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CHAPTER 1 GLOBALIZATION I LIQUIDS, FLOWS, AND STRUCTURES
ОглавлениеFrom Solids to Liquids (to Gases)
Solids
Heavy Structures that Expedite Flows
Heavy Structures as Barriers to Flows
The Winners and Losers of Global Flows
Thinking about Global Flows and Structures
Globalization1 is increasingly omnipresent. We are living in a – or even the – “global age” (Albrow 1996; Deflem 2016; Kershaw 2019). Globalization is clearly a very important change; it can even be argued (Bauman 2003) that it is the most important change in human history. This is reflected in many domains, but particularly in social relationships and social structures,2 especially those that are widely dispersed geographically. “In the era of globalization… shared humanity face[s] the most fateful of the many fateful steps” it has made in its long history (Bauman 2003: 156, italics added).
The following is the definition of globalization3 to be used in this book (note that all of the italicized terms will be discussed in this chapter):
globalization is a planetary process or set of processes involving increasing liquidity and the growing multidirectional flows of people, objects, places and information as well as the structures they encounter and create that are barriers to, or expedite, those flows …4
In contrast to many other definitions of globalization, this one does not assume that greater integration is an inevitable component of globalization. That is, globalization can bring with it greater integration (especially when things flow easily), but it can also serve to reduce the level of integration (when structures are erected that successfully block flows). For example, increasingly global flows recently led to the so-called Brexit, where British voters rejected greater integration with the European Union. The global spread of COVID-19 has led to some (perhaps temporary) barriers placed on the movement of people and goods between countries.
