Anna Spiegel

Understanding transnational knowledge

Looking back on nearly three decades of scientific thought on globalization (and knowledge) at least two shifts in argumentation can be identified. The scholarly debate started with a unifying “world view” of globalization, then turned the attention to the more or less suband transnational developments and, recently, has begun to address symbolic battles regarding regulative ideas of world society within a time of crisis and re-nationalization. In the beginning of the 1990s, when the career of the buzz-word “globalization” started, it was mainly driven by the idea of what Appadurai called “modernity at large” (Appadurai, 1996). Globalization seemed to be the transformation of the whole globe into a mirror image of Western modernity. Scholars put forward the idea of a “global age” (Albrow, 1998) transcending the hitherto fragmented international order of political (Western and Eastern) influence spheres and bridging the knowledge division between so-called developed and under-developed world regions. This process was not at all conceived as a uni-directional process without contradictions. Critiques foresaw a phase of “cultural imperialism” based upon the capitalist infrastructure of the globalization mode (Tomlinson, 2001). But the thesis of imperialism shared the basic assumption of a globalized (capitalist) world order in the making. In a second phase of the debate, the production of (global) knowledge was understood accordingly: as a collaborative effort to combine modern ideas with cultural difference adding up to what Geertz called the universe of discourse. Reasoning about globalization is itself part of the historical development which the concept tries to grasp and to elaborate. After 1989 the opening up of a single-world vision seemed to be a realistic possibility (at least from a Western point of view). The implosion of the Soviet Union, the diminishing of the “Iron Curtain” and the supposed end of a global confrontation of economic systems and military threats seemed to open up a historic window of opportunity for the spread of democracy, free market economy and ideas of global equality and human rights in accordance with the promise of preserving cultural diversity in the world. Within such a unifying world vision all sorts of problems (environment, poverty, war, migration) could be regarded as obstacles to be handled by world society as a single entity (the so-called world risk society; Beck, 1999).