Trans-Local and Trans-Regional Socio-Economic Structures in Global Development: a 'horizontal' perspective.

Despite the appearance of great variety, the most influential perspectives on development exhibit a basic intellectual unity. All focus on whole states or societies, and define them with reference to their advanced less advanced, or backward position relative to other states (and/or their superordinate or subordinate position in a global hierarchy of power). All adopt, or unintentionally reproduce (e.g. postcolonial and subaltern studies), schemas that define a tripartite or binary division of the globe. All accept a highly ideological reading of Europe's nineteenth century industrial expansion and use it, implicitly or explicitly, as a starting point and basis for comparison in studying contemporary developing societies. The result of these characteristic features of existing perspectives has been to systematically obscure the trans-local, trans-regional institutional complex that has underpinned global development since the late eighteenth century. This paper explores the trans-local social structures and transformations that brought into being and continue to shape the contemporary world order. Its central focus is the trans-local/cross-regional interactions and connections that, beginning in the late eighteenth century, brought about the development of dualistic economies within and outside of Europe; and how this circuit was reconfigured after the world wars by means of decolonisation, nationalism, 'first' and 'second' world development, and globalisation. What this perspective brings into view is a horizontal rather than vertical division of the world: the synchronic and interdependent development of dynamic focal points of growth throughout the world shaped, both within and outside of Europe, by translocal interaction and connection, as well as by local struggles and relations of dominance and subordination. The paper describes (1) local relations of power in Europe in the nineteenth century, (2) the trans-local circuit of exchange that connected the main export sectors of dualistic economies around the world, (3) the historical juncture that put European economies on a fundamentally different footing; and (4) how decolonisation, nationalism, and a global campaign to contain social democracy helped to reconfigure the circuit after World War II. It concludes (5) by drawing the implications of the analysis for how we understand globalisation today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]