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World Views

Joachim Hirsch

Globalization has changed the world. Or, more precisely: globalization has radically changed global relationships. Capitalist relations of production have spread across almost the entire globe; combined with the increasingly free flow of capital across national borders, this has led to a restriction of governmental autonomy regarding economic and social politics. These conditions resulted from a political strategy that enabled capital to overcome the 1970s world economic crisis — the second major crisis of this kind in the 20th century. The crisis had emerged from a post-war period that saw an increasing internationalization of capital, giving multinational corporations more power and independence in their dealings with state governments, while at the same time their profit potential was constrained by nationally institutionalized structures that were designed to facilitate a social compromise. During the twentieth century, the capitalist Northwest profited from a ‘Fordist’ capitalism, based on Taylorist mass production and mass consumption. This was characterized by strong trade unions, relatively well developed national social security systems, and state interventionism geared toward full employment. In the decades following World War II, this constellation became a barrier for the deployment of capital. Corporate profits fell and the accumulation of capital stagnated. At the end of the seventies and under US pressure, a deregulation of capital and financial markets was introduced, creating the conditions under which capital could liberate itself from nationally institutionalized regulatory systems. Social compromises were abandoned, groups lobbying for labour interests were undermined, and income distribution shifted internationally in favour of corporate enterprises. Globalization is therefore not based on ‘natural law’ or an evolutionary logic. It is a political project that is the result of a comprehensive, ideological, political and economic offensive, advanced by internationalized capital and cooperating neo-liberal governments. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the East-West conflict made the success of this capitalist neo-liberal campaign complete.

The public perception of this process varies. From one perspective it appears as a threat — against jobs, democracy, national independence and cultural traditions; yet, it also represents a promise. Terms such as ‘global village’ or ‘global civil society’ are indicative of the hope for the development of a more peaceful and democratic world, embracing the ideals of solidarity. People are indeed brought closer together by new information, communication, and transportation technologies. Events that in the past would never have registered are now transmitted in real time to all corners of the world. Confronted by the movement toward universal human rights, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes no longer necessarily enjoy the complete protection of the principle of national sovereignty. As such, global interdependencies are now more visible. It is also more apparent that consumer lifestyles in urban centres of the developed world depend on socio-political conditions elsewhere — most poignantly in the case of oil, the most important lubricant of global capitalism.

As previously nationally circumscribed economies open up and state governments seem increasingly powerless in the face of globally mobile capital, the nation state appears to be in demise. The universal opening of borders is equated with a dismantling of bureaucratic rule — a peaceful ‘global civil society’ in the making. This perception, however, is contradicted by the fact that the neo-liberal restructuring of capitalism was politically implemented by powerful states, i.e., it was forcibly imposed. Albeit, the character and functionality of nation states has changed in the process of globalization. The liberalization of capital and financial markets intensified the competition between distant sites of production, while the need to guarantee profitable conditions in order to attract and retain internationally flexible capital became the determining factor in policy decisions of individual nations. These policies were, if necessary, imposed against the interests of the majority of the respective citizenry. In addition, the political decision-making process shifted in favour of international organizations that were effectively no longer democratically accountable, or toward obscure systems of negotiation between governments and international corporations, all of which resulted in a crucial weakening of democratic structures. The new democratic age, proclaimed after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, turns out to have been an illusion. Accordingly, nation states do not disappear, they change in character. It is democracy, not the nation state, that is being undermined. States reveal themselves now more than ever as coercive power apparatuses whose actions increasingly escape democratic influence.

States are fundamental to capitalist relations of production and therefore cannot simply disappear as long as these conditions exist. However, states change along with economic conditions, class structures and social power balances. The existence of states, i.e., the political fragmentation of the world is, and remains, an important basis for the global accumulation of capital. This accumulation process, in turn, is based on economic, social and political inequalities that are inscribed in the actual state system. Transnational ‘surplus-value accumulation chains’ organized by multinational capital represent a significant basis for rationalization and profit maximization that would not be viable without the world’s fragmentation into individual nations. It is this configuration that allows consumers in privileged parts of the planet to enjoy cheap products that are manufactured elsewhere under extremely low wage and inhumane working conditions. It is also what permits environmentally destructive production to be shifted into peripheral zones, or the use of dependent countries as garbage dumps. At the same time, people remain tethered to national delineations with the consequence that they can be played off against each other. ‘Illegalized’ migration supplies capital with cheap labour and undermines existing wage conditions.

The process of globalization has resulted in the rise of inequalities world-wide. The disparities between capitalist centers and the periphery have continued to grow. Concurrently, former boundaries between ‘first’ and ‘third world’ are blurred. Third world conditions now also proliferate in capitalist urban centres, while new hubs of economic growth develop in some parts of the periphery. Meanwhile, these international relationships of inequality and dependency remain invisible in common geopolitical world maps. What is represented by these maps is merely a web of national borders. Nation states appear as a type of container whose contents and relationships to other states remain hidden. These states are considered to be equal and to differ only in their geographical size. In some sense, this representation reflects a 19th century constellation of states, consisting of an assortment of ostensibly ‘sovereign’ units — without hierarchies and dependencies among them — as if these were still the essential structural elements constituting the current world order. These world maps represent a reality that never existed in such an unambiguous way and that, on account of globalization, exists less and less. In this sense, these maps are ideological in character.

It is therefore appropriate to search for other symbolic representations of dominant world conditions, capable of also cartographically expressing differences, hierarchies and dependencies. If, for example, one was to measure the size of countries on a world map according to their per-capita income, geographically-small Switzerland would far exceed the size of many African countries. If, conversely, one considered wealth in natural resources as the criterion, Switzerland would shrink to a minimum. The number of registered patents would reveal certain states as centers of innovation and accordingly as industrial hubs; the size of weapons arsenals would expose a state’s importance as a power apparatus. If one was to consider the size of oil deposits versus oil consumption, crucial global dependencies would become apparent. The same applies to the availability of drinking water — the natural resource that will to a great degree determine future global conflicts. In other words: structures that remain hidden in traditional maps would become visible. As these international structures of dominance and dependencies are extremely complex, a multiplicity of maps would be required. There are many views of the world.

Nonetheless, this method would retain the notion of states as essential units — a problematic construct if economic connections and socialization processes increasingly exceed national borders. How economically independent are Canada and Mexico vis-à-vis the USA? How to represent the millions of Turkish people living in the Federal Republic of Germany? Globalization has changed the overall structure of space. The ‘Rhine axis,’ stretching between the Netherlands and northern Italy, has long been a coherent commercial region in which national borders often play only a negligible role. Many British tourists are more familiar with Mallorca than they are with Scotland. Financial managers in Frankfurt or New York share, with regard to social contacts and milieus, more similarities with each other than with their neighbours in the Bronx or the Frankfurt suburb of Zeilsheim. However, both possibly employ — perhaps illegal — domestic workers originating in Southeast Asia and whose living conditions remain largely unknown to their respective employers. Space is not physically predetermined, but a social construct, the product of social conditions. The process of globalization results in a diversification and multiplication of spaces that are subject to new configurations and specific expansion and contraction processes. Consequently, the linear and serial space that determines our imagination and that is at the basis of traditional mapworks melts away. This also requires new forms of symbolic representation.

How does this relate to art? As part of contradictory and conflicting social conditions, art is always ‘ideological.’ But it is particularly able to intervene in political and social discourse, if it is conscious of its ideological nature. This is the case if, for instance, art questions the globalization-related terms of the ‘global village’ and a uniform ‘world society.’ Insofar as art utilizes pictures and symbols, it can often reveal realities more clearly than abstract scientific analyses and statistics. Art is always political, and at its best, when it is consciously so.

Joachim Hirsch is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.