Globalizations
More proof that the New York Review of Books should hire me as a writer. Just after I wrote my post on “capitalisms” I came across this NYRB article by John Gray which reviews three books on globalization:
Though the world’s diverse societies are continuously interacting, the proc-ess is producing a variety of hybrid regimes rather than convergence on a single model. Yet a belief that a universally accepted type of society is emerging continues to shape the way social scientists and public commentators think about the contemporary condition, and it is taken for granted that industrialization enables something like the way of life of rich countries to be reproduced everywhere.
In addition to making the point about how diverse the global economy really is, the article also trashes some other cherished assumptions of the world-is-flat crowd. Drawing from Globalization and Its Enemies, by Daniel Cohen, Gray writes
“Today’s globalization,” he notes, “is ‘immobile.’” Goods are produced and marketed on a planetary scale but those who live in rich countries encounter other societies chiefly through television and exotic vacations. There are politically controversial migrations of poor people from the Middle East and Africa to Europe and from Mexico to the United States, but immigrants still make up only around 3 percent of the world’s population today, whereas in 1913 it was about 10 percent. Again, trade has expanded greatly in the past thirty years but a great deal of it occurs between rich countries. The fifteen longstanding members of the European Union make up around 40 percent of global commerce, but two thirds of their imports and exports are traded within Europe itself. As Cohen puts it, “in wealthy countries globalization is largely imaginary.”
It always helps to put things in a historical perspective, and I do think the world was far more “globalized” at the peak of colonialism than it is in the age of neoliberalism. A point that has often been made by Doug Henwood. (BTW: Henwood’s classic book Wall Street is now available as a FREE download!)
Gray has a bone to pick about the environmental aspects of Globalization, which he feels isn’t adequately addressed by any of the three books under review, but all of them sound like they provide a fresh perspective on an issue that is too often oversimplified by critics and boosters alike.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
makes it clear how cultural rights can serve to help those who have been dealt cards from the bottom of the pile. What is missing here is a sense of history. Globalization is not a new phenomenon. In fact, there are good arguments that today’sglobalization is far more limited than what the world witnessed at the peak of the colonial era. What Appiah is noticing is not so much the product of the integration of the world’s economies as it is the rise of a cosmopolitan global elite. The second part of this historical