Jan Aart Scholte: For me, the most helpful and distinctive way of thinking about globalization is as a process of increasing transplanetary connections between people. By 'transplanetary', I mean a situation in which people anywhere on the planet may have quite direct connections with each other, no matter where on earth they may happen to be located. This restricted meaning, I think, helps us to capture what is characteristically 'global' about globalization.
So often, as you just mentioned, 'globalization' gets conflated with other notions and other terms that, although important, we actually have other vocabulary to cover. Thus, globalization is not simply about 'international' relations between territorial units such as nation-states. Similarly, it is not intrinsically about policies of economic liberalization; nor is it the same as Americanization or westernization. All of these other attributes can be connected to globalization, but the process of globalization itself is about increasing connections between people on a transworld basis.
Jan Aart Scholte: As a move towards small-scale social organization, localization strikes me as sensible and democratizing. In small-scale structures, people have better chances of contact, communication, access, and control. That said, I wouldn't want to romanticize the local. You can have local mafias; similarly, your local bureaucrat can be just as distant, untransparent, and authoritarian as an IMF official in Washington, DC. There is nothing holy about the local.
Another caution is that, in a globalizing world, there is no way we can reduce the process of governance to local governance alone. We need coordination across wider spaces than the local in order to address issues like climate change, global health issues, global migration flows, global money flows, global financial flows, and global trade. Although some of the implementation and adjustment of global and regional rules can be made at local level in line with local circumstances, we can't ultimately have a world without substantial global and regional regulation existing alongside national and local governance. By all means, we should try to make everything as local as possible, but we should not see the local as a panacea or believe that everything local by definition will be good.
As a footnote to this, we also perhaps need to rethink what we actually mean by "local". In a globalizing world, where we can be in very immediate contact with other people and places on the earth through the internet, telecommunications, air travel and more, we might conceive of the local as a form of small group solidarity that is expressed through connections other than those based on simply having dwellings in the same district. Indeed, we might come to a supra-territorial or non-territorial notion of locality, premised upon the solidarities between people who have commonalities in terms of their disability, their gender, their hobbies, or other nonterritorial bases for identity and community. In this way, we might think of the local itself in deterritorialized terms.
I liked the views of Scholte.
Professor Jan Aart Scholte
The relationship between globalisation and capitalism to which you referred is important. Capitalism is a significant causal factor in the globalisation process, but it will not determine the political framework we must adopt in relation to globalisation. I would therefore draw a major distinction between globalisation as a factor for social change and liberalisation, which is actually a policy adopted in relation to globalisation. A great number of forms of globalisation are possible: neo-liberalism, world social democracy, central planning and so on.
Your comment on territorial roots is perfectly valid and also covers the re-territorialisation to which I referred and which accompanies globalisation. In certain respects, globalisation will abolish sovereign states' monopoly of governance, because there are now all these interchanges that prevent states from exercising their former absolute and central control. This has created much more opportunity for sub-national and supra-national governance, and the identities that accompany them.
Very interesting indeed. Almost proves what I've put forward about regionalism and globalism.
Professor Jan Aart Scholte
Globalisation is both a continuous phenomenon and a change over time and I hope that my contribution did have a historical dimension, though perhaps the long-term perspective was lacking. My conclusion finally was that, over the long term, the qualitative difference in geographical structuring is striking. In the 1940s, supraterritorial relationships did not exist. I therefore believe that there is a form of continuity and that mixing the continuity of territoriality and territorial identities with the emergence of new territorial identities is the right approach.
Congratz!
And thanks Andrik
