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What
Is Culture, Anyway?
Few
words are as hard to define as culture. In a strict, anthropological
sense, 'cultural' is often used in contradistinction to 'genetic'.
That's to say, if a piece of human behaviour cannot be attributed
to genetic evolution, then it is said to have
a cultural origin. On the other hand, in discussing the culture
of a human group or tribe, the word is usually
being used in a portmanteau sense and includes both genetic and
non-genetic elements.
In
this book, it would not make much sense to discuss the globalization
of genetic aspects of culture, since they are already common to
all humans; clearly, its arguments are concerned more with the differences
between humans rather than their similarities.
On
the whole, the word will be used here to convey the totality of
the idea that a person has of their own (or another) society, and
inevitably this is going to trespass sometimes onto genetic ground,
not least because it is often unclear where the dividing line actually
occurs.
Introduction
This
chapter continues the analysis of the process of globalization.
Although the word itself is most often used in economic contexts,
and the vociferous opponents of globalization focus their attentions
mainly on its economic dimensions, cultural globalization is arguably
more fundamental to the process. Without cultural globalization
to create a common mental framework among humans, economic or political
globalization would have little impact on most aspects of human
life.
When
American chocolate bars began to elbow traditional Russian sweets
off the supermarket shelves in the 1990s, the Russians called it
'snickerizatsiya'. Even the old-style magazin (grocery store - and
it was a French word adopted in the 18th century) turned into a
'supermarkyet'; and you can't move in Central Moscow without falling
into an Irish bar.
The
French look down their Gallic noses at 'Mickey Mouse' culture (a
French word, of course) and have a grand institution whose task
it is to maintain the purity of the sacred French language. But
still there is Disneyland outside Paris, where children go at le
'weekend', and there are 'pubs' on the Champs Elysees.
Economic
and political globalization is driven mostly by international or
global institutions and organizations, assisted by language;
but cultural globalization is driven by language, assisted by revolutions
in communications and travel.
Culture,
as expressed and articulated by groups of people (nations, villages,
schools, legislatures, clubs etc) evidently changes along with development
of individuals' internal understanding
of their roles. Since much of the cultural identity of modern human
individuals is wrapped up with the concept of nationality, changes
to the form, role and status of nations will have a disproportionate
influence on culture.
Says
Martin Wolf 1 : 'The
State normally defines the identity of human beings. A sense of
belonging is a part of people's sense of security. It is perhaps
not surprising that some of the most successfully internationally
integrated economies are small, homogeneous countries with a strong
sense of collective identity.'
That
is no doubt correct, but its corollary is that as people increasingly
feel themselves as actors on a global stage, rather than on a national
stage, so will culture become global rather than national. This
is not at all to say that culture will become homogenized into some
kind of featureless global mish-mash - what is feared by some opponents
of globalization - because a person who steps out of the strait-jacket
of national cultural identity has freedom
in both directions, both onto a bigger stage and also onto selected
smaller ones.
Human
Consciousness as the Receptacle of Culture
Clearly,
individual consciousness plays a major role in the understanding
and expression of culture; and cultural change over time needs to
be seen at least in part as linked to changes in individual and
group consciousness. As noted in the Introduction, it is certainly
not right to think that the consciousness of an individual,
as we experience it in the 21st century, is to be taken as a fixed
aspect of human individuals throughout time, or even through recorded
history. There is much argument about when consciousness originated,
and why, but not much dispute that it has enlarged enormously over
the last few thousand years. Even more surely, self-consciousness
can be taken to be a relatively recent addition to the equipment
of the human psyche.
Emile
Durkheim 2 describes the individual
consciousness as being the receptacle of content held in the 'collective
consciousness', meaning somehow the cultural burden of society.
However, it needs to be said that Durkheim, as would be expected
for the period at which he was writing, does not distinguish clearly
between the conscious and and the unconscious
as these terms are now understood. The very word 'unconscious' does
not occur in Durkheim's book (first published in 1893) until page
150, where 'instinctive' would do almost as well. It wasn't until
Freud (after 1900) that humans began to be conscious of their unconscious
in the modern sense of the term! 'Psychic' might be a possible replacement
for 'conscious' in Durkheim's writing.
Durkheim's
statement about culture is therefore not that useful in discussing
consciousness in the modern sense as distinct from the overall cognitive
apparatus (see Kuper 3 , for instance
). However, many other writers are in agreement
with Durkheim both that the individual takes her moral
content from the collective, and that the individual
psyche plays an increasingly prominent role in society.
Steven
Mithen 4 quotes Nicholas Humphrey
in asserting that the biological function of consciousness was to
allow one individual to predict the behaviour
of another. He seems to accept that human consciousness broadened
over time as the modern mind was created. Thus, for Mithen, chimpanzees
have consciousness, but only in respect of social interaction, while
modern human consciousness covers a much broader array of mental
activities.
Whether
or not consciousness evolved partly in order to allow the participation
of human individuals in the culture of the groups in which they
lived, it is a fact that culture can hardly exist without a mechanism
to generate adherence to common norms of behaviour, and that this
requires individuals to be aware of their behaviour in relation
to that of others. The cultures that developed prior to the emergence
of the nation state, or more generally, prior
to the development of a hierarchical model of society (say, prior
to 10,000 years ago), were heavily skewed towards the realities
of life in a kin-group, and/or the hunter-gatherer
group.
Such
cultures certainly included rules for inter-personal behaviour,
observance of myth-based social practices, language, the use of
music, dance and painting for mythic or plainly social purposes,
the organization of trade, and most importantly the maintenance
of kin-group bonds through marriage and other relationship types.
However, in the absence of any permanent means of recording information,
or of permanent, specialized institutions, culture remained limited
to what could be passed on by individual tuition, and was surely
far more dependent on basic, unvarying human nature than on separately
developed norms.
Anthropologists
and ethnologists stress the cultural commonality of the primitive
tribes they have studied, although the detailed expression of cultural
traits varies widely. Language is the most
obvious example of this, but other central planks of early group-based
cultures include dispute resolution (the delivery
of justice, to use a fancier term), trading
practices, and myth-based behavioural codes.
The commonality of these features of human society, which were largely
preserved in the societal and cultural forms which developed during
the earlier stages of recorded history, indeed right up to mediaeval
times, was to be blown apart by the development of the nation state.
The
Role Of The Nation State In Establishing Cultural Uniformity
As
explained in the Introduction, a sense of national cultural commonality
came into being as a result of the spread of nation states in the
17th to 19th centuries, driven by the emergence of national 'print-languages'
which fostered a feeling of community among their users (readers),
although 'print-languages' and nations were by no means co-terminous
(see Benedict Anderson 5
.) Nations as such had existed prior to the 15th century, but
owed little to any sense of nationality among their inhabitants.
It's
probably not accurate to think of national consciousness
as somehow replacing the previously existing layers or aspects of
consciouness: a 19th century worker still belonged to a nuclear
family, an extended family, a local community and a host of other
groups, each of which contributes its own cultural resonance to
the individual's total cultural equipment. However, the State
certainly did deliberately try to create over-riding cultural imperatives
(patriotism, for example), and other national cultural content came
about through the agency of the media, sometimes
with government's active involvement and sometimes without.
In
between national culture and private group-based culture there is
a set of group-like associations which exist for a variety of semi-
or purely public reasons, and which contribute strongly towards
the cultural totality of an individual's environment. Trades Unions
are an obvious example. This aspect of states has been widely investigated
in public choice theory. Many of these types of group have unhelpful
features, and they are far from conforming to the ideal of a human
collective.
Richerson
and Boyd 6 describe how the trend towards
larger groupings that has accompanied the growth of the State has
tended to be an abuse of the nature of the basic, evolved human
group: 'Almost everything in modern life - trade, religion, government
and science - is a mistake from the point of view of the selfish
gene.'
Mancur Olsen 7 shows
that the activities of special-interest groups at policy level have
a negative impact in economic terms. Obvious examples would include
trades unions, employer organizations and producer lobby groups.
In most respects they are no advertisement for groupishness, and
what can one say except that you have to fight fire with fire. It
is the fault of the State that trades unions, which once upon a
time fulfilled useful social roles for their members are now reduced
to holding out begging bowls and standing in the way of change.
Although
printing was the primary technological innovation which allowed
modern nation states to form, they have not been slow to use other
innovative communication techniques, including of course wireless,
television and the movies quite effectively in order to (mis)educate,
(dis)inform and (over)control their citizens; this is a process
that perhaps reached its apogee during the Second World War, when
most countries exercised stringent control over the content of newspapers,
books, radio, movies and other media. In other words, they attempted
to control the cultural life-blood of their societies.
This
was a difference only in degree, rather than kind, to what had already
been increasingly the case. By the beginning of the 20th century,
individuals already conceived their cultural identity in strongly
national terms. This had not been the explicit goal of nation states,
although they would not have been unhappy about such an outcome.
The
emergence of national stereotypes is one indication of what had
happened. They were and are extremely well developed for almost
all significant nations. Think of John Bull; the Germans occupying
sun-beds in a famous TV advertisement; 'loud' Americans 'over here';
the French with their berets and wine; Italians in shades and stripey
t-shirts; and so on. These cultural personifications of countries
date from the 19th century, evidencing the fact that 'country' had
become a major indicator of cultural identity. This would have been
a nonsensical idea 500 years before.
National
stereotypes are alive and well in the early 21st century, although
their time in the sun may be coming to an end. The British national
cultural assemblage includes:
Warm
beer
Being reserved
Lager louts
Pubs
Football hooligans
Mean Scotsmen
Drunken Irish
Morris dancing
The BBC
Red London buses
The friendly bobbie
Blackpool Tower
Benny Hill
Inability to speak foreign languages
Fox-hunting
Whippets
The Beatles
Remembrance Sunday
This
list could be five times as long; but there is no need to go on,
the picture is clear. Any given individual in the UK would align
themselves with only a few, or possibly even none of these categories;
never mind, it is a description of Britishness which is instantly
recognizable to Brits, and to many other non-British people in the
world. Benny Hill is very popular in Russia, along with Shakespeare
and Absolutely Fabulous.
Does
one suppose that 14th century villagers would have had a corresponding
set of cultural categories to mark themselves off from other people
from far away? It is a fascinating exercise to imagine how such
people might describe the distinguishing characteristics of their
culture if we were now able to ask them about it. Here's a guess:
Feudal
ties
Tithes
Agriculture
Archers
Demotic speakers (the feudal lords spoke French or Latin)
God-fearing church-goers
Beer
Outlaws
Beggars
Markets
Sheep
Would
the list have been about the same anywhere in Europe, except perhaps
for the sheep? The comparison illustrates how individual consciousness
has expanded to take in concepts linked to nationality, and it could
not have done this without the advent of communications technologies,
first books, then newspapers, radio and television.
The
Beginning of the End for National Consciousness
The
second half of the 20th century saw a number of developments which
have further expanded consciousness in a way that tends to diminish
national identity and to allow individuals
to see themselves in a broader context.
The
availability of recording and communication techniques was the pre-condition
for this to take places, and after WWII when states had less need
to control their citizenry, people began to take advantage of new
freedoms to travel physically and mentally on a mass scale.
It
would not be right to say that school primary and secondary education
(firmly in the grip of nation states, after all) has played a major
role in the cultural expansion we have witnessed in the last 50
years. Curriculi are woefully archaic, and teachers are a highly
conservative force in cultural terms. We must look elsewhere for
a number of trends that have played their part in the process: a
boom in tertiary and adult education, more leisure time, more money,
the mushrooming of television content and the introduction of popular
air travel are some of the most important of these; and now the
Internet will become the most important
of all.
Highly
educated people tend to sniff at the popular culture that has been
created by and for the mass market. There is certainly something
rather repellent about the image of an obese, chav couch potato
surrounded by empty lager cans, watching reality TV. (Perhaps this
is only a British stereotype, in any case.) But that is to disregard
the millions of young people who have degrees (even if only in media
studies), have done a gap year in some vaguely socially responsible
way, are working in a job with prospects, and in a hundred ways
have cultural perspectives that enormously outstretch the mental
universe available to their grand-parents working in the mine or
the fields.
The
Internet
Technology
impacts on individual brains by enlarging the cognitive
space accessible to the human mind. The social group and language
itself was the first adaptation used by humans to increase the amount
of information available to individuals. Much later, humans used
writing to record and store information they could not carry in
their brains. Printing enormously extended the availability of written
stores of material. Now, physical means of extending linguistic
consciousness have been succeeded by other types
of recording technique, including video, DVD, movies, and computer
storage. All these add to the reach of consciousness and consequently
the extent of human culture.
The
Internet enormously expands the universe of cultural content available
to an individual. Although life already
seems unimaginable without the Internet, it has only been an embedded
feature of normal life in advanced nations for less than ten years.
There is therefore no adult generation for which the Internet has
been an embedded part of their childhood, and no-one knows what
will happen when the 'wired' generation now growing up starts to
contribute to the cultural burden of society.
Unlike other inventions that have expanded human consciousness,
however, the Internet plays to the strength of the human tendency
to affiliate and associate.
A
Californian e-Bay trader living in a 'gated' community who accumulates
his profits in an offshore bank account
(legal as long as he pays his taxes), spends his evenings on World
of Warfare, chats with putative Ukrainian girl-friends over Skype
VOIP, and goes to his tennis club (games set up using ICQ, of course,
among club members) in the afternoons is about as detached from
the conventional 'real'-world economy as he could be. Almost everything
he does is the result of group activity and
is governed by sets of group rules (laws) that are independent of
the State's rule of law.
The
insistent intrusion of 'trade' into Internet
groups is no surprise to an evolutionary biologist: as noted both
in the Introduction and in Chapter 1, trade was one of the first
characteristic activities of human hunter-gatherer
groups once they began to settle down, or perhaps even before. The
instinct to trade is very deeply rooted in the human
psyche, and sits on very nearly the same level of the unconscious
as does groupishness. Nation states, among
their other crimes, have tended to set severe limits to the ability
of individuals to express their proclivity to trade, first by encouraging
a pattern of existence in which people work until they are too tired
to do more than go home and sleep, by marking off most 'professions'
and reserving them to monopolistic groups of middle-class individuals,
and by selling (also monopolistic) trading privileges in many economic
sectors to individuals or companies.
The explosion in car-boot sales and 'Sunday markets' which followed
the development of mass motoring in the UK bears graphic witness
to the amount of bottled-up trading energy resident in wage-slaves.
What is now happening on the Internet in terms of trading, through
such as e-Bay and virtual reality environments
will dwarf the car-boot phenomenon.
The
impact of the Internet on society is explored in much greater depth
in Chapter 7, while Virtual Internet Communities (VICs) such as
World of Warcraft are analysed in Appendix 3.
Here,
it is enough to note that the Internet will enormously enlarge the
cultural psychological space occupied by private groups, widely
defined, while tending to eat away at the cultural foot-print of
national and quasi-State organizations by increasing the objectivity
of individuals and leading them to question the right of such organizations
to the cultural hegemony they claim.
The
Future of Language as a Cultural Marker
As
has been seen, language is a dominant factor in establishing the
cultural space of an individual. Before language existed, it is
reasonable to suppose, culture would have been limited to music,
dance, graphic images and mythic ceremony, with some very primitive
aspects of inter-personal relationships, all of which could be transmitted
by imitation.
As
we have also seen, the invention of printing
made language available as a tool of mass indoctrination or education,
and prepared the ground for the emergence of modern nation
states.
There
are an enormous number of languages in existence, and they are in
a constant state of evolution, so that it would never be possible
to define that number exactly. Ethnologists and anthropologists
constantly bemoan the loss of diversity in languages as minority
cultures become subsumed into more successful ones. If a language
has not been written down (still the case for a majority of the
languages spoken on the planet) then once it has died out, its culture
is lost. The culture of a written language survives the death of
the language in the sense that books, plays, operas and other cultural
artefacts involving language remain extant, and can give some clue
of what the culture of speakers of the language may have been like.
But without a recording of the psyche of
a speaker - and preferably many speakers - of the language, how
far can one really assert that we 'know' that culture?
The
question is far from academic, since the time is not far off (2020?)
when immediate machine translation from one language to another
will become a reality, and soon after that (2030?) there will be
a 'babel-fish' as in The Hitch-hiker's Guide
To The Galaxy - an implant which will enable an individual to hear
another's speech in her own language. These technologies, and the
implacable advance of English as a common global language, will
undermine the existence of today's widely differentiated set of
languages and the variegated cultures they generate.
There
are further, more speculative possibilities. Despite intense study,
there is no agreement yet on whether psychological concepts exist
in the absence of language, and are merely clothed in verbal form
when communicated to one's linguistic consciousness or to the outside
world, or whether the concepts are stored in absolute linguistic
form. The present and future roles of language in delivering culture,
and the extent of non-linguistic symbolic
cognitive representation will be dealt with more thoroughly in Chapter
9, Language and Other Cultural Artefacts. But perhaps it is not
a distortion of the situation to say that opinion is tending towards
a considerable degree of independence of conceptual thought from
language. It is quite difficult to explain a person who speaks a
number of languages equally fluently without supposing some degree
of shared conceptual storage.
It
is not necessary to posit the existence of telepathy in order to
have a non-linguistic world: experiments on the control of prosthetic
limbs without the mediation of nerves or even the immediate sensory
apparatus of the medulla oblongata show that psychological events
and decisions pass through a varied set of implementing and converting
mechanisms before they have their effect in the physical world.
Can it be ruled out that direct radio (or magnetic) communication
could take place between people's psyches without the interposition
of language?
If
it's the case that language is at least partly just a cloak placed
around non-linguistic thought for the purposes of expression, then
it is possible that communication between individuals could become
non-verbal, at least to an extent. What then of culture? Beethoven
will still be Beethoven; Cezanne will still be Cezanne; and love
will still be love: 'A rose by any other name smells just as sweet'.
Is
it possible then that culture, to the extent it is carried by particular
forms of linguistic expression, is a spandrel, ie it is an accidental
by-product of evolution? Maybe culture, in
so far as the word means 'what makes someone different', is just
something that gets in the way? Of course, in so far as it means,
what makes someone individual, that is fine.
Well,
retreating from such speculations to firmer ground, it is at least
undeniable that mutually understandable linguistic communication
will shortly exist, regardless of the 'native' languages of the
speakers and listeners concerned. This is certain to have a powerful
effect in terms of reducing cultural differences between nations.
Let's
explore that a little. Human nature is a
given; that is the inescapable conclusion of countless researchers.
Humans, all humans, have at least the following social
characteristics:
- A
propensity to affiliate
- Ability
to belong to multiple groups simultaneously
- Awareness
of one's membership of groups and of the others who belong to
them
- Ability
to communicate on a group level, and to display behaviours which
are constant and predictable among members of a group
- Ability
to function in a complex social hierarchy
- Use
of grooming, deception, gossip and reputation
management techniques
- The
ability to distinguish individuals and remember their behaviour,
and behave back accordingly.
- Shared
intentionality, and a theory of mind
- Reciprocal
altruism; a tendency to help other members of groups to which
the individual belongs
- Xenophobia;
a tendency to fight and mistrust members of groups other than
one's own
- The
possession of a shared (collective) unconscious
among all humans which contains archetypes
and myths spanning a very wide range of aspects of human life
- The
possession of a shared (collective) unconscious which contains
information about the characteristics of groups to which the individual
belongs
- The
ability to feel and express a wide range of emotions, including
fear, joy, pride, rage, happiness, misery, shame
- The
ability to empathize
- The
ability to learn and use language of various types (mimetic, visual,
conceptual and spoken)
- Musical
ability and the propensity to dance
- Consciousness
of group memberships and the capacity to submit to group demands
at the expense of individual desires
- A
tendency to accept guidance from qualified
'elder' members of a group to which an individual belongs
- A
propensity to exchange and to trade
Nowhere
in the list will you find any of the British cultural characteristics
set out in a previous section; they exist courtesy of the power
that language has to form and preserve cultural ideas (one could
almost say 'memes', along with Richard Dawkins).
'Mean
Scotsmen' is a sample British cultural characteristic given above,
and which arguably could not exist without the linguistic concepts
'mean' and 'Scotsmen'.
No-one
supposes that any given Scot is necessarily mean, let alone that
all Scots are mean. Nonetheless, most English speakers and quite
a few non-English speakers will have that generalization in their
psyches and will employ it, whether consciously or unconsciously,
in deploying linguistic and other behaviours when a Scotsman forms
part of a life situation. But meanness is not a standard human characteristic.
This is not to say that it is inappropriate sometimes to be mean,
just that it is wrong to think, however jokingly, that a particular
type of human is mean by nature. And it is language that causes
such a result. Maybe we will be better off without it! At any rate,
we would be better off without the cultural distortions that are
embodied in the existence of different languages.
The
argument can be left there, for the moment. Parts Two and Three
will take it up again in the effort to map possible futures for
the human race.
Organizational
and Commercial Trends Towards Cultural Globalization
Important
as they may be, nationality and language are far from being the
only influences on the cultural mind-set of an individual in the
21st century.
Travel
has already been mentioned. Among the other fields which are likely
to contribute to the process of cultural globalization are education,
health (including charity) and sport. The remainder of this section
consists of descriptions of some of the more prominent international
organizations working in these fields, along with some general remarks
to begin each sub-section.
All
of the organizations mentioned are described in comparable or greater
detail in Appendix 1.
Education
As
noted above, nation states have exercised a
stranglehold over primary and secondary education for the last 100
years or more. Their motives are very mixed, but certainly include
the desire to create obedient, socially well-adjusted citizens.
Even the private educational sector in major Western countries has
followed a pro-state agenda. It is joked that the British private
school system was designed (by the Victorians) to train Rhodesian
policemen; and it was true in a general way that such schools existed
to produce a carefully crafted supervisory elite for a colonial
power. The problem is that they have hardly changed since.
The
conservatism of education professionals, and the tendency for special
interest groups such as religions to seize
upon education as a means of propagating their particular world
views conspire to reduce the responsiveness of the educational system
to ongoing cultural trends, at least at primary and secondary levels.
In
addition, parents are not slow to impose their own ideas and prejudices
on their children. This is a controversial subject; but it has to
be asked whether bringing a child up in a highly sectarian environment
which may be at odds with surrounding social culture is really doing
it any favours. Examples in contemporary European societies are
not hard to find.
Tertiary
education has been freer, and more practical, since in most countries
it has not been directly under state control, although usually it
has some financial dependency on the state. And adult education
has been largely market-driven - but the damage has already been
done, in most cases!
What
is needed is a free market for education, and this is nowhere in
sight other than perhaps in management education and in a very primitive
way, on the Internet. The impact of education
on the development of human thought will therefore lie largely in
the hands of individuals who choose
to take advantage of educational opportunities away from the mainstream.
The Internet will eventually have a powerful impact in this respect,
and there will be a great expansion of institutions such as the
UK's Open University which allow remote learning.
The
signs of change can already be discerned. A search on Yahoo for
business schools brought up 331 links; among the first 20 of them,
all business schools, 7 are in the USA, 11 in Europe, one in Japan
and one in Brazil. In 17 out of the 20, the language of tuition
is English; the exceptions were one college in Italy, one in France,
and the one in Brazil (Portuguese language). A search for business
schools in the French language shows that almost all of them operate
in English; even the Grenoble Ecole de Management (!) has an English
web-site.
At
primary and secondary level, the 'international schools' movement
is quite prominent and is growing rapidly.
Educational
Organisations:
The International Baccalaureat Organization
currently works with 1,895 schools in 124 countries to develop and
offer programmes to more than 487,000 students aged 3 to 19 years.
Says its Director, Dr Seefried: 'What started as an education of
the citizen in a local or state context has to now embrace not only
an education for national citizenship but also a cosmopolitan sense
of civic responsibilities. In a much enlarged global context, the
teaching of ethics and ethical decision-making has to be grounded
in the shared values of our common world heritage and traditions
of learning.'
The
European Council of International Schools provides
services to support professional development, curriculum and instruction,
leadership and good governance in international schools located
in Europe and around the world. ECIS says that its schools are committed
to the promotion of an international outlook amongst all members
of their communities, and that their staff and students are characterized
by knowledge of, and respect for, the beliefs and values of their
own and other cultures and by the willingness to acknowledge the
existence and necessity of a range of perspectives.
ECIS
members and affiliate members serve and support member schools through
an ongoing process of professional renewal characterized and facilitated
by networking, research, sharing and collegiality.
The
Asia Society's International Studies Schools Network
(ISSN), a US organization, says: 'Urban secondary school students
deserve an opportunity to be successful within an increasingly global
environment. By introducing the study of world regions, languages,
and international affairs into the national high school reform agenda,
Asia Society aims to modernize instruction and be a catalyst for
“bringing the world” into the classroom.
International
Schools Services, founded in 1955 in Princeton, New
Jersey, is dedicated to educational excellence for children attending
international schools worldwide. ISS plans and manages schools throughout
the world for companies, individuals, and consortiums and currently
works with more than 300 international schools.
The
International Schools Association has a general brief
to support the development of international schools and was instrumental
in the development of the International Baccalaureate Organization
(see above). It is linked to UNESCO.
Health
There
are vast numbers of international health and relief organizations,
charitable, religious or public in their nature, but here the concentration
is on those organizations whose agenda takes in cultural and ethical
change in addition to relief or health improvement as such.
Health
Organizations:
The
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) says
it is an impartial, neutral and independent organization whose exclusively
humanitarian mission is to protect the lives and dignity of victims
of war and internal violence and to provide them with assistance.
It directs and coordinates the international relief activities conducted
by the Movement in situations of conflict. It also endeavours to
prevent suffering by promoting and strengthening humanitarian law
and universal humanitarian principles.
Medecins
Sans Frontieres. It is part of MSF's work to address
any violations of basic human rights encountered
by field teams, violations perpetrated or sustained by political
actors. It does so by confronting the responsible actors themselves,
by putting pressure on them through mobilisation of the international
community and by issuing information publicly. In order to prevent
compromise or manipulation of MSF's relief activities, MSF maintains
neutrality and independence from individual governments.
The
Global Health Council, formerly the National Council
of International Health, is a US-based, nonprofit membership organization
that was created in 1972 to identify priority world health problems
and to report on them to the US public, legislators, international
and domestic government agencies, academic institutions and the
global health community. The Global Health Council Policy Series
provides a platform for global health practitioners to inform and
engage in global health policy through congressional briefings,
educational forums, and policy dinner dialogues.
The
World Health Organization is the United Nations specialized
agency for health. WHO is governed by 193 Member States through
the World Health Assembly. From the perspective of developing global
standards and practices, the WHO's Ethics, Trade, Human Rights and
Health Law (ETH) unit is relevant.
The
work carried out by ETH, which involves technical units across WHO/HQ
as well as regional and country offices, ranges from activities
that date to WHO's founding to responses to the most contemporary
challenges facing Member States. It aims to promote human dignity,
justice and security in health, and to ensure that the emerging
global architecture for health governance is developed in line with
ethical and human rights principles.
The
International Medical Informatics Association is an
independent organization established under Swiss law in 1989. IMIA
plays a major global role in the application of information science
and technology in the fields of healthcare and research in medical,
health and bio-informatics.
In
the next few years IMIA says it will focus on "bridging the
knowledge gap" by facilitating and providing support to developing
nations. Specific goals include supporting the ongoing development
of the African Region, and, on a broader basis, the development
of the "Virtual University", an ongoing
initiative of IMIA’s working Group 1, Health and Medical Informatics
Education.
At
the fall meeting of 2000, a task force was established by the General
Assembly to develop an Ethical Code of Practice for adoption by
IMIA. The resulting draft was reviewed by the General Assembly in
the 2001 meeting, following detailed consultation with IMIA member
countries and was submitted for approval in the fall of 2002.
The Council for International Organizations
of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) is an international, non-governmental,
non-profit organization established jointly by WHO and UNESCO in
1949.
The
main objectives of CIOMS are:
-
To facilitate and promote international activities in the field
of biomedical sciences, especially when the participation of several
international associations and national institutions is deemed
necessary;
-
To maintain collaborative relations with the United Nations and
its specialized agencies, in particular with WHO and UNESCO;
-
To serve the scientific interests of the international biomedical
community in general.
To
achieve its objectives, CIOMS has initiated and coordinates long-term
programmes in Bioethics (the issuance of international
guidelines for the application of ethical principles in various
key areas), Health Policy, Ethics and Human Values, and Drug Development
and Use (standardized international reporting of individual cases
of serious, unexpected adverse drug reactions).
It will be seen that, although there are as yet no formalized international
rule-making or judicial bodies in the health sector, most of the
organizations listed above are working their way towards global
structures of ethical and practical guidelines. Within say 20 years,
surely, the standards will have mandatory global application, and
there will be a system of specialized tribunals to handle dispute
resolution and rule-breaking among health practitioners and national
agencies.
Sport
While
education and health have been seen as a primary responsibility
of national governance for quite a long time, at any rate since
the beginning of the 20th century, governments have not concerned
themselves overmuch with sport until relatively recently, and then
more from a 'patriotic' perspective than with regulatory or supervisory
intent. This has not prevented the emergence of global sporting
bodies; if anything, perhaps, it has given them more freedom to
make and enforce rules.
Sporting
Organizations:
The
General Association of International Sports Federations
says it is the only forum 'bringing together the whole of sports
organizations once a year to exchange viewpoints on themes of common
interest'.
Among
the objectives laid down in its Statutes, GAISF is to:
-
maintain the authority and the autonomy of its members;
-
promote closer links between its members and all other sports
organizations;
-
co-ordinate and protect common interests;
-
collect, verify and disseminate information.
GAISF's General Assembly met in Lausanne on 5 November 1988 to agree
a text which 'specifies the means and the practical goals of GAISF's
International Member Federations and expresses most of all the international
sports movement's will to preserve sport's fundamental values, and
most particularly its educational aspects, despite the strong pressures
to which it is presently confronted'.
The
Olympic Movement includes the International
Olympic Committee (IOC), Organising Committees of the Olympic Games
(OCOGs), the National Olympic Committees (NOCs), the International
Federations (IFs), the national associations, clubs and, of course,
the athletes.
The
IOC Juridical Commission was created in 1974. Its terms of reference
include carrying out studies of a legal nature on issues which may
affect the interests of the IOC.
In 1999, the International Olympic Committee's (IOC's) Executive
Board created an independent Ethics Commission comprising eight
members. The Ethics Commission has three roles:
-
It draws up and constantly updates a framework of ethical principles,
including especially a Code of Ethics based on the values and
principles enshrined in the Olympic Charter. These principles
must be respected by the IOC and its members, by the cities wishing
to organise the Olympic Games, by the Organising Committees of
the Olympic Games (OCOGs), by the National Olympic Committees
(NOCs) as well as by the "participants" in the Olympic
Games;
-
it plays a monitoring role; as such, it ensures that ethical principles
are respected; it conducts investigations into breaches of ethics
submitted to it, and, when needed, makes recommendations to the
Executive Board;
-
it has a mission of prevention and advising the Olympic parties
on the application of the ethical principles and rules.
The IOC has developed a highly prescriptive framework for Olympic
marketing, which it requires national host governments to incorporate
into national law. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the impact
of globalised (shall we call it oligarchic?) sport on national prerogatives.
Perhaps
though the most noticeable feature of the IOC's world judicial role
is the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which ' promotes and coordinates
the worldwide fight against doping in all its forms'. A major initiative
of the new organization has been the development of the World Anti-Doping
Code (“Code”), finalized in 2003, and which has been
adopted by a large majority of countries.
Federation
Internationale des Football Associations
Many
sports have global status and organizations to match, but superstar
status has to be accorded to football, which is the nearest thing
there is to a global sport. FIFA has considerable legislative and
judicial power which in many respects over-rules or has spawned
national legislation.
FIFA was founded in 1904, although the stand-offish British did
not join for some years. FIFA now has more than 200 national member
associations.
Key
FIFA regulations are those for the status and transfer of players,
for players' agents, and for match agents. There is a Dispute Resolution
Chamber. The FIFA disciplinary code encompasses doping, corruption,
arbitration, racism, stadium bans and ineligibilty and provides
for the Disciplinary Committee and an Appeal Committee. In keeping
with FIFA's policy regarding the separation of decision-making powers,
members of these committees reach their decisions entirely independently.
They receive no instructions from any other body, and may not sit
on any other FIFA committee.
From very early on, clubs and players were forbidden to play simultaneously
for different National Associations, and disciplinary action taken
by one member association was automatically recognized by all others.
Only FIFA alone was entitled to handle the organisation of an international
competition. Outsiders were forbidden to organise matches for lucrative
purposes. In 1905, when the "English Ramblers", an improvised
English football club, wanted to play games on the continent without
the authorization of the Football Association, FIFA forbade its
members from playing against this team.
The
Court of Arbitration for Sport came into existence
in the 1980s. All Olympic International Federations but one and
many National Olympic Committees have recognised the jurisdiction
of the CAS and included in their statutes an arbitration clause
referring disputes to the CAS. It is described in greater depth
in Chapter 5.
Summary
Allowing
for the difficulty in defining 'culture', this chapter has demonstrated
that globalization is well advanced in most, or perhaps all of the
fields which contribute to an individual's mind-view of society
and her place in it, at least for people living in relatively developed
parts of the world. If once, the average citizen saw herself primarily
as a fairly featureless cog in a national machine, now the average
person also sees herself as having broad potential on a variety
of global stages. The individual's cultural consciousness has enormously
increased, and the proportion of it occupied by national affairs
and stereotypes has much dimished.
Footnotes:
1.
Wolf, M (2004) Why Globalization Works, Yale University
Press
2.
Durkheim, E (1984) The Division of Labour In Society, tr
W D Halls, Simon & Schuster, New York (originally published
in French in 1893)
3.
Kuper, A (1996) Anthropology and Anthopologists; The Modern
British School, (3rd edition; first published 1973) Allen Lane
The Penguin Press, London
4.
Mithen, Stephen (1996) The Prehistory of the Mind, Thames
& Hudson, London
5.
Anderson, B (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (2nd ed, first published
1983), Verso, London
6.
Richerson, P J, and Boyd, R (2004) Not By Genes Alone; How Culture
Transformed Human Evolution, University of Chicago Press, Chicago
and London
7.
Olsen, M (1982) The Rise And Decline Of Nations, Yale University
Press, New Haven and London
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