of globalizing forces of change. Variations
along these lines give rise to different receptions of and cleavages around
globalization.
This birds eye view of the implications of globalizations may be endlessly elaborated. Here we confine ourselves to a few explications. For
brevitys sake, the social outline of Table 3 is kept in the background and
not brought explicitly into this regional context.
Table 3 Main Regional Effects of Current Globalization
Area

Situation effect

Opening

Shape

Western Europe Secondary

Marginal

Competition
Immigration

Eastern Europe

Consumption

Connections

Transition to Europe
and the West

Investment
Competition

Cultural access

USA

Competition

Market access

Third World

Divisive
Secondary
Adjustment
Connections
Investment
Cultural access
Cultural challenge

World Bank, IMF

Creditors, donors

Southeast and
East Asia

Living standard
Market access
Cultural challenge Cultural access

Own initiative

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Low-wage producers
World market
World government

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In Western Europe there is a relatively minor situational impact, given
the old tradition of open societies and economies and the overpowering
regional impetus of European integration. Europe still seems to overshadow the globe, in spite of some business pleading and trend-conscious
sociology to the contrary.
De facto, although usually not perceived under this name, globalization
in Western Europe appears most visibly and dramatically in the new
pattern of world migration. In the early 1960s, Europe transformed from
a continent of emigration to one of immigration, and in the 1980s and
1990s European societies changed considerably, with a significant influx
of non-European immigrants. This has led to considerable social friction
and has given rise to xenophobic movements and violence.
In Eastern Europe current globalization means both an opening of previously relatively closed economies and cultures and entry into another
economic system, capitalism, apertures perceived as Europe and the
West a tremendous change, in other words, with a starkly differentiated impact on economic winners and losers. So far, most Eastern Europeans have lost economically, above all in the former Soviet Union and
the Balkans, although access to consumer goods has increased.
In terms of perception, globalization here mostly appears wrapped up
in the transition problematic, namely the transitions to democracy, capitalism, Europe, the West, or, as it is often put without the slightest selfirony, to normalcy.
The international agencies, the IMF and World Bank above all, which de
facto govern many of the economic and social policies of post-Communist
Europe, seem so far to have received less attention as agents of globalization here than in other parts of the world where they are important.
In the USA, while the countrys political and economic leadership is
pushing for wider opening of world markets, there is a surprisingly strong
and widely spread (across the leftright spectrum) concern with and fear
of the dangers of globalization, seen mainly as global competition, but
also as the threat of world government. To a non-American these reactions appear surprisingly strong for the worlds only superpower, and for
a huge and rich economy that is little dependent on foreign trade. American reactions against globalization seem to derive from three kinds of
reasons. One has to do with American history and identity and expresses
itself in a continuous vacillation between splendid isolation and world
power. The size, the wealth of the country, and its oceanic distance to any
major potential enemy make its self-sufficient isolationist orientation and
its local, special traditionalism understandable. They resemble somewhat
those of the Chinese empire before its decline.
Second, from the traditional self-sufficiency of the US economy, where
imports 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 the
form of Japanese cars, meant a dramatic change, and foreign imports
increased much more than exports.
Third, the modest opening of the US economy has coincided with a stagnation of real wages since the oil crisis of the mid-1970s and with an
increase in relative poverty. This development, the most direct cause of
which is a uniquely successful corporate offensive against workers, is often
seen or portrayed as following from low-wage competition from abroad.
In the Third World, from Latin America to Africa and, with some qualifications, South Asia, globalization appears most tangibly in imposed
liberalization, earlier known in Africa as structural adjustment policies,
imposed by the World Bank and the IMF. Imposed liberalization entails
fiscal austerity by expenditure cuts, tariff reductions and privatizations,
all paving the road for foreign, private investors. Even on its own economic terms, the successes of imposed structural adjustments have been
few, limited and short-lived. The winners of these measures have so far
been very few and the losers many (Williams, 1994; Bird, 1996; Laurell,
this issue, pp. 31314). The result has been a series of IMF riots, above
all in Africa and the Arab world, and widespread popular wrath against
the institutions of economic globalization, eloquently expressed by the
Bolivian archbishop quoted at the beginning of this article, who compared
the latter to Sodom and Gomorrah.
The Third World tends to be religious, and post-colonial frustrations are
often expressed in religious terms (Westerlund, 1996), but the relation
between religious fundamentalism and globalization is quite complex.
Among Christians, opposition to or critique of globalization tends to come
from sections of the established (non-fundamentalist) churches. More
fundamentalist Protestant Evangelical movements, often of US origin, on
the other hand, tend to be less concerned with worldly issues. One of the
reasons for their spread in Latin America has been the failure of left-wing
Catholicism to bring about any mundane social change (Vzquez, 1998).
Islamic fundamentalism tends to be more directed against a secular nationstate experienced as a socioeconomic failure and seen as an alien import
and appears, at least sometimes, more as an alternative globalization
than a territorially delimited reaction against it. Hindu fundamentalism
and militant Buddhism in Sri Lanka, on the other hand, thrive mainly from
communal conflicts within and around their respective states.
Seen from a multidimensional perspective, to the Third World, globalization is irreducible to economic objectivation, be it from imposed liberalism, indebtedness, or dependence on aid or capital inflow. Processes of
globalization have also widened the range of options to people in the
Third World. In spite of all state border controls and attempts at exclusion, new intercontinental migratory chains have opened up from South
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to North and from East to West. Womens groups, street children, child
laborers, trade unionists and indigenous peoples have acquired resourceful friends in the rich world through the UN machinery and otherwise
providing political and economic support, publicity and advice. Transnational satellite television and transistor radios have opened access to
other patterns of consumption, entertainment and lifestyles and, occasionally, to other political information than those provided by the state regime
and the local culture. All this may be evaluated critically as a cultural
invasion or challenge as well as positively. Anyway, Third World discourse on globalization is also strongly cultural, perhaps more so in, for
example, the Arab world, than in some other parts.7
In Southeast and East Asia, post-Second World War globalizations have
been experienced neither as a threat nor as a brutal imposition from outside
but, first of all, as a self-determined entry into world opportunities by
access to universal technology, through export drives, and then, by the forerunners, through forays into world finance. As one ASEAN writer put it:
In Vietnam, as in the other Asean [Southeast Asian] economies, globalization was initiated by the government (Soesastro, 1998: 28). The Thai Royal
Academy has translated globalization as lokapiwat, expanding globally,
conquering the world (Chantana, 1998: 259). India in the 1990s, after
liberalization, appears to be located somewhere between China and the
rest of the Third World, but much less open to foreign trade and investment.
There has been relatively little incoming (non-East Asian) foreign direct
investment, and domestic consumer markets are still heavily dominated
by domestic firms. A global orientation here has hitherto been rewarded
by a staggering growth of living standards for the large majority. In the
decade from 1985 to 1995, East Asia was also the main region of trade
union growth in the world (ILO, 1997: 2, 2356).
The core countries of the region were never subject to western colonialism, and they have kept a distinctive, largely secular culture elite as well
as popular of their own, now, of course, affected by global cultural currents. The cultural challenge appears to be primarily political, perceived
as undermining political authorities, but also as intrusive upon national
traditions.
In summary, globalizations are not globally uniform but regionally and
nationally variable. The reactions they provoke and the actions they
promote differ strongly from one context to another.

Governance in a New Era

The rather recently resurrected concept of governance is vaguer and more
general than that of government. It is akin to the German concept of
Steuerung, 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 world
government is (still) a utopia, world governance is an immediate practical challenge.

. . . But Still in the Century of the State

Current discussions on challenges to and the decline of the state had better
keep in mind that recent developments are taking place from the peak of
state power and control. The second third of the 20th century, from the
Depression until the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of fixed
inter-state exchange rates, will probably be remembered as the zenith of
the state, but until very recently the whole century has experienced an
increase in the significance of the state.
Economically, states grew in relation to markets, globally as well as
domestically. Domestically, this was the time of planning, of state mobilizations of the countrys resources and, somewhat later, the establishment
of large-scale, state-guaranteed social entitlements. The share in the
domestic economy of state revenue and state expenditure took a leap
upward. State control over its territory and its population increased enormously, with legal unifications, administrative growth and the development of technologies of registration and surveillance. Radio provided an
effective national mass medium. In terms of identifications, nationalism
rose to new heights and spread further across the globe than ever before,
expressed in the enthusiastic war mobilizations and in the vast anticolonial movement. Whether through democracy or dictatorship, populations were integrated into, and mobilized by a state they regarded as
theirs, to an unprecedented extent.
Now, we all know that since the late 1970s, markets have grown faster
than the state, financial markets explosively so in the last dozen years.
The contradiction of capitalist development that Marx pointed out
between private property and the increasingly social character of the productive forces was remarkably correct for 20th-century capitalism, up till
the 1970s. Since then, there has been a reversal, with new means of private
resource mobilization and technology development via markets. This is
undoubtedly an epochal shift. But how far has it taken us in changing the
significance of the nation-state?
Not very far, yet, I argue. Most parts of the world are still more nationstate governed than they were in the first half of the 20th century. This
clearly holds true for todays China, in comparison with the decaying
empire of the Qing and with the fractured Republic; for India, in relation
to the mosaic of British empire, princely states and local customs; for the
successor states of the Ottoman empire; for the whole of Africa; and for
the 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 with
the pre-Second World War oligarchies or the convulsions of the Mexican
Revolution. It holds for the USA, where the writ of the federal government and the US Constitution, including its 14th Amendment (on racial
equality), are now valid across the whole territory of the nation, including the South. Western Europe is somewhat different, but not because of
global markets and local fragmentation. It is regional integration, organized by the nation-states, that makes the difference.
Everywhere, except post-Communist Russia, a larger part of territorial
economies is extracted and spent by nation-states than it was 50 or a 100
years ago. Before the First World War, no state in high-spending Europe
spent as much as a fifth of the countrys GDP, usually one-tenth or oneseventh. Before the Second World War, general taxation extracted onefifth or more of GDP only in Germany from 1936 on (Flora, 1983: 262, 264
and Ch. 8). By 1950, all the OECD states extracted more than a fifth of
their GDPs in taxes, the USA almost a fourth, but no one more than a
third which France, Germany and the UK all did (Taylor, 1983: 262). By
1997, the weighted average of general public expenditure in the OECD
was 39 percent of GDP and average receipts from taxes and other sources
were 38 percent. No country, except recent member Korea, spent less than
about a third of domestic economic resources (OECD, 1998: 2523).
In contrast to the three previous waves of globalization, the current one
is not at all state driven, but it starts from a peak of state power. A good
many of the forces and processes which made the 20th century the century
of the state are still at work. A great deal of the coming problems of
governance will derive from the continued existence and power of states.
The world posing questions of governance seems to me still to be more
an 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 world
government, world leadership and world norms. De facto, most of us
probably perceive a world government with hard global law as further
away than about a 100 years ago, when the French legal scholar Edouard
Lambert presented a proposal of a droit commun de lhumanit (a law of all
humankind) at an international legal congress simultaneous with the Paris
World Exhibition in 1900 (Sousa Santos, 1995: 221).
The best prospects of global governance seem to reside in global norm
formation. That is, in the development of rules and regulations of what
is right and wrong that do not have the force of law backed by a quasimonopoly of the means of violence (i.e. by a world state), but which are
something 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 enrich
future social theory.
There are at least three main areas where a global normative approach
would not only be very important but could also be argued without
necessarily having to confront cultural diversity and cultural relativism.
One concerns the planet Earth as an ecosystem. A second refers to
humankind as a species. The third may be logically more divisive, but a
cumulative effect of the waves of globalization has made it recognized
worldwide, if not universally. That is the conception of humankind as an
aggregate of individuals of intrinsically equal worth, at least at birth.8
In each of these areas, processes of forming global norms are already
at work. According to one count, there were by 1992 more than 900 international legal instruments dealing with the environment (Jacobson and
Weiss, 1995: 119). The UN conferences in Stockholm (1972), Rio (1992) and
Kyoto (1997) have spawned or inspired a number of environmental protocols and accords clearly with at least some significant environmental
effect, for instance on ozone-depleting substances. The World Heritage
Convention of 1972 laid foundations for a common human cultural heritage. Other attempts at a ius humanitais have so far been more controversial and opposed by the USA as interfering with private property. The
USA has therefore not ratified the Law of the Sea Convention that stipulates the ocean floor and its subsoil a common heritage of humankind or
the similar Moon Treaty (Sousa Santos, 1995: 366ff.). The WHO and its
monitoring of the health of humankind has been very successful in a
number of areas of disease. Population policies constitute another field of
recent global concern, and the UN Conference on Population and
Development (in Cairo 1994) managed to introduce the normative concept
of reproductive rights into them. Individual human rights were solemnly
proclaimed in the Declaration of 1948. They became a frequently invoked
norm in the second half of the 1970s and have generated several UN conventions with monitoring committees (see further Steiner and Alston,
1996). The most significant of the latter appears to be the committee
following implementations of the convention against racial discrimination
and, in particular, the one devoted to the Convention on the Rights of the
Child (Banton, 1996; LeBlanc, 1995).
The actual course of global normativity looks like a meandering path
in the shadow of a towering continuous range of gross and massive violations of the most elementary human rights, but with a far-reaching blue
horizon on the other side following from a rational argumentation in favor
of the planet, the species and the fundamental equality of all individuals.
The horizon is pointed to by Muhammed Bedjaoui, president of the International Court of Justice, referring to the Declaration of the Right to
Development, 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 peoples
are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social,
cultural, and political development. To Bedjaoui, the right to development . . . is the core right from which all the others stem (Steiner and
Alston, 1996: 1117).
Human rights as a rallying cry has radical and far-reaching implications. They may very well become a fulcrum of radical politics worldwide in the new century.9
Between the two poles of the reckless global capitalist and the concerned cosmopolitan citizen of the world or, alternatively, between those
of boundless globalism and local fundamentalism, actual globalizations
offer a range of courses of action. Governance by normative regulation
makes up an important part of this range of possibilities (see further Held
and Sassen, this issue, pp. 399413 and 37797).

Notes
1. 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 globalization.
2. A high-powered intellectual contribution to the genre is Thurow (1992). For an
important critique of this discourse from inside mainstream economics, see
Krugman (1996).
3. Cited from La Prensa (Buenos Aires) 6 July 1998: 13, translation from Spanish
is mine.
4. The first UN monitoring report was Holdgate and El-Hinnawi (1982). The
programmatic report of the World Environment and Development Commission followed in 1987. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change
began its work in 1988. In 1989 a workshop on Global Natural Resource Monitoring and Assessment took place in Venice. The annual UN Human Development Report began in 1990.
5. The Mongol 13th14th century empire and the Mongols connecting the
Eurasian continent from Korea to Europe might also be seen as a mighty globalizing 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 his
paper (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, independence, identity, unity, socialism, etc. without due recourse to such global
values as human rights.

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Biographical Note: Gran Therborn is co-director of the Swedish Collegium for

Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at Uppsala, Professor of Sociology at
Gteborg University, and chair of the Globalizations Committee of the Swedish
research council FRN. His latest books are Globalizations and Modernities

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Therborn Globalizations
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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