as “a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions – assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact – generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity” (Held et al. 1999, p. 16).
One of the dangers perceived in globalization is the predominance of a single way of thinking, which apparently emerged from the defeat of “real socialism.” The international system had been tied to a bipolar structure in which each of the two blocs represented a different ideology; the fall of the Berlin Wall, which symbolically marked the demise of the Eastern bloc, made capitalism seem the single, dominant model. In cultural terms, “modernization” processes promoted by science and the leisure industry have paved the way for what Serge Latouche (1989) called “the westernization of the world,” i.e., the spread on a global scale of Western values and beliefs. Although the scenario of a single “McDonaldized” world culture (Ritzer 2000) is an exaggeration, there is an undeniable increase in cultural interactions with the exportation – albeit filtered through local culture – of Western cultural products and values (Robertson 1992). The metaphor of a “global village” stresses that we are targeted in real time by messages sent from the most faraway places. The spread of satellite TV and the internet have made instantaneous communication possible, easily crossing national boundaries.
While national and subnational identities do not fade, the impact of values from other cultures and the growth of interaction between cultures increase the number of identifications that interweave into and compete with those anchored in the territory. Globalization is not only “out there” but also “in here” (Giddens 1990, p. 22): it transforms everyday life and leads to local resistance oriented to defending cultural traditions against the intrusion of foreign ideas and global issues. The resurgence of forms of nationalism, ethnic movements, religious mobilizations, and Islamic (and other) fundamentalism(s) are in part a reaction to this type of intrusion. While cultural globalization risks causing a loss of national identity, new technologies also provide a formidable array of tools for global mobilization, easing communication between worlds once distant, with a language that defies censorship. Increased perception of issues as global also heightens people’s willingness to mobilize at a transnational level. Through the presence of transnational networks of ethnocultural communities, local traditions also become delocalized and readapt to new contexts (Thompson 1995).
With some pessimism about the capacity of a new collective subject to emerge, Zygmunt Bauman has located in liquid modernity the cultural dimension of the social conflicts. This implies insecurity and flexibility, which make collective identities difficult to develop. While heavy/solid/condensed/systemic modernity was composed of compulsory homogeneity, liquid modernity emphasizes momentary impulses. With the end of the illusion of a telos (as a state of perfection to be reached), there is a deregulation and privatization of tasks and duties from collective endowments to individual management. In this view, individualism prevails over the collectivity, as community and corporations no longer offer protection by embedding the individuals in dense nets of social bonds, ensuing insecurity pushes toward the search for scapegoats. In the past, the modern state had managed fears through protection of social state institutions that constructed new webs of social bonds (Bauman 2000, p. 59) or long‐term involvement in the Fordist factory; nowadays, a deregulation‐cum‐individualization develops fears (ibid., p. 67).
In the new context, some scholars singled out the challenges for collective identities to be difficult to develop. Individuals are seen as lukewarm toward the common good, common cause, good society (Bauman 2000, p. 36). However, this is not linked to the colonization of the lifeworld by the state, but rather by its decline, as “it is no more true that the ‘public’ is set on colonizing the ‘private.’ The opposite is the case: it is the private that colonizes the public spaces” (Bauman 2000, p. 39). The collapse of confidence is said to bring about a fading will to political commitment with endemic instability. A state‐induced insecurity develops, indeed, with individualization through market flexibility and a broadening sense of relative deprivation, as flexibility precludes the possibility of existential security (Baumann 2007, p. 14).
However, anti‐austerity movements seem to develop what Ernesto Laclau (2005) has defined as a populist reason. According to him, populism is a political logic: not a type of movement, but the construction of the people as a way of breaking order and reconstructing it. As neoliberalism brings about a fragmentation in the social structure, the discursive construction of the people requires new attention. The search for a populist reason, as the need for naming the self and for recognition of the self, is driven by a crisis that challenges a process of habituation, fueling processes of (new) identification. In times of crisis, a dissonance arises between expectation and reality, as a crisis suspends the doxa, made up of undiscussed ideas, and stimulates the elaboration of new arguments (Bourdieu 1977, p. 168). Actual protests can then be interpreted as nonconformative action using discourse and opinions to challenge habitus and doxa. According to empirical analyses, in fact, in today’s protests the search for a naming of the self that could bring together different groups has indeed produced the spread of definitions of the self as the people, or even more, the persons or the citizens. These ideas have reflected and challenged the cultural effects of neoliberalism (della Porta 2015a).
2.4 STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS, NEW CONFLICTS, NEW CLASSES
The processes of structural change, which we discussed briefly in the preceding pages, contribute in various ways to the weakening of traditional social conflicts and their recent reemergence in new forms. It is more debatable whether it is possible to establish a global characterization of new conflicts on this basis. The transformations we have discussed – and even more so the interpretations that different scholars have provided of them – seem to point in divergent and sometimes contradictory directions.
2.4.1 Still Classes?
Several of the changes we have mentioned point at two common elements. First, there is a marked increase of activities linked to the production of knowledge and to symbolic manipulation, and the identification in the control of those activities as a major stake of conflict. The development of the administrative/service sector in fact reflects the growing relevance in the economic sphere of information‐processing, compared with the transformation of natural resources. The same expansion of areas of state intervention, which leads to the multiplication of identities and of politically based interests, has made ever more essential the role of decision makers and communicators able to develop efficient syntheses between heterogeneous concerns and values.
Second, many recent transformations have produced the potential for conflicts that cut across conventional distinctions between the private and public spheres. Evidence of this includes the influence that certain styles of scientific knowledge and certain ways of organizing it have on the psychophysical well‐being of the individual (for example, in the field of therapies and the health services). Alternatively, one may think of the public and collective relevance of individual consumer behavior and ways of life, which previously would have been relegated to the private sphere. Or, again, one might consider the importance of ascribed traits such as ethnicity or gender in conflicts concerning the extension and full realization of citizens’ rights.
These processes point at a specific area of nonmaterial conflicts. Their stake is represented by the control of resources that produce meaning and allow actors to intervene not only on their own environment but also on the personal sphere, and above all on the link between these two levels. Rather than with economic or political power, contemporary social conflict has, according to this view, more to do with the production and circulation of information; social conditions for production and the use of scientific knowledge; and the creation of symbols and cultural models concerned with the definition of individual and collective identities. This thesis has been formulated in a number of ways and with various levels of theoretical generalization (Touraine 1981; Lash
