Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism 9781594513220, 1594513228, 2006014181, 9781594513237

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GLOBAL MODERNITY

◊ THE RADICAL IMAGINATION SERIES Edited by Henry A. Giroux and Stanley Aronowitz Now Available Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism: Global Uncertainty and the Challenge of the New Media by Henry A. Giroux Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism by Arif Dirlik Left Turn: Forging a New Political Future by Stanley Aronowitz Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability by Henry A. Giroux Forthcoming Afromodernity: How Europe Is Evolving toward Africa by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff

GLOBAL MODERNITY Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism

ARIF DIRLIK

First published 2007 by Paradigm Publishers Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2007 , Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dirlik, Arif Global modernity : modernity in the age of global capitalism / Arif Dirlik. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-59451-322-0 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-59451-322-8 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Globalization. 2. Culture. 3. Imperialism. 4. International relations. I. Title. JZ1318.D57 2007 337—dc22 2006014181

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ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-322-0 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-323-7 (pbk)

◊ Contents Preface

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1

Introduction: Global Modernity

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Thinking Globalization Historically

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Conceptual Field(s) of Globality

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Legacies: The Global and the Colonial

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Alternatives? The PRC and the Global South

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Conclusion: Is There a Future after Globalization?

153

Keywords from the Text

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Index

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About the Author

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◊ Preface This book reflects on a set of questions that I first took up in After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism, published more than a decade ago (Wesleyan/University of New England Press, 1994). The questions have assumed sharper focus with the unfolding of global events since then. Proliferating literature on globalization since the mid-1990s has brought to light further questions that have added to the complexity of the phenomena encompassed by (and justifying) the concept itself. Most important in giving shape to the argument presented here is the sense, provoked by imperial policies pursued by the United States globally from Hainan Island in the South China Sea to Iraq and western Asia, that the present is not the point of departure for but the end result of globalization, creating a condition that I describe as “global modernity.” The present world is a world of competing claims on modernity, which may be another way of saying that modernity as we have known it, in its very globalization, has lost its plausibility as either a reflection on the past or a pointer to the future. What remains of it are efforts to sustain the power relations that were its product. Political, social, economic, and cultural developments around the world provide plausible evidence that while an earlier Eurocentrically conceived modernity is no longer satisfactory in accounting for contemporary global relationships, the present is structured nevertheless by its past in the colonial racial and class relationships that were intrinsic to the formation of a capitalist modernity centered around Europe and North America north of the Mexican border. vii

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The ideas that have gone into the making of this book were discussed in many seminars and conferences at Adelaide University, Bauhaus University, Beijing University, Beijing Language and Culture University, Binghamton University, the China Center for Comparative Politics and Economics, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, City University of New York Graduate Center, Cornell University, German Historical Institutes (Washington, D.C., and London), Griffith University, the Hainan Writers Association (Hainan, People’s Republic of China), Hampshire College, Hong Kong University, the House of World Cultures (Berlin), the Internationales Forschungzentrum Kulturwissenschaften (Vienna), Leiden University, McMaster University, the New University of Bulgaria, New York University, Northwestern University, Oberlin College, Tianjin Normal University, the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, Tokyo University, Tsinghua University (Taiwan), the University of Basel, the University in Bergen, the University of British Columbia, the University of California–Berkeley, the University of California–Davis, the University of California–Los Angeles, the University of California–Santa Cruz, the University of Chicago, the University of Hamburg, the University of Hawai’i–Manoa, the University of Manitoba, the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, the University of Michigan, the University of Regina, the University of Toronto, and the University of Victoria (British Columbia). I am grateful to the organizers of, and participants in, these conferences for the many intellectually stimulating and provocative occasions they provided. They are too many to name individually, but I would like to single out several individuals whose invitations and input have been of particular help in the development of this essay: Jeff Chan, William Coleman, Chris Connery, Georgi Derluguian, S. N. Eisenstadt, Balz Engler, Jonathan Friedman, Jon Goss, Han Shaogong, Huang Ping, Bruce Kapferer, Nick Knight, Abidin Kusno, Li Tuo, Yngve Lithman, Colin McKerras, Dianne Newell, Ravi Palat, Peter Seel, Neil Smith, Majid Tehranian, Goran Therborn, Immanuel Wallerstein, Wang Fengzhen, Terence Wesley-Smith, John

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Willinsky, Rob Wilson, Alexander Woodside, Robert Young, Yu Keping, and Zhang Xudong. In hindsight, this text had a “Canadian trajectory.” The earliest parts were delivered as one of the inaugural lectures for the McMaster/Toronto project on globalization and autonomy. The manuscript was completed during a brief stay as distinguished visitor at the Peter Wall Institute at the University of British Columbia. I am grateful to Will Coleman and Dianne Newell for making these occasions possible. I am also grateful to Abidin Kusno, Phil Resnick, John Willinsky, and Alec Woodside of the University of British Columbia for their participation in the day-long workshop on global modernity at the Peter Wall Institute at the initiative of its director, Dianne Newell, who has been a dear friend for a quarter century. My graduate students at the University of Oregon—Ana Candela, Soonyi Lee, Guannan Li, Hsiao-pei Yen, and Hongmei Yu—have been a stimulating presence during the years that this book was taking shape. I wish the best to Ana, Hsiao-pei, and Soonyi, who are leaving for universities with more substantial Ph.D. programs than the University of Oregon to complete their doctoral studies. Finally, I would like to express my deep appreciation to Roxann and Nicki for the loving challenges that they have provided over the years and that they continue to provide.

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◊ 1

Introduction Global Modernity Is the world unifying, creating a common organizational structure and a new culture to bolster it, or is it fragmenting into units of various kinds and sizes that are at odds with one another and themselves fractured in many ways internally? Is it looking to a future of expanded if not general welfare and prosperity, or is it about to flounder as it runs out of those resources without which the present organization of political economy will be drained of its life force in a matter of decades? Does the future lie with a new system of world governance that will bring with it peace, equality, and democracy to the billions who are deprived of them, or does it point to a despotism of unprecedented power and reach, with the technological ability to make and remake individuals and societies organizationally and culturally, as has been achieved to some measure already with colonialism, nation-states, and transnational capital, whose convergence has been fundamental in creating the world of the present? These questions, and others similar to them but with different emphases, have been on many minds globally for the past decade. It was from the early 1990s that globalization rapidly and insistently emerged as a concept with paradigmatic claims, demanding attention not only as a guide to the present, the future, and the past of the world we live in 1

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but also as a resource for the reevaluation and reorganization of the social and the human sciences—and our ways of knowing in general. There has been no shortage of answers to these questions as globalization has turned into the most recent fashion in and out of academia. The answers usually have been products of conflicting ideological efforts to appropriate it for different visions of the future, as well as different appreciations of what the concept implies, which have become more and more complicated as the term has spread across diverse fields. More often than not, such answers are notable for their reductionism and the wishful (if not self-consciously ideological) thinking that motivates them. The world we live in is too complicated to lend itself to clear-cut answers demanded by either/or questions of the sort cited here. It is both unifying and fragmenting, depending on where we look. Some places and some people are doing much better than before, thank you, while far greater numbers seem to be caught in a frightful—and irresistible—race to the bottom and oblivion. Yes, greater numbers are consuming more than ever before, which all of a sudden makes the nightmare of disappearing resources into the reality of the next generation, if not toward the end of this one. We may have reason to celebrate the diffusion of values of democracy and human rights into all corners of the world. Yet, more often than not, the whole thing is spoiled by the rendering of these fundamental values and rights into instruments of empire, giving plausibility to a widespread perception globally that globalization is little more than a euphemism for old-fashioned imperialism. This perception itself goes far in negating the very idea that the world is globalizing. What may be certain in the midst of all this uncertainty is that some of the positive promises of globalization better be realized before its negative effects become a total reality; doing so may require a restructuring of the world as we know it. This conclusion is not very common these days among those who speak of and write about globalization, even among many former leftist radicals, who are embarrassed by the failure of past efforts to restructure the world that ended up betraying the very promises that had legitimized them

Introduction

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in the first place. And yet there seems to be a pervasive feeling around the world that something has gone terribly wrong, that the wrongs are deepening, and that there may be no way of correcting them as things are going presently—toward what seems to be widespread disaster and destruction. To speak of restructuring the world is to say something that is radically different from what we find in most discussions of globalization. It is associated mostly with globalization’s foes, rather than those who celebrate it or are simply convinced of its inevitability. It is possible to observe, nevertheless, that a world in which the promises of globalization may become a reality is not to be achieved through teleologies built into the idea of globalization as we have it presently, which points to more of the same as before, albeit reconfigured in its patterns of production and consumption by contemporary circumstances. This is quite evident in efforts to rewrite the past in accordance with contemporary perspectives on globalization, which reconfigure the past but, in the process, also render it into a prison for the present, ruling out the imagination of global possibilities that can overcome the legacies of colonialism, environmental destruction, and assorted social inequalities and political oppressions that are very much part of the constitution of globality as we know it. If the assumptions underlying these perspectives are to be taken seriously, the present is a product and terminal state of globalization, not a point of departure for a future that offers any hope of breaking with these past legacies. The future is now. Such historicism serves more to avoid consideration of alternative possibilities to the future by once again rewriting the past to render the present into its inevitable outcome, rather than to uncover the alternatives that had to be suppressed so that the present could become a possibility. The question it raises, in an immediate sense, is whether the realization of a just and democratic globality is possible under the current regime of capitalism, which, ever since the dissolution of all systematic efforts to create alternatives to it, has acquired the guise of a force of nature. Opposition to it, such as it is, finds inspiration not in imagining

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globality differently but in deploying other pasts to assert identities of one kind or another within the social and political parameters demanded by the capitalist reorganization of life globally. It is true that disillusionment with the effects of globalization has produced or revived, depending on the larger political and ideological context, a multiplicity of political orientations that draw inspiration from radical left legacies, ranging from hopes of a universal anarchist society to the generation of place-based and indigenous alternatives that challenge the concentration of economic and political power at levels of global hierarchies that are ever more distant from the everyday lives of the people globally—more distant for some than for others. But most conspicuous, and of fundamental significance in shaping contemporary world politics, is the struggle for dominance within the capitalist world economy, which contrasts with an earlier period of modernity when struggles took the form of struggles between the globalization of capitalism and resistance to it, most importantly in the guise of socialism. Current struggles over the future of capitalism find ideological expression increasingly in imagined cultural legacies that have come to replace not only radical left but also liberal ideologies of modernity that shared a common ground in the elevation of reason over history. Even as something called globalization is supposedly happening, world politics is dominated by imperial visions of ideological (if not physical) world conquest. The rhetoric of human rights and democracy that long has served to legitimize Euro-American imperialism increasingly is infused, especially in the case of the United States, by religious values that supposedly should have been washed away by modernity. Religion, likewise, infuses the language of resistance to imperialism, as well as of claims to cultural identity.1 There is nothing new about clashes among reactionary fundamentalists, with their conflicting claims to absolute, universal truth. What is new is that these clashes are now being played out on the grounds of a globalized capitalist political economy. Unlike in an earlier period of modernity, with its teleological assumption of the ultimate victory of certain truths deemed to be universal, it seems that these

Introduction

5

conflicting claims to truth are not likely to disappear anytime soon and that they are as crucial to grasping a contemporary condition of globality as is the common grounding in a capitalist economy. Normalized as constituents of cultural identity in a world that has given up hope in any shared universalism, these values, which appeared earlier as markers of religious and cultural right-wing politics, not only are endemic to politics globally but have come to be identifying features of a contemporary modernity. In this book, I seek to bring some clarity to these problems thrown up by a contemporary world situation that globalization as paradigm is intended to describe and explain. Globalization in my reading refers both to world processes and to a way of thinking about the world. I make every effort in this undertaking to remain “worldly,” to be attentive to the relationship between the concept and what goes on in the world. But the primary stress in this discussion is on the concept itself, not only in its reference to the world but also in its reference to other concepts it has come to replace, such as modernization and world systems analysis, as well as to concepts contemporaneous with it in intellectual, academic, and artistic circles—notably, postmodernity and postcoloniality. I make no attempt to define globalization. The precision gained by defining concepts of necessity exacts a price by placing closure on both their form and content. This is especially the case with a contested term like globalization. Defining it may serve ideological purposes in privileging one sense of the concept over another. For the same reason, it would deprive the concept of its historicity and work against any serious possibility of grasping the fluid world situations that it is intended to comprehend. The fruitlessness of efforts to define the concept of globalization is evident in the many efforts to do so, which are most notable for their failure to establish a plausible correspondence between their definitions and the realities of the world. The qualifications offered in order to achieve such correspondence in the end overwhelm the definitions, depriving the concept of coherence even as an idea, let alone in its relationship to those realities.

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It makes sense, instead, to view globalization as an ongoing discourse in search of its object and to comprehend it within a broader constellation of concepts; to place it as paradigm in historical context, considering the material and ideological associations that attended its emergence in the 1990s, with an examination of what it has come to replace: the modernization discourse of the post–World War II years, as well as the radical challenges offered to it in the 1960s and 1970s, ranging from revolutionary ideas of development to more circumscribed theorizations of development in world system analysis, dependency theory, and so forth. Globalization as a discourse needs to be understood as both a continuation and a disavowal of an earlier modernization discourse. Its erasure of radical alternatives to modernization discourse is more direct and less ambiguous (and less dialectical, I might add). At the same time, as a social scientific discourse, globalization resonates (and is contemporaneous) with postmodernism and postcolonialism in cultural studies. Exploration of a possible relationship between these phenomena, different aspects of an emerging world situation, may have much to tell us about the intellectual history of our times, where we have come from, what we have left behind, and where—if anywhere—we might be headed. One of the more interesting problems presented by globalization as a discourse is whether it is an end or a beginning, or both—in other words, whether the teleology built into it as a concept is one that already has been realized and represents a present state of affairs, or whether the world has only reached a state to appreciate a vision that still lies in the future. Ideologues of globalization claim that it is both, that the future, the present, and the past together provide evidence of both its historical necessity and its moral goodness. The past is in the process of being rewritten presently to accord with the demands of this vision, even as the present provides little hope that the vision may ever be reached, as globalization so-called has brought to the surface fractures so deep that they may be overcome only by the unprecedented exercise of power on the part of the powerful, which confounds the relationship

Introduction

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between globalization and imperialism and throws into question its conceptual integrity by exposing the ideological struggles at its core. This is the state of affairs that I describe in the following pages as global modernity. I also suggest that global modernity (which I take to be in the singular) is a product of globalization rather than its harbinger, and it bears upon it the contradictions of the history that has produced it—both as the realization of that history and as its negation, the most crucial issue being its relationship to the colonial past.2 Globalization may be viewed as the process whereby modernity—capitalist modernity—has gone global, universalizing not only the material and ideological practices but also the contradictions of modernity, including the very negation of its claims to universality. Global modernity may promise liberation from the past globally, including from the past of modernity itself, but it also bears the stamp of the colonial economically, politically, socially, and culturally, perpetuating past inequalities while adding to them new ones of its own. It is also possible to think of globalization as a pointer to the future, one that is an improvement materially and morally over the present. I believe that will require a different kind of globalization, freed from the teleologies that drive contemporary understandings of the world and the word. It will be a globalization that can be fulfilled only by overcoming global modernity to create a different kind of globality than what passes for it at the present, which is in many ways little more than the fulfillment of a colonial modernity. The colonialism of an earlier day has been restructured to accommodate new kinds of power, products themselves of colonial modernity. There no doubt also has been a change of personnel in the engineering and operation of the structures that embody the global materially and endow it with the ideological persuasiveness that it has come to command. But there is little evidence to support claims that the world we live in has been freed in its structuring from the prerogatives of colonial power. Claims that revivals of local histories and practices (from the place based to the national or regional) represent liberation from

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the hegemony of colonial modernity or that they point to alternative or multiple modernities are not very convincing, as most such claims already take for granted the global victory of capitalism in material life, leaving it to the realm of culture to carry the burden of difference. A deeper historical perspective enjoins us to question, on the one hand, whether cultural difference can survive a modernity, of necessity understood presently as capitalist modernity, that thrives on the production of simulacra—including the simulacra of cultural difference. On the other hand, we need also to ask whether such a modernity can survive material, cultural, and intellectual decolonization, the key to which may be not the reassertion of imagined histories and cultural differences but a recognition of the coloniality of the modernity in which we live, which surely must be the first step in any reconsideration of the future. The “decolonization of the mind” was an important ideal when it seemed for a short while that material (including political) decolonization had been achieved already.3 The end of that illusion requires that the “decolonization of the mind” attend not just to matters cultural but to issues of culture where they pertain to the transformation of material life. What kind of globalization may help achieve a globality beyond the colonial is something that needs urgent attention. I will return by way of conclusion to my own “wishful thinking.” The primary goal of the discussion that follows is to offer a perspective that renders visible contradictions in contemporary global modernity that I hope will show why we should think of globalization as we know it as a fundamental formative constituent of the present, which for the same reason may offer little help in overcoming the present to reenvision the future. Notes 1. The relationship between religion and globalization is a very important but underexplored problem. In some ways, the relationship brings out the contradictions of globalization more eloquently, if tragically, than any other area. Religion and globality

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produce one another. It may be for the same reason that religious conflict also has taken a deadlier form as it plays out on the terrain of the global. For a preliminary discussion, see Arif Dirlik, “Modernity in Question? Culture and Religion in an Age of Global Modernity,” Diaspora 12, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 147–68. 2. That globalization is over is a point made forcefully in a recent book, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, by the noted Canadian author John Ralston Saul (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2005). There is much in common between Saul’s argument and mine, although his emphasis is on the last three decades of neoliberal globalization, whereas I am more concerned here with issues of the relationship between modernity and globalization. 3. The term is Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s. See Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: Currey, 1986).

◊ 2

Thinking Globalization Historically When I joined the faculty of the history department at Duke University in 1971, one of my tasks was to teach in a course, already in place, titled “From Tradition to Modernity.” It was a team-taught, two-semester course that covered China, Japan, South Asia (India), Africa, and Latin America, more or less corresponding to the “areas” of area studies. The first semester was devoted to traditions, the second to modernity. In the first semester, following an introductory lecture on Talcott Parsons’s “pattern-variables,” we each took three-week turns to discuss tradition in our respective societies, in the order of religion, social, and political structures.1 We followed the same pattern the second semester, although we had more to say to one another as the various societies we covered seemed now to have more in common with one another. By the end of that decade, the sixties had caught up with the course. It was renamed “The Third World and the West,” the tradition/modernity binarism was dropped to be replaced by premodern and modern, and the content of the course shifted to discussion of economic relationships, colonialism, and revolution. The tradition/modernity binarism already appeared by then as part of the ideological apparatus of colonialist hegemony that promoted a Eurocentric conception of the world, relegated the contemporary third world to the past under the sign of tradition, and blamed the victims of colonialism or neocolonialism for their backwardness. It was still a team-taught course, but only briefly. Since the team could not agree on either the beginnings of 10

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the modern or what could be appropriately discussed across all the areas (the same ones covered by the earlier course), we soon decided each to go his or her own way. Over roughly a thirty-year period, order and coherence in social science understandings of modernity have given way to a chaos of sorts. Exposure of the flaws of modernization discourse, in the words of a scholar who has contributed much himself to that end, has led to calls for “unthinking social science.”2 Oceans have been added to areas, and “border crossings” at times scramble the boundaries between them. Globalization as paradigm may be viewed at one level as a means to overcome this conceptual incoherence. It is equally evident, however, that it has failed to do so, as the evidence of the world presently frustrates all efforts to restore a plausible teleology to world development economically, socially, politically, or culturally. Globalization rendered into a teleology (primarily spatial, but still bound by nostalgia to the temporal teleology of modernization) itself becomes an ideological distraction from the necessity of confronting global problems not merely as leftovers from the past but as the very products of globalization. Forces of globalization throw up new problems as well as reconfigure past ones. These forces no longer emanate from a single center and drive the world in a single direction, as was assumed in an earlier modernization discourse, but point to a multiplicity of centers and a fractured modernity that also has deprived the future of any coherence.

From Modernization to Globalization While the experience of the Duke course may be unique, it is not for that reason parochial. The transformations the course went through in the 1970s were in response to changes in scholarship in general on questions of modernity and modernization. I am not concerned here with those changes. I preface my discussion with this experience because it offers one way of bringing the perspective of the past on contemporary discussions of modernity and

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modernization, which is what I would like to take up here. Such a perspective suggests, for instance, that the urgent intellectual issues of the present—from the necessity of repudiating a Eurocentric teleology and, with it, the hegemony of Eurocentrism in scholarship, to the need to overcome the tradition/modernity binarism so as to bring to the surface of discussion the entanglements of modernities, or the entanglements of modernities and traditions, the affirmation of multiple modernities, and so forth—are long-standing issues, going back to the 1960s, if not earlier. Any serious examination of these issues needs to be historically informed yet recognize that the vital issues of the present are not necessarily those of the past, even if that past is a very recent past. Do we continue to worry about such questions as those presented in the introduction because the problems of the past are still with us, or because we are still constrained by the paradigms and the counterparadigms of the sixties and the seventies—or both? Are radical paradigms of modernity thrown up by postcolonial struggles for liberation most notable for closing a chapter in discussions of modernity, rather than opening up a new chapter that accounts for the problems of a present, which are no longer the same as those of the 1960s and 1970s? What about the movements and works of an earlier period that played crucial parts in challenging the modernization discourse of the 1950s and 1960s, from national liberation movements in the third world to their echoes in first world scholarship that ranged from world system analysis to dependency theory to analyses of “the development of underdevelopment,” in the memorable formulation of Andre Gunder Frank?3 By going back to a problematic of modernity/tradition that already had been superseded by these works, do we suppress an earlier repudiation of modernization discourse along lines that may differ from those of the present, for which there is evidence in the branding in some quarters not only of earlier revolutionary movements but of these various approaches informed by them as “Eurocentric”? Postmodernism in the 1980s and postcolonial criticism in the 1990s were quite influential in the questioning of these earlier approaches (and of past revolutionary movements) for their Eurocentric

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premises. Did they also play some part in returning us to the modernity/tradition problematic in a new guise, however contrary to their intentions? Alternatively, is there in this preoccupation with past problems also an avoidance of the present, not because past problems are no longer relevant but because they appear now in reconfigurations that require a radical reformulation of the problematic of modernity for their accounting? If contemporary discussions of modernity are haunted by the questions of the past, it is because those questions have refused to lose their relevance. On the other hand, global transformations over the past three decades have thrown up new questions, calling for a reformulation of earlier problematics. But it is not just the world that has changed, as we have changed along with it. If past efforts to dispose of a Eurocentric modernization discourse appear in hindsight to have been less than successful, we need not only to query their shortcomings but also wonder why the alternatives to modernization discourse they proffered no longer seem sufficient—indeed, appear as part and parcel of the Eurocentrism they sought to overcome. The repudiation of those alternatives, nevertheless, comes at a high price, because it involves the repudiation of the politics that informed them, which may be more important today than ever before. We need to be cognizant, in other words, of the very conditions under which we currently discuss the problem of modernity—historicizing ourselves, so to speak, which I take to be crucial to a self-critical approach to these questions. In spite of the persistence of certain questions concerning modernity and tradition, I believe that there is a wide gap between then and now, because not only the world has changed but so have our ways of coming to terms with it. If it is to escape banality or, more seriously, complicity in contemporary configurations of power, any critique of modernity must be keenly aware of its own historicity, as well as its relationship to these contemporary configurations of power. It must be aware, in other words, of its relationship to the past as well as to the present. This requires attention, most seriously, to the relationship between the discourses

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of modernization and globalization—and our own relationship to these discourses, especially the latter. Considering the problem of modernity through a new paradigm of globalization may provide at least some answers to the questions I have raised. There is good reason to think that an earlier discourse or paradigm of modernization already has been superseded by a paradigm or discourse of globalization. Even if that is not the case, it is still useful to view modernization through the claims of globalization. The latter may represent no more than a realization of the goals of modernization or a rephrasing of the problematics of modernity and modernization that retain their most fundamental assumptions—as is suggested, for example, by Anthony Giddens’s description of the present as “high modernity.”4 Uncertain as the relationship of globalization to modernization may be, the paradigm of globalization may nevertheless be enabling of a reformulation of the problematics of modernity, as it seeks to respond to the reconfiguration of global economic, political, and cultural problematics. In the process, it opens up an ideological terrain in which questions suppressed under the regime of modernity play an increasingly important part, and earlier problems appear in radically new guises. It is possible to suggest, for instance, that the very idea of “multiple modernities” is authorized by a condition and consciousness of globality, which renders unacceptable the teleologies of earlier modernization discourses and even the alternatives to them. On the other hand, it is also arguable that while the idea of “multiple modernities” permits recognition of different experiences and forms of modernity, the idea itself, and the discourse of globalization off which it nourishes, legitimizes the most fundamental assumptions of modernization by rendering them globally valid, forecloses serious consideration of alternatives to modernization, and reintroduces Eurocentrism by the back door—albeit as an absent presence. Globalization as paradigm has superseded modernization discourse in recognizing the possibility of a multicentered or even a decentered world against the Eurocentrism of modernization discourse in either of its capitalist or socialist

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guises. It has done so, however, by assimilating some of the fundamental presuppositions of the latter, most notably, the inevitable reorganization of the globe in accordance with the premises of a globalized capitalist economy. What it has successfully erased is not modernization discourse as such, which it has internalized as part of its constitution, but alternatives to it that drew their inspiration from noncapitalist visions of the future—from revolutionary efforts of socialist and postcolonial political movements to create noncapitalist futures, to the theorization these efforts inspired in first world social science in the form of world system analysis or its Latin American counterpart, dependency theory. The most important characteristic of these alternatives, one that they shared in common, was their stress on relationships rather than autonomy in explanations of development. At the risk of some slight simplification, modernization discourse viewed economic, social, and political development in terms of a tradition/modernity binarism; modernization meant development from one to the other. Modernity itself was defined in terms of existing instances of modern societies, identified with societies of Western Europe and North America north of the Mexican border. Accordingly, modernization was conceived teleologically, with societies of the second (socialist) and third (traditional) worlds following the path carved out by Western Europe and its North American offshoots. In the aftermath of World War II, the Eurocentric teleology of an earlier day already had been replaced by a teleology that posited the United States as the ultimately modern society. The defining features of a modern society then were taken to be the features that supposedly defined U.S. society: market capitalism, political democracy, social individualism, and a culture defined by values of science and technology. In this theoretical outlook, culture itself played an important, causative role in modernization. Values of individualism and technological rationality had played a crucial part in the modernization of “Western” societies. Traditional societies, in contrast, suffered from a surplus of history (tradition) that held them back and that could be overcome only by their cultural transformation. Each society

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in this explanatory scheme was held to be responsible for its own development or backwardness (or, more politely, underdevelopment).5 Even at the height of its popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, modernization discourse was subjected to criticism from within. Theorists such as S. N. Eisenstadt, unhappy with simplistic zero-sum approaches to the tradition/modernity binarism, suggested “posttraditional” as a substitute for modern to indicate the persistence of traditions into modernity, which also helped explain why modern societies differed from one another.6 An even more radical—and illiberal—critique was offered by Samuel Huntington, who saw in the process of modernization the forces that unleashed revolution and who argued for the necessity of greater political control in the process of change that favored conservative dictatorships over liberal democracies in the supervision of modernization.7 The more radical challenges to modernization discourse were mounted in the 1960s by scholars who were largely inspired by revolutionary paths to modernity, which were represented at the time not only by socialist states but by third world liberation struggles that were the immediate concern of modernization discourse. Fundamental to these challenges was the insistence that questions of development and underdevelopment needed to be comprehended not in terms of the characteristics of individual societies but in terms of the relationships, as old as the history of modernity, that had created not only modernity itself but also inequalities in development and power that were endemic to modernity and that gave it its shape. What created capitalist modernity in Europe is a question that still worries historians and historical sociologists. While there is no shortage of those who continue to believe that European capitalism was the product of autonomous European values and developments (traced back to Rome and Greece), such Eurocentrism has been thrown into serious question by proliferating evidence of transactions across Eurasia that provided the context for the emergence of capitalism in Europe. This is not to deny uniqueness to Europe, or to other societies, but rather to place local values within the context of extralocal relationships, which

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produced different social and political formations in different parts of Eurasia. If the emergence of capitalist modernity in Europe was a product of such relationships, capitalism itself would empower Western European societies to redirect the historical trajectories of societies globally. If capitalism in its modern phase is incomprehensible without reference to colonialism and neocolonialism (economic domination without actual political rule), modernity as we have known it has been shaped through and through with capitalism. And the very same processes out of which capitalist modernity emerged in Europe (and, subsequently, North America) produced underdevelopment in societies that Europe colonized or bent to its economic, political, and cultural will. Underdevelopment, in this perspective, is a product not of autonomous societies but of societies whose development was conditioned by their placement on the peripheries of the capitalist world system or in dependent relationships vis-à-vis advancing capitalist societies—societies, in other words, that were deprived of their autonomy in the course of global capitalist development. It followed also, politically speaking, that these societies could achieve development not by following in the footsteps of advanced capitalist societies but by liberating themselves (“de-linking,” in Samir Amin’s words) from the web of relationships that condemned them to marginality and backwardness—“the development of underdevelopment.”8 Against the domination of analysis by the teleology of modernization, which privileged time over space (which did not matter since the same temporality would be replayed across vastly different spaces), radical challenges to modernization discourse, in their very emphasis on relationships, brought space back into the analysis of development. We may suggest, in this very particular sense, that they paved the ground of social sciences in preparation for the kind of analysis that is also crucial to any paradigm of globalization. At the same time, it should also be evident why globalization discourse could be read as an effort to co-opt these radical critiques of modernization discourse and salvage its most important assumption: the identification of modernity with capitalist modernity. What is missing from contemporary

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globalization discourse, as from modernization discourse earlier, is the foregrounding of power relationships in the analysis of development and underdevelopment.9 If in the logic of these alternative analyses liberation from the capitalist world system appeared as the only way to autonomous development, the failure of experiments with autonomous development (from the People’s Republic of China to Kampuchea) undermined the solution that they proffered. The analyses have survived, but they have been overtaken by globalization discourse and the alternative it offers: incorporation into global capitalism. The fear these days is to be left out of global capitalism. Not totally. Radical critiques of modernization discourse were inspired by radical political movements of the day to find alternatives to capitalist development. It is not surprising that present-day oppositional movements, from the Zapatistas to the many localized social movements around the world, continue to draw their inspiration from these earlier visions. Not surprisingly, they also oppose globalization discourse for its hegemonic presupposition of the remaking of the globe through the universalization of capital. Globalization as Paradigm Critical evaluation of claims made for globalization by its proponents and propagandists requires awareness of the pitfalls involved in describing it as “a new paradigm.” Yet it may be productive to take the risk and think through some of the implications of doing so. For reasons that I will try to explain here, it is necessary if only tentatively to distinguish globalization as a descriptive term referring to historical process from its deployment as a self-consciously new way of viewing the world, which is what I have in mind when I refer to it as a paradigm or discourse. It is arguable that globalization as historical process has been under way since the origins of humanity, when humans or humanoids started their long trek out of Africa to spread around the world. It has gathered in scope, speed, and self-consciousness over the past few centuries (the

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period of modernity and modernization), entering a new phase in recent decades. Not only are there more people than ever on the planet, which brings them closer to one another than ever before, as if on a crowded bus, but they are more interconnected than ever through a variety of media. But what does such naturalization of globalization in history tell us about its dynamics and its consequences in its different phases, if that is indeed an appropriate way of describing it? This teleological/evolutionary sense of globalization is challenged in most critical work on globalization, which tends to identify it with the recent past, emerging in the 1970s, reaching an apogee during the Reagan-Thatcher 1980s, and heading for collapse with the Asian crisis of the late 1990s. Two recent works are noteworthy for the strong case they make for the relationship of globalization as paradigm to the emergent global hegemony of neoliberal economic assumptions during these decades.10 Globalization in this perspective did not just happen; it was made to happen in response to a crisis of accumulation within the capitalist economy. Both works agree, moreover, that while the interests of advanced capitalist economies of North America, Europe, and Japan have provided the motive force behind globalization, what facilitated the global hegemony of neoliberalism was the acceptance of or compliance with the neoliberal economic model of a third world Chile and a socialist China. David Harvey, while quite cognizant of the difficulties involved in identifying the class beneficiaries of globalization, proposes nevertheless that we can . . . interpret neoliberalization either as a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites. . . . The second of these objectives has in practice dominated. Neoliberalization has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring, or

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in some instances (as in China and Russia) creating, the power of an economic elite.11 The two perspectives on globalization—the long-term perspective that endows it with historical longevity (and inevitability) and the short-term perspective of recent history—are not irreconcilable. Globalization may also represent a recurrent conjunctural phenomenon marked by advances and retreats over the course of time. Without denying the existence of globalizing forces in history, which will be discussed further in the next chapter, it is possible to suggest that contemporary globalization derives its meaning not from reference to the entirety of human history but from the contrast between the present and the immediate past, ruled materially and ideologically by the premises of modernization. Globalization as self-conscious paradigm, it is equally arguable, is a product of the recent past, and it represents a departure from ways of conceiving the world that have been dominant for the past two centuries, shaping social scientific and cultural thinking.12 Fundamental to this shift is the “spatial turn” in the conceptualization of modernity or, more accurately, the ascendancy of the spatial over the temporal,13 which is crucial to grasping the inescapable contradictoriness of the very idea of globalization as we currently confront it, and which also distinguishes it from earlier ways of conceiving the world: the recognition that localization or, more strongly, fragmentation is an inevitable condition of globalization, while globalization informs such fragmentation and serves as a reference for its articulation. Glocalization may be a more accurately descriptive word for this turn, but it seems to make some sense to stick with globalization, which seems to me to be the primary aspect of the contradiction. Receptivity, if not resignation, to the simultaneous fragmentation and unification of the world represents a break with modernity’s ways of knowing, but it is not a return to some premodern condition either, for different claims to knowledge do not merely coexist in blissful obliviousness to other ways of knowing but in conscious claims to domains

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of their own against other claims—which are themselves a product of modernity. Over the past decade, globalization has replaced modernization as a paradigm of change and a social imaginary. The discourse of globalization claims to break with the earlier modernization discourse in important ways, most notably in abandoning a Eurocentric teleology of change, which in many ways has been compelled by real economic, political, and cultural challenges to Eurocentrism. It is rendered plausible by the appearance of new centers of economic and political power, assertions of cultural diversity in the midst of apparent cultural commonality, intensifying motions of people that scramble boundaries, and the emergence of new global institutional forms to deal with problems that transcend nations and regions—which all suggest that institutional arrangements informed by a Eurocentric modernization process are no longer sufficient to grasp and to deal with the world’s problems. Globalization has an obvious appeal to a political left, which has been committed all along to internationalism, equality, and closer ties between peoples. That the most visible reactions against globalization emanate from the political right reinforces the image of globalization as a move to left or, at the very least, liberal left aspirations.14 The euphoria over globalization, however, has served to disguise the very real social and economic inequalities that are not merely leftovers from the past but products of the new developments. There is some question as to whether globalization represents the end, or the fulfillment of a Eurocentric modernization. One scholar has described it as an “invisible colonialism,” the third phase in the unfolding of Euro-American colonization of the globe.15 Globalization as a discourse would seem to be increasingly pervasive, but it is propagated most enthusiastically from the older centers of power, most notably the United States, fueling suspicion of the hegemonic aspirations that inform it.16 Economic and political power may be more decentered than earlier, but globalization is incomprehensible without reference to the global victory of capitalism, and pressures toward the globalization of “markets and democracy” are at the

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core of globalization as they once were of modernization. Cultural conflicts are played out even more evidently than before on an ideological and institutional terrain that is a product of Eurocentric modernization. Finally, unlike in an earlier period of socialist and third world alternatives, challenges to Eurocentrism come mostly from those who have been empowered by their very success in making capitalist modernity their own, whose challenges are voiced in the language of that modernity, and whose vision of alternatives is inescapably refracted through the lens of their incorporation into a capitalist world economy. For all the new kinds of conflicts to which it has given rise, globalization may well represent the universalization of developmentalism in its capitalist guise (as its socialist counterpart is no longer an issue). It is not clear, in other words, whether globalization is the final chapter in the history of capitalist modernity as globalized by European power or the beginning of something else that is yet to appear with any kind of concreteness. What is clear, however, is that globalization discourse is a response both to changing configurations in global relations—new unities as well as new fractures—and the need for a new epistemology to grasp those changes. But globalization is also ideological, as it seeks to reshape the world in accordance with a new global imaginary that serves some interests better than others. A triumphalist account of globalization, as appealing to cosmopolitan liberals or leftists as it is to transnational capitalists, celebrates the immanent unification of the world, overlooking that the problems that persist are not just leftovers from the past but products of the very process of globalization with the developmentalist assumptions built into its ideology. That others than Euro-Americans now participate in the process does not make it any the less ideological or devastating in its consequences but merely points to changes in the global configuration of classes; in this sense, the preoccupation in globalization discourse with the problem of Eurocentrism is a distraction from confronting new forms of power. The emancipatory promise of globalization is just that, a promise that is perpetually deferred to the future, while

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globalization itself creates new forms of economic and political exploitation and marginalization. Some problems thrown up by globalization, most importantly environmental ones, are conceded by its very engineers. Others are represented merely as legacies of the past that will be eliminated as globalization fulfills its promise. Ideologues of globalization may promise plenty for all, but as a number of studies have revealed, the actual forecast of what globalization promises is much more pessimistic: the marginalization of the majority of the world’s population, including many in the core societies. Globalization would seem to be creating structural inequalities across national and regional boundaries. Available income distribution figures indicate that inequalities at the global level are increasingly paralleled at the national level, at least in the case of developed and fast-developing societies, expressed frequently in references to the 20:80 society.17 Economic marginalization also implies political marginalization as, in the midst of spreading democracy, the most important decisions concerning human life are progressively removed beyond the reach of electorates. The world may be reconfigured, but the reconfiguration takes place under the regime of capitalism, which continues to reproduce under new circumstances, and in new forms, the inequalities built into its structuring of the world. Perhaps the most conspicuous problem with globalization rests with the term itself. The term globalization suggests a process that encompasses the entire surface of the globe, which clearly is not the case, because many areas of the world are left out of the process. Manuel Castells has argued that the configuration of contemporary global political economy is best conceived of in terms of networks rather than surfaces. In this sense, globalization may be a retreat from modernization, which accounted for surfaces if only through the agencies of nationalism and colonialism.18 This is a very serious problem created by what goes under the name of globalization. It also provides something of a material basis for why it might be useful to view it as a new paradigm. Nation-states and the surfaces they claim have not disappeared, needless to say, nor have a variety

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of claims by someone or other on the Earth’s surfaces or the industry that humans have put into the Earth for their survival. But there is much to be said for the argument that the main action of the world’s business goes on in the networks of capital and its attendant institutions, and these increasingly connect nodes in the distribution of the global political economy, marginalizing immense numbers of people because they are superfluous to this economy, creating a global reserve of labor to be deployed as capital and states see fit. Those outside the network may not be active participants in it, but they still find their lives transformed by inductive forces emanating from the flows of capital, technology, and labor along the network. The network is not merely a metaphor; it is the very materiality of the new information-driven economy, giving shape to it as a new mode of production in a developing global capitalist economy. It is inclusive, but it is also exclusive, and it adds to the question of labor exploitation the threat of marginalization for millions, if not billions, of people. Spaces of marginality may fall outside the network or within it, within the spaces marked by its configuration. This is, I think, crucial to understanding the globalization of modernity, what is being conceptualized here as global modernity. The unevenness of regions may be the product of a long history, but it is being exacerbated by developmental policies that are very much consistent with the ideology of globalization, from which the concept of globalization derives its sustenance and vitality. This is not only the case with social inequalities, now tied in closely with participation in the global economy, but even more so with the shift of attention in the allocation of resources from surfaces, or national spaces, to nodes in global networks, or what has been called variously global cities, global city regions, or even region-states.19 The network metaphor is especially productive in providing a way to grasp reconfigurations of economic and political power, as well as the consequences of these reconfigurations in the marginalization of populations both within and without the circuits of power—the spaces outside the network, as well as the holes within.

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Castells’s ambitious three-volume study of contemporary global transformations, The Rise of the Network Society, offers a most revealing analysis of the respatialization of the political economy of development both as concept and as practice.20 His theorization of the new situation of globality is important not because what he has to say is particularly unusual, but because he is able through the metaphor of the “network society” to synthesize much that has been written on the question of globalization. His work is particularly relevant to my argument here because a spatialization of the global capitalist economy around nodes in a network provides a cogent contrast to the spatialization around bounded surfaces that I discussed earlier. It may or may not describe accurately the processes at work in the contemporary world economy, but it has much to say about a shift in ways of thinking about the world economy that has taken place over the past two decades, and it does so without an apparent ideological commitment to globalization. One of the most impressive aspects of Castells’s analysis is its ability to account for an intensified mobility of capital while retaining a strong sense of the persistence of structural relationships in power. His metaphor of networks in the description of contemporary capitalism is derived from the central importance he assigns to information technologies, which then serve as the paradigm for the reconfiguration of global relations. The metaphor of “network” offers ways of envisaging the new global capitalism in both its unities and disunities, in its pervasiveness as well as in the huge gaps that are systemic products of the global economy. The metaphor of network shifts attention from surfaces to “highways” that link nodes in the global economy. A network has no boundaries of any permanence but may expand or contract at a moment’s notice and shift in its internal configurations as its nodes move from one location to another. Marginality to the global economy may mean being outside the network, as well as in the many spaces within that are in its many gaps. Marginality does not imply being untouched by the networks, as the inductive effects of network flows affect even those who are not direct participants in its many flows. Finally, the network

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metaphor offers new ways of accounting for power. It is possible to state that the most powerful nodes in the global economy—for example, Saskia Sassen’s “global cities”—may be those locations where nodes of economic, political, and cultural power coincide. The network militates against neat spatialities, but it also allows for their inclusion in considerations of power; while any location may be included in the network, the most powerful, and controlling, nodes are still located in the national spaces of commanding global presence. Castells identifies North America, Europe, and East Asia as the locations of such commanding power that determine “the basic architecture” of global relations. “Within this visible architecture,” however, “there are dynamic processes of competition and change that infuse a variable geometry into the global system of economic processes.” What I call the newest international division of labor is constructed around four different positions in the informational/global economy: the producers of high value, based on informational labor; the producers of high volume, based on lower cost labor; the producers of raw materials, based on natural endowments; and the redundant producers, reduced to devalued labor. . . . The critical matter is that these different positions do not coincide with countries. They are organized in networks and flows, using the technological infrastructure of the informational economy. They feature geographic concentrations in some areas of the planet, so that the global economy is not geographically undifferentiated. . . . Yet the newest international division of labor does not take place between countries but between economic agents placed in the four positions that I have indicated along a global structure of networks and flows. . . . [A]ll countries are penetrated by the four positions. . . . Even marginalized economies have a small segment of their directional functions connected to a high-value producers network. . . . And certainly, the most powerful economies have marginal segments of their population[s] placed in a position of

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devalued labor. . . . The newest international division of labor is organized on the basis of labor and technology, but is enacted and modified by governments and entrepreneurs.21 What is pertinent to the discussion here is Castells’s observation that while nation-states are by no means irrelevant to the functioning of the new global economy, national spaces no longer serve as meaningful economic units, crisscrossed as they are by economic activities of various sorts between nodes that are as much parts of a variety of global structurations (subject to chaos though they may be) as they are of the national space in which they are located. As he is focused almost exclusively on labor and technologies, Castells has less to say about the organizational aspects of such structurations—on the alternative spatializations produced, for instance, by transnational corporations as well as a host of transnational organizations from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to universities. His analysis is nevertheless at one with most other analyses of globalization that are premised on the insufficiency of the nation as a unit of study in assessing the contemporary global economy. While to an analyst such as Castells this point may present a problem where the social, political, and cultural implications of globalization are concerned, ideologues of global capitalism perceive in it the end of the nation-state and a need to respatialize politics to conform to the essential “borderlessness” of a globalized economy. One such analyst is Kenichi Ohmae, who suggests that “the nationstate has become an unnatural—even a dysfunctional—organizational unit for thinking about economic activity.”22 The alternative is to rethink of political units in terms of “region-states” that correspond to the “regional economies” emerging with globalization. Such region-states, we might note, also correspond to the more stable nodes in global networks. Ohmae’s analysis is concerned most importantly with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The reconfiguration of the Chinese economy with its incorporation into a global capitalism in many ways informs Ohmae’s theorization. He writes:

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The people of Guangzhou [in southern China] know that they cannot deny a significant, ongoing relationship with the rest of mainland China. That connection is real—and is part of their strength and appeal. What they cannot afford is to be victims of tight, centralized control. But they can productively be—in fact, they would do well to be—part of a loose grouping of Chinese regional states, a kind of Chinese federation or commonwealth.23 Unfortunately, Ohmae has little to say on what the mutual responsibility would be of the region-states in such a federation or what role a central government would play in enforcing those responsibilities. We may glean what he has in mind, however, from his discussion of “the civil minimum,” the provision of equal services, including those that entail subsistence needs, to all the citizens of the nation-state, which in his view is inconsistent with the efficient allocation of resources. As he puts it: Alignment of government power with domestic special interests and have-not regions makes it virtually impossible for those at the center to adopt responsible policies for a nation as a whole, let alone for its participation in the wider borderless economy. . . . No matter how understandable the political or even social pressures behind these alignments, they make no sense economically. Investing money inefficiently never does. In a borderless world, where economic interdependence creates ever-higher degrees of sensitivity to other economies, it is inherently unsustainable.24 Ohmae does not tell the reader what “an explicit commitment to heightened regional autonomy within a ‘commonwealth’ of China” might leave of a “commonwealth of China” when the regional economy acts or aspires to act “as a local outpost of the global economy.”25 The message, however, is clear. Globalization means the supremacy of the market in shaping all relations, social and political, and the nationstate in its social and political concerns is an impediment

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to the efficient functioning of the market. The nation-state must allow the regional autonomy that permits successful regions to participate in the global economy, unhampered by obligations to other parts or constituencies of the nation guaranteed earlier by the state. What he does not say is why the nation-state might be needed at all under the circumstances, except to guarantee the success of its global “nodes” in the global economy and perhaps to suppress the dissent that might result from its own participation in the “bifurcation” of the economy. The state here becomes something more than a mere promoter of economic development; it appears as an enforcer of the interests of the “local outposts of the global economy” and, we might add, of those in charge of the “local outposts.” This is the state of global capitalism. For all their vaunted internationalism, socialist states, in their real or imagined responsibility to popular constituencies, produced a totalistic empowerment of the nation-state. It is no less interesting that capitalism, which experienced its embryonic growth within the womb of the nation-state, would return the nation-state to an earlier alliance between capital and the state, where the state seeks to shed its responsibilities to constituencies other than those who manage and operate the global economy, rendering the nation into more or less an empty shell or a mere geographic or cartographic expression. The contrast provides a clue to the predicament that faces us all. The reconfiguration of space implied by network formations suggests that the contemporary marginalization of large numbers of humans, and of the spaces they dwell in, is not to be viewed as a transitory contingency or a remnant from the past that will be overcome by further globalization. It is a very product of globalization, which indeed has succeeded in globalizing capitalist modernity. We no longer may anticipate passages from tradition to modernity, which was the premise of an earlier modernization discourse. In fact, the traditions of an earlier day have become the sources presently of alternative claims to modernity—the fragmentation of modernity itself—in a world that has come to view itself in the single temporality indicated by globality. It may

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be that only those encompassed by the term “transnational capitalist class”26 or, more broadly, those groups regularly engaged in the business of transnational transactions of global capitalism dwell in this temporality, which Fernand Braudel has described as “world-time,” while the majority of the world’s peoples still dwell in local temporalities and partake of world-time only voyeuristically.27 While for this transnational class or group nation-states and civilizations may no longer point to effective units of global organization, they continue to serve as cultural resources in the insistence on difference in sameness. It is quite important that globalization has been accompanied by the return of traditions that serve to legitimize claims not only to alternative modernities but also to alternative epistemologies. And although this resurgence, crucial to the so-called cultural turn of the past two decades, has received the greatest attention as a source of “clashes between civilizations,” it is no less important in cultural divisions internal to so-called civilizations as well as nations. In a recent essay, the political scientist Edward Friedman notes that those who dwell in the “advanced” coastal regions in China utilize the same stereotyped notions of backwardness with reference to the populations of the interior and the West as first world societies long have employed in their depictions of the third world and explanations of their backwardness.28 The coincidence here is not quite accidental, as the Chinese coastal elite early on internalized imperialist notions of Chinese “lack,” but they projected it on the lower classes and the interior. Writing on the issue of “hygienic modernity” (weisheng), Ruth Rogaski observes that weisheng as a discourse of deficiency allowed Chinese elites to distance themselves from the violence of the Boxer suppression. The foreign occupation may have brought about a violent rupture with the past, but at the same time it exacerbated a spatial rupture that existed between treaty-port elites and the denizens of the hinterland. These elites would not endure the burden of deficiency, hygienic or otherwise, and could best resist its onus by embracing modernity and its

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imperial agents. The Chinese peasantry (and urban underclass) were left to carry the label of hygienic deficiency, while Chinese elites worked at negotiating their status between the unwashed masses and the more “senior members” of the global hygienic order.29 One way the native elites sought to “negotiate” their place in this global hygienic order was, Rogaski tells us, through the consumption of hygienic products.30 Overcoming this kind of mind-set—and the coast/interior bifurcation of the economy implicit in Ohmae’s analysis—a legacy of a colonial past, was a fundamental goal of the now-failed socialist revolution in China. Indeed, how Chinese Marxists envisaged the tasks of the revolution offers a stark contrast to the Ohmae’s analysis in its concern with surfaces in their relationship to social structures. Despite internal differences in their diagnoses of the problems of national development, Chinese Marxist analyses were uniformly inspired by V. I. Lenin’s view of the contradictory role imperialism (understood as “the highest stage of capitalism”) played in colonial and semicolonial societies: that while imperialism was responsible for introducing into these societies the progressive forces of capitalism, it also created structural impediments to the realization of capitalist development as in Europe and North America.31 There were two major aspects to these impediments. One was economic. Development in these societies resulted not from the logic of the national economy, responding to internal demand and needs, but rather from the logic of a globalizing capitalist economy, the search of imperialist powers for markets for commodities and capital, as well as the conflict generated by the competition among them in this search. As imperialists had little or no interest in the national development of these societies, what development there was contributed not to national economic integration, and an economic structure that answered the various needs of the national economy, including subsistence needs of the population, but to a bifurcated economy, with a modern capitalist sector increasingly integrated into a global capitalist economy, and a much larger sector that remained mired

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in premodern economic practices and was subject to the exploitative forces of the modern sector just as the national economy as a whole was subject to the exploitative forces of global capitalism. Spatially speaking, in the case of the Chinese economy, this meant the lopsided development of coastal areas and a few coastal cities such as Shanghai, and the increasing “underdevelopment” of vast areas of the interior and the populations therein. Economic bifurcation, needless to say, also undermined efforts to achieve integration at the political level. The other aspect was social; the creation of a new class structure. As capitalism was introduced into China from the outside, the emergent Chinese bourgeoisie was itself a foreign product, aligned in its interests with the outside forces that produced it, with little commitment to the interests of the nation as a whole. True, there was some distinction between an overtly “comprador” bourgeoisie and a “national” bourgeoisie that strove for autonomy within the structural context of imperialism. But even the latter were more closely integrated structurally with the forces of global capitalism than with the national economy, and they were condemned in their very activities to contribute to the deepening of the almost inevitable structural bifurcation of the economy. This was the major reason that any hope for national development had to be preceded by a social revolution that would transfer power to social forces that had an investment in the creation of a national economy, represented most importantly by the working class and the peasantry. Ultimately, this meant the creation of an autonomous state that could use political means to establish boundaries around the national economy and the basis for national economic integration—an autonomous economy that answered to internal needs, in other words. The incorporation of China in a global capitalist economy has re-created the conditions that the revolution sought to overcome for half a century, unsuccessfully. The problem is by no means one restricted to the PRC or to other formerly socialist regimes. The globalization of capitalist modernity—the creation of global modernity—also has meant the universalization of its contradictions between

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and within societies. As a nonteleological alternative to the discourse of globalization, global modernity is premised on a recognition of the present not as a point of departure for a utopian future of global plenty and welfare but as already a product of globalization. No less real than the welfare that globalization has brought to some are continued immiseration of the majority of the world’s peoples through benign neglect, if not severe exploitation, and even an ongoing war against the poor. The condition of global modernity, in recognizing alternative claims to modernity (not to be confused with “alternative modernities”), implies some measure of equality among nation-states. It might suggest, therefore, that unlike in an earlier era of colonialism or neocolonialism, nations should be able to attend to demarginalizing the marginalized in order to achieve their goals of integration, development, and social coherence. Global modernity, moreover, has witnessed the recovery of the continued legitimacy, relevance, and prestige of national and civilizational traditions that had been discredited earlier under conditions of Eurocentric modernity. One of the most ignored aspects of the question of culture under conditions of globality is the hearing acquired by native epistemologies, which serve as the basis for claims to “alternative modernities.” It follows, at least in the abstract, that it should be easier now than earlier to put native knowledge that is quite close at hand to practical use in the solution of social problems, including problems of public health. Why nation-states (aided by international organizations) have been unable to resolve the marginalization of populations, or bring native knowledge to bear upon social problems, is a crucial question. It is important to recall that socialist and national liberation states were much more successful on either count than the contemporary state under assault from the forces of globalization, most importantly, transnational capital. The success of socialist states, as in the case of the PRC, had much to do with the reorganization of society from the bottom up, which contributed to state despotism, no doubt, but also enabled the state to enforce reforms at the lowest levels of society, across the national

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territory. The present state, by contrast, has great difficulty in undertaking similar reforms even where it has the will. That itself is rendered highly problematic by the ascendancy to power of social groups and classes whose interests are tied closely with transnational capitalism and who, in their urge to participate successfully in the global economy, seek to liberate themselves from the burden of national responsibility—as implied in Ohmae’s analysis. This is where the legacy of colonial or neocolonial pasts, combined with the demands of geopolitical power, not only constrains the ability of the state to deal with social problems but redefines the tasks of the state away from national hinterlands toward the off-ground demands of globality—as is visible in the behavior of states from the United States to the PRC.32 Indeed, the only exceptions presently may be the so-called rogue states that serve to legitimize U.S. imperialism much as Communist states did in an earlier day. Much debate these days pertains to whether globalization is simply a “natural” historical product of capitalism (I realize the oxymoron here) or a cover for U.S. imperialism. Global modernity suggests that imperialism may not be an appropriate concept for grasping the complexities of the present. Nevertheless, the apparent recognition of autonomy to different paths of modernity in the ideology of “global multiculturalism” needs serious qualification in light of the continued legacy of the colonial past in shaping the present, as is suggested by Castells’s metaphor of “architecture” in the depiction of the global system, which recognizes the power of the earlier nodes of colonial capitalism over the global economy and politics. In a study published nearly a decade ago, William Robinson pointed to a shift in U.S. foreign policy from the mid-1970s, from a unilateral domination of the world to the production of global hegemony through the promotion of “democracy,” and the creation of a global constituency, a “civil society,” that would be amenable to the exercise of U.S. power. How new this policy may have been is questionable, as the creation of a global “middle class” has long been a goal of U.S. foreign policy. Robinson also notes an important change in the shift from unilateral domination

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to what he describes as “polyarchy,” which in many ways corresponds to the concept of a “transnational capitalist class” or what we might describe broadly as corporate consituencies.33 Recent actions by the United States are more reminiscent of old-fashioned imperialism and the resurgence of military domination over the construction of hegemonic blocs, but the latter has by no means disappeared and is necessary to explain not just U.S. policies of world hegemony but also the complicity in it of national leaderships around the world. Globalization in Historical Perspective Paradoxical though it may seem, it makes considerable critical sense to grasp globalization as both a novel phenomenon of the contemporary world and as a process that has characterized the human condition since its origins. The latter by itself often seems trivial, as it is not easily distinguishable from earlier diffusionist arguments. It is hardly big news that human beings have been on the move since their origins somewhere in East Africa more than two million years ago. Nor is it a major breakthrough in views of the past that interactions have taken place among societies all along, some of them quite consequential. That we should analyze the histories of societies in terms of these relationships rather than in isolation is an important epistemological argument, but that, too, has been around for quite some time, perhaps going back to Herodotus and Sima Qian but most conspicuously to Enlightenment views of history. What may be novel about the present is the projection of a contemporary consciousness of globality onto the entire past, therefore erasing important historical differences between different forms and dimensions of globality not only in material interactions among societies but, perhaps more important, in the consciousness of globality. It also erases critical consciousness of its own conditions of emergence. This is quite evident in the essays collected in a recently published volume, Globalization in World History. The

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organization of this volume is quite revealing of the workings of globalization as ideology. On the surface, it is quite cognizant of the problematic nature of the concept. This recognition nevertheless does not prevent the casting of the discussions in a periodization that renders globalization into a new teleology. We now have, as a result, a new periodization of world history into four stages of archaic, proto-, modern, and postcolonial globalization. Equally important is the mobilization of “other” societies, such as China, as an alibi for globalization by rendering globalization into a phenomenon that has many regional and national origins. Not surprisingly, colonialism as a force shaping the modern world receives bare mention in the book’s discussions. It is ironic that the People’s Republic of China, a foremost beneficiary of economic globalization, touts its own long history of globalization in six-hundredth anniversary celebrations of the voyages to the West of the Ming dynasty admiral Zheng He.34 The confounding of these differences also obviates the need to account for the relationship of contemporary globalization and its material/mental consequences to its historical precedents, including its immediate historical precedents. Is it possible that consciousness of globalization ebbs and flows in response to historical circumstances, but that the ebbs and flows carry different meanings at different times, and for different peoples occupying different locations in global arrangements of power? If so, what is the relationship between power and ideologies of globalization? Conversely, if there is a secular trend to globalization, where in the past do we locate it? The preferred answer to the last question is the origins of capitalism, because it is with the emergence of capitalism that we can detect a continuing trend toward the globalization not only of economic activity but of politics and culture as well. This does not mean, as I will suggest, that the ebbs and flows of either globalization or consciousness of it disappeared; but, aside from culminating in the eighteenthcentury mapping of the world as we know it today, capitalism not only provided a sustained motive force for globalization but also served as the vehicle for the unification of the world

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under a new European hegemony. If the origins of capitalism lay in its prehistory in earlier modes of production, that neither negates the unprecedented historical role capitalism was to play in unifying the world nor renders the whole of human history rather than the structures of capitalism as the historical context for contemporary globalization. What Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century might have seemed fantastic in their day, but it is an eerily apt description of ours: The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, and increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known. . . . Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. . . . The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. . . . The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. . . . The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. . . . All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant

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lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world-literature. . . . The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image.35 Both material and cultural globalization are implicit in what Marx and Engels have to say concerning the effects of the expansion of European capitalism. The language of the last few sentences may betray a Eurocentric bias, and it is certainly offensive from a contemporary perspective—though even there the irony that the authors introduce (“what it calls civilisation”) should not be overlooked. And the very last sentence is problematic in its assumption of a single bourgeois “self-image,” which is blind to the possibility of the emergence of multiple self-images and interests as the bourgeoisie became more cosmopolitan in content, paving the way for the many internal contradictions that would mark the subsequent history of capitalism. But these are precisely the issues, rather than globalization as an ongoing historical process, that distinguish a contemporary consciousness of globalization from its antecedents, a point to which I will return momentarily. As Giovanni Arrighi has argued recently, capital has been globalizing all along, even before there was a structured and

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structuring entity that could be recognized as a “capitalist world-system.”36 Arrighi in turn draws on the work of Fernand Braudel, which in his analysis of the emergence of a European world system recognizes the existence of a multiplicity of regional world systems, with their own interactions, insertion into which enabled the bourgeoisies of Europe first to construct a European world system and subsequently to create the economic and political institutions that enabled them to draw all these other world systems within the orbit of Europe to create a world system that was global in scope.37 Although the capitalist world system as it emerged in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries may provide the historical-structural context for contemporary globalization, however, it is necessary to comprehend the particular features of the latter to account for the history of capitalism itself, and what I referred to earlier as “ebbs and flows” both in its processes and in the consciousness of globalization. Globalization may be viewed as an irrevocable process, at least from the time when Marx and Engels penned the Communist Manifesto. Consciousness of globality would proceed apace, and not just among Euro-Americans, who through imperialism and colonialism compelled it on increasingly broader constituencies in the world. But the very process of globalization created its own parochialism, including the parochialism of the European bourgeoisie, as Marx and Engels noted in their ironic reference to what the bourgeoisie calls “civilization.” If globalization was to become an ever-inescapable phenomenon, it was through colonialism, nationalism, and socialism, which were at once products of globalization and efforts to shape it in some ways, or even to restrain it, as in the case of nationalism and socialism. Roland Robertson, a pioneer in discussions of globalization, has divided globalization in history into five phases: the “germinal phase” (the fifteenth to mid–eighteenth centuries), the “incipient phase” (the mid–eighteenth century to the 1870s), the “take-off phase” (the 1870s to the mid1920s), “the struggle-for-hegemony phase” (the mid-1920s to the late 1960s), and “the uncertainty phase” (the 1960s

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to the 1990s).38 His depiction as “the uncertainty phase” of the last period, when globalization as paradigm came into its own, is an interesting point to which we shall return. Of more immediate relevance here is the coincidence of globalization in this “outline” with the history of “the capitalist world-system,” as world system analysts such as Immanuel Wallerstein would argue, and his identification as the “take-off phase” of the half-century from the 1870s, when “globalizing tendencies of previous periods and places gave way to a single, inexorable form.”39 Robertson is not alone in endowing this particular period with formative significance. Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, in their recent critique of the concept of globalization, point to this same period as a baseline against which to evaluate contemporary claims to globality. They conclude that at least in terms of the volume and intensity of economic activity between nations and regions of the globe, it is difficult to argue that the last quarter of the twentieth century represents more of a condition of globality than the last quarter of the nineteenth.40 Most interesting may be the conclusions of a New York Times article from May 1999 (of necessity less thorough in scholarship but quite well informed in the expertise it draws on) that suggests that in terms of trade, financial investments, and transactions and labor flows, the peak of globalization “occurred a century ago, making the twentieth century memorable in economic history mostly for its retreat from globalization. In some respects, only now is the world economy becoming as interlinked as it was a century ago.”41 Similar evidence may be found in the realms of consciousness and culture. From the Suez to the Panama canals, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the undertaking of grand projects intended to link different parts of the world. The American railroad tycoon Edward Harriman visualized a railroad line that would encircle the world; to that end, he organized an expedition to Alaska in 1899 to investigate the possibilities of building a bridge across the Bering Strait (with imported Chinese and Japanese labor) that would be a first step in his project.42 Organizers of world fairs, prominent cultural/commercial

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phenomena across Europe and the United States for nearly a hundred years following the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in the mid-nineteenth century, viewed the fairs as “encyclopedias of the world” that brought together not just peoples and artifacts of the whole world but the world’s knowledges as well.43 It is also to this period that we owe the great museums that sought to bring the world within their walls for preservation and research, in its many presents and its pasts. If such is indeed the case, we might ask why, then, did “globalization” have to wait for the end of the twentieth century to emerge to the forefront of consciousness as a new way of comprehending the world? Or, more precisely (if we focus not on the term but its substance), does globalization have the same effect and the same meaning at all times? That globalization has a history does not in and of itself refute the novelty of contemporary processes of globalization. Neither does it prove that globalization is an inevitable evolutionary process, as is recognized by the New York Times article, which suggests that the twentieth century may have represented a retreat from late nineteenth-century globality. Is globalization, then, a conjunctural phenomenon, deriving its meaning at any one historical conjuncture from the moments that go into the making of the conjuncture, which are not merely technical or economic but also political and cultural? Since globalization at every moment of its history involves not only integration but also differentiation, how does difference, and the conceptualization of difference, enter into the consciousness of globality? This may be the most pertinent question in our understanding of globalization as paradigm. Comparison with late nineteenth-century globality is quite revealing in dealing with at least some of these questions. But such comparison, to be meaningful, needs to account for forces not just of integration but also of differentiation. Comparisons of the kind cited earlier, while they may serve to refute the claims to novelty of contemporary globalization, nevertheless are limited by the very ideological claims that they seek to deconstruct—namely, claims that presuppose globalization as global integration. Integration,

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however, is only one aspect of the problem, the other being the particular form in which difference is articulated. Although we may perceive in both periods common globalizing forces of capital, there are nevertheless immense technological differences between the two periods that distinguish the one from the other both in the scope and configurations of globality and in the momentum of its processes. What I would like to take up here, however, are the political and cultural differences. The processes of economic globalization in the late nineteenth century coincided with the global diffusion of nationalism and colonialism, whereas contemporary globalization is not only postcolonial but also postnational (in the sense both of following global reorganization of societies into nations and also of proliferating assaults on the nation-state). While it is necessary to be cognizant of differences between now and then over issues of nationalism and colonialism, however, it is equally important not to exaggerate the differences or assume an absolute break between now and then. Colonialism and nationalism as they emerged in the late nineteenth century may also be viewed as manifestations of efforts to contain problems created by this earlier phase of globalization. This point is suggested by Saul, who argues that the rise of empires, along with “war, nationalism and management theory,” was a response to the problems created by free trade in the nineteenth century. It may follow, for our period as well, that the globalization of the past three decades of the twentieth century may end up in creating its own forms of division, of which there is many a sign. Globalism, then, becomes not some “natural manifestation of economic principles” but a mode of management. It is possible to see this shift in the understanding of globalism in recent works by its proponents. Against earlier neoliberal notions, in other words, globalism becomes a new regulatory paradigm that may be upheld by left and right liberals alike.44 Culturally speaking, if we are to characterize the late nineteenth century as a period of intense globalization, we need also to note that this globalization was almost synonymous with the globalization of Euro-American norms. It is not that there was no recognition of difference

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at the time, but difference was hierarchized in a temporality in which Euro-American economic, political, social, and cultural norms represented the teleological end of history. While these assumptions by no means have disappeared from contemporary conceptualizations of globality, they now have to contend with alternative claims to modernity that draw on alternative historical trajectories. This breakdown of Eurocentric hegemony is crucial to grasping globalization as a paradigm. Nationalism and colonialism in historical hindsight were at once products and agents of a Eurocentric globalization. This is quite evident in the case of colonialism. which followed from Euro-American expansion over the world and also served to bring the colonized within a Euro-American orbit economically, politically, and culturally. It is less evident in the case of nationalism, especially the emergence of the nation-state, which, in its territorial presuppositions, seems to contradict the imperatives of globalization. A number of observers, prominent among them Robertson, have suggested, however, that the nation-state itself was a product of the prior emergence of interstate relationships, which more or less forced nationhood on a previously diverse set of political systems, ranging from the tribal to the imperial. The global spread of the nation-form from the second half of the nineteenth century in turn contributed further to processes of globalization in two ways. First was the diffusion globally of the juridical principles regulating not only relationships between states but also relationships between states and their constituencies. Second was the erasure in the name of national cultural homogeneity of local differences within the nation. That these processes took different paths in different places, and remained incompletely realized, should not distract us from the revolutionary role that they played in the course of the twentieth century. Nationalism and colonialism, even as they contributed to globalization, also divided the globe in new ways into national and colonial spaces, which, as the New York Times article suggests, represented a decline not just from globality but, more precisely, a Eurocentric globality. They did not, therefore, undercut the vision of a Eurocentric end to

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history among either the proponents or the opponents (especially the socialist opponents) of a capitalist world order. The nineteenth century, especially the second half of the nineteenth century, coincides with the emergence of the social and cultural sciences as we have known them, including history. A hierarchical ordering of global differences informed not only the division of labor among the emerging social sciences but their content as well, as the peoples of the world were placed in the new order of knowledge according to their presumed distance from Euro-Americans, and their potential for living up to universal political and cultural norms for which the reference was contemporary Euro-American “civilization.” The price of failure to live up to those norms would be not just marginality but physical and/or cultural extinction. More than any other realm, it is the world of culture, and cultural assumptions about knowledge, that points to radical differences between the worlds of the present and the late nineteenth century, which are not to be captured by statistics on trade, investment, and labor flows. The scientists and even the environmentalists like John Muir, whom Edward Harriman gathered to accompany him on his expedition to Alaska, were there to gather botanical, zoological, and cultural artifacts because they were convinced that progress (of the kind envisioned by Harriman) would lead to the extinction of much that was in Alaska. The world fairs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gathered peoples from around the world in their exhibits, but there was no question whatsoever about the hierarchies that shaped the exhibits. The organizers of those fairs were so assured of the supremacy of Euro-American capitalist modernity (with colonialism as its most cogent evidence) that it would have been impossible for them to imagine that a hundred years later the descendants of Geronimo and Sitting Bull, who were put on exhibit in different fairs, would be demanding the return of ancestral bones with which the scientists of the age were stuffing their museums. Conviction in the supremacy of Euro-American modernity justified a racial hierarchy, backed by “scientific evidence,” that placed white Euro-Americans at the pinnacle of evolution, further

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bolstering their claims to supremacy. They had no need to think globally (any more than they did multiculturally), because they were convinced that those around the globe who did not respond to the demands of reason and progress would soon go out of existence. Racist contempt was not restricted to peoples deemed “primitive.” In the Congress of Learning that accompanied the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, intended to create one holistic system that would bring together all knowledge, natural or social scientific, only one scholar (Henri Maspero) was invited to speak on the knowledges and cultures of “Asia.” A chart of human types published by the anthropology exhibit placed the Chinese about midway in the ladder of human progress, halfway between “prehistoric man” and European/American whites (although Japan, represented by a female image—probably Madame Butterfly—was placed third, after Russians).45 There is a wide range of answers to the question of when globalization emerged as a paradigm at the end of the twentieth century—most of them technology driven and focused on the unification of the globe: from Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” to the view of the Earth from outer space to the Internet.46 Answers that address only issues of global unity seem to me to be lacking, however, in their failure to address the simultaneous phenomenon of global fragmentation, and they render globalization into little more than an advanced stage of modernization. One answer that is often ignored, which seems to me to clamor for a hearing, is that the awareness of globalization is at once the product of a making of a Eurocentric order of the world and of its breakdown, which now calls on our consciousness to abandon the claims of Eurocentrism while retaining consciousness of globality, which would have been inconceivable without that same order. It was necessary, before globalization in this contemporary sense could emerge to the forefront of consciousness, for a Euro-American globality to lose its claims to universality as the end of history—which is evident in our day most conspicuously not in the economic sphere, where those claims may still be sustained, but in the realms of culture and knowledge, which display a proliferation of alternatives to

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Eurocentrism. The latter, ironically, are voiced most strongly in societies empowered by success in the capitalist economy, the very products themselves of capitalist globalization. Native pasts may serve as sources for claims to alternative cultures and knowledges. But these are pasts that are themselves inventions of modernity, that already have been reimagined in the face of cultural challenges presented by a hegemonic Eurocentrism as well as more than a century of social and political transformation. These responses to Eurocentrism are themselves postcolonial and postnational, perhaps even postglobal, as they are informed by a keen awareness of challenges presented by the global hegemony of a Eurocentrism empowered by capitalism. Critics of Eurocentric modernity celebrate this condition of uncertainty in proclamations of multiple or alternative modernities, while its defenders mourn its passing, but they agree that modernity as we have known it is in ruins. Cultural challenges to Eurocentric modernity might have found their way to the surface of consciousness much earlier had it not been for the division of the world into two camps of capitalism and communism for at least half a century. Noting that “our triumphant modernity is threatened by the resurgence of history,” Jean-Marie Guehenno writes that “the cold war acted like a vast magnet on the iron filings of political institutions. For several decades, the polarization of East and West gave an order to human societies. . . . Today, the magnet has been cast aside, and the iron filings have become sparse little heaps.”47 Guehenno is referring here mainly to political institutions, in particular the nation-state, but an even more interesting facet of fragmentation in the post–Cold War world are the lines of fracture that have appeared in the world of capitalism at its very moment of victory; in the proliferating references to different capitalisms and different cultures of capitalism, which may make it more proper presently to speak of a “pan-capitalism,” a conglomeration of capitalisms based on variant social and cultural repertoires, rather than a global capitalism that is homogeneous in its practices.48 The simultaneous global sweep and fracturing of capitalism undermines also the spatial order built into neat coreperiphery distinctions as in the “world system analysis” version of globality, bringing the whole world within the domain of

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capital but at the same time introducing all the divisions of that world into the very structuring (or destructuring) of the capitalist world system. It is this predicament of capitalism that leads Manuel Castells to draw a distinction between the “architecture” and the “geometry” of the world system, recognizing the persistence of centers of capital in the so-called triad societies of Europe, North America, and Japan but also the instability of the whole system due to the constant motions of capital in global “networks.”49 Even the center here is decentered, as it represents not a single center but a multiplicity of centers that themselves, especially in Europe and East Asia, are subject to internal competitions and reconfigurations. Any account of the emergence of globalization as paradigm needs to recognize an awareness of the simultaneous unification and fragmentation of the world as an important moment in its emergence. It may not be too surprising that the term globalization acquired prominence in discussions of political economy and culture not just with the end of the Cold War but with the increasing attention drawn to the emergence of new capitalist economies in the 1980s, most conspicuously in East and Southeast Asia. No less important is the fact that the emergence of these economies was accompanied by a reassertion of claims to cultural difference that had been submerged so long as these societies remained under the shadow of Europe and the United States. Interestingly, their emergence had an impact also on relations between North American and European economies, as they have entered renewed competition to capture trade and investment (or even rich migrants) in the so-called newly industrializing societies. Contemporary conceptualizations of globalization base their claims to novelty most importantly on their claims to break with the modernization discourse, grounded in what the (by then predominantly U.S.) bourgeoisie called “civilization,” and the alternative to it provided by socialist modernization. While locked in deadly opposition, these two alternatives ironically shared a common commitment to developmentalism, and each sought to draw into its orbit the nations of the postcolonial world, themselves anxious

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to develop so as to overcome the legacies of colonialism and enhance national autonomy and power. The “three worlds” of modernization discourse, moreover, all conceived of modernization in terms of national units, which disguised the fundamental ways in which both the three worlds idea and the idea of the nation were premised on prior assumptions and processes of globalization.50 It is nevertheless important to the distinction drawn here that globality was conceived of under the regime of modernization (capitalist and socialist) as “internationalism” rather than as “globalism.” The immediate context for contemporary forms and consciousnesses of globality is the breakdown of this mapping of the world, first with the transformations that rendered increasingly questionable the idea of the “third world” and subsequently with the abandonment and/or fall of the socialist alternative. Already in the late 1960s and early 1970s important alternatives had emerged that questioned the nation-based, culturalist assumptions of modernization discourse. As a new global situation emerged in the 1980s with transformations within capitalism—most important, the decentering of economic power with the appearance of competitors to U.S. hegemony—the analysis of capitalism itself assumed greater complexity. Finally, as the post–Cold War promise of a “new world order” in the early nineties has given way to evidence of new kinds of disorder, drawing on sources of identity that are as old as, if not older than, modernity, still other analyses of globality have become an urgent necessity. Globalization as paradigm, in short, represents both a recognition of the decentering of the world (which had to be centered before it could be decentered), including the world of capitalism, and also the institutions and knowledges that are necessary to manage and contain difference (or, even, chaos). Why is it that globalization should have produced social and cultural sciences with universalist claims at one stage of its historical progress, while at a later stage we are called on to question, as a very condition of globality, the claims to universality of those very same social and cultural sciences—nay, the very notion of science and the claims of the social and cultural sciences to scientificity? The question is

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worth pondering as a crucial difference between the present and the past. It also goes to the very heart of the concept of globalization, which in its positive claims draws nourishment from earlier traditions of universalism in the social and cultural sciences, at the same time undermining its own claims by exposing the parochialness of its claims to universalism as it seeks to appropriate alternative ways of knowing. If globalization as “material” process is incomprehensible without reference to the fragmentation that is also its inevitable concomitant, globalization as paradigm is enabled by its divorce from the universalist aspirations that marked it earlier in its history.51 Claims to universalistic knowledge under the circumstances are revealing at best of the hegemonic assumptions that continue to infuse contemporary arguments for globalization, also revealing its ties to existing structures of power. To abandon those claims is also to resign to the parochialness—and hence the relativity—of all knowledge, which not only abolishes all the commonalities that are the products of the past few centuries of global interactions but also deprives humans of their ability to communicate across societal boundaries (wherever those may be drawn at any one time and place). Is this why the condition of globalization, once it has become self-aware, is also a condition of “uncertainty,” as Robertson puts it, or “the end of the world as we know it,” in the somewhat more apocalyptic phraseology of Immanuel Wallerstein?52 It is one of the profound ironies of our times that modernity should be in question more seriously than ever before at the very moment of its apparent global victory. If globalization means anything, it is the incorporation of societies globally into a capitalist modernity, with all the implications of the latter—economic, social, political, and cultural. While dynamized by the homogenizing and integrative forces and urges of capital, and its attendant organizational and cultural demands, globalization has complicated further contradictions between and within societies, including a fundamental contradiction between a seemingly irresistible modernity and past legacies that not only refuse to go away but draw renewed vitality from

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the very globalizing process. Intensified and accelerated interactions between societies—that justify the discourse of globalization—are surely signs of the modern. Yet these very same relationships render modernity into a site of conflict and contention, raising fundamental questions about its historical and ethical meaning (or meaninglessness). The effort to overcome Eurocentrism and to bring into modernity the voices, experiences, and cultural legacies of others has driven discussions of modernity in fields that range from postcolonial studies to more conventional studies of modernization in sociology and political science. Most revisionist studies of modernity and modernization project on the past contemporary perspectives of globality, and most argue that modernity all along has been global in scope, plural in form and direction, and hybrid not only across cultural boundaries but also in the relationship of the modern to the traditional. I do not question these conclusions. I nevertheless suggest that there is much to be gained in clarity from viewing “global modernity” as a period concept, to contrast it with a preceding period that, for all its complexities, was indeed marked by Euro-American domination and hegemony. The nearly unchallenged U.S. domination of the world is a continuation of the power relations of modernity, but in a world that has been transformed significantly in its economic and political configurations. For all the concentration of naked power, this world, when compared with a previous period of modernity dominated by Euro-America, is decentered ideologically and organizationally, including in the emergent values and organizations of political economy, which makes it possible to speak of “globalcentrism” against an earlier Eurocentrism.53 It is this spatial reconfiguration of modernity, rather than quantitative figures of trade or migrations, that distinguish the present from earlier conjunctures of globality. It could be argued, as some do, that if we recognize modernity as a relationship rather than isolate it as an exclusive creation of Euro-America, then all parties to the relationship must be viewed as modern in terms of their historical dynamics. On the one hand, this is indeed the proper way to understand

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modernity historically. On the other hand, it does not follow that modernity has no content beyond these relationships, so that no judgment is possible of modernity as a historical phenomenon that is distinguishable from other formations in terms of economic, social, political, and cultural characteristics. The identification of modernity as a historical formation indeed has become very problematic, as have distinctions between the modern and the nonmodern or the premodern—more often than not, ironically, in the name of a postmodern or, alternatively, postcolonial disorganization of historical temporalities and teleologies. The problem this presents is that spatialities and temporalities of history are themselves understood differently in different times and places. It was not merely the colonizers who depicted the colonized as backward, but the colonized themselves adopted this same perspective; the striving out of what is considered backwardness continues to our day. On the other hand, while victimization of the colonized by the colonizer is by no means absent from our so-called postcolonial days, this is no longer taken as a natural or historical necessity but is the object of struggles against inequality and injustice that are recognized as legitimate rights universally. Unlike in the late nineteenth century, with its evolutionary grasp of history, it would be rather difficult to maintain presently (though it might be believed privately) that different societies are aligned on different locations along a ladder of progress, the pinnacle of which lies in Europe or North America. This postcolonial sense of contemporaneity surely has something to do with what Harvey has called “time-space compression,” which accounts for the sense of globality that is part of a contemporary consciousness, which makes it far easier for an ideological globalization to acquire cultural plausibility. In fact, in many ways, the formerly colonized or otherwise dominated by Euro-America—such as India and the People’s Republic of China—now view themselves not as victims of modernity but as its agents. Modernity has been globalizing all along, but the realization of global modernity was obstructed by two products of capitalist modernity itself: colonialism and socialism.

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Decolonization since World War II has restored the voices of the colonized and opened the way to recognition of the spatial and temporal copresence of those whom a Eurocentric modernization discourse had relegated to invisibility and backwardness. Decolonization owed much to socialism as ideology and the presence of socialist states. But so long as socialism persisted as a viable alternative to capitalism, the effects of decolonization were dissolved into the teleologies of Eurocentrically conceived modernity. The decline and fall of socialism in the course of the 1980s opened the way to the globalization of capital. It also eliminated socialism as a crucial obstacle to cultural appropriations—and, therefore, the proliferation—of modernities, which now finds expression in the fragmentation of a single modernity into multiple and alternative modernities. Questioning of Eurocentric teleology in either the capitalist or the socialist guise has revealed modernity in its full historicity and “geohistorical” diversity,54 which is a condition of what I describe here as global modernity. It was capitalist modernity that produced the societies—as we have currently them—which now make their own claims on modernity against Euro-American domination. The disappearance of the socialist alternative to capitalism may be one important reason for the ascendancy in these claims of arguments based on cultural autonomy or persistence. But so is the globalization of capital in the emergence of new centers of corporate capital—most important, in East and Southeast Asia—in the increasingly diverse labor force that staffs transnational corporations, and in the transnationalization of marketing and advertising, which create new cultural fault lines that call for close management of culture. Culture looms large in contemporary scholarship and politics, as it is deployed in a number of capacities: in opposition to modernity, in explanations of local appropriations of the modern, or in its newfound significance as an instrument of political and corporate management. This new situation is a product of modernity, but it needs to be recognized nevertheless for the new kinds of contradictions it presents, which differentiate it from a period of Eurocentric modernity. Global modernity unifies and divides the

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globe in new ways. It does not do so to emphasize one or the other, as with naive ideas of global unity expressed in slogans of globalization, or obscurantist notions of conflict that see the world fracturing along “cultural” divides impervious to all common political and economic activities—as well as to the pervasiveness of class, gender, and various spatial divisions that cut across “cultural” boundaries. Notes 1. For “pattern-variables,” see Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, eds., Toward a General Theory of Action: Theoretical Foundations for the Social Sciences (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1951), especially part 2. The subtitle is indicative of the ambitious (and scientistic) agenda that informed modernization discourse. 2. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of World-Systems Analysis,” Review 21, no. 1 (1998): 103–12. See also Immanuel Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 1991). 3. Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution: Essays on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970). 4. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 163. 5. For an illuminating discussion, see Dean C. Tipps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 15, no. 2 (March 1973): 199–226. See also Carl Pletsch, “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 4 (December 1981): 565–90. 6. S. N. Eisenstadt, Post-traditional Societies (New York: Norton, 1974). 7. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974). See also Charles Tilly, “Does Modernization Breed Revolution?” Comparative Politics 5, no. 3 (April 1973): 425–47. 8. For the critical questions concerning modernization discourse that motivated alternatives to it, see Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science; Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of World-System Analysis”; I. Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Compara-

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tive Analysis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16, no. 4 (September 1974): 53–54; and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “Dependency Revisited,” 1973 Hackett Memorial Lecture (Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas, 1973). See also Theotonio dos Santos, “World Economic System: On the Genesis of a Concept,” Journal of World Systems Research 11, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2000): 456–77. For “de-linking,” see Samir Amin, De-linking: Towards a Polycentric World (London: Zed, 1990). 9. Wallerstein, for one, is careful to distinguish the “globality” in world systems analysis from the globality of globalization discourse. See “The Rise and Future Demise of World-Systems Analysis,” 106. For an extended discussion of the two paradigms, see Maximilian C. Forte, “Globalization and World-Systems Analysis: Toward New Paradigms of a Geo-Historical Social Anthropology (A Research Review),” Review 21, no. 1 (1998): 29–99. See also Arif Dirlik, “Shijie tixi fenxi he quanqiu ziben zhuyi: dui xiandaihua lilunde yizhong jiantao” (World System Analysis and Global Capitalism: Reflections on Modernization Theory), Zhanlue yu guanli (Strategy and Management) 1 (November 1993): 50–55. 10. John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2005); and David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 11. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 19. The situation in China and Russia arguably has been more complicated, as it entailed the conversion of a Communist political elite into the elite of a market economy as well, but Harvey points to a fundamental aspect of globalization that I will discuss further, the emergence of a transnational capitalist class. 12. Anthony King, drawing on the Oxford English Dictionary, suggests that “the term ‘globalization’ had entered the vocabulary at the latest by 1962.” A. King, “Introduction: Spaces of Culture, Spaces of Knowledge,” in Culture, Globalization and the WorldSystem: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, 2nd rev. ed., ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 1–18; 4n8. For the social sciences, their past and future, see the essays collected in Immanuel Wallerstein, The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-first Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), part 2, “The World of Knowledge.” 13. For a somewhat celebratory account of the “spatial turn” as a break with modernity, see Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places

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(Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996). More critical accounts of the “spatial turn,” and its relationship to the workings of capital are found in the many works by David Harvey and Neil Smith. See, for example, David Harvey, Limits to Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). Fredric Jameson was one of the first to draw attention to the “spatial turn” or what he described as “the displacement of time, the spatialization of the temporal” as a characteristic of postmodernity. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 156. Whether in celebration or criticism, all writers on space acknowledge a debt to Henri Lefevbre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991) (first published in 1974). 14. We might also note here that while the proponents of globalization may share certain assumptions in common, there is also a wide range of meanings attached to the whole notion of globalization, especially in the appropriation of globalization in different political and cultural contexts. For a discussion, see Arif Dirlik, “Formations of Globality and Radical Politics,” Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 21, no. 4 (1999): 300–338; reprinted in Georgi M. Derluguian and Scott L. Greer, eds., Questioning Geopolitics: Political Projects in a Changing World-System (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000), 111–35. 15. Farshad Araghi, “The Three Colonialisms of Historical Capitalism: The Second Colonialism and the Rise of Pan-Islamic Nationalism in Iran,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 27, 2000. 16. See the reference to globalization (along with multiculturalism) as one more example of U.S. cultural imperialism in Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” Theory, Culture and Society 16, no. 1 (1999): 42. For a view from the United States, see Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1999), where LaFeber sees in the combination of corporate media capitalism, consumer culture, sports, and the iconic image of Michael Jordan, a powerful force in spreading U.S. culture around the world. Michael Jordan, along with China’s own Yao Ming, now concludes the diaromic exhibit of important personages in the National Museum of History in Beijing, which takes the visitor

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from Confucius through modern revolutionary personages to contemporary cultural icons. 17. Thus, the top 20 percent of the world population commands 82.5 percent of world income, while the bottom 60 percent receives only 5.6 percent, with the remainder going to the second layer from the top. Figures given in David Held, Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2004), 35. 18. Among the works that are notable for what they reveal about globalization are Hans Peter-Martin and Harald Schumann, The Global Trap: Globalization and the Assault on Democracy and Prosperity, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Zed, 1997); Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); and Roger Burbach, Orlando Nunez, and Boris Kagarlitsky, Globalization and Its Discontents (London: Pluto, 1997). Martin and Schumann, citing globalizationists, point out that globalization is expected to produce a “20:80” society sustained by “tittytainment”—that is, a society where only 20 percent of the world’s population will benefit from globalization, while the rest will be kept occupied by entertainment. The 20:80 figure was originally forecast by the European Union. See Ricardo Petrella, “World City-States of the Future,” NPQ (New Perspectives Quarterly) (Fall 1991): 59–64. For the “network” image of globalization, see Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 1, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996). The network image appeared in discussions of globalization from the beginning, in references to a contemporary “Hanseatic League.” For a discussion, see Arif Dirlik, After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 50. The analogy is also a reminder of the reality of globalization as a network of “global cities” (in Saskia Sassen’s terminology) in which the rural hinterlands appear increasingly marginal. See Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). 19. Sassen, The Global City. Needless to say, the nodes of the network economy are not restricted to these major centers. For an elaboration, see Saskia Sassen, ed., Global Networks, Linked Cities (New York: Routledge, 2002). For global city regions, see Roger Simmonds and Gary Hack, eds., Global City Regions: Their Emerging Forms (London: Spon, 2000). For region-states, see Kenichi

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Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies: How Capital, Corporations, Consumers, and Communication Are Reshaping the Global Markets (New York: Free Press, 1995). How these region-states are linking together to form a coastal corridor from Singapore to Tokyo is the subject of some of the essays in Kris Olds, Peter Dicken, Philip Kelly, Lily Kong, and Henry W. C. Yeung, Globalisation and the Asia-Pacific: Contested Territories (London: Routledge, 1999). For the case of the PRC, see the detailed study by Xiangming Chen, As Borders Bend: Transnational Spaces on the Pacific Rim (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). 20. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society. 21. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 146–47. 22. Ohmae, The End of the Nation State, 16. 23. Ohmae, The End of the Nation State, 16. 24. Ohmae, The End of the Nation State, 57. 25. Ohmae, The End of the Nation State, 74, 94. 26. For the transnational capitalist class, see Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). 27. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, vol. 3, The Perspective of the World: 15th–18th Century, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), especially the foreword and chap.1. 28. Edward Friedman, “Jiang Zemin’s Successors and China’s Growing Rich-Poor Gap,” in The 16th CCP Congress: China beyond Jiang, ed. T. J. Cheng (forthcoming). I am grateful to Professor Friedman for sharing this paper with me. 29. Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 191–92. 30. Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity, 227–33. 31. For more extensive discussion of Marxist analyses of Chinese society, see Arif Dirlik, Revolution and History: Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 32. This tendency also seems to shape thinking on public health in some quarters. Two influential writers, having noted the erosion of national sovereignty by actors playing at the supranational global level, advocate shifting attention from the nation-state to networks of globality to meet new health challenges. They write that against international organizations that still take the nationstate as their units, “‘back home’ internal sovereignty in health is being significantly challenged if not eroded in a wide range of countries through a myriad of factors: the actions of transnational

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corporations, conditionalities set by the IMF [International Monetary Fund], premises of the heath care reforms of the World Bank, priorities set by bilateral agencies and the agreements reached at the World Trade Organization or the European Union.” Hence the need for a “network approach” to meet these actors on their own ground, and a reconceptualization of “international” as “global public health.” Ilona Kickbusch and Evelyne de Leeuw, “Editorial: Global Public Health: Revisiting Healthy Public Policy at the Global Level,” Health Promotion International 14, no. 4 (December 1999): 286–87. This is no doubt pointing to an important level of health activity, but it is rather uncritical in ignoring the part networks play in the marginalization of surfaces (and their populations), as discussed earlier, and the possibility that a health policy thus formulated becomes part of the discourse of globalization, exacerbating some of the very problems it is intended to resolve. A more thorough theoretical formulation of this position is to be found in Ilona Kickbusch, “Global Health Governance: Some Theoretical Considerations on the New Political Space,” in Health Impacts of Globalization: Towards Global Governance, ed. Kelley Lee (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 192–203. There is no reason, of course, why health policy should be restricted to one level, instead of a multilevel conceptualization in terms of global, regional, national, subnational regional, all the way down to placebased levels. I have no reason to think that these authors would disagree with a multilevel approach. On the other hand, the exclusive focus on the national versus the global in much of the literature on globalization, including health literature, results at the very least in the discursive suppression of these other considerations that bear directly on the health of everyday life. 33. William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 34. A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (London: Random House, 2002). See, especially, Hopkins’s conceptual introduction, “The History of Globalization—and the Globalization of History?” where the question mark serves most importantly to disguise what the essay seeks to perform (12–44). See also Arif Dirlik, “Confounding Metaphors, Inventions of the World: What Is World History For?” in Writing World History, 1800–2000, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs (London: Oxford University Press for the German Historical Institute, 2002), 91–133. 35. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, reproduction of the English edition of 1888 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1968), 31–36.

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36. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Time (London: Verso, 1994). 37. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, vol. 3, The Perspective of the World: 15th–18th Century. Braudel himself drew on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world system analysis, adding to the latter a recognition of other world systems that predated the emergence of capitalism. He also restricted the definition of capital, identifying it with large enterprises devoted to accumulation. In his case, as in the case of Arrighi, the emphasis is on the role of finance in globalization. Financial expansion required an alliance between the territorial state and a globalizing capital, but it also created contradictions between the two because of their conflicting orientations to territorial grounding. The argument is highly plausible but is questionable in ignoring both production and issues of culture, especially for the period after the eighteenth century. Accumulation is the goal (and the defining feature) of capital, but production may be essential to comprehending both sources of national power and the foreshortening of the cycles of financial accumulation and dispersion that is important in Arrighi’s analysis. It is also important to explain why the creation of the nation-state accompanied mechanisms of accumulation at one stage of globalization, while its dissolution or the qualification of its powers would seem to be a feature of contemporary globalization. Such questions require greater attention, I think, to the relationship among accumulation, production, and national markets. It is also important to recognize that national cultures, once they had come into existence, also have played autonomous roles in influencing, if not shaping, the actions of both states and capital. 38. Robertson, “Mapping the Global Condition,” in Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1994), 58–59. 39. Robertson, “Mapping the Global Condition,” 59. 40. Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), especially chap. 2. The purpose of this volume, I should note, is not just to draw abstract comparisons between the present and the past but, rather, to deny the novelty of globalization to argue that the nation-state, and social policies enacted through the state, are still relevant. Hirst and Thompson are careful to point out that their arguments are directed against “extreme” globalizers who see in globalization the end of the nation. 41. Nicholas D. Kristof, “At This Rate, We’ll Be Global in Another Hundred Years,” New York Times, 23 May 1999, Week in Review.

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42. William H. Goetzmann and Kay Sloan, Looking Far North: The Harriman Expedition to Alaska, 1899 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 7–8. 43. See Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1998); and Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 44. Saul, The Collapse of Globalism, 42–44. There is evidence in much recent work by champions or sympathizers of globalization of a recognition of its contradictions and of the need for intervention and regulation to alleviate the problems it has created. For a view from a left-liberal position, see David Held, Global Covenant. Examples of the new understanding of globalism from conservative/right liberal perspectives are to be found in Martin Wolf, Why Globalization Works (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), especially the concluding chapter, “Today’s Threats, Tomorrow’s Promises”; Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), especially the section, “Geopolitics and the Flat World,” which recognizes the “unflatness” of the world; and Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (New York: Penguin, 2005), which makes an explicit case for intervention in the global economy to save the poor. 45. For the conference, see George Haines IV and Frederick H. Jackson, “A Neglected Landmark in the History of Ideas,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 34, no. 1 (June 1947): 201–20. For the chart of human evolution, see the anthropology volume of the series, Louisiana and the Fair: An Exposition of the World, Its People and Their Achievements, ed. J. W. Buel (St. Louis: World’s Progress, 1904), frontispiece. I owe the Madame Butterfly insight to a friend, Larry Schneider, who noted the contemporary popularity of Puccini’s opera. 46. Reference here is to Marshall McLuhan, whose work on communications was quite influential in fostering interest in globalization as early as the 1960s (e.g., The Gutenberg Galaxy [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962]). For discussion of global village, see Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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47. Jean-Marie Guehenno, The End of the Nation-State, trans. Victoria Elliott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), x. 48. I owe this term to Majid Tehranian, although I use it in a slightly modified sense than his. 49. Manuel Castells, The Information Age, vol. 1; The Rise of the Network Society, 145–47. 50. For a more detailed discussion, see Arif Dirlik, “Three Worlds or One, or Many? The Reconfiguration of Global Relations under Contemporary Capitalism,” in The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997): 146–62. 51. Globalization as the end of universalism is a point that has been taken up by Zygmunt Bauman. See his Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 59–65. We may share Bauman’s pessimistic evaluation of this transition. On the other hand, viewed from non-Euro-American perspectives, the end of universalism also has opened up spaces for the articulation of “traditions” suppressed under the regime of modernity. 52. The apocalyptic tone is even more explicit in the diagnosis of the contemporary situation by another world system theorist, Giovanni Arrighi. Arrighi concludes The Long Twentieth Century with the following lines: Before humanity chokes (or basks) in the dungeon (or paradise) of a post-capitalist world empire or of a post-capitalist world market society, it may well burn up in the horrors (or glories) of the escalating violence that has accompanied the liquidation of the Cold War world order. In this case, capitalist history would also come to an end but by reverting permanently to the systemic chaos from which it began six hundred years ago and which has been reproduced on an ever-increasing scale with each transition. Whether this would mean the end just of capitalist history or of all of human history, it is impossible to tell. (356) 53. Fernando Coronil, “Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature,” Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 351–74. 54. For “geohistorical,” see Peter J. Taylor, Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Historicity in my usage is quite the same as Taylor’s “geohistory,” as I denote by it both temporal and spatial dimensions of location.

◊ 3

Conceptual Field(s) of Globality Globalization as a concept acquired popularity in the 1990s, following important transformations in the structures and constituencies of capitalism during the previous two decades and the fall or weakening of socialist regimes as they fell into the gravitational field of market economies. This field also contained efforts to explain contemporary changes through a variety of concepts from the postmodern and the postcolonial to the diasporic and the place-based. It in turn extended into, and undermined, existing notions of a singular modernity, giving rise to a concern with different kinds of modernity. How these various concerns were articulated to one another in such an intellectual and political field is important for understanding the various dimensions of globalization as concept. I take up in this chapter the relationship of globalization as concept to this broader discursive field. Globalization, Postmodernity, and Postcoloniality The question of the modern has been of central concern in discussions of postmodernity and postcoloniality, concepts that themselves may be viewed as intellectual and cultural products of the same world situation that globalization is intended to comprehend. Indeed, the feverish concern with postmodernity and postcoloniality of the 1980s and 1990s would seem to have given way by the late 1990s to 62

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an equally feverish preoccupation with globalization across the human and the social sciences not just in North America and Europe but globally. The coincidence or, more strongly, conjuncture of the concepts raises unavoidable questions about their historical relationship as alternative efforts to conceptualize the present and its modern past, whether or not the postmodern and the postcolonial as they appeared in the 1980s may have signified the passage from Eurocentric to global modernity and, in turn, the ways in which they may have prepared the cultural and intellectual grounds for the seemingly effortless passage to globalization, as well as the particular ways in which it has come to be understood. To be sure, these concepts have their own individual histories. Perry Anderson has traced the origins of the term postmodernism to Hispanophone literary criticism in the 1930s. Hans Bertens has emphasized the proliferation of the use of the term in artistic circles in the United States in the 1950s. But it was in the 1970s that the term seems to have acquired widespread currency, mostly with reference to architecture and the visual arts.1 Through these years, and well into the 1970s, postmodernism as a concept was restricted to the domain of arts, architecture, and literature. It also conveyed diverse and often conflicting messages. Postmodernism in the arts would culminate in some cases in a shift of attention from meaning to representation. But it also carried with it overtones of antimodernism—not a rejection of modernism per se but dissatisfaction with the modern fetishism of technology and efficiency, and a desire to bring back in subjectivities associated with nature, place, and history. Throughout, however, postmodernism has been double coded as an extension of modernity and an expression of efforts to overcome it. Like all “posts,” the post- in postmodern is most productive intellectually when it is understood in the periodizing sense of “what comes after,” but with the essential proviso that what comes after bears on it the stamp of what preceded it. It is in this sense that postmodernism is best understood as modernity become self-conscious

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and self-critical. It is also in this sense that it is highly appropriate to describe a situation that is different from before but also much the same—as in the relationship of globalization to modernization. These contradictions in the attributions of postmodernism would persist into the 1980s, when it acquired a new kind of status as an epistemological critique of the modern, on the one hand, and as a cultural formation in its own right, on the other hand, that was associated with a new phase in the development of capitalism. Jean-François Lyotard’s influential manifesto, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,2 was a foremost expression of the articulation of postmodernism to poststructuralism in its uncompromising repudiation of the totalities and metanarratives of modernity, particularly Marxism. Against it was the articulation of postmodernism to a narrative of capitalism in the works of Jean Baudrillard in France as well as Fredric Jameson and David Harvey in the United States.3 These last works are of the greatest interest from the perspective of the discussion here, as they sought to bring together postmodernism as cultural phenomenon with postmodernity as a condition of late twentieth-century capitalism. This is especially the case with the work of Harvey. Jameson’s account of political economy drew heavily on Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism,4 which stressed new developments in capitalism toward the ever more intense penetration of everyday life (the rise of a consumer society, which also had been a point of departure for Baudrillard, who did not have much to say about the global dimensions of capitalism). The same could be said of Harvey, who had been a pioneer in the spatial analysis of capitalism in such works as Limits to Capital5 but was more interested in this work in changes in the nature of capitalist production—namely, the rise of a post-Fordist economy. Others, however, had already noted from the early 1980s on a correspondence between so-called flexible production (which would characterize a post-Fordist economy) and a new international division of labor, which would ultimately be of great significance in stimulating interest in globalization and, to some extent, making it a reality.6

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The other side of the Marxist articulation of postmodernity to a globalizing capitalist economy was the anticipation in postmodernism, at least conceptually, of the social and cultural uncertainties that were to be thrown up by capital in its globalization. Despite important analytical and political differences, Lyotard’s rejection of metanarratives has something fundamental in common with the Marxist assimilation of postmodernism by Jameson and Harvey to a new phase in the development of capitalism. Both point in their different ways to the fragmentation of cultural coherence—the one in its affirmation of the local against structural totalities, the other in its identification of a logic for such fragmentation in the structural totality itself, but with similar results. Jameson has argued that what coherence is to be found in postmodern art and architecture derives not from some inner necessity but from the interplay of surface forms, making the pastiche and the collage into the paradigmatic form of postmodernity—not just in art, we may add, but culture in general. At the risk of pushing the metaphor of collage beyond the realm of aesthetics, it is worth observing that a social and political ideology such as multiculturalism, very much bound up with issues of globalization, may be to social forms what the collage is to two-dimensional representation. If the denial of inner coherence renders culture into pastiche or a collage, it also allows for—at least in theory—the insertion of disparate cultural elements into the same cultural agglomeration, weakening if not undermining notions of inside and outside, as well as rendering irrelevant (if not oppressive) judgments of essences and foundations. This is conceded in commonplace social and cultural metaphors of “mosaic” or even “salad bowl” over the past two decades. These are by-now familiar themes of postmodernity but also of what goes by the name of globalization. Repudiation of the coherence of totalities and metanarratives has had liberating effects in giving voice to or rendering visible those who had been suppressed under the regime of modernity. While postmodernity is most importantly a “cultural logic” of advanced capitalist societies, the logic has spread around the world as practices of contemporary capitalism have gone

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global. Thus, Akbar Ahmed has found in the superseding of third world regimes of modernity the liberation of those who had been suppressed by these regimes, committed as they had been to modern faiths of reason and secularism, which he views as being tantamount to a “demotic revolution.”7 Traditions and religious beliefs once viewed as backward have made a comeback as modernity itself has come under question, powered by incorporation in new economic practices. These same beliefs have acquired global legitimacy as modernity has come under questioning within the first world itself. This is a modernity, nevertheless, that is conceived primarily in terms of its association with Eurocentrism and Eurocentric assumptions of progress, which are disassociated from issues of the reorganization of global relations with the globalization of capital. What is lost from perception in the process is that underlying it all is a new regime of power. Multiculturalism was sponsored initially by transnational corporations in search of techniques to manage an increasingly international labor force.8 However liberal the intentions may have been, this multiculturalism was inseparable from efforts to forge out of a multiplicity of cultural orientations company cultures for transnational capitalism. It could also be argued that such cultural compromises were a condition for, not a consequence of, the globalization of capital. This point, too, may be grasped better in terms of global modernity—a product of contradictions created in the first place by modernity—than in terms of a teleology of globalization. The “cultural turn” in its origins was a product, it may be suggested, of efforts to render culture into a free-floating signifier, which could be deployed for contingent ends. This has been the case over issues of Eurocentrism as much as of problems presented by national cultures. The relationship between globalization and postcoloniality is even more direct, and not just because the two terms gained currency at about the same time, from the early 1990s. Postcolonial, too, has a history. In its emergence in the decades after World War II, it referred to regimes and movements seeking liberation from colonialism, and

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the most important sense it conveyed was opposition to colonialism. Unlike postmodernism, it was primarily a political term, with significant social, economic, and cultural implications; as with the anticolonial national liberation movements of the 1960s that sought to bolster the political independence they had gained with social revolutions that would also guarantee economic and cultural autonomy. The post- in postcolonial, too, had a double coding, referring to the anticolonial that came after the colonial, as well as to the lingering power of colonialism to shape what came after, but it seems to me that this latter sense was pushed to the background in the Manichean struggle, as Abdul JanMohamed has termed it, between colonialism and anticolonialism.9 It is this latter sense that has come forward since the late 1970s, considerably complicating notions both of the colonial and the postcolonial. In the retreat from anticolonialism that accompanied the failure of national liberation regimes to deliver their promises—and even to replicate the habits of colonialists—the idea of the postcolonial has lost much of its political sense or even its concrete reference in colonialism, turning into a cultural metaphor. In the process, it has been redefined to coincide not with the end but the beginning of colonialism, which has led to an enormous expansion of its historical scope—across the history of modern colonialism but also, in some cases, all of known history, which in a general sense may be read as a history of colonialism. The meaning of the postcolonial has also been blurred in its conversion into a cultural metaphor, especially in first world locations, where it has become available for use to describe not just colonial but gender and ethnic relations as well, obfuscating differences between specifically colonial and other forms of social difference and oppression. Finally, while the idea of the postcolonial in the 1960s was closely articulated with Marxist analyses of capitalism and social (class) revolution, it also increasingly adopted, similarly to postmodernism, the language of poststructuralism. By the late 1980s, it resonated closely with the concerns and orientations of the latter, further blurring the

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boundaries between metropolitan and specifically postcolonial criticism, especially as postcolonialism as we have come to know it over the past decade found its voice most importantly among third world intellectuals located in North America, Australia, and Europe. One of the most important developments that accompanied these transformations was the blurring of the historical divide between the colonial and what came after, which was implicit in the recognition of the lingering power of the colonial over the “post” that followed it but also in the extension of the postcolonial back to the beginnings of colonialism. The immediate consequence (or perhaps a motivation) was the questioning of the claims of nationalism to have broken with the colonial past. If an earlier generation of postcolonial intellectuals and movements perceived in the nation the instrument of liberation from colonialism, a current generation of postcolonial intellectuals have added to the political and cultural agenda escape from nationalism itself. The recognition of the power of the colonial past to shape the postcolonial is a fundamental question that I will take up later. The historicism of postcolonial criticism has had further implications of a fundamental nature, including the questioning of the boundaries separating the colonizer and the colonized. As with the postmodernist questioning of totalities and metanarratives, postcolonial criticism in its current reincarnation has turned its back on its Marxist past and evolved into a much more complicated portrayal of the relationship between colonizer and colonized that stresses localized encounters and cultural hybridization over and against structural totalities and Manichean divisions. Modern colonialism as a global phenomenon, associated with capitalism, itself disappears in this picture, replaced with localized colonialisms. Whereas earlier postcolonial struggles were to inspire the tripartite division of the world, contemporary postcolonial critics in many cases have rejected identification with a generalized third world. Finally, in many of these accounts, the colonized appear not in the guise of the oppressed—not completely oppressed, anyway—but in their everyday resistance to the colonizers, while the latter are deprived of much of their

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seeming omnipotence that circumstances force on them by the necessity of compromise with the colonized. There is no doubt a great deal of historical truth to this portrayal, but it suffers from the problems presented by all historicism that focus on the local and the particular without raising the question of how the local is overdetermined by forces that are not local and that may emanate from locations that were even beyond the geographic ken of the colonized. It also is insufficiently cognizant of class, gender, and other differences among both the colonizers and the colonized that made for significantly different experiences of the colonial encounter. I have discussed some of the ideological and analytical problems presented by postcolonial criticism at length elsewhere. Here, I would like to underline two aspects of contemporary postcoloniality that bear directly on its relationship to questions of globalization. First, postcolonial intellectuals have contributed directly to processes of globalization; as intellectuals who have come to play a strategic role in intellectual activity globally, but especially in first world institutions and global organizations. I have in mind here not just intellectuals working in capacities generally considered as cultural/intellectual work but also technical personnel staffing transnational corporations and other organizations. Second, postcolonial intellectuals doing intellectual/cultural work have contributed directly to ideological globalization in their critiques of the nation-state and national identities. Somewhat ironically, these same intellectuals have played a part in their critique of Eurocentrism and their affirmation of cultural legacies that survived colonialism, however hybridized they may have been in the process. What they have contributed in this regard needs to be distinguished from conservative revivalisms, but they have played a significant part, especially in first world locations, in promoting notions of multiculturalism and similar ideological developments. What I observed earlier of the cultural incoherence in postmodernism may be even truer of postcolonial criticism, which has done much to abolish—at least theoretically—such distinctions as East and West, Europe and others, or even differences between civilizational and

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national entities, which have prepared the ground intellectually and culturally for the acceptance of globalization. Products of globalizing forces, postcolonial intellectuals have been poised to play important parts in globalization.10 While each in its own way has called into question the crude distinction between the social sciences and the humanities established under capitalist modernity, it is fair to say that postmodernism and postcolonialism have been most visible in fields traditionally associated with the humanities, while most of the theorizing about globalization has been undertaken by social scientists. Still, what is remarkable is the ease with which problems, ideas, and even interpretive methods have been transposed from one conceptual domain to the other. Equally important has been their effects on perceptions of the contemporary world, which have reinforced one another to raise fundamental questions about our ways of knowing the world. The effects of globalization appear strikingly as if they were the fulfillment globally of the deconstructive procedures with which postmodernists and postcolonialists had been seeking to revise the understanding of modernity—the one from first world, the other from third world, perspectives, although both spoke largely from first world locations. The ability of globalization to accommodate problems thrown up from postmodern and postcolonial perspectives has also rendered the latter increasingly redundant, which may explain why there has been a significant cooling of the intellectual fever they fueled in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One important consequence of the articulation of the global and the postcolonial has been to serve as a reminder of the persistence of colonial spaces and practices within the global—in the political economy, in the flows especially of labor, and at the level of culture. I will say more on this question in the next chapter. Multiple/Alternative Modernities One fundamental aspect of our times, which cannot be stressed too much, is that it is a time of reversals when

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traditions and ideologies that were assigned by modernization discourse to the dustbin of history have made a comeback with a vengeance, empowered by reconfigurations in global relations and legitimized by the repudiation of Eurocentrism. A case in point is the Confucian revival in contemporary China. In his seminal work on Chinese modernity published in the early 1960s, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, Joseph Levenson argued that Marxist historicism had resolved a problem that had plagued Chinese intellectuals ever since the encounter with the modern West had forced a parochialization of Confucian values from their once-universalistic status into the circumscribed endowment of a national past—an endowment, moreover, that was inconsistent with the struggle for modernity. Continued attachment to Confucianism despite loss of faith in its intellectual validity represented for Levenson a tension between history and value.11 Confucianism, necessary as the historical source of a Chinese national identity, had to be overcome if China was to become a nation. Levenson sought to understand the source of the appeals of Marxism, which he found in the ability of Marxist historicism to resolve this fundamental tension in Chinese intellectual life by relegating Confucianism into the museum, salvaging Confucius for the nation but also rendering him irrelevant to the living present. As he put it: Confucius . . . redeemed from both the class aberration (feudal) of idolization and the class aberration (bourgeois) of destruction, might be kept as a national monument, unworshipped, yet also unshattered. In effect, the disdain of a modern pro-Western bourgeoisie for Confucius cancelled out, for the dialecticians, a feudal class’s pre-modern devotion. The Communists, driving history to a classless synthetic fulfilment, retired Confucius honorably into the silence of the museum.12 It may be one of the profound ironies of our times that this situation has been reversed since Levenson wrote his analysis: Confucius has been brought out of the museum

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once again, while it is the revolution that is on its way to being museumified—not by feudal worshippers of Confucius but by the bourgeoisie who once disdained Confucius and the Communist Party that remains in power as the beneficiary of that revolution. Levenson’s analysis, and his evaluation of what the revolution had achieved in resolving the tension between the past and the present, was informed by a Eurocentric teleology of modernity: that the claims of the values of ancient civilizations must inevitably be relegated to the past with the victory of modernity as represented by the modern nation. If the pasts of those civilizations have been resurrected once again, it is because of not only the passing of revolutions but, more important, the questioning of this teleology that has come to the fore as globalization has replaced modernization as a paradigm of contemporary change. The passing of the Chinese Revolution, as of socialist revolutions in general, may be attributed to its particular failings. Similarly, advocates of the Confucian revival may attribute the revival to the particular virtues inherent in Confucianism. While there may be something to be said for such views, in my opinion, they suffer from a debilitating parochialism that fails to account for a larger historical context where it is not just socialist revolutions that are relegated to the past but the very idea of revolution, and it is not just the Confucian tradition that is at issue but the return of traditions in general. Nor do such views explain attempts to articulate Confucianism to values of entire regions, such as East and Southeast Asia, or of an entire continent, such as Asia. Further complicating the situation are conflicts that attend these efforts. For all the talk about Asia and Asian values over the past few years, the idea of Asia remains quite problematic, and so do the ideological and cultural sources from which Asian values are to be derived. The most visible competitor to the Confucian revival may be the Islamic revival that has also become visible during this same period; but the period has also witnessed a Hindu revival in India, and right-wing nationalists in Turkey, echoing East Asian nationalists and their Euro-American cheerleaders, have resurrected

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earlier Pan-Turanian utopias to assert that the twentyfirst century will be a Turkish century. In other societies in Asia, Buddhism continues to hold sway. It is difficult to avoid an inference that all these revivals, coinciding temporally, are products of the same world situation, though they obviously have local inflections depending on social context and ideological claims. These reversals have been accompanied by challenges to modernity’s ways of knowing. The past twenty years have witnessed calls for the “sinicization” and “islamicization” of sociology. There has been a revival in the People’s Republic of China of the so-called national studies, which advocate a return not only to the epistemologies but the methodologies of classical studies. The attacks on history and science of thinkers such as Vandana Shiva, Ashis Nandy, and Vine Deloria Jr. gain a hearing in the most hallowed organs and institutions of Euro-American learning. While the effect of such criticism is felt most deeply in the humanities and the social sciences, as abstract a field as mathematics is under some pressure to recognize “ethnomathematics” as a legitimate area of study. Even U.S. foundations have joined the chorus of criticism against the equation of modernity with Western ways of knowing.13 What is at issue here at the broadest level is a loss of consensus over the institutional and intellectual content of modernity even as modernity is globalized. As one critic puts it uncompromisingly: Colonialism and modernity are indivisible features of the history of industrial capitalism . . . to reestablish three points: The first is that “modernity” must not be mistaken for a thing in itself, for that sleight of hand obliterates the context of political economy. The second is that once modernity is construed to be prior to colonialism, it becomes all too easy to assume, wrongly, the existence of an originary and insurmountable temporal lag separating colonialism from modernity. Thus, the third point is that the modernity of nonEuropean colonies is as indisputable as the colonial core of European modernity.14

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Modernity is not a thing but a relationship, and being part of the relationship is the ultimate marker of the modern. The view expressed here is a postcolonial rephrasing of critiques of modernization discourse that got under way in the 1960s to challenge the spatial and temporal distancing of traditions from modernity, the deployments of culture in explanations of progress and backwardness, and the disassociation of questions of development from questions of underdevelopment—all of which served to illustrate the complicity of existing discourses of modernity and modernization with colonialism.15 These critiques also questioned the methodological validity of using institutions and values derived from the Euro-American experiences as criteria for modernity in general. They demanded a shift of attention instead to relationships that bound together the modern and the premodern and shaped both. Their goal was to illustrate the ideological nature of discourses of modernity by exposing the tacit equation of modernity in these discourses with capitalist modernity. Alternative modernity, then, could be conceived as socialist modernity of one kind or another (the historicization of socialism, the prelude to its demise, preceded the historicization of capitalism, which would appear with globalization). Earlier critiques, therefore, retained a view of European modernity as the source of modernity, which is questioned in the statement just quoted. Most important, while earlier critiques shifted attention to structures of political economy in order to counteract the culturalism of modernization discourse, postcolonial criticism of modernity has brought culture back in to reaffirm the persistence of local subjectivities and the local appropriations of capitalist modernity. Even in the more political, economically sensitive versions of postcolonial criticism, such as Barlow’s, there is the danger of slippage from an insistence on the contemporaneity of all societies that are parts of the relationships of modernity and that help define the latter, to the potential or actual “modernness” of all such societies, which is quite misleading and imposes on the past a consciousness that is a product of a postcolonial demand for cultural recognition and equality.16

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Postcolonial criticism is driven by an urge to deconstruct claims to cultural essentialism, even though it has done more than its share in contributing to the “culture-talk” that has become so audible during the past decade, reaching its crescendo with the discussions surrounding the events of September 11. The latter also dramatized that, contrary to the assertions of postcolonial criticism, what has been at work for the past two decades is not the dissolution of cultural essentialism but the hardening of cultural boundaries that accompanied the revival of cultural fundamentalisms around the globe. Boundaries have been (and are) in a process of reconfiguration, to be sure, but rather than disappear, they have been proliferating, as new claims to ethnic and cultural identity produce demands for new sovereignties. Indeed, for all its purported constructivism, the very urge in postcolonial criticism to overcome a dichotomous modernity/tradition distinction invites by the back door reified notions of culture. Radical postcolonial criticism has been at one with a resurgent modernization discourse and contemporary geopolitical analysis in perpetuating reified views of cultural traditions, identified with political or civilizational units that are themselves the products of modernity’s political imagination. Statements such as those of Barlow’s are products of a “radical” reading of the same situation that prompted the more geopolitically oriented Samuel Huntington to conclude that with socialisms out of the way, the major problem of the present was not a problem of conflict between nations but a “clash of civilizations.”17 Two aspects of Huntington’s argument are directly pertinent here. First, that the civilizations he referred to, while they represented long-standing cultural traditions, were not relics of the past but were products of modernity that were empowered by their claims on modernity. Second, that to impose the values of the modern West on these societies not only would not work but also represents a kind of imperialism. Huntington’s argument resonates with contemporary cultural claims on modernity in many non-Western societies. It is also echoed, if with greater circumspection, in recent efforts to revise modernization discourse. In his introduc-

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tion to a recently published special issue of Daedalus, titled “Multiple Modernities,” the distinguished analyst of modernity and editor of the issue, S. N. Eisenstadt, writes that the idea of “multiple modernities” goes against the views long prevalent in scholarly and general discourse. It goes against the view of the “classical” theories of modernization and of the convergence of industrial societies prevalent in the 1950s, and indeed against the classical sociological analyses of Marx, Durkheim and (to a large extent) even of Weber . . . that the cultural program of modernity as it developed in Europe and the basic institutional constellations that emerged there would ultimately take over in all modernizing and modern societies. . . . The actual developments in modernizing societies have refuted the homogenizing and hegemonic assumptions of this Western program of modernity. While a general trend toward structural differentiation developed across a wide range of institutions in most of these societies . . . the ways in which these arenas were defined and organized varied greatly . . . giving rise to multiple institutional and ideological patterns. These patterns did not constitute simple continuations in the modern era of the traditions of their respective societies. Such patterns were distinctively modern, though greatly influenced by specific cultural premises, traditions and historical experiences. All developed distinctly modern dynamics and modes of interpretation, for which the original Western project constituted the crucial (and usually ambivalent) reference point.18 Eisenstadt’s comments are echoed by another contributor to the volume, Bjorn Wittrock, who reaffirms modernity as a common condition but goes even further in evacuating it of substantial uniformity even in its origins in Europe, while acknowledging the persistence of the pre- and the nonmodern as constituents of modernity. The question Wittrock poses is deceptively simple: whether we associate modernity with an epoch, a certain period in human history,

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or “distinct phenomena and processes in a given society at a given time.” He suggests that “the first perspective poses the problem of where to locate the beginning, and maybe the end of the modern age. However, once this has been determined, the question of whether we live in one or many modernities becomes trivial.”19 In order to substantiate modernity, it then becomes necessary to locate it in certain institutions or modes of thinking, which is Wittrock’s choice (as it is of Anthony Giddens, with “reflexivity” as a distinguishing feature of modernity).20 The important question here is to shift the location of modernity from nations, regions, and civilizations (themselves the creations of a Eurocentric modernity) to institutions and ways of thinking—in other words, discourses conceived in both linguistic and institutional terms. It is possible to suggest in this perspective, as Wittrock does, that there is no such thing as a Western, European, or American modernity, as these all represent different mixtures of modern, premodern, or nonmodern elements; there are simply modern discourses that coexist with pre- or nonmodern discourses that themselves represent all kinds of local varieties. As modernity is deterritorialized from its spatial associations, moreover, it may also be globalized, for, whatever the origins, the discourse is transportable across geographic or cultural boundaries. It is worth quoting Wittrock’s concluding lines: There was, from the very origins of modern societal institutions, an empirically undeniable and easily observable variety of institutional and cultural forms, even in the context of Western and Central Europe. This became even more obvious once the institutional projects that had been originally conceived in Europe were spread to other regions of the world. This multiformity means that we may still speak of a variety of different civilizations in the sense that origins of institutions and roots of cosmological thinking are highly different in different parts of the world. There is no reason to assume that all these differences will just fade away and be replaced by an encompassing, worldwide civilization. However, modernity is a global

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condition that now affects all our actions, interpretations, and habits, across nations and irrespective of which civilizational roots we may have or lay claim to. In this sense, it is a common condition on a global scale that we live in and with, engage in dialogue about, and that we have to reach out to grasp.21 While not the cause of global uncertainty over modernity, the importance of the disappearance of the socialist alternative to capitalism in creating this uncertainty has not been sufficiently appreciated. The fall of socialism, with its promise of the possibility of a rational resolution of the problems of modernity, has shaken faith in rationalism, itself a hallmark of modernity. For more than a century, socialism also provided the primary mode of resistance to capitalism and the possibility of an alternative to it, which in a postsocialist world finds expression now in revivals of native traditions as alternative modernities. At the same time, the disappearance of socialism has eliminated the possibility of an outside to capitalism, in the process forcing to the surface of consciousness the incoherence of the inside. We may recall here Jean-Marie Guehenno’s statement, cited earlier, concerning the fragmentation of the world following the end of the Cold War. The relationship between the consciousness of globalization and the fragmentation of earlier visions of the world is stated most starkly by Zygmunt Bauman, who perceives in globalization the end of the universalisms that had constituted modernity: It is this novel and uncomfortable perception of “things getting out of hand” which has been articulated (with little benefit to intellectual clarity) in the currently fashionable concept of globalization. The deepest meaning conveyed by the idea of globalization is that of the indeterminate, unruly and self-propelled character of world affairs; the absence of a centre, of a controlling desk, of a board of directors, of a managerial office. Globalization . . . is “new world disorder” under another name. This trait, undetachable from the image of globalization, sets it radically apart from

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another idea which it ostensibly replaced, that of “universalization.”22 Multiple Modernities: Global Multiculturalism Claims to alternative modernity, ironically, are voiced most strongly in societies empowered by success in the capitalist economy. Equally important (and ironic) in empowering such challenges is the global visibility of postcolonial intellectuals, who find in the reassertion of native cultures and knowledge systems the means to combat the “colonization of the mind” that survives past formal political decolonization. Failures of political decolonization, combined with the seeming inevitability of capitalism, have played a major part in the foregrounding of culture, which both provides an escape from politics and a means to conduct politics by other means. The cultures and the knowledges that contemporary postcolonial intellectuals proclaim draw on native pasts but by no means point to a return to those pasts, as the pasts now revived are pasts that have been reorganized already by a consciousness of a century or more of social and political transformation. They are, in other words, not just postcolonial and postnational but perhaps even postglobal, as cultural contention and competition are played out on a terrain that itself presupposes an uncertain globality. The challenge to the cultural legacies of colonialism is informed by vastly different political affiliations and motivations, which are not necessarily more progressive than the object of their challenges—although that judgment itself is increasingly difficult to sustain as history itself is called into question. In some cases, such challenges bolster the claims of the colonial modernity that they seek to challenge, while in others they can sustain their anticolonialism only by resort to the most reactionary revivals of imagined pasts. But they have contributed in their different ways to undermining the universalist claims of Eurocentrism. On the one hand, claims to universal knowledge express hegemonic assumptions that continue to infuse contemporary arguments for globalization, also revealing its ties to existing structures of power. On the other hand, to

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abandon those claims is also to resign to the parochialness—and hence the relativity—of all knowledge, which not only abolishes the commonalities born of centuries of global interactions but also rules out communication across societal boundaries (wherever those may be drawn at any one time or place). The downgrading of a Eurocentric modernity, accompanied by culturally driven claims on modernity, goes a long ways toward explaining the contradictions to which I referred earlier, as well as why those contradictions may appear differently to participants in the new dialogue on modernity. Too much preoccupation with Eurocentrism or colonialism also disguises fundamental questions of contemporary modernity that cut across so-called cultural divides, especially as the locations of modernity and culture are themselves thrown into question with the reconfigurations of economic and political organization globally. What provokes immediate questions concerning the “multiple modernities” idea is the concomitant ascendancy of globalization as a new paradigm for grasping the reconfiguration of power in the contemporary world. Globalization suggests inescapably that, for all its divisions around issues of culture, the world as we have it shares something in common, which is conceded in Eisenstadt’s previously cited reference to an “original Western project” that continues to serve as a “reference point” globally or in Wittrock’s description of modernity as a “global condition.” Globalization differs from modernization by relinquishing a Eurocentric teleology to accommodate the possibility of different historical trajectories in the unfolding of modernity. But that still leaves open the question of what provides this world with a commonality that, if anything, is more powerful in its claims than anything that could be imagined in the past. It is possible that fear of intellectual reductionism, or functionalism, or simply sounding like a Marxist when Marxism is supposedly discredited, makes for a reluctance to stress the context of current discussions of modernity within the political economy of contemporary capitalism. Yet, this context is important to grasping not only arguments for globalization but also the hearing granted to

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assertions of cultural difference. I would like to emphasize “the hearing” here, for while cultural differences have been present all along, what distinguishes our times from times past is a willingness to listen to invocations of cultural legacies not as reactionary responses to modernity but as the very conditions of a global modernity. Especially pertinent is the challenge to Eurocentric conceptions of capitalism that became audible from the late seventies with the emergence of East Asian societies as a new center of capitalist power, which remapped the geography of capitalism but also, in its very decentering of capitalism, signaled the arrival of a global capitalism. In this perspective, “multiple modernities” may signify either the proliferation of modernities (in its multiplicity) or its universalization (with the multiplicities as local inflections of a common discourse but also as its agents). A second problem, however, points to mappings of the world that are in conflict with arguments for globalization and that calls for attention to a different dimension. “Multiple modernities” suggests a global multiculturalism that reifies cultures in order to render manageable cultural and political incoherence—diversity management on a global scale, so to speak. How else can we explain the continual slippage in the analyses into the language of nations and civilizations against the recognition of the internal incoherence of the entities so described? Arguments for multiple modernities, no less than arguments for globalization, state their case in terms of cultural differences that are aligned around spatialities that are the products themselves of modernization: nations, cultures, civilizations, and ethnicities. In identifying “multiplicity” with boundaries of nations, cultures, civilizations, and ethnicities, the idea of multiple modernities seeks to contain challenges to modernity by conceding the possibility of culturally different ways of being modern. While this is an improvement over an earlier Eurocentric modernization discourse, it perpetuates the culturalist biases of the latter, relegating to the background social and political differences that are the products not just of past legacies but of modernity and that cut across national or civilizational boundaries.

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The framing of modernities within the boundaries of reified cultural entities nourishes off, and in turn legitimizes, the most conservative cultural claims on modernity. What an idea of multiple modernities ignores is that the question of modernity is subject to debate within the cultural, civilizational, national, or ethnic spaces it takes as its units of analysis. The problem of Eurocentrism, its foundation in capitalism as a dynamic force, and attendant problems of modernity are not simply problems between nations and civilizations but problems that are internal to their constitution. The most important difference between now and then is not the appearance of challenges to Eurocentrism from different cultural perspectives but the recognition that what seemed to be a problem for nonEuro-American societies is a problem for Euro-American societies as well. The problem of cultural modernity is brought into questionings of Euro-American domination as Eurocentrism long has been a problem of other modernities, calling into question the boundaries in terms of which we think of modernity—in other words, the very locations of modernity. A consideration of these questions compels a somewhat more complicated approach to the question of the relationship between globalization and universalism. Globalization coincides, on the one hand, with the disillusionment with universalism and in turn has opened up spaces for rethinking alternative ways of knowing. On the other hand, it is too easy in the enthusiasm or despair over globalization to overlook that globalization also serves as an agent of spreading the epistemological assumptions of Eurocentrism, which acquire progressively more compelling power as capitalism is globalized. The social sciences and the humanities as we have known them are not merely “European” or “American” but entangled in a social system of which capitalism has been the dynamic formative moment. The globalization of capitalism has given additional force to the ideology of development, or “developmentalism,” which forces all societies under the threat of extinction to acquire the technologies of knowledge that contribute to this end. These knowledges are no longer just “European” or “American” but internal

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to societies worldwide that provide the personnel for the global institutions of capital. This is not to suggest that other, non-European traditions may not serve as reservoirs of values and knowledges with which to amend and enrich modern ways of knowing. However, for better or worse, that is not the same as taking modernity out of the picture by an act of will, least of all by intellectuals who are better prepared by their education to participate in Euro-American dialogues on modernity than to serve as representatives of their so-called cultural traditions.23 We need to remember also that the present is witness not just to revivals of traditions but also to an enthusiastic embrace by elites globally of the promises of technological modernity. Even the reassertion of traditions often takes the form of articulating those traditions to the demands of a global capitalism. Thus, a distinguished Chinese academic and a leader in the “national studies” movement writes that Chinese tradition must itself be reinterpreted to accord with the demands of the age, but it contains fundamental ideas that can contribute to the solution of fundamental problems of our age. If the emergence of civilizations marked the beginning of the first axial age in the first millennium B.C., he suggests, the cooperation of “civilizations” may signal the beginning of a second axial age. Where there is a stubborn clinging, on the one hand, to imagined traditions against the demands of modernity—as in the case, for instance, of the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Iranian Revolution in its more extreme phases—the result is not acceptance but isolation. On the other hand, those native scholars who seek to “sinicize” or “islamicize” sociology quickly find out that such goals cannot be accomplished without a simultaneous “sociologization” of Chinese values or of Islam.24 The very process of nativization reveals the impossibility of sustaining reified, holistic notions of traditions, which already have been transformed by modernity and which appear most prominently as sites of conflict between different social interests and different visions of the modern. These developments do not signal the end of modernity as much as its globalization. What may be most important about

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claims such as the above is the proliferation of claims on modernity. The former colonial “subjects” of Euro-American projects of modernity are empowered in a postcolonial world to assert their own projects of modernity. Those who are the most successful in doing so are those who have acquired an indispensable partnership in the world of global capital and who demand recognition of their cultural subjectivities, invented or not, in the making of a global modernity. Against a seemingly concerted effort to depoliticize culture and knowledge by displacing political questions to the realm of culture, what needs urgent attention presently is the political meaning of the culturalist claims on epistemology. Assertions of cultural difference do not necessarily make for good or desirable politics, as they serve reactionary as well as progressive politics. To take at face value any declaration of difference leaves us at the mercy of ethical and political relativism, as well as of corporate manipulations which seek to define difference. Over the past decade, discourses of globalization and postcoloniality have diminished the value of the concept of colonialism not only for the present but in our understanding of the past. The history of the past five hundred years has been reworked as a march toward globality, and the power relations that shaped global history have disappeared into localized contingencies, deprived of the structural centrality assigned to them in an earlier historiography. I will make a case in later chapters not only for the importance of retaining the centrality of colonialism to the globalizing forces of the past but for the fundamental importance of the colonial past in shaping the present. I disagree with the implications of discourses of multiple or alternative modernities, but it is also important to address the questions they have raised, most importantly with regard to earlier usages of the term colonialism, which erased the actions and the subjectivities of the colonized in a one-sided approach to the construction of the modern world by EuroAmerican capitalism and imperialism. Global modernity reveals how important these voices are, and were, if only in forms that were worked over by the colonization of the world by capitalist modernity. The term colonial modernity

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is significant most importantly because it recognizes the voices of the colonized without dissipating into globalization or postcolonial blurrings the power relations that have shaped the globe as we encounter it today. Shifts in the understanding and representation of colonialism are not fortuitous but are bound up with shifts in power globally between and within nations that favor those groups and classes that were the products of colonialism, that perceive in the colonial past not obstacles to modernity but crucibles for their own formation—and of the alternative modernities for which they speak. While the contemporary world has broken with the past in significant ways, enabling these shifts, it also bears the marks of the world of colonial modernity—the modern world, in other words—of which it is the product. It may be stretching the point to describe the condition of global modernity as the historical fulfillment of colonial modernity, but the perspective of colonial modernity may nevertheless enable new departures in the questions we raise concerning the present and the futures to which it may point. At the very least, it is of some help in explaining a widespread ambivalence regarding the present’s relationship to its past over questions of globalization versus imperialism, a centered world of empire versus a decentered world of civilizations in conflict, and issues of domination and hegemony in this world. The globalization of colonial modernity may also help account for a sense—shared by some of us—of the immanence of fascism in contemporary global modernity. Notes 1. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 2002), 3–5; Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London: Routledge, 1995), chaps. 1, 4. 2. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 3. Baudrillard’s works, such as The Mirror of Production (St. Louis: Telos, 1975) and The Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis: Telos, 1981), were written in the 1970s but exerted the

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greatest influence in the early 1980s. Jameson’s seminal article, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” was published in 1984 (New Left Review 146: 53–92). Harvey’s magisterial volume, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, was published in 1989 (Oxford: Blackwell). 4. Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1978). 5. David Harvey, Limits to Capital (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1982). 6. In a later work, Harvey takes up the issue of globalization directly and makes a passing reference to the proliferation of “posts,” including postmodernism, as a sign of the times. See “Contemporary Globalization,” in David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 68. Harvey has remained skeptical of the idea of globalization. He expresses a preference, on the same page, for “uneven geographical development” over “globalization.” 7. Akbar S. Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise (New York: Routledge, 1992). 8. Arif Dirlik, “The Postmodernization of Production and Its Organization: Flexible Production, Work and Culture,” in The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997), 186–219. 9. Abdul JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 59–87. 10. I would like to take note here of Homi Bhabha, considered by many to be a paradigmatic postcolonial intellectual and theorist, whose career as postcolonial critic has culminated over the past few years in being rewarded by a place as cultural authority in the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum at Davos, perhaps the ultimate paradigm of top-down globalization. 11. Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, 3 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 12. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, vol. 3, The Problem of Historical Significance, 79. 13. For the “sinicization” of sociology, see Cai Yongmei and Xiao Xinhuang, eds., Shehuixue Zhongguohua (Sinicization of Sociology) (Taipei: Juliu tushu gongsi, 1985). Islamicization of sociology is discussed in Nilufer Gule, “Snapshots of Islamic Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 112–13. See also Park Myoung-Kyu and Chang Kyung-sup, “Sociology between

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Western Theory and Korean Reality: Accommodation, Tension, and a Search for Alternatives,” International Sociology 14, no. 2 (June 1999): 139–56. Shiva, Nandy, and Deloria Jr. are the authors of many works. For representative titles, see Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (London: Zed, 1989); Ashis Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” History and Theory 34, no. 2 (1995): 44–66; and Vine Deloria Jr., Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1997). For recent discussions of knowledge systems with reference to Pacific studies, see Robert Borofsky, ed., Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000). For ethnomathematics, see Elizabeth Greene, “Ethnomathematics: A Step toward Peace?” Dialogue (Duke University) 15, no. 9 (20 October 2000): 4–5. For foundations, see Jacob Heilbrunn, “The News from Everywhere: Does Global Thinking Threaten Local Knowledge? The Social Science Research Council Debates the Future of Area Studies,” Lingua Franca (May–June 1996): 49–56. Nandy and Deloria have been distinguished speakers at the Duke University Pivotal Ideas series in spring 2000 and spring 2001, respectively. For a discussion of these challenges in relation to modernity, see Arif Dirlik, “Reading Ashis Nandy: The Return of the Past, or Modernity with a Vengeance,” in Postmodernity’s Histories: The Past as Legacy and Project (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 119–41. 14. Tani Barlow, “Introduction,” in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani Barlow (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 1. 15. For a sampling of this literature representing different political perspectives, see Samuel P. Huntington, “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics,” Comparative Politics 3, no. 3 (April 1971): 283–322; Dean C. Tipps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 15, no. 2 (March 1973): 199–226; and Arif Dirlik, “National Development and Social Revolution in Early Chinese Marxist Thought,” China Quarterly 58 (April–June 1974): 286–309. This literature was a response to the revolutionary upheavals and national liberation movements of the 1960s, as well as the political and ideological complicity of modernization theorists and discourses with (by then) U.S. imperialism. It was these same upheavals that were responsible for the emergence of alternatives to modernization discourse in world system analysis and

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dependency theory, associated with such seminal revisionists as Samir Amin, Fernando H. Cardoso, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein. The contemporary “cultural turn” in analyses of global modernity turns its back not only on the establishment modernization discourse of an earlier period but also on these radical challenges to it, which are now tarred with the same brush of “Eurocentrism.” 16. For the classic statement of the issue of contemporaneity, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 17. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993): 22–49; Samuel P. Huntington, “The West Unique, Not Universal,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 1996): 28–46; and, Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 18. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 1. 19. Bjorn Wittrock, “Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 31. 20. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990). 21. Wittrock, “Modernity,” 58–59. 22. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 59. 23. Tang Yijie, “Zai jingji quanqiuhua xingshi xiade Zhonghua wenhua dingwei” (The Establishment of Chinese Culture in the Age of Economic Globalization,” Zhongguo Wenhua Yanjiu (Chinese Culture Research), 30 (Winter 2000): 3. 24. See Ma Liqin, “Lun shuli yanjiude Zhongguohua” (Sinicization of Research in Alienation), in Shehuixue Zhongguohua (Sinicization of Sociology), ed. Cai Yongmei and Xiao Xinhuang (Taipei: Juliu tushu gongsi, 1985), 191–212; and Nilufer Gole, “Snapshots of Islamic Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 113.

◊ 4

Legacies The Global and the Colonial The concept of global modernity is intended to capture a present reality that is not merely a more developed version of the past but breaks with it in the proliferation of claims on modernity and its future. However, this present is informed and structured by a colonial past that was an inescapable part of modernity. Claims to alternative modernities, or autonomous histories, are already products of a modernity shaped globally by Europe and North America, perpetuating colonial relationships past formal decolonization. This is the case even with efforts to indigenize modernity. This chapter elaborates on the relationships between globality and its colonial past. In the process, it seeks to reverse a contemporary tendency to subordinate colonialism to globalization, as merely a phase in the unfolding of the latter, that is, to view globalization itself in the perspective of its colonial past. The implications are not merely intellectual but deeply political as well. I will return to the latter in the chapter 6. Global Modernity I understand the term global modernity in the singular, as a “singular modernity,” to use Fredric Jameson’s phrase, which is nevertheless productive of contradictory claims on modernity for which it has come to serve as a site of 89

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conflict.1 My insistence on the singularity of global modernity arises out of a recognition of some validity to arguments for globalization and the global commonalities it implies. At the same time, global modernity as a concept is intended to overcome a teleological (and ideological) bias for global commonality and homogeneity embedded in the very term globalization. It recognizes as equally fundamental tendencies to fragmentation and contradiction that are also products of globalization and of past legacies that find exaggerated expression in their projection on a global scene. Globalization in this perspective implies not just some naive expectation of a utopianized global village or, conversely, an undesirable global hegemony, depending on perspective, but a proliferation of boundaries globally, adding new boundaries to already existing ones even as modernity is globalized. Notions of multiple or alternative modernities, in rendering into units of modernity traditions that are themselves the very products of modernity, in fact universalize the claims of modernity by appropriating them as endowments of otherwise vastly different and complex pasts.2 These claims often are also oblivious to the historicity of the present and assume that present differences or commonalities may be read into the future, which is quite problematic. The long historical struggle against colonialism and unequal power relations has given way over the past two decades to conflicts over modernity, informed by national or civilizational cultural presence in globality even as nations and civilizations are rendered more tenuous in their existence by the globalizing pressures of an expanding transnational capitalism. This is also what renders the past colonial modernity quite relevant to the understanding of the present, with intensifying struggles to reconfigure the relationships of power that have shaped the world as we confront it today. The globalization of modernity needs to be comprehended not just in the trivial sense of an originary modernity reaching out and touching all, even those who are left out of its benefits, as in the ideological deployments of globalization but, more important, as a proliferation of claims on modernity. So-called traditions no longer imply a contrast with

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modernity, as they did in modernization discourse. Nor are they the domain of backward-looking conservatism, except in exceptional instances—such as the Taliban. They are invoked increasingly to establish claims to alternative modernities (but only rarely to alternatives to modernity). They point not to the past but, taking a detour through the past, to an alternative future. They have taken over from a nowdefunct socialism—even in formally “socialist” societies, such as the People’s Republic of China—the task of speaking for those oppressed or cast aside by a capitalist modernity and pointing to different possibilities for the future. The irony is that these claims to difference in most cases presuppose a commonality where assumptions of progress and development are concerned in a fetishization of development (i.e., developmentalism), for which the sole model is capitalist development, with some local modifications—the future of which remain highly uncertain. The contradictions they present are very real and significant culturally and politically. Bolstered by success in development, assertions of cultural difference proliferate, breaking down the universalist presuppositions of Eurocentric models of modernity. But the cultural assumptions of claims to difference are themselves subject to disintegrative forces in their very mobilization in the cause of development, as development produces social and cultural forces, including cosmopolitan classes, that are not easily containable within imagined cultural crucibles. This is what I have in mind when I refer to the universalization of the contradictions of a capitalist modernity—not just between societies but, more important, within them. If this indeed is the case, contemporary arguments over universalism versus particularism, homogenization versus heterogenization, and even postcolonial notions of hybridization, third spaces, and so forth, are largely off the mark and hinder, rather than help, analysis for a few reasons.3 First, such arguments tend toward an either/or approach to these questions, avoiding the possibility—quite visible globally—that both tendencies may be at work, not in some facile process of hybridization, or the substitution of hybrid spaces for essentialized spaces of old, but in the proliferation of spaces and the contradictions they present.

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Second, the focus on Eurocentrism in such arguments, where they avoid the question of capitalism, restrict analysis to the level of abstract cultural, national, or civilizational values, ignoring the very significant transformations at work in the globalization of technological values and attendant cultural practices, which are very much bound up with the universalization of capitalism, however it may be modified otherwise to suit localized needs. The claims of Eurocentrism to universality may be dead. We may hardly say the same of the capitalist civilization that was the historical creation of Europe and North America, which now rules the world even where its origins may have been forgotten or ignored. We need to take seriously the distinctive claims to different pasts and different futures in what someone like Guehenno perceives as the “resurgence of histories” suppressed under the regime of modernity. But neither can we ignore that the cultural endowments that justify such claims have been infused thoroughly with the everyday values of production and consumption that are characteristic of capitalist society, in the invention and propagation of which Europe and North America still play key roles, even when they no longer provide directly the agents who propagate those values. The globalization of production and consumption through transnational agencies, most important among them transnational corporations—still based for the most part in Europe and North America is in the process of creating a “transnational capitalist class” that shares not only similar occupations but similar education and lifestyles as well.4 One of the most important developments of recent years is the transnationalization of university education, not just with the increased attendance in first world universities of elites from the third world but with the export from the first world to the third of models of both education and actual university campuses.5 The relationship is not itself new, but it is not insignificant that what once was undertaken by missionary activity is now conducted directly by an educational apparatus (educational institutions, educational consultants, publishers) that is not only under the direct sway of corporations but increasingly models itself after corporate management and

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plays a strategic part in the technologization and marketization of education itself.6 Multiculturalism, itself invented by transnational corporations, appears in this perspective as a way of managing difference within a context of commonality (without which difference would be meaningless). Third, debates over issues of culture are increasingly meaningless to the extent that they take as their units nations, civilizations, or so-called cultures. The increasing visibility of a transnational capitalist class would suggest different locations for culture. This class may partake of local characteristics, but it is unified also by participation in a common organization of the political economy, a common education, and common lifestyles that provide them with not only a “third space” of their own but also distance them from their immediate environment—sometimes behind locked gates in emulation of American lifestyles.7 The same may be said of other social groupings. Notions of gender are increasingly globalized, as women, depending on class, engage in similar cultural practices globally or gather together to struggle against the ravages of globalization. Migrant tradespeople and migrant workers, at the other end of the social scale, come to partake of a common culture, as they move back and forth across boundaries of nation and continent, contributing to the appearance of globalization but also profoundly transforming societies of both departure and origin. The point in all of this is not global homogenization or assimilation to global roles, but a question of material and cultural contexts that are at once products of these processes and that launch societies in new directions, creating new kinds of unities as well as new kinds of fractures. Any exploration of contemporary global processes needs to be attentive to this question of the “location of culture,” to borrow Homi Bhabha’s felicitous term (against his intentions),8 which is no longer associated with nations or civilizations, in spite of all the apparent evidence presently of conflicts between so-called Christian, Islamic, Confucian, and other civilizations or nations. These serve more as mobilizing ideas than as descriptions of life at the everyday level in the societies so depicted. Such conflicts need to be taken seriously, as mobilizing ideas do come

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into play as important historical forces, but they should not blind us to the complexities presented by simultaneous forces making for global commonality, on the one hand, and the many other dimensions of global fractures, on the other. I might add that the globalization appears here as only one dimension of a historical process that has many other dimensions—an add-on to existing forces of the many dimensions of localization that has the power to reconfigure those forces but gets reconfigured itself in the process. Such are the contradictions of global modernity. If I may summarize briefly here what I take to be the outstanding features of global modernity, it has four aspects that distinguish it as a concept both from an earlier period of modernity and globalization. First, global modernity is in many ways the contemporary resting place of globalization. Stated differently, globalization as we have known it—driven by capitalism—is not something that is happening that has yet to fulfill its promise or something that is about to happen. It already has happened. And the result is global modernity. True, “Empire” as Hardt and Negri have identified it, is very much a fact of global modernity, with the United States as a supreme military power claiming global sovereignty for itself while on occasion denying to others even their claims to national sovereignty. But this is an Empire ridden with contradictions, which open up the spaces for alternatives to its rule. Within these spaces, challengers to Empire are appearing, legitimized not only by modern ideals of democracy, justice, and popular sovereignty but also by the revival of past legacies, which are not merely residues from the past but represent legacies that already have been worked over by modernity. In other words, they are postmodern. The conflicts between these legacies are over alternative claims to modernity, and as they are divided by such claims and conflicting interests, they are also grounded in a common terrain defined by a globalized capitalism. Second, despite enormous differences in power, levels of material development, and incorporation within a global capitalist economy, global modernity is characterized by temporal contemporaneity, which distinguishes it from an

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earlier Eurocentric modernity. It was only about two decades ago that Johannes Fabian published his classic critique of anthropology, Time and the Other, where he argued that the denial of “coevalness” to the Other was fundamental to the Eurocentric teleology of modernity.9 Already in the early 1980s, Europe’s East Asian “Others” were claiming possible superiority in the development of capitalism. Modernization discourse had drawn a clear line between tradition and modernity and has rendered their relationship into a zero-sum relationship: the more modern, the less traditional. East Asian so-called tigers already felt empowered by their success in the capitalist economy to claim that the “Confucian” tradition they drew on was a force not of backwardness (as it had been earlier) but of success, a claim that was backed by their cheerleaders in Europe and North America. At about the same time, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 brought forth claims about the modernity of Islam. One by one, societies globally have revived or proclaimed the compatibility of their traditions (or cultural legacies) with modernity, and they have made it the basis for their claims to alternative modernities. The advanced-backward distinction has not disappeared from mutual perceptions between nations, “cultures,” and “civilizations” but is overdetermined increasingly by differences within the same population, including the fundamental structural differentiation of those who are on the pathways of global capitalism and those who are not. Global modernity by no means represents the “death” of the nation-state or of nationalism. On the contrary, the past few years have witnessed both a proliferation of nationalisms, and a strengthening in the power of the state vis-à-vis the population. The transformations associated with globalization have been of a different kind, in the abandonment by states of their responsibilities to large sectors of their populations, and a shift of attention from national surfaces to global nodes in the pursuit of development (not to be confused with obliviousness to national borders). I will elaborate on this point in the later discussion on public health in the People’s Republic of China. Third, the globalization of capitalism has reconfigured global relations. The tripartite spatialization of the world

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produced during the Cold War years was internalized in modernization discourse. The fall of the second world of socialism and the appearance of new centers of capital from the 1960s have ended up scrambling this neat geographic spatialization, also raising questions in the process about nations as viable units of the economy, politics, or culture. What is called globalization is in reality a conglomeration of phenomena that occur at different scales, from the global to the regional to the national to the intranational and the local. This spatialization is complicated further by the persistence of earlier spatializations, such as the colonial spaces described earlier, as well as spaces of indigeneity. There are presently first worlds in the third (e.g., Shanghai) and third worlds in the first (e.g., New Orleans). Global capitalism moves along networks, with global cities at its nodes. This has also meant the shift of economic activity from surfaces to networks. I will elaborate on this shift later, in the discussion of public health under globalization. Suffice it to say here that as capital (and associated) organizations move along the networks, those who are not on the networks or are outside the network economy, fall through the cracks and feel the effects of the global economy only by its inductive effects on their livelihood. The majority of the world’s population is now in a process of marginalization or, as some anthropologists have put it even more strongly, “abjection—being thrown down and thrown out of the global.”10 Fourth, it is not entire spaces that are being left out of the global economy (which exposes eloquently the ideological basis of globalization) but also entire groups of people across national boundaries. Class structuration, in other words, has gone global with the appearance of a “transnational capitalist class” and comparable class, gender, and ethnic formations at different scales. This renders misleading those arguments that continue to take nations and civilizations as their units. Such arguments ignore the transnationalization and translocalization (to be distinguished from globalization) of economic, social, and cultural formations. Differences that are taken to be differences between nations and civilizations are, more often

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than not, also differences within the same society that are hidden from sight when the focus is on the inside/outside of national and civilizational boundaries. Classes, genders, and ethnicities, as well as organizational formations of one kind or another—from NGOs to transnational corporations to professional organizations—are as much the “locations of culture” as are nations and civilizations, complicating both social formations and cultural configurations. It is these complications that make it difficult to speak of imperialism or of cultural homogenization or heterogenization. Where all this may end up is hardly predictable at this point, as capital itself (not to speak of states) seems to have lost all vision of the future, beyond the manipulation of existing differences for purposes of immediate power and profit. For the same reason, it is meaningless to speak of “alternative modernities,” as if cultural revivalisms of the present may be read teleologically into the future. It is this state of affairs, with a surplus of history but deficit of future, that the concept of global modernity seeks to capture. It may be for the same reason that most of our contemporary vocabulary of “posts” refers primarily to the past, without the courage or the hope to name the future. The contradictions of global modernity also make it difficult to speak of colonialism—not just at the present but, by implication, in the histories of which the present is a product in its own complicated and multidirectional transformations. Colonialism as concept also has lost much of its critical power with the abolition of the temporal gap between modernity and tradition, which only a generation ago justified both a progressivist and Eurocentric modernization discourse, as well as radical criticism of the colonialist impulses that informed it. This is not to suggest that those impulses have disappeared from global politics, but they appear in a far more complicated guise than they did earlier that undercuts the ability of colonialism in an earlier sense to serve either as a historical explanation or as a mobilizing political idea. Global modernity appears at one level as the end of colonialism, a product of decolonization that has enabled the surge into modernity, as alternatives to colonialist

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modernity of the formerly colonized. On another level, it may be viewed also as the universalization and deepening of colonialism, in the internalization into societies globally of the premises of a capitalist modernity that was deeply entangled in colonialism, to which there is now no viable alternative. This ambiguity opens up the possibility that what we are witnessing presently—from the transnationalization of capital to human motions to cultural conflict—is not so much decolonization as the reconfiguration of colonialism as capital is globalized, necessitating the incorporation in its operations of new states that are crucial to global management, as well as a voice for the classes of its creation who provide the personnel for that management. It is remarkable that the destructuring and deterritorializing of earlier regimes of coloniality, rather than putting an end to colonialism, have intensified colonial conflicts—now rephrased as conflicts over globality—“many globalizations,” in the phraseology of a recent volume.11 Earlier colonial structurings of power, including its mappings of both the physical and the social worlds, are still visible in the palimpsest of global geopolitics. They provide both the context and the horizon of global politics even as formerly marginalized states and the subalterns of colonial capitalism enter the fray. End of Colonialism? It is ironic that colonialism became difficult to speak about even as the term moved to the center of critical discourse in the early 1990s. Postcolonial criticism, responsible for bringing colonialism into the center of critical discourses, also is responsible for an inflation of the concept that has rendered it quite problematic. The concept has been rendered even more incoherent by the appropriation of paradigmatic postcolonial concepts (hybridity, borderlands, etc.) for social distinctions that have little to do with colonialism in a strict sense, such as gender, race, and ethnicity. The broader the concept becomes in its compass, the greater the incoherence and the more remote its relationship to an

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earlier notion of the postcolonial. The incoherence also has implications for our understanding of the present. In the works of theorists who are (rightly or wrongly) associated with the emergence of postcolonial criticism such as Edward Said, Stuart Hall, or Gayatri Spivak, the postcolonial was of importance because of the relevance of colonialism to understanding the present (the post- implying not “after” but more like “produced by”). This is visible even in the work of someone like Homi Bhabha, whose deconstructive efforts would contribute significantly to rendering the term meaningless. “Postcoloniality,” Bhabha wrote in 1994, “is a salutary reminder of the persistent ‘neo-colonial’ relations within the ‘new’ world order and the multi-national division of labour.” Nevertheless, increasingly from the 1990s, the postcolonial has dissipated into areas that had nothing to do with the colonial and rendered into a literary reading strategy rather than a social and political concept—largely under the influence of the likes of Bhabha.12 The difficulties of dealing with colonialism and imperialism in the present are quite evident in the discussions provoked by the book Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and their argument that imperialism has now given way to an abstract empire, without a clearly identifiable center or boundaries, where empire is as much a condition of everyday life as it is of a legal order that recognizes no outside.13 The thesis is outrageous against the background of a U.S. imperialism that respects no boundaries except those of practical power and corporate colonization of the world. Yet few have cared to reject the argument outright, as I think we are all vaguely aware that something is at work that was not there before, that this imperialism presupposes a different ordering of the world than in the days of good old-fashioned imperialism. Thus, two authors, insistent on the continuity of the present with the past, nevertheless feel constrained to write that [u]sing this concept, the network of institutions that define the structure of the new global economic system is viewed not in structural terms, but as intentional and contingent, subject to the control of individuals

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who represent and seek to advance the interests of a new international capitalist class. This class, it is argued, is formed on the basis of institutions that include a complex of some 37,000 transnational corporations (TNCs), the operating units of global capitalism, the bearers of capital and technology and the major agents of the new imperial order. These TNCs are not the only organizational bases of this order, which include the World Bank, the International Monetary fund. . . . In addition, the New World Order is made up of a host of global strategic planning and policy forums. . . . All of these institutions form an integral part of the new imperialism—the new system of global governance.14 The authors elide the question of why imperialism should be viewed as such in the presence of “a new international capitalist class,” which creates at least some blurring of the distinction between the subjects and objects of imperialism. When imperialism arrives by invitation, is it still imperialism? On the other hand, the “new international capitalist class” is increasingly global in constitution, albeit sharing ever more visibly a common education and, therefore, a common culture. Similarly to the transnationalization of corporate capital, the transnationalization of higher educational institutions, often as “joint enterprises,” is one of the foremost expressions of this common culture and its entanglement with the culture of corporate capital, deepening the corporatization of higher education globally. If this is imperialism, it is imperialism that is to a significant degree self-inflicted!15 Contemporary ambivalence about imperialism also has implications for our understanding of past colonialism. As one example of global significance, as recently as two decades ago, it seemed quite unproblematic to speak of imperialism in modern Chinese history and of the extensive educational activities conducted by foreigners—most importantly, missionaries—as one of the most significant media in the production and consolidation of Euro-American cultural hegemony. Education in the hands of missionaries seemed designed to complete the job begun by gunboats.

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For nationalists in China as elsewhere, with their ideological investment in state-directed education as the most effective instrument of creating a homogeneous culture and loyal citizens, foreign involvement in education meant ideological subjugation and, consequently, compromise of national sovereignty. It is remarkable how problematic this view of education as a tool of imperialism has become over the past decade. It is not that nationalist objections to foreign-sponsored education have disappeared or that historians are no longer concerned with issues thrown up by the confrontation between nationalism and imperialism (or colonialism). “Decolonizing the mind” still appears as an urgent task to conservative as well as radical postcolonial intellectuals obsessed with unfinished national projects, and conservatives globally (including in the United States) contemplate with anxiety if not outright hostility any effort to introduce greater social and ethnic complexity to the writing of national histories, which they feel might weaken the nation ideologically. In the People’s Republic of China itself, patriotic education is very much the order of the day, and the postsocialist regime finds in the reaffirmation of civilizational values a source of legitimation as a substitute for the waning faith in socialism. Nevertheless, in recent years, doubts concerning the historical status of both imperialism and nationalism have proliferated. What is most important in recent transformations, I would like to suggest here, is the challenge presented by the progressive blurring of the distinction between the inside and the outside that has been crucial over the past century to the sustenance of the seemingly unbridgeable opposition between the national and the colonial (or imperialist). The blurring of this distinction is not just ideological but social in a very significant sense. Structural transformations in global relationships have endowed with a new significance social groups that are the products of two centuries of global interactions between colonizers and colonized, who long were objects of suspicion in nationalist ideology but find themselves valorized in new ways as they increasingly occupy a strategic position in the global

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economy. It is not very surprising that the education that produced these groups is also subject to reevaluation accordingly. As an intense desire for incorporation in global capitalism replaces in Communist Party policy the radical anti-imperialism of Maoist revolutionary socialism, it is not very surprising that we should be witnessing in the People’s Republic of China a similar reevaluation of modern Chinese history and of the role in it of imperialism and its cultural legacies, including education. In a provocative study of cultural imperialism published in the early 1990s, John Tomlinson discussed the entanglement of cultural imperialism in issues of modernity, urging that in the assigning of “blame” for the ills of domination, a distinction be made between “the critical discourse of modernity and the other discourses of cultural imperialism.” In the latter, some clear, present, agent of domination was identified: the mass media, America, multinational capitalists. There was the idea that this agent was responsible—that criticism meant laying the blame at its door. But here we have to think of a situation being to blame and this is less satisfying to the critical spirit. Thinking in terms of modernity seems to mean thinking in a rather different critical mode from that employed in the discourse of cultural imperialism. It seems to mean, for example, accepting that our cultural discontents have complex multiple determinations that have arisen over time and thus that no present agent is “responsible” in any full sense.16 Tomlinson’s substitution of modernity (a “situation”) for cultural imperialism (an “agency”) was informed by a further distinction he made in the unfolding of modernity through a period of imperialism to a present condition of globalization, beginning roughly in the 1970s. Globalisation may be distinguished from imperialism in that it is a far less coherent or culturally directed process. . . . The idea of imperialism contains, at least, the notion of a purposeful project: the intended spread

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of a social system from one centre of power across the globe. The idea of “globalisation” suggests interconnection and interdependency of all global areas which happens in a far less purposeful way.17 I would like to bracket here for the moment the possibility that Tomlinson’s questioning of “cultural imperialism” at the moment of the fall of socialisms and the global victory of capitalism is only one more example of an enthusiasm over a nonimperial globality that was characteristic of the 1990s, which has been rendered since then largely irrelevant by an intensified U.S. imperialism that may well be unprecedented in its urge to “spread . . . a social system from one centre of power across the world.” The idea of an empire without center or boundary and, therefore, agency, would be argued even more forcefully by the end of the decade by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. These questionings of “imperialism” have been accompanied, most importantly in postcolonial criticism, by questions concerning the relationship between nationalism and colonialism that have further called into question the utility of the concepts of colonialism and imperialism in understanding not only the present but the past as well. In some contemporary works, the colonial and imperial pasts appear merely as stages of an inexorable globalization that has presently replaced an earlier modernization discourse as a paradigm for understanding the development of the modern world—of which Tomlinson’s own work provides one example.18 It is possible also to reverse the relationship here, as I will suggest later: that rather than the history of colonialism disappearing into a new teleology of globalization, globalization itself may be understood as the fulfillment of a modernity of which colonialism and imperialism have been constituent moments—colonial modernity. Contrary to Tomlinson’s view, moreover, modernity is no more “just” a situation than the capitalism that dynamizes it, which has its own agencies. Colonialism has been a preeminent agency in the globalization of modernity. If we seem today to live in a world where colonialism has been superseded by a global modernity, in which the formerly colonized and dominated

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once again assert their own political and cultural claims to modernity, this global modernity is nevertheless one that has been marked indelibly by its origins in colonialism. This quality is quite apparent in its unevenness, as well as the uneven distributions of economic, social, political, and cultural power that are the legacies to it of modern colonialism and imperialism, distinguished historically by their sources in capitalism and the nation-state. The teleology of globalization is of crucial importance. Postcolonial discourse in the immediate aftermath of World War II, driven by goals of national liberation, was led to a seemingly irrefutable conclusion that, in order to have a serious chance of decolonization, it was necessary for formerly colonial or “semicolonial” societies to exit from, and establish spaces outside, the capitalist world system. Whether we think of globalization as a new kind of imperialism or a postimperialist stage of modernity, the danger now seems to be left out of the world system, not being incorporated in it. This shift also helps account for the differences between postcolonial discourse then and now. Most important, from a perspective of the present, the colonialism of an earlier day appears not as a subjection of one people by another but as one more stage on the way to incorporation in globality—which is exactly how colonialists viewed what they were doing when they informed the colonized that they could not be permitted to stay out of civilized exchanges of commodities or ideas. What the colonialists promoted have become acceptable, it seems, but with a difference. The formerly colonized who now wish to join in globalization insist on doing it on their own terms, rather than be dragged into it as the objects of colonial power. While there is no shortage in contemporary fundamentalisms of an insistence on native subjectivities that have survived cultural modernity intact, it is subjectivities hybridized in colonial encounters that provide the most effective medium for the conjoining of the colonial and the global. The two most prominent expressions today of third world presence in globality are postcolonial criticism of intellectuals, especially so-called diasporic intellectuals, and nativist traditionalism, which is also quite intellectual in its

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claims but also has broad popularity beyond intellectuals. Other alternatives are suppressed or marginalized by the prominence of these two alternatives. Most important here is to underline how these two alternatives complicate the issue of colonialism. The novelty of modern colonialism and its effects on either the colonizer or the colonized have been in dispute all along. Liberal and conservative development discourses, most notably modernization discourse, have for the most part dismissed colonialism as an important aspect of modernity; where they have recognized its importance, they have assigned to it a progressive historical role.19 Marxists have been more ambivalent on the question. Lenin’s interpretation of colonialism as an indispensable stage of capitalism was to play a crucial part in bringing colonialism into the center of radical politics globally. Still, while mainstream Marxism has condemned colonialism for the oppression and exploitation of the colonized, it, too, often has identified colonialism with a progressive function in bringing societies “vegetating in the teeth of time,” in Marx’s words, into modernity.20 Third world Marxists have shared in this ambivalence.21 Nevertheless, if colonialism as a historical phenomenon always has been in dispute, in an earlier period, there was some consensus over the meaning of colonialism.22 Well into the 1970s, colonialism in a strict sense referred to the political control by one nation of another nation or a society striving to become a nation. Where a colony had already achieved formal political independence but still could not claim full autonomy due primarily to economic but also ideological reasons, the preferred term was neocolonialism. These terms could be broadened in scope to refer also to relationships between “regions,” as in the colonial or neocolonial subjection of the third to the first world. Although there was some recognition, moreover, that colonialism was not a monopoly of capitalism because it could be practiced by “socialist” states as well, the ultimate cause of colonial formations was installed in the structuring of the globe by capitalism, to which socialism itself was a response. Hence, a common assumption was that the way out of the legacies

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of colonialism lay with some form of socialism, which in practice meant the creation of autonomous and sovereign economies that could escape structural dependence on advanced capitalist societies and that set their own developmental agenda. The issue of colonialism, in other words, revolved mostly around the issue of capitalism and was in many ways subsidiary to the latter. To be sure, by the 1960s, questions of the relationship between colonialism and racism were on the agenda of postcolonial discourses. This third worldism may be the most important source of contemporary postcolonial criticism. But in the immediate context of national liberation struggles, they appeared more often than not not as problems in and of themselves but as distinguishing features of capitalism in the setting of colonialism (the form that class relations took in colonial capitalism, so to speak) that could be resolved in the long run only through the abolition of capitalism. Anticolonial struggles derived their historical meaning primarily from their contribution to the long-term struggle between capitalism and socialism. Lenin, much more so than Marx, was the inspiration behind this view of the relationship between capitalism and colonialism. As oppression and exploitation marked the political and economic relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, the relationship appeared culturally as a “Manichean” opposition between the two.23 There was all along a recognition of a structural dialectic between the colonizer and the colonized. Structurally, economic and political colonialism produced new practices and social formations, including class formations, that bound the two together. Just as colonialism created a new native class that drew its sustenance from the colonizer, the task of colonization was rendered much easier by the collaboration of this class with the colonizers. Even where it was possible to speak of a common culture shared by the colonizer and the colonized in the “contact zones” of the colonies,24 this common culture enhanced, rather than alleviated, the Manichean opposition between the two, expressed most importantly in the language of race, leaving no doubt as to where each

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belonged economically, politically, and culturally. In ideologies of national liberation, native groups and classes that were economically and culturally entangled with colonialism were viewed not as elements integral to the constitution of the nation but as intrusions into the nation of foreign elements that would have to be eliminated in the realization of national sovereignty and autonomy. These ideas were spelled out most forcefully in the work of Frantz Fanon, who stands in many ways at the origins of a radical, critical, and political postcolonialism.25 If we are to imagine how ambiguous the discourse of colonialism may appear to future generations, we need look no further than postcolonial criticism as it has developed over the past decade or so, bringing to the surface fundamental contradictions in an earlier discourse on colonialism.26 Contemporary postcolonial criticism is heir to this earlier discourse in reaffirming the centrality of the colonial experience, but it also parts ways with it in quite significant ways that, ironically, call into question the very meaning of colonialism. There were all along third world voices dissatisfied with the containment of the colonial experience within the categories of capitalism, demanding a hearing for the psychological and cultural dimensions of colonialism to which racism was of fundamental significance.27 These are the voices that have come forward over the past two decades when postcolonial discourse has shifted distinctly from the economic and political to the cultural and the personal-experiential. The results where colonialism is concerned are quite contradictory. The shift in attention to questions of cultural identity in postcolonial discourse has been both a moment in and a beneficiary of a more general reorientation in Marxist thinking toward a recognition of at least the partial autonomy of the cultural from the economic or the political spheres of life. Introduced into the colonial context, this shift has resulted in a disassociation of questions of culture and cultural identity from the structures of capitalism, moving the grounds for discourse to the encounter between the colonizer and the colonized, unmediated by the structures of political economy within which they had been

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subsumed earlier. The distancing of questions of colonialism from questions of capitalism has in some measure also made possible the foregrounding of colonialism, rather than capitalism, as the central datum of modern history. This centering of colonialism, however, has also rendered the term increasingly ambiguous, and it raises serious questions in particular about modern colonialism. In many ways, contemporary postcolonial criticism is most important as a reflection on the history of postcolonial discourses (a self-criticism of the discourse, in other words), bringing to the surface contradictions that were rendered invisible earlier by barely examined and fundamentally teleological assumptions concerning capitalism, socialism, and the nation, but above all revolutionary national liberation movements against colonialism, the failure of which has done much to provoke an awareness of these contradictions. Recognition of these contradictions also renders the concept of colonialism quite problematic. Robert Young writes with reference to J. P. Sartre and A. Memmi that Sartre’s insight that the Manichean system of racism and colonization, apparently dividing colonizer from colonized, in fact generates dynamic mutual mental relations between colonizer and colonized which bind them in the colonial drama, was further elaborated by Albert Memmi in his demonstration that the dialectic also involved what Hegel had called the “excluded middle”: the spectral presence of the liminal, subaltern figures who slip between the two dominant antithetical categories. Sartre’s response was to emphasize the dialectical aspect of his own account, suggesting that Memmi saw a situation where he also saw a system.28 The difference between Sartre and Memmi to which Young points may be symbolic of the shift that has taken place in postcolonial criticism over the past two decades, with Memmi having the last word—although contemporary postcolonial criticism arguably has gone beyond what appears in Memmi’s work as a qualification and refinement

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of the concept through personal experience to an explicit repudiation of systemic understandings of colonialism. To the extent that colonialism has been disassociated from capitalism, the understanding of colonialism as system has retreated before a situational approach that valorizes contingency and difference over systemic totality. I would like to stress here three consequences that have issued from the reconfiguration of our understanding of colonialism and the world it created from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. First, the hybridization of colonialism has shifted attention from the irreducible divide in earlier nationalist thinking between the colonizer and the colonized to those “contact zones” where new cultures were forged, in which the colonizer and the colonized were partners, if not equal partners. This shift has been accompanied by questionings concerning anticolonial nation building itself as a colonizing activity. Nation building as colonizing activity may characterize the history of nationalism in general.29 It has a particular relevance in colonial societies and third world societies in general, where the nation is an import from the colonizers, and it may be said in many instances to replay the policies inherited from the colonizers, sometimes as cruel parody. At any rate, the universalization of the nation-form is itself a sign of the colonial restructuring of the globe. Recognition of the nation as a product as well as an agent of colonialism raises serious questions about the very idea of colonialism, which are exacerbated by the hybridization of colonialism, further blurring the assumptions about colonialism in history. Second, the discrediting of earlier notions of colonialism, as well as of the socialist inspiration that informed anticolonial nationalism in many movements of national liberation, have facilitated an emergent tendency to render the history of colonialism into a teleology of globalization that is increasingly projected on the past, rendering the colonial past into one more phase of globalization. There is an admirable intention in many efforts at historical revisionism informed by globalization to overcome the Eurocentrism of past “world histories.” Nevertheless, the extension of historical agency to other societies in the making of the

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modern world also renders them complicit in the making of this world, erasing in the process the relationships of power that were to define that world—which should be evident, one might think, simply from looking at maps of the world around the globe. Without any apparent possibility of an outside to capitalism in the present, the outsides are also in the process of disappearing from the past, and spaces defined earlier by colonialism and the struggles against colonialism (i.e., the third world of an earlier postcolonial discourse) are “naturalized” into a history conceived in terms of a paradigm of globalization and the emergence of a global modernity defined by capitalism—although the capitalism in global modernity is at best only an “absent presence” in most such analyses.30 Where claims to alternative spaces persist, it is for the most part in culturalistically conceived assertions of ”alternative modernities,” which seem to be oblivious to the most basic problems of teleology presented by naming ambiguous historical developments after the fact, not to speak of the disguise such renaming casts on the power relations that played (and continue to play) a formative part in the structuring of the world by the twin forces of capitalism and nationalism. Until only two decades ago, Chinese Marxist historians’ claims to autonomous “sprouts of capitalism” in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties met with skeptical mirth among most historians of China in Europe and North America. The claim is now on its way to becoming orthodoxy in a liberal historiography that has taken up the cause of globalization. The difference is worth pondering in terms of changing relations of power—in the arcane world of history writing no less than in the real world of global politics. The final consequence of the attenuation of colonialism that is relevant here is the waning of revolutions. It is quite apparent that revolutions are no longer possible to entertain as political event because they are against the law. The historical understanding of past revolutions follows suit, reading presently as a history of failures—or much worse. The single power that dominates the world order has renamed as terrorism any act of insurgency against that order; this also disguises the colonial nostalgia that drives

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its own urge to reshape the world in a U.S. imperial image as well as in the interest of transnational corporations based in the United States. But the revolutions of the formerly colonial or the third world had been renounced already by those who had made them. Their claims to revolutionary spaces outside global capital appeared increasingly by the 1970s not as a fulfillment of the utopian promises of revolution but as an imprisonment in perpetual backwardness. Since then, the initiative for development has passed from the advocates of national revolutionary purity to those more open to colonial hybridization, whose very hybridity qualifies them for leadership in national incorporation in global modernity. I think few would argue that the structures of economic, political, and cultural inequality created by colonialism have disappeared from the contemporary world. But it is equally evident that there have been serious changes since World War II in participation in these structures—most important, perhaps, in the emergence of East and Southeast Asia in a trilateral reconfiguration of global power. Most significant, at a level closer to the ground, is the transformation of the personnel of global power, which now transgresses against colonizer-colonized divisions in the operations of capital at the level of both management and labor, with significant consequences. The complicated relationship between the operations of global capital and the spatial legacies of colonialism is not easily disentangled and requires closer attention. A possible point of departure is suggested by Manuel Castells in his distinction between the “architecture” and the “geometry” of the present world system, which accounts for lasting structures as well as ongoing shifts.31 How this translates into the analysis of power in the concrete calls for closer attention. These three shifts in our thinking have played a major part, I think, in the willingness at the global level to listen to the voices of the colonized, which were quite absent from analyses of these problems until the 1970s. From fundamentalist reassertions of traditions to postcolonial valorizations of hybridity, there is little question that the formerly colonized are presently part of the global dialogue on modernity in a way that they were not earlier as either

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colonials or revolutionaries against colonialism. The consequences for discourses of power, culture, and development have been quite significant: claims to alternative development readily acquire a hearing (at least partly because the alternative as alternative still confirms the now-globalized faith in development) and justify the reconceptualization of modernity as global modernity. At the same time, we need to remind ourselves that these voices are now speaking in a modern discourse of capitalist modernity of which they are the products one way or another. In fact, such voices were never entirely absent in an earlier world of colonialism, as is captured in the idea of a “colonial modernity,” which was itself a product of colonialism but expressed a recognition that the colonizers were not alone in shaping the culture of colonialism. The recognition of this dialectic may go toward attenuating colonialism as a historical force emanating from EuroAmerica that reshaped the world. We can also move in the other direction and suggest that the contemporary world of global modernity, fulfilling the apparently irresistible urge of capital to globalize, itself represents the recognition of, if not resignation to, an expanded colonial modernity, which is necessary to both the global expansion and the more efficient working of capitalism. Colonial modernity may even have a life of its own against transformations of those who participate in its discourse—which have a great deal to do with the dynamics of capital, of which colonialism and colonial modernity are different expressions. In the next chapter, I will elaborate briefly on the concept of “colonial modernity,” which I understand somewhat differently from its deployment in some recent work. Colonial Modernity Whatever name we may employ to describe the present, it is hard to overcome a sense of modernity gone wrong—which inevitably makes one wonder whether it was wrong all along! While this sense may be stronger in some locations than in others, it is there regardless of where we may look.

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There are no longer havens from modernity, backward or progressive. This is the condition of global modernity. It is the product of the globalization of colonial modernity. The idea of colonial modernity has appeared with some regularity over the past few years, largely as a consequence of postcolonial criticism. It appears in these writings as a concept intended to overcome the binarism of the modern and the colonial, one centered in Euro-America and forward looking, the other covering much of the third world—the term that came to denote colonial and semicolonial regions after World War II—and identified with backwardness. Colonial modernity affirms the contemporaneity and the complicity of the modern and the colonial, rendering the terms into two inextricable constituents of a relationship.32 The colonized, rather than being left out of history by virtue of being colonized,33 as was conceived both in colonial and postcolonial nationalist historiography, now acquire a history as agents in a colonial modernity that they helped fashion with their participation in its workings. This perspective is neither wrong nor unreasonable. But it is as partial as the earlier view it has replaced, which valorized not the hybrid products of colonialism, which it did recognize, but the revolutionary subject, equally a product of the colonial encounter, who rejected the possibility of an accommodation with colonialism and sought through the anticolonial struggle to overcome bourgeois modernity in general in search of an alternative—not to modernity as such but to bourgeois modernity. The alternative modernities that now assert themselves against Euro-American paradigms of modernity are products of the interaction between particular colonialisms and precolonial native legacies, fashioned into localized modernities by the subjects of colonial modernity. These are now also the subjects of global modernity, asserting themselves on a global scene in the ideological spaces seemingly evacuated by a “provincialized” Euro-America, in tenuous negotiation over the future of modernity, which frequently degenerates into the reassertion of colonial practices. Colonial modernity in much of this contemporary postcolonial writing is intended, on the one hand, to reaffirm

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the modernness of the colonized and, on the other hand, to undermine Eurocentric claims to a modernity that can be conceived apart from colonialism. Without questioning either the historical or the political validity of this impulse, I would like to suggest nevertheless that the urge to rescue the colonized for history also calls for some caution against tendencies to a reductionist equation of the modern and the colonial. Though inextricably related, the two nevertheless are not reducible to one another. Equally problematic is the dispersal of modernity into an endless number of modernities, which, accompanied by a rejection of totalities, deprives modernity even of synechdochal unity, depriving it of all meaning. The equation of the modernities of the colonizer and colonized also downplays structural inequalities that globally shaped colonial modernity and dissolved dialectical interplays between the actors of colonial modernity into diffuse borderland hybridities that dispense with the necessity of accounting for power relations that shape the borderlands and their social, political, and cultural products. I would like to suggest that rather than collapse the two terms, it may be more productive both intellectually and politically to identify the colonial in the modern and the modern in the colonial. Such an approach may enable both an avoidance of the teleology of modernization and the somewhat naive urge in third worldist anticolonialism to overcome the modern. At a time when reactionary fundamentalism is on the surge globally, some caution is necessary politically in casting the modern into the prison of the colonial. At the same time, an unqualified identification of the colonial as modern—except in the very specific historical sense of locating it in terms of relationships—obscures conflicts over modernity among the colonials themselves, but it may also end up depriving criticism of its ability to deal with reactionary elements in formerly colonial societies, as all are now qualified as modern out of historical location, as if modern itself could have no substantial content aside from such relationships. Colonial modernity is best viewed as a structural relationship, dynamized by a capitalism emanating from Euro-America, that is a product of the dialectics between

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the structuring forces of capitalism that have been global in scope and reach (not universal or homogeneous for being global), and the many local forces transformed by these forces but also transforming them into many local guises, which then could act back upon Euro-American societies with transformative effects of their own. The term colonial modern, in its original deployment in earlier, colonial times, was infused with a sense of power relations that might be useful now to recall. Robert Rydell writes of what he describes as “the ‘coloniale moderne’ sensibility” in early twentieth-century universal expositions: Rooted in the exotic fascination with the “Other” cultivated at European fairs before the Great War, coloniale moderne—a conjuncture of modernistic architectural styles and representations of imperial policies that stressed the benefits of colonialism to colonizer and colonized alike—developed from the desire by European imperial authorities to decant the old wine of imperialism into new bottles bearing the modernistic designs of the interwar years. More specifically, the coloniale moderne practice—habitus may be a better expression—crystallized around efforts by governments to make the modernistic dream worlds of mass consumption on view at fairs unthinkable apart from the maintenance and extension of empire.34 Colonial modernity, in other words, was marked not only by inequalities in power structurally but also by inequalities in the “hybridization” of those who inhabited the contact zones of colonial modernity. The term colonial modernity was deployed in specifically colonial situations, but it may be productive in hindsight to view it as a defining characteristic of modernity in general—even where colonialism, technically speaking, did not exist (e.g., in China or Turkey). Some of these societies had colonial ambitions of their own, but efforts to find some kind of equivalence between these world empire colonialisms and the colonialism of capitalist or socialist modernity of the kind associated with actually existing socialisms, with the nation-state at its center, are

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not very convincing.35 These were the societies that, following formal decolonization, would be renamed the third world. Now the third world itself has lost much of its meaning, but the global inequalities that informed the deployment of the term are still very much with us, even if new mappings have been superimposed on earlier delineations of the nations and regions encompassed by the term. Aside from the hegemonic relationships produced by Euro-American power, it seems to me that the most important instrument of colonialism in the modern age was the nation-state, which, as I have argued earlier, itself was a colonizing force as an agent of modernization. The colonialism of the nation-state is even more starkly evident in third world situations, where the nation-state has claimed for itself a civilizing mission in bringing modernity to the population it claims as its own. Whether we view the nation in class, gender and ethnic, or urban-rural and regional terms, nation building—representing the demands of those who view themselves to be the most modernized elements in society—has served as the most thoroughgoing instrument of the colonization of the world in the name of modernity. It is both extensive and intensive: the colonization of physical space as well as the spaces of everyday life and the interior spaces of individuals. It is also important to note that colonialism also shaped modernity in its original homelands by practices that were evolved in the process of the colonial invasion and transformation of the world. Gauri Viswanathan has shown the impact on literary education in England, including the teaching of English, of methods developed with great success teaching colonial subjects in India.36 Susan Thorne has highlighted the importance in the cultural formation of nineteenth-century England of missionary attitudes and practices that had evolved in the colonies.37 French colonial officials, bringing the most modern methods of governance to the colonies, believed “that the arts of government . . . deployed in the colonies were also applicable in France.”38 We are already well aware from scholarship on the third world, of which Edward Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism are seminal examples, of the ways

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in which conquest of the world has shaped modern EuroAmerican learning and its organization—which, for all practical purposes, is modern learning—and the ways in which this learning has appropriated for itself the learning of the world, discarding ways of knowing that do not fit with its imperial claims to truth. Most fundamentally, capitalism itself may be incomprehensible without reference to colonialism. The history of capitalism is in many ways coeval with the history of colonialism, which, as Fernand Braudel has argued, included the colonization of Europe itself by a world economy expanding from the Mediterranean in all directions of the globe. In the uncompromising if somewhat reductionist words of Gayatri Spivak: In the earlier stages of industrial capitalism, the colonies provided the raw materials so that the colonizing countries could develop their manufacturing industrial base. Indigenous production was thus crippled and destroyed. To minimize circulation time, industrial capitalism needed to establish due process, and such civilizing instruments as railways, postal services, and a uniformly graded system of education. This, together with the labor movements in the First World and the mechanisms of the welfare state, slowly made it imperative that manufacturing itself be carried out on the soil of the Third World, where labor can make fewer demands, and the governments are mortgaged.39 We may have come full circle at the present, when it is possible to speak of the structures and the destructurations—cultural as well as material—generated by the colonial past in their deterritorialization from the nation-state; where motions of capital, commodities, peoples, and cultures have in turn put into motion national or civilizational claims on modernity, giving global modernity its fluid appearance. Colonial modernity is still visible not only in the unevenness of modernity, as it appears in static mappings of the world, but also in the persistence of colonial spaces and the power relations that direct global flows. Capital and production are in the process of being exported to the

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third world, completing the task of economic colonization, now in the name of development and globalization. There is an apparent redistribution of wealth among the laboring populations even as it is concentrated simultaneously in the hands of a global elite cutting across national, regional, or other boundaries of first, second, and third worlds. The jobs of blue- and white-collar workers are exported from the first to the third world, even as former colonials travel home to the colonial spaces that refuse to vanish with talk about globalization. If so-called globalization does not look like the colonialism of old, it is because the unevenness and inequality created by colonialisms globally is deterritorialized from the nation, and wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a global elite. One conservative commentator, Paul Craig Roberts, predicts that the United States will become a third world country in twenty years! Some parts already have. We may recall in this regard that the nineteenth-century colonialists’ contempt for the colonials was also extended to the oppressed and marginalized at home, including the working populations and women. We need to note also that the state in countries such as India and the People’s Republic of China is by now complicit in the colonial activities of capital, which provides it not only with new opportunities for development but also with a means to carry through its own colonial projects internally and externally.40 The legacy of colonialism is also evident in conflicts over cultural and political identity. Despite a commonplace tendency these days to invoke varieties of traditions in claims to separate identities, these traditions now appear in forms that have been reworked (if not created) by colonialism. The difference now is not between the colonized and the colonizer but among those who have been shaped by the colonial past in different ways and who now mobilize identities against one another that are equally—not identically—products of colonialism but that are still subject to the inequalities of cultural power that are the legacies of the past. What I have in mind here is cogently expressed in a study by Ulf Hedetoft of the cultures produced by British colonialism not just among the colonials but in Britain as

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well, which now are visible in conflicting claims to British citizenship. It is not only in the identity, and identity-crisis, of the modern English character that the colonial past makes its presence felt, however. At the other end of the spectrum, the different forms of British colonialism produced a variety of colonial subjects and identities whose self-image and conceptions of the world were fully as much the product of the confrontation with the British as the latter’s feelings of superior character were the result of the clash with and suppression of colonial “barbarians”; interestingly, however—and embarrassingly for the British, these colonial products were not all simply left to cope with their own problems in their “Third World” countries following decolonisation, but some of them reversed the colonial migratory movement and, as a result of the form decolonisation assumed (British attempts to cling to the spoils of Empire through the Commonwealth), re-appeared on the British scene as immigrants, would-be settlers and British nationals.41 It makes some sense, in addressing the relationship among capitalism, colonialism, the nation-state, and cultural modernity, among other things, to keep them separate analytically while recognizing their entanglement in the processes that we have come to encapsulate under the term modernity. It is possible to suggest that colonialism in a trivial sense is as old as the history of humankind. What distinguishes modern colonialism from earlier colonialisms is its relationship to capitalism and nationalism, which also guarantee its persistence even after colonialism as a formal system of international relations has come to an end—with the important exception of indigenous peoples around the world who serve as a constant reminder of the persistence of colonialism.42 The culture of modernity, too, may be incomprehensible without reference to colonialism, both in its formation and in its diffusion over the world, which were part and parcel of the same process.

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The totality created by these relations needs to be kept in mind in any serious critique of colonialism. Modernity, as I understand it, is the name we have given to the historically changing totality that is the product of these relationships. An analytical separation of the various moments that have gone into its making is crucial, nevertheless, to grasping these relationships as contradictions—relationships of unity as well as opposition. If colonialism has undermined the best ideals of an Enlightenment utopianism—including the ideal of cosmopolitan coexistence—by mobilizing them in the service of world conquest, then the same ideals have inspired struggles against colonialism at home and abroad, not to speak of the critical perspectives we bring to the appreciation of modernity. Those struggles, too, are by now part of an unfolding modernity.43 A great deal may be said for recognizing colonial history as history, rather than as history gone underground (as in nationalist historiography), which indeed may be crucial to understanding colonialism not simply as a structural concomitant of capitalism or nationalism but as a condition of everyday life. It is also necessary to recognize the ways in which the colonial encounters with native societies have produced not only alternative modernities but alternative modernities that have produced their own colonialisms, if only in the form of nation-states. The “Janus face” of the nation-state may be most clearly visible in colonial states where the nation is indispensable to warding off one kind of colonialism while it seeks to make possible its resistance by a colonial appropriation of local differences.44 The nation-state, in other words, did not put an end to colonial history but inaugurated a new phase within it, playing a crucial role in its globalization—by which I mean, as I have noted, the proliferation of those participating in colonial activity who, if they do not form a transnational class, nevertheless share a certain outlook on the world in common, as may be perceived in the rapid global spread in the use of “terror” to curtail democracy and social justice.45 The concept of class has gone out of fashion these days, partly due to the failures of class politics but also because the concept has been the object of systematic forgetting not just in conservative circles but among radicals preoccupied

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with other concerns such as gender and race. Conditions of globality also challenge the idea of class, as they challenge all similar concepts that found expression within the context of national politics and nationally oriented social science. We might want to remember, however, that in its original formulation, at least in Marxist theory, class was intended to be an inter- or transnational concept. I think it is important to devote closer attention to the transnationalization of class interests, so long as we remember that like any other concept, whether at the national or transnational level, class is marked by heterogeneity and contradiction, which express its overdetermination by other categories from the social categories of class and gender to spatial categories of place and nation. National leaderships, otherwise at odds with one another, may nevertheless share common interests in legitimizing internal colonialism or labeling as terror any serious political opposition. Transnational elites, at odds with the nation-state in their activities and ideologies, may share with national leaderships common interests in the promotion of ideologies of globalization. The turn from radical opposition to colonialism and neocolonialism to accommodation of colonial practices has found expression over the past decade in the appropriation by new transnational classes of critical efforts to deal with the historical problems presented by colonialism. This has resulted in the dissolution of problems of inequality, injustice, and destructive oppression into textual ambivalence over colonialism, as well as in the celebration of hybridities that in some usages do away with even the ability to distinguish the colonizer from the colonized.46 In real borders, rather than the abstract borderlands of postcolonial criticism, oppression and discrimination on the basis of race, gender, class, and “third-worldliness” refuse to go away. Indeed, class and third world origin may be more significant than ever under the circumstances of transnational capitalism. As the author of a recent study comparing the U.S.-Canadian and the U.S.-Mexican borders writes: Similar to developments in other parts of the world, U.S. conditions for entry are thus becoming increasingly formalized into citizenship criteria that divide

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contemporary immigrants into several, hierarchically defined groups. In comparison to nineteenth century U.S. law which openly excluded immigrants on the basis of ethnic and national origin by barring entire groups of people, today’s immigration policies (with certain exceptions) stratify migrants according to class, educational and social background as well as the kind of classed position into which they will eventually be inserted in the United States.47 These very real problems of class inequality and discrimination in actual borders and global motions of people are suppressed in certain brands of postcolonial criticism, which foreground the experiences and ideologies of those who, by virtue of privileged access to modernity under conditions of colonial or neocolonial regimes, are better suited than others to relocate to the equally privileged spaces of cosmopolitanism under transnational capitalism. As Aijaz Ahmad puts it: [T]he ideological ambiguity in these rhetorics of migrancy resides in the key fact that the migrant in question comes from a nation which is subordinated in the imperialist system of intra-state relationships, but, simultaneously, from the class, more often than not, which is the dominant class within that nation—this, in turn, makes it possible for that migrant to arrive in the metropolitan country to join not the working classes but the professional middle strata, hence to forge a kind of rhetoric which submerges the class question and speaks of migrancy as an ontological condition, more or less.48 We might add that access to colonial education—not necessarily restricted to the upper classes that Ahmad speaks of—itself becomes a marker of class privilege under circumstances of colonialism or neocolonialism. It is not very surprising that those who are forged in the crucible of colonialism, and their take on the present as well as on the colonial past, should be welcomed with unqualified

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celebration in first world institutions of power. It is here that global modernity appears at its most undisguised as the fulfillment of colonial modernity.49 Recognition of colonial modernity as history, rather than some kind of aberration in time, may be crucial to continued struggles for social justice and democracy. Today there is also a proliferation of struggles against the colonialism of states and capital that is worldwide in scope. Many of us in the contemporary academic and intellectual worlds may be unable to grasp the fears and hopes that drive these struggles, and we may fail to appreciate them as the anticolonial struggles that they are, because our own intellectual and institutional context is both a beneficiary and a constituent of colonial modernity. Visions of postcolonial globalization and diasporic hybridization, seemingly the antidotes to colonialism in their tolerance for temporal multilinearity and social diversity, are themselves premised very much on the legacies of colonialism, and they distract attention from the necessity of confronting colonial modernity as a global political and ideological issue. On the one hand, the world structured by colonial modernity has not ended with the inclusion among the colonizers of the formerly colonized, as individuals, corporations, or nations—as with the so-called coalition of the willing in Iraq, which, however illusory as an entity, claims global legitimacy by virtue of including within it peoples of all continents and colors, colonizers as well as their former colonials. On the other hand, decolonization in either a political or ideological sense carries little meaning when the nation-state is recognized as a colonial institution. To be thorough, in other words, decolonization cannot be limited merely to an escape from Euro-American colonialism into some imagined national culture, but it must go further to question the colonizing implications of the idea of a national culture backed up by the power of the nation-state. The urgency of this question should be especially evident in the present. In its alliance with transnational capital—particularly evident not just in the United States but in a formerly socialist state such as the People’s Republic of China—the state seeks to minimize its responsibility to the society

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that is its source of legitimacy and instead seeks to create a global space for the operations of capital (including finance, production, labor, and markets), which includes the abandonment to the vagaries of an uncontrolled global market of the laboring population, regardless of the color of their collars. It may not be long before citizens become once again little more than a reserve army of labor and of a perpetual war in the interests of capital. Such a recognition makes the task of overcoming colonial modernity a far more difficult undertaking than the anticolonial struggles of a generation ago. The call for such struggle itself seems much less attractive given the experiences with earlier anticolonial struggles and the headlong rush to the lures of global markets and a global consumption society. What necessitates it is the economic, cultural, and political violence inflicted daily on countless numbers in the name of development and democracy, with disastrous consequences not only for democracy and social justice but for the very conditions of life and livelihood. The recovery of those conditions is a task of the highest priority against a contemporary preoccupation with political and cultural identity, which perpetuates the problems it sets out to resolve. If we are to find our way out of a now-globalized colonial modernity, we first need to recognize that it is indeed our historically given point of departure. Notes 1. I stress this point in order to distinguish the argument here from approaches to global modernity in the plural, as in the case of the essays included in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995), or in the special issue of Daedalus, “Multiple Modernities,” ed. S. N. Eisenstadt, 129, no. 1 (Winter 2000). The former volume renders “global modernities” as a stand-in for globalization. The Daedalus volume recognizes the singular origins of modernity, but some of the contributions nevertheless stress differences based on culture over the commonalities of modernity. These approaches are problematic, I think, precisely because of their tendency to sweep under the rug issues of the colonial in modernity in the name of globalization. For “singular modernity,”

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see Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002). 2. I have discussed this topic in a number of places for the case of China, most notably in “Confucius in the Borderlands: Global Capitalism and the Reinvention of Confucianism,” boundary 2 22, no. 3 (November 1995): 229–73. For an illuminating discussion of the manner in which assumptions of modernity were internalized in Indian history, see Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). Prakash’s discussion is particularly relevant here for his deployment of “colonial modernity” in addressing this issue. 3. I have analyzed this problem at greater length, with reference to the People’s Republic of China, in Arif Dirlik, “Markets, Culture, Power: The Making of a ‘Second Cultural Revolution’ in China,” Asian Studies Review 25, no. 1 (March 2001): 1–34. 4. For the transnational capitalist class, see Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), and William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 5. This development needs much closer attention. For one illuminating discussion, see Kris Olds, “Articulating Agendas and Traveling Principles in the Layering of New Strands of Academic Freedom in Contemporary Singapore,” in Global Ideas: How Ideas, Objects and Practices Travel in the Global Economy, ed. Barbara Czarniawska and Guje Savon (Copenhagen: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, 2005). In 2003, the leadership of Beijing University (one of the premier educational institutions in the People’s Republic of China) created a furor with plans to transform the university, including changing instruction to English. For a collection of the debates that ensued, see Qian Liqun and Gao Yuandong, eds., Zhongguo daxuede wenti yu gaige (Problems and Reform of Higher Education in China) (Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Press, 2003). See also Dai Xiaoxia, Mo Jiahao, and Xie Anna, eds., Gaodeng jiaoyu shichanghua (Marketization of Higher Education) (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2004) and Wang Xiao, Quanqiuhua yu Zhongguo jiaoyu (Globalization and Chinese Education) (Chengdu: Sichuan People’s Press, 2002). 6. The University of Liverpool announced at the end of October 2005 that it was establishing a campus in the PRC jointly with Xi’an Jiaotong University that would concentrate on technological subjects. According to a report, the campus is to be located in Suzhou Industrial Park in eastern China, which is quite a distance not only

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from Liverpool but also from Xi’an. The attraction of the location is that it is home to foreign enterprises in the PRC, including fiftythree Fortune 500 Companies. The founding of the university, in other words, is one more example of higher education as enterprise, this time as “joint enterprise,” which has been the standard form of Sino-foreign business collaboration. The deal, moreover, is being backed up by Laureate Educational Limited, an online education transnational. See Polly Curtis, “Liverpool to Establish Chinese University,” Guardian Unlimited, 27 October 2005. 7. For one example of many such reports on such developments, mostly celebratory, see “Looks Like American Suburbia, but It’s Home in India,” Register-Guard, 9 October 2005, A19. Many a housing development in the People’s Republic of China advertises itself with names derived from locations in the United States, especially California. 8. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004). 9. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 10. Jack R. Friedman, “Ambivalence, Abjection, and the Outside of the Global: On Statementality,” unpublished manuscript, 5. I am grateful to Friedman for sharing this paper with me. 11. Peter L. Berger and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). The title refers to the multiplying efforts in the contemporary world to project national/civilizational values on the global scene. In other words, we are all imperialists now, although we may not be equally good at the undertaking! 12. For an extended discussion of issues of the postcolonial, see Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997). 13. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). I prefer colonial to imperial in this discussion because, in my understanding, although the two terms share the sense of the political control of one society by another, colonial refers more directly to experiences at the everyday level, including cultural experiences, which are crucial to grasping the relationship between the present and the world of colonialism of which it is the product. 14. James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the Twenty-first Century (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood/Zed, 2002), 12. 15. Bill Readings addressed this question in The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

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The “transnationalization” of the university is visible both in the increased visibility, mostly in first world locations, of students from around the world (who can now afford education in first world institutions), as well as in the proliferation across national boundaries of the campuses of first world universities, which, if the trend continues, themselves may get to look like transnational business networks. 16. John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 168–69. 17. Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, 175. 18. See for example, the essays collected in A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (London: Random House, 2002). The volume offers a new periodization of world history in terms of four periods of archaic, proto-, modern, and postcolonial globalization. 19. For a recent example of a cavalier dismissal of colonialism, see Gilbert Rozman, “Theories of Modernization and Theories of Revolution: China and Russia,” in Zhongguo xiandaihua lunwen ji (Essays on the Modernization of China) (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991), 633–46. 20. Karl Marx, “History of the Opium Trade,” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (New York: International, 1981), 16: 6. It is interesting that in his “keywords” of modernity, Raymond Williams has no entry for colonialism, although there is one for imperialism. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 21. See the discussions of capitalism and imperialism by Chinese Marxists in the 1920s and 1930s in Arif Dirlik, Revolution and History: Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), especially chap. 3. 22. My description here of the understanding of colonialism that prevailed during the two to three decades after World War II will be familiar to most who lived through or study that period. A cogent illustration of the various points I make may be found in the recent English language publication of essays on colonialism by Jean-Paul Sartre, who was one of the preeminent critics of colonialism during the period in question. These essays, mostly written in the late fifties and early sixties, were first published in French in 1964. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (London: Routledge, 2001). Sartre’s views were informed by, and in some ways derivative of, the writings of postcolonial intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, with whom he had an intimate personal relationship.

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23. Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 59–87. 24. I borrow “contact zones” from Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). 25. Chinese Marxists, for example, argued that national autonomy and development could not be achieved without a simultaneous social revolution that would eliminate the classes, bourgeois or “feudal,” who were allied to imperialism in their interests. See Arif Dirlik, “National Development and Social Revolution in Early Chinese Marxist Thought,” China Quarterly 58 (April–June 1974): 286–309. 26. For a discussion of the transformation of postcolonial criticism from the 1960s to the present, see Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” Race and Class 36, no. 3 (1995): 1–20. 27. As Aime Cesaire put it, “Marx is all right, but we need to complete Marx.” Quoted in Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), 133. 28. Robert Young, “Preface,” in Sartre, Colonialism and NeoColonialism, xiv. See also Sartre on “Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized,” in Sartre, Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism, 51n. 29. I should note here that I am not one of those who celebrate the demise of the nation in the name of globalization. I think that the nation is still important in resistance to imperialism. Equally important, despite a great deal of abstract talk about “global civil society” or “diasporic public spheres,” democracy is still inconceivable without reference to the nation. Recognition of the colonial moment in nation building points to a fatal flaw at the very origins of democracy. The colonial (and class) character of the nation-state has been exacerbated in recent years as states have allied with transnational capital, which has also required the deterritorialization of the state from the nation, exposing the postnational state in its colonial guise. This recognition points also to the urgency of placing on the agenda of radical politics the recovery of democracy, which is crucial to the struggle for social, economic, and environmental justice. 30. The foremost example of this “turn” may be Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Frank’s case is especially powerful as a symbol of the shift in our thinking, as it was associated earlier with an analysis of the world to which colonialism was fundamental.

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31. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 1, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996). 32. Tani Barlow, “Introduction,” in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani Barlow (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–20. 33. “Colonial modernity,” at least in some usages, is endowed with normalcy as any other kind of modernity. Thus, the editors of a recent volume on Korean modernity write, “‘True modernity’ here would mean that an independent and discrete Korean modernity was interrupted by the imposition of Japanese colonial rule. Yet this precolonial modernity is also described using a Western-centered conception of the key elements of modernity. It is thus impossible to separate different models of modernity in such a manner.” Gi-wook Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 382, n. 18. Shin and Robinson stress the unequal power relations that shaped this colonial modernity, including the unevenness that resulted from it (11). Their work nevertheless has been received with some resentment in Korea for erasing or downplaying colonialism (I owe this point to a personal communication from Paik Nak-chung). In some discussions of modernity under the aegis of colonialism, the word colonial itself does not even appear with any prominence. See, for example, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), which deliberately privileges the colonial modern as the modern. For an elaborate affirmation of the modernity of colonial modernity against its nationalist and Marxist critics who stress its deficiencies (its “lacks”), see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Histories and Post-Enlightenment Rationalism,” in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 20–37. With his own commitment to the postcolonial, Chakrabarty is vague on the coloniality of the modern at the present. The deployment of “colonial modernity” that comes closest to my argument here is in Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). Jones underlines the transformative power of the colonial, its foundations in political economy, and its persistence even in its radical or right-wing appropriations for nationalist purposes. He is vague, however, on its long-term applications, partly because his study stops in 1937 and partly because of a tendency to merge the colonial into the transnational.

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34. Robert Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Exhibitions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 62. The participants in the production of various forms of art identifiable as “colonial modern” included the indigenous people, colonials of European origin, and Europeans influenced by the exoticism of the colonies. 35. For one such effort, see Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 36. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 37. Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). See also Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 38. Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 281. 39. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), 90. 40. I would like to recall here, by way of acknowledgment of an intellectual debt, an article by Masao Miyoshi published a decade ago that stands at the origins of my own thinking on issues of colonialism and globalization: “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the NationState,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 726–51. In this article, Miyoshi undertook a sharp critique of then-new trends in the humanities and the social sciences associated with globalization and postcolonial criticism, exploring the ways in which these trends served as alibis for emergent colonialism associated more with the transnational corporation than the nation-state. I agree with much of what Miyoshi had to say, although it should be clear from the discussion here that I also have a more complicated approach to the persistence of colonialism, one that would associate it exclusively or primarily with corporate power. 41. Ulf Hedetoft, British Imperialism and Modern Identity (Aalborg, Denmark: Institut for Uddannelse og Socialisering, AUC, 1985), 2. Colonialism transformed both the colonizer and the colonized, Hedetoft shows, but did so in unequal ways that now persist in English attitudes toward immigrants—the formerly colonized coming home to mother, in other words. See also the essays collected in Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney, eds., Postcolonial Cultures in France (London: Routledge, 1997), especially

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the editors’ introduction, 3–25. These essays deal with both the colonial transformation of French and Maghrebi cultures and the persistence of colonial difference and inequality past decolonization, as well as the relocation of Maghrebis in France, attesting to the persistence of colonial modernity in the very context that invented the term and the idea. 42. For further discussion, see Arif Dirlik, “Rethinking Colonialism: Globalization, Postcolonialism, and the Nation,” Interventions 4, no. 3 (2002): 428–48. 43. For a study of anti-imperialist thinking during the Enlightenment (i.e., in France and Germany), see Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). Indeed, as anti-Eurocentrism has become fashionable and less and less discriminating in its condemnations, we have lost sight of how much contemporary critiques of colonialism owe to the complex legacies of the Enlightenment, including their permutations in other modernities. A cogent example is provided by Dipesh Chakrabarty’s influential Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). This work, often cited as an alibi for anti-Eurocentrism, explicitly acknowledges the author’s debt to Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger, two outstanding heirs to Enlightenment modernity. 44. We owe the term Janus faced to Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London: Verso, 1981). 45. The British sociologist Leslie Sklair has been the foremost advocate and analyst of the idea of a transnational capitalist class for over a decade, most recently in The Transnational Capitalist Class. His contributions in this regard would be greatly enriched if he were to attend more closely to the increased (and increasingly important) participation in this class of personnel—including intellectual and cultural personnel—from outside Euro-America and outside corporate structures alone. Such participation also points to the contradictions within this class and the way culture has become a medium for their articulation. 46. The foremost (and popular) advocate of “ambivalence at the site of the colonial” is, needless to say, Homo Bhabha. Bhabha even confesses to a “taste for in-between states and moments of hybridity,” which no doubt endears him to power holders who would rather take colonialism out of the picture both in history and in contemporary globalization. Bhabha’s contributions to the erasure of colonialism, one suspects, played a crucial part in earning him a place at the pinnacle of globalizers at the World Economic Forum, convened in Davos in 2003. For his “taste,”

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see Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 208. For his participation in Davos, see the Web site for the World Economic Forum, 2003. 47. Claudia Sadowski-Smith, “Reading across Diaspora: Chinese and Mexican Undocumented Immigration across U.S. Land Borders,” in Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital and Citizenship at U.S. Borders, ed. Claudia Sadowski-Smith (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 79. This essay also shows, without stressing the point, that the differences between the first world boundary between the United States and Canada and the first–third world boundary between the United States and Mexico has been attenuated considerably, especially since 9/11, as Canada has appeared increasingly as a first world conduit for third worlders headed for the United States. The importance of class for understanding contemporary migration is very much in evidence in the case of Chinese (or East Indian migrants, among others). Whereas those with wealth and prestige may enjoy the benefits of “flexible citizenship” (in Aihwa Ong’s term), those who hail from the lower social ranks drown at sea, perish in containers, or languish in prisons as they seek to get smuggled into the United States and Europe. See Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), and Peter Kwong, Forbidden Workers: Illegal Chinese Immigrants and American Labor (New York: New Press, 1999). For important discussions of the relationship among colonialism, global capitalism, and migration, with an emphasis on legal questions, see Ibrahim J. Gassama, Robert S. Chang, and Keith Aoki, eds., “Symposium: Citizenship and Its Discontents: Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination,” Oregon Law Review 76, nos. 2–3 (Summer–Fall 1997), especially the introduction by the editors and the articles by Tayyab Mahmud and Kunal M. Parker. 48. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 13. 49. For further discussion, illustrated through the example of architecture, see Arif Dirlik, “Architectures of Global Modernity, Colonialism, and Places,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 33–61.

◊ 5

Alternatives? The PRC and the Global South As the People’s Republic of China has emerged over the past decade as an engine of global capitalism, there has been some talk that it may offer an alternative mode of globalization to that represented by neoliberal globalization. The claim draws some plausibility from the refusal of Communist Party leadership to break with the socialist past completely, even though the socialist legacy has been compromised almost irreparably in practice. It is addressed most importantly to the “global South,” which also has become visible once again in the flourishing of social and political activity directed against a globalization orchestrated from the “North.” It may be ironic that the very determined incorporation of the PRC in global capitalism, rather than contribute to further globalization, may well be one more signal of its attenuation. It is important, at any rate, to examine the claims to an alternative mode of globalization, which supposedly accounts for the concerns of formerly colonial or neocolonial societies. I will explore here a possible resonance between two ideas that have acquired some popularity over the few years in different but not unrelated contexts. One is the idea of a “Beijing Consensus” or a “Chinese model of development,” which not only has attracted considerable attention not only among Chinese intellectuals and political theorists but also has provoked some interest outside the PRC among leaders 133

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of the global South. The other is the idea of “global South” itself, especially its relationship to an earlier term that it is replacing, third world. These terms have historical associations of their own. The idea of a Chinese model of development first acquired popularity in the 1950s, with reference to revolutionary policies followed under Mao Zedong, which were viewed at the time as offering an alternative not only to capitalist but also to the Soviet models of development. The term third world emerged early in the same decade, but it acquired greater visibility after the Bandung Conference of Non-aligned Nations in 1955, which similarly pointed to a third way of development against hegemonic capitalist and socialist models. These past associations are invoked increasingly these days with reference to the possibility of paths of development against the contemporary domination of United States–led neoliberalism. Understanding differences between the present and its past may be important to a critical understanding of current claims made to resonance between a Chinese model of development and an autonomous path of development for societies of the South. The term global South—or at least the “South” component of it—goes back to the 1970s, and it is entangled in its implications with other terms that post–World War II modernization discourse and revolutionary movements generated to describe societies that seemed to face difficulties in achieving the economic and political goals of either capitalist or socialist modernity. It was largely equivalent to, but not identical with, the popular designation for such societies in the 1950s and 1960s, third world, to which it bore a contradictory relationship.1 It was popularized by the Brandt Commission reports published in 1980 and 1983, both of which bore “North-South” in their titles. The reports advocated large infusions of capital from the North to the South to enable the latter’s modernization.2 I am not certain when global was attached to South to form the contemporary compound term; the predicate suggests some relationship to the discourse of globalization that was on the emergence in the 1990s. The United Nations Development Program initiative of 2003, “Forging a Global

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South,”3 has played an important part in drawing attention to the concept, as has interactivity among societies of the “South” to establish their own initiatives in pursuing developmental agendas. The changing usages of the term, and the different agendas that they imply, offer clues to both continuities and discontinuities over the past half century in the global positioning of the South, as well as in the ideological and political roles assigned to it in global politics. The use of the term is explained by some geographically: that with two exceptions, Australia and New Zealand, the developed countries of the world lie to the north of the developing, undeveloped, or least developed ones.4 While its coiners undoubtedly did not intend for the term to be taken in a literal physical-geographic sense, it seems worth pointing out, nevertheless, that like all geographic designations for ideological and political spaces and projects (globalization comes to mind), its geography is much more complicated than the term suggests, and it is subject to change over time; so that the “South” of the contemporary world may be significantly different in its composition and territorial spread than the South of the early 1970s or the colonial South of the immediate post–World War period. The Inuits are practically on the North Pole, while some formerly colonial or neocolonial urban centers are a match in activity and appearance for metropolitan cities at the headquarters of capital. The context, too, is different. The disappearance of the socialist alternative has left behind one hegemonic power and one hegemonic ideology: neoliberalism. This situation has in many ways increased the burdens on the South, both in the problems it faces and in the role it may play in the resolution of global problems. Both the problems of the South and the political projects it suggests are subject to variation over time in accordance with such internal/external and material/ideological changes. It is hardly necessary to elaborate that the term third world, coined by Alfred Sauvy in 1952 and intended to distinguish the formerly colonized or neocolonized world from the modernizing worlds of capitalism and socialism, was to become by the 1960s a central political slogan for the radical

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left. The term in its origins had suggested that societies of the third world, embarking on the long path to modernity, had one of two paths to follow: the capitalist or the socialist. Implicit in it was a lingering assumption, ultimately to be fulfilled, that the socialist path itself was something of a temporary deviation, as modernization discourse assigned to capitalism the ultimate teleological task of bringing history to an end.5 Nevertheless, given the close association of capitalism with imperialism, the socialist example exerted significant influence on the national liberation movements that the third world idea spawned. But the third world could also be conceived as a third path to modernity, and it was conceived as such by the societies of the South who participated in the Bandung Conference of 1955. This conception was of crucial relevance in the high value placed on third world national liberation movements in both the North and South as a way out of capitalism, doomed to fall with the end of colonialism and imperialism, without falling back on Stalinist socialism. Nineteen sixty-eight was the year of the third world. The third world was by then not just an empirical term. It had come also to represent a revolutionary way out of the dilemmas presented by capitalism and actually existing socialism. The South seemed poised at the edge of history. Only a decade later, the situation seemed to have been transformed. The Brandt Commission was established in 1977 by the then-head of the World Bank, Robert McNamara of Vietnam fame, who had reinvented himself from the official in charge of U.S. military conduct of the war in Vietnam, to compassionate patron of the third world (note similarities to Paul Wolfowitz today). Led by the former mayor of Berlin and German chancellor Willy Brandt, a Social Democrat with Green inclinations, the commission perceived an impending economic and environmental global crisis on the horizon and saw increased succor for the South as one crucial way to avert catastrophe for humankind. Within a decade, the South had turned from a possible savior of the world to an object of compassion that must be saved in order for the world to save itself. But the salvation now pointed to a different path than the one envisaged

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earlier with the liberationist impulses of world revolutionary movements. The publication of the first Brandt Commission report in 1981 coincided with the beginnings of the so-called Reagan-Thatcher revolution, the appearance of East and Southeast Asian capitalisms as competitors to the North, and the receding of socialism, beginning with the People’s Republic of China in 1978. The Brandt Commission’s global neo-Keynesianism was stillborn in its rapid replacement in the course of the 1980s by neoliberal economic policies enforced by the U.S.-dominated World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The transformation found expression ultimately in the so-called Washington Consensus, a term coined in 1990 primarily with reference to U.S. policies in Latin America but that quickly came to be associated with the shift from governmental aid to marketization that characterized the discourse of globalization (which itself acquired prominence in the 1990s). The South had to seek development in the global capitalist economy. This also signified an important shift in the content of development—away from an earlier emphasis on development as national development (or the development of the whole nation). It is quite evident in hindsight that under contemporary conditions, national economic development no longer means the development of the whole nation but rather development only of those sectors of the economy and population that can participate successfully in the global economy, usually in urban networks that are components of a global network society. With the so-called globalization of the 1990s, the geographies of development have been reconfigured, calling into question not only the earlier three worlds, idea but the viability of the North/South distinction. Presently, the boundaries between the two are crisscrossed by networks of various kinds, relocating some parts of the South in the North, and vice versa. I am referring here not only to migrations across various boundaries of developmental success but also to the creation of “native” pockets of poverty in the North that are very much reminiscent of the South. I do not wish to imply that the countries of the North and South suffer from the same deprivations and maladies. The

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Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, coming on the heels of the tsunami tragedy in South Asia, is a reminder nevertheless that the distinction between the North and the South (as between the three worlds of an earlier day) is not an absolute one, and it is blurred progressively as globalization reconfigures relationships of class, gender, and ethnic inequality across national and regional boundaries. As with poverty, so it is with wealth. The South now has its global cities, on the circuits of transnational capital, as well as ruling classes that are players in transnational capitalism. Territorially based differences are overdetermined by emerging social inequalities—not just ethnic but class and gender ones—that render the South into a site of internal contradictions and conflicts, much the same as in the North but without some of the institutional restraints. What is important is that the solutions to the South’s problems must be part of global solutions—or, at the least, regional solutions that transcend national boundaries. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) project of 2003, “Forging a Global South,” is described as a “new paradigm of development.” The project is intended for the South to take command of its own future. Rather than await succor from the North, the countries of the South must cooperate with one another in fostering the overall development of the South: “south-south cooperation,” as the framers put it. South-south cooperation, described as a “decentralized cooperation,” is to be open to cooperation with countries outside the South in what is termed “triangular cooperation.”6 What may be most significant here is the suggestion that the South must invent itself and acquire visibility on the global scene in an assertion of its autonomy—partial autonomy, at least. On the one hand, it has some kinship with the idea of the third world in its self-assertion. On the other hand, it is also the product of a quite different historical situation. The disappearance of the second world, the world of socialism, has left behind a world that is nearly unipolar in military might but otherwise quite chaotic in its economic, political, and cultural alignments. As it invents itself, the South must also invent economic alternatives to neoliberalism if it is to achieve autonomous

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development within the confines of global capitalism, which is about the only option available on the horizon. Can this aim be achieved? Such an achievement may be dependent, ironically, on the return to some of the economic and political alignments of an earlier, “three worlds” spatialization of the world. At the same time, it must account for the entanglements of the South and the North in one another, and the reconfiguration of spatial relationships through the globalization and the transnationalization of capital, and the institutions it calls forth. The philosophy of self-help is splendid, but it requires for its practice autonomy of nation and region, which in turn calls for a global institutional arrangement that respects and supports such autonomy, rather than subject it to the subversions of supposedly universal neoliberal market principles. It is also important to remember that the obstacles to autonomous development do not lie outside alone, as there are groups and classes in most societies of the South that are already parts of a transnational economy and its social formations and that have a stake in its perpetuation and expansion. Nevertheless, there are certain affinities between these societies in terms of mutual recognition of historical experiences with colonialism and neocolonialism, a history not yet ended of economic, political, and social (racial) marginalization and, in some cases, memories of cooperation or common cause in struggles for global justice in past liberation movements. The UNDP Global South project has coincided with renewed activity in which societies of the South have taken the initiative, from the World Social Forum to the formation in 2003 of the Group of 20, representing powerful southern societies such as China, India, and Brazil. The South, in cooperation with radical forces in the North, has played an increasingly visible part in global political activity, from protests against the World Trade Organization to protests against the war in Iraq.7 Not to be too romantic about third world affinities, we must acknowledge that issues of global power are also at stake. There are societies poised between the North and the South by virtue of developmental success—China and

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India being prime examples—that can play a leadership role in the South and also benefit from the role in the enhancement of their own power on the global scene. For the same reason, some evidence already from the People’s Republic of China to India, Brazil, and South Africa indicates that societies that might qualify for leadership in the global South are already engaged in a competition for power among themselves (as had been the case earlier with Bandung), undermining the promise of unity as well as inviting manipulation from the outside—most importantly, by the United States, which has been openly hostile to any signs of southern resurgence.8 A further predicament is that these societies themselves are under pressure from neoliberal globalization, of which they are beneficiaries, and they suffer some of the consequences of uneven development that is a structural characteristic of global capitalism—unequal developmentally on a territorial basis, as well as severe social inequalities on the emergence. Internal as well as external forces are pushing these societies in the direction of greater globalization and assimilation into a neoliberal capitalism, and forces favor autonomous development with greater equity and social justice (and less environmental degradation, I might add). Which of these forces may prevail is an open question, dependent to a large extent on the international environment as well. I would like to illustrate some of the possibilities and predicaments of a southern alliance in the perspective of the People’s Republic of China, an increasingly important player in world economy and politics. Over the past two years, there has been frequent reference to a “Beijing consensus” as an alternative to the neoliberal Washington consensus. The idea of a Beijing Consensus was floated by a former Time magazine foreign news editor and present Goldman and Sachs employee in Beijing, Joshua Cooper Ramo. It is quite simple in its basics in arguing for a Chinese model of development that has registered significant success in the global economy, without sacrificing national autonomy and goals.9 Where the Chinese model of development is concerned, Ramo’s discussion

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of the Beijing Consensus is naively ideological and full of contradictions. Nevertheless, while critical of Ramo’s particular approach and assertions, intellectuals in the PRC, including some in the Communist Party, have found in the notion of a Beijing Consensus something that resonates with their own dispositions.10 And the stress on the possibility of autonomous development within the framework of global capitalism has caught the attention of many in the third world. According to Ramo: China is marking a path for other nations around the world who are trying to figure out not simply how to develop their countries, but also how to fit into the international order in a way that allows them to be truly independent, to protect their way of life and political choices in a world with a single massively powerful centre of gravity. I call this new centre and physics of power and development the Beijing Consensus. This new “physics of power,” according to Ramo, may be encapsulated in three “theorems.” The first theorem “repositions the value of innovation”: “Rather than the old-physics’ argument that developing countries must start development with trailing-edge technology . . . [i]t insists . . . on the necessity of bleeding-edge innovation to create change that moves faster than the problems change creates.” The second theorem demands a development model where sustainability and equality become first considerations, not luxuries.” Finally, “Beijing consensus contains a theory of self-determination, one that stresses using leverage to move big, hegemonic powers that may be tempted to tread on your toes.”11 In Ramo’s conception, these three “theorems” combine to form a single developmental structure, and rightly so. The problem is what is left out of the analysis and the author’s failure to confront the contradictions, which he recognizes but only in passing, as if they had no bearing on the procedures of economic development that account for China’s developmental success. This is especially evident in his discussion of “theorems” 1 and 2. Despite the problematic

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nature, according to many analyses, of whether the Chinese economy has reached the level of self-sustaining innovativeness, Ramo attributes Chinese development almost wholly to an unwavering commitment to “innovation,” which in his wording is rendered into something of a utopia and, like most utopias, conveys its message more through rhetorical extravagance than substantial demonstration. He writes: Innovation is a way to increase the density of Chinese society. It binds people together via webs of connections, it cuts time-to-reform, it makes communication easier and faster. And the better the innovation, the greater the density—and the faster the growth. You can see this at work all over China. You can also see it not working, in parts of the culture that have been hollowed-out cylinder-like by lack of trust, corruption or other problems. This leads to the first Beijing Consensus Theorem: the only cure for the problems of change is more change and more innovation: innovation density saves.12 This utopianization of innovation is what I had in mind earlier when I referred to the Silicon Valley model of development. Indeed, the explicit references to Moore’s and Metcalfe’s laws (Gordon Moore and Robert Metcalfe, two important figures in the development of the Internet) suggest that Ramo conceives of contemporary life in general in terms of “rules” established by the workings of cyberspace. There is no reference in his analysis to the part played by transnational corporate investments, to the cheap supply of mostly obedient labor that is responsible for bringing in the investments in the first place, and to the allures of a China market that, even with a middle class that encompasses less than a quarter of the population, promises more consumers than France, Germany, and Japan combined. There is, however, another problem with Ramo’s understanding of innovation, which renders innovation into a fetish with a life of its own, free from contamination by social and political goals, as he would have it. As Chinese society faces the challenges of political and economic transformation,

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there is a great deal of innovativeness at work in the search for new forms of governance. Such search is anything but goal-free; on the contrary, the search for “political form” is subject to all the ideological uncertainties and tensions of a society seeking a way out of its revolutionary past without completely abandoning the historical legacies of revolutionary socialism. In this particular sense, the present is continuous with the past. It is not too much of an exaggeration to observe that China has been something of an experimental society for the past century, and the experiment continues in the present. The Silicon Valley model of development fetishizes one mode of innovation and tacitly privileges the social forces that favor that particular mode, while erasing alternative, and politically significant, innovations that point to a search for different configurations of social forces.13 Even more peculiar is the absence of attention in Ramo’s work to those who are left out of or marginalized by the new developmental policies. While China has been developing at breakneck speed over the past ten to fifteen years, not all Chinese have shared equally in the development. Ramo observes that the development has brought almost a quarter of the population above the one-dollar line of abject poverty, but he fails to note that with the marketization of society, both urban-rural and class differences have sharpened, and 75 percent of the population (mostly in the rural areas) has hardly any access to basic needs such as medical care and education. As one source has observed recently, “though China has hundreds of millions of people living on a dollar a day, it is creating middle class affluence on a scale and at a speed unprecedented in human history.”14 Ramo underlines his reference to “not working,” as if to indicate emphatically that he recognizes the problems created by so-called innovations—and he does, although what he says in one part of his essay seems to be forgotten as he moves to another. He writes, for example, that China’s market dynamism has brought all sorts of problems. On the macro level these problems include pollution, social instability, corruption, mistrust of

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the government and unemployment. On a personal level, all but the youngest Chinese find themselves at least somewhat disoriented by the rapid change in their lives. . . . In the last 25 years, China’s economy has moved from one of the most equitable in the world in terms of income distribution to one of the most inequitable.15 It is remarkable that the author, having recognized such problems, can then turn around and skirt them in his diagnosis of a Chinese model available for emulation by others. The promise of innovation to resolve the problems created by innovation obviates the need to recognize these problems not as contingencies but as the structural products of a neoliberal export-oriented economy, which calls into question the validity of his second “theorem”—that “sustainability and equality become first considerations, not luxuries.” It is interesting that while integrated development (at least in appearance) has been an important source of appeal of the Chinese model among third world leaders, such development is presently more wishful thinking than reality. Although China may be unlike many other third world countries, where development is concentrated in one or two metropolitan centers, the growing gap in development between coastal cities and the vast hinterland has been of immense concern to the government. Ramo himself writes that “where the front page of People’s Daily used to be characterized by images of top leaders opening airports in coastal cities, the paper is now more likely to carry a report of a top leader urging reform in some poor rural area.”16 He recognizes the costs in the pollution of economic development and “the social risks of uneven development,”17 which is evident in the pervasive instability across the country against class exploitation, corruption, and pollution. But he offers little analysis of the structural sources of these difficulties, which are swept aside by a faith in the ability of an abstract notion of “innovation” to resolve them. The Chinese model in this perspective appears not as an alternative to the neoliberal Washington consensus but more

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as a method of moderating its spatial, social, and political consequences within the parameters set by that consensus. It remains to be seen whether it may succeed in doing so and check the slide of the social structure toward the sharpening class divisions of advanced capitalist societies, which are now in the process of globalization as well. This may also be the key to the realization of the third goal or, as Ramo would have it, “theorem”—the quest for self-determination, which is the other important source of appeal of the so-called Chinese model in the third world. I think it is here that the Beijing consensus offers a genuine alternative to the Washington consensus, not in the economy or social policy but in reshaping the global political environment, which is the context for economic development. The People’s Republic of China has opened up to the globe economically, but, much to the chagrin of groups ranging from Reaganite conservatives to labor leaders in the United States, it has managed nevertheless to preserve its political autonomy and sovereignty. A recent study by a Chinese American scholar, Colleen Lye, observes perceptively that over the century and a half of relations between the United States and China, it has been an American dream to convert China to capitalism, which turns into a nightmare the moment the conversion begins to show signs of success.18 This, of course, has been part of a larger global project. On the one hand, globalization itself has presupposed the conversion of the globe into capitalism under the aegis of the advanced capitalist societies, especially North America and Europe. On the other hand, globalization has derived much of its substantial reality from the sprouting of localized capitalisms that unifies the globe but that also divides it in new ways. Contrary to ideologues of globalization, the craving for autonomy and self-determination has not disappeared from the globe. On the contrary, it may have acquired renewed force from the proliferation of global institutions and communication, complicating notions of autonomy and self-determination by adding new demands to already existing ones. Ramo makes a good argument that in the case of the People’s Republic of China, the search for autonomy and

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self-determination has taken the form not only of maintaining controls over the economy internally, but also of taking a multilateralist approach to global relationships that contrasts sharply with the increasingly unilateralist direction that U.S. policy has taken over the past two decades. The most important aspect of the Beijing consensus may be an approach to global relationships that seeks a new global order in multilateral global relationships that is founded on economic relationships but that also recognizes political and cultural difference, that acknowledges differences in regional and national practices within a common global framework, and that is founded not on homogenizing universalisms that inevitably lead to hegemonism but on a simulatenous recognition of commonality and difference. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms beginning in the 1980s gave priority to economic intercourse over political correctness. In the pursuit of these goals over the past two decades, the PRC has emerged as a counter to U.S. economic and political hegemony without directly challenging the United States. What is also remarkable is the willingness of transnational corporations, including U.S. transnational corporations, to go along with Beijing’s policies internally and externally. Ramo’s Beijing Consensus may be read also as a consensus among global corporate capital to go along with Beijing. World systems analysts from Andre Gundar Frank to Giovanni Arrighi and Immanuel Wallerstein have argued for some time now that the center of the capitalist world system is in the process of relocating to East Asia. The realignments around Beijing may be further evidence of such a shift, so long as we keep in mind the spatial reconfiguration of East Asia due to the phenomena I referred to earlier—most important, the new spatial and social divisions that make it difficult to speak of East Asia in terms of national surfaces or socially and culturally homogenized national spaces. East Asia, in other words, is being reconfigured as it plays an increasingly central part in the global economy. The PRC seeks to integrate itself not only with East Asia but also with Southeast Asia and the Pacific. There has been talk also of China, India, and Brazil forming a new third world triangle to counter the economic

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and political domination of Europe and North America.19 These new networks are not just economic and political but also geopolitical, pointing to a new kind of competition over global resources. Beijing may be on the emergence as a new center of gravity of the third world—or the global South—a Bandung for the age of global capitalism when the issue is no longer overcoming colonialism or finding a “third way of development” but, rather, including the voices of the formerly colonized and marginalized in a world that already has been shaped by a colonial modernity to which there is no alternative in sight—the world of global modernity. Whatever the name we give it, a global consensus against a hegemonic empire has far-reaching implications not only for international relations but also for the solution of problems internal to societies.20 The global domination of neoliberalism rules out the formation of autonomous social and political spaces that are necessary for the pursuit of social justice and welfare within nations. Where it is not possible to establish any kind of a clear demarcation between the inside and the outside, an alternative global order premised on the recognition of local particularities and needs may be the indispensable condition of such a pursuit. It is no longer possible to entertain hopes for or confidence in “delinking” from global capitalism as a means to this end. The search for answers to global problems must itself be global in its vision. In the particular case of the People’s Republic of China, “the opening and reform” (gaige kaifang) of the past three decades is irreversible. There is every indication that the PRC may well end up in a complete assimilation to global capitalism. But there are other possibilities as well, and their realization may well depend on the ability of the postsocialist regime to pursue a reconfiguration of global forces to counter the universalistic pretensions of neoliberalism. A century of revolutionary socialist search for autonomy, bolstered by recent economic success, qualifies the PRC eminently to provide leadership in the formation of an alternative global order. Over the past two years, the notion of a Beijing consensus seems to have acquired a life of its own. The search for an

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alternative to neoliberal globalization no doubt has played an important part in provoking interest in the implications of the term, especially in the third world, but in the formerly second world as well. Dissatisfaction with the “shock therapies” of neoliberalism came to a head with the Asian crisis of 1997. Successful economic development of the PRC has made it the envy of the developing world; writings from abroad frequently focus on the ability of the Beijing government to pursue its own agenda as a major reason for that success. The Brazilian leader Lula DaSilva expressed his admiration for the PRC in its ability to pursue an integrated development and to globalize without giving up its autonomy and sovereignty.21 Beijing in turn has intensified its efforts to engage in multilateral agreements that have contributed to its positive image around the world and, with it, the prestige of a notion of a Beijing consensus. The appeal of the Beijing consensus no doubt has also benefited from the decline of U.S. prestige globally with the unscrupulous use of American power under the current administration, intensifying concerns with the need to find an alternative model of global development to that represented by the United States. Whether or not a “Chinese model” can serve such a purpose is another question. Localization is an important aspect of China’s participation in the global economy (as it was of the Chinese Revolution earlier). In a global perspective, localization, needless to say, points to the importance of tailoring development policies to local needs, which of necessity are different from one location to another. In this sense, I think it is important to draw a distinction between a Beijing consensus, which points to an alternative global organization, and a Chinese model, which answers to the particular needs of Chinese society. The distinction is similar to that of an earlier day, when “Chinese model” referred to a particularly Chinese path of socialist development, without repudiating the global necessity of socialism. It is all the more important, given the urgency of these questions, to keep a perspective on the contemporary situation. The undeniable success of the development of the Chinese economy should not blind us to the problems

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created by the very same success, which, ironically, are in those very areas that attract the admiration of outsiders. The PRC economy is by no means integrated but suffers from severe uneven development in both spatial and social terms. Levels of pollution have reached such severity that they have become an additional cause of public suffering and disturbance. Although a remarkable growth of wealth has indeed occurred in certain sectors of the population, and an explosion in the size of the urban middle class has ensued, the majority of the population has experienced a decline in basic welfare. For all its ability to keep neoliberalism at arm’s length, the successes of the Chinese economy are attributable in the end to successful manipulation of a neoliberal global economy, as are the problems it has produced. The Wal-Martization of society would seem to be gathering in strength, there is every evidence of the spread of a consumer culture not only in major urban areas but in the countryside as well, and the PRC in terms of its internally structuring of power increasingly approximates global class divisions, with its own fraction of a transnational capitalist class.22 PRC enterprises abroad do not seem to be any more attentive to local needs and welfare than their explicitly capitalist counterparts.23 Not good signs! It is equally important to remember that those aspects of development that outside observers find attractive are not products of this neoliberal economy but legacies of the socialist revolution. Integration of the national economy, autonomous development, political and economic sovereignty, and social equality are all themes that are as old as the history of the Chinese Revolution, which in the end found expression in the socialist revolution. One author has observed recently that a crucial element in the success of the post-1978 reforms was that they built “on the achievements of the earlier regime.”24 Post1978 developments are used these days to discredit the policies of revolutionary socialism of an earlier period. It is also possible to state not only that those policies laid the economic, social, and political foundation for China’s autonomous path into globalization but also that it is the

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same foundation, now in the process of crumbling, that secured the minimum social welfare that enabled participation in a neoliberal global economy. How these developments will end up remains to be seen, but it seems at this crucial juncture that some reconsideration of the now-abandoned socialist policies of social welfare and integration is very much in order. Socialism is, after all, attention to public policy against the vagaries of the market or of innovation, and the ends of development (in contrast to development as an end) are very much a matter of public policy. The global South has its roots in earlier third world visions of liberation, and those visions still have an important role to play in restoring human ends to development, so long as they do not become blinders against recognition of a changed world situation. Notes 1. See “Third World,” in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Third-world. 2. Independent Commission on International Development Issues (i.e., the Brandt Commission), North-South: A Programme for Survival (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980) and Common Crisis North-South: Cooperation for World Recovery (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983). 3. United Nations Development Programme, “Forging a Global South,” United Nations Day for South-South Cooperation, 19 December 2004. The Global South program was a reconceptualization and reorganization of the UN Conference on Technical Cooperation that went back to 1948 in its origins. 4. “Third World,” in Wikipedia. 5. The classic discussion of the various implications of the third world idea is to be found in Carl Pletsch, “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (October 1981): 565–90. More recent discussions, with reference to the present, may be found in the special issue of Third World Quarterly, “After the Third World?” ed. Mark T. Berger, 25, no. 1 (2004). 6. UNDP, “Forging a Global South,” 4. 7. See Iris Marion Young, “Europe and the Global South: Towards a Circle of Equality,” Open Democracy, 20 August 2003. www.openDemocracy.net.

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8. See Ranjit Devraj, “India, Brazil, South Africa Ready to Lead Global South,” Interpress Service, 19 August 2005, referring to the “New Delhi Agenda for Cooperation,” http://ipsnews.net/interna. asp?idnews’22714. Brazilian claims to leadership are discussed in Andreas Hernandez, “A Global Left Turn?” Countercurrents, http://www.countercurrents.org/glo-hernandez-150703.htm. For U.S. efforts to undermine third world efforts, see Ferial Haffajee, “Monterrey Meet: Washington Consensus in Sombrero,” http:// www.turnside.org.sg/title/twe277f.htm. The 2002 Monterrey, Mexico, meeting was organized by the Organization of Southern States, the G-77, to achieve some autonomy over the processes of development. The United States managed, in the words of the report, to eviscerate most of the decisions before the meeting was over. 9. Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Beijing Consensus: Notes on the New Physics of Chinese Power (London: Foreign Policy Centre, 2004). 10. Huang Ping and Cui Zhiyuan, eds., Zhongguo yu quanqiuhua: Huashengdun gongshi haishi Beijing Gongshi (China and Globalization: The Washington Consensus, the Beijing Consensus, or What?) (Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2005). 11. Ramo, The Beijing Consensus, 3–4. 12. Ramo, The Beijing Consensus, 5; emphasis in the original. 13. For a discussion of earlier experiments, see Arif Dirlik, “Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Mao Zedong’s Marxism,” in Arif Dirlik, Marxism in the Chinese Revolution (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 105–24. For a discussion of the search for new forms of governance, see Yu Keping et al., Zhongguo gongmin shehuide xingqi yu zhilide bianqian (The Emergence of Civil Society and Its Significance to Governance in Reform China) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chuban she, 2002). 14. “China’s Middle Class: Larger Than France, Nearly the Size of Germany” (from Dave Barboza, “The Great Malls of China,” New York Times, 25 May 2005), http://www.dinocrat.com/ archives/2005/05/25/chinas-middle-class-larger -thanfrance/. 15. Ramo, The Beijing Consensus, 24. 16. Ramo, The Beijing Consensus, 21. 17. Ramo, The Beijing Consensus, 22. 18. Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). 19. Jerry Harris, “Emerging Third World Powers: China, India and Brazil,” Race and Class 46, no. 3 (2005): 7–27.

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20. For another suggestion in the search for alternatives to United States–led neoliberalism, see David Held, Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2004). The PRC is likely to be crucial to any such search because it is uniquely situated between the second and third worlds of the former “three worlds,” as analyzed by Mao Zedong in the 1970s, or the European North and the South of the present. 21. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, “O Gigante e a Globalizacao” (Gigantic and Globalized), La Insignia, 22 May 2001, http:// lainsignia.org/2001/mayo/econ_016.htm. I am grateful to my student Ana Candela for her help with translating this article. 22. For further discussion of these tendencies, see Arif Dirlik, “Markets, Culture, Power: The Making of a ‘Second Cultural Revolution’ in China,” in Dirlik, Marxism in the Chinese Revolution, 285–318. 23. PRC companies freely engage in the same practices as other global enterprises, regardless of origin. See, for example, Larry Rohter, “Brazil Weighs Costs and Benefits of Alliance with China,” New York Times, 20 November 2005, www.nytimes. com/2005/11/20/international/americas/20amazon.html. See also Peter S. Goodman, “China Ventures Southward: In Search of Cheaper Labor, Firms Invest in Vietnam,” Washington Post Foreign Service, 6 December 2005, http://www.washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/05/AR2005120502098 pf.html. The practices of harsh exploitation of labor, obliviousness to ecological destruction, and an overall retreat from the provision of welfare services (including health and education) are prevalent within the PRC itself. For a recent report, see Andreas Lorenz and Wieland Wagner, “Cheap, Cheerful and Chinese?” Spiegel Online, 17 November 2005, http://www.spiegel.de/international/ spiegel/0,1518,385446,00.html. See also Arif Dirlik, “Globalization, Spatial Reconfigurations, and Global Health: Perspectives from the People’s Republic of China,” boundary 2 33, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 99–122. 24. Kavaljit Singh, “From Beijing Consensus to Washington Consensus: China’s Journey to Liberalization and Globalization,” Asia-Pacific Research Network, http://www.aprnet.org/ journals/6/v7–3.htm. See also the essays in Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner, eds., Marxism and the Chinese Experience: Issues in Contemporary Chinese Socialism (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1989).

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Conclusion Is There a Future after Globalization? Is global modernity a prison from which there is no escape, either to a world configured by a mutual commitment to global health and welfare, or to a future that has overcome cultural conflicts bred by the proliferation of modernities? Contrary to claims that render globalization into an irresistible force of nature, globalization is as much a discursive as a descriptive concept, and how we read it has much to do with our politics. The most obvious reading of it is in terms of the existing status quo, where it appears in its globally integrative guise: as the spatial extension of the promise of a capitalist modernity. At the other extreme, globalization appears as the consequence not of the integrative but of the divisive consequences of modernity, where modernity simply has served to strengthen or reify different cultural traditions that are now pitted against one another in an uncompromising struggle. It is also possible to read globalization in a third way: as the terrain for conflicting discourses, which both unites and divides in unprecedented ways. It is this last sense that has guided the reading of globalization in this book. I set out to bring some clarity to problems in the deployment of globalization as paradigm that emerge when we place its explanations and promises against the evidence of the contemporary world. The world simply lends no evidence to claims that it is in the process of becoming one through forces of globalization, 153

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that nation-states are on their way out, or that cultural differences are fading before the homogenizing powers of markets and consumption. At the same time, neither can the promises of globalization be dismissed out of hand, as global institutions may be the only hope for keeping in check forces of fragmentation, combined with frightful militarization, the slide to parochial fundamentalism, and social divisions that are increasingly transnational in dimension, not to speak of all the social and ecological problems associated with the globalization of uncontrolled capitalism. This contradiction is responsible, I think, for the turn discussions of globalization have taken since the subsiding of the euphoria of the 1990s. In most recent discussions, many cited in this book, globalization appears now not as a process of unlimited global growth guaranteed by a neoliberal release of the forces of markets and democracy, but much more soberly as a problem as well. Even for those who retain their faith in globalization, globalism seems to appear presently as a new regulatory principle that will have to retain many of the features of earlier modes of regulation in order to prevent the slide into chaos. What renders globalization as paradigm problematic is that it refers, depending on political perspective, to a process either of unlimited growth and unity or of inevitable disaster. It preserves, in its core assumptions, the evolutionist (or devolutionist) thinking that long has characterized thinking on modernity and modernization. I have suggested that globalization (or globality) may represent not some linear evolution but a conjunctural phenomenon, and to understand the contradictory phenomena it presents, we need to account for what may be particular about the present conjuncture—which I have described as the globalization of modernity, or global modernity. From a temporal perspective, global modernity is at once an end and a beginning—an end, because it is indeed the culmination of a historical process in which Euro-American expansion over the globe (not just materially but also culturally) played a crucial part. But it is also an end in another sense. The very appropriation of the globe for Euro-America has brought

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into modernity the differences that mark the globe, which are currently as much a part of the global scene as unity. If in its globalization capitalist modernity provides the commonality that enables us to speak of a global modernity, it nevertheless has launched societies on different trajectories that find expression in postmodernity or different claims on history. In this sense, globalization is also a new beginning, if only, once again, into uncharted waters. We have all been touched by modernity, but we have been touched differently, and that point also is important for considering what postmodernity may bring. One thing is for sure. As history ceases to provide a compass for the future, human agency in creating the future acquires greater weight than ever before. And our visions of good society have to confront a multiplicity of competing visions that need to be accounted for and not simply relegated to the past or to oblivion. Isn’t that what Marx had in mind, if only rhetorically, when he observed that with socialism, human prehistory would mark the turn to history? What is history but the product of choices we make and the uncertain outcomes that they produce. Globalization, to paraphrase Stuart Hall, is about histories without guarantees. And that may be a new beginning of history as humankind wakes up, after a century of slumber, from a century of the EuroAmerican dream, perhaps better off for having dreamed it than not to have dreamed at all—or maybe worse? That, too, depends on how we read the dream. Globalization is the most recent guise in which the dream appears. It may not be too surprising that, depending on perspective, the dream appears also as a nightmare, as it always has, to some extent, but now with greater frightfulness than ever. This, of course, is the best reason for not being seduced by the teleological promises of globalization but instead viewing it for what it has produced: our present, which, as I remarked in the introduction, is also our future, as we have little reason to see through available evidence what might lie ahead. The United States, the major exporter of globalization as paradigm, does its best, through the revival of imperialism-as-plunder-and-bullying, to undercut any promise that globalization as vision

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might hold forth. Capital is as destructive as it has always been. The main difference between the present and the past may be the marginalization of the majority of the world’s population, which also threatens the minority that benefits from globalization. Having drawn people all around the world into its orbit, capitalist modernity now condemns the majority to abjection, literally with nowhere and nothing to go back to. This may be a period, among other “ends,” of the “end of utopia,” as Russell Jacoby recently has written.1 But it is not, therefore, the end. The French historian of China, Jean Chesneaux, wrote two decades ago of many “pasts and futures,” subtitled significantly, “what is history for?”2 There is every reason to feel that perhaps we face too many pasts and too many futures. Depending on political perspective, that may appear as either “the rubble” left on the ruins of utopias or a liberating promise that allows the once voiceless to regain their voices. One of the fascinating issues raised by the globalization paradigm is the status of history in human life: how, having invented the past, human beings remain yoked themselves to the very pasts of their creation. Globalization, in pitting different pasts against one another and revealing the impossibility of predicting any plausible future from such a proliferation of pasts, may put to rest the fetishization of history, which in the end has coincided for the most part with the fetishization of imagined national pasts. This critical possibility has been overwhelmed, however, by the fetishization of globalization itself. The earlier resignation to a naturalized history (“you can’t stop progress”) has been replaced in some quarters by a naturalized history reconceived as globalization (“you can’t stop globalization”). The clash between these two conflicting fetishizations of history goes a long ways toward explaining contemporary global conflicts. If globalization produces forces that erode the nation, it comes to serve itself as the new terrain on which national competition for power is played out. Deadly as these conflicts have been, they also take their toll in the production of a politics of fear that threatens global degeneration into fascism in one guise or another, to

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which globalization is offered as a cure by its more liberal and radical proponents. Few today would question that global problems do indeed require global solutions. This includes the cultivation of a global or planetary consciousness. It is necessary, however, to distinguish clearly global solutions that are imposed from above, which in its very authoritarianism easily slips back into a reproduction of habits of colonialism, be it of nation or class, and global solutions that are global because they are produced by activity from below. Social activity assumes a global coloring, as if of necessity, as it confronts similar problems regardless of location. The victims of colonialism and development obviously are much more vulnerable in the face of these problems than those who have been their beneficiaries. But the problems are there nevertheless. There seems to be an increasingly more visible parallelism between marginalization and class bifurcation at the global level as at the level of the nation. How to bring this to the awareness of people globally is a major challenge. This is work that is being addressed worldwide with intensifying urgency in the proliferating social movements in which many cooperate at the level of nations, regions, and even the globe. These social movements are driven by a new awareness of acting at these levels without forgetting the places from which they hail, an awareness that there cannot be any convincing global solutions that are not also local solutions, and that globality itself makes sense only in its recognition of difference. The awareness is the other side—the hopeful side—of global modernity. The concept of global modernity is intended, on the one hand, to overcome the teleology of globalization and, on the other hand, to point to the possibility of another future that may yet emerge from its contradictions. Unlike postmodernity that arises out of a first world perspective on the contemporary crisis of modernity and its counterpart, postcoloniality, which is informed by the experience of colonialism, global modernity also seeks to take a global perspective on modernity, its present, and its future(s). Globalization suggests a continuity with the past into the future even where it seeks to repudiate its imperialist

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implications or to negate the legacies of modernity. Global modernity has been viewed here as an end-state of globalization, with nowhere to go except colonize the future with more of the present. At the same time, it leaves open the possibility not just of alternative modernities but also of alternatives to modernity that may yet emerge from the contradictions of global modernity. Evidence of these alternatives exist in the many efforts globally to create spaces to withstand the ravages of globalization for many of the globe’s inhabitants, spaces that may also be harbingers of different modes of existence than that which has been the hallmark of modernity. This may seem to be little more than wishful thinking at the present moment of global crisis. There is little evidence presently that even those societies claiming radical difference from neoliberal capitalism point to a radically different future, as in their developmentalism they have already internalized the premises of capitalist development. Such is the case presently with the People’s Republic of China. Other candidates for leadership in the Global South—from Brazil to South Africa to Venezuela—are forced more often than not to achieve some accommodation with global capitalism. Even Islamic societies, with which the United States is at war, are integrated into the same global economic structure. The structure finds articulation in the formation of a new class and new organizational forms that share common interests despite seemingly strong ideological and cultural differences. On the other hand, these very structural contradictions of unity and dispersal, homogenization and heterogenization, and past legacies and present realities not only serve as reminders of the legacies of a colonial past but also open up spaces where efforts are possible to turn globalization to advantage to the benefit of local communities in their everyday struggle for survival and justice. Socialism is not quite dead; it is now pursued not through centralized parties or states but in social movements across the globe, responding to different needs in different places, without losing sight of the universalist values that inform it. If states of the Global South that claim alternative modernities are to pursue such alternatives seriously, they need to respond

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to the needs of such democratic movements for survival and justice—as the movements must keep up the pressure both on states and on the global scene. Global modernity as a concept suggests also that these movements should be open to finding ideological and political nourishment and inspiration in diverse historical legacies in imagining the future differently—before a very crisis of survival forces tragic consequences upon populations globally, with little human say on its consequences. In opening up these spaces in its very contradictions, global modernity also reaffirms the importance of political agency against the teleological demands of globalization, a globalization, to boot, that is already behind us. Only if this regressiveness of contemporary notions of globalization is recognized, I believe, will it be possible to think the future differently. Global modernity as concept is intended ultimately to provoke such a recognition. Notes 1. Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 2. Jean Chesneaux, Pasts and Futures: Or What Is History For? trans. Schofield Coryell (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978).

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◊ Keywords from the Text colonial modernity: Refers to the idea that colonialism has been integral to modernity and vice versa. It is, therefore, integral also to global modernity even though the latter appears as a repudiation of colonialism (see below) and the reconfiguration of the world it produced. While repudiating Eurocentric norms of development, global modernity represents the internalization of capitalist developmentalism as the fate of humankind. In this sense, it may be described by a term coined by the writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, “colonization of the mind,” that has outlasted formal political decolonization. Global modernity may be viewed in this perspective as the fulfillment of colonial modernity, which is in the process of being naturalized and normalized through the agency of globalization. colonialism: Conventionally, if anachronistically, colonialism is used to denote the conquest and rule of one nation by another. I say anachronistically because many of the nations of the world were products themselves of colonialism, and consciousness of colonialism was very much entangled in inventing these nations; colonialism becomes colonialism subsequent to the emergence of a national consciousness, itself a product of colonialism. This usage also disguises that nation-building itself is a variant of colonial activity in erasing local differences and structures. Colonialism appears at a number of spatial and organizational levels, ranging from the political to the economic, social, and cultural. A full-blown colonialism would encompass all levels. Partial or incomplete colonialism has been described as neocolonialism 161

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(see below) or cultural imperialism, depending on the realm of life to which it refers. Domination of one ethnic group by another within the same society has been referred to as “internal colonialism.” The term has also been used in a spatial sense, as in “colonization of the future.” One usage that is semantically vacuous but has served an important function as a political slogan is “semicolonial,” referring to situations of incomplete colonialism that nevertheless were marked by unequal power relations. Postcolonial criticism (see below), which in the 1960s carried a strong connotation of anticolonialism, in recent decades has questioned the completeness of colonialism and the binarism of “colonizer-colonized” on the grounds that the colonial encounter was very fuzzy in the boundaries it produced, especially cultural boundaries. Colonialism in the sense of one species invading the space of another may be as old as the history of humanity and may even predate it. Modern colonialism is distinguished by its association with capital and the nation-state. global modernity: The subject of this study, global modernity refers to a condition when modernity has gone global. With the end of formal colonialism and the collapse of the socialist alternative, capitalist modernity has drawn all societies into its orbit. This is the process that has given rise to the concept of globalization (see below). Globalization has rendered meaningless the tripartite division of the world (three worlds, see below) and even the North-South conceptualization, although uneven development still marks the global spaces encompassed by those terms, keeping them alive in political vocabulary. Global modernity is a period term that is intended to distinguish the present situation from an earlier period of Eurocentric modernity. It refers as much to a consciousness of the world as to the world itself. The identification of modernity with Europe and North America in an earlier period has given way from the late twentieth century to competing claims on modernity, giving rise to concepts such as alternative and multiple modernities Global modernity shares a common conceptual field with postmodernity and postcoloniality, which appear in this

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perspective as so many expressions of the reconfiguration of global relationships. The modern/traditional dichotomy, intended to distinguish modern regions and nations from pre- or nonmodern ones, has not faded away entirely. But it is now complicated by the recognition of differences internal to regions and nations and that distinguish groups of people that cut across national, regional, or civilizational boundaries. Needless to say, the globalization of modernity has been accompanied by its fragmentation into reinvented cultural spaces, rendering tradition itself into a formative moment of modernity. Global modernity reveals modernity in its origins as a product of complex interactions among societies that achieved seminal expression in one corner of Eurasia. The universalization of European modernity through the agencies of capitalism and colonialism may seem undesirable from a contemporary perspective for its perpetuation of Eurocentrism. This perspective is crucial, nevertheless, to a critical appreciation of modernity and the dynamic role played in its universalization by capitalism. globalization: The term globalization acquired currency in political and scholarly language in the 1990s, in conjunction with revolutionary transformations in communication and transportation that produced a “new international division of labor.” It has replaced the earlier concept of modernization, with which it shares a teleology: global transformation through the universalization of the norms and practices of advanced capitalist society. On the other hand, it also differs from modernization both in foregrounding the spatial over the temporal and in its challenges to the nation-state as the basic organizational unit of society. The concept has given rise to problems to which there are no ready answers: whether globalization is a new form of global cooperation or imperialism in a new disguise, whether it is leading to cultural homogenization or heterogenization, and whether or not it signals the end of the nation-state. Optimistic ideologues see in globalization the deliverance of humanity from the many problems it faces, while opponents and critics view it as the very source of these problems. The problem, we might insist, is that these tendencies coexist, and the

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contradictions show no sign of disappearing. In other words, globalization is something that has already happened, and it has created both new unities and new fragmentations. This is a world that is better captured, it is suggested here, as the world of global modernity. Global modernity need not be a prison from which there is no escape, however, because its contradictions provide spaces and opportunities for thinking the world differently. modernity: The concept of modernity has been subjected to so many qualifications and contestations that the historical existence of modernity itself has been called into question. It refers here most importantly to the emergence of an attitude, beginning in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of differentiating/distancing the present from the past and celebrating the difference. The difference itself derived its persuasiveness from improvements in material life and the intensification of human control over nature through the agency of capitalism and the scientific and technological revolutions to which it gave substance. Capitalism and modernity, therefore, are hardly distinguishable in their origins, although modernity would subsequently take a number of different directions, most notably in the socialist challenge and, more recently, in culturalist claims on modernity. Modernity is marked by a commitment to ceaseless change and the production of difference, so every moment of modernity is immanently postmodern as well. It is ironic, however, that capitalist modernity, for all its commitment to difference, also has worked as a force of global homogenization and the universalization of the “commodityform” in all aspects of social existence. neocolonialism: Refers to colonial control primarily through economic means, but with the complicity of native elites. During colonial rule and in the immediate postcolonial period this elite served as a “comprador bourgeoisie,” a native bourgeoisie that was dependent on foreign capital where it did not actually serve the latter. Over the past half century, these elites have been transformed into integral participants in a globalizing capitalist economy, contributing to the formation of a “transnational capitalist class” (see below). The term neocolonialism still

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retains its usefulness even though it has lost its significance as transnationalism (see below) replaces nationalism in the analysis of economic relations. postcoloniality: Refers to a condition that comes after the colonial but is also structured by it. It may be viewed fruitfully as a third world parallel to postmodernity in the first world (see three worlds), especially as it has been conditioned by the language of the latter, and it expresses the worldviews of third-world intellectuals relocated in the first world. The emergence of a postcolonial consciousness accompanied the struggles for liberation from colonialism. Initially linked to questions of political economy and the search for a thirdworld alternative to capitalism and actually existing socialism, it has undergone a deradicalization with the so-called cultural turn of the 1980s. Since then, postcolonial criticism has turned to questions of cultural identity within a context of global capitalism, stressing the ambiguities of the colonial encounter. The colonial encounter itself has been marginalized in the rendering of postcolonial criticism into a “method” available for use in a number of fields from ethnic and gender studies to studies of sexuality. postmodernity: Refers to a condition that comes after modernity. It is also contained by the modern, which is the referent from which it derives its meaning. It is this ambiguity that the term postmodern expresses. The ambiguity governs not only the temporalities of modern and postmodern but also cultural practices from writing to architecture that are emblematic of a stylistic postmodernity. One useful way of thinking about postmodernity is as a critical self-consciousness of modernity. The term itself has a long history, going back to the 1930s in the works of Spanish philosophers who used it to signal the end of the modern. It was used in U.S. literary circles in the 1950s in antimodernist critiques. It has acquired its current meaning since the 1980s, when the idea of the postmodern came under the methodological influence of French poststructuralism with its emphasis on language as the mediator between consciousness and the world, suspicion of grand narratives, and critique of Eurocentric modernity, including socialism.

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three worlds: Refers to a conceptualization of the world that was coined by the French scholar A. Sauvy in the early 1950s, reaching its height of popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. The term referred to the first world of advanced capitalism (Europe, North America north of Mexico, and, subsequently, Japan), the second world of socialist societies, and the third world of colonial and postcolonial societies (a fourth world was added later to denote indigenous peoples). While coined by a social scientist within the context of modernization discourse, the term third world was adopted by the people so described as part of their self-identification and assumed the status of a revolutionary slogan following the Bandung Conference of 1955, coming to refer not just to contemporary spaces but also to the possibility of a “third way” of development that would differ both from capitalism and existing socialism. It is arguable that, historically, the first and the third worlds created one another and preceded as formations the second world of socialism, which emerged after the Russian Revolution of 1917. By the late 1970s the three worlds conceptualization of the globe had given way to a “North-South” conceptualization. The terms first and third worlds became semantically meaningless with the fall of socialisms (the second world) after 1989, and it has been repudiated by a new generation of postcolonial critics. But these terms have refused to disappear from the languages of politics and social science because they still serve to keep alive an awareness of unequal and uneven development that is disguised by such blanket terms as globalization. translocal: Localities, however we may define them, have been in interaction with one another as long as the history of humankind, producing larger formations of one kind or another, including the nation-state in the modern period. Nation-formation, on the other hand, may be viewed as an erasure of the local and an effort to contain translocal activities, directing them to a political center. Translocal is much broader in its historical compass than the transnational and offers a flexible concept in the analysis of social and

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political formations while also underlining the importance of place in human activity. transnational capitalist class: While global modernity is marked by uneven economic development and the marginalization of large numbers of people, the organizational needs of global capitalism have produced a new global class to manage the operations of its institutional, legal, and cultural structures. Those included in this class do not share equally in its benefits and are vastly unequal in power. They are also divided by local cultural habits and loyalties. However, there is a class in formation that shares a common interest and, increasingly, a common technological language, culture, and education. Its contradictions are contradictions that attend any class formation. The concept is important, nevertheless, to understanding the processes of globalization, as well as the persuasiveness of claims to global unification. Coined by the sociologist Leslie Sklar, the term has also been analyzed in depth by William Robinson. transnationalism: Transnational has acquired currency in the same historical context as a number of terms such as globalization and diaspora, all of which signify a move away from the nation as a proper unit of analysis. Transnational refers to activities that cut across national boundaries. As with many terms of contemporary social and political analysis, it has also been subject to intellectual abuse in being rendered into a cliché that cuts across historical times and spaces. Properly speaking, its use should be restricted with careful attention to its referent, the national. It is appropriate, in other words, only to a historical period that is defined by the pervasiveness, if not universality, of the nation-state. It should be inapplicable to the period before the emergence of the modern nation-state and will perhaps be inapplicable again in the future if transnational forces continue to erode the nation as unit of political organization. world-system analysis: A historical sociological approach to capitalist development that emerged in the 1960s to challenge modernization discourse. The latter approached development in terms of individual nations, judged development in terms of

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norms derived from the western European and North American experiences, and stressed institutional and cultural structures in the dynamics of development and underdevelopment. World-system analysis took as its fundamental units not nations but “world-systems” defined by economic relationships and division of labor between societies, so that development and underdevelopment became parts of the same dynamics. “World-system” referred to geographical spaces that were unified by intense economic activity but were also differentiated by cores and peripheries, explaining at once “combined and uneven development,” grounding earlier distinctions of tradition and modernity in social material relationships of exchange and production. The global history of capitalism appears in this perspective as the formation of one global system out of a multiplicity of regionally based “world-systems.” Its compass goes beyond colonizer/colonized distinctions, as it applies to noncolonial situations as well. While challenged presently by notions of globalization, it still serves an important corrective to the latter in its attention to regional and national uneven development, which is treated in globalization discourse as an afterthought. “World-system” analysis as a “school” is identified most closely with the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and the Fernand Braudel Center in Binghamton University. Its methodological premises, which ultimately are traceable to Marxist and “marketing system” analyses of capitalism, are shared in common with the Dependency School in Latin America, as well as the work of economists such as Samir Amin and Andre Gunder Frank and historians such as Fernand Braudel.

◊ Index 1930s, 63 1950s, 12, 16 1960s, 10, 12, 16, 48 1970s, 11, 12, 18, 48, 63, 135 1980s, 12, 18, 63 1990s, 12, 134 20/80 society, 23 Africa, 18, 35 Ahmad, Aijaz, 122 Ahmed, Akbar, 66 Alaska, 40, 44 alternative modernity, 8, 33, 70–79, 89, 90 Amin, Samir, 17 Anderson, Perry, 63 anticolonialism, 67 antimodernism, 63 architecture of global relations, 26, 34, 47, 111 area studies, 10 Arrighi, Giovanni, 38–39, 145 Australia, 135 Bandung Conference, 134, 136 Barlow, Tani, 74, 75 Baudrillard, Jean, 64 Bauman, Zygmunt, 78 “Beijing Consensus,” 133, 140–48 Bering Straits, 40

Bertens, Hans, 63 Bhabha, Homi, 93, 99 bifurcation, of Chinese society, 31–32 borderlands, 121–22 bourgeoisie: Chinese, 32–33, 72; comprador, 32; European, 38; national, 32; U.S., 47 Brandt, Willy, 136 Brandt Commission, 134, 136–37 Braudel, Fernand, 30, 39 Brazil, 139, 147, 158 Buddhism, 73 capitalism, 4–5, 17–22; in East Asia, 81; globalization of, 94–98; and the origins of globalization, 35–41; relation to colonialism of, 106–12; universalization of, 81–85; and the universalization of Eurocentrism, 92 capitalist modernity, 17, 22, 32, 49, 52, 70; contradictions of, 91 capitalist world-system, 18, 39, 146 Castells, Manuel, 23–27, 34, 47, 111 Chesneaux, Jean, 156

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Chile, 19 China, 30–33. See also People’s Republic of China (PRC) “Chinese Model of Development,” 133–34, 140–49 Chinese Revolution, 72 citizenship, 119 clashes between civilizations, 30, 75 class, 19, 34, 96–97, 100–102, 106–7, 120–21, 157. See also transnational capitalist class coastal development, 32 colonial capitalism, 34 coloniale moderne sensibility, 115 colonialism, 10, 17, 23, 33, 97–112; and class formations, 106–7; conceptual incoherence of, 99–112; and the globalization of modernity, 103–5; hybridization of, 109; and late-nineteenth-century globalization, 42–44, 48; and modernity, 73–74; and the nation-state, 116; relation to capitalism, 106–7; relation to globalization, 51–52; and the shaping of modernity, 119 colonial modernity, 8, 84–85, 112–24 “Commonwealth of China,” 28 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 39 Communist Party (China), 72, 102 Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Levenson), 71–72

Confucian revival, 71–72, 95 conjuncture, 20 “contact zones,” 106 contemporaneity, 94–95 Crystal Palace Exhibition, 41 cultural difference, proliferation of claims to, 47–53 cultural identity, 4 cultural imperialism, 102–3 cultural sciences,44, 48–49 cultural studies, 6 “cultural turn,” 66 culture: depoliticization of, 84; and globalization, 44–45; increased attention to, 52–53; and knowledge, 46, 63–70, 79; reification of, 80–85; units of, 93 Culture and Imperialism (Said), 116 “culture talk,” 75 Daedalus, 76 decentralized cooperation, 138 decolonization, 8, 52, 89, 104 decolonizing the mind, 101 de-linking, 17 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 73 demotic revolution, 66 dependency theory, 15 development, 18, 138 developmentalism, 22, 47, 82 development of underdevelopment, 12 diasporic hybridization, 123 Duke University, 10, 11 East Asia, 47, 52, 81, 95, 137 eighties (decade), 12, 18, 63 Eisenstadt, S. N., 16, 76–77 Empire, 94, 99 encyclopedias of the world, 41

Index end of utopia, 156 Engels, Friedrich, 37–39 Enlightenment, 35 ethnomathematics, 73 Euro-America, 4 Eurocentric globalization, 43–45; breakdown of, 45–49 Eurocentric modernity, 33, 44–53, 74, 80, 94–95 Eurocentrism, 12, 16, 38, 50 Europe, 19 Fabian, Johannes, 95 Fanon, Frantz, 107 fifties (decade), 12, 16 “Forging a Global South,” 134–35, 138 Frank, Andre Gunder, 12, 146 Friedman, Edward, 30 gaige kaifang (reform and opening), 147 geometry of global processes, 26, 47, 111 Geronimo, 44 Giddens, Anthony, 77 global capitalism, 18 global cities, 24, 26 global city regions, 24 globalism, 48; as regulatory paradigm, 42 globality, consciousness of, 14, 41; Eurocentric, 43–44 globalization: as conjunctural phenomenon, 20, 154–55; and culture, 44–46; as discourse, 6; as end of universalism, 78, 80–85; Eurocentric, 43; as fulfillment of colonialism, 103–4; history of, 35–41; as ideology, 6–7; and inequality, 22–23; and

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marginalization, 23; of modernity, 90–91; and modernization, 10–18, 21–22; in the nineteenth century, 39–46; as paradigm, 1, 6, 11, 14–15, 17, 18, 41, 47, 48–49, 154; and postcolonialism, 67–70; and postmodernism, 65–66; problems of defining, 5; related to the breakdown of Eurocentric modernity, 47–48; relation to capitalism of, 35–41; relation to imperialism, 7; teleology of, 3, 6, 11, 17–18 global modernity, 89–98; and alternatives to Eurocentrism, 33; and the colonial past, 97–98; contradictions of, 94, 97, 158; from Eurocentric to, 63; four features of, 94–98; as limit to globalization, 7, 94; as nonteleological alternative to globalization, 33; as period concept, 50; and the question of imperialism, 34–35 Global South, 133–40, 158 “global village,” 45 glocalization, 20 Group of 20, 139 Guangzhou (Canton), 28 Guehenno, Jean-Marie, 46, 78, 92 Hall, Stuart, 99, 155 Hardt, Michael, 94, 99, 103 Harriman, Edward, 40, 44 Harvey, David, 19, 51, 64, 65 Hedetoft, Ulf, 118

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hegemony, 8; and democracy, 34; European and American, 37, 116; knowledge and, 79; of Eurocentrism, 12, 43; of neoliberalism, 19; U.S., 48 Herodotus, 35 heterogenization, 91, 158 Hindu revival, 72 Hirst, Paul, 40 Hispanophone, 63 historicism, 3, 13; Marxist, 72 homogenization, 91, 158 human rights, 4 Huntington, Samuel P., 16, 75 Hurricane Katrina, 138 “hygienic modernity,” 30–31 imperialism, 4, 99–104; as plunder, 155 India, 118, 139, 147 indigenism, 4 internationalism, contrasted to globalism, 48 International Monetary Fund, 137 invisible colonialism, 21 Iranian Revolution, 83, 95 Islam, 95 Islamicization, 73 Jacoby, Russell, 156 Jameson, Fredric, 64, 65, 89 JanMohamed, Abdul, 67 Japan, 19 Late Capitalism (Mandel), 64 Latin America, 15, 137 Lenin, V. I., 31; and colonialism, 105–6 Levenson, Joseph, 71–72 Limits to Capital (Harvey), 64 localization, 148

location of culture, 93, 97 London, 41 Lye, Colleen, 145 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 64, 65 Madame Butterfly, 45 Mandel, Ernest, 64 Manichean struggle, 67, 68 Maoism, 102 Mao Zedong, 134 marginalization, 23, 24 , 29, 97 Marx, Karl, 37–39, 106, 155 Marxism, 31; and Chinese tradition, 71–72; and class analysis, 120–121; and colonialism, 105–8; and postmodernity, 65; without guarantees, 155 Marxist analyses of Chinese society, 31–33, 110 Maspero, Henri, 45 McLuhan, Marshall, 45 McNamara, Robert, 136 Memmi, Albert, 108 metanarratives, 65 Metcalfe, Robert, 142 Ming Dynasty, 36, 110 modernity, 10, 44–53; capitalist, 17, 22, 32, 49, 52, 70; colonial, 73–74; and cultural imperialism, 102–3; fracturing of, 11, 47–53, 76–79, 80–84; as “global condition,” 80; globalization of, 51–52, 90–98, 103–4; as historical totality; indigenization of, 89, 93–94; paradigms of, 12; problems of defining, 51, 73–79; proliferation of claims on, 90–98; in question, 49–50;

Index reconfiguration of, 50–51; socialist, 74 modernity/tradition, 10, 12 modernization, 23; as discourse, 11–15, 21, 29, 47–48; Eurocentrism of, 13; teleology of, 15, 17, 21, 114 Moore, Gordon, 142 Muir, John, 44 multiculturalism, 65, 66 multiple modernities, 8, 14, 70–85, 90 Nandy, Ashis, 73 nationalism, 23; and latenineteenth-century globalization, 42–44 national liberation movements, 12, 104, 109 national studies (PRC), 73, 83 nation-building, as colonialism, 120 nation-states, 23–24, 26, 29, 33–34; as agent of colonialism, 116, 123; “Janus face” of, 120 Negri, Antonio, 94, 99, 103 neocolonialism, 10, 17, 105 neo-Keynesianism, 137 neoliberalism, 42, 134, 148–49; global hegemony of, 19, 147 network society, 25, 137 networks, 23–27, 96 new international capitalist class, 100 New Orleans, 96, 138 New York Times, 40, 41, 43 New Zealand, 135 nineteenth century, late, 39–52 nineties (decade), 12, 134 nonaligned nations, 134

173

nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 27, 97 North America, 19 Ohmae, Kenichi, 27–29, 31, 34 Orientalism (Said), 116 Panama Canal, 40 pan-capitalism, 46 pan-Turanianism, 73 Parsons, Talcott, 10 pattern-variables, 10 People’s Daily, 144 People’s Republic of China, 19, 27, 33–34, 133–50; as agent of modernization, 51; and capitalist modernity, 91; complicity in colonialism of, 118; patriotic education in, 101 physics of power, 141 place-based alternatives, 4, 7 polyarchy, 35 postcolonial, the, 42, 46, 79 postcolonial criticism, 12, 98–99, 103; as reflection on colonial discourses, 108 postcolonial globalization, 123 postcolonial intellectuals, 69–70, 122 postcolonialism, 6; different senses of, 67; and globalization, 67–70; and Marxism, 68; political, 107; popularity in Commonwealth societies of, 68 post-Fordist economy, 64 postglobal, 46 Postmodern Condition, A Report on Knowledge (Lyotard), 64 postmodernism, 6, 12, 62–67; as “cultural logic,” 65;

174

Index

postmodernism (continued): different senses of, 63–64; and globalization, 65; and Marxism, 65; origins of, 63 postnational, 42, 46, 79 postructuralism, 64, 67 posttraditional, 16 Qing Dynasty, 110 racism, 45 Ramo, Joshua Cooper, 140–48 Reagan-Thatcher revolution, 19, 137 reflexivity, 77 region-states, 2–28 religion, 4; in the surge of right-wing politics, 114 resurgence of history, 46, 92 revolution, end of, 110–11 Rise of the Network Society (Castells), 25 Roberts, Paul Craig, 118 Robertson, Roland, 39–40, 43, 49 Robinson, William, 34 Rogaski, Ruth, 30–31 Rydell, Robert, 115 Said, Edward, 99, 116 St. Louis Exposition, 45 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 108 Sassen, Saskia, 26 Saul, John Ralston, 42 Sauvy, Alfred, 135 September 11, 2001, 75 seventies (decade), 11, 12, 18, 48, 63, 135 Shanghai, 32, 96 Shiva, Vandana, 73 Silicon Valley Model of Development, 142, 143 Sima Qian, 35

singular modernity, 89 sinicization, 73 Sitting Bull, 44 sixties (decade), 10, 12, 16, 48 socialism, 4, 15; as alternative to capitalism, 22; living off the legacies of, 149–150; relation to globalization, 51– 52; and social movements, 158; Stalinist, 136 socialist modernity, 74 social movements, 18, 158 social revolution, 32 social sciences, 44, 48–49, 63, 70; and Eurocentrism, 82; origins in capitalism of, 82–83 sociology, 73 South Africa, 158 Southeast Asia, 47, 52, 137 south-south cooperation, 138 spatial turn, 20 Spivak, Gayatri, 99, 117 sprouts of capitalism, 110 Suez Canal, 40 surfaces, 23–24 Taliban, 83, 91 teleology: Eurocentric, 12; of globalization, 3, 90–91, 97, 104, 109; of modernization, 15, 17, 51 third space, 93 third world, 10, 12, 15; alternatives to capitalism in, 22, 134; origins of the concept of, 135–36 third-worldliness, 121 thirties (decade), 63 Thompson, Grahame, 40 Thorne, Susan, 116 three worlds, 48; reconfiguration of, 95–96; the return of, 139

Index Time and the Other (Fabian), 95 time-space compression, 51 Tomlinson, John, 102–3 totality, 65; modernity as, 120 tradition, 10, 83–84, 90–91 translocalization, 96 transnational capitalist class, 30, 35, 93–97, 117–18, 121 transnational corporations, 146; and multiculturalism, 66, 93 transnationalization, 92–93, 96; of corporate capital, 100; of university education, 100–101 triad societies, 47 triangular cooperation, 138 trilateralism, 111 Turkey, 72–73 underdevelopment, 12, 17, 18; in Chinese society, 32 uneven development, 140 United Nations Development Program (UNDP), 134, 138, 139 United States, 4; as end of modernization, 15 universalism, 5; breakdown of, 45–46, 48–49, 78–80

175

university education, transnationalization of, 92–93, 100–101 unthinking social science, 11 Venezuela, 158 Vietnam War, 136 Viswanathan, Gauri, 116 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 40, 49, 146 Wal-martization, 149 Washington Consensus, 137, 140, 144, 145 ways of knowing, 73, 80–85 weisheng (hygiene), 30–31 Wittrock, Bjorn, 76–77, 80 Wolfowitz, Paul, 136 World Bank, 136, 137 world history, 109 World Social Forum, 139 world-system analysis, 15, 38–40, 46 world-time, 30 World Trade Organization, 139 World’s Fairs, 40–41, 44–45 Young, Robert, 108 Zapatistas, 18 Zheng He, 36

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◊ About the Author Arif Dirlik, recently retired, taught at Duke University for thirty years. He has also served as visiting professor at the University of British Columbia, University of Victoria (British Columbia), University of California-Los Angeles, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Dirlik is the recipient of Fulbright, NEH, Chiang Chingkuo, and ACLS fellowships. He has been a fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, the Nordic Institute for Asian Studies (Copenhagen), the Program in Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, and, most recently, of the China Center for Comparative Politics and Economics in Beijing. Dirlik serves on the editorial boards of boundary 2, China Quarterly (England), China Review (Hong Kong), Asian Studies Review (Australia), China Information (The Netherlands), China Scholarship (Beijing), Cultural Studies (Beijing), Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Taiwan and Singapore), Norwegian Journal of Migration Research, Globalsouth, and Development and Society (Korea). He edits the book series Pacific Formations with Rowman & Littlefield, is coeditor of the book series Explorations in Postcolonial Studies with SUNY Press, and is coeditor of a series of translations from prominent Chinese intellectuals published by Brill Publishers in the Netherlands. Dirlik’s works have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Bulgarian, French, German, and Portuguese. His recent publications in English include 177

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About the Author

Marxism in the Chinese Revolution (Rowman & Littlefield 2005), The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Westview 1997), and Postmodernity’s Histories: The Past as Legacy and Project (Rowman & Littlefield 2000). He is also the editor or coeditor of many volumes, including most recently Pedagogies of the Global: Knowledge in the Human Interest (Paradigm 2006), Places and Politics in an Age of Global Capitalism (Rowman & Littlefield 2001), Chinese on the American Frontier (Rowman & Littlefield 2001), Postmodernism and China (Duke University Press 2000), and History after the Three Worlds: Post-Eurocentric Historiographies (Rowman & Littlefield 2000). Dirlik lives in Eugene, Oregon. He can be reached at [email protected].