Globalization
From RationalWiki
Globalization is the term often given to the ways in which the world has dramatically shrunk in the last few decades. Planes can carry people (or packages) around the world in less time than it used to take to travel between nearby towns. Money and ownership can change as rapidly as electrons flowing through cable. People in the United States knew about the war in Georgia about as quickly as people in Russia did. People flow freely too, and attempts to stem the tides of immigration have been failing around the world.
This disturbs many people, as they see it as either a US led effort to destroy indigenous cultures and spread capitalism and McWorld throughout the world, or as an attempt by the rest of the world to destroy American culture and the American way of life.
Even experts are divided on what effect globalization is going to have on anything. Some argue that states will become meaningless, with people instead merging across state lines into larger cooperative groups, like the EU. Others believe states will become meaningless as people look for strength in smaller, tribal groupings. Others expect that corporations will completely take over. Lastly, some see all of these people as dense, and expect states to maintain their current roles.
One thing that all experts do agree on is that globalization is not something that can be easily undone. Trade barriers could go back up to what they were in the 1920s, but the communications revolution is here to stay, and much of globalization is based on that. Moreover, while states have tried hard to slow or stop the spread of various kinds of transnationalism, particularly with respect to labor or terrorism, they have been remarkably unable to. We live in an age when people and ideas will continue to easily cross state borders.
One thing to keep in mind: Whenever someone rails against the evils of globalization to you, ask them if they enjoy any of the following:
- Foreign cuisine, like the ever trendy Indian food, and contaminated milk and baby formula from China.
- Foreign entertainment (including martial arts movies and art house flicks)
- The lowered prices on everything at Wal-Mart
- The ability to communicate instantly and quickly with other anti-globalization activists thanks to teh Internets and text messaging, but not knowing any of your own neighbors.
- Websites like this.
- Closed factories in the Rust Belt that were horribly inefficient [citation needed] anyway.
- Pittsburgh losing half its population since 1979
[edit] Critiques of the globalization paradigm
As Fred Cooper points out in Colonialism in Question, there are two things wrong with "globalization" as a term for understanding the world's networks of information, economic and cultural exchanges—the "global" and the "-ization." By this, Cooper means that it is problematic to talk about globalization as a unified, worldwide and singular process when one takes into account the extent to which different social groups experience and are affected by the alleged phenomenon in different ways.
Another criticism is that "globalization" is nothing new—from the Indian Ocean trade of the twelfth century to the Atlantic system, ideas, information, commodities, technologies and money have been moving around the globe for a very long time now. The pace at which things move may have accelerated somewhat, but the networks carrying them have been around for centuries.
The legacies of these older forms of globalization can be found the "traditions" that people want to protect against the perils of contemporary globalization. Consider, if you will, the Jamaican patty, a "traditional" West Indian food. Essentially a Scottish meat pie filled with Indian curry, prepared by and sold to disaporic Africans in the Caribbean. A delicious treat impossible to conceive of in a pre-globalized world.
[edit] A real critique
In modern trade, with lowered tariff barriers, manufacturers chase the cheapest source of labor available. This has led to the de-industrialisation of the United States and its horrible trade deficit with low-wage China. Not only does China offer incredibly cheap labor, on top of that they keep their currency cheap to encourage exports instead of letting it float on the market - which true globalism would expect.
