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What makes globalization really new? Sociological views on our current globalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2019

Romain Lecler
Romain Lecler*
Affiliation:
Université du Québec à Montréal, Political Science Department, Case postale 8888, succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal (Québec) H3C 3P8, Canada
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: lecler.romain@uqam.ca
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Abstract

Reducing globalization to transnational movements and exchanges prevents us from understanding the specificity of our contemporary globalization, which was preceded by earlier waves of globalization. In particular, in the middle of the nineteenth century, many of the dimensions of our globalization had already been identified: the mobility of people, the expansion of trade, financial and cultural flows worldwide, and international cooperation. For example, as early as the 1850s, Marx diagnosed a ‘global’ expansion of capitalism bringing together many of the features of our contemporary globalization. In this article, I thus raise the question of the specificity of our globalization. What makes it new when compared to previous globalization processes? The main sociological theories of globalization in the 1990s relied on the thesis of a transition from a national to a global era. Many sociologists have therefore identified new aspects of our contemporary globalization. I explore six of those in turn: the invention of the terms ‘global’ and ‘globalization’ themselves; the rise of ‘transmigrations’; the rise of value chains, logistics, and ‘emerging’ countries in international trade; global cities and informational capitalism as new geographies of transnational financial flows; the threat to cultural diversity posed by a globalizing culture; and a sociology of globalization that is less and less monopolized by privileged or specific actors, becoming, on the contrary, increasingly ordinary and widespread.

Keywords

capitalismglobalglobalizationmarketssociologytransnational
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 14 , Special Issue 3: Historicizing the global: an interdisciplinary perspective , November 2019 , pp. 355 - 373
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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