Bulletin

Issue: January/February 2007

Research in Action

Not truly global...

In their collaborative study of globalisation through its umbilical links to the British Empire, Professors Gary Magee, left, and Andrew Thompson are breaking new ground. What they see includes, for example:

• that globalisation is ‘not truly global’: that it is, to a large extent, an inter-connected series of parallel movements of ethnicallybased, regionally integrated migrations.
• that today’s globalisation had much of its antecedents in the same regionalised forms of integration that were characteristic of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, exemplified by the outward migration of millions of British and European migrants in search of the ‘new world.’ (See main story, Globalisation through the prism of Empire.)
• that then as now this created ‘antiglobal’ tensions sourced in co-ethnic, nation-state resistance to ‘some kinds of migration’ - for example in Australia then by the White Australia Policy, and throughout the world today among many societies resisting the influx of people from different ethnic backgrounds.
• that the influx of Africans and Asians to the UK and France after the Second World War was collateral, reverse migration - an inevitable tidal flow-back following outbound and homecoming streams of European migration.
• that the weakness of globalisation, now as then, may be inherent in its structure: in the co-ethnic, regionally-oriented, socially and economically integrated networks on which it is built.
• that the fabric of globalisation may eventually fray under the strain of internationally challenging economic conditions.
• that its regionally-integrated constituents may again retreat behind fortresses of nationalism and ethnicity.