Understanding Late-Twentieth-Century Capitalism: Reassessing the Globalization Theme

Abstract

There are Many Ambiguities Within The Literature on globalization. Some scholars speak of a world that is chunging others use the framework as part of a new univocal discourse to describe late twentieth-century capitalism. Apart from ‘globalization’, many other cartographic and navigational metaphors have been employed to describe the present world order. There is the loss of the ‘magnetic North’; an ‘emerging global civilization’; and a curious notion of an evolving ‘global civil society’. Master concepts like ‘sustainable development’ and ‘world politics’ have consequently become popular and are creeping into international relations discourse. In extreme cases the literature seems to suggest or imply that history is coming to an end on convenient Western socio-cultural terms only. Indeed it seems that proponents of globalization have come to proclaim universality afresh in similar vein to that of those who indulge in and perpetuate the notion of a post-Columbus 500-year capitalist historicism. I do not share the triumphalism of the liberal globalization discourse. It is certainly important to ask whether the wave of technological change, interdependent policy-making, international socialization of production, and time-space compression have or have not come to transcend or replace the complex web of centre-periphery relations. There remains generally a familiar interstate world system, albeit with the spatial and temporal limits to state, market and human interactions experientially compressed. Questions about who rules, who benefits or suffers, and whether prospects for social survival are better or worse remain as important as ever.