Analysis of Globalization - Essay Example

Analysis of Globalization Globalization is the modern term that determines changing situation among all aspects of our society under the influence of the global trend towards openness and interdependence. At the end of the twentieth century the world economy as a collection of national economies and their economic and political relationship acquires a new quality: globalization becomes the most important form and simultaneously a new phase of internationalization of economic life. It covers the major processes of the world socio-economic development and accelerates economic growth and modernization. At the same time, globalization gives rise to new contradictions and problems in the global economy. The process of globalization today overcame all the countries in the world in a different degree. Thus, in this paper it is necessary to discuss the new phenomenon of our society – globalization. The goal of the work is to show the usefulness of this term, paying specific attention to economic inequality, increased consumption of natural resources, and as a result, environmental disaster. First of all it is necessary to mention that globalization has both positive and negative impacts on contemporary world, and exactly nowadays it is difficult to find a more fashionable and debatable topic than globalization. Different conferences and symposia, hundreds of modern books and thousands of articles are devoted to it. Scientists and politicians, businessmen and economists, religious leaders and artists argue about it. The subject of lively debate is literally everything - what the globalization is, when it started, how it fits with other processes in public and economic life, and what its immediate and long-term consequences are. However, the abundance of approaches, opinions and assessments do not guarantee the deep study of this fundamental issue. Globalization is considered to be a difficult question that is not difficult only for mass consciousness but for scientific analysis, too. Thus, it is waiting for a thorough study and we are going to begin its discussion from the perspective of economic inequality. Thinking about economic inequality trough the prism of globalization it is necessary to mention that the main consequence of this is the global division of labor, migration across the planet's capital, human and industrial resources, the standardization of legislation, economic and technological processes, as well as the convergence of cultures in different countries. It is an objective process that is systemic in its nature and that covers all the aspects of society. Globalization is associated primarily with the internationalization of the entire public activity on the Earth (Gumery, 2006). This internationalization means that humanity is a single system of social, cultural, economic, political and other relations, interactions and relationships in the modern era. For example, including all the countries and nationalities, epochal events and changes that happened in the world at the end of the last century we recognize globalization’s influence. Humanity now lives in the ‘world community’ where a single country or a group of countries can not be fully fenced off from each other. Globalization deeply leaves roots in the history, and, however, it is considered to be the phenomenon of the 20th century. It is obvious that the processes of globalization of world economy observed in recent decades, have conflicting implications for the economic development of many countries. Currently two opposite points of view on globalization as a factor in the balanced development of the world economy co-exist. According to the first position, globalization is a ‘zero-sum game’: it gives a gain to relatively more developed countries, and it gives losses to less developed (developing) countries. Developed countries use developing countries as economic resources (natural raw materials, cheap labor), and use their markets in their own purposes (for sales of their products), which leads to the preservation of a relatively backward economic structure of the latter, as well as to reducing the rate of economic growth. In this case, globalization becomes a factor in the increasing inequality between countries. Supporters of the second point of view believe that the increase of international exchange is more beneficial for developing countries because it promotes a more rapid catch-up development. In the process of globalization, developing countries get access to the capital and technologies of developed countries (Giddens, 2002). As a result, economic disparities between countries in the world are reduced, the global economy becomes more balanced. Thinking about the problem of increased consumption of natural resources in the frames of globalization it is necessary to mention that exactly economic globalization increases consumption (e.g., oil, paper, meat). Modern humanity, tending to establish its domination over the nature, is faced to the situation where the operation of an artificially created ‘second nature’, which is generally called ‘technosphere’, spawned a whole range of issues of global importance (Kiggundu, 2002). Thus, we see that increased consumption of natural resources escalates into a conflict of the first type of contradiction - between man and nature, and the contradictions of the second type - between communities in the society, will inevitably lead to social, environmental and technological disasters. In this part of the paper let us examine the way how increased consumption of natural resources will lead to environmental disaster. For example, increased consumption of paper needs more trees to be cut down and it will lead to deforestation and global warming and the end of this process. It is obvious that in the frames of the process of globalization we are not talking about natural disasters caused by natural forces of nature itself. In the case when the disaster is caused by nature we can determine the positive potential of globalization, specifically the rapidly developing technological advances that help to minimize the losses (for example, using the scientific prediction, rapid transmission of information, advanced search capabilities, etc.). We should remember that environmental and technological disasters are the most alarming, because they basically have a human impact on the biosphere in their essence (Zachary, 1999). Environmental disasters are expressed mainly in the imbalance in the ratio of different species in vital pyramid and in basic cycles, which ultimately undermine the biosphere resilience (Brennan, 2003). In their turn, energy, nuclear, transportation, infrastructure, catastrophic accidents attributed the mismatch interaction of the elements of man-machine systems. In this type of disaster with the development of technology the great importance belongs to the human factor - engineering errors, errors of staff, ineffective assistance of rescue services, etc. Thus, modern disasters are complex phenomena and are closely related to economic and political aspects of life, because in pursuit of a decent life citizens of developing countries in one way or another come in the wake of the developed world in the exploitation of natural resources. Thinking about positive characteristics of globalization we can mention that they include the rejection of an obedient subordinate to political economy beginning, a decisive choice in favor of the competitive (market) economic model, the recognition of the capitalist model as ‘optimal’ sociology-economic system (Lindsay and Daalder, 2003). All this is at least theoretically; it has made the world more uniform and allowed to hope that the relative uniformity of social order will help to eliminate poverty and destitution, the smoothing of economic inequality in the global space. Thus, it is possible to say that the problem of the ambiguous attitude toward globalization can be partly explained by different meanings, which certain authors have invested in this notion. Some believe that globalization means the free movement of capital, others associate it with the cultural and economic hegemony of the United States, and others generally use this term as a kind of universal concept to describe all that they do not like in modern life. In conclusion, globalization impacts on all the countries of the world in different degree and in its own way; it leads to economic growth and decline, increases level of consumption of natural resources, and causes different kinds of disasters, but in spite of everything globalization has become one of the most important factors in the development of our society nowadays, and humanity should remember that its main mission is to be attentive to surrounding reality and be careful with the own decisions. Works cited: Brennan, Teresa. Globalization and Its Terrors. Routledge, 2003. Giddens, Anthony. Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives. Routledge, 2002. Gumery, Keith. International Views: America and the Rest of the World. Longman, 2006. Kiggundu, Moses N. Managing Globalization in Developing Countries and Transition Economies: Building Capacities for a Changing World. Praeger, 2002. Lindsay, James M. and Daalder, Ivo H. “The Globalization of Politics: American Foreign Policy for a New Century.” The Brookings Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter, 2003. Zachary, G. Pascal. “The World Gets in Touch with Its Inner American.” Mother Jones Magazine, January/February 1999. Read More