Globalization and the Prospects for Cosmopolitan World Society.[1]

 

Barrie Axford and Richard Huggins

Department of Politics

Oxford Brookes University

Oxford
OX3 OBP

UK

tel: 00-44-01865-483934/483936

e-mail: baxford@brookes.ac.uk

rhuggins@brookes.ac.uk

 

 

 

Introduction:

 

In this paper we will argue that globalization reveals, and to some extent enhances, the prospects for cosmopolitan society and cosmopolitan identities, while noting that it can also produce quite other results.  The argument is informed less by utopian visions of a putative “cosmopolis”[2] or by a universalist ethic, than by a regard for  evidence which points to the intensification of certain cultural and organisational features of world society, and by other forms of trans and post-nationalization which are expressions of what is often called globalization from below.  Such evidence points to a radical deterritorialization of social relationships; and at most towards a global civil society.   However, our more cautious position is that the sort of global civil society thus configured looks less like conventional strains of normative cosmopolitanism, and more like a form of transnational network society.  In itself this fact is not discommoding for the development of global civil society, but it does raise some issues about the sort of cosmopolitan society that is emerging, and for some, doubts about its authenticity.

 

The argument assumes the growing statelessness of world society in an period of intense globalization, in which the power of “ worldwide models” or cultural scripts to define and legitimate agendas for local action is very pronounced ( Meyer et al,1997,153-4 ).  But for the purposes of this paper we are more exercised by the extent to which various transnational phenomena - “actor-networks” ( Latour, 1993 ) and “global -webs” ( Reich, 1991) - are interrogating received definitions of political, economic and cultural space and the identities attached to these ( Axford, 1999a and b ).

 

To reiterate; in what follows we will argue that evidence of growing transnationalization augurs and perhaps even constitutes a cosmopolitan global society.  This is not to accept that globalization from below must lead, willy-nilly, to a cosmopolitan civil society.  Indeed, even to construe what is emerging as cosmopolitan , we need to step outside both liberal discourses on key concepts such as political community, and neo-Tocquevillian assumptions about the appropriate- the natural- spaces of civic association [3].  In other words we have to abjure the dominant spatial paradigm of territoriality which still determines whether we treat some identities and attachments as authentic and others as not.  This paradigm has placed boundaries around some of the most fundamental attachments of the modern world, notably community, nationality and citizenship.  Of course, it is now commonplace to depict territoriality and the identities attached to territories as everywhere in retreat under the impact of globalizing forces.  However three strong and related responses to this trend bear witness to the continued power of the territorial narrative.  The first is the emergence or re-emergence of communal, nationalist and ethnic identities as part of a self-conscious backlash politics, sometimes romaticised as “resistance to globalization”, despite the facts that such phenomena are themselves part of the dialectic of globalization, and the claim by at least some of these forces to embody a conscious alternative version of globalization, especially where they manifest civilizational or religious identities.  The second is the somewhat vitiated, but still potent, force of the legal fiction of sovereignty , or of its more lumpen cousin, non-interference.  The third is to treat global phenomena, such as trans-territorial networks , or various signifiers of global cultures , as in some way inauthentic, either devoid of, or else incapable of sustaining social solidarity, providing social capital and the attributes of “real” communities.   It goes without saying that some strains of communitarian thinking are in the forefront of this line of attack.

 

 We will return to these arguments later, but the overarching point here is that while it is entirely appropriate to address the putative widening of the moral and political boundaries of “community” under the impact of globalization, and to question whether this does or does not reveal a rude and perhaps an unselfconscious cosmopolitanism, it may be that in order to do so, we have to reject both liberal and assimiliationist  models of community ( that is, models which traffic conventionally “thin” or  “thick” versions of community, democracy and identity ) in order to make sense of a world in which there are now possibilties for multiple allegiances and identities.  Clearly all this constitutes an uncomfortable zone for social analysis.

 

In a recent intervention on these matters, Zygmunt Baumann has written about the discrepancy between “power”, which is global, and “politics”, which is still resolutely national, with the gap between them largely devoid of agency.  Although this view provides some purchase on the consequences of globalization, it is a misreading of the density and robustness of global civil society and a rather limited view of the nature and capacities of different types of agency in its construction.  While it is true that the world is characterised by some asymmetry between the growing extra-territorial nature of much power ( especially economic power ) and the continuing territoriality of the ways in which people live much of their everyday lives, we will try to show that global civil society is increasingly rich and populated by significant agents who demonstrate a practical citizenship. Some of these, to be sure, are part of local and transnational resistance to globalization, where that can be read as the globalization of the Western cultural account, but there are a host of other political and cultural forces and actors - world religions and diasporas, IGOs and INGOs and , most germane to this discussion, transnational social movements and transnational networks of actors - which all presage a new sort of global politics.  When analysing forms of transnational sociability and political activism with a view to assessing whether they map onto received  notions about cosmopolitan society, we will have to dispense with conventional wisdom about what constitute “thick” and “thin” affinities and imaginaries, since these notions too are problematised by the processes of globalization. One basic premise does remain true; namely that political communities have to be built from the bottom up and not the other way round, and this fact bears on the ways in which a global civil society can subsist.  To address these issues, first we will consider globalization as a multidimensional process, and indicate why the contradictory nature of globalization  reveals new opportunities for structuration, along with new forms of politics and civility; offer a nuanced reading of cosmopolitan prospects, and examine some sites at which a cosmopolitan global civil society is emerging.

 

Enacting globalization:

By globalization we mean the processes through which the world is becoming a single place ( Axford, 1995, 1997, 1999, Robertson, 1992 and 1998 ).  Of course the idea of a single place must be treated with some caution in order to avoid the impression of an homogenised space in which global structures and processes simply have the power to meld individual subjects, communities and localities, as well as whole cultures.  As Roland Roberstson says, this is a matter of recognising both a growing “concrete interdependence” in and a greater consciousness” of the world, while insisting that neither of these should be taken as uncontested, let alone complete. We favour a relatively strong version of globalization, albeit one which draws attention to its multidimensional character.  Globalizing processes involve variable, but usually significant, shifts in the spatial ordering and reach of networks ( for example in finance, trade, communications, other forms of technology and migration , as well as in cultural goods and ideas ) in the stretching of personal and social relationships  across time and space, and in organisational forms and functions ( including the paradigm political forms of the modern territorial state and the international system of states ).  It is also a process which triggers important changes in consciousness, as individual and collective actors embrace, oppose or in some way are “constrained to identify” ( Robertson, 1992 ) with the global condition.  The study of globalization requires attention both to material considerations, such as the volume of goods traded, or the market penetration of global products, and to the meanings which attach to these “transnational connections “ ( Hannerz, 1996 ).  Only by examining the extent and intensity of global consciousness  is it possible to estimate the impact of global processes upon more -or-less situated and more-or-less sensitive and vulnerable actors, and estimate the strength or fragility of global institutions.  During different historical periods of globalization, the density of social relationships across borders varied enormously.  At the end of this century, it is clear that through various  media - the burgeoning capacity of electronic communications to compress both time and space; changes in technology which allow production and culture to be divorced from place; the pervasiveness of global ideologies on subjects such as the environment and human rights; and recent seismic shifts in the world’s geo-political balance - the world is now thoroughly, if contentiously, globalized.   

 

Like the construction of political community, globalization is usefully seen as an enacted process, one in which there are reflexive relationships between actors and the conditions of action.  Given the tendency to discuss both globalization and normative cosmopolitanism without much reference to agency , this is an important insight, one which may well afford a purchase on the vagaries of global civil society construction.  The part played by agency in the reproduction, but also the transformation of structure can be seen in the ways in which social institutions ( rules) as frameworks for action are initiated, legitimated and diffused by the practices of actors.   In the global circumstance, agents are faced not just by a dominant set of structural and cultural properties, largely based on the foundational principle of territoriality, but by intersecting, overlapping and  sometimes contradictory sets , where institutional scripts - local, national, democratic, gender, welfare , inter and supra-national, and so on - cross-cut.  One of the effects, perhaps the single most important effect, of these changes is to problematise what constitutes a political sphere or a cultural order and who are to be allotted roles as legitimate and competent actors in them.  Globalization has relativised the world and identities in it by penetrating or dissolving the boundaries around previously closed ( or partially closed ) systems, often of a communal or ethnic variety , creating, or beginning to create, inter-societal, supra and even post-territorial discursive spaces and networks of relationships along the time-space edges of existence. Along the way, various transformations are in train, including reconceptualisations of existing categories of social stratification and in key signifiers such as race, class, gender, sexual preference, and locality, along with key associations such as citzenship and nationality. The upshot is a rearranged ( or rearranging ) social and political space.  Globalizing forces alter the frame of agency because they make traditional boundaries and subjectivities ambiguous, possibly even unsustainable, except by dint of reinvention or ( contra  cosmopolitanism ) through retrenchment.  

 

  The labile quality of globalization as described above points to processes which are reshaping the contours of social action and redefining the space of the political and the identity spaces of individuals and collective actors  This transformative capacity glosses how we interpret both the prospects for cosmopolitan society and the ideal of cosmopolitanism itself, because we may be dealing with political forms and imaginaries which are effectively de novo, but which we are still prone to judge using concepts and models more suited to a different age.  Of course we may judge that it is neither possible nor desirable to abjure these legacies entirely.

 

Cosmopolitan society and globalization.

So globalization problematises key modern concepts, associations and practices.  Not to be coy, almost every practical feature of state sovereignty and behavioural autonomy is subject to international and global constraints.  Because of this, significant changes are taking place in the definition of what constitutes a political community, and in the definition of political and other statuses under it, as well as in the very architecture of governance ( Held,1995, 1997; Cerny, 1991 etc ).  Echoing a much-bruited position, David Held says that in face of globalizing  pressures, two central elements of liberal democratic theory of sovereignty  become difficult to sustain. The first , the idea of a political community of fate, can no longer be located within the boundaries of the territorial nation-state. Second, the locus of effective political power has shifted from national governments to a host of international regimes and forums, international and regional organisations, and a variety of transnational corporations. The general tendency is towards a global system in which there is overlapping or multi-layered authority and divided ,or perhaps, multiple loyalties.  These ideas are no longer particularly contentious, except perhaps among the depleted ranks of realists and, curiously, for born-again leftists, who have exhumed the nation-state as a bastion of resistance to global neo-liberalism.  Political communites , says Held , have rarely, if ever, existed in isolation as bounded geographical totalities, and , of course, boundaries have always been more permeable than much social science supposed.  With a more eloquent and certainly a more postmodernist tinge, Sousa Santos opines that after two centuries of pronounced deterritorialization of social relations, the community cannot limit itself to being the territoriality of contiguous space.  We live, he says, in an era of opaque, local-global and immediate-final nexus. The despatialised “neocommunity” transforms the local , the immediate and the global, so that the world becomes ( has become) an “intersubjective web of reciprocities” ( 1996 ).  There is a palpable richness and a vein of contention here that we cannot hope to deal with now.  At all events, is this the sort of milieu that requires and could sustain a cosmopolitan society and democracy?

 

Held appears to suggest that it must and could.  In his version of a cosmopolitan democracy, in addition to the existence of overlapping and spatially variable sovereignties, there are a multitude of political communities with multiple citizenships ( Held, 1995, 1998, and with a different agenda, Bull, 1977  ).  Indeed, the latter proposal is the basis for his version of a cosmopolitan democracy.  This version is not a call for a single “world government”, however benign and however accountable.  Rather, it looks to the instantiation of a system based on the principles of democratic autonomy ( in some respects eminently liberal notions about equal rights and equal obligations, and circumstances where human beings can freely adjudge their common conditions of association ) within a framework of a democratic public law which is entrenched across borders - in his terms a radicalized democracy.  And if all this appears just a tad utopian, Held is at pains to point to the actual scope for enacting aspects of his programme, some of them of greater promise than others: through a more dynamic  post-Cold War UN, more confident in its role as peacemaker and pressing for greater powers; in the European Union as the site of an audacious experiment in trans-territorial governance and democracy; and through the growth in trans-border communities and networks of affect and interest that afford the basis for both “informal” citizen participation and a healthy global civil society.

 

Without doubt, Held’s cosmopolitanism is of an altogether more cautious variety than is found in some brands of Idealist thinking, being a blend of normative and legal argument linked to specific institutional reforms and innovations.  Other proponents of cosmopolitanism advocate the whole philosophical package of universal, trans-cultural authority which is the hallmark of Kantian ethics.  For example, Martha Nussbaum ( 1996 ) with due acknowledgement to the Stoics,but very little regard for issues outside the ethical domain, insists that rights, obligations and  commitments do not stop short at the borders of the nation.  She counsels a primary allegiance to “ the worldwide community of human beings”, in which educative processes gradually narrow the gap between particular and broader loyalties, and between the local and humanity as a whole. 

 

It would be under-selling many of the responses to this sort of argument to suggest that they are merely sceptical.   They range from modest objections to the empirical thinness of the argument, through cautionary tales of the difficult logistics involved in constructing a cosmopolitan society,  to full-blown diatribes on the dangers posed by cosmopolitanism  and its insidious variant multiculturalism,  to the virtues of patriotism and community.  Let us examine some of these positions as a way into a more considered treatment of the relationships between transnationalization and cosmopolitanism.  

 

To begin at the highest level of principled objection.  Many of the responses to Martha Nussbaum’s plea for a humanistic cosmopolitanism  treat local attachments as peremptory and absolute.  For Gertrude Himmelfarb, cosmopolitanism “ obscures and even denies...the givens of life: parents, ancestors, family, race, religion, heritage, history , culture, tradition, community -- and nationality. “. Benjamin Barber , another social analyst exercised by  the motivational crisis allegedly threatening democratic life, argues that to “bypass” the local is to end up “nowhere”, only in bootless “abstraction and disembodiment”.  The message bears repetition and we shall return to it more directly below: moral communities and politically correct forms of constitutional, civic nationalism ( as opposed to the more visceral, and, some would say, more vogue-ish , ethnic variety ) are best nurtured within the confines of the bounded nation and the territorial state.  Beyond these confines lies a world which is not only distant, but, in many regions, liminal.  Strangers should not, can not be treated in the same way as friends.  In the same volume, Amy Gutmann opines that to think of ourselves as “citizens of the world”, is “ morally misguided and politically dangerous”.  These are world views of some intensity and, on the face of it, not amenable to the cosmopolitan plea that distant strangers are also interlocutors with whom, in an interconnected world, situated actors must enter into dialogue in order to secure the conditions for rule, justice and community, or common participants in what are by  now transnational public spheres.

 

In an interesting gloss on the virtues of the local and the national relative to the global and cosmopolitan, are those arguments which treat globalization as a facet of capitalist expansion, driven largely by transnational corporations and financial institutions, and in which cosmopolitanism is at least complicit.  In such versions, what passes for cosmopolitanism is really only the global  “village of the liberal managerial class”.  In a recent paper on just this theme, Leslie Sklair offers a view of the global system in which a transnational capitalist class ( TCC ) constitute a global power elite, ruling class or inner circle ( which ? ) made up of the executives of transnational corporations, globalising state bureaucrats, politicians and professionals and what he calls “consumerist elites” ( 1998, 4 ) who demonstrate all those features of the power elite familiar to students of the community power debates which lacerated American political science and sociology in the 1960’s and ‘70’s.  Now leaving aside  intriguing  but, for purposes of this paper, tangential questions about the appropriate methodology needed to accurately map any such power elite, Sklair’s view of globalization typifies the one-dimensional approach to globalization that simplifies its provenance and caricatures its complex dynamics.  To be fair, Sklair’s global system does contain oppositional elements, in the shape of opponents of capitalism and varieties of anti-globalists, but generally they have a thin time of it.  However, he is silent on the complex and contradictory relations between economy, culture and politics, on the intertwinings of an economic system admittedly dependent on the principle of commodification, and cultural terrains which are both determined by, yet still manage to elude and sometimes to subvert that principle.  A multi-dimensional view of globalization , by contrast makes no such a-priori assumptions about the economic realism of the global system.  As such, it does not underestimate the depth or the pluralistic nature of global civil society.

 

And yet the jury has still to be out on the relationship between globalization and democracy.  Ben Barber’s ( 1996 ) bleak vision for our age - either tribalism or globalism - is painted as threatening to both thin and thick versions of democracy.  He discerns in the forces of tribalism the “jihad” principle, where “culture is pitted against culture, people against people”; while the pressures of homogenising globalization, that “onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity, that mesmerise the world with fast music, fast computers and fast food”  delivers  only “McWorld”. On his reckoning, neither of these forces respect democracy nor have they any moral currency with which to sustain it.  McWorld holds out the promise of peace, prosperity and stability, but only at the price of autonomy, community and identity.  Critically, it demands and expects neither citizenship nor participation. This pathological image of a globalised world roots the crisis of late-modern societies in questions of motivation and identity, as, in a rather more “down-home” fashion , do the complaints by Robert Putnam and others that in America and maybe the rest of the West, we have squandered our reserves of social capital on the chimera of an easy life of consumption ( 1992 and 1995 ).  Jihad , let it be said, can and probably  will deliver vibrant, even visceral local identities, easy mobilisation and a strong sense of community.  In such a world you know who and where you are, but ( from the standpoint of cosmopolitanism at least ) at the cost of parochialism , the need for stern defence of enclaves and the enduring suspicion of strangers.  Not much room in either of these for a philosophical cosmopolitanism or for anything more than an instrumental connectivity which realises a “community” of advantage.

 

Less apocalyptic accounts of the impact of globalization upon democracy  are still aware of the threats  as well as the opportunities afforded by globalization for citizenship.  Richard Falk has argued recently ( 1996, 2000 ) that the growing importance of transnational relations is weakening citizenship in many states.   This is an interesting argument, one predicated on the decline of social capital and existing national institutions as a direct result of the increase in bonds of interest and solidarity across borders.   Because the “logic of market opportunity” no longer coincides with the “logic of territorial loyalty”, elites (in particular) are more and more likely to create links and solidaries across borders rather than within them.  Citizens, concerned either to resist or augment the effects of globalization often follow suit, organising locally and transnationally.  The nation-state and the national democracy become pigs-in-the -middle of this re-spatialising of interest and affect.  To be sure, what transpires is an alternative form of globalization, one which, says Falk, is part of the psycho-political adjustment to the deterritorialization or hollowing -out of the state.  One of the interesting questions which arise from his thesis is whether, if at all, the alleged loss of social capital at the level of the nation -state and national societies is being or can be replenished by trans-territorial activity , to create even a simulacrum of a cosmopolitan civic culture. Falk would answer in the negative, despite growing evidence of transnationality, which in his estimation is no more than the politics of the relatively powerless faced with the extra-territorial power of corporations in business and finance.

 

Of course Falk raises some pertinent questions about the possibility or likelihood of forms of “global citizenship”, which derive , in part, from the logistical and resource  problems of ensuring effective participation by non-elites at the level of the global system, or in the case of the European Union, the regional level of governance.  There is clearly a good deal to be said for this caution, especially when it stops short of proclaiming a global citizenry, but there is a weakness , even a failure of imagination in his view of transnational social forces as only being oppositional or, in a more diffuse way, just counter-cultural , rather than constitutive of a transforming world polity.  Politics or globalization from below, for Falk, is a strategy for offsetting the tendency for national governments to be coopted by  market -oriented forces pressing “globalization from above”.  In terms of establishing a functioning global civil society this has to be seen as a properly democratising process, notably in areas such the environment, human rights and human reproduction, where forms of opposition become institutionalised over time,  but it does rather underplay the extent to which the emergence of networks transnationalizes key areas of public policy and citizen activity, and thus instantiates and normalises the notion of global public spheres.    To be sure Falk is sensitive to these issues and to the extent to which globalization poses hard questions for the institution of territoriality .  He acknowledges that transnational social forces are playing a part in the development of a global civil society, and even recognises the postmodern quality of trans and post-national politics.  For all this there is a kind of nostalgia in his assessment that the rise of transnational social forces -  in which rise he discerns as an “innovative and variegated type of politics” - “represents a further withdrawal of energy from traditional domains of citizens action”.

 

Indeed, one of the difficulties that many observers have with treating the emergence of  “postmodern geographies” ( O’Tuathail, 1998 ) as transforming political space and identities, is that they cannot imagine , or else want to reject, the normative and empirical arguments of the transnational and / or cosmopolitan thesis.  Communitarians of various persuasions are unconvinced by the universalist claims of cosmopolitans, instead stressing the cultural particularity of rights and citizenship and the palpable cultural “thickness” of “real” communities.  They also want to dispute the claims of the more enthusiastic proponents of globalization as to the scope and intensity of interconnectedness and over the role and power of the territorial state ( Bellamy and Catiglione, 1998 ).   

 

Transnationalization:

The debate about the social morphology of transnational society is instructive on the tensions between communitarians and transnationalists/cosmopolitans.  Transnationalization is seen in the growing reach and density of networks and flows: of goods between nations, business and tourism, in the post-national politics of INGOs and the cyborg cultures of “organisationless “ transnational corporations.  Such interconnections globalise the world in a measurable way, but do so more profoundly because they are redefining the perceptions and experience of more and more actors - or so the argument goes ( Axford, 1999a ). For communitarians, networks are seen as thin, stringy and inauthentic contexts for identity formation and social intercourse.  At best they are instrumental, at worst ( pace Falk, Tarrow, Barber ) destructive of real places and firm identities ( Nussbaum’s critics ).  For communitatrians, only rarely are global spaces traversed by true cosmopolitans (and these are to be distrusted) competent transcultural travellers or connoisseurs and lovers of “otherness”.  Even Ulf Hannerz ( 1992 ) cautions that we should not mistake the creation of global spaces for cosmopolitanism, since world spaces are often no more than hyper-space.  Confusingly he also says ( 1996 ) that the idea of “transnational communities is not a contrdiction in terms, because what is personal, primary and has the feeling of intimacy is not always restricted in space.  In other words the spatial reach of networks is, in itself, no barrier to their “thickness”.  Broadly speaking  this is also our position.

 

Received models of  territorial societies and bounded states depict them as the containers of both thick and thin identities. By ‘thick’ we intend a notion which is closer to the idea of community ( gemeinschaft ) perhaps even of  habitus, though without its more brutish overtones. Here the idea of ‘us’ refers to palpable communites and the jumble of meanings that bind people to particular places and to the past ( Lash and Urry, 1994, 316 ). Thick identities constitute a group of people, closing the gaps between them. By ‘thin’we imply more apparent instrumentality in relationships and an emphasis on procedures which open up spaces for and between people as individuals, thereby respecting their autonomy. In some measure, but only loosely, this notion is akin to the established concept of gesellschaft.  Of course  one of the problems with conceptualising transnational networks as thick in the sense used here, is that thick cultures are seen as providing the basis for a cohesive, and probably exclusive form of community, while thin constructs seem to owe more to the observance of a common set or rules or protocols, which overlay, disguise , or even sanitise more elemental attachments. Thick communities have the feel of wholeness, they are overarching and primary, while thin networks seem partial, convenient, secondary or ephemeral. To some extent this imagery demonstrates the continued power of the territorial narrative and the continued appeal of ‘real’ places. Like Monty Python, we all know implicitly what we mean when we say that the extension of social relationships across space and across borders is likely to produce only thin networks of  capital, production, communication, INGOs and epistemic communities. In this imagination, firm or thick cultures are found in localities, in bounded nations, in ethnies, in tribes and in criminal gangs. Where exceptions are made, as in the case of cults and diasporas, it is because they are vivified by transcendent and all-subsuming spirituality, by love of  particular places, and occasionally, as in the case of some transnational social movements, by ideology or some powerful expressive motivation which augments mere connection. Imagery apart, the de-centring of the nation-state and of territorial identities still has to be addressed through the growing spatial reach of transnational networks, the increasing density of their actions and interactions in different domains, and the changing consciousness of networked actors.  At this point in the contested transformation of territoriality, the thickness or thinness of their ontologies is perhaps less crucial than the fact that their appearance is discommoding to this order, though their character or identity  remains crucial to the sort of world that is emerging.

Transnationalization in practice.

             In the final section of the paper we will look at different forms of transnational  practice in different domains. We will do this by examining i) recent work on transnational networks and movements, which either adopts a world society problematic, or else is located as part of a discussion of the “geographies of resistance” ( Pile and Keith, 1997 ); ii) by discussing some forms of radical connectivity, applied both to virtual networks and to those which now routinely use information and communications technology to compress the world, and iii) through a consideration of different ways of conceptualising European unity in the spaces and flows of the European Information Society.  

 

            a)Transnational networks are part of the changing logic of collective action in the globalized world ( Cerny, 1995 ), but the “radical interdependence” across borders that they exemplify and foster ( Campbell, 1996, 96 ) is nowhere near modal, although it is increasingly dense and visible. As Michael Mann says ( 1998, 187 )  however  we choose to define transnational networks, there has been a huge increase in the shift away from local networks of interaction to the national, the international and the transnational , and of course to the global. One index of this development is the growth of international non-governmental organisations ( INGOs ) over the last one hundred years or so.  As part of a study to demonstrate the roles played by INGOs in shaping world culture and impacting upon states and inter-statist organisations, Boli and Thomas ( 1997 ) chart the increase in active cross-border organisations from a base of 200 at the turn of the century to 800 in 1930, to 4000 in 1980. Their argument is part of a strong case for transnationality, tempered by the recognition that territorial states and their offshoots still exercise great power in the world polity. In this hybrid world INGOs as transnational actors in areas like population policy, the environment, the status and role of women and  technical standardization,  “ employ limited resources to make rules, set standards, propagate principles and broadly represent “humanity” vis-a-vis states and other actors “ ( 1997, 172 ).  Related evidence on the impact of transnational  INGO activity on the policies of national states can be found in Jakobsen’s account of the way in which transnational dynamics affected the policy of Brazil and India on climate change ( 1997 ).  In like vein, Mato ( 1996 ) seeks to reveal the manner in which transnational networks, and what he terms other “global agents” have been instrumental in the reconstruction of civil societies in Latin America.  

 

            On a more cautious note, Sidney Tarrow ( 1996 ) is agnostic on the question of whether a transnational civil society is being constructed out of the many cases of diffusion, political exchange, issue networks and social movements, all spawn of the globalization of the world economy and the greater density of transnational ties ( 1996, 14 ). He is aware that notionally objective conditions-- economic and geo-political flux--are not enough in themselves to trigger collective action, just as a sense of common identity or a more diffuse awareness of shared interests may not be sufficient to produce action. Questions of transaction costs and other resource considerations are also critical in turning potential into actual mobilization. Tarrow acknowledges that there are important forms of transnational collective action, but insists that most of what is defined as transnational collective action, or  more narrowly as transnational social movements are not actually cases of unified movements which cross national boundaries at all, but forms of action which, on the face of it, are more in keeping with the world as it is, being largely  national or international in scope and  character. This is quite a powerful critique, but in key respects misses the point, which lies less in the taxonomic status of networked actors, and more in the kind of politics which their existence opens up, and the challenges they pose to the script of nationality and national definitions of value, even where their remit may be thoroughly local and their actions confined to particular  places.  Terrains of resistance, as Paul Routledge says, comprise a “multiplicity of possibilities and movements” ( 1996, 526 ) and can refer to any site where contestation between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic  powers and discourses takes place ( 1996, 516 ).

             In all this activity there is not and probably never can be any uniformity of purpose or organisational style.  Local resistors meet with their transnational counterparts only on the site of contestation that is the territory and the representational forms of the nation-state, or  maybe in opposition to the ideology and practices of global neo-liberalism or unaccountable government. Even where they consciously challenge globalization, they are often implicated in it, and thus , as Castells says ( 1997, 70 ) are themselves “ symptoms of our societies”, impacting upon social structures and cultures with variable intensities and outcomes. Which view seems not too distanced from the more assertive and up-beat formulation offered by Ulrich Beck in his discussion of the “sub-politics” of an emerging cosmopolitan world society ( 1996 ).  Like Castells, Beck argues that transnational networks are symptoms of the current disorder, which in his case is the advent of a global “risk society”.  Beck insists that the contingent qualities of the world risk society promote intense reflexivity and open up the prospects for a cosmopolitan society made up of “global mutualities”, cooperative global institutions and forms of “sub-politics” which give shape to what he calls the “world public”. Sub-politics constitutes a form of globalization from below in that its appearance through new transnational actors, such as Greenpeace,  establishes a politics which is outside and beyond the representative institutions of the political system of nation-states ( 1996, 18 ). Critically, he suggests that “sub-politics” sets politics free by changing the rules and boundaries of the political “ ( , 1996, 18 ). In all these accounts of transnational networks, the importance of  information and communications technologies ( ICTs ) is seen as critical.

            b)The key role of ICTs in at least facilitating the formation and work of transnational networks is acknowledged widely. Castells writes  that new technologies are critical to the survival of social movements , especially where they are oppositional. Referring to the “Zapatistas” in Mexico, he opines that  without the aid of fax, Internet and alternative media they might have remained an isolated and localized guerrilla force ( 1997, 107 ). In an aside to a more thorough-going examination of transnational migrant communities and the nation-state, John Rex muses that “ethnicity today often operates by e-mail” ( Rex, 1998, 73 ).  But aside from their obvious instrumental uses in promoting what Dominic Anderson calls “ long-distance nationalism”  and other, seemingly more respectable kinds of  social movement, there is often some reluctance to treat with networks actually constituted by electronic communications as authentic, despite the fact that they are par excellence symptomatic of a globalized world.  In this respect Tarrow’s sentiments are typical. He worries lest the growing web of  virtual networks, in the form of e-mail conferences; gossip-swaps and so on, are proving so seductive in terms of their ability to reduce transaction costs and afford “visibility” that they blind participants to the real social costs incurred. These are that such networks do not, indeed can not deliver the same “crystallization of mutual trust and collective identity” ( 1996, 14 ) in other words the same thickness, as the interpersonal ties seen for example among the founders of nineteenth centuy socialism or Islamic fundamentalism. Here once again is a clear rehearsal of the points raised above. Electronic networks by definition, are seen as inauthentic, incapable of being either subject or context. These sentiments echo the debate about the impact of media cultures on the stock of social capital in the United States ( Putnam, 1995 ) and are also part of a neo-Tocquevillian romanticism about the propriety of certain political forms and practices relative to others.  Part of the problem with countering these claims is that empirical evidence on the construction and functioning of electronic networks is patchy. Prescription and perhaps hyperbole abound.  Appadurai ( 1996 ) waxes lyrical about the profusion of  “diasporic public spheres” effected through the mediascapes and technoscapes of a deterritorializing globality, but we know little about the actual working of these, because the more lumpen reality is that to date there is a lack of the kind of ethnographic studies of  electronic networks which are now commonplace for other transnational communities and transnational networks ( but see Basch ,1994 and Turkle, 1997).  And  yet “global communications spaces” ( Schlesinger, 1992 ) as well as Appadurai’s mediascapes are obvious sites for the examination of communities entirely reliant upon electronic mediation, even if this has to be conceptualised as the study of diverse audiences. Mediascapes offer large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and ethnoscapes for audiences throughout the world ( Uncapher, 1994 ). As sharers in a mediated culture, these audiences  “ experience themselves as a complicated and interconnected repertoire of print, celluloid, electronic screens and billboards “ ( Uncapher, 1994, 2). Too slick? Possibly, but most assuredly these developments bear strongly on questions of  meaning and identity. But when the opportunity arises for the creation of new transnational, borderless environments in cyberspace, the convention is that by far the most durable are those which allow people to interact in a shared place where they can feel secure. The attempt to construct actor-networks which are more than  “thread-like, wiry and stringy” to quote Latour ( 1997 ) and to analogise properties of the”real -world”--from bills of rights to the virtual mansion as a meeting place--demonstrates just how strong are our older fictions.

            c) In the European Union many of the issues raised here are being played out in the most audacious experiment in regional integration seen in the modern world. Current interest in the integrative process centres on whether the EU is to be understood as some kind of superstate, an exercise in advanced intergovernmentalism, or, as is now fashionable, sui generis, a unique, multi-level polity and exemplar of the ‘new governance’ ( for a summary of these positions, see Hix, 1998 ). In the new Europe of the 1990’s all sorts of boundaries are being redefined ( Axford and Huggins, 1999 ) partly by dint of the liberal ideology of deregulation which has driven the Single Market process, partly because of the collapse of state socialism, and also through the space and time devouring capacities of electronic communications. Along with global markets, digital technologies are attenuating the territorial state’s claims to autonomy and its status as the sole locus and guarantor of the  imagined community of the nation. Despite all this confusion over the way to conceptualise the EU polity, the official version of constructing Europe owes much to a “conceptual grid “ ( Caporaso, 1996 ) which converts what are really questions about transnational governance into the niceties of territorial government, thereby suggesting that uniting Europe is, or can be, a process akin to that of nation-building. But the EU does not fit easily into any accepted category of government, and its lack of  legitimacy among national populations in member states  makes it difficult to conceive of it as an imagined community. To consolidate the integration process, the Commission has given prominence to the idea of a European identity as a key building block in the integration process ( Laffan, 1996 ).  But the “inarticulate major premises “ ( Ruggie, 1992 ) governing the ideals of territorial rule and ways of legitimating it culturally, seem at odds with the more postmodern concept of Europe as  “space of flows”, which Ruggie also puts forward, and which is the rationale of the internal market process ( though not of the Maastricht Treaty). Now to some extent, the EU has already addressed the fact that the idea of ‘a’ Europe is in reality only a pot-pourri of local, regional, national, ethnic and even global identity claims. So pluralism of sorts is already part of its wish-list for a viable “united” Europe. 

            If Europe is a space of flows, even a loosely articulated multi-level polity, then it is possible to imagine Europe as a network polity and civil society, as a space created and reproduced through transnational , regional and local networks of interaction--cultural, commercial, scientific, military and educational--rather than, or as well as, a territory to be governed or regulated in the usual sense of these terms. This is clearly Castells’s intention in his discussion of the network state in Europe ( 1997b) and it informs Michael Mann’s insistence ( 1998, 205) that “Euro”, as he puts it, is an ecumene of interaction networks, composed of multiple, overlapping and intersecting networks of specialists, Euromanagers, Socrates exchange students and so on. However, as I have suggested, this mildly postmodern interpretation runs up against the imagining of those seeking European cultural integration, perhaps even  a ‘thick’ European identity. These conflicting visions of Europe collide in the policy  space of the European Information Society Project ( ISPO ). 

            Overall the idea of a European Information Society offers a general prescription for a virtual Europe made up of transnational networks ( Bangemann 1994; High Level Group of Experts, 1997; Bangemann, 1997 ). At the same time, it is influenced by two strands of thinking about culture as an integrative force and about the role of ICTs as the chosen means of cultural production and delivery.  The first strand interprets culture as a discourse which transcends national societies and expresses a genuinely European heritage. In this strand, ICTs are integral in mapping a post-national cultural space, which not only affects the ways in which  people interact with each other across borders, but also changes their perceptions through the representation of existing culture, through the ways in which cultural goods are produced and disseminated , and thus through the  ability of people to understand the traditions and cultures of the past. ICTs are thus the gateway to the representation of a new European cultural  metanarrative . 

            By contrast, the second strand emphasises the role of ICTs in reviving local cultures, or the cultural survival of spatial communities of various kinds. Here the EU is mindful of the space annihilating  nature of information technologies, while it also holds out the prospect of new non-spatial “communities of interest”, that is, specialist discourses which presumably subsist in ( rather than transcend ) the wrack, or new-found elan of local cultures and fit alongside the transcendental discourse of European culture.  Leaving aside the functionalist concept of culture on offer in Euro policy statements, this collision of different imaginings of Europe in fact looks quite fruitful and properly inchoate, though it results in a good deal of policy confusion.The increasing reliance on transnational networks and communities of interest to initiate and deliver programmes under the ISPO remit represents a significant institutional innovation and a re-imagining of policy and identity space. In addition it problematises what is meant by community and the sense of what can be taken as integration. Both Michael Mann and Anthony Smith ( 1998 ; 1995 ) wish to distinguish any form of European network identity or symbolic community from national sentiments which are embedded in communities of ritual and emotion. Smith goes so far as to argue that it is impossible to create an authentic European identity in the absence of  real European signifiers, but without much hard evidence it is wiser to be less dogmatic. Our  structurationist, and  mildly  postmodern  position ( Axford, 1995 ), is that the networks and flows of the European infomation society, open up new possibilities for the articulation of  spatial and virtual communities and thus new ways of imagining European unity.

 

Conclusion:

The world order is changing from the modern secular model of territorial communities and identities to one characterised by postmodern networks and flows. This a messy and protracted process, one contested at the level of theory and in practice.  Apocalyptic visions of world dis-order vie with more anodyne philosophical accounts of Kantian universalism, with the ruttedness of everyday politics in between; it was ever thus.  This excursion through some of the issues pertaining to the prospects for a cosmopolitan society under conditions of globalization leads us to believe that transnationalization is not the same thing as unblemished cosmopolitanism; how could it be?  However, as Bruce Robbins suggests ( 1997 ) , in this sort of world ,where so many modern tenets are under challenge, it is only through negotiating the messy, soiling compromises between a normative cosmopolitanism and the descriptive cosmpolitanism contained in the less-than -universal, but robust transnationalism of social movements, virtual networks and the like that a sustainable world future is possible.  As Falk suggests, the struggle is to construct a future through the engagment and impact of transnational forces, which will eventually  fully develop a global civil society worthy of the expression.  In the meanwhile, as Robbins says, while abstraction is pure, impurity is sexier.

    

 

 

 

 

 


[1] This paper is a preliminary version of part of work which will appear in a jointly-authored book. See B. Axford, G. K. Browning and R. Huggins, “ Democracy and Democratization”, Routledge, 2001 ( forthcoming ).

[2] For an elegant and sceptical treatment of  the prospects for cosmopoltan society, see Danilo Zolo’s “Cosmopolis: Prospects for World Government”, Cambridge, Polity, 1997.

[3] Here we are indebted to Michael J Shapiro’s provocative and informative essay on re-imagining the spaces of civic engagement in America.  See “Bowling Blind: Post Liberal Civil Society and the Worlds of neo-Tocquevillian Social Theory”, Baltimore, JHU Press, 1997.