Capitalism Then and Now
Goodbye to “Globalization”
Harold James and Matteo Albanese
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FLORENCE – The term “globalization” first swept the world in the 1990’s and reached its highpoint of popularity in 2000 and 2001. In 2001, for instance, Le Monde contained more than 3,500 references to mondialisation. But then the figure steadily fell – more than 80% by 2006. Since the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2007, the word’s usage in major newspapers such as the New York Times and the Financial Times has fallen still further. Globalization is on its way out.
A brief history of the concept, and a comparison with another term that also became discredited by overuse, helps to explain what happened.
The twentieth century’s two most important conceptual innovations, “totalitarianism” and “globalization,” were originally Italian. The first term defined the tumultuous middle of the twentieth century, the latter its benign ending. “Totalitarianism” finally disintegrated in 1989, and globalization prevailed.
Both terms originated as criticisms that were supposed to undermine and subvert the political tendencies they described. But both ended up being just as frequently and enthusiastically used by the respective tendencies’ proponents.
“Totalitarianism” began its conceptual life in 1923 as a criticism or parody by the liberal writer Giovanni Amendola of the megalomaniacal pretensions of Benito Mussolini’s new regime. In the course of a few years, it had become the proud self-definition of Italian fascism, endorsed by Mussolini’s education minister, Giovanni Gentile, who became the official philosopher of fascism, and then incorporated in a ghost-written article by Mussolini himself in the Encyclopedia of Fascism.
In both the hostile and the celebratory use of the word, totalitarianism was intended to describe a movement that embraced all aspects of life in what purported to be a coherent philosophy of politics, economics, and society. Fascists liked to think of themselves as imbued with total knowledge and total power.
Today, few know where the term “globalization” originated. The Oxford English Dictionary gives as the earliest reference to its current usage an academic article from 1972. The word had been used earlier, but in a rather different sense. It was a diplomatic term conveying the linkage between disparate policy areas (for example, in negotiating simultaneously on financial and security matters).
The OED etymology ignores the non-English origins of the term, which can be found in the inventive linguistic terminology of continental European student radicalism. In 1970, the radical left-wing Italian underground periodical Sinistra Proletaria carried an article entitled “The Process of Globalization of Capitalist Society,” which was a description of IBM, an “organization which presents itself as a totality and controls all its activities towards the goal of profit and ‘globalizes’ all activity in the productive process.” Because IBM, according to the article, produced in 14 countries and sold in 109, it “contains in itself the globalization (mondializzazione) of capitalist imperialism.” This obscure left-wing publication is the first known reference to globalization in its contemporary sense.
Since then, the term has had ups and downs. It became increasingly faddish in the 1990’s, but mostly as a term of abuse. In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, anti-globalization demonstrations targeted the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum, and McDonald’s. Globalization was seen at this time – as in the vision of the 1960’s Italian leftists – as the exploitation of the world’s poor by a plutocratic and technocratic elite.
But in the 2000’s, the meaning of globalization shifted and began to take on a semi-positive note, in large part because it increasingly looked as if the major winners of globalization included many rapidly growing emerging markets. Indeed, countries that had previously been described as “under-developed” or “Third World” were becoming incipient global hegemons. Moreover, many former critics began to recognize global connectedness as a way of solving global problems such as climate change, economic crisis, and poverty.
Historians have started to project globalization backwards. It is no longer seen only as a story of the capital-market-driven integration of the last two decades of the twentieth century, or even of an “early wave of globalization” in the nineteenth century, when the gold standard and the Atlantic telegram seemed to unite the world. Instead, the wider and deeper historical vision is of a globalization that encompasses the Roman empire and the Song dynasty, and goes back to the globalization of the human species from a common African origin.
The terms that we use to describe complex political and social phenomena and processes have odd ambiguities. Some concepts that are designed as criticisms are quickly inverted to become celebratory.
By 2011, anti-globalization rhetoric had largely faded, and globalization is thought of as not something to be neither fought nor cheered, but as a fundamental characteristic of the human story, in which disparate geographies and diverse themes are inextricably intertwined. In short, globalization has lost its polemical bite, and with that loss, its attractions as a concept have faded.
Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University. Matteo Albanese is a researcher in history at the European University Institute.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.
www.project-syndicate.org
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cicero 06:58 03 Feb 11
..."In short, globalization has lost its polemical bite, and with that loss, its attractions as a concept have faded."
In fact, the term continues to have pejorative force for those who remain uncomfortable with capitalism, even, perhaps especially, within the academy. "Globalization" was probably never much used in a celebratory manner, but it remains the most accurate descriptor of the recent transformation of economic and cultural life across the globe: managing in a single word to encompass both processes and outcome. The term will have along and healthy life - even if the process doesn't.
captbob 03:50 06 Feb 11
"Globalization" as a term describing economic, political, cultural, social activity that spanned national boundaries was probably best described by Walter Wriston, formerly head of Citicorp and an economic advisor to the Reagan Administration in his book, "The Twilight of Sovereignty", published in 1992. Wriston used the term to describe the cascade of changes to the international system wrought by the decoupling of the US dollar from gold reserves; international capital liquidity made possible by unregulated private international banking computer networks; and new systems of credit in the 1970s to take advantage of these changes.
I suspect it's "fallen out of fashion" because it's effects are now ubiquitous, and like air, taken for granted. In the '70s the internet didn't exist; the first global commercial broadcast (Elvis in Hawaii, January 14, 1973) ushered in ubiquitous, real-time media (albeit only available to large media corporations). The commercial internet, (dating from about 1990 or so), made possible ubiquitous, global real-time communications by virtually anyone with access to a computer, (although audio- and video-capabilities didn't come until the late-90s).
It has taken roughly 40 years for popular consciousness to absorb some of the changes wrought by the technologies that made globalization possible. We now expect it and are not surprised when a small incident in Tunisia topples a long-standing authoritarian government and cascades to a much larger country in a matter of weeks, all facilitated by 24hr professional and enthusiast media coverage.
And while "globalization" has lost it's "wow!" cachet, it has not lost its relevance in discussions relating to how national, international and trans-national institutions adapt to it's effects.
llisa2u2 06:13 02 Feb 11
Absolutely excellent article. It is very interesting to read a realistic historical view explaining the "media" spin of one word, parallel human commercial trends, and social change at the same time. I can finally understand how important history really is, as a real application!