Copyrighted material - 9781137293411 New Age Globalization Meaning and Metaphors Aqueil Ahmad Copyrighted material - 9781137293411 Copyrighted material - 9781137293411 new age globalization Copyright © Aqueil Ahmad, 2013. All rights reserved. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-1-137-29341-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ahmad, Aqueil. New age globalization : meaning and metaphors / Aqueil Ahmad. pages cm ISBN 978-1-137-29341-1 (alk. paper) 1. Globalization. I. Title. JZ1318.A433 2013 303.48’2—dc23 2012051223 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: July 2013 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyrighted material - 9781137293411 Copyrighted material - 9781137293411 Contents Introduction: The Meaning and Metaphors of New Age Globalization 1 1 Conceptual Framework for Exploring New Age Globalization 17 2 Global Population and Demographic Trends 33 3 The Global Economy (or Economic Globalization) 61 4 The Global Ecological/Environmental System 103 5 The Global Political System (or Political Globalization) 127 6 Global Conflicts 155 7 Globalization of Culture (or Cultural Globalization) 169 8 Globalization of Knowledge, Science, and Technology: The Past, Present, and Future 179 9 World Religions 223 Notes 247 Bibliography 271 Index 289 Copyrighted material - 9781137293411 Copyrighted material - 9781137293411 Copyrighted material - 9781137293411 Copyrighted material - 9781137293411 Introduction The Meaning and Metaphors of New Age Globalization his book examines the interdependent and interconnected global Tsociety, or globalization, in terms of its structural and functional or process characteristics. For its value implications, it is dedicated to the peo- ple—the men, women, and children as citizens of the world—who make and unmake global society and are most affected by it. Whether always spe- cifically stated or not, the underlying concern of this work is global social change for human welfare on this planet, which is either aided or abated by human action itself. The term global society refers to the architecture of this world order, while globalization is treated as its process dimension. Global or “global- ized” structures refer to the institutions, agencies, and organizations whose missions, mandates, networks, and even the workforce, with its values and attitudes, are essentially global rather than local in nature. Such struc- tures are legion in the contemporary world society. Structures such as the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), other international agencies (both governmental and nongovernmental), regional economic zones, and mul- tinational financial, manufacturing, sales, and service corporations imme- diately come to mind in this context. What these institutions do by way of their outreach activities, which affect billions of people, multiple resources, and diverse cultures and environments, are assumed to be the process aspects of global society (or globalization) as a large interconnected and interdependent system with a variety of subsystems within it as explained in this book. Copyrighted material - 9781137293411 Copyrighted material - 9781137293411 2 NEW AGE GLOBALIZATION Sociologists of the structural-functional school and systems theorists in general have used for decades the systemic analogy to explain the inher- ent interdependencies in complex organizations as well as within national societies. To the best of my knowledge it has not been used in the expla- nation of what may be called a global society, the global social system, or globalization per se for obvious reasons. To define and discuss national societies as continuous, interdependent, and interconnected systems in terms of their structures and corresponding processes itself poses enor- mous analytical difficulties because of their complexities and amorphous natures. These difficulties compound when the unit of analysis is the world as a whole. Such conceptualization would be unthinkable in the pre- Sputnik or “preglobalization age” when the notion of our planet as a con- tinuous system was beyond our common perception and consciousness, despite the fact that in some important ways it has been in the making for a long time. Intraplanetary connections are easier to comprehend in the new age globalization, with advanced and ever-faster means of communication, travel, and transfer of people, products, and services from one part of the world to the others. It is in this context that global structures and the pro- cesses that connect them are seen as a large but imperfect system; globaliza- tion is merely a heuristic device. This is done to help simplify and enhance our understanding of unity within the diversity of a very complex, newly emerged or emerging reality defined simply as “globalization” in common language and literature. A quick check at the Davis Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill delivered more than 1,100 relevant titles covering 96 pages under the term “globalization” compared to only 20 pages of 32 overlap- ping entries for “global society.” I believe this would be true in other uni- versity libraries in the United States as well. Unless otherwise delineated, the complementary terms of global society and globalization are often used interchangeably in the following discussion, as they appear to be used in the Davis Library archives as well. A lot has changed since my book Exploring Globalization: Structures and Processes, Impacts, and Implications was published in the middle of 2010. President Obama has been reelected as the forty-fourth president of the United States against seemingly insurmountable odds. French President Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated by François Hollande to form the second Socialist government in France after François Mitterrand’s long tenure from 1981 to 1995. In a monumental Supreme Court decision on June 28, 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts changed ranks with his conservative colleagues on the bench to uphold the Obama’s universal health care plan for all Americans. Enrique Pena Nieto was elected as the president of Mex- ico as his country struggled to fight drug-related violence but held steady Copyrighted material - 9781137293411 Copyrighted material - 9781137293411 INTRODUCTION 3 economic growth. The EU remained intact despite continued economic chaos and political and social instability in half a dozen European coun- tries, including Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and others. As a true measure of global interdependence, economic difficulties in the Euro Zone affected the economies west and east of Europe—North America, China, India, and beyond—and vice versa. In his 2012 book, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz warned of the grow- ing inequality in America as the single most destructive aspect of capitalism and the failure of rational market theories in general to correct economic imbalances in the Western world, particularly the Unites States of America. One characteristic stands out in the new age globalization more than any other: that is the universally experienced ever-faster pace of change in the industrialized and the industrializing countries alike. Interestingly it is the very nature of globalization itself—systemic interconnections, and consequently interdependence—that largely explains why much of the world spins around simultaneously, sometimes a couple of steps for- ward, at other times a couple of steps backward. On the global political scene these gyrations were, or are, no more visible than in the so-called Arab Spring in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, and Egypt, where dictators were toppled in a dramatic domino effect to be replaced by political instabil- ity and unrest. These global revolutions of rising expectations presumably helped spawn the Occupy Wall Street protests all across the United States that dramatized the highly skewed distribution of wealth and consequently political power between the haves and have-nots, the 1 percent and the 99 percent of the common folks, echoing Stiglitz’s warning about the price of inequality in America. The origins and spread of these revolutions can be explained reason- ably well by my favorite conceptual categories of powerful reactions to powerlessness of the weak and of global consciousness among the masses. These psychosocial forces are further stimulated and strengthened by the emerging global invisible college (or colleges) of international scientific communities that is mutually informed and is encouraged to develop and disseminate inventions like television, the Internet, and mobile phones— the technologies of instant communication that become the technologies of revolutions of rising expectations “that produce the agents of change through the process of change itself,” to reenact the eloquent phraseology of