For Added Challenge: Defining Globalization



Assignment: Read through the definitions of Globalization provided below. Get into groups of four. Each person in the group should take a particular instance of Globalization mentioned in the definition paragraphs above. Look up the articles in full on the web, or find similar articles that take either a pro or con stance, or that propose alternatives to the current model of Globalization. Decide on your stance concerning globalization as a group. Find images to convey your argument. Then, together, compose a proposal in which you delineate an economic prospectus according to one of the four definitions.

Definition 1

“Globalization – the growing integration of economies and societies around the world – has been one of the most hotly-debated topics in international economics over the past few years. Rapid growth and poverty reduction in China, India, and other countries that were poor 20 years ago, has been a positive aspect of globalization. But globalization has also generated significant international opposition over concerns that it has increased inequality and environmental degradation.”

-World Bank Group ()

Definition 2

“Throughout history, adventurers, generals, merchants, and financiers have constructed an ever-more-global economy. Today, unprecedented changes in communications, transportation, and computer technology have given the process new impetus. As globally mobile capital reorganizes business firms, it sweeps away regulation and undermines local and national politics. Globalization creates new markets and wealth, even as it causes widespread suffering, disorder, and unrest. It is both a source of repression and a catalyst for global movements of social justice and emancipation. These materials look at the main features of globalization, asking what is new, what drives the process, how it changes politics, and how it affects global institutions like the UN.”

-Global Policy Organization, Globalization homepage

Definition 3

An Alternative to Globalization: the Global Social Justice Movement

Human societies across the globe have established progressively closer contacts over many centuries, but recently the pace has dramatically increased. Jet airplanes, cheap telephone service, email, computers, huge oceangoing vessels, instant capital flows, all these have made the world more interdependent than ever. Multinational corporations manufacture products in many countries and sell to consumers around the world. Money, technology and raw materials move ever more swiftly across national borders. Along with products and finances, ideas and cultures circulate more freely. As a result, laws, economies, and social movements are forming at the international level. Many politicians, academics, and journalists treat these trends as both inevitable and (on the whole) welcome. But for billions of the world’s people, business-driven globalization means uprooting old ways of life and threatening livelihoods and cultures. The global social justice movement, itself a product of globalization, proposes an alternative path, more responsive to public needs. Intense political disputes will continue over globalization’s meaning and its future direction.

- Global Policy Organization, Defining Globalization page )

Definition 4

What is globalization?

Many see it as a primarily economic phenomenon, involving the increasing interaction, or integration, of national economic systems through the growth in international trade, investment and capital flows.

However, one can also point to a rapid increase in cross-border social, cultural and technological exchange as part of the phenomenon of globalization.

The sociologist, Anthony Giddens, defines globalization as a decoupling of space and time, emphasizing that with instantaneous communications, knowledge and culture can be shared around the world simultaneously.

A Dutch academic, Ruud Lubbers, defines it as a process in which geographic distance becomes a factor of diminishing importance in the establishment and maintenance of cross border economic, political and socio-cultural relations

Left critics of globalization define the word quite differently, presenting it as worldwide drive toward a globalized economic system dominated by supranational corporate trade and banking institutions that are not accountable to democratic processes or national governments.

Globalization is an undeniably capitalist process. It has taken off as a concept in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and of socialism as a viable alternate form of economic organization.

Globalization is the rapid increase in cross-border economic, social, technological exchange under conditions of capitalism

- Asia-Europe Dialogue

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download