Читать книгу Contemporary Sociological Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 23

From the 1970s, understanding modernity became inseparable from accelerating globalization. Financialization, agreements to reduce trade barriers, and new technologies each played a role. This was disruptive but also created opportunities. There were more billionaires than ever before, not just in the United States but around the world. Asia enjoyed dramatic growth, lifting millions out of poverty and bringing the rise of a new middle class. Asian countries assumed new stature in global affairs. The United States remained central to the global capitalist economy, and it continued to engage actively in international politics. But from the era of the Vietnam War and its end without victory through repeated wars in the Middle East, the shock of 9/11 and an attack in the United States itself, through a long war in Afghanistan, again with victory, US global hegemony declined. The United States remained the world’s most powerful country, both economically and politically, but by the 21st century, the rise of China – and other Asian economies – limited US action. The end of the Cold War – and the Soviet Union – gave Americans a brief sense of triumph in the 1990s. But it also became clear that the United States could not afford the economic costs of continual war abroad and was unwilling to accept the loss of lives.

So far, the 21st century has brought terrorism, financial crises and austerity programs, pandemics of increasing scale, and the threat of climate change. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck captured a mood as well as a trend by writing that modern society has become a risk society.³⁴ Risks are global even when politicians respond with nationalist calls to close borders. The coronavirus pandemic revealed just how globalized economies were as it disrupted supply chains that stretched across continents to supply components to computers, cars, and air conditioners. The virus itself spread throughout the world. Coping with it was complicated by a wave of populist political mobilizations and problematic use of social media expressing suspicion of authorities – governmental or scientific, resentments of elites, and desires for security. Climate change poses a quintessential global challenge, but it has proven difficult to coordinate action in response.

Globalization is not all economics, politics, and risk. It is also culture: world music, dance crazes, TikTok (Douyin), Instagram, Weibo, Twitter and films from not just Hollywood but also Bollywood and Nollywood. It is global Islam and global Buddhism. It is money organized through cybercurrencies not based on any national government. It is migrations that have helped to make all the world’s richer and more developed countries increasingly multicultural. It is media that provide instant information about distant events – even if we do not always have the capacity to act on what we know. And it is social movements – both calls from young activists to see the urgency of responding to climate change and less positive networking on the far right.

Globalization does not erase nation states but does show the limits of a purely national perspective. Levitt and Schiller (excerpted here) show, for example, that transnational migration is not just a matter of moving from one nation state to another but that migrants maintain transnational ties. New spaces of social connection and identity are created. Still, as Calhoun suggests, as problematic as they may be, nations remain important units of solidarity. And for all the ways in which contemporary culture, economy, and migration cross national boundaries, nations continue to be reproduced in standard social imaginaries. We look at maps that fail to show the global flows but clearly demarcate borders among countries with colors. In an example of what Beck called “methodological nationalism,” social science uses statistics collected by nation states to try to understand global patterns.