IDST 3050 N Capital, Culture, and Globalization Spring, 2012

IDST 3050 N
Capital, Culture, and Globalization
Spring, 2012

Time:Wednesdays, 6 to 8:50 pm

 

Course instructor: Professor Anthony J. Hall
Office: A 812H (Globalization Studies/Liberal Education)
raprockprof2@gmail.com
www.globalizationstudies.ca
www.ourowncbc.info/
http://www.youtube.com/user/Globalization1492
http://vimeo.com/channels/globalization
http://sites.google.com/a/earthintoproperty.info/colonization/home/...
http://people.uleth.ca/~hall/index.htm
http://globalizationstudies.ca/?page_id=10
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=Anthony%20J.%20Hall%20AND%2...

Office Hours:Tuesdays, 2 to 4 pm

 

 

 

Course Description

Interdisciplinary investigation of the dynamics of globalization; special emphasis on theories of interaction among peoples, political economies, and cultures; case studies examine relationships between change and continuity, the particular and the universal, the relative and the absolute in global transformations.

Sample Topics

1.The Role of European Imperialism, 1492-1945, as the Primary Agency of Globalization

2.The Response of Indigenous peoples to the Inroads of Imperial, National, and Corporate Colonialism
3. The Financial Debacle of 2008-2009 and the Public Bailouts of the Global Financial Services Sector
4. The Olympic Games and Globalization
5. Barack Obama: An Icon of Post-Modernism’s Utility in Military Governance
6.Trade, Migration, and Technological Transformation on the Communications Highways of Globalization
7.Cultural Clashes, Cultural Mergers, Cultural Genocide, and Cultural Invention on the Frontiers and Borderlands of Global Civilizations
8.The Convergence of Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the Institution of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
9.From the East India Company to Exxon Mobil: A history of the law, philosophy, economics, and operations of national,
transnational, and global corporations
10.From New England to the New World Order: The Rise of the United States to the Status of a Superpower
11.Marxism, the Soviet Union, China and the Communist Ideal of Global Governance Based on Workers’ Solidarity
12.Religious Fundamentalism, Market Fundamentalism, and the Crisis of Liberalism: Can the Centre hold?
13.From the Holy Roman Empire to the World Bank, From the Conquest of Mexico to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, From the Spanish Inquisition to Nuremberg and the International Criminal Court: The trials and tribulations of the quest for a world order based on the rule of law rather than the rule of force
14.From the Gutenberg Galaxy to the Worldwide Web: publishers and broadcasters as liberators, educators, entertainers, propagandists, hucksters, and thought police
15.Energy, Economics, Ecology, and the Politics of Global Inequality
16.China, Wal*Mart, and the New Global Configurations of Wealth, Debt, Industrialization, Jobs, Poverty, and Entitlement
17.Music, Film, Photography, and Other Art Forms as Media of Globalization
18.The Changing Constructions of Sovereignty in National, International, Transnational, and Supranational Politics
19.Women, Men, Family, and Labour in the Renewal of Human Life, the Creation of Property, the Ownership of Property, and the Cultivation of Wellbeing
20.The Spreading of Languages and the Death of Languages in the Processes of Globalization
21.Democracy: What is it? Who has it? Who lacks it? What is globalization’s effect on its existence and exercise?
22.The Theory of Relativity and the Apparent Bending of Time and Space in the Communications Revolution Driving Globalization.
23.Epidemics, Public Health, and Globalization
24.Environmental Issues and Globalization
25.Technological Change and Globalization
26.Globalization and the Privatization of Water
27.Globalization and the Universalization of Capitalism
28.9/11 and the Globalization of Police Powers
29.Cuba as an Emerging Centre for the International Organization of Alternative Approaches to Global Trade, Health Care and Food Security
30.The Rise of the Privatized Terror Economy in Global Capitalism

Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge

The University of Lethbridge initiated the project in 2002 when the Dean of Arts and Science appointed Anthony J. Hall as Coordinator of Globalization Studies. Between 1990 and 2002 Hall was Associate Professor of Native American Studies. Hall’s background helps to explain the emphasis placed in the GS curriculum on the relationship between Indigenous peoples throughout the world and the history of colonization by empire builders, by successor states of the imperial powers and by global corporations. Since his appointments as Founding Coordinator of Globalization Studies, Hall has published two large books to help establish sound academic foundations for this interdisciplinary and cross-cultural initiative. The first volume appeared in 2004. It is entitled The American Empire and the Fourth World. The second volume appeared in 2010. It is entitled Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism. Both peer-reviewed works are published by McGill-Queen’s University Press based in Montreal and Kingston. Together the two-volume set is entitled The Bowl with One Spoon.

 

 

As any google search of the Globalization Studies initiative at the University of Lethbridge will quickly reveal, the project’s practitioners have been making ample use of the interactive capacities of the Internet since the first offering of the introductory course, Globalization since 1492, in the spring term of 2003. The strategy has been to use one of the major media of globalization, namely the worldwide web, to host an international discussion on the past, present and future attributes of globalization. GS announced this goal with the publication of its first web site in the summer of 2003. The mission statement asserted, “We emphasize innovative uses of the worldwide web as a means of advancing inclusiveness and democratization in the complex of processes that go by the name of globalization.” http://people.uleth.ca/~hall/index.htm.

 

 

Many GS classes involve the use of video-conference technology, or, more recently, Skype, to include contributions from thinkers outside of Lethbridge in the formulation of the curriculum. These interactive events include three Lethbridge classes taught in 2008 through video conferences from sites in Tourin Poland.

 

 

After a period of trial and error the Globalization Studies initiative settled into a collaborative relationship with the Liberal Education program at the University of Lethbridge. Currently the two GS courses offered, Globalization since 1492 and Capital, Culture and Globalization are both listed under the heading of Interdisciplinary Studies in the calendar of the University of Lethbridge (IDST 2050 and IDST 3050). The distinct character of Globalization Studies in a scholarly federation of overlapping research, publication and pedagogy with Liberal Education and Interdisciplinary Studies was confirmed in 2008 when the Globalization Studies Committee of the Arts and Science Faculty promoted Hall through the process of peer review to the rank of Full Professor. Joshua Blakeney is presently Professor Hall’s graduate student. Mr. Blakeney is the most recent recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II scholarship for the academic excellence at the University of Lethbridge.

Assignments

Mid-Term Test 20%
Book Review Assignment (due Wed. Feb. 15) 30%
Internet Assignment (details to be discussed in class) 20%
Final Test ( Take-Home) 20%
Attendance/General Participation 10%

Book Review Assignment

 

 

Choose one of texts list below as the subject of your book review. Most of the books are for sale in the University of Lethbridge Bookstore in the Interdisciplinary Studies section. The book review should be about 2000 words in length. You should present in your review a succinct account of the main themes and interpretations presented in the chosen text. Some consideration of the background, expertise and experience of the book’s author or authors would be helpful. When was the book written? Why was it written? Are there any special features connecting the book’s author to the subject he or she has chosen to cover? Good book reviews will present the reviewer’s thoughtful and balanced assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, and distinguishing features of the work being considered. Not only should a book reviewer be able to indicate what he or she likes in the text. The reviewer should also be able to articulate why he or she has developed this opinion. Often book reviewers will select and quote a few exemplary or illustrative passages from the book being considered to give backing, substance and proof to the main arguments being advanced.

 

Choose one of the following books:

 

Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (Toronto: Anansi, 1989)

 

Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, The CIA Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010)

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2007)

 

Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

 

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Mariner, 2006)

 

Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006)

 

Stephen R. Bown, Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900 (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntryre, 2009)

 

Anthony J. Hall, Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010)

 

Earth into Property is very big. It is divided into three main parts. Students have the option of basing the book review assignment on one of the three parts.

 

Assignment is due on Feb. 15, 2011

 

Internet Presentation

 

Over the course of the term each student will present in class a small project that he or she has created for the Internet. Each student must identify an appropriate topic of his or her own choice that has some relevance to the subject matter of the course. Quite possibly students will develop the project using information taken from the Internet in the form of text, pictures, audio material, movies or any other kind of digitalized data. Some presentations will probably involve the creation of blogs but students are encouraged to experiment broadly in the use of the New Media to create something innovative and original.

 

 

Readings and Interpretations

 

Students will be directed to course readings on the open Internet over the term of the course. Some handouts will also be distributed in class. The course will reflect the professor’s own interpretive approach to Globalization since 1492. The aim of the lectures and the discussions they generate, however, is not to pressure students into replicating the professor’s own understanding. Rather it is to encourage each individual in the class to develop his or her own informed view of how world society, in all its diversity and uniformity, has been constructed by human beings since the inception of the modern era of globalization in 1492.

Introducing Globalization

by Anthony J. Hall
Professor of Globalization Studies
University of Lethbridge

 

The term, “globalization,” came into prominence in the 1990s. Discussion about globalization rapidly entered popular and professional discussion once the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 removed the last major obstacle to the transformation of transnational corporations into genuinely global corporations. The failure of the Soviet-style socialism seemingly opened up the whole world to the globalization of a single system of political economy frequently described as capitalism. The transformation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) into the World Trade Organization in 1994 came to symbolize the drive to retool all countries and all material relationships to conform to the political economy of the Cold War’s apparent victor, the United States of America. The concurrent development of the internet in the 1990s reflected, reinforced, and advanced the fact that a major transformation of human relationships was underway. With more rapid globalization comes accelerating cycles of change that dramatically reconfigure all sorts of borders, including political, national, commercial, ideological, and cultural boundaries. The pace of globalization increased as old institutions and conventions gave way to the supercharged transactions of transnational business combined with the revolutionary spread of digital communications technology.

 

 

This globalization of the culture of capitalism after the Cold War prompted criticism from many constituencies, including those involved in trade unions and organizations devoted to environmental protection and biocultural diversity. The critics charged that the growing domination of governments by transnational business was undermining democracy by concentrating power in fewer and fewer hands. They charged that this type of business-dominated globalization was increasing the polarization between rich and poor. This polarization was occurring both within countries and between the prosperous North and the disadvantaged South. They charged that the post-Cold War rush to expand the corporate sector and diminish the public sector was limiting the power of governments to safeguard the public interest. They charged that the neoliberal push to deregulate business and to download and privatize the delivery of public services was crippling the capacity of governments to protect the environment, public health, and workers, but especially women employed in the industries of developing countries. They criticized the disparity between the haphazardness of international protections afforded human rights and the very elaborate and regimented protections afforded corporate rights, but especially the imperative of corporate investors and directors to move manufacturing plants from high-wage areas to low-wage areas.

 

 

This type of criticism led to a large and spirited protest in 1999 in Seattle during the Millennial Round of negotiations between members of the World Trade Organization. Similar protests took place in, for instance, Quebec City and Genoa Italy in 2001. No Logo, a book by a Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, became a sort of manifesto presenting many of the main outlines of this protest against the alleged subordination of the rights and interests of many constituencies to the elevated power of global corporations, stock markets, currency markets, and financial institutions. As Klein and others saw it, behind this subordination of the power of people to the higher power of money lay the machinations of a small clique of extremely wealthy individuals who advanced their own class interests in political venues by financing and directing the activities of high powered lobbyists, media spin doctors, and the executives and managers who administer their assets.

 

 

The conflict in Seattle in 1999 announced to the world the existence of a major political fault line. The commercial media tended to present this division as a disagreement between advocates of globalization and anti-globalization. This characterization badly misrepresents the true nature of the contention. In fact those associated with so-called “anti-globalization” were made up of very diverse groups and individuals from all over the world whose mode of international networking and communications epitomized a very sophisticated embrace of globalization. This network of activists was by and large not against globalization per se. Instead their dominant inclination has been to open up the debate on globalization so that there can be more informed and broad-ranging discussions and negotiations about the range of options available in shaping instruments of trade, technology, and self-determination to serve the interests of all humanity rather than those of a small and self-serving elite. Part of the quest to change the framework of the debate over the future of globalization has involved the effort to deepen and expand understanding that many of the issues that must be addressed are not new.

 

 

While the word, globalization, is a recent one, the processes it describes are very old, at least as old as 1492. That is the year when Christopher Columbus set out to prove by sailing westward towards the Orient that the earth is a round orb capable of being circumnavigated. While Columbus stumbled on the Western Hemisphere rather than the outskirts of India, as he himself believed to be the case, his theory that the world is round turned out to be correct. The wide dissemination of this knowledge about the character and shape of our global home establishes the basis for the contention that the modern era of globalization really begins in 1492. The era of European discovery and exploration initiated by Columbus immediately raised all sorts of questions and issues that continue to lie near the heart of the debate over globalization. Essentially these questions come down to issues concerning how decisions affecting the global future are to be made and how ownership and control of the earth’s natural resources are to be apportioned and legitimized. Uncertainties about how to deal with these issues continue to provoke political disagreement. This heritage of controversy goes back to 1493 when the Roman Catholic Pope “donated” all of the Western Hemisphere to the sovereigns of Spain. Then the donation was subsequently modified to include Portugal as a recipient of the newly-discovered territory. This astounding denial of the rights of many tens of millions of Indigenous peoples in the Americas to jurisdiction in themselves and their Aboriginal lands established patterns of exclusion and hierarchies of power that remain very much alive to this day.

 

 

From 1492 until the end of the Second World War European empire building was the most influential agency in the creation and elaboration of those networks of trade, communication, migration, and warfare that drove the complex of processes that might be described as globalization. A key factor in this thrust of globalization has depended on technological innovations in transport and communications that have seemingly compressed space and accelerated time. The effect of these alterations in human relationships to time and space has broadened the range and form of possible interaction among human beings. While the imperial expansion of European influences, including the voluntary migration of White emigrants and the involuntary migration of Black slaves, has formed the dominant thrust of globalization over almost five centuries, globalization has also been advanced by the efforts of Indigenous peoples outside Europe to resist colonial expansion and oppression. This thrust of this anti-imperial globalization has come about because of the need to build broad confederacies of shared struggle and common understanding to oppose the empire building of the European powers.

 

 

The emergence of the United States from the British Empire in 1783 was based on a successful episode of anti-imperial struggle. Clearly, however, the failure to integrate Black slaves and Indigenous peoples into the American Revolution and into citizenship in the newly-created United States contributed to the perpetuation of patterns and precedents of exclusion with significant consequences for the kind of globalization which continues to prevail until this day. That dominant motif of globalization continues to draw more heavily on the legacy of imperial expansion than on the legacy of those who have resisted enslavement, genocide, colonial disenfranchisement, and the colonial appropriation of their Aboriginal lands, water, and other resources. It remains to be seen if those who gathered at Seattle, Quebec City, and Genoa to oppose the expansionary thrust of corporate-driven globalization will place themselves in the historical tradition of the American revolutionaries of 1776 or in the deeper heritage of those who have continued to oppose forms of imperial globalization that began with the transformative events of 1492.

 

 

The political economy of the world we presently inhabit is thus poised on the interaction of many forces, including the two competing trajectories of history rooted in imperialism and anti-imperial struggle. One trajectory of globalization can thus be conceived as the continuation of processes that began with the expansion of empires emanating from Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Germany, Russia, Belgium, and Turkey. As some critics of US foreign policy see it, imperialism’s expansionary thrust mutated during the second half of the twentieth century into a regime of global domination policed by the military-industrial complex of a single superpower. The trajectory of anti-imperial globalization has its origins in a looser organization of human society reflecting economic pluralism, ecological diversity, and local self-determination. The disparity of power between modern-day imperialism and resistance to imperialism continues to be expressed in the propensity for what is local, indigenous, and particular to be challenged, terminated, or displaced by external influences emanating from distant command centers where industrial commercial, political, and military influence tends to be concentrated.

 

 

The old imperialism was frequently justified in the language of politics, religion, and civilization. In Victorian times, for instance, empire building was often described as the fulfillment of natural law and the ascent of civilization over savagery and barbarism. Imperialism was romantized in Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem as an expression of “The White Man’s Burden.” In more recent times the extension of the power of rich metropolitan centers into the hinterlands of less advantaged populations tends to be characterized in the language of economics and development. Instead of referring to colonized groups as savage and underdeveloped they are more often labeled as citizens of failed states. The newer forms of commercial domination as administered through agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are often described as neo-imperialism or neo-colonialism.

 

 

Hence the process of globalization continues to be invested with many paradoxes and complexities. Some of those complexities are derived from the need to find a balance in mechanisms of governance that reflect both the diversities of culture and history linking human beings to nationality, community, and place as well as the more universal attributes uniting the entire human family through commonalities permeating the overall human condition. Ironically the defense of local self-determination and the protection of the ecological conditions for biocultural diversity may necessitate the elaboration of a regime of global governance capable of democratically enacting laws and enforcing universal standards for the protection of human and environmental rights. With all its inadequacies and imperfections the United Nations represents the only credible venue of global governance currently available to humanity in the quest to universalize principles of equality, justice, and democracy. Accordingly many of the old questions about the future of globalization converge in political controversies questioning the future of the United Nations. Will the United Nations or the United States serve as the highest authority when it comes to regulating the great questions of war and peace on the planet? Will globalization be guided by the orderly evolution and enforcement of international law or will militarism, coercion, and force be the primary basis for determining how things get done, who benefits, and who in the global community must bear the greatest liabilities and costs?

 

 

After 1945 European imperialism was rapidly replaced by the political economy of the Cold War. In the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union both put themselves at the center of competing systems of political economy, namely capitalism and communism respectively. Both superpowers sought to universalize and thus globalize their own systems of production, distribution, and decision making. In 1955 at a conference in Bandung Indonesia representatives of the colonized peoples of Asia and Africa gathered to oppose the new type of colonialism generated by the imposed polarities of the Cold War. The delegates rejected the idea that humanity was limited to a choice between only two systems of political economy, namely capitalism or communism. In founding the Non-Aligned Movement the Bandung delegations sought to advance a vision of globalization based on the recognition of the inherent right of all peoples to self-determination. They proposed a vision of the future based not on the monocultural triumph of a single system of material relations. Instead they pictured a form of globalization based on exchange and interaction between free peoples empowered to make intelligent use of their own Aboriginal lands and diverse histories in adapting to the present and in preparing for the future. George Manuel, a Shuswap Indian from British Columbia, described this vision of ecological globalization in 1974 in a book entitled The Fourth World.

 

 

There is no escaping the fact that the United States, with all its international indebtedness and all its increasingly apparent internal weaknesses, still holds much power over the conditions of life or death for all organisms on this planet. The massive military budget of the United States is bigger than the total budget of the next fifteen largest military spenders combined. There has never in all of history been a killing machine as formidable as that presently under the control of the US government. Hence capitalism's primary heartland and laboratory in the twentieth century still retains considerable capacity in the twenty-first century to determine whether large portions of humanity will be subjected to the illiberal tyranny of imposed absolutisms or whether Earth’s citizens will be allowed the opportunity to embrace the pluralism implicit in the liberal option of rational relativism. The United States, however, cannot point the way to the promised land of universal justice until its own citizens address the contradictions between their country’s formal commitment to law, liberty, and equality and the wildly disproportionate capacity of its own elites to impose their self-interested will on others, both domestically and internationally.

 

 

The contradictions between rhetoric and action became increasingly stark as the US government recycled its Cold War rhetoric of freedom and democracy in its effort to impose its will on the people of Iraq. Rather than rising to a spirited defense of liberalism after the 911 conflagrations at the Pentagon and Twin Towers, the US government opted to exploit the atmosphere of crisis in order to pursue its own decidedly illiberal quest for what it called Full Spectrum Dominance and Total Information Awareness. The US government opted to define the United States as the global leader of a War on Terror in much the same fashion that it had previously presented itself as the leader of the anti-communist, pro-capitalist side of the Cold War. It used the attacks attributed to al-Qaeda to press forward a previously formulated agenda emphasizing US control of global oil supplies and the use of the US Armed Forces as capitalism’s ultimate police agency. In the name of the Global War on Terror, the US government adopted the policies of the Project for the New American Century just as in the Cold War it had adopted as its own Henry Luce’s neo-imperial vision of the American Century. In the name of the Global War on Terror the US presidency widened and entrenched the imperative of the executive branch to subordinate all other branches of the US government.

 

 

Both the Cold War and the Global War on Terror have served the interests of those who profit most from the expanding operations of the world's dominant military-industrial complex. Both the Cold War and the Global War on Terror were crafted in ways that subordinate true national “defense” to the higher purpose of maintaining the United States as, in Hannah Arendt’s words, “the greatest power on earth.” Both the Cold War and the Global War on Terror have provided the means to elaborate networks of patronage and federal transfers to military contractors. These contractors have spread out their domestic operations all over the United States so that the money they receive from Washington does double duty as regional subsidies. The political dimension of this system for distributing federal largesse has grown increasingly important ever since the United States became addicted to its permanent wartime economy beginning in 1941. Both the Cold War and the Global War on Terror defined the enemy in such vague and open ended ways that US officials and their international clients and collaborators have invested themselves with almost unlimited arbitrary authority to criminalize, vanquish, or eliminate any group or individual deemed unfriendly to the policies of the status quo. Hence the Cold War and the Global War on Terror have both been shaped in ways that deny due process and the rule of law to many human beings. As illustrated by revelations about abuses of power at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and a host of so-called ghost prisons under US military control, the targeted groups may include a few real criminals along with a host of others whose only crime is to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time or to hold opinions and ideas that call into question the continuing hegemony of the capitalism, neo-colonialism, and superpower privilege.

 

 

The spread to worldwide proportions of the financial contagion that began on Wall Street in 2008 demonstrates the huge scope of the global economy. It demonstrates how interdependent humanity’s various branches have become on one another since capitalism extended its reach following the elimination of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union. The reverberations of the massive bailouts that held back a global recession have resulted in a burst of global debt of public debt that in 2010 rocked the financial foundations of, for instance, Greece, Spain and the United Kingdom. This growing public indebtedness also further eroded the financial power of the ailing capitalist superpower, the United States.

 

 

The rapidly increasing indebtedness of the United States is paralleled by the rise of China as a major industrial and financial power. China’s rise is increasingly connected to the rise of India, another densely populated country. India is an emerging powerhouse in the production of the software and hardware driving the communication revolution in interactive technology. Accordingly, as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, we are witnessing the end of the brief reign of a single superpower. In its place we see the makings of a more multipolar world. The rising price of oil together with the growing environmental hazard of global warming is increasing the pressure for significant alterations in the way economic and political relations are structured.

Marking Scheme

A+ 90 - 100 B+ 77 - 79 C+ 67 - 69 D+ 57 - 59
A 85 - 89 B 73 - 76 C 63 - 66 D 50 - 56
A- 80 - 84 B- 70 - 72 C- 60 - 62 F below 50