Abstract
It is interesting to compare these two books, the one French, the other British. They certainly give the lie to any crude homogenization of culture thesis. They are characteristic products of their respective national academic systems. The professor at Sciences Po writes an ambitious, theory driven, historically grounded engagement with the politics and political economy of globalization, targeting a readership more likely to read Les Temps Modernes than a student textbook. The Senior Lecturer in the University of Brighton produces a survey of current English language publications on globalization, a useful course book, excellently contrived to provide easily accessible answers to undergraduate essay questions.
In other words there is very little in common between them, though ostensibly they treat the same topic. But then they both acknowledge what is widely agreed, namely that globalization can cover anything under the sun, so the kind critic will stop looking for points of comparison and consider them each as representatives of their different national genres. I won't however be able to resist one quick test applied to each: Which Freed- or Friedmans do they cite? But let's leave that to the end.
Taking Zaki Laïdi's book first, this is an explicit echo of Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation (1944). That was a book which the eminent Robert M. MacIver described as making most books in its field obsolete, so there is no lack of ambition here. Polanyi's first sentence succinctly captured his moment of time with ‘Nineteenth century civilization has collapsed.’ An equivalent for Laïdi might be ‘Human existence on this planet is under threat’ and while the range and depth of his analysis mean that he can share a place with Polanyi on a fairly short bookshelf of important diagnosticians of our time his less apocalyptic tone is unlikely to help him achieve the same impact.
His main thesis is that the world of sovereign entities celebrated by the sixteenth century Jean Bodin has been transformed into one where the forces that exclude any option other than pursuing democratic global governance also produce the maximum insecurity and anxiety. The new big players on the international stage, China, Russia, India and Brazil will measure their own potency by the way they can bend globalization to their own ends, but neither they nor many other smaller players will be able to evade the force of a governance system in which states are essential components. Great differences in orientation to globalization, as between the USA and Europe will persist and regionalization is an intermediate emerging level of meaning between states and the global system, but the future remains open and indeterminate. Globalization is not the end of history.
Against that less than cataclysmic background Laïdi provides detailed examination of intractable issues of our time. He sets American/European differences in the context of their very different approaches both to the market that transcends them and to the international system that makes governance, and hence a European model, the necessary future for a global system that can deliver effective responses to climate change or in securing international criminal justice. He finds no necessary outcome to the conflict between the two Western models, seeing it determined not by their relations with each other but by the choices Russia, Brazil, India and South Korea will make between sovereignism and governance.
If from that short summary the impression is gained that Laïdi regards globalization as an issue secondary to the power plays of the big states then that is reinforced by his treatment of the anti-globalization, now the alterglobal, movement which he sees as united only by a generalized unease about change rather than by any coherent strategy or realistic solutions to global problems. He sees the global perspective of the diverse adherents of the movement failing to provide any focussed remedies for particular grievances, for instance the inadequate unemployment insurance of workers in the French culture industry. He infers from this that “It confirms the central hypothesis of this book: globalization is as much an object in an imaginary register as a tangible reality.” (p. 165)
We can more than reverse this statement for Paul Hopper, for whom cultural globalization is very broadly a reality rather than an imaginary register. Perhaps, more precisely, he finds that tagging ‘cultural globalization’ to the work of a broad range of contemporary writers across disciplines produces a reality content sufficient to assemble successive chapters on its history, space and flows, communication and media, global culture, national culture, cultural conflict and cosmopolitanism. We shouldn't, he says, ‘become too hung up on identifying what is global and what is not’ (p. 188). We may not either be too concerned whether we should judge that refreshing or banal, for this is a book that is unpretentious, has no grand theory of culture or indeed of globalization to promote, is admirably sound in its accounts of its authorities and immensely well suited to undergraduate readership in Britain. A bibliography of over 500 items does not exaggerate its coverage of materials, though since they are mainly secondary, the book may perhaps be called tertiary.
And the Freed/Friedmans? Well, true to their chosen tasks, Hopper cites just Jonathan Freedman, Laïdi only Milton Friedman. Neither reference Thomas L. Friedman. Of course there has to be limit to referencing one might say. But this Pulitzer Prize winner's paeans to globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999) sold 150000 copies in its first six weeks and more recently The World is Flat (2005) has closed on a million copies. The big cultural fact has been the active promotion of the idea itself, globalization as praxis, and Friedman is only one of an army of culture workers who have had this as their task.
Referencing the historical transformations of the second half of the twentieth century as global arose out of a sense of the commonality of the human condition and of the threat to human existence on this planet. For business and political purposes the postmaterialist values of the sixties and seventies later came to be assimilated to a programme of globalization, first in the Harvard Business School's global strategy thinking of the 80s and then the Third Way politics of the 90s. This was a major narrative turn and not just the reflex of technology and markets. Both of these very different books would benefit from more attention to human agency, to the culture of globalization, to the choices that are made in telling the story of our time and the way they could be different.