 I'm Sal the Torbobonus and today's lecture is the emergence of world society. As globalization became a reality in the 1990s, scholars and policymakers began to talk about the emergence of a single world society in which we are all participants. The world society spirit was captured in 1995 by Hillary Clinton with her adage, it takes a village to raise a child. Similarly, the elite participants in the World Economic Forum say they are committed to improving the state of the world. But 20 years on, world society has yet to emerge, except perhaps as a set of protections for successful individuals. In a 1995 appeal for more inclusive social policy, Hillary Clinton wrote that it takes a village to raise a child, a perspective she has since taken global. Hillary Clinton is certainly right, the kinds of social policies she proposed in the book are sound, good-sense social policies that emphasize that children are not raised individually by their parents in isolation, but children's success reflects the quality of the society in which they live. In addition to Hillary Clinton and her foundation, peak bodies run by the global elite routinely use inclusive globalist language as inspiration for their activities. The World Economic Forum, which meets every February in Davos, Switzerland, attracting the cream of the crop of global billionaires, politicians, journalists and academics, is supposedly committed to improving the state of the world. They embrace a globalist narrative that, like Clinton, they care about the whole world, not just about themselves and their own children. It's a very noble spirit, but to what extent is it actually true? This globalist narrative has been taken up in academic writing as well, where it's also couched in scientific language, but embracing universal values. To be clear, globalism is a sense of the world as one place, the idea that all human beings have equal value regardless of where they live. That can sound unobjectionable, of course all human beings have value regardless of where they live, but that philosophy embeds a very strong individualist narrative that's often buried under a lot of rhetoric. If every human being counts, that's not the same as every human culture or every human society counted, and in effect, it means that the rights of the individual take precedence over the power of the group. Now, that's resulted in a real backlash against globalism in places like Russia, Uganda, Poland, Japan, all over the world where conservative social movements have been fighting for the supremacy of society over the individual. And this is a very difficult moral conundrum, but it's one that tends to be swept under the carpet by globalist narratives. Globalism, with its focus on the individual, is very susceptible to cherry picking, to plucking the inspiring individual story out of the broader group reality. So, for example, in the work of Hillary Clinton on microfinance, she's been a tireless advocate of the power of microfinance to improve women's lives in poor countries like India, shown here, and Bangladesh, but microfinance institutions offer small loans to poor women to help them start businesses. And of course, if you give small loans to poor women to help them start businesses, you'll be able to find a small number of women who succeed in a dramatic way from access to credit, and those women can then be put on a global stage in New York and shown off as a shining example of how microcredit is changing lives. What these narratives miss is the fact that the people who benefit from these initiatives tend to be a small number of exceptionally talented people who happen to have had the bad luck to end up in poverty. And so when this exceptional person is finally given a break, finally given a chance, that person can make a huge difference in her own life. But in fact, systematic empirical studies show little benefit to microfinance for the poor. Many people, many poor women end up in poverty as a result of microfinance or unable to repay their loans. Very often they end up being even more socially excluded or persecuted because other women have pledged to act as collateral for their loans and so they're excluded from their social communities because they've let down their social community if they can't repay a loan. Microcredit is not a bad thing. We don't have systematic empirical evidence that it harms people, but the empirical studies have shown that it doesn't seem to have the benefits that it was advertised to have. On average, it can have magical, liberating effects on any particular individual's life, just as it can also ruin any particular individual's life. In sociology, globalist world society approaches are most associated with the eminent sociologist John Meyer, whose original focus was on comparative educational sociology. The emergence of the world society perspective in sociology began in the 1990s and was driven by the spread of internationalists, we would now say globalist norms and institutions. These emphasize the importance of technical efficiency, emphasized individualism coupled with standardization, so standard processes that allow the individual to thrive. For example, microfinance being a very standardized approach in which individuals either succeed or fail, and the establishment of a world culture founded on human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. Meyer thought that educational institutions and professional associations are the key vectors, the key agents spreading world society, and in fact educational institutions very clearly provide a global standardized environment. The bachelor's degree is something offered everywhere around the world that allows individuals, talented individuals, to reach their potential. Of course, that also leaves behind less talented individuals who are unable to reach their potential. And then a force creating the standardization around the world is mimesis or mimicry, copying forms that are seen in other countries. So virtually the entire world now has US and European style bachelor's degrees because those degrees have been successful in one place and then they're admired and they're imported into other places that previously had different forms of educational institutions. I'm going to focus on this world culture triumvirate of human rights, democracy, and rule of law. These have become the universal norms over the past quarter century. Now, human rights norms have been around for a long time, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Refugee Convention, but those rights were not necessarily operational. The fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights said that every human being had rights didn't actually create those human rights for most people in most of the world. I remember that at the time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights half the world was ruled by communist dictatorships where people had no individual human rights. So much more important than these generic declarations has been the creation of actual means to enforce individual human rights. For example, the International Criminal Court or the United Nations Security Council's responsibility to protect doctrine that says that countries with members of the Security Council have a responsibility to protect individual rights against persecution from countries that are trampling over them. And in fact, indices created by the World Justice Project show the greatest protections of fundamental human rights in those rich developed countries that have the responsibility to protect, so places like North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand. The democracies of the world, and remember the three parts of world society are human rights, democracy, and rule of law, the democracies of the world tend to be concentrated in the same places that have strong human rights. So once again, North America, Western Europe, and Australia, New Zealand. With a bizarre anomaly of Mongolia in this survey, but I think that that has more to do with the political outlook of the survey takers than anything to do with reality. And finally, rule of law is also strongest. Court systems function well, and people can have their rights enforced in places like North America, Western Europe, and Australia, and New Zealand. So world society really in a way means developed society. Those places that are the rich developed European heritage places of the world spreading an individualistic approach to society to the rest of the world. This spread is occurring both through voluntary spread of institutions and through the spread of norms. Educational institutions are a major force for spreading world society norms. Traditional society tends to disintegrate with higher levels of education as people become more secular. People move from focusing on their own survival and getting ahead vis-a-vis others to focusing on self-fulfillment, getting ahead for one's self in society. And all of this is reinforced by education. Professional societies also play a role in this, but all over the world people want to mimic the perceived success of North America and Western Europe. World society is not always being forced on an unwilling, undeveloped world. The less developed world actively seeks out European and especially North American-style institutions to replicate in their own countries. For example, democracy is coming to be seen simply as the only legitimate way to make decisions. The role of law has just come to be seen as, of course, something people want. So for example, if you travel in China or Russia or Brazil, you constantly hear the refrain, we just want to live in a normal country, meaning a country without bribery, a country where court systems are fair and judicious, countries where rule of law is well established. Well, in fact, most countries are not normal countries in that sense, but by using the word normal, people imply not the average country, countries like China, Russia, and Brazil are average. They want to live in a normal country, a country that adheres to emerging global norms. And to them, those normal countries are the places they want to move, the places they want their children to go to school, places like the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Western Europe. Since the early 1990s, world society has also been strengthened through the increasing influence of global governance institutions. So world society is not just mimesis and copying of the poor wanting to copy the rich. There's also a top-down spread of world society as global governance institutions increasingly push their own agenda on the world. Global governance institutions has been defined most often as institutions that are governing without sovereign authority relationships that transcend national frontiers. But really, the definitions aside, global governance institutions are those that are, you know, attempting to shape the way world society develops. We can divide global governance institutions into three types, IGOs, INGOs or INGOs and MNCs, intergovernmental organizations, international non-governmental organizations, and multinational corporations. The IGOs, intergovernmental organizations, are organizations that have governments as members. The United Nations, World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organization, or some that are not global in scale, like the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Council of Europe, African Union, ASEAN, APEC, OAS, the Arab League, et cetera, et cetera, all of these alphabet associations. These intergovernmental organizations mostly, not all, but most of them promote a general world society agenda of democracy, human rights democracy, and rule of law. And even regional organizations like the OECD, when they're regional organizations of high prestige countries, tend to promote standards that are adopted by people in lower prestige countries. Contrast that with an organization like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, this is an organization of China, Russia, and the countries of Central Asia, very few people have any interest in the policies promoted by the SCO. And so, again, there's a prestige hierarchy of high prestige countries and high prestige organizations like the OECD, tend to be copied by the rest of the world, whereas low prestige countries working in low prestige organizations do not have the same ability to have their agenda heard. Many of these IGOs are centered on North America and Western Europe. So the OECD is one of them, also NATO, the European Union, the G7. These are all groups or organizations where people adopt a world society viewpoint naturally, because it's their own viewpoint. People who are working for an organization like NATO or the European Union don't have to think twice about whether or not democracy is a good form of government. They all come from democracies and they all embrace democracy, and as a result, they all spread democracy in their work, either intentionally or unintentionally, because it's just the way they view the world. International, non-governmental organizations, NGOs or international NGOs, are civil society organizations that have people or businesses as members. You can think of human rights organizations like Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, or the Red Cross, or democracy promotion organizations like the Carnegie Endowment or the Open Society Foundation, or even pro-business organizations like Transparency International and the World Economic Forum. Again, all of them take globalist world society viewpoints simply for granted. These are the sorts of viewpoints that they promote in the world. Controversially, most of these institutions are based and controlled by European and American people and countries. One view of these organizations is that they are doing good in the world. They're spreading democracy, spreading human rights. That's a wonderful thing. But another view is that they're just front organizations for rich countries and rich people and corporations who want to have their way in the world. Now, the reality is that international NGOs certainly are neocolonial. That is, they certainly are the West imposing its views on the rest. And that's both good and bad. Most of us, hopefully most of you listening to this lecture, value human rights and democracy and the rule of law. So if these organizations push those kinds of values on the rest of the world, well, that's a good thing. On the other hand, these organizations are undemocratic themselves. Having an unelected outsider push democracy in your country, well, that's not very democratic. So there's a built-in conundrum, a built-in colonialism in the way NGOs operate. That's simply unavoidable. Controversially, from the standpoint of poor and vulnerable countries and individuals, multinational corporations or MNCs are also part of the world's global governance infrastructure. Now, if you live in a rich country, you may not think of corporations as providing governance, but in the poorest countries of the world, multinational corporations may be the only organizations paying taxes. They may be the only organizations capable of building roads or providing health services. This is especially true in the small countries of Africa and Central America, and here natural resource dependency is a major factor. Countries that have little to sell except their natural resources are caught in a trap that they can either not accept help, but as a result be poorer, or they can accept help, but as a result be subject to the whims of multinational corporations. Global governance institutions like IGOs, INGOs, and MNCs are now at the forefront of promoting the globalist agenda of movement towards a world society. But on whose behalf? This web of global governance is thickened substantially. The sorts of people who work at NGOs are the same sorts of people, them and their spouses are the same sorts of people who are managers of multinational corporations or who are high government officials. This is a class of people who are connected in a web, who know each other, who marry each other, who talk to each other, but who are not controlled or not accountable to the democratic constituencies in which they work. So who controls them? Who should control them? For what purpose should global governance be used? These are big conundrums. It's a fundamental problem that we can't easily resolve. If you value the sorts of things that global governance organizations do, and I think most of us value that, then we come across the problem that these values are being imposed in societies, whether or not the societies receiving the values embrace them. As a result, world society has really come to being the empowerment of individuals. And this empowerment is often against the very societies from which they come. Human rights narratives empower individuals to resist oppression. Well, that sounds good until we say oppression from whom? It's oppression by the societies in which they live. As well, the clear result is a world in which individualism hollows out society. Now, this can be a very good thing. There are very few of us who want to reverse the gains that have been made in improving human rights democracy and rule of law over the last quarter century. But the very success of this agenda is tending to create a world of individuals. And as the UK Prime Minister very controversially said, if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere. Now, that may be a very controversial statement, but it does contain a grain of truth. Key takeaways. The emergence of world society starting in the 1990s was driven by the spread of internationalist norms and institutions. Second, the three main elements of world culture are democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. And finally, globalist approaches like world society theory tend to assert the primacy of the individual over the societies in which they live. Thank you for listening. This is Salvaturbo bonus. You can find out more about me at salvaturbobonus.com where you can also sign up for my monthly Global Asian newsletter.