Network Power and Globalization‪.‬

Globalization is often celebrated as an advance of human freedom in which individuals are ever freer to lead fives of their own choosing. Transnational flows of money, goods, and ideas, it is argued, will accompany an increasingly liberal international order in which individuals can participate in a global economy and culture. At the same time, however, critics of globalization claim that it involves the imposition of a set of common global standards. These standards involve the exercise of power, and can even be said to constitute a kind of "empire." How should we understand this claim that globalization represents a kind of empire? After all, the choices of people to learn English or of nations to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) are voluntary, free choices--and reflect the reasoned assessment of those doing the choosing. I advance a concept of "network power" to explain how the dynamic operating in globalization nevertheless reflects a kind of domination. It is the awareness of this kind of domination that breeds the resentment that is articulated in accusations of empire. The idea of network power captures the ways in which the systematic features of our social world emerge from human action and remain intelligible in light of it, even while they constrain us in ways that do not reduce straightforwardly to the power of command. It explains how the convergence on a set of common global standards is driven by the accretion of individual choices that are free and forced at the same time.