Globalization: a Definition

Should we conclude that, as was the case with the word 'international' two centuries ago, the recent proliferation of references to globalization signals that a far-reaching change is taking place in world affairs? If so, what is the nature of this change more precisely? Critics have rightly objected that the term 'globalization' is often used vaguely and inconsistently. (See Box 1.1 for samples of different conceptions.) In particular, many authors fail to specify how 'global' relations differ from 'interna­tional' relations. Indeed, people frequently employ the notions 'globalization' and 'internationalization' interchangeably. Yet if the concepts refer to the same conditions, then talk of globalization is redundant. Current debates about globalization would in this case merely rehash the same argu­ments that realists, liberalists, and Marxists rehearsed twenty, sixty, and even a hundred and more years ago. The survey of theories in Part Two of this book would then include nothing that might not equally have been written in an International Relations textbook of the 1930s or the 1970s.

However, a significant change has been unfold­ing in the world during roughly the last four decades of the twentieth century, and the term 'globalization' characterizes it well. As the word is used here, globalization refers to processes whereby social relations acquire relatively distanceless and borderless qualities, so that human lives are increasingly played out in the world as a single place. Social relations—that is, the countless and complex ways that people interact with and affect each other—are more and more being con­ducted and organized on the basis of a planetary unit. By the same token country locations, and in particular the boundaries between territorial states, are in some important senses becoming less central to our lives, although they do remain significant. Globalization is thus an ongoing trend whereby the world has—in many respects and at a generally accelerating rate—become one relatively borderless social sphere.

Globalization needs in this light to be distin­guished from internationalization. As the construc­tion of that term indicates, 'internationalization' refers to a process of intensifying connections between national domains. As a result of interna­tionalization, countries may come to have wide-ranging and deep effects on each other, but they remain distinct and separate places. In interna­tional relations, countries are divided from each other by clearly marked frontiers as well as by the substantial time that is generally required to cover the distance between their respective territories. To put the difference in a nutshell, the international realm is a patchwork of bordered countries, while the global sphere is a web of transborder networks. Whereas international links (for example, trade in cocoa) require people to cross considerable dis­tances in comparatively long time intervals, global connections (for example, satellite newscasts) are effectively distanceless and instantaneous. Global Phenomena can extend across the world at the same time and can move between places in no time; they are in this sense supraterritorial. While the patterns of 'international' interdependence are strongly influenced by national-state divisions, the lines of 'global' interconnections often have little correspondence to territorial boundaries. Inter­national and global relations can coexist, of course, and indeed the contemporary world is at the same time both internationalized and globalizing.

Box 1.1. Globalization: A Collection of Definitions 'Globalization refers to all those processes by which the peoples of the world are incorporated into a single world society, global society.' (Martin Albrow 1990) 'Globalization can ... be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.' (Anthony Giddens 1990) 'Die Globalisierung... global networking that has welded together previously disparate and isolated communities on this planet into mutual dependence and unity of "one world".' (Emanuel Richter, translated from German) 'The characteristics of the globalization trend include the internationalizing of production, the new international division of labor, new migratory movements from South to North, the new competitive environment that accel­erates these processes, and the internationalizing of the state . . . making states into agencies of the globalizing world.' (Robert Cox 1994) 'The world is becoming a global shopping mall in which ideas and products are available everywhere at the same time.' (Rosabeth Moss Kanter 1995) 'Globalization does not simply refer to the objectiveness of increasing interconnectedness. It also refers to cultural and subjective matters [namely, the scope and depth of consciousness of the world as a single place].' (Roland Robertson 1992) 'Globalization is what we in the Third World have for sev­eral centuries called colonization.' (Martin Khor l995)