‘Material exchanges localise; political exchanges internationalise; and symbolic exchanges globalise’ (Waters, 1995). Discuss.

Globalisation is a widely discussed theorem of the last decade of the 20^th century. As Waters puts it ‘globalisation may be the concept of the 1990s’  (1995: 1, italics original) and through his argument he tries to distinguish three different kinds of exchanges that can take place between populations and how they affect the localities or the understanding of localities by their inhabitants. He puts his main argument in a nutshell by stating that ‘material exchanges localise; political exchanges internationalise; and symbolic exchanges globalise’ (1995: 9, italics deleted) which forms the main discussion point of this essay.

 For Waters material exchanges appear to tie social relationships to localities. The reason for that is the requirement of labour, capital, raw materials and production sites that have to be geographically located to specific loci. The products then have to be transported to specific locations from where they will be purchased by the public. This process imposes geographic limitations which are increased by the ability of states to impose trade barriers on products and immigration control on labour. The internationalisation of political exchanges is justified by Waters by saying that they involve a reciprocal interaction by neighbour nation-states. Their function occupies the establishment of common borders, and the confirmation of each state’s territorial sovereignty. Symbolic exchanges that according to Waters constitute globalisation are the ones that liberate social relationships form any spatial reference. They can be produced and consumed anywhere and at any time. Their nature allows them to cross borders without any difficulty and according to Waters ‘because they frequently seek to appeal to human fundamentals they can often claim universal significance’ (1995: 9).

 My argument in this essay is that in the contemporary era, all those exchanges are interlinked. At no point can we separate material exchanges from political and symbolic ones. Globalisation is exactly that interconnectedness that has been applied to all sorts of exchanges. 

Material exchanges.

 Material exchanges are the ones that deal with actual products, the ones that relate with space and time, ones that require an effective transportation infrastructure in order to take place. They are dealt with economic aspects as raw materials, labour market and production. Thinking along these terms, places material exchanges in direct relation with specific localities. Raw material have to be derived from specific places. Likewise production has to be bounded in a locality, in which has to exist a labour market. One cannot expect to extract oil where there are no deposits of it, nor one can expect to hire specialised professional where there are none in the local labour market. The physical constrains are apparent, and under those terms the assumption that material exchanges localise is justified.

 If we take a closer look at the above sentences we can notice that there are three parameters that are mentioned. Raw material, production and labour market. These parameters constitute the production side of material exchanges, and due to the fact that we are dealing with exchanges we cannot limit the argument to those three elements. In order for an exchange to take place, a product must not only be produced, it also has to be consumed, and in order for that to happen it has to be traded first.

 Trade is understood as the exchange of commodities and services between nation-states. The development of intense multinational trade took place in the 19^th century where the main players were European countries and the emerging USA when several treaties or agreements between trading nations contributed to a large growth. Namely some of them are the 1860 Anglo-French trade treaty, the most favoured nation principle (MFN) and most important, the Gold Standard in the 1870s (Held et al 1999: 154-7). From the Gold Standard age up to the Great Depression there has been an intensification of trade on a global basis even though the inter-war period was characterised by protectionism (Waters 1995: 68). Rapid growth of trade on a global base can be noted in the golden age post-war period (1950-73) when trade volumes grew at 5.8 per cent per annum, and world output grew at 3.9 per cent per annum (Held et al 1999: 163-4). In 1990 the majority of nation-states is trading with over 120 other countries (ibid p166).

 This intensification and globalisation of trade required some global mechanisms in order to be sustained and to make sure that states will not return to previous protectionist statuses. The establishment of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947 was an attempt for the establishment of such a regulator. In 1995 it was superseded by the World Trade Organisation, which holds more power than GATT. The number of countries involved in those organisation rose in such levels that in the 1986-93 Uruguay round most countries of the world participated (ibid: 164).

The involvement of politics in the development of trade is apparent. No multinational agreements can be established and sustained if there is no political engagement. Politics can influence even further the material exchanges. A change in taxation could make industries relocate to another country. The same could happen with a change in the labour law. I do not imply that relocation of a company is so easy, however I do not forget that it is not possible. This is the primary reason that made companies of the first world to relocate their production centres overseas; the quest for cheap and unprotected labour.

 In relation to material with symbolic exchanges there is even more interconnectedness between them since they are linked with all aspects of material exchanges. The culturalisation of economy and production is an important aspect of the contemporary era, and it is one that we cannot disregard. A material product is no longer just a product since its production and consumption takes place within specific cultures. Lash and Urry (1994) explain on the dimension that the designing of the product affects its significance. This is the reason why there are many types of the same products, we are in a post-fordist economy, one that deals with customisation in order to satisfy customers. From a utilitarian position, design is a waste of resources since one car for example can serve the same purpose than another car. However, a car is not just a vehicle for transportation, it is an index of personal status and position in the society. Thus by receiving those attributes a product achieves a position in culture and society which is strengthened even further by the application of advertising and other media representations of products. When we make a purchase, we do not by just a product, we buy a lifestyle that has been embedded into it. 

Political Exchanges.

 For Waters political exchanges create a process of internationalisation. That means that there is a notion of interaction between nation-states, but he does not consider such an interaction as a globalising one because borders are still maintained as well as barriers of interaction between each nation-state’s inhabitants (1995: 122). In order to investigate the validity of such statement, I will look at the evolution of the nation-state and its role in what we call globalisation.

 The first international agreement that established the role of the nation-state in an international setting was the new conception of international law (which has been referred to as the Westphalian model), in Westphalia in 1648 (see Held et al, 1999: 37; Poggi 1978: 89). This model is the one that describes the nation-state as an international agent. Its main point is the ascertainment of the state as the sovereign power within its own borders where there is no superior authority, which subsequently disregard what we now call international law. Consequently from that time onwards the nation-states had a free hand in imposing a unification model into their subjects in a process of cultural assimilation that would eventually force them to identify as being ‘the same’ or ‘friends’ (see Bauman, 1990) by breaking the rival centres of power and authority within the nation-state (see Held et al, 1999). This process differentiates the ‘new’ state system from the older system of empires. The state becomes an agent of representation of its uniformed subjects rule, instead of one of rule upon differentiated subjects which was the case in the older empires (see Poggi, 1978).

 Political exchanges between states in the 19^th century, even though they incorporated complex structures and at the same time the development of concepts that are still acknowledged today (like diplomatic immunity), were limited to reaffirming the sovereignty of the nation-state to others, and to the establishment of bipartite treaties. Indeed such nature of international politics justifies Waters claim of the internationalisation of the political exchanges. That status however soon changed mainly because of the increased awareness of the world as a whole, and the increase in world trade which in turn required a more complex nature of international politics. Principles that I have discussed in the previous chapter (MFN, and Gold Standard) would have been impossible to implement had international politics only been concerned with the re-affirmation of state sovereignty (see Giddens 1990). A move from bipartite to multipartite agreements can be observed that leads to an intensive internationalisation between state politics. This internationalisation gradually shifts to a globalising procedure in the post-war era. The establishment of the United Nations along with regulating bodies like GATT, leads to an even more interdependence between states which it has to be noted would not be possible to achieve without political will. An even more striking example is the establishment of the European Union, in which nation-states willingly gave up part of their sovereignty. It is a phenomenal case where each member-state is legally binded to comply with decisions that are taken by a third body which is out of its total control.

 Waters starts chapter five with a statement by Daniel Bell in which he says that ‘the nation-state is becoming too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems of life’ (cited in Waters 1995: 96). That statement might highlight the insufficiencies of the nation-state, but it totally disregards its advantages. Globalisation should not necessarily mean the abolition of states and borders over the domination of powerful international organisation as Waters regards it. By assuming such a hypothesis we entrap the argument of globalisation in a paradox one. As Bell implies the nation-state should transfer powers to a lower level such as the one of local government that can deal with local issues more efficiently. At the same time however it has to be acknowledged that nation-states still comprise a sort of locality even though a more extended one. Therefore Waters’s model of ideal political globalisation disregards the fact that if only local and international political authorities exist, a gap of interconnection between localities will present that will subsequently cause problems of interlinkage between those localities. This problem becomes more apparent if we consider the fact that as material exchanges cannot be dissembeded by their cultural significance, also political ones cannot be regarded as not being interlinked with cultures. As we recognise that a locality like a municipality in a particular nation-state deals with different issues as another one, the same thing happens with nation-states in an international organisation. Assuming that the EU was the only power holder apart from local governments, would create a tremendous amount of problems. Problems that exist in the locality of Sweden are probably different than the problems that the locality of Italy faces, which means that they cannot be dealt by the same organisation. In his concluding inventory of political globalisation, Waters is making a statement regarding the condition of state sovereignty in an ideal-typical pattern of globalisation, where he proposes ‘absence of sovereign states. Multiple centres of power at global, local and intermediate levels’ (Waters 1995: 123). There is no explanation however why the state cannot be one of those centres of power.

 Thereas assuming that political exchanges internationalise is to only think of political exchanges of the past. In the contemporary political situation they are one of the major drives for globalisation. As Giddens points out, they are still the holders of power and remain an important actor (1990: 67-71). 

Symbolic exchanges.

 Symbolic exchanges are the ones to which Waters attributes the role of promoting globalisation. They are linked with cultural exchanges, and with every notion and idea that can be conceptualised. Since the advance of electronic communication, symbolic exchanges became almost instantaneous, something that accelerated their propagation and as Waters argues, the process of globalisation.

 Probably the most important thing that has to be pointed out when we consider symbolic exchanges, is that even though they went through rapid changes in the past centuries especially since the discovery of electronic communications, they are something of the past which can be traced thousands of years back. Waters in his analysis refers to five categories of symbolic exchanges; rightfully one of them is the notion of religious exchanges. Religions can claim the pioneering position in the issue of globalisation, since they encapsulate a version of the creation of the world and claim universality in their beliefs that has to apply to everyone on the planet, as there cannot be such a thing as two versions of the ‘truth’[1]. There have been two modes of religion in world history: the ones that expanded and the ones that stayed within their own particular locations. Specifically in the first mode we can allocate the religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, while on the second mode the designated religions are Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism (Held et al, 1999: 332). This differentiation can attributed to the political and circumstances of the civilisations that those religions represented. As Held describes:

‘Most clearly in the cases of Islam and Christianity, the mobilising capacity of religion was coupled with the capacity to extend military power and cultural influence. Neither Chinese nor Indian civilisation ever embarked on such bouts of conquest and thus their indigenous faiths remained within their own loosely defined borders, but it is worth remembering just how large those territories were themselves.’ (Held et al, 1999: 332)

 Held defines as global religion the one that escapes from its indigenous boundaries and manages to create even small minorities around the world. This diaspora of believers of the same religion justifies the idea about time-space compression since people in different localities end up feeling that they have something in common with people they have never encountered before. Of course until the advance of mass transportation systems there can be no claim of an actual time-space compression, however we can think of it as an ideological compression, the feeling that something familiar (or some ‘friends’) exists outside of one’s locality.

 In the case of Christianity a global presence was achieved with the colonisation process of the Americas and the conquest of African and Asian territories. During the medieval era Christianity in Europe approximated a political ideology that helped to sustain  and legitimate the feudal political system by stratifying the relationship between individuals and God through a hierarchy of power (see Waters 1995: 128). Therefore we can assume that the missionary processes of the colonisation era were not attempting to salvage the ‘lost souls’ of the native populations of the colonies, but to enforce a system of values of control that proved very efficient in Europe during the medieval period. Thus that can be classified as the first process of cultural imperialism which at the time was congruent with military imperialism.

With the advance of modernity and the secularisation of thought, religions lost some part of their importance in the advent of globalisation. In the case of Christianity Protestantism and reformed Catholicism were the answer to the secularisation of thought. As Waters writes ‘it [religion] specifies that the morals of state and economic action, for example, are governed not by general and public principles but by the consciences of their individual practitioners.’ Therefore ‘war and economic exploitation can thus equally be condoned because Christianity assumes that politicians and business leaders have exercised an individual moral calculus in advance of the act’ (Waters, 1995: 129). However the segregation of religious with political power was a crucial blow to the importance of religion as a courier of ideas in a global setting. The advance of modernity though brought new ways that those symbolic exchanges could be transmitted.

 What Appadurai defines as Mediascapes – a term which is used by Waters as well – is ‘image-centred, narrative based accounts of strips of reality… [that]… can and do get disaggregated into complex sets of metaphors by which people live as they help to constitute fantasies which could become prolegomena to the desire for acquisition and movement’ (Appadurai 1990: 299).

 This definition encapsulates all forms of electronic (and digital) communication that take place in the contemporary era, even if not image-centred. Exchange of news, of cultural products, even interpersonal long-distance communication fall under this category. Due to their nature, those kind of exchanges enjoy (at least in theory) a unique form of propagation which can cross borders and reach any person in the world instantly.

 The treatment of media by Appadurai, which also forms the basis of Waters’s argument, is in a way over simplistic since both of them ignore the micro and macro-processes that take place, and most important if one wants to link this argument to third world countries one has to consider if they take place.

 The ‘Third World’ has close to 80 per cent of the world’s population, yet only 20 per cent of the world’s income (see Sussman, 1997: 215). 39 countries (that amount for over half of the world’s population) have an annual per capita income of less than $425 (see Sussman, 1997: 216). At the same time access to media is also limited obviously due to the economic inequalities.

Global Media and Information Access, 1989 (per 1000 population)

Region                   Television Receivers

Africa^*                                  36

Asia                                     60

Arab States                          90^**

Europe                                 372

Latin America                       140

North America^#                      796

Oceania                                315

Former USSR                         375

^* Excluding Arab States; ^** Middle East, including Israel; ^# Not Including Mexico. Data taken by Sussman 1997: 230.

The above table relates only with data concerning Television receivers. The same traces of imbalance however can be found in other forms of media and communication. Of the world’s 700 million telephones, 75 per cent of them can be found in the 9 richest countries while the poor countries possess less than 10 per cent and in most rural areas there is less than 1 telephone for every 1000 people (see Hamelink in Downing et al, 1995: 296). There are more telephones in Japan than in the 50 nations of Africa combined (ibid), Manhattan has more telephone lines than all of sub-Saharan Africa, and Italy has as many as Latin America (see Sussman 1997: 231).

 Thereas looking at the above data, the theory that symbolic exchanges can built ‘transnational connections, links between collective actors and individuals that subvert state frontiers’ (Waters 1995: 149) is unsubstantial since most of the individuals in this planet do not even have access to the technologies necessary for these processes to take place.

 On the other hand of the argument is the micro-processes in the consumption of cultural products. As many scholars of media and culture have concluded (Ang, Morley, Barths, Hall) the same text is not always interpreted in the same way by different audiences. What is red in one way by some will be red in another way by others. The personal biographies along with the indigenous culture of a specific population will affect the reading of the text disseminated by the global media. Therefore once again we cannot say that media will built transnational connections, since the understanding of their products might be totally different around various localities.

 At the same time the geography of the production is also an important factor that is often ignored. The fact that media products can circulate with a relative ease around the world, does not mean that they are not produced in some specific places. This means that the production will be linked with the culture of the production locus one way or another.

 Another important section of symbolic exchanges is the one that relates with people’s movement around the planet or as defined by Appadurai, the notion of ethnoscape. Even though this notion presupposes physical movement of persons around the world, it is an important courier of cultural exchange that has an impact both to the travellers, but also to the local cultures from which the travellers originate and to which they travel.

 Population movement has been taking place since the recording of human history. Imperial conquests, settlers, refugees, have contributed to the formulation of today’s political and cultural geography. In the last century another form of travelling is introduced, which comes in the form of tourism.

 The movement of people creates cultural exchanges. Of course that move has to be sustained in order for those exchanges to take place. As Held et al write ‘a single traveller from one isolated community to another is unlikely to establish or create a permanent cultural transformation in either place or create an enduring network of interaction and reciprocal cultural influences’ (1999: 329). If however the movement of people is sustained or is comprised by a large number of population move, a process of cultural exchanges will take place.

 Immigrants and refugees are travellers that mostly do not go back in their own country, instead they are settling into the host country and create their own communities. Because of their histories they are couriers of their own culture that due to the change of localities has to be adopted in order to fit in. This creates most of the times one new hybrid culture that manages to incorporate the one from their home and the one from the host country. Whether that hybrid culture will tent to bend toward their original or their newly adapted home, it will depend on the culture and the history of the host country. I will argue that countries that offer a flexible identity and an assimilating environment will tend to absorb immigrant populations into their general populous. On the other hand, countries that have a very strict notion of ‘nationality’ will tent to isolate those populations, which will in turn form their own strict communities and curry on preserving their own culture. But I have to note that it is not only the culture of the newly arrived population that has to be compromised. Most of the times, this movement will also affect the culture of the host country as its original subjects will come into contact with something new, which will at one point or another lead to a renegotiation of their own culture.

 Immigrants’ and refugees’ movement is a lot different than the travelling undertaken by tourist. Tourism is big business in the service sector. People in the Western World are offered holidays in places that were considered as destinations for elites a decade ago. This can be attributed to the increased competition in the airline industry which brought down the prices for travelling. Nevertheless, people can go over their national boundaries quite easily, which gives them the opportunity to explore another culture. However Lash and Urry point out that most times what tourists get (or what they want to get) is a notion of their home, in a different setting. For example an American going to Spain might expect to enjoy all the facilities s/he enjoys in the US plus to see bullfighting. Also one can note by looking at the available brochures in a travel agency, that most of them advertise ‘packet’ holidays where the tourist will arrive in a hotel-complex which will include everything, from a bar to a hairdresser. Such types of holidays are becoming more and more common since most people want to relax during their time off work and find those packets to be quite attractive. However they don’t allow interaction with the indigenous culture of the host locality.

 But that is definitely not a rule, or if one is to say that it is, we must accept its exceptions. One of those exceptions comes from an example given by Jonathan Friedman (1990). Friedman talks about the case of Ainu, an ethnic minority in Japan, who was loosing its cultural characteristics due to Japanese assimilation. What is significant about the Ainu is that they managed to reconceptualise their culture and maintain it through tourism. The creation of ‘traditional’ places that were exposing the ‘traditional’ culture of those people, became a very popular destination for many tourists ready to consume that different indigenous culture and thus helped the Ainu to maintain their ethnic identity.

 As in the other two types of exchanges, symbolic ones can not be separated by the rest of the social context. By saying that I do not want to be thought of suggesting that they are not the most important ones in the process of globalisation, instead, I mean that in order for them to take place a number of different factors has to apply. For example, as I mentioned above, the information imbalance in the world is tremendous. A lot of the world’s population does not have access to the information/ communication technologies to enjoy products from other cultures. This is directly linked to politics and social development of the south, which is in turn linked with necessary infrastructure that also has to be developed. Therefore assuming that symbolic exchanges will create global processes without taking into account that many people will not even be able to have access to them creates a paradox. 

Conclusion.

 In the course of history material exchanges were the first ones to take place. Afterwards followed political and then symbolic exchanges. The world has been getting smaller and smaller with the advance of time as humanity’s perception of the world was getting bigger. In that sense there can be a link between localisation to globalisation processes with the different types of exchanges. What has to be realised though is that none of those exchanges can be separated from the rest and treated totally on its own. There is an interconnection between the three of them that cannot be ignored in any way. When a product is treated it is embedded with the culture and the politics of its place of origin. Thereas it acquires certain attributes that have nothing to do with its material substance. For example Italian shoes are treated as being very good products, because mainly there is a perception that in Italy there is a fine shoe industry. Thereas those shoes are being enculturated and carry symbolic meanings. At the same time a lot of people look at the politics of production. If it comes out in the open that a certain product is manufactured by children in a Third world country that work in sweatshops, it is likely that consumer behaviour is going to be negative against that specific product, and probably against all the products manufactured from the same company. This could even create an issue with the products that originate from that specific country.

 As globalisation has gone deeper and deeper into our everyday life, trying to separate different processes becomes more and more difficult. However, I do not want to be thought of suggesting that what Waters says is inapplicable. On the contrary, I suggest that it forms the basis for a good argument and discussion of the globalisation process, and the way that it generated in the first place; though one has to pay attention that in the contemporary era, at the dawn of the third millennium, things are inextricably linked together in such way that on an analysis one definitely has to think of the whole picture, and not just the sum of its parts. 

Bibliography.

Appadurai A., ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in Featherstone M. (ed), Global Culture, 1990, Sage, London.

 Bauman Z., Globalisation: the Human Consequences, 1998, Polity Press, Cambridge.

 Bauman Z., ‘Modernity and Ambivalence’, in Featherstone M. (ed), Global Culture, 1990, Sage, London.

 Friedman J., ‘Being in the World: Globalisation and Localisation’, in Featherstone M. (ed), Global Culture, 1990, Sage, London.

 Giddens A., The Consequences of Modernity, 1990, Polity Press, Cambridge.

 Hamelink C. J., ‘Information Imbalance Across the Globe’, in Downing J., Mohammadi A., Sreberny-Mohammadi A. (eds), Questioning the Media: a critical introduction, 1995, Sage, London.

 Held D., Goldblatt D., McGrew A., Perraton J., Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture, 1999, Polity Press, Cambridge.

 Lash S. and Urry J., Economies of Signs and Space, 1994, Sage, London.

 Poggi G., The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction, 1978, Stanford University Press, California.

 Sussman G., Communication, Technology and Politics in the Information Age, 1997, Sage, London.

 Waters M., Globalisation, 1995, Routledge, London.

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