‘Arguing Globalizations: Propositions Towards an Investigation of Global Formation’ (2005)

Globalizations September 2005, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 193– 209 Arguing Globalizations: Propositions towards an Investigation of Global Formation PAUL JAMES Globalism Institute, Australia ABSTRACT Theorizing globalization in all its contradictions and unevenness is still at a very formative stage. Too many theories are either characterized by reductive appropriations of the phenomenon or by studied vagueness. This article attempts to answer the question how can we set up a method for understanding such a variable set of processes associated with globalization(s) while still recognizing broad and changing dominant patterns of practice across world history. The article begins with the apparently simple issue of defining globalization, suggesting that definitional issues often hide a multitude of methodological questions. It then goes onto to develop a series of propositions about the nature of globalization and how we might move from detailed empirical studies of different social processes of extension across world space and time to an understanding of the changing nature of the spatiality and temporality itself. This is linked to an argument about the structures of power and subjection. Across the turn of the millennium, images of planet earth were commodified as corporate icons even as they were used to signify the wonders of local and embodied life. Just as the globalization literature began to focus on the problem of the relationship between globalism and localism, advertising images of the global began actively reclaiming the localized, the embodied and the culturally specific. Some of the examples are extraordinary. The telecommunications transnational Nortel transmogrifies the globe into a spongy human brain divided into eastern and western hemispheres: ‘To guarantee our success’, they say, ‘we source intelligence from both hemispheres.’ Energex’s naked baby reaches towards a blue heaven, sitting on corporate cloudy-blue earth. Barclays Global Investors uses an image of the globe with the words, ‘Events here. Affect your investments here . . . and here . . . and here.’ Vectors of penetration pointing to unnamed locations are used to indicate the multitude of places where your personal Correspondence Address: Paul James, Director, Globalism Institute, RMIT University, PO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001, Australia. Email: [email protected] ISSN 1474-7731 Print=ISSN 1474-774X Online=05=020193–17 # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080=14747730500202206 194 P. James investments might be affected. Lockheed Martin, the producer of weapons of guided destruction, presents a globe that has been broken into a thousand facets of localized colour or globalized significance. And perhaps in the most strikingly derivative connection of the embodied and disembodied, NEC, under the slogan ‘C&C for Human Potential’, uses a peacenik-style water-colour-rendered globe around which floating people—all Western, all white—link their bodies to form a kind of global garland.1 Such advertisements, as bizarre as they are, act as distorting representations within the dominant matrix of subjective representations of globalization today. They present the globe as getting subjectively smaller and people becoming more interconnected even as the nature of that connection becomes objectively more abstract and mediated by techniques and technologies of spatial extension-connection.2 That such images can link global capitalism to the putatively grounded expressions of the human without appearing simply ridiculous is indicative of a much bigger issue—the phenomenal experiences (and objective relations) of globalization are contradictory. Subjectively, globalization is experienced as an over-bracing phenomenon coming from the outside, but one that affects life on the ground including how we eat, work and acquire knowledge (for two very different accounts of this see Savage et al., 2005; Brennan, 2003). Objectively, globalization works differently at different levels and in different spheres of human activity. In this context, many commentators have taken that experience of globalization and made it into the basis of their definitions and theorizing. Roland Robertson has, for example, coined the concept of ‘glocalization’, defined as the simultaneous globalizing and localizing of social life, and used it to name one aspect of this matrix of different levels and extensions of social relations.3 This was a useful first step. However, the concept of ‘glocalization’ does not in itself explain anything, and I am not sure that George Ritzer’s (2003) ‘grobalization’ takes us any further. Alongside the simultaneous and inconsistent use of such concepts as ‘time–space distantiation’ and ‘time–space compression’, it has allowed critics such as Justin Rosenberg (2000) to take apart existing theories of these globalizing tensions and critically dissect their methodological confusions and limitations. In this context, the present article takes as its core task the problem of reframing the arguments about the formations of globalization. The article suggests that an adequate theory of globalization requires a prior and generalizing social theory, one that is able to take into account the contradictory nature of the various processes that extend social relations across time and space—from the local to global, and everything in-between. In other words, a theory of globalization has to be first and foremost a theory of different social formations. There can be no adequate theory of globalization-in-itself. Such a theory, arguably, has to be part of a broader method that takes into account the contradictory and uneven layering of different practices and subjectivities across all social relations. This is too large a task for one article to do more than take a couple of extra steps, but we need to begin the process somewhere. The discussion is thus organized around a series of interconnected propositions and arguments. The article begins with the apparently simple issue of defining globalization. It is suggested that definitional issues hide a multitude of methodological questions. This discussion is used to draw out the series of propositions for consideration, followed then by a preliminary presentation of an alternative method of analysis. Finally, the article relates this method to questions of politics as an elaboration on one of the central propositions—namely, that globalization is structured as relations of power. Towards an Alternative Definition Too many definitions of globalization are reductive, with a tendency to over-emphasize the economic basis of global relations or to focus on the communication revolution as its defining Arguing Globalizations 195 characteristic. One of the most quoted, broadest and most useful conceptions in the field—a definition that does not have this problem of being reductive—comes from a book called Global Transformations. There globalization is defined as a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions, assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact— generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction and the exercise of power. (Held et al., 1999, p. 16) The first key definitional point being made here is that globalization is a process, not a state of being. Secondly, it is treated as a process that involves organized social connections across space, with that space specified as transcontinental or inter-regional. This is a definition that mostly works, however it is workable partly because of its studied vagueness. We might well ask what degree of extensity, intensity, velocity and impact, make for globalization. Or alternatively, why is the inter-regional or even transcontinental reorganization of space sufficient to call it ‘globalization’? Why have changes in the mode of organization become the defining basis of globalization? Globalization, in the case that I want to mount, is defined not in terms of interregional reorganization. Nor is it, as some other definitions have suggested, the annihilation of space, the end of the nation-state, the overcoming of distance, or an end-state that we will finally reach when the local is subsumed by the global. Globalization may become more totalizing than it is now, but can never be complete—at least while we remain human and bound to some extent by our bodies and immediate relations. Rather, as I will suggest in a moment, it is no more than the extension of matrices of social practice and meaning across world-space where the notion of ‘world-space’ is itself defined in the historically variable terms that it has been practised and understood phenomenally through changing world-time. Globalization is thus a layered and uneven process, changing in its form, rather than able to be defined as a specific condition. Malcolm Waters’ approach gives us much more specificity, but also provides an instructive case study of the problems inherent in moving too quickly from definitional to methodological claims. He writes that globalization can be defined as ‘A social process in which the constraints of geography on economic, political, social and cultural arrangements recede, in which people become increasingly aware that they are receding and in which people act accordingly’ (Waters, 2001, p. 5; emphasis original).4 This definition is not reductive and it sounds helpful on the face of it. However, it quickly fades into an over-generalized claim that globalization includes every process of abstracting mobility across space—for example, the use of wheeled vehicles in the ancient world after 3000 BCE, spreading across Eurasia from the Fertile Crescent, would fit his definition. Alternatively, beneath the definition remains an under-theorized claim that implies that where people do not believe that the constraints of geography are not lifted, globalization does not exist. Thus Waters finds himself arguing two contrary points at the same time: firstly, that ‘some measure of globalization has always occurred’, and secondly that ‘globalization could not begin until [the early modern period] because it was only the Copernican revolution that could convince humanity that it inhabited a globe’ (Waters, 2001, p. 7).5 Beyond the historical problems with such as claim, there are methodological issues: the ‘constraints of geography’ do not simply recede across all levels of interchange. The English Channel has not dried up, and the executives of the world’s communications-connected corporations still experience jet-lag as they fly to an ever-increasing number of ‘face-to-face’ meetings. Put in more theoretical terms, what it suggests is the need for a layered rather than one-dimensional approach to 196 P. James understanding the spatial integration of social relations from the local to the global, and from the embodied to the disembodied. Waters’ approach in fact turns to a kind of ‘levels’ metaphor to attempt to get out of the very problem that his definition of globalization initially sets up. In the end the move fails, but it is instructive for considering what kinds of pitfalls a ‘levels’ approach needs to avoid. Part of the problem is that he reduces the metaphor of levels into a series of ideal types. He begins by distinguishing three types of exchange: material exchanges from trade to capital accumulation (linked to the economy); power exchanges from elections to the exercises of military control (linked to the polity); and symbolic exchanges from oral communication to data transfer (linked to the culture) (Waters, 2001, p. 19).6 Already we have a problem here, because, as theorists as dissimilar as Michael Mann and Michel Foucault have suggested, questions of power are relevant across all spheres of social life. Power reaches far beyond the political. Similarly, material relations cannot be limited to economic exchange relations. Both projections of power and symbolic interchange always have a material dimension. According to Waters (2001), these three types of exchange tend to be associated with three different types of spatially organized social relations: local, international and global. First, ignoring the obvious point that ‘material exchanges’ such as trade (using his definition of ‘material’) are in the contemporary period central to the process of globalization, Waters concludes that commodity and labour exchanges tend to bind social arrangements to localized settings. Secondly, ‘power exchanges’, he says, tend ‘to tie social arrangements to extended territories . . . indeed they are specifically directed towards controlling the population that occupies a territory’. This is the sphere of nation-states engaged in international relations. Again by a peculiar definitional closure, international relations are not globalizing. The third of his forms of exchange, symbolic exchange, thus becomes the arena of globalization. Such exchanges ‘release social arrangements from spatial referents’. He has already forgotten that on the previous page he defined symbolic exchange as including, alongside more abstracted or mediated forms of communication, forms of communication that are often conducted as face-to-face interchanges: oral communication, performance, oratory, ritual and public demonstration. In a reversal of his argument we can say that these forms of exchange often act to bind social arrangements to place and to localize others. The act of talking to someone is a form of symbolic exchange, but it is not usually the stuff of globalization. Waters’ Globalization, like a lot of globalization theory, never stops taking new methodological turns to solve the problems of the last turn. ‘In summary then’, he writes, ‘the theorem that underpins the new theoretical paradigm of globalization is that: material exchanges localize; political exchanges internationalize and symbolic exchanges globalize’ (Waters, 2001; emphasis original)—all of which, I suggest, are both empirically unsustainable and theoretically unhelpful. To get out of the set of problems that this proclamation entails, Waters’ (2001) approach takes another helical turn. He writes: We need to make a point here which is subtle and complex but which is extremely important. The apparent correspondence between the three arenas of social life—economy, politics, and culture— and the three types of exchange—material, power and symbolic—should not mislead us into thinking that each type of exchange is restricted to a single arena. In this case, the writer is onto something, but has twisted himself like a cartoon super-hero in a spiral of increasingly powerful confusion. The key implicit insight for our purposes—though never made explicit—is that processes of embodied integration tend to tie people to localities Arguing Globalizations 197 while disembodied or more abstract processes are potentially associated with the crossing of spatial and temporal boundaries. This relatively simple point is rarely made in the literature on globalization and the following discussion will attempt to take this further. In terms of the alternative approach that I am arguing for, we can say that in the contemporary world the more abstract the form of relation the more it seems to transcend borders. Put more precisely, the more materially abstract the process of globalization, the more it has in the contemporary period been deregulated and allowed to cross the borders of locales and nation-states. While the movements of bodies, objects of exchange and processes of disembodied inter-relation are all increasingly globalized, what most commentators miss is the relatively obvious point that they are globalized in different ways. In empirical terms, finance capital flies across ‘deterritorialized’ national borders (albeit made possible by very material processes of exchange and organization), while refugees are administered by states with a heavy-handed vigilance unknown in human history. Drawing out of the previous discussion and taking up the method of the ‘constitutive abstraction’ approach outlined in more detail elsewhere,7 this point can be taken further as part of a systematic series of propositions. Arguing Globalizations Proposition 1. Globalization is the extension of social relations across world-space, defining that world-space in terms of the historically variable ways that it has been practised and socially understood through changing world-time. In other words, long before that stunning photograph of the globe, ‘Earthrise’, 1968, hit us in the face with the obviousness of planet earth, there were different practices and conceptions of world-space. We may not have previously come close to the current condition of self-conscious globality—an unprecedented development in human history—but processes of globalization and the subjectivities of globalism were occurring, both intended and unintended, to the extent that social relations and subjectivities (together with their ecological consequences) were being given global reach. For example, subjective and ideological projections of the globe (globalism)8 emerged with the incipient development of a technical-analytical mode of enquiry by the ancient Greek philosophers. An understanding of the inhabited world-space (the oecumene) began to be debated during the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, combining information both from phenomenal experience such as oral testimony and from abstract principles such as geometry (Jacob, 1999). Lines of objective global extension developed in the traditional empires, arguably, for example, with the Roman Empire as it sought to control the known world. Proposition 2. The forms of globalization have been, and continue to be, historically changing. This can be analytically understood in terms of ‘globalization’ taking fundamentally different modes across world history, or even within one historical moment. In any particular period, globalization ranges from embodied extensions of the social, such as through the movements of peoples, to the disembodied extensions, such as through communications on the wings of textual or digital encoding. In terms of the present argument, across human history, and carrying into the present, the dominant forms of globalization range from traditional forms (primarily carried by the embodied movement of peoples and the projections of traditional intellectuals) to modern and postmodern forms (primarily carried by disembodied practices of abstracted extension, in particular the projections and practices of an emergent cosmopolitan class of the intellectually trained. 198 P. James Proposition 3. The driving structural determinants of contemporary globalization can best be understood in term of modes of practice that relate to social relations in general: production, exchange, communication, organization and enquiry. So that the contemporary dominant form of globalization needs to be understood in terms of capitalism (based on an accelerating electronic mode of production and an expanding mode of commodity and financial exchange), mediatism (the systemic interconnectivity of a mass-mediated world, based on a mode of electronically networked communication), and techno-scientism (based on a new intersection between the mode of production and the mode of enquiry). Contemporary globalization has reached its present stage of relative globality under conditions of the intersection of each of these modes of practice. For example, satellite transmission, cable networking, and the internet were all developed techno-scientifically as means of communication within state-supported capitalist markets that rapidly carried globalization to a new dominant level of technological mediation (Briggs & Burke, 2002). Proposition 4. Globalization is structured as relations of power. If it can be argued that disembodied power, borne across the various modes of practice, has the greatest capacity to effect generalized change at a distance, this proposition can be made more explicit. The dominant form of contemporary globalization is structured as relations of disembodied power that bear back upon the bodies of the people across the world with increasing intensity and systematicity. Proposition 5. Globalization does not inevitably sweep all before it. All that is solid does not melt into air. For example, processes of globalization may eventually undermine the sovereignty of the nation-state, but there is no inevitability about such an outcome, neither in logic or reality. It is salutary to remember that the institutions and structures of modern globalization and the modern nation-state were born during the same period; they were formed through concurrent processes, with the tension between these two phenomena being over boundary formation and sovereignty rather than in general. This argument goes directly against those who would treat nation formation and global formation as the antithetical outcomes of respectively a ‘first and second modernity’, or those who would narrowly define globalization as that which undermines the nation-state.9 In the context of contemporary globalization we have seen both nationalist revivals and reassertions of tribalism. As Michael Freeman argues: The impact of technological and economic globalization is more complex than simplistic ‘end-ofnation-state’ prophesies allow, but it is reordering of the world in such a way that many feel excluded and insecure. In this situation the so-called ‘new tribalism’ (which we have seen is not really new nor tribalism) appears to offer security and a measure of self-determination. As decision-making power moves away to trans-state or supra-state agencies, so sub-state ethnonationalist groups are encouraged to bypass what they perceive to be their unresponsive nation-states and seek solutions either at higher levels, where the real power is thought to be located, and/or at more local levels, where autonomy seems possible. Globalism and ‘tribalism’ may, therefore, not only co-exist but mutually support each other. (Freeman, 1998, p. 27) All of this suggests a very different approach from positing a ‘world of flows’—of ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes—such as presented by Arjun Appadurai (1996). It also suggests the need to go beyond the claims about a one-dimensional ‘network society’ as presented by Manuel Castells (see Sharp, 1997). Globalization is not simply a process of disorder, fragmentation or rupture. Nor, on the other hand, is it simply a force of homogenization. Writers as sophisticated and concerned about the structures of the ‘social whole’ as Fredric Jameson and David Harvey have found themselves arguing that Arguing Globalizations 199 the postmodern world has become increasingly fragmented without having an account of the level at which fragmentation takes place and the level at which reintegration is occurring.10 A similar problem of positing a social whole based on fragmentation is found in the argument about a shift from ‘organized’ to ‘disorganized capitalism’ (Lash & Urry, 1987; Offe, 1985). World capitalism has not recently become disorganized—and it was not uniquely organized in the first place; certainly not when Rudolf Hilferding first coined the term at the beginning of this century. It is true that the pace of change has accelerated and the life-world is experienced as increasingly in flux, but this does not mean that generalizable patterns cannot be ascertained. Both the critics of postmodernity and the postmodernists themselves may be right to point to the subjective experience of fragmentation. However, they have done very little to theorize the relationship between the increasing interconnection of social relations at a more abstract level (able to be generalized when viewed from afar) and the confusing, variable pastiche of fragmented practices and counter-practices apparent when viewed at close hand. How then do we take the next step? By explicitly recognizing how the nature of our analysis depends upon the place from which we begin the analysis (in other words, the level of abstraction taken by the theory), we can usefully move across a manifold of theoretical levels from onthe-ground detailed description to generalizations about modes of practice and forms of social being without privileging any one level.11 In doing so, it becomes possible to say that the world is becoming increasingly interconnected at the most abstract level of integration—for example, by the disembodying networks of electronic mass communication—even as social difference and social disruption at the level of the face-to-face is accented in and through that same process. Towards an Alternative Methodology Empirical Analysis It is generally accepted that any theory of globalization has to be built on a foundation of extensive empirical research. However, problems usually arise over either describing different things or partial versions of the same thing—hence the aptness of Manfred Steger’s (2002, p. 17) use of the Buddhist parable of the blind scholars attempting to describe an animal they have never encountered before by groping at its various body parts. As such the debates over the process of globalization are full of unhelpful proclamations. Either it is said that it does not exist as such (Hirst & Thompson, 1999), or that it is all-embracing or epochal (Waters, 2001; Albrow, 1996); that an earlier stage of globalization was brought to an end by the Great Depression (James, 2001), or that the dominance of market globalization ended with the attack on the World Trade Center towers.12 By moving to a more abstract level of analysis the all-or-nothing style of these interpretative claims can be avoided. Conjunctural Analysis At the more abstract level of conjunctural analysis, one useful way of examining the nature of globalization is through tracking the networks of social interchange in relation to analytically distinguishable modes of practice. Many writers already make this move partially and implicitly, some more successfully than others. Richard Langhorne’s writing is well grounded, but it illustrates the limitations of concentrating on one mode of practice. He begins with the tautologous claim that globalization is made possible by ‘global communications’. This is expressed 200 P. James dramatically as a single determinative: the ‘communications revolution is the cause of globalization’ (Langhorne, 2001, p. 2; emphasis added). Descending into reductionist technological determinism, he writes: ‘the real beginning of the globalizing process came when the steam locomotive revolutionized the transport of people, goods and information, particularly newspapers, and at much the same time, the electric telegraph first divorced verbal communication from whatever was the speed of terrestrial transport’ (Langhorne, 2001, pp. xi –xii). Anthony Giddens vacillates between the same emphasis on communications technologies as the key and saying singularly vague things such as ‘Globalisation is thus a complex set of processes, not a single one . . . Globalisation not only pulls upwards, but also pushes downwards . . . Globalisation also squeezes sideways’ (Giddens, 2002, pp. 10, 12– 13).13 Working from a quite different perspective that at once avoids the tendencies in the literature to over-emphasize the mode of communications and/or lose specificity of focus, Susan Strange (1996, chs. 1 – 2) takes the categories of security, credit, knowledge, and production as her basis for analysing the systems of power in globalization. Strange’s categories are adequate for what she wants to understand—namely, the control of who-gets-what in the world of finance capital— but her categories leave out too much for a broader understanding. Even if it is not the single determinative basis of globalization, changes in the mode of communication have to be recognized in the matrix of explanation somewhere. Arguably, by working across modes of production, exchange, communication, organization and enquiry we are in a better position to engage in a fuller range of questions across the spectrum of concerns about globalization and localization.14 A summary of the dominant determinative pressures in the world today would thus look something like the following. In the contemporary period, the dominant mode of production has become computer-mediated and less dependent on labour-in-place or single-site integration; exchange has become increasing dominated by the manifold processes of commodity marketing and abstracted capital trading; enquiry has become techno-scientific and rationally decontextualizing of locality and specific nature; organization has become abstract rationalbureaucratic and centred on the institutions of the state and the transnational corporation; and communication has become dominated by electronic interchange, including mass broadcasting with the content sourced across the globe, but control either centred in corporate America or organized relative to it. All of these processes contribute to the extensions of globalization. Focusing for a moment on the mode of communication, and providing an illustration for Proposition 3, we can bring together empirical and conjunctural analyses. In April 2003 Rupert Murdoch closed a $US6.6 billion contract to buy US pay-television group DirecTV, thus giving the News Corporation – Fox Entertainment nexus the first global pay-TV satellite network, including Star Asia, Star Plus (India) and British Sky. This is empirically a powerful illustration of globalization in action, but it does not tell us much about the nature of the process. What does it mean in relation to evidence that this globalizing corporation is part of promoting the new nationalism? Fox News succeeded in winning the largest cable-audience share in the United States during ‘Operation Freedom for Iraq’ predicated on presenting the war through the matrix of gung-ho nationalism. The stars-and-stripes fluttered in the top left-hand corner of the screen and presenters such as Bill O’Reilly spoke in the language of ‘us’ and ‘them’, the ‘good’ and the ‘evil’. The O’Reilly Factor had a daily American audience of 5.4 million viewers in the first week of April 2003. Despite the global reach of Fox News, this is evidence that might be equally taken as substantiating claims about counter-globalization tendencies and suggesting a return to the boundaries of the nation-state. The point here, however, is that we are not talking about content, but about the social form of communication. Whatever the force of the content—localizing, nationalizing or globalizing—the form of the media is globalizing in its Arguing Globalizations 201 interconnections, points of reference and technological sourcing. Whether it is Fox News, CNN, or even Al-Jazeera, the dominant telecommunications systems are satellite-based, cross-referential, and watched by more than their local or national audiences. Fox News, like all of the news groups, has a globally accessible website. Neilsen/NetRatings reported that in the week ending 23 March 2003, over 2.3 million persons accessed Fox News, 8.3 million persons accessed MSNBC and over 10 million persons accessed CNN. Across the month of March 2003, Nielsen gave the ‘active internet universe’ as 247.5 million users, a massive expansion from that time in March 1994 when the US Vice-President Al Gore presented ‘his’ project for a network of networks—the Global Information Infrastructure. Integrational Analysis Layered across an analysis of modes of practice we can move to another level of analysis to examine the nature of the relations in which those patterns of practice occur. It is only at this more abstract level of analysis that the argument previously made about power being carried by the most abstracted-mediated forms of global movement and global interconnection can be directly addressed. At this level can thus distinguish between different dominant kinds of globalism expressed in terms of different modes of integration from the embodied to the disembodied or abstract-mediated. . Embodied globalism—the movements of peoples across the world, the oldest form of globalism, but still current in the movements of refugees, emigrants, travellers and tourists. . Object-extended globalism—the movements of objects, in particular traded commodities, as well as those most ubiquitous objects of exchange and communication: coins, notes, stamps and postcards. It is no small irony that Nike is at once the (traditional) Greek goddess of victory and also the name of a (modern/postmodern) globalized consumption object. Traded global commodities today range from pre-loved pairs of Levis to the relics and treasures of antiquity such as Cleopatra’s Needle and the Ram in the Thicket from Ur, a statue representing a deity from 2,600 BC, reported as stolen from the Iraq National Museum during the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime. . Agency-extended globalism—the movements of agents of institutions such as corporations and states, but beginning with the expansionist empire of Rome and the proselytizing of the agents of Christendom. . Disembodied globalism—the movements of immaterial things and processes including images, electronic texts and encoded capital. This is the really new phenomenon, but it has taken on a new generality with the intersection of electronic communications, computerized exchange, techno-science and late-capitalism It is at this level of analysis that Proposition 2 can best be understood. Put most directly, the argument here is that embodied globalism is not the defining condition of contemporary globalization, although it is still present. Despite interesting work by writers such as Stephen Castles (2000) and Robin Cohen (1987) on the post-war changes in migration patterns, the statistical evidence suggests that in terms of sheer numbers and proportions the century after 1815 rather than the present century was the period of embodied global resettlement. The century from 1915 saw a sharp decrease in transnational migration between the world wars and then an upsurge after 1945, however, in relative terms, global migration was constrained by increasingly restrictive immigration laws (Hirst & Thompson, 1999, ch. 2; Held et al., 1999, ch. 6). 202 P. James What is new in relation to migration in the last few decades, I would argue, is the increased diversity and spread of immigrant destinations across the globe, not the fact of massive movement. However, in this argument, what is really novel, and perhaps the defining dominant condition of contemporary globalization, is the movement of abstracted capital and culture through processes of disembodied interchange. These different modes of integration can in turn be better understood in terms of how they are framed by basic conditions of existence such as temporality. Hence we need to take the analysis through one last level of increased abstraction. Categorical Analysis This level of analysis emphasizes the changing nature of the various categories of being including temporality and spatiality, embodiment and epistemology. Here we are interested, for example, in the nature of the space that people move in, relate across, and set up systems to manage or transcend. While globalization by definition involves the extension of social relations across world space, it does not mean that globalization can be explained in terms of the abstraction of spatiality in itself. This point relates to Proposition 1 and parallels Justin Rosenberg’s argument (2000, p. 63): It is not only space and time which partake of these qualities of uniformity and abstraction. On the contrary, for classical social theory, it was precisely the generalising of these properties across the totality of forms of social reproduction (mental and material) which define the key question— the question of modernity itself. Abstraction of individuals as ‘individuals’, of space and time as ‘emptiable’, of states as ‘sovereign’, of things as ‘exchange-values’—we moderns, wrote Marx, ‘are now ruled by abstractions’. One of the most telling processes of abstraction of space can be illustrated by linking back to the early discussion of the changing patterns of the mode of exchange. As Saskia Sassen documents, the foreign-currency exchange market led the way with increasingly globalized transactions from the mid-1970s with a daily turnover of US$15 billion. The escalation in itself was extraordinary: $60 billion in the early 1980s; US$1.3 trillion in the late 1990s. Over and above this, however, the point is that these more abstract forms of exchange outpaced more concrete exchange transactions such as commodity trading, which itself was greatly increasing in volume: foreign currency exchange was 10 times world trade in 1983, 60 times in 1992 and 70 times in 1999 (Sassen, 2000; see also Arnoldi, 2004). For all the substantial facts and figures that Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson accumulate in order to dismiss the significance of this change and to show the continuities in the international integration of the economy from the 1870s to the present, they reduce the differences in form to the kind of empirical generalizations that an accountant might make. For example, the change in character for them is reduced to ‘a switch to short-term capital’ from the longer-term capital of the gold standard period. Some of ‘the capital flows of the present, they suggest, ‘could thus be accounted for by significant differences in the pattern of interest rate variation’ (Hirst & Thompson, 1999, p. 29). This hides so much, including the recurrent themes of contemporary globalization: the speed of transactions (at one level, challenging the modern idea of regulating temporality for social return) and the transversal of jurisdictional bases (at one level, challenging the modern idea of the nationstate regulating territoriality) (see e.g. Frankman, 2002; Mandle, 2000, Amin, 2004; Paris, 2003; Edwards, 2002). The volume of traded derivatives, in this respect, abstracts from and carries forward the power of older kinds of capital movement such as direct foreign-currency exchange. Arguing Globalizations 203 Traded derivatives developed from the 1970s and grew exponentially from the mid-1980s. By the turn of the century, they amounted to an estimated US$70 trillion or eight times the annual GDP of the United States. The vagueness of the figures are testament to the abstraction of the process: derivative exchanges are conducted ‘Over the Counter’ on private digital networks as the exchange of the temporally projected value of value-units that do not yet exist. This methodological conversation, as brief as it is, is intended to be only indicative of the kind of research needed in relation to the changing forms of globalization and how they are bound up with the most basic conditions of how we live spatially and temporarily. There is a final task to which we still have to attend—namely, as an extension of Proposition 4, to put into theoretical context what is happening to the ‘wretched of the earth’ in these changed circumstances. If you read the tracts put out by conservative think-tanks and governments, globalization is simply a ‘great force for good’.15 According to a recent Australian government report, ‘Over the past 30 years, mainly due to strong growth in globalising East Asia, world poverty has declined. However, poverty increased significantly in more inward looking economies, many of which also were poorly governed economies’ (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2003, p. 1). Presumably the second sentence of that pronouncement is intended to cover the fact that over the 1990s more than 50 countries suffered declining living standards as measured in conventional terms. Globalism and the Politics of Subjection16 Each day, around the world, 30,000 children die of preventable diseases. Across the last decade 13,000,000 children were killed by diarrhoea, a number that exceeds the count of all the people killed in armed combat since World War II.17 Despite an increasing global division of wealth and poverty, avant-garde theory tends to be consumed by post-structural questions about globalism as a chaotic process and neo-colonial identity as an ambivalent subject-position. Mainstream theory in its various guises—conservative, liberal and radical—now takes for granted the very structures of global capitalism that earlier theories of dependency and imperialism, in all their faltering over-confident dogmatism, tried to criticize. In general, amorphous conceptions of ‘interdependency’ and ‘the borderless world’ have tended to replace the hard-edged connotations of imperialism, dependency, underdevelopment and structured subjugation.18 This two-fold softening of the theories of structured subjugation is mirrored darkly by Western mass-cultural representations of the Global South. It also brings us back to the advertising images of the globe with which the article began. Counterposed to the unremittingly positive images of the global oecumene discussed earlier, the images of the Global South take two major forms: firstly, as an aestheticized theatre of horror in which only a few can be rescued from amongst the mass of unredeemable; and, secondly, as a romanticized location of Otherness. The global electronic media has enhanced the possibility of us witnessing tsunamis, famines and floods on the other side of the world. However, in one of those tragic contradictions of globalism, the images of Third World poverty and exploitation are far more likely to be anaesthetized in the form of advertisements for World Vision, the Body Shop or Benetton, than they are to be systematically examined on the evening television news. The second form taken by popular images, romanticization, can be found everywhere. They range from the ridiculous—for example, IBM’s postmodern advertising campaign ‘Solutions for a small planetTM’ depicted Buddhist monks in saffron robes meditating on the side of a mountain and telepathically anticipating the joy of being able to communicate globally—to the commodified sublime, including the marketing of World Music and the conferencing of novels by 204 P. James Salman Rushdie. One issue of Studio Bambini, ‘Out of Africa’, featured 100 pages of winter fashion photographed in Africa, with its front-cover image depicting an African boy dressed in safari leather-gear protectively embracing a European girl wearing a delicate turtle-neck knit. Hermes Paris advertised its silk twill scarf featuring African masks using a photograph of a European woman bearing an African baby on her back: ‘Africa. Mother and Earth.’ With the problems of the dispossessed of the Third World brought into soft focus in our mediated memory banks, the virtues of the poorer regions of the world as sources of interesting anguished literature, as producers of rainforest timber, and as tourist destinations (that is, at least the unspoilt, unlogged bits), can be presented without fear of too much guilt. Commentators such as Peter Bauer no longer write tomes of expiation on ‘Western guilt and Third World Poverty’ (Bauer, 1981, title of ch. 4). Instead, in the late twentieth century a conservative liberal, Francis Fukuyama, comfortably pronounced the victory of market-oriented liberal democracy and wrote a book on Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. Why are significant parts of the Third World poverty-stricken? Implicitly in Fukuyama’s account it is because they have low levels of abstract trust—that is, trust in strangers and systems, the ‘spontaneous sociability, which constitutes a subset of social capital’ (Fukuyama, 1995, p. 27; emphasis original. See also Fukuyama, 1992). New attempts to understand empire have their own problems, particularly given the issue that the increasingly abstract dominant nature of power as discussed earlier does not mean that it is any less structured. This is a premise close to the hearts of writers such as Hardt and Negri: structure is the patterned instantiation of people doing things. The present essay however parts company with their attempt to bring back the concept of ‘empire’ as ‘a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonial and postimperialist’ (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 9. See also Hardt & Negri, 2005). This goes directly against Propositions 1 –5 that suggest that globalization and thus global subjection should treated as socially contingent, historically specific and spatially layered processes, usefully understood within a ‘levels’ framework which continues to take seriously the Marxist notion that people make history but not under conditions of their own choosing. Global capitalism is the dominant condition of our time. In that context, global subjection is a relational process, defined as a condition of subjection (used in both senses of that word) within a dominant pattern of social practices or institutional framework(s). This argument then extends upon our series of interconnected propositions about globalization outlined earlier. For example, as an extension upon Proposition 4 on the nature of power at a distance we can talk about the nature of domination across different degrees of extension. Proposition 6. Domination and subjection operate differently across various degrees of geographical extension—local, regional, nation-state and global relations—and across various levels of social integration—from the embodied to the disembodied. Over the last couple of decades, a framework of globalizing connections has emerged as the dominant form of geographical extension through which power is exercised. To say that we have seen the emerging dominance and increasing penetration of various modes of practice including production and communication conducted across a global reach is not to imply that the immediacy and efficacy of other levels of extension from the local to the regional are simply subordinated within what some theorists have ontologically flattened out as ‘the global flow’. This simple proposition has not been handled well in the literature. Dependency theory, for example, became self-contradictory by statistically documenting dependency and subjection in terms of state-bounded development, and simultaneously treating the Arguing Globalizations 205 world-system as the primary object of enquiry. World-system theory countered this problem by designating ‘the region’ as the primary subunit of the world economy, however, this overly restricts the analysis while at the same time problematically leaving the category ‘world economy’ as a definitional totality characterized by a single mode of production. In response it is worth repeating the point that the geo-political designations—locale, region, nation-state and global relations—can usefully be deployed as descriptive of various overlaying levels of spatial extension so long as the approach goes beyond a proposition about spatial reach. This kind of argument allows us to show how cultural contradictions and tensions of interest emerge in the overlaying of levels.19 The corporate and communications culture of globalism is the most obvious area where we can see the levels of extension being ideologically collapsed into each other while continuing in practice to raise questions of power. On the one hand, transnational corporations increasingly present themselves as bridging the local and the global. In his introduction to the News Corporation Annual Report, 2002, Rupert Murdoch writes: Our efforts have always been driven by a fierce egalitarian spirit, by a deep belief in fair play and the rights of individuals. This is the spirit that guided our diverse operations as we’ve catered for audiences from Britain to Bangalore; as our newspapers have earned one loyal reader at a time from New York to New Guinea . . . (p. 6) On the other hand, this kind of presentation allows the anti-corporate globalization movement to point up the hypocrisy of such a claim given that the corporations are so obviously oriented to globalizing their profit. ‘Therefore, I am pleased to report’, Rupert Murdoch continues, ‘revenues rose 10 per cent to US$15.2 billion.’ We can also take this further to make one last claim: Proposition 7. The changing structures of capitalism, a racing globalization and an enhanced sense of comparative place and comparative identity have both subjectively and objectively reframed (though not necessarily replaced) the old imperial connections. Subjection is no longer predominantly based upon the old lines of imperial exploitation and domination. Globalizing disembodied capitalism, not classical imperialism, I suggest, now frames the various forms of dependency and exploitation. However, in making this argument the concept of ‘framing’ is intended to emphasize the reconstitutive and delimiting processes of social reproduction, not to suggest that historically long-term institutions such as colonialism or imperialism are magically irrelevant to the picture of the present. It is certainly not to agree with the post-structuralist Gianni Vattimo (1992, p. 4) that we have seen ‘the end of colonialism and imperialism’.20 Within this emerging global (postmodern) setting at the turn of the twenty-first century, acts of imperially driven (modernizing) activity continue to occur with unfortunate regularity. When the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ invaded the territory of Iraq in 2002 it was clear that they were not doing so only to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein. Just as with one of the predominant determinations of the United States’ precipitous involvement in the first Gulf War of 1991—with a heavier bombing of Iraq in 43 days than in Vietnam in eight years—one driver of the invasion was preventing the anticipated destabilizing of the world’s oil production. Nevertheless, despite the regularity of such acts in which imperial power still plays a part, state-based imperialism no longer constitutes a way of life. It no longer dominates the structures of world politics. Acts of domination for extending national interest claims now have to be socially legitimated, politically rationalized and ethically defended against ever-more acerbic scrutiny. Increasingly, they have become ethically ambiguous and half-thought-through reactionary attempts to ameliorate problems exacerbated by earlier activities of modern imperialism. 206 P. James Despite the carry-overs, much has changed. Classical imperialism, from the ancient and traditional empires to early twentieth century colonialism and mid-century neo-colonialism was based largely upon a control of territory (however uneven that might have been) and the relatively direct exploitation of the production and trading of material commodities. It entailed forms of agency-extension, that is, the presence on the ground of agents of the empire. With the development of electronic trading, computerized storage of information, and an exponentially increasing movement of capital, there has been an abstraction of the possibilities of control and exploitation, an abstraction of the relationship between territory and power, and an abstraction of the dominant level of integration. The term ‘casino capitalism’ (Susan Strange’s [1996] term) partly captures this process, but together with terms such as ‘fictitious capital formation’ (that is, capital produced without a growth in production of material objects) it gives the misleading impression that this abstraction is less real than gunboat diplomacy, more ethereal than factory production. To the contrary, when for example global electronic markets sell futures options on agricultural goods not yet produced and transnational corporations speculate on the basis of satellite weather-forecasting, both the relations and the power-effects are very real. Interests other than the importance of feeding people are framing production choices. In over-accentuating the capitalist mode of production or exchange as the basic determinant of contemporary international relations, dependency theory, world-system theory and some of their recent variants present us with a thoroughly reductive account of social practice.21 One problem, as I began to discuss earlier, is that capitalism is treated as a system of economics that reconfigures and replaces everything that came before it. Dependency theory gave market capitalism the upper hand centuries before it came to be the predominant formation of practice, but even in the present period it is important not to turn globalizing late capitalism into a one-dimensional system. If we accept that late capitalism has completely replaced prior modes of production then we have no way of understanding why the penetration of capitalism, as extensive and intensive as it is, has not produced a homogenization of cultures and economies. Practices of resistance keep occurring in the Third World and the First, but even that is not the answer. In the same way that the article argues for an alternative analytic scheme based on the metaphor of overlaying (or imbricating) levels of extension, here I am suggesting that modes of production, indeed all modes of practice, should be treated in the same way—that is as overlaying modes with the dominant mode of practice setting the framing conditions for subordinate modes. This discussion is intended as only a beginning, leaving as many questions to be explored as it has answered. As the questions of method compound upon each other, it is worth returning to the underlying political concern of the article. One of its key premises has been that major discrepancies of power operate across the supposedly free and open flow of global exchange and interdependence. Alongside these lines of interconnection, contemporary globalization has also brought with it heightening inequalities and increasing political violence. It is this very ambiguity that the proponents of globalization find so hard to admit. In this context, developing a coherent theory of globalization becomes even more imperative. In the meantime, we will continue to see images of globalization fluctuate between the ‘global garland’ and the ‘pockets of horror’ as if the two are not connected. Notes 1 Earlier examples of the commodification of pictures of planet earth can be found, particularly from travel companies. For example, advertisements from Thomas Cook, Shaw Savill Lines, and Nippon Yusen Kaisya at Arguing Globalizations 207 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 the beginning of The Geographical Magazine Atlas (Philip, 1938) use images of the globe. However, they are quite limited in their generalization. For more recent examples see Cosgrove (1994). Abstraction is used here as a social-relational term in the material sense of ‘drawn away’ from the immediacy of embodied or face-to-face relations. Capitalist exchange is, for example, more abstract than reciprocal exchange in the sense that the particularities of the persons involved in the exchange process become less and less relevant to the nature of that exchange. It is still material rather than virtual in the sense that it is practised in patterned ways by people doing or effecting things, however mediated. In the early 1990s, Robertson (1992, pp. 173 –174) used the concept advisedly. However, by the middle of the decade it unreservedly took a central place in his writings (Robertson, 1995). I concentrate on this book because it is so widely used on university courses and prominent in the field, but also because it boldly attempts to get beyond the usual range of vague or reductive definitions. See by contrast Cosgrove (2003). Rather than attributing the subjectivity of globalization to a single revolution in science he documents the deep history of globalism back through Ortelius to the Classical Romans and Greeks. All the following quotes from Waters (2001) are from pp. 19 –20. The first sustained development of this approach was Sharp’s (1985). Most recently see also Nairn and James (2005), and James (2005). My definition of ‘globalism’ as the subjectivity or ideology framing the projection of the globe is therefore broader than Manfred Steger’s (2002) when he emphasizes the intersection of globalism and neo-liberalism. Subjectivities and ideologies of globalism in the definition of this article have taken many forms from heliocentrism to classical imperialism and cosmopolitanism, as well as neo-liberal globalism. See, for example, Ulrich Beck’s presumptive and therefore unhelpful definition of globalization as denoting ‘the processes through which sovereign national states are criss-crossed and undermined’ (Beck, 2000, p. 11). The classic early statement on the fragmentations of postmodernity by a structuralist is Fredric Jameson’s ‘(1991). Similarly, David Harvey’s (1989) is a brilliant attempt to theorize the structures of the changing world, but he still falls back upon the postmodernist language of fragmentation without providing us with an account of the levels at which fragmentation actually occurs. This is to shift gear and talk of levels of epistemological abstraction; not the broader category of levels of ontological abstraction that the earlier part of the essay briefly addressed. John Gray, London School of Economics, cited in The Economist, 29 September 2001. This descent into methodological incoherence does not compare well with his overall position presented in the two volumes of A Critique of Historical Materialism. There he posited a gently modified mode-of-production argument in intersection with an emphasis on the mode of organisation: the extension of allocative resources under conditions of capitalism/industrialism. For example, security is a social theme rather than a mode of practice, but we can analyze the different historical forms that generating security have taken through examining the dominant modalities of organization or exchange that they have taken. From the opening article of the special lift-out on globalization by The Economist, 29 September 2001. The following section recontextualizes research that I first did for a chapter in Darby (1997). UN annual development report figures reported in The Guardian, 9 July 2003. Going back to the early period of writings on globalization, see, for example, Robert Keohane’s (1984) highly regarded text, After Hegemony: Co-operation and Discord in the World Economy. Despite the title of his book, he devotes a grand total of two paragraphs to what he calls ‘negative reciprocity’, that is, ‘attempts to maximize utility at the expense of others’ (p. 128). There are of course exceptions. See for example, Amin (1990). For a discussion of levels of extension in relation to the changing form of the economy see Hinkson (1993, pp. 23 –44). Cf. the writings of Walter D. Mignolo (2000) who rightly continues to emphasize the continuing relevance of colonialism. For a useful discussion of the relevance of a non-reductive ‘modes of production’ approach to the study of international relations see Cox (1987). References Albrow, M. (1996) The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press). Amin, A. (2004) Regulating economic globalization, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, new series, no. 29, pp. 217–233. 208 P. James Amin, S. (1990) Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure (London: Zed Books). Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Arnoldi, J. (2004) Derivatives: virtual values and real risks, Theory, Culture and Society, 21(6), pp. 23 –42. Bauer, P. T. (1981) Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Beck, U. (2000) What is Globalization? (Cambridge: Polity Press). Brennan, T. (2003) Globalization and its Terrors: Daily Life in the West (London: Routledge). Briggs, A. & Burke, P. (2002) A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Cambridge: Polity Press). Castles, S. (2000) Ethnicity and Globalization (London: Sage Publications). Cohen, R. (1987) The New Helots: Migrants in the International Division of Labour (Aldershot: Gower). Cosgrove, D. (1994) Contested global visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo space photographs, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 84(2), pp. 270–94. Cosgrove, D. (2003) Globalism and tolerance in early modern geography, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93(4), pp. 852– 70. Cox, R. (1987) Production, Power and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press). Darby, P. (ed) (1997) At the Edge of International Relations: Postcolonialism, Gender and Dependency (London: Pinter). Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (2003) Globalisation: Keeping the Gains (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia). Frankman, M. (2002) Beyond the Tobin Tax: global democracy and a global currency, Annals of the American Academy, no. 581, pp. 61–73. Freeman, M. (1998) Theories of ethnicity, tribalism and nationalism, in Kenneth Christie (ed) Ethnic Conflict, Tribal Politics: A Global Perspective (Richmond: Curzon Press). Edwards, S. (2002) Capital mobility, capital controls, and globalization in the twenty-first century, The Annals of the American Academy, no. 579, pp. 261 –270. Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press). Fukuyama, F. (1995) Trust (London: Hamish Hamilton). Giddens, A. (2002) Runaway World: How Globalisation is Reshaping Our Lives, 2nd edn (London: Profile Books). Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2000) Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2005) Multitude (London: Hamish Hamilton). Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D. & Perraton, J. (1999) Global Transformations (Cambridge: Polity Press). Hinkson, J. (1993) Postmodern economy: value, self-formation and intellectual practice, Arena Journal, new series no.1, pp. 23–44. Hirst, P. & Thompson, G. (1999) Globalization in Question, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press). Jacob, C. (1999) Mapping in the mind: the earth from ancient Alexandria, in Cosgrove, D. (ed) Mappings (London: Reaktion Books). James, H. (2001) The End of Globalisation: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). James, P. (2005) Globalism, Nationalism and Tribalism: Bringing Theory back In (London: Sage Publications), forthcoming. Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso). Keohane, R. (1984) After Hegemony: Co-operation and Discord in the World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Langhorne, R. (2001) The Coming of Globalization: Its Evolutionary and Contemporary Consequences (Basingstoke: Palgrave). Lash, S. & Urry, J. (1987) The End of Organized Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press). Mandle, J. (2000) Globalization and justice, Annals of the American Academy, no. 570, pp. 126 –139. Mignolo, W. D. (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Nairn, T. & James, P. (2005) Global Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and State-Terrorism (London: Pluto Press). Offe, C. (1985) Disorganized Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press). Paris, R. (2003) The globalization of taxation? Electronic commerce and the transformation of the state, International Studies Quarterly, 47, pp. 153– 182. Philip, G. (1938) The Geographical Magazine Atlas (published by the Geographical Magazine and George Philip & Son, London, no date but circa 1938). Ritzer, G. (2003) Rethinking globalization: glocalization/grobalization and something/nothing, Sociological Theory, 21(3), pp. 193–209. Arguing Globalizations 209 Robertson, R. (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage Publications). Robertson, R. (1995) Glocalization: time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity, in Featherstone, M., Lash, S. & Robertson, R. (eds) Global Modernities (London: Sage). Rosenberg, J. (2000) The Follies of Globalisation Theory (London: Verso). Sassen, S. (2000) Digital networks and the state, Theory, Culture and Society, 17(4), pp. 19– 33. Savage, M., Bagnall, G. & Longhurst, B. (2005) Globalization and Belonging (London: Sage Publications). Sharp, G. (1985) Constitutive abstraction and social practice, Arena, 70, pp. 48– 82. Sharp, G. (1987) An overview for the next millennium, Arena Journal, new series no. 9, pp. 1–8. Steger, M. B. (2002) Globalism: The New Market Ideology (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield). Strange, S. (1996) The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Vattimo, G. (1992) The Transparent Society (Cambridge: Polity Press). Waters, M. (2001) Globalization, 2nd edn (London: Routledge). Paul James is Director of the Globalism Institute (RMIT), an editor of Arena Journal, and on the Council of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. He has received a number of awards including the Japan – Australia Foundation Fellowship, an Australian Research Council Fellowship, and the Crisp Medal by the Australasian Political Studies Association for the best book in the field of political studies. Invitations have been received to deliver addresses in Australia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cuba, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Israel – Palestine, Japan, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Portugal, Scotland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States. He is author or editor of nine books including, Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community (Sage, 1996). His book with Tom Nairn, Global Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and State-Terror, has just been published by Pluto Press, and Globalism, Nationalism Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In will be published by Sage shortly.