Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anthony Giddens is the director of the London School of Economics and Political Science and been an advisor to both Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. A cofounder of Polity Press, he is the author of many books including the international bestseller The Third Way. He has seven honorary degrees and has taught at Cambridge, Boston, Harvard, New York and Stanford universities and the University of California, Berkeley and the Sorbonne.

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Runaway World

Routledge

Chapter One

Globalisation

A friend of mine studies village life in centralAfrica. A few years ago, she paid her first visit toa remote area where she was to carry out herfieldwork. The day she arrived, she was invited to a localhome for an evening's entertainment. She expected tofind out about the traditional pastimes of this isolatedcommunity. Instead, the occasion turned out to be aviewing of Basic Instinct on video. The film at that pointhadn't even reached the cinemas in London.

    Such vignettes reveal something about our world.And what they reveal isn't trivial. It isn't just a matter ofpeople adding modern paraphernalia ? videos, televisionsets, personal computers and so forth ? to theirexisting ways of life. We live in a world of transformations,affecting almost every aspect of what we do. Forbetter or worse, we are being propelled into a globalorder that no one fully understands, but which ismaking its effects felt upon all of us.

    Globalisation may not be a particularly attractive orelegant word. But absolutely no one who wants tounderstand our prospects at century's end can ignore it.I travel a lot to speak abroad. I haven't been to a singlecountry recently where globalisation isn't being intensivelydiscussed. In France, the word is mondialisation. InSpain and Latin America, it is globalización. The Germanssay Globalisierung.

    The global spread of the term is evidence of the verydevelopments to which it refers. Every business gurutalks about it. No political speech is complete withoutreference to it. Yet even in the late 1980s the term washardly used, either in the academic literature or ineveryday language. It has come from nowhere to bealmost everywhere.

    Given its sudden popularity, we shouldn't be surprisedthat the meaning of the notion isn't always clear,or that an intellectual reaction has set in against it. Globalisationhas something to do with the thesis that wenow all live in one world ? but in what ways exactly, andis the idea really valid? Different thinkers have takenalmost completely opposite views about globalisation indebates that have sprung up over the past few years.Some dispute the whole thing. I'll call them the sceptics.

    According to the sceptics, all the talk aboutglobalisation is only that ? just talk. Whatever its benefits,its trials and tribulations, the global economy isn'tespecially different from that which existed at previousperiods. The world carries on much the same as it hasdone for many years.

    Most countries, the sceptics argue, gain only a smallamount of their income from external trade. Moreover,a good deal of economic exchange is between regions,rather than being truly world-wide. The countries of theEuropean Union, for example, mostly trade amongthemselves. The same is true of the other main tradingblocs, such as those of Asia?Pacific or North America.

    Others take a very different position. I'll label themthe radicals. The radicals argue that not only is globalisationvery real, but that its consequences can be felteverywhere. The global market-place, they say, is muchmore developed than even in the 1960s and 1970s and isindifferent to national borders. Nations have lost most ofthe sovereignty they once had, and politicians have lostmost of their capability to influence events. It isn't surprisingthat no one respects political leaders any more,or has much interest in what they have to say. The era ofthe nation-state is over. Nations, as the Japanese businesswriter Kenichi Ohmae puts it, have become mere `fictions'.Authors such as Ohmae see the economic difficultiesof the 1998 Asian crisis as demonstrating thereality of globalisation, albeit seen from its disruptive side.

    The sceptics tend to be on the political left, especiallythe old left. For if all of this is essentially a myth, governmentscan still control economic life and the welfarestate remain intact. The notion of globalisation, accordingto the sceptics, is an ideology put about by free-marketeerswho wish to dismantle welfare systems and cutback on state expenditures. What has happened is atmost a reversion to how the world was a century ago. Inthe late nineteenth century there was already an openglobal economy, with a great deal of trade, includingtrade in currencies.

    Well, who is right in this debate? I think it is the radicals.The level of world trade today is much higher thanit ever was before, and involves a much wider range ofgoods and services. But the biggest difference is in thelevel of finance and capital flows. Geared as it is to electronicmoney ? money that exists only as digits in computers-- the current world economy has no parallels inearlier times.

    In the new global electronic economy, fund managers,banks, corporations, as well as millions of individualinvestors, can transfer vast amounts of capital fromone side of the world to another at the click of a mouse.As they do so, they can destabilise what might haveseemed rock-solid economies ? as happened in theevents in Asia.

    The volume of world financial transactions is usuallymeasured in US dollars. A million dollars is a lot ofmoney for most people. Measured as a stack of hundred-dollarnotes, it would be eight inches high. A billiondollars ? in other words, a thousand million ? wouldstand higher than St Paul's Cathedral. A trillion dollars ? amillion million ? would be over 120 miles high, 20times higher than Mount Everest.

    Yet far more than a trillion dollars is now turned overeach day on global currency markets. This is a massiveincrease from only the late 1980s, let alone the more distantpast. The value of whatever money we may have inour pockets, or our bank accounts, shifts from momentto moment according to fluctuations in such markets.

    I would have no hesitation, therefore, in saying thatglobalisation, as we are experiencing it, is in manyrespects not only new, but also revolutionary. Yet I don'tbelieve that either the sceptics or the radicals have properlyunderstood either what it is or its implications forus. Both groups see the phenomenon almost solely ineconomic terms. This is a mistake. Globalisation is political,technological and cultural, as well as economic. Ithas been influenced above all by developments in systemsof communication, dating back only to the late1960s.

    In the mid-nineteenth century, a Massachusetts portraitpainter, Samuel Morse, transmitted the first message,`What hath God wrought?', by electric telegraph.In so doing, he initiated a new phase in world history.Never before could a message be sent without someonegoing somewhere to carry it. Yet the advent of satellitecommunications marks every bit as dramatic a breakwith the past. The first commercial satellite waslaunched only in 1969. Now there are more than 200such satellites above the earth, each carrying a vast rangeof information. For the first time ever, instantaneouscommunication is possible from one side of the world tothe other. Other types of electronic communication,more and more integrated with satellite transmission,have also accelerated over the past few years. No dedicatedtransatlantic or transpacific...