9780199297771 Baylis

Chapter 1

Globalization and global politics
ANTHONY MCGREW

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• Introduction ········································································································································· 16
• Making sense of globalization·········································································································· 16
• Conceptualizing globalization ·········································································································· 18
• Contemporary globalization ············································································································ 20
• A world transformed: globalization and distorted global politics············································ 23
• From distorted global politics to cosmopolitan global politics?·············································· 29
• Conclusion ············································································································································ 32

Reader’s Guide
This chapter offers an account of globalization and its consequences for world politics. It defines globalization as a historical process which involves the widening, deepening, speeding up and growing impact of worldwide interconnectedness. This process, however, is highly uneven such that far from bringing about a more cooperative world it generates powerful sources of friction, conflict, and fragmentation. It also has important consequences for the nation-state though it by no means, as many have argued or desired, prefigures its demise. Globalization is transforming world politics and this chapter explores some of those significant transformations. It concludes that a conceptual shift in our thinking is required to grasp fully the nature of these changes. This conceptual shift involves embracing the idea of global politics: the politics of an embryonic global society in which domestic and

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world politics, even if conceptually distinct, are practically inseparable. It also requires rethinking many of the traditional organizing assumptions and institutions of modern political life—from sovereignty to democracy—since in a globalized world power is no longer simply organized along national or territorial lines.
The radically uneven distribution of power in today’s world, however, makes for a distorted global politics in which the interests of the few more often than not take precedence over the interests of the majority of humankind. Whether a more just and democratic global politics can be fashioned out of the contemporary global condition is a matter of intense debate among theorists, practioners, and political activists alike. This chapter has three interrelated objectives: to elucidate and elaborate the concept of globalization; to examine and explore its implications for world politics; and to reflect upon the key normative issues it poses for the study of world politics.

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Introduction
Globalization—simply the widening, deepening, and

speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness—is a contentious issue in the study of world politics. Some—the hyperglobalists—argue that it is bringing about the demise of the sovereign nation-state as global forces undermine the ability of governments to control their own economies and societies (Ohmae 1995;
Scholte 2000). Others—the sceptics—reject the idea of globalization as so much ‘globaloney’, and argue that states and geopolitics remain the principal forces shaping world order (Krasner 1999; Gilpin 2001). This chapter takes a rather different approach—a transformationalist perspective—arguing that both the hyperglobalists and sceptics alike exaggerate their arguments and thereby misconstrue the contemporary world order.
By contrast, while the transformationalist perspective takes globalization seriously, it acknowledges that it is leading not so much to the demise of the sovereign state but to a globalization of politics: to the emergence of a conspicuously global politics in which the traditional distinction between domestic and international affairs is not terribly meaningful. Under these conditions
‘politics everywhere, it would seem, are related to politics everywhere else’ such that the orthodox approaches to

international relations—which are constructed upon this very distinction—provide at best only a partial insight into the forces shaping the contemporary world (Rosenau in Mansbach, Ferguson, and Lampert 1976: 22).
Since it is such a ‘slippery’ and misused concept it is hardly surprising that globalization should engender such intense debate. Accordingly, this chapter commences by elucidating the concept of globalization before exploring its implications for the study of world politics.
The chapter is organized into three main sections: section one will address several interrelated questions, namely:
What is globalization? How is it best conceptualized and defined? How is it manifest today, most especially given the events of 9/11? Is it really all that new? Section two will discuss the ways in which globalization is contributing to the emergence of a distorted global politics which is highly skewed in favour of a global power elite and to the exclusion of the majority of humankind. Finally, section three will reflect upon the ethical challenges posed by the realities of this distorted global politics. It examines current thinking about the conditions, and prospects, for a more humane global politics which is both more inclusive of, and responsive to, those in greatest need in the global community. Making sense of globalization
Over the last three decades the sheer scale and scope of global interconnectedness has become increasingly evident in every sphere from the economic to the cultural.
Worldwide economic integration has intensified as the expansion of global commerce, finance, and production links together the fate of nations, communities, and households across the world’s major economic regions and beyond within an emerging global market economy. Crises in one region, whether the collapse of the Argentinean economy in 2002 or the East Asian recession of 1997, take their toll on jobs, production, savings, and investment many thousands of miles away, while a slowdown in the US economy is felt everywhere from
Birmingham to Bangkok.

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Every day over $1.88 trillion flows across the world’s foreign exchange markets so that no government, even the most powerful, has the resources to resist sustained speculation against its currency and thereby the credibility of its economic policy (see Ch. 26). In 1992 the British government was forced to abandon its economic strategy and devalue the pound as it came under sustained attack from currency speculators.
Transnational corporations now account for between 25 and 33 per cent of world output, 70 per cent of world trade, and 80 per cent of international investment, while overseas production by these firms exceeds considerably the level of world exports, making them key players in the global economy controlling the

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Chapter 1 Globalization and global politics location and distribution of economic and technological resources. New modes and infrastructures of global communication have made it possible to organize and mobilize like-minded people across the globe in virtual real time, as expressed in coordinated worldwide protests in early
2003 against military intervention in Iraq and the 45,000 international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), from Greenpeace to the Climate Action Network, not to mention the activities of transnational criminal and terrorist networks, from drugs cartels to Al Qaeda.
With a global communications infrastructure has also come the transnational spread of ideas, cultures, and information, from Madonna to Muhammad, both among like-minded peoples and between different cultural groups—reinforcing simultaneous tendencies towards both an expanded sense of global solidarity among the like-minded and difference, if not outright hostility, between different cultures, nations, and ethnic groupings. People—with their cultures—are also on the move in their millions—whether legally or illegally—with global migration almost on a scale of the great nineteenthcentury movements but transcending all continents, from south to north and east to west, while over 600 million tourists are on the move every year.
As globalization has proceeded so has the recognition of transnational problems requiring global regulation, from climate change to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Dealing with these transnational issues has led to an explosive growth of transnational and global forms of rule-making and regulation. This is evident in both the expanding jurisdiction of established international organizations, such as the International Monetary
Fund or the International Civil Aviation Organization, and the literally thousands of informal networks of cooperation between parallel government agencies in different countries, from the Financial Action Task Force (which brings together government experts on money-laundering from different countries) and the Dublin Group (which brings together drug enforcement agencies from the European
Union, USA, and other countries).
With the recognition of global problems and global interconnectedness has come a growing awareness of

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Box 1.1 Definitions of globalization
Globalization is variously defined in the literature as:
1 ‘The intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.’
(Giddens 1990: 21)
2 ‘The integration of the world-economy.’
(Gilpin 2001: 364)
3 ‘De-territorialization—or . . . the growth of supraterritorial relations between people.’
(Scholte 2000: 46)
4 ‘time–space compression.’
(Harvey 1989)

the multiple ways in which the security and prosperity of communities in different regions of the world is bound together. A single terrorist bombing in Bali has repercussions for public perceptions of security in Europe and the USA, while agricultural subsidies in the USA and the EU have significant consequences for the livelihoods of farmers in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
We inhabit a world in which the most distant events can rapidly, if not almost instantaneously, come to have very profound consequences for our individual and collective prosperity and perceptions of security. For those of a sceptical persuasion, however, this is far from a novel condition nor is it necessarily evidence of globalization if that term means something more than simply international interdependence, that is linkages between countries.
What, then, distinguishes the concept of globalization from notions of internationalization or interdependence? What, in other words, is globalization?

Key Points
• Over the last three decades the sheer scale and scope of global interconnectedness has become increasingly evident in every sphere from the economic to the cultural. Sceptics do not regard this as evidence of globalization if that term means something more than simply international interdependence, i.e. linkages between countries. The key issue becomes what we understand by the term ‘globalization’.

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Conceptualizing globalization
Initially, it might be helpful to think of globalization as a process characterized by:
• a stretching of social, political, and economic activities across political frontiers so that events, decisions, and activities in one region of the world come to have significance for individuals and communities in distant regions of the globe. Civil wars and conflict in the world’s poorest regions, for instance, increase the flow of asylum seekers and illegal migrants into the world’s affluent countries;
• the intensification, or the growing magnitude, of interconnectedness, in almost every sphere of social existence from the economic to the ecological, from the activities of Microsoft to the spread of harmful microbes, such as the SARS virus, from the intensification of world trade to the spread of weapons of mass destruction;
• the accelerating pace of global interactions and processes as the evolution of worldwide systems of transport and communication increases the rapidity or velocity with which ideas, news, goods, information, capital, and technology move around the world. Routine telephone banking transactions in the UK are dealt with by call centres in India in real time;
• the growing extensity, intensity, and velocity of global interactions is associated with a deepening enmeshment of the local and global in so far as local events may come to have global consequences and global events can have serious local consequences, creating a growing collective awareness or consciousness of the world as a shared social space, that is globality or globalism. This is expressed, among other ways, in the worldwide diffusion of the very idea of globalization itself as it becomes incorporated into the world’s many languages, from Mandarin to Gaelic.
As this brief description suggests, there is more to the concept of globalization than simply interconnectedness.
It implies that the cumulative scale, scope, velocity, and depth of contemporary interconnectedness is dissolving the significance of the borders and boundaries which separate the world into its some 193 constituent states or national economic and political spaces (Rosenau 1997).
Rather than growing interdependence between discrete

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bounded national states, or internationalization as the sceptics refer to it, the concept of globalization seeks to capture the dramatic shift that is underway in the organization of human affairs: from a world of discrete but interdependent national states to the world as a shared social space. The concept of globalization therefore carries with it the implication of an unfolding process of structural change in the scale of human social and economic organization. Rather than social, economic, and political activities being organized primarily on a local or national scale today, they are also increasingly organized on a transnational or global scale. Globalization therefore denotes a significant shift in the scale of social organization, in every sphere from the economic to the security, transcending the world’s major regions and continents.
Central to this structural change are contemporary informatics technologies and infrastructures of communication and transportation. These have greatly facilitated new forms and possibilities of virtual real-time worldwide organization and coordination, from the operations of multinational corporations to the worldwide mobilization and demonstrations of the anti-globalization movement. Although geography and distance still matter, it is nevertheless the case that globalization is synonymous with a process of time–space compression—literally a shrinking world—in which the sources of even very local developments, from unemployment to ethnic conflict, may be traced to distant conditions or decisions. In this respect globalization embodies a process of deterritorialization: as social, political, and economic activities are increasingly ‘stretched’ across the globe, they become in a significant sense no longer organized solely according to a strictly territorial logic. Terrorist and criminal networks, for instance, operate both locally and globally. National economic space, under conditions of globalization, is no longer coterminous with national territorial space since, for example, many of the UK’s largest companies have their headquarters abroad while many domestic companies now outsource their production to China and
East Asia among other locations. This is not to argue that territory and borders are now irrelevant, but rather to acknowledge that under conditions of globalization their relative significance, as constraints upon social action and the exercise of power, is declining. In an era of

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Case Study 1 Global production and the iPod

Take just one component of the iPod nano, the central microchip provided by the U.S. company PortalPlayer. The core technology of the chip is licensed from British firm ARM and is modified by
PortalPlayer’s programmers in California, Washington State, and
Hyderabad. PortalPlayer then works with microchip design companies in California that send the finished design to a ‘foundry’ in
Taiwan (China) that produces ‘wafers’ (thin metal disks) imprinted with thousands of chips. The capital costs of these foundries can be more than $2.5 million. These wafers are then cut up into individual disks and sent elsewhere in Taiwan (China) where each one is tested. The chips are then encased in plastic and readied for

assembly by Silicon-Ware in Taiwan (China) and Amkor in the
Republic of Korea. The finished microchip is then warehoused in
Hong Kong (China) before being transported to mainland China where the iPod is assembled.
Working conditions and wages in China are low relative to
Western standards and levels. Many workers live in dormitories and work long hours. It is suggested that overtime is compulsory.
Nevertheless, wages are higher than the average of the region in which the assembly plants are located and allow for substantial transfers to rural areas and hence contribute to declining rural povery. PortalPlayer was only established in 1999 but had revenues in excess of $225 million in 2005. PortalPlayer’s chief executive officer has argued that the outsourcing to countries such as
India and Taiwan (China) of ‘non-critical aspects of your business’ has been crucial to the development of the firm and its innovation: ‘it allows you to become nimbler and spend R&D dollars on core strengths.’
Since 2003, soon after the iPod was launched, the share price of Apple, the company that produces and sells the iPod, has risen from just over $6 to over $60. Those who own shares in Apple have benefited from the globalization of the iPod.
Source: C. Joseph, ‘The iPod’s Incredible Journey’,
Mail on Sunday, 15 July 2006; ‘Meet the iPod’s “Intel”’
Business Trends, 32(4) (April), 2006

(World Bank (2006), Global Economic Prospects 2007: Managing the Next Wave of Globalization (Washington, DC: World Bank): 118).

instantaneous real-time global communication and organization, the distinction between the domestic and the international, inside and outside the state breaks down.
Territorial borders no longer demarcate the boundaries of national economic or political space.
A ‘shrinking world’ implies that sites of power and the subjects of power quite literally may be continents apart.
Under these conditions the location of power cannot be disclosed simply by reference to local circumstances. As the War in Iraq (2003–) demonstrates, the key sites of global power, whether in Washington, the United Nations in New York, or London, are quite literally oceans apart from the local communities whose destiny they may determine. In this regard globalization involves the idea that power, whether economic, political, and cultural or military is increasingly organized and exercised at a distance. As such the concept of globalization denotes the relative denationalization of power in so far as, in an increasingly interconnected global system, power is organized and exercised on a transregional, transnational, or transcontinental basis while—see the discussion of

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political globalization—many other actors, from international organizations to criminal networks, exercise power within, across, and against states. States no longer have a monopoly of power resources whether economic, coercive, or political.
To summarize: globalization is a process which involves much more than simply growing connections or interdependence between states. It can be defined as:
A historical process involving a fundamental shift or transformation in the spatial scale of human social organization that links distant communities and expands the reach of power relations across regions and continents. Such a definition enables us to distinguish globalization from more spatially delimited processes such as internationalization and regionalization. Whereas internationalization refers to growing interdependence between states, the very idea of internationalization presumes that they remain discrete national units with clearly demarcated borders. By contrast, globalization refers to a

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Box 1.2 Globalization since 9/11
‘. . . 2004 was still a good one for globalization. International trade grew by a robust 9 percent, and trade became more central to most national economies. Trade in merchandise led the way, growing even faster than services. Many countries in the developing world shared in the profits as commodity prices soared, thanks to powerful demand from China. And it wasn’t just steel, fuel, and concrete that headed east. So too did piles of mostly Western cash: Foreign investment in Asia jumped 45 percent from the previous year. Latin America also got a boost from foreign investors, who upped their ante in the region by 44 percent. Overall, foreign direct investment increased 9 percent, and most of that increase was due to investment in developing countries.’
(Foreign Policy, Nov. / Dec. 2006)

process in which the very distinction between the domestic and the external breaks down. Distance and time are collapsed, so that events many thousands of miles away can come to have almost immediate local consequences while the impacts of even more localized developments may be diffused rapidly around the globe. This is not to argue that distance and borders are now irrelevant. It is rather to acknowledge that, under conditions of globalization, their relative significance, as limits upon the exercise of power, is not quite so strong as it may have been in the past.

If globalization refers to transcontinental or transregional networks, flows, or interconnectedness, then regionalization can be conceived as the intensification of patterns of interconnectedness and integration among states which share common borders or are geographically proximate as in the European Union (see Ch.25).
Accordingly, whereas flows of trade and finance between the world’s three major economic blocs—North America,
Asia Pacific, and Europe—constitute globalization, by contrast, such flows within these blocs are best described as regionalization.

Key Points
• Globalization is evident in the growing extensity, intensity, velocity, and deepening impact of worldwide interconnectedness.
• Globalization denotes a shift in the scale of social organization, the emergence of the world as a shared social space, the relative deterritorialization of social, economic, and political activity, and the relative denationalization of power.
• Globalization can be conceptualized as a fundamental shift or transformation in the spatial scale of human social organization that links distant communities and expands the reach of power relations across regions and continents.
• Globalization is to be distinguished from internationalization and regionalization.

Contemporary globalization
According to John Gray, the cataclysmic attacks on the
United States on 11 September 2001 heralded a new epoch in world affairs, ‘The era of globalization is over’
(Naím 2002). States have reasserted their power and borders have been sealed, however imperfectly, in response to the perceived worldwide terrorist threat. Measured in terms of flows within the circuits of the world-economy, economic globalization undoubtedly stalled by comparison with the position at the turn of the century. This has been seized upon by those of a sceptical persuasion as confirmation of their argument (Hirst and Thompson
2003). Sceptics conclude that not only has globalization been highly exaggerated but it is a myth which has concealed the reality of a world which is less interdependent than it was in the nineteenth century and one which remains dominated by geopolitics (Hirst and Thompson

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1999; Gilpin 2002). By contrast, for many of a more globalist persuasion, 9/11 and the climate of insecurity it has engendered are evidence of a pervasive ‘clash of globalizations’. This is expressed in the form of a heightening confrontation between the globalization of Western modernity (i.e. ways of life) and the globalization of reactions against it. What is at issue here, at least in part, are differing (theoretical and historical) interpretations of globalization. One of the problems of the sceptical argument is that it tends to conflate globalization solely with economic trends. It thus tends to overlook other evidence. Indeed, contemporary globalization is not a singular process: it operates within all aspects of social life from politics to production, culture to crime, and economics to education. It is implicated directly and indirectly in many

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Box 1.3 The sceptical view of globalization
Sceptical accounts of globalization tend to dismiss its significance for the study of world politics. They do so on the grounds that:
1 By comparison with the period 1870 to 1914, the world is much less globalized economically, politically, and culturally.
2 Rather than globalization, the contemporary world is marked by intensifying geopolitics, regionalization, and internationalization.
3 The vast bulk of international economic and political activity is concentrated within the group of OECD states.
4 By comparison with the heyday of European global empires, the majority of the world’s population and countries in the South are now much less integrated into the global system.

aspects of our daily lives, from the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the knowledge we accumulate, through to our individual and collective sense of security in an uncertain world. Evidence of globalization is all around us: universities are literally global institutions from the recruitment of students to the dissemination of academic research.
To understand contemporary globalization therefore requires a mapping of the distinctive patterns of worldwide interconnectedness in all of the key sectors of social activity, from the economic and the political through to the military, the cultural, and the ecological.
As Box 1.4 illustrates, globalization is occurring, albeit with varying intensity and at a varying pace, in every domain of social activity. Of course it is more advanced in some domains than others. For instance, economic globalization is much more extensive and intensive than is cultural or mili-

5 Geopolitics, state power, nationalism, and territorial boundaries are of growing, not less, importance in world politics.
6 Internationalization or regionalization are creatures of state policy not corporate actors or capitalist imperatives.
7 Globalization is at best a self-serving myth or ideology which reinforces Western and particularly US hegemony in world politics. (Hirst and Thompson 1999, 2003; Hay 2000;
Hoogvelt 2001; Gilpin 2002)

tary globalization. To this extent contemporary globalization is highly uneven, with the result that in seeking to understand it we have to ask the prior question: the globalization of what? Contrary to the sceptics, it is crucial to recognize that globalization is a complex multidimensional process: patterns of economic globalization and cultural globalization are not identical. In this respect, to draw general conclusions about globalizing trends simply from one domain produces a false picture. As noted, in the aftermath of 9/11 the slowdown in economic globalization was heralded by sceptics as marking the end of globalization yet this ignored the accelerating pace of globalization in the military, technological, and cultural domains. Moreover, what is highly distinctive about contemporary globalization is the confluence of globalizing tendencies across all the key domains of social activity. Significantly, these tendencies have proved

Box 1.4 Patterns of contemporary globalization
Globalization, to varying degrees, is evident in all the principal sectors of social activity:

institutions such as the International Criminal Court is indicative of an emerging global legal order.

Economic: in the economic sphere, patterns of worldwide trade, finance, and production are creating global markets and, in the process, a single global capitalist economy—what Castells (2000) calls
‘global informational capitalism’. Multinational corporations organize production and marketing on a global basis while the operation of global financial markets determines which countries get credit and upon what terms.

Ecological: a shared ecology involves shared environmental problems, from global warming to species protection, alongside the creation of multilateral responses and regimes of glbal environmental governance. Military: in the military domain the global arms trade, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the growth of transnational terrorism, the growing significance of transnational military corporations, and the discourse of global insecurity point to the existence of a global military order.
Legal: the expansion of transnational and international law from trade to human rights alongside the creation of new world legal

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Cultural: involves a complex mix of homogenization and increased heterogeneity given the global diffusion of popular culture, global media corporations, communications networks, etc., simultaneously with the reassertion of nationalism, ethnicity, and difference. But few cultures are hermetically sealed off from cultural interaction. Social: shifting patterns of migration from South to North and
East to West have turned migration into a major global issue as movements come close to the record levels of the great nineteenthcentury movements of people.

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anthony mcgrew remarkably robust in the face of global instability and military conflicts.
If patterns of contemporary globalization are uneven, they are also highly asymmetrical. It is a common misconception of many sceptics that globalization implies universalism: that the ‘global’ in globalization implies that all regions or countries must be similarly enmeshed in worldwide processes. This is plainly not the case for it very markedly involves differential patterns of enmeshment, giving it what Castells calls its ‘variable geometry’ (Castells 2000). The rich OECD countries are much more globalized than many of the poorest sub-Saharan
African states. Globalization is not uniformly experienced across all regions, countries, or even communities since it is inevitably a highly asymmetrical process. Even within
OECD states and sub-Saharan African states many elites are in the vanguard of globalization while others find themselves excluded. As a highly asymmetrical process globalization exhibits a distinctive geography of inclusion and exclusion, resulting in clear winners and losers not just between countries but within and across them.
For the most affluent it may very well entail a shrinking world—jet travel, global television and the World Wide
Web—but for the largest slice of humanity it tends to be associated with a profound sense of disempowerment.
Inequality is inscribed deeply in the very processes of contemporary globalization such that it is more accurately described as asymmetrical globalization.

Box 1.5 The engines of globalization
Explanations of globalization tend to focus on three interrelated factors, namely: technics (technological change and social organization); economics (markets and capitalism); and politics (power, interests, and institutions).
Technics is central to any account of globalization since it is a truism that without modern communications infrastructures, in particular, a global system or worldwide economy would not be possible. Economics—crucial as technology is, so too is its specifically economic logic. Capitalism’s insatiable requirement for new markets and profits lead inevitably to the globalization of economic activity. Politics—shorthand here for ideas, interests, and power—constitutes the third logic of globalization. If technology provides the physical infrastructure of globalization, politics provides its normative infrastructure. Governments, such as those of the USA and the UK, have been critical actors in nurturing the process of globalization. Chap01.indd 22

Given such asymmetries it should not be surprising to learn that globalization does not prefigure the emergence of a global community or an ethic of global cooperation. On the contrary, as 9/11 tragically demonstrated, the more the world becomes a shared social space the greater the sense of division, difference, and conflict it creates. Asymmetrical globalization is principally perceived beyond the OECD core as Western globalization, provoking fears of a new imperialism and significant counter-reactions, from the protests of the anti-globalization movement to the actions of different cultural or national communities seeking to protect their indigenous culture and way of life. Rather than a more cooperative world order, contemporary globalization, in many respects, has exacerbated existing tensions and conflicts, generated new divisions and insecurities, creating a more unruly world. Globalization is a complex process embodying contradictory tendencies towards global integration and fragmentation, cooperation and conflict, order and disorder. This has been its history. Violence has always been central to globalization, whether in the form of the
‘New Imperialism’ of the 1890s or the current ‘war on global terror’.
By comparison with previous periods, contemporary globalization combines a remarkable confluence of dense patterns of global interconnectedness, alongside their unprecedented institutionalization through new global and regional infrastructures of control and communication, from the World Trade Organization (WTO) to transnational corporations. In nearly all domains contemporary patterns of globalization have not only surpassed those of earlier epochs, but also displayed unparalleled qualitative differences—that is in terms of

Box 1.6 The three waves of globalization
Globalization is not a novel phenomenon. Viewed as a secular historical process by which human civilizations have come to form a single world system, it has occurred in three distinct waves.
In the first wave, the age of discovery (1450–1850), globalization was decisively shaped by European expansion and conquest.
The second wave (1850–1945) evidenced a major expansion in the spread and entrenchment of European empires.
By comparison, contemporary globalization (1960 on) marks a new epoch in human affairs. Just as the industrial revolution and the expansion of the West in the nineteenth century defined a new age in world history, so today the microchip and the satellite are icons of a globalized world order.

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Chapter 1 Globalization and global politics how globalization is organized and managed. The existence of new real-time global communications infrastructures, in which the world literally is transformed into a single social space, distinguishes very clearly contemporary globalization from that of the past. In these respects it is best described as a thick form of globalization or globalism (Held, McGrew et al. 1999; Keohane and Nye 2003).
As such it delineates the set of constraints and opportunities which confront governments and thereby conditions their freedom of action or autonomy, most especially in the economic realm. For instance, the unprecedented scale of global financial flows at over
$1.88 trillion a day imposes a significant discipline on any government, even the most economically powerful,

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in its conduct of national economic policy. Thick globalization embodies a powerful systemic logic in so far as it structures the context in which states operate and thereby defines the parameters of state power. It therefore has significant consequences for how we understand world politics.

Key Points
• The contemporary phase of globalization has proved more robust in the aftermath of 9/11 than the sceptics recognize.
• Contemporary globalization is a multidimensional, uneven, and asymmetrical process.
• Contemporary globalization is best described as a thick form of globalization or globalism.

A world transformed: globalization and distorted global politics
Consider a political map of the world: its most striking feature is the division of the entire earth’s surface into over 190 neatly defined territorial units, namely states.
To a student of politics in the Middle Ages such a representation of the world, which gave primacy to borders and boundaries, would make little sense. Historically, borders are a relatively recent invention, as is the idea that states are sovereign, self-governing, territorially delimited political communities or polities. Although today a convenient fiction, this presumption remains central to orthodox state-centric conceptions of world politics as the pursuit of power and interests between sovereign states. Globalization, however, calls this state-centric conception of world politics into question. Taking globalization seriously therefore requires a conceptual shift in the way we think about world politics.

normative structure or constitution of the modern world

order. At the heart of the Westphalian settlement was agreement among Europe’s rulers to recognize each other’s right to rule their own territories free from outside interference. This was codified over time in the doctrine of sovereign statehood. But it was only in the twentieth century, as global empires collapsed, that sovereign statehood and with it national self-determination finally acquired the status of universal organizing principles of world order. Contrary to Pope Innocent’s desires, the
Westphalian Constitution by then had come to colonize the entire planet.
Constitutions are important because they establish the location of legitimate political authority within a polity

Box 1.7 The Westphalian Constitution of world politics
The Westphalian Constitution of world order
The Peace Treaties of Westphalia and Osnabruck (1648) established the legal basis of modern statehood and by implication the fundamental rules or constitution of modern world politics. Although Pope Innocent referred to the Westphalian settlement at the time as ‘null, reprobate and devoid of meaning for all time’, in the course of the subsequent four centuries it has formed the

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1 Territoriality: humankind is organized principally into exclusive territorial (political) communities with fixed borders.
2 Sovereignty: within its borders the state or government has an entitlement to supreme, unqualified, and exclusive political and legal authority.
3 Autonomy: the principle of self-determination or self-governance constructs countries as autonomous containers of political, social, and economic activity in that fixed borders separate the domestic sphere from the world outside.

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anthony mcgrew and the rules which inform the exercise and limits of political power. In codifying and legitimating the principle of sovereign statehood the Westphalian Constitution gave birth to the modern states-system. It welded together the idea of territoriality with the notion of legitimate sovereign rule. Westphalian sovereignty located supreme legal and political authority within territorially delimited states. Sovereignty involved the rightful entitlement to exclusive, unqualified, and supreme rule within a delimited territory. It was exclusive in so far as no ruler had the right to intervene in the sovereign affairs of other nations; unqualified in that within their territories rulers had complete authority over their subjects; and supreme in that there was no legal or political authority beyond the state. Of course for many, especially weak states, sovereignty—as the legitimate claim to rule—has not always translated into effective control within their territories. As Krasner recognizes, the Westphalian system has for many states been little more than a form of ‘organized hypocrisy’ (Krasner 1999). Nevertheless this never fundamentally compromised its influence upon the developmental trajectory of world politics. Although the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights modified aspects of the Westphalian Constitution, in qualifying aspects of state sovereignty, it remains the founding covenant of world politics. However, many argue that contemporary globalization presents a fundamental challenge to the Westphalian ideal of sovereign statehood and in so doing is transforming world order.

From (state-centric) geopolitics to (geocentric) global politics
As globalization has intensified over the last five decades, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain the popular fiction of the ‘great divide’: that is, treating political life as having two quite separate spheres of action, the domestic and the international, which operate according to different logics with different rules, actors, and agendas.
There is a growing recognition that, as former President
Clinton described it: the once bright line between domestic and foreign policy is blurring. If I could do anything to change the speech patterns of those of us in public life, I would like almost to stop hearing people talk about foreign policy and

Chap01.indd 24

Box 1.8 The post-Westphalian order
Territoriality
Borders and territory still remain important, not least for administrative purposes. Under conditions of globalization, however, a new geography of political organization and political power is emerging which transcends territories and borders.

State sovereignty
The sovereign power and authority of national government—the entitlement of states to rule within their own territorial space—is being transformed but not necessarily eroded. Sovereignty today is increasingly understood as the shared exercise of public power and authority between national, regional, and global authorities.

State autonomy
In a more interdependent world, simply to achieve domestic objectives national governments are forced to engage in extensive multilateral collaboration and co-operation. But in becoming more embedded in systems of global and regional governance states confront a real dilemma: in return for more effective public policy and meeting their citizens’ demands, whether in relation to the drugs trade or employment, their capacity for self-governance— that is state autonomy—is compromised.

domestic policy, and instead start discussing economic policy, security policy, environmental policy.
(quoted in Cusimano 2000: 6)

As the substantive issues of political life consistently ignore the artificial foreign/domestic divide, from the worldwide coordination of anti-globalization protests to national courts enforcing the rulings of the World Trade Organization, the
Westphalian Constitution appears increasingly anachronistic. A post-Westphalian world order is emerging and with it a distinctive form of global politics.
To talk of global politics is to recognize that politics itself has been globalized and that as a consequence there is much more to the study of world politics than conflict and cooperation between states, even if this remains crucial. In other words, globalization challenges the one-dimensionality of orthodox accounts of world politics which conceive it purely in terms of geopolitics and the struggle for power between states. By contrast, the concept of global politics focuses our attention upon the global structures and processes of rule-making, problem-solving, and the maintenance of security and order in the world system
(Brown 1992). It requires us to acknowledge the importance of states and geopolitics but not a priori to grant

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Chapter 1 Globalization and global politics them a privileged status in understanding and explaining contemporary world affairs. For under conditions of political globalization states are increasingly embedded in thickening and overlapping worldwide webs of: multilateral institutions and multilateral politics such as NATO and the World Bank; transnational associations and networks, from the International Chamber of Commerce to the World Muslim Congress; global policy networks of officials, corporate and non-governmental actors, dealing with global issues, such as the Global AIDS Fund and the Roll Back Malaria Initiative; and those formal and informal (transgovernmental) networks of government officials dealing with shared global problems, including the Basle Committee of central bankers and the Financial
Action Task Force on money-laundering (Fig. 1.1).
Global politics directs our attention to the emergence of a fragile global polity within which ‘interests are articulated and aggregated, decisions are made, values

25

allocated and policies conducted through international or transnational political processes’ (Ougaard 2004: 5).
In other words, to how the global order is, or fails to be, governed. Since the UN’s creation in 1945 a vast nexus of global and regional institutions has evolved surrounded by a proliferation of non-governmental agencies and networks seeking to influence the governance of global affairs. While world government remains a fanciful idea, there does exist an evolving global governance complex— embracing states, international institutions, transnational networks and agencies (both public and private)—which functions, with variable effect, to promote, regulate, or intervene in, the common affairs of humanity (Fig. 1.2).
Over the last five decades, its scope and impact have expanded dramatically with the result that its activities have become significantly politicized, as global protests against the WTO attest.

International organization
Transnational organization
Government

Society

Figure 1.1 The World Wide Web

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anthony mcgrew

UN agencies
e.g. IMF, WB,
WHO, UNDP

Transnational civil society e.g. MSF, ICC, FOE,
AI, PMC, IASB, RAN

Informal clubs
G8, G10, G20,
G77

International institutions e.g. NATO, WTO,
WIPO

Regional bodies
e.g. Eu, AU, ARF,
MERCOSUR

Global public policy networks e.g. Global Aids Fund,
ICECL, FATF

National governments Private govermance
e.g. IASB, ICC,
GCA

Local associations, citizen guoups, governments
KEY:
AI
ARE
AU
EU
FATF

Amnesty International
Asean Regional Forum
African Union
Europenan Union
Finacial Action Task Force
(on money-laundering)
FOE Friends of the Earth
G8 Group of 8 (US, Italy, UK, France,
Germany, Russia, Cannada, Japan & EU)
G77 Group of 77 developing countries
GCA Global credit agencies, e.g. Moodies,
Standard and poor
IASB International Accounting Standards Board
ICC International Chamber of Commerce

ICECL

International Convention on tne
Elimination of Child Labour
IMF
International Monetary Fund
MERCOSUR Southem American Common Market
MSF
Médecin sans Frontierès
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
PMC
Private military companies, e.g. Sandline
RAN
Rainforest Action Network
UNDP
UN Development Programme
WB
World Bank
WHO
World Health Organization
WIPO
World Intellectual Property Ringhts
Organization
WTO
World Trade Organization

Figure 1.2 The global governance complex
This evolving global governance complex encompasses the multitude of formal and informal structures of political coordination among governments, intergovernmental and transnational agencies—public and private—designed to realize common purposes or collectively agreed goals through the making or implementing of global or transnational rules, and the regulation of transborder problems. A good illustration of this is the creation of international labour codes to protect vulnerable workers. The International Convention on the
Elimination of Child Labour (ICECL), for instance, was

Chap01.indd 26

the product of a complex politics involving public and private actors from trade unions, industrial associations, humanitarian groups, governments, legal experts, not forgetting officials and experts within the International
Labour Organization (ILO).
Within this global governance complex private or non-governmental agencies have become increasingly influential in the formulation and implementation of global public policy. The International
Accounting Standards Board establishes global accounting rules, while the major credit-rating agencies, such

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Chapter 1 Globalization and global politics as Moodys and Standard and Poor, determine the credit status of governments and corporations around the globe. This is a form of private global governance in which private organizations regulate, often in the shadow of global public authorities, aspects of global economic and social affairs. In those realms in which it has become highly significant, mainly the economic and the technological, this private global governance involves a relocation of authority from states and multilateral bodies to non-governmental organizations and private agencies.
Coextensive with the global governance complex is an embryonic transnational civil society. In recent decades a plethora of NGOs, transnational organizations
(from the International Chamber of Commerce, international trade unions, and the Rainforest Network to the Catholic Church), advocacy networks (from the women’s movement to Nazis on the net), and citizens’ groups have come to play a significant role in mobilizing,

27

organizing, and exercising political power across national boundaries. This has been facilitated by the speed and ease of modern global communications and a growing awareness of common interests between groups in different countries and regions of the world. At the 2006 Ministerial
Meeting of the WTO in Hong Kong, the representatives of environmental, corporate, and other interested parties outnumbered the formal representatives of government.
Of course, not all the members of transnational civil society are either civil or representative; some seek to further dubious, reactionary, or even criminal causes while many lack effective accountability. Furthermore, there are considerable inequalities between the agencies of transnational civil society in terms of resources, influence and access to key centres of global decision-making.
Multinational corporations, like Rupert Murdoch’s News
International, have much greater access to centres of power, and capacity to shape the global agenda, than does the Rainforest Action Network.

Case Study 2 Security and violence in global politics

Paradoxically, the same global infrastructures which make it possible to organize production on a worldwide basis can also be exploited to lethal effect. National security increasingly begins abroad, not at the border, since borders are as much carriers as barriers to transnational organized violence. This has become increasingly evident in relation to ‘new wars’ — complex irregular warfare in the global
South. Inter-state war has been almost entirely supplanted by intrastate and trans-state conflict located in the global South, or on the perimeters of the West. These so-called ‘new wars’ are primarily located in weak states and rooted in identity politics, local conflicts, and rivalries. They involve complex irregular warfare between military, para-military, criminal, and private forces which rages through, but often around and across, state borders with little discrimina-

Chap01.indd 27

tion between civilians and combatants. The United Nations estimates, for instance, that thirty-five people die every hour across the globe as a consequence of irregular armed conflict. These ‘new wars’, whether in Bosnia, Darfur, or Venezuela, are curiously modern since they are sustained largely by the capacity of combatants to exploit global networks to provide finance, arms, émigré support, or aid as well as to facilitate profiteering, racketeering, and shadow economies, such as the diamond or drugs trade, which pays for arms and influence. Despite their apparently localized quality, ‘new wars’ are in fact a manifestation of the contemporary globalization of organized violence. Disorder in one part of the world (as in Darfur in 2006, or in Kosovo and Somalia in the 1990s) combines with global media coverage and the speed of travel to feed insecurity, creating overlapping global security complexes. These complexes bind together the security of societies across the North–South divide. They also highlight a major disjuncture between the distribution of formal military power and the distribution of effective coercive power in the world today. Al Qaeda, the Triads, private military companies, drug cartels, narco-terrorism, and the illicit global arms trade are all examples of the growth of informal organized violence or post-international violence. They pose, as Keohane starkly notes, a profound challenge since ‘States no longer have a monopoly on the means of mass destruction: more people died in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon than in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941’.
(Keohane 2002a: 284)

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anthony mcgrew
If global politics involves a diversity of actors and institutions it is also marked by a diversity of political concerns. The agenda of global politics is anchored to not just traditional geopolitical concerns but also to a proliferation of economic, social, cultural, and ecological questions. Pollution, drugs, human rights, and terrorism are among an increasing number of transnational policy issues which, because of globalization, transcend territorial borders and existing political jurisdictions, and thereby require international cooperation for their effective resolution. Politics today is marked by a proliferation of new types of ‘boundary problem’. In the past, of course, nation-states principally resolved their differences over boundary matters by pursuing reasons of state backed by diplomatic initiatives and, ultimately, by coercive means. But this geopolitical logic appears singularly inadequate and inappropriate to resolve the many complex issues, from economic regulation to resource depletion and environmental degradation to chemical weapons proliferation, which engender—at seemingly ever greater speeds—an intermeshing of ‘national fortunes’.
This is not to argue that the sovereign state is in decline. The sovereign power and authority of national government—the entitlement of states to rule within their own territorial space—is being transformed but by no means eroded. Locked into systems of global and regional governance, states now assert their sovereignty less in the form of a legal claim to supreme power than as a bargaining tool, in the context of transnational systems of rule-making, with other agencies and social forces.
Sovereignty is bartered, shared, and divided among the agencies of public power at different levels from the local to the global. The Westphalian conception of sovereignty as an indivisible, territorially exclusive form of public power is being displaced by a new sovereignty regime, in which sovereignty is understood as the shared exercise of public power and authority. In this respect we are witnessing the emergence of a post-Westphalian world order.
Furthermore, far from globalization leading to ‘the end of the state’, it elicits a more activist state. This is because, in a world of global enmeshment, simply to achieve domestic objectives national governments are forced to engage in extensive multilateral collaboration and cooperation. But in becoming more embedded in frameworks of global and regional governance, states confront a real dilemma: in return for more effective public

Chap01.indd 28

policy and meeting their citizens’ demands, their capacity for self-governance—that is, state autonomy—is compromised. Today, a difficult trade-off is posed between effective governance and self-governance. In this respect, the Westphalian image of the monolithic, unitary state is being displaced by the image of the disaggregated state in which its constituent agencies increasingly interact with their counterparts abroad, international agencies, and NGOs in the management of common and global affairs (Slaughter 2004) (Fig. 1.3).
Global politics is a term which acknowledges that the scale of political life has fundamentally altered: politics understood as that set of activities concerned primarily with the achievement of order and justice does not recognize territorial boundaries. It questions the utility of the distinction between the domestic and the foreign, inside and outside the territorial state, the national and the international since decisions and actions taken in one region impact upon the welfare of communities in distant parts of the globe, with the result that domestic politics is internationalized and world politics becomes domesticated. It acknowledges that power in the global system is not the sole preserve of states but is distributed (unevenly) among a diverse array of public and private actors and networks (from international agencies, through corporations to NGOs) with important consequences for who gets what, how, when, and where. It recognizes that political authority has been diffused not only upwards to supra-state bodies, such as the European Union, but also downwards to sub-state bodies, such as regional assemblies, and beyond the state to private agencies, such as the International Accounting Standards Board.
It accepts that sovereignty remains a principal juridical attribute of states but concludes that it is increasingly divided and shared between local, national, regional, and global authorities. Finally, it affirms that, in an age of globalization, national polities no longer function as closed systems. On the contrary, it asserts that all politics—understood as the pursuit of order and justice—are played out in a global context.
However, as with globalization, inequality and exclusion are endemic features of contemporary global politics.
There are many reasons for this but three factors in particular are crucial: first, enormous inequalities of power between states; second, global governance is shaped by an unwritten constitution that tends to privilege the interests

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Chapter 1 Globalization and global politics
State B

Finance

Finance

Trade

Trade

Health

Health

Environment

Environment

Justice

Justice

Education

Education

Security

Security

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES

State A

29

Patterns of direct communication interaction and transgovernmental networks

Figure 1.3 The disaggregated state

and agenda of global capitalism; third, the technocratic nature of much global decision-making, from health to security, tends to exclude many with a legitimate stake in the outcomes.
These three factors produce cumulative inequalities of power and exclusion—reflecting the inequalities of power between North and South—with the result that contemporary global politics is more accurately described as distorted global politics: ‘distorted’ in the sense that inevitably those states and groups with greater power resources and access to key sites of global decisionmaking tend to have the greatest control or influence over the agenda and outcomes of global politics. In short, global politics has few democratic qualities. This sits in tension with a world in which democracy is generally

valued. Whether a more democratic global politics is imaginable and what it might look like is the concern of normative theorists and is the subject of the concluding section of this chapter.

Key Points
• Globalization is transforming but not burying the Westphalian ideal of sovereign statehood. It is producing the disaggregated state. • Globalization requires a conceptual shift in our thinking about world politics from a primarily geopolitical perspective to the perspective of geocentric or global politics—the politics of worldwide social relations.
• Global politics is more accurately described as distorted global politics because it is afflicted by significant power asymmetries. From distorted global politics to cosmopolition global politics?
Globalization, it can be argued, is associated with a double democratic deficit. On the one hand, it has compounded the tension between democracy as a territoriality rooted system of rule and the operation of global markets and transnational networks of corporate power. For if democratic governments are losing the capacity to manage transnational forces in accordance with the expressed

Chap01.indd 29

preferences of their citizens, then the very essence of democracy, namely self-governance, is decidedly compromised. On the other hand, it is associated with the emergence of a distorted global politics in which power asymmetries and global institutions more often than not enhance the interests of global elites at the expense of the wider world community. Many of the agencies of global

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anthony mcgrew

Box 1.9 Cosmopolitan democracy
Guiding ethical principles/core values Global social justice, democracy, universal human rights, human security, rule of law, transnational solidarity

Short-term measure

Governance
•

Reform of global governance: representative Security Council; establishment of
Human Security Council (to coordinate global development policies); Global Civil
Society Forum; strengthened systems of global accountability; enhancement of national and regional governance infrastructures and capacities; enhanced parliamentary scrutiny

Economy
•
•

Regulating global markets: selective capital controls; regulation of offshore financial centres; voluntary codes of conduct for multinational corporations (MNCs)
Promoting development: abolition of debt for highly indebted poor countries
(HIPCs); meeting UN aid targets of 0.7% GNP; fair trade rules; removal of EU and
US subsidies of agriculture and textiles

Security
•

Long-term transformations

Strengthening global humanitarian protection capacities; implementation of existing global poverty reduction and human development commitments and policies; strengthening of arms control and arms trade regulation

Governance
•

Double democratization (national to supra-state governance); enhanced global public goods provision; global citizenship

Economy
•

Taming global markets; World Financial Authority; mandatory codes of conduct for
MNCs; global tax mechanism; global competition authority

•

Market correcting: mandatory global labour and environmental standards; foreign investment codes and standards; redistributive and compensatory measures; commodity price and supply agreements

•

Market promoting: privileged market access for developing countries; convention on global labour mobility

Security
•

Institutional/political conditions Global social charter; permanent peacekeeping and humanitarian emergency forces; social exclusion and equity impact reviews of all global development measures

Activist states, global progressive coalition (involving key Western and developing states and civil society forces), strong multilateral Institutions, open regionalism, global civil society, redistributive regimes, regulation of global markets, transnational public sphere

civil society too are highly unrepresentative of the world’s peoples. Distorted global politics, in other words, has weak democratic credentials. Arguably, redressing this double democratic deficit, alongside global poverty reduction, is the greatest ethical and political challenge of the twentyfirst century.

Chap01.indd 30

Within the normative theory of world politics one particular approach speaks directly to the failings of distorted global politics, namely, cosmopolitanism (see
Ch.11) (Held 2002; Moellendorf 2002). Cosmopolitanism presents a radical critique of distorted global politics for the manner in which it perpetuates global inequalities

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Chapter 1 Globalization and global politics and therefore global injustices. Realizing a more humane and just world order requires a reformed and more democratic system of global governance, which can at a minimum regulate global markets and prevent transnational harm to the most vulnerable. This might be termed the project of cosmopolitan democracy (Box 1.9).
Cosmopolitan democracy can be conceived as a basis for combining the democratization of global governance with the pursuit of global social justice (see Ch.31).
It seeks to nurture and institutionalize some of the core values of social democracy—the rule of law, political equality, democratic governance, social justice, social solidarity, and economic efficiency—within global power systems. Cosmopolitan democracy seeks to reinvigorate democracy within states by extending democracy to relations between and across states. Only through such a double democratization will the double democratic deficit created by globalization be addressed. In effect, those global sites and transnational networks of power, which at present escape effective national democratic control, will be brought to account, so establishing the conditions befitting the realization of a more humane and democratic global politics. In the context of a deeply divided world, in which violence is endemic and might seeks to impose right, the prospects for its realization might currently appear somewhat remote. Yet its advocates argue that it is rooted in the actually existing conditions of global politics.
Cosmopolitanism builds upon the argument that globalization is bringing about a post-Westphalian order. As a result, the present world order combines, in an unstable mix, elements of both paradise and power: that is, of democratic principles and realpolitik (see Ch.5 and
Ch.7). Thus the principles of self-determination, the rule of law, popular sovereignty, democratic legitimacy, the legal equality of states, and even redistribution (through aid) are embedded in global politics. So too are the ideas that might is right and that the national interest has primacy over all else. Globalization thereby has provoked major political reactions which in their more progressive manifestations have engendered a wider political debate about the democratic credentials of the existing

Chap01.indd 31

31

global governance complex. Regulating globalization in the public and global interest has become a paramount political issue across the world. Witness, for instance, the global campaign in 2005 to Make Poverty History. There is now increased political pressure on G8 governments especially to bring good governance to global governance by making it more transparent, accountable, and legitimate. A broader global consensus appears to be emerging on the need for such reform, drawing political support from across the North–South divide and among diverse constituencies of transnational civil society. In short, distorted global politics gives expression to diverse democratic impulses and constituencies. However, it would be foolish to assume that such impulses and constituencies will triumph in the near future since arrayed against them are powerful global forces which resist the creation of a more cosmopolitan or humane global politics. Arguably, distorted global politics embodies a historic struggle between the logic of power politics (statism) and the logic of cosmopolitanism, between power and paradise. Its future trajectory, however, remains wholly speculative. That it is so is a source of both intellectual despair and huge relief: despair since it reaffirms the limits of our current theories of world politics in so far as they offer scant guide to the future, relief because it confirms that the future remains to be made, even if, to paraphrase Marx, it is not within the conditions of our own choosing. Therefore globalization undoubtedly will remain a powerful force for global change, hopefully for the better but quite possibly for the worse.

Key Points
• Globalization creates a double democratic deficit in that it places limits on democracy within states and new mechanisms of global governance which lack democratic credentials.
• Global politics has engendered its own global political theory which draws upon cosmopolitan thinking.
• Cosmopolitanism offers an account of the desirability and feasibility of the democratization of global politics.
• Distorted global politics can be interpreted as expressing a contest between the forces of statism and cosmopolitanism in the conduct and management of world affairs.

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anthony mcgrew

Conclusion
This chapter has sought to elucidate the concept of globalization and identify its implications for the study of world politics. It has argued that globalization reconstructs the world as a shared social space. But it does so in a far from uniform manner: contemporary globalization is highly uneven—it varies in its intensity and extensity between different spheres of activity, and is highly asymmetrical—and it engenders a highly unequal geography of global inclusion and exclusion. In doing so it is as much a source of conflict and violence as of cooperation and harmony in world affairs.
In focusing upon the consequences of globalization for the study of international relations, this chapter has argued that it engenders a fundamental shift in the constitution of world politics. A post-Westphalian world order is in the making as sovereign statehood is transformed by the dynamics of globalization. A conceptual shift in our thinking is therefore required: from geopoli-

tics (or inter-state politics) to global politics—the politics of state and non-state actors within a shared global social space. Global politics is imbued with deep inequalities of power such that in its current configuration it is more accurately described as distorted global politics: a politics of domination, contestation and competition between powerful states and transnational social forces.
Cosmopolitan theory, it was noted, suggests that a more democratic form of global politics is both desirable and feasible. To this extent the trajectory of global politics will be shaped significantly by the struggle between the forces of statism and cosmopolitanism, or might is right versus right is might. The outcome of this contest will determine whether twenty-first-century global politics will be a politics of hope or of fear; in other words, whether a more humane and democratic global politics can be fashioned out of today’s distorted global politics.

Questions
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

Distinguish the concept of globalization from that of regionalization and internationalization.
What do you understand by the Westphalian Constitution of world order?
Why is global politics today more accurately described as distorted global politics?
Outline the principal causes of globalization.
Review the sceptical argument and critically evaluate it.
What are the principal characteristics of the post-Westphalian order?
Identify some of the key elements of political globalization.
What are the principal characteristics of contemporary globalization?
Distinguish the concept of global politics from that of geopolitics and inter-state politics.
Outline the main elements of cosmopolitan global politics.
Is the state being eclipsed by the forces of globalization and global governance?
Is state sovereignty being eroded or transformed? Explain your answer.

Guide to further reading
Castells, M. (2000), (Oxford: Blackwells). This is a now contemporary classic account of the political economy of globalization which is comprehensive in its analysis of the new global informational capitalism.

Chap01.indd 32

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Chapter 1 Globalization and global politics

33

Duffield, M. (2001), Global Governance and the New Wars (London: Zed). A very readable account of how globalization is leading to the fusion of the development and security agendas within the global governance complex.
Gilpin, R. (2001), Global Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). A more sceptical view of economic globalization which, although taking it seriously, conceives it as an expression of Americanization or American hegemony.
Held, D., and McGrew, A. (2007), Globalization/Anti-Globalization: Beyond the Great Divide, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press). A short introduction to all aspects of the current globalization debate and its implications for the study for world politics.
Hirst, P., and Thompson, G. (1999), Globalization in Question, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press).
An excellent and sober critique of the hyperglobalist argument, which is thoroughly sceptical about the globalization thesis, viewing it as a return to the belle époque and heavily shaped by states. Holton, R. (2005), Making Globalization (London: Palgrave). A comprehensive overview of globalization and its implications for the study of the social sciences written from a sociological perspective. Kennedy, P., et al. (2002), Global Trends and Global Governance (London: Pluto Press). A good introduction to how globalization is reshaping world politics and the nature of global governance.
Robertson, R. (2003), The Three Waves of Globalization: A History of Developing Global
Consciousness (London: Zed). A very good account of globalization as a long-term historical process driven by a combination of economic and political factors.
Scholte, J. A. (2005), Globalization—A critical Introduction, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan).
An excellent introduction to the globalization debate from its causes to its consequences for the global political economy from within a critical political economy perspective.

Online Resource Centre
Visit the Online Resource Centre that accompanies this book to access more learning resources on this chapter topic at www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/uk/orc/baylis_smith4e/

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