Yearley Steven - Sociology Environmentalism and

SOCIOLOGY, ENVIRONMENTALISM, GLOBALIZATION
Reinventing the Globe
Steven Yearley
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Steven Yearley 1996 First published 1996 All rights reserved. N o part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transm itted or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 6 Bonhill Street London EC2A 4PU SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller R oad Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd 32, M -Block M arket G reater K ailash - I New Delhi 110 048 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 8039 7516-3 ISBN 0 8039 7517-1 (pbk) Library of Congress catalog record available
Typeset by M ayhew Typesetting, Rhayader, Powys Printed in G reat Britain by The Cromwell Press Ltd, Broughton Gifford, M elksham, Wiltshire
Contents
P reface 1 2 3 T h e Sociology o f G lo b alizatio n E n v iro n m e n ta l Issues an d the C om pression o f the G lo b e H o w d o th e W o rld s E n v iro n m en tal P roblem s com e to be G lo b a l? U n iv ersalizin g D iscourses and G lo b alizatio n R e th in k in g th e G lo b al R eferences In d ex vii 1 26
62 100 142 152 159
4 5
aU C S O -B ib lio teca
Preface
environmental interests is considered, as well as the likely future role for universalistic discourses in policy formation. In sum, by examining this complex of issues, the book is able to investigate globalization in a leading m ajor policy arena at the close o f the twentieth century and to take a critical look at how the globality o f global issues is constructed, negotiated and, therefore, open to creative reworking.
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The Sociology of Globalization

Identifying with the Global
To put it a t its simplest, sociologists have concerned themselves with two aspects of globalization, one subjective, one objective. The aspect which is taken to be objective relates to the rise to prominence of m ore and more global processes such as global marketing and world-wide financial markets. The subjective aspect refers to the idea th at people are increas ingly viewing themselves as participants in a globalized world. This may be because, in the words of the slogan, they think global and act local. Or it could be because they are aware of the ways in which the world is - in R obertsons terms - becoming compressed. On the strength of these two processes, the terms global and globalization occur with ever greater frequency in popular and academic writing. In the general culture there seems to be an idea that contem porary society spans the globe, an idea reinforced by advertising and brand names centred on global images, whether cosmetics from the globe, rainforest flavour ice-cream, or the planet-conscious yoghurt mentioned in the Preface. Social scientists too are increasingly producing books and responding to funding programmes with the word global in the title. In reviewing social scientific thinking about globalization we need to ask w hat justification there is for talking of global culture, processes of global ization or global problems. Let us start with the subjective aspect, that is with the sense of global oneness, w hat Robertson calls the consciousness of the world as a single place (1992: 183). The key idea here is that increasingly people are aware of themselves and of humanity as inhabitants of the one globe. Along with this growing consciousness of global citizen ship, goes the idea that sociology should also assess society on a global scale. In one sense it is patently true that the discipline of sociology has to deal with the global society. Aside from cosmonauts circling in space stations, all hum an life is on the globe. Still, it might be objected that this realization can hardly be put down as a recent discovery. D ating from way before the voyages of discovery which culminated in the circumnavigation of the globe in the early sixteenth century, many people had formed the idea that the E arth was a sphere and that hum an society was restricted to the globe. After the initial voyages of exploration in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and following the charting of the Pacific in the eighteenth century, the exhaustive m apping of the coastlines, and adventures in the
Sociology, Environmentalism, Globalization
polar regions, the modem notion of the globe became fixed. This, one might say, marked the im portant acceptance that that was all there was. F o r sure, that conviction did not imply that there was nowhere left for Western people to investigate or explore or settle/colonize. Though the shape and extent of the world were very thoroughly understood by the early nineteenth century, the interiors of Africa, South America, Asia and N orth America were well known only to the indigenous peoples. As various works of European fiction indicated, it was perhaps still possible that under the oceans, deep in the forest, or just possibly beneath the earth itself there might be other peoples. Just over a century-and-a-half later, it is now commonly accepted that the world has been exhaustively visited, m apped and recorded. There can hardly be any places left where a Landrover or Toyota has not been, and where portable radios, and probably CNN , have not brought news and representations of the external world. The decisive point here, however, is not just that the world has been catalogued, that all the remaining points have been ticked off the cartographers list, but that what once seemed vast and mysterious now appears limited and familiar. Whereas the rest of the globe was once outside our society and beyond our experience, now it feels as though it is all inside. The globe, the way we now know it, seems to us truly the limit of human society. In island Britain, possibly in Japan or on Crete too, it was all along possible to have the sense that a society was naturally delimited by its boundaries. Civilization, good manners or adequate sanitation stopped at these limits, at least in the minds of the islanders. But there was always the certainty that there was human life beyond. There was trade and there might be invaders. The feeling of global insularity is qualitatively different. There are no extraterrestrial exports and - interplanetary crop circle artists aside - no expectation of visitors. One im portant consequence of this realization is that some geographers and social scientists have suggested that the global is the only natural and adequate level of analysis. F o r example, if one thinks o f economics, there is room for doubt whether national economies should be thought of as adequate as analytic units. Politicians and commentators blithely talk of the British economy and so on, even though many firms operating in Britain are not British and many British firms make their profits overseas. One has to use conventions of national accounting to work out w hat to count as British and so on. But at the global level, this is not a problem. The globe is a natural entity. In politics too, the so-called new World O rder which followed from the breakdown of the Soviet Bloc, invites us to think of the world as a unity, possibly one to be m anaged in a benign way by the United States. In these ways, the sense that the globe is all there is - which as I say is not itself new - has lately been intensified. These feelings, that we now know the limits of human experience and that we are for some significant purposes all in the same boat, account in part for the recent journalistic,
The Sociology o f Globalization
popular and academic interest in humanitys global identity, the subjective aspect o f globalization. But, according to most writers, this stimulus to global identification is complemented by the objective processes of globalization, namely by the globalizing of various fundamental aspects of contem porary culture and economics.
Global Processes
The candidate examples here are very numerous. There is first of all finance. As was shown by the international speculation which split the European Exchange R ate Mechanism (ERM) in 1992 and nearly under mined the remaining framework a year later, currency markets are no longer national or even regional. The ERM , in the name of promoting unity in Europe, offered to fix exchange rates between European currencies. It effectively promised th at the national banks in Germany, France, D enm ark and the Benelux countries would go on selling marks or guilders or whatever in return for lira, pesetas or sterling at a fixed rate indefinitely. Potentially, this was good news for manufacture and commerce in all these countries as it allowed people to agree contracts with confidence. A British firm could settle a lira price for selling its goods in Italy and know how many pounds the deal would be worth in the months ahead when the merchandise was delivered. But people who manage money (companies which look after pension funds, the deposits in banks, the holdings of savings groups, as well as some fantastically rich individuals) took a different view. Their experience was that sterling, lira and the peseta had a history o f devaluing while the mark did not. They used the suspect currencies to buy the firm ones at the agreed price. By their very actions they made pounds and lira less desirable, the m ark more desirable, and the fixed rate deal less and less sensible from the viewpoint of the German central bank. Sensing which way the trend was going, small business people in Italy and elsewhere took their own currency and bought marks at the agreed rate. In the end the situation became unstable because the markets dem anded marks more than pounds and so on, even though in theory the relationship between them was fixed. But the more demand there was for the m ark, the more valuable it became to hold it in practice - even if that extra value could not be recognized by a greater value on the currencyexchange markets. When the ERM came apart, the pound, lira and peseta fell by around 20 per cent on average, giving a corresponding windfall to all those traders who had sold the weak currencies to central banks, and fat profits to the Italians, Spanish and British people who had sold their own currencies and bought marks. People who timed their move correctly made approximately 20 per cent gains overnight. The key point in this dram a was that it was the disproportion between on the one hand - the am ount of money held by banks and finance companies and - on the other - the available government funds, which
ensured that the governments were out-manoeuvred. Governments in small European countries such as the Irish Republic and Portugal (which also devalued in the end) were overwhelmed by the scale of the money-changing operations. Even bigger countries, such as Italy and the United Kingdom, could not commit endless billions of dollars to combating speculative buying in the market. By contrast, the currency m arket was open to banks, dealing companies and fund-holding agencies all over the globe. In short, in this case the avowed political objectives of the European U nion1 - including four of the worlds leading economies and at the time representing in total the largest and m ost economically powerful trading bloc in the world - were thwarted by the play of state-less money in global financial centres. A similar dram a was enacted at the end o f 1994 and early 1995 when the Mexican peso fell against the dollar and other international currencies. Editorializing, The Economist worried that global investors might be stampeding out of Latin American investments (notably in Argentina and Brazil) for no good reason. The papers view was that:
As the capital market has become increasingly world-spanning, the prices o f financial instruments with identical risks ought in principle to converge across markets. This helps to produce a more efficient allocation of capital. The draw back, from the point o f view o f governments, is that it also makes the market far more sensitive to individual risks. The more efficient the global market, the more likely it is to reward sound economic policy, and the swifter to take fright at mistakes. . . . [Sadly] Sometimes investors merely panic, and gallop like a herd for the exit. Some of that may be happening in Latin America. (14 January 1995:
18) As capital markets become global, the fate of whole countries economies can fall prey to the fears and imaginings of investors in the international money markets. The success (at least in the dealers eyes) of these financial operations was based on a second aspect of globalization, the spread of international communications. The growth of commerce and the expansion of empires always depended on a communications infrastructure. All the time that secure transfer of information depended on messengers, news could only travel as fast as the courier could. This was changed by telegraphy and the growing ability to send information down a wire. Still, the spread in the 1980s of information and communication technologies (ICTs) marked an increase in the speed, am ount and the range of things which could be transmitted. N ot only spoken or written information, but designs and images could now be reliably and cheaply sent between people hundreds of kilometres apart. Together with an increase in the number of com munications satellites, these changes m eant th at geographical closeness was no longer necessarily an aid to communication and ensured that com munication within a geographical unit, such as a country, was no longer especially advantaged. Corporations could manage their activities in a concerted way without having to have their plants located close together.
Contracts could be put out to a range of international bidders and orders could instantly be placed where prices were most favourable. Pundits began talking about telecommuting, the idea that one could work from home or from a remote centre, without needing to go near the office or factory. By 1995 the Swedish culture minister was running her government department mostly through telecommuting from her home town, deep in the forest (The Economist, 25 February 1995: 56). By this means, journalists could write their stories at the site of the accident, interview or crime, and file the report electronically. Designers could work wherever in the world they chose, submitting illustrations or drawings by phone or satellite. Com puting businesses in the West could draw on the skills of Indian software writers who could send in their work without ever having to come near Europe or the USA. And US insurance companies could get their claims handled overnight, while N orth America slept, by computer staff working days in the Irish Republic, who could send back completed records in time for US employees arriving on the companies morning shift. The chief point to which sociologists have drawn attention here is that customary links between proximity, in terms of physical distance and therefore travel time, and social closeness have been broken down by new ICTs. D istant people are no harder to contact, and no harder to do many kinds o f business with, than those who are close. O f course, one cannot fully build a ship or grow vegetables with colleagues across the globe. But, for a whole range of activities, distance no longer matters. One can buy and sell, write and compose, advise or sue, report and even record with partners thousands of kilometres away almost as easily as with ones immediate neighbours. In that sense, the globe becomes a single, unified place, where in principle everybody can be reached and where notions of closeness and convenience are separated from connotations of physical proximity; instead they become questions of electronic connection. Though this globalization of communication has so far largely affected the corporate and scientific worlds, recent enthusiasm for the growth of the Internet, the system of computer communication chiefly between private individuals, indicates how it might work for ordinary citizens as well. By allowing relatively cheap, interactive connections between individual computer owners, the Internet offers to put people with shared interests in touch almost regardless of physical location. Early ventures in this area tended to grow around groups of users who had shared interests in computing. But the Internet is being increasingly seen as a way of swapping information, whether that be news for film fans, the supposed language of Klingons, computer encoded pictures of military equipment, or horoscopes. When, in November 1994, a computer hacker allegedly broke into files containing the most top secret telephone numbers in the U K (including royalty and secret defence establishments), there was much alarm over the potential for this information to be sent to 35 million people world-wide on the N et (The Independent, 24 November 1994: 1). The vision held up by many is of virtual communities of people who share an interest and who
can form links, friendships and undertake activities with others who just happen to have the same enthusiasms. Such groupings are referred to as virtual because they have no physical existence as communities. The people might all be in Birmingham, but they could as easily be scattered across the world. Advocates of the Internet present this as a strong democratic and liberalizing influence. Reference to films and the celebrated aliens from Star Trek leads into the third aspect of globalization, the growth of a common culture. The argu ment is made that the culture industry and the marketing departments of giant organizations have been largely successful in prom oting a world m arket for popular music, film, fashion, entertainment media including soap operas and even news. The central claim here is that, while cultures used to be associated with a locality or nation, they are increasingly supranational. In part this is a story about the marketing, merchandising and popularity of certain stars. Established celebrities such as M adonna and Pink Floyd sell their works and are broadcast throughout the world. They perform in concerts on every continent and their lyrics, and images from their videos, are known all over the planet. But it is also a story about the way in which culture is broadcast. With the rise of satellite channels, the same music and news programmes are available in hotels, clubs, bars and the homes of the relatively affluent throughout the world. Even if the raw appeal of these artists is not sufficient to attract everyone, the ubiquity of the broadcasts is likely to make everyone familiar with them. Similarly, world sporting events are the subject of news and sports reports - as well as the vehicle for advertising and cultivating a brand image - throughout the globe. To some extent these cultures are supplanting indigenous tradi tions and enthusiasm, but even where they are not they are adding a level of global familiarity. M adonna and M aradona are a safe bet as topics of conversation more or less wherever one travels. The global spread of local cultures is also encouraged by migrations, as well as the journeys of guest workers and tourists (see Appadurai, 1990: 297). O f course culture is not only about identity and enjoyment, but also about selling goods. You need a radio, a tape machine or a CD-player to listen to the latest in popular music. Sports events are sponsored by global companies keen to prom ote product recognition all over the globe. And this issue leads into the fourth aspect of globalization, the globalizing of business. The relative cheapness of transport and the efficiency of m odem shipment systems have combined to ensure that some similar goods are available the world over. Some products have been taken as particularly symbolizing this creeping takeover of the planet by consumer culture. Thus Coca Cola, Pepsi and the Golden Arches of M cD onalds are brands and brand images which command literally world-wide recognition. Ford suggestively named its most recent saloon model, among the first of its models to be retailed throughout most of the world, the M ondeo, the word evoking the idea of the world in Latin languages. Com pared with the other phenomena discussed here, particularly the
growth in satellite and com puter technology, this world spread of m anu facture and sales cannot be viewed as all that modem. Commentators have long been charting the growth of giant corporations with bases in many countries. Such corporations practise an international division o f labour with, for example, certain car parts made in the F ar East, some in A ustralia and others in Europe or the USA. The assembled car is not the product of any one country. Two things however are making the global ization of such companies more pronounced. One factor is the growing state-less character of the companies. In part, old anxieties about trans national companies derived precisely from the fact that they were seen as fundam entally Germ an, British or whatever. It was feared that any plant they set up, whether in neighbouring states or in developing countries, would actually be subservient to the interests of the home base. Though this depiction of the company as having a home headquarters or main com m itm ent to the nation in which it originated is still accurate in many cases (Japanese and French corporations particularly come to mind here), there is now a trend towards global companies which have no particular partiality for any hom e territory. According to Grant:
A recent development is the emergence o f the stateless company. The ownership o f the company in terms o f shareholdings is internationalized, a development reflected in the composition o f the board o f directors, and of the senior manage ment. The company no longer sees itself as being based in one country, but as operating globally. The headquarters operation is very small, and could be located anywhere. There is no longer loyalty to a particular country which is seen as the home country, but rather to the firm which orients itself to the global economy. (1993: 61)
He goes on to quote from an interview with the chief executive of the Swedish-Swiss engineering and technology firm ABB (Asea Brown Boveri) in which the executive claims, we change relations between countries. We function as a lubricant for worldwide economic integration. G rant is careful to limit his claims. Companies may achieve most of their sales outside their hom e and even have the majority of their assets overseas but still m aintain share ownership highly concentrated at home. But G ran ts principal claim is that while companies are increasingly global, national governments remain wedded to an older outlook. Governments accordingly run an increasing risk of being out flanked by companies which have no loyalties but to themselves and their internationally dispersed shareholders. The second aspect of the globalization of companies arises from the fact that competition between these large concerns means that they have to be careful to produce and to prom ote products for the greatest possible variety of markets. While a few products will work in a small niche m arket (items based on a local custom for example or the much-publicized Japanese m arket for retro-look cars), the majority have to be aimed as widely as possible, giving manufacturers a reason to appreciate the global spread of cultural artefacts, trends and icons. Precisely because large sales and large
turnovers provide economies o f scale, companies have to compete on the largest scale they can. The drive towards global marketing is in that sense the logical consequence of commercial competitiveness. N o large com pany can any longer afford to be w ithout a global strategy. In this way, companies are only too well aware that the world is all there is. There is a fixed realm to sell into; the only questions concern retention of m arket share and the achievement o f greater penetration. Companies know full well that there is one, bounded global economy. The final strand in the diagnosis o f globalization deals with the political level. While there are occasional calls for w hat Porter and Brown (1991: 152) describe as institutions for global environmental governance there are no prospects for global governmental organizations even in the restricted fields of environmental or security policy. There are, however, im portant international agreements (sometimes backed up by enforcement agencies) which bind governments to deal with each other in stipulated ways. There is, for example, the undertaking to honour 200 mile economic exclusion zones around nations coasts, as well as the series of agreements (said to be aimed at guaranteeing world-wide free trade) which comprise the G A T T (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) treaty, negotiated through the first half of the 1990s and culm inating in the form ation - in January 1995 - o f the W orld Trade Organization (WTO). The W TO is joined by other global institutions such as the International M onetary Fund and the W orld Bank which, like the W TO, carries its claims to world-wide influence in its very name. M oreover, there are developing blocs, most notably the E uropean U nion and N A FT A (the N orth American Free Trade Agree ment). While these blocs are definitely limited to certain territories (they are not global in that sense), their rationale is implicitly global, since their existence acknowledges the fact th at single countries cannot w ithstand the competition in the global market. For example, one of the functions which the European Commission is keen should be increasingly performed at the European level is the funding of research to prom ote European industry, for example in the anticipated growth areas of high-definition television and various aspects of biotechnology. This is implicitly to recognize that there is a global contest in which European countries cannot realistically compete with the American and Japanese economies unless they cooperate among themselves. Aside from the strategies o f states, other kinds o f political activity are also increasingly oriented to transnational and global audiences. As many Western governments have discovered, criminal and terrorist organizations are alert to globalizing trends. F or example, targets for highjacks or bombings - as with the explosions at the W orld Trade Center in New Y ork in 1993 - may be selected for their international symbolic value and for the world-wide news coverage they will generate rather than for any close connection between the target and the particular political issue at stake. Just as governments and official bodies undertake politics at a w orld wide level, so too do campaign organizations and pressure groups. As will
be seen later on, in Chapters 3 -5 , campaigning organizations focusing on w om ens issues, workers interests, environmental problems, disarmament and social development have all adopted a transnational outlook. The Red Cross, Amnesty International and Greenpeace International are among the most well known and indicative examples o f bodies taking a world-wide profile.
Obstacles to Making Sociological Sense of Globalization

To summarize so far, we can see evidence for globalization both in the sense that various processes are coming to be organized on a global level and in the sense that there is an awareness of the interrelations among people on the globe and a recognition of the globe as finite and limited. It is (respectively) these objective and subjective processes that he is referring to when Robertson claims that, Globalization as a concept refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole (1992: 8). Thus, the world is being compressed through the electronic overcoming of distance and through the cultural similarities advanced by the global entertainment industry. At the same time, people are becoming more self-consciously aware that the world is full of intricate connections and that our world is all that there is. These two processes clearly feed each other: the more that products and popular culture become the same wherever people go, the stronger the grounds for people per ceiving themselves as members of a global society. The more people see themselves as members of a global community, the more likely they appear to be to support Amnesty International or Greenpeace International (on growing support for global voluntary organizations, see McCormick, 1991: 153-4). U nder the influence of Robertson and other writers, a sociological literature on globalization has recently begun to appear. Before considering sociologists attem pts to interpret and make sense o f globalization, how ever, it will be helpful to examine two specific obstacles which have discouraged sociology from thinking at the global level. Obstacle I: Sociology, ' Society and the Nation The first obstacle is quite simply the tight connection between the discipline of sociology and the nation-state (see Turner, 1990: 343). While claiming to be the scientific study of society as an abstract entity, sociology has in practice long acted as though society was only found in the form of nation states. From sociology texts one learns to focus on the class structure, on social mobility, the educational system, ethnic and gender divisions and the sociology of political parties. All these occur in terms of nations. The farreaching consequences of this are attested to by the experience of teachers of sociology in smaller English-speaking countries, such as the Irish Republic, New Zealand or Scotland. Teachers and students in these
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countries buy books on society only to find out that the texts are generally accounts of British or US society. The occupational structure o f the students country, its political institutions, its educational systems m ay be very different from th at depicted in the book. But these significant differences have often been overlooked because of an assumption that sociology is the systematic study o f society whereas - in fact - it has been the study of nations. Clearly, to treat nations and society as the same thing is incorrect. Even if we take the short lifetime of the discipline of sociology itself, we can see th at at the end of the nineteenth century the world was not organized into nations to any significant extent. Admittedly, with the unifications of G erm any and o f Italy in the 1870s, the m ap of Europe took on a super ficially fam iliar form. But the countries of Europe were not so much nations as we now understand the term as centres of Empire. Africa was almost wholly divided into territories ruled by imperial authorities, terri tories which often bore in their names the indication of their subject status: the Belgian Congo, French W est Africa, British East Africa and G erm an South W est Africa. South and East Asia were extensively under the influence or direct control of European powers. Only in the Americas were there numerous new nations, from the recently peaceful U nited States of America to the dozen or so self-consciously independent nations of Central and South America. In part, it was this extreme European influence which allowed the w ar of 1914-18 (in effect a European civil war) to come to be known as a World W ar. Only in the years after the 1939-45 w ar (which was this time much more literally a world-wide war, though again driven primarily by European conflicts) was there a great growth in the num ber of nations, with around three nations a year being granted independence between 1945 and 1975. A fter a com paratively quiet period in the 1980s, there was a renewed rush o f nation-form ing in the afterm ath of the disintegration o f the USSR and of the political structures in the Eastern Bloc, giving rise to the emergence or reappearance o f G eorgia, Estonia, the Ukraine, Slovenia and so on. One m ight have thought that, as the num ber of nation-states has grown (to around 180, depending exactly on how they are counted) and as the form er imperial powers - G erm any, France, Britain, Italy and so on have become m ere nations, sociologys disciplinary emphasis on nations would be becoming increasingly justified and descriptively accurate. Ironically, however, this is not the case because m any o f the new nations are small, economically weak and - in some cases - politically fragile. They do not have the characteristics which sociologists have assumed to be the identifying m arks of nationhood and therefore society-hood. F or example, their economies may be extremely dependent on loans from international agencies or from private corporations based overseas; their industrial development may be tied to investments by large foreign companies, on whose boards there is no citizen o f that country nor any role for form al representations by the government; the m ost popular and
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influential broadcast media m ay not be produced by th at country itself. In other words, the very issues which sociologists took for granted as making up the m eat of a sociological study o f the nation actually tum out not to characterize a sizeable minority of the w orlds nations. The working assum ption (and it was generally nothing more than an assumption) that sociology consists o f a nation-by-nation study o f the world turns out to be a rather poor basis for analysis. As well as taking the nation for granted as a unit of analysis, sociologists have often lacked curiosity about the nation itself. M ore recently, political scientists and sociologists have begun to examine more deeply the status o f nationhood and to analyse the processes that contribute to nations viability. Along with the work of Gellner (1983), the most celebrated analysis has been carried out by Anderson (1991). In his well-known ter minology, nations are imagined communities, imaginary both in the sense that the mem bers do not meet each other in the way th at happens in traditional communities, and in the sense that nations are imaginative (maybe conceptual m akes the point better) constructs. Geographical divisions could be (and have been) drawn in quite different ways for quite different purposes, and peoples sense of location and identity could be couched in very different terms. A nderson m akes the point that nations differ from other kinds of terri torial units (possibly regions, or empires) by exercising limited sovereignty. To be a nation is, by definition, to claim complete sovereignty over your territories but to accept your neighbours rights to comparable sovereignty for themselves. O f course, in practice, states may disagree about where the proper borders lie. But, once their boundaries are secured, nations unlike, say, empires - do not make claims over wider areas or for addi tional peoples. As A nderson expresses it:
The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest o f them, encom passing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. N o nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream o f a day when all the members o f the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream o f a wholly Christian planet.
(1991: 7) F o r this reason, one can sensibly have a United N ations organization in which nations are able to unite because their claims are, by definition, non-conflicting. They unite to offer political support for the rights of nations. In the ideal situation there would be no conflict between nations since they claim exhaustive sovereignty over their lands and peoples. N o land, no people are left out and there should be no cases of double booking. Although these imagined communities have, in historical terms, only com paratively recently been formed, the idea has found extremely widespread acceptance, so m uch so th at it now seems to many a natural condition. M atching this insight about the meaning of national status have been
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observations ab o u t the m echanism s by w hich n atio n h o o d has been devel oped. These points have been usefully sum m arized by G iddens (1985: 116 21, 172-97); he describes the nation-states as a collectivity existing w ithin a clearly dem arcated territory, w hich is . . . subject to a unitary ad m in istration, reflexively m onitored b o th by the internal state ap p aratu s an d those o f other states (1985: 11). By reflexive m onitoring, G iddens m eans th a t certain territories are constituted as n ations by the atten tio n o f adm inistrative supervision. A ccordingly, the existence o f nations requires th at boundaries are m apped, th a t tim e-keeping is system atized, that internal order is m aintained by the states ap pointed forces, th a t com m uni cation is institutionalized and, com m only, th a t broadcasting is harm onized. E ach o f these factors then w orks iteratively w ith the cultural assum ptions o f n atio n h o o d to further ingrain the sense o f nation. In the archetypal m o d em n atio n , there are n atio n al new spapers, n atio n al advertising cam paigns, natio n al car num ber plate conventions, ways o f painting road m arkings and o f displaying signposts. T elephone kiosks have a ch a ra c teristic design, as do post-boxes, the vans o f the m ail service, often the trains. T he n a tio n s officials w ear com m on uniform s. These are the things w hich one notices as different w hen one travels abroad. They are the signs w hich allow you to recognize you are hom e after an overnight train journey or long-distance drive. It is n o t ju st the custom s officials and border signs w hich dem arcate the extent o f a nation, it is the cultural practices. O f course, m any n atio n s also correspond m ore o r less to language com m unities so th a t N orw egians know pretty well w hen they are hom e, th ough A ustrians an d G erm ans m ay not. B ut the m ore general po in t is th a t the signs w hich denote n atio n al identity are so pervasive and so m uch p art o f the backcloth o f social life th a t they becom e alm ost invisible, except to the stranger. In sum m ary, the idea o f a nation w ith territorially lim ited b u t legally exclusive au th o rity is a relatively recent creation, though actors often seek to legitim ate the concept by presenting it as natural. In practice, an iterative process binds the nation together. T he system o f laws and adm in istration gives people com m on experiences, producing a solidarity w hich is attrib u ted to being co-nationals. Sociologists have often been blind b o th to the extent to w hich nations are im agined (or constructed) and to the inappropriateness o f the term national identity w hen it is applied to m any o f the nations which now m ake u p the globe. Before considering sociologists attem pts to m ove beyond national-level analysis, it is tim e to look at one other issue ignored in sociological writings. Obstacle 2: Society, Sociology and Geography If the first p o in t w as about the lim ited self-aw areness o f sociologists when dealing w ith the nation an d society, the second is th a t the discipline has given predom inance to the social characteristics o f n atio n s identities. Stereotypically, a sociological account tells one ab o u t the social institutions
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o f n atio n s, th eir political parties, industrial strategies, class p attern s an d educational system s. A s rem ark ed above, these do vary in interesting ways from one co u n try to another: som e industrial societies have retained their m onarchies, m o st others have not; w o m en s rights are viewed differently in different m o d em dem ocracies, a n d so on. Since these differences are cul tural (an d therefore, one m ight say, m ore or less im aginary in A n d erso n s sense), it is easy to assum e th a t they can be erased as institutions are copied from one society to ano th er. T he trends tow ards the globalization o f culture and m edia w ould im ply th a t these differences are likely to dim inish. Such an exclusive focus on the m alleable, social characteristics o f n atio n s draw s atten tio n aw ay fro m the fact th a t countries also differ significantly in their geographies. T h ere is a tendency fo r every discipline to relegate the variables o f o th er disciplines to the role o f m ere exogenous factors. E conom ists, fo r exam ple, scrutinize th e prices o f goods b u t tend to leave aside the sociological a n d psychological elem ents w hich drive goods in an d o ut o f fashion. Sociology has been no different. T o give a crude, th o u g h n o t unrealistic exam ple, sociologists dealing w ith tropical countries tend to use the stan d ard im ages o f a n atio n al society, adding on the ad d itio n al consideration th a t the clim ate is very w arm . B ut if one is realistically aim ing to give a sociological acco u n t o f the global o rg an izatio n o f society in the present day then geography c a n n o t be om itted. In particular, if one is interested in the sociology o f in tern atio n al environm ental problem s one can n o t overlook the differential consequences w hich, in p a rt, follow from a society having a high o r a low rainfall, having alkaline or acidic soils, o r being a region o f high o r low biological diversity. A ccordingly, sociologys view o f society as m ad e up o f a series o f n ations needs to be com plem ented w ith an explicitly geographical view o f w h at co u n tries characteristics are. T he globe is geographically d ifferentiated in a w ay th a t is sim ply n o t recognized by the assu m p tio n th a t all societies com e p ack ag ed as nations. A n y ad eq u ate sociological in terp retatio n o f global processes an d p h en o m en a will need to m ove beyond sociologys fixation w ith the n atio n an d will have to m ak e ro o m fo r an analysis o f geographical differentiation (on this issue o f co m p lem en tarity see also B enton, 1991, 1994). In the next section I will exam ine a tte m p ts to elab o rate an ad eq u ate theoretical basis fo r globallevel analysis.
World Systems Theory and the Sociology of Globalization

T here is one area o f sociological interest w hich has proved to be a notable exception to m y claim s a b o u t treatin g countries singly: the sociology o f developm ent. P articu larly w ithin the b ro ad ly neo-M arxist trad itio n , the leading id ea has been th a t there is a relationship o f exploitation betw een the developed an d the underdeveloped w orld. As is well know n, the central arg u m en t here is th a t the T h ird W o rld 2 is n ot in its present lowly
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econom ic condition because it lacks developm ent. R ath er, the idea is th a t this im poverished condition has resulted from w hat the industrialized w orld has done to it. T h ro u g h colonial exploitation and neo-colonial control over trad in g an d finance, the countries o f th e T h ird W orld have been actively underdeveloped. C orrect or n o t (and the idea o f dependency is clearly to som e extent descriptively justified if nothing else, see Berger, 1987: 129-30), w h at is o f presen t interest ab o u t this idea is the w ay it links the fate o f one set o f n atio n s (the underdeveloped T hird W orld) to the actions o f agencies and com panies in others. P ointing to phenom ena such as the slave trade, the establishm ent o f p lan tatio n s to provide raw m aterials for the colonial centres, and to interventions in overseas econom ies to guarantee m arkets for the W estern co u n tries products, w riters on underdevelopm ent have explicitly m ade the p o in t th a t the w orlds econom ies have evolved in an interdependent way. T he school o f thought m ost intim ately associated w ith this idea is based aro u n d the w o rk o f W allerstein. H e gives a clear signal o f his recognition o f this su p ran atio n al em phasis in the nam e o f his theoretical program m e, w orld system s th eo ry . H e argues th a t one can only u n d erstan d the developm ent o f the various individual societies in term s o f the b ro ad er w orld-historical context. Thus, he claim s to have alw ays d o u b ted the significance o f n atio n s an d o f explanations w hich focus on the n atio n al level: T h e tran sitio n from feudalism to capitalism involves first o f all (first logically and first tem porally) the creation o f a w orld-econom y. Such com m odity chains w ere already there in the sixteenth century and pre-dated anything th a t could m eaningfully be called national econom ies (1990a: 165). F o r W allerstein, the unit o f analysis should alw ays have been the w orld system , n o t the histories o f p articu lar nations. A s is well know n, W allersteins theoretical analysis depends on dividing the w orld into three essentially econom ic categories: the core, the periphery an d the sem i-periphery. In his view, there has been a discernible w orld system since aro u n d 1600 w hen the core zones o f north-w est E urope began to be clearly established. T he key p o in t is th a t subsequent socio econom ic developm ent is shaped by trends in the w orld econom y, by trad e cycles an d long w aves o f grow th and retrenchm ent. W hile the overall fortunes o f the w orld system are lim ited in this way, W allerstein is careful n o t to regard th e fate o f p articu lar regions or countries as determ ined. They can seize their o p p o rtu n ity (or fail to seize it) to m ove from the periphery to the sem i-periphery and so on. O verall however, it has been th e w orldsystem then an d n ot the separate societies th a t has been developing (1990a: 165). O n the face o f it W allerstein provides exactly the kind o f analysis w hich appears to be required. As noted by G iddens (1981: 197), he insists upon the m ethodological necessity o f studying inter-societal system s . . . [and recognizes that] the capitalist state . . . exists in an external environm ent in w hich econom ic m echanism s hold sw ay. B ut th o u g h his analysis explicitly deals w ith global-level phenom ena, it is n o t adequate for the purpose in
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hand. In asserting this I am n o t intending to focus attention on criticisms com m only m ad e o f the theory - for exam ple th a t the criteria for classifying countries in to th e three categories are unclear, or th a t the account o f how the core ex p lo its the periphery is contentious. R ather, the problem lies w ith the in terp retatio n o f global offered by the theory. If the econom y has been op eratin g in term s o f a w orld system for four centuries, if the history o f developm ent really has been the story o f the developm ent o f the w orld system , th en this theory has little to say ab o u t the distinctively recent experience o f global identity. H a d people understood correctly, they w ould have been thin k in g in term s o f global processes all along. A second a u th o r w ho has explicitly tried to get questions o f globalization taken on to the agenda o f sociology is Sklair (1991, 1994). H is w ork starts out from a recognition o f the huge reach and global pow er o f tran sn atio n al com panies. In addition to tran sn atio n al businesses, Sklair also believes it is im p o rtan t to recognize a tran sn atio n al capitalist class and the cultureideology o f consum erism (1991: 38, 42). In o th er words, th roughout the w orld there are m em bers o f econom ically d o m in an t groups w ho align them selves politically w ith the perceived interests o f the global capitalist system , th a t is o f tran sn atio n al businesses (1994: 206). The political pow er and business successes o f these corporations and this class are com m only challenged by political m ovem ents, by strikes, by protest cam paigns and so on. H ow ever, th eir position is to som e extent protected by the cultureideology o f consum erism . T he consum erist culture places a prem ium on new goods and on innovative styles and ideas. T his culture offers som e p rotection to the d o m in an t system by allow ing critical ideas to be coopted and by providing for oppositional cultural m ovem ents to becom e absorbed into the establishm ent*. T hus, youth cultures becom e p a rt o f the style industry, rap m usic com es to be used in advertisem ents, and even an n i versaries o f challenges to the d om in an t ideology become opportunities for consum ption: the celebrations o f the tw entieth anniversary o f the revolts of 1968 becam e a m edia event in E urope . . . and were relentlessly com m ercialized. . . . W e shall have to w ait for the year 2017 to see w hat the culture-ideology o f consum erism m akes o f the Bolshevik revolution! (1991: 42). In these w orks Sklair identifies im p o rtan t issues ab o u t the world-wide organization o f m o d em societies. U nlike W allerstein, he does em phasize the new ness o f globalization. But it is im p o rtan t to appreciate the status o f his leading concepts (the tran sn atio n al practices as he calls them ), nam ely the tra n sn a tio n a l co rp o ratio n , tran sn atio n al capitalist class and cultureideology o f consum erism . Speaking o f the ideological role o f culture, for exam ple, he notes th a t
This is not an empirical assertion, for if it was it w ould no doubt sometimes be false and usually im possible to prove one way or the other. The idea o f culturalideological transnational practices and, in particular the idea o f the cultureideology o f consum erism in the global system, are conceptual tools in the theory o f the global system. (1991: 42)
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W hat this appears to m ean is th at Sklair is using these terms in a hypo thetical sense, believing th at they are likely to be analytically beneficial but unable to dem onstrate it in detail. Convinced th at society is becoming globalized, Sklair has developed a terminology to capture or reflect that globalization, but it is simultaneously a terminology which assumes the correctness of his original convictions. W here W allerstein rendered it difficult to talk about globalization in the contem porary w orld by m aking the whole history o f capitalism global, Sklair m akes it difficult by assuming from the outset that production and trade, politics and culture are already alm ost comprehensively globalized. He leaves little space for the possibility that some processes are less globalized than others, and appears to take a m ono-causal view o f globalization, namely that it is driven by transnational capital. Both these authors ideas are stim ulating but they are unsatis factory. Both, additionally, reveal how difficult it is to devise an appro priate theoretical perspective for analysing the sociology of global society. It has become clearer from this review of recent attem pts to articulate a sociology of global phenom ena w hat it is th at one should dem and o f an analysis o f globalization. F o r one thing, a suitable analysis has to make sense o f the newness of global compression and of peoples consciousness of that compression. Second, the question arises: why is it th at a variety o f processes of globalization (cultural, technological, political) all appear to be taking place around the same time (see the essays in Featherstone, 1990)? Giddens attem pts to address this second issue by considering processes o f globalization in w hat he identifies as the four institutional dimensions of m odernity: capital accum ulation, surveillance, military power and indus trialism (1990: 59; see also Yearley, 1994a: 154). As M cG rew summarizes it, G iddens argum ent is that:
Each o f these dimensions embodies a distinctive globalizing imperative, nurtured by quite different institutional forces and constituencies. . . . Globalization is therefore understood as . . . a complex, discontinuous and contingent process, which is driven by a number o f distinct but intersecting logics. (1992: 72)
Though such an approach breaks away from the rather m ono-causal stance of W allerstein and Sklair, it is not w ithout its own difficulties. F o r one thing, the theory is so complex and discontinuous (to use M cG rew s terms) that it is difficult to derive precise implications from it. Its very flexibility actually turns it, in practice, into a descriptive, nominalistic approach to global-level phenom ena - as is revealed by G iddens own definition o f globalization as the intensification o f world-wide social rela tions which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring m any miles away and vice versa (1990: 64). M oreover, as R obertson points out, Giddens appears com m itted to the thesis that globalization is a consequence o f modernity (1992: 144; my italics - th at being the title of G iddens book). In other words, since (according to Giddens, 1990: 63) m odernity is inherently globalizing, he
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ultim ately views globalization as the m ere outcom e o f m odernization or o f the project o f m odernity. By contrast, in his w ork on globalization, R obertson em phasizes the independence o f the cultural sphere. H e and L echner assert th at there are independent dynam ics o f global culture' (1985: 103; m y italics) - though elsewhere he describes the process as only relatively au to n o m o u s (1992: 60). In place o f a single theory ab o u t the cause(s) o f globalization, R o b ertso n s em phasis on the heterogeneous elem ents p rom oting globality leads him to develop an historical m odel o f stages o f globalization (1992: 58-60). Even this is n o t the last w ord, how ever, since after elaborating this m odel, he still calls for m uch m ore em pirical and theoretical w ork (1992: 60). B oth R ob ertso n and G iddens com e closer to offering a m ore w orkable sociological ap p ro ach to globalization but, even so, it is clear th at neither offers a fully w orked o u t theory w hich can simply be applied to such em pirical topics as environm entalism .
Working Down to the Globa)

U p to this point we have m ostly considered ways o f m oving u p to the global from national-level phenom ena. B ut there is an o th er w ay to app ro ach the global, nam ely from the level o f phenom ena w hich are taken to be universal, to apply literally everywhere. A fter all, from the view point o f the universal, the global looks rath er small-scale. I f we know things w hich are universal, then surely these m ust be o f global validity too. System atic analysis o f the universal can easily be traced back to the philosophers o f classical Greece. W ithout a t all addressing the intricacies o f the different views they held, it is safe to say th at Plato and A ristotle were both im pressed by the realization th a t while o u r bodies are restricted in time an d place, our ideas seem to give us access to realm s o f timeless insight freed from the lim itations o f space and location. One can point to num erous exam ples. G eom etry m akes a good place to start. Since P y th a g o ra s o u tlin ed his g eom etrical arg u m en ts - to the p o p u la r im agination he literally outlined them , in the sand - people have been struck by the idea th at conclusions derived from one im perfectly draw n right-angled triangle apply to all such triangles, o f w hatever size, w hatever the other angles, w herever they are. It is easy to suppose th a t Pythagoras taught us som ething not ju st ab o u t his particular triangle, n ot ju st ab o u t all the triangles he and his followers ever drew, but about the idea of triangularness. A nd this is the key to the argum ent ab o u t universals: som ehow th ro u g h ideas, hum ans appear to have access to universal truths, truths w hich apply regardless of time an d place. In som e ways the intuitively obvious response to this realization was, an d is, to think th a t our ideas m ust therefore in som e m anner provide us w ith access to a parallel universe, a universe o f essences w here truths are timeless an d universal, a universe w hich could hardly be m ore different from everyday experience.3
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M ore fabulous still, this parallel universe provides us with a handle on the everyday one; Pythagorean ideas about triangles allow us to calculate the lengths o f actual inclines, to calibrate right angles and so on. As Russell put it: M athem atical knowledge appeared [to Pythagoras] to be certain, exact, and applicable to the real w orld; m oreover it was obtained by m ere thinking, w ithout the need of observation (1945: 34). Once this kind o f insight into the universal is recognized and accepted, there is no reason to halt at geometry. A rithm etic follows fairly readily. M athem aticians can do intellectual w ork on mere num bers, devise theorem s and so on, w hich actually allow us to gain understanding about num bers o f things. Purely abstract sums can be done which turn out to be applicable to peas in the pod, starlings in the flock and grains o f sand on the beach. But it does not stop there either. T here is logic, supposedly allowing us to establish the quality o f a deductive argum ent, regardless o f w hat the argum ent is about. A nd there then are questions o f right and beauty. The excitem ent about geom etry, m athem atics and logic stem m ed from the fact th at here were m anipulations o f pure ideas w hich som ehow have an applicability to em pirical objects. But in expressly evaluative m atters too, it w as argued, th at there was a w orld o f universals which inform ed our everyday m eanings. A m ong the clearest instances here concerns the idea o f w hat is m orally right. It has been a standard concern of m oral and ethical philosophy to w ork out w hat the right thing to do is: w hether capital punishm ent is m orally justified or not, w hether adultery is w rong and so on. As people have argued over the wrongs and rights o f particular issues, they have also had cause to think about the so-called m eta-ethical ques tions, questions about w hat it actually m eans to say th at som ething is right o r w rong. One tim e-honoured approach here is simply to subm it to the rulings o f G od. On this view, with superhum an wisdom the divinity has stipulated w hat is right o r w rong and it is our duty to obey those rules; such rules are com m only backed up w ith som e powerful sanction such as th a t those w ho do n ot conform will spend eternity sm ouldering on the devils barbecue. Still, even am ong religious thinkers, it is com m on to find an additional idea, nam ely that people are im bued w ith a capacity for telling right from w rong, and for taking pleasure from right conduct. H ere the prospect arises once again th at hum an reflection can lead to the uncovering o f universal truths, though in this instance they are n o t truths about how the w orld is, b u t about how it rightly should be. F o r the m any philosophers who have dispensed w ith G od as a long-stop in ethical m atters, there are few places oth er th an reason to turn for an account o f w hat we m ean by good. A dm ittedly, there are som e subjectivists who have given up on the idea o f intersubjective standards altogether. F o r them, good is ju st w hat appears correct to individuals, or to com m unities, or to some other local reference point. O thers (utilitarians) have attem pted a different approach, suggesting th at the real m easure o f goodness is the greatest happiness o f the greatest num ber. But the two recently-dom inant approaches to m eta-ethical
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questions b o th regard it as necessary th a t there is som ething other-worldly (or, at least, not-quite-this-w orldly) to ethical standards. One approach, currently m ost associated w ith the legal philosopher Rawls, ties our sense o f w hat is right to reason and to an im aginary contract. T o p ut it crudely, R aw ls (1972) argues th at the rules determ ining good conduct are those th at w ould be agreed upon by a group o f reason able people called on to discuss this m atter, but who were blindfolded to the extent th a t they did n ot know w hat their own attributes and interests w ould be. F o r instance, they w ould know th at some people m ight be poor and others rich, some unwell others w onderfully fit and athletic, b ut they w ould n ot be aw are which category they themselves were in. On the chance that they were am ong the p o o r or poorly, we m ight expect this blindfolded group to favour standards o f justice independent o f rank and fortune, systematic provision for the poor and so on - in short, to come up w ith a set of ethical standards sim ilar to m odem liberal values. I term ed this procedure other-w orldly because no such group ever could exist, n o r - even if it could - is there any likelihood th at other people alive then o r sub sequently w ould treat th a t p articular group as the arbitrators o f correctness. It offers an ideal against which actual rule-m aking can be judged. The second approach is even m ore directly analogous to the cases o f geom etry and arithm etic. H ere the idea is that, in Russells term s, by m ere thinking (or, at least, by strenuous reasoning) people can arrive at know ledge of w hat is good. By analysing about w hat m akes a good citizen, a good deed or a good law, we can reason about the m eaning o f goodness. This exercise has taken various form s in the centuries since the Classical writers b ut has largely been based on the same general assum ptions (as explored by M acIntyre, 1981). Though philosophers m ay disagree about the particular rights and w rongs, there persists a view th at since people can m ore o r less agree about w hat is good, there m ust be some independent m eaning or standard for th a t term , ju st as with Pythagoras triangles. O f course, it is conceivable th at there m ight not be any external standard at all. W h at we regard as good could just be a convention, an arbitrary agreem ent accepted in our society and therefore only in some loose sense correct, such as the habit o f driving on the right o r on the left. But m ost philosophers have considered th at the good, justice and so on have to m ean m ore than this. A nd, since the good is supposed to transcend (as well as som ehow inform ) p articu lar judgem ents, it is assumed to be universal, in the sam e w ay th at geom etrical theorem s about triangles and logical conclusions ab o u t the structure o f argum ents are. In broad terms, therefore, the argum ent appears to com e dow n to this: either w hat we m ean by right is ju st a convention (in which case there is no enduring reason to pursue it) or it is som ething m ore th an convention. If it is the latter, it is somehow external to particular hum an societies and m ust - presum ably - occupy the same sort o f realm or parallel universe as do triangularness and perfect deductions. F urtherm ore, from these views about the right and the good, it is a short step to applying these argum ents to questions o f beauty and
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aesthetic value too. C ontinuing debates over the m eaning o f quality in a rt and literature point to the persistent vitality o f this issue too. W hichever basis for validity one chooses for deciding ab o u t the good and ab o u t peoples rights, it is im p o rtan t to recognize th a t the upshot is the same: these rights are supposedly universal. T he same principles are held to be applicable to systems o f justice everywhere, to each citizen regardless o f rank, o r to all hum an beings. This is the spirit o f the idea m ost fam ously enshrined in the U S constitution where the R ights o f M an are held to be self-evident. W hile W estern societies have som etimes been rath er m ore successful in spelling o ut an d codifying these rights th an in im plem enting them , it is fair to say th a t the ideals o f universal rights and universal principles have been very pow erful and usually progressive ideas. A nd, such ideas are plainly connected to the analysis o f global problem s precisely because o f their supposed universality. A ny hum an right w orth its salt is ideally - going to be a right all over the globe. If it were agreed th a t free speech is a fundam ental hum an right, then one could safely assum e it ought to be a right the w orld over. Lately, how ever, some o f these universal principles have com e under attack, n o t from conservatives who m ight regard them as excessively favourable to the undeserving, b ut from radical critics. A m ong the m ost celebrated o f such critics is the U S legal analyst M acK innon. Stated briefly, her argum ent has been th at w hat liberals have com e to regard as universalistic principles are, in significant ways, m ale-orientated principles. The claim to universality is only superficial, a superficiality which in fact is injurious to w om ens position. A typical argum ent advanced here turns on the idea th a t free-speech excuses verbal and graphical violence against w om en, m ost notably pornography. M acK innon expresses her argum ent as follows:
In liberalism, speech must never be sacrificed for other social goals. But liberal ism has never understood this reality o f pornography: the free so-called speech o f men silences the free speech o f w om en. . . . First, wom en do not simply have freedom o f speech on a social level. The m ost basic assumption underlying First Amendm ent adjudication is that, socially, speech is free. The First Am endm ent itself says, Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom o f speech. Free speech exists. The problem for government is to avoid constraining that which, if unconstrained by government, is free. This tends to presuppose that whole segments o f the population are not systematically silenced socially, prior to government action. Second, the law o f the First Amendment comprehends that freedom o f expression, in the abstract, is a system but fails to comprehend that sexism (and racism), in the concrete, are also systems. A s a result, it cannot grasp that the speech o f som e silences the speech o f others in a w ay that is not sim ply a matter o f competition for airtime. That pornography chills w om ens expression is difficult to demonstrate empirically because silence is not eloquent. Y et on no more o f the same kind o f evidence, the argument that suppressing pornography might chill legitimate speech has supported its protection. (1989: 205-6; see also
1987) In recent years, a sim ilar argum ent has come to prom inence in the U nited K ingdom over the courts acceptance o f claim s th a t certain crimes
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are carried out in an unplanned way, on the spur o f the m om ent as the perpetrator lost control. This argum ent too, it is suggested, is tilted in favour o f men. W omen m ay face similar levels o f provocation but be too scared to act, the male often being stronger and more accustomed to carrying out acts o f violence. O ut o f desperation women may subsequently produce a violent response, but as this shows signs o f pre-planning, they lack the defence of spontaneous action available to men. Such argum ents have met with a mixed response. Some com m entators have accepted th at universal standards m ay include unexamined assumptions and m ay not therefore be as truly universal as proposed. Others have suggested that once one starts trying to match principles to specific groups or specific individuals, the pow er o f the principle itself evaporates. In other words, if it is accepted th at the rights o f m an are indeed m ens rights - if, in other words, w om ens rights are allowed to differ (even if only slightly) from mens - this opens the possibility o f weak m ens rights differing from those of the strong, and so on. Similarly, it becomes possible to argue that women o f different races have different rights. Once fractured, universality can begin to split in any num ber of ways. This issue o f the universality of rights and other ethical principles will reappear in Chapters 4 and 5. There is one further sort o f knowledge which briefly needs to be con sidered before finishing this section: namely, science or systematic empirical knowledge. U p until the last two or three hundred years, philosophers were keen to honour logic and geometry above natural science. As outlined above, logic and geometry appear to be very special sorts o f knowledge and they were regarded as superior to science in a num ber o f respects. First, where science m ay turn out to be wrong and is, at least in principle, constantly open to disproof, logic and geometry are certain. Scientific knowledge depends on m anipulation of the world, whereas logical truths can be know n by the nobler business of reflection alone. Lastly, logic and geometry are thought to apply for all time and everywhere; science gives knowledge of actual m atter which is limited in time and often perishable. These argum ents about the relative standing of science on the one side and logic and geometry on the other, have been actively pursued since the seventeenth century. Over time the tables have rather come to be reversed. For one thing, as the scientific enterprise has grown and the fundam ental world-view o f science has won wider and wider acceptance, the suggested inferiority o f science has come to ring a little hollow. Science now claims to tell us about the origin o f the universe, about the evolution o f life, the m ake-up o f the hum an genetic structure and the fundam ental constituents o f m atter. It is hard to sustain the idea that such knowledge is inferior. Second, the advance o f science has contributed to the undoing of the apparent certainty o f logic, arithm etic and geometry. F o r example, twentieth-century physics tells us that the universe is not a simple three dimensional place, and Pythagoras theorem does not therefore apply through all time and space. Accordingly, the universe itself defies our geometrical intuitions and aspects o f our sense o f logic. The geometry to
22
w hich we seem to have intuitive access turns out, according to science, not to be the fundam ental geom etry o f the universe after all. Scientists have found it profitable to invent alternative geom etries to ch art the universe, and alternative logics and m athem atics to interpret it. O n the one hand, therefore, science has m ade the universals o f philos ophers look significantly less universal. But th a t still leaves a question on the other hand: w hat kind o f confidence can we invest in know ledge like science which is m erely em pirical? The em erging problem o f how em pirically-based science could outgun* logic has been resolved for som e philosophers by the suggestion th at science follows a rigorous m ethod. This m ove sw itches the burden o f responsibility on to the m ethod em ployed in science and aw ay from the substance o f the em pirical claim s which scientists m ake at any particular stage in the history o f science. T his argum ent allow s for the fact th a t scientific theories are som etim es overthrow n and rejected. T hus, some em inent nineteenth-century biologists, for exam ple, th o u g h t th a t w hat we regard as genetic m aterial w as carried in the blood. L ater, views concentrated on the role o f special reproductive cells. Since scientists effectively change their m inds ab o u t how the w orld w orks (in a w ay th a t geom etricians and logicians never seemed to change theirs), one can n o t expect p articular scientific beliefs to be universally valid. C u rren t scientific beliefs are all likely to be overturned or subject to adjustm ent and correction at som e future date (see N ew ton-Sm ith, 1981: 183-5). Philosophers o f science have em phasized instead the m ethod of science; it is the disciplined way in which beliefs are subject to change th at is held to account for the special character o f scientific beliefs.4 In this way, it becom es possible to argue th at science too can aim at universal validity in m aking claim s to knowledge. T hough no particular scientific claim can count on universal validity, the scientific m ethod offers a universally valid approach to developing know ledge ab o u t the natural w orld. T he universe-w ide credibility o f the scientific approach can be backed up by pointing to the success o f science in dealing w ith the rem ote and inaccessible w orlds o f astronom y, prehistory and subatom ic particles. Since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, philosophical faith in science and in the pow er o f the scientific m ethod to deliver in practice universal know ledge has grow n and grown. T o sum m arize this section, intellectual history reveals a continuing interest in aspects o f know ledge w hich som ehow exceed experience but which none the less allow us to grasp and interpret actual experiences. K a n t was so im pressed by these form s o f know ledge th a t he invented a special category ju st for them (he referred to them as the synthetic a p rio ri). Such geom etrical and logical knowledge is com plem ented by evaluative and norm ative form s o f understanding w hich are also believed to possess universal validity. These form s o f knowledge have been elaborated in ways - such as in w ritten geom etrical theorem s and logical proofs - w hich have com e to be seen as self-evident. R ecent doubts over the adequacy of som e o f these universal principles, such as those voiced by M acK innon, indicate
23
provisional grounds for caution here. Lastly, there is scientific knowledge. Science boasts o f its em pirical status and is therefore avowedly not the product of reflection alone. Scientific knowledge depends on careful observation and contrived experiment; it is m ost definitely not self-evident. N one the less, the view has arisen that scientific m ethod allows science to enjoy in practice the kinds of universalistic benefits of the other kinds of knowledge: scientific know ledge aims to identify the consistent and generalizable properties of m atter and of natural systems. A rm ed with these three sources o f knowledge which boast of their applicability through tim e and space, the task o f interpreting global trends seems m uch m ore easily undertaken. The irony is that, except in the case of science, we are using thousand-year old tools to study a supposedly m odern problem.
Summary: Globalization and the Social Scientific Study of the Environment

So far in this chapter we have established th a t there are good grounds for taking the idea o f globalization seriously. A cross a wide range of phenom ena, from international m arkets to telecom m unications, from popular culture to m ass production, it appears th at the world is becoming com pressed. T h at is n ot to say th a t peoples experiences are necessarily becoming m ore similar. Even if one looks only at internal differentiation within w ealthy industrial countries - the U SA and Britain for example the past fifteen years have witnessed a grow ing distance between the w ealthy and the poor. A global w orld is not a uniform w orld. But it is one in which key processes - m anufacture, food production, cultural trans mission - are increasingly being organized at a transnational level. A t the same time, in m any ways people are becom ing m ore aw are of cross national and w orld-wide connections and are being invited to subscribe to supranational identities, w hether by A m nesty International, by their T N C em ployer or by the publicity m achinery of the E uropean U nion and proE uropean political parties. W hile it is easy enough for sociologists to docum ent a num ber o f these global processes and to point to agencies and organizations which are proposing global identification, sociology has specific weaknesses when faced w ith global levels o f analysis. Though barely having acknowledged it, sociology has not so m uch been the systematic study of society (the com m on textbook definition of the discipline) as the study o f a handful of national societies. Furtherm ore, its em phasis on the social characteristics o f these nations tended to draw attention away from geographical and other features which are likely to be o f significance in relation to a systematic analysis a t the level of the globe (especially in relation to environm ental issues). C ertain sociological approaches have been developed in response to a perceived need for global analyses but these have som etimes been simply
24
descriptive or, on the other hand, inaccurately theoretical. W orld systems theory, fo r exam ple, offers an ap propriate level o f analysis b u t proposes th a t the w orld has always been global, in w hich case the distinctiveness of m o d em globalization is h a rd to understand. Sklairs theory stresses the novelty o f globalization in an attractive way but tends to be restrictive and m ono-causal in its approach. R o b ertso n s and G iddens m ore nuanced approaches have their difficulties too. Ironically, the academ ic traditions with - in m any respects - the best claims to a concern w ith hum anistic concepts o f a world-wide validity have been ethical an d epistem ological theory. T h o u g h m any authors such as Offe (cited in the Preface) and A rcher (1991: 144) have noticed th a t som e activists an d politicians, spurred on by the fear o f threats to the global environm ent, are trying to assem ble a global identity around environm ental issues, little attention has been paid to environm entalism or to ecological problem s in the bulk o f recent globaliz ation w riting (though Sklair, 1994 is an exception; see also Y earley, 1995b). Y et the case o f the environm ent offers itself as a central exam ple o f m any of the phenom ena discussed in this chapter. E nvironm entalists have been at the forefront in attem pting to identify the im age of the globe w ith their political project, and they have succeeded to the extent th at talk o f the p lan et o r the globe is now com m only heard as 'green ta lk (as the yoghurt-pot exam ple in the Preface implied). On the other hand, when globalization authors do m ention the environm ent, they com m only high light the well know n global environm ental problem s o f global w anning and ozone depletion; ecological problem s are frequently invoked in a rather undiscrim inating way as potential catastrophes or species-threatening p henom ena (R obertson, 1992: 133). A ccordingly, in the rest o f this book I shall use a review of global environm ental problem s and m o d em environ m ental m ovem ents and politics to m ak e a critical exam ination of globalization in an area w here the objective conditions and the subjective aw areness appear to be favourable. In C hapter 2 I will begin by reviewing the environm ental issues which are com m only taken as m aking up the principal hazards facing the global environm ent.
Notes
1 The E uropean U nion was know n, before the M aastricht T reaty, as the E uropean Com m unity. To avoid confusion I have used E uropean U nion (EU ) throughout, even if it is som etim es not strictly correct. 2 M any people now regard the T hird W orld as an inappropriate term , b oth because the Second W orld' o f Soviet socialism has disintegrated a n d out o f an ethical concern that underdeveloped countries should n o t be given a lower ranking than the F irst. In any case, it is also pointed out that the T hird W orld is very internally differentiated with, for instance, countries such as South K orea enjoying rapid econom ic developm ent while others, such as N iger, continue to face colossal econom ic difficulties. W hile I accept th at there is m uch to all these argum ents, I am choosing to use the term since it is used by m any T hird-W orld authors themselves a n d sincc it is relatively neutral as regards the reasons why this w orld exists. To
25
avoid endless repetition of the term I will, however, also use South' and North* to indicate the Third and First W orlds respectively, and will sometimes employ W estern to refer to European and N orth American culture. 3 Some advocates o f universals do opt to locate them in the actual world rather than in some parallel realm (see for example Kripke, 1980: 113fF.). My thanks to Dave A rchard for instructive advice on this section of the argument; remaining weaknesses are solely down to me. 4 A lthough I present this argum ent here, I am sceptical about arguments which rely heavily on a supposed scientific m ethod (see Yearley, 1988, 1994b). R ather than argue a t an abstract level in this chapter, I have reserved my comments for the discussion o f the practical ability o f science to m ake universal claims in C hapter 4.

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Reinventing the Globe

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