Читать книгу Globalization - George Ritzer - Страница 19

It is worth differentiating among several different types of flows. One is interconnected flows. The fact is that global flows do not occur in isolation from one another; many different flows interconnect at various points and times. Take the example of the global sex industry (Farr 2005, 2017). The sex industry requires the intersection of the flow of people who work or are trafficked in the industry (usually women and girls) with the flow of customers (e.g. sex tourists). Other flows that interconnect with the global sex industry involve money and drugs. Then there are the sexually transmitted diseases that are carried by the participants in that industry and from them branch off into many other disease flows throughout the world.

A very different example of interconnected flows is in the global fish industry. That industry is now dominated by the flows of huge industrial ships and the massive amount of frozen fish that they produce and which is distributed throughout the world. In addition, these huge industrial ships are putting many small fishers out of business and some are using their boats for other kinds of flows (e.g. transporting undocumented immigrants from Africa to Europe) (LaFraniere 2008). Over-fishing by industrial ships has emptied the waters of fish and this has served to drive up their price. This has made the industry attractive to criminals and the result is an increase in the global flow of illegal fish (Rosenthal 2008).

Then there are multidirectional flows. Globalization is not a one-way process as concepts like Westernization and Americanization (see Chapter 3) seem to imply (Marling 2006; Singer 2013). While all sorts of things do flow out of the West and the United States to every part of the world, many more flow into the West and the US from everywhere (e.g. Japanese automobiles, Chinese T-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, Russian sex workers, and so on). Furthermore, all sorts of things flow in every conceivable direction among all other points in the world.

Still another layer of complexity is added when we recognize that planetary processes not only can complement one another (e.g. the meeting of flows of sex tourists and sex workers), but often also conflict with one another (and with much else). In fact, it is usually these conflicting flows that attract the greatest attention. This is most obvious in the case of the ongoing “war” on terror between the United States and Islamist militants and jihadists (e.g. al-Qaeda and ISIS). On the one hand, al-Qaeda and other Islamist militants are clearly trying to maintain, or to increase, their global influence and, undoubtedly, to find other ways of engaging in a range of terrorist activities. For its part, the US is involved in a wide variety of global processes designed to counter that threat, stymie al-Qaeda’s ambitions, and ultimately and ideally to contain, if not destroy, it. This encompassed first the US invasions of Iraq⁶ and Afghanistan, and now the ongoing involvement in global flows of military personnel and equipment to other locales (e.g. Pakistan, Syria, and, increasingly, African countries); and counter-terrorism activities (e.g. drone strikes) designed to find and kill its leaders, and ongoing contact with intelligence agencies of other nations in order to share information on Islamist militants, and so on.

There are also reverse flows. In some cases, processes flowing in one direction act back on their source (and much else). This is what Ulrich Beck (1992) has called the boomerang effect. In Beck’s work the boomerang effect takes the form of, for example, pollution that is “exported” to other parts of the world but then returns to affect the point of origin. So, for example, countries may insist that their factories be built with extremely high smokestacks so that the pollution reaches greater heights in the atmosphere and is thereby blown by prevailing winds into other countries and perhaps even around the globe (Ritzer and Stepnisky 2017). While this seems to reduce pollution in the home country, the boomerang effect is manifest when prevailing winds change direction and the pollution is blown back to its source. In addition, nations that are the recipients of another nation’s air pollution may find ways of returning the favor by building their own smokestacks even higher than their neighbors.