At
the outset of
this little book based on a 1999 BBC lecture, Anthony
Giddens explains the unexpected outcome of the
Western European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.
The Enlightenment
philosophers--and those who subscribed to their
thinking--believed that by applying reason to natural
and human affairs and by demystifying experience,
human beings would bring greater order and stability
to life. They would gain greater understanding of the
world's processes.
Their belief has not
been realized in modern history. Instead, we now live
in a "runaway world." It is bringing us
disorder and instability on a scale that has become
global. (20)
It is that globally
disordered situation that Giddens seeks to
understand. He analyzes the phenomenon of
globalization (24-37), which is still emerging as a
new order of human interrelationships unimagined by
its Enlightenment forefathers hundreds of years ago.
At its core it is about "rationalized"
world trade at an unprecedented level, he says. More
specifically it is about the uniquely new level of
world finance and the flows of capital. (27) However,
globalization is more than an economic development,
Giddens says--it is also transforming political,
technological, and cultural dimensions of life
worldwide, owing in large part to the rise of
"instantaneous electronic communication."
(29)
Giddens emphasizes
the complexity of globalization processes, which
affect the "intimate and personal aspects of our
lives" no less than the "big systems."
(30)
He touches on the
negative interpretation of globalization by many
outside Europe and North America. They see it
destroying local cultures, causing widening
inequality, deepening poverty, and degrading the
environment. (33).
But Giddens does not
agree that globalization is simply the Westernization
of non-Western areas of the world. Globalization
"is becoming increasingly decentered--not under
the control of any group of nations, and still less
of the large corporations." (34)
Giddens sees
globalization transforming institutions of every kind
even though they continue to retain their "outer
shell." (36) This is especially true of nation
states, he thinks.
The cumulative result
of all the changes occurring globally add up to a new
"global cosmopolitan society." (37) Like so
much else in the runaway world, this society too
seems out of control to us because we have not yet
reconstructed our institutions to deal with it.
In the rest of his book, Giddens fills in
details of this overview of globalization. He
examines a handful of characteristics that coalesce
around it. These are social characteristics that
emerge from Enlightenment roots and effloresce into
full-blown features of globalization. They are the
notion of RISK, the meaning of TRADITION,
the structure and function of the FAMILY,
and the idea of DEMOCRACY.
Giddens's imaginative reading of globalization
through these points of entry gives us a fresh way of
thinking about the world that seems to be running
away with us.
RISK
Giddens suggests that
the idea of risk belongs strictly to the modern era.
It arose with the beginnings of sea voyages by the
Portuguese and Spanish. For the first time, humans
began to calculate the risks involved in future
possibilities--like the probabilities of shipwreck.
Until that time, the gods determined. (40)
Risk of course went
hand in hand with the development of modern
capitalism. Through insurance and other systems of
redistributing risk, capitalism developed a method
for bringing the future under some control. (42-3)
Now, however, in the globalization system, Giddens
finds that greater uncertainty surrounds risk. This
is new. (44)
The novelty lies in
the shift from "external" risk created by
nature to "manufactured" risk. Humans are
now creating risk through "the very impact of
our developing knowledge upon the world." (44)
The critical difference now is that we cannot
calculate manufactured risk with the actuarial
certainty attached to the old nature-based risk.
Certainty comes too late. So we have to make
decisions with less certainty that they are the right
ones. This has the effect of making life even
riskier, since our decisions may well turn out to be
the wrong ones sooner or later. (48)
Earlier modern
society, Giddens observes, treated new scientific
knowledge with respect. It was thought to be the
means of overcoming tradition in the great advance of
Enlightenment. Scientific knowledge, says Giddens,
became a commanding tradition in its own right. It
was modern society's means of reducing natural risk.
But that has changed in the conditions of
globalization, as he sees it. Manufactured risk
arises largely from the newly "mobile
character" of science and technology. (49)
Genetic engineering, to take only one area, is just
in the beginning stages of accelerating this
mobility. This will increase risk in the
globalization era by further decreasing certainty of
future consequences. (50-51)
Despite the greater
uncertainty associated with manufactured risk,
Giddens insists that we cannot escape risk-taking.
Indeed, he ends his look at risk on a sanguine note:
"We may need quite often to be bold rather than
cautious in supporting scientific innovation or other
forms of change." (53)
TRADITION
Giddens observes that
"the idea of tradition...is itself a creation of
modernity." (57) It was a pejorative label that
Enlightenment thinkers attached to the old and the
customary. Their mission was to replace traditional
behavior with behavior grounded in reason.
Giddens delves more
deeply into the idea of tradition in his effort to
explain contemporary globalization.
Its endurance over a
long time is not the distinguishing trait of
tradition, he says. Rather, "ritual and
repetition" in a social setting are its
distinguishing markers. (59) Tradition offers people
in a given society a "framework for action"
that they need not question at every turn. (59) This
"stored-up wisdom," he thinks, is what
conservative defenders of tradition mainly valued as
they resisted Enlightenment modernity. (60)
Moreover, the
Enlightenment project affected public institutions
without reaching into the traditional patterns of
personal life associated with family and sexuality.
These patterns persisted into the modern era
alongside the modernized conditions of government and
the economy. (60)
Giddens finds that
this coexistence of modernity and tradition is
changing under the new conditions of globalization.
(61) He believes that, just as world society is now
"living after the end of nature," so it is
beginning to live "after the end of
tradition." He does not mean that the
Enlightenment project has finally expunged tradition.
He means that tradition, while continuing to
flourish, no longer does so "in the traditional
way." (61)
Traditionalists no
longer defend traditional activities by appealing to
their "internal claims to truth." (61)
Instead, they now defend traditions in
non-traditional ways that appeal to reason. They
defend traditions, that is, by arguing that they
provide a useful social function, giving
"continuity and form to life." (63)
Giddens looks at new
personal dynamics that arise from the transformation
of the function of tradition in the emerging global
society. "As the influence of tradition and
custom shrink on a world-wide level, the very basis
of our self-identity--our sense of
self--changes." (65) Therapy, counseling,
psychoanalysis--these are some evidences of the new
need of individuals to define themselves more
autonomously than in the past, without the
unreflective crutch of received tradition. (65)
He also examines the
clash between cosmopolitanism and fundamentalism
under conditions of globalization. Fundamentalism,
Giddens finds, is not the tradition of old. It arose
"in response to the globalizing influences...all
around us." (66) It focuses on the way "the
truth of beliefs is defended or asserted." (67)
That is, it asserts truth not as an outcome of reason
(which is the cosmopolitan way) but as a
pronouncement from an unambiguous authority. "It
is a refusal of dialogue in a world whose peace and
continuity depend on it." (67) Giddens worries
about the violent implications of fundamentalism
(writing before 9-11), for it is inimical to the
cosmopolitan values of globalization.
Yet, fundamentalism
challenges that cosmopolitanism with the basic
question: "Can we live in a world where nothing
is sacred?" (68) We cannot, in Giddens's view.
Traditions as he has redefined them should persist.
FAMILY
Of all the
traditional institutions undergoing change through
the pressures of globalization, Giddens singles out
the family for particular notice. The
"traditional family" was based in most
cultures not on personal relations of husband and
wife but on economic requirements, particularly in
agricultural settings. He recalls the subordinate
position of women to their fathers and husbands. (72)
He recalls that children lacked rights no less than
women--families valued them "more for the
contribution they made to the common economic task
than for themselves." (73) Issues of
reproduction and female virtue dominated family
sexuality before the development of safe birth
control. (73-4)
Giddens examines the
fundamental change that pressures related to
globalization have brought to the traditional family.
This change resulted from "the separation of
sexuality from reproduction." (75) This
contributed to the transformation of marriage and the
family into "shell institutions." They look
the same on the outside but they now are separated
from economic imperatives or extended family customs.
(76)
Giddens coins the
term "coupledom" to characterize the basic
change in these shell institutions. Coupledom arose
as economic motives declined and inequalities
diminished. To have a "stable relationship"
based on emotional communication and intimacy became
the defining goal. (78-9) Giddens analyzes the
effects of this change in (a) sexual and love
relationships, (b) parent-child relationships, (c)
and friendships. (79) In all three, he finds a
promising comparison between the openness and honesty
of personal relationships ("democracy of the
emotions"), on one hand, and democratic
societies on the other hand. This brings Giddens back
to the struggle between cosmopolitanism and
fundamentalism that arises as globalization emerges:
Equality of the
sexes, and the sexual freedom of women, are anathema
to fundamentalist groups. Opposition to them, indeed,
is one of the defining features of religious
fundamentalism across the world. (83)
Giddens says,
therefore, that the traditional family is a
counterproductive force as a global civil society
struggles to be born. It resists the forces of
personal freedom and the related forces of political
democratization, which he believes are desirable
outgrowths of globalization. (83-84).
DEMOCRACY
The spread of global
communications, Giddens argues, has strongly
influenced the spread of democracy of one kind or
another. Democracy, therefore, is an important piece
in the mosaic of issues comprising the "runaway
world" created by globalization. (86)
Giddens describes the
spread of democracy around the world since the
mid-1970s and seeks to explain why it has happened.
(88-89) The answer lies in the erosion of the
tradition that "life is fate" (90) by the
power of global communications. (90) The widespread
distrust of government does not come from a distrust
of democracy, Giddens finds. It comes from a distrust
of the generalized nostrums offered by politicians.
Openness of communications shows up their limits as
never before.
Giddens thinks that a
deepening of democracy will reinforce the spread of
democracy of the last 30 years or so. He calls this
"democratising democracy" transnationally.
(93)
Democratising
democracy involves distributing power within nations,
promoting greater political transparency,
experimenting with alternative democratic procedures
such as electronic voting, normalizing the role of
single-issue groups in politics. Giddens's vision of
emerging democracy gives special importance to
"the fostering of a strong civic culture"
where "a democracy of the emotions" can
develop. (95)
He observes that
globalization is disconnecting nation states from
ecological, economic, and technological forces that
profoundly affect their citizens. (97) This is
stimulating the expectation for democracy "above
the level of the nation." (97) The European
Union is an example, he thinks, of a transnational
structure that could foster democratization across
borders.
Giddens ends by
returning to "the runaway world." The trend
toward greater democratization, he asserts, is
"bound up with structural changes in world
society." (100) The world needs more democracy
of a transnational kind to stem the bad effects of
globalization.
Giddens's book is valuable as an analytical
exercise. It identifies the currently uncontrolled
("runaway") state of globalization. It
underlines the inability of laissez-faire global
markets--fundamentalist economics--by themselves to
bring under civil control the runaway world that they
have created. It cuts through the tangled complexity
of globalization to expose key social and cultural
structures that it affects.
But Giddens is a
polemicist for globalization as much as an analyst.
He is not content with merely describing the runaway
condition of the world. The structural changes that
he identifies could, in his view, become the
foundation for positive policies. Those changes
mainly lead away from traditional social and
non-democratic political practices toward
cosmopolitan, equalitarian, democratic practices. In
Giddens's view, such practices on a transnational
level hold the promise for reining in the runaway
world and bringing a kind of order new to human
history.
However attractive it
may be to a hopeful Western mind, Giddens's polemical
argument is too sketchy and brief to be persuasive. I
found it impossible to read the book without
constantly thinking of 9-11 and our newly found need
to develop a strategy of engagement between Western
cosmopolitan society and Islamic societies
preoccupied with the impact of globalization on their
traditions. Giddens identifies the EU as his best
example of a transnational institution capable of
propagating the values of equality and democracy
emerging from globalization. This does not touch even
the boundary of the inter-cultural obstacles to
further globalization.
Giddens may say that
we have gone beyond the original Enlightenment
project in this era of globalization. He may say that
globalization is not a mere extension of Western
culture to non-Western regions of the world. But he
clearly speaks from a Western platform. He fails to
show how globalization is a "de-centered"
process that does not depend essentially on the
dynamics of Western initiative and Enlightenment
ideas.
I take away from the
book mainly a couple of conceptual tools that help me
to see globalization more clearly. (1) Giddens
usefully describes how "tradition" has
become something else as a result of
globalization--indeed, has become a dynamic component
of globalization itself. (2) His analysis of
"risk" gets at the very heart of why we
live today with unrelenting and unceasing
uncertainty. These parts alone make the book worth
reading.
But as a whole it is
merely a stimulant to further thinking about the
dynamics of globalization. And, like much else in
print on the subject before 9-11, it suffers from an
unavoidable echo of obsolescence.
