ABSTRACT
Many years ago, I pointed out that even globalization, which is so often seen as something that began in the 1990s, or perhaps after the SecondWorldWar, in fact has no meaningful starting point (Mennell, 1990). At most, one can say that the survival groups on which most people depend for the basic requirements of their lives have, over many millennia, grown larger and fewer in number; and that the chains of interdependence that link survival units to each other have become more numerous and tighter. Such chains include bonds of rivalry, hostility and violence as well as of collaboration, amity and peaceful coexistence. Viewed in this long-term perspective, globalization has been driven as much by war as by the expansion of trade and contact between cultures. But, in a more conventional perspective, the term globalization is often used almost as a
synonym for Americanization – for the rise to military, economic, financial and cultural dominance of the United States of America, since 1990 the self-proclaimed sole superpower. The period 1945-90, when the USA and the USSR, with their respective networks of allies, confronted each other across the planet, was a key precursor period. Such bipolar figurations had existed before, but they had been regional rather than global in scope, with the result that the victor in each contest was sooner or later confronted by opponents with roughly equivalent or greater power potential.What was different about the ColdWar, Elias pointed out, was that ‘in the present phase of the millennial elimination struggle, all possible actors are already on stage’ (2007: 154, but writing in 1980-1). In another essay, he foresaw the collapse of one of the rival parties to the conflict as one possible outcome, in which ‘unification of the world under a central monopoly would be brought about – a world state under the leadership of one of the two hegemonic powers’ (2008a: 103), though he did not live quite long enough to witness the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union or the USA’s more or less conscious and intentional attempt to fulfil his prophecy. In Humana Conditio (2010b), however, Elias expressed some scepticism about whether such a world monopoly was in practice feasible.
