Globalisation and Global Politics

Globalisation and Global Politics

John Baylis

Chapter – 1

Harshit Sharma

Alumnus (BHU)

Contact

Introduction

Globalization is the widening, deepening, and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness.
Hyperglobalists argue globalization leads to the demise of the sovereign nation-state as global forces undermine government control over economies and societies (Ohmae 1995; Scholte 2000).
Sceptics reject globalization, arguing states and geopolitics remain the primary forces shaping world order (Krasner 1999; Gilpin 2001).
The transformationalist perspective takes a different approach, acknowledging globalization but asserting it does not lead to the demise of the sovereign state.
The transformationalist view suggests globalization leads to a globalization of politics, where the distinction between domestic and international affairs is blurred.
Politics everywhere are increasingly connected, and traditional international relations theories, based on the domestic-international divide, offer only a partial understanding of world forces (Rosenau in Mansbach, Ferguson, and Lampert 1976: 22).
Globalization is a contested concept, often misused, and generates intense debate.
The chapter begins by exploring what globalization is, how it can be conceptualized and defined, its current manifestations, especially post-9/11, and whether it is truly new.
The second section addresses how globalization leads to a distorted global politics, skewed in favor of a global power elite and excluding the majority of humankind.
The third section focuses on ethical challenges posed by distorted global politics, exploring current thinking on creating a more humane global politics that is inclusive and responsive to those in greatest need.

Making sense of globalization

Global interconnectedness has significantly expanded over the last three decades, affecting economic and cultural spheres.
Economic integration has intensified, linking global commerce, finance, and production into a global market economy.
Crises, such as the Argentinean economy collapse (2002) or East Asian recession (1997), have far-reaching effects on jobs, production, and investments globally.
A slowdown in the US economy is felt worldwide, from Birmingham to Bangkok.
$1.88 trillion flows across foreign exchange markets daily, making it impossible for even powerful governments to resist sustained currency speculation.
In 1992, the British government had to devalue the pound after sustained attacks from currency speculators.
Transnational corporations account for 25-33% of world output, 70% of world trade, and 80% of international investment, playing a key role in the global economy.
These corporations control the distribution of economic and technological resources, with overseas production exceeding world exports.
Global communication infrastructures enable organizing and mobilizing people worldwide in real-time, as seen in 2003 protests against military intervention in Iraq.
Over 45,000 international NGOs, such as Greenpeace and the Climate Action Network, also contribute to global mobilization.
Transnational criminal and terrorist networks, like drug cartels and Al Qaeda, operate within this infrastructure.
Global communication has led to the spread of ideas, cultures, and information, creating solidarity among like-minded people and tensions between different cultural groups.
Global migration has reached significant levels, with millions moving both legally and illegally, and over 600 million tourists traveling annually.
Transnational problems, such as climate change and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, require global regulation and have led to the growth of global rule-making.
International organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund and International Civil Aviation Organization, are expanding their jurisdiction.
Informal networks of cooperation between parallel government agencies, like the Financial Action Task Force and Dublin Group, are growing.
Security and prosperity are increasingly interlinked across regions, with incidents like the Bali bombing impacting perceptions of security globally.
Agricultural subsidies in the USA and the EU affect farmers in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
Globalization is defined in various ways:
- Giddens (1990): The intensification of worldwide social relations linking distant localities.
- Gilpin (2001): The integration of the world-economy.
- Scholte (2000): De-territorialization and growth of supraterritorial relations.
- Harvey (1989): Time-space compression, where distant events have profound consequences rapidly.
For sceptics, globalization is not a novel condition, nor is it necessarily more than international interdependence.
The concept of globalization differs from internationalization or interdependence, focusing on broader, deeper, and more rapid interconnectedness across the globe.

Conceptualizing globalization

Globalization involves the stretching of social, political, and economic activities across political frontiers, linking distant regions of the world.
Events, decisions, and activities in one region can significantly affect individuals and communities in other regions, such as civil wars and conflict increasing asylum seekers and illegal migrants.
Intensification of interconnectedness in economic, ecological, and other spheres, such as the spread of harmful microbes like the SARS virus and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Acceleration of global interactions due to advancements in transportation and communication, increasing the speed of movement of ideas, news, goods, information, capital, and technology.
Real-time banking transactions in the UK are handled by call centers in India, showing the global flow of services.
Global interactions are becoming more extensive, intense, and fast, creating a shared social space or globality, seen in the worldwide diffusion of the concept of globalization.
Globalization implies the dissolution of borders and boundaries separating the world into discrete national units, transforming human affairs from interdependent national states to a shared global space.
Informatics technologies and communication infrastructures facilitate virtual, real-time global coordination, seen in operations of multinational corporations and anti-globalization movements.
Geography and distance still matter, but globalization embodies time-space compression, shrinking the world where local developments can trace their sources to distant global conditions.
Globalization leads to deterritorialization, where social, political, and economic activities are increasingly organized across borders, as seen with multinational corporations outsourcing production to countries like China and East Asia.
While territory and borders still matter, their relative significance as constraints on power is declining under globalization.
In a shrinking world, power is exercised across vast distances, and the distinction between domestic and international, inside and outside the state, breaks down.
Global power can be located in places like Washington, New York (UN), or London, but it may affect distant local communities, as shown in the Iraq War (2003-).
Globalization involves the denationalization of power, where power is exercised on transregional, transnational, or transcontinental levels.
States no longer have a monopoly on power resources, including economic, coercive, or political power.
Globalization is a historical process that represents a shift in the spatial scale of human social organization, linking distant communities and expanding the reach of power across regions and continents.
Globalization differs from internationalization, which refers to interdependence between discrete national units with clearly defined borders.
Internationalization assumes national borders remain, whereas globalization blurs the distinction between domesticand external spaces.
Distance and time are compressed, allowing local events to have immediate global impacts, and localized developments to spread quickly around the world.
Regionalization refers to intensified interconnectedness within geographically proximate states, such as within the European Union, whereas globalization concerns transcontinental or transregional flows and networks.
Flows of trade and finance between North America, Asia Pacific, and Europe are globalization, while similar flows within these regions are considered regionalization.

Contemporary globalization

John Gray argues that the cataclysmic attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 marked the end of the era of globalization.
In response to the global terrorist threat, states have reasserted their power, and borders have been sealed, although imperfectly.
Economic globalization stalled compared to the turn of the century, and sceptics view this as confirmation that globalization was exaggerated.
Sceptics argue that globalization is a myth that concealed a world less interdependent than in the nineteenth century, still dominated by geopolitics.
Globalists believe 9/11 and the insecurity it caused demonstrate a clash of globalizations, with a confrontation between Western modernity and reactions against it.
One problem with the sceptical argument is its focus on economic trends, overlooking other forms of globalization, such as in culture, crime, education, and politics.
Globalization is multidimensional, impacting all aspects of social life and not limited to economics. It is visible in daily life, including in the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and our collective sense of security.
Universities are global institutions with international student recruitment and the dissemination of academic research, reflecting the broad reach of globalization.
Understanding globalization requires mapping its patterns across all key sectors, from economic to political, military, cultural, and ecological domains.
Economic globalization is more advanced than cultural or military globalization, making globalization highly uneven.
The key question in understanding globalization is: the globalization of what? Patterns of economic and cultural globalization are not identical, so general conclusions based on one domain can be misleading.
After 9/11, the slowdown in economic globalization was seen by sceptics as the end of globalization, but this ignored the acceleration of globalization in military, technological, and cultural domains.
Contemporary globalization is distinctive because it involves the confluence of globalizing trends across multiple domains, which have proven resilient despite global instability and conflicts.
Globalization is asymmetrical, with uneven experiences across regions, countries, and communities, resulting in clear winners and losers.
The most affluent experience a shrinking world through jet travel, global television, and the Internet, while many feel disempowered.
Inequality is a deep feature of globalization, leading to asymmetrical globalization rather than a global community or cooperative ethic.
As globalization spreads, it often exacerbates divisions, generating conflict and insecurity, as seen in the aftermath of 9/11.
Globalization involves contradictory tendencies toward global integration and fragmentation, cooperation and conflict, order and disorder.
Violence has always been central to globalization, whether in imperialism or the current war on global terror.
Contemporary globalization combines dense global interconnectedness with new infrastructures of control and communication, from the WTO to transnational corporations.
Contemporary patterns of globalization surpass earlier epochs in terms of scale and quality, especially due to real-time global communication infrastructures.
Modern globalization is described as a thick form of globalization, with powerful implications for state autonomy and economic policy.
The scale of global financial flows ($1.88 trillion per day) imposes significant constraints on governments’ national economic policy.
Thick globalization shapes the context in which states operate, defining the parameters of state power and significantly impacting world politics.

A world transformed: globalization and distorted global politics

A political map of the world is divided into over 190 territorial units, namely states.
This division, emphasizing borders and boundaries, would be incomprehensible to a student of politics in the Middle Ages.
Historically, borders are a relatively recent invention, as is the concept of sovereign, self-governing, territorially delimited political communities (states).
The idea of states as sovereign, territorial units is now a convenient fiction but remains central to orthodox state-centric conceptions of world politics.
Globalization challenges this state-centric view of world politics, as it questions the primacy of borders and sovereignty.
To understand globalization, it is necessary to make a conceptual shift in how we think about world politics.

The Westphalian Constitution of world order

The Peace Treaties of Westphalia and Osnabruck (1648) established the legal basis for modern statehood and the rules of world politics.
Pope Innocent rejected the Westphalian settlement, calling it “null, reprobate, and devoid of meaning”, but over four centuries it became the normative structure of the modern world order.
At the core of the Westphalian settlement was the recognition of each ruler’s right to rule their own territories free from outside interference, codified in the doctrine of sovereign statehood.
In the twentieth century, as global empires collapsed, sovereign statehood and national self-determination became universal organizing principles of world order.
The Westphalian Constitution provided the framework for modern world politics, establishing the legitimacy of sovereign rule and territoriality.
Constitutions are crucial for determining the location of legitimate political authority and the rules governing the exercise and limits of political power.
The Westphalian Constitution merged territoriality with sovereign rule, defining sovereignty as the right to exclusive, unqualified, and supreme rule within a delimited territory.
Sovereignty is exclusive (no outside intervention), unqualified (complete authority within territories), and supreme (no higher legal authority).
For many weak states, sovereignty hasn’t always equated to effective control within their territories, leading to “organized hypocrisy” (Krasner).
Despite these challenges, the Westphalian system has shaped the trajectory of world politics and remains the founding covenant of world politics.
The UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have modified aspects of the Westphalian Constitution, especially regarding sovereignty.
Many argue that contemporary globalization presents a challenge to sovereign statehood and is transforming world order.

From (state-centric) geopolitics to (geocentric) global politics

Globalization over the past five decades has blurred the line between domestic and foreign policy, challenging the fiction of a separate domestic and international political sphere.
Former President Clinton advocated for discussing issues like economic policy, security policy, and environmental policy rather than separating foreign and domestic policy.
Anti-globalization protests and national courts enforcing World Trade Organization (WTO) rulings highlight the anachronistic nature of the Westphalian system.
A post-Westphalian world order is emerging, with a focus on global politics, which includes rule-making, problem-solving, and maintaining global security and order.
Global politics involves more than conflict and cooperation between states, emphasizing the need to recognize the importance of states, geopolitics, and global structures.
Political globalization challenges the traditional one-dimensional view of world politics as solely a power struggle between states.
Under political globalization, states are embedded in global systems with multilateral institutions, transnational networks, and global policy networks.
Global governance complex includes states, international institutions, transnational networks, and public/private agencies, coordinating global affairs.
Private global governance involves non-governmental agencies shaping global economic and social affairs, like the International Accounting Standards Board and credit-rating agencies.
A growing transnational civil society of NGOs, advocacy networks, and citizens’ groups plays a significant role in global politics.
At the 2006 WTO Ministerial in Hong Kong, environmental and corporate representatives outnumbered government representatives, signaling the rise of transnational civil society.
Inequality in transnational civil society exists, with multinational corporations having more access to power than smaller advocacy groups.
Global politics is marked by economic, social, cultural, and ecological concerns such as pollution, drugs, human rights, and terrorism, which require international cooperation.
Traditional geopolitical logic is inadequate for addressing issues like resource depletion, environmental degradation, and chemical weapons proliferation, which transcend borders.
Sovereign state power is being transformed but not eroded; states now assert sovereignty as a bargaining tool in transnational systems.
The Westphalian view of sovereignty as indivisible and territorially exclusive is being replaced by a shared form of sovereignty in a post-Westphalian world order.
Globalization doesn’t lead to the end of the state but creates a more activist state, requiring extensive multilateral collaboration to achieve domestic objectives.
State autonomy is compromised by global governance frameworks, presenting a trade-off between effective governance and self-governance.
The disaggregated state model replaces the idea of a monolithic state, with different government agencies interacting with international counterparts and NGOs.
Global politics is no longer confined to territorial boundaries; it acknowledges that decisions made in one region impact distant regions, blurring the lines between domestic and international politics.
Power in the global system is distributed unevenly among various actors, including states, corporations, and NGOs.
Political authority is diffused upwards to supra-state bodies like the European Union, downwards to sub-state bodies, and beyond the state to private agencies.
Sovereignty remains an important concept but is increasingly shared and divided between local, national, regional, and global authorities.
The rise of global politics challenges traditional notions of closed national polities and recognizes that all politics occur in a global context.
Inequality and exclusion remain prevalent in global politics due to power imbalances between states, the dominance of global capitalism, and technocratic decision-making.
These factors contribute to distorted global politics, where states and groups with greater power resources dominate the global agenda and decision-making.
Democracy in global politics is limited, as powerful states and organizations have disproportionate control over global issues.
The possibility of a more democratic global politics is a key concern for normative theorists.

From distorted global politics to cosmopolition global politics?

Globalization is associated with a double democratic deficit:
- It undermines the ability of democratic governments to manage transnational forces in line with citizens’ preferences, compromising self-governance.
- It leads to distorted global politics, where power asymmetries benefit global elites at the expense of the broader global community.
Many global civil society agencies are unrepresentative of the world’s peoples, weakening the democratic credentialsof global politics.
Redressing the double democratic deficit and addressing global poverty are key challenges for the twenty-first century.
Cosmopolitanism critiques distorted global politics for perpetuating global inequalities and injustices, advocating for a reformed global governance system that can regulate global markets and prevent harm to the most vulnerable.
Cosmopolitan democracy combines the democratization of global governance with the pursuit of global social justice, aiming to institutionalize values like rule of law, political equality, social justice, and economic efficiencywithin global power systems.
Cosmopolitan democracy seeks to extend democracy beyond national borders, addressing the double democratic deficit caused by globalization.
It aims to bring transnational networks of power under effective democratic control, establishing conditions for a more humane and democratic global politics.
Violence, division, and the dominance of might over right currently undermine the realization of cosmopolitan democracy, but its advocates argue it is rooted in existing global conditions.
Cosmopolitanism builds on the idea that globalization is creating a post-Westphalian order, blending elements of democratic principles and realpolitik in global politics.
The current world order includes self-determination, the rule of law, popular sovereignty, democratic legitimacy, and redistribution through aid, alongside might is right and national interest as dominant forces.
Globalization has sparked major political reactions, with progressive movements calling for more democratic global governance and regulation in the public and global interest.
The 2005 Make Poverty History campaign and increased pressure on G8 governments emphasize the need for more transparent, accountable, and legitimate global governance.
A global consensus is emerging on the need for reform, supported by diverse constituencies from both the North and South, as well as transnational civil society.
Distorted global politics expresses diverse democratic impulses, but powerful global forces resist the creation of a cosmopolitan or humane global politics.
Distorted global politics embodies a struggle between the logic of power politics (statism) and the logic of cosmopolitanism, between power and paradise.
The future trajectory of global politics remains speculative, raising both intellectual despair and relief: despair because current theories offer limited guidance, relief because the future is yet to be shaped.
Globalization will continue to be a powerful force for global change, with uncertain outcomes that could either improve or worsen global conditions.

Conclusion

This chapter explores the concept of globalization and its implications for the study of world politics.
Globalization reconstructs the world as a shared social space, but it is highly uneven in its intensity, extensity, and asymmetry across different spheres.
Globalization leads to a highly unequal geography of global inclusion and exclusion, contributing to both conflict and cooperation in world affairs.
The chapter emphasizes a fundamental shift in world politics due to globalization: a move from geopolitics (inter-state politics) to global politics—the politics of both state and non-state actors within a shared global space.
Global politics is marked by deep inequalities of power, and in its current form, it is more accurately described as distorted global politics—a politics of domination, contestations, and competition between powerful states and transnational social forces.
Cosmopolitan theory argues that a more democratic global politics is both desirable and feasible.
The trajectory of global politics will be shaped by the struggle between the forces of statism and cosmopolitanism—or the conflict between might is right versus right is might.
The outcome of this contest will determine whether twenty-first-century global politics will be characterized by hopeor fear, and whether a more humane and democratic global politics can emerge from today’s distorted global politics.