Understanding Globalization Around the World

Understanding Globalization Around the World

  • Submitted By: abbccc
  • Date Submitted: 08/18/2010 3:32 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 2479
  • Page: 10
  • Views: 1

Understanding Globalization

Everyone has been talking about globalization for more than a decade and a half. While corporate honchos jubilated over the vision of a world without borders converted into a gigantic shopping mall, political leaders apprehended the impending demise of the nation state and cultural critics agonized over the threat of global monoculture to indigenous cultures and identities. Even the common man or woman could not remain immune to the new phenomenon that appeared to have transformed their lives in ways they could not have imagined before. Not only public intellectuals, politicians, and tycoons but also the masses engaged in debates on the alien force that appeared to have changed almost every aspect of human existence. Yet not many of those who casually bandy the term about have only a fuzzy understanding of what globalization actually means. This note aims to elucidate some of the competing definitions of globalization that have emerged over the years.

Imre Szeman defines globalization as the “name that has been given to the social, economic and political processes that have, taken together, produced the characteristic conditions of contemporary existence”.(2001 209) Szeman’s definition rightly calls attention to the many faces of globalization. Speaking politically, globalization refers to the integration of the world into ‘a single place’, to quote Roland Robertson (1992) , after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the former USSR that led to a serious questioning of the suzerainty of the nation state. Some would place political globalization to the birth of the new world order with the setting of an international institutions after the Second World War. However, the post cold war phase of globalization differs in various ways from the ‘internationalizing’ movement after the second World War due to the establishment of new transnational structures and institutions that cannot be comprehended through the...

Similar Essays