Globalization. George Ritzer
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have revolutionized and greatly expanded the global flow of information. As with all other structures, such networks can be blocked or monitored in various ways (e.g. the “Great Firewall” or NSF surveillance).
All sorts of networks have been made possible by the Internet. The Internet can be seen as being of enormous importance in allowing information of various sorts to flow in innumerable directions. One important example involves the formation of the networks that became and constitute the movements for global justice and democratization (Vanden et al. 2017; see Chapter 15). It (as well as its various political actions, most notably the anti-WTO [World Trade Organization] protests in Seattle in 1999), like much else in the world today (e.g. the popular uprisings in Turkey and Egypt in 2013), was made possible by the Internet:
By significantly enhancing the speed, flexibility, and global reach of information flows, allowing for communication at a distance in real time, digital networks provide the technological infrastructure for the emergence of contemporary network-based social forms … allowing communities to sustain interactions across vast distances… . Using the Internet as technological architecture, such movements operate at local, regional, and global levels… .(Juris 2008: 353–4)
Finally, it is not only individuals who are increasingly involved in networks. An increasing number of social structures (e.g. states, cities, law) and social institutions (the family, religion, sport) are interconnected on a global basis and these, too, enable and enhance global flows. For example, the international banking system has an infrastructure that facilitates the global movement of funds among a network of banks. Included in that infrastructure are IBANs (International Bank Account Numbers), rules, norms, and procedures on how such money transfers are to occur, and a highly sophisticated technical language that allows those in the business to communicate with one another wherever they are in the world. Another example involves global (Sassen 1991, 2013) and world cities (Derudder et al. 2012) (see Chapter 13) that are increasingly interconnected with one another directly rather than through the nation-states in which they happen to exist. The financial markets of the world cities of New York, London, and Tokyo are tightly linked with the result that all sorts of financial products flow among them and at lightning speed. More generally, in this context, we can talk in terms of the “global economy’s connectedness” (Altman 2007). To take another example, the World Health Organization (WHO) includes nearly 200 member states and has coordinated the global response to COVID-19 (see Chapter 15). When the virus was discovered at the end of 2019, the WHO immediately went into action by tracking cases and the spread of the disease, disseminating the most recent medical knowledge, helping to distribute personal protective equipment (PPE) throughout networked countries, recommending health-related policies, and developing the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for fundraising for the pandemic. Once again, however, barriers are erected to limit such interconnections (e.g. the unwillingness of at least some countries to acknowledge the urgent threat of the disease, and the US’s attempt to withdraw funding to the WHO).
HEAVY STRUCTURES AS BARRIERS TO FLOWS
While there is no question that the world is increasingly characterized by greater liquidity, increased flows, as well as various structures that expedite those flows, we also need to recognize that there are limits and barriers to those flows. The world is not just in process, there are also many material structures (trade agreements, regulatory agencies, borders, customs barriers, standards, and so on) in existence. As Inda and Rosaldo (2008: 31) argue: “Material infrastructures do not only promote mobility… . They also hinder and block it.” Any thoroughgoing account of globalization needs to look at both flows and structures and, in terms of the latter, the ways in which they both produce and enhance flows as well as alter and even block them. In other words, there is interplay between flows and structures, especially between flows and the structures that are created in an attempt to inhibit or to stop them. As Shamir (2005: 197) puts it, globalization is an epoch of increased openness and “simultaneously an era of growing restrictions on movement.” Borders, of course, are major points at which movement is blocked. There are many examples of this including the toughening of border controls in the UK (and elsewhere in Europe), Australia, and the US because of growing hostility to refugees and undocumented immigratns (Hogan and Haltinner 2015).
There are challenges to the idea that all there is to globalization is flows and fluidity (Tsing 2000). In examining global flows (some of which have been anticipated above), we also need to consider those agents who “carve” the channels through which things flow, those who alter those channels over time, national and regional units that create and battle over flows, and coalitions of claimants for control over channels.
A focus on the above kinds of agents and structures, rather than flows, promises a more critical orientation to globalization in terms of the structures themselves, as well as in terms of who creates the structures through which things flow as well as who does and does not control and profit from them (more on this in the next section).
Another important idea is the “frictions,” or the “awkward, unequal, unstable … interconnection across difference” (Lowenhaupt Tsing 2005: 4). The main idea is that the global flows that create interconnections do not move about smoothly; they do not move about without creating friction. Friction gets in the way of the smooth operation of global flows.3 However, friction not only slows flows down, it can also serve to keep them moving and even speed them up. Highways can have this double-edged quality by both limiting where people and vehicles can go while at the same time making movement “easier and more efficient” (Lowenhaupt Tsing 2005: 6). More generally, “global connections [are] made, and muddied, in friction” (Lowenhaupt Tsing 2005: 272). The key point in this context is that flows themselves produce friction that can slow or even stop global flows: “without even trying friction gets in the way of the smooth operation of global power. Difference can disrupt, causing everyday malfunctions as well as unexpected cataclysms. Friction refuses the lie that global power operates as a well-oiled machine. Furthermore, difference sometimes inspires insurrection. Friction can be the fly in the elephant’s nose” (Lowenhaupt Tsing 2005: 6). A prime example of this today is the many frictions being produced in many parts of the world by large numbers of documented and undocumented immigrants, and the backlash against them. For example, refugees from Syria have fled to Europe and other places, and have sometimes been killed by border guards when entering a country without authorization (Yeginsu and Shoumali 2016). Such frictions led Greece to complete a 6.5 mile fence along its border with Turkey, which was considered the most porous entry point for undocumented immigrants entering Europe (Besant 2012). As has already been mentioned, the most important and most obvious barriers to global flows are those constructed by nation-states. There are borders, gates, guards, passport controls, customs agents, health inspectors, and so on, in most countries in the world. (The great exception is the countries that are part of the European Union [EU] where barriers to movement among and between member countries have been greatly reduced, if not eliminated. The EU is a kind of structure that allows people and products to move much more freely and much more quickly. At the same time, it serves to reduce the need to use hidden channels since there is far less need to conceal what is moving among and between EU countries.) Although many people (undocumented immigrants) and things (contraband goods) do get through those barriers, some of them are successfully blocked or impeded by the barriers. However, it is far more difficult to erect barriers against many newer phenomena, especially the non-material phenomena associated with cell phones and the Internet.
Specific examples of barriers created by the nation-state involve blocking economic transactions that it regards as not in the national interest. For example, in 2006 the US government blocked a deal in which a Dubai company was to purchase an American company involved in the business of running America’s ports (Economist 2006: March 10). The government felt that such ownership would be a threat to national security since foreign nationals, perhaps enemies, could acquire information that would allow terrorists easy entrée to the ports. In other examples, the US government blocked a Singapore-based firm from acquiring