CIAO DATE: 06/2008
January 2003
Finnish Institute for International Affairs
One of the central objectives of the ever-expanding entrepreneurship of globalisation literature has been to formulate a single, concise definition of the phenomenon of globalisation. Needless to say, this has usually proved a hugely difficult task, if not an impossible one. The strategy of the ensuing pages will therefore be somewhat different. I will start off with an explicit idea of the multiplicity of ‘globalisation’, that is, from the assumption (or fact) that globalisation covers such a wide range of different issues, attitudes, processes, policies, destinies, and people perceive it in so many different ways that any simple definition of it is doomed to be virtually useless. There is, in other words, no need to bring all these different features and views under a single totalising explication. By contrast, the best way to conceptualise the notion is to do it with the help of all those definitional problems, controversies, disputes and even paradoxes that it seems to entail – that is, with an explicit vagueness of the notion in mind, a vagueness that also implies a great deal of dynamism and continuous change.
In the following I will take up, in a rather sketchy and even metaphorical manner, as many as ten this kind of controversies or problems; they all come up more or less regularly as people – scholars, politicians, journalists, lay men and women – try to make sense of the notion of globalisation. These controversies are partially overlapping, interdependent in a number of ways, and their internal logic and relative importance vary a great deal. It is also possible to group them – the way this has been done in the list below is only one possibility. What is important, however, is that all these problems can be formulated in a dichotomous manner, as dichotomous pairs. The ‘dialectics of globalisation’ then simply emerges from the need to enter into a dialogue between both ends or extremes within these pairs; both ends are relevant aspects of globalisation, and we should look for syntheses between them. The paramount aim of this short presentation is to show that thinking in terms of this kind of dialectics may provide us with a useful analytical tool for understanding the peculiarities of globalisation.
Resource link: The Dialectics of Globalisation [PDF] - 140K