L'approccio scettico di Luhmann alla globalizzazione

Luhmann developed his thinking in the work Global Theory. In this sense, he believed that functional-structuralism had universal relevance, and was therefore global. Global Theory meant, and means, taking into account the entire social complex and not only fragments. Luhmann therefore treats the overall phenomenon of globalisation in his theory, or better, a series of narratives that were contemporary in his days, centred on the combination of processes that define that series. As has been written by many authors who have studied the evolution of globalisation, the debate on the issues and features of globalised societies has strongly characterised not only socio-economic theories but also political theories since the 1990s. Over time however, the accent has changed regarding analyses of globalisation processes. We should remember that, at the beginning of the decade under consideration, the internationalisation of private companies, the development of new markets, the processes of industrial decentralising on a worldwide scale and the potential of new technologies heralded scenarios of permanent growth. We believed in continuous progress, such as to favour the spread of the benefits of development also for less developed world economies. After the events of September 11, 2001, all that seems to have been reconsidered. According to Luhmann around 1995, it was possible to speak about globalisation when moving towards the affirmation of a single sub-system for each functional environment on a planetary scale. If the definition, sui generis, suggests that there is a single (complex) economic sub-system on a planetary scale, this does not imply for the master of Bielefeld (as one might think in common sense) a simplification of the codes utilised. In other terms, the unification of economic organisations does not constitute a decisive central element of socio-cultural simplification. This because the sub-system is not defined as an organisational phenomenon, but as a societal one. We might say that the tendency is to unify the code of economic communication: in other words, money. The number of currencies is reduced, the convertibility of each one is increased, the relationship between State and Currency is reduced or eliminated. Above all, for Luhmann, globalisation achieves something completely different than the mere domination of markets; given that the process of unification of functional codes presents other aspects. The processes of globalisation, while projecting onto a planetary scale, are reinforced through specialisation, which implies the inter-dependence (even if relative) of single codes. In the framework presented thusly, the mass media, which might be considered other systems, increased the functional autonomy of their codes during the 1990s. Through these, the social function of the global world media does not serve to direct the self-observation of the social system (said differently, self-description) but rather to divide stil more than in the past the global world into sub-systems of communication and environments.