I have a question for you, dear readers, and would appreciate responses in the comments. The question is what is globalization?
Don't go to your Stiglitz, Held, Giddens, Rosenau, etc. or Wikipedia for the response. I know all that stuff. I'm really interested in what your own immediate working definition is.
I've written quite a bit already on globalization (beyond blogland), but one thing globalization theorists often do is make reference to a vague and perhaps necessarily unempirical notion of a publicly shared idea of globalization.
If you're an expert, by all means let me know what you think. But especially if you're not, I'm very interested in hearing what you have to say.
25 comments:
We live in NYC -- my daughter is a third grader here. I was born and raised in Manhattan and have lived in a loft in what is now TRIBECA (god I hate that name) for the last 30 years --- rent stabilised because I've never been able to buy an apartment, just never able to afford it.
Four years ago while on vacation in Paris I saw a listing for an apartment in a great area at a price that we could afford. We bought it. It's tiny 450 sq ft. You can call it a pied a terre -- though that makes it sound alot more glamorous than it is.
Because I work in television I'm able to sort of justify spending long periods there (summer, my daughter's school breaks).
We can't afford a country or summer place on the eastern seabord and getting there takes a little longer and is more expensive that's all.
FRankly the thought of shoveling money into inflated real estate here just to live with the same people that surround us in Manhattan doesn't make sense. That's globalisation to me
Globalization is the economic and cultural integration that results from the reduction of the cost of transporting goods and services across national boundaries.
This can come from the actual reduction of transportation costs which allows a boat trip from Korea to Long Beach to add relatively little cost to the total cost of a good or service. It can be a reduction in tarrifs and duties which allow transprotation of goods from proximate, though legally and culturally distinct regions. It can be the result of lower cost transmission of cultural assets (movies, music) accross legal and cultural boundaries.
Simply it is the combination of the capacity to send things inexpensively from one place to another cheaply which lowers cultural resistance to alien objects and ideas. Once this resistance is lowered, we all participate in markets (including cultural ones) which extend beyond political and cultural boundaries.
I like this definition:
Globalization is the economic and cultural integration that results from the reduction of the cost of transporting goods and services across national boundaries.
But I don't think it does any good to talk about globalization without noting how the idea, which is supposed to lift all boats, is corrupted by forces who build unfair advantages for owners into the system. That ends up making globalization most like a vortex that sucks workers and economies down to the lowest common level instead of lifting anyone up.
Have fun in Venezuela.
Globalization: Karl Marx's grave must by now be a perfect glass-lined cocoon from all the spinning he's been doing in there. The sand in the grave-dirt will have melted from the friction & fused into a beautiful smooth-walled cylinder that would do lovely things with light, if light could penetrate the 20-foot-thick cement lining.
OTOH: Too Much Monkey Business, by Chuck Berry
Word Verification: dvbqk, which is Arabic for "By the beard of the Profit, I need some vowels!"
"Globalization" is a noun. Derivationally speaking, its noun-ness results from the addition of affix "-ation" to the verb "globalize," which results from the addition of the affix "-ize" to the adjective "global," which results from the addition of the affix "-al" to the noun "globe."
Thiking in this way about the word can remind us to ask serious, if silly-sounding, questions about it. Say, for instance, we use a different set of derivational affixes altogether: globe:globic:globicate:globicatitude. What would globicatitude be? (I know you think about this stuff, for the name of your blog is "phronesisaical.") Or, hell, skip the adjective: globe:globify:globifiness. What do the derived nouns mean?
The problem with the idea of "globalization" hinges on the verb that's being made a noun. Both "globicate" and "globify" sound like transitive verbs without clear objects; the same is true of "globalize." Can you come up with an object for that? What gets globalized? Not the globe, obviously; it's already global. Is commerce "globalized"? People say things like this, but what does it mean? Commerce is shaped more like a sphere? No, not really. To globalize.
I know it isn't an answer to your question, exactly, but it seems like the formulation "who globalizes what?" might be a good place to begin.
Globalization: The process of leveraging international disparity to maximize short-term gain. Internationalizing inequity and applying new universal human values to the business of exploitation.
There are distinctive species in the Galapagos Islands, Australia, and other places because these places have been isolated from other places -- or because other places have been isolated from them. Globalization means that all of our social ecosystems are connected by land links -- that there is no more isolation. This does not mean minority species die out. If they have a niche, they may thrive. But the point is that they are now competing with everyone else. Globalization.
Globalization is the process of moving production to those parts of the world where it can be done the most efficiently (i.e. the cheapest). These efficiencies are achieved almost always as a result of cheaper labor and lower levels of regulation. The promise is that while the poor countries are producing our "everyday low price" knick-knacks, we're freed to build flying cars and wonder drugs.
I'm not an expert here but I think globalization is, or should be, the free flow of products and information across borders. Not going to happen until we get one world government. Right now it's a way for businesses to save money and increase profits by searching out the most desperate people to make their goods at the cheapest prices.
Thanks for these comments. They're all great. Curiously, however, there's much less emphasis on the cultural and political side of globalization than the economic. Surely economic globalization leads the way. But I wonder if claims about "creative destruction" or Anthony Giddens saying that "globalisation lies behind the expansion of democracy" have a whole lot of purchase. I get mixed reviews from people who live in developing nations.
One other thing, regarding global pricing, comparative advantage, etc. Many argue that priciing works the other way around than how several of you suggest. That is, economies of scale -- production in the wealthy industrialized nations -- actually undercuts price in developing countries, forcing farmers off their farms, and other workers into new forms of employment for which they may not have the skills nor the ability to acquire the skills. That's the process of dumping, helped along by, for example, agricultural subsidies in the US and EU. Neoclassical economists will say that this process may cause short-term pain for farmers and other workers, but that in the long run it turns national economies towards what is truly in the comparative advantage over other nations. There are plenty of critiques of this view. But we often seem to asssume in the US that American prices,production, and labor is exclusively undercut by cheap labor and production processes in other countries. Both sides have elements of truth to them. Something to consider....
My views are colored by my profession (public health), which is a "global" enterprise in the sense that the bugs adn the chemical plumes don't know or care about national boundaries. So for me, globablization (in the political sense) is the currently unfolding process where by various realities (transportation, multinational economic structures, public health, culture, language) are breaking down the nation state system into "somethng else." The something else is globalization. I just don't know what that is (except that it is something other than the national system and not any of its predecessors, like feudalism).
Low cost businesses rule.
I'm here via Majikthise...
Globalization: The reduction of barriers to the transfer of ideas, organizational structures, species (microbes, plants, animals), goods, capital, and people across political and natural boundaries.
Globalization is people in other countries making goods and services for us that we used to make and provide for ourselves. They do it in other countries cheaper. Other countries have no labor laws and environmental restrictions to deal with. And we lose jobs here because of it. But we get to buy real cheap stuff from Walmart, and eat salads that traveled 8,000 miles to get here. In America however, we still mix our own drinks domestically. For now.
Globalization is a manifestation of class warfare in which class has completely surplanted nationality.
Globalization is a sexy word that gives Tom Friedman of the NY Times a big chubby. He dresses all his blow-up dolls in "GLOBALIZATION" tshirts during those lonely Bangalor and Malaysia trips.
Again, thanks to all of you who have come over from Majikthise and By Neddie Jingo! Majikthise has it's own comment string going on the question -- I had asked Lindsay to link to my post here. Thanks to those of you who have posted in both places. Here's what I had to say a moment ago over at Majikthise:
Re Gordo's post. Yes, globalization has little to do with internationalism. The medium we're using right now to communicate is itself not inter-national. It's global. But this doesn't mean it's inclusive. For one thing, we're writing in English. For another, impoverished people usually don't have computers and internet connections and usually don't pay attention to blogs. There are more important things to worry about, such as not starving.
This is the point of this exercise. Globalization is a complex phenomenon, and it is not even necessarily an entirely contemporary phenomenon. The Friedman's of the world use the term basically to make a career and boost their own status. Economic globalization has widened the global gap between incomes when it was supposed to close them. People's livelihoods are destroyed in developing nations and developed nations where the commitment is to a nation's comparative advantage. What that basically means is that an activity that doesn't earn increase capital within a country is of much less interest and this can have deleterious effects even on subsistence-level activities such as farming.
But I think we can nevertheless use "globalization" in both a descriptive and a normative sense that is distinct from but not unrelated to economic globalization. Human rights discourse is one example. If ever there was a shared international or global norm,human rights most closely approximates it. Even when human rights norms are abused, there are still excuses made ("a few bad apples" at Abu Ghraib), which suggests that the agents of human rights abuses know that the norm has global legitimacy and that they have broken it.
If we look at environmental issues such as global warming, there is no way to mitigate it unless the problem -- a global one -- is dealt with in global terms. Any success on this count requires moving past national interests. Public health, as one commenter mentioned on my blog, is similar -- a global problem requiring a kind of coordination that would appear to move beyond nation-states. The reality is that states still act in their own interests, so resolving such problems is difficult when those individual state interests and problem-solving capacities are asymmetrical. Global civil society unbound by national centers (as with transnational corporations) has grown around the problems that "investor class" globalization has wrought. The NGOs, etc. that comrise global civil society are not a panacea, but they suggest a different form of globalization, even if the cause is anti-globalization.
I think you're right that globalization is -- descriptively -- a project of "furthering the interests of the investor class". But, normatively, a different form of globalizationmight be possible. The internet started as a US military project, was opened to public access, and has been transformed by corporations but also by us. We're doing it right now. This goes for software, hardware, and content.
So, I suppose what I'm getting at is that globalization as it exists at present leaves a lot of human and environmental damage in its wake, but it also opens up possibilities for a transformation of its very nature.
And then also this:
It's an interesting discussion and, I think, consequential. I'll do a bit of posting from Venezuela over at my place (Phronesisaical) if I can while in VZ. But I'll certainly do so when I'm back. VZ is interesting because it's facing it's own version of trying to carve out a third way. Poverty is rampant as is environmental damage. But it's recognized as a problem and my hosts there -- who are responsible for organizing nation-wide education reforms which will include a required high school level course on democracy -- are very interested in sorting out Venezuela's place in the world as a social democracy that can balance economic development (qualitatively speaking!) with social reforms with greater democratic inclusion. Whatever one may think of Chavez (and many on both the right and the left think he's a demagogue -- I'm not sure yet myself), he's leading an extremely dynamic country that's posing questions to itself as an increasingly inclusive public dialogue that we in the US ought also to do more often.
Globalization is the name commonly used to describe the international political economy of the era following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies and client states, in which exploitation of third world nations, in addition to that of metropolitan working classes and the natural environment, is expedited in the interest of "socializing" risks and costs, while maximizing the "privatization" of profits accruing to investors who would have been identified as "imperialists" during most of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The fact that shipping costs have been thusfar almost invisibly submerged in the cost structure of prices of commodities, facilitating an astonishing ability for manufacturing to "run away" from the physical sites of consumer markets, is but one indication of how risk has been shifted from investors and onto workers, consumers and the natural environment.
What's gonna happen to globalization of trade after peak oil? Will it still be worth shipping the lettuce for your salad 8000 miles? We'll need our farms back. Guess what? Walmart paved them over. And where will the famers come from anyway? And who'll be able to afford a 100 mile daily commute to work? Check out Jim Kunstler for a dose of reality: http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/
The transition to post-fossil world WILL happen. It WON'T be pleasant. Globalization will be of concern only as far as the countries who hold our debt and pump the oil we covet are concerned. And for anyone who would enjoy watching gasbag Tom Friedman get a hilarius puncturing, read Matt Taibbi's no-nonsense skewering of Friedman's goofy prose and "Flat Earth" thinking:
http://nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm?in1=y
Globalization is, to my mind, neo-feudalism. Think of multinationals as inchoate vassals who, very quickly, will be able to dissolve democratically elected governments. We may be on the precipice of the absolutism of the corporation -- not to be a Cassandra, but corporation seems to be the apt characterization. Our present day dynasties marry through international mergers and acquisitions, sustained by an aristocracy of specialized talent -- once a meritocracy, now self-perpetuating and inborn. The new elite, much like the old, are insulated from the daily travails of the hoi polloi. Contemporary media and the culture of materialism as an opiate for the masses has, I would suggest, a similar analogue in pre-enlightenment Christian hegemony -- a natural tool, though most likely an amoral cultural phenomenon, that offers psychic redemption to Weber’s iron cage of modernity. (See revival of religious evangelism)
The forces of good have it wrong. Surely it is better to “Think locally and ‘act locally’”; for only in regional warrens can the community exorcise the demiurge, or at least diminish its externalities and cannibalize it as a vehicle for moderate good. Things will get worse. The race to the bottom has just begun and China will push and push until it hurts. This canard about embracing China economically so human rights gains can be encouraged in the future is spurious. We only reward bad behavior and disincentivize the likelihood of progress -- we have no leverage.
But I digress.
Globalization isn’t a new phenomenon, per se, but the celerity with which it proceeds is without historical precedent. Think of the tumultuous decades leading up toward the absolutism of Kings, and the resultant proliferation of burgher and merchant guilds. Exhausted economies crave new material -- fresh product. There will be more wars. Put simply, Globalization is a familiar wolf in stylish new sheep’s clothing. Yeats, in the Second Coming, put it best: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Very good and thought-provoking comments, folks. Thanks. We're slouching towards Bethlehem, it appears, possibly through globicationality.
Please keep at it. This keeps getting better as we go along. After all, whatever this historical moment we're in the midst of is -- often called "globalization" -- we're in it together and it's accelerating.
Please no more Thomas Friedman references, though. Too easy a target. Our grand public intellectual on the subject: "Flat earth," he "whispers." Sheesh....
here from majikthise :)
for starters, it's not a flat world. there are hills and valleys galore and springs and deserts alike. lots of variance. lots.
anywho, to answer the Q.
the hydra of globalization has many many heads, one of which is an outgrowth of the internationalized society that itself grew out of the polarized world in the grips of the cold war. it is an extension of the worst philosophies of capitalism, such as an unbridled desire for expansion and the thorough and devastating utilization of natural resources. globalization is a term used to mask the process whereby corporations spread globally, reducing their overall risk factors but increasing the risk factor for each affected nation.
there are more, but i am a little tired. maybe i'll be back later to try and wrap things up?
The most prevelant context with the most dominant narrative is the economic one, covered most ably here,but since you are fishing for other aspects I also see globalization as the current phase of the modern project, an extension of the enlightenment with it's attendant problems and rewards for mankind.Expanding and finally eliminating physical boundaries and cultural barriers as the self attempts to re-unite with the One is risky and bloody and frightening but teleologically as unavoidable as the dawn.
Without reading any of the other comments, I would have to say that my "working definition" is that globalization is the phenomenon of relocating industry to minimize the entire cost of production, from manufacturing through to delivery. It is the evolution of the "make low, sell high" business objective into the modern age of advanced communication and transportation technologies.
In the short term, producers can take their operations to relatively undeveloped countries where labor is cheap and ship the product to highly developed countries where wages are high, with enough markup at the point of sale to more than compensate for the cost of transportation.
In theory, however, corporations won't be able to exploit third-world labor pools indefinitely. Where they build infrastructure to support their operations, wages will increase, cutting into the profit margin they sought by moving. In time, the wage advantage won't be enough to offset the transportation costs, and they'll have to relocate again.
Eventually, they'll be relocating to cut transportation costs instead of labor costs, because world-wide wage disparities won't be enough to cover the cost of shipping.
The effect of globalization, then, would be a "leveling of the playing field" in the long term. Just how long is anybody's guess.
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