Globalization

INTRODUCTION TO
GLOBALIZATION
The Contemporary World

GLOBALIZATION CONCEPTS, MEANINGS,
FEATURES, AND DIMENSION
• Globalization is the process in which
people, ideas and goods spread
throughout the world, spurring more
interaction and integration between the
world's cultures, governments and
economies.

There were similarities in features of those
prevailing wave of globalization before the
outbreak of the First World War in 1914 to the
current wave. There is an increase cross border-
trade, investment, and migration due to policy
and technical developments in the past few
decades. It is in the area of economic
development that observers believe the world has
entered a new phase.

In the years since the Second World
War, and especially during the past two
decades, many governments have adopted
free-market economic systems, vastly
increasing their own productive potential
and creating myriad new opportunities for
international trade and investment.

Governments also have negotiated dramatic
reductions in barriers to commerce and have
established international agreements to promote
trade in goods, services, and investment. Taking
advantage of new opportunities in foreign markets,
corporations have built foreign factories and
established production and marketing
arrangements with foreign partners. A defining
feature of globalization, therefore, is an
international industrial and financial business
structure.

One principal driver of globalization is technology.
Economic life is dramatically transformed by
advancement in information technology. All sorts of
individual economic actors like consumers, investors,
and businesses which are valuable new tools for
identifying and pursuing economic opportunities,
including faster and more informed analyses of
economic trends around the world, easy transfers of
assets, and collaboration with far-flung partners are
provided by information technologies(4)

Globalization is the process of integration of
economies across the world through cross-border
flow of factors product and information (5).
According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
globalization is the growing economic
interdependence of countries worldwide through
increasing volume and variety of cross border
transactions in goods and services and of
international capital flows and also through the
more rapid and wide diffusion of technology (6).

Globalization is an expansion,
and intensification of social
relations and consciousness across
world time and world space. It is
about growing worldwide
connectivity according to Steger.

In the fifth edition of his bestselling Very Short
Introduction Manfred B. Steger considers the major
dimensions of globalization: economic, political,
cultural, ideological, and ecological. He looks at its
causes and effects, and engages with the hotly
contested question of whether globalization is,
ultimately, a good or a bad thing. From climate
change to the Ebola virus,

…Donald Trump to Twitter, trade
wars to China's growing global profile,
Steger explores today's unprecedented
levels of planetary integration as well
as the recent challenges posed by
resurgent national populism.

Further, globalization is considered a multi-
dimensional process involving economic, political,
technological, cultural, religious and ecological
dimensions. It suggests a dynamic process of
change that results in either positive or negative
development. It leads to the creation of something
new; it involves the multiplication of social
connections and various activities that transgress
traditional and political, economic, cultural and
geographical lines.

ATTRIBUTES, QUALITIES OR
CHARACTERISTICS OF GLOBALIZATION
1. It involves both the creation of
new social networks and the
multiplication of existing
connections that cut across
traditional, political, economic,
cultural, and geographical
boundaries.

Example (1): Brazilian World Cup:
Today’s media combine
conventional TV coverage with
multiple streaming feeds into
digital devices and networking
sites that transcend nationally

2. Globalization is reflected in the
expansion and the stretching of
social relations, activities, and
connections.

Examples:
Reaching of financial markets around the globe
Occurrence of electronic around the clock
Emergence of gigantic and virtually identical
shopping malls in all continents to cater to consumers
who can afford commodities all over the world-
including products whose various components were
manufactured in different countries. This process is
called social stretching.

Covered in the process of social stretching are:
Non-governmental organization Commercial
enterprises
Social clubs
Regional & global institutions and
associations (UN, EU, ASEAN, Google and
others)

3. Globalization involves the
intensification and acceleration of
social exchanges and activities

Examples (3):
The worldwide web relays distant information in
real time
Satellites provide consumers with instant pictures of
remote events
Sophisticated social networking by means of
facebook or twitter has become routine activity for
more than a billion people around the globe

4. Globalization processes do not occur merely
or an objective, material level but they also
involve the subjective plane of human
consciousness. Without erasing local and
national attachments, the compression of the
world into a single place has increasingly
made global the frame of reference for human
thought and action.

Globalization involves both the macro-structures of
a global community and the micro-structures of
global personhood. It extends deep into the core of
the self and its dispositions, facilitating the creation
of multiple individual and collective identities
nurtured by the intensifying relations between the
personal and the global. They differ from each
other by acceleration in the speed of social
exchanges and widening of geographical scopes (7)

HISTORICAL PERIODS OF
GLOBALIZATION
1. The Prehistoric Period (10000 BCE-3500
BCE) In this earliest phase of
globalization, contacts among hunters
and gatherers – who were spread around
the world – were geographically limited.
In this period due to absence of advanced
forms of technology, globalization was
severely limited.

GLOBALIZATION
2. The Pre-modern Period (3500 BCE- 1500 CE)
In this period the invention of writing and the
wheel were great social and technological
boosts that moved globalization to a new
level. The invention of wheel in addition to
roads made the transportation of people and
goods more efficient. On the other hand
writing facilitated the spread of ideas and
inventions.

GLOBALIZATION
3.The Early Modern Period (1500-1750) It is
the period between the Enlightenment and
the Renaissance. In this period, European
Enlightenment project tried to achieve a
universal form of morality and law. This with
the emergence of European metropolitan
centers and unlimited material accumulation
which led to the capitalist world system
helped to strengthen globalization

GLOBALIZATION
4. The Modern Period (1750-1970)
Innovations in transportation and
communication technology, population
explosion, and increase in migration led
to more cultural exchanges and
transformation in traditional social
patterns. Process of industrialization also
accelerated.

GLOBALIZATION
5. The Contemporary Period (from
1970 to present) The creation,
expansion, and acceleration of
worldwide interdependencies
occurred in a dramatic way and it
was a kind of leap in the history of
globalization.

DIMENSIONS OF GLOBALIZATION
1. Economic Dimension-This refers to
the extensive development of
economic relations across the globe as
a result of technology and the
enormous flow of capital that has
stimulated trade in both sources and
goods (8).

Major players in the current century’s
global economic order
1. Huge international corporations
(General Motors, Walmart, Mitsubishi)
2. International Economic Institutions (IMF,
World Bank, The World Trade
Organization)

The result of these powerful forces
resulted in the wide gap between the
rich and the poor countries. Major
Sources of Economic Growth across
Countries (9) 1. Property rights 2.
Regulatory institutions 3. Institutions
for macro-economics.

4. Stabilization
5. Institutions for social influence
7. Institutions for conflict
management

2. Political Dimension This refers to
an enlargement and strengthening
of political interrelations across the
globe (10)

Political Issues that Surface in this
Dimension
1. The principle of state sovereignty
2. Increasing impact of various
intergovernmental organization
3. Future shapes of regional and global
governance

The globalization rendered almost powerless
any political efforts to introduce restrictive
policies affecting individual states, with the
results that the world in many ways turned
into a borderless world. Governments often
seek to restrict the migration of peoples,
especially those coming from the poor
countries in the global South.

In the development of supra-national
structures and associations held together by
common concerns and mutually agreed upon
norm, the most obvious is political
globalization.
On the part of the involved parties, informal
structures which are considered binding, bring
together world power centers due to common
interests.

Example:
Global cities like New York, London,
Tokyo, and Singapore are closely
connected with one another than they are
to various cities in their own countries.
European Union, United nations, NATO,
The World Trade Organization

3. Cultural Dimension This refers to
the increase in the amount of
cultural flows across the globe.
Cultural interconnections are at the
foundations of contemporary
globalization.

Individualism and consumerism which are the
dominant cultural characteristics of our age and the
drive for economic success stimulated by the
internet and other technological devices circulate
much more easily than they did in earlier periods. In
the dissemination of popular culture, transactional
media corporations play a major role which brought
a sharp rise in homogenized popular culture that is
manifested in the dominance of fast food restaurant
on more aspects of life.

Cultural diversity often results
hybridization- a constructive interaction
process between global and local
characteristics which is often visible in
food, music, dance, film, fashion, and
language. As a result there is a scarcely
any society in the world that expresses
itself in its own self-contained and
authentic culture.

Media empires generated and directed
the extensive flow of culture. Examples of
these are Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and
Disney. Advertisement plays an important
role in this cultural flow by featuring
various celebrities in the television aside
from transforming newscast into
entertainment shows.

4. Religious Dimension Religion is a personal or
institutionalized set of attitudes, beliefs, and practices
relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an
acknowledged ultimate reality or deity (12). It is the
most important defining element of any civilization as
contrasted with race, language, or way of life. As such, it
is also portrayed as a defining element in future
conflicts. Whether the root cause of a particular conflict
or merely a vehicle for the mobilization of nationalist or
ethnic passions, religion is certainly central to much of
the strife currently taking place around the globe.

Jihadist globalism is a religious response to the
materialist assault by the ungodly West in the rest of the
world. Coming out of what they consider a pure form of
Islam, its disciples seek to destroy all those alien
influences that have been imposed on Muslim people. It
applies to those extremely violent strains of religion that
convert the global imaginary into very concrete political
agendas and terrorist tactics. It is also applied to those
violent fundamentalists in the West who seek to
transform the world into a Christian Empire.

Example:
Bin Ladin understands umma as a single community of believers
professing faith in the one and only God, but at the same time
committed to destroying not only alien invaders but also corrupt
Islamic elites in order to return power to the Muslim masses.
Since one third of the world’s Muslim population lives in non-
Islamic countries, the restoration of God’s proper reign must be a
global event. Hence, Al-Qaeda established jihadist cells in
various parts of the world.

Roman Catholic Teaching of Globalization
There are eight (8) principles that summarize
the Roman Catholic Teachings
1. Commitment to universal human rights
2. Commitment to the social nature of the
human person
3. Commitment to the common good

4. Solidarity (The principle of
Solidarity affirms that
membership in the human
family means that all bear
responsibility for one another

5. Preferential option of the poor (In the Theology
of the Incarnation- Christ God became poor for us
so as to enrich us by his poverty. The poor are
susceptible to the effects of environmental
irresponsibility because they live in countries where
cheap building materials and cheap labor are
readily available. They regularly work in farming,
fishing, and forestry, areas which suffer
environmental damage

6. Subsidiary (The Catholic Church
teaches that decisions should be made at
the lowest level in order to achieve the
common good.
7. Justice
8. Integral Humanism- is concerned with
whole person

Justice is divided in three (3)
categories:
1. Commutative justice This aims at
fulfilling the terms of contracts and
other promises on both personal and
social

2. Distributive justice -This ensures a
basic equity in how both the burden
and the goods of society are
distributed and that ensures that every
person enjoys a basically equal moral
and legal standing apart from
differences in wealth, privilege, talent
and achievements.

3. Social justice This refers to the
creation of the conditions in which
the first two categories of justice
can be realized and the common
good identified and defended.

5. Ideological Dimensions
Ideology is a system of widely shared ideas, beliefs,
norms and values among a group of people. It is often
used to legitimize certain political interests or to defend
dominant power structures. Ideology connects human
actions with some generalized claims.
Globalization is a social process of intensifying global
interdependence while globalism is an ideology that
gives the concept of neo-liberal values and meanings to
globalization

Major Ideological Claims of Advocates of Globalism
1. Globalization is about the liberalization and
global integration of markets. The problem with this
claim is that liberalization and integration of
markets happen through political project of
engineering free markets by interference of
centralized state power, and it is in contrast to the
neoliberal ideal of limited role of governments.

2. Globalization is inevitable and irreversible.
Globalists believe that spread of market forces
driven by technological innovations is
inevitable in globalization. Neoliberals use this
claim to convince people to adopt the natural
discipline of the market if they want to
prosper, which implies the elimination of
government controls over the market.

3. Nobody is in charge of
globalization. This claim seeks to
depoliticize the public debate on
globalization and neutralizing anti -
globalist movements.

4. Globalization benefits everyone.
Globalists talk about the benefits of market
liberalization such as rising global living
standards, economic efficiency, individual
freedom, and technological progress. But the
reality is that the opportunities of
globalization are spread unequally and power
and wealth are concentrated among a specific
group of people, regions and corporations.

5. Globalization furthers the spread of democracy in
the world. For the globalists democracy and free
markets are synonymous. The neoliberal
explanation of globalization is ideological because
it is politically motivated and contributes to the
construction of particular meanings of globalization
which stabilize existing power relations. Globalism
tries to create collective meaning and shape
people’s identities.

6. Ecological Dimension- examines the
effects of global alliances on ecological
issues.

Globalization

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