Globalization, Phenomenon of

Globalization is the extension of social relations across world-space. It is a simple definition, although it is a description that needs further elaboration given that it turns on a second concept—world-space. This changing space, the space of the “world as it is known,” needs to be defined in terms of the historically variable ways in which it has been practiced and socially understood.

To give one illustration, the world as understood by Claudius Ptolemaeus (ca. 90–150) when he revived the Hellenic belief in the Pythagorean theory of a spherical globe was substantially different from that of George W. Bush when he initiated the global War on Terror. Both conceptions take the world to be a spherical globe. However, the nature of that sphere and how a particular empire or a state is to reach across that world-space is understood and practiced in fundamentally different ways. By analytically defining globalization in this variable way, we can say that the phenomenon of globalization has been occurring across the world for centuries but in changing ways. Across history, globalization has involved the extension of uneven connections among people in far distant places through such processes as the movement of people, the exchange of goods, and the communication of ideas.

Looking back across world history, we can see a long run of different kinds of globalization, but people did not name it as such or study it as a phenomenon in itself until very recently. In the late 19th century, writers such as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote that international interdependence and the revolutionizing of production were bringing about world-historical changes. However, it took another century for the phenomenon to be named globalization.

As those processes of global extension intensified significantly in the late 20th century and into the present century, increasing awareness of this intensification gave rise to two almost concurrent developments. From the 1980s, the concept of globalization and a popular sense of a globalizing planet swept across the world as finance capitalism, electronic media, and techno-science tightened the connections between people into an integrating, if uneven, layer of globalizing economics, ecology, politics, and culture. And from the 1990s, the field of global studies came to overlay and provide pathways among studies of imperialism, development studies, comparative area studies, international studies, and so on, in an attempt to understand the phenomena.

The concept of globalization became the dominant orienting signifier of the last decade of the 20th century. As Manfred Steger has written, across the course of the 20th century and into the present, we have witnessed the rise of a dominant “global imaginary.” Although it is true that during the past few years, discussions about the effects of globalization have lost some of their urgency, and debates about the nature of the phenomenon have settled into regularized patterns of public and academic discourse, processes of globalization endure in the form of a global financial crisis, global climate change, and ever-intensifying interrelations of cultural transmission. In this context, one conceptual development is the generalized recognition that globalization cannot be reduced to an economic phenomenon, as many neoliberal writers tended to do. Another conceptual development is that there can be positive and negative forms of globalization. Accordingly, calls for the end of globalization by the antiglobalization movements have given way to critiques by what is now called the alter-globalization movements.

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