Modern society and world society.

What is modern society mean? Western industrialization rapidly became the model for the whole world, and western modernity an example to be followed by all nations. Colonies or clients of western powers were developed along these lines before they attained independence. Apparently the only viable polity in the modern world was industrial society, and only industrial societies could be active global agents. Thus japans humiliated by the west mid-19^th century, industrialized and became one of the most powerful societies in the world. Japan’s experience confirmed that there were several routes to modernity. Britain, Western Europe and the USA had industrialized on the basis of individual entrepreneurship and the free market economy. In Germany and Japan, the state and political elites played a major role, in organizing and planning development, and restricting foreign access to home markets in the interests of native industry. Following the Russian revolution of 1917, there came the authoritarian model of modernization under the one party state. Many developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America industrialized according to economic plans drawn by the political elites and imposed upon their populations. Independent India, instituted formal liberal democracy, but its industrialization was guided by the Indian national congress, identified with the struggle for independence. There were also the African socialisms of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana and Julius Nyerers Tanzania, the Chinese socialism of mao Zedong, the Cuban socialism of Fidel Castro, and the Yagoslave socialism of Josip Broz Tito. All these became models of development to certain third world societies. In japan, the Soviet Union and china the state supervised industrialization, made major decisions about investment, transport, communications, and education. Mass communications became agencies of mass socialization. Industrialization has taken place within a context of world industrialization, in a world system of states of unequal power. Towards the end of the 20^th century the ideological divisions between west and east, became obsolete with the collapse of communist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe. There are core countries that include the united state and Japan; semi-peripheral counties include Brazil, eastern European states and china, Africa and Asia.  Wallerstein’s model recognizes the internationalization of the industrial economy. Nation-states, whether capitalist or communist, are becoming increasingly subordinate to world economic developments. Thus the politics of energy procurement are global in nature just as much as military strategy. Capital investment and growth are global issues, and multinational corporations are significant actors on the world stage, busy establishing a new international division of labour. Manufacturing units are shifted from place to place depending on considerations such as the presence of cheap labour, compliant governments and tax-havens. In this sense multinational corporations embody the independence of core and periphery nations. However the modernization has certainly brought material abundance, but in a differentiated pattern that is reflected in the complex nature of social classes and identities. It has brought control of natural environment this too, at the cost of damaging it, some would say, irreparably.