Globalization a homogenization

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.