The world is no longer the master of its house: towards a narrative-theory and alternative of globalization

Abstract

The current socio-historical situation is characterized by the fact that nobody doubts the World. What does this mean? Through a simultaneous process of mundialization and globalization the World has become a social imaginary shared by the biggest part of humanity. This has been possible by what is called in this article mondanic closing, the phenomenon through which the world has become its own subject. This is the result of a longue durée process which began in the intermediate period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. During this period it was plausible and desirable for some people to get access to the entire planet to fulfil personal and political goals, leading to an increase in the movement of people, objects and ideas.

This process of expansion gave rise to the mondanic closing. In the context of this analysis, closing is understood as the tendency though which each society or social field explains itself departing from its own social imaginaries as an extra-social force; in other worlds, closing is the fact of social auto-reference and society’s tendency to explain itself as the result or cause of an extra-social force. The mondanic closing is composed of two moments: first, the moment of the world as subject-object-container, through this contradictory, complementary and superimposed understanding of the world, it is simultaneously the object of a rationality of control, and it is the subject of its own becoming; second, the moment of the becoming of victim-victimizer-of-itself, the world’s logic of expansion makes possible the idea of an interdependent and unitary world, but at the same time this world is fragile through its own means of expansion which involves an economy of exploitation and the development of a never-ending war industry.

These two moments help to understand, as an alternative narrative of globalization, the becoming of a unitary and interdependent world process in which intellectual and material changes collide. This has been a violent process and, at the same time, this same process increases the violence. By way of the closing, being-in-the-world is characterized by the loss of the tranquility, it is to say that the day to day living is no longer tranquil and security becomes a central value. On the other hand, being-in -the-world is experienced as being in a social field that is hostile because the world, which we usually think of as controllable, shows itself every day as a force that cannot be controlled. This is reflected in the lack of ground or stability characterizing world politics and the overall dimensions of existence as well, a life full of objects and services related with security, safety and care.

Through the becoming of the mondanic closing and thanks to it, a new social field has emerged: the field of the global. Although inter-cultural relationships existed before the beginning of globalization, this new field is characterized by the way in which the mondanic closing has informed the institutional framework and the primary social imaginaries that make the “global” possible; particularly, the predominance of state and market as the main institutional instances. They make it possible to experience the world as a unitary and interdependent field of action: on the one hand, because they made the West’s expansion throughout the planet possible and ensured the processes of institutionalization of social imaginaries in colonized societies; on the other hand, because state and market became the only possibility of dominated societies to be independent and be recognized by its western counterparts. For this reason, market expansion and state building are just two sides of the same phenomenon. They are not independent, as is assumed by erroneous formulations which situate state and market as contradictory institutions with different goals.

In this way, the main manifestation of the mondanic closing is world tyranny. This refers to a social existence in which humans are alienated from the world in the form of being and time. Tyranny is understood in the way Plato conceives it in Republic, as a form of government and a shape of the soul characterized by an existence uncontrolled, a non-sense and a non-being. Something similar happens with the world. Considering its functioning and the imaginaries that make progress and personal fulfillment the main goals of human reality, it is possible to state that the becoming of the world is the possibility of human realization. But like the tyrant in Plato, this is just an illusion. The world is not the master in its own house, it is the victim of its own means. Warfare makes it fragile, putting it at the edge of the abyss; material interdependence puts a pressure on nature that is not possible to sustain in the long run; wealth needs a more and more unequal economic system and the development of political apparatuses of oppression. In other words, the world is its own victim. In order to accomplish this objective, the article is divided into three parts: first, there is an analysis of mundialization as the process through which the world has become the subject of its own happening; second, I turn to an analysis of globalization as the process by which the world has coincided with the earth or with itself; third, being constitutive moments of the mondanic closing, I show how mundialization and globalization have configured a world tyranny, which is the shape of an existence alienated by being and time.

Finally, to address the problematic of the mondanic closing, this article turns to philosophy and International Relations at the same time, considering that an integral approach is necessary. In the first place, philosophy gives an important insight because the World has been one of the main preoccupations of this field since the Enlightenment and in the XX century it arrived at a new perspective of this problem. For this reason, the article resorts to some common areas of phenomenology, particularly the concept of world and facticity. In the second place, International Relations suits this analysis because it is one of the results of the closing and the largest part of its production and research is oriented toward the problem of the World as a social field based on unity and interdependence. The English School of International Relations, despite some of the critics of its Western orientation, is useful to understand the world as founded on a common institutional framework which makes experience of the World possible.