International sociology, or global sociology, which takes the relations among nations as its focus—or, alternatively, treats the world or some subsystem of it as its unit of analysis—is the least developed area of sociology. By now, however, it is one of the most important, largely because of the ongoing transformation of its subject matter, the world.

Most nineteenth-century European sociologists centered their attention on the developing Western world, the world in which they lived. They were interested mainly in deciphering—and alternatively celebrating or regretting—the sea of social changes that were revolutionizing the industrializing and democratizing world. The early American sociologists were similarly absorbed with the problems of their own industrializing, urbanizing, and diversifying society. Insofar as Western sociologists glanced abroad, they, along with their anthropological colleagues, did so through the lens of classical evolutionary analysis. These thinkers regarded most other societies as less developed than their own, and concentrated mainly on their differences from the more advanced West. And because they assumed that these societies stood, variably, somewhere along the line of evolutionary development—development believed to be either immanent or stemming from causes within society (e.g., technological forces)—they were not inclined to focus on the relations among nations.

While classical evolutionary theory was more or less thoroughly discredited by the early twentieth century, one aspect of it survived in the resurgent literature on modernization that dominated in the 1950s and 1960s. That was the recurrent focus on the internal dynamics of developing (and not-developing) societies—technology, entrepreneurship, investment, and the rural-to-urban transformation, as well as obstacles to modernization found in indigenous religions, kinship systems, and other ascriptive forms. As critics from the dependency and world system points of view were to argue subsequently, this inward focus constituted a systematic limitation and liability for that phase of modernization theory.

Sociology's neglect of the intersocietal does not, of course, tell the whole story. Without attempting to be exhaustive, I point to the following traditions of sociology with an international or global emphasis.

•     In one respect Karl Marx was drawn away from the study of relations among societies, because, he, too, locked his analysis into an evolutionary scheme, dictated by stages of internal development of the forces and relations of production. At the same time, he clearly recognized the dynamic of capitalism as a quintessentially international phenomenon (Marx [1867] 1949) driven by its own contradictions and crises outside the boundaries of its own societies anti spreading ultimately to the colonization, exploitation, and transformation of other regions of the world. Lenin ([1917] 1939) extended that principle in his formulation of imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, and insofar as world system theorists such as Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) adhere to the materialism derived from Marx, that tradition remains alive to this day.

•     Another thread of internationalism appeared in the early twentieth century in the form of diffusionism in anthropology. Much of the impetus for the development of this approach arose from direct criticism of the "internalist" bias of classical evolutionary  theory. Because culture traveled and was borrowed, diffusionists argued, societies could skip stages or otherwise alter the presumed fixity of developmental paths posited by the evolutionists. The early diffusionists, however, tended to concentrate on the migration of the cultural items, such as the calendar and the number zero, and they wrote little about the relations among societies, or the contextual modifications of items once borrowed. The diffusionist tradition is a continuing one. A later version of it appeared in the work of modernization theorists such as Alexander Gerschenkron (1962) and Reinhard Bendix ([1964] 1977), who regarded the modernization of latecomers to development as affected profoundly by their consciousness of, borrowing from, and competition with already-modernized nations.

•     There is also a social science tradition of the study of colonial domination, with manifestations in anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and history. This, too, has an internationalist flavor as well, since the study of colonialization inevitably excites an interest in the relations between colonial and colonized societies. A remarkable example is the last work of Bronislaw Malinowski (1945), which treated the transformation of British African colonies as a dialectical and synthetic process involving colonizing forces outside and traditional forces within. This tradition of colonial sociology, if we may call it that, continues among scholars in the West and in developing countries in their study of the past, as well as in their study of post- and neocolonial forms of domination.

•     More recently, the perspectives of dependency and world system analysis, both spawned in part as reactions to the limitations of modernization theory, take the international economy and its patterns of domination as their starting point anti trace the ramifications of that economy in the internal history of nations. While both these approaches have experienced their own season of criticism, and while adaptations of each have appeared, they have played an important role in generating the currently existing subfields of international anti global sociology.

•     We must also include reference to the tradition of systematic-comparative work, of which Weber's was foremost. Much of this tradition, however, treats similarities and differences among societies but not their relations to one another, and hence is not international in the sense l am using the term.

•     One feature of international sociology is that it is scarcely sociology at all with respect to disciplinary concerns. Internationally minded economists, political scientists, sociologists, historians, and anthropologists deal with overlapping problems, and often approach these problems in an interdisciplinary way. Just as internationalization as a process is blurring the familiar boundaries of the world, so it is forcing social scientists to break down traditional disciplinary barriers among themselves.

The Nature of Contemporary Internationalization

So much for a sketch of some of the ways that social scientists have tried to comprehend the relations among nations and societies and to trace the influence of those relations on their internal structures and processes. The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to three lines of analysis: (1) to present the fundamental directions of change—and contradictions—on the current and future international scene; (2) to call attention to some sociological dimensions and processes involved in these changes: (3) to enunciate some methodological problematics that the study of international or global sociology raises.

I would identify four major ongoing revolutions in the world at the present time—some continuations of existing and known ones, some newer. Each revolution is interesting in its own right, but the relationships among the four should command our attention especially. In these relations we will find notes of both unity and disunity.

The Continuing Revolution in Economic Growth

It is perhaps old-fashioned to point to economic growth as a revolution because we social scientists have recognized it, praised it, and—to some degree, at least—protested against its negative consequences for so long. But we must note it again because it has not abated. Indeed, it possesses all the momentum it ever had, and has taken on some new characteristics.

•     The impetus to growth has diffused so much that the whole world aspires to it—the developed economic powers to protect their position, the newly industrializing countries to catch up, the Third World countries to break from their economic entrapment, and the world's economic and political leaders to preserve their positions of stability and profit. These are the loudest voices in the world today, and the power of those voices that speak otherwise is puny by comparison.

•     The aegis for growth has been a resurgence of market-based capitalism with a heightened international character, involving the dramatic migration of production—most of the world's manufacturing is no longer located in the so-called industrial nations—and the accelerated international movement of all the factors of production. The major alternatives to capitalism— traditionalism, communism, socialism, and imaginative Third World forms—have collapsed or weakened, and some variant of capitalism has been embraced in their place. And on the global scene economic growth continues (irregularly and with stagnant periods), and international trade, markets, and finance spiral.

•     The resurgence of world capitalism has many faces, but from a cultural point of view, it gives renewed priority to two features of the human condition—individual action and individual choice. First, there has been a resurgence of the free labor maket—the trademark of which is incentives—in which employers and employees choose one another. Second, there has been an increase in consumer markets in which the individual is regarded as capable of choosing —within his or her means—what goods and services to purchase. Both these markets contrast with the traditional and administered systems of pricing, in which culture and political authority, respectively, are the engines of exchange. To point to this augmented formal freedom is by no means to ignore the fact that free labor anti consumer markets often work blindly, cruelly, and exploitatively—and thus create the paradox of freedom in principle and lack of freedom in practice—but none of this seems to have diminished their resurgence.

The Continuing Democratic Revolution

The second revolution is a political one, also an acceleration of a known process. I refer to the continuing march of democracy and the democratic principle. Early in the nineteenth century Tocqueville ([1835] 1945) described the advance of democracy—with its facets of liberty and equality—as a "providential fact," and nothing in subsequent history seems to have proved him wrong. The democratic impulse has been one of the most vital during the past two centuries. The past quarter-century, however, has witnessed what Samuel Huntington (1991) called a "third wave" of democratization, beginning with the revolutionary seizure in Portugal in 1974—a wave affecting dozens of nations throughout the world and reaching a climax with the events of Tiananmen Square in Beijing anti surging through the former Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries.

While market-based capitalism and political democracy are distinct phenomena, they resemble one another in one essential respect: both give a high premium to the individual actor, individual choice, and individual agency. Political democracy celebrates active political participation, ennobles the individual citizen and voter, and presumably endows that individual with a measure of control over political affairs.

Needless to say, the dream of democracy has seldom, if ever, been realized in practice. Tendencies to stumble into political chaos or to backslide into authoritarian or totalitarian regimes are ever-present; electorates and citizens forever tend to fall into passivity; and critics remind us that formal democratic institutions often conceal other powerful processes of domination. Yet, in a way, these observations that democracy is forever on the verge of failure support the point: the ideal thrusts of that political system are agency, activism, and control, particularly when it is compared with its more traditionalistic and authoritarian alternatives.

The Revolution in Solidarity and Identity

The third great revolution is an integrative one. I referred to it in the last chapter while considering the fate of the modern nation-state. It is best described as a revolution in solidarity and identity. It is a reassertion of the salience of subnational groups. These may be based on region, religion, race, ethnicity, language, gender, lifestyle, or some mix of these. Alternatively, they may be solidary groups that are associated with social movements pressing for recognition, status, anti rights of such groups, or advocating a cause such a peace or antagonism to nuclear power. This group impulse, traceable to the 1960s (Gurr 1994), appears everywhere in the world, though in different guises. Sociologists have noticed how successfully these groups compete with social class as a focus of organization and loyalty. They also tend to undermine other; traditional loci of subnational integration, such as organized religion, the community, the neighborhood, anti kinship. During the past two centuries both industrial capitalism anti the nation-state eroded these foci of integration. The newer integration based on different subnational solidarities has continued that war on those traditional forms by competing with them directly for the loyalty, affection, and commitment of individuals.

I noted that the acceleration of the market principle and the march of democracy share a premium on individual choice and agency. At first glimpse the increasing salience of new subnational solidary groups runs contrary to that theme. As often as not, membership in these groups comes close to what sociologists call ascription —the subordination of the individual to the group, whether because the individual is born into it or because it often demands an absolute commitment.

All this is true enough. But from another standpoint the vitalization of such groups is an assertion of human agency. Group leaders and members frequently represent themselves as solidary forces opposed to the nation-state—that invention which, I pointed out in the preceding chapter, fused territoriality, governance, identity, and group solidarity into a single entity. That fusion is now being challenged on every front. The challenging groups themselves provide, or promise to provide, a new basis for realizing human agency—if not individual in the first instance, then certainly collective—endowing their individual members with a sense of dignity, purpose, and action through the collectivity.

The Environmental Revolution

The fourth revolution, in varying strength throughout the world, is an environmental one. It is a kind of double revolution. The first arm involves the destruction of the natural world in which we live; the second arm involves the mobilization of consciousness, political activity, and policies designed to stem that destruction and establish some kind of "sustainable" equilibrium between humanity's domination of the natural world and its tendency to spoil, exhaust, or destroy it. The ravaging of the earth, its oceans, and its atmosphere is not new, but all signs point to the fact that it is increasingly massive and in the end constitutes the most important threat to humanity. Moreover, that threat is truly universal in character, because it involves the fate of the entire human species in relation to the sustaining environment—no respecter of nation, class, or group in its ultimate consequences, though its short-term effects are selective in these regards.

The second arm of the revolution, the environmental movement proper, is clearly in evidence, particularly in the developed countries of the world, but it is a weak force when compared to the threat itself. This relative weakness stems from two forces—first, the strength of the technological, economic, and demographic trends that arc primarily responsible for environmental devastation, and second, the fragmentation of goals of the environmental movement (nuclear danger, water pollution, global warming, air pollution, toxification of the earth). Despite this, the environmental movement expresses the same impulse of human agency and activism that is found in the other three revolutions. That is to say, the environmental revolution acknowledges that only human beings can set right the balance between humanity and nature, just as human beings have been the agents who have threatened to ruin it.

Continuities and Contradictions among the Four Revolutions

I have identified one master impulse in all four revolutions. That impulse is the insistence on behalf of individual agency, choice, and activism: the ennoblement of human control of human affairs. This impulse has become more salient in the whole world, not only in the West where it was invented, defined, and cultivated. It manifests itself in all four of the revolutions, and in the largest sense makes the four into one. In recent years Alain Touraine (1991) has stressed above all the force of individualism in the modern world and traced its manifold benefits and costs to humankind. On the basis of the observations I have made, we can only underscore his message.

This commonality, however, is only a small part of the story. We cannot really imagine a unity among the four revolutions. The contemporary—and coming—world is fraught with old and new anomalies, paradoxes, and contradictions, both within each revolution and among them. Here are the most salient of these.

•     We witness immediately one long-standing and familiar contradiction. The new anti victorious surge of world capitalism is no different from the old in that it perpetuates extreme inequality among classes and groups within nations and among nations. Marx foresaw and described capitalism as a world system, but what we witness today goes far beyond his vision. One especially dramatic consequence of the Marxian vision is that the process of proletarianization has become an international phenomenon. Yet the modern world displays some peculiarities that deviate in some ways from the pure Marxian vision. Industries have weakened in numbers and strength in the developed regions of the world—in part by the exportation of industrial manufacturing of products to less developed parts of the world. The massive increase in service workers in the developed countries has certainly created a service proletariat in these nations, but circumstances—mainly occupational specialization anti the dispersion of interests—have always conspired, in different ways, to weaken the class impulse in the service sectors.

•     The victory of the forces of the new capitalism is not complete. It continues to confront competing systems that are threatened or discredited but continue to reassert themselves. Two examples will suffice. First, the national impulse struggles against the international. In some of the developed countries, nationally based capital finds itself in alliance with nationally based labor movements, both protesting against the forces of economic internationalization and pressing for limitations on the internationalization of the movements of the factors of production (including labor) anti free international trade. Second, in those areas of the world, notably the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the dominant voice is that of new world capitalism. Yet the apparently headlong rush to market systems evident after 1989 has met resistances from forces inherited from the communist and socialist traditions of those countries. We thus observe the apparently contradictory results of favoring wage labor, the profit system, and the consumer economy but at the same time favoring socialist-type guarantees (mainly in the form of welfare) that reduce the risks and inequalities that have always been built into market capitalism. There does not seem much doubt about which set of forces will ultimately prevail, but the contemporary scene continues to manifest ambivalence toward and a continuing political struggle among them.

•     The first and third revolutions—growth through world economic capitalism and the new subnational solidarities—undermine the nation-state and nationally based political democracy in complex and subtle ways. Three of these ways, mentioned in a different context in the last chapter, should be stressed.

(1)     The sovereignty of the state is being eroded by the world capitalist forces that reduce its control over its own economic and political affairs. It is extremely difficult for single states to act as a decisive influence over international economic forces that drive, in large part, their internal economic affairs: the policies and activities of multinational corporations, banks, and international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund; fluctuations in world production, trade, and capital flows; fluctuations in exchange rates. Yet the political survival of democracies and other kinds of polities depends in significant part on their capacity to affect, if not control, the economic fortunes of their citizenry. The contradiction is between the international forces that affect nations and the diminished political capacity to control those forces.

(2)     The drive toward both economic growth and political democracy acts almost universally to increase economic and political expectations on the part of individual citizens and groups in society. Both these forces translate into political pressures on governments to sustain growth, productivity, and prosperity in their own countries. Political leaders struggle to accommodate such demands in the interest of their own survival, and the spiral is completed as they strive to generate continued growth. The contradiction here is the unending and irreversible drive toward growth in the interests of satisfying relevant political constituencies—a cycle through which a point of stability and satisfaction is never reached.

(3)     Subnational cultural groupings and social movements dedicated to principle, while competitors for loyalty with the nation-state, also make political demands on nation-states. I outlined the special difficulties created by these kinds of demands toward the end of the last chapter.

•     A further tension arises between the forces of internationalization and the forces of localization. While internationalization proceeds apace along all fronts—production, trade, and finance; regional alliances anti governments; the growth of an international community; and the diffusion of syncretic international culture—the world has also seen a resurgence of localism, as subnational groups primarily assert their own cultural identity and integrity and, in some cases, link these demands with pressures for political autonomy (including new statehood in some cases) and increased local economic self-sufficiency. Many of these movements must be regarded as economically and culturally nonrational, even irrational, because they work to isolate localities from the world economic scene and sometimes threaten to impoverish them. Yet that realization does not diminish their force and importance.

•     The forces anti contradictions outlined—pressures for economic growth, increased and accelerating demands on polities, and the defensive efforts of polities to contain, manage, and to some degree satisfy these demands—all point in directions that run contrary to the environmental survival of the human race in the long run. Those with optimism argue that one way out of this apparent collision course is more technology; that is to say, technology is the route to population control and increased productivity to encounter the environmental devastation. The view is not without some merit, and some examples could be provided. Be that as it may, we have not seen the necessary reversals of direction as yet, and the present course of economic and political developments point more toward environmental destruction than environmental salvation.

Mechanisms and Processes Involved in the Internationalization Process

So much for the major directions of the most important changes on the contemporary global scene. What are the main mechanisms and processes involved, and how might we best frame our understanding of them?

Specialization, Differentiation, and Interdependence

In the last chapter, I directed attention to the continuing theoretical and empirical relevance of societal structural differentiation and its multiple manifestations. The same theoretical problem surfaces internationally, though our conceptualization and concern with it has to be altered and tailored at that level.

The tradition of international economics, tracing to the mercantilists and Adam Smith, is based on the assumption of a world composed of national economies. The mercantilists argued that production and trade policies ought to be subordinated to the issue of national power, and Smith argued that all nations would become wealthier (and, indirectly, more powerful through that wealth) if they pursued the policies of comparative national advantage. In both the concept of the nation remained paramount (after all, Smith entitled his book The Wealth of Nations ). The accompanying assumption was that nations would specialize and trade with one another and that a world division of labor would evolve.

Given the international developments of the twentieth century, one wonders to what degree that model of international specialization retains its usefulness. Although nations maintain some control over economic policy, other economic agencies (especially multinational firms and the international agents that supply capital for development) impinge on this power. World specialization can change in relatively brief periods by the decisions of individual firms to move entire plants or suboperations, and they may do this selectively by investing or contracting out across national lines. The world has witnessed a greater differentiation among production, assembly, anti corporate control. Often these operations are not organized by nation but, rather, cut across national lines and often bypass national governments. More and more, production of subcommodities is dispersed and located in sites different from assembly, and corporate control of both may be located still elsewhere. The cities of the world are developing new patterns of specialization not so much nationally as regionally. "Global cities" such as New York, London, Tokyo, and Paris are just that—cities oriented as much toward the world as they are toward their national economies (Sassen 1991). They sometimes overshadow national capitals, and are the locus of decisions made without reference to the welfare of the nations in which they are geographically situated. They develop new roles of internationally oriented commercial, financial, legal, and advertising services.

Correspondingly, the pattern of world specialization becomes more complicated. With the increasing internationalization of the economy, the economic interdependence has increased, but this interdependence has become differentiated to a greater degree from the political interdependence among nations. It is true that national economies still exist anti that national governments, through their treasuries and banks, are still responsible for servicing trade deficits, international loans, and making good losses experienced through currency fluctuations. But as indicated earlier, they have lost effective control over this interdependence because they directly control neither regional economic arrangements nor production complexes nor international finance. As a result, governments control only partially economic decisions—and their effects—taking place within their boundaries. Students of differentiation and interdependence within societies have operated comfortably under the assumption that these phenomena develop within politically discrete societies. When we move to the international level, we must deal with a disjunction between economic differentiation and political control.

In sum, the global economic revolution of the last half of the twentieth century, which is surely accelerating and irreversible, has created more specialization and interdependence in the world and has complicated that pattern of interdependency because of the addition of new major actors in the economic world: multinational production and financial units and regional economies, in addition to nations. An enlarged but extremely imperfect and often unreliable global regulating apparatus (made up of a mix of coalitions of national governments, international financial combines, and the dynamics of international markets) has also risen. Finally, as Spencer (1897) and Durkheim ([1893] 1984) reminded us long ago, greater interdependence makes for greater potential fragility in a system, for the very reason that it is more systemic. When there is a sneeze in one part, the remainder is more likely to catch cold, and—in the extreme case—a breakdown in one part of the world, unless counteracted, can threaten the stability of the whole.

The Internationalization of Social Problems

Many social problems in the contemporary world already have an international character. The combination of the unequal distribution of both world income and world population growth (both working to the disadvantage of the less developed world) means that the great range of problems associated with poverty—malnutrition, infant mortality, deficiencies in education, and so on—are similarly differentially distributed. In addition, other international dimensions of social problems are already in evidence, and promise to become more salient as more of the world experiences the greater urbanization and population movements. The following are illustrations.

•     We may expect the persistence and spread of social problems associated with Western market and urban development as other nations experience related lines of development. These problems include divorce and family instability, vice, crime, drugs, and abuse on the streets. Russia and Eastern Europe already show these signs, and there is no reason to believe that they will not increase as universal problems.

•     The increased traffic of people through world migration and travel will internationalize health problems to a greater degree than they now are. Today no country can escape the AIDS menace for this reason, and the same will surely be true for any new infectious diseases.

•     Much contemporary prostitution is becoming world prostitution, the most dramatic example of which is international sex tourism in South Asia.

•     Many of those vast global cities (Sassen 1991) are leading the way in the creation of low-skill and low-paid service occupation masses, a new kind of "service proletariat" in the stratification system.

•     Many social problems will be "created" by social forces external to the societies having the political jurisdiction and responsibility to deal with them. International sex tourism is an example— generated in large part by male tourists from developed countries but the responsibility of the Indian, Thai, and Philippine governments. The large-scale employment of low-skill female workers by multinationals in developing Third World countries—with the attendant problems of job insecurity, poverty, and gender conflict—is another. Future generations will witness an increase in externally generated problems. The phenomenon is an extension of what we have seen already—the pollution of Palm Springs, California, by smog from the coastal conurbation, the injury to the Black Forest from Eastern European industrial pollution, and, most dramatically, the toxification of several Western European countries in the Chernobyl incident. Extending this principle, J. Craig Jenkins and Kurt Schock (1992) have pointed out that in recent years scholars have been referring more to global structures than to domestic conditions as explanatory factors in domestic political conflict. This internationalization of social problems and the accompanying realization that they are world systemic in character will, it is hoped, provide a major impulse for legal and other forms of international intervention.

•     Social problems—and the activities of those who protest against them—will become less localized and more frequently tried in the court of international public opinion, or, more precisely, the international press. The exposure of repression in Tiananmen Square, governmental impotence in Eastern Europe, and starvation in Somalia are only illustrations of the power of the media to internationalize political and social problems in an instant.

The Dynamics of International Stratification

The greater economic specialization of the world and the faster rates of growth in some developing areas make for a certain equalization of nations, in the limited sense that, being specialized, they depend more on one another for their economic survival. Put another way, they have more power over one another; the OPEC petroleum crisis of the early 1970s demonstrated that. Yet this tendency must be regarded as an interaction with other complex and long-standing systems of established inequality along economic, political-military, and prestige lines—an interaction that defies any neat characterization such as that found in some versions of Marxist and world system analysis. The broad outlines of those systems of inequality since World War II may be described briefly as follows:

•     The world economy emerged from World War II with a clear hegemony of the United States, the one great economic power left undestroyed. This period proved short-lived. The Western and Soviet-dominated economies became frozen in a pattern of relative insulation from one another during the decades of the military cold war—with the Eastern bloc, however, never providing a decisive economic threat. Then, in area after area, American hegemony was challenged—by the American-assisted recovery of Western Europe and Japan, by other regions in Asia, by rapid but irregular strides in newly developing countries in Latin America, China, and elsewhere. The current pattern shows a relatively weakened America, but a clear pattern of domination by the North (the combined economic power of North America, Western Europe, and Japan) over the South and over the former Soviet bloc.

•     The political-military pattern followed a related but different course. The postwar American monopoly on nuclear weapons was neutralized in short order by Soviet developments in nuclear and missile technology. For most of the cold war the world faced a situation of rough political-military parity (made so) by the capacity of both the United States and the Soviet Union to destroy one another several times over). The dominant patterns of international activity were those of mutual threat and the politics of aligning powers and keeping them aligned elsewhere in the world. The economic disparity of the free worm and the Soviet bloc, however, continued to be enormous, and it was that very discrepancy that proved, in the end, to undo finally an already weakening political system in the Soviet bloc. That is to say, the American acceleration of the arms race in the 1980s created a situation the American economy could not afford and the Soviet economy could not bear. The end of the Soviet system, of course, had an internal political dynamic as well, but the economic collapse provided the final breaking point. Since the end of the cold war the United States and its Western allies returned to a point of near-nuclear monopoly once again, but that brute political-military dominance is rendered fragile by the threat of nuclear proliferation, the economic and political costs of international peacekeeping, a diminution of collective responsibility after the Soviet threat receded, and the continuing nonfeasibility of actually deploying the ultimate weapons.

•     The international system of prestige is a very real phenomenon, correlated with but distinguishable from international economic and political stratification. Yet it is the most elusive of the three, and this involves more than difficulties of conceptualization and measurement. It is certainly impossible—indeed, an error to try— to line up nations in a prestige row from top to bottom, as one can in ranking nations by income per capita. However, it is true that those nations that are wealthier and most closely approximate some ideal model of political democracy are most likely to be high in prestige. But this is only part of the story. The ideological competition of the cold war period was, in fact, a context over the criteria for international prestige between the Western and Eastern blocs.

The most evident feature of the international system—and perhaps all systems of prestige—is that it is a ranking-plus-ambivalence system. It is true that developing and less developed nations are striving to "catch up" with the West in all respects of development and, in doing so, are consciously, tacitly, or unconsciously endowing the developed countries with higher prestige. But that attitude is always tinged with envy, resentment, and rejection—a simultaneous retraction of that prestige, if you will. In our consideration of this more cultural system of international stratification, then, we must always begin with the phenomenon of ambivalence—not simply emulation or rejection, but both—and then move on to a deeper understanding of that phenomenon.

The Globalization of Culture

As the complexity of the world increases and intensifies, so does the communication among its various parts. Part of this is "virtual," especially the spectacular growth of television (the cultural image medium par excellence) and electronic mail systems. Another part is increased "real" communication—in trade, finance, political dialogue, migration, tourism, and international meetings.

In connection with the increasing globalization of culture, two extreme views have emerged among scholars. The one might be called homogenization, the other contextualization. The first, represented in the work of E A. Tenbruck, holds that television spreads a common (mainly popularized American) culture throughout the world, a culture that overwhelms all others. "Generally, individual cultures are losing their autonomy as they are being drawn into the network of electronic mass media that are instrumental in creating cross-cultural audiences, movements, issues, images, and lifestyles" (Tenbruck 1990: 205). The contextualization view has been advanced by Ulf Hannerz (1990), who argues that cultural flows are complex and involve no single pattern of imperialism, and that no matter how clear the message, the transmission of culture cannot determine the spirit in which it is received and interpreted. Individual viewers "syncretize" common messages by adapting them to their own cultural wishes, attitudes, and outlooks. The truth, as in all debates about diffusion and cultural domination, must fall in the middle. All cultural forms—technology, philosophies, ideologies, social forms such as labor unions, images of heroes and villains—give evidence of both continuity and contextual alteration as they move around the world. Accordingly, models of both increasing homogenization and continuing cultural diversity must give way to synthetic models of domination-plus-syncretism.

One question has to do with whether there has been a spread of some form of the culture of "modernization" throughout the world. The roots of the debate stem in part from the work of Max Weber, who, in a dramatic formulation, argued that a special complex of values—those found in ascetic Protestantism—constituted an especially favorable cultural base for the cultivation of a capitalist mentality, entrepreneurship, rational organization of economic activities, and, by immediate extension, economic development or modernization. Sociology and, to some degree, the other social sciences have witnessed a range of interrelated controversies related to the Weber thesis: Was Protestantism indeed an efficacious cultural force, or some kind of derivative of economic development itself? Are "functional counterparts" to Protestantism to be found in other successful cases of economic development? Can "traditional" values adapt themselves into positive forces for development? Does the development of traditional societies call for the "invention" and dissemination of new cultural standards that overshadow or replace traditional ones?

Comparative research has produced no definitive answers to these queries, and the debates promise to continue. The best formulation of this issue with respect to the contemporary global scene, in my estimation, is that of S. N. Eisenstadt (1992), who argues that there is indeed a culture of "modernization" that has spread more or less universally—but irregularly—throughout most parts of the world. His point is not the earlier, somewhat discredited formulation that the "rest" of the world is striving to become like the West. At the same time, almost all nations of the world—the developed, the newly developed, the less developed—have embraced a loose congeries of values that includes a desire for material improvement (development), some species of individualism, some version of democracy, and visible elements of nationalism or cultural-regional pride. This cultural complex is not uniform in content or form but adapts itself to, shapes, and incorporates indigenous cultural traditions, and thus emerges as a powerful motive force for growth. In all cases, however, the value of modernization is a syncretic product, tailored to the distinctive traditions of the nation or area in which it takes root.

The Development of International Community

On this topic we may perhaps be most brief, because the development of an international community has lagged noticeably behind the other aspects of world development. Indeed, a certain kind of "cultural lag" is evident. We have seen only a limited capacity of individuals to bond in a world community that transcends that of the well-established and well-endowed communities of the nation-states, fragile as these may be at this point in history. The logic of this argument is both functionalist and normative: if the world has become more systematic in all other respects, then it is essential that it become systemic as a community, if for no other reason than to provide better regulation of the systemic. However, dominant contemporary forces seem to press toward the development of subnational rather than supranational communities. That being said, several other observations about the development of the international community can be ventured.

•     All international interaction, even war, involves the operation of at least minimal normative understandings about types of behavior that are condoned and not condoned and limits that cannot be exceeded. Much of the cold war communication between the United States and the Soviet Union consisted of the very perilous process of continually drawing lines that could not be crossed. The most dramatic examples were the Berlin airlift and the Cuban missile crisis, but others could be cited.

•     An important model of the growth of international community is found in regional alliances—the European Union is the most salient instance, but the recent increases in cooperation among the United States, Canada, and Mexico is another—in which new forms of interaction and legal regulation grow crescively but irregularly toward a new level of community with at least a minimal notion of individual membership, if not citizenship. The evolution of German nationalism toward the idea of Germany within Europe is a remarkable example of this. The most facilitative mechanism for this kind of growth of community is, at least initially, the mutual self-interest of nations in fostering cooperative relations. At a certain point, however, the supra-national community comes to assume a reality and a logic of its own. At the moment and for the foreseeable future, however, this kind of internationalization of community remains regional, not global.

•     In the last analysis, the growth of international community, if it is to endure, must involve a significant redefinition of identity— with the world or humanity as a whole as its focus, not nations, classes, castes, religions, tribes, and other units. My colleague and friend, Erik Erikson, recognized this necessity in his repeated insistence on the need of humanity—for its own survival—to shed its kaleidoscopic array of "pseudo-species." By this term he referred to the tendency of human groupings to define themselves as the "true people" and to regard all other groupings as less than human in some measure. Erikson's notion of a single world humanity identifying with one another as a single species is still hopelessly utopian in the contemporary world, and probably impossible to realize ever. It is likely that any evolution of a sense of international community cannot be of the gemeinschaft variety that Erikson's vision calls to mind. Entirely new cultural beliefs and sentiments, to say nothing of institutional arrangements, may be called for. But Erikson's conception does point to the ultimate basis for all stable community life: some consciousness of kind that leads to mutual respect, civility, and nondestructiveness.

Two Methodological Messages in Closing

One of the themes emerging from these essays is that the nation-state is not what it used to be, at least in its ideal-typical nineteenth-century form. That happy fusion of control of wealth, power, influence, culture, and social solidarity is in the process of diffusing to units—both supranational and subnational—that crosscut the nation-state.

The implications of these developments are apparently endless. I will trace out only two—the first having to do with the foundations of the social science disciplines, the second having to do with the comparative analysis of societies (including cross-cultural and cross-national studies).

(1) As I pointed out at the beginning of the last chapter, virtually every social science has taken some version of the national society as the basic unit and the framing context for its intellectual enterprise. The question I raise is whether these analytic bases of disciplines are growing less relevant, given the complex of changes occurring in our subject matter. Insofar as the national society becomes less and less the actual determining basis of behavior, interaction, and institutional life, it would seem that it becomes less and less relevant to consider it the primary analytic base for framing and organizing our knowledge about that social life. Perhaps it is time to demote the nation-state from its throne of analytic sovereignty correspondingly, as its real base of economic, political, integrative, and cultural sovereignty is lessened.

This is not to argue that the nation-state can or should disappear as a unit of analysis, largely because it remains and will remain, if weakening, as an organizing unit for much of institutional and collective life. However, its analytic status requires questioning along many lines, among which are the following three.

•     At one time, Parsons (1951) suggested that the unit of a social system (e.g., a society) should not be regarded as a person, but rather as a relational quality among persons, namely, roles. At a  later time Parsons and Smelser (1956) argued that the unit of a system should be a subsystem and that a subsystem was not a person. As things turned out, neither suggestion took very deep root in the social sciences, but they still merit reflection. In particular, if the world is regarded as a system, it is an open question as to what the basic units should be, and perhaps it should be relational qualities among nations and other units that are the focus of some lines of analysis.

•     Insofar as the nation remains the fundamental unit of an international system, it will have to be redefined as a less autonomous, more porous entity. The state now appears to be a unit that "sifts" and "conditions" penetrating influences over which it has limited control, rather than "reacts" to them as an independent agency. The imagery will have to be that of state units as open systems with semipermeable membranes. This alteration would also modify our idea of equilibrium and other concepts that derive from the notion of systems with discrete units. Similarly, our analysis of the causal interaction among economic, political, social, and cultural forces may have to be cast at different levels than within the confines of nation-states.

•     We may also wish to recast our ideas of cultural diversity. Diversity within nations is the subject of widespread political concern at the present time. But it must be remembered that this concern arises in the context of the nation-state as reference point. It is the nation-state that is thought to "contain" a diverse population, and it is nation-states that are regarded as the units being diversified. If the nation-state recedes as a prime contender for the loyalties of citizens—for what is "diversity" if not the pressing of nonstate, nonhomogeneous claims to loyalty and identity as alternatives to nation-state loyalty?—then our whole conceptualization of diversity will have to be modified. Similarly, received cultural notions such as national identity and national culture will have to undergo revision.

(2) Internationalization, finally, challenges our accepted modes of comparative analysis. The methodological underpinning of comparative analysis is that there exists a population of units (nations or societies) that can be compared and that associations and causal processes within these units are deemed stronger or weaker according to variations in their occurrence. From the beginning the confounding effect of the possibility of the nonindependence of cases ("Galton's problem") has been an issue in comparative studies, and it has never been satisfactorily resolved (Smelser 1976). But if it is the case that the empirical independence of "units" of the world system of "nations" is being eroded through the processes of internationalization, then Gal-ton's problem becomes progressively more serious. In the extreme, internationalization can make a mockery of the idea that independent units are being compared, because common observed effects may not result from the internal dynamics of the national system-units but from the common effect of suprasystemic processes. At that point the comparative analyst must think of abandoning the idea of nations as "cases" in a larger "population" and instead consider them as dependent, permeable units of some kind of superordinate system. In that case comparative analysis as we frequently conduct it would lose force, as would its ancillary operations of sampling, correlational analysis, the comparison of national time series, and causal inferences based on these. What would be called for, instead, would be analyses of the "case" of the world and tracing the ramifications of dynamics within this over-arching system composed of partially independent units. In this connection, we might be called on to invent new methodologies and methods of comparative analysis.