the global society essay

A Global Perspective: Bringing the World Into Classrooms

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The need for students to be able to empathize with others, value diverse perspectives and cultures, understand how events around the world are interconnected, and solve problems that transcend borders has never been greater. Just consider the recent attacks inspired by hate and terrorism in Orlando, Fla., San Bernardino, Calif., Brussels, Paris, Tunis, Istanbul, and Yemen, or the unparalleled flow of migrants—many of them children—from war- and violence-stricken regions in the Middle East and Central America. Then there’s threat of damaging and deadly viruses such as Zika and Ebola hopping across people and countries.

The quick tick of news headlines exemplifies just how interconnected the world is today. It also points to the intercultural collaboration and problem-solving skills necessary to thwart the hatred that spawns terrorist attacks, successfully integrate culturally and linguistically diverse populations into classrooms and communities, and solve health and environmental crises.

Engaging students with the world is one step toward one day accomplishing such objectives. But what should educators teach to ensure that all students are prepared to successfully engage in the globalized world in which they already live? Furthermore, what steps can educators take to effectively foster globally minded knowledge, skills, and attitudes in students?

As part of the movement to educate the whole child and ensure students are challenged academically and prepared for participation in a global environment, the organization for which I work, ASCD, has launched an effort to focus on answering these questions. The place to start, I believe, is with some definitions on what global engagement means in a practical sense.

More Than a ‘21st-Century Skill’

For students to participate effectively in the global community, they will need to develop global competence: the attitudes, knowledge, and skills needed to live and work in today’s interconnected world and to build a sustainable, peaceful, inclusive world for the future. Global competence is often, and rightly, labeled a “21st century skill” needed for employment in today’s global economy. Yet global competence is so much more than a ticket to a competitive job. Students also need global competence to participate as empathetic, engaged, and effective citizens of the world.

What exactly does global competence entail? Many organizations have devised specific frameworks that define the term (see examples from the Asia Society , the OECD , World Savvy , and the Globally-Competent Teaching Continuum ). These frameworks tend to coalesce around the following attitudes, knowledge, and skills:

• Attitudes : This includes openness, respect, and appreciation for diversity; valuing of multiple perspectives, including an awareness of the cultural and experiential influences that shape one’s own and others’ perspectives; empathy; and social responsibility, or a desire to better the human condition on a local and global scale.

• Knowledge : This refers to the ability to understand global issues and current events; global interdependence, including the impact of global events on local conditions and vice versa; the processes of globalization and its effects on economic and social inequities locally and globally; world history; culture; and geography.

• Skills : These includes the ability to communicate across cultural and linguistic boundaries, including the ability to speak, listen, read, and write in more than one language; collaborate with people who have diverse cultural, racial, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds; think critically and analytically; problem-solve; and take action on issues of global importance.

Connecting Educators Across the World

Just as teachers of algebra know how to solve equations and music teachers know how to play scales, educators should also strive to develop these global competencies in themselves so that they can foster them in their students.

Engaging with the world is one way educators can develop global competence. Traditionally in the United States, educators as a whole have experienced limited training around global diversity. For example, very few teacher-preparation programs provide opportunities for preservice teachers to study abroad or require coursework in global topics. Therefore, connecting practicing teachers, principals, and district leaders across communities and continents through summits, conferences, exchanges, and virtual meetings geared towards common professional learning needs can provide experiences that help develop a globally oriented mindset, knowledge base, and skill set. Furthermore, when provided a platform to network, educators can lead the way in changing the broader education system locally and globally to better support the whole child and elevate the teaching profession.

A number of opportunities already exist for teachers to connect with one another across the world. There are an array of exchange programs run by the U.S. State Department and NGOs (e.g., American Councils for International Education , EF Tours , Teachers2Teachers-International ) that provide educators with opportunities for meaningful cross-cultural interactions. And if travel is not always feasible due to financial or familial obligations, teachers can still engage with the wider world through virtual exchanges that connect classrooms across the globe as partners in learning activities that prepare students to be productive, engaged citizens of the world (for example, iEARN , Global SchoolNet ).

Classroom Strategies

There are plenty of steps that educators can take today to put students on the path towards creating a better world for tomorrow. This doesn’t require legislation that mandates a change in the curriculum, the introduction of a global studies course for graduation, or a line item from the state or federal budget. In a recent study of teachers committed to globally competent teaching , researchers found that the educators used the following common strategies to foster global citizenship and competency:

• Integrating global topics and perspectives across content areas. Globally competent teaching does not require a separate course or unit of study. Instead, teachers infused global content into the required curriculum, regardless of subject area. For example, math teachers used real-world global challenges as contexts for introducing new concepts (e.g., using word problems on population growth as a way to teach the rules of exponents) and language arts teachers used texts that represent diverse cultural perspectives and that take place in settings around the world to teach literature and informational texts.

• Providing opportunities for authentic engagement with global issues. Teachers provided real-world audiences for students to engage with around global issues. This took the form of pen pal and Skype exchanges with schools in other countries, service-learning projects emphasizing issues of global concern (e.g., access to clean water), or working in teams to devise and debate solutions to real-world problems, such as climate change, and sharing those solutions with government leaders. Notably, these activities were student-centered and inquiry-based.

• Connecting the global experiences of students and teachers to the classroom. Teachers adopted culturally responsive teaching practices that incorporated the cultures, languages, perspectives, and experiences of diverse students into curriculum and instruction. Teachers also incorporated their own cross-cultural experiences into the classroom through informal conversation, discussions around artifacts and photos, and lesson plans that incorporated knowledge gained and relationships built through their global experiences.

With these strategies in hand, the time is now for teachers to engage themselves, and their students, with the world. The lives of all students, no matter their zip code or their cultural, racial, linguistic, or economic background, are in some way influenced by the wider world. They too have the potential to shape that world. Their future, and the future of our world, depends on it.

What does global engagement mean to you? Why do you think it is important? Join the conversation by posting your reflections in the comments section.

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World Studies Extended Essay: Global Themes

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World Studies Global Themes

Conflict, peace, and security Culture, language, and identity Environmental and/or economic sustainability Equality and inequality Health and development Science, technology and society

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Chapter 10. Global Society

10.3. Contemporary Global Society

Global society is a new and distinct form of social life. Over the tens of thousands of years of human existence, the world has never been as integrated. From the point of view of interpretive sociology, globalization signifies a qualitative shift in the nature of the lived experience of everyone on the planet. In particular, it has strong implications for the way in which people understand themselves, conceptualize the problems they face and define their place in the world.

Anthony Giddens (1990, 1991) and others have referred to this new form of life as late modernity . He identifies four key developments that characterize this new period of human existence.

De-Traditionalization

One aspect of the world as a global village that Marshall McLuhan described at the beginning of the chapter is the way it both resembles and no longer resembles the village life of humans that existed for millennia. It resembles that village life because, through the transformation of media and transportation, the world has shrunk. People around the world are in many respects closer, more aware of, and more involved in each other’s lives. They are also exposed to each other’s traditions. But it also no longer resembles that age-old village because, through the same transformations, as well as the formation of a global economy, people lives have become increasingly disembedded from the particularities of local traditions and local cycles of nature.

Giddens describes two concepts involved in this aspect of globalization. De-traditionalization is the process whereby day-to-day life is increasingly less informed by traditions or the ways of life passed down in local cultural and ecological contexts. “For someone following a traditional practice, questions don’t have to be asked about alternatives. Tradition provides a framework for action that can go largely unquestioned” (Giddens, 2002).

Disembedding is the process in which day to day life is no longer embedded in local, micro-level interactions in any simple way but becomes coordinated on a global basis. One has to get up at 3AM for a video meeting with business colleagues in New York or Tokyo, or (back in the day) train their hair stylist to give them a Beatle’s or Twiggy haircut. Giddens describes it as a process that “lifts out social relations from local contexts of interaction” and restructures them “across indefinite spans of time and space” (Giddens, 1991).

What replaces tradition and locality? The hold of tradition — the customary patterns of life, beliefs, rituals of places — and the restraints of local time and space are diminished to the degree that societies are organized extra-locally and globally through expert systems (Giddens, 1990). Expert systems refer to advanced systems of knowledge and practice in science, technology, computerization, communications, law, medicine, and finance, etc., that are required to run the complex institutional arrangements and technological systems that coordinate contemporary global life. The routine of air travel, for example, is guided every step of the way by air traffic control, global satellite systems, digital communications, multilevel security surveillance and detailed international agreements.   In the absence of the stability provided by traditions and local knowledge, Giddens argues that reliance on expert systems in global society provides a new source of “‘guarantees’ of expectation across distanciated time-space” (Giddens, 1990). They provide the sense of order, predictability, and stability that local traditions no longer provide.

Globalization

As discussed throughout the chapter, globalization is the process by which people around the world are integrated into a single global society, albeit in “an anarchic, haphazard, fashion” as Giddens (2002) puts it. People have become increasingly interdependent on a global scale. To sum up the key points, the structures of contemporary globalization are driven and defined by (1) the increasingly geographically interconnected processes of global capitalism , (2) the division of the world into the sovereign state system , (3) the system of international relations and the emergence of super-national agencies and institutions like the UN and the WTO, (4) the role of transportation and communication technologies that reduce constraints of time and space.

In terms of the lived experience of people across the world, the local and the global come together as people are exposed to diverse languages, cultures, cuisines, music, religions, current events, economic trends, global markets, and diseases. People interact daily with friends, strangers, family, colleagues, employers, and contacts on the other side of the world in real time.

This has lead, on one hand, to an exposure to the diversification of social life and cultures, which can bridge distances between people or become sites for new and deeper divisions. People live with cultural differences as an everyday norm.

On the other hand, globalization has also lead to the opposite tendency, the homogenization of life.  Local cultures become more alike through the commodification, standardization and uniformity of products and processes: McDonald’s restaurants, Hollywood movies, social media platforms, even the architecture of international airports and the design of bank machines.

Finally, people develop a global consciousness as they become increasingly aware of shared planetary conditions and come to grips with global events like climate change, pandemics, economic crises, terrorism, and the threat of nuclear war.

Expressive Individualism and the New Tribalism

This means that through de-traditionalization and globalization, individuals increasingly form their identities in the context of global cosmopolitanism, (literally ‘world citizenship’ from the Greek kosmopolitēs ), where a multiplicity of ideas, traditions and customs intermingle. The individual is no longer constrained by local tradition and authority and has to exercise at least some degree of freedom and autonomy in constructing their identity and choosing the cultural practices best suited to them from a variety of available possibilities.

Expressive individualism is the late modern drive to find one’s “self” and to express one’s unique individuality, even in the face of resistance. With the diminishing influence of tradition and the expansion of lifestyle options, the individual’s identity becomes increasingly a product of individual choices and personal achievements. Rather than a predetermined role ascribed by birth, family, custom or social convention, with the rapid changes of globalization there is an expansive and increasingly global range of alternatives to engage with. Once the traditional options for identity can no longer be taken for granted, the individual is compelled to invent their own identity (Bauman, 2004).

At the same time as there is a need to “become oneself,” individuals continue to seek one another out to share common experiences and world views. They seek like-minded others to construct common narratives, which can turn their personal choice of identity into something more meaningful and collective. The new tribalism refers to the emergence of group identities like fundamentalist religion, Antifa, “Freedom Convoy” populism, Indigenous resurgence, Quebecois nationalism, etc., which provide individuals with a means of distinguishing themselves from others. Attachment to cultural, ethnic, political, or religious differences as identity markers provides a distinct place of allegiance or belonging in the face of cosmopolitan diversity. Unlike historical tribalism however, these identities are often based on symbols, imagery and lineages of belief that circulate globally through the media, disembedded from specific localities and traditions.

Risk and Trust

Risk management has become a prevalent element of institutional and individual life in the 20th and 21st centuries. The future is seen as something that can be shaped by calculation and risk analysis. As a result, individuals and institutions have become increasingly reflexive in their activities.  They continuously accumulate and examine data to reflect on how to improve their effectiveness and anticipate future threats and problems. Constant monitoring of activities to assess risks, and a readiness to modify practices in response to new information, are hallmarks of contemporary reflexivity.

The scope and nature of these risks change with globalization. As Beck (1992) and Giddens (1990) argue, people are increasingly aware of existential risks like climate change, loss of species diversity, pandemics, nuclear accidents, and weapons of mass destruction that threaten planetary existence. They are also aware of contingent risks to everyday life that emerge from the complex interdependence of global systems: the failure of U.S. subprime mortgage mechanisms that sparked the 2008 global financial crisis or the global effect of a single container ship stuck in the Suez Canal, discussed earlier in the chapter. At the same time, people have become aware of changes in the type of risk they confront. The unanticipated consequences of human interventions into nature, like the effect of fish farming on salmon run collapses, the release of carbon into the atmosphere, fear of mRNA vaccines, or the invention of plastics, define a new category of risk with global implications. Parallel to these risks, humans create their own “institutionalized risk environments” like futures markets or algorithmic trading, which expose the livelihood of millions of people to risky decisions made by a few.

The awareness of global risks establishes an emotional baseline for global society. They are sources of anxiety and insecurity for everyone on the planet. Notably, global integration itself has become a source of risk, which defines a characteristic risk/trust dilemma of late modernity.

To deal with their anxiety, people tend to default to an attitude of trust in the expert systems that govern the complex technical systems that coordinate global life. The scope of the systems, the complexity of the knowledge involved, and the magnitude of the issues presented offer little alternative. However, this creates a distinctive dilemma of global society because people are also aware of the limitations of these expert systems in responding to risks, not to mention the role of the systems in creating risk in the first place. Some reject scientific expertise altogether and invest in “alternate science” that allows global problems like pandemics and climate change to magically disappear. But inevitably the reflexive stance of contemporary forms of life is based on the awareness of the unpredictability and contingency of global existence (the “unknown unknowns”), as well as the fallibility of science and planning. Science itself is uncertain and open to revision. Thus, global citizens are destined to fluctuate between the anxiety of recognizing risks and the uncertainty of trust in expert systems to respond to them.

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• Figure 10.22 Op de set van The Beatles (VARA, 1964) , version by Bvspall, via the B&G Wiki website, [Original source: Sound and Vision Archive, catalog number 64228 kb, photo number 34], is used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 NL  licence.
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• Figure 10.24 Cultures and Land at Risk by NASA Godard Space Flight Center, via Flickr, is used under a CC BY 2.0 licence.

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The problem, the solution.

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Is There a Global Society?

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Jens Bartelson, Is There a Global Society?, International Political Sociology , Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2009, Pages 112–115, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2008.00066_3.x

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The concept of globality is today commonly used to describe a condition characterized by the existence of a single sociopolitical space on a planetary scale. Such a global realm is believed to have resulted from the gradual dissolution of boundaries brought about by intensified exchange and increased interconnectedness between territorially bounded and distinct societies. But while there is a broad agreement to the effect that it is necessary to posit a distinct global level of analysis in order to be able to explain and understand a wide range of phenomena which transcend the boundaries of individual states, the social ontology of this purportedly new domain remains largely unexplored. Arguably, unless we are able to make sociological sense of what goes on in this domain, the very notion of globality and all that goes with it will be of little analytical value to the social sciences (see for example Rosenberg 2005 ). In this context, one important question has recently been raised by Mathias Albert (2007) , who has asked “whether the tools of social theory―or, more specifically, theories of society―are applicable to the global realm.” Implicit in this question is that we need to be able to conceptualize the global in societal terms in order for other sociological concepts, like those of differentiation and rationalization, to become applicable in a theoretically fruitful way.

Yet the concept of society has proven difficult to use with reference to the global realm. As I shall suggest, the theoretical difficulties we encounter when we try to apply modern theories of society to the global realm are indicative of the extent to which our conceptions of human association have been nationalized , rather than of any limitations intrinsic to the global realm itself. As I would like to argue, as a consequence of conceptual nationalization, we ended up with a profoundly particularistic social ontology which has made it hard if not impossible to make coherent sense of human associations other than bounded ones. Hence also the constant but futile attempts to overcome the restrictions of this social ontology by means of domestic analogies. This contention will lead me to argue that if we want to be able to make sense of the concept of a global society, we will have to look beyond modern social theory for inspiration, by recovering those earlier universalistic notions of human association which largely have been forgotten by modern political and social theory. When dusted off, these conceptions might help us to conceptualize global society as a larger social whole, rather than as the sum total of individual human beings or particular societies. We would then be free to ask questions about how and why this global society has been differentiated into distinct and territorially bounded communities, as well as under what conditions this compartmentalization of mankind is likely to give way to higher degrees of functional integration. I shall start by a brief overview of some of the problems encountered by those who have tried to conceptualize global society, and then go on to suggest an alternative way to conceptualize global society that draws on earlier and boundless conceptions of human association.

The difficulties in coming to terms with the concept of global society have been especially evident within academic international relations. Most theories of international relations still habitually assume that their field of inquiry is delimited to the interaction between bounded political societies in a context defined by the absence of centralized authority. Given this basic understanding of the topic of international relations, a distinct global realm becomes hard to envisage other than perhaps as an epiphenomenon to interstate interaction and interdependence. As Beck (2006) has remarked, “the cosmopolitanization of reality appears as the enemy of international theory, for it seems to undermine the authority of the theory of the state, to abolish the political monopoly of the national state and international relations.” Hence, to the extent that the possibility of a global society has been taken seriously at all within international relations theory, it has been conceptualized as an end state of a set of processes which originate in the international system, rather than as a sui generis form of human association capable of existing prior to or independently of the international system of states ( Ruggie 2004 ; Sassen 2006 ).

At first glance, sociologists would seem to be better equipped to conceptualize the global in societal terms. Sociological concepts seem to have been less burdened with nationalist baggage than those of international relations, and hence easier to stretch to fit a condition in which social and political life is believed to be increasingly unbounded ( Wagner 2000 ; Inglis and Robertson 2008 ). This semantic plasticity is evident from some contemporary efforts to apply categories of sociological analysis to the global realm, while making traditional conceptions of society look increasingly incoherent and redundant in the process ( Urry 2000 ). Yet simultaneously, however, sociologists have found it difficult to argue that the global realm constitutes a society in its own right, since the global realm seems to lack precisely the traditional defining properties of societies and communities, such as a common culture or a common historical memory that could bestow such a society with a common identity. To the extent that historical sociologists are willing to speak of anything resembling a society on a world scale, it is widely believed to be an outcome of intercourse between territorially bounded societies ( Rosenberg 2006 ). Being an outcome of interaction within the international system, a global society would ultimately depend on a fragile global consciousness of its existence. As Martin Shaw (2000) has put it, global society is constituted by “a common consciousness of human society on a world scale.” Thus, many of those who have tried to argue that the global realm indeed constitutes a society have had to face conceptual difficulties stemming from their particularistic social ontology, according to which forms of human association have to be both bounded and homogeneous in order to qualify as societies in the first place. Consequently, the concept of society becomes hard to apply to the global realm without thereby stretching its meaning beyond the limits of intelligibility posed by modern social theory.

In my view, the main reason why we have ended up with such a particularistic social ontology is to be found in the nationalization that sociopolitical concepts have undergone during the last centuries. In this context, nationalization implies that the range of reference of sociopolitical concepts gradually was brought to coincide with the spatial boundaries of the modern state, and that their meaningful employment was equally restricted by the imagined necessity of such boundaries. In most instances, such nationalization of sociopolitical concepts took place well before a politicization and ideologization of the same concepts could take place in different national contexts. But before processes of conceptual nationalization started to gain momentum during the seventeenth century, the predominant way of understanding human association in Western political thought was by regarding the human species as one immanent and universal society, by virtue of its members sharing the essential capacities for forming social bonds. Societies of lesser scope were frequently regarded as instantiations of such an immanent society of all mankind, the enigmatic but apparent cultural differences between particular communities being explained with reference to an accidental geographical dispersion of different peoples to different places with different natural characteristics (see for example Headley 2002 ). All the way from the Stoics via Dante to Kant and Herder, the assumption of a universal and boundless society of all mankind constituted the default setting of much Western speculation on the origins and conditions of human associations, and also served as an important starting point for critiques of despotism, imperial expansion, and colonial exploitation (see for example, Muthu 2003 ). Thus, a universal society of all mankind was not thought to result from the transcendence of a plurality of particular communities, but rather thought to be always already present in the shape of a primordial social bond between human beings by virtue of their shared capacity for social intercourse. To many writers, this shared capacity for social intercourse and the concomitant propensity to form societies were thought to derive from the use of language and reason by members of the human species, not from the use of a specific language or from a specific principle of reason.

To many scholars, such universalistic theories of human community are of little but historical interest, since they lack any obvious relevance in a world of nation-states. And indeed, most of these theories are based upon assumptions that are hard to defend in secular or scientific terms. But they also make one very useful assumption about the nature of human association, by positing the existence of a larger social whole: a society of all mankind constitutes such a larger social whole simply by being something more than the sum total of its individual parts, whether these are individuals or particular communities. So within this view, the existence of human community is not dependent on things like shared cultural values or a common historical memory. This being so, since members share characteristics in common that supposedly are exclusive to the human species, and which exist independently of its individual members. While this conception of human community is unlikely to satisfy modern nationalists, it might contain the seed values of what we need in order to make sense of the global in societal terms. A global society thus could be said to exist, not as a consequence of anything resembling a common global culture or a common global memory―although those things might well be there if we bother to look beyond modern sociology and historiography for clues―but rather as a consequence of two things: the relatively even dispersion of human beings on a planetary scale and the capacities for intercourse entailed by human sociability. So instead of asking whether processes of globalization will take us from an international system of states into a boundless global society, we might rather ask why this global society was territorially differentiated into a system of states in the first place, how this particular differentiation has been legitimized by modern international relations theory and modern sociology to the point of being taken for granted by both, as well as under what conditions human intercourse on a planetary scale is likely to replace the compartmentalization of mankind with new forms of political community. Indeed, questions of differentiation become hard to pose at the global level in the absence of prior assumptions about the essential unity of mankind, and about the basic homogeneity of a global space. Otherwise, theories of differentiation will always beg the questions: what is being differentiated, and where does this differentiation take place? So to conclude in answer to Mathias Albert's question, I would like to suggest that we indeed can speak coherently of a global society, but only to the extent that we are willing to venture beyond modern theories of society, the latter which I take to be part of the problem rather than of the solution.

Albert Mathias . ( 2007 ) “Globalization Theory”: Yesterday's Fad or More Lively than Ever? International Political Sociology 1 ( 2 ): 171 .

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Headley John M. ( 2002 ) The Universalizing Principle and Process: On the West's Intrinsic Commitment to a Global Context . Journal of World History 13 ( 2 ): 291 – 321 .

Inglis David Robertson Roland . ( 2008 ) The Elementary Forms of Globality. Durkheim and the Emergence and Nature of Global Life . Journal of Classical Sociology 8 ( 1 ): 5 – 25 .

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Article contents

International society.

• Katarzyna Kaczmarska Katarzyna Kaczmarska Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.98
• Published online: 20 November 2017

The essay discusses the origins and development of the idea of international society in the discipline of International Relations (IR). It locates the concept in the English School tradition, providing a summary of the classic statements as found in the writings of Wight, Bull and Manning. It engages with more recent writing, including Buzan’s reconceptualization of international society and explaining the pluralist-solidarist distinction. The essay traces key debates surrounding the concept, such as the expansion of international society, humanitarian intervention and the standard of civilisation. The final part presents the main criticisms of the concept and explores the ontological status of international society.

• international society
• international relations
• English School tradition
• pluralist–solidarist debates
• international politics
• social bonds
• globalization
• regional international societies

Introduction: The English School and Its Core Concept of International Society

The idea of international society relies on the assumption of the “societal” nature of inter-state relations. This concept is usually taken to mean that order in international politics is maintained due to social bonds between states. Hedley Bull authored the most concise definition, according to which international society “exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions” (Bull, 2002 , p. 13).

Despite this frequently repeated characterization, international society remains a puzzling concept. Even though it may seem persuasive and tends to evoke positive connotations through its promise of orderly international relations, it has amassed devoted supporters as well as ardent critics. A steadily growing research programme has accompanied the idea. This essay looks at the roots and development of the idea of international society in the discipline of international relations (IR) and outlines major interpretations of international society in an attempt to establish why it arouses both reproach and enthusiasm. The article highlights themes and research areas that, making use of the concept, contributed to its development, such as the standard of civilization, pluralism, solidarism and (in)equality. Moreover, the essay does not shy away from exploring contradictions stemming from the writing on international society. Rather than insulating the idea from inconsistencies, it tries to engage with its contradictions.

Notably, the early discussion of international society unfolded in the context of the development of IR as an academic discipline. The urge to establish IR as a separate field of scholarly inquiry was an important factor that stimulated the debate on international society. As a result, the idea became entangled in broader considerations of the subject and methodology of IR and in a quasi-competition between American and European interpretations of international politics.

The idea of international society is most commonly attributed to the English School of international relations. Considered its “master concept,” it played an important role in establishing this school of thought among other approaches to theorizing international relations (Brown, 2001 ). The English School was a name given to a group of scholars interested in the history and “workings” of international society. The “English School” label was successfully popularized by a largely critical article that advocated the school’s closure (Grader, 1988 ; Jones, 1981 ). Known also as the British institutionalists, these scholars are usually associated with postulating rationalism and a greater attention to history in the study of relations between states (Suganami, 2003 ). There is, however, no agreement as to the unifying characteristics of the English School or to whether a particular group of writers should be recognized as constituting a distinct school (Linklater & Suganami, 2006 ; Wilson, 1989 ). This long-standing debate has had a bearing on the concept of international society. The feature common to the writing of the first generation of the English School scholars was the rejection of the “domestic analogy,” by which they meant that international politics cannot be modeled on a state’s internal arrangements. They also shared the aim to distinguish their research and approach from American IR. The following quotation, which is explicit in that regard, also presents the general orientation the English School took in exploring international society: “The British have probably been more concerned with the historical than the contemporary, with the normative than the scientific, with the philosophical than the methodological, with the principles than policy” (Butterfield & Wight, 1966 ).

Although most commonly identified with the English School of international relations, the concept of international society cannot be limited to the English School tradition. There is a large body of literature in IR that presupposes the existence of international society whether or not the term is used directly. International legal studies, historical sociology and regime theory, as well as or among them some constructivist writers, have relied on the idea that relations between states are subject to norms and rules. Due to the breadth of this writing, the penultimate section of this essay introduces this literature only marginally; it focuses on works that refer more specifically to the international society idea.

What Is International Society?

In its simplest exposition, international society is one of the ways of characterizing relations between states both historically and in the present. The idea relies heavily on a particular historical narrative used to account for the emergence of the European interstate system. According to this interpretation, the modern society of states originated in Europe, and, by the 19th century , its members recognized themselves as forming a club of civilized states bound by international law. Through the process known as “expansion,” the institutional structure of international society is said to have spread around the globe (Keene, 2014 ).

In IR, the employment of the concept of a society to account for interactions between states dates back to Charles Manning (Manning, 1962 ), Martin Wight (Wight et al., 1991 ) and Hedley Bull (Bull, 1966b ). These three thinkers are also considered the primary figures or even the founding fathers of the English School. They are also recognized as the pioneers of the idea of international society (Dunne, 1998 ; Linklater & Suganami, 2006 ; Suganami, 2001 ).

C. A. W. Manning can be regarded as the first to have pondered the concept within the framework of IR as an academic discipline. Manning, in the first half of the 20th century , thought of the society of states as of a particular ontology of international relations. He viewed international society as an idiosyncratic subject matter, explicating the need to create a separate discipline dedicated to the study of IR (Manning, 1962 ). Manning was particularly interested in the way in which states coexist in the absence of an international system of government, as they are neither in the Hobbesian state of nature nor form part of a world state. Manning argued that the condition of possibility for such an arrangement was based on common assumptions that states shared as well as on their constant effort to keep such an organization in place. According to Manning, international society was an element of a prevalent assumption operating in international politics. It was only as a result of state leaders and diplomats’ acting on this assumption that interstate relations could take on features that external observers recognized as “societal” (Long, 2005 ; Manning, 1962 ; Wilson, 2004 ). The classical minimalist conception of international society, ascribed to Manning ( 1962 ) and James ( 1973 ), encompassed states, international law and diplomacy. The very existence of international law was deemed sufficient to conceive of relations between states as forming a society (Mapel & Nardin, 1998 , p. 20).

Wight interpreted world politics through a conversation between the three traditions: Grotian, Kantian and Hobbesian. This move was intended to equip international relations with a proper theory as well as to overcome the dichotomy between realism and idealism. However, by referring to the three thinkers and intending to delineate clearly between them, it has been argued that Wight abused the history of thought (Bull, 2002 ).

Hedley Bull and Martin Wight together with a number of other scholars and diplomats, formed the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics (Dunne, 1998 ). Their key volume, The Diplomatic Investigations , outlined the contours of the international society idea (Butterfield & Wight, 1966 ). This is, however, Hedley Bull and his seminal work The Anarchical Society ( 2002 ), who is credited with this idea’s first comprehensive as well as succinct exposition. For Bull, international society was not the only possible way of arranging international politics. He distinguished the international system, in which states maintain contact with each other, need to take others into account in their own calculations and are able to impact another’s decision but are not bound by common values, rules and institutions (Bull, 2002 , pp. 9, 240–241). Bull also described a world society, in which humanity as a whole shares interests and values (Bull, 2002 , p. 269). Nonetheless, in his view, it was the society of states that prevailed in international politics. In Bull’s words, international society existed when a group of states, realizing they shared certain interests and values, formed a society. This meant that these states accepted certain rules that steered their relations with one another and recognized common institutions, which Bull interpreted as sets of habits and practices (Bull, 2002 , p. 13).

In Bull’s view, these societal ties binding states secured order in international politics. Order was one of the principal themes in Bull’s Anarchical Society , where he sought to demonstrate how order can be maintained in the system of states and argued that this system has to be constantly assessed in relation to the goal of world order. Bull identified several goals he deemed elementary for each social life: the restriction of violence, respect for agreements and the stabilization of possession. On that basis, he claimed that international society should be valued since it provided a degree of order conducive to the attainment of societal goals. Shared rules were to provide guidance as to how common interests could be achieved (Bull, 2002 , pp. 51–52). Common institutions were to assist in the realization of common goals (Bull, 2002 , p. 71). Bull identified five such institutions: the balance of power, international law, the diplomatic mechanism, the managerial system of the great powers and war.

Since these initial but also fundamental contributions to the development of the idea of international society, this concept has been used to explain the fact that states are in no need of a supra-state or world government above them to maintain orderly relations. The binding force constructed on the basis of common interests and values has been deemed enough of an authority. Key to such an arrangement is consent. States agree that certain norms and rules will govern their behavior and their relations with each other. The major incentive is that the advancement of common interests is made possible only by respecting the agreed upon rules.

A specific narrative of European history heavily influenced the English School’s concept of international society. There are clear links to A. H. L. Heeren’s early- 19th-century definition of a states system where member states were joined by a reciprocity of interests (Bull, 2002 , p. 12). States system was indeed a term used by the English School authors, and their initial aim was to formulate a comparative history of such state systems (Wight, 1977 ; Watson, 1992 ).

Reviving the Idea of International Society

Insights provided by Hedley Bull, Martin Wight and Charles Manning remain at the heart of the idea of international society. However, changes that have taken place in international politics since their writing, such as the end of the Cold War, as well as new developments in the discipline of IR, have spurred attempts at revising the classical definition.

One approach focused on establishing ways of defining international society. The degree of cultural homogeneity, which initially perplexed Martin Wight as the necessary component for the effective functioning of the then-called states system, was followed by other considerations. Ian Clark focused on legitimacy, which for him could be used to denote the existence of international society (Clark, 2005 ). Further, Christian Reus-Smit argued that the modern society of states is underpinned by two fundamental institutions: contractual international law and multilateralism (Reus-Smit, 1997 , 1999 ).

Barry Buzan offered one of the most thorough reconceptualizations of the idea of international society. In his endeavor, Buzan postulated that the classical definition needed to be elaborated to encompass developments that were not present or scarce under the conditions of the Cold War. Moreover, for Buzan, the English School was an “imperfect” theory but nevertheless a candidate for a grand theory of international relations (Buzan, 2004 , pp. 25–26). Buzan thus attempted to turn the English School scholarship into a systematically organized field of study (Buzan, 2004 , pp. 24–25). To that end, he reworked the classical Wightian triad of realism, rationalism, and revolutionism and proposed viewing the international system, international society and world society as analytical concepts that revealed the material and social structures of the international system.

As a point of departure, Buzan asserted that all interaction in the state system is social and that norms and values are the building blocks of societies (Buzan, 2004 , p. 102). International society “is about the institutionalization of shared interest and identity among states, and puts the creation and maintenance of shared norms, rules and institutions at the centre of the IR theory” (Buzan, 2004 , p. 7). In order to introduce the coherence needed to build a clear theoretical framework, Buzan presented relations between individuals as first-order society and those between collectives (e.g., states) as second-order societies. He also insisted that the difference between international and world society should be constructed on the basis of the type of unit (state or non-state) and not with regard to the attitude toward dominant ideas (Buzan, 2004 , pp. 96–97). The aim was for the theory to encompass three domains: interhuman, transnational and interstate (Buzan, 2004 , p. 159). The reworked definition of international society encompasses a political and legal frame composed of states but where transnational actors and individuals are participants. States are defined as international society members and as the dominant actors in the triad, able to shape the two others to a larger extent than vice versa (Buzan, 2004 , pp. 202, 259). Buzan’s expansion of the international society concept led him to drop the idea of a mechanistic international system. If the spectrum of interstate societies spreads between asocial and confederative, there is no need for an additional category of a state system to explain relations between states (Buzan, 2004 , pp. 128–129, and see p. 159 for graph).

An account of primary and secondary institutions of international society complements the picture. Whereas earlier writing by Hedley Bull distinguished only five institutions of international society (balance of power, international law, diplomacy, war and great powers), Buzan suggested that distinguishing between primary and secondary institutions helps to consider international order globally and from a regional perspective. Primary institutions, in Buzan’s view, should be understood as fundamental and durable practices that evolved from interactions between states and remained a constitutive of actors and their legitimate activities. Secondary institutions, in turn, were consciously designed by states for specific purposes (Buzan, 2004 , pp. 164–170).

International society as a theoretical lens animated several strands of research. The authors of Theorising International Society ( 2009 ) were chiefly concerned with endowing international society research with an adequate methodological foundation, such that would allow the English School to identify the social structures and normative content of international politics (Navari, 2009 ). As Navari argued, the English School distanced itself from methodological concerns and took pride in an eclectic approach. Navari’s edited volume pointed to the limitations of methodological pluralism.

Globalization of International Society

Hedley Bull’s work is important for the development of the idea of international society not solely for the considerations he outlined in Anarchical Society but also for his volume co-edited with Adam Watson, The Expansion of International Society . This influential work argued that international society, spreading from the European center, reached the entire globe (Bull & Watson, 1984 ). The expansion was understood in terms of the expansion of rules and institutions, especially that of international law, seen as the crucial element of social interactions between sovereign states (Bull, 2002 , p. 123, p. 136; Bull & Watson, 1984 ). The volume described encounters of European international society with entities considered parts of the outside world, such as Russia (Watson, 1984b ), Spain and the Indies (Donelan, 1984 ) and Africa (Bull, 1984b ). The process of broadening the international society membership was presented as a result of non-European polities, such as the Ottoman empire (Naff, 1984 ), China (Gong, 1984a ) and Japan (Suganami, 1984 ), joining the society of states. The Expansion concluded with a discussion of the evolution of a European-turned-global international society, and it addressed the possibility of the Third World’s revolt against the West (Bull, 1984c ) and the question of racial equality (Vincent, 1984 ).

According to Manning, the expansion of international society was a “pragmatic inevitability.” States needed to accept positive international law that originated in the West (Aalberts, 2012 , p. 176). The English School scholars generally saw this expansion as a historical process but also as a rational way to conduct international relations (Suganami, 2011 ). Bull and Watson suggested that the formation of the European international society and the expansion of Europe were two interrelated processes.

It is now 30 years since Bull and Watson’s classic work was published. In the intervening years, a wealth of new scholarship has challenged many aspects of this account with special reference to its Eurocentric approach to history. The historical narrative of the expansion of international society remains a contested issue. According to Bull and Watson, international society emerged in Europe and spread globally; it superseded other political organizations mainly because of its military supremacy (Bull, 1984a ; Watson, 1984a ). Gong ( 1984b ) and Watson ( 1992 ) reinforced this narrative. The competing approach stressed the relative underdevelopment of the European international society at the beginning of its global expansion and the resulting evolution of this society under the influence of encounters with non-European political entities (Buzan & Little, 2008 ). The critics of the European foundations of the global international society pointed to numerous historical inaccuracies of such a Eurocentric grand narrative. They argued that up to the 19th century , the development of norms and rules was the result of two-way interactions between Europe and other regions (Suzuki, Zhang, & Quirk, 2013 ). Finally, critics of the expansion thesis proposed replacing the concept of “expansion” with “stratification” and suggested it would be more fruitful to ask who was where within international society rather than who was a member, thereby dictating the boundaries of that society (Keene, 2014 ).

In spite of the many disputes surrounding the expansion question, it has undoubtedly inspired a broad research agenda. The topic of “entry” into international society has been explored with regard to Russia (Neumann, 2011 ), Greece (Stivachtis, 1998 ), Egypt (Roberson, 2009 ), Southeastern Europe (Bilgic, 2015 ; Ejdus, 2015 ; Wigen, 2015 ) and West and Central Africa (Pella, 2014 ).

Regional International Societies

The other dynamic that has come to the forefront in the studies of international society is the increasing attention paid to regions. Together with the greater regional integration observed in practice, the need arose to take the sub-global structures into consideration. A pressing need was felt to account for regional dynamics at play in global international society (Dunne, 2005 , p. 159). Barry Buzan was the chief advocate and an ardent critic of the English School’s neglect of the regional dimension (Buzan, 2004 , pp. 201–212). Arguably, the regional aspect had been present in what Wight termed the “comparative sociology of states systems” (Wight, 1977 ). However, Buzan accurately claimed that having established that the international society expanded to cover the globe, regional developments have never been a key concern for the English School with its preference for analyzing the state system in its totality. In order to change this pattern and to allow the English School to account for a wider range of international phenomena, Buzan mapped his conception of international society onto regional developments. His chief claim was that elements of international society existing at the global level can also be found at the sub-global scale. Moreover, some societal aspects could be more pronounced regionally than globally (Buzan, 2004 , p. 134). Certain regional groupings of states may represent “greater normative content” or an increased consciousness of common interests and values and, thus, a propensity for the joint formulation of specific common rules and institutions (Ayoob, 1999 , p. 248). For Buzan, sub-global international societies were not deemed to fall into rivalry with each other. There were also no grounds to suggest that regional developments would necessarily weaken the global social dimension (Buzan, 2004 , p. 209).

Scholars attempted to apply the concept of a regional international society with regard to the Middle East (Buzan, 2009 ) and Scandinavia (Schouenborg, 2012 ). Other regional groupings approached from the English School perspective included Europe (Sakwa, 2011 ), the European Union (Czaputowicz, 2003 ; Diez, Manners, & Whitman, 2011 ; Stivachtis & Webber, 2011 ), the Association of Southwest Asian Nations (Narine, 2006 ), Southeast Asia (Quayle, 2013 ), East Asia (Buzan & Zhang, 2014 ) and Africa (Tan Shek Yan, 2013 ). In spite of the sophisticated theoretical approach several of these studies adopted, including the application of Buzan’s insights on primary and secondary institutions, the results were inconclusive. The reliance on primary institutions resulted in a conclusion that the Middle East can be thought of as a sub-global interstate society (Gonzalez-Pelaez, 2009 , pp. 114–115). The analysis of secondary institutions, however, contested this claim (Murden, 2009 ).

The Pluralist-Solidarist Debate

The idea of international society encompasses a number of contradictions. The division between pluralism and solidarism and a cognate tension between order and justice are the two most contentious aspects that characterize this approach to international politics.

The pluralist-versus-solidarist debate has long been described in terms of “the best-known tension within English School theory” (Williams, 2005 , p. 20). The understandings of solidarism and pluralism, however, have been changing and separating from this dichotomy and have shifted toward a more complex form of interplay and merging between the two (Weinert, 2011 ). To be able to appreciate this development, we have to start with the distinction and return once more to Hedley Bull, its original proponent. Bull defined solidarist international society as one where the collective enforcement of international rules and the guardianship of human rights were possible (Bull, 1966a ). Building his argumentation on the Grotian thought exposed in De Jure Belli ac Pacis , Bull assumed that individuals should be subject to international law, and solidarism was to reflect this line of reasoning. A solidarist international society was thought of as prioritizing justice, embracing the possibility for progress and acknowledging the existence of superior human values that should be promoted and protected. From this strand of thinking arose the proposition that states have duties to humanity—a thesis difficult to reconcile with sovereignty, the principal pluralist rule and the building block of international society. Pluralism, in contrast, embraced diversity as the fundamental feature of international society. The pluralist view of international society was based on the concept of coexistence and on the appreciation of difference. It embraced the idea that states are inclined to only agree on a narrow set of purposes and will avoid activities taking individuals as the point of reference (Bull, 1966a ). Bull’s approach strengthened the impression that pluralism and solidarism are mutually exclusive and that international society may represent only one type at any given time.

Bull’s own position with regard to international society as pluralist or solidarist fluctuated. Bull’s pluralism was much more prominent in his earlier work, whereas his later interventions leaned toward solidarism. His ambiguous position led Wheeler and Dunne to advocate for “Bull’s pluralism of the intellect and solidarism of the will” (Wheeler & Dunne, 1996 ). Throughout Bull’s work, the topic of justice and the “revolt against the West” perplexed him. He called for a redistribution of power and wealth from North to South, without which non-Western peoples would not support international society (Bull, 2002 , pp. 316–317). Although emphasis was always placed on order, Bull at the same time recognized the need for greater justice (Bull, 1984a , p.18). On other hand, he feared that “solidarist visions can be used to defend a homogenous international society” (Linklater & Suganami, 2006 , p. 157). He also observed that “the nascent cosmopolitan culture” was biased ‘in favor of the dominant cultures of the West (Bull, 2002 , p. 305) and that solidarism and its “tools” (e.g., trial and punishment of war criminals) were selective and prone to the influences of power politics (Bull, 2002 , pp. 85–86). Hedley Bull’s solidarism rested on the presumption that there existed common human good and that some sort of human society is not only desirable but also attainable (Bull, 2002 , p. 278).

The pluralist-solidarist tension returned as the central analytical framework following the end of the Cold War and Western claims to victory coupled with greater normative ambitions on part of liberal democratic states (Buzan, 2004 , pp. 47–49; Hurrell, 2005 , p. 21, 2007c , p. 58). Democratic states pledging of responsibility for peace and security globally was interpreted as the ascendance of solidarism. This international society, with an extending range of cooperative norms, rules, and institutions and composed of states converging in terms of ideology and internal governance, was seen as having goals that were much more ambitious than the preservation of order (Buzan, 2004 , p. 131; Hurrell, 2007c , pp. 59–60). This society, and especially liberal states purportedly forming its core, have shown growing acceptance of different types of intervention (Hurrell, 2005 , pp. 20–21).

The humanitarian intervention debate has been one important offshoot of the solidarist question in international society propagated with Nick Wheeler’s seminal work Saving Strangers . Wheeler’s theory of humanitarian intervention helped to determine what should count as legitimate humanitarian intervention (Wheeler, 2000 ). Wheeler not only recognized the solidarity exhibited by the society of states but also openly advocated a “solidarist project.” He claimed it was possible to reconcile order and justice, especially with regard to the enforcement of human rights (Wheeler, 2000 , p. 285).

In addition to the human rights issue as an important theme for solidarist ideas, the literature also links solidarism to normative requirements regarding states’ internal organization—in technical-bureaucratic as well as in ideological terms. The promotion of a particular example of a state, with a specific political and institutional set-up modeled on the West, was influenced by Robert Jackson’s introduction of the concept of a quasi-state (Jackson, 1990 ). Reus-Smit, for whom the starting point of the analysis was “modern international society” built on the pillars of contractual international law and multilateralism, argued that international society’s intersubjective values have a bearing on a state’s identity and provide the rules of rightful state action (Reus-Smit, 1997 , pp. 584–585, 1999 , pp. 36–39). Clark further argued that legitimacy, which he regarded as crucial for the conceptualization of international society, was composed of rightful membership and rightful conduct (Clark, 2005 , p. 2).

On the most general level, it may be stated that solidarists defend the breach of national sovereignty (Linklater & Suganami, 2006 , p. 143). The ethical standpoint is much more pronounced than it is in pluralism, and it is revealed in the call for ethical international society. Human rights are viewed as standards rather than as enforceable commitments, and norms acquire common-sense quality.

Up until the events of 9/11, scholars tended to agree that order ceased to be the exclusive objective states should pursue. The post 9/11 era was interpreted as a reversal of previous gains as states ceased to see purposes “beyond themselves” and restored to the framework of national security (Dunne, 2007 , p. 142).

Buzan attempted to transgress the division between pluralism and solidarism, arguing that they should be understood “as positions on a spectrum representing, respectively, thin and thick sets of shared norms, rules and institutions” not as mutually exclusive positions (Buzan, 2004 ). Weinert ( 2011 ) further developed the proposition that solidarism and pluralism are not mutually exclusive but operate in tandem. Features of the solidarist-pluralist debate have been reflected in William Bain’s discussion of societas vs universitas . Using Oakeshott’s concept, Bain proposed viewing international society as organized along the values of societas , an association based on authority grounded in law, or universitas , an association in recognition of a common purpose. Contemporary international politics do not resemble either one or the other image; both are present in international society practice (Bain, 2006 , pp. 201–202).

Membership and (In)equality

The question put forward by Wight, “How far does international society—supposing there be one—extend?” (Wight et al., 1991 , p. 49), continues to animate scholarly debates. Much of Bull’s work was concentrated on the issues of international society membership, criteria for it and the question of those at its fringes/borders. Bull was preoccupied with the position of weaker states in international society and their role in legitimizing the international society. In his opinion, there was no other way for the international society to last then taking into consideration and in fact reflecting the values and interests of weaker states. While the problem of what type of states should be accommodated remains underdeveloped in Bull’s writing, Clark ( 2005 ) and Hurrell ( 2007b , p. 41) addressed the membership question.

International society proponents have agreed that the idea is premised on the equality of states. Wight asserted that “the movement from a hierarchical to an egalitarian principle was probably inherent in the reciprocal recognition of sovereignty” (Wight, 1977 , p. 135). International society, as a voluntary association, was supposed to be a reciprocal agreement based on the idea of free will expressed by equal members (Bain, 2003b , p. 70).

The English School paid considerable attention to the fact that, in a judicially equal society, there exists unequal distribution of power: “the modern European states-system, while formulating the principle of the equality of states, has modified it by establishing the class of great powers” (Wight, 1977 , p. 42). Manning suggested that states do not vary in formal status as sovereignty is uniform; what differs is the stature and hence the standing in international relations (Manning, 1962 , p. 190). Great powers have been identified as one of the institutions of international society, possessing special rights as well as responsibilities for international society management and preservation (Bull, 2002 , p. 17, chapter 9).

Several authors have pointed to the existence of international society’s core composed of liberal-constitutionalist states. These states have prevailed as the winning coalition following all major conflicts, most recently the Cold War. The core states have been principal agents in the production and reproduction of the practices underpinning international society (Buzan, 2004 ). Their values shape the modern constitutional structure (Reus-Smit, 1997 , pp. 584–585). In other words, the powerful are seen as privileged in relation to the rest of the international society members, despite formal equality of all states (Buzan, 2004 , pp. 222–227). The “inner” grouping’ interprets and implements the wishes of international society as a whole (Clark, 2005 , p. 159). The core is also presented as a homogenizing force and as a model others are expected to emulate (Buzan, 2004 , p. 60). Bain argued that international society as a voluntary association is no longer the case if one analyses modern instances of “trusteeship,” such as Kosovo under the UN administration (Bain, 2003a ).

The inequality theme found its most comprehensive reflection in the debate about the standard of civilization. The narrative developed around the standard of civilization suggested that Western states in their encounters with non-Western societies before the early 20th century demonstrated that they considered themselves to be the representatives of a genuine (read “better”) civilization. This belief justified the expansion of their own social, political, legal and cultural norms and practices beyond Western Europe.

The first exponent of this approach was Gong ( 1984b ). Historically, the relationship between the expansion of the international society of European states and the standard of civilization was intimate. The standard of civilization originated in Europe in the 19th century and was used as an explanation and legitimation of powerful states’ expansion. As such, it also forged changes in the European international society and altered states that sought international society membership (Gong, 1984b , p. 4). The standard of civilization has been used to express a tacit or explicit set of rules that enabled the distinction between those states belonging to an allegedly more advanced grouping and those that did not (Gong, 1984b , p. 3). The standard of civilization was premised on and perpetuated the division between the advanced, the privileged, those setting the rules and those following (willingly or as a result of coercion). The standard of civilization was an idea as well as means to organize international society and enable its expansion. Non-Europeans, due to their alleged lack of an “adequate” civilization or their “shortcomings” in terms of religion, were not sovereign international society members (Sørensen, 2006 , p. 49). As it became enshrined in international law, the standard also took an increasingly explicit juridical character (Gong, 1984b , p. 5).

As the standard itself was a broad and evolving category, the goals of the employment of the 19th century were far from uniform. It served either to bar certain countries (Japan, China) from participating in the international society, to impose unequal treaties on them or to legitimize colonization. An important objective—especially with regard to these elements of the standard that touched upon the internal organization of a state (i.e., the effectiveness in running state affairs, the independence of judiciary from the executive and, especially, the protection of property)—was also to protect Europeans leaving in the colonies (Gong, 1984b , p. 64).

More recently, scholars reengaged with the standard of civilization argument: (Bowden 2009 ), Keene ( 2002 ) and Suzuki ( 2009 ). Keene, in particular, saw it as leading to the creation of two distinct orders ruled by contrasting laws: one superior and one subordinate deliberately sustained by the leading states in colonial peripheries (Keene, 2002 ). The inscription of the standard of civilization in international law allowed for sustaining this unequal relation between the two orders (Anghie, 1999 , 2005 ).

Critique of the Idea of International Society

Several currents can be distinguished in the critique of the idea of international society. The first, originating from the English School camp, advances a mild criticism centered on the problem of the decline of international society. Another “insider” criticism relates to the lack of methodological rigor in the study of international society. The English School methodological orientation is said to be either difficult to pin down (Keene, 2009 ) or nonexistent (Jackson, 2009 ). Scholars who do not identify with the English School research agenda have typically pointed to the Eurocentric nature of the idea of international society. The third charge castigates the international society idea for providing an illusion of certainty and simplicity. The failure to take the complexity and multidimensional aspect of international politics on board undermine, to a large extent, the idea’s potential for a meaningful engagement with contemporary international developments (Edkins & Zehfuss, 2005 ).

Already in 1975 , Bull considered international society to be “in decline” (in Bull, 2002 , p. xxi). Western primacy established in the aftermath of the Cold War propelled doubts as to the durability of global international society. Ian Hall argued that solidarist developments reflected in the works of Time Dunne or Nicholas Wheeler undermined the very foundations of international society, such as the centrality of states or the importance of power politics (Hall, 2001 ).

This strand of critique was strengthened in the wake of the United States’ reaction to the 9/11 attacks. International society was regarded as threatened by the extent of American preponderance. Other members of the international society could not compel the United States to act in ways that would support the existing international order. Instead, the United States rearranged international politics along the lines of hierarchical order (Dunne, 2003 ). American actions were largely considered as undermining international society (Bellamy, 2005 ). These discussions culminated with an attempt to reconcile practices of hierarchy with the idea of international society. Presenting hegemony as one of the primary institutions of international society, Ian Clark sought to reinvigorate international society as a still adequate framework to account for developments in international politics (Clark, 2009 , 2011 ).

Another current criticized the idea of international society as reflecting only a particular historical experience: that of Western states. The classical figures of the English School have been castigated for their excessive Eurocentrism and for the downplaying of the role of imperialism in bringing about the allegedly shared norms of international society. The idea, according to Keal, helped legitimize a highly unequal international system, comprising the practices of imperialism and colonialism (Keal, 2003 ). Edward Keene, who chose to examine international society and its membership requirements from the point of view of the non-Western world, criticized the overreliance on the Western European example and the superficiality of order built on the supposedly shared foundations of international society. He proposed acknowledging the “dualistic nature of order.” The modern world’s history, Keene argued, was divided into two different patterns of international political and legal order. Institutional and legal structures of that order developed differently in Europe and beyond. While European order was tolerant with regard to ethnic, cultural and political difference, the “extra-European” one was preoccupied with the civilizing mission—an inward world of promoting toleration and outward of promoting civilization. The key challenge posed by Keene centers on the fact that thinking in terms of international society prevents us from taking other forms of international order, such as imperial systems, seriously (Keene, 2002 , p. 41).

The English School has also been criticized for the neglect of coercive aspects of international society’s expansion and for presenting the expansion as a progressive and positive process (Suzuki, 2009 ). Some critics vowed to replace “expansion” with the “subjugation” of other regions by European states (Halliday, 2009 ).

International Society Beyond the English School

Despite this essay’s focus on the English School’s take on international society, it is necessary to acknowledge that the idea of international society has a larger following. This is particularly visible among scholars of international law and of historical sociology. The common feature of this writing is that authors generally do not pay particular attention to defining international society. Instead, they approach it as a given, as the state of affairs or the organizing future of international politics. Adopting such a standpoint, most authors have relied on the Grotian conception of international law. Whereas for the English School international law is but one element or—to use their nomenclature—one institution of international society, for scholars outside of the English School tradition, it is international law that is central to the existence of international society, a sine qua non of international society.

For Richard Falk, for instance, international society provides a political framework that conditioned and enabled the existence and operation of international law (Falk, 1970 ). Falk simply acknowledged the existence of international society, without any specific consideration of its features and principles. Concerned with the politics of international law, he asked how international law emerged and continues to be conditioned by politics as well as how it cannot be treated as objective or politically neutral.

Hermann Mosler equated international society with an international legal community composed of independent political entities organized on a territorial basis and “a general conviction” that these entities are bound by reciprocal rules (Mosler, 1980 , p. 2). His definition is therefore not markedly different from that put forward by the English School.

Mark Klamberg, proposing a sociological approach to international law, combined the study of the content of international rules with their influence on the course of international relations with the principal aim to discover why these rules actually affect states behavior (Klamberg, 2015 ). Despite the title of his volume Power and Law in International Society , there is scarce discussion of what the international society may mean or entail. The main concern converges, however, with the central research question posed by the classical English School: How is it possible to have binding rules among states without any central authority on the international level? (Klamberg, 2015 , p. 4). A number of other legal scholars have approached international society as a framework provided by international law (Tourme-Jouannet, 2013 ). More critically leaning authors challenged the neutrality of positive international law and explored its functions in safeguarding the West’s primacy in international politics at the expense of non-European actors (Anghie, 2005 ).

Contradictions: The Ontological Status of International Society

One of the rarely acknowledged but central problems in the international society scholarship is the lack of agreement as to the ontological status of the society of states. Partly a result of inconsistencies in classical writings and partly the consequence of an ever-growing research agenda, international society tends to be presented as an ideal type, as an analytical framework or as a fairly adequate depiction of reality.

Manning and Bull constructed the idea of international society in a somewhat contradictory manner. It was to be an ideal type, to which any system of states might approximate. At the same time, however, it was a concept read from the practice of states (Linklater & Suganami, 2006 , p. 53). In Bull and Watson’s volume, international society was presented as an existing phenomenon with global reach and universal acceptance. Bull’s initial outline of a framework in 1977 —that is, a way of looking at and evaluating the world—became equated with empirical reality (Bull & Watson, 1984 , p. 8).

Some scholars have approached international society as actually existing and, as such, amenable to empirical study: the historical work of the English School presented this society as emerging from and replacing international anarchy. According to functionally based accounts, the current international society is an outcome of purposive activity on the part of states as well as a conscious effort undertaken with a goal of establishing international order (Buzan, 1993 , p. 327). Other scholars have claimed that international society is a normative framework. This camp is further divided into those claiming it is a framework that actually exists and those viewing it as an ideal beyond reach but worth attempting to attain. The third camp has approached it as an analytical framework (i.e., as a device aiding the study of international politics and broadening our understanding of it). In addition, these three strands are not neatly delineated in academic works.

From Jackson’s perspective, international society is a “moral and legal framework” (Jackson, 2000 , p. 39). He depicted international society as “basically a normative framework by reference to which foreign policy, diplomacy, the threat or use of armed force, and other international activities are to be judged” (Jackson, 2000 , p. 31). For Clark, international society is a political framework but one that allows for the application of “constitutionally mediated” norms (Clark, 2005 , p. 7). In his other writings, Clark presented international society in terms of “historically changing principles of legitimacy” (Clark, 2005 , p. 7). In Grader’s analysis of the English School’s scholarship, she pointed out that various authors differ as to their conceptions of international society. She noted that it was metaphysical for Manning and it was empirical and normative for Bull, while others, such as Northedge, would opt for a system rather than a society of states (Grader, 1988 ). In a reply to Grader’s criticism, Peter Wilson argued that international society is ideational and norm-based for both Manning and Bull (Wilson, 1989 ).

Another aspect that has arisen concerns the relationship between the idea of international society and these aspects of international politics that can be considered social. The English School has claimed to share a number of concerns with constructivism (Dunne, 1995b ; Reus–Smit, 2002 ). Constructivists have even been criticized for their unreferenced rediscovery of inputs that the English School made a decade earlier (Hurrell, 2007a ; Suganami, 2001 , p. 5).

The point of convergence between the English School and constructivists is the agreement regarding the existence of a social dimension to international politics (Reus-Smit, 2009 ). The social dimension , however, tends to be interpreted in various ways in writings on international society. To some, it denotes the fact that international society is not a given but has been constructed by states and, as a result, forms a structure that contains the behavior of states through institutions and practices (Dunne, 1995a ). Others have claimed that intersubjective knowledge and social relations among actors constitute international relations (Towns, 2010 ). This ambiguity notwithstanding, the prevalent supposition is that international relations take place in a social setting co-constructed and mutually intelligible to those involved. The idea of international society has been thought of as a possible “baseline for international theory” on the grounds that there exist intersubjective understandings of rules that constitute international society (Mayall, 1978 ). For IR constructivists, such as Nicholas Onuf, the international legal regime occupies a central place and is the defining feature of international society. However, from their perspective, the presence of legal rules needs to be supplemented by informal rules or “rules of the game” (Onuf, 1994 , p. 15). Both constructivists and English School authors discussed international society in relation to regime theory. For Onuf, international society is a particular type of regime: it is “nothing more than an inclusive regime, within which are nested all international regimes, themselves constituted from the relations of states and other well-bounded regimes” (Onuf, 1994 , p. 9). Buzan ( 1993 ) argued that regime theory and international society belong to the same tradition but had been separated by the peculiarities of academic discourse (Buzan, 1993 , p. 328).

Several scholars have taken up the request, originating most often from the constructivist side of academia, for more clarity about the defining features of system, society and community (Dunne, 2008 ; Hurrell, 2007b ; Linklater & Suganami, 2006 , p. 103). However, due to ontological challenges, no conclusion has been reached. Moreover, the drive to establish IR as a discipline and later to claim the English School as a legitimate subfield of inquiry have contributed to a forced unification of thinking on international society and to the dismissal of rather than a deeper engagement with the problems international society poses as an analytical framework.

Despite its contradictions, the tendency to legitimize rather than criticize the status quo in international politics and commend it under the banner of order, the idea of international society and especially the English School’s elaborate discussion of its parameters have contributed to the development of IR theory. One of the chief inputs was that IR subject matter should be conceptualized in broader terms and should include social bonds between states, built on their common interests and encompassing norms and rules as well as institutions. In addition, the idea of international society helped emphasize the need for historical contextualization in the study of international politics and to counter the narratives and interpretations relying on power-political models of interstate relations on the one hand and idealistic accounts of a world government on the other. The English School’s most recognizable contribution to IR theory is the proposition that the international system cannot be discussed solely in material terms. It also cannot be exclusively looked at through an idealist lens. The idea of international society is supposed to provide the “third way” between realism and idealism/liberalism. While realism made conflict the major feature of international politics and idealism/liberalism focused on co-operation, international society was supposed to encompass elements of both conflict and co-operation (Bellamy, 2005 ). Though power still remains an important element, common norms and institutions have a significant role to play in structuring relations between states.

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From Science to Arts, an Inevitable Decision?

The wonderful world of fungi, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, simultaneous translation technology – ever closer to reality, featured author, latest book, the impact of the internet on society: a global perspective, introduction.

The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, as the electrical engine was the vector of technological transformation of the Industrial Age. This global network of computer networks, largely based nowadays on platforms of wireless communication, provides ubiquitous capacity of multimodal, interactive communication in chosen time, transcending space. The Internet is not really a new technology: its ancestor, the Arpanet, was first deployed in 1969 (Abbate 1999). But it was in the 1990s when it was privatized and released from the control of the U.S. Department of Commerce that it diffused around the world at extraordinary speed: in 1996 the first survey of Internet users counted about 40 million; in 2013 they are over 2.5 billion, with China accounting for the largest number of Internet users. Furthermore, for some time the spread of the Internet was limited by the difficulty to lay out land-based telecommunications infrastructure in the emerging countries. This has changed with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, in 1991, there were about 16 million subscribers of wireless devices in the world, in 2013 they are close to 7 billion (in a planet of 7.7 billion human beings). Counting on the family and village uses of mobile phones, and taking into consideration the limited use of these devices among children under five years of age, we can say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in the bandwidth as well as in the efficiency and price of the service.

At the heart of these communication networks the Internet ensures the production, distribution, and use of digitized information in all formats. According to the study published by Martin Hilbert in Science (Hilbert and López 2011), 95 percent of all information existing in the planet is digitized and most of it is accessible on the Internet and other computer networks.

The speed and scope of the transformation of our communication environment by Internet and wireless communication has triggered all kind of utopian and dystopian perceptions around the world.

As in all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects.

The media aggravate the distorted perception by dwelling into scary reports on the basis of anecdotal observation and biased commentary. If there is a topic in which social sciences, in their diversity, should contribute to the full understanding of the world in which we live, it is precisely the area that has come to be named in academia as Internet Studies. Because, in fact, academic research knows a great deal on the interaction between Internet and society, on the basis of methodologically rigorous empirical research conducted in a plurality of cultural and institutional contexts. Any process of major technological change generates its own mythology. In part because it comes into practice before scientists can assess its effects and implications, so there is always a gap between social change and its understanding. For instance, media often report that intense use of the Internet increases the risk of alienation, isolation, depression, and withdrawal from society. In fact, available evidence shows that there is either no relationship or a positive cumulative relationship between the Internet use and the intensity of sociability. We observe that, overall, the more sociable people are, the more they use the Internet. And the more they use the Internet, the more they increase their sociability online and offline, their civic engagement, and the intensity of family and friendship relationships, in all cultures—with the exception of a couple of early studies of the Internet in the 1990s, corrected by their authors later (Castells 2001; Castells et al. 2007; Rainie and Wellman 2012; Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.).

Thus, the purpose of this chapter will be to summarize some of the key research findings on the social effects of the Internet relying on the evidence provided by some of the major institutions specialized in the social study of the Internet. More specifically, I will be using the data from the world at large: the World Internet Survey conducted by the Center for the Digital Future, University of Southern California; the reports of the British Computer Society (BCS), using data from the World Values Survey of the University of Michigan; the Nielsen reports for a variety of countries; and the annual reports from the International Telecommunications Union. For data on the United States, I have used the Pew American Life and Internet Project of the Pew Institute. For the United Kingdom, the Oxford Internet Survey from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, as well as the Virtual Society Project from the Economic and Social Science Research Council. For Spain, the Project Internet Catalonia of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC); the various reports on the information society from Telefónica; and from the Orange Foundation. For Portugal, the Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC) in Lisbon. I would like to emphasize that most of the data in these reports converge toward similar trends. Thus I have selected for my analysis the findings that complement and reinforce each other, offering a consistent picture of the human experience on the Internet in spite of the human diversity.

Given the aim of this publication to reach a broad audience, I will not present in this text the data supporting the analysis presented here. Instead, I am referring the interested reader to the web sources of the research organizations mentioned above, as well as to selected bibliographic references discussing the empirical foundation of the social trends reported here.

Technologies of Freedom, the Network Society, and the Culture of Autonomy

In order to fully understand the effects of the Internet on society, we should remember that technology is material culture. It is produced in a social process in a given institutional environment on the basis of the ideas, values, interests, and knowledge of their producers, both their early producers and their subsequent producers. In this process we must include the users of the technology, who appropriate and adapt the technology rather than adopting it, and by so doing they modify it and produce it in an endless process of interaction between technological production and social use. So, to assess the relevance of Internet in society we must recall the specific characteristics of Internet as a technology. Then we must place it in the context of the transformation of the overall social structure, as well as in relationship to the culture characteristic of this social structure. Indeed, we live in a new social structure, the global network society, characterized by the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy.

Internet is a technology of freedom, in the terms coined by Ithiel de Sola Pool in 1973, coming from a libertarian culture, paradoxically financed by the Pentagon for the benefit of scientists, engineers, and their students, with no direct military application in mind (Castells 2001). The expansion of the Internet from the mid-1990s onward resulted from the combination of three main factors:

• The technological discovery of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee and his willingness to distribute the source code to improve it by the open-source contribution of a global community of users, in continuity with the openness of the TCP/IP Internet protocols. The web keeps running under the same principle of open source. And two-thirds of web servers are operated by Apache, an open-source server program.
• Institutional change in the management of the Internet, keeping it under the loose management of the global Internet community, privatizing it, and allowing both commercial uses and cooperative uses.
• Major changes in social structure, culture, and social behavior: networking as a prevalent organizational form; individuation as the main orientation of social behavior; and the culture of autonomy as the culture of the network society.

I will elaborate on these major trends.

Our society is a network society; that is, a society constructed around personal and organizational networks powered by digital networks and communicated by the Internet. And because networks are global and know no boundaries, the network society is a global network society. This historically specific social structure resulted from the interaction between the emerging technological paradigm based on the digital revolution and some major sociocultural changes. A primary dimension of these changes is what has been labeled the rise of the Me-centered society, or, in sociological terms, the process of individuation, the decline of community understood in terms of space, work, family, and ascription in general. This is not the end of community, and not the end of place-based interaction, but there is a shift toward the reconstruction of social relationships, including strong cultural and personal ties that could be considered a form of community, on the basis of individual interests, values, and projects.

The process of individuation is not just a matter of cultural evolution, it is materially produced by the new forms of organizing economic activities, and social and political life, as I analyzed in my trilogy on the Information Age (Castells 1996–2003). It is based on the transformation of space (metropolitan life), work and economic activity (rise of the networked enterprise and networked work processes), culture and communication (shift from mass communication based on mass media to mass self-communication based on the Internet); on the crisis of the patriarchal family, with increasing autonomy of its individual members; the substitution of media politics for mass party politics; and globalization as the selective networking of places and processes throughout the planet.

But individuation does not mean isolation, or even less the end of community. Sociability is reconstructed as networked individualism and community through a quest for like-minded individuals in a process that combines online interaction with offline interaction, cyberspace and the local space. Individuation is the key process in constituting subjects (individual or collective), networking is the organizational form constructed by these subjects; this is the network society, and the form of sociability is what Rainie and Wellman (2012) conceptualized as networked individualism. Network technologies are of course the medium for this new social structure and this new culture (Papacharissi 2010).

As stated above, academic research has established that the Internet does not isolate people, nor does it reduce their sociability; it actually increases sociability, as shown by myself in my studies in Catalonia (Castells 2007), Rainie and Wellman in the United States (2012), Cardoso in Portugal (2010), and the World Internet Survey for the world at large (Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.). Furthermore, a major study by Michael Willmott for the British Computer Society (Trajectory Partnership 2010) has shown a positive correlation, for individuals and for countries, between the frequency and intensity of the use of the Internet and the psychological indicators of personal happiness. He used global data for 35,000 people obtained from the World Wide Survey of the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2007. Controlling for other factors, the study showed that Internet use empowers people by increasing their feelings of security, personal freedom, and influence, all feelings that have a positive effect on happiness and personal well-being. The effect is particularly positive for people with lower income and who are less qualified, for people in the developing world, and for women. Age does not affect the positive relationship; it is significant for all ages. Why women? Because they are at the center of the network of their families, Internet helps them to organize their lives. Also, it helps them to overcome their isolation, particularly in patriarchal societies. The Internet also contributes to the rise of the culture of autonomy.

The key for the process of individuation is the construction of autonomy by social actors, who become subjects in the process. They do so by defining their specific projects in interaction with, but not submission to, the institutions of society. This is the case for a minority of individuals, but because of their capacity to lead and mobilize they introduce a new culture in every domain of social life: in work (entrepreneurship), in the media (the active audience), in the Internet (the creative user), in the market (the informed and proactive consumer), in education (students as informed critical thinkers, making possible the new frontier of e-learning and m-learning pedagogy), in health (the patient-centered health management system) in e-government (the informed, participatory citizen), in social movements (cultural change from the grassroots, as in feminism or environmentalism), and in politics (the independent-minded citizen able to participate in self-generated political networks).

There is increasing evidence of the direct relationship between the Internet and the rise of social autonomy. From 2002 to 2007 I directed in Catalonia one of the largest studies ever conducted in Europe on the Internet and society, based on 55,000 interviews, one-third of them face to face (IN3 2002–07). As part of this study, my collaborators and I compared the behavior of Internet users to non-Internet users in a sample of 3,000 people, representative of the population of Catalonia. Because in 2003 only about 40 percent of people were Internet users we could really compare the differences in social behavior for users and non-users, something that nowadays would be more difficult given the 79 percent penetration rate of the Internet in Catalonia. Although the data are relatively old, the findings are not, as more recent studies in other countries (particularly in Portugal) appear to confirm the observed trends. We constructed scales of autonomy in different dimensions. Only between 10 and 20 percent of the population, depending on dimensions, were in the high level of autonomy. But we focused on this active segment of the population to explore the role of the Internet in the construction of autonomy. Using factor analysis we identified six major types of autonomy based on projects of individuals according to their practices:

a) professional development b) communicative autonomy c) entrepreneurship d) autonomy of the body e) sociopolitical participation f) personal, individual autonomy

These six types of autonomous practices were statistically independent among themselves. But each one of them correlated positively with Internet use in statistically significant terms, in a self-reinforcing loop (time sequence): the more one person was autonomous, the more she/he used the web, and the more she/he used the web, the more autonomous she/he became (Castells et al. 2007). This is a major empirical finding. Because if the dominant cultural trend in our society is the search for autonomy, and if the Internet powers this search, then we are moving toward a society of assertive individuals and cultural freedom, regardless of the barriers of rigid social organizations inherited from the Industrial Age. From this Internet-based culture of autonomy have emerged a new kind of sociability, networked sociability, and a new kind of sociopolitical practice, networked social movements and networked democracy. I will now turn to the analysis of these two fundamental trends at the source of current processes of social change worldwide.

The Rise of Social Network Sites on the Internet

Since 2002 (creation of Friendster, prior to Facebook) a new socio-technical revolution has taken place on the Internet: the rise of social network sites where now all human activities are present, from personal interaction to business, to work, to culture, to communication, to social movements, and to politics.

Social Network Sites are web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

(Boyd and Ellison 2007, 2)

Social networking uses, in time globally spent, surpassed e-mail in November 2007. It surpassed e-mail in number of users in July 2009. In terms of users it reached 1 billion by September 2010, with Facebook accounting for about half of it. In 2013 it has almost doubled, particularly because of increasing use in China, India, and Latin America. There is indeed a great diversity of social networking sites (SNS) by countries and cultures. Facebook, started for Harvard-only members in 2004, is present in most of the world, but QQ, Cyworld, and Baidu dominate in China; Orkut in Brazil; Mixi in Japan; etc. In terms of demographics, age is the main differential factor in the use of SNS, with a drop of frequency of use after 50 years of age, and particularly 65. But this is not just a teenager’s activity. The main Facebook U.S. category is in the age group 35–44, whose frequency of use of the site is higher than for younger people. Nearly 60 percent of adults in the U.S. have at least one SNS profile, 30 percent two, and 15 percent three or more. Females are as present as males, except when in a society there is a general gender gap. We observe no differences in education and class, but there is some class specialization of SNS, such as Myspace being lower than FB; LinkedIn is for professionals.

Thus, the most important activity on the Internet at this point in time goes through social networking, and SNS have become the chosen platforms for all kind of activities, not just personal friendships or chatting, but for marketing, e-commerce, education, cultural creativity, media and entertainment distribution, health applications, and sociopolitical activism. This is a significant trend for society at large. Let me explore the meaning of this trend on the basis of the still scant evidence.

Social networking sites are constructed by users themselves building on specific criteria of grouping. There is entrepreneurship in the process of creating sites, then people choose according to their interests and projects. Networks are tailored by people themselves with different levels of profiling and privacy. The key to success is not anonymity, but on the contrary, self-presentation of a real person connecting to real people (in some cases people are excluded from the SNS when they fake their identity). So, it is a self-constructed society by networking connecting to other networks. But this is not a virtual society. There is a close connection between virtual networks and networks in life at large. This is a hybrid world, a real world, not a virtual world or a segregated world.

People build networks to be with others, and to be with others they want to be with on the basis of criteria that include those people who they already know (a selected sub-segment). Most users go on the site every day. It is permanent connectivity. If we needed an answer to what happened to sociability in the Internet world, here it is:

There is a dramatic increase in sociability, but a different kind of sociability, facilitated and dynamized by permanent connectivity and social networking on the web.

Based on the time when Facebook was still releasing data (this time is now gone) we know that in 2009 users spent 500 billion minutes per month. This is not just about friendship or interpersonal communication. People do things together, share, act, exactly as in society, although the personal dimension is always there. Thus, in the U.S. 38 percent of adults share content, 21 percent remix, 14 percent blog, and this is growing exponentially, with development of technology, software, and SNS entrepreneurial initiatives. On Facebook, in 2009 the average user was connected to 60 pages, groups, and events, people interacted per month to 160 million objects (pages, groups, events), the average user created 70 pieces of content per month, and there were 25 billion pieces of content shared per month (web links, news stories, blogs posts, notes, photos). SNS are living spaces connecting all dimensions of people’s experience. This transforms culture because people share experience with a low emotional cost, while saving energy and effort. They transcend time and space, yet they produce content, set up links, and connect practices. It is a constantly networked world in every dimension of human experience. They co-evolve in permanent, multiple interaction. But they choose the terms of their co-evolution.

Thus, people live their physical lives but increasingly connect on multiple dimensions in SNS.

Paradoxically, the virtual life is more social than the physical life, now individualized by the organization of work and urban living.

But people do not live a virtual reality, indeed it is a real virtuality, since social practices, sharing, mixing, and living in society is facilitated in the virtuality, in what I called time ago the “space of flows” (Castells 1996).

Because people are increasingly at ease in the multi-textuality and multidimensionality of the web, marketers, work organizations, service agencies, government, and civil society are migrating massively to the Internet, less and less setting up alternative sites, more and more being present in the networks that people construct by themselves and for themselves, with the help of Internet social networking entrepreneurs, some of whom become billionaires in the process, actually selling freedom and the possibility of the autonomous construction of lives. This is the liberating potential of the Internet made material practice by these social networking sites. The largest of these social networking sites are usually bounded social spaces managed by a company. However, if the company tries to impede free communication it may lose many of its users, because the entry barriers in this industry are very low. A couple of technologically savvy youngsters with little capital can set up a site on the Internet and attract escapees from a more restricted Internet space, as happened to AOL and other networking sites of the first generation, and as could happen to Facebook or any other SNS if they are tempted to tinker with the rules of openness (Facebook tried to make users pay and retracted within days). So, SNS are often a business, but they are in the business of selling freedom, free expression, chosen sociability. When they tinker with this promise they risk their hollowing by net citizens migrating with their friends to more friendly virtual lands.

Perhaps the most telling expression of this new freedom is the transformation of sociopolitical practices on the Internet.

Communication Power: Mass-Self Communication and the Transformation of Politics

Power and counterpower, the foundational relationships of society, are constructed in the human mind, through the construction of meaning and the processing of information according to certain sets of values and interests (Castells 2009).

Ideological apparatuses and the mass media have been key tools of mediating communication and asserting power, and still are. But the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy, has found in Internet and mobile communication networks a major medium of mass self-communication and self-organization.

The key source for the social production of meaning is the process of socialized communication. I define communication as the process of sharing meaning through the exchange of information. Socialized communication is the one that exists in the public realm, that has the potential of reaching society at large. Therefore, the battle over the human mind is largely played out in the process of socialized communication. And this is particularly so in the network society, the social structure of the Information Age, which is characterized by the pervasiveness of communication networks in a multimodal hypertext.

The ongoing transformation of communication technology in the digital age extends the reach of communication media to all domains of social life in a network that is at the same time global and local, generic and customized, in an ever-changing pattern.

As a result, power relations, that is the relations that constitute the foundation of all societies, as well as the processes challenging institutionalized power relations, are increasingly shaped and decided in the communication field. Meaningful, conscious communication is what makes humans human. Thus, any major transformation in the technology and organization of communication is of utmost relevance for social change. Over the last four decades the advent of the Internet and of wireless communication has shifted the communication process in society at large from mass communication to mass self-communication. This is from a message sent from one to many with little interactivity to a system based on messages from many to many, multimodal, in chosen time, and with interactivity, so that senders are receivers and receivers are senders. And both have access to a multimodal hypertext in the web that constitutes the endlessly changing backbone of communication processes.

The transformation of communication from mass communication to mass self-communication has contributed decisively to alter the process of social change. As power relationships have always been based on the control of communication and information that feed the neural networks constitutive of the human mind, the rise of horizontal networks of communication has created a new landscape of social and political change by the process of disintermediation of the government and corporate controls over communication. This is the power of the network, as social actors build their own networks on the basis of their projects, values, and interests. The outcome of these processes is open ended and dependent on specific contexts. Freedom, in this case freedom of communicate, does not say anything on the uses of freedom in society. This is to be established by scholarly research. But we need to start from this major historical phenomenon: the building of a global communication network based on the Internet, a technology that embodies the culture of freedom that was at its source.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century there have been multiple social movements around the world that have used the Internet as their space of formation and permanent connectivity, among the movements and with society at large. These networked social movements, formed in the social networking sites on the Internet, have mobilized in the urban space and in the institutional space, inducing new forms of social movements that are the main actors of social change in the network society. Networked social movements have been particularly active since 2010, and especially in the Arab revolutions against dictatorships; in Europe and the U.S. as forms of protest against the management of the financial crisis; in Brazil; in Turkey; in Mexico; and in highly diverse institutional contexts and economic conditions. It is precisely the similarity of the movements in extremely different contexts that allows the formulation of the hypothesis that this is the pattern of social movements characteristic of the global network society. In all cases we observe the capacity of these movements for self-organization, without a central leadership, on the basis of a spontaneous emotional movement. In all cases there is a connection between Internet-based communication, mobile networks, and the mass media in different forms, feeding into each other and amplifying the movement locally and globally.

These movements take place in the context of exploitation and oppression, social tensions and social struggles; but struggles that were not able to successfully challenge the state in other instances of revolt are now powered by the tools of mass self-communication. It is not the technology that induces the movements, but without the technology (Internet and wireless communication) social movements would not take the present form of being a challenge to state power. The fact is that technology is material culture (ideas brought into the design) and the Internet materialized the culture of freedom that, as it has been documented, emerged on American campuses in the 1960s. This culture-made technology is at the source of the new wave of social movements that exemplify the depth of the global impact of the Internet in all spheres of social organization, affecting particularly power relationships, the foundation of the institutions of society. (See case studies and an analytical perspective on the interaction between Internet and networked social movements in Castells 2012.)

The Internet, as all technologies, does not produce effects by itself. Yet, it has specific effects in altering the capacity of the communication system to be organized around flows that are interactive, multimodal, asynchronous or synchronous, global or local, and from many to many, from people to people, from people to objects, and from objects to objects, increasingly relying on the semantic web. How these characteristics affect specific systems of social relationships has to be established by research, and this is what I tried to present in this text. What is clear is that without the Internet we would not have seen the large-scale development of networking as the fundamental mechanism of social structuring and social change in every domain of social life. The Internet, the World Wide Web, and a variety of networks increasingly based on wireless platforms constitute the technological infrastructure of the network society, as the electrical grid and the electrical engine were the support system for the form of social organization that we conceptualized as the industrial society. Thus, as a social construction, this technological system is open ended, as the network society is an open-ended form of social organization that conveys the best and the worse in humankind. Yet, the global network society is our society, and the understanding of its logic on the basis of the interaction between culture, organization, and technology in the formation and development of social and technological networks is a key field of research in the twenty-first century.

We can only make progress in our understanding through the cumulative effort of scholarly research. Only then we will be able to cut through the myths surrounding the key technology of our time. A digital communication technology that is already a second skin for young people, yet it continues to feed the fears and the fantasies of those who are still in charge of a society that they barely understand.

These references are in fact sources of more detailed references specific to each one of the topics analyzed in this text.

Abbate, Janet. A Social History of the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Boyd, Danah M., and Nicole B. Ellison. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007).

Cardoso, Gustavo, Angus Cheong, and Jeffrey Cole (eds). World Wide Internet: Changing Societies, Economies and Cultures. Macau: University of Macau Press, 2009.

Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. 3 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996–2003.

———. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

———. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

———. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.

Castells, Manuel, Imma Tubella, Teresa Sancho, and Meritxell Roca.

La transición a la sociedad red. Barcelona: Ariel, 2007.

Hilbert, Martin, and Priscilla López. “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information.” Science 332, no. 6025 (April 1, 2011): pp. 60–65.

Papacharissi, Zizi, ed. The Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Networking Sites. Routledge, 2010.

Rainie. Lee, and Barry Wellman. Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

Trajectory Partnership (Michael Willmott and Paul Flatters). The Information Dividend: Why IT Makes You “Happier.” Swindon: British Informatics Society Limited, 2010. http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/info-dividend-full-report.pdf

Selected Web References.   Used as sources for analysis in the chapter

Agência para a Sociedade do Conhecimento. “Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC).” http://www.umic.pt/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3026&Itemid=167

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. “Features, Press and Policy.” http://www.bcs.org/category/7307

Center for the Digital Future. The World Internet Project International Report. 4th ed. Los Angeles: USC Annenberg School, Center for the Digital Future, 2012. http://www.worldinternetproject.net/_files/_Published/_oldis/770_2012wip_report4th_ed.pdf

ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council). “Papers and Reports.” Virtual Society. http://virtualsociety.sbs.ox.ac.uk/reports.htm

Fundación Orange. “Análisis y Prospectiva: Informe eEspaña.” Fundación Orange. http://fundacionorange.es/fundacionorange/analisisprospectiva.html

Fundación Telefónica. “Informes SI.” Fundación Telefónica. http://sociedadinformacion.fundacion.telefonica.com/DYC/SHI/InformesSI/seccion=1190&idioma=es_ES.do

IN3 (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute). UOC. “Project Internet Catalonia (PIC): An Overview.” Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, 2002–07. http://www.uoc.edu/in3/pic/eng/

International Telecommunication Union. “Annual Reports.” http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/sfo/annual_reports/index.html

Nielsen Company. “Reports.” 2013. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/reports/2013.html?tag=Category:Media+ and+Entertainment

Oxford Internet Surveys. “Publications.” http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/oxis/publications

Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Social Networking.” Pew Internet. http://www.pewinternet.org/Topics/Activities-and-Pursuits/Social-Networking.aspx?typeFilter=5

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The Internet, Politics and the Politics of Internet Debate

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Promises and Pitfalls of Technology

Politics and privacy, private-sector influence and big tech, state competition and conflict, author biography, how is technology changing the world, and how should the world change technology.

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Josephine Wolff; How Is Technology Changing the World, and How Should the World Change Technology?. Global Perspectives 1 February 2021; 2 (1): 27353. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.27353

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Technologies are becoming increasingly complicated and increasingly interconnected. Cars, airplanes, medical devices, financial transactions, and electricity systems all rely on more computer software than they ever have before, making them seem both harder to understand and, in some cases, harder to control. Government and corporate surveillance of individuals and information processing relies largely on digital technologies and artificial intelligence, and therefore involves less human-to-human contact than ever before and more opportunities for biases to be embedded and codified in our technological systems in ways we may not even be able to identify or recognize. Bioengineering advances are opening up new terrain for challenging philosophical, political, and economic questions regarding human-natural relations. Additionally, the management of these large and small devices and systems is increasingly done through the cloud, so that control over them is both very remote and removed from direct human or social control. The study of how to make technologies like artificial intelligence or the Internet of Things “explainable” has become its own area of research because it is so difficult to understand how they work or what is at fault when something goes wrong (Gunning and Aha 2019) .

This growing complexity makes it more difficult than ever—and more imperative than ever—for scholars to probe how technological advancements are altering life around the world in both positive and negative ways and what social, political, and legal tools are needed to help shape the development and design of technology in beneficial directions. This can seem like an impossible task in light of the rapid pace of technological change and the sense that its continued advancement is inevitable, but many countries around the world are only just beginning to take significant steps toward regulating computer technologies and are still in the process of radically rethinking the rules governing global data flows and exchange of technology across borders.

These are exciting times not just for technological development but also for technology policy—our technologies may be more advanced and complicated than ever but so, too, are our understandings of how they can best be leveraged, protected, and even constrained. The structures of technological systems as determined largely by government and institutional policies and those structures have tremendous implications for social organization and agency, ranging from open source, open systems that are highly distributed and decentralized, to those that are tightly controlled and closed, structured according to stricter and more hierarchical models. And just as our understanding of the governance of technology is developing in new and interesting ways, so, too, is our understanding of the social, cultural, environmental, and political dimensions of emerging technologies. We are realizing both the challenges and the importance of mapping out the full range of ways that technology is changing our society, what we want those changes to look like, and what tools we have to try to influence and guide those shifts.

Technology can be a source of tremendous optimism. It can help overcome some of the greatest challenges our society faces, including climate change, famine, and disease. For those who believe in the power of innovation and the promise of creative destruction to advance economic development and lead to better quality of life, technology is a vital economic driver (Schumpeter 1942) . But it can also be a tool of tremendous fear and oppression, embedding biases in automated decision-making processes and information-processing algorithms, exacerbating economic and social inequalities within and between countries to a staggering degree, or creating new weapons and avenues for attack unlike any we have had to face in the past. Scholars have even contended that the emergence of the term technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked a shift from viewing individual pieces of machinery as a means to achieving political and social progress to the more dangerous, or hazardous, view that larger-scale, more complex technological systems were a semiautonomous form of progress in and of themselves (Marx 2010) . More recently, technologists have sharply criticized what they view as a wave of new Luddites, people intent on slowing the development of technology and turning back the clock on innovation as a means of mitigating the societal impacts of technological change (Marlowe 1970) .

At the heart of fights over new technologies and their resulting global changes are often two conflicting visions of technology: a fundamentally optimistic one that believes humans use it as a tool to achieve greater goals, and a fundamentally pessimistic one that holds that technological systems have reached a point beyond our control. Technology philosophers have argued that neither of these views is wholly accurate and that a purely optimistic or pessimistic view of technology is insufficient to capture the nuances and complexity of our relationship to technology (Oberdiek and Tiles 1995) . Understanding technology and how we can make better decisions about designing, deploying, and refining it requires capturing that nuance and complexity through in-depth analysis of the impacts of different technological advancements and the ways they have played out in all their complicated and controversial messiness across the world.

These impacts are often unpredictable as technologies are adopted in new contexts and come to be used in ways that sometimes diverge significantly from the use cases envisioned by their designers. The internet, designed to help transmit information between computer networks, became a crucial vehicle for commerce, introducing unexpected avenues for crime and financial fraud. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, designed to connect friends and families through sharing photographs and life updates, became focal points of election controversies and political influence. Cryptocurrencies, originally intended as a means of decentralized digital cash, have become a significant environmental hazard as more and more computing resources are devoted to mining these forms of virtual money. One of the crucial challenges in this area is therefore recognizing, documenting, and even anticipating some of these unexpected consequences and providing mechanisms to technologists for how to think through the impacts of their work, as well as possible other paths to different outcomes (Verbeek 2006) . And just as technological innovations can cause unexpected harm, they can also bring about extraordinary benefits—new vaccines and medicines to address global pandemics and save thousands of lives, new sources of energy that can drastically reduce emissions and help combat climate change, new modes of education that can reach people who would otherwise have no access to schooling. Regulating technology therefore requires a careful balance of mitigating risks without overly restricting potentially beneficial innovations.

Nations around the world have taken very different approaches to governing emerging technologies and have adopted a range of different technologies themselves in pursuit of more modern governance structures and processes (Braman 2009) . In Europe, the precautionary principle has guided much more anticipatory regulation aimed at addressing the risks presented by technologies even before they are fully realized. For instance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation focuses on the responsibilities of data controllers and processors to provide individuals with access to their data and information about how that data is being used not just as a means of addressing existing security and privacy threats, such as data breaches, but also to protect against future developments and uses of that data for artificial intelligence and automated decision-making purposes. In Germany, Technische Überwachungsvereine, or TÜVs, perform regular tests and inspections of technological systems to assess and minimize risks over time, as the tech landscape evolves. In the United States, by contrast, there is much greater reliance on litigation and liability regimes to address safety and security failings after-the-fact. These different approaches reflect not just the different legal and regulatory mechanisms and philosophies of different nations but also the different ways those nations prioritize rapid development of the technology industry versus safety, security, and individual control. Typically, governance innovations move much more slowly than technological innovations, and regulations can lag years, or even decades, behind the technologies they aim to govern.

In addition to this varied set of national regulatory approaches, a variety of international and nongovernmental organizations also contribute to the process of developing standards, rules, and norms for new technologies, including the International Organization for Standardization­ and the International Telecommunication Union. These multilateral and NGO actors play an especially important role in trying to define appropriate boundaries for the use of new technologies by governments as instruments of control for the state.

At the same time that policymakers are under scrutiny both for their decisions about how to regulate technology as well as their decisions about how and when to adopt technologies like facial recognition themselves, technology firms and designers have also come under increasing criticism. Growing recognition that the design of technologies can have far-reaching social and political implications means that there is more pressure on technologists to take into consideration the consequences of their decisions early on in the design process (Vincenti 1993; Winner 1980) . The question of how technologists should incorporate these social dimensions into their design and development processes is an old one, and debate on these issues dates back to the 1970s, but it remains an urgent and often overlooked part of the puzzle because so many of the supposedly systematic mechanisms for assessing the impacts of new technologies in both the private and public sectors are primarily bureaucratic, symbolic processes rather than carrying any real weight or influence.

Technologists are often ill-equipped or unwilling to respond to the sorts of social problems that their creations have—often unwittingly—exacerbated, and instead point to governments and lawmakers to address those problems (Zuckerberg 2019) . But governments often have few incentives to engage in this area. This is because setting clear standards and rules for an ever-evolving technological landscape can be extremely challenging, because enforcement of those rules can be a significant undertaking requiring considerable expertise, and because the tech sector is a major source of jobs and revenue for many countries that may fear losing those benefits if they constrain companies too much. This indicates not just a need for clearer incentives and better policies for both private- and public-sector entities but also a need for new mechanisms whereby the technology development and design process can be influenced and assessed by people with a wider range of experiences and expertise. If we want technologies to be designed with an eye to their impacts, who is responsible for predicting, measuring, and mitigating those impacts throughout the design process? Involving policymakers in that process in a more meaningful way will also require training them to have the analytic and technical capacity to more fully engage with technologists and understand more fully the implications of their decisions.

At the same time that tech companies seem unwilling or unable to rein in their creations, many also fear they wield too much power, in some cases all but replacing governments and international organizations in their ability to make decisions that affect millions of people worldwide and control access to information, platforms, and audiences (Kilovaty 2020) . Regulators around the world have begun considering whether some of these companies have become so powerful that they violate the tenets of antitrust laws, but it can be difficult for governments to identify exactly what those violations are, especially in the context of an industry where the largest players often provide their customers with free services. And the platforms and services developed by tech companies are often wielded most powerfully and dangerously not directly by their private-sector creators and operators but instead by states themselves for widespread misinformation campaigns that serve political purposes (Nye 2018) .

Since the largest private entities in the tech sector operate in many countries, they are often better poised to implement global changes to the technological ecosystem than individual states or regulatory bodies, creating new challenges to existing governance structures and hierarchies. Just as it can be challenging to provide oversight for government use of technologies, so, too, oversight of the biggest tech companies, which have more resources, reach, and power than many nations, can prove to be a daunting task. The rise of network forms of organization and the growing gig economy have added to these challenges, making it even harder for regulators to fully address the breadth of these companies’ operations (Powell 1990) . The private-public partnerships that have emerged around energy, transportation, medical, and cyber technologies further complicate this picture, blurring the line between the public and private sectors and raising critical questions about the role of each in providing critical infrastructure, health care, and security. How can and should private tech companies operating in these different sectors be governed, and what types of influence do they exert over regulators? How feasible are different policy proposals aimed at technological innovation, and what potential unintended consequences might they have?

Conflict between countries has also spilled over significantly into the private sector in recent years, most notably in the case of tensions between the United States and China over which technologies developed in each country will be permitted by the other and which will be purchased by other customers, outside those two countries. Countries competing to develop the best technology is not a new phenomenon, but the current conflicts have major international ramifications and will influence the infrastructure that is installed and used around the world for years to come. Untangling the different factors that feed into these tussles as well as whom they benefit and whom they leave at a disadvantage is crucial for understanding how governments can most effectively foster technological innovation and invention domestically as well as the global consequences of those efforts. As much of the world is forced to choose between buying technology from the United States or from China, how should we understand the long-term impacts of those choices and the options available to people in countries without robust domestic tech industries? Does the global spread of technologies help fuel further innovation in countries with smaller tech markets, or does it reinforce the dominance of the states that are already most prominent in this sector? How can research universities maintain global collaborations and research communities in light of these national competitions, and what role does government research and development spending play in fostering innovation within its own borders and worldwide? How should intellectual property protections evolve to meet the demands of the technology industry, and how can those protections be enforced globally?

These conflicts between countries sometimes appear to challenge the feasibility of truly global technologies and networks that operate across all countries through standardized protocols and design features. Organizations like the International Organization for Standardization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and many others have tried to harmonize these policies and protocols across different countries for years, but have met with limited success when it comes to resolving the issues of greatest tension and disagreement among nations. For technology to operate in a global environment, there is a need for a much greater degree of coordination among countries and the development of common standards and norms, but governments continue to struggle to agree not just on those norms themselves but even the appropriate venue and processes for developing them. Without greater global cooperation, is it possible to maintain a global network like the internet or to promote the spread of new technologies around the world to address challenges of sustainability? What might help incentivize that cooperation moving forward, and what could new structures and process for governance of global technologies look like? Why has the tech industry’s self-regulation culture persisted? Do the same traditional drivers for public policy, such as politics of harmonization and path dependency in policy-making, still sufficiently explain policy outcomes in this space? As new technologies and their applications spread across the globe in uneven ways, how and when do they create forces of change from unexpected places?

These are some of the questions that we hope to address in the Technology and Global Change section through articles that tackle new dimensions of the global landscape of designing, developing, deploying, and assessing new technologies to address major challenges the world faces. Understanding these processes requires synthesizing knowledge from a range of different fields, including sociology, political science, economics, and history, as well as technical fields such as engineering, climate science, and computer science. A crucial part of understanding how technology has created global change and, in turn, how global changes have influenced the development of new technologies is understanding the technologies themselves in all their richness and complexity—how they work, the limits of what they can do, what they were designed to do, how they are actually used. Just as technologies themselves are becoming more complicated, so are their embeddings and relationships to the larger social, political, and legal contexts in which they exist. Scholars across all disciplines are encouraged to join us in untangling those complexities.

Josephine Wolff is an associate professor of cybersecurity policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her book You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches was published by MIT Press in 2018.

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The Importance of Education in the Global Society

Being educated is an important issue in the global society of the 21 st century. The majority of people in developed countries begin to learn to read, write and count before they go to school. Later in school, they are told that their grades should be high enough so they could go to college or the university. Studying at the university is considered to be prestigious and admired. People spend enormous amounts of money to provide their children with the best education they can achieve. The role and the importance of education in the modern world is a subject of this essay.

In the world of 21 st century, about 67 million children in developing countries have no possibility to attend primary school. The education is not free and considered to be a privilege of people who have enough costs. This refers to a primary education as well. Children begin to work as soon as they begin to understand how to perform the simplest labor functions. They work in fields and factories, look after their younger siblings while their parents are working, they are involved in street and market trade, they deliver things and work as porters, etc. They are involved in everything that can provide their family with money that is mostly spent on a simple food. The parents, not being educated themselves, often take education as something excessive and unnecessary. In other cases, parents want their children to go to school, but they simply lack costs for books, clothes and writing materials. As a result, a high percentage of adults in these countries are illiterate and form the society driven by superstitious, often barbaric traditions, creating a serious background for humanitarian catastrophes, violence, epidemics. Countries with the high level of illiteracy will never succeed in the modern world.

On the other hand, developed countries tend to educate as many children as possible. The elementary and secondary education is obligatory and free in the majority of them. The image of educated person is widely popularized. There are many supporting educational programs dealing not only with children and adolescents but also with adult people. Graduating from school is not only admired – it is obligatory in the majority of cases. However, it is not enough for the prospective future. The knowledge and the experience gained in colleges and universities determine the way of life, put the person on the highest social level, provide with the opportunity of getting higher salary, broaden the chances to better, exciting, secure and independent life. The implementation of obligatory and available education on the level of state home policy results in higher life standards expectation and developed society that can choose and determine its way of development.

The high percentage of educated people forms high communication, cultural and behavior standards of society. They have more interests to share; they gain firm and diverse background that tends to better understanding and interaction with people from other countries and of other nations, thus expanding the possibilities of the individual and improving country’s international image. As a rule, educated people see the broader specter of possibilities and outcomes of the situation than uneducated, and, thus, more ways of action. Education is a moving force for science, culture, medicine, and technology development; as well as it provides raising the morals standards.

Education is a very important issue in the modern world considering the many aspects like extremely fast technology and social development. Educated people gain more possibilities to fulfill their ideas and improve their way of life, as well as to choose their way of personal development.

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IvyPanda. (2023, November 23). The Importance of Education in the Global Society. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-importance-of-education-in-the-global-society/

"The Importance of Education in the Global Society." IvyPanda , 23 Nov. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/the-importance-of-education-in-the-global-society/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'The Importance of Education in the Global Society'. 23 November.

IvyPanda . 2023. "The Importance of Education in the Global Society." November 23, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-importance-of-education-in-the-global-society/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Importance of Education in the Global Society." November 23, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-importance-of-education-in-the-global-society/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Importance of Education in the Global Society." November 23, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-importance-of-education-in-the-global-society/.

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Essay: Where Global Governance Went Wrong—and How to Fix It

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Where Global Governance Went Wrong—and How to Fix It

International agreements have not balanced our freedoms in the way that they should..

Global governance, never really settled, has recently been having an especially hard time. Everyone believes in a rules-based system, but everyone wants to make the rules and dislikes it when the rules work against them, saying that they infringe on their sovereignty and their freedom. There are deep asymmetries, with the powerful countries not only making the rules but also breaking them almost at will, which raises the question: Do we even have a rules-based system, or is it just a facade? Of course, in such circumstances, those who break the rules say they only do so because others are, too.

The current moment is a good illustration. It is the product of longstanding beliefs and power relations. Under this system, industrial subsidies were a no-no, forbidden (so it was thought) not just by World Trade Organization rules, but also by the dictates of what was considered sound economics. “Sound economics” was that set of doctrines known as neoliberal economics, which promised growth and prosperity through, mostly, supposedly freeing the economy by allowing so-called free enterprise to flourish. The “liberal” in neoliberalism stood for freedom and “neo” for new, suggesting that it was a different and updated version of 19 th -century liberalism.

This essay is adapted from the book T he Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society by Joseph E. Stiglitz, W.W. Norton, 384 pp., $29.99, April 2024

In fact, it was neither really new nor really liberating. True, it gave firms more rights to pollute, but in doing so, it took away the freedom to breathe clean air—or in the case of those with asthma, sometimes even the most fundamental of all freedoms, the freedom to live.

“Freedom” meant freedom for the monopolists to exploit consumers, for the monopsonists (the large number of firms that have market power over labor) to exploit workers, and freedom for the banks to exploit all of us—engineering the most massive financial crisis in history, which required taxpayers to fork out trillions of dollars in bailouts, often hidden, to ensure that the so-called free enterprise system could survive.

The promise that this liberalization would lead to faster growth from which all would benefit never materialized. Under these doctrines that have prevailed for more than four decades, growth has actually slowed in most advanced countries. For instance, real growth in GDP per capita (average percent increase per annum) according to data compiled by the St. Louis Fed, was 2.5% from 1960 to 1990, but slowed to 1.5% from 1990 to 2018. Instead of trickle-down economics, where everyone would benefit, we had trickle-up economics, where the top 1 percent and especially the top 0.1 percent, got a larger and larger slice of the pie.

These are illustrations of British political theorist Isaiah Berlin’s dictum that “total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs”; or, as I have sometimes put it less gracefully, freedom for some has meant the unfreedom of others—their loss of freedom.

Just as individuals rightly cherish their freedom, countries do, too, often under the name “sovereignty.” But while these words are easily uttered, there is too little thought about their deeper meanings. Economics has weighed into the debate about what freedom and sovereignty mean, with John Stuart Mill’s contribution in the 19th century ( On Liberty ), and Milton Friedman’s and Friedrich Hayek’s works in the mid-20th ( Capitalism and Freedom and The Road to Serfdom ).

But contrary to what Hayek and Friedman asserted, free and unfettered markets do not lead to efficiency and the well-being of society; that should be obvious to anyone looking around. Just think of the inequality crisis, the climate crisis, the opioid crisis, the childhood diabetes crisis, or the 2008 financial crisis.  These are crises created by the market, exacerbated by the market, and/or crises which the market hasn’t been able to deal with adequately.

Economic theorists (including me) have shown that whenever there is imperfect information or imperfect markets (that is to say, always), there is a presumption that markets are not efficient. Even a very little bit of imperfection can have big effects.

The problem is that much of the global economic architecture designed over recent decades has been based on neoliberalism—the kinds of ideas that Hayek and Friedman put forward. The system of rules that evolved from there must be fundamentally rethought.

U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at the G-20 economic summit in Hamburg, Germany, on July 8, 2017. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

From an economist’s perspective, freedom is the “freedom to do,” meaning the size of the opportunity set of what a person can do, or the range of the choices that are available.

Someone on the verge of starvation has no real freedom—she does what she must to survive. A rich person obviously has more freedom to choose. “Freedom to do” is also constrained when an individual is harmed. Obviously, if an individual is killed by a gunman or a virus, or even hospitalized by COVID-19, he has lost freedom in a meaningful sense, and we then have a dramatic illustration of Berlin’s dictum: Freedom for some—the freedom to carry guns, or to not be masked, or to be unvaccinated—may entail a large loss of freedom for others.

The same principle applies to the international arena. The rules-based trade system consists of a set of rules intended to expand the freedoms of all in a meaningful way by imposing constraints. The idea that constraints can be freeing, while seemingly self-contradictory, is obvious: Stoplights force us to take turns going through intersections, but without this seeming constraint, there would be gridlock and no one would be able to move.

All contracts are agreements about constraints—with one party agreeing to do or not do something in return for another person making other promises—with the belief that in doing so, all parties will be better off. Of course, if one party cheats and doesn’t deliver on its promise, then that party gains at the expense of others. And there is always the temptation to do so, which is why we require governments to enforce contracts, so that promises mean something. No government could enforce all contracts, and the so-called free market would crash if all participants were grifters.

But while there are similarities between discussions of freedom at the individual level and the country level, there are also a couple of big differences. Most importantly, there is no global government to ensure that the powerful countries obey an agreement, as we are seeing today in the case of U.S. industrial subsidies. The World Trade Organization (WTO) generally forbids such subsidies and especially disapproves of some of the provisions—such as requiring domestic manufacturing (“Made in America”)—in legislation passed recently by the U.S. Congress, including the CHIPS and Science Act .

Big Tech Is Trying to Prevent Debate About Its Social Harms

The industry’s “digital trade” strategy seeks to preemptively constrain governments.

The Global Credibility Gap

No one power or group can uphold the international order anymore—and that means much more geopolitical uncertainty ahead.

Moreover, within democratic countries, the role of power in the making and enforcement of the rules is often obscure; we know that inequalities in wealth and income get translated into inequalities in political power, which determines who gets to design the rules and how they are enforced. An imbalance of power means that the powerful within a country determine the rules in ways that benefit them, often at the expense of the weak.

Still, the democratic context means that every once in a while, power is checked—as it was when the antitrust laws were passed in the United States in the latter part of the 19th century, or the Wagner Act was passed during the New Deal of the 1930s, giving workers more power.

In an international setting, power is even more concentrated, and democratic forces are even weaker. What has happened in the past few years illustrates this. The United States was at the center in constructing the rules-based system, in both designing the rules and how they were to be enforced, including dispute resolutions through the WTO’s Appellate Body.  But when the rules—such as those concerning industrial subsidies—were inconvenient, it decided to ignore them, knowing that there was little, if anything, that any country could or would do about it. So much for the rules-based system.

And the United States’ confidence that nothing could or would be done was reinforced by the fact that it had effectively defenestrated the Appellate Body, because that Body had made decisions it didn’t like, and the U.S. thought that the Body was guilty of overreaching, going beyond what it was entitled to do. But rather than going back to the WTO and clarifying what the Body’s role should be, the U.S. simply hamstrung any adjudication within the WTO. The situation would be like suspending the U.S. Supreme Court while figuring out how to bring the justices back to a reasonable theory of jurisprudence.

This imbalance of power has played out repeatedly in recent years. When developed countries attempted to implement industrial policies—even mild policies, such as Brazil’s effort to provide capital to aerospace corporation Embraer at reasonable interest rates through that country’s development bank (as opposed to the outlandishly high rates then prevailing in its financial markets)—they were attacked . When Indonesia tried to ensure that more of the added value associated with its rich nickel deposits remained in Indonesia, it was attacked .

People line up to receive the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccination at a local hospital in in Harare, Zimbabwe, on March 29, 2021. Tafadzwa Ufumeli/Getty Images

Even worse, when more than 100 countries proposed a waiver of intellectual property related to COVID-19—in the spirit of the compulsory licenses already seemingly part of the WTO framework, but given the urgency of the moment, a less bureaucratic process was of the essence—they were denied. The result: vaccine apartheid , where the advanced countries had all the vaccines they wanted, and the developing countries had almost zero access. This almost surely resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths and tens of thousands of unnecessary hospitalizations in the poorer countries.

These are obviously no small matters in the well-being of citizens in around the world, especially not for developing countries and emerging markets. Nor are they small matters in geoeconomics and geopolitics. The neoliberal rules forbidding subsidies effectively meant that developing countries couldn’t catch up to the advanced countries; the rules condemned them to being commodity producers, reserving the higher value-added production for the advanced countries.

This tariff structure has been rightly criticized as a crucial tool in the preservation of colonial trade patterns—aided and abetted by other unfair aspects of the trade regime, such as escalating tariffs. As economist Ha-Joon Chang has put it , the advanced countries “kicked away the ladder” from which they themselves had used.

It should be clear, too, that there are geopolitical consequences in refusing to play by the rules. The United States and the advanced countries are losing support for some of the most important issues requiring global cooperation, including climate change , global health, and the support needed to resolve the conflict in Ukraine as well as Washington’s apparent battle for democracy and hegemony with China.

The global south may yet steer the ship of international rules back on course. When the United States was the hegemon, it could do as it wanted, but its influence is now being challenged. China has provided more infrastructure than the United States has; early on in the pandemic, both China and Russia seemed more generous in providing vaccines.

Washington told the developing countries to open their doors to its multinationals, but when those countries asked that the rich corporations pay the taxes they owed, the United States was not supportive—reforms under an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development initiative called BEPS (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting) generated sparse revenues for the poorer countries, and in return, the developing countries were asked to forego digital taxation. When, accordingly, the African Union asked for a change in venue of the discussions of global tax reform to the United Nations, the United States not only opposed it , but also tried to strong-arm others to do so. Last November, the United States lost the vote overwhelmingly at the U.N.

So whither goes global governance? In the absence of rules, the law of the jungle prevails. While the United States might win that fight, it would simultaneously lose the cooperation it needs so badly in a host of arenas. Overall, it would lose.

It is in the interests of the United States to abandon the corporate-driven rules-based system and work instead to create a set of at least basic rules that would reflect common interests. For instance, instead of the comprehensive so-called free trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership , that were really managed trade agreements (and managed specifically in the interests of Big Pharma and some of the big polluters), the United States should have narrow agreements—say, a green agreement to share knowledge and technology, promote sustainable forests, and work together to save the planet.

We need agreements that do more to constrain the large countries—whose actions can hurt the global economy—and do less to constrain the small, whose actions have little global consequences.

For instance, we need rules that would constrain the European Union and the United States from using monetary policy in ways that benefit their economies at the expense of others, as the United States has repeatedly done. Today, even the United States recognizes that investment agreements (such as NAFTA’s infamous Chapter 11 ) that allow corporations to sue states actually exert constraints on sovereignty without commensurate benefits. A key difference between NAFTA and the trade agreement that succeeded it is the effective dropping of Chapter 11. But the United States should go further, strengthening the ability of any government party to an agreement to sue corporations when terms of the agreement have been violated.

To win the hearts and minds in the new cold war brewing between the United States and China, the United States needs to do more. Washington needs to use the money it has to provide assistance to the poor, and the power that it possesses to construct rules that are fair. Nowhere is that more evident than in response to the debt crisis that the United States faces today and the recent pandemic, another of which the world will almost surely face in the future.

An aerial view shows open graves, left, near recent burials at a cemetery in São Paulo, Brazil, on May 22, 2021, during a surge of deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic. Mario Tama/Getty Images

With most sovereign debt contracts written in the United States, Washington has the power to change the legal framework governing these contracts in ways that make the resolution of crises—where countries can’t pay back what they owe—faster and better. This approach would address the “too little, too late” problem by which one crisis is followed by another, which has plagued the world for so long. With more creditors entering the field, debt resolution is becoming ever more difficult. There are important proposals currently before the New York legislature (where most of the money is raised), but support from the Biden administration would be enormously helpful.

The world has just gone through a terrible pandemic, and the recognition that there will be another has spurred work on a proposed pandemic preparedness treaty. Unfortunately, under the influence of Big Pharma, there are no provisions in the treaty for the kind of intellectual property waiver that the world so badly needs, let alone the technology transfer that would allow the production of all the products—protective gear, vaccines, and therapeutics—necessary to fight the next disease that strikes.

The freedom to live is the most important freedom that we have. Our global agreements have not balanced our freedoms in the way they should. Better global agreements can benefit all countries, though not necessarily all people within them: Such agreements would constrain the power of the exploiters to exploit the rest of us, thereby making a dent on their bottom line, but they would benefit society more generally.

Striving to create global agreements that are fair and generous to the poor would, I believe, be in the United States’ self-interest—in its “enlightened” self-interest, taking into account the new geoeconomics and geopolitics. It was never in the United States’ self-interest to pursue a corporatist global agenda, even when it was the hegemon. But it is especially not so today.

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Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate in economics and a professor at Columbia University. Twitter:  @JosephEStiglitz

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10 Battles That Shaped Russia

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Mother Russia. The largest country in world, by area, is filled with allure, amazing biodiversity, rich history, and beautiful vodka-drinking women. It is also home to about 145 million people that comprise over 150 different ethnic groups, and at least 50 newspapers publish their voice in a language other than Russian. From 1283 to the present-day, Russia has slowly, steadily expanded its initial territory centered at Moscow east, west, north, and south. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville saw in Russia an alternative to the American democratic model that he observed firsthand in the conclusion  of Volume 1 of his magnificent, two-volume book Democracy in America . Tocqueville observed of the Russians and the Americans:

“The American struggles against the natural obstacles which oppose him; the adversaries of the Russian are men; the former combats the wilderness and savage life; the latter, civilization with all its weapons and its arts: the conquests of the one are therefore gained by the ploughshare; those of the other by the sword. The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided exertions and common-sense of the citizens; the Russian centres all the authority of society in a single arm: the principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter servitude.”

 Indeed. All throughout the Cold War, de Tocqueville’s short paragraph comparing Russia with America was used as an introduction to essays comparing the two countries. The fact that it is again being used as an introduction to another essay on Russia serves as a harbinger of just how far these two countries have grown apart over the last decade and a half.

And yet, who among us would deny this insight, even in the first month of the year 2018? Who would describe Russia as a bastion of liberty today, save for those nationalists in the motherland who claim Moscow is only protecting ethnic Russians from oppressive regimes abroad?

Because Russia has been around for so long (the Grand Duchy of Moscow was founded in 1283), and because its territory stretches from the Baltic to the Pacific to the Arctic to the subtropical climates along the shore of the Black Sea, Russian battles have been numerous and far-flung. The following 10 battles fought by the Russian military can help to explain not only Russia’s long, illustrious, and bloody history, but also its relationships with current world players.

1. Battle of Aslanduz (October 1812) . Russia and Persia (now Iran) have fought wars against each other since the mid 17th century, but the last important war was  fought in the mid 19th century. Russo-Persian wars were bitter affairs fought mostly over the Caucasus, though religion was often used as the ideological justification for such wars. These wars outlasted plenty of dynasties on both sides of the mountainous border. The Battle of Aslanduz was a surprise attack led by Pyotr Kotlyarevsky, where 2,300 Russian soldiers ambushed 30,000 Persian troops at night and slaughtered them. The battle made Kotlyarevsky a celebrity back in Moscow, and forced the Persians to sue for peace. Today Russia and Persia still vie for influence in the Caucasus, though the Russians have the upper hand.

2. Siege of Izmail (December 22, 1789). Russia’s other main enemy in the Near East, the Ottoman Empire, also fought a number of wars with Moscow - over the course of four hundred years. Like the Persians, the Ottoman state was explicitly Muslim, so the Russians made good use of this fact in order to justify their wars in Eastern Europe against Istanbul. Izmail was a major Ottoman commercial city along the Danube River in what is now Ukraine, and it was heavily fortified with 40,000 Ottoman troops when the Russians attacked it from land and water. The siege was so successful that an unofficial national anthem (“Let the Thunder of Victory Rumble!”) was composed in its honor.

3. Battle of Klushino (July 4, 1610). While the steady conquest of Persian and Ottoman lands went on slowly but surely through the late 18th to mid 19th centuries, the outcome was predictable given Russia’s technological and institutional superiority over the Sultans and Shahs. Moscow’s confidence was much shakier during its Baltic conquests nearly 200 years earlier. Russia, which found itself nestled up to the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Swedish Empire, and for a time played a distant third fiddle to both powers in the Baltic Sea. The Battle of Klushino is illustrative of this, as less than 7,000 Polish cavalry crushed 35,000 Russian (and mercenary) troops. This battle cleared the way for a Polish aristocrat to enter Moscow unopposed as conqueror and liberator. Poland’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier commemorates this battle, a testament to the peoples’ long history of violent interaction and mistrust.

4. Battle of Moscow (September 1 and 3, 1612). This battle saw Russians, organized into volunteer armies, liberate their capital city from foreign rule. When the Russian army lost to the Poles at Klushino, many Russian aristocrats actually decided to side with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and invited the Poles into Moscow to protect them from “anarchy.” Politics drove this battle more than anything else, but the narrative espoused by Russians plays to a distinct nationalist thread in Russian historiography. Volunteer armies, funded by Moscow’s merchants, fought Polish troops in the alleyways of Moscow and on her narrow streets, as the Poles tried to get provisions to their garrison stationed at the Kremlin. The volunteers held them off, thus forcing the Poles to choose between starvation or surrender (which they did on Nov. 7, 1612). This battle unofficially ended the Polish-Muscovy War, though officially hostilities didn’t end until 1618.

5. Battle of Poltava (July 8, 1709). Russia eventually succeeded in sedating Polish power in the Baltics, but Sweden was a continental Great Power and thus did not go easily into the night. For centuries Moscow and Stockholm clashed for supremacy in the Baltics, but it wasn’t until the Battle of Poltava that Russia finally landed a knockout blow. Fought during the Great Northern War (1700-1721), where everyone from Poland to Denmark-Norway to Great Britain to Prussia to the Netherlands to the Ottoman Empire participated, Peter the Great’s Russian army overpowered Sweden’s much smaller invading army at Poltava, using 40,000 troops to attack the 16,000 troops Sweden had marshaled for an offensive aimed at Russia’s beating heart: Moscow. Instead, Russia smashed Sweden, forcing the remnants of its army into the woods to be pursued and hounded until finally surrendering on July 11, 1709, a mere 10 days after the initial Swedish assault. Russia emerged as the clear victor of the 20-year war for the north, and the rest, as they say, is history.

6. The many battles for Albazin (17th century). Albazin was a fort along the Amur River, which is today part of the long border between Russia and China, that was built in the 17th century in order to bolster attempts by the Russians to colonize the area. Throughout the 17th century, Chinese armies repeatedly attacked and razed the fort, only to have to return again and again to do the same thing. This process, reminiscent of frontier tactics elsewhere in the world, played out for decades. In 1689, Russia signed its first treaty with China (“Treaty of Nerchinsk”) in large part because of its failed attempts at colonization through Albazin. It wasn’t until the humiliating Convention of Peking that Russia fully, officially acquired its Far Eastern territory stretching to the Pacific Rim city of Vladivostok. The battles for Albazin help to clarify the ambivalent nature of Sino-Russian relations. Sure, they’re suspicious neighbors, but they’ve got plenty of frontier between their metropoles.

7. Siege and Capture of Khiva (June 10, 1873). Khanate of Khiva was still a hotbed of slavery in 1873, and it was known particularly as place where slaves of Russian Orthodox stock were brought, bought, and sold. This gave Russia the perfect excuse to expand its empire into Central Asia. Slavery was also a big moral issue in London (the U.K. was fighting a war purportedly against slavery in West Africa and the Ashanti Empire in 1873), and the British Empire thus declared war on the khanate around the same time as Moscow. This war against slavery by two Christian states against a Muslim khanate was a major part of the Great Game, even more important than the Afghanistan campaign waged by both empires. The Russian Imperial Army took about two months to fully conquer Khiva, but because of its rivalry with Britain, the khanate survived as a sovereignty by becoming a protectorate (this was done so that the British could not use anti-Russian propaganda to foster unrest). Central Asia today looks much like it did when the Russians marched into the region to establish an empire and enact imperial reforms: loosely governed from Moscow, but still well within its orbit.

8. Battle of Tsushima (May 27 and 28, 1905). Fought between Russia and Japan on the high seas of East Asia, this massive battle saw the Russian Imperial Navy get destroyed by the up-and-coming Japanese Imperial Navy. The battle is known by military historians as being the only battle with steel battleships involved leading to a decisive victory (for Japan), but what is less known is that Russia had to send an entire squadron from the Baltic to the Pacific - around Africa due to Russia being banned from using the Suez Canal - to meet the Japanese head on. The Russians suffered heavy casualties as the Japanese Navy was larger, better equipped, more familiar with the terrain, and closer to home. Russia lost all of its battleships and most of its other fighting warships, too. It essentially ended the Russo-Japanese War and showed observers everywhere that there was a new sick man of Europe to keep a weary, hungry eye on.

9. Battle of Borodino (September 7, 1812). This was the only major battle fought between Napoleonic France and Russia on Russian soil. The Russians lost, and Moscow was captured because of it, but this was a pyrrhic victory for Napoleon’s revolutionary army. The Russians knew they couldn’t defeat a better trained, better equipped army, so they just kept retreating, burning as they went. The scorched earth tactics demoralized French generals and starved French troops. If the Russian people starved, too, you would never hear about it. They were just taking one for the team, after all. The battle itself saw maybe 40,000 Russian soldiers lose their lives, but it also led to the deaths of roughly 30,000 invading French troops. And that was before the infamous Russian winter made its appearance. To illustrate just how massive Russia had become, this battle was being fought at the same time that Moscow’s tsardom was waging an offensive war against Persia in the Caucasus. Incredible.

10. Battle of Stalingrad (1942-43). You didn’t think I would forget about this one, did you? If ever there were an invasion to illustrate Russian resolve, it would be this one. Ian Johnson, writing at War on the Rocks , has a better summary of the battle  than I could ever hope to write, so I’ll just outsource to him on that front. Russia’s relationship with what is now Germany began in the early 18th century with Moscow’s defeat of Sweden in the Great Northern War. This introduced a formal Russian state to its new German-speaking neighbors and the many polities they governed. For the next 300 years these two peoples were enemies, allies, frenemies, and, above all else, peoples speaking different languages, worshipping Jesus Christ in a different manner from one another, and looking at the world from different geographic lenses. The differences between the two peoples today have hardly changed.

 Further thoughts

Thankfully the United States and Russia have never come to blows the same way that Moscow and her neighbors have. I am optimistic that we can keep it this way, though I am also pessimistic about the future of liberty in Russia. Socialism has rightly become a loathed relic of Russia’s past, but its ugly cousin - fascism - is now, I fear, en vogue.

This doesn’t necessarily mean Russia will become more aggressive in foreign affairs, but given its long, storied, beautifully tragic past, it also means we really have no idea what to expect, except that the Russians we happen across will be dour, smirk-inducing funny, and full of confident answers to the probing questions that Westerners have for the Russians of today. With a history like theirs, who can blame them?

Brandon Christensen lives in Austin with his beautiful wife and very small daughter. He is a contributor to RealClearHistory and has been featured at RealClearWorld, RealClearMarkets, Reason Papers, and the Foundation for Economic Education. He has undergraduate degrees in economics and cultural anthropology from UCLA and is also a member of the Notes On Liberty blogging consortium.

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Karl Marx 1845

Theses On Feuerbach

Written : by Marx in Brussels in the spring of 1845, under the title “1) ad Feuerbach”; Marx’s original text was first published in 1924, in German and in Russian translation, by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Marx-Engels Archives, Book I, Moscow. The English translation was first published in the Lawrence and Wishart edition of The German Ideology   in 1938. The most widely known version of the Theses is that based on Engels’ edited version, published as an appendix to his Ludwig Feuerbach in 1888, where he gave it the title Theses on Feuerbach ; Translated : by Cyril Smith 2002, based on work done jointly with Don Cuckson.

The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the Object [ der Gegenstand ] , actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object [ Objekts ] , or of contemplation [ Anschauung ] , but not as human sensuous activity, practice [ Praxis ] , not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in opposition to materialism, was developed by idealism — but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects [ Objekte ] , differentiated from thought-objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective [ gegenst�ndliche ] activity. In The Essence of Christianity [ Das Wesen des Christenthums ] , he therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice [ Praxis ] is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance [ Erscheinungsform ] [1] . Hence he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, of ‘practical-critical’, activity.

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e. , the reality and power, the this-sidedness [ Diesseitigkeit ] of his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [ Selbstver�nderung ] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice .

Feuerbach starts off from the fact of religious self-estrangement [ Selbstentfremdung ] , of the duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world, and a secular [ weltliche ] one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done. For the fact that the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm can only be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must itself be understood in its contradiction and then, by the removal of the contradiction, revolutionised. Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must itself be annihilated [ vernichtet ] theoretically and practically.

Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking , wants sensuous contemplation [ Anschauung ] ; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical , human-sensuous activity.

Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man [ menschliche Wesen = ‘human nature’] . But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence is hence obliged:

1. To abstract from the historical process and to define the religious sentiment regarded by itself, and to presuppose an abstract — isolated - human individual.

2. The essence therefore can by him only be regarded as ‘species’, as an inner ‘dumb’ generality which unites many individuals only in a natural way.

Feuerbach consequently does not see that the ‘religious sentiment’ is itself a social product , and that the abstract individual that he analyses belongs in reality to a particular social form.

All social life is essentially practical . All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

The highest point reached by contemplative [ anschauende ] materialism, that is, materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is the contemplation of single individuals and of civil society [ b�rgerlichen Gesellschaft ] .

The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society or social humanity.

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

1. “Dirty-Jewish” — according to Marhsall Berman, this is an allusion to the Jewish God of the Old Testament, who had to ‘get his hands dirty’ making the world, tied up with a symbolic contrast between the Christian God of the Word, and the God of the Deed, symbolising practical life. See The Significance of the Creation in Judaism , Essence of Christianity 1841

Deutsch | 1938 translation of Marx’s original | 1969 Selected Works translation | Engels’ 1888 version

Marx/Engels Works Archive | Study Guide | Engels on Feuerbach | Image of Thesis 11 | Works Index

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Guest Essay

Xi Thinks China Can Slow Climate Change. What if He’s Right?

By Jacob Dreyer

Mr. Dreyer, an editor and writer who focuses on the Chinese political economy and science, wrote from Shanghai.

At first glance, Xi Jinping seems to have lost the plot.

China’s president appears to be smothering the entrepreneurial dynamism that allowed his country to crawl out of poverty and become the factory of the world. He has brushed aside Deng Xiaoping’s maxim “To get rich is glorious” in favor of centralized planning and Communist-sounding slogans like “ ecological civilization ” and “ new, quality productive forces ,” which have prompted predictions of the end of China’s economic miracle.

But Mr. Xi is, in fact, making a decades-long bet that China can dominate the global transition to green energy, with his one-party state acting as the driving force in a way that free markets cannot or will not. His ultimate goal is not just to address one of humanity’s most urgent problems — climate change — but also to position China as the global savior in the process.

It has already begun. In recent years, the transition away from fossil fuels has become Mr. Xi’s mantra and the common thread in China’s industrial policies. It’s yielding results: China is now the world’s leading manufacturer of climate-friendly technologies, such as solar panels , batteries and electric vehicles . Last year the energy transition was China’s single biggest driver of overall investment and economic growth, making it the first large economy to achieve that.

This raises an important question for the United States and all of humanity: Is Mr. Xi right? Is a state-directed system like China’s better positioned to solve a generational crisis like climate change, or is a decentralized market approach — i.e., the American way — the answer?

How this plays out could have serious implications for American power and influence.

Look at what happened in the early 20th century, when fascism posed a global threat. America entered the fight late, but with its industrial power — the arsenal of democracy — it emerged on top. Whoever unlocks the door inherits the kingdom, and the United States set about building a new architecture of trade and international relations. The era of American dominance began.

Climate change is, similarly, a global problem, one that threatens our species and the world’s biodiversity. Where do Brazil , Pakistan , Indonesia and other large developing nations that are already grappling with the effects of climate change find their solutions? It will be in technologies that offer an affordable path to decarbonization, and so far, it’s China that is providing most of the solar panels , electric cars and more. China’s exports, increasingly led by green technology, are booming, and much of the growth involves exports to developing countries .

From the American neoliberal economic viewpoint, a state-led push like this might seem illegitimate or even unfair. The state, with its subsidies and political directives, is making decisions that are better left to the markets, the thinking goes.

But China’s leaders have their own calculations, which prioritize stability decades from now over shareholder returns today. Chinese history is littered with dynasties that fell because of famines, floods or failures to adapt to new realities. The Chinese Communist Party’s centrally planned system values constant struggle for its own sake, and today’s struggle is against climate change. China received a frightening reminder of this in 2022, when vast areas of the country baked for weeks under a record heat wave that dried up rivers , withered crops and was blamed for several heatstroke deaths.

China’s government knows that it must make this green transition out of rational self-interest or risk joining the Soviet Union on history’s scrap heap, and is actively positioning itself to do so. It is increasingly led by people with backgrounds in science, technology and environmental issues. Shanghai, the country’s largest city and its financial and industrial leading edge, is headed by Chen Jining, an environmental systems expert and China’s former minister of environmental protection. Across the country, money is being poured into developing and bringing to market new advances in things like rechargeable batteries and into creating corporate champions in renewable energy .

To be clear, for Mr. Xi, this green agenda is not purely an environmental endeavor. It also helps him tighten his grip on power. In 2015, for instance, the Central Environmental Inspection Team was formed to investigate whether provincial leaders and even agencies of the central government were adhering to his green push, giving him another tool with which to exert his already considerable power and authority.

At the same time, locking in renewable energy sources is a national security issue for Mr. Xi; unlike the United States, China imports almost all of its oil, which could be disrupted by the U.S. Navy in choke points like the Malacca Strait in the event of war.

Mr. Xi’s plan — call it his Green Leap Forward — has serious deficiencies. China continues to build coal-fired power plants , and its annual greenhouse-gas emissions remain far greater than those of the United States, though American emissions are higher on a per-capita basis. China’s electric vehicle industry was built on subsidies , and the country may be using forced labor to produce solar panels. Those are serious concerns, but they fade into the background when Pakistan floods or Brazil wants to build an E.V. factory or South Africa desperately needs solar panels for a faltering energy grid.

American politics may be inadvertently helping China gobble up global market share in renewable energy products. When the United States — whether for national security or protectionist reasons — keeps Chinese companies like Huawei out of the American market or rolls up the welcome mat for electric vehicle makers like BYD or companies involved in artificial intelligence or self-driving cars, those businesses must look elsewhere.

President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act , aimed at tackling climate change, has put the United States on a solid path toward carbon neutrality. But America’s decentralization and focus on private innovation means government policy cannot have quite the same impact that it can in China.

So it is crucial for Americans to recognize that, for most of the world, perhaps for all of us, China’s ability to provide low-cost green technology is, on balance, great news. All of humanity needs to move toward renewables at a huge scale — and fast. America still leads in innovation, while China excels in taking frontier science and making its application in the real world cost-effective. If American politicians, investors and businesses recognize that climate change is humanity’s biggest threat, that could open pathways for diplomacy, collaboration and constructive competition with China that benefit us all.

Together, China and the United States could decarbonize the world. But if Americans don’t get serious about it, the Chinese will do it without them.

And if the United States tries to obstruct China, by way of corporate blacklists, trade or technology bans or diplomatic pressure, it will end up looking like part of the climate problem. That happened earlier this month when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, during a visit to China, urged officials here to rein in green technology exports that the United States says are hurting American companies.

Mr. Xi won’t completely toss out the polluting manufacturing-for-export economic model that has served China so well, nor does he seem ready to halt construction of coal plants. Both are considered necessary for economic and energy security until the green transition is complete. But they are now only a means to an end. The endgame, it seems, is to reach carbon neutrality while dominating the industries making that possible.

Much like how the United States showed up late for World War II, China’s clean-tech companies are latecomers, piggybacking on technology developed elsewhere. But history rewards not necessarily who was there first but who was there last — when a problem was solved. Mr. Xi seems to discern the climate chaos on the horizon. Winning the race for solutions means winning the world that comes next.

Jacob Dreyer is an American editor and writer focused on the intersection of the Chinese political economy and science. He lives in Shanghai.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Packaging Is the Biggest Driver of Global Plastics Use

Earth day 2024.

Earth Day, celebrated annually on April 22, marks a global commitment to environmental protection and sustainability. The first Earth Day took place in 1970, ignited by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, who aimed to raise awareness about environmental issues and mobilize action to address them. Since then, Earth Day has evolved into a worldwide movement, engaging millions of people across the globe in activities such as tree planting, clean-up campaigns and advocacy for environmental policies. Its organizer is EARTHDAY.ORG, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting environmental conservation and mobilizing communities to take action for a healthier planet.

The theme of this year’s Earth Day is “ Planet vs. Plastics ” – a theme chosen to raise awareness of the damage done by plastic to humans, animals and the planet and to promote policies aiming to reduce global plastic production by 60 percent by 2040.

As our chart shows, global plastics use has increased rapidly over the past few decades, growing 250 percent since 1990 to reach 460 million tonnes in 2019, according to the OECD’s Global Plastics Outlook , which projects another 67-percent increase in global plastics use by 2040 and for the world’s annual plastic use to exceed one billion tonnes by 2052. As our chart shows, packaging is the largest driver of global plastics use, which is why a rapid phasing out of all single use plastics by 2030 is one of the policy measures proposed under EARTHDAY.ORG’s 60X40 framework.

Other major applications of plastics include building and construction, transportation as well as textiles, with the fast fashion industry particularly guilty of adding to the world’s plastic footprint. “The fast fashion industry annually produces over 100 billion garments,” the Earth Day organizers write. “Overproduction and overconsumption have transformed the industry, leading to the disposability of fashion. People now buy 60 percent more clothing than 15 years ago, but each item is kept for only half as long.” Most importantly, the organization points out that 85 percent of disposed garments end up in landfills or incinerators, while just 1 percent are being recycled.

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• California Research Alliance (CARA) in the USA has expanded to 11 California universities and launched 117 projects advancing technologies addressing key sustainability challenges
• CARA has fostered 94 peer-reviewed papers, 47 patent applications and multiple technologies that have been integrated into BASF products

BASF and University of California (UC), Berkeley, USA, are celebrating the 10-year anniversary of their collaboration known as the California Research Alliance (CARA). The multidisciplinary research center is focused on evaluating new materials, technologies and processes that will help address key sustainability challenges. To mark the anniversary, BASF and CARA hosted a scientific symposium on sustainable transformation in chemistry on April 22, 2024. The symposium brought together academic researchers, government representatives, and BASF scientists to celebrate the achievements of CARA and discuss how industry and academia can continue to work together to tackle the challenges facing the industry and society as a whole.

In its 10 year history, CARA has fostered 117 research projects resulting in 94 peer-reviewed papers, 47 patent applications and multiple technologies that have been integrated into BASF products. Since 2014, the collaboration has expanded to 11 California universities, including UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine as well as Stanford University, California Institute of Technology, and University of Southern California. More than 80 faculty members and 170 postdocs/graduate students have worked with BASF and CARA, and BASF has hired 11 postdocs/students from the CARA community. In 2022, BASF and UC Berkeley renewed their Master Research Agreement for an additional five years.

“We are proud of the achievements of the CARA program over the past 10 years and excited to celebrate this milestone with our academic partners,” said Dr. Helmut Winterling, President of Group Research, BASF SE. “This symposium is an opportunity to value this collaboration, to reflect on our progress and discuss how we can continue to work together to address the challenges of our society and the transformation of the chemical industry.”

“The California research community appreciates this long-term support from BASF. Looking back at the 10 years of CARA operation, I am very much impressed with its output and impact,” said Prof. Peidong Yang, CARA director at UC Berkeley. “Over the years, CARA has trained many talented researchers, many papers have been published, and many patents have been filed. CARA indeed represents an ideal model for effective industry-university collaboration. By closely interacting with our industrial partners, CARA researchers are delivering critical technological solutions by answering fundamental scientific questions. I look forward to the continued success of CARA for years to come.”

BASF currently holds collaborations with approximately 280 academic institutions globally for advancing research and development as well as a means to engage with early-in-career talent.

“I am convinced that our continued partnership within CARA is not just about developing solutions together, but also nurturing and developing the talent pipeline in the chemistry field,” said Dr. Kerstin Schierle-Arndt, Vice President Research Inorganic Materials and Synthesis, BASF SE and Associate Director of CARA. “Through continued interaction, BASF aims to engage with the bright minds, jointly empowering them to become the future leaders and innovators in industry and academia.”

For more information on CARA, please visit: www.basf.com/cara .

At BASF, we create chemistry for a sustainable future. We combine economic success with environmental protection and social responsibility. Around 112,000 employees in the BASF Group contribute to the success of our customers in nearly all sectors and almost every country in the world. Our portfolio comprises six segments: Chemicals, Materials, Industrial Solutions, Surface Technologies, Nutrition & Care and Agricultural Solutions. BASF generated sales of €68.9 billion in 2023. BASF shares are traded on the stock exchange in Frankfurt (BAS) and as American Depositary Receipts (BASFY) in the United States. Further information at www.basf.com .

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