A truly global age

By Awatef Abdel-Rahman *

During the same period, many developing countries began to step up their economic liberalisation programmes and encourage international commerce. For this group of economic theoreticians, such transformations tended toward the creation of a single international system in which relationships of interdependency would prevail in the production, sale and consumption of raw materials, manufactured goods, markets, capital, and labour.

Multinational companies, according to the same economists, were the agents most able to stimulate the economic and information technology aspects of globalisation through investment, transportation, job creation, speculation, scientific research, and political and cultural influence.

A second group of economic thinkers offer a critical historical analysis. To them, globalisation began with the process of colonial expansion into Africa, Asia and the Americas in the late 17th century, accompanied by the rapid development of a modern commercial system in Europe itself. World economic history, thus, is the history of the breaking down of borders before expanding markets. It is also the history of the industrial revolution, which emerged in England in the middle of the 18th century, then spread to other parts of Europe.

When the technological revolution began in the '60s, the basis of the economy began to shift increasingly toward information and communications technology. This revolution gave the same impetus to the human mind that the earlier industrial revolution had given to physical means of transportation and locomotion.

As academic and organisational know-how gains pre-eminence over raw materials, research development and patents are becoming the most precious and powerful factors of production. The increasing importance of data is already visible in stock movements. With the latest developments in electronics, vast fortunes can be moved across continents without the need for actual currency exchange or customs administrators. The information revolution extends beyond economics to the dissemination of ideas, beliefs, and images.

While classical economists see in globalisation a global levelling process, however, critics argue that globalisation is the most recent peak in the North's overwhelming monopoly of capital and economic power, accompanied by the increasing marginalisation of the countries of the South. Capital is drained from the South toward the investment centres of the industrialised nations, the Third World's attempts at development prove futile, and the gap between rich and poor increases within and between nations.

Critics of globalisation also recall that when industrial capitalists emerged from World War II, sapped of their strength, they applied themselves to overcoming all obstacles to the process of globalism. Success came by way of the technological revolution in information processing and communications.

This success is also reflected in the ever-decreasing margin allowed to economic and social systems that do not operate according to the mechanisms of global capital. During the present decade, in particular, many developing countries have capitulated to the international financial institutions (principally the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) which speak and mediate for globalisation.

Increasingly sharp polarisation has also taken its toll on the current world order: the status of the UN and its affiliate agencies has declined as the influence of the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organisation (WTO) increases yet further. These financial institutions, in turn, are under the absolute control of the G7, which therefore dictates the ideology of the market economy. The WTO has exceptionally extensive powers, enabling it to dictate the international rules for implementation of the 1994 GATT Accord.

The ideology of the market economy has also promoted various types of international economic activities that function independently of any checks or controls. Perhaps the most dangerous is speculation on the international stock markets, where billions of dollars can be accumulated without being tacked to any tangible production and with no political supervision at any level. Clearly, the mechanisms of globalisation work in favour of the multinational companies, the bulk of which are based in, and concentrate their assets in, the seven industrial nations.

The most prevalent analysis of globalisation among sociologists uses a conceptual framework similar to that of the economists who seek to analyse globalisation and critique it from a historical perspective. Globalisation, these sociologists write, represents the apogee of the capitalist system at the universal level, the ultimate degree of imperialist domination.

Several sociologists, however, have drawn an important distinction between globalisation and internationalism. Globalisation, they contend, is a form of containment and invasion aimed at depleting and nullifying cultural specificity. Internationalism, by contrast, is open to the "universal" and promotes the enrichment of cultural identity. While internationalism is an affirmation of cultural specificity, the cultural penetration inherent in globalisation aims to supplant ideological conflict by the control of human consciousness through media images of a superficial, highly emotive, anti-cerebral and reductionist content. Cultural penetration aims to mold behaviour and entrench a specific pattern of consumption of goods, knowledge and culture.

According to some sociologists, globalisation is a qualitative development in the history of political, economic, social and cultural systems that relies on new means of domination. Among the most important of these means are transnational companies that represent the first line of assault on the political and economic boundaries of the nation state. Media and information networks work to undermine social and cultural borders.

Culture, as a social product, has become as much a part of the new economic-commercial process as tangible goods and products and, without customs restrictions, can circulate just as easily on the international market. Yet while the cultural product may be subjected to the same laws of commerce as tangible goods, the scope for competition in marketing it is highly restricted. Only the major players that dominate the communications and information revolution are in a position to influence thought and behaviour.

In other words, the cultural exchange that is operating at present in the pathway forged by free trade is grossly lopsided, an imbalance fed by the disparity between the cultures armed with advanced communications and information technology, on one hand, and those deprived of the legislative or technological means to impose equitable interaction between cultures, peoples and societies, on the other. Globalisation by any other name is simply Western cultural dominance.

In contrast to the culture of globalisation, national cultures in the countries of the South and elsewhere are characterised by specificity and consistency. They have the capacity to bind people together spiritually and mentally through a common set of values, a collective memory, a sense of historical identity and a shared fate. The culture of globalisation does not have the capacity to generate this sense of solidarity. It cannot draw upon collective memory since it is severed from any past, even if it derives inspiration from history in order to appropriate fashion, music and art wrested from their original, indigenous context, synthesised and given a cosmopolitan packaging. In essence, globalisation is ahistorical culture.

Some political economists have sought to explain why American culture has become the prime repository of the ideology and symbols of globalisation. They suggest that American cultural pre-eminence is not the product of a cultural rivalry like that expressed by the popular demonstration against the GATT countries. Rather, they contend that a single Western culture exists, and that the true source of discrepancy within European under globalisation relates to the relative status of various countries in the global capitalist hierarchy. They argue that the political circles, multinational corporations, and media and satellite conglomerates that manufacture and control globalisation are dismantling the international code that came into being in the wake of World War II, and which allowed countries of the South the opportunity to benefit from cultural and economic assistance from the UN, its specialised agencies, and both the superpowers vying for supremacy in the Cold War.

The manufacturers of globalisation are now seeking to establish a new international code that will serve to maintain the cohesiveness of the Western world (despite the contradictions and disparities that divide its components) against the disenfranchised countries of the periphery.

At one point, it was possible for nation states to maintain and regenerate their sovereignty over national culture through two principal institutions. The first was the family, the primary unit in the social structure, which fostered a national cultural conscience through networks of social values instilled in its members from childhood. The second was the school, which supplemented the formative functions of the family by instilling the bases of national culture and civic responsibility.

Political and economic changes, however, have deprived these two institutions of their determinative role in socialisation and acculturation. The media has emerged as a new instrument of cultural and value production. It is gaining ascendancy through the revolution in communications and information technology, and by virtue of the fact that educational policy and the school system are no longer capable of fulfilling the people's needs within the framework of the nation state. The disintegration of the system of national culture in the South has cleared the way for the mechanisms of cultural globalisation, which are to homogenise the world within a single value system that will respond passively to the demands of the world market.

In this context, the culture and laws of globalisation represent the ascendancy of visual over written culture. The written word has dominated since the Sumerians invented Cuneiform in 3600BC, and has formed the basis of mass communications since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Writing, however, is not one of the mechanisms for the dissemination of globalisation -- post-literate culture. This development would not have been possible were it not for the enormous breakthroughs in communications technology that have enabled the transmission of cultural production across national boundaries and geographical obstacles at the speed of light.

As ideological conflict fades from the international arena, and cultural conflict emerges, the ramifications of this technology are enormous. With the network of satellites that spans the world, it is now possible to attain cultural hegemony through the transmission of culture- and value-laden images to all parts of the world.The US at present is the most influential locus of the cultural globalisation endeavour in its monopolistic form. Its technological prowess has become the determinant factor in the promulgation of consumer culture.In order for this culture to prevail, localised cultures must be distorted and marginalised, while redundant infrastructures are reproduced time and again. Only in this way can greed, exploitation, irrationality, corruption and bribery flourish so abundantly.

*The writer is head of the Journalism Department at Cairo University's Faculty of Mass Communications.