Moving Europeans in the Globalizing World: Contemporary Migrations in a Historical-Comparative Perspective (1955-1994 v. 1870-1914)
Author(s)
Morawska, Eva; Spohn, Willfried
Abstract
The concepts of globalization and the world-system have been used in the literature in several different ways. People understand globalization as a historical process of the increasing “systemness” or interconnectedness of various dimensions (technological, economic, sociocultural, political-military) of social life and, in consequence, of different regions of the world; the latter stipulates the necessity to consider the positioning and interrelations of other dimensions or parts of the emerging system in order to understand the location and attributes of a particular fragment of this system. People view globalization as an uneven, long-lasting development whose roots reach deep into the nineteenth century and even earlier, and the pace of movement (forward or in reverse) is contingent on time and place. The notion of the world-system as used in this chapter relates to transnational structures characterized by considerable but variable levels of systemness, large but flexible scopes of coverage, and different degrees of openness or closure; people speak about the Atlantic world-system, the Soviet world-system, and the global world-system (or just global system). Finally, people take globalization and regionalism, or the world-system and localism, to be noncontradictory, empirically as well as theoretically. The latter assumption derives from the representation of social life as an ongoing mutually constitutive relationship, or “structuration” in Anthony Giddens’ renowned coinage, between the micro-, meso-, and macrolevels or contexts of social life, that is, individual and collective human agencies and their proximate, intermediate, and distant environments. Large-scale human migrations that are a component part of the globalization process actually take place in the micro-to-intermediate environments constituting the social world: The configuration and pressure of forces at the upper structural layers set the limits of the possible and the impossible within which people move, but it is at the level of the more proximate surroundings that individuals and groups evaluate their situations, define purposes, and undertake actions.
