Globe Talk: the Cartographic Logic of Late Capitalism

In the bright dawn of globalization talk – sometime in the early '90s – the dean of radical geography was asked what he thought of it all. 'Globaloney' was the terse response, suggesting early-onset jaundice with the new buzzword on the lips of graduating MBAs, think-tank pundits, and financial journalists everywhere. Nearly two decades on, the niagara of hype has slackened and the word even carries a shopworn aura ('past its sell-by date', one can almost hear the feature editors intone). Yet the processes it names, or misnames, are not over. The conditions that gave 'globalization' its currency are surely still at work in the new millennium.

The term itself was hatched and took wing in business schools and the echo-chambers of the licensed press; it was intended both to describe and to promote the dismantling of barriers to the movement of capital and the loss of local and national sovereignties to the interests of transnational firms. All this was helped along by developments in telecommunications and silicon capitalism. The geopolitical context was the collapse in 1989 of the Soviet empire ('the end of history'). The propagandists of both blocs had told the same lie, that the USSR was communist. But whatever the Soviet Union was or was not, the barriers to Western capital in search of markets, raw materials and cheap labour had been real enough. Once the 'wall' came down, the old West/East division began to dissolve quickly, since it had been predicated for most of the twentieth century on the political geography of the capitalist-communist bloc system. It has given way to North/South terminology, reflecting the new – but in reality old – configuration of a Northern capitalist core (to use the metaphor of world-systems theory) and a Southern periphery. The obvious limitations of these hemispheric spatial terms led, in the first case, to the coining of 'tiers monde'/ 'third world' for countries 'non-aligned' with the two blocs, and more recently to the attachment of 'global' to 'South' to capture the fact that capitalism's uneven development creates conditions typically associated with the South inside the Northern heartlands.

We are greatly in Geoff Eley's debt for his survey, and for the heroic attempt to take stock of what is by now a vast and daunting literature, though a lot of it is frankly hogwash. Above all, the effort to historicize is to be welcomed, since the assassination of memory and the flattening of historical depth are among the chief effects of spectacle, an effect already widely noted with respect to 'postmodernity', globalization's slightly older sibling.

The linguistic and discursive power of naming – things and people and animals, buildings and spaces, epochs and ages – is a sure sign of social or political power. Big men (and the occasional woman) have whole eras named after them; millions of nineteenth-century humans around the globe found themselves willy-nilly living inside the biography of a big woman across the ocean. Raymond Williams, a critic from the Welsh borders whose trajectory made him especially attuned to these matters, often used to remark that those in opposition to the ruling powers have to deal with the fact that they typically stand on ground – he was talking of real ground but also of discursive and linguistic ground – not of their own choosing. Williams was fortunate not to have to witness the Orwellian onomastics performed by the spin merchants of the Bush Administration – for example, the 2002 Healthy Forests Initiative (in reality a logging permit for big timber), or the 2003 Clear Skies Act (a license to pollute).

To restate the obvious, there has always been a lot at stake over names ('A disease named is a disease half cured') and such is certainly the case when it comes to periodizing the present.¹ Eley understands this, of course – it's one of the reasons he wrote the essay – and he is in a club with many in the movement of movements, who continue to fret over the 'anti-globalization' label. The anxiety is no doubt due to the implicit rejection of...