RUNAWAY WORLD PROFESSOR GIDDENS
LECTURE 1 - GLOBALISATION - LONDON
GLOBALISATION
A friend of mine studies village life in central Africa. A few years ago,
she paid her first visit to a remote area where she was to carry out
her fieldwork. The evening she got there, she was invited to a local
home for an evening's entertainment. She expected to find out about
the traditional pastimes of this isolated community. Instead, the
evening turned out to be a viewing of basic instinct on video. The film
at that point hadn't even reached the cinemas in London.
Such vignettes reveal something about our world. And what they
reveal isn't trivial. It isn't just a matter of people adding modern
paraphernalia - videos, TVs, personal computers and so forth - to
their traditional ways of life. We live in a world of transformations,
affecting almost every aspect of what we do. For better or worse, we
are being propelled into a global order that no one fully understands,
but which is making its effects felt upon all of us.
Globalisation is the main theme of my lecture tonight, and of the
lectures as a whole. The term may not be - it isn't - a particularly
attractive or elegant one. But absolutely no-one who wants to
understand our prospects and possibilities at century's end can ignore
it. I travel a lot to speak abroad. I haven't been to a single country
recently where globalisation isn't being intensively discussed. In
France, the word is mondialisation. In Spain and Latin America, it is
globalizacion. The Germans say globalisierung.
The global spread of the term is evidence of the very developments to
which it refers. Every business guru talks about it. No political speech
is complete without reference to it. Yet as little as 10 years ago the
term was hardly used, either in the academic literature or in everyday
language. It has come from nowhere to be almost everywhere. Given
its sudden popularity, we shouldn't be surprised that the meaning of
the notion isn't always clear, or that an intellectual reaction has set in
against it. Globalisation has something to do with the thesis that we
now all live in one world - but in what ways exactly, and is the idea
really valid?
Different thinkers have taken almost completely opposite views about
globalisation in debates that have sprung up over the past few years.
Some dispute the whole thing. I'll call them the sceptics. According to
the sceptics, all the talk about globalisation is only that - just talk.
Whatever its benefits, its trials and tribulations, the global economy
isn't especially different from that which existed at previous periods.
The world carries on much the same as it has done for many years.
Most countries, the sceptics argue, only gain a small amount of their
income from external trade. Moreover, a good deal of economic
exchange is between regions, rather than being truly world-wide. The
countries of the European Union, for example, mostly trade among
themselves. The same is true of the other main trading blocs, such as
those of the Asia Pacific or North America.
Others, however, take a very different position. I'll label them the
radicals. The radicals argue that not only is globalisation very real, but
that its consequences can be felt everywhere. The global
marketplace, they say, is much more developed than even two or
three decades ago, and is indifferent to national borders. Nations have
lost most of the sovereignty they once had, and politicians have lost
most of their capability to influence events. It isn't surprising that no
one respects political leaders any more, or has much interest in what
they have to say. The era of the nation state is over. Nations, as the
Japanese business writer Keniche Ohmae puts it, have become mere
'fictions'. Authors like Ohmae see the economic difficulties of last year
and this as demonstrating the reality of globalisation, albeit seen from
its disruptive side.
The sceptics tend to be on the political left, especially the old left.
For if all of this is essentially a myth, governments can still intervene
in economic life and the welfare state remain intact. The notion of
globalisation, according to the sceptics, is an ideology put about by
free-marketeers who wish to dismantle welfare systems and cut back
on state expenditures. What has happened is at most a reversion to
how the world was a century ago. In the late 19th Century there was
already an open global economy, with a great deal of trade, including
trade in currencies.
Well, who is right in this debate? I think it is the radicals. The level of
world trade today is much higher than it ever was before, and involves
a much wider range of goods and services. But the biggest difference
is in the level of finance and capital flows. Geared as it is to electronic
money - money that exists only as digits in computers - the current
world economy has no parallels in earlier times. In the new global
electronic economy, fund managers, banks, corporations, as well as
millions of individual investors, can transfer vast amounts of capital
from one side of the world to another at the click of a mouse. As they
do so, they can destabilise what might have seemed rock-solid
economies - as happened in East Asia.
The volume of world financial transactions is usually measured in US
dollars. A million dollars is a lot of money for most people. Measured as
a stack of thousand dollar notes, it would be eight inches high. A
billion dollars - in other words, a million million - would be over 120
miles high, 20 times higher than Mount Everest.
Yet far more than a trillion dollars is now turned over each day on
global currency markets, a massive increase from only 10 years ago,
let alone the more distant past. The value of whatever money we may
have in our pockets, or our bank accounts, shifts from moment to
moment according to fluctuations in such markets. I would have no
hesitation, therefore, in saying that globalisation, as we are
experiencing it, is in many respects not only new, but revolutionary.
However, I don't believe either the sceptics or the radicals have
properly understood either what it is or its implications for us. Both
groups see the phenomenon almost solely in economic terms. This is a
mistake. Globalisation is political, technological and cultural, as well as
economic. It has been influenced above all by developments in
systems of communication, dating back only to the late 1960's.
In the mid-19th Century, a Massachusetts portrait painter, Samuel
Morse, transmitted the first message, "What hath god wrought?", by
electric telegraph. In so doing, he initiated a new phase in world
history. Never before could a message be sent without someone going
somewhere to carry it. Yet the advent of satellite communications
marks every bit as dramatic a break with the past. The first
communications satellite was launched only just over 30 years ago.
Now there are more than 200 such satellites above the earth, each
carrying a vast range of information. For the first time ever,
instantaneous communication is possible from one side of the world to
the other. Other types of electronic communication, more and more
integrated with satellite transmission, have also accelerated over the
past few years. No dedicated transatlantic or transpacific cables
existed at all until the late 1950's. The first held less than 100 voice
paths. Those of today carry more than a million.
On the first of February 1999, about 150 years after Morse invented
his system of dots and dashes, Morse code finally disappeared from
the world stage, discontinued as a means of communication for the
sea. In its place has come a system using satellite technology,
whereby any ship in distress can be pinpointed immediately. Most
countries prepared for the transition some while before. The French,
for example, stopped using Morse as a distress code in their local
waters two years ago, signing off with a Gallic flourish: 'Calling all.
This is our last cry before our external silence'.
Instantaneous electronic communication isn't just a way in which
news or information is conveyed more quickly. Its existence alters the
very texture of our lives, rich and poor alike. When the image of
Nelson Mandela may be is more familiar to us than the face of our next
door neighbour, something has changed in the nature of our everyday
experience.
Nelson Mandela is a global celebrity, and celebrity itself is largely a
product of new communications technology. The reach of media
technologies is growing with each wave of innovation. It took 40
years for radio in the United States to gain an audience of 50 million.
The same number were using personal computers only 15 years after
the PC was introduced. It needed a mere four years, after it was
made available for 50 million Americans to be regularly using the
Internet.
It is wrong to think of globalisation as just concerning the big
systems, like the world financial order. Globalisation isn't only about
what is 'out there', remote and far away from the individual. It is an 'in
here' phenomenon too, influencing intimate and personal aspects of
our lives. The debate about family values, for example, that is going
on in many countries, might seem far removed from globalising
influences. It isn't. Traditional family systems are becoming
transformed, or are under strain, in many parts of the world,
particularly as women stake claim to greater equality. There has never
before been a society, so far as we know from the historical record, in
which women have been even approximately equal to men. This is a
truly global revolution in everyday life, whose consequences are being
felt around the world in spheres from work to politics.
Globalisation thus is a complex set of processes, not a single one. And
these operate in a contradictory or oppositional fashion. Most people
think of it as simply 'pulling away' power or influence from local
communities and nations into the global arena. And indeed this is one
of its consequences. Nations do lose some of the economic power
they once had. However, it also has an opposite effect. Globalisation
not only pulls upwards, it pushes downwards, creating new pressures
for local autonomy. The American sociologist Daniel Bell expresses this
very well when he says that the nation becomes too small to solve
the big problems, but also too large to solve the small ones.
Globalisation is the reason for the revival of local cultural identities in
different parts of the world. if one asks, for example, why the Scots
want more independence in the UK, or why there is a strong
separatist movement in Quebec, the answer is not to be found only in
their cultural history. Local nationalisms spring up as a response to
globalising tendencies, as the hold of older nation-states weakens.
Globalisation also squeezes sideways. It creates new economic and
cultural zones within and across nations. Examples are the Hong Kong
region, northern Italy, or Silicon Valley in California. The area around
Barcelona in northern Spain extends over into France. Catalonia,
where Barcelona is located, is closely integrated into the European
Union. It is part of Spain, yet also looks outwards.
The changes are being propelled by a range of factors, some
structural, others more specific and historical. Economic influences are
certainly among the driving forces, especially the global financial
system. Yet they aren't like forces of nature. They have been shaped
by technology, and cultural diffusion, as well as by the decisions of
governments to liberalise and deregulate their national economies.
The collapse of soviet communism has added further weight to such
developments, since no significant group of countries any longer
stands outside. That collapse wasn't just something that happened to
occur. Globalisation explains both why and how Soviet communism met
its end. The Soviet Union and the East European countries were
comparable to the West in terms of growth rates until somewhere
around the early 1970s. After that point, they fell rapidly behind.
Soviet communism, with its emphasis upon state-run enterprise and
heavy industry, could not compete in the global electronic economy.
The ideological and cultural control upon which communist political
authority was based similarly could not survive in an era of global
media.
The Soviet and the East European regimes were unable to prevent the
reception of western radio and TV broadcasts. Television played a
direct role in the 1989 revolutions, which have rightly been called the
first "television revolutions". Street protests taking place in one
country were watched by the audiences in others, large numbers of
whom then took to the streets themselves.
Globalisation, of course, isn't developing in an even-handed way, and
is by no means wholly benign in its consequences. To many living
outside Europe and North America, it looks uncomfortably like
Westernisation - or, perhaps, Americanisation, since the US is now the
sole superpower, with a dominant economic, cultural and military
position in the global order. many of the most visible cultural
expressions of globalisation are American - Coca-Cola, McDonalds, .
Most of giant multinational companies are based in the US too. Those
that aren't all come from the rich countries, not the poorer areas of
the world. A pessimistic view of globalisation would consider it largely
an affair of the industrial North, in which the developing societies of
the south play little or no active part. It would see it as destroying
local cultures, widening world inequalities and worsening the lot of the
impoverished. Globalisation, some argue, creates a world of winners
and losers, a few on the fast track to prosperity, the majority
condemned to a life of misery and despair.
And indeed the statistics are daunting. The share of the poorest fifth
of the world's population in global income has dropped from 2.3% to
1.4% over the past 10 years. The proportion taken by the richest
fifth, on the other hand, has risen from 70% to 85%. In Sub-Saharan
Africa, 20 countries have lower incomes per head in real terms than
they did two decades ago. In many less developed countries, safety
and environmental regulations are low or virtually non-existent. Some
trans-national companies sell goods there that are controlled or
banned in the industrial countries - poor quality medical drugs,
destructive pesticides or high tar and nicotine content cigarettes. As
one writer put it recently, rather than a global village, this is more like
global pillage.
Along with ecological risk, to which it is related, expanding inequality
is the most serious problem facing world society. It will not do,
however, merely to blame it on the wealthy. It is fundamental to my
argument that globalisation today is only partly Westernisation. Of
course the western nations, and more generally the industrial
countries, still have far more influence over world affairs than do the
poorer states. But globalisation is becoming increasingly de-centred -
not under the control of any group of nations, and still less of the
large corporations. Its effects are felt just as much in the western
countries as elsewhere.
This is true of the global financial system, communications and media,
and of changes affecting the nature of government itself. Examples of
'reverse colonisation' are becoming more and more common. Reverse
colonisation means that non-western countries influence
developments in the west. Examples abound - such as the Latinising
of Los Angeles, the emergence of a globally-oriented high-tech sector
in India, or the selling of Brazilian TV programmes to Portugal.
Is globalisation a force promoting the general good? The question
can't be answered in simple way, given the complexity of the
phenomenon. People who ask it, and who blame globalisation for
deepening world inequalities, usually have in mind economic
globalisation, and within that, free trade. Now it is surely obvious that
free trade is not an unalloyed benefit. This is especially so as
concerns the less developed countries. Opening up a country, or
regions within it, to free trade can undermine a local subsistence
economy. An area that becomes dependent upon a few products sold
on world markets is very vulnerable to shifts in prices as well as to
technological change.
Trade always needs a framework of institutions, as do other forms of
economic development. Markets cannot be created by purely
economic means, and how far a given economy should be exposed to
the world marketplace must depend upon a range of criteria. Yet to
oppose economic globalisation, and to opt for economic protectionism,
would be a misplaced tactic for rich and poor nations alike.
Protectionism may be a necessary strategy at some times and in some
countries. In my view, for example, Malaysia was correct to introduce
controls in 1998, to stem the flood of capital from the country. But
more permanent forms of protectionism will not help the development
of the poor countries, and among the rich would lead to warring trade
blocs.
The debates about globalisation I mentioned at the beginning have
concentrated mainly upon its implications for the nation-state. Are
nation-states, and hence national political leaders, still powerful, or
are they becoming largely irrelevant to the forces shaping the world?
Nation-states are indeed still powerful and political leaders have a
large role to play in the world. Yet at the same time the nation-state
is being reshaped before our eyes. National economic policy can't be
as effective as it once was. More importantly, nations have to rethink
their identities now the older forms of geopolitics are becoming
obsolete. Although this is a contentious point, I would say that,
following the dissolving of the cold war, nations no longer have
enemies. Who are the enemies of Britain, or France, or Japan? Nations
today face risks and dangers rather than enemies, a massive shift in
their very nature.
It isn't only of the nation that such comments could be made.
Everywhere we look, we see institutions that appear the same as they
used to be from the outside, and carry the same names, but inside
have become quite different. We continue to talk of the nation, the
family, work, tradition, nature, as if they were all the same as in the
past. They are not. The outer shell remains, but inside all is different -
and this is happening not only in the US, Britain, or France, but almost
everywhere. They are what I call shell institutions, and I shall talk
about them quite a bit in the lectures to come. They are institutions
that have become inadequate to the tasks they are called upon to
perform.
As the changes I have described in this lecture gather weight, they
are creating something that has never existed before, a global
cosmopolitan society. We are the first generation to live in this
society, whose contours we can as yet only dimly see. It is shaking
up our existing ways of life, no matter where we happen to be. This is
not - at least at the moment - a global order driven by collective
human will. Instead, it is emerging in an anarchic, haphazard, fashion,
carried along by a mixture of economic, technological and cultural
imperatives.
It is not settled or secure, but fraught with anxieties, as well as
scarred by deep divisions. Many of us feel in the grip of forces over
which we have no control. Can we re-impose our will upon them? I
believe we can. The powerlessness we experience is not a sign of
personal failings, but reflects the incapacities of our institutions. We
need to reconstruct those we have, or create new ones, in ways
appropriate to the global age.
We should and we can look to achieve greater control over our
runaway world. We shan't be able to do so if we shirk the challenges,
or pretend that all can go on as before. For globalisation is not
incidental to our lives today. It is a shift in our very life
circumstances. It is the way we now live.
RISK
My theme is risk. I hope to persuade you that this apparently simple
notion helps unlock some of the characteristics of the world in which
we now live.
At first sight the concept of risk might seem to have no specific
relevance to our times. After all, haven't people always had to face
their share of risks? In the middle ages, in Europe, life was nasty,
brutish and short.
But the middle ages had no concept of risk. And many traditional
culture didn't have a concept of risk. The reason is they didn't need
one. Risk isn't the same as danger. Risk refers to hazards that are
actively assessed in relation to future possibilities. It only comes into
wide usage in a society which sees the future as territory to be
conquered or colonised. Risk presumes a society that actively tries to
break away from its past - the characteristic of modern industrial
civilisation.
Previous cultures, including the great early civilisations of the world,
have lived primarily in the past. They have used the ideas of fate,
luck, or will of the gods where we now tend to substitute risk.
Acceptance of risk entails excitement and adventure - the pleasures
some people get from gambling, driving fast, sexual adventurism or the
plunge of a fairground rollercoaster. Embracing risk is the very source
of that energy which creates wealth in a modern economy.
Risk is the dynamic of a society bent on change, that wants to
determine its own future rather than leaving it to religion, tradition, or
the vagaries of nature. Risk was supposed to be a way of regulating
the future, of normalising it and bringing it under our dominion. Things
haven't turned out that way! Our attempts to control the future
rebound, forcing us to look for different ways of relating to
uncertainty.
We can make a distinction between two types of risk. External risk is
experienced as coming from outside, from the fixities of tradition or
nature. I distinguish this from manufactured risk, which is created by
the impact of our developing knowledge upon the world. Manufactured
risk refers to situations where history provides us with very little
experience to go on, such as global warming.
As manufactured risk expands, we simply don't know what the level of
risk is. In many cases we won't know until it is too late.
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