Globality Research Paper

Throughout most of human history there have been different civilizational conceptions of the scope, features, and conditions of the world. Scholars have, over thousands of years, speculated and theorized about the place of terrestrial earth in the cosmos. Of particular import in this regard was the period of the European Renaissance, an era of radical restructuring of philosophy, the arts, and the sciences in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Cassirer 1963). A pivotal occurrence of this period was when the Polish scientist philosopher Copernicus showed in 1512 that the earth was not the center of the universe, but that planets exist in a heliocentric universe. This perspective had truly major historical ramifications, in that the Renaissance as a whole, to put it all too simply, involved within Christendom an increasing valorization of humanitas, in contrast to previous worldviews that stressed the preeminence of God. The Renaissance view, well articulated by Cusanus (Cassirer 1963, pp. 7–45), did not, however, elevate humanity to the level of God. For Cassirer, the significance of Cusanus was in the latter’s exposition of a move from the pre-Renaissance idea of a metaphysical world of transcendence to the Renaissance view of a scientific world of immanence. This shift represented not a triumph of the latter over the former, but rather a complex form of complementarity (Domandi 1963).

Closely intertwined in the European context with the crystallization of ideas concerning humanity were voyages and travels of ‘discovery’ to other parts of the world, particularly to Asia and to the Western Hemisphere. The ‘discovery’ of Africa, from the European standpoint, was not to come until a little later (Wills 2001, pp. 32–44). This expansion of the heliocentric world added a crucial spatial dimension to the more scholastic ruminations of leading figures of the European Renaissance, helped greatly by map-making becoming much more expansive, detailed, and accurate than had been the norm prior to that. It is of great importance to recognize the intimacy of the relationship between the motifs of humanity and globality, which were brought closely together during the European Renaissance and were to come even closer, up to and including, the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. This involved, again, an enrichment of the conception of humanity and an even broader and more concrete extension of the ideas concerning global variety. Consciousness of the latter was not often explicitly expressed via the specific concept of globality, this being a latent rather than a manifest theme.

Ever since the Moon landing of 1969, consciousness of what has come to be known as globality has increased. Space travel generally, as well as much of science fiction and the modern cinema, have greatly enhanced our tendency as human beings to gaze upon our global habitat, to become increasingly conscious of and sensitive to our globality. Even though this exact term may not yet have been used much, the ancient Greek notions of oikoumene and okeanos have remained central to conceptions of what are now considered under the rubric of globality. For example, the recent work of the Swedish anthropologist, Hannerz (1996, pp. 1–13), is centered on the concept of the global ecumene (oikoumene), a term which he has borrowed from the cultural anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. Kroeber (1945, p. 9) saw the scope of anthropology to be the global, ecumenical circumstance, suggesting that humanity at large consists of interwoven relationships among a variety of societies and civilizational regions, with particular reference to culture.

In spite of this long etymological history, had it not been for the enormous and still growing degree of attention given to the contested concept of globalization (Robertson 1992, 2001a, 2001b), the notion of globality would not have acquired the contemporary significance that it now has. The discussion of globalization in a considerable number of social sciences and humanities has led to increasing talk about our now living in a global age (e.g., Albrow 1996), even though, as has been stressed, the philosophical, metaphysical, and theological interest in this topic, in a diffuse sense, dates back to ancient speculation about what we would now call the human species and the shape, configuration, and place of the earthly world in the universe.

In fact the phrase, ‘the global age,’ has become a common, although not unproblematic, characterization of the present condition of humankind. In this regard, there is a controversy in a number of disciplines concerning the relationships between such themes as tradition, modernity, postmodernity, and globality (Robertson 1992, pp. 138–45). Indeed, it is not fully possible to delineate the contours of globality without situating this concept, in contemporary terms, within this array of themes. Likewise, it is not possible to neglect the issue of locality in relation to globality, largely because the two have often, although very simplistically, been viewed as opposites, within the debate about globalization and related issues in recent decades of so-called modernity. In fact the relationship between globality and modernity is particularly controversial, basically because some have claimed that the process of globalization and the consciousness of the condition of globality have been a consequence of modernity (e.g., Giddens 1990), while others (e.g., Robertson 1992, 2001a) have insisted that globalization was a precondition for the rise and spread of different types of modernity in, or to, different parts of the world.

Globalization as an analytic concept first began to be used rather widely in sociology, religious studies, and, and to a lesser extent, anthropology in the early 1980s, although the theme of world, or global, history had been thematized in different civilizational contexts much earlier in the twentieth century than that, falling, however, into temporary decline from the 1920s until the 1980s. The concept of globalization came to be employed in a truncated and increasingly politicized way in some social-scientific, political and journalistic circles, but particularly in the field of business studies, from the late 1980s onward (Robertson and Khondker 1998, Robertson 2001a). This narrowing of the concept of globalization has had the consequence of pushing the theme of globality into the background. Even so, even were this circumscription to be comprehensively embraced, the theme of globality would not thereby be eliminated. This is so in spite of the fact that many academics, not to speak of the ‘informed public,’ do not appreciate that the concept of globalization was being debated quite extensively before it was more or less independently taken up in business studies, policy-making, and ideological forms. The theme of globality has very little to do in any significant respect with conceptions of globalization that limit it primarily to economic change and politico-economic policy. But the notion of globality is not necessarily marginalized as a consequence. The great attention that has been given to human rights and related concerns since the late 1970s helps to demonstrate this. For the virtually worldwide interest in and controversy about human rights have become closely bound-up with concrete matters of politicoeconomic policies.

When the term globality is explicitly employed, it usually refers to an historical circumstance of human life, and it is the extent to which this circumstance marks a new phase in the history of humankind as a whole that is particularly important, as well as problematic. More specifically, it may be defined as the intensification of more-or-less worldwide connectivity and increasingly reflexive global consciousness (Beck 2000, Robertson 1992). Overall, the condition of globality is accentuated greatly by the compression of the world. To this definitional statement must be added that, in a simply objective sense, this worldly planet was as global millennia ago as it is now. In this regard the world has always existed in itself, but over many centuries it has become more and more for-itself, this meaning that as human beings we have become more and more conscious of and have acquired doctrines and views about the future of the world.

Looking at this from the opposite direction, the notion of globaphobia (Burtless et al. 1998) may be invoked. Globaphopia, a term coined originally by a group of economists to characterize resistance to the opening of national economies to free trade and globewide economic competition, may be defined, more generally, as a sentiment involving resistance to globewide, more loosely what are perceived to be foreign or alien, phenomena and trends. Such trends are regarded as threatening the integrity and primordiality of a particular collectivity. Globality is in this sense a form of complexity, a complexity that is seen by some as going beyond the complexity of what has usually been called modernity—or, more recently, postmodernity. For example, in the USA, so-called Christian fundamentalists have spoken vociferously of the evil of (American) secular humanism. In more recent years, however, the enemy has become secular globalism (Bowen 1984). Even though parallel conflicts are to be found in many societies around the world, that between the self-proclaimed antiglobalists and those who subscribe in one way or another to a much more open society within the USA is, given the paramountcy of the USA in the world, of unavoidable—indeed global—significance (Robertson 2001b).

The perceived threat of globalism as a conspiracy against core American values has intermittently been, but particularly in recent years, a conspicuous feature of political discourse in the USA. Many societies have traditions of belief in conspiracy, but the USA has been one of the most prominent in this respect. This has partly been a response to the opposite trend—to be found in many American educational circles— involving the advocacy (often, but by no means only, for economic reasons) of teaching about other cultures and languages, as well as the condition of the world as a whole. This leads to a much more general—indeed, global—issue concerning the ways in which, to greatly varying degrees, people experience existential difficulty in being confronted by alternative ways of life. This is often encapsulated in the idea of alterity, or otherness. Rigid rejection of ‘the other’ is to be seen most clearly in what has come to be declared by some as fundamentalism (Robertson 1995). Thus, when normatively embraced, globality involves an eager acceptance of the idea of the global-human condition. At the other extreme, fundamentalism entails adamant rejection of the latter, at least insofar as one confines the concept of fundamentalism to specific societies or localities. A complication here, however, is that there is a form of global fundamentalism, one that stresses the priority in everyday life of globality and humanity over such aspects as international relations, features of particular societies or the life-cycles and identities of individuals.

The quotidian problem of alterity arises primarily from processes of relativization. Relativization involves the situational problems arising from the challenges posed to a particular way of life by the problematic realization that there are other, alternative ways of life. In a world marked by its high degree of connectivity, confrontations between different forms of life are ever-increasing. For, as the world becomes more connected and people around the globe become increasingly aware of both their differences and their shared fate, the likelihood of dilemmas and ambivalences concerning ‘others’ greatly intensifies. Indeed, probably the most general feature of longterm globalization, over many centuries, has been the persistence of relativization processes.

Although the notion of globalism is often used, even by mainstream academic contributors to the discourse of globalization, in its broad, comprehensive—as opposed to its narrow economistic—sense, it is misleading so to do. Specifically, the sentiment, or even ideology, of globaphopia often involves the presentation of ‘the enemy’ as the ideology of globalism or what is also often called, in a pejorative sense, oneworldism. Thus, even though some social scientists use the idea of globalism with the best of intentions, that is, to indicate their or others’ cognitive and moral commitment to a global perspective, they nonetheless unwittingly engage in the rhetoric of resistance to the idea that we now live in a condition of shared globality. So globality is a much more preferable concept in relation to much, but by no means all, of the talk about globalism. The two terms have very different connotations, although they are often used interchangeably, with subsequent confusion. Globality indicates—for the most part—a condition, or circumstance, while globalism is an ambigious term, ranging in its meaning, on the one hand, from the relatively innocuous expression of adopting a so-called global perspective to a pejorative, condemnatory declaration, on the other hand, of the evils of subscription to the view that there is a general, inclusive conception of humanity and that, moreover, we all, every single human being, live in and share a single, global place (Robertson 1992).

When we read or make such statements as ‘we now live in a global world,’ ‘the world is my home,’ or ‘we must take the feeling of home into exile’ (see Iyer 2000), we are drawing attention to global complexity and at the same time welcoming it. This is indeed a personal and seemingly positive kind of globalism, but at the same time, from the analytic standpoint, such attitudes are merely symptomatic of the condition of reflexive globality. The question necessarily arises as to whether these orientations are merely to be found among certain kinds of intellectual or more privileged people, such as those who flit from one habitat, or habitus, to another. Thus it is not unreasonable to ask the question as to whether it is only certain global elites who dwell in and welcome the circumstance of globality. However, in many ways it is the world’s most deprived peoples, not to mention those, such as students, who move back and forth between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity,’ that are most reflexively conscious of the global condition. Moreover, the everyday life of people all over the world, even though they may be relatively, or even absolutely, immobile geographically is becoming increasingly global, not least through representations of ‘other cultures’ in movies on cable or satellite TV, through popular culture generally, or everyday interaction, including electronic communication. In other word, vicarious, virtual interactional communication is increasingly part-and-parcel of everyday life. Even though celebrities, business elites, and some academics are increasingly conscious of the condition of globality, they do not in fact have a privileged position in this respect; for in one way or another people all over the planet earth are evidently becoming more and more ‘global.’ While it has to be conceded that there is much resistance all over the world, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to strangers, it has been argued persuasively that this, often violent, opposition to polyethnicity and polyreligiosity (in the symbolic form of ethnic cleansing), constitutes the dusk of the norm of homogeneity and the contested return of what has been described as the polyethnic norm (McNeill 1986).

Whether ‘the average person’ is or is not fully conscious of their ‘global membership,’ many ‘average people’ nonetheless participate in increasingly reflexive global consciousness. The development of such has been proceeding for a very long time, at least since the crystallization of the so-called world religions in what has been called the Axial Age (Jaspers 1953), for example, through pilgramages, world map projections, voyages of ‘discovery,’ and so on. In much more recent times such a variety of phenomena as two World Wars, the Cold War, the European and other holocausts, the global AIDS pandemic, awareness of global ecological problems (notably global warming), the World Soccer Cup and other world championships, rapidly burgeoning touristic travel, global festivals, and so on and so forth—the list could be vastly extended—amply illustrate this.

While, in its most simplistic formulation, globality may be interpreted as referring to planetary territoriality and the beings (including nonhuman forms of life) that inhabit this earthly place, it is increasingly clear that globality involves and indicates variety and difference with respect, inter alia, to gender and sexuality, ‘race’ and ethnicity, nationality, and so on. Moreover, each of these, and other, attributes of human beings have become increasingly elective. In our time, to varying degrees, one choses one’s body, one’s ‘roots,’ one’s gender, one’s ethnicity, one’s nationality, even one’s own form of globality. For some (e.g., Beck 1999) we now live in a global risk society, a world in which we are continously confronted with a multitude of choices, choices that we make without the firm norms and values of tradition and in the absence of secure agencies of authorative trust. In short, our planetary circumstance is ‘a runaway world’ (Beck 1999, 2001).

When the idea of the global-human condition is invoked, the aim is to underline that we would not now be talking about globality were it not for the connection of this theme with that of humanity. The latter certainly has had a very long, although until fairly recently, rather abstract, history. But since the European Renaissance and particularly since the European Enlightenment, the theme of humanity has become increasingly concretized. The intersection of the concept of humanity with that of globality is to be seen with particular clarity in the French philosophical and sociological tradition from the early nineteenth century through the first quarter of the twentieth century. This was a period during which theological ideas were widely rejected, but also one when a new kind of, or surrogate, religion was deemed to be required. For example, a disciple of Saint-Simon wrote that ‘there is in fact only one branch of knowledge, that of humanity, which includes everything and epitomizes everything’ (Merle 1987). Saint-Simon’s followers elaborated his thinking in a new journal, the Globe. August Comte, who had been Saint-Simon’s secretary, was to advocate a religion of humanity in his later years. In sum, major French writers of the first half of the nineteenth century maintained not merely that globality and humanity were complicitous, but that a new form of social-science (sociology) inevitably arose from this connection. In the late nineteenth century this relationship was further elaborated by major sociologists such as Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss.

Since the 1960s there has been a strong predilection to conceive of ‘the local’ as the opposite of ‘the global’—as reflected in the maxim ‘think globally, act locally.’ However, recent demonstrations in various countries against global institutions—such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization—have clearly involved a severe modification of this maxim. Protesters against global institutions have come to recognize that global targets require global movements (Robertson 2001a, 2001b). This is probably the most obvious way in which the condition of globality has become inexorably central to the life of many people across the globe. For ostensibly, antiglobal movements have, paradoxically, become part of the process of globalization itself.

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