World Cultures under the Pressure of Globalization

Rainer Tetzlaff

World Cultures under the Pressure of Globalization: Experiences and Responses from the Different Continents

21 October 1998

Motto 1: In the 1970s, it was the authors of Critical Theory, of the Frankfurt School, who determined the key concepts for society and politics. In the 1980s, this role was taken over by the French philosophers and sociologists of postmodernism. Since the start of the 1990s, it is British sociologists who have been setting the tone in Europe, with the debate about globalization. This very asynchronicity and cultural disparity in the way the phenomena associated with globalization are perceived and evaluated is one of the latter's inherent curiosities, and it demonstrates how protean--and precipitate?--the talk about "world society" still is' (Ulrich Beck, Preface to Perspektiven der Weltgesellschaft, Frankfurt/M., 1998, p. 10)

Motto 2: No one can resist globalization--in the area of infrastructures, globalization is like a war: kill or be killed' (Mr Haharap, Indonesian Minister for Infrastructure and Development, September 1994).1

1. On the Definition of Globalization

Globalization' has become what is probably the most talked-about theme of the 1990s in the Western social sciences. Though to many it appears simply a magical buzzword, it does graphically convey the process of trans-border enmeshment from which modern-day world society has resulted. That society is, equally, the ambivalent product of the `capitalization' of the earth, which began some 500 years ago, is still not complete, and has produced a wealth of cultural flotsam--fragments of modernity. It is a diversity without unity, though as far as the Third World is concerned, it has a common operating basis--the profit-based expansion and modernization of foreign commercial concerns. It represents a challenge to the Third World, either as a model worthy of emulation, or, conversely, as a world to which a better alternative is sought.2

The concept of globalization--this much can be said in a first descriptive attempt at definition--encompasses a host of interwoven processes. `These include, amongst other things: increasing transnational movement of capital, goods, and people; closer ties via new communications technologies; a more complex international division of labour as a result of the dispersal of the production of goods and services to a number of different locations; a rapid turnover of ideas, of images, and of patterns and objects of consumption; a growing awareness of risks and dangers that threaten the world as a whole; a quantitative increase in, and growth in importance of, transnational institutions and globally interlinked political movements. What is involved is thus the interpenetration of these processes both horizontally and vertically, and at national, subnational, and transnational levels.'3

"Globalization" is thus a complex multidimensional process of, on the one hand, de-bordering and de-spatialization, and, on the other, compaction and interlinkage. In the current debate about globalization, the term may signify one of four things. First, globalization is talked of where there is an attempt to convey the global scope of environmental risks: `Environmental damage is neither spatially contained nor chronologically reversible, it is not tied to class or to the location in which it originates. It has a global impact, creates networks of risks and chains of risks, produces a world-wide bond between perpetrators and victims.'4

Secondly, "globalization" is taken to mean the expansionist take-over of the present-day developing countries by the Western economic system, in the process of which the systems associated with a capitalist market-economy (capitalization) and with formal democracy (democratization) are disseminated. Traditional cultures are undermined and there is a forcible selective integration of the less developed economies into a world market dominated by the industrial countries. Via numerous channels which began to be set up in colonial times, the technologically and scientifically highly developed industrial and service-based societies (`The West') exert a `globalizatory pressure' on the `colonized' countries of the economic South, and this pressure is varyingly perceived there as an opportunity or a curse.

Thirdly, `globalization' signifies the repercussive effect of this expansion by the industrial economies into the developing countries and of the latter's increasing integration into the world market and growing competitivity (particularly in the case of the newly industrialized emerging economies). This results in individual companies, sectors, and regions in the industrial countries being subjected to increased pressure to adjust, and, in Germany and France, for example, has led to a globalization crisis. In this connection, it is often forgotten that this `reactive globalization' (in the West) has been preceded by an `active globalization' (by the West): `The original globalizatory pressure has produced a globalizatory counter-pressure. Because of the economic action and reaction, the political pressure and counter-pressure, a discriminating ethical appraisal of the situation is called for--one that avoids apportioning the opportunities and risks one-sidedly.'5

Fourthly and lastly, with the globalization of the economy and of systems of communication and transport comes an internationalization of various negative effects of speculator-capitalism such as unemployment, the feminization of poverty, crime, and drug-trafficking. It is therefore also reasonable to talk of a globalization of crime.

Further dimensions of globalization have been distinguished, but these need not be considered in detail here. One distinction that does seem useful, however, is that between globalism and globalization, introduced into the debate in Germany by Altvater and Mahnkopf6 and taken up and refined by Ulrich Beck, with a view to identifying the `errors of globalism' and enabling them to be tackled politically. Ulrich Beck is one of Germany's most original thinkers on the globalized world. He regards the neoliberal notion of the diktat of the world market as a manifestation of antiquated economism. Against this background, Beck has spent the best part of a decade championing a responsible style of social policy that sees the collapse of the old world-order (`early modernity') as an opportunity to embark on a `reflexive late modernity'.7

Beck describes globalism as the view that `the world market displaces or replaces political action--in other words [it is] the ideology of world-market dominion, the ideology of neoliberalism. It operates monocausally, economistically; it reduces the multi-dimensionality of globalization to a single, economic dimension (which, on top of this, is linear in its conception), and it only talks, if at all, about the many other dimensions--that is to say, globalization in the ecological, cultural, political, and civil-society domains--in a way that assumes the dominance of the world-market system'.8

Here, by contrast, globalization is not viewed as an inexorable consequence of economic constraints, against which politics is utterly impotent. There is undoubtedly plenty of evidence to support the thesis that we are currently faced with a growing gap between economic globalization and the political capacity to direct affairs.9 The political impotence of the G7 states and the Bretton Woods institutions in the face of the financial and economic crises in South-East Asia, Japan, Russia, and Brazil currently illustrates the lack of any international management of global risks.

At the close of the twentieth century, world society is still a world risk society, facing growing global problems but with no system of `global governance'--that ambitious concept based on the acceptance of divided sovereignties, the strengthening of the global rule of law, and the recognition of universally valid values and principles.10 At the same time, it must be emphasized that the present dynamic of the world economy (in the West) is not only politically willed, but, since the foundation of the Bretton Woods institutions as a neoliberal project of universal scope, has been politically propagated as well11 --which shows that it could, in principle, be moulded and directed, if political interests, or the perception of them, could be changed.

From the standpoint of the Third World, it is probably more a case of resigned acceptance of existing North-South relations than historical constraint. Globalization is widely seen as the expansionist take-over of the present-day developing countries by the Western market-model and model of prosperity, in the course of which traditional cultures disappear, the systems associated with a capitalist market-economy and formal democracy are disseminated, and the less developed economies are forcibly integrated into a world market dominated by the industrial countries. A `globalizatory pressure' is thus exerted by the industrial countries and their transnational companies (TNCs) on the `colonized' countries of the economic South. It is not national priorities but internationally defined and evaluated competitivity that determines a society's chances of development, its credit-worthiness, and thus also its ability to move forward into the future.

As a result of the de-bordering of familiar spaces (like the nation-state), time also acquires an entirely new meaning: flexibility, readiness to reform, and the pace of change become socio-cultural preconditions of competitivity--a trend that does not immediately chime with cultural traditions in many extra-European societies.12 In places where a mythical understanding of time still obtains, and the past is a constant element of the present, willingness to respond quickly and adopt and assimilate innovations is unlikely to be very great. Against this background, Shalini Randeria's thesis that `from the perspective of the majority of postcolonial societies...globalization [looks like] an attempt both to re-colonize the present and to colonialize the future', acquires a certain plausibility.13 Is there no way out of the much-discussed `globalization trap' for these societies, no alternative to adjustment?

Over the last few years, a `globalization debate' has been under way in probably every region of modern world-society--a debate triggered by abrupt, difficult-to-comprehend changes in the world economy. Advocates and opponents of globalization argue with one another about whether the new modernization-offensive is a blessing or a curse. Whilst the optimists cite the enormous opportunities which a rapidly expanding world-economy will offer even to those who lag behind, the pessimists bemoan above all the threatened loss of the sense of home, of comfortableness, and of national individuality as a result of the `levelling-down' effects of transnational companies and other `global players'. The optimists call for the domestic economy to be restructured in the ways needed to create or maintain competitivity; the pessimists bemoan the consequences of globalization and refuse to submit to it through cut-backs in the welfare state, deregulation, greater flexibility, privatization, and reductions in the state's share in the national product. The first view is based on the assumption that only adjustment to globalization can save or enhance prosperity, whereas the second claims it can be saved by `making a stand.14 To increase knowledge about, and understanding of, the discourse about globalization and development in the former Third World is the purpose of this book.

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