Module 1 - Introduction To Globalization
Module 1 - Introduction To Globalization
Module 1 - Introduction To Globalization
Module 1
Introduction to Globalization: Defining Globalization
Objectives: At the end of the class discussions, the students will be able to:
1. Define globalization and agree on a working definition of globalization for the
course.
2. Differentiate the competing conceptions of globalization.
3. Identify the underlying philosophies of the varying definitions of globalization.
Introduction
Despite the voluminous globalization discourse, a number of crucial points are still
lacking in our understanding of the phenomenon. We need a sufficiently comprehensive
definition of globalization to serve as a starting point in verifying numerous globalization-
related hypotheses and ideas on concrete data before we can consider them true, or
false, or partially true, or true under certain conditions.
Globalization Defined
Globalization is a term used to describe the increasing connectedness and
interdependence of world cultures and economies.
When did globalization begin? Many scholars say it started with Columbus’s
voyage to the New World in 1492. People traveled to nearby and faraway places well
before Columbus’s voyage, however, exchanging their ideas, products, and customs
along the way. The Silk Road, an ancient network of trade routes across China, Central
Asia, and the Mediterranean used between 50 B.C.E. and 250 C.E. is perhaps the most
well-known early example. As with future globalizing booms, new technologies played a
key role in the Silk Road trade. Advances in metallurgy led to the creation of coins;
advances in transportation led to the building of roads connecting the major empires of
the day; and increased agricultural production meant more food could be trafficked
between locales. Along with Chinese silk, Roman glass, and Arabian spices, ideas such
as Buddhist beliefs and the secrets of paper-making also spread via these tendrils of
trade.
The web of globalization continued to spin out through the Age of Revolution, when
ideas about liberty, equality, and fraternity spread like fire from America to France to Latin
America and beyond. It rode the waves of industrialization, colonization, and war through
the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, powered by the invention of factories,
railways, steamboats, cars, and planes.
With the Information Age, globalization went into overdrive. Advances in computer
and communications technology launched a new global era and redefined what it meant
to be “connected.” Modern communications satellites meant the 1964 Summer Olympics
in Tokyo could be watched in the United States for the first time. The World Wide Web
and the Internet allowed someone in Germany to read about a breaking news story in
Bolivia in real time. Someone wishing to travel from Boston, Massachusetts, to London,
England, could do so in hours rather than the week or more it would have taken a hundred
years ago. This digital revolution massively impacted economies across the world as well:
they became more information-based and more interdependent. In the modern era,
economic success or failure at one focal point of the global web can be felt in every major
world economy.
The benefits and disadvantages of globalization are the subject of ongoing debate.
The downside to globalization can be seen in the increased risk for the transmission of
diseases like ebola or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Globalization has of
course led to great good, too. Richer nations now can—and do—come to the aid of poorer
nations in crisis. Increasing diversity in many countries has meant more opportunity to
learn about and celebrate other cultures. The sense that there is a global village, a
worldwide “us,” has emerged.
Dimensions/Approaches of Globalization
1. Economic
Economic globalization is the intensification and stretching of economic
interrelations around the globe. It encompasses such things as the emergence of a new
global economic order, the internationalization of trade and finance, the changing power
of transnational corporations, and the enhanced role of international economic
institutions.
2. Political
Political globalization is the intensification and expansion of political interrelations
around the globe. Aspects of political globalization include the modern-nation
state system and its changing place in today's world, the role of global governance, and
the direction of our global political systems.
Military
3. Cultural
Cultural globalization is the intensification and expansion of cultural flows across
the globe. Culture is a very broad concept and has many facets, but in the discussion on
globalization, Steger means it to refer to “the symbolic construction, articulation, and
dissemination of meaning.” Topics under this heading include discussion about the
development of a global culture, or lack thereof, the role of the media in shaping our
identities and desires, and the globalization of languages.
4. Ecological
Topics of ecological globalization include population growth, access to food,
worldwide reduction in biodiversity, the gap between rich and poor as well as between
the global North and global South, human-induced climate change, and global
environmental degradation.
Ideologies
• Market globalism seeks to endow ‘globalization’ with free-market norms and neoliberal
meanings.
• Justice globalism constructs an alternative vision of globalization based on egalitarian ideals
of global solidarity and distributive justice.
• Religious globalisms struggle against both market globalism and justice globalism as they
seek to mobilize a religious values and beliefs that are thought to be under severe attack by
the forces of secularism and consumerism.
These ideologies of globalization (or globalisms) then relate to broader imaginaries and
ontologies.