was interpreted by contemporaries quite adequately, as we may see today.
However, the theory of imperialism, quite well-formed and corresponding fairly well to the social practice, was undeservedly forgotten at the end of the twentieth century: at the time, the establishment of globalization was a leading systemic phenomenon that was behind the fight among sociopolitical systems which defined the course of the twentieth century, so globalization then seemed something essentially new.
Nevertheless, despite the few manifestations of globalization, the impressive increase in physical and financial volumes of international trade (especially during the world wars that spurred on international trade and cargo turnover), nation states and regional blocs during imperialism and industrialism generally had closed-off economic, political and informational spaces. In a situation where internal networks were more important than external ones and where the state could be seen as a closed-off self-regulating system, allowing for external trade, the world could be seen as the sum of its parts, the description of which did not require states to be viewed as part of a global system.
The watershed moment for globalization came when the world’s leading states de facto turned into an open socioeconomic system while retaining nominal sovereignty. Their dependence on the global supra-system, including international political and financial institutions, has significantly strengthened and moved to a new level. The influence of this supra-system on the economic, social and cultural life of the population became comparable to the influence of national governments.
However, it would be imprudent to talk about globalization before 1991, when the forms of social life typical of Western civilization were given an impetus for global spread. The 1991 landmark comprises the political dissolution of the USSR and the involvement of the new countries that appeared on the USSR’s territory, its former allies helping to form a global community and global market economy which considerably widened the “periphery’ and “half-periphery’ of the global system.
Starting from 1991, a wave of similar and almost simultaneous reforms swept across both the West and developing and post-socialist countries, including privatization of the systemically important state monopolies such as railways, energy, network providers, education and medicine. That was the beginning of the stage of crisis and top-down dismantlement of the classic imperialist bourgeois state and its social institutions. That was the stage of the privatization of welfare state and revenge of the elites, when the state was losing its influence in the economic and social spheres of the social being and transforming gradually into an instrument serving situational interests.
There had previously been no single socioeconomic environment on a global scale, but rather a range of large ones: politically, ethnically and culturally heterogeneous states (including empires) with relatively closed-off economies and a certain number of local and even regional trade and economy systems.
At the same time, any empire-like state, be it the Roman Empire or the state of Genghis Khan, Arab Caliphate or China, was striving for maximum territorial expansion in order to gain new subjects, aiming to reach natural geographical limits of territorial extension, seas and low-yield mountainous and desert-like terrains, devoid of population and roads.
However, empires eventually reached the peak of their territorial expansion, which was followed by a political crisis caused by the limited internal connections, the fragmentation of empire elites and the increase in the length of the borders that needed military protection.
The dramatic turnabout in world history came about on the cusp of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – that is, during the Age of Discovery. From that time onwards, more Western European countries (first Spain and Portugal, then Britain, France and Germany) began basing their policies on economic considerations.
Due to the Europeans having monopolized direct sea routes to other continents, the system of global trade connections appeared and began to evolve, gradually enveloping the whole known world. The top positions in this global trade system were held be those who created it – namely, the Europeans. They were capable of reaping the benefits from trade operations with countries in Asia, Africa and America, large benefits over which they held a monopoly due to the non-equivalent – that is, the one-sided character – of this trade exchange. That led to the creation of a phenomenon that had not existed before in the history of humankind: the global economic system, also known as the global capitalist system or simply the modern global system). From the perspective of the world-systems approach, modern history is nothing other than a watershed moment for the creation and development of the world (global) economic system.
The most important features of the global economic system are that, firstly, it functions as a market – i.e. the trade exchange system – and secondly (and of the utmost importance), it does not have external social systems. At the same time, local economic and social systems, while retaining their agency, are becoming increasingly open to external factors, less independent. In other words, the global economic system, moving away from the political regulations of the state, signifies the accretion and expansion of capital.
As a result, the commercialization of the whole world – including the commercialization, mechanization (industrialization) and unification of all spheres of the social life that were previously uninvolved in market turnover – is the main objective developmental tendency.
Adequate conceptual study of globalization leads to a whole range of new methodology issues. In particular, it is widely known that all sociophilosophical theories comprise two components: the descriptive one that explains the world, and a prescriptive one, describing what should be, or the perfect condition of the society and the human being.
Correspondingly, theories of globalization, claiming to be systemic, are forced not only to describe and explain, but also to provide a prescriptive model of social relations, either explicitly or implicitly, which means there should be an ideological component reflecting the interests of the elites, but at the same time calling upon the interests and values of wider social groups, including “panhuman’ ones.
The methodological weakness of theories of globalization lies in the fact that the external form of social theories – built upon the rules of the natural sciences, studying objective natural patterns – are inevitably hiding a subjective, instrumental, ideological component, predicated on the social, civilizational and corporate affiliation of the researcher and, on a more global level, on a certain scientific school of thought or a scientific community. The ongoing global commercialization of science and education makes the latent subjectivity of social studies explicit, as science becomes a commercial market of scientific services, where supply considerably exceeds demand. A so-called buyer’s market appears, where the client dominates and scientific services are more and more often requested by non-state agents.
In any case, the ideological, prescriptive component of theories of globalization should be singled out during the analysis as a model of a society or a type of social behaviour, designed for a certain social group (target audience). One should consider the theory of a certain social phenomenon not only as a model of this phenomenon, but also as a symbolical resource, forming social and individual consciousness.
Thus, existing concepts of globalization, while reflecting the point of view and interests of certain social agents, should be seen not only as theories, but also as instruments to promote these agents’ specific interests. Therefore, constructivist and instrumentalist approaches to sociogenesis, which take subjective moments of sociohistorical development into consideration, are especially important for the theory of globalization.
Are there any universally accepted postulates of globalistics?
Undoubtedly,
