The World E-Book

Göran Therborn

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 495

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

What is the world of the 21st century like now that the centrality of the West is no longer given? How were the societies and cultures of today's world together with their interconnections forged, and what is driving human society in our times? In short, what is the state of the world today as we enter the second decade of the 21st century?

This is the first book which deals with planetary human society as whole. It is a beginner's guide to the world after the West and after globalization, compact, portable, and jargon-free. It is aimed at everybody who, even with experience, has kept a beginner's curiosity of the world, to everybody who does not know everything they want to know about it, about the good, the evil, and the salvation of the world.

• It lays bare the socio-cultural geology of the world, its major civilizations, its historical waves of globalization, its family-sex-gender systems, and its pathways to modernity.
• It outlines the dynamics of the world, its basic drives, the contours of its most important global and sub-global processes.
• It presents the big team players on the world stage, populous as well as rich countries, missions and movements as well corporations and cities.
• It traces the life-courses of men and women on all the continents, from their birth and childhood to their old age, and their funeral.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

List of Tables and Maps

PROLOGUE: IN THE BEGINNING THERE IS . . . 

INTRODUCTION: HUMANKIND AND ITS WORLD

1 WHY WE ARE WHO WE ARE: A SOCIOCULTURAL GEOLOGY OF TODAY’S WORLD

The Rock of Civilizations

Family-Sex-Gender Systems

Sediments of Six Waves of Globalization

Pathways to Modernity and Their Legacy

Legacies of the Routes to Modernity

The Modern Fate of Religions

Windows of Opportunity

2 WORLD DYNAMICS: HUMAN EVOLUTION AND ITS DRIVERS

Modes of Livelihood : The Ups and Downs of Capitalism, and the Rest

Population Ecology and the Ending of Modern Ecological Emancipation

The Ethnic, Religious, and Sexual Dynamics of Recognition and Respect

Politics of Collective Power: State Apotheosis

Culture: Modernism Globalized, Accelerated and Chastened

Channels of Operation

Global Processes

National Processes

3 THE CURRENT WORLD STAGE

Scenography: World Space

The Big Players

4 OUR TIME ON EARTH: COURSES OF LIFE

Birth and Survival

Childhood

Youth: Sex and Culture

Adulthood

Old Age

An Ideal Twenty-first Century Life-course

Death and After

CONCLUSION: HOW WE GOT HERE, AND WHERE WE ARE GOING

How Did We Get Here?

Where Are We Going?

REFERENCES

Index

Copyright © Göran Therborn 2011

The right of Göran Therborn to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2011 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose 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.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4343-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4344-1 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5853-7 (Multi-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5854-4 (Single-user ebook)

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

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

List of Tables and Maps

LIST OF TABLES

2.1 The world stock of international migrants, 2005, by continents

2.2 The world’s main cultural exporters, 2002

2.3 National population growth, 2000–8

2.4 Income inequality on the planet, in nations and in cities, mid 2000s

3.1 The most populous states of the world, 2008

3.2 The largest countries

3.3 The world’s largest economies: gross national income, 2008

3.4 The most prosperous countries and the income of big countries, 2008

3.5 The world’s ten largest corporations, 2009

3.6 Market capitalization shares among major countries, 2009

3.7 A global urban hierarchy of business services, 2000, 2008

3.8 Collective bargaining coverage, 2007

4.1 Class, ethnicity/race, and nation in male life expectancy at birth, early/mid-2000s

4.2 Especially important values in children

4.3 Urbanization of major countries in the 2000s

4.4 Work in regions of the world, 2008

4.5 Status at work in regions of the world, 2006

4.6 Popular classes in China and India in the mid-2000s

4.7 Working for poverty in the world, 2008

4.8 Income groups of the world, c.2005

4.9 Male labour force participation among the 65+ age group, 2005

4.10 Relative poverty among adults and old people, mid-2000s

4.11 Elderly household structures in the world, c.2000

LIST OF MAPS

1 Families of African Languages

2 Muslim Arab Conquests, 632–750 CE

3 Extension of Indic Civilization

4 Pathways to Modernity

PROLOGUE: IN THE BEGINNING THERE IS … 

Most of us are beginners on the planetary terrain of humankind. We are much more familiar with our own country, occasionally with our own continental region, be it Africa, Europe, Latin America, North America or a part of Asia, but rarely all of it. And each and all of us are beginners in the twenty-first century, a century which promises at least one thing – that it will be very different from the past one. Therefore, this is a beginner’s guide, written for all those of us who are curious about this world, those of us who do not already know everything we want to know, who do not know everything we need to know about the evil, the good and the salvation of this world. On offer is not a primary of mainstream wisdom, it is an individual scholar’s vision, coming out of half a century of social study and carried by his personal passion for human freedom and equality, and for empirical evidence.

In this book, you will find a sociocultural geological map of the world, a compass outline of the fundamental drives of human society and a specification of how they operate in the world today, a picture of the current world stage with its major actors. You will be invited to a worldwide human life-course journey, from birth to after-life. In another sense, this is also a guide of beginning, of snapshots never shown before (outside my Cambridge classrooms), although pixelled together from the vast archives of human research and experience.

This is a guide to the world after the stardust of ‘globalization’ has settled, when the global vista is clearing up. What is opening up then is a new space of social imagination, no longer just national, no longer the North Atlantic region writ large as the universe, of a first or second, solid or liquid modernity, or of postmodernity. It is a finite planet of enormous variety, interdependent and intercommunicating. This new world is a world of plural civilizations, each with its living history, not the binary one of yesterday’s North Atlantic leaders putting (our) civilization against the barbarians threatening it. It is a world of emerging powers and re-emerging cultures, and not just one of global markets, a world of alternative possibilities and of different life-courses.

Intellectually, this may the hour of global sociology, taken as scholarship, with its sensitivity to variety and limitations as well as to connectivity, and its refraining from policy pontificating. Half a century ago, I entered university, in Lund in Sweden, with a view to studying politics and economics, but in the process I learnt about sociology, as a more scientific approach, which may have reflected local circumstances more than a universal truth. Later on, in the Netherlands, I had a chair of political science, and political economy has always been prominent on my mind, although my favourite scholarly writers have mostly been historians, models of erudition-cum-style. Nevertheless, I think sociology offers the best vantage-point from which to comprehend the world as a whole, the past and the contemporary together. It is wide open to different expertise and disciplines, itself pluralistic, driven by an unbound, non-paradigmatic curiosity, and by an ambition of connecting as much evidence, as much human experience, as possible.

However, after all, academic disciplines are important only within the small compounds of academia, and this book is concerned with the world outside. It is written by a scholar-citizen to fellow citizens of the world. Suddenly, besides everything else we are, we have become fellow residents of a planet and members of humanity.

Finally, a word of thanks. I am a craftsman sociologist, neither an armchair theorist nor a research manager. Most of the empirical evidence on which this book is based I have dug out with my own hands, voraciously and gratefully picking up fruits from institutional data collectors as well as from scholarly colleagues of many disciplines. But I thankfully acknowledge the assistance of my student Maruta Herding on cultural exchange. I further want to thank all my students at Cambridge for a most challenging and stimulating teaching experience, and for intercultural learning. My editor and colleague, Professor John Thompson, is also one of my creditors, for his sharp critical acumen as well as for his generous support.

Cambridge, England / Ljungbyholm, Sweden

INTRODUCTION: HUMANKIND AND ITS WORLD

Human society and human history can only be grasped by their contradictions. The twentieth century was homicidal, the worst since the sixteenth century and the European conquest of the Americas – as well as the peak of human net population growth. It produced the worst genocidal racism of human history, and it left us with a legacy of an awareness of one humankind existing in a common, finite world.

Human rights, the internet, ‘globalization’ and the Kyoto Protocol – all products of the last quarter of the previous century – have opened a new horizon of social understanding and of social action, i.e., humankind and its world. While we go on being, say, Chinese or Americans, Muslims or Hindus, workers or bankers, African women or European men, young or old, we have also become members of a common humankind and stakeholders in the same planet.

It was an extraordinary confluence of events. The post-fascist 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights was an avant-garde publication of little importance for a long while. Its affirmation of the freedom to marry (or not), for instance, was systematically violated in most of Africa, Asia and the USA (inter-racial marriages), often in the rest of the Americas and in Eastern Europe, although there recent legislation had at least formally freed young people from parental control. Human rights began to emerge as a serious issue in the 1960s, thanks to Amnesty International, but reached the geopolitical mainstream only by the mid-1970s. The Western powers had them inserted in the Helsinki Accord of 1975, recognizing the post-Second World War borders of Europe, crucial to Poles and most other East Europeans, communist or anti-communist. In the Americas, human rights also became a key issue in the second half of the 1970s. In Latin America, they became a defence in defeat, after all attempts at progressive social change (outside Cuba) had been crushed by military dictatorships. In the USA, there was, for once, a positive resonance during the Carter administration. The completely unforeseen interlocking of Cold War diplomacy and a US recognition of human rights in the Americas made human rights irremovable from the international political agenda, accepted in violation even by the Reagan and the two Bush administrations.

Segments of humanity have been in global, or at least transcontinental, transoceanic, contact for a long time. There were trading links between ancient Rome and India about 2,000 years ago, and between India and China. The foray of Alexander of Macedonia into Central Asia 2,300 years ago is evident from the Greek-looking Buddha statues in the British Museum. What is new is the mass of contact, and the contact of masses, mass travel and mass self-communication. Global TV broadcasting by satellite emerged on a large routine scale in the 1980s. The internet became public in 1991. Global chat and picture-exchange clubs appeared in the 2000s, soon acquiring tens, nay hundreds of millions, of members worldwide. The net and the satellites now reach almost every corner of the planet, whereas in my mid-life career (in the 1980s), one could hardly correspond with colleagues in Italy, because of the dreadful state of the Italian mail.

When the Cold War ended, ‘globalization’ became the most popular of social concepts, its usage exploding in the 1990s. It captured the moods of the time, in plural because it had both positive and negative vibrations. In both cases, it referred primarily to a global extension of what existed, capital and markets above all, but also cultures. Social change had ceased to have structural or cultural content, and had become only or overwhelmingly spatial. Anyhow, whatever critical quarrels one might have with globalization discourse, it was right in drawing attention to the new interdependence of humankind, through capital flows, commodity chains, foreign penetration of domestic markets, migration flows picking up and cultural exchange intensifying and cross-fertilizing.

The planetary environment of humankind first emerged into the limelight in 1972, with the Limits to Growth, put out by a tiny, rather aristocratic outfit called the Club of Rome. It had great resonance because of the oil crisis of 1973–4 in the wake of the US rescue of Israel in the Egyptian-Israeli Ramadan/Yom Kippur war of 1973. The United Nations took up the environmental challenge rapidly, with conferences in Stockholm in 1972 and in Rio in 1992, and with its attempt at global legislation in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Because of the refusal of the US Congress to participate, not much concrete action came out of Kyoto, but awareness of a common human environmental challenge from manmade climate change increased in the 2000s. Again, the UN effort at Copenhagen in December 2009 was largely unsuccessful in terms of action, but there was an almost universal consensus that there is one humanity facing a planetary environmental problem.

This is a novel situation in the history of humans, a mass awareness of a common humanity, electronically directly interconnected and a common target of satellite beams of communication, in one global economy, in one planetary environment. Among intellectual elites, visions of a world community have a history. Just in the European tradition, there is the ‘world citizen perspective’ (welbürgerliche Sicht) of Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment, and even before that the medieval universalism of Dante and the sixteenth-century defence of Amerindian humanity by Bartolomé de Las Casas (see Bartelson 2009). But that was only single intellectual vision, and Kant’s hope for a ‘perpetual peace’ was followed by the mass carnage of the Napoleonic wars, the last phase of the Franco-British world war.

The world as otherness has a long history of mass fascination with exploration and conquest. We are all indebted to the intellectual as well as the physical courage of the great geographers and cartographers, from Strabo and Mercator and on, of the great travellers and explorers, from Ibn Batuta, Marco Polo, Zheng He, Fernão de Magalhães, James Cook, Alexander von Humboldt etc, and we are also heirs to the more ambiguous legacy of the big conquerors, from Alexander, to Chingiz Khan and Hernán Cortés and their later followers.

The new challenge is to comprehend, and to be able to act upon, this new common human world. A very elementary start is to recognize that commonality necessarily entails neither sameness nor equality. Rather, any proper understanding of contemporary humanity had better be prepared for its diversity and for its inequality, not a priori less than that of the manorial village, the plantation, the Indian caste system or the current ‘global city’, all supposed to manifest a common society. But that is only a precaution against short-circuiting common awareness of existence and conditions for sameness or equality. The real task begins, then.

To get a handle on humankind and its world, for action as well as for understanding, we need to know something about the following. Why are we who we are? From where come our characteristics, our knowledge and our ignorance? It will be argued that these questions will require a recourse to sociocultural geology, of enduring, layered history, looking at enduring effects of ancient civilizations, multiple waves of globalization, different pathways to modernity. Our views of the world, our fundamental beliefs, aesthetic tastes, our languages, our ways and manners of social interactions, our politics and our sports interests can all be traced back to our historical formation.

Secondly, why do we and others act the way we/they do? I will argue that there are five irreducible drives of humankind which constitute the world dynamics. By no means do they exhaustively constitute the human condition, but they are propelling the social world. Where they will take us, neither God nor academia can tell. But they can be understood, and put to use.

Thirdly, there is the world stage of geopolitics and geoeconomics, but also of a media show. While world idols and celebrities do form a significant part of current humanity, focus here will be primarily on the small set of big collective players dominating the field of world power.

Then, there is the human life-course, our finite time on earth. We are living our lives in almost seven billion different ways, but we are all subjected to a pre-programmed life-course, truncated or extended, with its different stations, characteristic challenges and rites of passage, from birth and infancy to old age and death. This life-course, and its probabilities in the different parts of the planet and in different sociocultural milieus, are amenable to social comprehension and analysis. Current human courses of life are set out on the base of the geology of human history, propelled – or blocked – by the dynamics of the contemporary world stage.

Finally, we shall take stock of why we got where we are, and venture some answers to the unanswerable question: where are we going?

1

WHY WE ARE WHO WE ARE: A SOCIOCULTURAL GEOLOGY OF TODAY’S WORLD

Coming together as members of humankind, we need, in order to relate and interact properly, to understand our differences – and not just the obvious ones, i.e., that we do not look alike, and talk in different tongues. Our basic values and tastes differ and our conceptions of the world and our expectations of life are different, as are our sense of body, sex and family. While no social scientist or psychologist will ever be able to grasp the infinite variety of human individuality, our differences tend to be historically and geographically patterned, and are thereby comprehensible.

As humans, we descend from different historical cultures and experiences. Our first task in grasping the world of humankind is to get a handle on this historical descent and experience. The most promising, if so far hardly used, approach, then, is to look at contemporary human societies and configurations from a perspective of social geology. The sociocultural mould, in which we have been formed, is not just of yesterday. It had better be understood as layered by different social processes of different age.

Sketching the contours of a contemporary global social geology depends on world history, of which the 1,300 or so pages of a ‘brief’ world history by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2008) are a wonderful start. But this book is neither dabbling in it nor competing with it. It is looking at the sedimentations of history from the special vantage point of the present. Our focus is not the historical record, but the historical DNA which we are carrying in our social and cultural make-up.

In this vein, I have found three extensive layers of human social formation, around the myriad of local strata, particularly pertinent. The most ancient we may, in accordance with much everyday language, call ‘civilizations’, in plural, spatially grounded cultural configurations of enduring importance, with ‘classical’ languages, texts and/or oral traditions, views of life and after-life, sense of beauty, notions of family, sex and gender.

Secondly, world patterns of society and culture history have been lastingly shaped by transcultural, transpolity, transcontinental processes, which we may term ‘waves of globalization’, even if, prior to 1492, they were not literally global. Thriving from long-distance travel, communication and exchange, these waves have by no means all been primarily economic in dynamics and significance. Religion and politics have also been at the forefront. These waves have further given rise to two important hybrid family-sex-gender systems, in Southeast Asia and in the Americas.

The third layer is ‘modernity’, the modern world. In the same way that art museums nowadays distinguish contemporary from modern art, so we should distinguish the contemporary from the modern world. The latter is a crucial historical layer of our formation, for two reasons. One is that modernity fought its way into cultural domination along different routes and across different constellations of proponents and opponents. These pathways have left their imprint on how much weight we give today to religion, to ideology, to class, to language. Secondly, the birth of the modern world was also the establishment of the current divide into what is now euphemistically referred to as ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, aka ‘underdeveloped’, countries. For almost all of us, being born in one or the other makes an enormous difference. Why that rift opened up and has divided the world for, by now, two centuries remains subject to seemingly interminable controversy. How it happened is somewhat less controversial. In the geological perspective of this book, the divide was established through the confluence of the roads to modernity and the fourth wave of historical globalization.