Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Chapter 9
Globalization
Introduction
There is no subject in contemporary international relations that attracts more
nonsense than the notion of globalization. Much of this nonsense comes
from the pen of theorists of ‘hyperglobalization’, many of whom work in
business schools and write for a particular class of high-flying business
executives (Held et al. 1999). Only such a person, for example, could write
of the emergence of a ‘borderless world’ (Ohmae 1990). The world may
seem borderless to people who turn left when they board an airliner, but one
would not want to have to explain – much less defend – the notion to the
millions of refugees, displaced persons and asylum-seekers who find them-
selves shunted from one holding facility to another while their fate is deter-
mined. In fact, since 9/11, new security arrangements have meant that even
top business executives are mildly inconvenienced when they cross borders,
although passengers to the UK who land in private jets at Northolt Airport
still have an easier time of it than the rest of us who use nearby Heathrow.
This ‘globaloney’ is extremely irritating, but almost equally misleading is
the characteristic professional deformation of the IR scholar, which is to
deny that anything ever changes, or indeed could change this side of the
apocalypse. It may well be that certain things about human beings do not
change, and so, say, Thucydides or Hobbes are still useful guides to the
darker side of social life – but it would be truly extraordinary if the momen-
tous changes in the way ordinary people live throughout the world did not
have some impact both on international relations and the theories we develop
to understand these relations. The task, then, is to keep a cool head; that is,
to acknowledge change but also to recognize continuity, and all the time to
remember that this is an unequal and divided world – things that seem very
important to the rich and powerful are unlikely to be read in the same way
by the poor and weak, and any account of globalization that does not place
this fact continually before us will be radically deficient.
Bearing all this in mind, this chapter will fall into four parts. First, the
political economy of globalization needs to be examined; the evolution of
the world economy is central to any reasonable account of globalization,
a fact that the hyperglobalizers got right, even though they got so much else
wrong. Second, the impact of this evolution on the theories of political
economy discussed in the last chapter needs to be assessed. Third, an account
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needs to be given of the problems thrown up by the processes of global
change, problems that the old Westphalian system cannot cope with; inter-
national environmental degradation is an obvious, but not exclusive, focus
here. Finally, the putative emergence of a global civil society needs to be
examined; is it actually the case that global media and common consumption
patterns are creating a new, genuinely global, social order?
A new economy?
At the end of the last chapter some important changes in the world economy
that have taken place over the last quarter-century were described, most