The Global Circumstance: Prior Treatments

It has become commonplace, almost a cliché, in recent years to speak of "the global village." Certainly the mass medial in various parts of the world have used this term (which is, of course, highly problematic from a disciplined sociological vantage point) with increasing frequency and have seemingly subscribed to the McLuhanist claim that it has been wrought largely by technological changes in the media of communication. It is as if the printing press largely promoted Gesellschaft, and the satellite dish—and its potential miniaturization—is promoting a global Gemeinschaft . Notwithstanding the severe shortcomings of this point of view, not to speak of its self-serving features, the use of the term "global village" is a remarkable indicator of the degree to which a consciousness of the world-as-a-whole has crystallized. Indeed, the explosion of the use of the adjective "global" is an indicator in its own right of the process of globalization.^[2] Further evidence of this process can, of course, be found in the readily perceivable and much-noted interlocking of sociocultural phenomena across societal boundaries on a global scale, particularly in economic respects; the rapid expansion and increase in the number of global institutions; the proliferation of global

[1] Dumont has made a major attempt to distinguish between Western and Eastern worldviews (what he calls ideologies). In the course of his analysis he relativizes Tönnies's Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft distinction as an intra-Western version of a much more general East-West difference. See Kavolis 1986.

[2] A word of warning is necessary here, for quite a lot of "globe talk" does not directly address the world-as-a-whole. "Global" is sometimes used—particularly in the United States—as a synonym for international or comparative. Nevertheless, I believe my general claim to be valid.

events and representative gatherings; the increasing concern with globe-threatening military, chemical, medical, and ecological problems; the considerable expansion of so-called international or global education; the aspirations of the leaders of some contemporary societies—most explicitly and conspicuously, the Japanese—to make those societies "global"; and so on. Also, the legitimacy of societal actions, attributes, and trends has increasingly become an issue that is cast in global terms, and terms such as "global public" and "world citizenry" have become part of contemporary public discourse.

Interest on the part of sociologists in the global circumstance as a definite theme did not crystallize until the 1960s. At that time social scientists mostly situated their concern with the world-as-a-whole within the then-thriving debate about societal modernization, and did so as a revamped version of the original Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft problem (Robertson and Lechner 1985).^[3] The thematization by social scientists (as opposed to specialists in international relations) of what later came to be widely (but not unproblematically) called the world-system was thus from the beginning largely centered on the theme of societal-structural change, specifically in reference to the differences between the societies of the "Third World" (itself a concept that had crystallized only a little earlier) and those of the West and/or the Soviet bloc. However, even at that time steps were being taken toward the analysis of culture at the global level. In our rejection of the prevailing conceptions and theories of societal modernization Nettl, Tudor, and I called for an approach that viewed modernization as a process of catching up with or surpassing another society or set of societies with attributes deemed to be, in whole or in part, desirable (Nettl and Robertson 1968; Robertson and Tudor 1968). Employing a mixture of Parsonian action-and-system theory, symbolic-interactionist ideas concerning (societal) identity and (societal) reflexivity, Schutzian ideas about multiple realities, and emerging conceptions of the structure of the system of intersocietal stratification, we attempted to refocus the field of modernization theory. Thus, we opposed to all intents and purposes what poststructuralists and postmodernists now call a "grand narrative" account of the past, present, and future—although that does not mean that the resulting perspective can be described, in the recent meaning of the term, as postmodern (Lyotard 1984). In place of theories that stood more or less directly in line with the nineteenth-century philosophies of history that indicated a definite, progressive movement of societies and civilizations along a particular (mainly Western) path, we offered a view of what, at the time, we continued

[3] Much of the relevant literature of that period is discussed, or at least cited, in Nettl and Robertson 1966, Robertson and Tudor 1968, Nettl and Robertson 1968, and Robertson 1968.

to call the "international system" as a place in which societies (or, more accurately, influential elites within societies) construct their own identities in tandem with the invocation and construction of ideas concerning the system as a whole. In this perspective societal modernization was not to be pivotally analyzed as an advance in a "progressive," Western direction or even as a move in the direction of either the First or Second worlds. Rather it was to be regarded analytically as indicating a field of definitions of the global situation, on the one hand, and self-societal definitions, on the other.

Generally speaking, the theory of modernization that we proposed in the 1960s was voluntaristic in the sense that Parsons (1937) had introduced that term. Although acknowledging—indeed emphasizing—that the global intersocietal system possessed its own structural properties and, thus, that societies acted under external-systemic (as well as internal) constraints, we also maintained that there was a strong element of "choice" involved as to the ideal direction or directions of societal change and the form or forms of global involvement. That element was seen to be centered on an emergent global culture, a global culture that demanded that all extant societies adopt an orientation to, if not necessarily an acceptance of, the idea of modernization. Thus, what was taken to be modern—or, more loosely, what was taken to be a worthy direction of societal aspiration—was something that was constructed in the global arena in relation to the constraints on (most) societies to maintain their own identities and senses of continuity in relation to the "international system." It was not just a case of the First or Second worlds presenting images of trajectories of modernization to Third (or Fourth) World societies but rather a much more complex situation of globewide "reality construction," in which intra- and intercivilizational and intra- and intersocietal traditions and circumstances all played important parts.

What placed the study of the global scene very firmly on the social-scientific map was, of course, the publication of Wallerstein's first extended statement on the making and history of what he called the modern world-system and the ensuing elaboration of his standpoint and debates about it (Wallerstein 1974). This chapter cannot be the place for a comprehensive analysis of the Wallersteinian program or its numerous extensions, variations, and rival perspectives.^[4] However, what does need to be noted is that it was, as quite a few critics have pointed out, remarkably economistic in its genesis but that in recent years there has been an increasing acknowledgment in Wallersteinian and neo-Wallersteinian circles of the significance of culture (Robertson and Lechner 1985). Wallerstein's

[4] Among the numerous and still proliferating discussions, see the following: Robertson and Lechner 1985, Chirot and Hall 1982, Worsley 1984, Markoff 1977, Berger 1986, and Gold 1986.

own program seems to be following the path taken by a number of Marxist theories: it started in an economic-deterministic mode and then, when impediments to the transition to (world) socialism were found to be very formidable, it turned to "the problem of culture" (Robertson 1985; Robertson and Lechner 1985).

More specifically, the world-system has come to be seen by Wallerstein himself as party guided and sustained by "metaphysical presuppositions" deriving historically from ideas developed during crucially formative periods of Western capitalism (Wallerstein 1983). These presuppositions—amounting to a kind of deep culture of and the capitalist world system per se—constitute, according to Wallerstein, an obstacle to the transformation of the world-system in a socialist direction. Hence, they need direct analytical (as well as political) treatment. Until the announcement of this view Wallersteinians had, more often than not, addressed the theme of culture by insisting that the variety of national and ethnic cultures produced in the world-system were epiphenomena of the shifting division of international-economic labor.^[5] Thus, the idea of a global culture was alien to the Wallersteinian school of thought, not least because it was, and still is, widely assumed by world-system theorists—and many other social scientists—that "culture" must always refer to a commonly held, relatively explicit body of ideas, values, beliefs, and symbols that constitutes a more or less binding consensus. Few would be so foolish as to assert that a global culture exists in this strong sense—with the important exception of those who strongly emphasize the force and significance of the global homogenization of popular culture, styles of consumerism, individual "life-styles," "global information," and so on—but it does not follow from the rejection of such an idea that culture must be regarded as inconsequential and usually epiphenomenal in the global situation. Regardless of the viability of Wallerstein's ideas about the presuppositions of the world-system, it is perfectly reasonable to think of global (or any other) culture as consisting in large part of contested and conflicting images and definitions of the global circumstance.^[6]

World-system theorists and researchers have clearly accomplished something of significance in emphasizing the idea that the world is a systemic phenomenon and that much of what has been traditionally analyzed

[5] What is sometimes called the Stanford school of world-system analysis has ventured much further than others in a cultural direction. See, in particular, Meyer 1980 and Thomas et al. 1987. See also Wuthnow 1980. Separately, the many contributions of Galtung since the early 1960s should be given special emphasis. Of particular relevance in the present context is Galtung 1980, not least because he has linked certain aspects of world-system theory to a discussion of possible forms of the world-as-a-whole.

[6] Other more specific layers of world culture are discussed in Nettl and Robertson 1968.

by social scientists in societal, or more broadly, civilizational terms can and should be relativized and discussed along global-systemic lines. That being granted, the fact remains that major difficulties arise from the Western-centeredness of the history of the Wallersteinian world-system. For this history, the issue of the making of the world-system is, empirically, a version of the problem of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which was itself a sociological precursor of, inter alia, the status-contract, Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft, mechanical-organic, and segmented-stratified Problemstellungen . But a more challenging and sociologically appropriate strategy is to relativize these Problemstellungen in such a way as to view the global system in a much more far-reaching perspective, one in which "the world" is not assumed to have been made simply from and out of the West (even though clearly in some respects it has).^[7]