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CIAO DATE: 07/06
Introduction
In the year 2000 the International Monetary Fund published an Issues Brief with the evocative title "Globalization: Threat or Opportunity?" IMF staff described globalization as "a historical process, the result of human innovation and technological progress. it refers to the increasing integration of economies around the world, particularly through trade and financial flows."
It's true that many people think of a liberalized approach to trade when they consider globalization, and in recent years economic effects have come to dominate discussion of this phenomenon. But there is also a powerful psychological dimension to globalization.
Media analyst Marshall McLuhan coined the famous phrase "global village" in the 1960s, describing a profound cultural shift in a world where radio waves connected all parts of the planet. Long before the wired world we live in, McLuhan analyzed advances in communications technology that disrupted both traditional and modern societies.
Many scholars have analyzed the topic further. Arjun Appadurai, the Indian anthropologist who is now provost of the New School for Social Research in New York City, sees globalization as "the name of a new industrial revolution (driven by powerful new information and communication technologies) which has barely begun. Because of its newness, it taxes our linguistic and political resources for understanding and managing it." Appadurai classifies five kinds of interconnectivity that characterize globalization: cross-border movements of people, money, ideas, media images, and technologies.
Where people disagree about globalization—often passionately—is in whether its effects are mostly good or mostly bad. As the World Bank's Web site puts it, globalization "has been one of the most hotly debated topics in international economics over the past few years. Rapid growth and poverty reduction in China, India, and other countries that were poor 20 years ago, has been a positive aspect of globalization. But globalization has also generated significant international opposition over concerns that it has increased inequality and environmental degradation."
Economic globalization often appears to be a kind of race, with real winners and losers. "Globalization offers extensive opportunities for truly worldwide development but it is not progressing evenly," in the words of the IMF Issues Brief. "Some countries are becoming integrated into the global economy more quickly than others. Countries that have been able to integrate are seeing faster growth and reduced poverty."
"In the United States and in the 10 or so most wealthy countries of the world," says Appadurai, "globalization is certainly a positive buzz word for corporate elites and their political allies. But for migrants, people of color, and other marginals (the so-called 'South' in the 'North'), it is a source of worry about inclusion, jobs, and deeper marginalization."
But globalization also inspires considerable anxiety in the United States and other parts of the developed world when it takes the form of outsourcing—the movement of factory and service work to countries with lower wages.
The British economist Phillipe Legrain, by contrast, recently pointed out the cultural benefits of globalization. "The beauty of globalization," Legrain writes, "is that it can free people from the tyranny of geography. Just because someone was born in France does not mean they can only aspire to speak French, eat French food, read French books, visit museums in France, and so on. A Frenchman—or an American, for that matter—can take holidays in Spain or Florida, eat sushi or spaghetti for dinner, drink Coke or Chilean wine, watch a Hollywood blockbuster or an Almodovar, listen to bhangra or rap, practice yoga or kickboxing, read Elle or The Economist, and have friends from all over the world."
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is also in the optimist camp about globalization's effects. According to his recent best-selling book, The World Is Flat, new Internet-based technologies mean that work can be moved anywhere in the world in search of expertise and low labor costs. Creative collaboration is enhanced. Doctors in Bangalore, India, are reading the x-rays of American patients as they sleep—a development that benefits both nations in Friedman's view. To use the metaphor he favors, the playing field of economic competition has been leveled.
Even for Friedman, however, globalization has its disquieting elements. "The flattened world means we are connecting all the knowledge centers on the planet together into a single global network which—if politics and terrorists do not get in the way—could usher in a new era of prosperity and innovation," he writes. "But contemplating the flat world also left me filled with dread … my personal dread derived from the obvious fact that it's not only the software writers and computer geeks who get empowered to collaborate in a flat world. It's also al-Qaida and other terrorist networks. The playing field is not being leveled only in ways that draw in and super-empower a whole new group of innovators. It's being leveled in a way that draws in a whole new group of angry, frustrated, and humiliated men and women."
Claude Smadja and Klaus Schwab, two founders of the World Economic Forum, the Swiss-based foundation that brings business and government leaders together to improve the state of the world, have summed up the primary challenge globalization faces. "At a time when the emphasis is on empowering people, on democracy moving ahead all over the world, on people asserting control over their own lives, globalization has established the supremacy of the market in an unprecedented way," they wrote in 1999. "We must demonstrate that globalization is not just a code word for an exclusive focus on shareholder value at the expense of any other consideration; that the free flow of goods and capital does not develop to the detriment of the most vulnerable segments of the population and of some accepted social and human standards. … If we do not invent ways to make globalization more inclusive, we have to face the prospect of a resurgence of the acute social confrontations of the past, magnified at the international level."
George Clack
Senior Editor