Prof. Isaline Bergamaschi, ULB. Introduction session.
For those who have just arrived in Brussels or at ULB — welcome, and good luck with all the registration, finding accommodation, and getting settled. You're going to be fine, but it will take a little while.
This is the Globalisation Studies course, which is in fact the sociology of globalisation.
I'm happy to be back and to teach today. I hope you had a good summer. I did.
I've been teaching at ULB for ten years now. I graduated from Sciences Po in Paris — very elite international blah blah school — quite a while ago. Then I spent almost five years, between 2012 and 2017, as a university professor in Bogotá, Colombia, after my PhD. And then I came to Brussels.
My name is Isaline Bergamaschi. I have a very Italian surname. I don't speak Italian at all — I can just about survive on board a film and speak to my great-aunt. But I do speak Spanish with a very strong Colombian accent, if you're interested.
English is not my mother tongue, which is good news for you too, I think. It makes it easier for us to speak this "Globish" — pretending we're very comfortable with it, but not really. So this class is an opportunity to practise. Depending on whether I've had a bad night's sleep or not, I may be searching for words, and sometimes I'll just say something in French because I can't find it in English. That's fine. Feel free to do the same. This is a large classroom, but one of the things we'll see in this course is that speaking English fluently and properly is also a sign of international capital — an indication of the degree to which you were able to access the Anglo-American international sphere. That says nothing about the quality of your personality or your value as a human being. Very often, it says a lot about privilege. So you're here to learn and practise. Try with your vocabulary, try with your accent — accents are seen as attractive in many countries you'll travel to, so don't worry too much. What matters is that people understand you.
A few things about me. I'm French. I'm 44. I'm child-free and very happy about it — I'm only mentioning it because I didn't know a single woman without children when I grew up, and I think it's useful to just put it out there. You can have children if you want. They're great. I love being an aunt — that's the perfect deal.
I used to work on international interventions in Mali, a West African country, for a long time — mostly during my PhD but also afterwards. I was interested in political economy, international development, and poverty reduction in this aid-dependent country, which then also became the setting, as you may know, for a French military intervention that was very post-colonial in nature, and a UN peacebuilding mission.
I no longer work on Mali, but I spent a lot of time in Bamako. In 2008, I did an internship in a Malian public administration as part of my PhD fieldwork. That was a very French thing to do — just imagine a Malian student trying to do the same in France's Ministry of Finance, without being able to get a visa. But I could do it, so I did. I was observing the daily interactions and negotiations between what we call international organisations and foreign aid donors on one side, and the Malian state on the other.
I continued going back for fieldwork. Travelling is also a privilege — I was lucky enough to do that. I no longer work on Mali for a number of reasons, including the fact that the authorities don't particularly want French citizens there anymore, and the political context has become less favourable. The last time I did fieldwork there, in 2022, the field was effectively closed — even actors I had known for a long time would no longer talk to me, because some people had been arrested and civic and democratic freedoms were under threat. My mother also didn't want me to go anymore, which was another factor. So I made a shift — both for security reasons and out of a genuine change of interest.
I am now in academic transition and increasingly interested in gender studies and their transnational dimensions. I teach another course here called Gender and Globalisation — if that interests you, do check it out and take it during your Master's programme. I also teach the IPE course in the finalité mondialisation et politique publique, where we look at development, global finance, international trade, and so on.
I'm currently working on something quite different — the global history and current developments of the sex-positive movement, here in Brussels but also globally and historically. Anyway — check out your professors. We are researchers as well as teachers. Look at what we've published, what we're working on. If you're thinking about a Master's thesis topic, come and speak to us about it.
Office hours: There is a typo on the slide — office hours are Thursdays from 2:15 to 4:15 p.m. Please email me first to make an appointment, because I don't want fifty students queuing in front of my office — that's not comfortable for anyone. My office is in the Bâtiment S, on the 15th floor. My email is also on the slide. Please call me Professor or Professor Bergamaschi — not Miss or Missus, which refers to age and marital status, which are not relevant here. Doctor sounds a bit odd to French ears unless you're a medical doctor.
One practical thing: I love to teach and I love talking to students, but please do not approach me before class to ask about your thesis, an internship, or anything else. I'm focusing on what's about to happen — this is effectively a two-hour monologue that I need to deliver — and every classroom at ULB has its own technical surprises. Come after class, or send me an email.
Any questions so far? Don't be shy. If speaking English in public is too difficult, you can make a point or ask a question in French and I'll translate. French is best because most people will understand it. If you need to do it in Italian or Spanish, we can work something out. Anything else would require finding a translator in the room.
If you are having trouble following the course or understanding the readings, please do not wait until the final exam to tell me — or not tell me. The students who need support the most are usually the ones who don't come to us, because they have student jobs, family pressures, and a lot going on. Try to reach out earlier, because once the final exam has happened, there is very little I can do. I would like to suggest one thing: because this course draws a lot on French sociology — particularly after Bourdieu — and because some texts exist in both French and English, I would recommend that those who struggle in English try to form a support network after class today to share materials available in French or to collectively translate passages. Start doing it now, because by January it will be too late.
Note on the PowerPoint slides: The slides will be on the UV and on Teams every week before class, as open PowerPoint files rather than PDFs. Some students find it practical to take notes directly under each slide, which a locked PDF format does not allow. Every author's name and important quote will be on the slides.
Before we start the introduction properly, I wanted to show you a short video from the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. The question I wanted you to keep in mind while watching it was: what are the ingredients of globalisation? Unfortunately the sound system isn't cooperating — there was a class before us and I couldn't come in early to set it up. We'll watch it next week. I'm sorry about that.
So let's start with a definition of globalisation. What do you expect to be included in a class about globalisation? What do we mean when we use this word — at university, with friends, wherever? What is it? And what is it not?
[Student discussion.]
Student responses and instructor commentary:
One student suggests it's about eroding national particularities and moving towards global norms for global governance — standards that may not be binding but shape behaviour. Good examples might include good governance, anti-corruption norms, global justice, LGBT+ rights, democracy — all sorts of things have circulated as global norms at different moments in history.
That points to trade and other forms of liberalisation — the removal of tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade. And deregulation, which means that states and other centres of political authority no longer regulate, restrict, limit or tax the circulation of goods, capital and people in the same way. These two are very much intertwined but are not exactly the same thing.
Another student raises culture — a generation globally shares a set of cultural references that are almost common. Netflix, Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl, the World Cup — these are major global cultural events. What you're also pointing to is cultural hybridisation: bubble tea (you can probably find it in Brussels, though it will cost you about six euros a glass), sushi, Tex-Mex — all of this is about mixing. Migrants and diasporas are key drivers of this kind of mix. What's interesting, though, is the power involved in deciding which local or national product goes global. Very often, that happens when it enters the American economy — which then makes it a global commodity. Shakira is a perfect example: she was playing guitar in Colombia, then someone in Miami said, we're going to turn you into something global — and she physically changed, the music changed, and she became a global product. Her Lebanese heritage, her Colombian roots, the cumbia and ranchera samples — all of it processed through the US music industry. Migrants and diasporas provide the raw material, but usually the US decides what becomes global. Same logic with García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude, the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, now a Netflix series — again, US economic actors selecting what becomes the global reference.
A student raises soft power: the way one country embeds its cultural values and projects into the world. That would sit somewhere in the culture and symbols cluster. If you're interested in these questions, look up the literature on public diplomacy — our colleague Juliette Chouac at REPI works extensively on that.
What's missing from our list so far is the power, violence, and resistance involved. This programme will be sensitive to that — we will not fall into the trap of treating globalisation as just free mobility and exchange. Borders are very sticky for Afghan or Colombian passport holders. Cultural globalisation brings controversies about cultural appropriation. If I, as a French woman, decided to open a bissap café — a West African hibiscus drink — near the European institutions, some people would rightly ask why I get to make money from a product that isn't part of my cultural heritage. To make it more ethical, I might bring in a Malian co-founder. But even that depends on who can access bank loans, who has capital. So the blurring of cultural forms also produces a lot of controversy about ownership, representation, and who benefits.
We also have transnational social movements: the coalition of scientists, academics, NGOs, and grassroots activists fighting on different scales to protect the environment. That connects to the broader notion of global commons and the vocabulary of shared goods.
Moving to formal definitions. Two quotes are worth holding on to from the slide:
"While it is conventional to begin studies of a particular subject with an initial definition, the doubt about the meaning and existence of globalisation makes this procedure extremely difficult." — Holton (2005)
"There are few terms that we use so frequently but which are in fact as poorly conceptualised as globalisation." — Giddens (1996)
Held and McGrew (2000): "A process — or rather a set of processes — which transforms the way in which social relations and the transactions that take place within them happen, in terms of reach, intensity, speed and impact; and a process which structures transcontinental or interregional flows, networks of activity, interactions and power."
Giddens (1996): "The intensification of social relations throughout the world."
Steger (2003): "The space and time expansion and intensification of social relations and a common awareness across the world."
One of the first differences between this course and a typical IR or IR theory course is that we will not study globalisation from the perspective of states, wars, and great men. What we are going to do is much closer to a political critique of globalisation, and it is also inspired by global history — an exciting branch of historiography that breaks down national histories by following products, actors, and individuals across borders, revealing the economic, social, political, ideological, and religious forces that drive globalisation.
One student suggests that a growing awareness of global challenges — environmental, systemic — is new. That's not quite right, though I understand where it comes from. It comes from a discourse of "everything has changed since smartphones, so we need new concepts." But the feeling of newness has been experienced in many different historical contexts. Think of the people from England, Ireland, or France migrating to Australia or the United States during the 19th century. People who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. People in London in the 19th century tasting spices from Asia for the first time. When people migrated — whether by choice, as slaves, as semi-slave workers, or as poor people fleeing hunger — there was no return ticket. The first journey was very long. You could die en route. You could die upon arrival because your body was exposed to new viruses: yellow fever, malaria. And there was almost no possibility of staying in touch with the people you had left behind. That was quite an international experience.
When the telegraph appeared, when the train appeared, people had that sense of awareness of the world too. What is new is the compression of time — and as Harvey (1989) writes, time-space compression: if you can write to your family instantaneously, space becomes less relevant because you can be in contact with someone 3,000 kilometres away in two seconds. That is new. The speed.
Take another example: students in Brussels mobilising against the genocide in Gaza. The awareness, the networks, the lobbying, the marches in front of the European Parliament — you can do that quickly. But this is not new either. The abolitionist campaign of the 19th century was a transnational campaign. People from the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and the US were working across the ocean — going on boats for weeks to see their activist comrades, sending letters to the British Parliament that took months to arrive. At some point activists were following slave trading boats in order to prevent them from reaching the Caribbean. The repertoire of action (répertoire d'action collective) had to be adapted to each scale: What do you do vis-à-vis the US Congress? What do you do in Haiti or Jamaica, where people are actually enslaved? How do you connect across these scales? What do you share, and what is never shared? These are the more complex and interesting questions. We haven't invented anything with our smartphones. It's just faster.
So the processes of things becoming global — spices, bodies, religions, wars — are not new. The word "globalisation" is quite new.
In English, the noun globe dates from the 15th century, when it began to denote a spherical representation of the earth. It is believed that Jeremy Bentham coined the word international in the 1780s, in reference to the rise of nation states and cross-border economic transactions. In the 1920s and 30s, newspapers in the US and Canada used globe in their titles (the Boston Globe, the Globe and Mail). In the 1930s, the Daily News had a rotating giant globe in the lobby of its headquarters in New York City. Universal Pictures chose the earth floating in space as their logo for advertising in the 1920s. In English, the verb to globalise appeared in the 1940s.
In the early 1980s, the term was rarely used with the meanings it has today. A French political economist mentioned the conquest of space and its global consequences. Some references appeared in connection with the United Nations system. Fun fact for nerds: Modelski, a researcher, did not receive a grant in 1968 for a project called "The Study of Globalization: A Preliminary Exploration" — because the topic was considered irrelevant.
The concept really emerged in the 1980s from the intersection of four communities of practice: academics, journalists, publishers and editors, and librarians. It consolidated in scientific communities and in business circles precisely because the 1970s and 80s were phases of intensified liberalisation and deregulation. In 1983, Levitt wrote "The Globalization of Markets" in the Harvard Business Review — meaning that the first major carrier of the concept was economics and business, in reference to market dynamics. Money made the word.
It is only after 1990 that the word moved into scientific papers and mainstream media, leaving the small circle of bankers and economists to become part of popular culture — translated into pretty much every language, understood in some way by everyone, including your grandparents.
This happened precisely at a time when other big explanatory concepts began to lose their prominence in academia and in ordinary conversation. The Cold War. Social class. Class struggle. The Third World (le Tiers Monde). When these concepts lost their power as catch-all explanatory frameworks — particularly with the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s — globalisation stepped in. It was useful and convenient as a substitute. But that doesn't mean those older concepts had become irrelevant. Class struggle is still a thing. "The Third World" is no longer a perfect concept, but it still refers to something. Today we say "the Global South," which is more geographical and less political — Third Worldism was a political project about renegotiating the terms of trade with rich countries, not just a geography.
Globalisation also has a crypto-neutral, businessy quality to it. If you ask your grandparents and parents, you'll see that some see it positively — travelling is great, speaking other languages, Erasmus programmes, cheap products, the best technology from everywhere — and some see it negatively. The anti-globalisation arguments: free trade agreements destroy decent jobs in both the North and the South; the globalisation of culture destroys local cultures and languages; the retreat of the state means it can no longer regulate the economy or manage migration. Both left-wing and right-wing versions of this critique exist — l'alter-mondialisme on one side, pro-sovereignty movements on the other.
Thomas Friedman (2005) argued in The World is Flat that the world has flattened due to ten key factors: the fall of the Berlin Wall; the launch of Windows in 1992; the internet; free software like Wikipedia; relocations; offshoring; globalised production chains; global distribution chains; global information networks; and the development of ICT. This is the business-friendly, optimistic perspective on globalisation — one this course will use as a starting point before critically examining it.
Globalisation is not an inevitable, linear, ever-deepening process. A few illustrations of its limits:
It was easier for you to move to the United States in 1905 than it is today. The 19th century was a century of massive transcontinental migration — it was only in the 1920s and 30s that US migration policy became restrictive. This is why there was historically a large Jewish community in Brussels: people fleeing discrimination in Central Europe were passing through Brussels on their way to Antwerp, intending to take a boat to the US. When US migration law tightened, they got stuck in Belgium and settled there. The plan was not to stay.
Another example: the share of sub-Saharan African countries in global international trade was higher in 1980 than it is today. That tells you something about who benefits from trade liberalisation. If lowering barriers was going universally, it shouldn't be that way.
So some things get more globalised; some things don't. We are all exposed to and contribute to globalisation, but we are not equal within it.
The textbook I like and will put on the UV is called Making Globalization. I like the title because it is precisely about the processes through which globalisation is being made — by people, with their bodies, their brains, their computers, their weapons, their religious beliefs. As the French political economist Frédéric Lordon has argued, "the markets" are not a floating abstract force: they are traders sitting in front of screens in the City of London and in New York, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Globalisation is not something that happens to people. People make it.
Nine propositions that will structure this course:
1. Globalisation is the thing to be explained, not the explanation for change. This is not just a play on words. When someone says "it's globalisation" as if that explains everything, they are usually producing a discourse of disempowerment — because if it's globalisation, there's nothing we can do about it. Don't take it for granted.
2. It is not new. As Jean-François Bayart (2007) argues, the 19th century had a huge impact on shaping what we call globalisation today. It was the century of the biggest migration flows in history, in terms of scale, numbers, and distances. It was the century of the generalisation of the nation state — not because people loved it, but partly because of colonisation. It was the century of the spread of global capitalism and industrialisation, and hence the introduction of capitalist logics into the colonies. Sometimes we focus on the destruction of languages, religions, and value systems through colonisation, but we forget: homo economicus, private property, the wage economy — these also came with colonisation. And the 19th century was the century of the embryos of international organisations: the founding of the American Red Cross in 1881; the abolitionist movement; and, after the Indian famines of 1837 and 1866, British norms of humanitarian response that were embedded in colonial logic. Henri Dunant observed the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino in 1859, wrote a book about it, and founded the Geneva Society for Public Welfare — one of the origins of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
3. It is not linear or inevitable — it is incomplete and incoherent. We should not study history backwards — knowing the outcome and then selecting only the facts that lead to it. Leave the complexity. There are always moments of backtracking.
4. Europe and the USA have played a leading role, but it is not Americanisation. As discussed above.
5. Globalisation is made. By whom? The analytical task is to look at the actors — Harvey (1989) speaks of time-space compression; Burawoy (2000) proposes grounded globalisation. We study from below: not states and their wars, but the nurses and first humanitarian workers, the slaves themselves, the sailors in quasi-slave working conditions, the pirates, the women hiding runaway slaves in Haiti or Jamaica, the school teachers today dealing with multiculturalism and state racism in Brussels classrooms.
6. From below, not from above. Bayart (2007), Global Subjects: A Political Critique of Globalization. This distinguishes our approach from mainstream IR.
7. Unequal access: globalisation builds on and creates hierarchies between people. Look at the articulation between geographical mobility and sociological mobility. Being internationally mobile is a resource — but only under certain social conditions. Under what conditions can you convert international experience into Bourdieusian capital? The answer depends enormously on where you come from and where you sit socially.
8. Neither "for" nor "against": politically neutral per se. We are not going to play the for-or-against globalisation game. We take it as politically neutral — instrumentalised by actors in many different directions, with effects that are more often than not unknown from the start. Which kind of globalisation do we want?
9. Global relations and reterritorialisation. Scholte (2008) proposes transplanetary connections — the point being that globalisation does not make geography irrelevant. Things get reterritorialised. Power is always exercised somewhere.
The course runs for 12 weeks, one session per week. I will teach every week unless I am ill. There are no surprise holidays and no make-up classes.
A note on the syllabus: I have tried to avoid quoting only European and North American authors. I try to always introduce the experience of globalisation from the Caribbean, from sub-Saharan Africa, from the Global South more broadly — and to include authors who themselves come from the Global South or write from that experience. Mali will come up a lot, because I still read about it and it remains a good case study for aid dependency, migration, and a range of other dynamics.
For students who want to enrich their year beyond the course readings, there are excellent conferences happening constantly at ULB — check the newsletters of the Institut de Sociologie, the Institut d'Études Européennes, CEVIPOL, LAMC, GERME, STRIGES, and the Approches Critiques de la Race group, as well as the REPI research centre and the Atelier Genre(s) et Sexualité(s).
Any questions? If not, we're done for today, finishing a little early. You can head to your next class, try to grab lunch. Thank you for your attention.