Reinventing the international approaches to globalization: The Helsinki Process

Abstract

In the last ten years we have been witnessing an essential change within what we might call the ‘international approaches towards globalization’. This change is not to be considered only as being incremental but rather fundamental as it consists not merely in a strategy-oriented shift but in one of principle. From the ‘worst enemy of the poor’, globalization turned into a ‘phenomenon that we all have to take profit of’. This essay will analyze the turning point in the anti-globalization attitudes by using the study of one of the most recent and important international programmes on globalization, the Helsinki Process on Globalization and Democracy, under the aspects of the historical reform of the international approaches towards globalization.     

Young pioneers: Children and the making of Chinese consumerism

Abstract

This article explores the cross-cutting forces shaping the emergence of consumerism in contemporary China through a detailed study of the craze for the Transformer range of toys among Chinese children in 1989, drawing on original fieldwork and translations from Chinese sources. It argues that rather than viewing the craze as evidence of an accelerating trend towards ‘cultural imperialism’ and Americanization, it should be understood as the product of a complex interplay between three cultural formations: the long-standing and still active legacy of Confucianism; past and present experiences of ‘actually existing’ Communism, and the emerging potentials of the new market oriented economy. The detailed evidence collected for this study suggests that ‘cultural globalization’ is a highly uneven process that must be investigated with proper regard to the specific historical and social dynamics of particular situations.     

INVOKING AFFECT

This article interrogates the contemporary emergence of affect as critical object and perspective through which to understand the social world and our place within it. Emphasising the unexpected, the singular or the quirky over the generally applicable, the turn to affect builds on important work in cultural studies on the pitfalls of writing the body out of theory. More importantly for this article, the contemporary interest in affect evidences a dissatisfaction with poststructuralist approaches to power, framed as hegemonic in their negativity and insistence of social structures rather than interpersonal relationships as formative of the subject. The article focuses on the recent contributions of Brain Massumi and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in particular, unpacking their celebration of the difference that affect makes. The author's critique of the affective turn focuses on both the illusion of choice that it offers the cultural critic, and its rewriting of the recent history of cultural theory to position affect as ‘the new cutting edge’. While affect may constitute a valuable critical focus in context, it frequently emerges through a circular logic designed to persuade ‘paranoid theorists’ into a more productive frame of mind - for who would not prefer affective freedom to social determinism? Yet it remains unclear what role affect may have once this rhetoric has worked its persuasive magic. In addition, and more worryingly, affective rewriting flattens out poststructuralist inquiry by ignoring the counter-hegemonic contributions of postcolonial and feminist theorists, only thereby positioning affect as ‘the answer’ to contemporary problems of cultural theory.     

Which is the ‘self’ in ‘self‐interest’?

This article contends that homogenisation of the term ‘self‐interest’– in sociological and economic discourse – has resulted in many misconceptions about what particular doctrines of ‘self‐interest’ were instituted to achieve at certain historical periods and in specific cultural milieux. At its worst, the article argues, this has led to a misunderstanding of the import of particular doctrines of self interest,which are read in terms of general tradition – such as that which views self‐interested conduct as a natural faculty – rather than in terms of the context specific aims of those advocating them. The article attempts to show how, historically, there have been quite significant changes in the characterisation of the ‘self’ deemed to be ‘self‐interested’. In particular, it focuses on the ‘self’ of certain early modern conceptions of self interest, and suggests this creation is best viewed not as a subjectivity transcendentally presupposed by experience, but as one historically cultivated to counter the exigencies of particular circumstances – the disaster of perpetual ‘warre’ in 17th century Europe – and to meet the purposes of a certain way of life – existence in the civitas.     

Recovering the social: globalization,football and transnationalism

Abstract In this article, we place the social and football (as a sporting realm) at the heart of social scientific analysis of globalization processes. Our theoretical framework sets out, in turn, the concepts of glocalization, with particular reference to what we term the ‘duality of glocality’; transnationalism, notably its socio‐historical aspects; connectivity, with particular reference to its antonym, ‘disconnectivity’; and cosmopolitanism, with strong focus on what we term its ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ variants. We explore the interplay of these concepts and processes within three broad domains of the ‘football world’: supporter subcultures, sport journalism, and Japanese football culture. We conclude in part by arguing for greater exploration of sport's role in regard to global processes and of the interrelationships between the duality of glocality and the thick/thin variants of cosmopolitanism.     

Understanding the origin of the Bohai state in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

The state of Bohai (on Korean reading – Parhae, ??) existed in what is modern Russian Primorye region (Приморский край/Maritime Region), North Korea and Northeastern China, from the late seventh to the early tenth centuries AD. It played an important role in the history of the area as a major regional power for over two centuries. Recently, the history of Bohai has begun to attract scholarly interest. However, North Korean studies of Bohai remain basically almost unknown in the Western world. In this article, I present the history of Bohai studies in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). In this article, I analyze not only North Korean studies of Bohai but also the opinions of the Korean scholars on the subject. They are rather specific for North Koreans who have unique access to the archaeological and historical materials on Bohai but are also subjected to unusually severe political pressures. The history of Bohai has now become an object of active political games which are related to territorial claims based on alleged archaeological and historical material. This situation increases the general interest in Bohai but also makes honest and unbiased research more difficult.     

Self-work and social change: disindividualised participation amongst young Australian Buddhist practitioners

Recent work on youth participation has mobilised a ‘DIY’ or ‘individualised’ framework to explain the nature of contemporary participation, particularly amongst minoritised religious youth. This paper examines this conceptual framework in light of concurrent claims that contemporary participation can be better conceptualised using a ‘doing it with others’ (DIWO) approach, which emphasises the collaborative nature of participation. In light of these claims, I analyse the participation experiences of 22 young adult Buddhist practitioners who are located within a neo-liberal Australian context, yet simultaneously have access to religious teachings and practices which challenge distinct notions of selfhood. This paper shows that both ‘DIY’ and ‘DIWO’ conceptions of participation find expression in the participation experiences of participants from the study, and that both DIY and DIWO approaches can additionally be seen as mutually reinforcing rather than distinctly contrasting. I propose a new concept of ‘disindividualisation’, suggesting that Maffesoli's concept of ‘disindividuation’ and Elias's work linking psychological development and social change should be considered in conjunction with an individualised or DIY perspective on youth participation to denote this kind of participatory work.     

The Social Studies—a Slogan or a Service

This article discusses the role that teacher educators can play in helping their students develop a fuller understanding of world history. Trends such as globalization have led to calls for increased teaching about the diverse cultures and peoples of the world. However, prospective teachers’ educational backgrounds have in most cases not adequately prepared them to teach world history effectively. The article begins with a discussion of the historical evolution of the course in world history; it then defines different approaches to this field, and concludes by providing suggestions for how teacher educators can help their students bring a true version of world history to their classrooms.     

Book Review

This article is concerned with current understandings of the relevance of urban community studies within sociology. It starts by revisiting some of the major critiques made of community studies in the 1960s and 1970s, and briefly reviews whether network analysis, and in particular a focus on ‘personal communities’, provided a satisfactory alternative approach. The main part of the article argues that despite the criticisms there have been there is still much to be gained from a focus on people's attachments to locality, including the networks to which they are linked. Taking processes of globalization and migration as its major themes, the article explores how research has demonstrated the continuing relevance of ‘locality’ and ‘community’ for understanding the ways that contemporary social and economic transformations shape people's experiences. As well as considering different aspects of social exclusion, the article reviews how recent studies have explored the increasingly complex interplay of locality and identity.     

The global animus: in the tracks of world consciousness

In recent years, much has been made of the idea that under conditions of globalization, more and more people in different parts of the planet conceive of themselves as part of a ‘global society’ or ‘global culture’. Often it has been alleged that forms of consciousness centred around a disposition to see one's own life as a single part of the ‘world as a whole’ are relatively recent products. In this paper we argue that such tendencies, or something very much like them, in fact were present in the ancient Mediterranean world. We examine how ways of thinking and feeling, that bear in certain ways close correspondence to modern ideas as to ‘globality’, were prevalent amongst certain social groups in the Roman empire. Those persons regarded themselves as part of a world that was rapidly shrinking through increasing levels of political, commercial and other modes of interconnection between its geographically disparate parts. By examining these ancient attitudes, we demonstrate an important aspect of the pre-history of modern sensibilities as to the nature of a ‘globalizing/globalized world’. Moreover, by attending to ancient evidence as to ‘global’ attitudes and ‘global consciousness’, one may begin to overcome the presentism implicit in many contemporary accounts of globalization.     

The inclusion of the non‐European world in international society, 1870s–1920s: evidence from global networks

Abstract This article is envisaged as a contribution to the historical sociology of globalization. In it I investigate the idea that from the 1870s peoples beyond Europe were increasingly included into international society. The discussion explores theoretical issues around intercultural engagement, arguing against those who see inclusion in terms of simple co‐option into Western modernity, and in favour of a more subtle co‐production of modern processes and forms of difference. Attention then moves on to examine historical evidence drawn from some knowledge networks involving Africa and India. Inclusion is seen in terms of a very complex and shifting set of engagements, conflicts and modes of cooperation, circumscribed by both racial and elite forms of discourse under the shadow of the growing political instability of empire. The methodology of interpersonal network analysis is also commended as a way of opening up debates about the long‐term history of the dynamics and limits to the emergence of global public spheres.     

Sovereignty in a Changing World: From Westphalia to Food Sovereignty

This article traces the shifting meaning of the notion of sovereignty from the modern age to the age of globalization and its aftermath, envisaging new constellations of sovereignty taking shape across the globe. Observing the term's centrality in the configuration of the modern nation-state and its epochal semantic shifts, it briefly examines the concept's ‘decline’ during the era of globalization. It then introduces the notion of ‘liquid sovereignty’ in the context of rapidly changing ideas of territoriality, power, and inter-dependence. This in turn, it is argued, is connected with the surfacing of new forms of sovereignty centred on aliments, nutrition, and survival, encapsulated in the notion of ‘food sovereignty’. The article suggests that the food sovereignty movement has helped in the recovery of basic aspects of sovereignty in a world threatened by climate change and neo-liberal globalization, as the cosmopolitical dimension merged with ethno-political claims, particularly amongst Indigenous Peoples in the Americas and, to a lesser extent, Western sub-state nationalist movements.     

The birth of the queen/the modern homosexual: historical explanations revisited

In this paper I review a number of explanations for the emergence of the modern homosexual category in Western (mainly Northwest European) cultures. I suggest there are four different emphases in respect of the social and cultural factors given priority in interpretations of the formation of the homosexual category. Of course, individual studies have often taken into consideration more than one single factor (most notably, Greenberg, 1988; Chauncey, 1994), and the grouping of previous studies that I here suggest only indicates where the focus of a given study is. The social and cultural factors emphasized in these four approaches are: 1) the effects of competitive capitalism on the bourgeois/middle class political economy of sexuality and sexual morals; 2) the rise of expert knowledges, controlling systems, and modern bureaucracies; 3) tensions within gender order and the struggle over new definitions of gender roles; 4) the rise of free wage labour, the proliferation of urban anonymity, and the unfolding of new modes of existence in the life-world of modern pluralist urban society. Finally, the article briefly considers the potential erosion of the homosexual vs. heterosexual divide in the light of the historical background. Almost thirty years have passed since ‘The Homosexual Role’, by Mary McIntosh (1968), the first notable contribution to the historical sociology of homosexuality operating within a social constructionist view of homosexuality. Since then, there have been numerous studies of the formation of the conceptual category and social aggregate of ‘modern homosexual’. Researchers have differed about whether the pedigree of ‘homosexual’ and homosexual identities and subcultures in Western societies can be traced back to the late nineteenth century or to the early eighteenth century, and whether or not some notion of ‘homosexual’ was established in the cultural imagery before the last fifty years or so. It might be fruitful to distinguish between the historically older categories of ‘molly’, ‘queen’, and ‘fairy’ on the one hand, and the more recent ‘homosexual’ on the other hand. It can be argued that the decisive feature of the first-mentioned ‘deviant men’ was their status as gender-crossers (which as a side-effect entailed an interest in homosexual conduct), whereas the modern term homosexual does not necessarily suggest gender-crossing or more generic ‘sexual inversion’(cf. Chauncey, 1994). However, allusions to gay men's purported effeminacy and lesbian women's purported masculinity continue to surface frequently also in contemporary culture. Hence, for the sake of brevity, I here use the term modern homosexual, by which I refer to a notion that there is in some people an inherent sexual desire exclusively for persons of the same sex, and that this so-called sexual orientation is to some degree intertwined with a tendency to gender-crossing conduct. ¹ 1 Historically there has been a mutually re-enforcing dynamics between the forma-tion of the conceptual category and the social aggregate of homosexual(s). Methodological considerations and also certain presumptions about the dynam-ics of culture and society help explain why, until recently, most studies have focused on the trajectory of concepts, identities, and social roles, rather than on the experiential, embodied aspects of the social aggregate of homosexual(s). The idea of sexual inversion predicates that homosexual desire is evidence of a faulty combination of body and soul: there is ‘a female soul in a male body’, or vice versa. On the distinctions between sexual orientation and sexual role see, King, 1984.
     

Challenging a culture of racial equivalence

We live at a time when our understandings and conceptualizations of ‘racism’ are often highly imprecise, broad, and used to describe a wide range of racialized phenomena. In this article, I raise some important questions about how the term racism is used and understood in contemporary British society by drawing on some recent cases of alleged racism in football and politics, many of which have been played out via new media technologies. A broader understanding of racism, through the use of the term ‘racialization’, has been helpful in articulating a more nuanced and complex understanding of racial incidents, especially of people's (often ambivalent) beliefs and behaviours. However, the growing emphasis upon ‘racialization’ has led to a conceptualization of racism which increasingly involves multiple perpetrators, victims, and practices without enough consideration of how and why particular interactions and practices constitute racism as such. The trend toward a growing culture of racial equivalence is worrying, as it denudes the idea of racism of its historical basis, severity and power. These frequent and commonplace assertions of racism in the public sphere paradoxically end up trivializing and homogenizing quite different forms of racialized interactions. I conclude that we need to retain the term ‘racism’, but we need to differentiate more clearly between ‘racism’ (as an historical and structured system of domination) from the broader notion of ‘racialization’.     

Going beyond methodological presentism: examples from a Copenhagen neighbourhood 1885–2010

Denmark is an example of a country where the idea of historical ethnic homogeneity stands strong. This article challenges this historical presentism: the scholarly and societal tendency to understand social phenomena within a limited contemporary framework, neglecting possible effects and similarities embedded in and established through human history. This will be done via an historical and ethnographic study of the Copenhagen neighbourhood of Nørrebro. The article underlines the ethnic heterogeneity of Danish history and further shows how combining historical and ethnographic methods in studying a neighbourhood can grant us important insights into the changing incorporation of immigrant groups and the changing meanings of ‘the immigrant’.     

‘It feels right in my heart’: affective accountability in narratives of attachment

This article makes a contribution to discussions around ‘affect’ in the social sciences (Clough and Halley, 2007; Connolly, 1999; Massumi, 2002). It emerges from a research project involving a network of mothers – in London – who breastfeed their children to ‘full term’. Typically, this would be up to the age of three or four, though ranged, in this case, to between one and eight years old. For many women, the most fundamental reasoning in their decision to breastfeed to ‘full term’ is that it simply ‘feels right.’ The article therefore explores anthropological approaches to the ‘feelings’ that embodied experiences generate, as revealed in the accounts and practices of the people we work with (whether at the physiological, emotional or moral levels). It considers various means of describing the feelings experienced by women during of long‐term breastfeeding – such as ‘hormones’, ‘instinct’ and ‘intuition’– but ultimately argues for a theoretical framework of ‘affect’ to incorporate best the combined physiological and moral aspects of ‘doing what feels right in my heart,’ so critical to women's perceptions of themselves as mothers.     

Connection and constitution: locating war and culture in globalization studies

War and the military are neglected in globalization studies, despite the fact that the worldwide circulation of people, goods and ideas often takes warlike form. This article seeks to remedy this neglect by conceiving war itself as a form of interconnection between peoples and locales, and as an occasion for circulation and interchange. The article develops a multi-dimensional and historical conception of globalization as relations of connection and mutual constitution, and locates war and culture within them. Cultural approaches to globalization are used to illuminate the role of war and the military in consciousness of the world as a whole and to address the significance of military ‘traveling cultures’.     

Forces of Altermodernization: Urban Social Movements and the New Urban Question in Contemporary Poland

The article discusses contemporary Polish ‘right to the city’ movements and their potential for creating change, described here as the potential for ‘alternative modernization’, a term rooted in the alterglobalist movement. The waning of the latter’s energy has fostered the emergence of local movements focused on protest and reform. In Poland, both an historical anti-urbanity and monologic patterns of regime transformation (the latter producing the ‘anti-city’) have become points of reference for urban movements and their demand for alternative patterns of modernization, called here altermodernization. The altermodernist model focuses, among other things, on discourses and praxis of decommodification, institutional reform and visions of a ‘well-organized city’. The article is primarily a product of desk research and the author’s own materials based on in-depth interviews collected in six Polish cities as well as participant observation and content analysis.     

Disabled people as counterfeit citizens: the politics of resentment past and present

In this article I argue that disabled people in the United Kingdom have been tipped into an abyss of counterfeit citizenship. They have been smeared as ‘false mendicants’ – an old trick well documented in the historical archives of ableism. Neoliberalism has used this repertoire of invalidation – its noxious taint of cunning and fraud – as the ‘moral justification’ for welfare reform and for the pillory and notoriety into which the entire disabled community has been placed. Austerity – through the neoliberal politics of resentment – has made disabled people its scapegoat. I argue that a historical precedent for the contemporary demonisation of disabled people as counterfeit citizens can be found in the early modern period in the mythology of the ‘sturdy beggar’.     

‘Life stage dissolution’ in Anglo‐American advertising and popular culture: Kidults,Lil’ Britneys and Middle Youths

The ‘long road to adulthood’ that supposedly now characterizes the period from the teens to the late twenties (for individuals in developed countries) has been the subject of much recent media and academic commentary. This paper adopts a sociological perspective to review and critique this commentary, and in particular the argument made by certain developmental psychologists that the period between adolescence and fully‐fledged adulthood is now distinct enough to constitute a new stage in the life cycle known as ‘emerging adulthood’. In contrast, it is argued that, rather than anything as significant as a new life stage, what is actually happening is the erosion of established ones. To illustrate this point, the article introduces the new theoretical concept of ‘life stage dissolution’ (and its attendant bi‐directional processes of ‘adultification’ and ‘infantilization’) – a blurring (or more accurately merging) process that makes it increasingly difficult for young people to differentiate and disassociate themselves from the generation immediately ahead of them, and indeed vice versa. The paper argues that, whilst this process takes a number of cultural/psychosocial forms, it is at its most prominent in contemporary Anglo‐American advertising and marketing practices that actively seek to erode traditionally demarcated adult and childhood roles, differences, and oppositions as a new and distinct message within contemporary consumerism.