 I'm Salvatore Babonis and today's lecture is the emergence of world society. Background. Most macro sociologists tend to interpret the social world and theorize social problems either in realist terms or phenomenological terms. Realists emphasize the importance of material forces in shaping social change. Karl Marx said that all history is the history of class struggle. Friedrich Engels in the very first book on the sociology of the family said that the types of family in a society depends on the type of property ownership in that society and that capitalism lent itself to the nuclear family. Phenomenologists, on the other hand, emphasize the importance of norms and institutions in shaping social change. People like Emile Durkheim who said that social facts are real and real in their consequences Max Weber who studied different types of legitimacy as the bases of power. Most sociologists, most social scientists probably don't realize that they're either realists or phenomenologists but these meta-theoretical traditions of realism and phenomenology are embedded in the ways we approach the world whether we know it or not. World systems analysis is a macro realist approach to understanding and interpreting the social world. Macro realist meaning that it's a realist approach but at the macro level studying countries and global forces rather than micro level individual interactions. World systems analysts think that macro level material forces determine outcomes even at the micro level. So individuals, people's lives are shaped by their position in macro level social structures. There's a focus on systems for the allocation of material resources throughout the world and global social problems are understood as being driven by fundamentally coercive forces that reward bad behavior and penalize good behavior in the world. The focus of today's lecture however is the world society approach. World society theory is a macro phenomenological approach to interpreting the social world and theorizing social problems. Macro phenomenological meaning that like world systems analysis, world society theory is construed at the macro level of countries and global forces but it takes a phenomenological approach to understanding norms and institutions as the determinants of outcomes in the world. World society theorists tend to focus on international organizations nongovernmental organizations, NGOs, intergovernmental organizations, IGOs and multinational corporations, MNCs that shape, that are institutions that shape our social world and either cause or in many cases fight the social problems that we observe around us. In a world society view, global social problems are driven by institutional shortcomings that arise when institutions are not sufficiently robust to deal with the global challenges they face. World systems and world society approaches to macro sociology are best used in combination. They're really complementary instead of competing accounts of the world. Both realist and phenomenological forces are always at work and so we should always have an eye towards both. The appropriate question to ask in thinking about them is not which theory is right, it's which theory is most useful for understanding any particular social problem. For example, Europe is experiencing a massive influx of Syrian refugees. A world systems account might attribute Syrian refugees to regional conflicts over access to oil and other resources that have led to regional wars involving Iran, Russia, the US and Turkey in Syria's civil war. That's a realist approach that focuses on the material factors that have driven refugees out of Syria. A world society approach from a macro phenomenological standpoint would argue that the United Nations and other conflict resolution institutions have failed in their missions to provide safe homes for refugees within the region. There are institutional failures both on the part of the Syrian state in the first place and now on the part of the United Nations and the European Union that have led to uncontrolled refugee flows from Syria into Western Europe. World Society Theory World society approaches are most associated with the sociologist John Meyer whose original focus was actually comparative educational sociology. He identified the emergence of world society starting in the 1990s with the spread of internationalist norms and institutions, the importance of technical efficiency sometimes summed up in the term McDonaldization, individualism coupled with standardization, but most of all in the establishment of a world culture that is embraced worldwide or is at least embraced by elites worldwide of human rights, democracy and rule of law. Now John Meyer is an educational sociologist and so of course he saw educational institutions as being central to the spread of world society. People, university students in universities around the world learned to embrace norms of human rights, democracy and rule of law in their very coursework studying for university degrees. But he also saw an important role for professional associations. Organizations of accountants, lawyers, doctors of all kinds of professionals that have established codes of ethics and codes of conduct and tried to spread world society or world culture norms through professional practice to all parts of the world. He also saw mimesis as a major force shaping international norms, ideas and behaviors. Mimesis essentially just means copying. People mimic what they see in other countries. So if people in a developing country see successful models of economic development in the United States and Europe, they adopt institutions that are similar to those that exist in the United States and Europe hoping that by copying institutions they will also reap the benefits of economic development. World culture is not just an invention of sociologists. You might even say it was first invented by marketing people and only later spread to academia. It's certainly been embraced by media and the corporate sector. Cultural globalization is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in the famous Coca-Cola ad from the 1970s I'd like to teach the world to sing translated into I'd like to buy the world a Coke. Taking all of the kind of good feelings of helping the world and pouring them into Coca-Cola friendly consumerism. Not coincidentally, Coca-Cola was the first western product made available for sale in China after China's opening to the world in December 1978. It was very much viewed by Deng Xiaoping in the Chinese leadership as an emblem of world culture that they were accepting into China as they brought China into the rest of the world. Cultural globalization is a tendency towards a single universal world culture and that world culture, as I said, is a combination of universal norms of human rights, democracy and rule of law but also a celebration of diversity, localness and authenticity. Again, if you watch the Coke ad, I won't play it in this video because I'm not sure about the copyright propriety of doing so but I encourage you to watch the Coca-Cola ad referenced in this video and you will see a celebration of diversity in the faces of the people chosen to sing in the ad a celebration of localness in the Italian countryside in which the ad is filmed and certainly a celebration of authenticity. You will hear in the background the rising voice Coke, it's the real thing. So there is an attempt to leverage these emerging world society norms by a consumer products company as early as the 1970s, long before they became well understood and well accepted in academia. Of course, the dark side of cultural globalization is, ironically, the evisceration of diverse local authentic cultures as this world culture spreads to cover the entire world, it smothers pre-existing cultures. That's maybe nowhere more apparent than in today's Middle East and in the Muslim majority countries of the Middle East in particular where protests against the United States can be seen perhaps just as much as protests against world culture. There's nothing that ISIS, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, dislikes more than human rights, democracy or the rule of law. The emerging world culture of the last 25 years embraces these three universal norms, human rights, democracy and rule of law. Global human rights norms are particularly strong and have come to be enshrined in a developing body of international law. This international law started with the foundation of the Red Cross in the 19th century and has really expanded in the late 20th and early 21st century to include a regular body of law in which you can now receive law training at the world's major law schools. Again, a form itself of education playing the role of spreading world culture. In recent years, these generic declarations of the 20th century have been turned into actual hard power projects in the end of the 20th and early 21st century, in particular the International Criminal Court where evil dictators and mass murderers can be brought to account in a special court in The Hague in the Netherlands for the crimes they commit against international law, usually against human rights. And the responsibility to protect doctrine, R2P, which was officially adopted unanimously by the United Nations in 2005, and the R2P has been understood as a, well, some say a responsibility to protect against genocide. The immediate cause of R2P was embarrassment over the genocide in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, which the international community did little to prevent or address. But the responsibility to protect has also been criticized as being a right to intervene. So on the one hand, R2P has been used as, has been considered a major accomplishment of international law by some. On the other hand, other people view it as a major transgression of international law because it gives countries an excuse to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries. Indices from the World Justice Project, an NGO, show the greatest protections for fundamental human rights in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. On this map, the darkest countries have the highest respect for human rights. What you see in the United States is not listed in the top rank of countries. That's because of U.S. military action around the world and its associated spying operations and drone strikes. Similarly, most of the world's democracies have a European heritage. And here again, when we look at democracy ratings, this from the Politi4 project, we see North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, and Mongolia having the highest ratings for democracy. And then when we look at rule of law, again we see the same usual candidates, North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan having the highest ratings for rule of law, again from the World Justice Project. From a world society perspective, these three world culture elements of human rights, democracy, and rule of law are being spread by voluntary, institutional, and normative diffusion, but it's impossible not to notice on those three maps that the countries that get the highest ratings are the western countries that have invented cultural globalization and that promote it most. So is it really a world culture of human rights, democracy, and rule of law that is being spread through voluntary diffusion? Or is it a western culture of human rights, democracy, and rule of law that is being imposed on other countries in the world through mechanisms like the International Criminal Court and the responsibility to protect? Answers to that question will vary enormously depending on who you ask. If you were to ask most socially conscious people in developed countries, are human rights, democracy, and rule of law good things that the West offers to the rest of the world, I think most people would say absolutely yes. Most people want these things and believe in spreading these ideals. However, the governments, and as far as we can tell, large majorities of the population in countries like China and Russia and Iran feel that these are western imperialist projects intended to change their internal structures against their will. And this reaction against western world society norms is especially strong in the Muslim majority countries of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Nonetheless, as education levels increase around the world, more and more people come to be aware of the unity of humankind, and values have been shifting. The most educated people, even in places like Russia, China, and the Muslim Middle East, are much more likely to embrace secular values and self-fulfillment values rather than traditional religious values and survival values. So the kinds of values associated with world society and with world society and world culture are the kinds of values that are being embraced by the most educated members of society in developing countries. And this is, of course, one reason why many people in developing countries are unhappy about education and westernization. It should be remembered that the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram chose a name that literally means western education should be or must be forbidden. So, you know, it's not surprising that many people in developing countries, especially many traditional people who embrace very foundational, survival values like the importance of the family and the importance of agriculture in the economy, that those sort of people might reject cultural globalization and world society. People all over the world, certainly educated people all over the world, want to mimic the perceived success of North America and the countries of European heritage. So even if they may not value democracy as such, they often see democracy as the only legitimate way for countries to make decisions. Thus the Communist Party of China is at pains to emphasize that China is a democratic country. Now, they have a different conception of democracy than most people in the West do, but nonetheless they insist on that value, on the idea that democracy is an important aspect of Chinese governments. The Chinese Communist Party also issues an annual human rights report on America in which the Chinese government evaluates American human rights deficits and claims that China respects human rights much more than the United States does. So rather than completely fighting world culture values like respect for human rights, democracy and rule of law, many countries, many developing country governance and elites actually take the more nuanced approach of embracing those norms but redefining them or attempting to redefine them according to their own ways of thinking. Now as John Mayer has consistently maintained, education plays an important role in the spread of world culture and world society and universities are at the peak level of this effort. The global spread of education over the last 50 years has been truly amazing. This is a map of average years of schooling in 1960 from our world in data. As you can see, most developed countries had levels of schooling where people went to school for maybe eight or nine years. In the rest of the world there were large swaths where people had virtually no schooling at all all across India, South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Fast forward 50 years and you see how much darker the graph looks. In North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, people have 10, 11, 12 years of education all across Latin America. People are more educated today than Westerners. People from North America and Western Europe typically were 50 years ago. The only places that remain with very low levels of education are conflict-ridden countries like Afghanistan and Niger. Still, education levels today are much lower than you might think. Fewer than 7% of the people in the world actually have university degrees. Developed countries today are about 40 years ahead of where developing countries are. If we look at this chart we can see almost a continuous line. If you were to look at today's developing countries and their levels of education in 1960 versus today, it's been rising rapidly over the last 40 years. In the same way, levels of education in developed countries have been rising rapidly. But the levels that developing countries have just reached in the 2000s are levels that prevailed in today's developed countries in the 1950s and 1960s. As you can see, the developing countries, even though they have made massive gains in education over the last 40 or 50 years, are still 40 or 50 years behind the advanced countries. Relative levels of education between developed and developing countries haven't budged. Everybody has simply become more educated. Ultimately, developing countries will catch up unless developed countries continue to expand in schooling. In fact, you might argue that developed countries are expanding not by having more and more years of education, but by improving education so that a person who graduates from high school or university in the future will know much more and have much greater skills than a person who graduates today. We don't know if that will happen, but past trends suggest that it very well might. At the most elite levels, university education is almost entirely homogeneous across the entire world. People get fundamentally the same education, whether they're in Europe, Australia, Russia, Japan, North America, or even in the elite universities of the Middle East, China and Africa. The quality differential is certainly there. But the type of education, the way education is done, is near identical. And a big reason for that is that the people teaching at universities in Africa, the Middle East, Russia, typically themselves got their own PhDs and their own advanced degrees in the United States or Western Europe. So there is a continuous flow of norms as people themselves flow from getting their education in the West to teaching in the East and the South of the world. Of course, English is increasingly the medium of instruction. All around the world, universities are switching from native language education to English language education. Students study the same majors. The typical academic menu that's available in the United States, Western Europe, or Australia is the same menu that has come to be available in the rest of the world. Even individual courses, individual units of study are highly standardized and becoming more so with the Bologna model, which is standardizing education across Europe and the Bologna model for higher education is being adopted by countries outside Europe to ensure their interoperability or transferability of credit with European universities. Students study abroad at very large rates. But I think the number one reason why education is becoming standardized globally is just that university lecturers are recruited globally. So there's a single population of Western educated lecturers who do the teaching at universities everywhere in the world. This is a major agent for the spread of world culture as elite university professors go back to their home countries with a frame of mind and a frame of reference that was gained in Europe or the United States or Australia. They then train the next generation of students coming up in their home countries in those Western norms. You've probably heard of Francis Fukuyama's famous claim in 1989 that it was the end of history, and this is actually very closely connected to education because the end of history did not mean the end of historical events. It meant the end of intellectual change in the world, that there would only be one ideology in the world going forward from 1989. Fukuyama made this argument at the time that the Soviet Union was collapsing and communism was coming to an end all around the world as an organized, ideological resistance to the West. What Fukuyama recognized was that the important fact of 1989 was not a military victory or a change in the balance of power. The important fact in 1989 was a restructuring of the world's ideological bases. Before 1990, many of the professors who went out to teach at universities in Africa and the Middle East and in Asia were not trained in Europe or America. Many of them were trained in the Soviet Union. In fact, in Moscow they still have several large institutions dedicated to training students from developing countries where students from developing countries can get scholarships to go visit in Moscow. They also have similar programs, although less popular, in China for students from developing countries. Before 1990, many countries in the world looked to Soviet and to a lesser extent to Chinese expertise for knowledge about how to run their economies and how to run their societies. That organized alternative, the Soviet model contrasting with the Anglo-American Western model, is no longer available. Today Russia still trains students from poor developing countries, but for the most part they're trained in a Western curriculum by Russian professors who themselves have PhDs from Western universities. The Soviet Union is gone, Russia is still there, and Russia is still there as a geopolitical power, but the ideological challenge posed by the Soviet Union is gone. Russia poses a physical challenge to other countries as shown in its interventions in Ukraine, in Georgia, in Moldova, in Syria, but Russia no longer poses an ideological challenge to the Western system. Not only does nobody want to be Russian or study Russian, it's much deeper than that. Russians themselves are not promoting an alternative ideological universe in contrast to world culture. They are demanding independence and sovereignty and they resist American aggression in the world, or at least claim to, but they make no claim to having a different knowledge system the way the Soviet Union did. And that's crucial because that's what's led to the victory of world culture, or you might think of it as Western culture, over all other cultures, because even though there are many local resistances, ISIS in Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Zapatista movement in central Mexico, these resistances are all disjointed in local. None of them represent a systematic global alternative to a Western world culture value system. Fuku Yama interpreted this end of history as what he called the emergence of a universal, homogeneous state consisting of liberal democracy combined with economic freedom. Liberal government, electoral democracy, a market economy, pretty much means, put together, human rights, democracy, and rule of law, at least in economic matters. He saw this as something that was becoming universal and homogeneous, meaning that it was spread throughout the world with no systematic differences between people of different races, different classes, different genders, that these are universal norms that would be applied universally to everybody. It may make a big difference in society whether you're black or white, female or male, but whether you're black or white, female or male, you get one vote in an election, you have the same legal human rights, and crucially for Fuku Yama, you're equal in the market. One person's dollar is as good as another's. It doesn't matter what color or gender you are. At least that was the theory that came from Fuku Yama with the universal, homogeneous state. Well, many people say it's not the end of history, and they point to China, Russia, and Islamic State as counter-examples, but those people, I think, misunderstand the main point. Fuku Yama did not say that events would cease to happen. He said that there would be only one ideology, and that in that ideology every person would be at least in principle equal. From a social problem standpoint, ideas of world culture may be homogeneous in principle, but are they universal in practice? That is, there is a, you know, homogeneous, there are homogeneous human rights. There's, you know, homogeneous democracies. There's certainly a homogeneous market in which anyone can participate who happens to have the money, no matter what their race, religion, or gender. But are these benefits universally available to everybody in practice? Well, you know, liberal government, you know, people's individual human rights are at risk even in the United States and other Anglo-Saxon countries. They're certainly non-operative in most countries of the world. Places like China and large parts of Latin America, ordinary people simply don't have the human rights that we take for granted in liberal countries of the West and Western Europe and North America. Electoral democracy is at risk from the increasing role of money in politics. Again, even in the most developed countries, like the United States and Western Europe, right now there are a series of nightly protests in Paris and all across France against the operation of France's democracy. And even though France is one of the most democratic countries in the world, nonetheless, people are unhappy with the conduct of their democracies. The rise of Donald Trump in the United States is evidence that people are unhappy with the quality of their democracies. If this is true in the United States and in France, imagine how compromised the quality of democracy is. Again, in countries like China and countries like Brazil where the current and previous presidents are both likely to be indicted for corruption, electoral democracy is hardly safe in most countries in the world. And finally, even the market economy is increasingly at risk from government intervention to protect corporations and investors. If you think about the things you buy in your daily life, the purchases you make, most of them are probably only available from monopolies or oligopolies, and those monopolies and oligopolies have very strong levels of government protection. Now, if you don't think that companies have strong government protections, just think about every single web service you sign up for or every airplane ticket you buy that has a long 10-page document that you have to click that you have read and understood the terms and conditions of those policies. Of course, you haven't read or understood the terms and conditions, but government will enforce corporations' rights over yours. And this puts the market economy ultimately at risk. Is it a free market or is it a market that is managed and manipulated by those who have much stronger political power than ordinary consumers? So while Fukuyama might be right that as a consumer everybody's dollar is equal, whether you're a man, a woman, black or white, Muslim or Christian, your dollar is not equal if you are a consumer versus a corporation selling a service. The corporations that run the economy certainly have much more power in that economy than the consumers who buy from them. Global governance. An important aspect of world society theory is the centrality placed on global governance institutions. Institutions are increasingly governing the world without sovereign authority, meaning that without a mandate from the people, institutions are increasingly governing relationships that transcend national frontiers. Now this definition of global governance, institutions are increasingly governing without sovereign authority relationships that transcend national frontiers, is attributed to the US diplomat Lawrence Finkelstein who put it in his account of a United Nations meeting. And this is not actually published in a book, but it's become a very well-known definition. Institutions that do this, that govern trans-nationally, are known as global governance institutions. And we usually recognize three basic types of global governance institutions. IGOs, INGOs, and MNCs, intergovernmental organizations in which governments are the member, international non-government organizations, organizations like Amnesty International or World Wildlife Fund, and multinational corporations that, well, of course, you know dozens of those. IGOs are organizations that have governments as members. The best known is the United Nations. Others include the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization. These are global IGOs in which almost all countries of the world are members. But there are also some smaller IGOs that are nonetheless influential. For example, the OECD, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is a club of mostly western richer countries that has enormous influence on school curricula, on how education is measured, and on how the economy is measured. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is an organization of Asian countries led by Russia and China that is very focused on security and anti-terrorism. Council of Europe, African Union, ASEAN, APEC, OAS, Arab League, et cetera, et cetera. There are dozens, well, hundreds of IGOs that have countries as members. The second, the most important IGOs are centered around the developed democracies of North America and Western Europe. So NATO, the European Union, the G7 are all leading intergovernmental organizations. Ingos or international NGOs are civil society organizations that have people or businesses as members. Most human rights organizations are INGOs, Amnesty Human Rights Wash, Red Cross Democracy Promotion Organizations, also tend to be NGOs, so the Carnegie Endowment, the Open Society Foundations, and many pro-business organizations or organizations of businesses like Chambers of Commerce, Transparency International, World Economic Forum are also Ingos. Most major global governance institutions, whether we're talking about IGOs, international non-government organizations, or multinational corporations, are based in and controlled by Euro-American people in countries. One view of these Ingos and other global governance institutions is that they're dedicated to doing good in the world. I mean, who doesn't like the World Wildlife Fund or who doesn't like the UN Refugee Agency or UNICEF? You know, they're doing great work and most people respect these organizations. But another view is that IGOs and Ingos are really front organizations that promote the agendas of the rich and powerful people and countries of the world. Do these NGOs and IGOs really have the interests of their clients at heart, that is of the poor and needy people of the world, or are they really driven by the desire to promote the views of their funders? In reality, Ingos and IGOs certainly are neocolonial, both for good and for bad. Most of us think it's a good thing to promote human rights in the world, but that's a neocolonial project. Most of us think neocolonialism is bad. Well, that's something that we have to reconcile for ourselves. Global governance institutions do great work that reduces human suffering, especially in countries that are failing their own people. It's fantastic that there are IGOs and NGOs that are willing to work with Syrian refugees to help them escape from the violence plaguing Syria today. On the other hand, IGOs and NGOs are undemocratic and unaccountable, and they impose Western values on their involuntary clients in poor countries. Think of NATO's involvement in Afghanistan, where NATO imposed a constitution that expanded rights for women and gave women seats in the Afghan parliament. Most of us in the West embrace women's rights and think that's wonderful, that Afghan women are no longer as severely discriminated against as they were under the Taliban. On the other hand, no one even asked Afghan women if what they wanted was emancipation. That's a value that Western organizations imposed on Afghanistan. Many of us believe, for good, I'm not condemning that imposition of Western values. I'm merely pointing out that for good or for bad, it's certainly a neocolonial imposition on countries whether they want it or not. From the standpoint of poor, vulnerable countries, even multinational corporations are in effect global governance infrastructures. In most of Africa and large parts of Latin America, governments don't have the capacity to build roads, to build telecommunications networks, to dig their own natural resources out of the ground. They depend on multinational corporations to do all the heavy lifting of providing infrastructure and exploiting resources. As a result, multinational corporations become de facto government agencies in these countries. In fact, many of them are much larger than the countries in which they operate, at least much larger in terms of revenues than the countries in which they operate. Put it all together, and global governance is more a web than a hierarchy, but it is a very hierarchical web. This web has thickened substantially since 1990, so the fall of the Soviet Union was definitely a watershed moment in history when Western-centered global governance institutions suddenly had a free field to run amok over the entire world, not just over the Western world. More and more organizations of many kinds are engaging in global governance that is governing without sovereign authority relationships that transcend national frontiers. But who controls global governance and who should control it? For what purposes should it be used? These are major challenges for us to grapple with when we think about the spread of world society. Key takeaways. First, the emergence of world society starting in the 1990s was driven by the spread of internationalist norms and institutions. Second, the three major elements of world culture are democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. And third, Francis Fukuyama saw the end of history as a universal, homogeneous state combining liberal democracy with economic freedoms. Thank you for listening. You can find out more about me at salvaturbabonus.com where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter on international affairs.