Globalization E-Book

Zygmunt Bauman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Themes for the 21st Century Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 218

Beschreibung

'Globalization' is a word that is currently much in use. This book is an attempt to show that there is far more to Globalization than its surface manifestations. Unpacking the social roots and social consequences of globalizing processes, this book disperses some of the mist that surrounds the term. Alongside the emerging planetary dimensions of business, finance, trade and information flow, a 'localizing', space-fixing process is set in motion. What appears as Globalization for some, means localization for many others; signalling new freedom for some, globalizing processes appear as uninvited and cruel fate for many others. Freedom to move, a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, quickly becomes the main stratifying factor of our times. Neo-tribal and fundamentalist tendencies are as legitimate offspring of Globalization as the widely acclaimed 'hybridization' of top culture - the culture at the globalized top. A particular reason to worry is the progressive breakdown in communication between the increasingly global and extra- territorial elites and ever more 'localized' majority. The bulk of the population, the 'new middle class', bears the brunt of these problems, and suffers uncertainty, anxiety and fear as a result. This book is a major contribution to the unfolding debate about Globalization, and as such will be of interest to students and professionals in sociology, human geography and cultural issues.

Leseprobe

Globalization

The Human Consequences

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN

Polity

Copyright © Zygmunt Bauman 1998

The right of Zygmunt Bauman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1998 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 1999 (twice), 2000 (twice), 2005

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Polity Press

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0–7456–2012–4

ISBN 0–7456–2013–2 (pbk)

ISBN 978–0–7456–5695–3 (ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Plantin

by SetSystems Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex

Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

Contents

Introduction

1Time and Class

Absentee landlords, mark II

Freedom of movement and the self-constitution of societies

New speed, new polarization

2Space Wars: a Career Report

The battle of the maps

From mapping space to the spatialization of maps

Agoraphobia and the renaissance of locality

Is there life after Panopticon?

3After the Nation-state – What?

Universalizing – or being globalized?

The new expropriation: this time, of the state

The global hierarchy of mobility

4Tourists and Vagabonds

Being a consumer in a consumer society

Divided we move

Moving through the world vs. the world moving by

For better or worse – united

5Global Law, Local Orders

Factories of immobility

Prisons in the post-correction age

Safety: a tangible means to an elusive end

The out of order

Notes

Index

Introduction

‘Globalization’ is on everybody’s lips; a fad word fast turning into a shibboleth, a magic incantation, a pass-key meant to unlock the gates to all present and future mysteries. For some, ‘globalization’ is what we are bound to do if we wish to be happy; for others ‘globalization’ is the cause of our unhappiness. For everybody, though, ‘globalization’ is the intractable fate of the world, an irreversible process; it is also a process which affects us all in the same measure and in the same way. We are all being ‘globalized’ – and being ‘globalized’ means much the same to all who ‘globalized’ are.

All vogue words tend to share a similar fate: the more experiences they pretend to make transparent, the more they themselves become opaque. The more numerous are the orthodox truths they elbow out and supplant, the faster they turn into no-questions-asked canons. Such human practices as the concept tried originally to grasp recede from view, and it is now the ‘facts of the matter’, the quality of ‘the world out there’ which the term seems to ‘get straight’ and which it invokes to claim its own immunity to questioning. ‘Globalization’ is no exception to that rule.

This book is an attempt to show that there is more to the phenomenon of globalization than meets the eye; unpacking the social roots and social consequences of the globalizing process, it will try to disperse some of the mist which surrounds the term that claims to bring clarity to the present-day human condition.

The term ‘time/space compression’ encapsulates the ongoing multi-faceted transformation of the parameters of the human condition. Once the social causes and outcomes of that compression are looked into, it will become evident that the globalizing processes lack the commonly assumed unity of effects. The uses of time and space are sharply differentiated as well as differentiating. Globalization divides as much as it unites; it divides as it unites – the causes of division being identical with those which promote the uniformity of the globe. Alongside the emerging planetary dimensions of business, finance, trade and information flow, a ‘localizing’, space-fixing process is set in motion. Between them, the two closely inter-connected processes sharply differentiate the existential conditions of whole populations and of various segments of each one of the populations. What appears as globalization for some means localization for others; signalling a new freedom for some, upon many others it descends as an uninvited and cruel fate. Mobility climbs to the rank of the uppermost among the coveted values – and the freedom to move, perpetually a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, fast becomes the main stratifying factor of our late-modern or postmodern times.

All of us are, willy-nilly, by design or by default, on the move. We are on the move even if, physically, we stay put: immobility is not a realistic option in a world of permanent change. And yet the effects of that new condition are radically unequal. Some of us become fully and truly ‘global’; some are fixed in their ‘locality’ – a predicament neither pleasurable nor endurable in the world in which the ‘globals’ set the tone and compose the rules of the life-game.

Being local in a globalized world is a sign of social deprivation and degradation. The discomforts of localized existence are compounded by the fact that with public spaces removed beyond the reaches of localized life, localities are losing their meaning-generating and meaning-negotiating capacity and are increasingly dependent on sense-giving and interpreting actions which they do not control – so much for the communitarianist dreams/consolations of the globalized intellectuals.

An integral part of the globalizing processes is progressive spatial segregation, separation and exclusion. Neo-tribal and fundamentalist tendencies, which reflect and articulate the experience of people on the receiving end of globalization, are as much legitimate offspring of globalization as the widely acclaimed ‘hybridization’ of top culture – the culture at the globalized top. A particular cause for worry is the progressive breakdown in communication between the increasingly global and extraterritorial elites and the ever more ‘localized’ rest. The centres of meaning-and-value production are today exterritorial and emancipated from local constraints – this does not apply, though, to the human condition which such values and meanings are to inform and make sense of.

With the freedom of mobility at its centre, the present-day polarization has many dimensions; the new centre puts a new gloss on the time-honoured distinctions between rich and poor, the nomads and the settled, the ‘normal’ and the abnormal or those in breach of law. Just how these various dimensions of polarity intertwine and influence each other is another complex problem this book attempts to unpack.

The first chapter considers the link between the historically changing nature of time and space and the pattern and scale of social organization – and particularly the effects of the present-day time/space compression on the structuration of planetary and territorial societies and communities. One of the effects scrutinized is the new version of ‘absentee landlordship’ – the newly acquired independence of global elites from territorially confined units of political and cultural power, and the consequent ‘disempowerment’ of the latter. The impact of the separation between the two settings in which the ‘top’ and the ‘bottom’ of the new hierarchy are respectively located is traced to the changing organization of space and the changing meaning of ‘neighbourhood’ in the contemporary metropolis.

The successive stages of modern wars for the right to define and enforce the meaning of shared space is the subject of the second chapter. The past adventures of comprehensive town planning, as well as the contemporary tendencies to fragmentation of design and to building for exclusion, are analysed in this light. Finally, the historical fate of Panopticon as the once favourite modern pattern of social control, and particularly its present irrelevance and gradual demise, are scrutinized.

The topic of the third chapter is the prospects of political sovereignty – and particularly of the self-constitution and self-government of national, and more generally territorial, communities, under conditions of globalized economy, finance and information. At the centre of attention is the widening discrepancy of scale between the realm of institutionalized decision-making and the universe in which the resources necessary for decisions and their implementation are produced, distributed, appropriated and deployed; in particular, the disabling effects of globalization on the decision-making capacity of the state governments – the major, and still unreplaced foci of effective social management for the greater part of modern history.

The fourth chapter takes stock of the cultural consequences of the above transformations. Their overall effect, it is postulated, is the bifurcation and polarization of human experience, with shared cultural tokens serving two sharply distinct interpretations. ‘Being on the move’ has a radically different, opposite sense for, respectively, those at the top and those at the bottom of the new hierarchy; with the bulk of the population – the ‘new middle class’, oscillating between the two extremes – bearing the brunt of that opposition and suffering acute existential uncertainty, anxiety and fear as a result. It is argued that the need to mitigate such fears and neutralize the potential of the discontent they contain is in its own turn a powerful factor in the further polarization of the two meanings of mobility.

The last chapter explores the extremal expressions of that polarization: the present-day tendency to criminalize cases falling below the idealized norm, and the role played by criminalization in offsetting the discomforts of ‘life on the move’ by rendering the image and the reality of alternative life, the life of immobility, ever more odious and repelling. The complex issue of existential insecurity brought about by the process of globalization tends to be reduced to the apparently straightforward issue of ‘law and order’. On the way, concerns with ‘safety’, more often than not trimmed down to the single-issue worry about the safety of the body and personal possessions, are ‘overloaded’, by being charged with anxieties generated by other, crucial dimensions of present-day existence – insecurity and uncertainty.

The theses of the book do not amount to a policy statement. In the intention of its author it is a discussion paper. Many more questions are asked here than answered, and no coherent forecast of the future consequences of present-day trends is arrived at. And yet – as Cornelius Castoriadis put it – the trouble with the contemporary condition of our modern civilization is that it stopped questioning itself. Not asking certain questions is pregnant with more dangers than failing to answer the questions already on the official agenda; while asking the wrong kind of questions all too often helps to avert eyes from the truly important issues. The price of silence is paid in the hard currency of human suffering. Asking the right questions makes, after all, all the difference between fate and destination, drifting and travelling. Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of the services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves. This book is first and foremost an exercise in asking and prompting the asking of questions – without the pretence that it is asking the right questions, all the right questions, and, most important, all the questions that have been asked.

1

Time and Class

‘The company belongs to people who invest in it – not to its employees, suppliers, nor the locality in which it is situated.’1 This is how Albert J. Dunlap, the celebrated ‘rationalizer’ of modern enterprise (a dépeceur —‘chopper’, ‘quarterer’, ‘dismemberer’ – in the juicy yet precise designation of the CNRS sociologist Denis Duclos)2 summarized his creed in the self-congratulating report of his activities which Times Books published for the enlightenment and edification of all seekers of economic progress.