Globalization

Globalization, a term that came into fashion around 1990, generally refers to processes leading to the increased density, speed, and reach of transnational connections, associated with the global spread of capitalism and new information and communication technologies. Globalization can be studied in its economic, political, ecological, or cultural aspects, and there is a rich scholarly literature, much of it interdisciplinary, dealing with the subject (see Eriksen 2007). Consumption is a central dimension of globalization, as noted by two leading scholars in the field: “Globalization clearly involves the worldwide proliferation of consumption goods, settings, practices and, most generally, consumer culture” (Ritzer and Slater 2001, 7).

The period since World War II, and especially since around 1990, has been a period of strongly intensified global interconnectedness. In the first postwar decades, the number of transnational companies grew, as did the number of transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The United Nations rapidly became a conglomerate of suborganizations with offices in most countries. International travel became easier and more common. In the 1960s, the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the term the global village to designate the new mass media situation, where especially television, in his view, would create shared frames of reference and mutual knowledge between people across the globe. In this period, global change—economic, environmental, political, cultural—became the subject of many new scholarly books. Some used the term development, intimating that the poor countries would eventually catch up with the rich ones. Others preferred terms such as imperialism, suggesting that the rich countries were actively exploiting the poor ones and preventing them from developing.

Various parts of the world had been interconnected, and there was considerable awareness of this, long before the coinage of the term globalization. Yet it can be argued that there is something new to the present world, the world that began roughly with the end of the cold war in 1989–1990, and that goes a long way to explain the rise of public interest in globalization and transnational phenomena more generally. Three factors, roughly coinciding in time, may be mentioned.

• The end of the cold war itself entailed a more encompassing global integration. The global two-bloc system, which had lasted since the 1940s, had made it difficult to think of geopolitics, transnational communication, and international trade in terms not dictated by the opposition between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. With the dissolution of this conflict, the world appeared to have become a single marketplace.
• The Internet, which had existed in an embryonic form since the late 1960s, began to grow exponentially around 1990. Throughout the 1990s, media buzzwords were about bandwidths, websites, portals, “the new economy,” and its business opportunities. The World Wide Web was introduced in 1992–1993, around the same time as many academics and businesspeople became accustomed to using e-mail for their daily correspondence. Cell phones became ubiquitous in the rich countries and eventually in the poorer ones. The impact of this double delocalization—the physical letter replaced by e-mail, the fixed phone line replaced by the wireless mobile—on the everyday life of millions of people has been considerable.
• Identity politics—nationalist, ethnic, religious, territorial—was at the forefront of the international agenda, both from above (states demanding homogeneity or engaging in ethnic cleansing) and from below (minorities demanding rights or secession). The Salman Rushdie affair, itself an excellent example of the globalization of ideas, began with the issuing of a fatwa by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini following the publication of Rushdie's allegedly blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses in 1988. It soon became apparent that Rushdie could move freely nowhere in the world since the fatwa had global implications. Only two years later, Yugoslavia dissolved, with ensuing civil wars based on ethnic differences. In the same period, debates about immigration and multiculturalism came to dominate political [Page 671]discourse in several Western countries, while the Hindu nationalists of the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in India.

These three dimensions of globalization—increased trade and transnational economic activity, faster and denser communication networks, and increased tensions between (and within) cultural groups due to intensified mutual exposure—do not suggest that the world has been fundamentally transformed after the late 1980s but that the driving forces of economic, political, and cultural dynamics are transnational—and that this is now widely acknowledged. As Roland Robertson puts it, “Globalization as a concept refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness about the world as a whole” (1992, 8).

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