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• A "globalizing of culture and communication structures".
• "Proliferation of forms of reflexivity", especially aesthetic awareness.
• Far more "personal mobility" – tourists, migrants and refugees.
• The development of a service class (salariat) with "cosmopolitan tastes especially for endlessly 'fashionable' consumer services" (often provided by migrant labour).
• The "declining effectiveness and legitimacy of nation-states".
• The "emergence of 'neo-worlds' . . . re-engineered cultural spaces which are the typical homeland for the cosmopolitan individual".
• The dissolution of locationally-segregated social classes.

In On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism (2000) – written in the form of a dialogue between Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton – Giddens identifies four key features of globalisation:

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• A ‘weightless’ global economy based on a trade in information rather than physical products.
• World-wide acceptance of the values and practices of capitalism (Marx predicted that the world would be transformed into a single capitalist market and coined the phrase "the internationalisation of capital").

• The transformation of everyday life as traditional social structures, such as those governing gender and family relations, have dissolved.

Anthony McGrew, A Global Society?, 1992, in Hall S. et al (eds) ‘Modernity and Its Futures’

Has our sense of time been confused by 24 hour trading, the heritage experience and pastiche? Has fashion, by definition ephemeral, become ever-more fleeting – here today, gone tomorrow? Has space been compressed by ever-faster forms of travel and electronic communication? Is location an ever-weaker indicator of consumption patterns?

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However, others argue that globalisation is a capitalist phenomenon unattached to any particular nation state, even the most powerful one in the world. Tomlinson says that the global market has no centre – he calls it a ‘non-space’ – and argues that transnational executives promote US mass culture throughout the world not because they like it, but because it earns them a lot of money: if a fizzy drink with more profit-making potential than cola were discovered in Burundi or Bulgaria it would soon find itself in the global marketplace. And globalisation works both ways, bringing the products of the less developed world to the West as well as exporting Western goods to less developed countries.

A MORI poll in September, 2001, found that only one in eight British adults believes that globalisation enhances everyone’s quality of life. 92% say that transnational corporations should meet the highest human health, animal welfare and environmental standards wherever in the world they are operating. And over 80% think that the government should protect the environment and employment even if it means taking action which goes against the interests of transnationals.

AOL Time Warner, the transnational corporation behind the first Harry Potter film, has an annual turnover of $7.7bn – roughly the same size as the Bolivian economy. AOL Time Warner uses some of its vast profits to fund political groups which oppose the Kyoto climate change treaty and lobby the governments of less developed nations to privatise their public services.

Some commentators assert that globalisation is a threat not only to traditional cultures but also to national identity in advanced societies:

of 'hybrid' cultures, each an amalgam of a national culture and various 'imported' cultural traits.

In Trading Identities: Why Countries and Companies Are Becoming More Alike (1999), a pamphlet written for the Foreign Policy Centre, Wally Olins

argues that companies and countries are changing fast to become more like each other. Countries are developing 'national brands' to compete for investment, trade and tourism, and their governments are rapidly learning the business language of performance indicators and hard statistics. At the same time, mega-merged global companies are using nation-building techniques to

achieve internal cohesion across cultures, while 'talking soft' about their social impact and trying to achieve popular legitimacy by becoming ever

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goods between producers and consumers.

world output and 70% of world trade, mostly in the form of intra-

company transfers (i.e. one branch of a company dealing with others).

820m people remained malnourished.

global grain trade. There is similar corporate domination of other

commodities such as cocoa, tea and bananas.

100,000 small to medium-sized farms and many displaced farmers began

clearing Amazonian rainforest to provide an alternative source of income.

"Economic violence, which the leaders of the rich world must defend, is at the heart of globalisation, or world-wide capitalism."

Globalisation has increased the opportunities for already very wealthy people to make even more money ever more quickly. They seek out the ‘best’ locations (cheap land, cheaper labour) for further capital accumulation and use a global system of intra-company transfers in order to avoid contributions to national exchequers – Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, for example, pays virtually none of the tax due on its assets and transactions.

While globalisation has brought enormous rewards to a few, it has left out or marginalises two-thirds of the world's population. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report, in 1960 the richest 20% of the world's population were thirty times better off than the poorest 20%. Since

According to the United Nations’ 2002 Human Development Report, 2.4bn people in the developing world lack basic sanitation and 1.1bn have no access to clean drinking water. The World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 set a target of halving these numbers by 2015.

then the differential has more than doubled. In seventy countries, average income has fallen since 1980 and the poorest 20% of the world's people now have to share just 1% of the world's income. Between 1994 and 1999, the world's 200 richest people more than doubled their wealth to over a trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000), giving an average holding of $50bn. The assets of the three richest billionaires exceed the combined GNP of all the least developed nations i.e. 600 million people.

Dasgupta's rough and ready calculations of per capita productive wealth show that in the Indian sub-continent, sub-Saharan Africa and China – countries and regions that together encompass half the world's population – it has been declining. For example, Pakistan's GNP per capita grew at a healthy 2.7% per year in the period 1965-96, implying a more than doubling of living standards. But the per capita wealth measure shows close to a 50% decline. And for sub-Saharan Africa, the fall in per capita wealth was even greater.

At the same time as a vast swathe of the less-developed world is growing less wealthy in per capita terms, countries like the UK and the US are growing wealthier. The explanation for the imbalance lies in the nature of poor countries' economies. Their productive wealth comprises mainly natural capital (commercial forests, oil and minerals, water, fisheries, soil, biodiversity, the atmosphere as a sink for carbon dioxide, etc.) which, owing to imperfect systems of property rights, is under-priced or even free. Much of this capital has been bought at knock-down prices by transnational corporations, thereby transferring productive wealth from people in poor nations to people in rich nations. In addition, the under-pricing of poor nations’ capital assets leads to an under-pricing of their primary output (coffee, minerals, timber. . .) and, as the bulk of their exports to rich nations consist of these primary goods, this effectively means that poor people are subsidising the consumption of rich people. By a cruel paradox, global economic development has led to sustainability in the developed world being bought at the expense of unsustainability elsewhere.

The Chief Executive of the Cargill Corporation is able to boast: "When we get up from the breakfast table each morning, much of what we have eaten – cereals, bread, coffee, sugar and so on – has passed through the hands of my company." He didn’t add: ‘to the financial benefit of me and my company’s shareholders, rather than the people who actually grew your breakfast foods’.

A key concern of anti-GM campaigners is that genetically modified seeds facilitate the corporate takeover of the food chain. Small farmers are seduced (or coerced) into GM seed deals, only to find that they can’t pay for the higher-priced seeds and the specified pesticides. They go bust and agri-businesses move in and ‘rationalise’ the seed market. This compromises bio-diversity and threatens food security itself.

Under the dual guises of ‘free trade’ and ‘modernisation’, less developed countries (LDCs) are persuaded: (a) to drop trade barriers which protected their endogenous economic activity; (b) to opt instead for ‘open economies’ based on producing cheap goods and cash crops for export to the west; (c) to privatise communal services such as health, education and the utilities so that they can be commercially exploited. Western aid is tied to acceptance of this so-called ‘economic liberalisation’ and political opposition is ruthlessly suppressed, either by local placemen (armed by state-subsidised western dealers) or, if necessary, by direct military intervention.

The result of this global economic project is that formerly self-sufficient people in LDCs are transformed into what John Pilger calls ‘globalisation’s unpeople’ – an international underclass forced to live in insanitary, disease-ridden labour camps and to work long hours in sweatshops for less than living wages producing the branded goods which sell in the west for many times their labour value. In the process, their countries accumulate huge debts to western financial institutions, the interest on which is often enough to wipe out export earnings. The winners are the international conglomerates which accumulate assets exceeding the GDPs of some of their client states.

Segment of world's Current share of

Richest 20% 86%

Middle 60% 13%

Poorest 20% 1%

[Source: International Institute for Sustainable Development]

Gold is Ghana’s biggest export and, urged on by the IMF and the World Bank, the Ghanaian government gives tax-breaks to mining companies and imposes virtually no environmental or other regulations. Two-thirds of the land in the west of Ghana is under concession to the companies and, everywhere you go, you see huge holes in the ground where there were once thriving, self-sufficient, villages. Ghana used to produce all its own rice – the people’s staple food. Now, the rice fields are fallow and Mary and her children have to pay far more than before for rice imported from America, where farmers receive tens of millions of dollars in support. The World Bank doesn’t allow Ghana to subsidise rice growers: its poverty reduction and debt-relief strategy allows subsidies only for export goods, like gold.

Global capital "creates more potential for wider co-operation and connections between people, which are the preconditions for liberation movements . . . in the same way that industrial capital made possible the organisation of the industrial working class." And, unlike the industrial proletariat, the ‘global multitude’ can’t be controlled because the ‘global empire’ has no ‘place of power’ – it is "a smooth space . . . both everywhere and nowhere . . . a non-place."

Robin Cohen and Paul Kennedy take a similar view. Whereas most commentaries on globalisation see it as something which diminishes human agency, Cohen and Kennedy say that participation in global social movements gives people the power to reshape the emerging world order and to create democratic and participatory possibilities.

The beginning of the C21 has witnessed a rapid coming together of global networks, coalitions and voluntary organisations, individually and collectively focussed on the iniquities of the global empire: in the two years following the Seattle world trade talks, three million people have demonstrated against globalisation – the Genoa social forum alone attracted over 700 groups from 100 countries to protest against G8 – an impressive achievement in a very short time-span. "This movement is unstopable now in both rich and poor countries," says Jose Bove, French farmers’ leader and resistance fighter against the hegemony of global capital. "We have seen nothing yet."

But the concerns of the world trade and G8 protesters have yet to impact on conventional politics – in the 2000 US Presidential election, for example, the world’s best known critic of amoral business activity, Ralph Nader, won just three percent of the vote. A cynical view of the current wave of anti-globalisation direct action is that it is a form of street-theatre – play politics for media consumption (another manifestation of reality TV?), which diverts attention from real solutions to real problems.

Globalisation has made life difficult for sociologists. According to Turner, sociology developed "to explain and understand local or national destinies". But, says McGrew, "in a 'shrinking' world, where transnational relations, networks, activities and interconnections of all kinds transcend national boundaries, it is increasingly difficult to understand local or national identities without reference to global forces."

Apart from Naomi Klein . . .

Sorros is a poacher turned gamekeeper – over many years he amassed a fortune as a world-wide financial speculator. (He was largely responsible for ‘Black Wednesday’ which led to Britain leaving the ERM in 1992.) Sorros argues that globalisation could be a force for good, but hasn’t been: unregulated international markets are "crisis prone"; the poor have been marginalised; the public realm has been neglected; and entire national economies are at the mercy of huge flows of capital that slosh incessantly round the globe.

Hertz is an academic who helped set up the Russian stock market. So his account of global corporations seizing power from democratic governments (in his view, voting is pointless because all major parties have been ‘bought’ by big business, and so called ‘consumer politics’ serves the interests of the wealthy) cannot be dismissed as leftist raving.

Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank. In Globalisation and Its Discontents he explains why the current international trade regime is unfair to developing countries. He lays much of the blame on the IMF (International Monetary Fund) which, he says, is shrouded in secrecy and fails properly to consult trade unions and other representatives of civil society, while bowing before corporate interests. He is equally critical of the World Bank: "Decisions were made on the basis of what seemed a curious blend of ideology and bad economics, dogma that sometimes seemed to be thinly veiling special interests . . . Open, frank discussion was discouraged – there was no room for it." The World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), says Stiglitz, have pushed fundamentalist free market solutions where a more balanced approach would have been better. Developing countries need capital, but forcing open their doors to speculative flows has hampered growth, induced instability and forestalled democracy. However, Stiglitz strongly believes that globalisation can be a positive force around the world, for both rich and poor ("Those who vilify globalization too often overlook its benefits."), but only if the IMF, World Bank, and WTO dramatically alter the way they operate, beginning with increased transparency.

Palast is an undercover journalist who has collected a mass of ‘confidential’ documents which reveal how greedy corporations have joined forces with bent politicians to thwart democracy, damage the environment and rip-off the people. Palast’s text contains some factual errors, seized on by his opponents, but the documentary evidence is wholly convincing.

The New Rulers of the World is a series of essays based on Pilger’s television films. Pilger is an iconoclast, who challenges conventional thinking on just about every issue he explores and is reviled by most other journalists and virtually all politicians. But that doesn’t mean he is wrong, and his enemies rarely manage to expose any factual inaccuracies in his work. In this, his latest book, he writes about "the myth of globalisation", which he sees as a confidence trick to rob the world’s poor of what little they have, rather than as something which will ever benefit humanity.

Jonathan Sacks (The Dignity of Difference, Continuum Books, 2002)

Sacks is Britain’s Chief Rabbi and an economic conservative. So he is broadly sympathetic to free market capitalism, which he sees as "the best means we have yet discovered for alleviating poverty," even though it "generates unequal outcomes, and the faster it moves, the more glaring the inequalities to which it gives rise." "Within and between nations," he says, "these inequalities have now become unacceptably large. The concentration of the world’s wealth into relatively few hands while millions of children live in poverty, ignorance and disease is a scandal that is no longer sustainable

. . . a scar on the face of humanity." In Sacks’ view, this "does not mean abandoning the global market, but it does mean taking seriously a set of non-market values which must be factored in to our decisions about the future." There’s a lot of hedging here, and you feel that Sacks is trying to be all things to all readers. But he does have a nice turn of phrase: "On the one hand, globalisation is bringing us closer together than ever before. On the other, a new tribalism – a regression to older and more fractious loyalties – is driving us ever more angrily apart." This is the book’s main theme.

Barbara Gunnell and David Timms (eds) (After Seattle: Globalisation and its discontents, Catalyst book 1, April 2000)
A collection of essays by some of Britain's foremost commentators on globalisation: Bernard Crick, Meghnad Desai, John Edmonds, Larry Elliott, William Keegan, Doreen Massey, George Monbiot and Hilary Wainwright. After Seattle is published by the democratic socialist thinktank, Catalyst, and its contributors are members of Catalyst’s editorial board. All are critical of the way globalisation has been shaping up but, within that framework, offer diverse analyses, prognoses and prescriptions.

Robin Cohen and Paul Kennedy (Global Sociology, MacMillan Press, 2000) Cohen and Kennedy provide an up-to-date survey of globalisation aimed at UK sociology students who might find the comprehensive glossary at the end of their book particularly useful.

Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson (Globalization in Question, Polity, 1999) Hirst and Thompson have written an accessible introduction to the topic.

Monbiot is a ruthlessly honest campaigning journalist. In Captive State he gives the low-down on multinational corporations’ strangle-hold on global politics.

David Held (Democracy and the Global Order, Polity, 1995)

and . . .

are generally positive about globalisation.

Thomas Frank (One Market Under God, 2002, Vintage)

isn’t.