Chairman cotton: Socialist Bulgaria’s cotton trade with African countries during the early Cold War (1946–70)

This article follows Bulgarian officials engaged in cotton and textile exchange with African states in the early Cold War. These officials founded enterprises for carrying out transactions, collected information on prices at international cotton exchanges and attended meetings of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) to coordinate trade activities in capitalist markets. Exploring how Bulgarian foreign trade organizations positioned themselves on the scene of international trade, this article argues that cotton traders, instead of upholding the supposed bloc bipolarity of the Cold War, followed the logic of the markets they worked in. A focus on trade infrastructures in particular shows that early Cold War East–South trade was not as strictly bilateral as official agreements and statistics suggest and reveals the systematic embeddedness of the socialist traders’ practices in global capitalist structures. In the field of cotton, the globalizing economy of the early Cold War was not cut in half, as globalization studies have implied.

Nationalism as a Global Institution: A Historical-Sociological View

This chapter elaborates how nationalism has long been underestimated in both sociological theory and globalization studies. It mentions sociological theorists who have theorized the role of nationalism in modernity and globalization literature, and who have tended to see globalization and nationalism as being in a zero-sum relationship. It also highlights a historical-sociological perspective on the nationalism–globalization nexus, which allows nationalism to be studied as a global institution. The chapter connects recent insights into inconspicuous 'banal' forms of nationalism to insights from globalization studies. It emphasizes two types of nationalism: 'institutionalized nationalism' and 'scarcity nationalism', showing how they have been reinforced by globalization dynamics and facilitated by the emergence of a global media system.

Do ‘Global Generations’ Exist?

There is today persistent debate in journalism and politics about social generations. Social scientists point out that young(er) people across the planet today seem to be in increasingly similar socio-economic, political and cultural situations. These involve shared forms of experience, as well as means of dealing with often highly challenging circumstances. A major debate at the intersection of social theory, globalization studies and youth studies is whether it makes sense to say that ‘younger’ people across the world today constitute one single ‘global generation’. Such ideas have been promoted by leading social theorists like Bryan S. Turner and Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. The analysis of social generations stretches back to Karl Mannheim’s pioneering statements in the 1920s. It has been argued that the Mannhemian tradition is in many ways outdated, and needs to be subjected to profound refurbishment, so that it may better understand cross-border, trans-national, ‘cosmopolitan’ phenomena, involving global generations and the forces and mechanisms which create them. This paper argues that claims about ‘global generations’ made by the theorists are muddled, especially in terms of conflating generations and age cohorts, and are often deterministic. The problems derive partly from imperfect readings and usages of Mannheim’s original ideas. It is shown that these are much more ‘cosmopolitan’ and attuned to cultural phenomena than critics allege. While the paper is sceptical as to the potential of the global generations concept in general, nonetheless the ongoing relevance of Mannheim for future endeavours to improve uses of it are underlined.

Web 2.0 and Critical Globalization Studies

In an introductory human geography course, students research chains of production for consumer products and put what they’ve learned on the internet for others to see and use.

Enduring or Crossing Distance for Love? Negotiating Love and Distance in the Lives of Mixed Transnational Couples

Within the field of transnationalism and globalization, studies have tended to focus on the flow of people, ideas and goods ( Giddens 2003 , Beck 2011 , Fitzgerald 2008 ). Within the field of migration this has meant importantly an increasing focus on studies of gender, migration and emotion ( Brooks and Simpson 2013 ; Svasek and Skrbis 2007 , Baldassar 2008 ). However, these studies tend to focus on the context of migration and how that shapes decisions around migration and belonging without focusing on the effect of migration on emotions themselves. Through ethnographic narrative interviews with 36 mixed transnational couples, this article analyses how the emotion of love is understood and practiced within some ‘global families’ ( Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2014 ). The article finds that for the mixed intercultural couples interviewed here, distance played a role in defining and confirming love (love at a distance) and was often seen as a reason to migrate or move (crossing distance for love) as a test or proof that love was real. These different cultural meanings of love show how distance could increasingly play a role in how we define and practice love today.