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Contents
Introduction...........................3
Theoretical Post Mortem.................11
Globalization and social theory ..........11
Globalization and historical sociology ...15
Historical Post Mortem..................26
The nature of conjunctural analysis .......29
'Social origins' of the conjuncture ...40
Inside the vacuum .......................48
The waning of the conjuncture .............59
Conclusion............................63
Introduction
The 'age of globalization' is over.1 There was a period in which that word globalization, seemed to many people to capture the essence of what was going on around them. During the 1990s, activists and politicians, journalists and academics observed the spread of economic liberalization, the rise of new information and communication technologies, the increased salience of international organizations, and the resurgence of a cosmopolitan Human Rights agenda; and many of them believed that the world was opening up to a new form of interconnectedness, that a multi-layered, multilateral system of 'global governance' was emerging, which was set to transform the very nature of international politics. Perhaps, in the end, the temporary but real ascendancy of this belief marks the only sense in which an 'age of globalization' could undeniably be said to have existed. But, at any rate, that period has now passed. The recent disappearance of this word from Anglo-American media and governmental commentaries has been almost as sudden as its meteoric rise a decade ago.
It is not hard to see why this should have happened. After all, the course of events in the real world has radically diverged from the historical expectations associated with the idea of 'globalization'. '[T]hrough a process of progressive, incremental change,' predicted David Held and Anthony McGrew in 1998, 'geo-political forces will come to be socialized into democratic agencies and practices' (1998, 242). If anything, however, recent international developments -- including the stymieing of the Kyoto Protocol, the crippling of the International Criminal Court, and the multiple crises of the international organizations (UN, NATO, EU) in the run-up to the second Iraq war -- have been dominated by the very opposite process: a vigorous re-assertion of great power national interests. And the talk is therefore now more and more of 'unilateralism' and even 'empire', and less and less of 'multilateralism' and 'global governance' (Cox, 2003). Doubtless, some of those who wrote about 'globalization' in the 1990s will try to shoe-horn current events back into...