Migration and Climate Change

5Organization, Climate and Sustainable Development

5.1. Organizations and time horizons: Beck’s theory

5.1.1. Organization and globalization

Globalization can be understood as a program for the transformation of cultures and political institutions in the world. This program was formulated in the 1980s, based on new opportunities that could be seized by firms that had become global. The major risk at the forefront at the time was the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. This led in its wake to the collapse of the Cold War system, due to the disappearance of rivalry with the communist bloc at the fall of the Berlin Wall. While “organization” is defined as all the intermediaries between public agencies and individuals, it did not play a major role in a permanent state of tension, that of the Cold War, which could lead in an instant to the mutual destruction of the great powers’ territories by nuclear fire.

While the time scales of the Cold War era were controlled by the possibility of the nuclear apocalypse, globalization programs have been formulated in a spatial and timeless way. The intellectual scene is that of the discussion about the end of history announced by Francis Fukuyama, that of a definitive victory of democracy. Fukuyama took up a concept by the philosopher Hegel. This suspension of historic time, a very Hegelian notion, is found in the formulations of globalization programs, the most exhaustive being that of Kenichi Ohmae [OHM 85; OHM 96]. Ohmae proposes a redefinition ...