Globalization a homogenization

By Hilman Adil

This is the first of two articles dealing with the issue of globalization.

JAKARTA (JP): The debate about globalization as a world process, and its consequences, has been going on now for some time.

Increasingly over the last few years the challenge of globalization has been much discussed in academic, political, business and wider public circles, referring to the possible demise of the nation-state.

Their key focus is on two fronts: (a) cultural fragmentation and things related to it, and (b) economic fragmentation, both on a global scale.

Global cultural fragmentation consists of the weakening of former national identities -- especially the dissolution of a membership known as citizenship, in the abstract meaning of membership in a territorially defined and stage-governed society, and its replacement by an identity based on primordial loyalties, ethnicity, race, local community, language and other culturally concrete forms.

The tendency to culturally fragment is in this view, not part of a process of development in the emergence of a post-industrial order -- an information society on a global scale.

Rather it is a question of economic fragmentation, an accompanying increase in competition and a tendency for new centers of accumulation to concentrate both economic and political power in their own hands, which is the beginning of a major shift in hegemony in the world system.

This process of fragmentation has taken the form of movements in cultural autonomy, nationalism, ethnicity and a general trend toward all forms of local autonomy.

The highest level of segmentation beneath the state are among nationalist-ethnic, ethnic and cultural autonomy movements. Nationalist movements, or rather subnationalist, and politics have become increasingly troublesome in the center of the system.

The belief in a pan-European society has for the most part faded away in the present situation, in the wake of both national conflicts of interest and internal movements of Basques, Scots, Bretons, the Flemish and others, referred to by a prominent scholar in the following terms: "The recent reemergence and intensification of subnational ethnic conflict in Western Europe and North America have come as a surprise to most scholarly observers." (A. Lijphart, Political Theories and its explanation of ethnic conflict in the Western world: falsified predictions and plausible post dictions, in Essman, M. (ed), Ethnic Conflict in the Western World, Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1977).

The focus on the economic front is directed toward economic policymakers who are constrained by global financial markets, international investors, policy decisions by the most powerful states, and more recently measures by powerful currency speculators.

What is needed is to map some of the shifting configurations of this problem, of the local and the global, particularly in relation to the nation-state.

From the outset, we should distinguish two types of globalization: (a) when separated elements (markets, cultures) make contact for the first time, without regulatory measures, certain phenomena will result, i.e. collapse of markets or the assimilation of one culture by another, and (b) when forces on a global scale favor uniformity, i.e. human societies or nation- states with different evolutionary and historical backgrounds.

In this article, we will concentrate on the second type of globalization.

The impact of globalization on the nation-state has been marked by pressure from seven key phenomena: (a) the growing trend toward free trade in markets, (b) computerization and automation in world industries, (c) the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has transformed the geopolitical situation by ending the Cold War, (d) new information and communications highways, (e) the globalization of environmental problems as a result of the greenhouse effect and ozone layer depletion, (f) the increase in world population, and lastly, (g) massive migration of human populations from countrysides to cities, from one country to another, or from one continent to other parts of the world.

The social and economic sciences have also given their own version of the impact of globalization. For example, economists attribute these to world-wide financial and economic stability or the extraordinary growth rate of some Southeast Asian countries before the recent currency crisis.

Sociologists are struck by the aspirations for a single life- style and by the monotonous resemblance of suburbs around the world, as well as the phenomena of exclusion, violence, and marginalization of entire populations, very often within one country.

Communicators tell us of new information channels that leap across national boundaries, and of their possible repercussions on the interaction of societies and individuals. Political scientists regard globalization as responsible for frequent regional wars and massive migrations, as well as for the nuclear proliferation threat and a new vision of geopolitical security.

The concept of culture poses us with a paradox. On one hand, culture is by definition particularistic. In the anthropological sense, culture means the set of values or practices of a particular group over those of another group at the same level of discourse, i.e. French vs. Italian culture, proletarian vs. bourgeois culture, etc.

On the other hand, there can be no justification of cultural values or practices other than by reference to some universal criteria. To argue the contrary would put people in isolation and force them either in cultural relativism or in a state of xenophobia since no other group's values or practices could be good or could be tolerated.

The premise of this article is that the global circulation of images, ideologies, people and resources poses a complex challenge to the cultural presumptions underlying the modern international system.

Notions of ethnic identity and cultural specificity are invoked to legitimize principles of state sovereignty and protectionism. But at the same time, the affiliations and identifications of increasing sections of society no longer correspond to existing territorial maps.

The first question which comes to mind is, can there conceivably be such a thing as a world culture. Some have argued, based on historical facts, that some people at least have put forward ideas which have asserted to be universal values.

Furthermore, for some 200 years now, and even more intensively for the last 50 years, many national governments as well as world institutions have asserted the validity and even the enforceability of such values.

Other writers have argued that the question posed before contains a historical paradox. The so-called nation-state, our primary cultural container, is of course a relatively recent creation. A world consisting of nation-states partially came into existence in the sixteenth century.

Such a world became a matter of widespread consciousness only in the nineteenth century. It became an inescapable universal phenomenon only after 1945. Side by side with the emergence of such nation-states, each with frontiers, each with its own traditions, the world has been moving toward a world consciousness which we call humanity.

And to top off this dual track, i.e. the historical creation of the nation-state side by side with the historical creation of universal humanity, we find a curious anomaly.

Over time, nation-states have come to resemble each other more in their cultural or political forms, each having a legislature, a constitution, a bureaucracy, trade unions or a national currency.

Even in the more particularistic art forms, each nation-state has its songs, dances, plays, museums and paintings. Curiously enough, the more intense the nationalist fervor, the more identical seem the expressions of this nationalism.

Indeed, one of the major nationalist demands has frequently been to obtain that from which more privileged countries already possess. This is in part from cultural diffusion, made possible by the advances in transportation and communications.

This phenomenon is usually explained in two ways: (a) the thesis of linear tendency toward one world, and (b) the stage theory of human development.

The thesis of linear tendency or secular tendency argues that the world originally contained a large number of distinct groups. Over time, as the scope of activity expands, with the aid of science and technology, groups will merge and become one world, so we will have one political world, one economic world and one cultural world.

The theory of human development maintains that the historic differences of all groups have always been superficial. In certain key structural ways, all groups have always been the same. Thus, all societies go through parallel stages but will end up with a single human society in the end and therefore with a world culture.

These two classic explanations for the trend toward a global culture have been criticized for the following reason. Defining culture is a question of defining boundaries that are essentially political.

The boundaries must be arbitrary in the sense that the drawing up of them is seldom easy to explain.

We could argue that no matter how a culture is defined, not all members of the designated group hold its presumed values or share its presumed practices.

It is, therefore, possible to find a variety of cultures in one region alone. What might be called the fluidity of culture has always been a social reality, and can only have become intensified with the increasing density of human settlement.

That is why we could say that every individual is the meeting point of a very large number of cultural traits. It means that each individual is in fact a unique composite of cultural characteristics. To use a metaphor of painting, the resulting collective cultural landscape is a very subtle blending of an incredibly large number of colors.

In this sense, the history of the world has been against the trend of cultural homogenization. It has rather been a trend toward cultural differentiation.

But we also know that this centrifugal process has not slid toward cultural anarchy. There are forces restraining the centrifugal tendencies. In our modern world-system, the single most powerful force has been the nation-state.

From this analysis we can surmise that although the present international system is less commanding, it is still influential. States are changing but they are not disappearing. Some communities are breaking up and others are consolidating.

Governments are weaker, but they still can throw their weight around. "Home" is no longer so much a place as it is a sense of connectedness, but it remains the center of daily life.

Boundaries can still keep out intruders, but they are also more porous. Landscapes are giving way to ethnoscapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes, technoscapes, and finanscapes.

The writer is director at the Center for Social and Cultural Studies at the National Institute of Sciences.