Unfinished Business: Thoughts on Globalization, Security, and “Progressive Research Programs”
Stephen Del Rosso
There is a certain “deja vu all over again” quality to the topic of this workshop that recalls the many efforts launched in the immediate post-Cold War years to redefine security. As a foundation officer who helped facilitate some of this earlier discussion and research and who has been part of more recent attempts to understand contemporary notions of security, I am struck not so much by what has changed in this discourse, but what has remained the same. The two scholars with whom I am honored to share this panel, Daniel Deudney and Michael Klare, as well as our moderator, James Der Derian, have been among the most original and prescient thinkers on the elusive, decade and a half-long quest to establish a new security paradigm. Each, in his own way, posed questions years go that still resonate today and provide entree to the central themes addressed in this workshop. Echoing concerns raised by Harold Lasswell and Arnold Wolfers decades before, Dan resisted post-Cold War efforts to problematize environmental issues under the rubric of national security. He railed against “the conceptual muddle” caused by such “analytically and conceptually misleading” linkages—a line of reasoning that has some interesting parallels with critiques of certain aspects of post-9/11 American foreign policy. Michael Klare, on the other hand, was a leading proponent of the loose constructionist school of security, pioneered earlier by such experts as Richard Ullman and Jessica Matthews, which insisted on redefining the term to “include protection against all major threats to human survival and well-being, not just military threats.” Again, although Michael professed this view in 1991 (in a book, by the way, that included chapters by both Deudney and Der Derian), it remains central to ongoing debates about the nature and scope of the security problematic. And James, early on, invoked critical theory to challenge the emerging discourse surrounding security and the use and misuse of words and symbols to frame debate and guide policy. His post-Cold War deconstruction of terrorism—an approach he used earlier on diplomacy and later on war—can be applied seamlessly to analysis of contemporary challenges.
Other familiar themes and motifs from this earlier era also remain relevant today. In a 1992 article in Atlantic Monthly, that was later expanded into a book, political scientist Benjamin Barber presented the arresting image of “Jihad vs. McWorld” to describe the countervailing forces of disintegration and integration that marked the early post-Cold War years and presaged an uncertain and dangerous future. Jihad, in Barber’s characterization, represents “the retribalization of large swaths of mankind,” while “McWorld” is a proxy for the diverse integrating forces that tie states together “by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce.” Barber was not the first to identify such antinomies, but his clever depiction helped popularize the notion that the world was being torn apart by what he termed the “deeply dialectical…dynamics” of Jihad vs. McWorld, “operating with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets.” The venerable (and, in scholarly circles, once fashionable) Hegelian dialectic he invoked denotes, of course, contradictory ideas colliding with each other to produce a synthesis that, in turn, becomes the premise for a series of further collisions and syntheses. But, as I will explain in my remarks, rather than being dialectically opposed, both Jihad and McWorld are inextricably interconnected, containing within themselves both integrative and disintegrative impulses that suggest a more variegated, complex, and overlapping relationship. Instead of Jihad vs. McWorld, what we have been witnessing in recent years is more akin to Jihad through McWorld and vice versa, in which the forces of disintegration employ the instruments of integration to serve their own purposes while, at the same time, shaping and being shaped by those instruments.
This messy and multifaceted dynamic can be characterized under the general rubric of “globalization”—a term that has spawned its own conceptual muddle and, more often than not, has been used as a “fuzzy but familiar cliché” to describe both a relentless, unfolding process and an end state that assumes the world is already “globalized.” Such terminological confusion is especially evident within the academy where globalization has become “one of the most over used and under specified concepts in contemporary social science.” In the course of some research I conducted a few years ago, I tried to unpack globalization’s multiple meanings and usages with the aim, pace Karl Deutsch, of “defining its limits” and settling upon an analytically functional approach that did not treat the concept as an unexplained given. I traced the various “waves” of globalization literature, much of it redundant and narrowly focused, and concluded that the term had been used so promiscuously over the past two decades that any single definition invoked analytically would run the risk of being necessarily idiosyncratic or impenetrably abstract.
For my purposes, I settled on a methodological approach borrowed from the late Pierre Bourdieu (himself, coincidentally, a renowned anti-globilizer) that distinguished “categories of practice” (“ ‘native,’ ‘folk’ or ‘lay’ categories”) from “categories of analysis” (“more scientific, experience distant categories…used by theorists to explain or understand phenomena”). In short, I posited that globalization could best be understood as a melded category of analysis and practice comprised of distinct but interrelated clusters of political, economic, social, and technological phenomena that have become generally and plausibly associated with the term in both popular and scholarly discourses. If not unequivocally unprecedented (a standard that “second wave” globalization scholars accused over exuberant “first wavers” of failing to meet), the content of these clusters would, at least, be especially significant in terms of scope and scale. Rather than a conclusive definition of globalization—which I conceded was not attainable—this approach would acknowledge the concept’s variable and contested nature, while also focusing on its most salient characteristics.
Even in the relatively short time since my research was completed, the term globalization threatened to become passé. The events of 9/11 seemed, in some ways, to diminish its relevance in the face of another inscrutable phenomenon that had captured the popular imagination. I am, therefore, pleased to see that the concept of globalization has been revitalized in Thomas Friedman’s new book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, in his description of a process of “shrinking and flattening” that is “connecting all world knowledge centers together into a single global network.” In what Friedman describes as “Globalization 3.0,” individuals—in addition to states and multinational corporations who were the primary global actors in versions 1.0 and 2.0, respectively—are now empowered to collaborate in unprecedented ways across both the developed and developing worlds. Although characteristically glib, Friedman has yet again succeeded in presenting a complex idea in an accessible form. He has, in many ways, breathed new life into a seemingly shopworn term. But even Friedman reveals a Barber-like propensity for invoking a dialectic. For Friedman, this upgraded form of globalization will thrive “if politics and terrorism don’t get in the way” [italics added]. A potential clash might occur between opposing forces that, presumably, would produce something other than the idealized, “flattened” world he imagines. Similar to my critique of Barber, rather than representing one side in a dialectical relationship, “politics and terrorism” are better thought of as part and parcel of the very phenomenon Friedman seeks to define; as implicated in its basic dynamic. To be fair, Friedman also describes how flattening can enable destructive power. His worldview, however, remains essentially Manichaean; recognizable forces of light battle equally discernible forces of darkness. But as I argue, it is not always so easy to distinguish light from dark, good from evil, in the murky haze enveloping an increasingly globalized world.
Returning to a central theme of this panel and workshop, this dynamic has important implications for the way global security is defined and operationalized. In essence, global security cannot be considered today without reference to globalization. But in order to be analytically serviceable, globalization needs to be unpacked and considered in its most prevalently recognized manifestations. In this way, the variable effects of this complex phenomenon can be assessed as they pertain to particular regions, states, groups, and individuals or to other contested notions, from “sovereignty” to “power” (terms that have been usefully unpacked by international relations scholars such as Stephen Krasner and Joseph Nye). Admittedly, this does not suggest the kind of methodological parsimony that is so revered by (some) political scientists, but it does acknowledge a world that stubbornly defies the tidy organizing principles that seemed to more readily define the security challenges of previous eras.
So what have we learned since the incomplete and faltering attempts to redefine security at the end of the Cold War? Did the events of 9/11 and their aftermath signal a fundamental discontinuity in world affairs, an epochal change, or are they more usefully considered as natural extensions of threats long in the making? Have the threats themselves changed dramatically or is it our perception of those threats that represent the real change? A clue can be found in the recently published final report of the U.N. Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. Beyond what some consider its debilitating refusal to countenance the use of force without Security Council approval, the report gives official sanction to an eclectic notion of security that avoids privileging any particular threat. Rather, it categorizes horizontally six “clusters of threats,” from weapons of mass destruction to social and economic problems, along a continuum corresponding to the perceptions of insecurity among various member states. As with the approach to globalization described above, the report avoids definitional certainties and acknowledges the variable and contested nature of security threats. And it declares, as if for the first time, that these threats are interrelated and cannot be addressed by any single nation acting alone.
Again, as with other themes in the current security discourse, references to interrelated threats and an inability to solve global problems through unilateral action are not new. Michael Klare, among others, used similar language fourteen years ago. What is new, however, is the context in which these pronouncements are being made. While it may have been premature to try to design a new security architecture in the immediate post-Cold War years as the dust was literally and figuratively falling from the toppled monuments of the Soviet Union, a similar claim could be made about more recent efforts following the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. But as noted above (and, it is hoped, clarified in my remarks), no effort to grasp the emerging security agenda will succeed unless the underlying assumptions and implications of the various strands of both the referent object of analysis—“security”—and its presumed components and principal foils are deeply interrogated, disassembled, and reassembled in what might well turn out to be surprising ways. Only then will policymakers begin to think the unthinkable. And only then will social scientists have any chance of building what Imre Lakatos famously described as a “progressive research program,” that elusive scholarly goal involving the development of theory, over time, that allows for an increase in content as it develops, explanations for the advancements of its predecessors, and independent corroboration. “Progressive,” of course, has another meaning distinct from what Lakatos intended. Although theory-building might seem a solipsistic diversion from the real work of addressing the urgent existential threats facing the world, it is necessary, if for no other reason, than to help counter the evocative cant that passes for higher truths these days during the all-encompassing Global War on Terror.
This draft should not to be quoted without permission from the author.
Harold D Lasswell, National Security and Individual Freedom (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), 50-75.
Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Pres, 1962), 147-165.
Daniel Deudney, “The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Volume 19, No. 3 (Winter 1990), 461-476.
Richard H. Ullman, “Redefining Security,” International Security (Summer 1983):123-129.
Jessica Tuchman Matthews, “Redefining Security,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Spring 1989): 162-77.
Michael T. Klare and Daniel C. Thomas, eds., World Security: Trends & Challenges at Century’s End, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1991), 3.
See for example, James Der Derian, “The Global Terrorist Discourse: Signs, States, and Systems of Global Political Violence, “ in World Security: Trends & Challenges at Century’s End, Klare and Thomas, eds., (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 237-265, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); and Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network ( Collingdale, PA : Diane Publishing, 2001).
Benjamin Barber, “Jihad vs. McWorld,” The Atlantic Monthly 269 (March 1992): 53-65; and later expanded in Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Times Books, 1995). Similar references to such integrative and disintegrative antinomies have been made by, among others; John Gaddis, “Toward the Post-Cold War World,” Foreign Affairs70 (Spring 1991): 102-122; and later by Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrer Strauz Giroux, 1999), 25-37; and Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping the Universe (New York: Routledge, 2000), 22.
Barber, “Jihad vs. McWorld,” 1995, 4.
Peter Berger, “Four Faces of Global Culture,” The National Interest (Fall 19976), 23-29.
Simon Reich, “What is Globalization:? Four Possible Answers,” working paper #261, Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, December 1998, 1
Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and its Alternatives ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969, 138.
For a description of these “Waves,” see Colin Hay and David Marsh, eds., Demystifying Globalization ( New York: St. Martins’s Press, Inc., 2000).
In, Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’ ,“ Theory and Society 29 (2000), 4.
Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century ( New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 10.
Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Joseph P. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics ( New York: PublicAffairs, 2004).
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Report of the Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, United Nations, December 2004.
See, among others, Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 59-89; Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, ed. E. Zahar and J. Worrall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); and Brendan Larvor, Lakatos: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998).