Reprinted from Ethics & International Affairs 17, no. 2.
© 2003 Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs.
Network Power and Globalization
David Singh Grewal
lobalization is often celebrated as an
G advance of human freedom in which
individuals are ever freer to lead lives
of their own choosing. Transnational flows of
money, goods, and ideas, it is argued, will
accompany an increasingly liberal interna-
tional order in which individuals can partici-
pate in a global economy and culture. At the
same time, however, critics of globalization
claim that it involves the imposition of a set
of common global standards. These stan-
dards involve the exercise of power, and can
even be said to constitute a kind of “empire.”
How should we understand this claim that
globalization represents a kind of empire?
After all, the choices of people to learn Eng-
lish or of nations to join the World Trade
Organization (WTO) are voluntary, free
choices—and reflect the reasoned assess-
ment of those doing the choosing. I advance
a concept of “network power” to explain how
the dynamic operating in globalization nev-
ertheless reflects a kind of domination. It is
the awareness of this kind of domination
that breeds the resentment that is articu-
lated in accusations of empire. The idea of
network power captures the ways in which
the systematic features of our social world
emerge from human action and remain
intelligible in light of it, even while they con-
strain us in ways that do not reduce straight-
forwardly to the power of command. It
explains how the convergence on a set of
common global standards is driven by the
accretion of individual choices that are free
and forced at the same time.
FORMAL AND INFORMAL EMPIRE
The characterization of globalization as
imperial is no longer the exclusive province of
anti-globalization activists but has become
the subject of mainstream discussion.1 Gen-
erally, the term “empire” is invoked to
describe a situation in which one political
society controls another. The most obvious
examples of this control are the outright con-
quest and domination of foreign societies, as
in the modern empires of Western Europe.
However, the control of one society by
another need not be so direct. The term
“empire” originally comes from the Latin
“imperium,” which means the mixture of ter-
ritorial conquest, informal commercial dom-
ination, and cultural hegemony that
characterized the Roman rule of the Mediter-
ranean in the early phase of its expansion.
The contrast between formal and infor-
mal empires is now a familiar one, serving to
distinguish the situations in which direct
control is needed to secure benefits from a
subordinated society from those in which it
is not. In the latter, the subordinated society
acts in a way that serves the interests of the
controlling society, whether through rela-
tions of economic dependency, military
1
For a review of contemporary works on empire and
American hegemony, see Anatol Lieven, “The Empire
Strikes Back,” Nation, July 7, 2003; available at
www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030707&s=
lieven. The most interesting of these is Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2000).
89
cooperation, or some other form of indirect
control.2 In either case, the subordinate soci-
ety is coerced, but the means by which such
control is maintained may vary. Certainly, as
many studies of imperial history conclude,
formal and informal imperial strategies are
not an opposing pair of strategies. When
pursued simultaneously in different con-
texts, they can be mutually reinforcing.
If contemporary globalization represents
a kind of empire, then it must be an infor-
mal empire, since direct imperial control is
absent in most of the world. But the idea of
informal empire—however intuitive and
apt it may seem—is empty unless the mech-
anism of informal control can be identified.
Part of the problem is conceptual. To each
idea of empire is necessarily tied a model of
the power underlying the control of the
subordinate society. Formal domination
assumes a Weberian model of power, oper-
ating as the command of a political superior
and backed up by outright force.3 In certain
regions of the world, this kind of analysis
will seem more plausible than in others. As
an account of globalization, however, it will
fall short, failing to offer insight into the eco-
nomic, cultural, and institutional aspects of
globalization that are often the most inter-
esting. Analyses of globalization as empire
that aim to address more than military force
and outright occupation will necessarily
confront the problems in theorizing power
that does not resemble the command of a
political superior.4 In fact, any plausible
characterization of globalization as empire
must rely upon heterodox understandings
of power.
NETWORK POWER
To develop an adequate account of the
power underlying globalization, we must
explain how the collective structures and
90
processes with which globalization is promi-
nently associated can at once be the prod-
ucts of choice and the outcomes of power. In
a globalized world, certain practices, institu-
tions, or cooperative regimes at the transna-
tional level play a role in coordinating social
exchange and their coordination has an
effect upon those who participate in them.
Philosophical studies of coordination games
or social conventions can offer insights into
these processes of globalization, in which
the coordination solutions and conventions
are scaled at the transnational level.5
Consider any system of coordination,
such as a language, measurement system,
currency, or even a rendezvous point in a
city, like the clock in the middle of Grand
2
The distinction between formal and informal empire
was developed in the mid-twentieth century historical
studies of the British Empire. See, e.g., John Gallagher
and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free
Trade,” Economic History Review 6, no. 1 (1953), pp. 1–15.
3
Weber is famously associated with the argument that
domination takes the form of a command by a political
superior, the “authoritarian power of command.” He
recognized other forms of power, however, and his
views on the subject are more nuanced than is often
recognized. See Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed.
Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Totowa, N.J.: Bed-
minster Press, 1968 [1921]).
4
The social theories of Antonio Gramsci and Michel
Foucault rely on such heterodox accounts of power.
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1980); Michel Foucault, Power,
ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000); Anto-
nio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of
Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Pub-
lishers, 1971); and Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political
Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolution-
ary Process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). See also
Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: Macmil-
lan, 1974).
5
For foundational works in the study of coordination
games and the analytic philosophy of conventions, see
Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1960); and David
Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1969).
David Singh Grewal
Central Station. When we speak a language
or use a measurement system or go to meet
up with a lost friend in Grand Central, we do
so because we know that others will behave
in this way, and will be counting on us to do
the same. We choose to do these things for
the sake of connecting with others, not
because these activities are uniquely valu-
able in themselves. When such isolated con-
ventions and systems of coordination are
considered as multiple, competing systems
of coordination, and the reasons for which
we choose among them are analyzed, they
can help us to make sense of the power in
globalization.
I refer to the power in globalization as
“network power.”6 A network is a group of
people united in a particular way that
makes them capable of mutual recognition
and exchange, whether of goods or ideas. It
is united via a standard, the particular
shared norm or practice that its members
use to gain access to one another. For
example, the global network of English
speakers all use the English language to
communicate.
Many forms of contemporary globaliza-
tion can be understood as involving the rise
to dominance of shared standards in trade,
media, legal procedures, and technology.
These forms of social coordination are diffi-
cult to alter once in place because they man-
age interdependent expectations. Standards
have power because they provide the con-
vention by which people can jointly coordi-
nate their activities and expectations. The
notion of network power consists in the
joining of two ideas. First, the coordinating
standards are more valuable when greater
numbers of people use them. Second, an
effect of this coordination is that it progres-
sively eliminates the alternatives over which
free choice among standards can effectively
be exercised.
network power and globalization
Importantly, we should distinguish two
kinds of standards: mediating standards
inherent in an activity, like a language or
measurement system, and standards for
membership that serve as the criteria by
which a group governs access to an activity,
as in the rules for joining a club or the trade
treaties overseen by the WTO. Either kind of
standards can possess network power if it
becomes the privileged point of access to
forms of cooperation.
Since the reason we use standards is to
benefit from cooperation with others, the
more people who adopt a given standard, the
more valuable it would be for others to adopt
the same standard. For example, a language
is more valuable for us to learn if many oth-
ers speak it. The reasons for the adoption of
a standard are subject to what political econ-
omists call network externalities, which
cause the increase in the value of a standard
such as a language when more people use it,
unlike the case of simple goods such as a
hamburger or a road. If we can adopt only
one standard—one language or measure-
ment system—we will choose the standard
with the greatest number of other users
because we can then coordinate with the
most people. (Of course, we care about the
greatest number of people who are relevant
to us, and not the number in the abstract.)
The effects of this increasing benefit are
clear if we focus on the case in which multi-
ple, competing standards come into contact.
Network power can induce people to
“switch” networks—by learning new lan-
guages or adopting different technical stan-
dards, or through joining organizations that
require adherence to new rules of conduct. In
the context of two networks in competition,
any individual member of one of the net-
6
Network power is explored in greater detail in my
forthcoming book, Globalization and Network Power.
91
works will want to use the standards of each
network where it is possible to gain access to
both of them. Where this is not possible, she
will want to use the dominant standard in
order to be part of the dominant network.
Further, the real push in network power
comes when we consider that the networks
do not stay static but grow and decline over
time with the addition or loss of mem-
bers—and that this change, too, affects the
value of network membership. As one net-
work gains an advantage over another, the
value of that network will increase at an
increasing rate. All things being equal, a
small network in competition with a larger
one will lose members, becoming increas-
ingly less viable as an alternative to the
dominant one.
Network power progressively eliminates
the exercise of effectively free choice among
networks. The adoption of a new standard
will prove varyingly difficult for different
people, depending on a whole host of fac-
tors, including the ease of switching and the
strength of their attachment to the original
network. Those who can switch networks at
least cost will presumably do so first in
order to gain the benefits of joining the
larger network. The value of the dominant
network will increase as its size increases.
With each lost member, the smaller net-
work becomes smaller in comparison to the
dominant one, and hence less attractive.
The costs will mount for the remaining
holdouts, increasing—perhaps even at an
increasing rate—as the successive depar-
tures increase the likelihood of yet further
departures.
For an individual in one network, the
availability of another network changes the
choices he or she faces because of the possi-
bility that others in her network may leave,
making her own membership less valuable.
In the case of a great inequality in the rela-
92
tive size of two networks, the pull to join the
larger network—the network power—can
lead to the abandonment of the smaller net-
work, which becomes increasingly unviable.
In fact, many examples of linguistic decline
and extinction in the contemporary world
work in just this way.7 Network power
pushes agents to converge on a single, dom-
inant standard.
POWER FROM CONSTRAINED
ALTERNATIVES
The mechanism of network power consists
in the role that standards play in coordinat-
ing human action. A successful standard can
rise to dominance by eclipsing others and
compelling nonusers to choose to adopt it.
Members of a small network may be subject
to the network power of a dominant net-
work, even when there is no individual
within the dominant network who directly
exercises this power. A member of a small
network would prefer to retain the local
standard, except under conditions in which
a larger network has substantial network
power. In that case, the small network will
become less and less viable, and the member
of the small network will eventually be
forced to switch to the dominant network.
Importantly, network power always oper-
ates through formal consent or choice, not
by direct force. The choices to switch to a
dominant network are formally free choices,
even when the disparity in network size is so
great that the alternative is, effectively, social
isolation. This unviable alternative, how-
ever, challenges the understanding—given
by the equation of power and command—
that power only operates where it com-
7
See Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing
Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially ch. 5.
David Singh Grewal
mands, and therefore always denies free
choice. Network power changes the out-
comes of our choices, and therefore the
choices that we will want to make. It can do
so, particularly in the case of mediating
standards, independently of any direct
influence that an individual person or
group exerts. (Of course, some individuals
or groups may have been instrumental in
catapulting a standard to prominence in the
first instance and may remain instrumental
in maintaining it, particularly when the
standards govern access by serving as crite-
ria for membership.) Network power char-
acterizes people as more or less rational
agents who choose based on good reasons
and are nevertheless trapped by structural
conditions into making decisions they
would not make if their collective arrange-
ments were different. It can explain how
structural conditions can be both the cause
and result of our individual choices.
We should distinguish the intrinsic rea-
sons for adopting a standard, the inherent
advantages that it offers, from the extrinsic
reasons, the value derived from a great num-
ber of other users. Importantly, people may
be led to adopt a standard before it underlies
a large network because of intrinsic reasons,
outright force, or even simple happenstance.
But once a standard possesses great network
power, none of these causes are as important
as the extrinsic reason, the fact that others
already use a certain standard. Indeed, a
standard that may have been intrinsically
less preferable may nevertheless be foisted
on us—while formally chosen by us—
because of this extrinsic reason, since the
point of standards is ultimately to gain
access to others. At the point at which a
given standard is adopted by nearly every-
one, despite possible good intrinsic reasons
to do so, the “choice” to adopt that standard
becomes more or less coerced.
network power and globalization
The distinction between the “freedom to
choose”—the freedom of choice without an
acceptable alternative—from the “freedom
to choose freely”—the freedom of choice
over viable alternatives—reveals the poverty
of simplistic doctrines that identify freedom
with consent without regard to the domain
of choice.8 According to this account, choice
in the absence of acceptable alternatives is
equivalent to coerced choice: the mere act of
choosing the only option on offer counts for
little. The network power of a dominant
standard converts the freedom to choose
freely into the freedom to choose by elimi-
nating the viability of alternative standards.
It is this dynamic of choice that makes the
emergence of global networks not a large-
scale act of international voluntarism or the
free enactment of a global social contract,
but instead a situation in which systematic
power can lead to unfree choices.
NETWORK POWER AND THE WTO
To illustrate how the idea of network power
can help us better to understand specific
instances of globalization, consider the par-
adox of force and freedom in the ascendance
of the WTO. The objective of the WTO is to
help trade “flow smoothly, freely, fairly, and
predictably.” The organization has 144 mem-
ber states and currently governs 97 percent
of (legal) global trade. It does so by oversee-
ing more than thirty international agree-
ments, consisting of thirty thousand pages
of rules, to which its member states are sig-
natories. The most important of these
8
See G. A. Cohen, “Are Disadvantaged Workers Who
Take Hazardous Jobs Forced to Take Hazardous Jobs?”
in G. A. Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes
from Marx (New York: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp.
239–54. This idea is interestingly developed in Sanjay G.
Reddy, “The Freedom to Choose Freely” (Harvard Uni-
versity, 1997, unpublished).
93
agreements regulate the international trade
in goods, services, and intellectual prop-
erty.9 The WTO also acts as a forum for
further negotiations about current and pro-
posed agreements, settles trade disputes,
and reviews national policies to judge their
compliance with WTO obligations.
The WTO is a focus of the globalization
debate. It has been a prominent target for
anti-globalization protests since the Seattle
Ministerial Conference in 2000. And yet, as
its defenders point out, it is the result of vol-
untarily adopted treaties that any country is
free to accept or decline. How should we
understand this controversy?
The WTO is often considered a free trade
organization, and certainly its main pur-
pose, and the major change that it has so far
accomplished, has been a liberalization of
trade by lowering the tariff barriers between
countries. But the WTO is not merely a neg-
ative instrument, designed to eliminate the
barriers to trade. It promotes a specific kind
of trade regime, governed by formal rules
encoded in the agreements, some of which,
but not all, promote free trade, which the
organization administers and which are
applicable only to certain parts of the global
economy, with the notable absence of such
sectors as agriculture. It does not just call for
the elimination of trade barriers, but serves
to coordinate the kind of trade—and the
kinds of trade-related policy measures—
that its member states pursue.
Taken together, the WTO agreements can
be considered a kind of standard—albeit a
complex and multifaceted one—and the
WTO exerts network power as the coordina-
tor of the multilateral trading system.10
Membership in the WTO is predicated on
accepting all of its agreements, which
together guarantee broad principles in the
governance of multilateral trade as, for exam-
ple, nondiscrimination. The WTO is both a
94
set of trade standards and the organization
that administers them—it is a standard for
membership that can possess network power
as it regulates valuable exchange.
The drive to join the WTO comes of the
desire to enjoy freer trade with other coun-
tries, as such membership provides nondis-
criminatory access to lucrative overseas
markets. With the backing of all the world’s
powerful economies—including, since 2001,
the People’s Republic of China—it should
come as no surprise that the WTO now gov-
erns virtually all international trade. Any
party wanting special access to the world’s
major economies can get it—but only
through membership in the WTO and con-
formity to its standards. (The acceptance of
these standards is often linked with other
bilateral and regional trade agreements that
offer further inducement to join.) Of course,
as in any instance of network power, the
standard promises benefits but involves
potential costs: it offers the benefit of access
and the threat of its costly denial, determined
by the standard criteria for membership.
Trade is a difficult subject in which to
argue that force is at work since it is the
exemplary voluntary act, in which two par-
ties exchange goods or services to mutual
benefit. But if we focus away from any indi-
vidual instance of trade to the trading sys-
tem itself, we begin to see how network
power is at work in the WTO. A system of
coordinating international trade might have
many different objectives and designs, any
one of which, if accepted by the world’s
9
These agreements are the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade, the General Agreement on Trade
in Services, and the Agreement on Trade-Related
Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights; available at
www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/final_e.htm.
10
It is appropriate to consider all the WTO agreements
as constituting a single, albeit complex, standard, since
for any member state these agreements must all be
accepted together for admission to the organization.
David Singh Grewal
powerful economies, would quickly become
the trading standard to use. For example, the
economist Dani Rodrik has argued that the
WTO rules might have been made more
development-friendly, focusing not on
maximizing the volume of trade but on
maximizing the economic development that
such trade brings. Such a system would
build in opt-out clauses to protect the long-
term interests of developing countries in
certain strategic areas, such as intellectual
property. If we accept that a number of free
trading systems might have been created to
manage trade and coordinate the expecta-
tions of the traders, we see that the rise to
ascendance of any particular one of them
necessarily entails a specific set of costs and
benefits to various parties. Importantly, as
a standard for membership is institution-
ally designed and sustained, it is possible to
revise it deliberately, unlike the case of
mediating standards. Thus, the complaint
against the WTO—or against any success-
ful standard—is not that parties do not
want to adopt a dominant standard, once it
is dominant, but that other standards under
which they might have fared better were
not adopted in the first instance. This argu-
ment also holds true for the development-
friendly alternative that Rodrik proposes: if
it became dominant and exerted network
power, the developed nations might simi-
larly complain that their interests would
have been better served in a different insti-
tutional structure. When developed coun-
tries advance such a complaint, however, it
may seem less plausible since they enjoy
many other advantages in the trading sys-
tem and in international negotiations more
generally.
The network power of the WTO pro-
duces, simultaneously, freer international
trade and an increasing loss of the freedom
to trade in a manner apart from that pro-
network power and globalization
scribed by WTO rules. (Whether this is ben-
eficial is a complex, empirical question.)
Certainly, a country could refuse to join the
WTO and attempt individually to negotiate
bilateral trade pacts with its current and
potential trading partners. But given the dif-
ficulty of doing so, and the position of the
WTO, membership is the easiest option,
perhaps even the only credible option for
almost every country. WTO advocates often
fail to acknowledge—or at least claim not to
see—that membership in the organization
cannot be reduced to the simple matter of
choosing whether or not to take part in its
agreements, given its dominance in the
world trading system.
The globalization of standards of eco-
nomic governance, with trade chief among
them, can lead to branding local experi-
ments as unacceptable heresies insofar as
they deviate from the neoliberal order. It is
this exercise of power that generates much
of the resentment against globalization
since it entails a loss of local autonomy, even
though this loss is voluntarily accepted,
given the lack of viable alternative ways of
gaining access to international markets.
Inherent in the use of any standard is a ten-
sion between the cooperation that it allows
users to enjoy and the suppression of inno-
vation, which requires a break in the estab-
lished routine. Standards such as the WTO’s
enable us to cooperate with each other but
also bind us, thus creating a tension
between experimentation and cooperation.
Critical to managing this tension is the
recognition that the benefits from interna-
tional cooperation must be fairly distrib-
uted. Again, the relevant question is not
whether any member of the WTO is “better
off ” as a member. Given conventional equi-
libria, everyone is in some absolute sense
better off—particularly when the alterna-
tive is isolation—so the focus must be on
95
the size of the relative advantage that any
member takes from the cooperation com-
pared to another system, including nonco-
operation. Without a fair distribution of the
advantages and disadvantages of member-
ship, we should expect to see continuing
trouble between developing and industrial-
ized countries of the sort that defeated the
addition of any new agreements at the Seat-
tle and Doha ministerial conferences.
BALANCING NETWORK POWER
Describing the rise of global standards as
involving a form of power does not itself
recommend any normative conclusions,
since power, per se, is neither avoidable nor
necessarily bad. But it does demand that we
focus our attention on the entrapping
aspects of these global social relations, and
with an eye to judging and possibly reform-
ing them. In evaluating the impact of net-
work power, we should consider the
distribution of two sets of costs: of transi-
tion and the loss of identity. The transition
from one standard to another will impose
various costs of adapting to a new standard,
which will be borne by those switching.
These costs can be of different kinds. Some
simply involve the difficulty of adopting a
new standard. The second set of costs
involves the loss of a standard that plays an
important role in people’s identities or cul-
ture. Linguistic loss is an obvious example:
abandoning one’s native language involves
much more than the costs of learning a new
one. These costs will generally be borne by
those who are far from the centers that net-
work power privileges: people from minor-
ity cultures and underdeveloped regions.
Often, the rise to dominance of a shared
standard will irremediably eclipse local
standards and impose costs unfairly. In par-
ticular, where local standards support val-
96
ued forms of shared association and distinct
ways of life, their loss can prove devastating,
the burdens heaped precisely on those least
able to bear them. The idea of network
power offers no solution for such misery,
nor any consolation for the fact that history
can be tragic. However, not all network
power is necessarily inevitable or incon-
testable. We must resist a totalizing impulse
that sees network power as pervasive and
systematically incontestable, as we find in
some heterodox theories of power. Instead,
the actual evaluation of network power
requires a close look at the institutional con-
ditions of any given network and standard.
Finding ways to offset the unacceptable
burdens imposed by network power can be
difficult since, unlike straightforward coer-
cion, this kind of power is driven through
forms of consent. Thus, a strategy based on
negative rights that carve out a zone of indi-
vidual autonomy is of limited use since net-
work power is driven by formally free choice
over unviable alternatives. A strategy based on
positive rights—on the opening up of new
possibilities for choice—requires a nuanced
institutional examination of the “boundary
properties” of networks. Since we are clamor-
ing for access to one another, the only way to
defuse network power is to provide alternative
and multiple channels for such access, thereby
refusing to privilege just one. Whether this is
possible depends on the particular configura-
tion of boundary properties in any instance.
The analysis of boundary properties is partic-
ularly relevant in the design and reform of
standards for membership, which can be
directly and deliberately altered, than for
mediating standards such as languages.
ACCESS TO NETWORKS
In discussions of the architecture of organi-
zations or systems some commentators have
David Singh Grewal
distinguished between open and closed
architectures. While the distinction is evoca-
tive, it does not fully capture the idea of
boundary properties. My analysis of the
boundary properties of standards subdivides
this general idea of openness into openness
to new entrants, to parallel systems, and to
revision. I call these characteristics openness,
compatibility, and malleability.
The first property, openness, indicates the
ease with which a network accepts new
entrants desiring to adopt its standard.
Obviously, all things being equal, greater
openness should translate into greater net-
work power, since potential entrants face
lower costs of adopting a new standard and
switching into a new network.
The second property, compatibility, indi-
cates the ease with which a standard allows
translation from other standards, or adop-
tion of parallel standards, facilitating access
to its network without requiring its adop-
tion. Compatibility can be seen as openness
to the use of either parallel or simultaneous
standards, and therefore, all else being
equal, compatibility defuses the network
power of any given standard, allowing
nonusers the access they desire without the
need to switch standards.
The third property, malleability, indicates
the extent to which a standard underlying a
given network is available for revision, how-
ever piecemeal. A network is only malleable
if the underlying standard—the institution
by which members gain access to one
another—can be revised without disrupting
the ongoing social relations it supports.
Revisability can augment the network
power of smaller networks—for example, by
increasing a standard’s similarity to other
standards, hence easing the transition to a
dominant standard. It can defuse the net-
work power of larger networks by increasing
their compatibility with other standards.
network power and globalization
Examining boundary properties can
reveal different ways of defusing network
power by setting up multiple modes of
access to a network. For example, where
forms of compatibility can be introduced or
enhanced, the rise of a dominant standard
will prove less destructive to smaller stan-
dards, for users of these standards will be
able to maintain connection to the domi-
nant network without losing their local affil-
iations. Support for such compatibility is a
question both of institutional design and of
the provision of resources necessary when
compatibility requires developing multiple
competencies. Institutional design can
enhance or suppress compatibility. For
example, the WTO could offer developing
countries access to global markets but
strengthen opt-out clauses allowing them
exemptions in critical areas of cultural pro-
tection and human development. Resources
are also often needed to ensure real compat-
ibility, as in the case of multilingual nations.
State support for the development of
minority-language media, schooling, and
community development may be required
to achieve a fairer distribution of the costs of
asymmetric bilingualism within and
between countries.
Ensuring compatibility does not elimi-
nate the desire for greater access to greater
numbers of people, but it does allow this
movement to proceed on terms more com-
patible with established histories and social
relations. It does not dissolve the network
power driving globalization, but it could tilt
the process in the direction of more freedom
and less force.
GLOBALIZATION AS EMPIRE
The claim that globalization is imperial rests
on two counts: first, the fact that many impor-
tant choices—and perhaps even national des-
97
tinies—seem already decided because of
globalization; and second, that certain privi-
leged countries benefit from (or at least expe-
rience no loss of freedom from) these same
processes of globalization. Both of these ele-
ments are comprehensible in light of the net-
work power of dominant global standards.
Coordination is both freeing and entrapping:
freeing because it offers access to others on
new scales, and entrapping because it does
so—often necessarily—in a way that privi-
leges one mode of access rather than another.
The insight that the relations that free us
also bind us is not new to those theorists of
modernity, like Max Weber, who understood
98
the loss of freedom accompanying the
progress of the age. But unlike the forms of
unfreedom associated with an internally gen-
erated modernity, global standards often come
from the outside. They also impose their costs
unevenly, privileging the already dominant.
Therefore globalization appears not to be the
iron cage of modernity manifest on a newly
global scale, but foreign imposition in the
familiar mould of empire. Given these dynam-
ics, we should not expect the accusation of
empire to disappear anytime soon. But neither
should we pretend that these accusations con-
sist of nothing more than confusion and bad
faith in a moment of global advance.
David Singh Grewal