GLOBALIZATION.

Globalization is an attractive analytic frame that frequently lacks empirical and historical specificity. In a review article on the concept, Mauro F. Guillen lists five questions that dominate the globalization literature and that typically yield competing and contradictory answers. First, is globalization happening? Second, does globalization produce convergence? Third, does globalization undermine the authority of the nation-state? Fourth, are globalization and modernity the same entity? And fifth, is there such a thing as a global culture? Each one of these questions addresses the situation in the early twenty-first century. In a 2005 article, Peer C. Fiss and Paul M. Hirsch map the emergence of the term globalization in the mass media and books in print. They demonstrate that a "discourse" around globalization began to appear in the mid-1980s and accelerated in the late 1990s as evidenced by an increase in the number of media mentions of the term.

GLOBALIZATION AS A HISTORICAL PHENOMENON

The discourse on globalization may be relatively new, but the process that the term describes began the first moment traders set sail in the 1300s in search of tea and spices. If we conceptualize globalization as the trans-border flow of capital, goods, persons, and, at a later stage, information, then we can properly date the beginning of a modern global universe in what Eric Hobsbawm calls the "Age of Capital"—the period between 1848 and 1875 when improvements in transportation and communications made global exchange possible and relatively efficient.

Historians generally date the first wave of global capitalism from around 1880 to World War I and the second wave during the years following World War II. (The interwar period does not figure prominently in discussions of globalization because these years were dominated by economic depression and protectionism.) Much of the discussion of the first period is focused upon Europe; the second period focuses on the United States. Only since the 1980s has the discussion of globalization incorporated what is in fact the globe.

1880 TO 1914: IMMIGRATION
AND TECHNOLOGY

Most historical accounts identify the period between 1880 and 1914 as the takeoff years of globalization—years during which capital and people crossed borders at ever-accelerating rates. Sidney Pollard provides statistics that demonstrate an almost tenfold increase in exports between 1830 and 1910. As trade was increasing, information and standardization of temporal and spatial processes were evolving. Mass media, in the form of newspapers, became more salient as sources of information as literacy rates were inching up in Europe and America. Europe did not achieve universal literacy until after World War II, but language standardization and compulsory education were beginning to have their effects in the years before World War I. The early 1900s also saw the beginnings of radio and the cinema, both of which would play significant roles in the national and international politics of the 1920s and 1930s and come to full development after World War II. Standardization practices from passports to national currencies and international exchange rates flourished during this period; for example, in 1884 twenty-five nation-states agreed to divide the world into time zones.

The years between 1880 and 1914 were a breakthrough period in the realm of transportation. Shipping was modernized, national railway systems were developed, and the airplane emerged on the scene. Charles Lindbergh did not land at Le Bourget, France, until 1927, and it was not until 1958 that the first commercial jet crossed the Atlantic; however, the development in the late nineteenth century of a transportation infrastructure capable of taking people across oceans and continents with relative efficiency helped spur a wave of migration from Europe to the United States. Jeffrey G. Williamson accounts for some of the economic consequences of this migration. He marshals an array of economic data to show that immigration from the poorer countries of Europe—Italy, Sweden, and Ireland—depressed wages in the United States while it raised wages in the countries of out-migration. The combination of capital flows and immigration in the period leading up to World War I created a convergence that paradoxically disadvantaged the United States while advantaging the poorer countries of Europe. Given this fact, it is not surprising that U.S. immigration policy in the 1920s introduced quotas and that Americans were wary of such ventures as the League of Nations.

The first period of globalization, in which Britain and its colonies were the driving force, began with empire and ended with war. In the aftermath of the war, two events would have long-term consequences. First, the Treaty of Versailles and the carving up of what had been the Ottoman Empire set up a pattern of colonialism and resentment that dominates Middle Eastern politics to the present day. An innocuous development at the time, Britain seemed to be getting its due as a major imperial power as it carved up territories and displaced groups such as the Kurds and the Palestinians. The second outcome of the first period of globalization was the world depression that not only brought in Nazism and fascism but also ushered in a period of protectionism or autarky in all the major nation-states of Europe and in the United States.

1945 TO THE NEW MILLENNIUM: THE AMERICAN CENTURY

Whereas Britain had been the leader in globalization in the pre-1914 period, the United States became the leader after the Second World War. Henry Luce, founder of the Time magazine conglomerate, famously predicted that the post–World War II period would be the "American century." Despite the apparent national hubris of Luce's claim, the United States was the undisputed world leader arguably through the 1970s. The nation saw itself as a protector of democracy and freedom and an international bulwark against communism during the Cold War. But despite Korea and Vietnam and the presence of U.S. missiles on European soil, the United States was an empire of goods, not of guns.

Victoria De Grazia makes this point elegantly, arguing that the battle against communism would be won by socializing Europeans into the American "standard of living." Consumption was the linchpin of Americanization. As De Grazia reports, Woodrow Wilson had realized the connection between democracy and consumption in 1916 when he attempted to persuade a convention of salesmen that statecraft and salesmanship were linked. Wilson's success on this particular issue is unknown; however, the groundwork for the "Americanization" of Europe was laid in the 1920s and 1930s when U.S. advertising agencies and firms set up shop in Europe. The political turmoil in interwar Europe militated against a large-scale embrace of U.S. products and consumption regimes. It was during the post–World War II recovery, particularly with some of the cultural propaganda of the Marshall Plan, that the link between democracy and goods began to take hold on European soil, however tenuously. The idea was that American goods and American-style production practices would produce the standard of living that would fight off the advance of European communism.

Cultural globalization began to take hold as American movies that had been popular in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s asserted their presence in the 1950s and 1960s. American film was in the avant-garde of such global phenomena as rock music, which leveled cultural distinctions. Ironically, the big American success story was in the world of material consumption—food and drink. Coca-Cola reached its peak in the 1960s, with McDonald's superseding it beginning in the 1970s. McDonald's became such a symbol of Americanization and globalization that the French activist farmer José Bové could burn a McDonald's under construction in the north of France in 1999 and the media and the public would understand the significance of his target.

With viable communist parties in France and Italy, the threat of communism was not an American fantasy. However, there were several other forces at work that mitigated the effects of an American Empire of goods on European soil. Europe developed its own solutions to the problem of communism and markets. One solution was the Treaty of Rome in 1957 which ushered in the European Common Market. And when the French foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950, he had peace as well as economics on his mind. Containing Germany, as well as the spread of communism, was a postwar priority. In contrast to U.S. citizens who experienced the Cold War through media propaganda, the Iron Curtain was real to those who lived in close proximity to Eastern Europe.

U.S. goods and free markets competed with European planned economies from the 1950s through the 1970s. The European postwar settlement aimed at growth, but it also aimed at containment of communism within Western Europe. Corporatist policies that brought business and labor together produced European welfare states as well as "thirty glorious years" of European prosperity. Europe and the United States were trading partners and the driving forces behind globalization, and with decolonization and the opening of markets in Latin America and Africa the character of trade gradually began to change.

The major continuity between early globalization and midcentury globalization was that Europe and the United States remained the key players. But a series of events beginning in the 1980s radically altered the economic landscape. First, a change in the character of immigration in both Europe and the United States altered the structure of labor markets and strategies of social and political incorporation. In postwar Europe migrants were guest workers from the poorer south—Italy, Spain, and Portugal—who migrated to the rich European core to fill temporary jobs in industry. This changed as the southern tier became richer and more immigrants flooded into France from former colonies and into Germany from Turkey. Suddenly there were migrants who would not return to their native lands and who by virtue of being Muslim were not considered properly European. The United States saw a parallel migration of persons from Mexico and Central America, many of whom entered the country illegally.

The second major change was that in 1989 the Iron Curtain fell, and suddenly Eastern Europe and Russia had to be factored into European and global markets. The third major change was the advance of technology. Until the early 1980s building a bigger and faster jet plane was considered the cutting edge of transportation and communications technology. Beginning in the 1980s a virtual revolution took place, bringing computers, the Internet, cell phones. The Internet made cyber-marketing possible and detached markets from both time and space. Lastly, Asia became a major player in global capital markets beginning in the 1980s. The acceleration of what Europeans call neoliberalism and what Americans view as free-market capitalism is a response to these accumulated structural and political changes as well as an attempt to retain a position of dominance in the new global economy.

CONCLUSION: HISTORICAL LESSONS

The accelerated pace of European integration, known in Europe as Europeanization, is one sign that Europe and America no longer dominate global markets. Peter J. Katzenstein has argued that the locus of economic power has shifted to permeable regional alliances. Most social scientists agree that the world has entered a transterritorial or global age, although they are sometimes at a loss as to how to specify it. The lesson that might be taken from both early and post–World War II globalization is that expansion brings political costs. Nation-states do not give up economic dominance easily. In spring 2005 both France and the Netherlands rejected the proposed European Constitution—albeit for different reasons. In France the public widely viewed it as a blueprint for globalization; the French prime minister spoke of "economic patriotism." In the United States, immigration rules were being tightened and vigilantes patrolled the country's southern borders. A new age of protectionism and economic nationalism in a world of cybermarkets and Chinese advance was worrisome. The 1920s and 1930s, the period between the first and second waves of globalization, were not good years for economic growth and human rights—perhaps a lesson that twenty-first-century elites and citizens should heed.

See alsoAmericanization; Anti-Americanism; European Constitution 2004–2005; European Union.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Grazia, Victoria. Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, Mass., 2005.

Fiss, Peer C., and Paul M. Hirsch. "The Discourse of Globalization: Framing and Sensemaking of an Emerging Concept." American Sociological Review 70, no. 1 (2005): 29–52.

Geyer, Martin H., and Johannes Paulmann, eds. The Mechanics of Internationalism. London, 2001.

Guillen, Mauro F. "Is Globalization Civilizing, Destructive or Feeble? A Critique of Five Key Debates in the Social Science Literature." Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 235–260.

Hobsbawm, Eric J. The Age of Capital 1848–1875. London, 1975.

Katzenstein, Peter J. A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium. Ithaca, N.Y., 2005.

Maier, Charles S. In Search of Stability. New York, 1987.

Milward, Alan S. The European Rescue of the Nation-State. 2nd ed. London, 2000.

Moch, Leslie Page. Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650. 2nd ed. Bloomington, Ind., 2003.

Osterhammel, Jürgen, and Niels P. Petersson. Globalization: A Short History. Translated by Dona Geyer. Princeton, N.J., 2005.

Pollard, Sidney. "Free Trade, Protectionism, and the World Economy." In The Mechanics of Internationalism, edited by Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann. London, 2001.

Trumpbour, John. Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.

Williamson, Jeffrey G. "Globalization, Convergence, and History." Journal of Economic History 56, no. 2 (1996): 1–30.

Mabel Berezin