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THINKING GLOBALLY

THINKING GLOBALLY A Global Studies Reader

EDITED BY

Mark Juergensmeyer

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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Thinking globally : a global studies reader / edited by Mark Juergensmeyer.

pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-27844-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) eISBN 9780520958012 1. Globalization—Textbooks. I. Juergensmeyer, Mark.

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CONTENTS

Preface: A Friendly Introduction to Global Studies

PART I: INTRODUCTION

1. Thinking Globally What is globalization and how do we make sense of it?

Manfred Steger, “Globalization: A Contested Concept” from Globalization: A Very Short Introduction

Thomas Friedman, “The World Is Ten Years Old” from The Lexus and the Olive Tree

Paul James, “Approaches to Globalization” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies

Steven Weber, “How Globalization Went Bad” from Foreign Policy

Further Reading

2. Globalization over Time Globalization has a history: the current global era is prefaced by periods of economic interaction, social expansion, and intense cultural encounters

William McNeill, “Globalization: Long Term Process or New Era in Human Affairs?” from New Global Studies

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, “Imperial Trajectories” from Empires in World History

Immanuel Wallerstein, “On the Study of Social Change” from The Modern World System

Dominic Sachsenmaier, “Movements and Patterns: Environments of Global History” from Global Perspectives on Global History

Further Reading

PART II: THE MARCH OF GLOBALIZATION, BY REGION

3. Africa: The Rise of Ethnic Politics in a Global World The impact of the slave trade and colonialization on Africa, influence of African culture on the Americas, and African aspects of the global rise of ethnic politics

Nayan Chanda, “The Hidden Story of a Journey” from Bound Together

Dilip Hiro, “Slavery” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies

Jeffrey Haynes, “African Diaspora Religions” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies

Jacob K. Olupona, “Thinking Globally about African Religion” from The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions

Okwudiba Nnoli, “The Cycle of ‘State-Ethnicity-State’ in African Politics” from MOST Ethno-Net Africa

Further Reading

4. The Middle East: Religious Politics and Antiglobalization The rise of global religious cultures from the Middle East, and current religious politics as part of a global challenge to secularism

Mohammed Bamyeh, “The Ideology of the Horizons” from The Social Origins of Islam

Said Amir Arjomand, “Thinking Globally about Islam” from The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions

Jonathan Fox, “Are Middle East Conflicts More Religious?” from Middle East Quarterly

Barah Mikaïl, “Religion and Politics in Arab Transitions” from FRIDE policy brief

Further Reading

5. South and Central Asia: Global Labor and Asian Culture The spread of Asian cultures from India and Central Asia via trade routes; the role of South Asia in global trade and information technology

Richard Foltz, “Religions of the Silk Road” from Religions of the Silk Road

Morris Rossabi, “The Early Mongols” from Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times

Vasudha Narayanan, “Hinduism” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies

Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, “Revolt, the Modern State, and Colonized Subjects, 1848–1885” from A Concise History of India

Carol Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi, “Outposts of the Global Information Economy” from In an Outpost of the Global Economy: Work and Workers in India’s Technology Industry

Further Reading

6. East Asia: Global Economic Empires The role of East Asia in global economic history, and the rise of new economies in China, Japan, and South Korea based on global trade

Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Great Divergence” from The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

Andre Gunder Frank, “The 21st Century Will Be Asian” from The Nikkei Weekly

Steven Radelat, Jeffrey Sachs, and Jong-Wha Lee, “Economic Growth in Asia” from Emerging Asia

Ho-Fung Hung, “Is the Rise of China Sustainable?” from China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism

Further Reading

7. Southeast Asia and the Pacific: The Edges of Globalization The emergence of Southeast Asia from colonial control; the rise of Australia and New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands on the edges of globalization

Georges Coedès, “The Indianized States of Southeast Asia” from The Indianized States of Southeast Asia

Benedict Anderson, “Imagined Communities” from Imagined Communities

Sucheng Chan, “Vietnam, 1945–2000: The Global Dimensions of Decolonization, War, Revolution, and Refugee Outflows”

Celeste Lipow MacLeod, “Asian Connections” from Multiethnic Australia: Its History and Future

Joel Robbins, “Pacific Islands Religious Communities” from The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions

Further Reading

8. Europe and Russia: Nationalism and Transnationalism The role of Europe in creating the concept of the nation, transnational politics in the Soviet Union, and the rise of the European Union

Peter Stearns, “The 1850s as Turning Point: The Birth of Globalization?” from Globalization in World History

Eric Hobsbawm, “The Nation” from The Nation as Novelty

Seyla Benhabib, “Citizens, Residents, and Aliens in a Changing World” from The Postnational Self

Odd Arne Westad, “Soviet Ideology and Foreign Interventions in the Global Cold War” from The Global Cold War

Jürgen Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity” from Praxis International

Further Reading

9. The Americas: Development Strategies The European conquest of the Americas, the rise of new societies, and varying patterns of economic development within a global context

Charles C. Mann, “Discovering the New World Columbus Created” from 1493: Discovering the New World Columbus Created

Tzvetan Todorov, “The Reasons for the Victory” from The Conquest of America

Francis Fukuyama, “Explaining the Development Gap between Latin America and the United States” from Falling Behind

Denis Lynn Daly Heyck, “Surviving Globalization in Three Latin American Communities” from Surviving Globalization in Three Latin American Communities

Further Reading

PART III: TRANSNATIONAL GLOBAL ISSUES

10. Global Forces in the New World Order Paradigms for thinking about the new world order (or disorder) in the post– Cold War global era

Benjamin Barber, “Jihad vs. McWorld” from Jihad vs. McWorld

Samuel Huntington, “A Multipolar, Multicivilizational World” from The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Empire” from Empire

Saskia Sassen, “Global Cities” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies

Further Reading

11. The Erosion of the Nation-State The fading strength of the nation-state and the rise of alternative conceptions of world order

Kenichi Ohmae, “The Cartographic Illusion” from The End of the Nation-State

Susan Strange, “The Westfailure System” from Review of International Studies

Zygmunt Bauman, “After the Nation-State—What?” from Globalization: The Human Consequences

William I. Robinson, “The Transnational State” from A Theory of Global Capitalism

Further Reading

12. Religious Politics and the New World Order The religious challenge to the secular state in new conceptions of political order

Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy Samuel Shah, “The Twenty-first Century as God’s Century” from God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics

Mark Juergensmeyer, “Religion in the New Global Order” from Europe: A Beautiful Idea?

Olivier Roy, “Al Qaeda and the New Terrorists” from Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah

Richard Falk, “Religion and Humane Global Governance” from Religion and Humane Global Governance

Further Reading

13. Transnational Economy and Global Labor Economic globalization: its relation to national economies, the growth of transnational corporations, and the changing role of labor

Richard Appelbaum, “Outsourcing” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies

Nelson Lichtenstein, “Wal-Mart: Template for 21st Century Capitalism?” from New Labor Forum

Robert B. Reich, “Who Is Us?” from Harvard Business Review

Jagdish Bhagwati, “Two Critiques of Globalization” from In Defense of Globalization

Joseph Stiglitz, “Toward a Globalization with a More Human Face” from Globalization and Its Discontents

Further Reading

14. Global Finance and Financial Inequality Changes in the concept of money and international financial markets

Benjamin J. Cohen, “Money in International Affairs” from The Geography of Money

Stephen J. Kobrin, “Electronic Cash and the End of National Markets” from Foreign Policy

Glenn Firebaugh, “The Rise in Income Disparities over the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” from The New Geography of Global Income Inequality

Dani Rodrik, “Globalization for Whom?” from Harvard Magazine

Further Reading

15. Development and the Role of Women in the Global Economy Competing views of development and the role of women in the global economy

Alvin Y. So, “Social Change and Development” from Social Change and Development

Mayra Buvinić, “Women in Poverty: A New Global Underclass” from Foreign Policy

Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian, and Debashish Munshi, “From the Edges of Development” from On the Edges of Development: Cultural Interventions

Further Reading

16. The Hidden Global Economy of Sex and Drugs Illegal trafficking in people and drugs, and the global attempts to control them

David Shirk, “The Drug War in Mexico” from The Drug War in Mexico: Confronting a Common Threat

Eduardo Porter, “Numbers Tell of Failure in Drug War” from the New York Times

Kevin Bales, “The New Slavery” from Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy

Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Nannies, Maids, and Sex

Workers in the Global Economy” from Global Woman

Further Reading

17. Global Environmental and Health Crises The principal environmental and health problems that transcend national boundaries, and global attempts to alleviate them

Catherine Gautier, “Climate Change” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies

Ron Fujita, “Turning the Tide” from Heal the Ocean: Solutions for Saving Our Seas

Hakan Seckinelgin, “HIV/AIDS” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies

Further Reading

18. Global Communications and New Media The role of new media—video, internet, and social networking—in global culture and politics

Yudhishthir Raj Isar, “Global Culture and Media” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies

Michael Curtin, “Media Capital in Chinese Film and Television” from Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV

Natana J. DeLong-Bas, “The New Social Media and the Arab Spring” from Oxford Islamic Studies Online

Pippa Norris, “The Worldwide Digital Divide” from Harvard University Kennedy School of Government

Further Reading

19. The Global Movement for Human Rights Transnational networks supporting human rights and legal protection for all

Micheline Ishay, “Globalization and Its Impact” from The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era

Alison Brysk, “Transnational Threats and Opportunities” from Globalization and Human Rights

Eve Darian-Smith, “Human Rights as an Ethics of Progress” from Laws and Societies in Global Contexts: Contemporary Approaches

David Held, “Changing Forms of Global Order” from Cosmopolitanism

Further Reading

20. The Future of Global Civil Society The emerging sense of global citizenship, and nongovernmental organizations and movements comprising a new “global civil society”: is this the global future?

Mary Kaldor, “Social Movements, NGOs, and Networks” from Global Civil Society

Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Shaping Globalization: Why Global Futures?” from Global Futures

Giles Gunn, “Being Other-Wise: Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents” from Ideas to Die For: Cosmopolitanism in a Global Era

Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Making Conversation” from Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

Further Reading

Acknowledgments Index

PREFACE A Friendly Introduction to Global Studies

I have a lot of friends on Facebook, and they live in all parts of the world. If I post something about global trade, I get responses from friends in China and Brazil. If I put up a link about interfaith harmony, I get appreciative “likes” from friends in Indonesia, India, and Northern Ireland. When I comment about domestic politics in the United States, I’m often politely ignored by my friends in the other part of the world, who find my local obsessions as arcane as I view their postings on Eritrean political squabbles. But when I post a link to a website that portrays nothing but pictures of bouncing cats, I receive appreciative notices from around the world. Everyone, it seems, loves bouncing cats. It is not just the bouncing cats that are global, however. It’s everything.

The very process of interaction and communication beyond national borders is a feature of our globalized world. And it is not just Facebook. Every time you go online, you go global. When you turn off the computer and go to the store, chances are you

will encounter not just your local milieu. A trip to Walmart is a journey into the global arena. And when you bring home all that stuff made not only in China but also in myriad countries around the world, you are literally bringing globalization home. Try this simple party game with your friends. Guess the country on everyone’s clothing labels, then check to see where the t-shirts and jackets and everything else you and your friends are wearing were made—Bangladesh, Trinidad, Cambodia, Yemen, or wherever. See how many countries are represented. And then imagine the journey that the clothing had to make, from cotton fields to textile factories to seaports and cargo containers to distribution centers to retail stores and eventually to the closets of you and your friends. Perhaps the most global area of your house is that closet. In some cases, you do not have to go anywhere to find examples of

globalization because they come to you. Globalization permeates the air that you breathe—including tiny particles emitted from volcanic eruptions half a world away. It affects your weather, as cycles of warming and cooling air react to global climate change. And globalization is part of the food that you eat. This is obvious if you have a taste for Chinese take-out or pad Thai noodles or Mexican burritos. But even if you are a meat-and- potatoes kind of person who likes a little tomato salad on the side, you are enjoying the effects of globalization about five hundred years ago. It was then that potatoes and tomatoes, plants originally found only in South America, were taken elsewhere by explorers to become a part of the food habits in North America, Europe, and around the world. Their dissemination was part of the extraordinary global diffusion of plants, germs, and cultures that followed European contacts with the Western Hemisphere, beginning with Columbus in 1492. So globalization is woven into the fabric of our daily lives. To study it is

to focus on the central feature of life in the twenty-first century. But how do you go about studying globalization? Is it really possible to study the whole world? Doesn’t this mean studying almost everything? And if so, where do you begin? These were the questions in the minds of a group of scholars who met in

Tokyo in 2008. They had met the year before in Santa Barbara, California, to explore the possibility of creating a new international organization for representatives of graduate programs in global studies—a whole new academic field that had been created in various universities around the world. The first college programs to be called “global studies” were formed in the mid-1990s, and within a decade there were hundreds. Students flocked to the new programs, intuitively knowing that this was something important. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, graduate programs had been established in dozens of universities in Asia, Europe, and North America, including Japan, South Korea, China, India, Germany, Denmark, Russia, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the United States. The field of global studies had arrived. But what was in this new field of study? When the scholars came

together in Tokyo in 2008, their main goals were to answer this question and to define the major features of the field of global studies. They came expecting to have something of a fight. After all, each of these programs had developed independently from the others. When representatives of all these different programs came together, they did not know what they would find, thinking that the field of global studies would be defined vastly differently in Tokyo, Leipzig, and Melbourne. But as it turned out, this was not the case. Happily, there was a great deal of agreement at the outset

regarding what the field of global studies contained and how to go about studying it. The five characteristics of global studies that the scholars agreed on at

that memorable founding meeting of the international Global Studies Consortium in Tokyo are discussed below.

Transnational. The scholars in Tokyo agreed that the field of global studies focuses primarily on the analysis of events, activities, ideas, trends, processes, and phenomena that appear across national boundaries and cultural regions. These include activities such as economic distribution systems, and ideologies such as nationalism or religious beliefs. The scholars used the term cultural regions as well as nations, since these kinds of global flows of activity and ideas transcend the limitations of regions even when they are not the same as national boundaries. Historically, much of the activity that we call “transnational” might more properly be called “transregional,” since it occurred before the concept of nation was applied to states.

Interdisciplinary. Since transnational phenomena are complex, these are examined from many disciplinary points of view. In general, the field of global studies does not keep strict disciplinary divisions among, for instance, sociological, historical, political, literary, or other academic fields. Rather, it takes a problem-focused approach, looking at situations such as global warming or the rise of new religio-political ideologies as specific cases. To make sense of these problem areas requires multiple perspectives, which may be economic, political, social, cultural, religious, ideological, or environmental. Scholars involved in global studies often work in interdisciplinary teams or freely use terms and concepts across fields of study. These scholars come from all fields of the social sciences (especially from sociology, economics, political science, and anthropology). And many of the fields are also related to the humanities, including particularly the fields of history, literature, religious studies, and the arts. Some scholars have expertise in areas of science, such as environmental studies and public health.

Contemporary and Historical. We think of globalization as being primarily contemporary, something unique to our time. But it is also historical. True, the pace and intensity of globalization have increased enormously in the post–Cold War period of the twentieth century and even more so in the

twenty-first century. But transnational activities have had historical antecedents. There are moments in history—such as in the ancient Mediterranean world during the Roman and Greek Empires—when there was a great deal of transnational activity and interchange on economic, cultural, and political levels. The global reach of European colonialism from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century provides another example of a global stratum of culture, education, technology, and economic activity upon which are based many aspects of the globalization of the twenty-first century. Thus, to fully understand the patterns of globalization today, it is necessary to probe their historical precedents.

Critical and Multicultural. The American and European view of globalization is not the only one. Although many aspects of contemporary globalization are based on European colonial precedents, most global studies scholars do not accept uncritically the notion that people in the West should be the only ones to benefit from economic, political, and cultural globalization. Some global studies scholars avoid using the term globalization to describe their subject of study, since the term sometimes is interpreted to imply the promotion of a Western-dominated hegemonic project aimed at spreading the acceptance of laissez-faire liberal economics throughout the world. Other scholars describe their approach as “critical globalization studies,” implying that their examination of globalization is not intended to promote or privilege Western economic models of globalization, but rather to understand it. To understand globalization well requires viewing it from many cultural

perspectives—from African and Asian, as well as European and American, points of view. Scholars of global studies acknowledge that globalization and other global issues, activities, and trends can be viewed differently in different parts of the world and from different socio-economic levels within each locality. For that reason, scholars of global studies sometimes speak of “many globalizations” or “multiple perspectives on global studies.” This position acknowledges that there is no dominant paradigm or perspective in global studies that is valued over others.

Globally Responsible. Scholars who work in global studies often advance an additional criterion for what they do: to help make the world a better place in which to live. By focusing on global problems, scholars imply that they want to help solve those problems. They also hope to foster a sense of global citizenship among their students. They like to think that they are helping to create “global literacy”—the ability to function in an increasingly

globalized world—by understanding both the specific aspects of diverse cultures and traditions and the commonly experienced global trends and patterns. Other teachers assert that they are providing training in “global leadership,” giving potential leaders of transnational organizations and movements the understanding and skills that will help them to solve problems and deal with issues on a global scale.

In this book we will embrace all of these aspects of global studies. In Part 2, we will move around the world from region to region—from Africa, the Middle East, South and Central Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia and the Pacific area to Europe and bicontinental Russia and the Americas. We explore readings that show how globalization is viewed from the perspective of each region, both historically and today. We will consider how global factors have affected each region and how each region has contributed to the larger currents of globalization during different historical periods. In Part 3, we will look at major transnational issues today, including the

decline of the nation-state, the rise of new religious politics, and several economic issues—such as finance, currency, and labor in the global economy; problems of development and the role of women in the world’s workforce; and the hidden economy involving trade in sex and illicit drugs. We will also explore global environmental problems, including climate change, transnational diseases and other global health issues, and global communications and new media, and end with a section on the role of civil society in the global future. In choosing the readings to explore these issues, I have tried to achieve a balance among disciplinary and cultural perspectives. And I hope for my readers to not only understand the nature of global problems, but also to consider some of the possibilities in solving them. So when you enter the field of global studies, you are encountering

some of the most significant aspects of our contemporary world. You are engaging with the transnational issues that have shaped the regions of the world from ancient times to the present and that are among the most pressing issues of our contemporary era. Like the Internet, global studies draws you into this wider world. But global studies, at its best, does more than that. As these readings will show, the scholars engaged in these studies have honed their analytic skills to make critical assessments and reasoned judgments about the character of the global transformations that are occurring around us. This does not make these scholars infallible; in fact, they frequently disagree with one another. But their insights do make them friends—not only to be liked, but also to be challenged by, to be

emulated, and to be known.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

1 THINKING GLOBALLY

Your friends may have peeked over your shoulders at this book and asked why you are interested in global studies. And they might have added, just what is that, anyway? So what do you tell them? You could say that you are studying what goes on in the world that knits us all together—but that sounds sort of soft and squishy. Or you could tell them that you are studying the economic and technological networks that interact on a global plane. But that’s only part of the story. The honest truth is that “global studies” can mean a lot of different

things, both the hard and the squishy. It is usually defined as the analysis of events, activities, ideas, processes, and flows that are transnational or that can affect all areas of the world. These global activities can be studied as one part of the established disciplines of sociology, economics, political science, history, religious studies, and the like. Or global studies can be a separate course or part of a whole new program or department. As an academic field, global studies is fairly new. It blossomed largely

after the turn of the twenty-first century. But the intellectual roots of the field lie in the pioneering work of the many different scholars who have thought globally over many decades. These thinkers have attempted to understand how things are related and have explored the connections among societies, polities, economies, and cultural systems throughout the world. One could argue that the first global studies scholars were among the

founders of the social sciences. Over a hundred years ago the pioneering German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) wrote a series of works on the religions of India, China, Judaism, and Protestant Christianity. Weber was interested in finding what was distinctive about each of them, and what was similar among all of them. Weber also attempted to discern

universal elements in the development of all societies. He showed, for example, that a certain kind of rational and legal authority and its associated bureaucratization was a globalizing process. Though his intellectual interests were Europocentric, his curiosity spanned the globe. Other early social scientists were also global thinkers. The French

sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) focused first on something very local: case studies of tribal societies. What he found, however, was something he regarded as quite global: the rise of organic solidarity based on functional interdependence. The German philosopher and social critic Karl Marx (1818–1883) likewise assumed that his theories were universal. Marx showed that capitalism was a globalizing force, one that would cause both production systems and markets to expand to encompass the entire world. Ideas in Europe, North America, and the rest of the Westernized world

were influenced by thinkers such as these. At the same time, significant thinking about intercultural commonalities and global awareness was being developed in intellectual centers in other parts of the world. The tolerant ideals of the Muslim thinker Ibn Khaldun were influential in North Africa and the Middle East, and notions of universal brotherhood advocated by the Indian philosopher Rabindranath Tagore had an impact on the intellectual circles of South Asia as well as on his admirers in Western societies. All of these early thinkers, both European and non-European, focused

on two ways of thinking globally: comparison and universality. In some cases, they looked at comparative and non-Western examples to determine differences and similarities. In other studies, they adopted intellectual positions that assumed a universal applicability. Hence early European theorists such as Weber and Marx thought that the social forces that were transforming Europe in the nineteenth century would eventually have relevance globally. Current scholarship in all areas of the humanities and social sciences—including global studies—is indebted to these pioneering scholars. But the specific focus on globalization itself is fairly new. Only recently

have scholars begun to examine transnational and global networks, flows, processes, ideologies, outlooks, and systems both historically and in the contemporary world. In fact, the first explicitly global works of scholarship of this sort only emerged a few decades ago, at the end of the twentieth century. One of the pioneers of contemporary global studies was the sociologist

Immanuel Wallerstein, who helped to formulate world systems theory. He incorporated insights from political economy, sociology, and history in order

to understand global patterns of hegemonic state power. Other sociologists, including Roland Robertson, Saskia Sassen, and Manfred Steger, explicitly examined the concept of the global, as opposed to local, points of view. Perspectives from other disciplines have also contributed to global

studies. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai broadened the understanding of global perspectives from landscape to a variety of “scapes”—culturally shaped understandings of the world. The political scientist David Held helped to formulate theories of politics in relation to globalization. William H. McNeill, Akira Iriye, and Bruce Mazlish, among other historians, helped to develop the subfields of world history and global history. Economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Jagdish Bhagwati have analyzed economic interactions and changes in global terms. And in the field of religious studies, Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Ninian Smart moved beyond the study of particular religious traditions to the study of world theology and worldview analysis, respectively. Other scholars developed analytic approaches to describe new forms of global society: Mary Kaldor examined an emerging global civil society while Kwame Anthony Appiah and Ulrich Beck have described what they regard as a cosmopolitan strand in the new global order. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, an imposing body of

scholarly literature and a flurry of new journals, book series, and scholarly conferences and associations emerged under the label of global studies. The field had arrived. This book provides a road map to the emerging field. At the same time—to mix metaphors—it provides a sampling of the intellectual feast that the current field provides. Global studies uses the term transnational a lot. What this means is that

global studies focus not just on the activities and patterns that are international—among nation-states—but also on those that exist beyond the borders of nations and regions and stretch across the various areas of the world. This is one way of thinking of global activity—not that it is universal, found everywhere on the planet, but that it transcends the usual boundaries that separate nation from nation. Transnational relations can be confined largely within a particular area of the world (such as economic cooperation within Europe, for instance, or among the nations along the Pacific Rim) and not necessarily occur throughout the whole world. At the same time, there are phenomena that are truly global in that they

are found everywhere, such as satellite communication systems that can be accessed anywhere on the planet. These are by definition transnational, since they occur beyond the limitations of national boundaries or control. All global phenomena encompass transnational linkages, but not everything

that is transnational is global. Terms can be confusing, but it’s useful to try to be as clear as possible about what we mean. In the field of global studies, we tend not to use the term international

very often, since it implies interactions between nation-states. In common, everyday language, however, many transnational phenomena are described as international, as in the description of some environmental issues as international problems, even though the phenomena themselves—such as the pollution of the oceans and global warming—are transnational. The wording gets tricky when one considers that many of the efforts to deal with transnational problems like global climate change are international— such as the collaboration of nations in efforts to agree on limiting carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Global studies has to do with globalization, of course, but what does

that mean? Often, globalization is defined as the process of bringing the world together in more intense interaction through all of the transnational activity that we have been talking about—economic, demographic, social, cultural, technological, and so on. Scholars such as Roland Robertson began using the term globalization in the 1980s. And a book by Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King used the term globalization in its title in the early 1990s. What they meant by the term was the process of social change that involved transnational interactions in all aspects of social, economic, and technological relationships. Thus, the word globalization describes a process. The result of globalization is a more unified and interactive planet—a

globalized world. Some scholars have called this globalized society “globality” or the era of “the global.” The attitude that people adopt in this more intensely interactive world can be said to be one of “globalism,” or “global consciousness,” or one embracing the “global imaginary.” These are all ways of thinking about the new state of global awareness in a world where transnational activity is the norm and everyone is affected by everyone else everywhere on the planet. These broad global trends seem vast, and they are. But they also are

felt on a very local level. There are pockets of globalism, for example, in neighborhoods that are multicultural and contain different immigrant communities that interact with one another. Some cities are described as “global cities,” both because of their importance as global nodes of economic and cultural networks and because their own populations are a tapestry of peoples from different parts of the world. In Los Angeles, for instance, you can find areas that are entirely Filipino, and other areas where only Vietnamese is spoken. Los Angeles contains one of the largest Mexican populations in the world and also one of the largest groups of

Iranians. In many ways, it is a social microcosm of the world, and yet all of these immigrant neighborhoods interact in a common urban locale. Roland Robertson coined the term glocal to describe these examples of

globalism in a local setting. In his description, glocalization is a logical extension of globalization. It is the way that local communities are affected by global trends. The appearance of big-box stores selling Chinese- manufactured products in sleepy rural towns of Arkansas is one example of glocalization. An Internet café that I found on a remote segment of the Inca trail near Machu Picchu in Peru is another. At the same time that global trends influence local settings, the reverse

can also happen: global patterns can be reinterpreted on a local level. The spread of the McDonald’s fast-food franchise around the world is an example. When I visit the McDonald’s in Delhi, I find that none of the hamburgers are, in fact, beef burgers; they are chicken or veggie burgers, reflecting the predominantly vegetarian eating customs of people in India. In Kyoto’s McDonald’s, you can get a Teriyaki McBurger; and in the McDonald’s restaurant in Milan, the sophisticated Italians may choose pasta rather than fries. So when globalization is glocalized, global patterns can adapt to local situations. In the readings in this section, these concepts of globalization and

globalism are explored by several influential scholars in the field of global studies. The first essay is by Manfred Steger, a native Austrian who helped to create the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Steger’s book Globalization: A Very Short Introduction is one of the most widely read books on the topic. In an excerpt from this book, Steger describes the phenomenon of globalization in the post–Cold War era—that is, since roughly 1990. He argues that globalization has increased even more since the turn of the century in 2000 and takes as his example the terrorist act on September 11, 2001. Steger shows that this incident, and the technology, media, and ideological elements related to it, exhibit the global interconnectedness of our contemporary world. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman also agrees that the

era of globalization is relatively recent. In his calculation, however, it begins around 1989, at the end of the Cold War, when the Berlin wall tumbled and the ideological confrontation between socialist and capitalist societies was replaced by a more fluid and varied concept of world order. In Friedman’s view, the wrestling matches between two huge lumbering superpowers has been replaced by the sprints to economic success by leaner independent economies. And though previous periods of globalization in history have shrunk the world from a size “large” to a size

“medium,” the current era shrinks the world to a size “small.” Paul James, a sociologist who helped develop the global studies program

at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, tries to put this global phenomenon in order. He describes the various aspects of globalization and the different approaches to studying it. In James’s comprehensive survey of the field, he shows that the study of globalization comes from all the major disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. Globalization is a basic feature of modern life. But is it always good? In

an essay from Foreign Policy, Steven Weber, a professor of political science and director of the Institute for International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that globalization often seems to have gone bad. This is especially true for those who expected America’s military and economic superiority in a post–Cold War era to give it unbridled control over the rest of the world. But Weber argues that globalization may not be such a bad thing after all. America’s security—and the world’s—depends not on just one superpower exerting its authority, but also on an interconnected set of relationships that reduces conflict through cooperation. Perhaps, Weber suggests, the best approach to dealing with a globalized world is not for one country to try to control it, but to let the political interconnectedness of the world provide for a mutual, collective security.

GLOBALIZATION: A CONTESTED CONCEPT

Manfred Steger

In the autumn of 2001, I was teaching an undergraduate class on modern political and social theory. Still traumatized by the recent terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, most of my students couldn’t quite grasp the connection between the violent forces of religious fundamentalism and the more secular picture of a technologically sophisticated, rapidly globalizing world that I had sought to convey in class lectures and discussions. “I understand that ‘globalization’ is a contested concept that refers to sometimes contradictory social processes,” a bright history major at the back of the room quipped, “but how can you say that the TV image of a religious fanatic who denounces modernity and secularism from a mountain cave in Afghanistan perfectly captures the complex dynamics of globalization? Don’t these terrible acts of terrorism suggest the opposite, namely, the growth of parochial forces that undermine globalization?” Obviously, the student was referring to Saudi-

born Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, whose videotaped statement condemning the activities of “international infidels” had been broadcast worldwide on 7 October. Struck by the sense of intellectual urgency that fuelled my student’s

question, I realized that the story of globalization would remain elusive without real-life examples capable of breathing shape, colour, and sound into a vague concept that had become the buzzword of our time. Hence, before delving into necessary matters of definition and analytical clarification, we ought to approach our subject in less abstract fashion. I suggest we begin our journey with a careful examination of the aforementioned videotape. It will soon become fairly obvious why a deconstruction of those images provides important clues to the nature and dynamics of the phenomenon we have come to call “globalization.”

DECONSTRUCTING OSAMA BIN LADEN

The infamous videotape bears no date, but experts estimate that the recording was made less than two weeks before it was broadcast. The timing of its release appears to have been carefully planned so as to achieve the maximum effect on the day the United States commenced its bombing campaign against Taliban and Al Qaeda (“The Base”) forces in Afghanistan. Although Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants were then hiding in a remote region of the country, they obviously possessed the hi- tech equipment needed to record the statement. Moreover, Al Qaeda members clearly enjoyed immediate access to sophisticated information and telecommunication networks that kept them informed—in real-time—of relevant international developments. Bin Laden may have denounced the forces of modernity with great conviction, but the smooth operation of his entire organization was entirely dependent on advanced forms of technology developed in the last two decades of the 20th century. To further illustrate this apparent contradiction, consider the complex

chain of global interdependencies that must have existed in order for bin Laden’s message to be heard and seen by billions of TV viewers around the world. After making its way from the secluded mountains of eastern Afghanistan to the capital city of Kabul, the videotape was dropped off by an unknown courier outside the local office of Al-Jazeera, a Qatar-based television company. This network had been launched only five years earlier as a state-financed, Arabic-language news and current affairs channel that offered limited programming. Before the founding of Al-Jazeera, cutting- edge TV journalism—such as free-ranging public affairs interviews and talk shows with call-in audiences—simply did not exist in the Arab world. Within

only three years, however, Al-Jazeera was offering its Middle Eastern audience a dizzying array of programmes, transmitted around the clock by powerful satellites put into orbit by European rockets and American space shuttles. Indeed, the network’s market share increased even further as a result

of the dramatic reduction in the price and size of satellite dishes. Suddenly, such technologies became affordable, even for low-income consumers. By the turn of the century, Al-Jazeera broadcasts could be watched around the clock on all five continents. In 2001, the company further intensified its global reach when its chief executives signed a lucrative cooperation agreement with CNN, the leading news network owned by the giant multinational corporation AOL-Time-Warner. A few months later, when the world’s attention shifted to the war in Afghanistan, Al-Jazeera had already positioned itself as a truly global player, powerful enough to rent equipment to such prominent news providers as Reuters and ABC, sell satellite time to the Associated Press and BBC, and design an innovative Arabic-language business news channel together with its other American network partner, CNBC. Unhampered by national borders and geographical obstacles,

cooperation among these sprawling news networks had become so efficient that CNN acquired and broadcast a copy of the Osama bin Laden tape only a few hours after it had been delivered to the Al-Jazeera office in Kabul. Caught off guard by the incredible speed of today’s information exchange, the Bush administration asked the Qatari government to “rein in Al-Jazeera,” claiming that the swift airing of the bin Laden tape without prior consultation was contributing to the rise of anti-American sentiments in the Arab world and thus threatened to undermine the US war effort. However, not only was the perceived “damage” already done, but segments of the tape—including the full text of bin Laden’s statement— could be viewed online by anyone with access to a computer and a modem. The Al-Jazeera website quickly attracted an international audience as its daily hit count skyrocketed to over seven million. There can be no doubt that it was the existence of this chain of global

interdependencies and interconnections that made possible the instant broadcast of bin Laden’s speech to a global audience. At the same time, however, it must be emphasized that even those voices that oppose modernity cannot extricate themselves from the very process of globalization they so decry. In order to spread their message and recruit new sympathizers, antimodernizers must utilize the tools provided by globalization. This obvious truth was visible even in bin Laden’s personal appearance. The tape shows that he was wearing contemporary military

fatigues over traditional Arab garments. In other words, his dress reflects the contemporary processes of fragmentation and cross-fertilization that globalization scholars call “hybridization”—the mixing of different cultural forms and styles facilitated by global economic and cultural exchanges. In fact, the pale colours of bin Laden’s mottled combat dress betrayed its Russian origins, suggesting that he wore the jacket as a symbolic reminder of the fierce guerrilla war waged by him and other Islamic militants against the Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan during the 1980s. His ever- present AK-47 Kalashnikov, too, was probably made in Russia, although dozens of gun factories around the world have been building this popular assault rifle for over 40 years. By the mid-1990s, more than 70 million Kalashnikovs had been manufactured in Russia and abroad. At least 50 national armies include such rifles in their arsenal, making Kalashnikovs truly weapons of global choice. Thus, bin Laden’s AK-47 could have come from anywhere in the world. However, given the astonishing globalization of organized crime during the last two decades, it is quite conceivable that bin Laden’s rifle was part of an illegal arms deal hatched and executed by such powerful international criminal organizations as Al Qaeda and the Russian Mafia. It is also possible that the rifle arrived in Afghanistan by means of an underground arms trade similar to the one that surfaced in May 1996, when police in San Francisco seized 2,000 illegally imported AK-47s manufactured in China. A close look at bin Laden’s right wrist reveals yet another clue to the

powerful dynamics of globalization. As he directs his words of contempt for the United States and its allies at his hand-held microphone, his retreating sleeve exposes a stylish sports watch. Journalists who noticed this expensive accessory have speculated about the origins of the timepiece in question. The emerging consensus points to a Timex product. However, given that Timex watches are as American as apple pie, it seems rather ironic that the Al Qaeda leader should have chosen this particular chronometer. After all, Timex Corporation, originally the Waterbury Clock Company, was founded in the 1850s in Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley, known throughout the 19th century as the “Switzerland of America.” Today, the company has gone multinational, maintaining close relations to affiliated businesses and sales offices in 65 countries. The corporation employs 7,500 employees, located on four continents. Thousands of workers—mostly from low-wage countries in the global South—constitute the driving force behind Timex’s global production process. Our brief deconstruction of some of the central images on the videotape

makes it easier to understand why the seemingly anachronistic images of an antimodern terrorist in front of an Afghan cave do, in fact, capture some

essential dynamics of globalization. Indeed, the tensions between the forces of particularism and those of universalism have reached unprecedented levels only because interdependencies that connect the local to the global have been growing faster than at any time in history. The rise of international terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda represents but one of the many manifestations of globalization. Just as bin Laden’s romantic ideology of a “pure Islam” is itself the result of the modern imagination, so has our global age with its obsession for technology and its mass-market commodities indelibly shaped the violent backlash against globalization. Our deconstruction of Osama bin Laden has provided us with a real-life

example of the intricate—and sometimes contradictory—social dynamics of globalization. We are now in a better position to tackle the rather demanding task of assembling a working definition of globalization that brings some analytical precision to a contested concept that has proven to be notoriously hard to pin down.

THE WORLD IS TEN YEARS OLD

Thomas Friedman

On the morning of December 8, 1997, the government of Thailand announced that it was closing 56 of the country’s 58 top finance houses. Almost overnight, these private banks had been bankrupted by the crash of the Thai currency, the baht. The finance houses had borrowed heavily in U.S. dollars and lent those dollars out to Thai businesses for the building of hotels, office blocks, luxury apartments and factories. The finance houses all thought they were safe because the Thai government was committed to keeping the Thai baht at a fixed rate against the dollar. But when the government failed to do so, in the wake of massive global speculation against the baht—triggered by a dawning awareness that the Thai economy was not as strong as previously believed—the Thai currency plummeted by 30 percent. This meant that businesses that had borrowed dollars had to come up with 30 percent more Thai baht to pay back each $1 of loans. Many businesses couldn’t pay the finance houses back, many finance houses couldn’t repay their foreign lenders and the whole system went into gridlock, putting 20,000 white-collar employees out of work. The next day, I happened to be driving to an appointment in Bangkok down Asoke Street, Thailand’s equivalent of Wall Street, where most of the bankrupt finance houses were located. As we slowly passed each one of

these fallen firms, my cabdriver pointed them out, pronouncing at each one: “Dead! . . . dead! . . . dead! . . . dead! . . . dead!” I did not know it at the time—no one did—but these Thai investment

houses were the first dominoes in what would prove to be the first global financial crisis of the new era of globalization—the era that followed the Cold War. The Thai crisis triggered a general flight of capital out of virtually all the Southeast Asian emerging markets, driving down the value of currencies in South Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia. Both global and local investors started scrutinizing these economies more closely, found them wanting, and either moved their cash out to safer havens or demanded higher interest rates to compensate for the higher risk. It wasn’t long before one of the most popular sweatshirts around Bangkok was emblazoned with the words “Former Rich.” Within a few months, the Southeast Asian recession began to have an

effect on commodity prices around the world. Asia had been an important engine for worldwide economic growth—an engine that consumed huge amounts of raw materials. When that engine started to sputter, the prices of gold, copper, aluminum and, most important, crude oil all started to fall. This fall in worldwide commodity prices turned out to be the mechanism for transmitting the Southeast Asian crisis to Russia. Russia at the time was minding its own business, trying, with the help of the IMF, to climb out of its own self-made economic morass onto a stable growth track. The problem with Russia, though, was that too many of its factories couldn’t make anything of value. In fact, much of what they made was considered “negative value added.” That is, a tractor made by a Russian factory was so bad it was actually worth more as scrap metal, or just raw iron ore, than it was as a finished, Russian-made tractor. On top of it all, those Russian factories that were making products that could be sold abroad were paying few, if any, taxes to the government, so the Kremlin was chronically short of cash. Without much of an economy to rely on for revenues, the Russian

government had become heavily dependent on taxes from crude oil and other commodity exports to fund its operating budget. It had also become dependent on foreign borrowers, whose money Russia lured by offering ridiculous rates of interest on various Russian government-issued bonds. As Russia’s economy continued to slide in early 1998, the Russians had

to raise the interest rate on their ruble bonds from 20 to 50 to 70 percent to keep attracting the foreigners. The hedge funds and foreign banks kept buying them, figuring that even if the Russian government couldn’t pay them back, the IMF would step in, bail out Russia and the foreigners would get their money back. Some hedge funds and foreign banks not only

continued to put their own money into Russia, but they went out and borrowed even more money, at 5 percent, and then bought Russian T-bills with it that paid 20 or 30 percent. As Grandma would say, “Such a deal!” But as Grandma would also say, “If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is!” And it was. The Asian-triggered slump in oil prices made it harder and

harder for the Russian government to pay the interest and principal on its T-bills. And with the IMF under pressure to make loans to rescue Thailand, Korea and Indonesia, it resisted any proposals for putting more cash into Russia—unless the Russians first fulfilled their promises to reform their economy, starting with getting their biggest businesses and banks to pay some taxes. On August 17 the Russian economic house of cards came tumbling down, dealing the markets a double whammy: Russia both devalued and unilaterally defaulted on its government bonds, without giving any warning to its creditors or arranging any workout agreement. The hedge funds, banks and investment banks that were invested in Russia began piling up massive losses, and those that had borrowed money to magnify their bets in the Kremlin casino were threatened with bankruptcy. On the face of it, the collapse of the Russian economy should not have

had much impact on the global system. Russia’s economy was smaller than that of the Netherlands. But the system was now more global than ever, and just as crude oil prices were the transmission mechanism from Southeast Asia to Russia, the hedge funds—the huge unregulated pools of private capital that scour the globe for the best investments—were the transmission mechanism from Russia to all the other emerging markers in the world, particularly Brazil. The hedge funds and other trading firms, having racked up huge losses in Russia, some of which were magnified fifty times by using borrowed money, suddenly had to raise cash to pay back their bankers. They had to sell anything that was liquid. So they started selling assets in financially sound countries to compensate for their losses in bad ones. Brazil, for instance, which had been doing a lot of the right things in the eyes of the global markets and the IMF, suddenly saw all its stocks and bonds being sold by panicky investors. Brazil had to raise its interest rates as high as 40 percent to try to hold capital inside the country. Variations on this scenario were played out throughout the world’s emerging markets, as investors fled for safety. They cashed in their Brazilian, Korean, Egyptian, Israeli and Mexican bonds and stocks, and put the money either under their mattresses or into the safest U.S. bonds they could find. So the declines in Brazil and the other emerging markets became the transmission mechanism that triggered a herdlike stampede into U.S. Treasury bonds. This, in turn, sharply drove up the value of U.S.

T-bonds, drove down the interest that the U.S. government had to offer on them to attract investors and increased the spread between U.S. T-bonds and other corporate and emerging market bonds. The steep drop in the yield on U.S. Treasury bonds was then the

transmission mechanism which crippled more hedge funds and investment banks. Take for instance Long-Term Capital Management, based in Greenwich, Connecticut. LTCM was the Mother of All Hedge Funds. Because so many hedge funds were attracted to the marketplace in the late 1980s, the field became fiercely competitive. Everyone pounced on the same opportunities. In order to make money in such a fiercely competitive world, the hedge funds had to seek ever more exotic bets with ever larger pools of cash. To guide them in placing the right bets, LTCM drew on the work of two Nobel Prize–winning business economists, whose research argued that the basic volatility of stocks and bonds could be estimated from how they reacted in the past. Using computer models, and borrowing heavily from different banks, LTCM put $120 billion at risk betting on the direction that certain key bonds would take in the summer of 1998. It implicitly bet that the value of U.S. T-bonds would go down, and that the value of junk bonds and emerging market bonds would go up. LTCM’s computer model, however, never anticipated something like the global contagion that would be set off in August by Russia’s collapse, and, as a result, its bets turned out to be exactly wrong. When the whole investment world panicked at once and decided to rush into U.S. T-bonds, their value soared instead of fell, and the value of junk bonds and emerging market bonds collapsed instead of soared. LTCM was like a wishbone that got pulled apart from both ends. It had to be bailed out by its bankers to prevent it from engaging in a fire sale of all its stocks and bonds that could have triggered a worldwide market meltdown. Now we get to my street. In early August 1998, I happened to invest in

my friend’s new Internet bank. The shares opened at $14.50 a share and soared to $27. I felt like a genius. But then Russia defaulted and set all these dominoes in motion, and my friend’s stock went to $8. Why? Because his bank held a lot of home mortgages, and with the fall of interest rates in America, triggered by the rush to buy T-bills, the markets feared that a lot of people would suddenly pay off their home mortgages early. If a lot of people paid off their home mortgages early, my friend’s bank might not have the income stream that it was counting on to pay depositors. The markets were actually wrong about my friend’s bank, and its stock bounced back nicely. Indeed, by early 1999 I was feeling like a genius again, as the Amazon.com Internet craze set in and drove my friend’s Internet bank stock sky high, as well as other technology shares we

owned. But, once again, it wasn’t long before the rest of the world crashed the party. Only this time, instead of Russia breaking down the front door, it was Brazil’s turn to upset U.S. markets and even dampen (temporarily) the Internet stock boom. As I watched all this play out, all I could think of was that it took nine

months for the events on Asoke Street to affect my street, and it took one week for events on the Brazilian Amazon (Amazon.country) to affect Amazon.com. USA Today aptly summed up the global marketplace at the end of 1998: “The trouble spread to one continent after another like a virus,” the paper noted. “U.S. markets reacted instantaneously. . . . People in barbershops actually talked about the Thai baht.” If nothing else, the cycle from Asoke Street to my street and from

Amazon.country to Amazon.com served to educate me and many others about the state of the world today. The slow, stable, chopped-up Cold War system that had dominated international affairs since 1945 had been firmly replaced by a new, very greased, interconnected system called globalization. We are all one river. If we didn’t fully understand that in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, we sure understood it a decade later. . . . From the mid-1800s to the late 1920s the world experienced a

similar era of globalization. If you compared the volumes of trade and capital flows across borders, relative to GNPs, and the flow of labor across borders, relative to populations, the period of globalization preceding World War I was quite similar to the one we are living through today. Great Britain, which was then the dominant global power, was a huge investor in emerging markets, and fat cats in England, Europe and America were often buffeted by financial crises, triggered by something that happened in Argentine railroad bonds, Latvian government bonds or German government bonds. There were no currency controls, so no sooner was the transatlantic cable connected in 1866 than banking and financial crises in New York were quickly being transmitted to London or Paris. I was on a panel once with John Monks, the head of the British Trades Union Congress, the AFL-CIO of Britain, who remarked that the agenda for the TUC’s first Congress in Manchester, England, in 1868, listed among the items that needed to be discussed: “The need to deal with competition from the Asian colonies” and “The need to match the educational and training standards of the United States and Germany.” In those days, people also migrated more than we remember, and, other than in wartime, countries did not require passports for travel before 1914. All those immigrants who flooded America’s shores came without visas. When you put all of these factors together, along with the inventions of the steamship, telegraph,

railroad and eventually telephone, it is safe to say that this first era of globalization before World War I shrank the world from a size “large” to a size “medium.” This first era of globalization and global finance capitalism was broken

apart by the successive hammer blows of World War I, the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression, which combined to fracture the world both physically and ideologically. The formally divided world that emerged after World War II was then frozen in place by the Cold War. The Cold War was also an international system. It lasted roughly from 1945 to 1989, when, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was replaced by another system: the new era of globalization we are now in. Call it “Globalization Round II.” It turns out that the roughly seventy-five-year period from the start of World War I to the end of the Cold War was just a long time-out between one era of globalization and another. While there are a lot of similarities in kind between the previous era of

globalization and the one we are now in, what is new today is the degree and intensity with which the world is being tied together into a single globalized marketplace. What is also new is the sheer number of people and countries able to partake of this process and be affected by it. The pre-1914 era of globalization may have been intense, but many developing countries in that era were left out of it. The pre-1914 era may have been large in scale relative to its time, but it was minuscule in absolute terms compared to today. Daily foreign exchange trading in 1900 was measured in the millions of dollars. In 1992, it was $820 billion a day, according to the New York Federal Reserve, and by April 1998 it was up to $1.5 trillion a day, and still rising. In the last decade alone total cross-border lending by banks around the world has doubled. Around 1900, private capital flows from developed countries to developing ones could be measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars and relatively few countries were involved. According to the IMF, in 1997 alone, private capital flows from the developed world to all emerging markets totaled $215 billion. This new era of globalization, compared to the one before World War I, is turbocharged. But today’s era of globalization is not only different in degree; in some

very important ways it is also different in kind. As The Economist once noted, the previous era of globalization was built around falling transportation costs. Thanks to the invention of the railroad, the steamship and the automobile, people could get to a lot more places faster and cheaper and they could trade with a lot more places faster and cheaper. Today’s era of globalization is built around falling telecommunications costs—thanks to microchips, satellites, fiber optics and the Internet. These

new technologies are able to weave the world together even tighter. These technologies mean that developing countries don’t just have to trade their raw materials to the West and get finished products in return; they mean that developing countries can become big-time producers as well. These technologies also allow companies to locate different parts of their production, research and marketing in different countries, but still tie them together through computers and teleconferencing as though they were in one place. Also, thanks to the combination of computers and cheap telecommunications, people can now offer and trade services globally— from medical advice to software writing to data processing—that could never really be traded before. And why not? According to The Economist, a three-minute call (in 1996 dollars) between New York and London cost $300 in 1930. Today it is almost free through the Internet. But what also makes this era of globalization unique is not just the fact

that these technologies are making it possible for traditional nation-states and corporations to reach farther, faster, cheaper and deeper around the world than ever before. It is the fact that it is allowing individuals to do so. I was reminded of this point one day in the summer of 1998 when my then seventy-nine-year-old mother, Margaret Friedman, who lives in Minneapolis, called me sounding very upset. “What’s wrong, Mom?” I asked. “Well,” she said, “I’ve been playing bridge on the Internet with three Frenchmen and they keep speaking French to each other and I can’t understand them.” When I chuckled at the thought of my card-shark mom playing bridge with three Frenchmen on the Net, she took a little umbrage. “Don’t laugh,” she said, “I was playing bridge with someone in Siberia the other day.” To all those who say that this era of globalization is no different from

the previous one, I would simply ask: Was your great-grandmother playing bridge with Frenchmen on the Internet in 1900? I don’t think so. There are some things about this era of globalization that we’ve seen before, and some things that we’ve never seen before and some things that are so new we don’t even understand them yet. For all these reasons, I would sum up the differences between the two eras of globalization this way: If the first era of globalization shrank the world from a size “large” to a size “medium,” this era of globalization is shrinking the world from a size “medium” to a size “small.” . . . This new era of globalization became the dominant international

system at the end of the twentieth century—replacing the Cold War system —and . . . it now shapes virtually everyone’s domestic politics and international relations. The body of literature that has been attempting to define the post–Cold War world [includes] four books: Paul M. Kennedy’s

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, the various essays and books of Robert D. Kaplan and Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. While all of these works contained important truths, I think none of

them really captured the post–Cold War world in any holistic way. Kaplan’s reporting was vivid and honest, but he took the grimmest corners of the globe and overgeneralized from them to the fate of the rest of the world. Huntington saw cultural conflicts around the world and wildly expanded that into an enduring, sharply defined clash of civilizations, even proclaiming that the next world war, if there is one, “will be a war between civilizations.” I believe both Kaplan and Huntington vastly underestimated how the power of states, the lure of global markets, the diffusion of technology, the rise of networks and the spread of global norms could trump their black-and-white (mostly black) projections. Both Kennedy and Huntington tried to divine the future too much from

the past and the past alone. Kennedy traced (quite brilliantly) the decline of the Spanish, French and British empires, but he concluded by suggesting that the American empire would be the next to fall because of its own imperial overreaching. His implicit message was that the end of the Cold War not only meant the end of the Soviet Union but would also herald the decline of the United States. I believe Kennedy did not appreciate enough that the relative decline of the United States in the 1980s, when he was writing, was part of America’s preparing itself for and adjusting to the new globalization system—a process that much of the rest of the world is going through only now. Kennedy did not anticipate that under the pressure of globalization America would slash its defense budget, shrink its government, and shift more and more powers to the free market in ways that would prolong its status as a Great Power, not diminish it. Huntington’s view was that, with the Cold War over, we won’t have the

Soviets to kick around any more, so we will naturally go back to kicking the Hindus and Muslims around and them kicking us around. He implicitly ruled out the rise of some new international system that could shape events differently. For Huntington, only tribalism could follow the Cold War, not anything new. Fukuyama’s pathbreaking book contained the most accurate insight

about what was new—the triumph of liberalism and free-market capitalism as the most effective way to organize a society—but his title (more than the book itself) implied a finality to this triumph that does not jibe with the world as I find it.

In a way, each of these works became prominent because they tried to capture in a single catchy thought “The One Big Thing,” the central moving part, the underlying motor, that would drive international affairs in the post–Cold War world—either the clash of civilizations, chaos, the decline of empires or the triumph of liberalism. . . . I believe that if you want to understand the post–Cold War world

you have to start by understanding that a new international system has succeeded it—globalization. That is “The One Big Thing” people should focus on. Globalization is not the only thing influencing events in the world today, but to the extent that there is a North Star and a worldwide shaping force, it is this system. What is new is the system; what is old is power politics, chaos, clashing civilizations and liberalism. And what is the drama of the post–Cold War world is the interaction between this new system and these old passions. It is a complex drama, with the final act still not written. That is why under the globalization system you will find both clashes of civilization and the homogenization of civilizations, both environmental disasters and amazing environmental rescues, both the triumph of liberal, free-market capitalism and a backlash against it, both the durability of nation-states and the rise of enormously powerful nonstate actors. . . . The publisher . . . Jonathan Galassi called me one day and said, “I

was telling some friends of mine that you’re writing a book about globalization and they said, ‘Oh, Friedman, he loves globalization.’ What would you say to that?” I answered Jonathan that I feel about globalization a lot like I feel about the dawn. Generally speaking, I think it’s a good thing that the sun comes up every morning. It does more good than harm. But even if I didn’t much care for the dawn there isn’t much I could do about it. I didn’t start globalization, I can’t stop it—except at a huge cost to human development—and I’m not going to waste time trying. All I want to think about is how I can get the best out of this new system, and cushion the worst, for the most people.

APPROACHES TO GLOBALIZATION

Paul James

There are many different approaches to the study of globalization, testifying to the diversity and vitality of the field of global studies. The diversity of these approaches is not easy to categorize, however, in part because of the intellectual climate in which most of the studies of

globalization have emerged. Studies of globalization and, more generally, studies in the broad and

loosely defined field of global studies did not become conscious of themselves as such until the 1990s; and by then the direct-line lineages of classic social theory had either been broken or segmented. The social sciences and humanities were in the midst of a retreat from grand theory. There was a growing suspicion, in part influenced by a poststructuralist turn, of any generalizing theoretical explanations of particular phenomena. This suspicion was paralleled by a claim made by some that the postmodern condition could be characterized by the end of grand narratives of all kinds: nationalism, socialism, liberalism, and by implication, globalism. Although in the past, approaches to any theoretical field could be comfortably organized according to three foundational considerations—theoretical lineage, scholarly discipline, and normative orientation—this was changing. By the end of the 20th and into the early 21st century, those kinds of considerations remained useful by way of background orientation, but the pattern of approaches was becoming less obvious and with more crossovers. There is an irony in this retreat from generalizing theory that is

important to note. It concerns a paradox that is yet to be explained. At the same time that generalizing theory lost its hold, a generalizing category of social relations gripped the imagination of both academic analysts and journalistic commentators—this, of course, was the category of “the global.” In this emerging imaginary, globalization was understood as a process of social interconnection, a process that was in different ways connecting people across planet Earth. Globalization as a practice and subjectivity connecting the (global) social whole thus became the standout object of critical enquiry. In other words, globalization demanded generalizing attention at the very moment that residual ideas that an all- embracing theory might be found to explain such a phenomenon was effectively dashed. This has profound consequences for the nature of globalization theory and how we might understand different approaches. . . .

EARLY APPROACHES TO GLOBALIZATION

Although there were some isolated articles across the 1960s to 1980s directly referring to globalization—with the most prominent of these being by Theodore Levitt on the globalization of markets in 1983—more elaborate academic approaches to globalization lagged by a decade or so. The burgeoning and dominant journalistic and business discourses of the

first wave of intense attention into the 1980s tended to be thin on analysis and thick on hyperbole. Most suggested that globalization was a completely new phenomenon symbolized by the triumph of the capitalist market. Levitt’s writing signaled the rise of the global corporation carried by a worldwide communications revolution. It took a sociologist of religion and a couple of anthropologists and

social theorists in the 1990s—scholars such as Roland Robertson, Jonathan Friedman, Arjun Appadurai, and Mike Featherstone—to write or edit the first major explorations of globalization-as-such, contributions that moved beyond hyperbole or thin description. Journals such as Theory, Culture and Society were in the vanguard of the new thinking of this second wave of attention. Earlier work, such as that of Immanuel Wallerstein and the world-systems theorists, or Andre Gunder Frank and the dependency theorists, had signaled a shift away from classic imperialism studies as the major carrier of work on globalizing relations. However, in relation to understanding globalization itself, this did not lead to significant developments in theory, except in the recognition that globalization was a centuries-old process. The work of Wallerstein in the discipline of international political

economy can here be used as an indication of the difficulty of coming to terms with issues of globalization. Instead of exploring the consequences of processes of globalization—economic, ecological, cultural, and political— for understanding the complexities of capitalism, Wallerstein reworked the verities of a world system’s understanding: namely, that capitalism had gone through two major overlapping cycles of development: from 1450, and from 1945 to the present, suggesting that capitalism was now entering a transition phase of terminal crisis. What others called globalization, he said, was just the epiphenomenon of the transition. Here the sophisticated critic of mainstream modernization theory thus reduced globalization to a reflection of the phases of capital. He limited its consequences to the domain of economics or the nexus between capital and everything else. Alternatively and more productively, the work of Roland Robertson took

a cultural turn. Like the critical political economists, Robertson recognized the long-term and changing history of globalization. However, unlike the dominant trend that for a time defined globalization in terms of the demise of the nation-state, perhaps most prominently surfacing in the writings of Arjun Appadurai and Ulrich Beck, Robertson recognized the complex intersection and layering of nationally and globally constituted social relations. One of his major contributions was to show how globalization across its long uneven history contributed to a relativization of social meaning and social practice, including the notion of a “world system.” His

work still stands up to scrutiny today, and he continues to be a major figure in the field. Another key figure of this time, Arjun Appadurai, also followed the

cultural turn, but instead of taking a critical modernist position on the changing order of things as Robertson did, he headed down the postmodern path to emphasize fluidity. The key contribution for which he is known is the notion of global “scapes,” unstructured formations with no boundaries or regularities. He distinguished different formations of what he called ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. This approach was avidly used for a period before it lost its standing as different writers realized that, apart from the categories of ethnoscapes and perhaps ideoscapes, his global landscape focused too narrowly on the cultural present and the recent past. Broader categories of analysis were needed to understand the unevenness of social continuities and discontinuities.

APPROACHES UNDERSTOOD IN TERMS OF THE DOMAIN OF ENQUIRY

A third wave of attention emerged across the turn of the century into the present. Journals such as Globalizations, Global Society, and Global Governance emerged as the number of publications exploded in number. One of the most important broader renderings of globalization came from a jointly written book called Global Transformations (1999) by David Held, a political philosopher; Anthony McGrew, an international relations theorist; David Goldblatt, a theorist of environmental politics; and Jonathan Perraton, an economist. Interdisciplinary studies had become the key. As signaled in the subtitle of the book, Politics, Economics and Culture, and extended in the chapter structure to include a focus on globalization and environment, this approach worked across the broad domains of economy, ecology, politics, and culture. Similarly Jan Aart Scholte worked across a broad series of domains. In his case, the domains were production, governance, identity, and knowledge. And, when Chamsy el-Ojeili and Patrick Hayden came to write their book Critical Theories of Globalization (2006), looking back on more than a decade of developing approaches to globalization they returned to the useful categorization of economics, politics, and culture. In all of these cases, however, there was no attempt to develop a theory of globalization as such. Rather these and other related writers—writers as diverse as James Mittleman, George Ritzer, Ulf Hannerz, and Heikki Patomaki—sought to explore the complexity of globalization across different domains. In the domain of culture, for example, a penetrating critique of the

dominant ideology of globalization by Manfred Steger joined with others in introducing the notion of “globalism.” In its midrange use, globalism can be defined as the ideologies and/or subjectivities associated with different historically dominant formations of global extension. Steger in his earlier writings from the early 1990s focused on globalism as neoliberalism, but as his analysis developed, he came to distinguish different kinds of globalism, including justice globalisms, imperial globalisms, and religious globalisms. He helped us to understand that globalism is therefore much more than the ideology associated with the contemporary dominant variant of globalism—market globalism and ideas of a borderless world.

APPROACHES UNDERSTOOD IN TERMS OF NORMATIVE ORIENTATION

Other ways to differentiate approaches to globalization include their normative or ethical orientation and their political descriptive stance. The most cited categorization of different kinds of approaches to globalization, which comes from Global Transformations, a book mentioned earlier, combines both of these categorizations and posits what it calls “three broad schools of thought”: the hyperglobalists, the sceptics, and the transformationalists. They are not actually schools at all but orientations. The hyperglobalizers include writers such as Kenichi Ohmae (a neoliberal) and Martin Albrow (a critical theorist) who argue that a wave of globalization is changing the world fundamentally and supplanting older national sovereignties. The sceptics include Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson who argue that with contemporary so-called globalization what we are witnessing is just another wave of internationalization. The transformationalists, including James Rosenau and Saskia Sassen, who suggest that while intensifying globalization is changing the nature of world politics, culture, and economy, the process is uneven.

APPROACHES UNDERSTOOD IN TERMS OF SCHOLARLY DISCIPLINE

With the realization in the 1990s that “the global” required direct attention, the taken-for-granted assumptions of fields of study such as international relations, politics, and sociology came under direct challenge. In international relations, the realist emphasis on nation-states as black- box entities in political inter-relation came under considerable pressure, as did the emphases of its critical counterparts, including even Marxism and rationalism that had long recognized the long reach of both material processes and ideas across the world. International relations as a

discipline had profound problems dealing with globalization, but into the new century, books started to come out by writers crossing the boundaries of the discipline, including international critical theorist Jan Aart Scholte and international political economist Mark Rupert. One discipline that saw a sea change in its approach was anthropology.

It maintained its classical emphasis on ethnographic depth, but it shifted its orientation from internally focused microstudies of remote locales to attempting to understand communities, whether they be remote or metropolitan, in terms of their place in a globalizing world. New subfields of history developed, including “big history” and “world history.” The field of global studies itself emerged during this period as an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relation between the local and the global across the domains of social life.

APPROACHES UNDERSTOOD IN TERMS OF THEORETICAL LINEAGE

A developing aversion to grand theory did not mean that the old theoretical lineages became completely irrelevant, although it did mean that approaches associated with the classical social theories of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber tended either to draw more loosely on those past writings or to work across them synthetically. Out of a critical reading of the Durkheimian–Weberian tradition came the work of such writers as Roland Robertson and American sociologist of global religion, Mark Juergensmeyer—although it should be said that Robertson was also influenced by an open version of neo-Marxist historical materialism. Out of the neo-Marxist lineage came the varied work of Paul Hirst, Mark Rupert, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Tony McGrew, and via Karl Polanyi, Ronnie Munck. Third, several writers explicitly set out to formulate a postclassical synthesis. The most prominent of these writers was British sociologist Anthony Giddens. He had been working across the 1980s and 1990s on a grand theoretical approach to the social called structurationism; however, by the time that he wrote in an elaborated way on globalization, his approach had become less theoretically integrated and more descriptive. His major point became that globalization is complex, shapes the way that we live, and is linked to the expansive dynamic of late modernity. Marxist writer Justin Rosenberg immediately took Giddens to task for

theoretical incoherence. In particular, he criticized a tendency in Giddens’s writing (and in many other writers on globalization) to treat globalization and the extension of social relations across world space as both the explanation and the outcome of a process of change. That is, he asked how if globalization involves spatial extension can it be explained by invoking

the claim that space is now global. The explanation and the thing-being- explained, he rightly says, are thus reduced into a self-confirming circle. Taking into account his critique, it is still legitimate to treat globalization as a descriptive category referring to a process of extension across a historically constituted world-space as we have been doing across this entry, but it is problematic to posit globalization as the simple cause of other phenomena, much less of itself.

CONCLUSION

Now, after three decades of writing on globalization, we have made some extraordinary gains in understanding. The historically changing and uneven nature of globalization is now generally understood. In the various scholarly approaches, much of the hyperbole has tended to drop away and the normative assessment of globalization has become more sober and qualified. Scholarly approaches have tended to move away from essentializing the phenomenon as necessarily good or bad. Similarly, at least in the scholarly arena, there has been a significant move beyond the reductive tendency to treat globalization only in terms of economic domain. On the other side of the ledger, our central weakness of understanding

goes back to the central paradox of globalization studies—the emergence of an aversion to generalizing theory at a time when the importance of a generalizing category of relations came to the fore. Globalization may simply be the name given to a matrix of processes that extend social relations across world-space, but the way in which people live those relations is incredibly complex, changing, and difficult to explain. Thus, we remain in search of generalizing methodologies (not a singular grand theory) that can sensitize us to those empirical complexities while enabling us to abstract patterns of change and continuity.

HOW GLOBALIZATION WENT BAD

Steven Weber

The world today is more dangerous and less orderly than it was supposed to be. Ten or 15 years ago, the naive expectations were that the “end of history” was near. The reality has been the opposite. The world has more international terrorism and more nuclear proliferation today than it did in 1990. International institutions are weaker. The threats of pandemic

disease and climate change are stronger. Cleavages of religious and cultural ideology are more intense. The global financial system is more unbalanced and precarious. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The end of the Cold War was supposed to make global politics and economics easier to manage, not harder. What went wrong? The bad news of the 21st century is that

globalization has a significant dark side. The container ships that carry manufactured Chinese goods to and from the United States also carry drugs. The airplanes that fly passengers nonstop from New York to Singapore also transport infectious diseases. And the Internet has proved just as adept at spreading deadly, extremist ideologies as it has e- commerce. The conventional belief is that the single greatest challenge of geopolitics today is managing this dark side of globalization, chipping away at the illegitimate co-travelers that exploit openness, mobility, and freedom, without putting too much sand in the gears. The current U.S. strategy is to push for more trade, more connectivity, more markets, and more openness. America does so for a good reason—it benefits from globalization more than any other country in the world. The United States acknowledges globalization’s dark side but attributes it merely to exploitative behavior by criminals, religious extremists, and other anachronistic elements that can be eliminated. The dark side of globalization, America says, with very little subtlety, can be mitigated by the expansion of American power, sometimes unilaterally and sometimes through multilateral institutions, depending on how the United States likes it. In other words, America is aiming for a “flat,” globalized world coordinated by a single superpower. That’s nice work if you can get it. But the United States almost certainly

cannot. Not only because other countries won’t let it, but, more profoundly, because that line of thinking is faulty. The predominance of American power has many benefits, but the management of globalization is not one of them. The mobility of ideas, capital, technology, and people is hardly new. But the rapid advance of globalization’s evils is. Most of that advance has taken place since 1990. Why? Because what changed profoundly in the 1990s was the polarity of the international system. For the first time in modern history, globalization was superimposed onto a world with a single superpower. What we have discovered in the past 15 years is that it is a dangerous mixture. The negative effects of globalization since 1990 are not the result of globalization itself. They are the dark side of American predominance.

THE DANGERS OF UNIPOLARITY

A straightforward piece of logic from market economics helps explain why unipolarity and globalization don’t mix. Monopolies, regardless of who holds them, are almost always bad for both the market and the monopolist. We propose three simple axioms of “globalization under unipolarity” that reveal these dangers.

Axiom 1: Above a certain threshold of power, the rate at which new global problems are generated will exceed the rate at which old problems are fixed. Power does two things in international politics: It enhances the capability of a state to do things, but it also increases the number of things that a state must worry about. At a certain point, the latter starts to overtake the former. It’s the familiar law of diminishing returns. Because powerful states have large spheres of influence and their security and economic interests touch every region of the world, they are threatened by the risk of things going wrong—anywhere. That is particularly true for the United States, which leverages its ability to go anywhere and do anything through massive debt. No one knows exactly when the law of diminishing returns will kick in. But, historically, it starts to happen long before a single great power dominates the entire globe, which is why large empires from Byzantium to Rome have always reached a point of unsustainability. That may already be happening to the United States today, on issues ranging from oil dependency and nuclear proliferation to pandemics and global warming. What Axiom 1 tells you is that more U.S. power is not the answer; it’s actually part of the problem. A multipolar world would almost certainly manage the globe’s pressing problems more effectively. The larger the number of great powers in the global system, the greater the chance that at least one of them would exercise some control over a given combination of space, other actors, and problems. Such reasoning doesn’t rest on hopeful notions that the great powers will work together. They might do so. But even if they don’t, the result is distributed governance, where some great power is interested in most every part of the world through productive competition.

Axiom 2: In an increasingly networked world, places that fall between the networks are very dangerous places—and there will be more ungoverned zones when there is only one network to join. The second axiom acknowledges that highly connected networks can be efficient, robust, and resilient to shocks. But in a highly connected world, the pieces that fall

between the networks are increasingly shut off from the benefits of connectivity. These problems fester in the form of failed states, mutate like pathogenic bacteria, and, in some cases, reconnect in subterranean networks such as al Qaeda. The truly dangerous places are the points where the subterranean networks touch the mainstream of global politics and economics. What made Afghanistan so dangerous under the Taliban was not that it was a failed state. It wasn’t. It was a partially failed and partially connected state that worked the interstices of globalization through the drug trade, counterfeiting, and terrorism. Can any single superpower monitor all the seams and back alleys of globalization? Hardly. In fact, a lone hegemon is unlikely to look closely at these problems, because more pressing issues are happening elsewhere, in places where trade and technology are growing. By contrast, a world of several great powers is a more interest-rich environment in which nations must look in less obvious places to find new sources of advantage. In such a system, it’s harder for troublemakers to spring up, because the cracks and seams of globalization are held together by stronger ties.

Axiom 3: Without a real chance to find useful allies to counter a superpower, opponents will try to neutralize power, by going underground, going nuclear, or going “bad.” Axiom 3 is a story about the preferred strategies of the weak. It’s a basic insight of international relations that states try to balance power. They protect themselves by joining groups that can hold a hegemonic threat at bay. But what if there is no viable group to join? In today’s unipolar world, every nation from Venezuela to North Korea is looking for a way to constrain American power. But in the unipolar world, it’s harder for states to join together to do that. So they turn to other means. They play a different game. Hamas, Iran, Somalia, North Korea, and Venezuela are not going to become allies anytime soon. Each is better off finding other ways to make life more difficult for Washington. Going nuclear is one way. Counterfeiting U.S. currency is another. Raising uncertainty about oil supplies is perhaps the most obvious method of all. Here’s the important downside of unipolar globalization. In a world with multiple great powers, many of these threats would be less troublesome. The relatively weak states would have a choice among potential partners with which to ally, enhancing their influence. Without that more attractive choice, facilitating the dark side of globalization becomes the most effective means of constraining American power.

SHARING GLOBALIZATION’S BURDEN

The world is paying a heavy price for the instability created by the combination of globalization and unipolarity, and the United States is bearing most of the burden. Consider the case of nuclear proliferation. There’s effectively a market out there for proliferation, with its own supply (states willing to share nuclear technology) and demand (states that badly want a nuclear weapon). The overlap of unipolarity with globalization ratchets up both the supply and demand, to the detriment of U.S. national security. It has become fashionable, in the wake of the Iraq war, to comment on the limits of conventional military force. But much of this analysis is overblown. The United States may not be able to stabilize and rebuild Iraq. But that doesn’t matter much from the perspective of a government that thinks the Pentagon has it in its sights. In Tehran, Pyongyang, and many other capitals, including Beijing, the bottom line is simple: The U.S. military could, with conventional force, end those regimes tomorrow if it chose to do so. No country in the world can dream of challenging U.S. conventional military power. But they can certainly hope to deter America from using it. And the best deterrent yet invented is the threat of nuclear retaliation. Before 1989, states that felt threatened by the United States could turn to the Soviet Union’s nuclear umbrella for protection. Now, they turn to people like A.Q. Khan. Having your own nuclear weapon used to be a luxury. Today, it is fast becoming a necessity. North Korea is the clearest example. Few countries had it worse during the Cold War. North Korea was surrounded by feuding, nuclear-armed communist neighbors, it was officially at war with its southern neighbor, and it stared continuously at tens of thousands of U.S. troops on its border. But, for 40 years, North Korea didn’t seek nuclear weapons. It didn’t need to, because it had the Soviet nuclear umbrella. Within five years of the Soviet collapse, however, Pyongyang was pushing ahead full steam on plutonium reprocessing facilities. North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, barely flinched when former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s administration readied war plans to strike his nuclear installations preemptively. That brinkmanship paid off. Today North Korea is likely a nuclear power, and Kim’s son rules the country with an iron fist. America’s conventional military strength means a lot less to a nuclear North Korea. Saddam Hussein’s great strategic blunder was that he took too long to get to the same place. How would things be different in a multipolar world? For starters, great

powers could split the job of policing proliferation, and even collaborate on some particularly hard cases. It’s often forgotten now that, during the Cold War, the only state with a tougher nonproliferation policy than the United States was the Soviet Union. Not a single country that had a formal

alliance with Moscow ever became a nuclear power. The Eastern bloc was full of countries with advanced technological capabilities in every area except one—nuclear weapons. Moscow simply wouldn’t permit it. But today we see the uneven and inadequate level of effort that non- superpowers devote to stopping proliferation. The Europeans dangle carrots at Iran, but they are unwilling to consider serious sticks. The Chinese refuse to admit that there is a problem. And the Russians are aiding Iran’s nuclear ambitions. When push comes to shove, nonproliferation today is almost entirely America’s burden. The same is true for global public health. Globalization is turning the world into an enormous petri dish for the incubation of infectious disease. Humans cannot outsmart disease, because it just evolves too quickly. Bacteria can reproduce a new generation in less than 30 minutes, while it takes us decades to come up with a new generation of antibiotics. Solutions are only possible when and where we get the upper hand. Poor countries where humans live in close proximity to farm animals are the best place to breed extremely dangerous zoonotic disease. These are often the same countries, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, that feel threatened by American power. Establishing an early warning system for these diseases —exactly what we lacked in the case of SARS a few years ago and exactly what we lack for avian flu today—will require a significant level of intervention into the very places that don’t want it. That will be true as long as international intervention means American interference. The most likely sources of the next ebola or HIV-like pandemic are the countries that simply won’t let U.S. or other Western agencies in, including the World Health Organization. Yet the threat is too arcane and not immediate enough for the West to force the issue. What’s needed is another great power to take over a piece of the work, a power that has more immediate interests in the countries where diseases incubate and one that is seen as less of a threat. As long as the United States remains the world’s lone superpower, we’re not likely to get any help. Even after HIV, SARS, and several years of mounting hysteria about avian flu, the world is still not ready for a viral pandemic in Southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. America can’t change that alone. If there were rival great powers with different cultural and ideological

leanings, globalization’s darkest problem of all—terrorism—would also likely look quite different. The pundits are partly right: Today’s international terrorism owes something to globalization. Al Qaeda uses the Internet to transmit messages, it uses credit cards and modern banking to move money, and it uses cell phones and laptops to plot attacks. But it’s not globalization that turned Osama bin Laden from a small-time Saudi

dissident into the symbolic head of a radical global movement. What created Osama bin Laden was the predominance of American power. A terrorist organization needs a story to attract resources and recruits. Oftentimes, mere frustration over political, economic, or religious conditions is not enough. Al Qaeda understands that, and, for that reason, it weaves a narrative of global jihad against a “modernization,” “Westernization,” and a “Judeo-Christian” threat. There is really just one country that both spearheads and represents that threat: the United States. And so the most efficient way for a terrorist to gain a reputation is to attack the United States. The logic is the same for all monopolies. A few years ago, every computer hacker in the world wanted to bring down Microsoft, just as every aspiring terrorist wants to create a spectacle of destruction akin to the September 11 attacks inside the United States. Al Qaeda cells have gone after alternate targets such as Britain, Egypt, and Spain. But these are not the acts that increase recruitment and fundraising, or mobilize the energy of otherwise disparate groups around the world. Nothing enhances the profile of a terrorist like killing an American, something Abu Musab al-Zarqawi understood well in Iraq. Even if al Qaeda’s deepest aspirations lie with the demise of the Saudi regime, the predominance of U.S. power and its role supporting the house of Saud makes America the only enemy really worth fighting. A multipolar world would surely confuse this kind of clear framing that pits Islamism against the West. What would be al Qaeda’s message if the Chinese were equally involved in propping up authoritarian regimes in the Islamic, oil-rich Gulf states? Does the al Qaeda story work if half its enemy is neither Western nor Christian?

RESTORING THE BALANCE

The consensus today in the U.S. foreign-policy community is that more American power is always better. Across the board. For both the United States and the rest of the globe. The National Security Strategy documents of 2002 and 2006 enshrine this consensus in phrases such as “a balance of power that favors freedom.” The strategy explicitly defines the “balance” as a continued imbalance, as the United States continues “dissuading potential competitors . . . from challenging the United States, its allies, and its partners.” In no way is U.S. power inherently a bad thing. Nor is it true that no good comes from unipolarity. But there are significant downsides to the imbalance of power. That view is hardly revolutionary. It has a long pedigree in U.S. foreign-policy thought. It was the perspective, for instance, that George Kennan brought to the table in the late 1940s when

he talked about the desirability of a European superpower to restrain the United States. Although the issues today are different than they were in Kennan’s time, it’s still the case that too much power may, as Kennan believed, lead to overreach. It may lead to arrogance. It may lead to insensitivity to the concerns of others. Though Kennan may have been prescient to voice these concerns, he couldn’t have predicted the degree to which American unipolarity would lead to such an unstable overlap with modern-day globalization. America has experienced this dangerous burden for 15 years, but it still

refuses to see it for what it really is. Antiglobalization sentiment is coming today from both the right and the left. But by blaming globalization for what ails the world, the U.S. foreign-policy community is missing a very big part of what is undermining one of the most hopeful trends in modern history—the reconnection of societies, economies, and minds that political borders have kept apart for far too long. America cannot indefinitely stave off the rise of another superpower. But, in today’s networked and interdependent world, such an event is not entirely a cause for mourning. A shift in the global balance of power would, in fact, help the United States manage some of the most costly and dangerous consequences of globalization. As the international playing field levels, the scope of these problems and the threat they pose to America will only decrease. When that happens, the United States will find globalization is a far easier burden to bear.

FURTHER READING

Albrow, Martin, and Elizabeth King. 1990. Globalization, Knowledge, and Society. London: Sage.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Chase-Dunn, Christopher. 1989. Global Formation: Structures of the World Economy. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Featherstone, Mike, ed. 1990. Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. London: Sage.

Friedman, Thomas. 2012. The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. New York: Picador.

Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press.

Held, David, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton. 1999. Global Transformations. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Friedman, Jonathan. 1994. Cultural Identity and Global Process. London: Sage.

Giddens, Anthony. 1999. Runaway World: How Globalisation Is Reshaping Our Lives. London: Profile Books.

James, Paul. 2006. Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In. London: Sage.

Robertson, Roland, “Religion, Global Complexity and the Human Condition,” in Absolute Values and the Creation of the New World, Volume 1. New York: International Cultural Foundation, 1983; and “Interpreting Globality,” in World Realities and International Studies Today. Glenside, PA: Pennsylvania Council on International Education, 1983.

Robertson, Roland. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage.

Rosenberg, Justin. 2000. The Follies of Globalization Theory. London: Verso.

Rupert, Mark. 2000. Ideologies of Globalization: Contending Visions of a New World Order. London: Routledge.

Scholte, Jan Aart. 2000. Globalization: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Steger, Manfred. 2009. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

2 GLOBALIZATION OVER TIME

When did globalization begin? If you wanted to trace the history of globalization, where would you start? Well, you could begin with the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union. If you get a bit more reflective, you might go back to a period of history several centuries earlier, when ships plied the oceans with cargoes of silver, spices, and sugar, or when the reach of European colonialization extended throughout the world. You might even reach back earlier in time, when great empires dominated huge stretches of land, such as the Mongol empire in Central Asia, the Incan and Aztec empires in South and Central America, respectively, and the Greek and Roman empires that shaped the Mediterranean world and united the peoples and cultures of North Africa, Southern Europe, and the Middle East. An argument could be made for each of these events as the emergence of globalization. In a sense, though, the world has had a global history from the very

beginning. Scientists tell us that the time–space continuum that informs our understanding of the world is a product of a unity of existence from the moment of the big bang some 13.75 billion years ago. When our planet began to cool and oceans and land masses appeared millions of years ago, there was only one continent. This singular land mass, which scholars call “Pangea,” was racked with deep volcanic eruptions and fissures in the earth’s thin crust that led to the continental drift that began 200 million years ago. South America parted from Africa, North America broke away from Europe, and the South Asian subcontinent floated from Africa across the open sea to smash into the Asian land mass, creating the high Himalayan mountain range. This process of continental drift continues today, as evidenced by the volcanic actions along the Pacific Rim from Japan and Indonesia to California. Early species of what became humans evolved in Africa. So we might

imagine that we have a great-great-great- (and so forth) grandmother who once lived in what is now Kenya or Tanzania, and who is the equivalent of the Bible’s Eve—the mother of us all. The various racial distinctions came later, as humans changed and adapted to the various parts of the planet they eventually called home. So we begin our planetary and human history with common beginnings.

In that sense, we were global from the start. The history for which we have written texts and drawings is only a few thousand years old, of course, but even these manuscripts show a global awareness. Early maps, though terribly parochial from our point of view, show particular regions, such as the ancient Mediterranean area, as if they were at the center of the world. Early Incan and Chinese writers were convinced that their lands were earthly centers as well. In their own ways, they were coming to terms with the vastness of the world and their place in it. Some ancient texts describe the origins of the world, and these creation

myths provide another insight into the global consciousness of ancient peoples. In the ancient Babylonian legend, the Enuma Elish, the world begins when chaos, imagined as a lumbering cow-like animal, is conquered by the gods. This image of chaos conquered reverberates through the ancient world and appears in altered form in the opening chapters of Genesis in the Bible and is revered by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Thus, even the ancient ideas of the nature of the world are themselves transported globally from culture to culture. The readings in this section look at the span of history to determine

what role globalization has played in it—the far-reaching spread of cultures and economies and political power. They ask whether globalization itself has a history: What are the roots of our present moment of globalization? They also ask whether the study of history can be done in a global way. In the first reading, one of the great historians of our time, William

McNeill, asks whether globalization is a long-term process or a new era in human affairs. McNeill, retired after years teaching at the University of Chicago, is regarded as one of the founders of world history, and his book, The Rise of the West, is regarded as a landmark in understanding the history of the modern world. McNeill answers his own question in the excerpt provided here, indicating that the vast intercultural reach of globalization is a long-term process that has been a part of world history from ancient times to the present. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper take a distinctive approach to

global history, arguing that the most significant stages of political history were built on great empires. Both of these historians teach at New York

University. Cooper specializes in African studies, particularly the effects of European colonialism on African labor practices, and Burbank works on Imperial Russia from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. In their book, they challenge the notion that nations are the natural configurations of societies through history and claim instead that the norm is transnational—or rather transcultural—imperial powers. Beginning with Rome and China in the third century BCE, they show how people of different cultural and language backgrounds have lived peaceably together under the rule of great empires. The next reading is an excerpt from volume 1 of the influential book The

Modern World System, by Immanuel Wallerstein, a sociologist and economic historian who has taught at Columbia, McGill, and the State University of New York–Binghamton. He began his academic career as a specialist on African affairs, but as he explains in the excerpt that follows, he became intrigued with the idea that the economic history of any one country, or even any one region of the world, is inextricably linked with other parts of the world. For this reason, it is important to see the interconnected relationships in a world system in order to understand how some regions benefit and develop economically while others become dependent and undeveloped based on the economic and political ties that bind them together in a global network. The last excerpt in this section takes a different approach. It looks at

historiography—the way history is conceived as a subject to be studied. The author of this excerpt, Dominic Sachsenmaier, is a German historian who has studied Chinese history and taught at Harvard, the University of California–Santa Barbara, Duke, and Jacobs University in Germany. In this excerpt, he observes that there is a tendency to look at the world from a local perspective—for European historians to think of history as dominated by Europe and for Chinese and Muslim historians to see the world centered in China and the Middle East, respectively. Even so, the political effect of the global spread of European colonialism and Western notions of academic scholarship has imposed a Eurocentric view of history on historians studying other parts of the world. Sachsenmaier shows that global forces can affect the very perception of global history.

GLOBALIZATION: LONG TERM PROCESS OR NEW ERA IN HUMAN AFFAIRS?

William McNeill

Globalization refers to the way recent changes in transport and

communication have tied humankind in all parts of the earth together more closely than ever before. One effect, the widespread breakup of older forms of village life after 1950, changed the daily experience of innumerable persons so drastically that those years may plausibly claim to mark a new era in human history. New and more capacious transport and communication were primarily responsible for that change, powerfully seconded by population growth that made older ways of life unsustainable in many rural landscapes. Massive migrations from village to city were the principal manifestations of the new order, and affected all the inhabited parts of the earth. Yet sporadic increases in the capacity of transport and communication

are age-old among humankind and have always changed behavior. That process began when our proto-human ancestors learned to control fire and to dance. Fire eventually allowed humans to accelerate the recycling of organic vegetation by deliberately setting grass and brush alight in dry seasons of the year; and to survive sub-freezing temperatures even in the Arctic. Control of fire was so valuable that all surviving humans acquired that skill, beginning as long ago as 400,000 BCE. Dancing aroused a different kind of warmth by communicating a sense

of commonality to participants that dissipated inter-personal frictions. That, in turn, allowed human bands to expand in size beyond the limits our chimpanzee relatives sustain today. The advantages of larger numbers of cooperating individuals were so great that all surviving humans learned to dance. But dancing leaves no archaeological trace, so dating is completely unknowable. Yet like control of fire, all humans learned to dance; and in all probability it was among bands enlarged and sustained by dancing on festival occasions that language, the principal vehicle of subsequent human communication, developed between 90,000 and 50,000 BCE. Language, too, was so advantageous that it also became universal among humankind. These three capabilities remain unique to our species; and of the three,

language is the most amazing. It proved capable of sustaining agreed upon meanings among indefinite numbers of persons—by now even among hundreds of millions. More particularly, it freed humans from the limitations of acting in response to sense experience in a rather narrow present as other animals do. By talking about things remembered and about what might happen in times to come our ancestors became able to agree on what to do tomorrow and even further into the future. Moreover, when planned actions met disappointment, they were stimulated, indeed required, to talk things over again, seeking to change what they had done in hope of achieving better results. That process of trial and error induced systematic change in human

behavior as never before, since discrepancy between hopes, plans and actual experience was perennial and only increased as new skills and knowledge enlarged human impact on the diverse environments into which they soon penetrated. We live with the result—an ever accelerating pace of social change that strains our capability for successful adjustment. The subsequent human past can plausibly be understood as a series of

thresholds when new conditions of life rather abruptly accelerated the pace of resulting change. Control of fire, which antedated language, had particularly drastic effects, allowing humans to transform local plant life by deliberately burning grass and brush wherever they went. Mastery of movement across water by use of rafts and boats much facilitated human dispersal from their ancestral cradle in Africa. The earliest clear evidence for this capability is the initial occupation of Australia in about 40,000 BCE, which required crossing miles of open water. Resort to agriculture was the next major accelerant of social change. As

they spread to different parts of the earth, humans discovered a wide variety of different plants to feed on. Ways to multiply the number of such plants by weeding and seeding and transplanting roots that grew naturally may well have been familiar to many hunters and gatherers long before they ever thought of settling down in a single spot and raising food crops in fields where they did not grow of their own accord. Why our ancestors did so remains unsure. Hunters and gatherers

enjoyed a more variegated and more dependable diet than early farmers; and tilling fields was far more laborious than wandering in search of game and wild-growing plant foods. But farming did produce far more food per acre and sustained far denser populations than hunting and gathering could do. That meant that wherever farmers settled down, superior numbers soon assured them against attack by hunter-gatherers and allowed them to encroach upon hunting grounds wherever cultivable land attracted their attention. Dense populations raising different crops in diverse landscapes arose

independently in several parts of the earth between 8000 BCE and 4000 BCE. From the start, deliberate selection of seeds and roots prevailed, sometimes changing food plants radically, as when wild teosinte turned into maize in Mexico. As food supplies increased, farming populations multiplied and established new villages wherever suitable land lay within reach. More people distributed over varying landscapes soon generated divergences of local customs and skills, so that even sporadic contacts with strangers, arriving on foot or by sea, brought attractive novelties to the attention of local communities more and more often. Consequently, the pace of social change accelerated systematically

within each of the major centers of agriculture because more people made more inventions; and some advantageous inventions and discoveries traveled well—new varieties of seeds for example and preciosities like mood-altering drugs, gems for decoration, and obsidian or flint to give cutting tools a sharp edge. In Eurasia, an impressive array of domesticated animals diversified the

agricultural complex of evolving plants and people still further—dogs, cats, donkeys, cattle, horses, water buffalo, camels and still others. Cattle, horses and camels were particularly significant, for their size and strength far surpassed that of human beings and could be used to plow the soil and to transport heavy loads. The Americas lacked a comparable array of large-bodied domesticable animals and much of Africa was inhospitable to them. Overland transport in those parts of the earth therefore remained more slender than in Eurasia. Accordingly, in the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa social change in

general, largely dependent on contacts with strangers, fell behind the pace of Eurasian developments. Other factors, especially the prevalence of lethal infectious diseases in much of Africa, also handicapped human populations more than in Eurasia, which therefore remained the principal setting for further advances of human power and skill. The appearance of cities and civilizations after 3500 BCE accelerated

social changes still further. Cities existed only by virtue of occupational differentiation and systematic exchanges of goods and services between urban populations and their rural hinterlands. Urban specialists persistently improved their skills and extended their reach further and further, as professional traders began to spend their lives traveling to and fro across long distances. When cities started to arise in Eurasia, merchants were already sailing

overseas in ships and traveling overland with caravans of pack animals. It was not accidental that where land and sea transport routes met in the land of Sumer (southernmost Iraq) was where the first cities and civilizations appeared. Other civilizations too arose at locations where strangers mingled more than usual, exchanging skills and ideas coming from extensive hinterlands. Consequently, wherever they existed, cities and civilizations circulated goods, skills and ideas more quickly and more widely than before. The earliest civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt were in slender

contact from the start; and successive West Asian empires and civilizations remained constantly in touch with Mediterranean cities and civilizations thereafter. Indian and Chinese civilizations were geographically distant; and climate as well as cultural differences limited what could travel from

western Asia and Europe to India and China, and vice versa, even after merchant, military and missionary contacts did begin to connect them loosely together. That became a reality by about 100 BCE and made all of Eurasia into a single interacting web, with tentacles reaching into sub- Saharan Africa, the frozen north and among the far-flung Pacific islands off South East Asia. The vastness and variety of peoples and landscapes within that circle

far exceeded similar interacting webs in other parts of the earth. It is therefore not surprising that the Eurasian web evolved levels of skill and power superior to what people elsewhere had at their command when new advances in transport and communication exposed them to Old World accomplishments after 1500 CE. Biological resistance to a long array of infectious diseases, from the

common cold to small pox, measles, plague and others, was the single most decisive factor in compelling previously isolated populations to submit to intruders from the disease-experienced Eurasian web. The most lethal of these diseases were transfers from animal herds. Eurasia’s uniquely complex array of domesticated—and some wild—animals had exposed civilized Eurasian peoples to these diseases across millennia, not without wreaking serious damages along the way. But when one epidemic after another started to rage in rapid succession among inexperienced populations in America and other newly-contacted lands, resulting die-offs were crippling. The newcomers remained little affected, thanks to immunities in their bloodstreams, partly inherited, and partly acquired or reinforced by exposure in early childhood. The human destruction that followed the opening of the oceans to

sustained navigation in the decades immediately after Columbus’s famous voyage of 1492 was greater than ever before, since European explorers and conquistadors encountered populous, civilized lands in both Mexico and Peru where millions of persons died of new diseases within a few decades. That massive die-off in turn provoked the trade in African slaves that carried millions of Africans across the Atlantic in subsequent centuries. Accordingly, Europeans, Africans and Amerindians mingled in the Americas earlier and more extensively than anywhere else. In Eurasia itself after 1500 the pace of change also accelerated. New

phenomena, like the flood of silver from American mines, upset prices and social-political patterns in China as well as in Europe, and the spread of new crops from America—especially maize, potatoes and sweet potatoes— enlarged food supplies very significantly as well. The global pace of change accelerated yet again with the introduction of

steam transport on both land and sea, together with instantaneous

electrical communication after 1850. One manifestation was the spread of European empires across much of Asia and Africa. Everywhere weavers and other artisans suffered severely from a flood of cheap, machine-made goods coming from newfangled European factories, powered first by flowing water, then by steam and later by electricity. But before very long Asian factories, especially in Japan, China and India, began to produce cheaper and, more recently, also better goods than Europeans (and Americans) did; and European empires all collapsed soon after World War II. From the long term point of view, therefore, recent mass migrations and

widespread disruption of village patterns of life by roads, trucks, buses, radio, TV and computers look more like another wave of intensified human interaction, comparable to its predecessors and far from unique. Argument about whether continuity or uniqueness prevails among us

today is really pointless. Each moment is unique in every human life; yet continuities are strong and undeniable, both privately and publicly. It is always tempting to exaggerate the unprecedented character of the problems we face. My personal cast of mind prefers to seek commonality; and one such indisputable commonality is that in recent centuries, as social change accelerated, each generation felt uniquely challenged, yet survived in greater numbers than before. No clear end of that process is yet in view, unsustainable though it is sure to be across any lengthy future. . . . I conclude that the world is indeed one interacting whole and always

has been. Human wealth and power have sporadically increased, spurting towards unexampled heights lately. Limits to that spurt may now be close at hand. But ingenuity and invention remain alive among us as much as ever. So we and our successors may perhaps continue to stumble onward like all preceding human generations, meeting with painful disappointments and changing behavior accordingly, only to provoke new risks and meet fresh disappointments. That has always been the human condition, and seems likely to last as long as we do.

IMPERIAL TRAJECTORIES

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper

We live in a world of nearly two hundred states. Each flaunts symbols of sovereignty—its flag, its seat in the United Nations—and each claims to represent a people. These states, big and small, are in principle equal members of a global community, bound together by international law. Yet

the world of nation-states we take for granted is scarcely sixty years old. Throughout history, most people have lived in political units that did not

pretend to represent a single people. Making state conform with nation is a recent phenomenon, neither fully carried out nor universally desired. In the 1990s the world witnessed attempts by political leaders to turn the state into an expression of “their” nationality: in Yugoslavia—a country put together after World War I on terrain wrested out from the Ottoman and Habsburg empires—and in Rwanda, a former Belgian colony. These efforts to create homogeneous nations led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people who had lived side by side. In the Middle East, Sunnis, Shi’ites, Kurds, Palestinians, Jews, and many others have fought over state authority and state boundaries for more than eighty years since the end of the Ottoman empire. Even as people struggled for and welcomed the breakups of empires over the course of the twentieth century, conflicts over what a nation is and who belongs within it flared around the world. . . . . . . The endurance of empire challenges the notion that the nation-state

is natural, necessary, and inevitable, and points us instead toward exploring the wide range of ways in which people over time, and for better or worse, have thought about politics and organized their states. Investigating the history of empires does not imply praising or condemning them. Instead, understanding possibilities as they appeared to people in their own times reveals the imperatives and actions that changed the past, created our present, and perhaps will shape the future. . . . Not that every significant state was an empire, but . . . for most of

human history empires and their interactions shaped the context in which people gauged their political possibilities, pursued their ambitions, and envisioned their societies. States large and small, rebels and loyalists and people who cared little for politics—all had to take empires, their ways of rule, and their competitions into account. Whether this imperial framework has come to an end is a question we [will] address. . . . We begin with Rome and China in the third century BCE, not because

they were the first empires—their great predecessors include Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Alexander the Great’s enormous conquests, and more ancient dynasties in China—but because these two empires became long- lasting reference points for later empire-builders. Rome and China both attained a huge physical size, integrated commerce and production into economies of world scale (the world that each of them created), devised institutions that sustained state power for centuries, developed compelling cultural frameworks to explain and promote their success, and assured, for long periods, acquiescence to imperial power. Their principal strategies—

China’s reliance on a class of loyal, trained officials, Rome’s empowerment, at least in theory, of its citizens—had lasting and profound effects on how people imagine their states and their place in them. We next consider empires that tried to move into Rome’s place—

resilient Byzantium, the dynamic but fissionable Islamic caliphates, and the short-lived Carolingians. These rivals built their empires on religious foundations; their histories display the possibilities and limits of militant monotheism as an arm of state power. The drive to convert or kill the unfaithful and to spread the true faith mobilized warriors for both Christianity and Islam, but also provoked splits inside empires over whose religious mantle was the true one and whose claim to power was god- given. In the thirteenth century, under Chinggis Khan and his successors,

Mongols put together the largest land empire of all time, based on a radically different principle—a pragmatic approach to religious and cultural difference. Mongol khans had the technological advantages of nomadic societies—above all, a mobile, largely self-sufficient, and hardy military—but it was thanks to their capacious notions of an imperial society that they rapidly made use of the skills and resources of the diverse peoples they conquered. Mongols’ repertoire of rule combined intimidating violence with the protection of different religions and cultures and the politics of personal loyalty. The Mongols are critical to our study for two reasons. First, their ways

of rule influenced politics across a huge continent—in China, as well as in the later Russian, Mughal, and Ottoman empires. Second, at a time when no state on the western edge of Eurasia (today’s Europe) could command loyalty and resources on a large scale, Mongols protected trade routes from the Black Sea to the Pacific and enabled cross-continental transmission of knowledge, goods, and statecraft. Other empires—in the region of today’s Iran, in southern India or Africa, and elsewhere—are not described in any detail here, although they, too, promoted connections and change, long before Europeans appeared on the great-power scene. It was the wealth and commercial vitality of Asia that eventually drew

people from what is now thought of as Europe into what was for them a new sphere of trade, transport, and possibility. The empires of Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain do not enter our account in the familiar guise of “the expansion of Europe.” In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Europe was unimaginable as a political entity, and in any case, geographical regions are not political actors. We focus instead on the reconfiguration of relations among empires at this time, a dynamic process whose consequences became evident only much later.

“European” maritime extensions were the product of three conditions: the high-value goods produced and exchanged in the Chinese imperial sphere; the obstacle posed by the Ottoman empire’s dominance of the eastern Mediterranean and land routes east; and the inability of rulers in western Eurasia to rebuild Roman-style unity on a terrain contested by rival monarchs and dynasts, lords with powerful followings, and cities defending their rights. It was this global configuration of power and resources that brought European navigators to Asia and, later, thanks to Columbus’s accidental discovery, to the Americas. These new connections eventually reconfigured the global economy and

world politics. But they were a long way from producing a unipolar, European-dominated world. Portuguese and Dutch maritime power depended on using force to constrain competitors’ commercial activity while ensuring that producers and local authorities in southeast Asia, where the riches in spices and textiles came from, had a stake in new long- distance trade. The fortified commercial enclave became a key element of Europeans’ repertoire of power. After Columbus’s “discovery,” his royal sponsors were able to make a “Spanish” empire by consolidating power on two continents and supplying the silver—produced with the coerced labor of indigenous Americans—that lubricated commerce in western Europe, across southeast Asia, and within the wealthy, commercially dynamic Chinese empire. In the Americas, settlers from Europe, slaves brought from Africa, and

their imperial masters produced new forms of imperial politics. Keeping subordinated people—indigenous or otherwise—from striking out on their own or casting their lot with rival empires was no simple task. Rulers of empires had to induce distant elites to cooperate, and they had to provide people—at home, overseas, and in between—with a sense of place within an equal but incorporate polity. Such efforts did not always produce assimilation, conformity, or even resigned acceptance; tensions and violent conflict among imperial rulers, overseas settlers, indigenous communities, and forced migrants appear throughout. . . . Empire, in Europe or elsewhere, was more than a matter of economic

exploitation. As early as the sixteenth century, a few European missionaries and jurists were making distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of imperial power, condemning Europeans’ assaults on indigenous societies and questioning an empire’s right to take land and labor from conquered peoples. It was only in the nineteenth century that some European states,

fortified by their imperial conquests, gained a clear technological and material edge over their neighbors and in other regions of the world. This

“western” moment of imperial domination was never complete or stable. Opposition to slavery and to the excesses and brutality of rulers and settlers brought before an engaged public the question of whether colonies were places where humans could be exploited at will or parts of an inclusive, albeit inequitable, polity. Moreover, the empires of China, Russia, the Ottomans, and Habsburgs were not imperial has-beens, as the conventional story reads. They took initiatives to counter economic and cultural challenges, and played crucial roles in the conflicts and connections that animated world politics. . . . . . . [I]mperial expansion across land—not just seas—produced distinct

configurations of politics and society. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the United States and Russia extended their rule across continents. Russia’s repertoire of rule—inherited from a mix of imperial predecessors and rivals—relied on bringing ever more people under the emperor’s care—and of course exploitation—while maintaining distinctions among incorporated groups. American revolutionaries invoked a different imperial politics, turning ideas of popular sovereignty against their British masters, then constructing an “Empire of Liberty” in Thomas Jefferson’s words. The United States, expanding as Americans conquered indigenous peoples or acquired parts of others’ empires, created a template for turning new territories into states, excluded Indians and slaves from the polity, and managed to stay together after a bitter civil war fought over the issue of governing different territories differently. In the late nineteenth century the young empire extended its power overseas—without developing a generally accepted idea of the United States as a ruler of colonies. Britain, France, Germany, and other European countries were less

reticent about colonial rule, and they applied it with vigor to new acquisitions in Africa and Asia in the late nineteenth century. These powers, however, found by the early twentieth century that actually governing African and Asian colonies was more difficult than military conquest. The very claim to be bringing “civilization” and economic “progress” to supposedly backward areas opened up colonial powers to questioning from inside, from rival empires, and from indigenous elites over what, if any, forms of colonialism were politically and morally defensible. Empires, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as in the sixteenth,

existed in relation to each other. Different organizations of power— colonies, protectorates, dominions, territories forced into a dominant culture, semi-autonomous national regions—were combined in different ways within empires. Empires drew on human and material resources

beyond the reach of any national polity, seeking control over both contiguous and distant lands and peoples. In the twentieth century it was rivalry among empires—made all the

more acute by Japan’s entry into the empire game and China’s temporary lapse out—that dragged imperial powers and their subjects around the world into two world wars. The devastating consequences of this interempire conflict, as well as the volatile notions of sovereignty nourished within and among empires, set the stage for the dissolution of colonial empires from the 1940s through the 1960s. But the dismantling of this kind of empire left in place the question of how powers like the United States, the USSR, and China would adapt their repertoires of power to changing conditions. What drove these major transformations in world politics? It used to be

argued that empires gave way to nation-states as ideas about rights, nations, and popular sovereignty emerged in the west. But there are several problems with this proposition. First, empires lasted well beyond the eighteenth century, when notions of popular sovereignty and natural rights captured political imagination in some parts of the world. Furthermore, if we assume that the origins of these concepts were “national,” we miss a crucial dynamic of political change. In British North America, the French Caribbean, Spanish South America, and elsewhere, struggles for political voice, rights, and citizenship took place within empires before they became revolutions against them. The results of these contests were not consistently national. Relationships between democracy, nation, and empire were still debated in the middle of the twentieth century. Other studies of world history attribute major shifts to the “rise of the

state” in the “early modern period,” two terms tied to the notion of a single path toward a normal and universal kind of sovereignty—the “western” kind. Scholars have advanced different dates for the birth of this “modern” state system—1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia, the eighteenth century with its innovations in western political theory, the American and French revolutions. But expanding our outlook over space and back in time and focusing on empires allows us to see that states have institutionalized power for over two millennia in different parts of the world. A story of European state development and other people’s “responses” would misrepresent the long-term dynamics of state power in both Europe and the rest of the world. To the extent that states became more powerful in England and France

in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these transformations were a consequence of empire, rather than the other way around. As

powers trying to control large spaces, empires channeled widely produced resources into state institutions that concentrated revenue and military force. War among empires in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries set the stage for revolutionary movements that challenged Europe’s empire-states. In other words, this study of empire breaks with the special claims of

nation, modernity, and Europe to explain the course of history. It is an interpretive essay, based on analyses of selected imperial settings. It suggests how imperial power—and contests over and within it—have for thousands of years configured societies and states, inspired ambition and imagination, and opened up and closed down political possibilities.

ON THE STUDY OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Immanuel Wallerstein

Change is eternal. Nothing ever changes. Both clichés are “true.” Structures are those coral reefs of human relations which have a stable existence over relatively long periods of time. But structures too are born, develop, and die. Unless we are to use the study of social change as a term synonymous

to the totality of social science, its meaning should be restricted to the study of changes in those phenomena which are most durable—the definition of durability itself being of course subject to change over historical time and place. One of the major assertions of world social science is that there are

some great watersheds in the history of man. One such generally recognized watershed, though one however studied by only a minority of social scientists, is the so-called neolithic or agricultural revolution. The other great watershed is the creation of the modern world. This latter event is at the center of most contemporary social science

theory, and indeed, of the nineteenth century as well. To be sure, there is immense debate as to what are the defining characteristics of modern times (and hence what are its temporal boundaries). Furthermore, there is much disagreement about the motors of this process of change. But there seems to be widespread consensus that some great structural changes did occur in the world in the last several hundred years, changes that make the world of today qualitatively different from the world of yesterday. Even those who reject evolutionist assumptions of determinate progress nonetheless admit the difference in structures.

What are the appropriate units to study if one wishes to describe this “difference” and account for it? In a sense, many of the major theoretical debates of our time can be reduced to arguments about this. It is the great quest of contemporary social science. It is therefore appropriate to begin . . . with an intellectual itinerary of one’s conceptual search. I started with an interest in the social underpinnings of political conflict

in my own society. I thought that by comprehending the modalities of such conflict, I might contribute as a rational man to the shaping of that society. This led me into two great debates. One was the degree to which “all history is the history of the class struggle.” Phrased another way, are classes the only significant operating units in the social and political arenas? Or, as Weber argued, are they only one of a trinity of units—class, status-group, and party—which exist, the interactions among which explain the political process? Although I had my prejudices on the subject, I found, like others before me, that neither the definition of these terms nor the description of their relations was easy to elucidate. I felt increasingly that this was far more a conceptual than an empirical problem, and that to resolve the debate, at least in my own mind, I would have to place the issues within a larger intellectual context. The second great debate, which was linked to the first, was about the

degree to which there could or did exist a consensus of values within a given society, and to the extent that such a consensus existed, the degree to which its presence or absence was in fact a major determinant of men’s actions. This debate is linked to the first because it is only if one rejects the primordial character of social struggle in civil society that the question can even be raised. Values are of course an elusive thing to observe and I became very

uneasy with a great deal of the theorizing about values, which seemed often to combine the absence of a rigorous empirical base with an affront to common sense. Still it was clear that men and groups did justify their actions by reference to ideologies. Furthermore, it seemed clear also that groups became more coherent and hence more politically efficacious to the extent that they were self-conscious, which meant that they developed a common language and a Weltanschauung [“worldview”]. I shifted my area of empirical concern from my own society to Africa in

the hope either that I would discover theories confirmed by what I found there or that a look at distant climes would sharpen my perception by directing my attention to issues I would otherwise have missed. I expected the former to happen. But it was the latter that came to pass. I went to Africa first during the colonial era and I witnessed the process

of “decolonization,” and then of the independence of a cascade of sovereign

states. White man that I was, I was bombarded by the onslaught of the colonial mentality of Europeans long resident in Africa. And sympathizer of nationalist movements that I was, I was privy to the angry analyses and optimistic passions of young militants of the African movements. It did not take long to realize that not only were these two groups at odds on political issues, but that they approached the situation with entirely different sets of conceptual frameworks. In general, in a deep conflict, the eyes of the downtrodden are more

acute about the reality of the present. For it is in their interest to perceive correctly in order to expose the hypocrisies of the rulers. They have less interest in ideological deflection. So it was in this case. The nationalists saw the reality in which they lived as a “colonial situation,” that is, one in which both their social action and that of the Europeans living side by side with them as administrators, missionaries, teachers, and merchants were determined by the constraints of a single legal and social entity. They saw further that the political machinery was based on a caste system in which rank and hence reward was accorded on the basis of race. African nationalists were determined to change the political structures

within which they lived. I have told this story elsewhere and it is not relevant to refer to it here. What is relevant here is that I thereby became aware of the degree to which society as an abstraction was heavily limited to politico-juridical systems as an empirical reality. It was a false perspective to take a unit like a “tribe” and seek to analyze its operations without reference to the fact that, in a colonial situation, the governing institutions of a “tribe,” far from being “sovereign,” were closely circumscribed by the laws (and customs) of a larger entity of which they were an indissociable part, the colony. Indeed this led me to the larger generalization that the study of social organization was by and large defective because of the widespread lack of consideration of the legal and political framework within which both organizations and their members operated. I sought to discover the general attributes of a colonial situation and to

describe what I thought of as its “natural history.” It quickly became clear to me that I had to hold at least some factors of the world-system constant. So I restricted myself to an analysis of how the colonial system operated for those countries which were colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of European powers and which were “overseas possessions” of these powers. Given this constant, I felt I could make generally applicable statements about the impact on social life of the imposition of colonial authority, the motives and modalities of resistance to this authority, the mechanisms by which colonial powers entrenched and sought to legitimate

their power, the contradictory nature of the forces that were able to operate within this framework, the reasons why men were led to form organizations that challenged colonial rule, and the structural elements that made for the expansion and eventual political triumph of anticolonial movements. The unit of analysis in all of this was the colonial territory as legally defined by the administering power. I was interested equally in what happened to these “new states” after

independence. As the study of colonial territories seemed to focus on the causes of the breakdown of existing political order, the study of the postindependence period seemed to focus on the opposite issue: How legitimate authority is established and a sense of membership in the national entity spread among the citizenry. This latter study ran into problems, however. In the first place, to study

the postindependence politics of Afro-Asian states seemed to be a process of running after the headlines. There could perforce be relatively little historical depth. Furthermore, there was the tricky question of Latin America. There were many ways in which the situations there seemed parallel, and more and more people began to think of the three continents as a “Third World.” But Latin American countries had been politically independent for 150 years. Their cultures were far more closely linked with the European tradition than anything in Africa or Asia. The whole enterprise seemed to be wavering on very shaky ground. In search for an appropriate unit of analysis, I turned to “states in the

period after formal independence but before they had achieved something that might be termed national integration.” This definition could be taken to include most or all of Latin America for all or almost all of the time up to the present. But it obviously included other areas as well. It included for example the United States of America, at least in the period before say the Civil War. It surely included eastern Europe, at least up until the twentieth century and possibly up to the present. And it even included western and southern Europe, at least for earlier periods of time. I was therefore forced by this logic to turn my attention to early modern

Europe. This led me first into the question of what I would take as the starting point of this process, a process I provisionally formulated, for want of a better conceptual tool, as the process of modernization. Furthermore, I had not only to consider the issue of starting points but of terminal points, unless I wished to include twentieth-century Britain or Germany as instances of this same social process. Since that seemed prima facie dubious, terminal points had to be thought about. At this point, I was clearly involved in a developmental schema and

some implicit notion of stages of development. This in turn posed two

problems: criteria for determining stages, and comparability of units across historical time. How many stages had there been? How many could there be? Is

industrialization a turning point or the consequence of some political turning point? What in this context would the empirical meaning of a term like “revolution” mean, as in the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution? Were these stages unilinear, or could a unit go “backward”? This seemed to be a vast conceptual morass into which I had stepped. Furthermore, getting out of the conceptual morass was very difficult

because of the absence of reasonable measuring instruments. How could one say that seventeenth-century France was in some sense equivalent to twentieth-century India? Laymen might consider such a statement absurd. Were they so wrong? It was all very well to fall back on textbook formulae of the virtues of scientific abstraction, but the practical difficulties of comparison seemed immense. One way to handle the “absurd” idea of comparing two such disparate

units was to accept the legitimacy of the objection and add another variable—the world context of any given era, or what Wolfram Eberhard has called “world time.” This meant that while seventeenth-century France might have shared some structural characteristics with twentieth-century India, they were to be seen as very different on the dimensions of world context. This was conceptually clarifying, but made measurement even more complicated. Finally, there seemed to be another difficulty. If given societies went

through “stages,” that is, had a “natural history,” what of the world-system itself? Did it not have “stages,” or at least a “natural history”? If so, were we not studying evolutions within evolutions? And if that, was not the theory getting to be top-heavy in epicycles? Did it not call for some simplifying thrust? It seemed to me it did. It was at this point that I abandoned the idea

altogether of taking either the sovereign state or that vaguer concept, the national society, as the unit of analysis. I decided that neither one was a social system and that one could only speak of social change in social systems. The only social system in this scheme was the world-system. This was of course enormously simplifying. I had one type of unit rather

than units within units. I could explain changes in the sovereign states as consequent upon the evolution and interaction of the world-system. But it was also enormously complicating. I probably only had one instance of this unit in the modern era. Suppose indeed that I was right, that the correct unit of analysis was the world-system, and that sovereign states were to be seen as one kind of organizational structure among others within this

single social system. Could I then do anything more than write its history? I was not interested in writing its history, nor did I begin to have the

empirical knowledge necessary for such a task. (And by its very nature, few individuals ever could.) But can there be laws about the unique? In a rigorous sense, there of course cannot be. A statement of causality or probability is made in terms of a series of like phenomena or like instances. Even if one were to include in such a series those that would probably or even possibly occur in the future, what could be proposed here was not to add a series of future possible instances to a network of present and past ones. It was to add a series of future possible instances to a single past-present one. There had only been one “modern world.” Maybe one day there would

be discovered to be comparable phenomena on other planets, or additional modern world-systems on this one. But here and now, the reality was clear —only one. It was here that I was inspired by the analogy with astronomy which purports to explain the laws governing the universe, although (as far as we know) only one universe has ever existed.

MOVEMENTS AND PATTERNS: ENVIRONMENTS OF GLOBAL HISTORY

Dominic Sachsenmaier

In a general sense, it is certainly possible to speak of long “traditions” of global or world historical thought and refer to such renowned figures as Herodotus or Ibn Khaldun as forefathers of the field. In many cultures and world regions there were earlier forms of world historical scholarship, which in some cases reach even back almost to the beginnings of history writing. However, when referring to “traditions” in a more concrete sense, that is, as trajectories reaching from the past into the present, the problem becomes far more complex. The crux of the matter lies in the mere fact that acknowledging the antecedents of modern border-crossing historiography does not answer questions about conceptual, social, or even institutional continuities. For example, in the Chinese case it would certainly be very problematic to hurriedly construct the idea of a rather timeless scholarly culture that would be characterized by distinct methodological features lasting from the days of Sima Qian up until the present. Blindly assuming such epistemological permanence from “classical” texts to today’s global historical scholarship would, in fact, move us dangerously close to a cascade of problematic intellectual positions ranging from new versions of Orientalism to the belief in pristine

national cultures. Indeed, in almost all world regions university-based historiography is at

least partly an outcome of epistemological discontinuities, outside influences, and shared transformations. . . . These also had an impact on the conceptions of space underlying world historical scholarship in the widest sense. Prior to the spread of history as a modern academic field, forms of border-crossing histories were typically written from a clear perspective of cultural, religious, or even ethical centricity, which means that they tended to be tied to distinct value claims. This situation changed decisively during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when either colonial rule or nation-building efforts had a profound impact on what elements were selected into the canon of academic historiography and many earlier forms of knowledge were rendered subaltern. Particularly in many countries outside of the West, geopolitical circumstances and domestic transformations no longer allowed for historians to define the cultural self as the center of “world” historical inquiry. This, however, should not make us assume that the dualism of centricity and marginality disappeared from the main currents of world historical thinking. In Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words, now a “hyperreal Europe” came to hold a strong position in many scholars’ imaginations during and after the global spread of academic historiography. As a general tendency, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many scholars from different continents began to share similar mental maps and core assumptions about world historical centers and peripheries. During that time period, significant parts of historical scholarship may have become more globally aware but they did not become more cosmopolitan in the sense of allowing for the idea of multiple, different, and equal centers of enunciation. A brief look at early forms of historiography reaching across

civilizational boundaries will help us fill this rather rough sketch with some more detail and further accentuate the changing conceptions of space that became foundational to modern historiography in many different parts of the world. This in turn will allow us to reflect upon the specific challenges, dangers, and opportunities that the current institutional and conceptual landscapes of historiography present for today’s global historical trend. A well-known European example of early versions of transcultural history writing is the Greek historian Herodotus, who—along with Ephoros (d. 330 BCE), Polybios, and Diodorus—often figures prominently in recent histories of world historical writing. In his account of the Greco-Persian War, Herodotus tried to depict different conditions and traditions from a superordinate perspective, yet at the same time his master narrative was structured around a clear division of the Greek polis as the harbor of

freedom, and the Persian Empire as a stronghold of tyranny. An arguably still more centered perspective was taken in the genre of Christian universal histories, which emerged during the later Roman Empire with scholars such as Eusebius (d. 340) or Orosius (d. 417) as leading protagonists. Here important histories of the known world such as the famous works by Otto von Freising (d. 1158) or, centuries later, Jacques Bossuet (d. 1704) were ordered along Christian timelines, and biblical events such as the creation, the deluge, or the incarnation of Christ figured as the main beats in world historical rhythms. Outside of Europe, world historical outlooks were also usually written

from the belief in the normative authority of one’s own cultural experience. For example, this was the case with the main works ascribable to the Chinese genre of “universal histories,” which dates at least back to the Han dynasty (c. 206–220 BCE). Likewise, the renowned Arabic historian Ibn Al Athir (d. 1233) wrote his “Complete History” covering information about the outside world largely from an Islamic perspective, following a religious chronology. Furthermore, Islamic accounts of the crusades or the Mongol conquests were—like their Christian counterparts—typically not written in the spirit of multiperspectivity. The famed historical work of the Islamic traveler Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), whose wide range of studies included comparative explorations and was unsurpassed in his time, described the Islamic world as unique and exemplary. Even though he emphasized the rise and fall of civilizations, Ibn Khaldun maintained that only Islam had a universal mission, and according to him one of its great assets was to unite the religious and the secular realms, whereas all other civilizations supposedly separated the two. Similarly, important Ottoman schools that emerged during the expansion of the empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often included accounts of non-Muslim communities, but did not abandon narratives centered on the primacy of Islam. Of course, culturally centrist outlooks of world history during the pre-

modern period were neither globally uniform nor did they remain completely unchallenged. For example, in the East Asian context Korean and Japanese scholarship often needed to negotiate tropes of cultural belonging and related normative claims with the idea of China’s dominant position in the region. However, also here outlooks on the world which acknowledged other but equal cultural centers outside of East Asia were extremely rare. This is not to say that counter-currents of this kind did not exist in premodern Asia. Even in cases like imperial China, challenges to Sinocentric world visions could emerge, particularly during times of political crises. At the same time, throughout Chinese history the main

strands of world historical thought had not been written based on the assumption that a distant continent such as, later, “Europe” constituted a key reference culture—a reference culture, which defined many important categories when thinking about history. Concomitant with the global spread of modern universities and profound

changes in historiographical cultures, the belief in Europe as the sole cradle of modern scholarship came to be adopted in many parts of the world. This was certainly less so because European historiography was indeed more advanced or universalizable than other ways of conceptualizing the past. Rather, a complex nexus of global power constellations and rapid transformations led to the emergence of an international academic system that marginalized many local traditions of writing history and privileged “scientific” forms of historical scholarship. The latter were seemingly emanating from long European traditions. The word “seemingly” is important in this context because Western historiography underwent significant transformations at the same time as European academia began to heavily influence historical research elsewhere. Also in Europe the establishment of modern academic historiography marginalized other ways of writing history, many of which could look back at long traditions. Given these massive changes in Europe itself, many globally influential

character traits of modern academic historiography need to be seen not as export products of an allegedly pristine European tradition but rather as byproducts of wider, global transformations and entanglements. This is also true for the fundamental conceptions of space, which came to frame much of historical scholarship in many different parts of the world. After all, the idea of the nation as the main container of local history and the notion of West as the source of dynamism in world history had been rather unusual in Europe prior to the late eighteenth century. Such new historical outlooks reflected forms of political order and global power formations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For this reason they became widely influential in conjunction with the global spread of university-based historical scholarship and surrounding sociopolitical transformations. For these reasons it would be erroneous to treat the global spread of

Eurocentric themes in history as the result of diffusion from the West to the rest. Yet even though such outlooks became very influential both in the centers and on the margins of the evolving academic system, their wider implications were rather different inside and outside of the Western world. In Europe it was possible to portray historical scholarship as the outgrowth of a shared Occidental heritage that reached back to the

ancient Greeks. On the contrary, the formation of modern academic disciplines in regions such as India, China, or the Middle East was visibly part of changing geopolitical dynamics, despite the fact that many indigenous traditions were being continued at universities and particularly outside of them. In many parts of the emerging Global South and Global East, the reality of imperialism, European intellectual dominance, and the inevitability of understanding nationalization at least partly as Westernization made it impossible to posit the indigenous past and local scholarship as standards for the rest of the world. Rather, familiarity with the West and other supposedly advanced nations came to be regarded as a precondition for new and timely ways of writing history. In many parts of Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, a highly constructed “West” or “Europe” thus necessarily occupied a large part of the methodologies, concepts, and commonly shared background knowledge of the emerging academic communities. By contrast, a majority of scholars in the West were never forced to face the idea that their own conceptual worlds and cultures of rationality were at least partly the products of global interactions and outside influences. In conclusion, the transformations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century

scholarship had great implications for the spatial parameters within which historians in different parts of the world would think about local and translocal history. For example, whereas thinkers ranging from Sima Qian to Ibn Khaldun could still conceive of themselves as rooted in their own cultural universes and regard the outside world accordingly, the situation had been dramatically different for Chinese and Middle Eastern historians during the previous one or two centuries. Even for radically nationalistic or culturally chauvinistic scholarship, it then became impossible to adopt world historical perspectives based on the idea of allegedly unbroken Confucian, Islamic, or other traditions of conceptualizing the past. Local intellectual outlooks as well as the institutional frameworks of universities had too obviously been influenced by exogenous developments. In other words, for many parts of the world, the history of transfers and outside influences has long not constituted an additional perspective that complemented the largely autochthonous tropes of national history; rather, it stood at the very foreground of modern history and historiography.

FURTHER READING

Bayly, C.A. 2004. The Birth of the Modern World: 1780–1914. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper. 2010. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

Chanda, Nayan. (2008). Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Iggers, Georg G., Q. Edward Wang, and Supriya Mukherjee. 2008. A Global History of Modern Historiography. Edinburgh Gate: Pearson Education.

Iriye, Akira. 2012. Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future. New York: Palgrave.

Kennedy, Paul. 1989. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Vintage.

McNeill, John R., and William McNeill. 2003. The Human Web: A Bird’s- Eye of World History. New York: Norton.

McNeill, William. 1963. The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sachsenmaier, Dominic. 2011. Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2011. The Modern World System. In 4 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press.

PART II

THE MARCH OF GLOBALIZATION, BY REGION

3 AFRICA

The Rise of Ethnic Politics in a Global World

In this and the next seven chapters of this book, we will explore the way that global forces have affected different regions of the world and the way that these areas have contributed to global culture, society, economy, and political life. You might call this the “global-in” and “global-out” approach. We are interested in the global currents that have flowed into a particular region at different moments in history (global in) and the way that elements of those societies have gone out into other areas of the world (global out). We begin with Africa. It is a logical place to start, since the African

continent is the birthplace of all humanity. In Ethiopia, bones have been discovered from precursors of ancient African Homo sapiens who roamed the earth 190,000 years ago. Archeologists have found evidence of our human predecessors in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania that are over a million years old. Eventually, the descendants of these ancient Africans— humans, or Homo sapiens—spread out from Africa to the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and everywhere else. What we think of as ethnic differences of skin and hair color and eye shapes are all later adaptations to the environmental conditions in different parts of the world. So the propagation of the human species from Africa throughout the planet is Africa’s first global out. In more recent history—the past thousand years or so—Africa has

continued to play a global role. In the thirteenth century, a great empire was established in West Africa, based in what is now the country of Mali, extending over much of the adjacent region. The wealth of this Manden Kurufaba empire was based on three huge gold mines; other resources included copper, salt, and profits from overland trade. For several

centuries, it was one of the richest and most influential empires in the world. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Africa began to feel the effects of

European maritime trade. Initially, this was a case of global in, as European ships plied their wares along the West African coast and traded their goods for local resources. But soon this trade turned into a global out of disastrous proportions—the slave trade, called by some the “African holocaust.” The slave trade involved the buying and selling of Africans. Some local

African leaders rounded up individuals from their enemies and sold the captured men and women to European traders. The Europeans, in turn, loaded them onto boats and sailed across the Atlantic in what was called “the Middle Passage.” Crowded into cargo holds like cattle, many of these unfortunate Africans died en route of disease, starvation, and brutality. Those who survived found themselves in Havana and other slave ports of the New World, where they were sold as workers for cotton fields in the United States and for sugar plantations in the Caribbean islands and the northeast coast of South America—from the three Guianas (Dutch, French, and British) all the way down to Brazil. Exact figures are hard to come by, but it is estimated that ten million to twenty million Africans were exported from the continent before the trade in enslaved Africans—and later, slavery itself—came to an end in the nineteenth century. This wretched trade had a crippling effect on Africa both economically

and socially. Not only did it rob the continent of some of its most able workers, but it also disrupted traditional social patterns and cultural homogeneity. At the same time, it enriched the European countries— especially Portugal, Spain, and England—that were involved in the trade. Some historians claim that the wealth gained from the trade of enslaved Africans helped to fuel the economies that made the Industrial Revolution possible. Others argue that the slave trade provided the excess wealth— the capital—to develop European capitalism into a formidable economic engine. Though other historians dispute these assertions, there is no question that the slave trade had a global economic impact. There were also cultural effects from the global diaspora of Africans

following the years of the slave trade. In some areas of North and South America and the Caribbean basin, the numbers of enslaved Africans were vastly greater than those of white European settlers. Descendants of the African diaspora became leading citizens of countries such as Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Brazil, and the United States. African music, religion, and customs became integral parts of the cultures of these areas of the New World, creating a

new synthesis of African, European, and Native American cultures in the Western hemisphere. In time, the trade with European commercial interests led to further

plundering of African resources and political control of African regions. By the nineteenth century, the map of Africa began to look like a crazy quilt of different European-controlled colonies, including those ruled by Spain, France, England, Germany, and Belgium. In the twentieth century, when the colonial powers retreated and these regions gained their independence, what remained were the nation-states of contemporary Africa. Thus, the colonial period of global-in European control resulted in the African nationalisms of the latter part of the twentieth century. The old colonial divisions that created the new boundaries of nation-

states did not always follow the cultural boundaries of traditional ethnic and linguistic groups. In Rwanda, for example, the Hutus and Tutsis warred over which group would dominate the independent nation. In other places, such as the countries of South Africa and what was Rhodesia—later renamed Zimbabwe—the issue was the role of the European settler communities that controlled the politics and economy of the countries, even though they were in the minority numerically as compared with the indigenous African populations. In both countries, the white Europeans have learned to live with black majority rule. In the twenty-first century, African resources have again become an

important aspect of the global economy. In the contemporary situation, however, it is unlikely that these resources will be exploited from the outside without providing substantially greater benefit to Africans than was the case in preceding centuries. The new situation is one in which investment in the region and extraction of its resources come not from Europe but from Asian countries, especially China. In the readings that follow, several of these aspects of global influences

in, and global impact out, will be explored. In the first reading, the African origin of global humanity is described by Nayan Chanda. Chanda was born in India and trained in history in Kolkata and in international relations at the Sorbonne in France. He then became a foreign correspondent during the Vietnam War and served as an editor of the Far East Economic Review in Hong Kong before launching a new career in the emerging field of global studies. Based at Yale University, where he edits the Internet journal YaleGlobal Online, Chanda has written an introductory book of global history, Bound Together, from which this excerpt is taken. The next excerpt is also by a journalist and historian born in South Asia.

Dilip Hiro, based in London, writes on historical themes and issues of contemporary global politics, including jihadi activism in South Asia. In the

excerpt below, he puts the trade of enslaved Africans into global and historical context. The diaspora of African culture and society as a result of the forced dispersion of Africans to the Western hemisphere is described in the succeeding excerpt by Jeffrey Haynes, a political scientist studying the relation of religion and politics in Africa and the Middle East who teaches in London. Following it is an excerpt from an essay by Jacob Olupona, who explores the cultural aspects of Africa’s experiences with globalization. Olupona traces the development of Christianity and Islam in the continent and shows how these traditions have become intertwined with traditional religious cultures. Olupona, originally from Nigeria, is a scholar of comparative religion who specializes in West African society. He taught at the University of California, Davis, before becoming a professor of African Studies at Harvard. The final excerpt in this chapter is from an essay by Okwudiba Nnoli, an

African political scientist who focuses on one of the enduring problems created by the nation-state system left behind by retreating European colonial powers. This is the problem of the relationship between national identity and ethnic communities. Because colonialism and nationalism are worldwide, this is a global problem, a continuing issue that confounds Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world where the idea of nationalism is still an unfinished project.

THE HIDDEN STORY OF A JOURNEY

Nayan Chanda

How do we know that we all are originally from Africa? Twenty years ago the proposition was mostly guesswork. In his work on human evolution The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Charles Darwin suggested that because Africa was inhabited by humans’ nearest allies, gorillas and chimpanzees, “it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.” Although voluminous biological and paleoanthropological evidence gathered since this statement has fortified the evolutionary history of life on earth, it has been a long wait to validate Darwin’s insight about Africa. Opportunity emerged with our new ability to look deep into our cells and decode the history written there. The first step was taken in 1953 when British scientist Francis S. Crick and his American colleague James D. Watson discovered the structure of DNA. “We’ve discovered the secret of life,” Crick announced with justifiable pride. With the discovery of the double

helix structure of DNA—the complex molecules that transmit genetic information from generation to generation—we received the most powerful tool to dig into our ancestral history. As Watson wrote, “We find written in every individual’s DNA sequences of a record of our ancestors’ respective journeys.” Since these early days, sequencing DNA has gotten much easier, faster, and cheaper. With help from archaeologists, climatologists, and linguists, geneticists and paleoanthropologists have been able to reconstruct the histories of human populations—a reconstruction that was unimaginable only two decades ago. The discovery of fossils of Homo erectus in Indonesia and China—the

so-called Java and Peking men—showed that the ancestors of Homo sapiens, or anatomically modern humans, had begun to travel and colonize Asia and the Old World about two million years ago. The dedicated work of paleoanthropologists like Louis and Mary Leakey in the 1950s and a slew of researchers in the following thirty years established that ancestors of modern humans lived in East Africa’s Rift Valley. The remains of a hundred- thousand-year-old Homo sapiens were found in Israel, but that species met a biological dead-end, blocked perhaps by the more robust Neanderthals who then inhabited the area. Amazingly, so far the only other remains of modern man dating back to forty-six thousand years have been found in Australia. Did these anatomically modern humans—Homo sapiens—have multiple origins, or did they evolve as a single species in Africa? The first intriguing evidence that those fossil finds in Africa were, not just the earliest humans, but our direct ancestors, came to light, not in some ancient fossils, but in the history contained in cells of modern women. This startling discovery was built on the earlier discovery of the structure of DNA. By analyzing the DNA of living humans from different parts of the world, geneticists can reconstruct the movement of their ancestors and track the prehistoric human colonization of the world. We now know that around sixty thousand years ago, a small group of people—as few as perhaps one hundred fifty to two thousand people from present-day East Africa—walked out. Over the next fifty thousand or so years they moved, slowly occupying the Fertile Crescent, Asia, Australia, and Europe and finally moving across the Beringia land bridge to the American continent. The rising waters at the end of the Ice Age separated the Americas from the Asian continent. It was not until Christopher Columbus’s encounter with the Arawak on the shores of San Salvador in 1492 that the long- separated human cousins from Africa would meet each other. . . .

A MOTHER IN AFRICA

The discovery that all humanity stems from the same common parents came in 1987. The New Zealand biochemist Allan Wilson and his American colleague Rebecca Cann reached this conclusion at the University of California, Berkeley, by looking into a so-far ignored part of human DNA. Wilson and Cann’s team collected 147 samples of mitochondrial DNA from baby placentas donated by hospitals around the world. Unlike the DNA that is recombined as it is passed from one generation to the next, mitochondrial DNA (abbreviated mtDNA) has tiny parts that remain largely intact through the generations, altered only occasionally by mutations that become “genetic markers.” MtDNA is maternally inherited, transmitted only from a mother to her offspring, and only daughters can pass it on to the next generation. The mtDNA leaves intact all the mutations that a daughter inherits from her maternal ancestors, thus allowing one to find the traces of the earliest mutation. Since the rate of mutation is roughly constant, the level of variation in mutations allows us to calculate the age of the family tree created by the mtDNA string passed down through the generations. The result of Wilson and Cann’s research was a bombshell. Going down the human family tree of five geographic populations, they found that all five stemmed from “one woman who is postulated to have lived about 200,000 years ago, probably in Africa.” The press inevitably, if misleadingly, called her the “African Eve.” She indeed was, as James Watson put it, “the great-great-great . . . grandmother of us all,” who lived in Africa some two hundred thousand years ago. Obviously, she was not the only woman alive at that time: she was just the luckiest because her progenies survived to populate the world, while the lines of descendants of other women became extinct. Or, in genealogical terms, their lines suffered a “pedigree collapse.” Children of the three surviving lines of daughters—identified by mtDNA markers L1, L2, and L3—now populate the world. While the first two lines mostly account for the African female population, the non-African women of the world all carry in their cells the inheritance of the two daughters of L3 line—M and N. A scientist has given these lines the nicknames Manju and Nasrin based on the assumption of where the two mutations are likely to have occurred: India and the Middle East. Our most recent common mother may have been African, but what

about the father? Significant recent progress in elucidating the paternal Y chromosome has filled in the gap. In a groundbreaking research paper in 2000, Italian geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his colleague Peter Underhill established that the Y chromosome that determines male sex also has an African ancestry. Just as mtDNA is transmitted only from a mother to her children, the Y chromosome that is passed on from a father

to his son also does not undergo the shuffling—or recombination—that the rest of the chromosomes do. But there are mutations just like mtDNA. The result is that the history of our fathers is carried in perpetuity by sons. Human ancestors who left Africa all carried in their cells either the African Adam’s Y chromosome, which has been given the prosaic label “M168,” or the mtDNA of one of the African Eve’s daughters. Based on extensive study of the world’s population, geneticists now say that the most recent common ancestor of us all left Africa just fifty thousand years ago. Wilson and Cann’s thesis of the human out-of-Africa origin was, of

course, not unchallenged by some anthropologists and geneticists. The school that believed in multiregional evolution of the modern human refused to accept a recent or unique origin of Homo sapiens. Its proponents argued that the abundant Homo erectus fossils found in China and other regions in East Asia (such as Peking Man and Java Man) demonstrate a continuity, and to these researchers it was evident that Homo sapiens emerged out of frequent gene exchanges between continental populations, since the earlier species Homo erectus came out of Africa about a million years ago. Besides, they argued, the archaeological evidence does not mesh with the out-of-Africa hypothesis, thus making this conclusion at best premature. At least in the case of Chinese critics, one also suspects that the disclaimer about African origins may be linked to national pride about the antiquity of the Chinese civilization. However, as research in the migration of the human genome has continued to produce more and more evidence of African origins, the scientific opinion has increasingly tilted toward the out-of-Africa school. Some Chinese objections have been countered with a large new body of research based on a massive DNA database collected by both Chinese and international geneticists. In 1998 a consortium of seven major research groups from China and the United States, funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, conducted a DNA analysis of twenty-eight of China’s official population groups and concluded that “modern humans originating in Africa constitute the majority of the current gene pool in East Asia.” Several other researchers, including Chinese, have since sampled a large number of Chinese from all over China and reached the same conclusion. Interestingly, research on both mtDNA and the Y chromosome has shown evidence even in Africa of the early colonization by the original group within Africa. The remaining cousins left in East Africa also spread out to the interior of the continent in search of survival. A strong school of thought in South Africa actually suggests the possibility that the ancestors of the Bushmen also are our ancestors and that the spread of those humans who all became our ancestors was from south to

north. Whichever way they moved, their imprint is left in the DNA of the Bushmen or Khoisan of the Kalahari Desert and in certain pygmy tribes in the central African rain forest. The genome revolution and the discovery of the African Eve have

sparked a new interest in finding one’s roots. The dark-haired New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof thought he knew who he was. His father came to the United States from Europe, so Kristof assumed himself to be of a typical American-European heritage. But he wanted to find out who he really was under the skin and learn more about his origins, and so he sent his DNA sample for analysis. He was in for a surprise. A mere two thousand generations ago his great-great-great-grandmother was an African, possibly from Ethiopia or Kenya. Under his white skin and Caucasian features, exclaimed Kristof, “I am African-American!” After the publication of his column he received a flood of e-mails. One particularly droll one read, “Welcome to the club. But look out while driving in New Jersey.” However, the African continent alone cannot lay sole claim to Nicholas Kristof. The genetic markers found in his DNA showed he was also related to people who now inhabit Finland, Poland, Armenia, the Netherlands, Scotland, Israel, Germany, and Norway. “The [DNA] testing just underscored the degree to which we’re all mongrels,” Kristof told me. One trait of the human community makes it possible to track the

genomic journey. Humans prefer to settle down in one place if conditions permit, but they are equally ready to migrate in search of a better life. The result has been that people who settled along the path of the human journey are marked by a lineage associated with geographic regions. The fact that humans have mostly practiced patrilocality—in which women come to their husband’s homes after marriage—enables one to associate the Y chromosome with a particular location. Looking at my DNA, geneticists could tell I was from the Indian subcontinent. My M52 Y chromosome, shared by a large number of Indians, was a giveaway. This ability has allowed geneticists and anthropologists to sketch out a better picture of when and how the progenies of the African Eve left the old continent and found themselves in their current habitat. DNA shows that this migration, spanning forty to fifty thousand years, came in successive waves, mostly in gentle ripples and sometimes in large swells. The Wilson team found that all the world populations they examined, except the African population, have multiple origins, implying that each region was colonized repeatedly.

THE BEACHCOMBER EXPRESS TO AUSTRALIA

The lack of archaeological evidence does not allow us to answer with certainty why our ancestors left Africa. Probably a dry spell of the late Ice Age shrank the forests and dried the savannas that provided game for the hunter-gatherer population. When a small group took the momentous step of crossing the Red Sea into the southern Arabian coast, the whole world was open. Following game herds up into the Middle East or following the shellfish beds around the Arabian Peninsula and on into India, the humans were launched on a journey that would result in populating the entire planet. One of the most striking of those journeys was the arrival of the

ancestral population from Africa to Australia in just seven hundred generations. Some have called this journey an “express train” to Australia. Of course, the ancestors did not know they were headed to Australia: they were just following food. But the eastward movement of generations of people along the Indian and Southeast Asian coasts brought them to a continent twelve thousand miles from their East African origins.

SLAVERY

Dilip Hiro

Slavery has had an enormous impact on the history of the global economy in the past five centuries and has a long checkered history dating back to antiquity. It evolved differently in war and peace: In armed conflicts, victors sometimes turned their prisoners of war into slaves. During peace, it became a form of punishment for crimes or failure to discharge loans.

HISTORY

Records show the existence of slavery in such ancient civilizations as Assyria, the Nile Valley, Greece, and the Roman Empire. In their expanding realm, the Roman conquerors resorted to enslaving large groups in the vanquished territories, and the slave trade became commonplace in the empire. The Romans’ captured territories included land that is now known as England, Wales, and Scotland. When Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (ruled 193–211 CE), a North African, governed Britain, he once remarked that the British made “bad slaves.” . . . The capture of slaves and slave trading thrived in the Christian world,

where the pope had authority in religious and moral affairs. After taking an equivocal position on slavery and slave trading, the Pope in the mid-15th

century allowed the Portuguese ruler to make slaves of pagans and other nonbelievers. Because the Portuguese, known for their maritime skills, had been exploring West Africa since 1415, the papal clearance opened the gate for taking West Africans first as servants and then as slaves. In 1444, the port of Lagos in southern Portugal saw the establishment of the first slave market for Africans in Europe. In a little over a century, 1 out of 10 residents of the capital, Lisbon, was an African slave. When, in the latter half of the 16th century, the Iberian kings ended

their slave trading monopoly, private slave traders transported slaves to the Iberian colonies in the Western Hemisphere, where there were vast plantations producing labor-intensive products, such as cotton, sugar cane, and tobacco, for export to Europe. The pace of development depended on the availability of labor, consisting of native Indian tribes, poor Whites, and African slaves. As the supply of American Indians and poor Whites dwindled, the Iberian plantation owners began to lean more heavily on the expediency of securing slave labor from Africa. Meanwhile, England, an important European maritime nation, was

busily developing contacts with West Africa and Asia through trade by sea. In 1554, John Locke, an English trader, brought slaves from West Africa to England and sold them as household servants. Sir John Hawkins, a British mariner, transported the first “cargo” of 500 slaves from West Africa to the Western Hemisphere in 1562. Later, during the early 1600s, as England established its own plantation colonies on the North American mainland and Barbados, its economic and political interests in slave trading and slavery increased. In 1655, Oliver Cromwell gave a further boost to this development by seizing Jamaica from Spain. The rise of vast plantations, worked by slaves who cost their owners the

bare minimum of maintenance, marked a qualitative change in the history of slavery. Previously, the relationship between a slave and his or her master had feudal characteristics. Now, it turned capitalist in an agrarian environment, with the plantation owner extracting maximum profit out of slave labor by spending just enough to maintain the slaves in a fit state to work. In another context, in the British plantation colonies in the Western Hemisphere, race relations emerged in their starkest form: Whites, as masters, were conceptualized as the superior race, and the Blacks, as slaves, as the inherently inferior race. Under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Britain acquired from France the

contract to supply African slaves to the Spanish colonies from its Caribbean territories. As a result, within 50 years, Britain became the leading slave trading nation in the world, the foremost slave carrier for other European nations, and the center of the triangular trade: British

ships ferried manufactured goods to West Africa, transported slaves to the New World, and brought back sugar, tobacco, and cotton to Britain. The slaves’ transatlantic journey of 9 to 13 weeks became known as the Middle Passage.

JUSTIFYING SLAVERY

As the British involvement in, and the profits from, slavery and the slave trade increased, the concept of the slave as a commodity began to emerge. Aboard ship, Africans were considered items of cargo. On plantations, African slaves were catalogued along with livestock and treated as work animals, to be worked to the maximum at the minimum cost. A similar view of slaves as property was taken by the courts in England

where, by the mid-18th century, thousands of households of English aristocrats and retired planters used African slaves as serving boys and menservants. They and slave traders had a strong vested interest to maintain the status quo of slavery and slave trade and often rationalized these practices. To counter criticism from liberal, humane quarters, slave masters and merchants argued that African slaves were subhuman. In other words, essentially to justify their economic gain, while simultaneously exorcizing themselves of any guilt they might have felt, slave masters and merchants argued that slaves were subhuman and received the treatment they (naturally) deserved. The fact that slaves were of a different race led many British masters and traders to apply their beliefs to the whole race. They ceased to call slaves African and, instead, referred to them by a racial label—negro. Generalizations about negroes proliferated and became part of popular beliefs and myths in Britain. Religious and cultural justifications were often advanced to establish

the inherent inferiority of negroes, as a race. It was argued that they were the descendants of Ham, the Black son of Noah. As such, they were natural slaves, condemned for ever to remain “hewers of wood and drawers of water” (Joshua 9:23). This justification reasoned that negroes were not only physically black, the color of Satan, but also morally black. They were, in short, savage creatures, who jumped from tree to tree in the steamy jungles of Africa and ate one another. Thus, from this perspective, to transport these supposedly subhuman, biologically inferior, mentally retarded creatures from the hell of African jungles to the tranquility and order of the plantations of the New World, where they were assured of protected existence, was an act of Christian charity.

ABOLISHING SLAVERY

Among small pockets of European settlers in North America, however, arose objections to slavery. In 1688, the Quakers in Pennsylvania were the first to air such views. Yet it was not until 1777 that Vermont, then an independent nation, declared slavery illegal. In Europe, the First Republic of France outlawed slavery in 1794. Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807 throughout its empire. It then set out to pressure others to follow suit. The Netherlands, the last European nation to do so, abolished slave trading in 1814. In South America, Brazil did so in 1826. The law abolishing slavery in the British Empire was passed in London

in 1833 and enforced the following year; yet, slavery continued elsewhere. Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1853. The end to slavery in the United States came only at the end of the 1861–1865 Civil War between the proslavery South and the antislavery North. In 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Proclamation of Emancipation, liberating slaves in the United States. Between 1518 and 1853, European nations filled their Western

Hemisphere–bound slave ships with an estimated 20 million Africans, of which only about 15 million survived the grueling conditions of the overcrowded African ports and the months-long Middle Passage across the Atlantic in tightly packed ships, leading to outbreaks of fatal diseases. As a result, many more Africans arrived in the New World during those 335 years than Europeans.

SLAVERY AND RELIGION

During slavery, knowledge of Christianity was often withheld from the slaves, although one of the earliest justifications for embarking on the slave trade and slavery given by Europeans in general, and Sir John Hawkins in particular, was to “Christianize the Africans.” (The first ship that Hawkins used as a slave carrier was named The Jesus.) With the development of a plantation economy in the West Indies, planters tended to consider it imperative to deprive their slaves of any knowledge that might lead to their “enlightenment” and possible disobedience. That included knowledge of Christian doctrine. Furthermore, by intermingling slaves from different tribes to form work

gangs, and banning the practice of their respective language and religious rituals, slave owners encouraged the decline of African religions. Over generations, through “house slaves”—slaves that worked in the owner’s house and were sometimes allowed to stand in at the rear of their owner’s

church on Sundays—and through periodic, distant observation of the Whites at church, field slaves were exposed to Christian ritual and doctrine. The result was an amalgam of orthodox Christianity and African beliefs in witchcraft, spirits, and the supernatural. Several slave masters in Jamaica considered this development

disturbing and attempted to formalize it by importing, in 1745, Moravian missionaries from America to instruct the slaves in Christian doctrine. Later, Baptist ministers from America and England were brought in to preach the gospel. By the time all slaves were emancipated in Jamaica, for instance, almost all had been exposed to Christian doctrine in one form or another. The African belief in the supernatural was blended with the Christian

concept of Jesus the Savior. Out of the marriage of Baptist fundamentalist gospel and African belief grew the Baptize, or Pentecostal school of Christian doctrine which, in the post-emancipation period, attracted thousands of ex-slaves, and which today claims the allegiance of about 20% to 25% of the Jamaican population. The participatory approach to service at a Pentecostal church—consisting of congregational singing and incorporating the spiritualist practices of trances, spirit possession, and “speaking in tongues”—proved particularly popular with the rural and/or poor African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans. The claim that slavery, which underwent profound changes during the

past millennia, is now extinct must be qualified. It persists in its feudal form in remote pockets of the Arabian Peninsula. Some argue that an indirect form of slavery—being bound to an economic role from which one cannot be easily extricated—is an unfortunate by-product of the 21st-century global economy.

AFRICAN DIASPORA RELIGIONS

Jeffrey Haynes

As many as 10 million Africans were transported from West and Central Africa to the Americas and the islands of the Caribbean between the 16th and 19th centuries, creating one of the largest and most jarring events of forced population change in global history. This Atlantic slave trade involved their removal from familiar customs and practices, and separation from families and communities. As a result of this diaspora, Africans were scattered and dispersed around the world. Yet they often managed to retain both traditions and identities in their new environments. As a result,

important elements of African cultures—including religions, languages, and folklore—survived the traumatic dislocation, serving as crucial links to their past lives. The term African diaspora religions (ADRs) refers to various African-

based religions relocated to the Americas as a consequence of Africans’ enslavement. ADRs highlight religious traditions originally from Africa which not only were able to survive cultural and ideological assault but also proved to be robust enough to provide spiritual resources for people whose identities were rooted in African cosmologies. ADRs are both urban and rural phenomena, emerging and developing as a direct result of the existential impacts of slavery and the associated belittling of African spirituality in the Americas. ADRs can be grouped into various types. First, there are the neo-

African religions—including Candomblé in Brazil; Santería in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico; and Vodun (Voodoo) in Haiti. Despite differences, they draw on similar ideas and concepts, often borrowing practices from Catholicism that reminded adherents of religious themes already encountered in Africa. The second type is ADRs influenced by Protestant missionary activity. Examples include Cumina and the Convince cult in Jamaica, the Big Drum Dance of Carriacou (Grenada), and St. Lucia’s Kele. Third, there are ADRs influenced by Pentecostal groups from the United States, especially found in Jamaica. A fourth type of ADR includes religions that emphasize divination, healing, and spirit mediumship. Examples include Umbanda in Brazil, the Maria Lionza cult in Venezuela, and Puerto Rico’s Espiritismo. The final type of ADR examined here is Rastafarianism, found primarily in Jamaica, a religion with a pronounced sociopolitical agenda.

NEO-AFRICAN RELIGIONS

Three representative examples are briefly discussed here: Candomblé (Brazil), Santería (Cuba), and Vodun (Voodoo; Haiti, Dominican Republic). Candomblé is practiced mainly in Brazil. Transported from Africa by indigenous priests and adherents, it developed in Brazil, during the era of slavery (1549–1888). The religion was originally confined to the slave population and, as a result, persecuted both by the dominant Catholic Church and the state. After slavery was ended, Candomblé grew to become a major, established religion. Now, about 2 million Brazilians (1.5% of the total population) are followers of Candomblé. Adherents come from all social classes. There are tens of thousands of temples in Brazil.

Candomblé is a religion of the body, focusing on emotions and expressions. Undertaken with blood sacrifice, trance, music, and dance, it does not have a clear code of ascetic conduct. These characteristics differentiate Candomblé from another fast-growing religion in Brazil: Pentecostalism. In short, Candomblé is a festive religion, where notions central to Western theology—including, sin, guilt, and expiation—play little or no role. Santería, also called Regla de Ocha or Regla Lucumi, is practiced widely

in Cuba. It is also found among people of Cuban extraction in the United States. Emanating from the Yoruba tradition of West Africa, Santería is, like Candomblé, a complex of divination, spirit possession, and sacrifice. To become a member of the Santería religion, one must undertake initiation, where the principal ceremony is the asiento (placing of the divinity in the initiate). The focal point of Santería is Babalawo, regarded by adherents as the diviner of the future. He also seeks causes of sicknesses, in both the past and the present, and is the officiating priest at initiations. Vodun (or Voodoo) is traceable to an African word for “spirit.” The term

can be traced back to the West African Yoruba people, who lived in what is now Benin (historically, Dahomey). Slaves brought their religion with them when they were forcibly shipped to Haiti and other islands in the Caribbean.

RELIGIONS INFLUENCED BY PROTESTANT MISSIONARY ACTIVITY

All such ADRs derive from West Africa. Cumina, for example, has its traditions in those of the Ashanti-Fanti people of the Gold Coast (now, Ghana), transported in millions to the Americas during the slave trade. It was in the Ashanti-Fanti religious cult of ancestral reverence that many slaves in Jamaica discovered a medium through which to express their religious and political sentiments. Cumina is a purely African religious cult, and elements of it remain in

the rural communities of Jamaica. In times of rebellion, and there were many such times in Jamaica during colonial rule, Cumina was thought to protect followers from colonialists’ bullets. An adherent possessed by the spirit of the ancestors would be swept up in dynamic dancing and would not recover from an altered state of consciousness until awakened later from the trance. The individual would be entirely ignorant of anything that had transpired. This possession trance is still found in all the ADRs of the Caribbean.

GROUPS INFLUENCED BY PENTECOSTAL GROUPS FROM THE UNITED STATES

Jamaica has many Pentecostal churches, including the Jamaica Pentecostal Church of God Trinity and the United Pentecostal Church. Such churches reflect both an intersection and a lack of fit between Western and West African religiously grounded “moral orders,” which surfaced during recent Jamaican acceptance and transformation of North American Pentecostalism. Today, Jamaica’s many Pentecostal churches highlight the current social/political significance of religious morality into the context of local/global transnational interconnections. Such Jamaican churches are bolstered by organizational and economic links to the transnational— mainly North American—Pentecostal movement, which not only informs and helps amend beliefs and practices of many ordinary Jamaicans followers but also helps to insulate them from pressures toward secularization. Jamaica’s Pentecostal churches were built on syncretistic ingredients of

Jamaica’s “moral inheritance.” This was informed by various factors, including British missionary revivalism and Calvinist moralizing, introduced to enslaved peoples in Jamaica, who primarily emanated from West Africa’s Gold Coast. The European moral order centered on acceptance of a single, transcendent God, with personal sin to be overcome by rigorous self- discipline. Death would lead to salvation. Such beliefs dovetailed with a suspicion of expressive ritual practice, bolstered by the missionary practice of stressing the desirability of ordered domesticity, hard work, and sexual morality as indicative of social worth. This could be contrasted with the perceived moral order of the slaves, which rested on a belief in an immanent world populated by multiple spirits, where both good and evil reside. So-called tricksters (exemplified by Anansi, the clever spider, hero of West African folktales) could make evil become good, and good turn into evil, through mediation of moral practices centering on rites of spirit possession linked to healing. In Jamaica, acceptance of North American Pentecostalism converged

with elements of the African-derived moral order. Central among these were glossolalia (speaking in tongues) and the doctrine of perfectionism leading toward individuals becoming saints. These ritually embodied signs of transformation by the holy ghost were interpreted by Jamaican converts as “tricks.” The Pentecostal advent was seen as a swift, unsuspected (rather like an unpredictable turn of events in an Anansi story) transformation. It was not understood as the product of systematic and “ethical rationalism,” which characterized pre-Pentecostal missionization.

RELIGIONS THAT EMPHASIZE DIVINATION, HEALING, AND SPIRIT MEDIUMSHIP

Examples include the Afro-Brazilian religion Umbanda. It is characterized not only by African religious elements but also draws on Catholicism and Kardecist Spiritualism. Although it has its own identity, Umbanda is similar in some respects to other Afro-Brazilian religions, including Candomblé, Macumba, Batuque, and Quimbanda. Umbanda emerged in Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s, a time of significant industrialization, before spreading to São Paulo and southern Brazil. It is also found in Argentina and Uruguay. Its emergence and development is linked with the name of Zélio Fernandino de Moraes, a psychic, who worked among the poor. Leaders of the religion are known as pai-de-santo and mãe-de-santo. For many adherents, one of the purposes of belonging to the religion is to seek upward mobility. While followers of Umbanda are linked by certain beliefs, it is also the

case that there are various branches of the religion, each with their own beliefs and practices. Adherents have the following in common: belief in a One Supreme Creator God (known as the Orixá Olorum) and in lesser deities called Orixás. The latter are believed to act as the Orixá Olorum’s helpers. They are the spirits of the deceased believed to counsel and guide the living through their lives on earth. They are also believed to be psychics who can channel messages from the spirit world having to do with reincarnation and spiritual evolution through successive lives. Adherents of Umbanda are under a religious obligation to practice charity, to aid the less fortunate.

RASTAFARIANISM

In Jamaica, where economic downturn and political polarization are well- established phenomena, a syncretistic religious cult emerged, known as Rastafarianism. For decades, Rastafarianism has epitomized the desire of many Jamaicans for redemption from, initially, colonial rule and now a poor postcolonial socioeconomic situation. Jamaica’s 2.8 million people, mostly descendants of West African slaves,

are predominantly Christian, although about 100,000 describe themselves as Rastafarians. The emergence of Rastafarianism in the 1930s was fueled by the unacceptability for many Jamaicans of the image of a white-skinned God promulgated by the British Christian colonists. Rastafarians regard the last Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie (“Ras Tafari”), who ruled from 1932 until his overthrow and death in 1974, as God. Rastafarians recognize the Black American, Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), as the religion’s greatest prophet. Garvey’s militant message of liberation, which

he preached until his death in the early 1940s, was highly influential in helping to spread Rastafarianism as the route to spiritual and political emancipation from British rule. Following Jamaica’s independence in 1962, serious riots occurred in

1965 and again in 1968, reflecting the polarization of society between a small rich elite and the mass of poor people. At this time, the Rastafarians’ idea of a new type of society based on equality and communitarian ideals offered a radical alternative to the status quo. Rastafarianism enjoyed a period of growing popularity, underpinned by the popularity of the great reggae artist, Bob Marley, a member of the Rastafarian faith. Following the death of Marley in 1980, however, the influence of the Rastafarian movement declined precipitously. It lost much of its direct political influence and is currently of only marginal significance in Jamaica.

CONCLUSION

ADRs are variable and various. What they have in common is that they emerged and developed during the long period during which Africans were taken against their will from Africa to Europe and the Americas, between the 16th and 19th centuries. ADRs were persecuted in the African diaspora, regarded with suspicion by authorities as having the potential to serve as vehicles of political challenge. Conventional expressions of Christianity condemned ADR practices as both heathen and demonic. During colonial times, ADR followers faced legal challenges in many countries, including Jamaica. Laws were passed restricting Africans’ right to preach and teach their religions. In Haiti, Catholic priests taught that Vodun was not a religion from God. Instead, it was said to come from the Devil. Today, many ADRs still face problems as a consequence of their practice

of sacrifice. In a recent case in the United States, however, the U.S. Supreme Court made the judgment that preventing them from undertaking sacrifices in the context of religious ceremonies violated their religious freedoms. Undeterred by both historical and contemporary setbacks, ADRs collectively continue to exhibit growth. One of their main attractions is that they evoke a world where the gods’ power and strength helps to forge human destiny. Moreover, they typically celebrate family, community, and life’s blessings, and offer adherents ways to understand the world and to deal with its trials and tribulations.

THINKING GLOBALLY ABOUT AFRICAN RELIGION

Jacob K. Olupona

The global dimensions of African religion sweep across the plains of the African continent and into the African diaspora. Contemporary “African religion” is itself a product of globalization, for it is less a single tradition than a sociological context in which the elements of a variety of indigenous religious experiences are combined with Islam and Christianity. All three of these dimensions—indigenous religion, Africanized Islam, and Africanized Christianity—are part of the interactive, globalized African religious experience. Some of the products of this growing interconnectedness of African and

Africanized religions are new religions. As Max Weber has observed, the charismatic becomes routinized, and new faiths become accepted as established traditions. Following Ernst Troeltsch’s categories, a breakaway sect can be characterized by the presence of doctrinal or ritual differences among the church’s membership, and the new African religions have elements of both. These new religious structures reflect emerging values and the adoption of new practices in a changing social context. In the case of the African religions, this process reflects a growing pluralism among African religious institutions. As globalization affects African religion both within Africa and

throughout the African diaspora, new identities emerge. In the African Christian church, the Islamic mosque and the Santería temple, a new pluralism in African identity links the values, memories and civil associations of a variety of African worldviews and moral systems. These are affected by their interactions with each other and with the cultures of the Western world. The very language we use to describe the diverse religious experiences

of people of African origin and descent is not only recent but also heavily dependent upon non-African paradigms and Eurocentric views. Terms such as Africa, Black and Pan-Africa, all derive from recent conceptual periods in history, where parts of the geographical area we now so readily call Africa interacted with Europe. It is this interaction beginning with trade and followed by the latter horrors of the slavery and colonialism, that led to the Eurocentric idea of African religious cultures and worldviews. As a consequence, it is difficult to come up with a distinct notion of

African religion that is independent of the shaping tendencies of the paradigms and terms of the Western world. A truly indigenous understanding must include not only the history of Africa before colonialism, but also aspects of living African communities that have derived from diverse heritages. Although the effort to define “African

religion” can be challenging, a number of scholars, writers and theologians have made the attempt. Writers associated with the “Pan-African” movement, for instance, which dates back for over three centuries, have sought to refine their sense of common being by looking at the totality of African religions within the global environment.

GLOBALIZATION

In looking at the relationship between African religion and globalization, we should not assume that globalization is an inevitable force that will one day replace all traditional values within the world with one common consumerist mass culture. In Africa globalization has had a significant impact upon traditions and cultural values but at the same time African traditionalism retains a resiliency and adaptability that enables it to maintain cohesion both in non-Western environments and in the context of faiths such as Christianity and Islam. African traditions are adaptable. Instead of offering inflexible dogmatic

beliefs, often they provide frameworks for viewing and processing information. If a new piece of information does not fit an existing framework, it can modify but not necessarily reject the framework. For example, a form of taboo observed by an African people can be maintained until the old framework adapts, and it changes. What is interesting to ask about African immigrant religions is not so much what aspects of their traditions have been abandoned as how the frameworks of the traditions have adapted. To some extent these churches were separated from other African

churches. They had difficulty in expanding their efforts beyond their original ethnic base. They were plagued with many of the same ethnic and political divisions that have separated the wider African society and created a series of contemporary political crises. . . .

CONCLUSION

The globalization of African religion, therefore, entails not only the death of African traditional values but also in many cases their expansion and promotion. This is the product of an innovative and somewhat unpredictable reshuffling of many of Africa’s cultures, faiths and traditions —which have become a force for change in both Western and non-Western societies. This is nowhere more evident than in the crosscurrents between contemporary religious communities in the Americas and the expansion of

African religions within the African continent itself. These movements are sources of cultural continuity, stability and authority, and demonstrate the remarkable resiliency and strength of character of African cultures. They have also at times been sources of tension, division, and conflict. These characteristics of innovation and diversity will continue to evolve as African religions expand from their roots in the three pivotal traditions of Christianity, Islam and indigenous faiths.

THE CYCLE OF “STATE-ETHNICITY-STATE” IN AFRICAN POLITICS

Okwudiba Nnoli

The genocide in Rwanda in 1994 radically changed the attitudes of Africans and non-Africans alike toward ethnicity in Africa. The extent of the bloodletting shocked the whole world. In spite of the numerous cases of ethnic violence on the continent in the past, no one expected the carnage and brutality that attended the genocide. Worse still its perpetrators have shown no remorse. Both Rwanda and Burundi are still locked in genocidal wars in which the Tutsi are pitted against the Hutu. People are asking questions about the contribution of ethnicity to the state of affairs in African politics. Of particular interest is the reason why ethnic conflict in Africa has been so destructive. This essay seeks to answer these questions. It suggests that past

attempts to answer them failed because they are based on inadequate understanding of ethnicity in Africa. They tend to see ethnicity everywhere and to conceive it in a self-explanatory manner. They view ethnicity essentially as given and take very little account of its substratum. From this point of view interests arising from ethnic identities differ from one another because of socio-cultural and economic differences among the relevant ethnic groups. Hardly any serious thought is given to how and why individuals embrace ethnic identity in the first place, and the origin of the ethnic group interests. Our view is that ethnicity in Africa arises from the projection of state

power by those who control the state. The undemocratic character of the state means that in extending political authority throughout the country and organizing economic and social activities in the society those who control the state often inflict direct or structural violence on peoples and communities. Direct violence occurs when a punitive expedition is sent to perpetrate violence against a community for past misdeeds. A good example is the military expedition sent by the Nigerian government in

1999 to sack the town of Odi in Bayelsa state. This action was punishment for the disappearance of some policemen in the area. Structural violence occurs when decisions are imposed on communities without consulting them, and often against their will. An example is the imposition of the structural adjustment program (SAP) on the various communities in Africa. As Ake argues, what occurs for the most part in Africa is violent

aggression by the state against communities, ethnic groups, minorities, workers, peasants, religious groups and the political opposition in the routine business of projecting power to realize vested interests and to sustain domination. . . . In other words, the violence does not need to arise from any articulated or perceived differences between the state and its victims. It is not necessarily related to any explicit struggle for state power. The differences and struggles emerge ex post facto from the unilateral actions of the state. A reckless abuse of power is often involved. This gradually builds up a critical mass of desperate enemies among the victims of state action. Ethnicity emerges as an inclusive framework for responding to this violence of the state. For example, the resort to arms by the Banyamulenge ethnic group in

the Congo (DRC) emerged ex post facto from the unilateral state policy of the Mobutu regime to divest them of their citizenship of the country. The result was a series of violent actions, reactions and coalitions that swept Mobutu Sese Seko from power and turned the Congo into a theatre of violent political struggles among local and foreign forces that are yet to be resolved. In Northern Ghana, the Konkomba-Nanumba war of 1981 is traceable to the generalized state-imposed structural violence that attended the country’s policy of SAP during the period 1980–1983. Those fleeing this violence to their ethnic homeland found themselves engaged in destructive socio-economic competition with neighboring ethnic groups that could not be resolved by other than violent means. This state-ethnicity nexus dates back to the colonial period. The colonial

state was undemocratic, ruthless and arbitrary. As a rule, it projected its power without consulting the people; invariably it acted against their will. Its policies completely changed the African political, economic and socio- cultural landscape. They produced a massive population shift, especially from the rural to the urban areas; alienated community land; destroyed local institutions; created new public institutions; redefined notions of physical and political space; and created new notions of citizenship. Unilateral and coercive actions of the colonial state played the leading role in forcing through these changes. This was the beginning of virulent ethnicity. This ethnicity was reinforced by the ruthless projection of state power

during the early post-colonial period. These were the heydays of the one- party state and military rule. Increased centralization of state power, a widening of the scope of corruption, increased repression, the expansion and intensification of the process of class formation, the emergence of class factions, and massive changes in the agrarian sector formed the context for the evolution of new identities, redefinition of pre-colonial and colonial identities, and the manipulation of these identities for political and other purposes. Added to all this is the impact of the political, economic and ecological crises of the state on ethnicity and its growth. Furthermore, the growth of ethnicity is promoted by the tendency of

globalization to bring everyone into close proximity by shrinking everything into one small intimate space that has to be fought for incessantly. Shrinking physical space, increasing proximity and enforced intimacy cause tension and anxiety because they crowd people into ever- smaller space with all their differences and mutual suspicions intact. Even when globalization tries to induce common values, as for example through the global market, it does not reduce the tensions; if anything it increases them by inducing convergence on the same values and focusing demand on the same scarce resources. . . . Such tensions are compounded by the increasing openness of state

boundaries spawned by globalization. Everyone everywhere is exposed to the unblinking view and judgment of a global society. There is no place to hide, no respite from scrutiny and assessment. One result of this trend is the tendency towards undermining the state. As the state is undermined it decomposes into its constituent linguistic, religious or ethnic components. The dismemberment of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia is illustrative. Globalization produces tensions, uncertainties and ruptures that cause serious changes in attitudes and orientations. The abstract universalism of civil identity in the nation-state is unable to contain these changes. This is because such changes elicit particularistic but holistic cultural identities such as religious or ethnic identities. By all indications, African peoples have sought to resist oppressive state

presence by embracing new identities, sometimes different from their pre- colonial identities. They have overwhelmingly embraced primary identities such as ethnic and religious identities. Their preference for primary identities is because of the generalized and cultural nature of the threat. Such a threat demands nothing but the crystallization of the self holistically. This is precisely what primary identities do. However, as self- reflexivity this type of primary identity takes itself and all its claims for granted but does not take rival identity claims seriously except in the confrontation by which it determines and invigorates itself by negation.

Therefore and unfortunately, when the struggle against the threat (state violence) is waged (ethnic conflict) it is sometimes directed against the wrong enemies, other ethnic groups rather than the rampaging undemocratic state. Unlike pre-colonial ethnicity, the ethnicity that emanates from these

rapidly changing national and global conditions is fiercely competitive and intolerant of ethnic minority views and feelings. It is not aimed at promoting production and commerce as in the pre-colonial past but the control and monopolization of power and material resources. It seeks advantage in the socio-economic and political scheme of things. These characteristics are reinforced by the partisan nature of the African state in factional disputes, the extensive intervention of the state in economic and social life that makes the state a strategic instrument for power and wealth in Africa. Thus, one can understand the intensity of the struggle among ethnic groups to control and dominate the state.

FURTHER READING

Ake, Claude. 1996. Democracy and Development in Africa. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Blackburn, Robin. 1998. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800. London: Verso.

Blackburn, Robin. 1998. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848. London: Verso.

Buxton, Thomas Fowell. 2011. The African Slave Trade. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Haynes, Jeffrey. 2013. Religion and Politics in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. London: Routledge.

Hiro, Dilip. 1991. Black British, White British: A History of Race Relations in Britain. London: HarperCollins.

Hopkins, Dwight N. 2005. Being Human: Race, Culture, and Religion. Minneapolis: Fortress

McCarthy Brown, Karen. 2001. Mama Lola: A Voudou Priestess in Brooklyn (revised edition). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Morgan, Kenneth. 2011. Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy 1660–1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Northrup, David(Ed.) 2010. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Olmos, Marguerite Fernández, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. 2003.

Creole Religion of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo. New York: New York University Press.

Redkey, Edwin. 1969. Black Exodus: Black Nationalism and Back to Africa Movements. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Rodney, Walter. 2011. How Europeans Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC: Howard University Press.

Russell-Wood, A.J.R. 2002. Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Brazil. Oxford, UK: Oneworld.

Thomas, Hugh. 2006. The Slave Trade: History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870. London: Phoenix.

Williams, Eric. 1994. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. (Originally published in 1964.)

4 THE MIDDLE EAST Religious Politics and Antiglobalization

The Europeans who gave the Middle East its name thought of it as the crossroads of West and East, at the intersection of the main overland routes between Africa and Asia and Europe. All of these areas influenced the Middle East, of course, but the Middle East has made its own enormous contributions to global culture and the transnational economy as well. Three of the world’s great religious traditions began there—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and its natural resources, including oil, have made parts of the Middle East prosperous. The world’s tallest building is in Dubai, and one of the world’s great news networks, al Jazeera, is based in the emirate of Qatar. As we begin to put the Middle East into a global context, however, we

have to figure out exactly what we’re talking about. The term originated with Europeans, who looked from Europe toward the Far East of China and Japan and found a lot of real estate in between, including Southwestern Asia. The fabled “Orient Express” of European railroads—the train from Paris that headed south and east—ended in Istanbul, making Turkey the gateway to the “Orient” of the Middle East. What these Europeans had in mind when they talked about the Middle

East was primarily the area east of the Mediterranean Sea, including all of the Arabian Peninsula and the land north of it, up to the Black and Caspian seas. (This might be a good time to check your Middle Eastern map to see for yourself how difficult it is to define the area.) If the northern and southern boundaries of the region are relatively clear, how far east should we go—Is Iran a part of the Middle East? Afghanistan? Pakistan? And how far west do the boundaries of the Middle East extend? Egypt is often considered part of the Middle East, and it is in Africa, of course (though a

bit of Egypt extends to the eastern side of the Red Sea and is thus a part of the Arabian Peninsula). Other North African countries, such as Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, at times have also been considered to be part of the Middle East. The region is not defined just by territory, but also by two other

important cultural factors: language and religion. Arabic is the dominant language, and since the residents of North African countries speak Arabic, along with local languages, that would explain why Egypt (and often other North African countries) is included. The other cultural feature of the Middle East is the religion of Islam. Since most Turks and Iranians are Muslim, their countries are often also brought into the Middle Eastern circle even though their languages are Turkish and Farsi, respectively, not Arabic. And there are some other anomalies. Israel, for example, is predominantly Jewish and its language Hebrew, and Lebanon contains a significant Christian population, but both are squarely in the Middle East. There are also old Christian communities in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, while the Jewish community in Iran is likewise centuries old. The Middle East has been at the intersection of civilizations from very

ancient times. Over two thousand years ago it was caught between great Persian empires to the East, Egyptian dynasties to the West, and Greek and Roman imperial powers to the Northwest. It was situated in the middle of the ancient Mediterranean world. Greek and Roman ideas intermingled with Egyptian and Persian thought, and locations such as Ephesus, Tyre, Alexandria, and Carthage—cities that are now in the nations of Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, and Tunisia, respectively—were important trade and political centers. Hence, the ancient Middle East was in the center of the global culture of its age. Global currents flowed into and through it. The Middle East contributed enormously to global culture as well.

Perhaps most significant are the ancient cultural traditions of the Mesopotamian and Nile River civilizations. Babylonian mythology— including the creation of the earth out of chaos and the story of surviving the great flood—became a part of the world’s literary heritage. The Semitic culture of ancient Israel was influenced by these traditions, and from these roots came Judaism and later Christianity. The Middle East is also the cradle of the Islamic tradition, which recalls that the line of prophecy reaches back to Christian and Jewish forebears. These Middle Eastern religious cultures have influenced the world. The

diaspora of Jewish communities were scattered from Europe to China to South America. Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire; it became so entrenched in Europe that many have thought of it as a European religion—even though in the twenty-first century there are

more Christians in Africa, Asia, and South America than there are in Europe and North America. Islam also has become a global religion, having spread rapidly throughout the Middle East and beyond, from Spain to Indonesia. In the mobile demographics of the global era, significant communities of Muslims have taken root in Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. What holds Muslim culture together is the centrality of a tradition

rooted in the Middle East. The Middle Eastern language of Arabic is the textual base of the tradition, and all pious Muslims must learn enough Arabic to read and even memorize the Holy Qur’an and to recite the daily prayers. The central pilgrimage place is Mecca, on the Western side of the Arabian peninsula, and undertaking a pilgrimage—the haj—at least once is an obligation of every Muslim who is able to afford it. The great legal and textual traditions of Islam are preserved in the Middle East, while the theological scholarship of al Al-Azhar University in Cairo serves the entire Muslim world. Thus, although Islam reaches out to the most distant corners of the

world, it is also a global center. Perhaps for this reason, strident new movements of Islamic politics that challenged secular Western notions of globalization emerged at the end of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. In some cases, these movements were local and nationalist, resenting the foreign intrusion of Western secular ideologies. In other cases, such as the jihadi activism associated with the al Qaeda network, they were transnational in scope. In a sense, they were fighting for their own vision of an alternative globalization, one conceptualized as a global Islam. The readings in this section begin with an evocative image of the Middle

East, describing the great sweep of desert landscapes and their impact on the breadth of Muslim political visions. This excerpt is by Mohammed Bamyeh, a sociologist of Palestinian background who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and from whose award-winning book, The Social Origins of Islam, this excerpt is taken. It is followed by an excerpt from an essay by Said Arjomand on the global reach of the Islamic tradition. The sociologist Arjomand was born in Iran and trained at the University of Chicago and now teaches at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. The next selection raises the question of whether Middle Eastern

conflicts are more religious than are conflicts in other parts of the world. The author, Jonathan Fox, examines empirical evidence to find the answer. His conclusion is that Middle Eastern conflicts are more intense but that religion is not the cause of this increased fervor. Rather, he suggests that

historical and social conditions of the region may have led to this situation. Fox is a political scientist trained at the University of Maryland, who teaches at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. The final reading is on the relation of religion and politics in the Middle

East in a post–Arab Spring world. The author, Barah Mikaïl, argues that religion continues to be a factor in political organization in the second decade of the twenty-first century, though he contends that it now appears through democratic processes and not through the violent means that some oppositional religious politics took at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Mikaïl is a senior researcher at the European think tank FRIDE (Fundacion para las Relaciones Internacionales y el Dialogo Exterior), with degrees in political science and international relations from universities in Paris.

THE IDEOLOGY OF THE HORIZONS

Mohammed Bamyeh

We are speaking of a terrain in which life repeats itself both endlessly and precariously. Here, the eyes of the inhabitant open daily to a topography of solemn solitude, far more imposing to the soul than the minuscule islets of social life encountered thereupon. The desert is a sphere of absolute speechlessness. What is strange in the desert is speaking, thinking in words, dialogizing, communicating. In this vast expanse, ridiculing all notions of paramount subjectivity, profuse wilderness covers all visible destinations between the here and all horizons; the human actor is but an insignificant footnote to the space; to think of presence in dogmatic terms of space—where space as a habitat is at best a seasonal interruption—is to practically annul oneself. Only a perennially visible enigma, the horizon, sets the boundaries of knowable nature. Like the sea, the horizon of the desert stands out in contrast to the landscape as the unreachable terminus of nature, its inconclusive conclusion. The Arabian Peninsula—the cradle of Islam—is dominated by the two

vast deserts that occupy the bulk of the land. The great Nufud wilderness claims much of the north, while the Empty Quarter, one of the most arid and impassable deserts on earth, stretches over half a million square kilometers in the south. Such immense horizons confound the ideas of beginning and end, depositing the concept of eternity in the heart of the concrete present. This ideology of the horizons . . . is oblivious to human structures of presence as a purposeful progression of moments where one

constructs for oneself a path in time, periodizes existence, valorizes destination. In other words, such an ideology sees in the spectacle of the horizon not so much an inviting mirage as the most fundamental picture of the emptiness of grandiose human quests. There are notable exceptions, of course, to this story. The recurrent

Semitic migrations outside of the peninsula during the four millennia preceding Islam were clearly intended to free population groups from such a magnitude of resourcelessness. But we are concerned with those who stayed and developed sedentary societies and sedentary ways of looking that challenged the desert’s inhospitability to any other life than one of permanent wandering. The story of Islam, along with many contemporaneous theological and cosmological experiments, rotates around such tensions in the ways of seeing and assessing the outside—and by extension the inside—of human society. But before such a permanent encampment, the concreteness of

existential emptiness could be derived purely by looking. No exceptional ability to see into the nature of things was required. The eternity of the same readily revealed itself to all those who had the patience to pause long enough to appreciate the horizons, the boundaries of the magnificent desert, and long enough to allow the horizon to fully transform itself into an idea, to become a part of seeing in the most fundamental way, in other words, to become an “ideology.” The ideology of horizons is a peculiar production of this form of wilderness. And it is an ideology that sustains wandering. Here, the horizon, consisting of visible sameness, visible emptiness, visible lack of any promise whatever, nullifies the quest after it. But on the other hand, such a horizon speaks of the conclusion of the desert and promises an unknown beyond, a different nature that cannot be seen without wandering toward the horizon. And in this other capacity, the horizon instigates the quest for that beyond. This perplexing appeal of the horizon situates it exactly at the

borderline, between two modes of wandering. One mode is to wander as a natural fate, preordained by the indifference of the desolate landscape to ordinary human needs. The other mode is to invest in the wandering a teleological scheme of crossing over into a land of lush riverbanks, where the horizon would gradually disappear as an invitation, goal, or boundary of permanent wandering. In both cases, the desert itself only promises traces, ruins, and betrayals of past loves and lives; nothing more. One wanders, and one forgets through wandering—in effect eliminating from view—the desert’s failure to sustain other than its own overpowering expanse, eternal and normative as it seems. Here, if there is a destination, one reaches it by simply moving. No elaborate schemes are required. No

scheming subject is required. In fact, no subject at all is required. Until poetic, cosmological, and thematic discourses about that nature began to be produced, valued, and preserved, there were no forms imposed on it. For the wanderer, the desert formed itself and dissipated along the way, with no everlasting images. Such a nature formed itself in the mode of interruptions, as though to encourage existence a little longer, precisely when the wanderer was about to perish. This is how the nomadic ode itself proceeded until exhaustion (and not conclusion) consumed its energy. But until the regular production and preservation of discourse and sedentarism, such interruptions were no more than erasable bursts of life. There was wandering, but there were no roads, no pathways, no passages into an alternative ideology or life, no meaning for time or direction. Unless one ceased to be a nomad, nothing altered that eternal presence. Throughout the peninsula, movement was the norm and halting the

exception. Agriculture, the primary precondition for settlement, was possible as a large-scale activity only in Yemen and the Green Mountain in Uman. Some isolated agricultural colonies also developed in some elevated regions of Hijaz and Najd, the most important of which was in and around Ta’if, which supplied Mecca with much of its food. Mecca itself, the birthplace of Islam, was far from being an agricultural community. In fact, it grew like a wild thorn amid an arid environment of solid rock. It survived only because of the growing world trade that passed through it. . . . But in spite of its world connection, Mecca, as a particular form of settlement, was left to determine its own ideology with reference to its own preconditions and surroundings, where nomadism and wandering predominated for enormous distances in all directions. With the exception of Yemen, the great powers of the time—the Romans, the Sassanids, the Abyssinians—displayed little interest in any part of the Arabian Peninsula. Thus, the particular story of permanent halting in Mecca contains

simultaneous elements of knowledge of and independence from all the great powers of the epoch (including peninsular powers such as Yemen). Mecca’s location deep in the desert insulated the city from the fate of the other nascent trading centers that were annexed to such powers. Palmyra and Petra were annexed by Rome, Aden was dominated by the Abyssinians and Sassanids. But it was also the relations with such powers that stabilized a form of halting, which would otherwise have been devoured by a nature that does not usually allow it. The Qur’an itself registers a profound awareness of Mecca’s precarious exceptionalism, nestled as it is in a resourceless terrain that under normal circumstances would not have allowed it to survive beyond a season or two. Such an exception, in turn, could be available only to foundational projects associated with prophetic

effort—Abraham’s in this case: “Abraham said: ‘Lord, I have settled some of my offspring in a barren valley near Your Sacred House. . . . Put in the hearts of men kindness towards them, and provide them with the earth’s fruits, so they may give thanks.’” In this case, an act of halting—indeed, an expression of an intention to

halt forever—was seen to depend on God’s leave and bounty. This is not to say, however, that a wandering nomad had no need for deities or that the sedentary God’s credentials consisted in his assistance in a mere earthly and immediate task. The story is far more complex than that. . . . [T]he decision and capacity to halt involve major metaphysical reorientations. Much of the dilemmas of Abraham’s descendants, indeed, consisted of the question of how to overcome the ideology of the horizons, with all of its underpinnings. Such underpinnings had involved an attenuation of the idea of displacement, a cyclical vision of nature, a materialist rather than spiritualist contextualization of the idea of fate, an understanding of human and logical finitude in terms of processional exhaustion rather than of summary verdict or unifying conclusion, a suspicion of subjective construction and planning, a tendency to mock abstract authority, and an almost reflexive antipathy to grand political schemes in general. In an important sense, the idea of a monotheistic God exemplified a sustained attack on the ideology of the horizons and an effort to place the experiences of halting and wandering under a different order of regulation than those the nomad was willing to tolerate. . . . [There is a] rich dialectic interaction between that ideology of the horizons and the emergent faith and the resulting metamorphoses in all social and discursive spheres affected by both. But first, where does the story begin? If halting had accentuated for Abraham the necessity of God, what did that same halting signify for a more resilient nomad?

THINKING GLOBALLY ABOUT ISLAM

Said Amir Arjomand

Virtually from its inception, Islam has been a global religion. It is the youngest of what Max Weber calls the world religions of salvation. Far more than with Christianity, the old dynamics of the expansion of Islam as a world religion have remained in full vigor, even in the twenty-first century when Islam now has a billion adherents around the world. In the last quarter of the twentieth century a new variety of religious movements arose in Islam—as in Christianity and Judaism—that have been called

“fundamentalist.” Although such movements have been a distinctive aspect of contemporary Islamic society they by no means comprise all aspects of the contemporary expansion of Islam as a universalist religion of salvation. . . .

THE UNIVERSALIST EXPANSION OF ISLAM

The Islamic era begins with the migration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622. It was in Medina that Muhammad built a society on the basis of Islam, the new religion he had preached to a small number of Meccan followers as the final revelation in the Abrahamic tradition of monotheism. In the last years of his life, Muhammad conquered Mecca and unified the tribes of Arabia. After his death in 632, his successors, the Caliphs, fought the refractory tribes in Arabia, and conquered vast territories of the Persian and Roman empires. The major step in the institutionalization of Islam after Muhammad’s death was the establishment of the text of the Qur’an under the third Caliph. The canonization of the text of the Qur’an as the Word of God made Islam the religion of the book, even more than the other Abrahamic religions. As the literal Word of God, recited by his Prophet, the Qur’an was a holy scripture par excellence. Its transcendent authority made possible the development of sectarian and mystical variants of Islam that diverged in their interpretation of the faith from the mainstream. In addition to studying the Qur’an, several schools of pious learning

began to collect and transmit the Traditions—reports of the sayings and deeds—of the Prophet. The influence of this pious religious learning on legal practice grew during the first two centuries of Islam. Consequently, the institution that emerged as the main embodiment of Islam by the end of its second century was neither a church, as in Christianity, nor a monastic system, as in Buddhism, but the Islamic law (shari`a). The law became the central institution in Islam, as had been the case with Rabbinical Judaism. The Islamic law was in principle based on the Qur’an, the Traditions of the Prophet and the consensus of the jurists, and remained, in Weber’s terms, a “jurists’ law.” The jurists formed schools of law, and engaged both in teaching students and in legal consultation. Their compiled opinions acquired the force of law. With the consolidation of Islamic law as the main institutional embodiment of Islam, the scholar-jurists, the ulema, emerged as its guardians and authoritative interpreters. The contribution of sects and heterodoxies to social transformation in

the Islamic civilization has been considerable. Modern historical scholarship of the past hundred years has significantly altered our picture

of the expansion of Islam in the seventh century and its penetration into the ancient societies that became parts of a vast Arab empire of conquest. As a result of modern scholarship, we know that Islam, as distinct from Arab domination, was not spread swiftly by the sword, but rather gradually and by popular missionary movements, often in defiance of the fiscal interest of the state. During the first three centuries of Islamic history, three important groups of sectarian movements—Kharijism, Murji`ism (which later merged with mainstream Islam) and Shi`ism—played a very important role in the conversion of the non-Arab subjects of the empire to Islam. The Arab confederate tribes which ruled a vast empire of conquest

were not keen on the conversion of its subject populations. It was only with the Abbasid revolution—Islam’s social revolution beyond Arabia in the mid- eighth century—that the universalist potential of Islam as a world religion of salvation was fully released from the superordinate interest of Arab imperial domination. With the Abbasid revolution, a society based on the equality of Arab and non-Arab Muslims came into being. It was in this society and during the first century of Abbasid rule that the institutionalization of Islamic law was achieved. Meanwhile, from the mid- ninth century onward, a movement known as Hanbalism sought to unify sundry traditionalist groups, first against philosophical and theological rationalism and later against Shi`ism. Among the movements that account for the spread of Islam in the formative period, Hanbalism acted as an important force in the intensive penetration and consolidation of Islam among the urban population. It opposed rationalism in matters of faith and insisted on the unconditional acceptance of the Qur’an and the Prophetic Traditions as its unalterable scriptural fundamentals. Hanbalism can therefore be regarded as the prototype of Islamic fundamentalism. Furthermore, by branding sectarian movements as heretical, the Hanbalites accelerated the process of mutual self-definition between the sects and the mainstream. The mainstream Muslims increasingly came to see themselves as standing against all schism and division, and advocating the unity of the Muslim community on the basis of the Tradition (Sunna) of the Prophet, hence the term Sunnism as the designation for the mainstream Islam. In the subsequent centuries, however, the pattern of institutionalization

of Islam through Islamic law showed its definite and rather rigid limits. Intensive Islamicization through the law could not facilitate Islam’s missionary expansion, nor could it penetrate deeply into society. The mission to convert the population of the frontier and rural areas increasingly fell upon a new mass movement, Sufism (Islamic mysticism).

Popular Sufism became the instruments of the spread of Islam both into the geographical periphery of the Muslim world and into the lower ranks of Muslim society, especially in the rural areas. For centuries, popular Sufism offered a distinct variant of Islam that was in many ways the opposite of the scriptural fundamentalism of the Hanbalites. From the fifteenth century onward, popular Shi`ism adopted many of the practices of the Sufis such the veneration of the holy Imams and their descendants, in place of the Sufi saints, and pilgrimages to the shrines. Since the beginning of the early modern period, a number of Islamic

movements have responded to the challenge of popular religiosity by advocating the revival or renewal (tajdid) of Islam by returning to the Book of God and the pristine Islam of the Prophet. These movements can be classified as orthodox reformism, as their aim was the reform and purification of religious beliefs and practices with close attention to the Qur’an and the Prophetic Tradition as the scriptural foundations of Islam. An important movement grew from within the Hanbalite fundamentalist tradition in Arabia to take up this challenge of popular Sufism and Shi`ism in the eighteenth century. It is known as the Wahhabi movement, after its founder Muhammad b. Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792) who had visited Shi`ite Iran and come into contact with popular Sufism in Arabia and considered both as disguised polytheism. His followers sacked the Shi`ite holy shrines in Iraq and destroyed the Sufi orders in Arabia. Wahhabi fundamentalism rejected popular religious practices as polytheistic and aimed at returning to the pure monotheism of early Islam with the cry, “Back to the Book and the Tradition of the Prophet!” Since the nineteenth century, Islam has faced the political and cultural

challenge of the West. The Muslim response to this challenge can be simplified into three main types of reaction: secularism, Islamic modernism and Islamic fundamentalism. Since World War II, this cultural and institutional response to Western domination has been deeply affected by an increasing vitality of Islam that has been firmly rooted in processes of social change. Throughout this time, the evolution of Islam as a universalist religion has continued. This evolution has been quite obvious in conversions to Islam in Black Africa and Southeast Asia but much less obvious in the form of intensive penetration of Islam within Muslim societies. The vitality of Islam caused by the social change of the last half- century has created major advantages for scriptural fundamentalism over Sufism in popular religion, with the consequence of greater penetration of scriptural Islam into the social lives of the Muslims. . . .

ISLAM AND GLOBALIZATION

Continuous improvement and declining cost of transportation since World War II has greatly increased the number of pilgrims to Mecca, and of missionaries from Africa and Asia to the main centers of Islamic learning in the Middle East. It should be noted that this aspect of globalization reinforces Islam’s old universalism institutionalized around the Hajj— pilgrimage to Mecca. In fact, improved sea transportation since the seventeenth century had encouraged international contact among Muslims and stimulated transnational movements for orthodox reformism and renewal (tajdid). The post-colonial era has witnessed massive immigration of Muslims

into Western Europe and North America where sizeable Muslim communities were formed. Meanwhile, there has been unprecedented global integration of Muslims through the mass media. The media contributed to the success of the Islamic revolution in Iran by enabling the Iranian opposition abroad to orchestrate widespread mass mobilization inside of Iran. Khomeini’s aides abroad and his followers in Iran were able to coordinate their nationwide protests by using telephone lines. Khomeini’s revolutionary speeches were disseminated by cassettes through the networks of mosques and religious associations. The Persian program of the British Broadcasting Corporation

sympathetically reported Khomeini’s activities and proclamations, and these reports were avidly received by millions of households in Iran to the dismay of the Shah and his political elite. The international repercussions of the Rushdie case also illustrates the

impact of the media on a globally integrated Muslim world. The protests and burning of his Satanic Verses by indignant Muslims began in Bradford, England. These were broadcast throughout the world and stimulated violent protests in Pakistan, which were in turn internationally broadcast. This media exposure gave Khomeini the opportunity to reassert his claim to revolutionary leadership of the Muslim world in the last year of his life. Only a few months after accepting the cease-fire in the war with Iraq, which had been like “drinking a cup of poison,” he had the final satisfaction of issuing, on February 14, 1989, an injunction (fatwa) sanctioning the death of Salman Rushdie, a non-Iranian writer who lived in England, for apostasy. The effects of globalization on Islam are interpreted variously.

Eickelman (1998) sees the combined effect of globalization, the growth of education and vigorous discussion of Islam in books and in public debates as the making of an Islamic Reformation. According to Eickelman, the

Islamicization of social life has been far reaching but also dispersed, lacking any focus or single thrust. Barber, by contrast, puts Islam in the front line of the global clash between “Jihad vs. McWorld.” He sees the effect of globalization concentrated in a sharply focused and vehement “anti-Western anti-universalist struggle” (Barber 1995: 207). Barber obliterates the distinction between Islamic fundamentalism and Islam. It is not just Islamic fundamentalism but Islam, tout court, that nurtures conditions favorable to Jihad: “parochialism, anti-modernism, exclusiveness and hostility to ‘others’” (Barber 1995: 205). I believe Barber’s view on Islam and globalization, which is widely

shared by journalists and commentators, is fundamentally mistaken. Not only is there variety in Islamic fundamentalism . . . , but Islamic fundamentalism is by no means identical with all the contemporary manifestations of Islam as a universalist religion. Urbanization, development of roads and transportation, the printing revolution and other contemporary processes of social change, including globalization, all reinforce trends toward expansion and intensive penetration of society that are typical of Islam as a universalist religion. These trends are not exclusively fundamentalist. One would therefore have to agree with Eickelman on the dispersion of the current trends in Islamicization, whether or not one concurs with his value-judgement that they constitute Reformation. One important question remains to be answered, however: How does globalization affect the old forms of Islamic universalism? An interesting feature of globalization is the unfolding of anti-global

sentiments in particularistic, variety-producing movements that seek local legitimacy but nevertheless have a global frame of self-reference. Global integration induces Muslims to emphasize their unique identity within their own frames of reference—cultures that can be at once universal and local. There can be no doubt that global integration has made many Muslims seek to appropriate universalist institutions by what might be called Islamic cloning. We thus hear more and more about “Islamic science,” “Islamic Human Rights,” and “the Islamic international system.” There are also a variety of organizations modeled after the United Nations and its offshoots, most notably the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which was founded in 1969 and whose meeting in Tehran in December 1997 was attended by the representatives of the fifty-five member countries, including many Muslim heads of state. This phenomenon is a direct result of globalization. To confuse it with fundamentalism is a grave mistake. It is, however, a reactive tendency and I would call it defensive counter- universalism. The dynamics of Islam as a universalist religion therefore includes a

fundamentalist trend, alongside many others, that has been reinforced by some of the contemporary processes of social change, including globalization. Islam also has acquired a new and sharply political edge under the impact of political modernization. It would be misleading, however, to speak simply of a shift from universalism to fundamentalism. For one thing, missionary traditional Islam continues to flourish, and has adopted modern technology to its growth. More importantly, the main impact of globalization on the Islamic world has not been the growth of fundamentalism but what I call defensive counteruniversalism. Fundamentalism can reasonably be characterized as selectively modern and electively traditional; it is therefore assimilative despite its intent. The assimilative character of defensive counter-universalism is more pronounced. It has already resulted in the assimilation of universal organizational forms, and albeit restrictively, of universal ideas such as human rights and rights of women. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, despite its intent, defensive counter-universalism is inevitably a step toward the modernization of the Islamic tradition.

ARE MIDDLE EAST CONFLICTS MORE RELIGIOUS?

Jonathan Fox

If, as many believe and scholarship confirms, religion is particularly important in ethnic conflicts involving Muslims, how does this affect the nature of conflict in the Middle East? This is a simple question, but finding an accurate answer is not at all

simple. It is complicated by two interrelated factors. First, due to differing perspectives and differing political agendas, interpretations of events in the region vary wildly, and accuracy is often lost. This problem is not limited to the study of the Middle East and, in fact, has been a central issue in political science since its inception. For instance, Karl Deutsch points out that comparative methodology, which consists of analyzing cases using introspection, intuition, and insight, while a powerful tool for analysis, is limited by our imaginations and preconceived notions. That is, a researcher who uses the method of familiarizing himself with as many facts as possible as well as with the insights of other scholars can easily be influenced by his own preconceptions. This can be problematic because due to such preconceptions we often

think we see relationships that we expect to see even if they do not exist, and we often fail to see relationships that do exist but that we never

expected to exist or even imagined might exist. Applied to the issue at hand, we must ask ourselves if the perception that religion is particularly important in the Middle East and is the driving force behind many of the region’s conflicts is accurate, or merely a reflection of what we expect to see. To some extent, this is true of the study of religion and ethnic conflict in the Middle East. Second, the issue of Islam’s role in generating conflict has become

especially controversial since Samuel Huntington asserted that Islam has “bloody borders” and predicted that the dynamics of civilizational conflict in the post-Cold War era would reinforce and intensify this phenomenon. His analysis is part of a larger notion that conflicts are increasingly defined by a “clash of civilizations.” Huntington holds three points: that post-Cold War conflict is mostly between world civilizations defined primarily by religion; that conflicts involving Islamic civilization will be particularly common and violent; and that Islamic civilization will be the greatest threat to Western civilization. While many, if not all, aspects of Huntington’s theory are controversial, his arguments concerning Islam have found acceptance among some policymakers. And that may, as some maintain, make Huntington’s analyses self-fulfilling. That is, if many Westerners expect Islam to be a threat and are disposed to perceive such a threat, whether it exists or not, then the expectations may wind up influencing policy. Thus can political agendas, preconceptions, and popular academic

theories obfuscate and perhaps even alter the role of religion in the Middle East. These complications make an accurate assessment of Islam’s role in Middle Eastern conflict all the more essential. This study uses an empirical method to provide a perspective on the

issue different from the comparative approach. While the empirical method has its limitations—primarily, it can analyze only what can be measured and measurements of social, political, and economic factors are often imperfect—it also has three advantages. It allows us to test and perhaps falsify theories. It makes clear what factors produce its results, and anyone analyzing the same data will get the same results. Also, it often produces surprising findings that would have never resulted from the comparative approach because no one would have looked for them. This analysis proceeds in two stages. First, the results from previous

empirical analyses are summarized. Second, we examine data on ethnic conflict to assess the extent and nature of the influence of religion in the Middle East.