Anthony Giddens on Globalization

I think the world which we live in is not the world we anticipated in the Enlightenment. We live in a world which feels to be spinning out of our control so the future which we were supposed to master has become a pain. Globalization means increasing interdependence of world society – it means that what happens here is linked to what happens in China and across the world and vice versa.

I was one of the first people in the world ever to use the term globalization in the early days, it was very hard to get anyone to take it seriously. It’s nicely ironic that we’re now talking about China and the rest of the world having emerged to some kind of parity through globalization because it’s certainly not what was expected at the beginning.

If I wanted to set up a date where I could say that we became the members of a new world society it would be the the time when a satellite system was sent up above the earth making instantaneous communication possible from any part of the earth to any other. That was truly dramatic and revolutionary; much more important than the changes that are going on now – important they might be.

You know the usual idea we have today is that democracy is a Western product and it’s kind of being exported into alien territory in other countries, which is not true at all. Democracy originates in many different cultures including local Chinese culture. Democracy emerges from assemblies of people in villages and towns who take decisions through collective discussion.

I don’t understand why there isn’t more on the role of the civil service in a modern political system which looks at the long term and helps take long term decisions after all the idea of a meritocracy and mandarins comes from China. I wonder why the book has a lot on new technologies but doesn’t seem to have much on the impact of television and directly electronic media on politics.

I feel in a way more pessimistic about the state of the world and it’s much better to feel like the authors do to challenge and do something concrete about it. I think even though I don’t necessarily always agree but my feeling is that we’re living the work which I’ve described as having moved off the edge of history. The main agencies of global governance like the United Nations are probably weakest they’ve ever been.

YARPP List

Related posts:

1. Law 17: Seize the Historical Moment (The Laws of Human Nature)
2. Part 2: Isolate the Victim (The Art of Seduction)
3. Chapter 16: The Capitalist Creed (Sapiens)
4. On Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra Summary (8.4/10)