Chapter 1. The Globalization of World Politics

Jan Aart Scholte

• Introduction: A Globalizing World

• Globalization: A Definition

• Globalization and the States-System

• Post-Sovereign Governance

• The Challenge of Global Democracy

• Conclusion

Reader's guide

This opening chapter considers the implications of globalization for the states-system and for the nature of world politics more generally. Its first section elaborates a general definition of globalization. The second section describes how globalization has been shifting world politics away from the Westphalian system and its central premise of sov­ereign statehood. The third section reviews four emergent patterns of global gover­nance: (a) the growth of transborder links between substate authorities; (b) the expansion of global law; (c) increased private-sector involvement in global regulation; and (d) the spread of global social movements. The chapter ends by arguing that current trends in world governance under conditions of globalization have worrying implica­tions for democracy.

Introduction: a Globalizing World

When a new word becomes popular, it is often because it captures an important change that is tak­ing place in the world. A new idea is needed to describe a new condition. For example, when the philosopher Jeremy Bentham coined the term 'international' in the 1780s, it caught hold because it highlighted a deepening reality of his day, namely, the rise of nation-states and of cross-border transactions between them. People had not spoken of 'international relations' before this time, since humanity had not previously been organized into national communities governed by territorial states.

Two hundred years later, in the 1980s, talk of 'globalization' became rife. The term quickly entered standard vocabulary—not only in acade­mic circles, but also amongst journalists, politi­cians, bankers, advertisers, and entertainers. Broadly equivalent notions have emerged roughly simultaneously across many languages. 'Globaliza­tion' in English has been paralleled by Quan Qui Hua in Chinese, globalizzazione in Italian, глобализация in Russian, jatyanthareekaranaya in Sinhalese, etc. It has become common to speak of global markets, global communications, global conferences, global threats, and so on. During the 1980s students of International Relations and other disciplines began to examine questions of global (as distinct from international) governance, global environmental change, global gender relations, global political economy, and more. The word 'globalization' has also found its way onto the cover of the present book.

It is true that ideas of globality were circulating well before 1980. English-speakers began to use the adjective 'global' to designate 'the whole world' at the end of the nineteenth century. Previously the word had only meant 'spherical'. The terms 'glob­alize' and 'globalism' were introduced in a little-read book published in 1944, while the noun 'globalization' entered a dictionary for the first time in 1961 (Reiser and Davies 1944: 212, 219; Webster 1961). Nevertheless, although global-speak had this long gestation period, it did not become part of the vocabulary of everyday life until the last quarter of the twentieth century. For example, hardly any titles of books and articles published before 1975 include references to globalness, whereas today, on the threshold of the twenty-first century, the con­cept has become pervasive.