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Is Globality Shapeable?

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Abstract

There has long been a substantial asymmetry with regard to usage and salience of globalization, globalism, and globality. This applies in particular to globality, both in public and academic discourses. Consequently, it remains necessary to determine more systematically what constitutes globality and to address the much neglected question of whether and to what extent globality can be shaped. To these ends, this contribution elaborates distinctive characters of globality as conditions of spatial expansion across the globe, which can pertain to ideas, products, or institutions among other things. Moreover, it demonstrates how globality amounts to results of human action that can take countless forms over space and time. As such, the particular qualities of globality, including its basic reference to space, human centeredness, as well as its complex relationship to power and structures, become evident, revealing the shaping power and potential of globality.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Wolf Schäfer, Lean Globality Studies, in: Globality Studies Journal, 7, 28 May 2007, pp. 1–15; see especially pp. 4ff.

  2. 2.

    Ibid., p. 7.

  3. 3.

    Ibid.

  4. 4.

    Martin Albrow, The Global Age. State and society beyond modernity, Stanford 1997, p. 82.

  5. 5.

    Jürgen Osterhammel/Niels P. Peterson, Globalization: a short history, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 5.

  6. 6.

    Staley J. Paliwoda/Stephanie Slater, Globalisation through the kaleidoscope, in: International Marketing Review, 26(4), p. 374.

  7. 7.

    Theodor Levitt, The Globalization of Markets, in: Harvard Business Review, 61(3), 1983, pp. 92–102.

  8. 8.

    Guru Theodor Levitt, in: The Economist, 27 February 2009, online at: www.economist.com/node/13167376 (last accessed 28.11.2017). 

  9. 9.

    This claim may seem to be a pretentious and ahistoric provocation for those viewing the global intensification of economic relations as a much older phenomenon. Indeed, the world came to be viewed as a possible unified economic space already by various thinkers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and academics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For instance, the volume edited by Tilman Mayer and colleagues documents that the banker Baron Meyer Carl Rothschild (1788–1855), revolutionaries Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1920–1895), and the philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) recognized in their lifetimes the worldwide links between technical and economic issues; see Tilman Mayer et al. (eds.), Globalisierung im Focus von Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2011, pp. 9ff. While acknowledging their intellectual foresight of a world growing ever closer as well as increasingly vulnerable together, the phenomena were not captured under the “rubrum” (Mayer, p. 10) of “globalization.” The analysis at hand is concerned primarily with pinpointing who invented the term “globalization” and since when it has emerged in scientific literature, not with capturing when economic relations between countries commenced to intensify and interconnect more. That is, the chief analytical concern is not the practice of consolidation and networking in economic life itself, but rather their intellectual and terminological conceptualization. Gauging by Levitt’s discovery, these are rather young phenomena, not older than 30 years.

  10. 10.

    Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalisation is Reshaping our Lives, London: Routledge, 2003.

  11. 11.

    Barbara Parker, Globalisation and Business Practices, London: Sage, 1998.

  12. 12.

    Wolf Schäfer, Lean Globality Studies, op. cit., p. 6.

  13. 13.

    Martin Wolf. Why Globalization Works, New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2005, p. 95.

  14. 14.

    Guru Theodor Levitt, in: The Economist, 27 February 2009, op. cit.

  15. 15.

    Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat. A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, p. 5.

  16. 16.

    See foreword by Joschka Fischer in the German-language edition: Jagdish Bhagwati, Verteidigung der Globalisierung, Munich: Pantheon, 2008, pp. 9–14. (English original: In defense of globalization, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  17. 17.

    Jürgen Osterhammel/Niels P. Peterson, Globalization: a short history, op. cit.

  18. 18.

    Pieter Meurs/Nicole Note/Diederik Aerts, The ‘Globe’ of Globalization, in: Kritike, 5(2), 2011, online at: www.kritike.org/journal/issue_10/meurs_december2011.pdf (last accessed 28.11.2017).

  19. 19.

    Wolf Schäfer, Lean Globality Studies, op. cit., p. 7.

  20. 20.

    See the contribution by Ludger Kühnhardt in this volume.

  21. 21.

    Robert A. Saunders, A Forgotten Core? Mapping the Globality of Central Asia, in: Globality Studies Journal 16 (2), 2010, pp. 1–27.

  22. 22.

    Humphrey Tonkin, Language, in: Roland Robertson/Jan Aart Scholte (eds.), Encyclopedia of Globalization, Volume 2, New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 711–717.

  23. 23.

    Wolf Schäfer, Lean Globality Studies, op. cit., p. 1ff.

  24. 24.

    See David Held/Anthony McGrew, Globalization/Anti-Globalization, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007; Manfred B. Steger, Anti-Globalization or Alter-Globalization? Mapping the Political Ideology of the Global Justice Movement, in: International Studies Quarterly, (2012), pp. 1–16; for an analysis of globalization critique from Latin American perspective; see, e.g., Alexander Paul Haslam, Globalization in Latin American and its Critics, in: International Studies Review, 14(2012), pp. 331–339.

  25. 25.

    Pieter Meurs/Nicole Note/Diederik Aerts, The ‘Globe’ of Globalization, op. cit., p. 12.

  26. 26.

    John Gray, The Era of Globalization is Over, in: The New Statesman, 24 September 2001, online at: www.i-p-o.org/globalization-gray.htm (last accessed 28.11.2017). 

  27. 27.

    Pieter Meurs/Nicole Note/Diederik Aerts, The ‘Globe’ of Globalization, op. cit., p. 19ff.

  28. 28.

    Peter Evans, Is an Alternative Globalization Possible?, in: Politics & Society, 36(2), 2008, pp. 271–305.

  29. 29.

    For the differences between three categories of power and their respective effects, see Xuewu Gu, Strukturelle Macht: eine dritte Machtquelle?, in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, 2(2012), pp. 259–275.

  30. 30.

    Robert P. Keohane/Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence. World Politics in Transition, Boston: Little, 1977, p. 11f.

  31. 31.

    Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power, in: Foreign Policy, 80(1990), p. 159.

  32. 32.

    Ralph Netzker, Raum, Zeit und Kausalität. Über die Struktur unserer Erfahrung, online at: www.dosisnet.de/raum_zeit_kausalitaet.pdf. (last accessed 28.11.2017). In the German original: “Raum, Zeit und Kausalität sind keine Dinge oder Gegenstände. Dinge und Gegenstände aller Art sind begrenzt, endlich und bedingt: Für Raum, Zeit und Kausalität gilt dies nicht. Raum, Zeit und Kausalität sind vielmehr die drei ‘Vektoren’ die unsere Wirklichkeit aufspannen, die Grundlage aller unserer Erkenntnis, die Voraussetzung aller Gegenständlichkeit. Und weil diese Wirklichkeit so groß und unerschöpflich ist, kann sie sich nur auf unendlichem Fundament erheben. Ein unendlich großes Zirkuszelt braucht unendlich hohe Masten. Raum, Zeit und Kausalität sind unendlich, weil sie unsere Welt enthalten.”

  33. 33.

    Martin Albrow, The Global Age. State and society beyond modernity, op. cit., pp. 191ff.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Relations, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Xuewu Gu

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Political Science, University of Bonn/Center for European Integration Studies (ZEI), Bonn, Germany

    Ludger Kühnhardt

  2. Political Science, History of Ideas and Contemporary History, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Tilman Mayer

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Gu, X. (2019). Is Globality Shapeable?. In: Kühnhardt, L., Mayer, T. (eds) The Bonn Handbook of Globality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90382-8_61

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