As I noted in the above discussion of common narratives of moderniza- tion, the tale is often told in terms of certain key ideas or values, above all
enlightenment, progress, equality, freedom and solidarity. These are common to all the sub-narratives, and this irrespective of whether the version we are considering is critical or laudatory, whether, for instance, we call them ‘bourgeois rights’ or ‘self-evident truths’. In the Luhmannian frame that I am using here, these refer to an overall and multi-dimensional increase in communicative power – for instance, knowledge, wealth, legal rights, surveillance and health – and the expectation that at least in moder- ately equitable fashion all people should have access to it. This latter, both in Parsonian and Luhmannian terms, points to the question of inclusion. Somewhat paradoxically, a key dimension of modernization and now globalization has been the assertion of the ‘rights’ of individuals to inclu- sion in consonance with the increasing power of distinctly ‘impersonal’ societal systems. Inclusion in this society amounts to access to the power of these systems, but the systems do not operate in terms of people ‘belonging’. In fact, the systems operate and must operate asymmetrically as concerns the distribution of their power. Famously, capitalism depends on inequalities of wealth. Government is the concentration of political decision-making power. Educational credentials reflect differential ability and success. Art must be exceptional. Access to health care, even ideally, depends to a large degree on being ill. And so forth. One important result of this structural feature is that the question of the status or place of persons in this society is of great importance – as reflected in the high degree of individuation the systems generate – but can only partially be answered in terms of incorporation in the dominant systems. Access to their power is part of the answer; those without such access are rather radically excluded. Yet access by itself does not settle the issue because individuation and its valorization dictate a further value-added quality, something about this profiled individual that expresses the individuation, the ‘other than’ systemic roles. It is in this slot that the highly contested, perpetual and exceedingly varied question of identity finds its fertile ground. Because, however, it serves to distinguish the person from systemic roles, that identity must express itself as difference. We come thus to that dialogic aspect of globalization that so many theories emphasize, what here I shall call the Robertsonian dimension of global society.
Robertson’s model of globalization, as noted above, places emphasis on two interrelated dimensions. There is the particularization of universalism in conjunction with the universalization of particularism; there is also the emphasis on the relations between or the mutual relativization of four fields, namely the individual, the national society, the system of national societies, and humanity (Robertson and Chirico 1985). The question just posed, that of difference and identity, is clearly central to his entire theory. Although the only function system more or less explicitly contained in this model is the state under the heading of national society, combining Robertson’s theory with the Luhmannian frame I am mostly using is rela-
tively unproblematic and has the important advantage of adding valuable conceptual resources for a better understanding of how identity and differ- ence play themselves out in global society. More specifically, Robertson’s perspective focuses more clearly than does Luhmann on the fact that the question of identity as inclusion manifests itself both individually and collectively. For Robertson, identity and particularization involve both individuals and groups; and therefore difference is also an individual and group affair. Amalgamating the Robertsonian and Luhmannian points of departure, however, requires that one find the theoretical place where iden- tity questions and the function systems mesh. For this purpose, one can look at semantic and socio-structural manifestations of the problem of inclusion in the form, respectively, of the evolution of human rights discourse and the question of regional appropriation of the function systems or, what amounts to the same and adopting a Wallersteinian formulation, regional incorporation into the world system.
Following the perceptive analysis of James Spickard (2002), human rights discourse over the past century has evolved three related subvariants or generations. Together they offer a good representative look at how the questions of identity/difference, function system access and inclusion have manifested themselves in the semantics of contemporary global society. The first generation rights are those that define the difference or freedom of the individual vis-à-vis society more broadly, and societal systems in particular. These include the so-called ‘bourgeois rights’ like freedom of speech, of religion, of thought, or from discrimination on the basis of ascribed differences like gender or race. These all define the relation of the individual to (national) society and provide the bases for the independence of individual identities from societal systems. Of note is the naming and therefore recognition of criteria that are critical for identities, but deemed beyond the concern of societal systems. Access to the latter, these rights state, should not be affected by these criteria. If systems use these criteria to determine access to them, that is illegitimate discrimination. First gener- ation rights do not, however, thereby speak directly to the question of the inclusion of individuals in the power of those systems. Second generation rights do. These ‘socialist rights’ seek to guarantee each individual a certain minimum of access to the power of the function systems. They speak above all of the right to economic resources, the right to education, and the right to health care. Human rights are violated, in other words, if people are excluded from systemic power. The third and most recent generation of rights moves the concerns of the first and second generation to the level of collectivities. These are group cultural rights, not only the right to self-determination, but also the right of cultures or collective iden- tities to the same protection from discrimination and exclusion as the individuals that supposedly carry them. Thus, for example, Aboriginal peoples, tribal peoples and national minorities around the world have the
right to preserve their cultures and ways of life, to determine and maintain their identities, without thereby being excluded from systemic access. These collective differences or exclusivities are to have the same value and status as individual ones.
Embedded within the three generations of human rights discourse is of course a fair amount of tension, which is to say different ways of inter- preting what human rights imply and which of the many potentially contradictory rights should take precedence. Neo-liberals may claim that the first generation rights by themselves will lead to the other two. Socialists may insist on the priority and defining character of the second generation. Representatives of various cultural minorities and regionally dominant cultures may insist that the first two generations are meaningless without the third, and that insisting on the priority of the first or the second amounts to cultural imperialism and therefore a violation of human rights. Without in the least trying to resolve these questions, they point directly to both the ambiguity of inclusion in contemporary global society and the constitutive tension between particular and universal in that society. In Luhmannian terms, the dominance of the function systems does not mean that globalization amounts to the universal homogenization of society across the globe according to the criteria of these systems, only that these systems condition the ways that people do difference in that society. This brings us to the structural illustration of the same circum- stance, namely to the question of the regional and particular appropriation of universalizing social systems, especially the function systems.
Given that in critical respects the dominant function systems began their current development in European society of the early modern period, a question that poses itself with respect to them is whether their spread is in fact not tantamount to the Europeanization or Westernization of the rest of the world. A dialogical perspective on globalization such as I am repre- senting here insists that it is at best misleading to imagine the process in this way; that the inadequacy of the concept of modernization for under- standing the emergence of global society lies precisely in its tendency to conflate that development with what has happened in so-called Western societies. Rather than a simple diffusion of structural forms from one part of the world to the rest, globalization refers to the analogous transforma- tion of society in Western and other regions of the world. More specifically, the function systems did not develop first in the West and then spread elsewhere. Their global spread is an integral part of their develop- ment; and this not just as Western imperialism, colonialism or imposition, although that also is an important part of the picture. Looking at global- ization not simply as the spread of the function systems but also as their development permits a shift in perspective, from globalization as only the universalization of particular social forms to include now also the reverse, namely the particularization of this universalizing. This latter aspect is just
as constitutive of globalization as the former. That, in turn, means that incorporation into the global system takes place through both modalities, not just the first. Globalization carries itself out in the ‘dialogue’, not just as a ‘soliloquy’. Pursuing this metaphor, we can say that globalization occurs in terms of multiple voices, different voices, and not just univocally. Inclusion of regions therefore means the appropriation by those regions of the instrumentalities of the global function systems while at the same time doing so in a locally particular way. That localization or particularization is a critical aspect of the universalization or globalization, not just a reac- tion to it. Thus, for example, as Wallerstein has amply demonstrated, the global economy develops as it incorporates more regions and that incorpo- ration is critical to what it becomes, to its functioning. The global political system emerges with the emergence of states, not simply by the spread of states or the establishment of relations among pre-existing local states. And, as I show in the next chapter, the development of the global religious system is identical with the emergence, construction and imagination of a plurality of mutually identifying religions, not as the mere imposition of a supposedly ‘Christian’ model on the rest of the world. Imperialism or universalization is in all cases part of the picture; but in no case is it more than a part.