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.

Thus the premodern period was the age of empires. As some states succeeded in establishing permanent rule over other states, the resulting vast territorial accumulations formed the basis of the Egyptian Kingdoms, the Persian Empire, the Macedonian Empire, the Americans Empires…

The term “modernity” has become associated with the 18th-century European Enlightenment project of developing objective science, achieving a universal form of morality and law, and liberating rational modes of thought and social organization from the perceived irrationalities of myth, religion, and political tyranny.

Having contributed little to technology and other civilizational achievements before about 1,000 CE, Europeans northwest of the Alps greatly benefited from the diffusion of technological innovations originating in Islamic and Chinese cultural spheres.

In the 1990s, the governments of Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and the Philippines gradually abandoned control over the domestic movement of capital in order to attract FDI. Intent on creating a stable money environment, they raised domestic interest rates and linked their national currencies to the value of the US dollar. The ensuring irrational euphoria of international investors translated into soaring stock and real estate markets all over Southeast Asia. However, by 1997, those investors realized that prices had become inflated much beyond their actual value. They panicked and withdrew a total of $105B from these countries, forcing governments in the region to abandon the dollar peg. Unable to halt the ensuring free fall of their currencies, those governments used up their entire foreign exchange reserves. As a result, economic output fell, unemployment increased, and wages plummeted. Foreign banks and creditors reacted by declining new credit applications and refusing to extend existing loans. By late 1997, the entire region found itself in the throes of a financial crisis that threatened to push the global economy into recession. This disastrous result was only narrowly averted by a combination of international bail-out packages and the immediate sale of Southeast Asian commercial assets to foreign corporate investors at rock-bottom prices. Today, ordinary citizens in Southeast Asia are still suffering from the devastating social and political consequences of that economic meltdown.

Enterprises like GM, Walmart, Exxon-Mobil, Mitsubishi, and Siemens belong to the 200 largest TNCs, which account for over half of the world’s industrial output. None of these corporations maintain headquarters outside of NA, Europe, Japan, and South Korea. This geographical concentration reflects existing asymmetrical power relations between the North and the South. Yet, clear power differentials can also be found within the global North. In 1999, 142 of the 200 TNCs were based in only three countries - the US, Japan, and Germany.

A close look at corporate sales and country GDPs reveals that 51 of the world’s 100 largest economies are corporations. Hence, it is not surprising that some critics have characterized economic globalization as “corporate globalization” or “globalization-from-above.”

However, Nokia’s gift to Finland — the distinction of being the most interconnected nation in the world — came at the price of economic dependency. Nokia is the engine of Finland’s economy, representing two-thirds of the stock market’s value and one-fifth of the nation’s total export.

Today, many Finnish citizens fear that decisions made by relatively few Nokia managers might pressure the government to lower corporate taxes and abandon the country’s generous and egalitarian welfare system.

Starting in the 1970s, and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, the economic agenda of the IMF and the WB has synchronized neoliberal interests to integrate and and deregulate markets around the world.

In return for supplying much-needed loans to developing countries, the IMF and the WB demand from their creditor nations the implementation of so-called “structural adjustment programs.” Unleashed on developing countries in the 1990s, this set of neoliberal policies is often referred to as the “Washington Consensus.” The official purpose of the documents was to reform the internal economic mechanisms of debtor countries in the developing world so that they would be in a better position to repay the debts they had incurred. In practice, however, the terms of the program spelled out a new form of colonialism.

This artificial division of planetary social space into “domestic” and “foreign” spheres corresponds to people’s collective identities based on the creation of a common “us” and an unfamiliar “them.” Thus, the modern nation-state system has rested on psychological foundations and cultural assumptions that convey a sense of existential security and historical continuity, while at the same time demanding from its citizens that they put their national loyalties to the ultimate test.

Based on the newly formulated principles of sovereignty and territoriality, the ensuing model of self-contained, impersonal states challenged the medieval mosaic of small polities in which political power tended to be local and personal in focus but still subordinated to a larger imperial authority. While the emergence of the Westphalian model did not eclipse the transnational character of vast imperial domains overnight, it nonetheless gradually strengthened a new conception of international law based on the principle that all states had an equal right to self-determination.

Westphalian model:

  1. The world consists of, and is divided into, sovereign territorial states which recognize no superior authority.
  2. The process of law-making, the settlement of disputes, and law enforcement are largely in the hands of individual states.
  3. International law is oriented to the establishment of minimal rules of co-existence; the creation of enduring relationships is an aim, but only to the extent that it allows state objectives to be met.
  4. Responsibility for cross-border wrongful acts is a “private matter” concerning only those affected.
  5. All states are regarded as equal before the law, but legal rules do not take account of asymmetries of power.
  6. Differences among states are often settled by force; the principle of effective power holds sway. Virtually no legal fetters exist to curb the resort to force; international legal standards afford only minimal protection.
  7. The collective priority of all states should be to minimize the impediments to state freedom.

In 1990, at the outset of the Gulf War, US President George H. W. Bush effectively pronounced dead the Westphalian model by announcing the birth of a “new world order” whose leaders no longer respected the idea that cross-border wrongful acts were a matter concerning only those states affected.

Chinese provinces and US federal states have established permanent mission and point of contact, some of which operate relatively autonomously with little oversight from their respective national governments.

“Global cities” like Tokyo, London, New York, and Singapore tend to be more closely connected to each other than they are to many cities in their home countries.

Obviously, “culture” is a very broad concept; it is frequently used to describe the whole of human experience. In order to avoid the ensuring problem of overgeneralization, it is important to make analytical distinctions between aspects of social life. For example, we associate the adjective “economic” with the production, exchange, and consumption of commodities. If we are discussing the “political,” we mean practices related to the generation and distribution of power in societies. If we are talking about the “cultural,” we are concerned with the symbolic construction, articulation, and dissemination of meaning. Given that language, music, and images constitute the major forms of symbolic expression, they assume special significance in the sphere of culture.

Those commentators who summarily denounce the homogenizing effects of Americanization must not forget that hardly any society in the world today possesses an “authentic,” self-contained culture. Those who despair at the flourishing of cultural hybridity ought to listen to exciting Indian rock songs, admire the intricacy of Hawaiian pidgin, or enjoying the culinary delights of Cuban-Chinese cuisine.

One of the most glaring developments of the last two decades has been the transformation of news broadcast and educational programmes into shallow entertainment shows. Given that news is less than half as profitable as entertainment, media firms are increasingly tempted to pursue higher profits by ignoring journalism’s much vaunted separation of newsroom practices and business decisions.

Ideologies offer individuals a more or less coherent picture of the world not only as it is, but also as it ought to be. In doing so, they help organize the tremendous complexity of human experiences into fairly simple, but frequently distorted, images that serve as guide and compass for social and political action.

Serving as the chief advocates of globalism, these individuals saturate the public discourse with idealized images of a consumerist, free-market world.

The problem with this claim is that the globalist message of liberalizing and integrating markets is only realizable through the political project of engineering free markets. Thus, globalists must be prepared to utilize the powers of government to weaken and eliminate those social policies and institutions that curtail the market. Since only strong governments are up to this ambitious task of transforming existing social arrangements, the successful liberalization of markets depends upon intervention and interference by centralized state power. Such actions, however, stand in stark contrast to the neoliberal idealization of the limited role of government.

The idea of inevitability also makes it easier to convince the general public to share the burdens of globalization, thus supporting an excuse often utilized by neoliberal politicians: “It is the market that made us cut social programmes.” As German President Roman Herzog put it in a nationally televised appeal, the irresistible pressure of global forces demands that everyone will have to make sacrifices. To be sure, President Herzog never spelled out what kinds of sacrifices will await large shareholders and corporate executives.

Like the rhetoric of historical inevitability, the idea that nobody is in charge seeks to depoliticize the public debate on the subject and thus demobilize antiglobalist movements.

Over one-third of the US workforce, 47M workers, made less than $10 per hour and work 160 hours longer per year than did workers in 1973.

Religious organizations like bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network feed on the common perception that Western modes of modernization have not only failed to put an end to widespread poverty in the region, but that they have also enhanced political instability and strengthened secular tendencies in their own societies.

Bin Laden left no doubt that his organization committed these atrocities in response to various manifestations of globalization: the expansion of the American military around the globe, especially the presence of US military bases in Saudi Arabia; the internationalization of the 1991 Gulf War; the escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; the “paganism” of the modern world; and the 80-year history of “humiliation and disgrace” perpetrated against the “Islamic Nation” by “international infidels.” Dividing the world’s population into “those who resort to the Almighty” and “those who refuse to be subdued in His religion,” bin Laden’s declaration of war against the American-led “international infidels” embodies the particularist-protectionist impulse in the most extreme form.

The period from 1860 to 1914 constituted a “Golden Age” of globalization, characterized by the unprecedented development of transportation and communication networks, the rapid growth of international trade, and a huge flow of capital.

Commercial interests came to dominate society by means of a ruthless market logic that effectively disconnected people’s economic activities from their social relations. The principles of the free market destroyed complex social relations of mutual obligation and undermined communal values such as civic engagement, reciprocity, and redistribution. As large segments of the population found themselves without an adequate system of social security and communal support, they resorted to radical measures to protect themselves against market globalization.