Globalization: The Human Consequences

This book represents one of a series, which, as one of its goals, "aims to shape the major intellectual controversies of our day". It deals with five major themes: the new "absentee landlords" of our time the "legibility of space" the "demise of state sovereignty" the "freedom to choose where to be", and the criminalisation of "the rejects and the waste of globalization". Zygmunt Bauman paints a stark picture of "state borders . . . levelled down". He writes about "the fast weakening hands of the nation-state", and the reduction of the state to "the issue of law and order". Is this a true reflection of reality? "Globalising" powers are, after all, nothing new. One may think of the papacy, or of colonialism, which exercised vast trans-national influence. While such powers undoubtedly had a profound impact on nation states, they did not erase either their borders or their national character. It would seem far more likely that state power is merely transmuting into new forms. The new global order, states Bauman, has largely emancipated business "from territorial constraints". In the past, we knew the "absentee landlord" -- a class of agricultural landowner who lives away from his property and is not directly involved in its day-to-day production. Even the absentee landlord, however, faced a "practical limit" to exploitation. According to Bauman, this is not so in the case of "late-modern capitalists and land-brokers, thanks to the new mobility of their now liquid resources". They easily uproot and relocate to exploit more favourable circumstances elsewhere, creating an "increasingly worrying polarization of the world". This was a worthwhile book. However, Bauman would seem to have oversimplified and overstated the case. He writes freely about "extremal expressions of . . . polarization", and of "worlds sedimented on the two poles". While there is surely much truth in his claims, this is not a nuanced book. This having been said, his polar opposites would seem, by and large, to represent modern trends. The world has indeed become more polarised through globalisation, to the great detriment of many millions of people on the planet.

Bauman's thesis is that the twin siblings of globalization are opulence and mobility at the top (the 'tourists') and alienation and despair at the bottom ('the vagabonds')of the social milieu. He makes a good case for such tendencies, though he relies on metaphor and allegory, more than careful argumernt. This is a brilliantly stimulating book which should be widely discussed. Nonetheless, the lack of qualification -(e.g., most of us are neither completely tourists or vagabonds - which Bauman notes but then drops) leaves his paradigms looking like caricatures. I felt aambivialence towards much of Bsuman's discussion, agreeing with him that he had identified a problem but disagreeing with him on its paramenters and extent. Globalization, though fraught with problems, deserves a bettter defense.

The process of socio-economic reform in the free-market era, facilitated under the direction of private enterprise, has created an international dichotomy in the political realm between the mobility of capital (global) and the immobility of labor (local). Essentially, Bauman argues that the privatization of the global economy, although gradually, has led to the erosion of the public sphere and a rise in absentee landlordism. In a sociological sense, the inculcation of the consumerist ethos, harnessed as a means of fueling the burgeoning private sector, amounts to the de facto division of global consciousness into two categories. For the author, the tourist and the vagabond, people with the financial ability to free themselves from the grips of spatial locality, and those who aspire to become free in the former sense, epitomize the cultural, economic, and political expectations of the new global elite and the local underclass. Bauman views the increased use of criminal incarceration and the conservative appeal to "public" law and order as an outgrowth of this spatial dichotomy, and the increase in urban criminal activity as a symptom of this new polarization. In referring to this issue as the "criminalization of poverty," Bauman suggests that the global elite have reconfigured the structure of power in the world market, since they are no longer bound by practical barriers, namely governmental restrictions and national boundaries. The tourists have effectively withdrawn from their historical obligation to local communities, while the underclass have been forced to contend with their plight (unemployment and economic insecurity) in the tumult of urban ghettos on an individual basis. Escape, slippage, and avoidance, according to the author, have become the preferred method of interaction with hostile localities, namely labor unions and unstable markets. Thus, the seat or seats of power, within the structure of the post-Fordist economy, have become more abstract and intangible, since capital mobility, capital flight, and financial investment are temporary, nomadic, and spatially diffused. Thus, contrary to the optimism of many free-market advocates and technocrats, the introduction of the technological/communicational age has not ushered in an era of international equality and access to the political sphere. In contrast, an asymmetrical structure of power relations now characterizes the global milieu and economic governance. Limited accountability, contemporarily speaking, has redefined the role of the business elite to their workers, communities, and consumers.

The world renown sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, illustrates extremely well the dynamics of globalization on civic society and its breakdown thereof due to mass consumption, the ease of ability of communication, and the inability of binding corporations to rules of conduct. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the grim realities of globalization for the nation and locality.