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A wish – for a new reality

Making the World Global. US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary
Forfatter: Isaac A. Kamola Duke
Forlag: University Press, (USA (2019))
GLOBALIZATION / When the concept of «globalization› took over the academic and political language, and since everyday language, it was not primarily a description of reality that fit into a post-Cold War capitalism, argues new book.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

That the world is overall, has become a phrase many people use without wondering what it really means. In the book Making the World Global. US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary Isaac A. Kamola explores how concepts such as globalization and globalization took over the political and academic language of the 1980s and 1990s. He argues that the concepts did not arise primarily in response to a changed reality, but in response to how a new reality could be shaped.

That global and Globalisation are used as leaky, imprecise and vaguely defined concepts, Kamola illustrates, among other things, with the Swiss KOF Globalization Index. In the latest survey, Norway ranked 11th (lower than the other Nordic countries), while the bottom places went to countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Gaza and the West Bank and the Cayman Islands.

Kamola notes that the indicators that are measured are not obviously logical: Hvad gør e.g. trade, direct foreign investment, telecommunications, tourism, internet use and the number of McDonalds and IKEA per capita as globalization indicators, while the number of offshore bank accounts (Cayman Islands) or the number of foreign soldiers per capita do not count?

"In other words, what counts (and does not count) as global is assumed to be so self-evident that the academic term globalization becomes an exercise in studying those things that are already imagined to be global," writes Kamola.

Three American economists

Kamola calls for neither "an alternative globalisation" nor a return to notions of the world as divided into demarcated regions and nation-states. On the contrary, he notes that both imaginary worlds are strongly influenced by Western intellectual traditions and economic and geopolitical interests.

Making the World Global is an analysis of how the connections between American universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations and international economic organizations have created the conditions that made it commonplace for journalists, students, researchers, politicians, business leaders and people and otherwise to talk about the world as global.

Theodore Levitt (Professor At Harvard Business School And Widely Recognized As
The author of the popularized edition of the term "Globalisation

Kamola zooms in on influential intellectuals – including the three American economists WW Rostow (who worked for the OSS intelligence service during World War II and then as an adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson), Robert McNamara (businessman, military man, defense minister under Kennedy and then head of the World Bank) and Theodore Levitt (professor at Harvard Business School and widely recognized as the originator of the popularized version of the term "globalization") – who moved between academic, political and economic fields. Through analyzes of their work, their texts and the spread of these texts, Kamola documents the world as an international system consisting of demarcated nation-states with the United States at the center – was gradually replaced by more marketized forms of academic knowledge production, and through that process created the conditions for globalization to become a special object of knowledge".

Social reproduction

Kamola's basic premise for the analysis is that all knowledge is a product of the material conditions under which it arises: that is, knowledge as social reproduction. From here he shows how "the emergence of global studies was not just a response to changes outside the world, but, when you look more closely, an intellectual adaptation to changes that took place within the higher education institutions".

He starts with the (white) American universities' (politically and economically influenced) interest in the world outside the USA in the post-war years – the establishment of so-called area studies. These go via the neoliberal era's erosion of relatively generous free research funds from the state, business and philanthropic organizations to the bone-chilling struggle for resources, which helped to get researchers and principals to collect the concept of globalization. It was simply what, not the young people, but the business world and the politicians wanted.

This does not mean, of course, that the world has not changed significantly in the last century, nor that researchers and ordinary people just uncritically collect the concepts that politicians and business leaders throw on the table. Or that new paradigms only travel one way. But Kamola shows with convincing care, how a concept traveled between different contexts, posing as a description of a new reality, but actually rather started as a notion – and a desire – for a new reality.

Critical attention

In my own latest book, I use "global" (and variations on it) 125 times, I discovered when I had to check myself after Kamola's critical history of the term. Admittedly over 451 pages, and admittedly sometimes as part of a quote, but still, that's a lot of times. And often without it being quite clear why that term should be so apt. It has just entered the language in such a natural way that we all believe, we know, what we ourselves and each other mean.

There is only one side of the problem, as Kamola points out. The other side is, from where, how and why the concept entered our world of imagination – and not least what effects it has. The questions that remain – and which Kamola does not really answer either – are: How do we find a way out of this conceptual fog? And how do we do it in a way, where we maintain a critical attention to the material conditions, which shape the language we use to describe, understand and create the world?

Nina Trige Andersen
Nina Trige Andersen
Trige Andersen is a freelance journalist and historian.

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