Globalization as the Rise of a Global Society

    So oft in theologic wars,
    The disputants, I ween,
    Rail on in utter ignorance
    Of what each other mean,
    And prate about an Elephant
    Not one of them has seen!

— John Godfrey Saxe, "The Blind Men and the Elephant," The Poems of John Godfrey Saxe, 1868

— John Godfrey Saxe, "The Blind Men and the Elephant," The Poems of John Godfrey Saxe, 1868

How can, and should, globalization, a contested notion, be understood? There exists no shared notion of what globalization is, what its principal properties might be, or the implications for humankind of what forces, themselves in dispute, are driving its complex social processes. Observers tend to seize on one, albeit important, dimension of globalization rather than view globalization as a whole — that is, as enlarging webs of connections and interdependencies of humans and human communities across the full range of their most significant and salient concerns.

These social webs, abstracted from the actors and agents ensnared and entangled in them — what Jean-Jacques Rousseau terms chains — are what interest this discussion. These social chains, paradoxically, empower individuals to act and, simultaneously, to limit the possibilities of their choices and the prospects of their self-realization. These layers of ever enlarging and increasingly denser tissues of social exchanges create a global society. To avoid the "blind men and the elephant" problem, it is the elephant, as a metaphor of the global society, that we wish to view as a whole.

It is important to keep in mind that the democracies are suspended within larger and more confining webs of connectedness and interdependence comprising the global society. These webs embrace powerful antidemocratic states and peoples as well as criminal and terrorist organizations. These diverse actors, themselves divided against themselves, reject, some violently, the democratic solutions to OWL imperatives for global governance. Their multiple forms of pushback are delineated in succeeding chapters.

Connectedness: The Emergence of a Global Society

To anchor the priority of global governance as a central concern of democratic populations, we need to show that a global society exists. Since connectedness and interdependence are properties of all human societies, they are no less so with the emergence of a global society. What has fundamentally changed is the scope of these properties, entangling inhabitants of the globe in greater or lesser measure. These properties are deeply embedded in the ceaseless interactions of the world's states and populations today. The totality of these countless and expanding interactions between and among democratic and nondemocratic peoples are the global society.

This conception of society departs from textbook or conventional understandings of society. For many scholars and observers, a society implies a community of like-minded, directed individuals. A typical textbook definition of society is a "group of individuals living as members of a community." They are assumed to have developed over time "common ideas, interests, and techniques for living and working together. It is the sense of living together as a community that makes up a society."

This widespread notion of society, loaded with normative baggage, does not readily fit the reality of a global society more divided against itself than united around common purposes. To fit the notion of society to a global society, I mean a lot less and also a lot more by "global society" than the notion of a society as a tight, morally integrated community. At a global level, humans, as social evolution and historical processes have served them up to us, can scarcely be said to have "common ideas, interests and techniques for living and working together." Fundamental, insurmountable differences abound. These are woven deeply into the web of humanly constructed social relations.

The connections and interdependencies engendered by globalization reinforce rather than reduce or diminish these clashes. The result is a global society of billions of people woven into a crazy-quilt of divergent and disputing identities, riven by tribal, ethnic, and national loyalties and contending cultural or religious values, and split even finer into clashing attributes of language, class, status, gender, and race. Yet, paradoxically, all are increasingly connected and interdependent in the pursuit of their divergent goals.

So when I use the term "global society," I mean a lot less than prevailing notions of communal cohesion. Nor do I assume an eventual convergence of cultural and religious beliefs and practices of the world's peoples. Much less, too, does this discussion assume some shared end point toward which humans are inexorably directed, yet to be discovered.

A Global Society: A Lot Less than a Traditional Society

The conception of a global society advanced here does not require meeting a test of internal coherence or cohesion. Connectedness and interdependence will do. In the extreme, a Hobbesian war of all against all is no less a society than the Utopian societies that dotted western expansion in the United States, wherein the members of these societies shared the same values and adhered to the norms of the group. In the limiting case of a Hobbesian world, developed in chapter 3, the very survival of its members hinges not only on their wits and resourcefulness but also on the responsive actions of their rivals, and vice versa. At both extremes, the property of interdependence, radically different in form and outcome, makes for a global society divided against itself.

The conception of society used here includes and revolves around all human interactions taken as a whole. In its fullest representation, "society," as Martin Shaw suggests, "is the totality or complex of social relations. Since social relations of all kinds are increasingly global, and all forms of social relations everywhere in the world are, at least in some indirect sense bound into global networks, society in this sense is now necessarily global." In adopting Shaw's perspective, our concern is focused primarily on that subset of "global networks" that are...