-Caveat Lector-

from:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_sept_2000/argument.html
Click Here: <A
HREF="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_sept_2000/argument.html">Foreign
Policy. The Magazine of Global Politics…</A>
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Foreign Policy
1779 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20036-2103
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Fax: 202-483-4430

The Spy Who Loved Globalization
James Bond was wrestling with forces of integration and fragmentation decades
before political scientists invented the ideas.
By David C. Earnest and James N. Rosenau
A group outside the world's established state system exploits tensions among
sovereign countries to advance a pet cause. Heads of state attempt to
coordinate their instruments of government to curtail that group's power.
Meanwhile, the tensions between sovereignty-bound governments and this
sovereignty-free rival threaten dire consequences for all humankind. To
contemporary globalization theorists, it is a familiar story. But it is also
the central plotline of practically every James Bond movie—many of which were
written by novelist Ian Fleming and adapted by screenwriters decades before
scholars ever pondered such ideas.

Art doesn't just imitate life, as the cliché goes, it anticipates it: The
first signs of the coming "century of war" were manifest in the popular
novels of the late 19th century, such as Sir George Chesney's The Battle of
Dorking (1871). The earliest indicators of the contemporary Space Age
appeared in science fiction and comic strips published decades before the
1950s. Given our modern celluloid sensibilities, it makes sense that
television and motion pictures should presage how the 21st century will
unfold.

But Bond, James Bond? Espionage is the most Cold War of genres. Even 007's
boss "M" dismisses him as a "relic of the Cold War" in Goldeneye (1995),
echoing the sentiments of many movie critics. But as early as the 1950s,
before Sean Connery first brought Fleming's hero to the screen, James Bond's
world was shaken, and stirred, by phenomena we've come to identify with
globalization. Indeed, compared with the real crises of the 1960s and 1970s,
Bond's world seems strikingly modern.

Each story consists of several fundamental, predictable elements: The
antagonist is a sovereignty-free actor—either a person or an
organization—that threatens the welfare and security of a society or perhaps
the entire world. This sovereignty-free actor thrives within the folds of the
sovereign state system—areas of activity that states are unable or unwilling
to regulate, such as international organized crime, arms trade, terrorism, or
international commerce. To combat a challenge to their authority and protect
and provide for the common welfare, state officials must put aside their
disagreements and cooperate.

Consider 007's nemeses. The most memorable of Fleming's villains is an
organization called SPECTRE, the "Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence,
Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion." Campy, to be sure, but not unfamiliar in
its methods. This sovereignty-free actor seeks to squeeze money from states
and to humiliate governments, either to create fissures in international
alliances or to spark popular unrest and political instability. In
Thunderball (1965) and Never Say Never Again (1983), SPECTRE hijacks nuclear
weapons to pry a hefty ransom from world powers. The tensions of the space
race almost explode into armed conflict when SPECTRE steals U.S. and Soviet
spacecrafts in You Only Live Twice (1967). While these goals may be crude in
literary terms, they prophesy the methods of contemporary sovereignty-free
actors such as millionaire and alleged terrorist Osama bin Laden or the
various Colombian drug cartels. These groups thrive by exploiting the
inability of states to cooperate and maintain control of transnational
technological, financial, commercial, and migratory flows.

Other Bond villains seem even more modern: A financier tries to hoard gold to
sow instability in foreign exchange markets and ruin industrial economies in
Goldfinger (1964), much like financier George Soros—if you believe his
critics. Multinational corporations seek to monopolize markets and use
international conflict to create demand for their products in A View to a
Kill (1985), a vision of the world that demonstrators at the World Trade
Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle would have found familiar. Millenarian
mass murder appears as a theme in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), The
Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and Moonraker (1979), anticipating the recent mass
murders and suicides in Uganda and outside San Diego (not to mention
Jonestown two decades earlier), and highlighting the persistent inability of
states to protect their citizens from violence. The ironic message of these
films is clear and prescient: States are better at protecting their citizens
from the violence of other states than from the violence and exploitation of
sovereignty-free actors, whether they be cults or corporations.
Without fail, tensions among sovereign states provide Bond's villains with
opportunities to challenge state authority. Just as military rivalry keeps
countries from cooperating on issues of mutual interest, it helps keep
terrorists armed and financed; just as international economic competition
prevents states from agreeing on trade and tariff regimes, it empowers
corporations to engage in damaging regulatory arbitrage. This dynamic of
state competition enables sovereignty-free actors, be they fictional Bond
villains or actual narcoterrorists and multinational corporations, to exploit
international politics and further their own agenda.

It is startling that Fleming developed this insight long before many scholars
of world affairs began to analyze the problems and consequences of
globalization. Whereas international relations theorists of the 1960s and
1970s focused on superpower security struggles and international regimes,
Fleming recognized an evolving second world of politics populated by
authorities free from the domestic and international constraints and
responsibilities of governments. Much like in Bond stories, the clash between
that world and the world of sovereign states has produced integrative and
fragmenting dynamics that some contemporary international affairs theorists
have labeled "glocalization," "chaord," and "fragmegration."

If Bond films have taught us one thing, it is that popular awareness of
globalization and its attendant tensions and paradoxes predates by decades
serious scholarly treatment of the subject. That a British author of fiction
in the 1950s and Hollywood scriptwriters in the 1960s and 1970s identified
themes that resonate so well—across not only four decades of movies but also a
cross cultures—should stir humility in every international affairs scholar.

Ironically, among those today who question whether globalization is a new
phenomenon, many do so as a means of arguing against the utility of
globalization theories. We are led to the opposite conclusion: If the
features of globalization have been around so long, why didn't we develop our
theories sooner? It seems that, as in the movies, James Bond is a step ahead
of us.

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Amen.
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