Interview
Globalization: history of an ancient and not only economic phenomenon
The term globalization is banal today, as if it describes our time, its dreams, its fears, its excesses.
However, this process is complex and has a long history.
To understand it, we asked a few questions to the geohistorian Vincent Capdepuy, author of
50 histories of globalization
and
Le Monde ou rien
.
“The blue marble”: photo of Africa, Antarctica and the Arabian Peninsula taken on the way to the Moon by Harrison Schmitt or Ron Evans during the Apollo 17 mission, December 7, 1972. This flight was the last to leave Earth's orbit.
© Harrison Schmitt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By: Olivier Favier Follow
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RFI: Let's start perhaps with a paradox. Do we need the whole world for there to be globalization?
Vincent Capdepuy:
No, for me globalization is the process of “creating the world”.
The notion of world does not only apply to global space, to the entire earth, but also to smaller, more partial spaces.
No one will be surprised to hear about the “Greek world”, the “Roman world”, the “Chinese world” or the “Arab world”.
These are names that date back to the 19th century.
Let us therefore ask ourselves what makes there a
“Roman world”
, for example.
What is the process that gave rise to this word?
Historians do not hesitate to use the term globalization to describe this implementation and it seems to me that this is one of the interests of the term globalization that the French use.
We can clearly see the continuity between the notion of the “Roman world” and that of globalization.
It is less obvious in English where we talk about
globalization
.
The word also exists in French, globalization, but in English there is no other.
In your
50 stories of globalization
(Alma publisher, 2018), you go back well beyond the 19th
century.
From when do we have the idea of a totality, which is not necessarily that of the terrestrial globe, because we are not necessarily aware of this limit, but of a closed whole ?
When the term globalization
was used for the first time in English
, that is to say during the Second World War, the reference to the terrestrial globe was obvious.
Globalization, for its part, refers to a more vague reality.
Today, we of course think of the world as a whole, in its global dimension.
But the idea of making a world, the pretension of making a world, which we find a lot in the imperial dimension, is on the other hand ancient.
One of the first stories of globalization that I tell is that of a Babylonian map where we find the “four regions of the world”, as we would say in French the
“four corners of the world”
.
There is indeed among these conquerors the idea of a totality.
Also read: Genghis Khan, “universal sovereign” at the origin of the largest contiguous empire in history
Is the history of globalization a political history, a military history or a capitalist history, is it a bit of all of these or, on the contrary, depending on the case, one or the other of these histories? ? Or again, wouldn't it be above all else a cultural history, the idea of a world which stops at what we know of it?
I started by working on the Middle East.
Globalization was my second area of research and I immediately had the idea of taking economic history in the opposite direction.
This obviously does not mean that this dimension does not exist, but I wanted to approach globalization through other means.
If we think of the totality that we mentioned earlier, we are in a logic of integration.
Often, what is at work are military conquests of a certain territorial scale, which can be described as imperial, whether in
Mesopotamia
, in China or during the Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries.
But the economic vector is important.
Some merchants go beyond the limits of the Empire.
A good example is the Silk Roads – an improper expression by the way, since these trade routes cover many other products.
These roads are old, but it is exceptional for a single merchant to travel them from one end to the other.
The contacts that exist are therefore too tenuous for, for example, one to consider that the Roman Empire and the Chinese Empire belong to the same world.
In this case, we will rather speak of globalization by concatenation, which nevertheless remains pre-globalization.
When we look at the history of the 20th
century, we find ourselves with two world wars, then a cold war which requires the entire world to define itself in relation to the two blocs, including for those who say they are non-aligned, but also with attempts at organization on a planetary scale, such as the League of Nations or the UN, or even with legal constructions that aim to be universal, such as the Declaration of Human Rights.
What do these realities say about globalization?
I am always shocked by political speeches advocating deglobalization.
I understand that we are then referring to problems of relocation, but talking about deglobalization demonstrates a lack of understanding of what the world is like today and the depth of globalization.
It is not a simple
economic
phenomenon , it also has political, legal, normative, or simply organizational dimensions.
Part of this globalization has become invisible.
I like to take the example of time zones.
There is a three-hour time difference as we speak, between where I live, Reunion Island, and where you are asking me from, mainland France, but we know exactly one and the other. 'other what time it is in either place.
We don't necessarily think about it, but it is part of a common world, which allows all of humanity to communicate and live despite everything at the same time: the present, even if "today" refers to a reality a little shifted, a little blurry on the scale of the globe.
This system does not override the fact that there are other calendars.
The Chinese calendar, the Tamil calendar and the Muslim calendar continue to exist.
This is something that I feel quite strongly in Reunion where the coexistence of communities means that we celebrate
several New Years
.
Among these invisible structures, we also find the units of measurement.
And since we raise the question of law, we have had a legal definition of genocide since the 1948 Convention, which we would have liked not to be used, but which proved useful in
Rwanda
or in the
former Yugoslavia
in the 1990s and which very recently was mobilized by South Africa to warn about what is happening in
Gaza
.
All these realities show that globalization exists according to two complementary temporal logics.
It can be told over a very long time, but also in everyday life, which brings the world up to date, whether through exchanges or the implementation of legal standards.
The only deglobalization that would make sense would be the consequence of a global catastrophe which would cause humanity to find itself in a fragmented state, in disjointed societies, disconnected from each other.
There would then be no more World.
Also read: 50 years ago, the Meadows report set limits to growth
The environmental issue also means that globalization is not a choice, but a state of affairs. In the most remote places on the planet, where human presence is reduced to a bare minimum, we still find traces of pollution which allow us to tell the story over several centuries.
I asked myself a somewhat theoretical question in
Le Monde ou rien
(Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2023).
Is it morally desirable for all human beings to be integrated into the same society?
To be honest, I don't have the answer.
I am an atheist and yet, in the fact that I feel like a globalist, I wondered if there was not an old heritage of Catholicism, whose Greek etymology recalls the universalist claim to extend to everything.
In any case, today we are faced with common problems, to which the response is global.
We cannot therefore reject this globalization as a globalization of humanity; in a sense it must even be accelerated in order to have stronger common responses.
In 1969, humans walked on the Moon. Is this beyond globalization, or a kind of confirmation that we are locked into a common fate, an idea that we find in the formula of environmental activists: “
There is no planet B
”?
Indeed, we have no alternative solution.
The first photograph where we see the entire Earth dates from 1972 (the “blue marble”, in the banner of this article).
Until then, we only saw parts of it.
It is also the year of the first Earth Summit in Stockholm, as if basically this image came to illustrate this affirmation of a global political consciousness.
Globalization is accompanied by planetarization, in other words the fact that we become aware of human action on the planetary environment.
At the beginning of the 1960s, people began to talk about the “planetary spaceship” in the immensity of the Universe.
The conquest of space in 1969 had a heroic dimension.
Today, China and the United States are starting to think about a permanent installation.
We are also thinking of going to Mars in 2033, when this planet will be closest to Earth.
Globalization found a sort of accomplishment, even finitude, in the fact that it came up against a geometric characteristic: the Earth is a sphere.
This idea was already present at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.
But nothing prevents us today from thinking that human beings will be able to settle in a more or less distant future on the Moon or on Mars.
Globalization will perhaps then find a new frontier.
“The world or nothing”, a book by Vincent Capdepuy (2023).
© Lyon University Press
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