The world got smaller, meaning more connected; the world grew, meaning more people and things. The physical size of the world is not measurably different, although its sheer weight probably is more, but not worth making estimations of it. Then there are evaluative characterizations of the world as a physical entity: it is warmer, maybe; smoother, hard to assess; more polluted, but that depends on for what and whom; older, for sure; closer or farther from other celestial objects, how to tell. All of these express change over time in its elemental form of before and after, a real constant, only reversible by the mental acts of fantasy or logic.

What we do know is that the human system is becoming, for practical concerns, has become global, a total system. It has also become more complex. Both terms refer to the world as a human, social system increasing by magnitudes of scale with defined physical limits. The world has always been a global system physically and certainly has become more complex with the arrival of living entities, but that took a very long time compared to the global development of the human social system.

The scale of the world's human system has become bigger and can become much bigger very quickly without its population becoming larger. Its human system can expand without either growth in numbers of people or things with its present surface physical limits. Indeed, the size of the world's population can shrink or the numbers of things on it can diminish and the world can still have a human social system that is rapidly getting bigger and more global, even without significantly hanging the world as physical system.

A version of this paper was presented to the International Seminar on Autonomy and Interdependence: Approaches to the Study of Local- Global Relations of the Thematic Group #6, the Sociology of Local-Global Relations, International Sociological Association, Pultusk, Poland, June 27-29 1997.

The World as Physical and Social Space

Physical spaces are dimensions of relationships among objects. Social space must be defined by cognitive mapping of defined social objects and activities, which will also contain at least implications about their physical dimensions. Both social and physical space involve relational properties. Both express distance/proximity and sequence/time. The concepts of social space use the logic of the physical, as is routine in statistical analysis, where proximity of properties of objects is "mapped" for inferences. In a general sense, knowledge is the mediator defining social space as relationships of distance and time among human societies, organizations, and individuals as well as to physical spaces and things arrayed across them.

All societies, organizations, and individuals occupy both social and physical space and history. In this sense, all human acts have spatial and temporal coordinates, but those include social spaces, whose absence is noted by a random distribution in a logical space. All observations have stipulated and unspecified coordinates. "This was a vote in the last Italian election" is such an observation without a specific designation of the place it was observed, but such a place is known to "exist", even if outside of Italy. Hence, all observations have unique standings in physical, social, and temporal places. Under certain circumstances, it is sufficient to know one of these to know another. If an object had only one social niche, which had a specific temporal one, by knowing the social niche, the object can be dated. In practice, approximations are made to identify one coordnate, a place, from knowledge of another, a period in history, a common exercise in archeology.

It took a long time to map the earth in terms of universal spatial coordinates. The first step was the surface, the earth as a spherical plane constructed from various composites, the most crude of which were water and land. As the map became more sophisticated in terms of composites and ups and downs, these coordinates also acquired more social spatial meaning, including those of economics and politics, and, finally, specialized maps of all kinds. Today the physical spatial frontiers are below and above the surface, extending outward into "real space. These cognitive extensions remain socially trivial, except in fiction.

Macro-Micro, Multiple Levels, and Global-Local

The core logic of social science analysis is across levels of human aggregation and organization and of all the sciences, across time. Macro-micro is a relational analytical concept used to refer to what is including and what is included and admits two levels. Except for the rule of inclusion, its application is arbitrary just as the concept of "to the left and right of" depends on where one stands. In economics the nation-state is generally the designated macro level for industries, sectors, regions, and individuals. The global economy is the macro for the nation-state.

Multiple levels parallel the concept of macro-micro but with intermediate "macros", each of which are also "micros", except for the most inclusive one, which is either a logical point in analysis or an empirical one, the world as a whole. In the logic of aggregation, a higher level, the macro, always must include everything at a lower level plus one other "thing". The tightest of the multi-level logics in the strict sense of inclusiveness are a symmetrical pyramid or a cone.

The concept of global-local implies physical empirical referents of territory, unlike the logical concepts of macro-micro and levels. It can also refer to the mst encompassing spatial aggregation and the last point of its de-aggregation. The concept of place is a unique location in time and space. For individuals with territorial social and political systems, residences, with the proper names of individuals attached to them, are among the most fixed physical locational coordinates in the world of states.

Precise locations in social and now electronic spaces are now also common. Unlike most human-physical spatial coordinates that, as a practical matter, can be relatively free of time dimensions because they do not change very much or do so very infrequently, social and electronic spaces require temporal coordinates, including movements both in time and in physical space. People change jobs, join different organizations, connect to more than one electronic system, and travel. A technical possibility that would identify the individual with only one location is the cell phone grafted into the body and integrated into a total global electronic network, from which escape could be achieved only by deep burial in the earth or launch into outer space. That thought aside, most spatial social and physical coordinates are becoming more complex and dynamic for more people.

Territorial-Political Dimensions of Space

Physical space and its composites have always been controlling forces in human evolution and behavior, for most of human history determining ones. Human settlements, social units occupying physical niches, have been at the heart of human social order and organization for nearly all of historically traceable societies. The social and political organization of space have defined human civilizations and development, indeed shaped the configurations of the evolution of the genetic structures of the human race. These are described in anthropological research as universal patterns of relationships between human nature and physical space across all cultures and in psychology as ubiquitous comfort zones of distances from strangers and ofspring. The main avenue of human development has been the expansion of individual freedom. Liberation from the fortunes of the immediate offerings of food, shelter, and security within walking distances came with agriculture and subsequent serfdom to land with hierarchical control of access to its yields. Mass production and improved transportation freed people from land and yet put them into the bigger cages of states with capacities to tax, incarcerate, and kill but also to assure accumulation for investments that could increase the scale of organization for defense, conquest, and stability in the use of land. Higher levels of territorial political organization provided more freedom from the constraints of the immediate physical environment, almost always at the cost of a different kind of social and political subordination, but generally with better and more reliable benefits. The principle of state subordination, sovereignty, was constrained by local realities in two ways. The first recognized past differences among localities in production, culture, language, often overlaid with a dynamic meshing and mixing of these into ethnic and national identities. The most formalized of this necessary compromise between control and local autonomy was the political federation, a compact between several lesser and one greater, not necessarily stronger, entities. The second recognized the necessity of adjusting to local traditions in order to dominate the local. Local people were appointed as political authorities with some discretion but were controlled by the center, with the expectation that deviance would be punished, often brutally.

These two accommodations between higher level authority and local variations often resulted in mixed patterns of local political autonomy and an enduring dynamic of conflict fixed in the structure of the politics of all territorial states--center-local. Nonetheless, the hierarchal impulse to control with its push to the political center redced social diversity within its physical space. The public secular justifications for reducing those differences during the past few centuries or so of state formation was social justice through authoritative allocation of resources and the imperatives of size to enable collective achievements of both wealth and cultural development. To this was added the fear of neighbors aspiring to impose their values or exploit for gain.

Political consolidation and cultural homogenization were the hallmarks of the modern nation-state, euphemistically so named. From about 5,000 identifiable political entities in the 15th century, Europe was consolidated into about 25 by the middle of this one. Contiguous areas sharing a common pattern of culture of settlement came together in large states. All of North America became three countries, and Japan, Germany, and Italy were unified in the 19th century. India, Pakistan, and Indonesia were put together in a process of de-colonization in the 20th. The divide to rule principle prevailed in Africa and the Caribbean, more accurately, to share the rule. Then, there were the poly ethnic empires of Austria and Turkey and the twice assertive 20th century imperial political systems of Germany and Russia, the stories of whose demise must include the forces of global developments.

With industrialization and urbanization from the middle of the 19th century until the 1980s, the centers gained authority and resource capacity relative to the local. Wealth based on land, accessible to local authorities, shifted to those in transactions, buying and selling, favoring the regional, to manufacture favoring the national level of government to observe and tax. The record of those countries whose economies more or less consistently grew during this period shows that national governmental revenues grew even faster. Their administrative/bureaucratic structures also expanded in activities and assertions of providing benefits faster than lower levels of government justified by claims of defense against threats from others or nature. Regulation supplemented taxes and expenditures as the means of state control.

By the beginning of the 20th century contiguous territory had become the primary foundation of the state with colonies with histories of mixed motives and losers and winners. The economic successes by the 1950s of a smaller Germany and Japan and the rise of strong economies on little pieces of Asian territory in the 1970s put to rest ideas of territorial expansion as the path to wealth and world power. By then it was clear that knowledge, skills, and organization, coupled with access to resources and markets, could make little places big players.

After the momentum of central control began to diminish in the wealthier states in the 1970s in part because the state lost control to global and regional forces and institutions which opened up channels for localities to the global, most states adjusted their national-local relations. The centers also approached the limits of appropriation of national resources for re-distribution, about half of the estimates of their annual production of monetarized wealth. To take more converged on resistance from both investors and consumers, risking declining economic growth as well as political discontent. The new local-higher level relationship acquiring political attention today is the local with the global, including transnational regions.

The secular justification for governance has shifted from collective well-being and achievements through rulership to individual opportunity through democracy, undermining the rationale for subordination of individuals, localities, and groups to the state. In so far as the ideology of democracy must be inclusive and, hence, global, the structure of conflict between the global and the state, the local and the national, has been re-cast as one of multiple competing and conflicting levels.

The stories of weak states with poor economies are differnt from the successful consolidators. They never were able to extract much more than a fifth of reckoned annual economic production, bureaucratically reaching but rarely penetrating their localities. Those economies, with a few exceptions, will never become national. Further, the collapsed communist states did not attain anything like complete state formation and many localities either broke away and went their own ways. More small states can be expected and they will start fresh as locals in the global.

State creation and consolidation brought the globe into a single, little system, an international system of states with about the level of complexity of a modest village. Personalities mattered, relationships were driven by liking and hating, barter exchanges prevailed, resentments accumulated against the big guys, goods were stolen, and bad guys were scolded and occasionally were beaten up. From time to time fights broke out and opportunities for revenge taken, "tit for tat". This is not to say that the players in the international system of states were stupid but rather their game was rather simple, even if intensely played for high stakes. Of course, exclusive possession of physical space was crucial to status and territorially inspired conflicts. But others began to engage in activities that would develop into more complex, interesting, and satisfying systems. .

A World of Cities

The other side of the emergence of states into an international territorial system with its "laws of war and peace" was the growth and expansion of cities, undermining land as the primary basis of economic and political power and then becoming a foundation for a global political economy. Not only have cities grown in sheer size and scale but the number of large ones, over a million people, has increased during the past 40 years from about a hundred to over 300 today. About half of the new ones are agglomerations of people and organizations in China and India and do not approximate anyting like political communities, but they are composed of economic interdependencies in a physical locality and share a common fate. In addition, there are thousands of smaller entities absorbing population from rural areas and linking with these larger cities. Although the majority of the world's population remains rural and millions of villages persist, their share of the world's population is not increasing and will decrease. As farming as a way of life disappears in those areas with increasing agricultural productivity and if, as seems likely, the world's population will stabilize in 20-30 years prior to some decrease, then it is likely that the main stratum of the world will be in middle sized urban places and in a larger number of very large but not "mega" cities.

At the present time various cities are being positioned in a hierarchy of cities. One tier is clearly global--London, New York, Tokyo with a few contenders, among them Singapore, Shanghai, and San Paulo. A more inclusive definition could put the number at a politically pretentious 50 or so. A second tier is transnational-regional, Berlin, Chicago, Milan, and Vienna being examples. A third is those of national dominance with a strong international presence, Paris, Moscow, Lagos among them. Then there is the fourth tier of cities of about a million or less population that are regional entities, linked to established national centers as well as directly to national, transnational, and global cities.

During the development of strong states and the establishment of about 100 weak ones in the 20th century, dialogues about the state carried notions about size, autonomy, and viability. Diminutive states or those isolated in their neighborhoods would require special protection from the international system of states, including formal recognition of neutrality. Along the same lines, a "people", politically identified as such, would be protected as minorities and supported in their quest for "ultimate" securty, whether false or not, in a state.

One difference between the "new" global economy and the "old" international system of states is both the economic viability and political autonomy of small states. The turning point in state consolidation in the late 20th century was the collapse of its last great empire and the growth in the number of smaller states. Past ideological resistance against small states by the leading ones, including the doctrine of "willing and capable" to meet international oblations as criteria for recognition as a state. During the past few years countries with less than five million population have not only acquired formal recognition but also have semblances of economic viability. These countries have the international measure of "city-states" in a world of nearly six thousand millions.

The political system of the world is now made up of two conflicting systems, one of cities and political communities within them as well as their organizations and associations with counterparts in other countries in a global political economy and the other the international system of states--the new and the old. The elite of the first is a loose association of business leaders trained in a common curriculum, professionals with various knowledge and amusement based activities, and regional and local public officials dealing with problems of transportation, education, the environment; that of the second are national political party leaders, trade union officials, military officers. The first rests on weak institutions and habits; the second on interests tied to place, including farming and "in-place" industries with a strong presence in the recruitment of political leaders, embedded in territorial principles, including elections, and local traditions of political organization and articulation.

The new, of course, threatens and disrupts the old. It restrains the options of national governments in taxation, economic distribution, and subsidies to old industries and he poor and marginalized. Differences in national political party platforms and programs diminish among countries in international agreements on issues of the environment, investment, immigration advocated by localities and of trade, exchange of information, and free flow of capital and human resources, supported by transnational groups. National governments are squeezed from both above and below, by local-global political alliances. Publicized cases are cities seeking athletic contests, allying with international sports interests, lobbying other international groups, including legislatures of other states, and then pressing their own national government to grant subsidies and tax exemptions.

A Variety of Places

The world has become bigger in thousands of places through the processes of their being integrated into global system of expanding scale. One obvious consequence is that production has been decentralized and made into a system integrating productive activities everywhere along with distribution in a flow spanning continents. But integration requires standardization of information and components.

The downsides of globalization are the appearances of everything the same everywhere, losses in cultural diversity, and a shrinking of the social repertoire for adaptations to unforeseen changes in viruses, weather, or extra-territorial intrusions. A global culture emerges in response to a global system, obliterating cultures reflecting centuries of human social evolution.

Exchanges and transactions, however, require variety distributed across social and physical space. If everything in Place A were the same as Place B, then any exchange between them would have no consequence except as performance of ritual. Why do places become different, differentiate, as they increase their contact with each other and become integrated?

First any social unit, including the individual, seeks out variety at low or convenient cost. They do so because acquiring variety and incorpoating it increases the chances of that social unit becoming more valuable to others, more likely to exchange with it. By combining something different with what it has, it is possible to become different from others. To the extent that a component of a social system is different in standardized ways is the extent to which it increases its attractiveness to others and acquires more worth or status. For physical places this includes things, ideas, experiences, and appearances.

Second, the more traffic in and out of an organization or place, the cheaper the unit costs of importing and exporting or sending and receiving. To this must be added the long term declines in the transporting goods and transmitting ideas, which on the whole have reduced the time/cost/distance restraints on movements across space to near zero. The main costs remain the encoding and decoding of items for movement or transmission rather than their actual re-location.

Third, as variety increases and becomes easily available, the ultimate act of fitting something new onto something else or one's self is eyeballing the item in multi-dimensional contexts of its origins and production. This becomes more important as abundance increases requiring responses to marginally diminishing differences among things, ideas, and experiences. Standardized electronic communication has not reduced business travel, exhibitions, face-to-face meetings, indeed, automobile and fashion shows, where small differences in presentations can have huge consequences in earnings.

Fourth, places and organizations become attractive to the extent that they innovate. That requires interaction among special kinds of people, usually those with up-scale preferences for variety. They operate in unstandardized environments to facilitate discovery and are accustomed to demand special consumption opportunities readily accessible in near physical and social space.

An important general theorem "discovered" in social science in the 1920s an still being expounded today is Hotelling's to explain why the same product retailed in the same place--jewelry, automobiles, clothing being familiar examples that can be multiplied. This despite cheaper occupancy costs elsewhere and locations available without competitors. The reason is that customers make a categoric decision to purchase something and then search for the most preferred item in that category. The theorem has been applied to other arenas, including ideological positioning of political parties in elections.

The theorem can be extended to "high-tech" global organizations. Because they are linked in electronic communication networks, it could be expected that they would be geographically dispersed to have cheap land and to secure themselves from unwanted invaders. And yet similar creative organizations are found in enclaves using expensive space. The reason is that the members of these organizations want a variety of specialized amenities which require aggregating people in sufficient numbers to provide them with some efficiency and at the same time to have access to historical centers in large cities associated with "culture". The configurations of location with access to these amenities not only attracts unique configurations of variety in particular place but also stimulates upgrading their quality. That is why quality products and experiences are found in large places.

Finally, not only is there a need, a necessity for variety to prosper and develop but also a counter-balancing one for familiarity. Thus all places must offer some things that are the same in order to attract those that are different. The standardization of hotels in strange places is an example. Those that try to be different do so in familiar places. In attracting people and organizations that are different, localities must also re-assure or comfort them with what they have experienced to make encounters with the "new" more tolerable. Large aggregations of populations thus have "cutural", sometimes residential ghettoes, their versions "China" towns, American clubs, and French schools. But these become part of the place, making it different as peoples of many cultures commingle. Rather than every place being the same, every place has a little bit of whatever other place has but it is never quite the same. Large places will have social and physical enclaves of other places, bundling together similar things into something different.

The World as a City

Democracy has become a single, global ideology for authority. There are no credible alternatives at this time. There will be contested interpretations of democracy, a search for African democracy, social democracy, and others. Democracy, however, requires small political spaces for familiarity based trust. National democracy at best is approximate representation of group interests. Complex, cross-cutting interests and individual quests for dignity are difficult to accommodate in few political parties necessary for a majority or a single national policy for equity. These differences which multiply with social development necessitate at least as unique a social standing and a political opportunity as each individual's genetic composition and history.

Just as 19th century institutions of representative democracy--political parties, elections, and legislatures--are being established in the new democracies, they are being abandoned in the old ones by withdrawal of individual trust and participation in them. Political organizations in the cities of industrializing countries were stories of political elites often controlling changing populations through corruption by political parties, as is happening today in the local politics of new democracies in poor countries.

New forms of political community are being formed in urban places--neighborhood organizations, residential associations, affinity based residential blocks or areas. Higher educational institutions produce thousands of self-identified coorts each year, increasingly made up of many peoples and cultures. Industrial and research parks offer life-styles as well as work. Economic organizations take on political activities, supporting political parties or candidates or "volunteering" to help others.

Democracy as a process requires negotiation of differences for collective action. Negotiations require trust or arbitration by third parties. Both are based on small social and physical spaces affording repetition to generate familiarity to trust others or to entrust third parties to guarantee a "fair" process.

The fears from past experiences with small units are that they exclude the unfamiliar and become maladaptive. They run down as closed countries do. Burma, Cuba, and North Korea stand as instructive examples. The deadly structural dynamic in reforming the Soviet Union was that to maintain hierarchical control by a single party, the country had to remain closed. To grow it had to import variety as all human systems do, just as families have to import genes. Opening the system destroyed encompassing hierarchical control of information. New information accelerated the de-legitimatization of the big Soviet political system.

Democracy requires openness and inclusion. Those are values which must be learned to offset those of fear and closure to the unknown. If the system, no matter how small, is open then it will be open to the global system. Although perhaps a matter of faith, the technologies of closure are not sufficient to offset those of penetration. Of course, democracies can and should have the right to fail. If they are small democracies, the scale of the global system will be affected no more than the world's physical size is by bombardments from outer space. New social spaces, new places, can be easily established and integrated into the global system, a very big place made up of a lot of big places and little ones that are getting bigger.

See Texts , Concepts, Mlinar's paper and a paper by Riggs.

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Updated: 16 May 1998