Qualifications

Having established that globalization is a major and on the whole relatively recent turn in world history, we need to sober our judgements by expressing a number of reservations concerning its extent, depth, causes, and consequences. Unfortunately, many discussions of globalization suffer from over­simplifications, exaggerations, and wishful think­ing. As a result of such intellectual sloppiness, certain sceptics have gone to an opposite extreme and dismissed notions of globalization as mythol­ogy (e.g. Hirst and Thompson 1996). The following five qualifications respond to some of the critics' main objections and point towards a more mea­sured and sophisticated understanding of the process.

First, globalization has not been experienced everywhere to the same extent. On the whole, the decreased importance of distance and territorial borders has gone markedly further in North America, the Pacific Rim, and Europe than in Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia. Phenomena like global companies and electronic mail have been mainly concentrated in the so-called North of the world. In addition, globalization has generally affected city dwellers, professional people, and younger generations relatively more than other groups, although the process has left no one com­pletely untouched. The point about globalization is not that certain conditions come to exist in all places and for all people to the same degree. Rather, it means that many things happen in the contem­porary world largely irrespective of territorial dis­tances and borders.

Second, globalization is not the straightforward process of homogenization that some accounts would have us believe, the transcendence of territorial geography by electronic mass media and the like has helped to give worldwide currency to a host of objects, ideas, standards, and habits. However, globalization has by no means brought an end to cultural diversity. For instance, different audiences interpret a global film differently, and a global product may be used differently in different places in accordance with specific local needs and customs. Moreover, the experience of having the whole world converge on one's home turf has prompted many people defensively to reassert their distinctiveness, in some cases even more insistently than ever. In this way globalization has contributed to a proliferation of national, ethnic, and religious revivalist movements since the 1960s (Scholte 1996). So globalization involves a complex mix of concurrent tendencies towards cultural conver­gence on the one hand and increased inter-group differentiation on the other.

Third, globalization has not eliminated the sig­nificance of place, distance, and territorial borders in world politics. Yes, the process has introduced additional dimensions of geography to social rela­tions, with the arrival of cyberspace, communica­tion via electromagnetic waves, and so on. However, this does not mean that the old geogra­phy of latitudes, longitudes, and altitudes no longer matters at the end of the twentieth century. For example, place obviously remains important in respect of the location of natural resources, feelings of national identity, and much more. Distance retains significant restraining and buffering effects when it comes to things like terrestrial travel and merchandise trade. Meanwhile state frontiers con­tinue to inhibit migration and smuggling even if border guards can do nothing to stop missile attacks or electronic money transfers. Hence globalization has not brought 'the end of geography', but rather has created a new supraterritorial space alongside, and interrelated with, the old territorial geography. The 'map' of world affairs has consequently become more complicated than ever.

Fourth, globalization cannot be understood in terms of a single driving force. For instance, the process is not reducible to an American or Western plot. Nor is it simply the inevitable outcome of cap­italism, or the preordained end-result of the Industrial Revolution, or the consequence of a modern secular quest for universal truth. There is probably something to all of these arguments and others, too, but each thesis by itself offers at best only a partial insight. A fuller explanation of global­ization needs to consider a complex and fluctuating mix of interlinked political, economic, cultural, ecological, and psychological forces, some of which are mutually reinforcing and some of which are contradictory. Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, global­ization is not a panacea. Some liberalist accounts have heralded the coming of a 'borderless world' as the dawn of universal equality, prosperity, peace, and freedom "(e.g. Ohmae 1990). Regrettably, evi­dence of the past several decades sooner points to contrary outcomes. For one thing, people have— depending on their sex, class, race, nationality, reli­gion, and other social categories—generally had equal access to, unequal voices in, and unequal benefits from globalization. Poverty is still rampant Erie contemporary globalizing world. Ecological degradation has never been worse. Although a third world war has thus far been avoided, thirty-five major armed conflicts were underway as of 1993 (et al. 1994: 18). Nor has globalization proved be a formula for democracy (as will be detailed later) or an answer to problems of alienation. Bearly there is no automatic link between globalization and emancipation.

Nevertheless, to acknowledge the above limitations to change is not to say that nothing has changed in world politics as a result of globalization. Although some commentators are prone to exaggerate its extent, a substantial, wide-ranging and deeply penetrating shift in the spatial character of world politics has been unfolding in recent decades. In this light globalization most definitely warrants the mass of attention that it has attracted of late.