When I started studying history, culture was all the rage. We considered the ways that structures and discourses articulated with the practice of everyday life. Networks, not institutions, governed society – and the network came with holes, spaces for agency and interpretation that were enabling, and not constraining.
Later, this seemed a little problematic. I was able to describe a lot of historical meaning, but there was little in the way of vectors of causation or political-economic trajectory. Becoming attentive to the material and the structural has linked me much more to the kinds of themes Barry Buzan raises in Making Global Society: A Study of Humankind Across Three Eras. Though in reading it I also became conscious that my inner cultural historian still has, and wants, a voice. Let me explain.
I’ll start with the latter part of Making Global Society, which was excellent. In his discussion of deep pluralism, which he argues is currently emergent, Barry Buzan gives an insightful account of the possibilities and trajectories as ‘Western domination has given way to a wider diffusion of wealth, power and cultural and political authority’ (p. 334). In this context superpowers wane and tensions emerge between globalisation and nationalism. These tensions, he persuasively explains, owe as much to decolonisation as to protectionism. ‘It is about the ending of two centuries of Western-dominated, core-periphery, world order, and the opening of a multi-civilisational one’. This deep pluralism, moreover, goes beyond the geopolitical to be evident also in global or nationalist possibilities as we face climate catastrophe, the post-truth political order into which we seem to have stumbled, and the institutional frameworks – multinational corporations, a decoupling of capitalism from democracy, major shifts in birth rates, and transformations in gender hierarchies – that all go a long way towards explaining what we see around us. I found this most refreshing.
It all points to a politics for global society, however, that I found unlikely (though admittedly perhaps not more unlikely than Revolution). The key contribution of the book, as far as I was concerned, was possibly best encapsulated in this quote: ‘Instead of integrated world society defining a possible future, it is set up as the core structural framing that defines both a long past and most probable futures’ (p. 423).
One important effect of this type of analysis was that the environment is no backdrop to the global history of humans. If this had been recognised all along, perhaps we would not be in this mess. More, ‘serious acceptance of the obligation to protect the planet would mark a fundamental modification to the ground-rules of global society’ (p. 396). Though this is not, I would argue, only because of the institutions that are the real subject of Buzan’s work, but because of the logic of the hierarchy that placed Western civilisation at its pinnacle.
It was through the lens of that hierarchical set of values, norms and institutions that the narratives underpinning some of the long history Buzan gives were constructed. I know that when anyone does big sweeping work like Buzan’s, they are bound to get a few things wrong. And since Buzan’s overall conclusions are worthwhile and interesting I don’t want to labour this too much. But there were many places where I found historical errors very distracting. It is a long time since my undergraduate prehistory, but the idea that patriarchy may have emerged because of heavy farm work (pp. 92-6) contradicted even the evidence back then – let alone that emerging now – that women have always done heavy work, with evidence from early modern England suggesting work tasks were often more interchangeable between men and women than was the norm in later centuries. More, the suggestion that African people were selected as slaves due to capacity to survive in the tropics turns the essentialised racism of the time into historical fact. Without seeing that hierarchies, established during the age of empire, have also been used to construct historical narratives, they tend to be replicated, rather than interrogated. This happened too frequently in this book, for my comfort.
The issue of uncritically reproducing the hierarchies of past societies also affected my wariness about Buzan’s periodisation – his big eras. A key historical contribution, Buzan claims, is that he focuses less on the eras themselves as on transitions from hunter gather society to this awful acronym called CAPE (based on an equally hard to remember conglomerated agricultural and pastoral era), and thence to modernity. This hardly seems unusual. Again, as I recall my undergraduate study, transition was at the centre – the domestication of plants and animals, the emergence and growth of sedentary societies, the emergence of modernity. The Whiggish sense of progress embodied in such transitions was in question even thirty years ago – and as our own Dark Emu debate has shown, there is still a problem of imagining, idealising and patronising hunter-gather societies, while simultaneously failing to recognise that many aspects of agriculture also co-existed with nomadic and semi-nomadic forms of social organisation.
Altogether, my inner cultural historian struggled against the book’s structural masculinism. I found it grating to read about patriarchy, but very little about gender. The selected categories, too, seemed gendered male. Sport was a secondary institution given value in the book, for example, but not art. Art is a cultural product for which we have, surely, the longest evidence of all. Political ideology got a run, but not discourse, or meaning, or agency. Perhaps my cultural history roots were rebelliously re-asserting themselves, but it made for a frustrating read, for me.
However, I remain committed to the task of understanding structure, and they were articulated very nicely in the excellent last section of the book. And yet in the lead-up to it, there was simultaneously too much being described, and not enough. Too many details that were too-frequently questionable were offset by the absence of really important structures like capital and labour, for example, which were hardly to be seen, despite Buzan’s lengthy discussion of slavery.
I am conscious that some of my frustrations as a reader were a matter, surely, of disciplinary distinction. As a historian, I was taught to never use an acronym that would not also be found in the Daily Telegraph and so I went a bit nuts trying, without a list of abbreviations, to keep track of them all. Despite feeling troubled by the masculinism of the structural analysis, I could also see that the book was much less so than most scholarship in International Relations, for which Buzan deserves some praise, at least. Even so, the argument that global society has produced structures that are leading us now into deep pluralism would have benefited, I think, by a deeper acknowledgement of the hierarchical discourses by which such received historical analyses have been constructed. Our rejection of some of the narratives that are (probably inadvertently) replicated in this book as historical fact, after all, are part of the process by which such pluralism has been brought into being.
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