Globalization: Another false universalism?

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 21, Issue 6, 2000, Pages 930-941

  Kessler, Clive S ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ECONOMIC RELATIONS; GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE; GLOBALIZATION;

EID: 0034525620     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01436590020011954     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. But, as James Mittelman has pointed out to me, this too may be an instance of an illusory cosmopolitanism or 'compromized universalism'. Overwhelmingly, this massive corpus of globalization literature has been produced by scholars in the dominant Euro-American world; substantially, if without acknowledgement, it reflects the quite partial viewpoint and sectional interests of those countries and their academic classes who are in many ways among the beneficiaries, the 'winners' rather than the 'losers', of globalization. All standpoints are to some degree partial and limited, all places are parochial. But, as any stranger who has ever lived in New York or London or Paris realizes, there is no parochialism like the parochialism of places that imagine themselves central.
2. The idea of time-space compression has been central to all Giddens writings about globalization and late modernity since the mid-1980s (such as Giddens, 1990, 1991) and features again in his 1999 BBC Reith Lectures entitled 'A Runaway World'. The same idea is also basic to Zygmunt Baumann's recent essay (1998).
3. In the case of the Muslim Malay villagers of the Malaysian state of Kelantan (as, I would argue, for most Muslims worldwide), the pilgrimage and fasting month rituals give expression to this elusive idea of the moral equality before God of all human beings and, at the same time, to the tension between this egalitarian vision of human commonality and the implacable actualities of social inequality and division in mundane life (see Kessler, 1978: 216-222, 244-46, especially 218-220). No less poignant, analogous moments of ritual recognition of the equality of all believers before God and, at the same time, of how this idea is commonly belied in everyday experience - of the tensions between the idea of the moral equality of all human beings and the facts of social inequality - are also identifiable in both Judaism and Christianity. It is in ritual that ideal visions and unideal reality are brought together; ritual gives expression to both these dimensions of the human situation and to the irreconcilable tensions between them. That the idea of human equality and the notion of the abstract individual (in this case under God's law, as a yardstick against which all humans should measure themselves morally) were born in the human imagination in a religious form, and were first launched into the world and human history under the sponsorship of religion, is a little recognized consequence, and part of the legacy, of monotheistic doctrine and faith.
4. Throughout Judaism, from it origins, Theodore Long (1991: 20-21) remarks, 'we find universalism entangled with particularism'. In its main themes, Hebrew religion 'contains seeds of universalism, but they are planted in a very particularistic soil which limited their full growth and flowering. In that sense at least, Israel's history is the story of universalism's struggle to grow in somewhat unfavourable conditions.' This view of ancient Judaism, especially in its prophetic variants, as the source of an emergent but not uncontested moral universlism was, of course, that of Max Weber (see Zeitlin, 1984).
5. This, with all its attendant understandings and implicit theory, is the term for civilizational encounters or engagements which, notoriously and quite unhelpfully, the work of Samuel Huntington (1996) had made fashionable.
6. The kind of 'market fundamentalism' which is widely known in the USA as 'neoliberalism' is often referred to elsewhere (including in Australia) as 'economic rationalism'. See in particular Pusey (1991). On the 'genealogy' of the term 'economic rationalism', see Schneider (1998). Less seriously, even sardonically if at times tediously, see also Ellis (1998).
7. This is part of the peculiar power of such movements as Pauline Hanson's One Nation party in Australia. The success of governments and parties championing the wholesale privatization of public assets and state facilities has rested, to a significant degree, on their ability to tap and mobilize electorally, on this very basis, the discontent of the principal victims of the 'deregulation' required by 'economic globalizalion' - especially certain vulnerable and increasingly marginalized remnants of the old urban working class, as well as those in various regional centres and non-metropolitan districts (centres of now declining industries that, as a result of the removal of old tariff protection, have become areas of catastrophic unemployment). Such people have arguably contributed most (especially in unemployment and declining social amenities and government facilities) to the economic restructuring of recent years and have generally received least from it. In this connection see Manne (1998. especially parts 2 and 3, pp 43-84, 85-103).
8. For some further development of this point and its practical implications for questions of 'cultural identity' and the 'negotiation of difference' see Kessler (1985: especially 136-137; 1991: especially 61-64).
9. The classic source for these adverse characterizations is Kathleen Gough's (1968) often reprinted article.
10. Despite its tendencies towards 'technological determinism' in the face of the new communications and information technologies, a recent work by the prominent Australian Labour Party politician Lindsay Tanner contends that, while globalization may be unavoidable, it is negotiable. One hopes he is right - and that it is accordingly the task of responsible states to negotiate the engagement of national structures with global forces. While the formula 'unavoidable but negotiable' is appealing, just how this is to be done, and what policies might be devised to further that end, remain unclear. That, perhaps, is the major challenge now facing social democracy in the new era of accelerating globalization.
11. For Ignatieff's account of 'the needs of strangers' and of the moral claims which they make upon us - based on his reading of the situation in extremis of Shakespeare's King Lear, and of elemental 'unaccommodated' humankind, 'the thing itself', as a 'bare forked animal' - see Ignatieff (1984).