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COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Copyright Regulations 1969 Warning This material has been reproduced and communicated to you by or on behalf of The Charles Darwin University pursuant to Part VB of the Copyright Act 1968 (the Act). The material in this communication may be subject to copyright under the Act. Any further reproduction or communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act. Do not remove this notice • Globalisation is taken up in this chapter as one of the most recent domains of sociology. At the same time, it is shown to refer to processes that have existed for hundreds of years. • The concept of economic globalisation is assessed in relation to the contemporary global condition and is shown to be less impor- tant today than various kinds of cultural globalisation. • Economic globalisation, a much more important process in the 19th century, is nevertheless related to the colonial system of nation-states which predominate today. While transnational corp- orations are very important, the relationship between first, second and third world states remains of foremost importance in deter- mining global economic realities. • The power of the nation-state in fostering national constituencies is undermined most visibly by forms of cultural globalisation. The role of migration, tourism, commodity exchange and the media, both old and new, is examined in relation to cultural globalisation. • On the one hand, cultural globalisation produces an inmixing of ethnic diversity and promotes an appreciation of difference, diver- sity and civic pluralism. But a second kind of cultural globalisation runs counter to the first. The globalisation of capitalist culture itself-the fast-food chains, the shopping malls, the theme parks- produces a standardisation and homogenisation of difference in the name of a consumer monoculture. 408 AUSTRALIAN SOCIOLOGY globalisation A complex set of social, economic, political and cultural processes which cut across national boundaries, increasing levels of interconnected- ness such that the world is reconstituted as a single social space. THE MISCHIEVOUS CONCEPT OF GLOBALISATION Since the early 1990s the term 'globalisation' has gained widespread currency in Australia and industrially developed countries. The discourses of globalisation appear regularly in the nightly news, on the lips of politicians of any persuasion, and are now featuring in the titles of the latest wave of sociology textbooks. For journalists and politicians, 'globalisation' has become the subject of a new kind of moral panic, according to which a 'postmodern' or post-industrial market is said to be beyond regulation and control. In this way, 'globalisation' as a process is often 'reified'-credited with a kind of alien, autonomous quality-into something that is beyond politics and agency and that is a repository of social processes out of reach of any meaningful analysis. It is sometimes used as a metaphor for recent sensibilities about social change, a sense of social change that occurs at too great a rate for the modern nation-state to cope with, and has even led some sociologists to declare the 'end of the social' (Rose 1996; Touraine 1998). As a concept, 'globalisation' became stretched to absurd degrees, leading one commentator to dub it 'the ugliest buzzword of the 1990s' (Wiseman 1995: 5). Yet, insofar as it is 'lived' as an important force in modern life, it has very real consequences. Globalisation gives us anxieties about national iden- tity: everything from the new kinds of 'panic racism' displayed by the Pauline Hanson phenomenon to cynicism towards expatriates who have renounced their Australian citizenship, such as Rupert Murdoch or Greg Norman. Anger over 'outsiders' who take Australian jobs, whether these be new migrants in factories or the managing director of the ABC (who is ridiculed for not having watched Australian tele- vision for 23 years, before taking up his post in 2000), translates into an overall mistrust of globalisation. These kinds of panic and consternation have been accompanied by heraldings of the death of the nation-state (Ohmae 1995; Martin 1997; Greider 1997; Elazar 1998), the end of history, and the triumph of liberal capitalism (Fukuyama 1992). Consider Herman Schwartz's States versus Markets (1994) with its contention that, after 1973, the ability of states to use the institutions built during the Great Depression and World War II to shelter domes- tic markets from the international market had eroded (see also Catley 1996). Similarly Susan Strange, in her book The Retreat of the State, gives a classical exposition of market determinism. While she points CHAPTER 13 GLOBALISATION 40 9 out shifts between the powers of nation-states, 'the search is on', she argues, 'for better ways of managing society and the economy than has so far been achieved through the unaided efforts of the individ- ual nation states' (Strange 1996: 183). But these kinds of trends in social and political thought are even more acute in contemporary journalism. In mid-1999, The Age news- paper in Melbourne ran an entire series on 'globalisation', replete with all of the now-familiar stereotypes that first circulated in corporate business thinking a decade ago. The series outlined the threat to tradi- tional jobs (Morton 1999), regulatory problems for home markets (Maiden 1999), the death of the nation-state (Button 1999), American economic imperialism (Flanagan 1999), and new inequalities that are said to result from the powerlessness of governments (Koutsoukis 1999). An exception to these articles was one by Geoffrey Blainey, who went some way towards demystifying the rhetoric of global determin- ism (Blainey 1999). As a term in social and political discourse, why is it so pervasive today, Blainey asks, when in fact the conditions of economic globalisation have become far more complex and in many ways not so visible? He points to the 19th century, when much of Australia's produce was exported overseas, to the global prestige of gold, to the high prominence of overseas banks in Australia. Curiously, Blainey, a conservative historian, echoes arguments estab- lished by Marxist political economists Hirst and Thompson (1996), who point out that 'tidal wave' globalisation accounts are a conve- nient justification for governmental restructurings of finance policy. Conversely, they are also an occasion for new kinds of social movements, as we increasingly see reports in the media of anti- globalisation marches and protests of various kinds (see The Economist, January 1997; Terranova, in Holmes 2001). When viewed as a television spectacle the message of the protestors seems to echo that of nationalist conservatives-that it is globalisation, as such, that is being rejected. On reading the literature of the protestors, however, it seems that the issue that animates them is global inequal- ity (see
). Myths of economic globalisation In their book Globalisation in Question, Hirst and Thompson argue that: (i) the international economy is currently in some respects less globalised than it was between 1870 and 1914, a time when the gold standard, pax Britannica and the intercontinental telegraph system provided the minimum conditions for a truly globalised (as opposed to internationalised) economic system (see Kern 1983); (ii) genuine economic globalisation Tho way in which the production, cir(ulation and consumption of goods incroiJsingly becomes subject to an international division of labour (production) and consumption that influences the nature of equality, both within and between nations. Modern economic globalisation has given rise to sup1 nnational bodies such as international t:conornic agencies (World Bank, lnterniltional Monetilry Fund, World Trade Organization), transnational and multiniltional corporations. 410 AUSTRALIAN SOCIOLOGY international economy As Hirst and Thompson (1996: 10) define it, internationalisation can be distinguished from globalisation in that it rests on an international economy rather than a global economy, where 'processes that are determined at the level of national economies dominate and inter- national phenomena are outcomes that emerge from the distinct and differential performance of the national economies'. TNCs are relatively rare as, while 'trade' is multinational, corporate structure is centred on. a national base, far more than extreme globalists care to represent; (iii) the third world remains largely marginal to foreign direct investment; (iv) trade, investment and financial flows are concentrated in the 'group of three' (G3) ofEurope, Japan and the USA; (v) a policy coordinated G3 can substantially steer global trends, in contradistinction to the thesis of the extreme globalists that global markets or a 'postmodern economy' are beyond regulation and control (Hirst & Thompson 1996: 2-3). Hirst and Thompson distinguish between a global economy and an international economy. In a global economy, 'distinct national economies are subsumed and rearticulated into a global economic system by international processes and transactions' (1996: 10). With an international economy, 'processes that are determined at the level of national economies dominate and international phenomena are outcomes that emerge from the distinct and differential performance of the national economies' (Hirst & Thompson 1996: 10). Their thesis is that the world economy is international rather than global, and that world relations can hardly be said to be in a tearaway manic condition, as some maintain (see Greider 1997; Lyons et al. 1995). Moreover, the rise of globally reaching information technology (see Jeffrey 1999), while significant in establishing new industries, is of relatively little consequence in the trade interdependence of nations. It might affect the complexity that is possible within many economic transactions, but this is generally true only of new kinds of finance transactions such as futures exchanges. However, no amount of information technology is going to affect how many products a country needs to import in any given month, nor will it affect the speed, carrying capacity or arrival date of a ship that is carrying rice from Australia to Japan. Hirst and Thompson would agree with Geoffrey Blainey that the panic surrounding globalisation is often a feature, and is to the bene- fit, of nation-building politicians in times of peace. Creating mischief with the term 'globalisation' is to the great benefit of national politi- cians in that it single-handedly justifies all kinds of political and economic measures towards the protection of national commodities and markets that are reflected in excise, tariffs, duties, levies and tightly negotiated trade agreements. In Australia, globalisation hysteria has been most pronounced in the