Antiglobalization

The antiglobalization movement is a new social movement that emerged at the turn of the millennium and that questions neoliberal globalization. It can be considered as a reaction to the frictions and stratifications that have been caused by neoliberal globalization.

Looking at definitions of globalization by important social scientists such as Anthony Giddens, David Held and colleagues, and Roland Robertson shows that they concentrate on quite similar aspects. Giddens portrayed globalization in 1990 as intensified worldwide social relations where local events are shaped by distant occurrences. Held and colleagues wrote in 1999 that globalization exemplifies interconnectedness of regions near and far, allowing for enhanced social-activity and power networking. Robertson noted in 1992 that the term globalization denotes both a compression of the world and greater consciousness of the world as an entity.

These definitions show that the central aspects of globalization are interconnection, intensification, time-space distanciation, deterritorialization, supraterritoriality, time-space compression, action at a distance, and accelerating interdependence. Globalization might be defined as the stretching of social relationships in space and time: A globalizing social system enlarges its border in a way that means social relationships can be maintained across larger spatial and temporal distances. Globalization is based on processes of disembedding, that is, the production of time-space distanciation of social relationships. Yet processes of disembedding are accompanied by processes of reembedding—processes that adapt the newly disembedded social relationships to local (temporal and spatial) conditions. Globalization involves the stretching of practices and structures that constitute social systems in time and space; it results in an increase of the intensity, extensity, reach, and velocity of social relationships; that is, there is a faster and wider flow of more artifacts, people, and symbols over networks across space-time. Disembedding and reembedding are interconnected processes that are an [Page 21]expression of the dialectic of the global and the local. The global is based on the interaction of localities; the local is adapted to local circumstances. Robertson spoke of this with the term glocalization in 1994.

The common theme underlying Giddens's concept of disembedding, Manuel Castells's 1996 concepts of timeless time and the space of flows, and David Harvey's 1990 concept of time-space compression is that modern technologies such as the computer both accelerate social relationships and make them more flexible. The history of modern society is a history of globalization and of the technological acceleration of transportation (of data, capital, commodities, people) that makes the world a smaller place: Technologies increasingly mediate social relationships more efficiently so that distances appear to shrink. Technological progress has resulted in an increasing separation of the movement of information from that of its carriers; the movement of information gathered speed on a pace much faster than the travel of bodies. Transportation and communication technologies (railway, telegraph, broadcasting, automobile, television, aviation, digital computer-based communication technology, and most recently digital network technology) especially have increased the speed of global flows of capital, commodities, power, communication, and information. The earth has been increasingly transformed into a global communication network that affects all realms of society. Knowledge is today quite substantially detached from territorial space: It cannot be situated at a fixed and limited territorial location, it operates largely without regard to territorial distance, and it transcends territorial space. New knowledge-based technologies such as the computer facilitate the delocalization and disembedding of communication in the sense of the generation of spatial and temporal distance.

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