Views and Explanations of Globalization - Coursework Example

 Competing Conceptions of Globalization We live in a world that is concurrently decreasing and growing, growing closer and farther apart and state borders are becoming less meaningful. Despite this fact, globalism does not seem to be effective. The speed of global transformation is exceptionally fast, and even those who have the expertise to track and evaluate it find it challenging to keep up with its progress. Despite these challenges, the developments are keenly observed and recorded, and the emerging terms soon become common in various spheres of the society. The right term for this trend is globalization. Although the meaning of this term is rather indistinct, and the phenomena it is used to denote extremely varied, it does articulate a prevailing feeling in the 21st century that human life is greatly shaped by forces, which have extended across boundaries, and which, concisely due to their magnitude and supremacy, are transforming life on this globe. All spheres of the society are being redefined by this process; people find their existence threatened or individuality thrown in to confusion; areas and entire regions are compelled to restructure themselves or diminish in the face of economic forces; and nations are experiencing gradually decreasing autonomy of action and closer ties to each other than any other time in the past (Scholte, 2000). At the present, there is a serious incongruity between the reality that globalization is in full gear, and the reality that the prevailing processes of global governance do not have the influence, ability and capacity to regulate and direct this process towards helpful ends. Due to this, globalization is usually unsettling and unbalanced in its outcomes. It has also brought new challenges for the current public institutions while at the same instance weathering their independence and support. Globalization has also provided the paradoxical means for those it eliminates culturally or economically to categorize against its subordinating and homogenizing force (Ohmae, 1999). Globalization: A Closer Look In essence, there are numerous explanations of globalization, which though consistent in various ways do illustrate varying faces of the process. According to analysts, globalization as a concept denotes both the solidifying of the world and amplification of perception of the globe as a whole. This incorporates the concrete global reliance and insight of the entire global in this new century. Still, there are those who define globalization as the escalation of international relations which merge far placed localities in such a way that anything happening locally is shaped by events taking place miles away and vice versa. In a large scale, this process is considered dialectical since this given happenings might be triggered by the distance dealings that define them. Local transformation is also a huge part of globalization as it represents creative expansion of social relations across both time and space (Hirst & Thompson, 2002). However, globalization is a terms that is commonly used in defining the world economy. What is intoned here is a qualitative movement towards an international economic system that no longer depends on independent nationwide economies but on a merged international marketplace for manufacture, supply and expenditure, in which distinctive national economies are included and rearticulated in to the system by essentially international methods and transactions (Hirst & Thompson, 2009). The primary vehicles for this process have been the rising trans nationalization of production, and the rising rise in influence of conglomerate businesses, and even more critically, the boom in the volume and scope of dealings in global financial markets. In essence, there has been in reality a transformation in nearly every financial aspect of the current global market. An example of these changes is in the banking industry where there are no more constraints in relation to time, place, and currency. Today, a European buyer can acquire a Japanese mortgage while an American can withdraw their money from a cash machine in China. Investors can buy shares everywhere in the world irrespective of the country of origin. However, one of the most notable effects of globalization is the homogenization of consumer markets across the globe, at least in various areas where the so-called McDonaldization of international consumption is rife (Moss, 2005). Critiques Although flaunted as representing the pinnacle of economic rationality, globalization has also been presented as possessing a very dark side. Critics constantly point out that the current form of globalization, propelled by economic superiority, evidently promotes the hegemony of Western culture and conglomerates. There have also been reports that globalization jeopardizes the jobs of those in rich nations and exploits cheap labour from third world nations especially in Africa and East Asia. Globalization is also believed to have led to a rise in environmental threats as well as undermining the establishments of democracy and societal stability by subjecting national political institutes to forces of economic transformation that are beyond their control. As recent research has pointed out, globalization is irregular both in its processes as well as in its effects. This is mainly because it brings about absorptions and deficiencies, which, in the average, comprise a progressively well-pointed power structure (Brecher, & Costello, 2012). Over the past few years, some critical thinkers have contended that economic forces are coalescing the globe in to a single economy and, to a slighter degree, one political society. Nations take part in global governance according to their economic power and this power matches the rights that these nations hold. In most cases, an informal leadership of the world’s most influential nations dominates the critical thinkers hold, the global order. The law of this informal leadership becomes the market logic and status in this emerging order is often the function of economic performance (Weiss, 2011). Critics also point out that there is an emerging neo-liberal ideology of globalization, which comes up to normalize the process. Neo-liberality in essence comes to make the entire process appear ordinary, unavoidable, and advantageous. In an examination of the North American Trade Association as a representation of both the philosophy and practice of globalization, economist (Tabb, 2001) gives data from the United States to substantiate what he terms the “social failures,” which are born by the trade pact between various nations. These are noted as enhanced income disparity, ecological damage and the fall of democratic control. Ideally, the widening income disparity cannot be said to be the only societal shortcoming that is borne by globalization principally and by the current business treaties in their entirety. This is because environmental destruction is believed to be on the rise due to globalization. In the contemporary society, it is becoming more difficult for citizens of any particular political unit to arrange and use their government to execute regulations on contaminating firms due to the greater mobility of capital markets. In addition to this, globalization generally has a negative impact on the value of politics and public life since it places restrictions on the ability of administrations to arbitrate in their own economies. As a result, this curtails the power of the people to implement power over their economic lives (Albrow, 2007). Although one should not necessarily take the words of these critics at face value, it points out to the state of things as organizations and capital have gained the means to steer and function on a much wider scale. In addition to this, it conveys a state of anxiety that the nation-state as an organizational structure cannot manage efficiently with these new developments, and, in reality, finds its own precedence’s and strategies heavily predisposed, if not ordered, by them. Given this state of affairs, the question that then emerges is who will express and safeguard the public interest against the international influence of private economic and business interests, when the latter are quicker? For example, nearly all except the economic critics argue that governments must step in to safeguard the public when the markets collapse, that is in the event that they are not free and competitive. However, the bid to attain such a strategy at the international level, through various bilateral and global institutions has attained very little success. As a result of this, world markets have become progressively more concentrated in key sectors. In addition, while it is true that there is a case to be made for bringing down the number of expensive and inefficient regulatory government structures. The absence of adequate regulatory standards cutting across borders does indeed offer an incentive for big corporations to select less regulated working environments, and incorporates nations seeking foreign investment in a “race for the bottom” competition to see who can offer the cheapest and least regulated business climate. In summation, there does indeed appear to be some level of truth in the negative depiction of globalization, and this subject becomes even more reasonable when globalization is examined as a driver of social conflict (Clayton, 2004). Globalization and Identity Another indefinite result of increasing globalization is that while it pursues to normalize on one side, it upsurges the perception of societal heterogeneity. Ideally, groups that who rely on various facets of the society to get their identity are increasingly finding their voice and are utilizing the global media to convey their discontent, and this sort of ethnic awareness progressively came up after the end of the Cold War. The Cold War was a conflict among states and served to promote the dominance of national identity in international society but in the new century the state, destabilized by globalization, has little effect in either forcing conformity or bringing together the national society, and minorities are now able to reassert their identity in response to normalized cultural forces (Holm, 1995). Unlike in the past, these minorities no longer view the state as responsible for safeguarding domestic interests, but instead see it as a partner with outside forces. Given this analogy, it can therefore be argued that the main source of conflict in the 21st century is no longer among states, but rather it is between the state and minority groups. The general effect of these developments has been to augment the salience of cultural multiplicity issues, both inside and across borders, for all the major players in international politics (Basil, 2002). Over the years, there have been various well-known political analysts who have argued differently on this theme. Some of them have posited that inter-civilizational conflict is the new threat to the prevalent powers in world affairs. To validate this claim, they claim that the efforts of the West to advance its values of democracy and liberalism as general values and to progress its economic interests engender countering reactions from other civilizations. Although some claims are radical, one thing that comes out clearly is that globalization in its current form contains values, which in themselves are essentially Western and liberal in nature, but they are being promoted globally as collective values, the inherent worth of which should be obvious to everyone who thinks straight. Although not plainly stated, clearly these objectives trigger the numerous liberal economic reforms that have been set up by international financial bodies for all the flailing economies. Currently, most or nearly all the current systems of global trade and communication support the concept of mass import of foreign cultural materials. These range from food, drugs, films, symbols and even myths. The anxieties created by such an occurrence has led to the emergence of more radical political groupings that demand cultural authenticity, conservation of conventional and religious values and dejection of foreign cultural antigens (MacEwan, 2004). When it comes to the conflicts of social reaction, the fundamentalisms of various kinds always stand out. In many parts of the world, societies have become defensive, as their governments have been trying to introduce western values in the guise of modernizing these societies. The global pressures that are discussed earlier increase the threat among these non-Western nations. Both the speed and course of change in these societies quickens the search for a solitary, often mythologized truth that can position all social customs and practices. For this reason, globalization sets the stage for the conflict of what some analysts call McWorld and Jihad. If examined correctly, one thing that comes out clearly is that globalization appears to be pulling nearly all identity groups on the planet out of their varied levels of isolation then propelling them into the waves of the international ecumene and, therefore, compelling them to re-define themselves in tandem to international trends. Relativization, however, is a process, which may incorporate either rejection or some sort of accommodation, assimilation, or fusion with the normative cultural and economic forces. For this reason, a more nuanced picture would demonstrate that instead of the gradual expansion of Western cultural dominance what is happening is a disputed and undecided encounter between international cultural flows and innate local identities as well as the troubled equilibrium between the persistence of distinctive local cultural identities and the restructuring of such distinctiveness by maximizing international cultural influences (Strange, 2008). A Changing World Economy As outlined earlier, the economic dimensions of globalizations have attracted much attention, majority of which has been negative due to the regularity and multiplicity of conflicts for which the process is held responsible. In essence, the economic sphere is also an area which it can be claimed that conflict has brought about certain creative responses from the global community. To begin with, it should be pointed out as one economist pointed out that capitalism certainly incorporates a process of destructive creation. Competition motivates organizations t innovate, both in goods and in manufacture, in order to outshine their rivals. However, there is a high possibility that entire business enterprises and localities can be marginalized or even obliterated as more companies that are new innovate. This is exhibited, for example, by the transformation from the horse and cart to cars, or from the use of canals to railways. The liberal observation has always been that, in spite of the rather the Darwinian manner this process creates winners and losers, the society as an entirety benefits from continual enhancement in the quality and range of goods and services that are available to consumers. In this regard, economic globalization is seen as the rational extension of this process to an increasingly integrated international market (Robertson, 2011). Ideally, the current period is characterized by a decrease in both the readiness and capability of governments to guarantee high employment by use of public expenditure or to compensate the unemployment and welfare benefits, which, to some extent, cushion employees in the industrial countries from the creative destruction of capitalism that came during the period after World War II. Instead, the rising significance of global economic capital in the world economy has forced governments to show more concern on investment climates in their respective countries, and to make sure that financial markets give approval for their macroeconomic policies. Simply stated, globalization has fundamentally transferred the balance of economic power in support of capital, which is greatly mobile and therefore able to move where profits are to be attained, against labour, which is much less mobile, and whose basis of organization is still more nationalized than global. Due to the imbalance created by the Western influence on globalization, many nations and areas face a process of quick deterioration that could give rise to destructive reactions. Within the framework of an emerging informational economy, a large section of the global population is changing from a structural position of abuse to a structural position of insignificance. Ideally, economic analysts link the cultural reaction discussed earlier to the weakening economic conditions of the third world countries. All these movements of reaction are geared towards cutting all the existing ties with the developed nations since there is no possibility that they can ever become equal partners in a world that is surprisingly inclusive of economies and rather exclusive of communities. For long, this globalization has only been evident in the third world countries but today there has been diminishing incomes, rising inequalities, job insecurity and violence that are tearing the social fabric of societies across the Northern hemisphere (Held, & McGrew, 2007). To some extent, the domestic tensions are to blame for the conflicts among states. Due to the constant threat of liberal trade, various domestic producers sent petitions to their governments to grant them official protection from external threats. In the event that they succeed, the relations with the states whose imports have been controlled is often fractioned. In some other instances, states such as the U.S.A., which have somewhat liberal markets for a range of industrial imports, push other states, which are thought as not as reciprocally open such as Japan for better business measures with the warning of reprisal not very far in the vicinity. The heightened formation and development of local trading blocs is far from being a reality, but there is sufficient evidence that numerous governments have comprehended the need to evade the return to the manner of extreme financial nationalism and the polices of relying o ones neighbours that are believed to have led to World War II. This in a way explains why international economic relations are differentiated by an institutional structure, which is more all-inclusive than anything yet accessible in the political sphere. In this regard, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have been joined by yet another supranational body, the World Trade Organization, which has a well formed dispute settlement mechanism and the ability to enforce substantial penalties on any member state that disobey its resolutions. These developments demonstrate that in relation to a wide range of economic matters, majority of the world’s political and economic leaders have concluded that the benefits of surrendering to these organizations goes beyond the benefit of a more autonomous policy (Dietrich, Stephens, & Stephens, 2002). Such progressions in the global collective action could be seen as a precursor of comparable programs in other parts of the world. Today, the average people across the globe increasingly have a feeling that they have been suffering because of economic globalization and they are widely unsure about the understanding and inspiration behind the numerous modern global trade deals. Given these statistics, it is therefore not surprising to note that any encouragement of free trade is received with mixed feeling in the political scene. This can be seen from the results of one study which showed that more that 50% of Americans believe that free trade associations cost the U.S. jobs while an even larger percentage are opposed to the U.S. forming any form of trade pacts with other nations (Gilpin, & Gilpin, 2001). Globalization vs. Globalism Despite the varying views regarding globalization and its conflicts, more common ground is clear if we look further. Regardless of whether one is a critic or just an observer, people acknowledge that the ambiguities are created by the fact that the quick pace of global change puts great stress on individuals as well as public institutions. There is also a general understanding that something must be done to aid individuals, communities adjust to this fast change, and that the strategies employed so far have not yielded any solutions (Friedman, 2005). These realities indicate a desire for new thinking about traditional questions; and in that logic, globalization issues affect the entire world. As prevailing institutions of global politics and society have confronted these prevailing issues, primary questions of political philosophy that have to do with influence, power and distributive justice. To some level, for the nations state in the last two decades, are increasingly being flouted again but this time in relation to the world as a single, political, social and economic system. Again, rather ironically, globalization lays the basis for such new thinking by developing a growing perception of the world as one place, a viewpoint that some have called globalism (Ritchie, 2006). Conclusion One thing that comes out from the above discussion is the varying views on globalization. On one side of the debate, we have cream of the crop in business and to some level, from politics commending is as the future, which though needing adjustment, guarantees new prospects for everyone. On the other side of the debate, there is another section of critical thinkers who point out that globalization in its entirety creates economic and cultural crisis. It is therefore sensible to conclude that even though the process is in several aspects irreversible, that is, there are no possible scenarios for ‘de-globalizing’ the world, it is also open-ended and interactive, and partakers have a chance to form it even as they react to it. From this perspective, the conflicts outlined mirror a rising determination of the globe’s individuals to advance substitute agendas to the ones currently driving globalization and to therefore participate in formulating decisions regarding the future of their world. References Albrow, M. (2007). The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Basil, D. (2002). The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State. New York: Times Books. Brecher, J., & Costello, T. (2012). Global Village or Global Pillage? Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up. Boston: South End Press. Clayton, T. (2004). Competing Conceptions of Globalization: Relocating the Tension between World-Systems Analysis and Globalization Analysis. Comparative Education Review 48 (3): 274-294. Dietrich, R., Stephens, E., & Stephens, D. (2002). Capitalist Development and Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Friedman, T. (2005). The World is Flat. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Gilpin, R., & Gilpin, J. (2001). Global Political Economy: Understanding the International Economic Order. Cambridge: Polity Press Held, D., & McGrew, A. (2007). Globalization/Anti-Globalization: Beyond the Great Divide. Polity Hirst, P. & Thompson, G. (2002). The Problem of 'Globalization': International Economic Relations, National Economic Management and the Formation of Trading Blocs. Polity and Society, 21, (4)1100-1115. Hirst, P., & Thompson, G. (2009). Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance. Cambridge: Polity Press. Holm, H. (1995). Whose World Order? Uneven Globalization and the End of the Cold War. Westview Press. MacEwan, A. (2004). Globalization and Stagnation. Monthly Review, 45, 1-16. Moss, K. (2005). World Class: Thriving Locally in the Global Economy. New York: Touchstone Ohmae, K. (1999). The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy. Harper Business Ritchie, M. (2006). Globalization vs. Globalism: Giving Internationalism a Bad Name. [Online] Available at: trade-strategy_igc.apc.org Robertson, R. (2011). Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Scholte, J. (2000). Globalization: A Critical Introduction. St. Martin's Press Strange, S. (2008). Globaloney? Review of International Political Economy, 5 (4): (2008), 704–711 Tabb, W. (2001). Questioning Globalization - Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance. Monthly Review 16 (3): 111-120. Weiss, L. (2011). Globalization and the Myth of the Powerless State. New Left Review, a, 114-132. Read More