A Relocation of Power

From my latest Substack column, The Relocation of Power: Reflecting on the Two Laws of Globalization.

A few years ago, I heard?Pankaj Ghemawat?speak about globalization. Professor Ghemawat teaches at the Stern School of Business at NYU. After hearing him speak, I purchased his book,?The Laws of Globalization and Business Applications. In the book, he lays out two general “laws” that govern globalization.

“The law of semiglobalization: International interactions, while nonnegligible, are significantly less intense than domestic interactions.

The law of distance: International interactions are dampened by distance along cultural, administrative, and geographic dimensions and are often affected by economic distance as well.”

Ghemawat describes how these laws are drawn from the field of geography.

“The two laws of globalization are generalizations … of the two laws of geography proposed by Waldo Tobler …

The phenomenon external to (a geographic) area of interest affects what goes on in the inside …

Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.”

This suggests to me that we cannot escape the geographic nature of our lives. Even with Smartphones and Zoom conferences, we are captive to our geography. We live in specific locations, in particular residences that reflect local tastes and materials. When war happens on another continent, it isn’t local to my neighbors but is to the people there. If I know someone there, as I do in Ukraine, then the war becomes a local concern. Whatever foreign policy purpose that Russia and the US have in this war is not that interesting to me. The reason is that I see the foreign policy by nation-states as essentially about influencing domestic power back home.

Pankaj Ghemawat’s two laws can guide us to understand the localness of our global community. He uses the term semiglobalization to show how the intensity of domestic relations is greater than global ones. In other words, globalization isn’t out there, but right here. To see this is to recognize that all global crises like the wars in Ukraine, Syria, or Yemen are local in character. They may not be in my local community, but they are in someone’s local community. Global is an abstraction. Where do you go to be global? I can show you where to go to be local. Local is concrete because it is where people actually live, and where war destroys life and property. In this sense, the Global is the enemy of the Local.

The second law of globalization, Ghemawat uses Toler’s insight that “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” We live in a connected world. Though I rather speak of it as a world system. Everything is connected through multiple connection points. As a result, the energy, shall we call it, that moves between each connection point goes back and forth. As a result, some events on a global scale impact us, and other things don’t. It is dynamic and consequential. It is not just political or economic. It is not singular, linear, or binary. It is whole.