Is globalization essentially a process of ‘universalisation’ of capitalist modernity? (2015, 10 Marks)
Capitalist modernity is the package that took shape in Europe from the sixteenth century: market accumulation, private property, the bureaucratic nation-state, science and secular individualism. For Anthony Giddens (The Consequences of Modernity, 1990), “modernity is inherently globalising”. The question is whether globalisation is essentially that package spreading outward, or something larger.
The case for
- Marxist lineage: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in 1848 that the bourgeoisie creates “a world after its own image”. Immanuel Wallerstein dates a single capitalist world-economy to the long sixteenth century, and Leslie Sklair names a transnational capitalist class as its agent.
- Institutional convergence: access to capital demands common company law, intellectual-property rules and central-bank independence; Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” (1989) claimed the liberal-capitalist package had no rival.
- Consumption: “Coca-colonisation” turns Third World populations into consumers of standardised goods, which George Ritzer analyses as McDonaldisation.
The case against
- Older than capitalism: Manfred B. Steger traces globalising networks to premodern times, and Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills argue for a world system five thousand years old, not five hundred; the Silk Road and Indian Ocean trade predate capitalism.
- Capitalism is plural: coordinated, liberal and developmental varieties persist. China joins world markets under party control and the Gulf states under dynastic rule, so capitalism has travelled further than liberal modernity.
- Multiple modernities: Shmuel N. Eisenstadt treats Japanese, Indian and Islamic modernities as genuine variants, not copies. Arjun Appadurai (Modernity at Large, 1996) shows global flows of people, media, money and ideas moving out of step and being refashioned locally, and Dipesh Chakrabarty (Provincializing Europe, 2000) finds European categories indispensable yet inadequate for non-Western experience.
- Resistance through the same channels: the networks that spread capitalist modernity also carry religious, identity and postmodern cultures of resistance (Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs McWorld, 1995), while ecological and feminist movements organise globally against the model.
India shows the gap: market reform since 1991 has coexisted with caste and religious mobilisation and a democracy that bends global templates to local ends.
Conclusion
Globalisation is substantially, but not essentially, the universalisation of capitalist modernity. It has nearly universalised the capitalist economy, but not the liberal polity or a single culture; today even its Western architects retreat into tariffs and industrial policy. Capitalist modernity is best seen as a powerful subset of a wider, contested process.