We
are used to speaking with awe about the current globalization: integration of
financial and goods’ markets, ease of travel. Yet,
“[around year
150]..it was possible for a young student, Tatian, to pass from the eastern,
Syrian, fringe of the Roman empire to Rome, speaking Greek all the way and
participating in a uniform Greek philosophical culture…To humbler men, [the
Empire] meant wider horizons and unprecedented opportunities for travel; it
meant the erosion of local differences through trade and emigration; and the
weakening of ancient barriers before new wealth and new criteria of status”
(Peter Brown, The World of late antiquity,
p. 60).
and
“[prior to
World War I the inhabitant of London] could secure…cheap and comfortable means
of transport to any country or climate without passport or other formality,
could dispatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such supply
of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad
to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs,
bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly
aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference. But most important of
all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent,
expect in the direction of further improvement…” (Keynes, The Economic consequences of the peace, pp. 11-12)1
As these quotes imply, we are currently standing at the
threshold of the Third Globalization. The first globalization was the Roman-led
empire that covered during the two to three centuries which we plausibly can
treat as a period of globalization the area from the Euphrates to Scotland,
from the Gibraltar to Armenia. The second globalization was, of course, the
British-led one, lasting from around 1870 until the Great War. But
 |
1 World Bank, Research
department.. I am grateful to Ethan Kapstein, Mansoob Murshed, Veljko Djuric
and Richard Kohl for valuable comments. The views expressed here are my own,
and should not be attribiuted to the World Bank or its affiliated institutions.
were these
periods real “globalization”, and how sure are we about assigning the dates to
them?
In Part 1, I
shall look at some similarities between the three globalizations; in Part 2, I
will consider the ideological backlashes against the three globalizations:
Christianity against the first, Marxism against the second. Finally, I will
indulge in some speculation as to what ideology might play a similar role in
the future, undermining the seemingly firm current dominance of liberal capitalism.
1. Similarities between the three globalizations
The dates and
definitions. Can we truly argue that the period of the Roman rule over the
large part of the inhabited globe was “globalization?” Is not a “partial” globalization a contradiction in terms? If the rule did not extend over the entire
globe, how can it be “global?” And if one empire, why not others: the Spanish
empire that spanned parts of Europe and most of South America. The reason lies
in the spread of the Roman empire, its duration and its overall approach. One
can reasonably argue that the empire grew “global” from the moment when it
reached its peak, both in terms of territorial expansion and social
stability—under Trajan who in 115 was the first, and the last, Roman emperor to
behold the shores of the Persian Gulf. It was
global because it included within its ambit a wide number of groups, tribes,
peoples, religions—it represented a “universum” as it included practically all
the known civilized peoples with the exceptions of Persians, and Germanic
tribes across the Rhine. (China and India were too far to be known.)
Now, if we can set the beginning of “globalization” with
relative ease, that is at the time which coincided with what is conventionally
regarded as the high watermark of Roman power, when was the end of the first
globalization? Deciding on the dates is important—not because we can truly
establish when globalization ended, nor choosing one year rather than another
per se matters—but because it forces us to look at different aspects of what
globalization means. For choosing different years means that we are defining
globalization differently. For example, if we say that the end of the “global”
phase coincides with a fall of Rome in 476, we are using a rather
symbolic ending date. For sure, the Eastern Roman empire continued for many
centuries. But the fall of Rome symbolically represented the end of integration
of the entire broad Mediterranean basin: trade between Syria and Britannia was
interrupted for many centuries—perhaps until the Second Globalization occurred
late in the 19th century. 2
But if we look further from the symbolic, we are forced
to recognize that not only had Rome had long ceased to be a very important part
of the Empire, it was not even the Imperial capital.3 Moreover,
since the time when in the early 5th century the Empire lost control
of Britain, Gaul, Iberian peninsula, and northern Africa, the integration
between the West and the East of the Mediterranean became a thing of the past.
One could thus date the end of the “global” phase from the early 5th
century as the Roman possessions in the West began to shrink. 4 To
complicate the matters further, the importance of market exchanges, which is
indeed an important feature of globalization, 5 declined with the
growth of a largely self-sufficient manorial system in the Western part of the
Empire. 6 Walbank (1946) thus describes the Western Empire in the
third century: “Over the whole Empire there was a gradual reversion to
small-scale, hand-to-mouth craftsmanship, producing for the local market and
for specific orders in the vicinity” (p. 31). “The gradual transfer of industry
from the cities to villages and large country estates [started]. In this way the essentially agrarian
character of ancient civilisation began to reassert itself over the urban
elements which had produced its highest and most typical developments”
(Walbank, 1946, p.33). There was “...the splitting-up of a single oecumenical
[global] trade system into a number
of provincial blocks” (p.38).
Similar ambivalence attends any attempt to pinpoint the
dates of the Second Globalization. In recent papers, Baldwin and Martin (1999),
and Williamson (1996) both date the Second Globalization to have lasted from
around 1870 until 1914. The ending date is clear, and it would seem, accepted
by everybody. But the beginning date coincides with the epoch of imperialism.
Hobson in his famous “Imperialism” also dated the beginning of “new”
imperialism to 1870. However, certain features that we believe are present in
globalization (ability and freedom to move from place to place, to sell and buy
goods from different locales, or to make investments) were present even in an
earlier period, say after the mid-19th century. Politically, if one
focuses on Europe (and Europe
indeed was the most important part of the world), the period between 1848
and 1914 represents a single whole.7 To use Hobsbawm’s terminology
the question is whether Second Globalization should include the Age of Capital
in addition to the Age of Empire. However, unlike our decision to treat a
period of Roman rule as globalization even if it excluded a large part of the
inhabited globe, a similar approach cannot be used to consider as globalization
the “European-only” period, that is the pre-imperialist era of the 19th
century. This is simply because the existence of the rest of the world was
indeed known by then. It may be
therefore more sensible to rather conventionally date the period of the Second
Globalization from around 1870 to 1914.
As for the Third Globalization, although the features we
associate with globalization started to spread to the parts of the world since
the 1960’s they did not include, until the end of the Cold War, the vast
expanses of the Euro-Asian continent. And, surely did not include China until
the changes in that country in the late 1970’s. “Globalization” that excludes
some 30 percent of world population (Communist countries of Europe, Asia and
China) can thus hardly be termed globalization.8 This is why we
believe that only now do we stand at the threshold of the Third Globalization.
What lessons can comparisons with the other two globalizations allow us to
draw? What similarities can we observe between these two episodes, and the present?
Globalization is
led by a hegemon. Globalization is inseparable from the existence of a
hegemon. It is not that globalization is a process where most of the countries,
and peoples participate on an equal footing, engaging equally in exchange and
production. Globalization emerges only when a hegemon ensures safe roads or
safe seas for many to engage in commerce and investment. The hegemon provides
security—a crucial public good. The role of world hegemon is no different from
that of a ruler of a country: he too provides safety.9 Of course,
not every hegemon will do so. Mongols did not. They were more interested in
extracting a surplus from those whom they ruled. Thus a relatively benevolent
hegemon (“a live and let live hegemon”) is needed for globalization. And the
three globalizations of which we speak here found in Rome, Britain, and the
United States, such three hegemons. In somewhat self-congratulatory words of
Lord Rosebery, the British empire was “the greatest secular agency for good
known to the world.” 10
Similar in spirit, albeit less elegant, is the recent description of the
United States by its Secretary of the Treasury, as “an indispensable nation.”
So long as the world is polarized, as it
was during the Cold War, globalization was impossible. Had Persia been a
stronger opponent for Rome, globalization, and certainly a Roman-led one, would
have never come to pass. Had Britain been weaker, there would not have been
Second Globalization, and indeed when it was faced by a strong challenger
(Germany), which it failed to defeat in a way that enabled it to regain its old
pre-eminence, the Second Globalization ended. It
is only because we live now in a unipolar world that globalization has
suddenly become so obvious.
Technological
progress not sufficient. Without technological progress, globalization is
simply technically unfeasible. Chariots and ships had to be invented for people
to be able to travel from one end of the Roman empire to another. Ships ferried
goods and people from Europe to Asia and to Africa and to Australia in the last
century. Telephones, Internet, and airplanes are needed today for people to
stay in touch with each other. So much is obvious. Yet, technological progress
alone is not sufficient. Had the Soviet Union not collapsed (or: had Persia
been stronger), we (or: the Mediterranean world) would have had the same
technology, but the world would not have been globalized. It is not technology alone that makes us
“global”: it is the political unity which is imparted to the world by the hegemon.
The global and the
particular. The constituent elements, as it were, of a globalization are
nation-states in the Second and Third Globalizations. Since the First
Globalization occurred within an Empire, its constituent elements were cities
(local governments). What is most interesting for us is that Roman-led
globalization coincided with increasing importance of local governments
(particularly in the Eastern part of the Empire), and great variability in
local legislation. Under the semblance of a uniform administration and imperial
laws, the role of cities increased. Many in the East consciously promoted and
displayed their Greek roots: “The Greek aristocracies treasured their local
rites...as guarantees of local status, and through a fear that the vast empire
in which they found themselves would become a cultural dust-bowl. The general
attitude of the age [4th century] stressed the brittle honeycomb of
local patriotism: the Greek cities
produced a rash of coins, each honoring its own god; and an African city
summed it up in an inscription: ‘More power to the home-town!’” (Brown, 1971,
p.60). The Roman example shows, translated into today’s circumstances, that
globalization does not need to lead to an obliteration of local customs, nor to
a total sidelining of the nation-state.
Even the hegemon is influenced. Thus while the First
Globalization took place under the Roman aegis, those who gradually extended
and maintained Roman borders were less and less recognizably “Roman.” The set
of the Illyrian-born emperors who restored Roman greatness in the Third century
after a period of 50 years of constant turmoil and weakness, would have been
hardly recognized as Romans by the 1st century senators. 11
They were hardy military leaders, speaking Latin because it was the
administrative language of the Empire, while all but ignoring the Senate, and
not even bothering to visit Rome except to celebrate a triumph. Diocletian,
who, as Gibbon put it, “like Augustus, …may be considered as the founder of a
new Empire” (The Decline and Fall… p.
359), became Roman emperor because he made a successful career as a military
leader, not because he had any particular cultural or ethnic attachments to
Rome. 12
Similarly, as the ruling elites in the US become more
globalized, they will less and less represent the interests of their American
constituents only. Not only will foreign lobbyists gradually become more
important (since they have more money) than
many domestic interest groups, even cultural similarities between the US and
foreign elites will make them feel closer to each other than they feel to their
domestic constituents. An interesting situation might then ensue: since the
decision on who will hold power in the hegemon will still be made by the
American people, we might have the people deciding between several competing
groups within the elite (as is already today the case), who, in their turn, are
partly bankrolled by foreign interests groups. We immediately see a strong
similarity between the role of the Roman senate and the American electorate.
Since Augustus (“this crafty prince” as Gibbon called him), the Senate had—with
very few exceptions—no substantive role in the election of the Emperor.
However, since Augustus, almost all
Emperors ostensibly deferred to the Senate and sought its approval. The
senators caved in, at first because they faced a fait accompli or were cajoled (both strategies used,
simultaneously, by Augustus), and later they gave their approvals out of a long habit, deeply aware of own impotence. Still, for senators,
playing the pretense was
more rewarding than refusing it—because they knew that a refusal might
lead to their own dismissal or replacement by the more pliant group. As money, and interest groups, at times
foreign-bankrolled, come to dominate the electoral process in the US, the power
of the American people to elect its own leaders may gradually be emptied of
real content: the people will be increasingly viewed as a group to be
manipulated through media blitzes or fooled by promises—but the real levers of power will be held elsewhere. 13
Imperialism.
The First Globalization was the direct outcome of successful Roman imperialism.
It was successful not only militarily, but, more importantly, politically as it
extended the benefits of Roman citizenship to all nations brought within its
confines. 14
The Second Globalization is indissolubly linked with
Imperialism. At the time when the Napoleonic wars ended, European powers did
not control, with the exception of Egypt and
a number of enclaves along the African coastline, no part of Africa. By 1914,
no part of Africa was independent save for Ethiopia. Moreover European
possessions also expanded in Asia, and
Oceania. Britain too followed, for a while, a policy of extending the
citizenship, until the fear of being overwhelmed by the other races stopped it.
The French were famous for teaching African children of “our ancestors the
Gauls.” But the North Europeans, the British and the French, were more wary of
extending citizenship the way the Romans did. Perhaps because with the Roman
example before them, they knew that such a policy will lead to the watering
down of what to be a Roman, or a British means. Thus, the triad of hegemonism,
imperialism, and globalization seems to go together.
How far will the current hegemon go along the path of
imperialism? We already see the clear signs: the almost total disregard of the
United Nations, or rather the fact that the UN has become an instrument of the
US policy, or when inconvenient is simply ignored; the disregard of the
existing international charters and documents; the US willingness to act
unilaterally or to drag, in an ostensible show of unity, its reluctant allies.
The hegemon is present at practically all points of the globe; and where it cannot
be present itself, it sends its regional
allies to do the job (Italy in Albania, Australia in
East Timor). So,
imperialism, like under the previous two globalizations, is part and parcel of
globalization.
Will the US be more like the Roman Empire who embraced
politically under its constitution all the people which willingly joined it or
were subdued, or would it be more like the British who found it too risqué to promise a true political union
or to give political rights to the subject peoples? Note that the British
political possessions fell into three categories—Crown colonies with no
self-governments, colonies with some representative, but not responsible
government, and colonies with self-rule in which the Crown retained only a veto
on some legislation—and that all but one of the 39 possessions acquired by
Britain after 1870 were simple colonies (the category 1).15 As
Hobson wrote in 1902: “Politically, the new [British and other European]
Imperialism was an expansion of autocracy” (ibid, p. 27).
The United States, being itself an amalgam of peoples
seem like a good candidate to follow the Roman example. However, the formal
extension of citizenship may be a costlier undertaking today than it was some
eighteen centuries ago. While it is true that there was an economic cost to the
original Roman citizens of further extension of citizenship (since subsidized
food rations had to be guaranteed to all citizens of Rome, Alexandria, and
later Constantinople), the costs were probably, in relation to the size of the
economy, less then than they are today—when government-provided benefits, and
thus taxes needed to finance them, are much greater. (This is simply the other
way of saying that provision of government benefits had increased faster, in
the rich countries of the world, than their income.) Furthermore, the US is a
democracy while Rome was not. And people in a democracy may be stingier of the
benefits than an absolute ruler. For the latter, extension of citizenship is a
trade-off where the benefits may be tangible (support of the new citizens for
his rule, enhanced greatness) and the offsets minimal (economic costs that he
does not bear himself).16 But for each citizen in a democracy,
extension of citizenship and suffrage may affect his purse directly.
Inequality.
The Second Globalization was accompanied –or rather—produced a massive increase
in world inequality. As Francois Bourgignon and Christian Morrison
(1999; Table 1) show in a recent paper—which for the first time calculated
inequality among the persons in the world (treating all individuals in the
world, irrespective of where the live equally) over the long period from 1820
to today—inequality increased between 1820 and 1870 by 6 Gini points (from 50.4
to 56.5) and then between 1870 and 1910 by another 5 Gini points (to 61.4).17
The increase in inequality was driven by rising differences in mean incomes
between various countries and country groups. While in 1820, inter-country
differences in mean incomes accounted (“explained”) for 11 percent of total
world inequality, in 1870, the percentage was 28 percent, and in 1910, 38
percent.18 Western Europe and North America pulled ahead of
everybody else. The rest of the world either remained stagnant or declined
(Asia in particular). 19
While our data regarding what happened in the 19th
century are reasonably good, the Roman data are much more tentative. Inequality
in the Empire seems to have increased from the 3rd century onward
(approximately, around Constantine’s assumption of full power) 20
but the increase seems to have been limited to the Western part. As Averil
Cameron (1993, p.117) writes: “One striking feature of the 4th
century [in the Western half of the Empire] is the tendency of landowners to
amass estates and wealth on an enormous scale.” But the situation was—as could
be implied from the growing role of local governments—different in the East. To
quote Cameron again: “[Existence of large estates] revealed a dangerous
concentration of wealth in the west…while the government itself became
increasingly weak. In the east, by
contrast, senatorial fortunes were smaller, partly in view of the very recent
development of the senate of Constantinople and the prominence in it of men of
much more ordinary origin” (ibid, p. 118). “The difference in atmosphere
between the two parts of the empire was largely due to the different role of
the small man. When Gaul [in the fifth century] was being terrorized by peasant
revolts, provoked by taxation and rack-renting, the farmers of northern Syria were able to build substantial stone
houses in villages that now [20th century] shelter only a few
nomads” (Brown, 1971, p. 44). Ultimately it led to large villa (manorial or
proto-feudal) economies in the West, and
small peasant and village economy in the East. Increased inequality in the West
coincided not with growing “marketization” but rather with its opposite: a
retrenchment from the relatively free exchange of the earlier century and from
the division of labor. It resulted
into what Max Weber called “the political capitalism.”
Cultural
integration. Neither the Second nor the Third Globalization have, in terms of cultural integration, reached the
level of the First. While the current may ultimately reach it—as witnessed by
growing cultural similarities between large swathes of the world, and the
cultural domination of the hegemon (films, books, and, in particular,
language), the world is not culturally as integrated as Europe and the Middle
East were in (say) the second
century. For the cultural milieu, perhaps because of shared citizenship and
shared language of the cultural elite (Latin and Greek, and often both), was
more uniform than it is today. It is
clearly a matter of an educated guess, but a New Yorker and a citizen of Tokyo (the very fact that there is no
English word to designate it should tell
us something!) may have less in common than a citizen of Antioch and
that of Tarragona. Even the fact that an emperor (Julian) would write a book
deriding the citizens of a city (Antioch) who mocked him because they did not
share his religious beliefs, is not conceivable today. He tried to convert them; they resisted it—but the attempt
at conversion and mockery betray a cultural closeness that would be hard to
imagine between an American president and the people of Japan.
2. Reactions to victorious globalization: Christianity, Marxism, what Next?
The new and
victorious ideology. Globalization, almost by definition, leads to deracinement (uprootedness). It does so by speeding up economic
progress which transforms communities, pushes people to abandon the existing
jobs and take the new ones, makes them move to the new places, or even when
they do not physically move requires them to confront new customs and ways of thinking. Globalization is the
opposite of closedness. It thus
severs the old ties that hold communities together. The uprootedness creates a
large pool of people who share similar condition and to whom a uniform,
universalist ideology will almost by definition appeal. That the ideology has
to be universalist is obvious if it wants to reach many people who differ by
their backgrounds, religion, custom etc., but who at the time of globalization
face the same problems. But uprootedness creates anxiety—even if it accompanied
by an improvement in the economic position, and, of course, even more so, if it
is not. Therefore, the attitude of the uprooted (deracinés) toward globalization, and in particular toward the
hegemon at
the apex, is ambivalent. On the one hand, even the uprooted people are
often, in an economic and social sense, the winners because globalization
widens their horizons, offers them greater social mobility, increases their
incomes, and –even more strikingly— opens up new opportunities for their
children. On the other hand, their resent it because globalization tosses them
around, physically and metaphorically, like playthings—it obeys to forces they find difficult to comprehend.
These large groups of the uprooted will be in the
instinctive search of a new ideology—ideology of the time of globalization.
This cannot be the ideology of the elite, that is, the ideology espoused by the
hegemon, because of their ambivalence towards globalization and the hegemon.
And indeed the First and the Second Globalizations have produced the two
strongest universalist ideologies ever which both owe their growth to the deracinés of the globalization:
Christianity and Marxism. This is how Moses Hadas in his 1948 introduction to
Burckhardt’s classic “The Age of Constantine the Great” saw Christianity: “...a
new and revolutionary social doctrine with an enormous emotional appeal was
spread abroad by men with a religious zeal for a new and authoritarian
cosmopolitanism and with a religious certainty that their end justified their
means.” 21 Would not the same definition, verbatim, apply to Marxism
around the turn of the 20th century?
It is not an
accident that Christianity and Marxism were born and grew during the first two
globalizations. They appealed to the displaced, to the uprooted and they
emphasized the common, universal.22 Both had to overcome, nay to
fight, against the dominant ideology which was the driving force behind
globalization: Roman paganism during the first, capitalist liberalism during
the second. Short of globalization, neither Christianity nor Marxism would have
aroused. Not only because globalization offered them the masses eager to follow
their message, but also because globalization provided them with the means to
spread their message. Without cultural and economic homogeneity of the
Graeco-Roman world, the message of the Gospel would have remained enclosed
within a small community. 23 Origen, writing in the middle of the
Third century, makes the parallel directly: “Jesus was born during the reign of
Augustus, the one who reduced to uniformity...the many kingdoms on earth so that he had s single
empire. It would have hindered
Jesus’s teaching from being spread through the whole world if there had beed
many kindgoms.” 24 Similarly, had Europe and the world been less
unified, few in China would have heard of a German exile writing in the British
Museum.25
If we extent
this analogy, we can see that those who believe that the current globalization
will result in an ideological triumph of the values that underlie the
globalization and are shared by the elite, are wrong.26 What history
seems to prove is that the eras of globalization are particularly propitious
times and settings for the growth of ideologies that while not against
globalization as such (among other things because they stress universalism) are
critical of the particular form of globalization—in other words of the ideology
propounded and held by the ruling elites. For sure, globalization will produce
ideologies that reject globalization, i.e. that are in direct opposition to it.
The Second Globalization produced a fair crop of nationalistic-romantic
rejections of liberalism. But the real powerful ideologies will be those that,
in an almost textbook Hegelian fashion, do not represent an antithesis of
globalism (that is, its rejection), but
the synthesis (that is, its transcendence). Marxism viewed capitalist
globalization of the 19th century as a great step forward in
mankind’s evolution—and few have waxed more eloquent about the achievements of
capitalism than Marx in The Communist
Manifesto— but not a final step. The next, logical, step was to get rid of
the classes and usher in universalist equality. Similarly, Christianity did not
oppose to the Roman triumphalism the exclusiveness of the ethnic religions in
the way that Judaism did. It accepted
Roman unification of the known (and civilized) world, and wanted to improve on
it. The ambivalence toward Rome, and all it symbolized, is nowhere clearer than
in Augustine’s City of God. It was specifically written to address
that ambivalence: Christians disliked Rome for all of what it represented of
paganism and licentiousness (and were hence supposed to rejoice in its
downfall),27 yet they
were culturally its citizens.28 The sack of Rome in 410 brought this
ambivalence to the fore. The similarities between Christianity and Marxism in
their attitude toward the globalization of their times are striking. Can we
expect that the Third Globalization will give birth to a new universalist ideology?
To us, it would seem that Islam would almost perfectly
fill the role of a new ideology fit to prevail in the Third Globalization: it
is universalist and expansionist
(proselytistic); it has a strong element of commonality (meaning that
people who share the religion feel particularly close to each other, maybe only
a shade less so than the early Christians and Communists felt among
themselves), and it is not the religion/ideology of the ruling elites. The
difference is, of course, that Islam is already an old religion which did not
arise in response to specific needs of today.
But one cannot rule out that it may
be sufficiently flexible to fill these specific needs.
The fall. For
the globalization to “count”, it need not only cover most or all of the surface
of the Earth; it also needs to last. It is premature to speak of the Third
Globalization now. In reality, we
should be speaking of it—if it persists in some fifty or one hundred years from now. But, assuming that we are
indeed on the verge of the Third Globalization, how did the previous two end?
The first ended, as we saw before, in the early 5th century when the
Western part of the Empire was lost. The connection with the rest of the Empire
was severed, and the cultural unity of the known (Western) world ended—and
quite arguably has never recovered since. (For the cultural closeness of
Palmyra and London was greater then than it is today.) But the cause of the
fall was military defeat of the West at the hands of the Goths and other
Germanic tribes. While the discussion of
the causes of the Fall is endless, and will probably never generate unanimity
nor will it lead us to isolate a single cause, the fact is that the western
Roman empire was lost at the battlefield. However, it was overthrown by the
people who, while not Roman citizens, were not culturally dissimilar from them.
Not only did Alaric serve as a general in the Roman army, but Goths were
permitted to live among the Romans (as they escaped from the Huns)—an
experience which left them, it is true, with bad memories but nevertheless culturally
close to Romans. The people who conquered Rome and sacked it were Christians
too—like most of Rome’s own inhabitants. In
the famous phrase by Gibbon, “if the decline of the Roman empire was
hastened by the conversion of Constantine, his victorious religion broke the
violence of the fall, and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors.” 29
The new religion born partly in resistance to Roman globalization, partly as a
means to transcending it, achieved its objective—its existence transcended that
of the Empire. The Empire which gave rise to the First Globalization ended, but the religion to which the Empire gave the raison d’être and the
wherewithal of
expansion, went up to conquer a large part of the world, and to rule up to our
days, two thousand years after it was created.
While the First Globalization ended through attacks from
without, the Second Globalization ended because of dissention among the elites.
The struggle for mastery in Europe and in the world between the hegemon (Great
Britain) and the upstart power (Germany) ended in the decline of both. Out of
that struggle, Marxism, not unlike Christianity, came victorious. It triumphed in one country, then spread
to rule over one- fourth of the people in the world, and sought too to
transcend the capitalist-led globalization by the one (in theory) led by
workers of the world. It failed in
its attempt— but while it mounted a challenge to capitalism, it was
sufficiently strong to end any dream of
a new universal hegemon and globalization. Only when Communism collapsed, did the
Third Globalization become possible. (Of course, the same would have been true
in the opposite case: had capitalism lost, and Communism won, we would have
also witnessed globalization, but led by another hegemon, and another ideology.)
What does the future
hold? All forecasts are the domain of the foolhardy. But if the analogy
between the first two and the Third Globalization holds, we can expect (rather:
that is what we already see) the rule of a single hegemon, increasing cultural
unity of the world, and the striving for a universalist ideology which will not
be the current ideology of the hegemon. The future of liberal capitalist
ideology is therefore not radiant. Its association with the hegemon will make
it unpalatable to the large masses of people that are brought into the process
of globalization. They are there, the deracites
of the 21st century, providing willing souls thirsting for
something that will explain to them the process into which they are thrown, or
in which are willingly participating, but which they nevertheless feel
baffling. The ideology which will best quench their new thirst will ultimately win. We do not know what it will be, nor
how it will be called—but we can see its
contours: it must be universalist, and specific, that is it must answer today’s
anxieties, not yesterday’s.
REFERENCES
Richard Baldwin and Philip
Martin (1999), “Two waves of globalisation: superficial similarities,
fundamental differences”, National Bureau of Economic Research Working paper
No. 6904, January.
Francois Bourguignon and
Christian Morrisson (1999), “The size distribution of income among world
citizens”, mimeo, June 1999.
Peter Brown (1971), The World of Late Antiquity AD 150-750, New York and London,
W.W. Norton.
Jacob Burckhart (1949), The Age of Constantine the Great, Berkeley and Los Angeles:
Univrersity of California Press, 1949 [first published in German in 1852].
Averil Cameron (1993), The Later Roman Empire, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Garth Fowden (1993), Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity,
Princeton University Press, 1993.
Arther Ferrill (1986), The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation, London:
Thames and Hudson.
Edward Gibbon (1994 [1776]), The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, London:
Pinguin’s, volume I.
K. A. Hobson (1965 [1902]), Imperialism, The University of Michigan
Press, Ann Arbor Paperbacks.
Jaroslav Pelikan (1987) The Excellent Empire: The Fall of Rome and the Triumph of the Church, Harper&
Row.
Ben Polak and Jeffrey G.
Williamson (1991), “Poverty, Policy and Industrialization: Lessons from the
distant past”, World Bank Working Paper No. 645, April 1991.
Ben Polak and Jeffrey G. Williamson
(1993), "Poverty, Policy and Industrialization in the
Past", in J. van der Gaag and
M. Lipton (eds.), Including the Poor, Washington, D.C.:IFPRI and the World Bank.
F.W. Walbank (1946), The Decline of the Roman Empire in the West, London: Corbett Press.
Jeffrey
Williamson (1991), "British
Inequality during the Industrial Revolution: Accounting for the Kuznets
curve", in Y.S. Brenner,
Hartmut Kaelble and Mark Thomas
(eds.), Income Distribution in Historical
Perspective, Cambridge and
Paris: Cambridge University Press and
Editions de la Maison des Sciences.
Jeffrey Williamson (1996),
“Globalization and inequality then and now: the late 19th and late 20th
centuries compared”,. National Bureau of Economic Research. Working paper
series No. 5491, March 1996.
 |
1 This is a somewhat overused
quote—but it is difficult to produce a better or a more succinct one.
2 In a less symbolic sense,
the fall of Rome represented the end of the Western Empire. The insignia of the
Empire were sent to Constantinople a few months after Romulus Augustulus was
deposed.
3 Note that starting with Diocletian
in 300, no emperor lived in Rome, and most hardly ever visited it. Under the
tetrarchy, Milan became the western, and Nicomedia the eastern capital, before,
of course both were later replaced by Constantinople. “Till Diocletian in the
twentieth year of his reign, celebrated his Roman triumph, it is extremely
doubtful that he ever visited the ancient capital of the empire. Even on that
memorable occasion his stay did not exceed two months” (Gibbon, The Decline and Fall…p. 385). “Rome is
rarely if ever on the imperial itinerary” writes Averil Cameron (1993, p.43).
Constantine visited it twice in more than twenty years of reign. Gibbon (The Decline and Fall..., p. 606; fn)
quotes a revealing statistics from Tillemont, to the effect that between Carus
until Honorius (year 400), in an interval of 120 years, no emperor was
physically present in Rome on Januuary 1, the day when officially the
consulships began.
4 But note that until 410 when
Alaric conducted his first sack of Rome, the borders of the Empire were about
the same as in 115.
5 In the most abstract economic way, globalization can be seen
to take place in several dimensions: globalization transcends narrow geographic
or national lines through movement of goods and services (trade), movement of
physical capital (direct foreign investments), movement of financial capital,
and movement of people (migration).
6 “But
another feature of the existence of large estates had a more direct impact on
the general economy. This is the fact that many dealings will have taken place
between one estate and another of the same landowner, or through arrangements
with his friends and relations, and so will have by-passed the open market
altogether.” (Cameron . p. 121).
7 It is not by accident that
A.J.P. Taylor chose precisely that period in his The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918.
8 Baldwin and Martin (1999)
define globalization to have started in the 1960’s. This, I believe, is a
fairly self-centered definition.
9 Unless he find it more
profutable to become a predatory bandit!
10 Quoted from Hobson (1965, p. 160).
11 I have in mind Claudius, Aurelian and Probus, all
generals born in Illyricum who ruled from 268 to 282. When Gallerius, of similar
origin, tried to impose personal taxation on citizens of Rome, they could not
“patiently brook the insolence of an Illyrian
peasant, who from his distant residence in Asia, presumed to number Rome among
the tributary cities of his empire” (Gibbon, The Decline and Fall…, p. 408). Yet pay they did.
12
“Latin emperors
like Diocletian and his colleagues [the tetrachs] showed that it is quite
possible to be a fanatical romanus and
yet to visit Rome only once in a lifetime.” (Brown, 1971, p. 42). Note that
under the fall of Constantinople 1453, its inhabitants and the emperor referred
to themselves as “Rhomaioi” [Greek for Romans].
13
What better
example of the trend than that of George W. Bush who has all but won the
Republican primaries before a single election was held: but he has a commanding
lead because nobody has amassed as much money!
14
“The bulk of
people acquired, with that [Roman citizenship] title, the benefit of the Roman
laws, particularly in the interesting articles of marriage, testaments, and
inheritance; and the road to fortune was open tothose whose pretensions were
seconded by favour or merit. The grandsons of the Gauls, who had beseiged
Julius Ceasar in Alesia, commanded legions, governed provinces, and were
admitted into the senate of Rome.” (Gibbon, The
Decline and Fall…, p. 64)
15
Only the
Transvaal belonged to category 2. From Hobson (1965, p.23).
16 It is notable that Roman citizenship was extended in 214 to all free subjects by Caracalla—a notoriously avaricious and cruel emperor.
As Gibbon writes:
“[Caracalla’s] liberality flowed
not…from the sentiments of a generous mind; it was the
sordid result of avarice…” (The Decline
and Fall…p. 178).
17
The Gini
coefficient ranges from 0 (perfect equality) to 100 (perfect inequality).
18
Inequality is
here measured by the Theil coefficient which, unlike the Gini, is fully
decomposable. Calculated from Bourguignon and Morrisson (1999, Table 3).
19
Inequality in
the hegemon alone (Great Britain) decreased during the period of Second
Globalization. According to Williamson (1991), and Polak and Williamson (1991,
p. 30), British inequality reached its peak in the 1870’s; the American
remained at the high plateau from the end of the Civil War to the 1920’s.
20 The battle of the Milvian bridge was in 312.
21 Hadas in J. Burckhardt (1949, p.7).
22 “The Christians were immigrants at heart—ideological
deracinés, separated from their
environment by a belief they knew they shared with little groups all over the
empire.” (Brown, ibid, p. 66)
23
“As soon as
those histories [of Jesus’s life and ressurection] were translated into the
Latin tongue they were perfectly intelligible to all the subjects of Rome...The
public highways, which had been constructed for the use of the legions, opened
an easy passage for the Christian missionares from Damascus to Corinth, and
from Italy to the extremity of Spain or Britain; nor did those spiritual
conquerors encounter any of the obstacles which usually retard or prevent the
introduction of a foreign religion into a distant country.” (Gibbon, The Decline and Fall...,p. 500).
24
Origen in Contra Celsus. Quoted from Fowden (1993,
p.89).
25
Brown (p.57)
makes a direct comparison: “[the Christian bishop in Rome in the time of
Hadrian] was an incomprehensible emigrant in a great city, like Karl Marx in
Victorian London.”
26
The most famous
such recent view is held by Fukuyama in The
End of History and the Last Man.
27
Burckhart (p.
218) writes: “To the Christians, as long as they saw and hated Rome as paganism
personified, as the Babylon of the Book of Revelation, ...the notion [of Roma aeterna] was folly. They regarded
Rome, as Arnobius plainly declares, as the “city created for the corruption of
the human race, for the sake of whose rule, the entire world was undeservedly
been subjugated.”
28 Tartullian insisted that the
Christians pray ‘in behalf of the emperors, nay, for the complete stability of
the empire, and for Roman interests in general.’ And the reason was this: ‘We
know that a mighty shock impending over the whole earth--in fact, the very end
of all things, threatening dreadful woes-- is being retarded only by the
continued existence of the Roman empire.” (Pelikan, 1987, p.47). Similarly,
Pelikan (ibid, p. 44) quotes Jerome:
“When I began to dictate [the Commentary on Ezekiel], I was so confounded by
the havoc wrought in the West and above all by the sack of Rome that, as the
common saying has it, I forgot even my own name. Long did I remain silent,
knowing that it was a time to weep.” Paganism was
not dead though. With Alaric ante portes, the pope Innocent “hoping to alleviate panic, agreed
to the performance of pagan rituals.” (Ferrill, 1986, p. 103).
29
Or in
Burckhardt’s words (1949, p. 216): “It was Christianity..that could bestow a
second youth upon the senascent Roman Empire; but it could so far prepare the
Empire’s Germanic conqueror that they did not wholly tread its culture
underfoot.”
