BOOK SERIES:

GLOBALIZATION AND DEMOCRACY PROJECT

Plans for a series of books on Globalization and Democracy, each focusing on a related question, are being made by a steering group composed of Fred W. Riggs, Ronaldo Munck, Barry Gills, and Henry Teune. It will be based on the initiatives and work of individuals participating in the Globalization and Democratization List and the Forum for Global Studies. The project was launched during the workshop on Global Democracy held at the ISA Conference in Chicago, Feb. 20, 2001. See the abstract or prospectus for each book.

The Books. Each book will have an editor in charge, with participants on a list engaged in collaborative research and discussions as explained below. The books will be published by Kumarian Press, Linda Beyus, editor, according to plans worked out during the Chicago conference. The Web Site for Kumarian Press provides information about their substantial interest in globalization. If you click on ENTER, you will find lists of their publications under various headings, including "Globalization." Although their focus has been on the "Third World," they hope to help obliterate this term from our vocabulary. Each book will be published in paper-back copies for widespread use in University classes, and the interested general public. However, a hard-back bound copy will also be produced for sale to libraries.

For our project we have discussed the following themes, each in the context of Globalization:

• Environment, Labor, Global Democracy, Gender, Contestation, Ethnicity. These are to have priority.

• Other themes for subsequent consideration include: Security, Faith-based Communities, Culture (art, music, literature), Poverty and Wealth, Communications, Corporations and Money, Education, Health, and "Small Places" (cities, islands, oases). Other themes can be added, as opportunities arise.

• All books should provide an in-depth historical background and discuss alternative futures. We see globalization as a long-term process but it has escalated in recent decades. Although some predictions are possible, we want to anticipate widely divergent possibilities.

• Tentative commitments have been made for the preparation of book projects dealing with Globalization and:
  • Communications -- Majid Tehranian
  • Culture: (Re)Locating Politics -- Honor Fagan *
  • Social Exclusion -- Ronaldo Munck *
  • Democracy -- Henry Teune
  • Ethnic Nationalism -- Fred Riggs *
  • Gender -- Dong-sook Gills, editor; Nancie Caraway, co-editor
  • Historicizing Globalization -- Barry Gills
  • Religion -- Fred Riggs *
  • Society -- Martin Albrow ? -- invited but not yet accepted

  * = hyperlink to abstract for the book project

Links. Links with relevant international associations will be activated. They include IPSA (Political Science), ISA (Sociology), ISA (International Relations), IPRA (Peace Research), and WFSF (Future Studies). Some members of our group are actively associated with one or more of these associations and will provide relevant links to them and to various institutes, committees, and research groups.

. A continuously augmented Glossary or Dictionary of concepts, classified by themes and alphabetized by key terms, will be maintained on the Web, for eventual publication as a reference work and general index. Relevant components will be included as an appendix in each book. Hypertext links will facilitate the location of texts in which new and fundamental concepts are used. References in each book will not only be to publications on paper, but also to relevant Web Sites. A comprehensive bibliography for Globalization studies, including annotated hypertext links, is being compiled at the Globalization Research Center, University of Hawaii. It will be made available for all editors and writers in this project.

Every book will be developed collaboratively by a group of contributors linked by our master list of participants in the Globalization and Democratization list - see link above. Participants in other lists will be invited to participate: including those already available for COVICO (Committee on Viable Constitutionalism), COCTA (Committee on Conceptual and Terminological Analysis), Globe-L (IPSA roundtable on concepts of globalization), Globalization Research Center, Univ. of Hawaii, Toda-L (Today Institute for Peace and Security), and various other lists with which we intend to work. Links to all of them will be available at: Globalization and Democratization . Readers are invited to consult these lists and propose additions.

Format. The format for each book can include the following elements, subject to space limitations set by the publisher:

• 1. Papers by specialists discussing a set of problems relevant to the book's theme;

• 2. Representative texts quoted from sources and Web Sites useful for anyone reading the book;

• 3. Boxes in the text for pictures, maps, statistical data, flow-charts, and other illustrative material;

• 4. References to documentation in libraries plus links for relevant Sites, and a master bibliography at the Globalization Research Center (GRC), University of Hawaii

• 5. Glossary of key concepts and terms with definitions and links both to relevant points in the book and to useful Web Sites

Process. The process for developing each book will be interactive including the following elements:

• 1. Preliminary discussion of each topic on a "GLOPRO" (Globalization Project) list, to be developed by participants in the DEMOGLO (Globalization and Democratization) project and other lists mentioned above. Riggs will manage the new list, but all participants will be able to correspond directly with each other on the list, and important contributions will be selected and archived for future reference. Participants in the proposed GLOPRO list will be asked to discuss and agree on the general plan for the project, as suggested above, but with whatever changes seem desirable to members of the whole group.

• 2. Project lists: for each book there will be a core group of scholar/teachers willing to prepare their contributions in the context of a seminar or workshop based at one or more universities, with face-to-face meetings at international conferences and continuous interaction on the Web, using both e-mail correspondence and archived texts or papers, linked by hypertext. An editor for each volume will be in charge of related activities, including the delivery of finalized text to the editor of Kumarian Press. However, when a book is published, its editor should continue to work with the Press to promote effective utilization and follow-up, including revision for new editions.

• 3. Proactive involvement: each book should be useful as a tool in a continuing educational and concerned citizen process, including follow-up discussion and promotion through the Internet in addition to all the conventional processes available before the launching of the WWW. Participants in our related lists will be given the information required for such activity, and invited to share in the development of relevant activities.

• 4. Continuous elaboration. The list of topics suggested above is intended only to stimulate our thinking and contribute to our decisions - some topics may be dropped or revised, and new ones can be added. Contributions by everyone reading this preliminary memo are invited. Please share your thoughts with Fred Riggs, Ronaldo Munck, Barry Gills, Henry Teune and others to be added to our core planning group.

Precis: The transformations of our social world covered by the term 'globalisation' have an inescapable cultural element. As Malcolm Waters puts it, 'we can expect the economy and polity to be globalised to the extent that they are culturalised' in the sense that we are moving increasingly towards symbolic exchanges. Anything we look at in our contemporary world, from September 11^th to Mc Donalds, from anti- WTO protests to so-called religious fundamentalism, can be read through the lens of cultural politics. My basic thesis is that the globalisation of culture is changing the nature of politics today, hence the subtitle '(re) locating politics'.

What this text seeks to do is a broad survey of the interaction between globalisation and the cultural domain today, culture understood broadly as the way in which we interpret our position in the world. A range of 'social' themes are examined first including how gender and ethnicity are being redefined culturally in the era of globalisation, and the increased cultural impact of travel and migration today. This section closes with a consideration of the critical relationship between the global and the local including the phenomenon known as 'globalisation'.

The text then moves from the social context to the more narrowly defined cultural domain. Successive chapters deal with religion, consumer and popular culture, and the global communications revolution. Here I set the main parameters of the culture and globalisation interactions using examples from across the globe as well as engaging with the relevant theoretical literature. Examples are drawn from North and South, East and West in the spirit of the new global studies.

The text closes with a review of the debate on the emergence of a global culture that has exercised Immanuel Wallerstein, Stuart Hall and Pierre Bourdieu amongst others. It serves to pull together the various strands of the book and plot a 'way forward' for the new political economy of culture approach.

1. Culture and Global Politics: Definitions and Debates
The politics of culture and cultural politics; the new identity politics; Naomi Klein and globalisation; 'culture wars'.

Part I: Social Themes

2. Globlisation, Ethnicity and Gender
The cultural politics of difference; new identity politics; transnational oppositional cultural politics.

3. Globalisation, Travel and Migration
The tourist gaze; the new Helots; people on the move; transborder people politics.

4. The Global and the Local
Beyond the binary oppositions; globalisation: out there, in here; the cultural political economy of the global city.

Part II: Cultural Themes

5. Globalisation and Religion:
Religions as global social movements; religion as universalising cultural signifier; 'fundamentalist' religious responses to globalisation.

6. Consumer Culture, Popular Culture:
Consumerism and globalisation: the dynamic duo; popular culture and postmodernity; culture as contested global political terrain.

7. Global Communications Revolution:
From the telegraph to the Internet; cultural capital today; hot money as cultural icon of globalisation.

Conclusion

8. Towards a Global Culture?
McDonaldisation as global future; jihad versus Mc World; Globalistion, modernity and post-modernity.

Length: 80,000 words approx.

Due: 1 April 2003

Readership: This text will be aimed squarely at the undergraduate market where the one competing text at the moment is J. Tomlinson's Globalisation and Culture (Polity Press) which, while sound, is not very accessible. The undergraduate readership (UK and US primarily) would include sociology, cultural studies, politics and education studies, and geography students.

Precis: According to the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report for 1999:

• "Globalisation expands the opportunities for unprecedented human advance for some but shrinks these opportunities for others and erodes human security"
  
• "Inequality has been rising in many countries since the early 1980's"
  
• "Inequality between countries has also increased"

Arguably, the impact of globalisation within and between nations is the 'new social issue' of our era as the 'worker question' was for early capitalism. The advocates of a free market based globalisation process believe that it will gradually decrease social inequalities worldwide after the initially short term increases. On the contrary, the critics of globalisation argue that it is structurally inherent in this process that it will increase social inequalities across the world. To resolve this debate we turn to the recently emerged concept of social exclusion which, arguably, is both distributional and relational in its import and thus analytically and politically more useful than traditional concepts of poverty. The approach developed here is called 'transformationalist' because while neither globalisation nor social exclusion are unambiguous concepts, they have certainly transformed the conditions of social transformation today.

Globalisation has an impact on social exclusion at the broad spatial level of regions. For example, whole regions of Africa are now considered as 'surplus to requirements' by the new global economic order, not even worth exploiting. The national competitiveness 'game' promoted by the global free market system inevitably generates winners and losers, rule makers and rule takers. In the latter categories we find regions, cities and social categories. Social exclusion has an impact in terms of social class, gender and 'race'/ ethnicity understood as processes creating interlinked patterns of social inequality. Overall, we assess whether increased global integration is leading to an increase in social disintegration in the West (developed economies), the East (transition economies) and the South (developing economies).

As to what is to be done, the World Bank and other promoters of globalisation recognise the dangers posed by social exclusion for stable democratic governance in the new world order. They promote the concept of 'social capital', which they argue should be developed to overcome social exclusion. We assess this strategy but also present a more radical proposal for global social regulation of the new economic order. There is also a need to develop not only a global social policy to deal with increasing inequality but also a new concentration of a global citizenship fit for our times.

1. Globalisation: Danger or Panacea?
The free market utopia of the globalisers; the demonic agent as portrayed by the anti-globalisers; beyond the buzzwords; towards a critical political economy of globalisation.

2. Social Exclusion: The New Social Issue?
From Eurocentric integrationist concept to global social policy; beyond poverty as relational paradigm; dimensions of social exclusion; globalisation and social exclusion

3. Global Integration, Social Disintegration
Winners and losers in the global economy; globalisation and growth since 1950; reducing world income inequality; the perceived problem of order

4. Space and Social Exclusion
Spatial integration, national disintegration; the case of Africa; the global city and the non-integrated city; global social development; a case study of convergence or divergence?

5. Gender, Poverty and Inequality
The world-wide 'feminisation' of poverty; patriarchy and capitalism as interacting dynamics; flexible capitalism and super-exploitation; gender and information capitalism.

6. 'Race', Ethnicity and Citizenship
The 'colour' of poverty in the U.S.; ethnicity, civil rights and citizenship; the 'underclass' thesis; the complex interaction of 'race' gender and class.

7. Class, Inequality and Exclusion
Social Class and income inequality; the dynamics of class structures world-wide; beyond 'class reductionism'; the complex dynamics of social exclusion.

8. Beyond Social Exclusion: Towards A Global Citizenship
Globlalisation and global social policy; social capital and social exclusion; the 'Polyani problem' (free market expansion versus the need for social regulation); global citizenship as a new paradigm for global governance.

Length: 80,000 words

Due: 31 December 2002

Readership: Undergraduate students of sociology, social policy, economics and political science. General readers and policy makers interested in globalisation and its discontents.

Precis: Al Qaeda seeks to make the current global conflict into a struggle between Muslims and Infidels, thereby creating Huntington's monstrous scenario of a clash between civilizations. The American policy calls for a war on terrorism, regardless of religion, and seeks friendship with Muslims as well as all other faith-based communities. In this context, what are we to believe and how are we to understand the role of religion in the context of contemporary globalization?

One way to find answers is to look at what these communities say about themselves through their Web sites: see examples at: Theo-Logic . For the most part, with virtually no exceptions, they have accepted globalism as a norm - they both seek to expand their communities globally and they offer messages of love and reconciliation that seek peace and harmony as universal norms. Representative exponents of these faiths will contribute chapters explaining their beliefs in the context of globalization, and comparativists who seek to understand all faiths in an analytical framework will comment on what can be observed by outsiders.

Globalization builds on secularism, the empirical scientific perspective that accepts as real only what can be measured or observed through the human senses. Faith involves belief in forces beyond such tangible proofs. We may think of this as theo-logic - the logic of unseen forces, whether they are monotheistic, polytheistic, pantheistic or atheistic. Communities based on these beliefs organize themselves to accomplish many good things - and sometimes, regrettably, hostile things also. Most faith-based communities preach universal values that seek world-wide peace and justice, but a few are exclusive and purist, claiming that a deep chasm separates true-believers from those who live in error.

Specialists in Comparative Religion have studied all of them and produced penetrating studies that seek to explain these beliefs as well as describe them - adherents have also reported and preached to spread their convictions. Some are repelled by the modern world and find it to be inherently evil, but others advocate reconciliation between traditional (religious) and modern (secular) understandings of reality. Many are also active in ecumenical movements that seek to harmonize different faiths and

GLOBALIZATION has profound effects on ethnic nationalism as this book-project will show. To define the scope of the project, consider how ethnic nationalism differs from state nationalism – these two types or dimensions of nationalism are complementary. They differ from each other in that state nationalism, the traditional form, is anchored in states that seek to homogenize their populations by transforming diverse ethnic communities into a single nation. By contrast, ethnic nationalists operate in a stateless environment: they seek to mobilize communities that lack a state in order to create a state of their own.

Globalization has both reduced the relative power of states and spurred the mobilization of ethnic nations that seek to establish their own states, often enough by partitioning existing states or seceding from them. Globalization is often viewed as a homogenizing process and, no doubt, many artifacts and cultural symbols have been dispersed globally as a result. However, another consequence of globalization involves local reactions and efforts to assert and manifest distinctive identities, a process that has been called glocalization. Indeed, we ought to see glocalization and globalization as complementary aspects of a single highly interactive process.

REACTIVE NATIONALISM. Perhaps in no other sphere of life is glocalization more clearly manifest than in the growth of ethnic nationalism, a process that has accelerated in recent years. No doubt, ethnic nationalism has long been manifest in the reaction to Western imperialism, as illustrated by the rise of Indian nationalism under the leadership of Mohatma Gandhi and other leaders whose world views had been shaped by exposure to Western learning and discrimination. As the events of September 11 have demonstrated, glocalization can also lead to the rage and anger that provokes suicidal terrorism. These reactions have now been multiplied and deepened by the proliferation of cross-cultural contacts and information made possible by the Internet as an accelerator of older forms of interaction found in study abroad programs, increasing travel and trade, and the explosive mass media.

International Relations as a field of study traditionally focused on relations between states, while paying little attention to non-state entities. In the context of global studies, by contrast, ethnic nations are important subjects of study, as are international non-governmental bodies, among whom are a growing number of inter-national bodies that count ethnic-nations among their members. A leading example is the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization . See also the World Council of Indigenous Peoples . Admittedly these are not comprehensive lists of ethnic nations, but they provide a good starting point. A list of Web Sites belonging to some ethnic nations can be found through the pages listed at: Glocal

WORLD WIDE WEB. The Internet may be viewed as a tool of globalization and one of its important engines. This means that any aspect of globalization can be viewed in the context of how it takes advantage of the Internet, and how it is affected by the communications and information revolution. Two important facets of this relationships need to be examined: first, the leaders of ethnic national movements have no doubt always traded experiences and sought mutual support. –The Internet now makes it much easier to do this. Second, national identity and objectives can be promoted on the Internet. Followers are recruited and guided by information posted on the World Wide Web. However, this process also generates contradictions – to some degree, ethnic nationalism now seems anachronistic and irrelevant in an increasingly integrated world system. Some chapters in this work will identify such factors in a global and comparative context, and others will focus on individual ethnic nations as case studies. By cross referencing these analyses, we may expect to obtain a more intelligible understanding of how globalization both affects and is affected by ethnic nationalism.

SOURCES. The literature, organizations and projects relating to nationalism are vast and growing. A good place to enter this material on the Web is: The Nationalism Project at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. An excellent source of data about ethnic nations can be found at the Minorities at Risk project of the Univesity of Maryland. Among many research centers that focus on nationalism, one that provides a wealth of links to other centers and bibliographic information is the Soloman Asch Center at the Univesity of Pennsylvania. My own Ethnic-L list also provides information about many centers for the study of ethnicity and nationalism.

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