All Connected Now: Life in the First Global Civilization

Walter Anderson's gift is to synthesize and explicate complex social issues in an intelligible, readable, and coherent manner. There is not a lot of news in this book. It is a fine overview of the complexities of globalization and all the different ways it manifests itself in our lives. It pulls together a lot of information on the ways in which our world is changing, how this change effects us, and how we effect the process of change. Anderson also provides an overview of how people are thinking about and conceptualizing our changing, globalizing world. In short, it is an excellent primer or introduction to the processes of globalization and how people are responding to it. It is not a ponderous academic tome, but it does have a bibliography that you can use as a springboard for further explorations.It helped me to get a handle on a lot of materials and information I was familiar with, but never had the time to read, study, and think about systematically. One thing which I found helpful was the symbolic references to the Treaty of Wesphalia which ended the 30 years war in the 17th Century. It marks the transition from the world of the Holy Roman Empire to the world of the sovereign nation state. The current era is post-Wesphalian in that the boundaries that defined nation states are becoming more permeable and oftentimes irrelevant. Environmental, medical, economic, political and social problems do not begin and end at national borders, hence new ways of thinking and new forms of global governance are emerging to deal with these problems. Our post 9-11 world has seen efforts to strengthen national boundaries in response to a globalized threat, but it only affects a small part of the globalization process.Another thing is the intersecting dimensions of Globalist-antiglobalist and political left-political right continuums. This could be conceived as a four fold table: globalist-left, globalist-right, antiglobalist-left, antiglobalist-right. I prefer to think of it as an x-y axis that defines a two dimensional grid. This categorization scheme captures some of the ambiguities and paradoxes of responses to globalism. Anderson uses it to explain different perspectives offered by various writers and actions by various activists. It also helps me understand my own conflicted feelings about globalization (free markets, immigration, multi-culturalism, global warming, the aids epidemic, etc.)Ultimately All Connected Now is a good place to start thinking about globalization. If you have already been thinking about globalization, this is a good place to pause and review your thinking, and the thoughts other's have had, about globalization.

Anderson provides an enlightening and accessible look at the multitude of changes taking place today that are usually characterized by the word 'globalization'. As he so clearly points out, these changes are not merely economic, although such changes are important, but also political, cultural and biological. This broader framework is likely to be important to those who would better understand (and perhaps alter) the course of globalization.Anderson notes that nations are increasingly losing their closed character (and becoming more open), a development exemplified by the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In consequence of this, individual nations have less control over their economic, political, cultural and biological dimensions, and there is an increased need for associations of nations. It should be noted, however, that Anderson is skeptical about the likelihood of the emergence of global government.A particularly useful part of Anderson's book is the classification of attitudes toward globalization that he presents in Chapter 12 ("Global Visions and Divisions"). They are: the globalist right; the globalist left; the antiglobalist right; and the antiglobalist left. With this classification in hand, one can better grasp the discomfort many people feel with the process of globalization, as well as why some people are working so hard to advance it.What Anderson does, therefore, is develop a more nuanced view of what globalization is and a more nuanced view of individual responses to globalization. He makes globalization more complex, but it is surely not something to be addressed in a simple-minded fashion.

The day I read the title of this book, my fears of the last 30 years were gone. It was stating the obvious, so obvious that not many managed to grasp it. Since humankind started to record history 5500 years ago and maybe long before, we are living in the First Global Civilisation. A civilisation that spans the planet and already goes beyond with human space missions, satellites, probes and robots.It started with Columbus and global travel. Then this new civilisation which was born thanks to long distance communication (telegraph in the 19th century, later phone, telex, fax, internet) is reshaping our lives in different ways: at home, in cities, in our workplace, in our environment, in our information, in our bio-information, in the perception we have from ourselves. In this perspective one understands the meaning of the 20th century, a transition between a set of civilisations gradually conquered by the West that took their independance but that remained connected into a global civilisation with multiple centers influencing each other.We are a sentient specie (author calls us a global animal) rather than an American, an European, a Japanese and our problems are not national problems but global or human problems. Global civilisation because it allows us to have a global vision of our planet (remember this picture taken from the Moon in 1969 showing Earth as a blue oasis in the middle of nowhere), to realize we have an ecosystem to which our survival is attached, to see the multiplicity of our beliefs and religions, the interraction of cultures, those who accept an open society and take ideas from abroad and those who refuse and fight against it. Sometimes the same people but on different subjects.Global civilisation does not only have states (more than 200 ranging from tiny Monaco or Vatican to US, Canada, Russia, India and China), NGOs (US Aid, Red Cross, ... ) but 400 international organisations including the UN, NATO, ASEAN, the Arab League and the European Union, 38,000 transnational or global corporations (global because because they adapted to the environment faster than others), non-state actors (billionaires, drugs lords, terrorists), religions (many with the biggest being Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Taoism all calling for more than 1 billion members), citizens as individuals or organised in communities and organisations. All those interract to form our present world. It does have an informal governance, a reunion of different spheres of the global civilisation but no global government (note: civilisations with multiple polities and no centralized government are numerous in the past: Mesopotamia, Greece, Mayan civilisation, Western Europe, India and China for some periods of their history).This global civilisation triggers reactions, vision and divisions: anti-globalization, environment movements, labour movements, etc... Although some author opinions will not be shared by everybody, it is concise, clear, well-written, easy to