CHAPTER 1

Globalization and Demography

Over the past decades, there has been an ocean of ink spilledabout the process that has come to be known as "globalization."While the term itself rose to high public and academicvisibility during this period, some have argued thatthe process that it denotes goes back centuries, even millennia.

Globalization has become a highly contentious subject, withthe word itself carrying diverse meanings that are deployed as cudgelsby proponents and opponents alike. It is now common to seeone or another position characterized as "pro-globalization" or "anti-globalization,"and in some cases activists describe themselves as such.

But what does it actually mean? While the term is sometimes usedvery broadly to connote simultaneous integration of the world's peoplesand systems along dimensions of economics, politics, technologies, andcultures, it is more often discussed in more narrowly economic terms.In the 2004 book In Defense of Globalization, a title indicative of thegrowing attacks then underway, trade theorist Jagdish Bhagwati concentratesupon the relatively recent integration of national economies intoa nearly global international economy, marked by free trade, free flowsof capital, expanded foreign direct investment, increasing internationalmigration, and the dissemination of technologies. These, he argues, haveled to increasing prosperity and well-being. We share many of theseviews but aim in this book to add a demographic dimension to them.Declining fertility and rising international migration are both features ofglobalization to which we need to attend. To understand contemporaryfertility and migration, we need to focus on significant political as wellas economic phenomena.

This book is intended to help put the politics back into our understandingof the shape, timing, and ramifications of globalization in theparticular setting of fertility decline and international migration. Doingso helps us distinguish between recent history and earlier phasesof globalization, marked by very different political and demographicregimes.

By politics we mean that network of power relationships extendingfrom the family to the neighborhood to the village or city to theregion and to the nation/state beyond it. It is in these networks of unequalactors that the linkages among economic forces, social structures,and cultural practices are negotiated. Politics certainly means governmentalaction and policy, but the outcomes of such initiatives alwaysentails interpretation, implementation, and deflection. Intentions andoutcomes are never perfectly aligned, especially when considering delicateand complex questions associated with fertility decisions. Thoughit is true that state actors now have unparalleled tools of communicationand intelligence gathering, we should not assume that they and theyalone dictate events, however much they would like to do so. Resistance,misinterpretation, and inertia on the part of individuals, families, clans,religions, bureaucracies, and others have their roles to play in populationhistory, as in other domains. The key point is that politics mattersin this field as in all others; in a nutshell, we present an alternative tothe view that in any straightforward way economic change "produces"demographic outcomes.

Instead of economic determinism, we emphasize the significanceof uncertainty—political, social, and economic uncertainty—in thehistory of fertility decline. We place the perception of risk, understoodin political, social, and economic terms, at the center of this study. Asdefined by Ulrich Beck, a "risk society" is one in which there is no wayindividuals and couples can anticipate accurately the risks they face inan uncertain world. Among those risks are the consequences of childbearingfor a man and a woman whose futures are clouded with doubton many levels. Women who forgo childbearing entirely or who decideto have only one child may well do so to manage the risks of an uncertainfuture, which could be constrained by family responsibilities. Thereis no way to know how great these risks are; that is part of the problem.But it is hard to deny that they exist and are evident at many levels—ecological,economic, and political—in places and at times in whichsupports for the well-being of individuals and families are either absentor under severe threat in many parts of the world. The "risk society,"Beck argues, is not an option but an inescapable structural conditionof industrializing or industrialized societies, now stretching across theglobe. One facet of the unfolding of the "risk society," understood inmany ways, is—with notable exceptions—the globalization of fertilitydecline.

Two Globalization Waves, Divided by a Century

While they acknowledge earlier periods of increased international integrationprior to the mid-nineteenth century, historians generally agreethat there have so far been two modern "waves" of globalization, dividedby a century: from 1880 to 1914, and from the mid-1980s to the present.The "first wave" of globalization was a dominant phenomenon at theturn of the twentieth century. By convention it is said to have originatedgradually and incrementally beginning in the 1880s, and to have endedwith a bang in 1914—as the Great War exploded into massive destructionof the globalized order that had grown rapidly during the precedingthree decades.

The drivers of the powerful forces of the first wave took manyforms: political, military, economic, technological, cultural. During thatperiod much of the world was dominated by Great Britain and its semi-globalBritish Empire. The Royal Navy, larger and more powerful thanany other fleet, assured the peace and the relative safety of internationaltransport and expanding global trade. Late-nineteenth-centurytechnologies played a central role, too, as new modes of transportationand communication sharply reduced the cost and time involved in internationaltrade. The global service sector—shipping,...