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First-wave hyperglobalizers view globalization as a very real, ongoing process with wide-ranging consequences that is producing a new global order, swept along by powerful flows of cross-border trade and production. Ohmae (1990, 1995) sees globalization leading to a ‘borderless world’ in which market forces are more powerful than national governments. A large part of this argument rests on the idea that nation-states are losing the power to control their own destiny. Rodrik (2011) argues that individual countries no longer oversee their economies because of the vast growth in world trade, while governments are increasingly unable to exercise authority over volatile world financial markets, investment decisions, increasing migration, environmental dangers or terrorist networks. Citizens also recognize that politicians have limited ability to address these problems and, as a result, lose faith in existing systems of national governance.

The hyperglobalization argument suggests that national governments are caught in a pincer movement, being challenged from above (by regional and international institutions, such as the European Union and the World Trade Organization) and from below (by international protest movements, global terrorism and a lot of talk about something that is quite longstanding, while many of the changes described are not ‘global’ at all (Hirst et al., 2009). For example, current levels of economic interdependence are not unprecedented. Nineteenth-century statistics on world trade and investment lead some to argue that contemporary globalization differs from the past only in the intensity of interactions between nation-states. If so, then it is more accurate to talk of ‘internationalization’ rather than globalization, and this also preserves the idea that nation-states have been and are likely to continue as the central political actors. For instance, Thompson (in Hirst et al., 2009) argues that, during the 2008 ‘global’ financial crisis, it was actually national governments and citizens’ initiatives). Taken together, these shifts signal the dawning of an age in which a global consciousness develops and the influence of national governments declines (Albrow 1997). One consequence is that sociologists will have to be weaned off the concept of ‘society’, which has conventionally meant the bounded nation-state. Urry (2000) has argued that sociology needs to develop a ‘post-societal’ agenda rooted in the study of global networks and multiple flows across national borders.

Table 4.4 Conceptualizing globalization: three tendencies/waves

Source: Adapted from Held et al. (1999: 10).