publicity, with journals free to criticize the inefficient state-run enterprises, to
help enforce perestroika, the restructuring of society. In the event glasnost may
have been the enemy of perestroika because open publicity did more to
highlight the initial failures of perestroika than to enthuse people in its cause.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union after the abortivecoup d’e ́tatof 1991
even glasnost has lost its significance, as a total freedom of expression and
speech forced itself on the unwilling bureaucracy.
Globalization
There are few social science concepts quite as popular in the media at the
beginning of the 21st century than that of globalization. While popular
concepts are often hollow, this one, however, is undoubtedly vitally important.
At its core the idea of globalization refers to the way in which economic
relations now transcend national boundaries. Large corporations exist in
several different countries, making components in several others, selling in
many, raising finance in still others. This, of course, has long been known, and
the problem of the so-called ‘multinationals’ has concerned both politicians
and political scientists for nearly a generation. Globalization, however, refers to
a much more fundamental interconnectedness. Whole national economies are
now intimately linked; a slow-down in a manufacturing industry in one area
can have very rapid and often very ‘logically distant’ impacts thousands of miles
away in several quite different sectors. In some ways it is rather like the
phenomenon physicists and mathematicians have noted about the instability
of supposedly deterministic systems. Proverbially it is said that a butterfly
flapping its wings in India can cause a rain storm in Delaware. Globalization
can, and has, meant that the collapse of a Japanese bank that over-lent on the
basis of over-priced land values in Tokyo can cause the unemployment of car-
factory workers in Wales.
Were globalization to mean only this, it would be important, but no more
than a shift in scale with what we have experienced before. There is more,
however; the very nature of the modern economy, dependent above all on
information production and dissemination, has made national boundaries
largely irrelevant. This has its mirrors in institutional and legal frameworks.
The near impossibility of states controlling pornography on the World Wide
Web, for example, is a distasteful example of globalization. Globalization
would still be merely a description of economic interdependence were it
not for two further factors. One is the rapid development of transnational
institutions. There are now over 25,000 non-governmental organizations of an
international character, when a century ago there were only a handful.
Doctrines of national sovereignty are breaking down and even long-derided
political institutions like the UN are beginning to have real authority. Parallel
Globalization