14 Theory, Culture & Society Moscovici, S. (1988) La machine a faire des dieux. Paris: Fayard. Moscovici, S, (forthcoming) 'Questions for the Twenty-First Century', Theory, Culture & Society. Offe, K. (1985) Disorganized Capitalism. Oxford: Polity Press. Polier, N. and Roseberry, W. (1989) 'Triste Tropes: Postmodern Anthropologists Encounter the Other and Discover Themselves', Economy and Society 18(2). Sakai, N. (1988) 'Modernity and its Critique. The Problem of Universalism and Particularism', South Atlantic Quarterly 87(3). Schiller, H.I. (1985) 'Electronic Information Flows: New Basis for Global Domination?', in P. Drummond and R. Patterson (eds), Television in Transition, London: British Film Institute. Schlesinger, P. (1987) 'On National Identity: Some Conceptions and Misconceptions Criticised', Social Science Information 26(2). Tiryakian, E.A. (1986) 'Sociology's Great Leap Forward: the Challenge of Internationalization', international Sociology 1(2). Wallerstein, I. (1987) 'World-Systems Analysis', in A. Giddens and J. Turner (eds), Social Theory Today. Oxford: Polity Press, Wernick, A. (forthcoming) 'Promo Culture: the Cultural Triumph of Exchange', Theory, Culture & Society 1(A). Wouters, C. (1986) 'Formalization and Informalization: Changing Tension Balances in Civilizing Processes', Theory, Culture & Society 3(2). Wouters, C. (forthcoming) 'Social Stratification and Informalization in Global Perspective', Theory, Culture & Society 7(4), Mike Featherstone teaches Sociology at Teesside Polytechnic. He is author of Postmodernism and Consumer Culture and co-editor of Body, Culture and Society, both of which will be published by Sage in late 1990. Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Concept Roland Robertson Nothing will be done anymore, without the whole world meddling in it. Paul Valéry (quoted in Lesourne, 1986:103) We are on the road from the evening-glow of European philosophy to the dawn of world philosophy. Karl Jaspers (1957:83-4) Insofar as [present realities] have brought us a global present without a common past [they] threaten to render all traditions and all particular past histories irrelevant. Hannah Arendt (1957:541) The transformation of the medieval into the modern can be depicted in at least two different ways. In one sense it represents the trend towards the consolidation and strengthening of the territorial state ... in another sense it represents a reordering in the priority of international and domestic realms, in the medieval period the world, or transnational, environment was primary, the domestic secondary. Richard Rosencrance (1986:77) My primary interest in this discussion is with the analytical and empirical aspects of globalization. On the other hand, I want to raise some general questions about social theory. As far as the main issue is concerned, I set out the grounds for systematic analysis and interpretation of globalization since the mid-eighteenth century — indicating the major phases of globalization in recent world history and exploring some of the more salient aspects of the contemporary global circumstance from an analytical point of view. On the general-theoretical front I suggest that much of social theory is both a product of and an implicit reaction to — as opposed to a direct engagement with — the globalization process. Thus I emphasize the need to redirect theory and research toward explicit recognition of globalization. While there is rapidly growing interest in that topic, much of it is expressed very diffusely and there Theory, Culture & Society (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi), Vol. 7 (1990), 15-30 16 Theory, Culture & Society is considerable danger that 'globalization' will become an intellectual 'play zone' — a site for the expression of residual social-theoretical interests, interpretive indulgence, or the display of world-ideological preferences. In any case I think that we must take very seriously Immanuel Wallerstein's (1987: 309) contention that 'world-systems' analysis is not a theory about the world. It is a protest against the ways in which social scientific enquiry was structured for all of us at its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century.' Even though I do not subscribe to world-system theory in the conventional sense of the term, primarily because of its econom-ism (Robertson and Lechner, 1985) and am not pessimistic about the possibility of our being able to accomplish significant theoretical work vis-ä-vis the world-as-a-whole, I consider it to be of the utmost importance for us to realize fully that much of the conventional sociology which has developed since the first quarter of the twentieth century has been held in thrall by the virtually global institutionalization of the idea of the culturally cohesive and sequestered national society during the main phase of 'classical' sociology (Robertson, 1990a). Ironically, the global aspect of that phenomenon has received relatively little attention (Meyer, 1980). Globalization and the Strucluralion of the World The present discussion is a continuation of my previous efforts to theorize the topic of globalization, a task made all the more difficult by the recent and continuing events in China, the USSR and Europe which have disrupted virtually all of the conventional views concerning world order. At the same time those events and the circumstances which they have created make the analytical effort all the more urgent. We have entered a phase of what appears to us in 1990 as great global uncertainty — so much so that the very idea of uncertainty promises to become globally institutionalized. Or, to put it in a very different way, there is an eerie relationship between the ideas of postmodernism and postmodernity and the day-by-day geopolitical 'earthquakes' which we (the virtually global we) have recently experienced. We need to enlarge our conception of 'world politics' in such a way as to facilitate systematic discussion of the relationship between politics in the relatively narrow sense and the broad questions of 'meaning' which can only be grasped by wide-ranging, empirically sensitive interpretations of the global-human condition as a whole. Robertson, Mapping the Global Condition 17 Specifically, I argue that what is often called world politics has in the twentieth century hinged considerably upon the issue of the response to modernity, aspects of which were politically and internationally thematized as the standard of 'civilization' (Gong, 1984) during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in particular reference to the inclusion of non-European (mainly Asian) societies in Eurocentric 'international society' (Bull and Watson, 1984). Communism and 'democratic capitalism' have constituted alternative forms of acceptance of modernity (Parsons, 1964) — although some would now argue that the recent and dramatic ebbing of Communism can in part be attributed to its 'attempt to preserve the integrity of the premodern system' (Parsons, 1967: 484-5) by invoking 'socialism' as the central of a series of largely 'covert gestures of reconciliation . . . toward both the past and the future' (Parsons, 1967: 484).' On the other hand, fascism and neo-fascism have, in spite of their original claims as to the establishment of new societal and international 'orders' (as was explicitly the case with the primary Axis powers of the Second World War, Germany and Japan), been directly interested in transcending or resolving the problems of modernity. The world politics of the global debate about modernity have rarely been considered of relevance to the latter and yet it is clear that, for example, the 'the sense of the past of the major belligerents in World War I reveals a striking contrast between the temporalities of the nations of each alliance system and underlying causes of resentment and misunderstanding' (Kern, 1983: 277), with the nations whose leaders considered them to be relatively deprived — most notably Germany and Japan — being particularly concerned to confront the problem of modernity in political and military terms.2 It may well be that the Cold War which developed after the defeat of big-power fascism constituted an interruption and a partial freezing of the world-cultural politics of modernity and that now with the possible ending of the Cold War those politics will be resumed in a situation of much greater global complexity — in the interrelated contexts of more intense globalization, the discourse of postmodernity and 'the ethnic revival' (Smith, 1981), which itself may well be considered as an aspect of the contemporary phase of globalization (Lechner, 1984). Any attempt to theorize the general field of globalization must lay the grounds for relatively patterned discussion of the politics of the global-human condition, by attempting to indicate the structure of any viable discourse about the shape and 'meaning' of the --■■-A-. rW/A ; Ai/'i/,!?;-..-^..^, ,,., Vakáty „..--,i I'T'1 *J d*