Appendix 1: An X-Ray of Today's "Global Society" | Appendix 2: Should All Peoples be United in a Single Global Society? | Appendix 3: War and Human Nature | Appendix 4: What is Globalization? | Appendix 5: Globalization: Good or Bad? | Appendix 6: Antiglobalization: What Are We For? | Appendix 7: Globalization: A Fate that can be Fought! | Appendix 8: Globalization Remains Viable, Alive and Well | Appendix 10: Is Puerto Rico Ready For The New Global Economy? | Appendix 9: Puerto Rico and Globalization | Appendix 11: Puerto Rico and the FTAA | Appendix 12: Puerto Rico's Future? | Appendix 13: The Domestic and International Digital Divide | Appendix 14: The "Clash of Civilizations" | Appendix 15: Western Values and the World | Appendix 16: Fighting "The Big One" in Iraq | Appendix 17: Global Income Less Dim Than Believed | Appendix 18: To Attack Hunger, Attack Poverty | Appendix 19: Recipe for Corruption in Latin American--and Elsewhere | Appendix 20: Saudi Arabia, Oil and the Future | Appendix 21: Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Home
GLOBAL SOCIETY: APPENDICES
Appendix 4: What is Globalization?

Simon Jeffery 

 

    It was the anti-globalization movement that really put globalization on the map. As a word it has existed since the 1960s, but the protests against this allegedly new process, which its opponents condemn as a way of ordering people's lives, brought globalization out of the financial and academic worlds and into everyday current affairs jargon. But that scarcely brings us nearer to what it means. The phenomenon could be a great deal of different things, or perhaps multiple manifestations of one prevailing trend. It has become a buzzword that some will use to describe everything that is happening in the world today.

 

   The dictionary definition is a great deal drier. Globalization (n) is the "process enabling financial and investment markets to operate internationally, largely as a result of deregulation and improved communications" (Collins) or - from the US - to "make worldwide in scope or application" (Webster). The financial markets, however, are where the story begins. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the business model termed the "globalized" financial market came to be seen as an entity that could have more than just an economic impact on the parts of the world it touched. It came to be seen as more than simply a way of doing business, or running financial markets: it became a process. From then on the word took on a life of its own.

 

   So how does the globalized market work? It is modern communications that make it possible; for a company  to deal with its customers through a call center in India, or for a sportswear manufacturer to design its products in Europe, make them in south-east Asia and sell them in North America. But this is where the anti-globalization side gets stuck in. If these practices replace domestic economic life with an economy that is heavily influenced or controlled from overseas, then the creation of a globalized economic model and the process of globalization can also be seen as a surrender of power to the corporations, or a means of keeping poorer nations in their place. Low-paid sweatshop workers, GM seed pressed on developing world farmers, selling off state-owned industry to qualify for IMF and World Bank loans and the increasing dominance of US and European corporate culture across the globe have come to symbolize globalization for some of its critics. The anti-globalization movement is famously broad, encompassing environmentalists, anarchists, unionists, the hard left, some of the soft left, those campaigning for fair development in poorer countries and others who want to tear the whole thing down, in the same way that the original Luddites attacked mechanized spinning machines.

 

   Not everyone agrees that globalization is necessarily evil, or that globalized corporations are running the lives of individuals or are more powerful than nations. Some say that the spread of globalization, free markets and free trade into the developing world is the best way to beat poverty. The only problem is that free markets and free trade do not yet truly exist. Globalization can be seen as a positive, negative or even marginal process. And regardless of whether it works for good or ill, globalization's exact meaning will continue to be the subject of debate among those who oppose, support or simply observe it.

 

   In short, the term globalization is a modern one, but many people hold the view that the phenomenon it describes is not new at all. Many say it is nothing more than the latest incarnation of a process that has been going on for many centuries; some argue that the current international economy is in many ways less open and integrated than it was in the period leading up to the first world war Another point regularly made is that the international economy of the present day is not really global at all and, just like before, it is dominated by a small number of players. In 1914 there were eight great powers, now there is the G8.

 

   The opposite view - that globalization is indeed a new phenomenon - has been articulated by many writers. They believe that the developments of the past few decades have spurred changes so large that the world has indeed entered a qualitatively new (and unwelcome) era. The statistics are certainly convincing: since 1950, the volume of world trade has increased by 20 times. And from just 1997 to 1999, flows of foreign investment nearly doubled, from $468bn to $827bn. Thomas Friedman, a New York Times writer, argues that today's era of globalization is different both in degree and in kind from previous eras. He says while the previous era of globalization was built around falling transport costs, today's globalization is built around falling telecommunications costs, which are able to weave the world together even tighter. These technologies mean that developing countries don't just have to trade their raw materials to the west and get finished products in return; now, developing countries can become big producers as well. Using an example of his mother's use of new technology to show how the world has changed, he asks rhetorically: "Was your great-grandmother playing bridge with Frenchmen on the internet in 1900?" One area where many, but certainly not all, experts tend to be in agreement about the novelty of globalization is the financial and monetary arena.