GLOBALIZATION: The Human Consequences

GLOBALIZATION: The Human Consequences. By Zygmunt Bauman. Columbia Univ. Press. 138 pp. $24.50

Francis Fukuyama ignited an op-ed page controversy in 1990 by portraying the conclusion of the Cold War as "the end of history." In its own way, Bauman’s new book is equally apocalyptic: it declares the end of geography.

Bauman, a Polish-born sociologist who has spent much of his career in England, recounts ways in which the technological advances of the past quarter-century have freed knowledge, capital, and political power from the traditional restraints of physical space, allowing them to rocket across the globe at the touch of a computer key. Corporations move where they wish, when they wish. So do the elites who manage them, the specialists who staff them at the highest levels, and the academics and cultural professionals who operate comfortably in their world. Meanwhile, the traditional world of familiar physical space, of local businesses, stable relationships, and face-toface public communication, is collapsing all across Western civilization. "With distances no longer meaning anything," Bauman observes, "localities, separated by distances, also lose their meanings."

Bauman is not the first to notice such changes, nor does he claim credit for the phrase "end of geography." But he does offer a systematic and wide-ranging (if occasionally sketchy) analysis of its consequences—most of which, in his view, are unfortunate. The fruits of postgeographical life, for instance, are not widely shared. While the elites live in time rather than space, forging a single international culture through e-mail and jet travel, the much larger cohort of "locals" remains trapped in the obsolete territorial culture, stuck in the cold reality of decaying communities and jobs that disappear virtually overnight, leaving them worse off than they were before. For the majority, even in the world’s most advanced countries, Bauman argues, there is nothing liberating about the Internet and the instant flow of information. Cyberspace, he says, "keeps the globals in the sieve and washes out the locals."

But for all the disparities in affluence, opportunity, and satisfaction, the globals and the locals have one thing in common: neither has any real security in their new environment. Work in the global economy may pay well, but employment is more precarious than ever, the author warns, and so are the privileges of global membership that successful careers seem to promise. "After all," Bauman asserts, "most jobs are temporary, shares may go down as well as up, skills keep being devalued and superseded by new and improved skills.... There are so many banana skins on the road, and so many sharp curbs on which one can stumble."

There is a term that describes all that we are losing, Bauman says: the German word sicherheit, a concept that signifies safety, security, and certainty—all three mixed together and all at the same time. Life after geography, in Bauman’s view, is life without sicherheit, and it is a life that millions all over the world, elites and masses alike, find profoundly unsettling.

This book will convince few who are not in sympathy with its ideas at the outset. To those who reflexively celebrate the expansion of personal choice and individual freedom, it will seem bewildering and overwrought. But anyone prepared to move beyond the seductiveness of libertarian ideology—anyone willing simply to look around and see the scars of global economic change on the streets of an ordinary city—will find Globalization as eloquent a summation of the problem as they are likely to encounter anywhere.

—Alan Ehrenhalt