Grobak Padi and the Melbourne Festival

Events that took place during the 2012 Melbourne Festival connected Jalan Malioboro (Malioboro Street), Yogyakarta and Swanston Street, Melbourne – two streets some 4,500 kilometres apart.

Performing the Global

It is now widely accepted that a key feature of life in our era is the deepening engagement of the local with the global. Ulrich Beck has defined globalization as:

The consequences of these mutually implicating principles, and the social and political transformations they might bring about, have been well examined in the context of cultural, economic and technological flows between sites in the developed world. Less attention has been paid to global circuits of exchange outside the West. Some notable exceptions have highlighted interconnections between countries of the global South and increasingly intense inter-Asia cultural flows (see, for example, Iwabuchi et al. 2004; Chen and Chua 2007; Chen 2010; Goh 2015). Cultural flows exceed and move beyond economic and political relationships, resulting in cultural traffic that can often be found moving in many different directions simultaneously (cf. Ahmed and Donnan 1994). To fully grasp the power of globalization to collapse the polarities and transform culture at the local or national level, we need to look beyond the economic, financial and material aspects to the imaginative and less tangible dimensions of social reality. Novel ideas and meanings can also transform local cultural sensibilities and give rise to an expanded consciousness – what we now understand, after Manfred Steger, as the ‘global imaginary’ (Steger 2008). Images and symbols of the global that can promote this new consciousness increasingly appear in the public domain, in particular, but not exclusively, in the urban, mediatized and consumption-oriented spaces we recognize as sites of modernity. Alongside these visual cues, certain performative practices have the power to create an imagined connection with the global. These imaginaries, as Steger asserts, acquire solidity – a sense of the ‘real’– through the (re)construction of social space and the repetitive performance of certain communal qualities (Steger 2008, p. 7). How this awareness of the global is generated in specific contexts and sites of cultural activity still remains to be discovered.

Rescaling welfare in an era of global competition

Scholars have tended to assume that social policies are national policies (Kazepov, 2010, p 35), with comparisons of national data dominating comparative analyses of welfare. This seems natural, since the ‘welfare state’ developed historically and conceptually within the frame of the ‘nation-state’, with policies ‘characterised by a collective management of individual standardised risks’ (Kazepov, 2010, p 42). States became the world's ‘social containers’, each national population being treated as ‘a cohesive social grouping that constituted a moral and practical social system’ (Taylor, 1994, p 156). As Keating (2009, pp 268–9) observes, T.H. Marshall's (1992) famous account of the development of citizenship, culminating with welfare states rooted in ‘social citizenship’, takes for granted that the nation-state is synonymous with the political, legal and social community.

Yet globalisation challenges some of these assumptions. The competition state thesis provides a nuanced account of the adaption of the welfare functions of the state in the face of intensified global competition, whereby the state has been reconfigured to sit at the ‘crossroads’ of global governance, transmitting the market discipline of the global capitalist economy within the borders of the national state (Cerny, 1997; 2010). A number of authors have observed the ways in which nation-states are increasingly enmeshed within more complex governance structures, ceding powers both ‘upwards’ to supranational institutions and ‘downwards’ to subnational levels of organisation (Hirst and Thompson, 1999). Pauly and Grande (2005, p 4) have observed the manner in which governance structures at all levels are becoming increasingly complex, leading to ‘multiple and overlapping hierarchies’. While states are now routinely enmeshed in a range of international and supranational organisations ‘above’ them, they may also have various incentives to loosen controls over subnational units of governance or areas of territory within or ‘below’ the state as a whole.

Keating (2001, p 53) highlights various strategies states that have traditionally used for managing their territories such that the competing claims of different populations and areas could be reconciled and the state's overall territorial integrity maintained.