Debate on Globalization : A Term Paper
Globalization means the growing economic interdependence of countries worldwide through the increasing volume and variety of cross-border transactions in goods and services. The international capital flows through the more rapid and widespread diffusion of technology. Very few people, groups, or governments oppose globalization in its entirety. Instead, critics of globalization believe aspects of the way globalization operates should be changed. The debate over globalization is about what the best rules are for governing the global economy so that its advantages can grow while its problems can be solved.
On one side of this debate are those who stress the benefits of removing barriers to international trade and involvements, allowing capital to be allocated more efficiently and giving consumers greater freedom of choice. With free market globalization, investment funds can move unimpeded from where they are plentiful to where they are most needed tariffs make goods produced at low cost from faraway places cheaper to buy. Producers of goods gain by selling to a wider market. More competition keeps seller on their toes and allows ideas and new technology to spread and benefit others.
On the other side of the debate are critics who see neoliberal policies as producing greater poverty, inequality, social conflict, cultural destruction, and environmental damage. They say that the most developed nations- the united States, Germany, and Japan-succeeded not because of free trade but because of protectionism and subsidies. They argue that the more recently successful economies of South Korea, Taiwan, and China all had strong state-led development strategies that did not follow neoliberalism. These critics think that government encouragement of infant industries- that is, industries that are just beginning to develop- enables a country to become internationally competitive.
E.J. Hobsbawn is in favour of globalization. He says that the most industrialized countries are now linked with the far remote backward countries through the globalization. He further says that the world has become a village. It is unified as one state. Globalization does not merely unified the world, rather, the economic factors are also been increased. In his essay, The World Unified , he says: "In other words in, say-thirty-five years, the value of the exchanges between the most industrialized economy and the most remote or backward regions of the world had increased about sixfold (53)."
In his same essay, The World Unified, Hobsbawn compares then and now, and says, not merely the economy and technology even culturally it has made the world as a global village.
We are today more familiar than the men of the mid-nineteenth century with this drawing together of all parts of the globe into a single world. Yet there is a substantial difference between the process as we experience it today and that in the previous century. What is most striking about it in the later twentieth century is an international standardization which goes far beyond the purely economic and technological… What hardly occurred then was the international, and the interlinguistics standardization of culture which today distributes, with at a best a slight time-lag, the same films, popular music styles, television programs and indeed styles of popular living across the world. (55)
Leslie Sklair is also in favour of globalization. He says that economic transnational practices make the world as a village. It helps the consumer. In his essay, Sociology of the Global System, he further explains:
Economic transnational practices are economic practices that transcend national boundaries. These may be entirely contained within the borders of a single country even though their effects are transnational. For example, there may within one country be a consumer demand for a product which is unavailable from domestic supply. The retailer places an order with a supplier who fills the order from a foreign source. (65-66)
The benefit of the globalization is not limited only in economic and cultural aspects. It also lies on new types of political operations. The great world cities are becoming new type of political center through transnationalization of labour. Saskia Sassen in his essay, Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims quotes:
Major cities have emerged as a strategic site not only for global capital but
also for the transnationalization of labor and the formation of transnational
identities. In this regard they are a site for new types of political
Every aspect has negative as well as positive impact. Similarly, globalization has also negative impact. Some critics argue that the infant industries must have protection. They cannot sustain without free zone trade concept. They must have quota system so that they can survive. The multinational companies have great net work and products so that they can have monopoly. Among those critics one of them is Immanuel Wallerstein. Wallerstein in his essay, The rise And Future Demise Of The World Capitalist System says:
In peripheral countries, the interests of the capitalist landowners lie in an opposite direction from those of the local commercial bourgeoisie. Their interests lie in maintaining an open economy to maximize their profit from world-market trade and in elimination of the commercial bourgeoisie in favor of outside merchants. Thus, in terms of the state, the coalition which strengthened it in core countries is precisely absent. (61)
In his same essay, Wallerstein says that because of the globalization the gap between the haves and have not is being wider: only the core nations are benefited rather than periphery ones. He says:
"The range of economic activities being far wider in the core than in the periphery, the range of syndical interest groups is far wider there. Thus it has been widely observed that there does not exit in many parts of the world today a proletariat of the kind which exists in, say Europe or North America. (63)
Because of the globalization now we are facing environmental crisis. Both population growth and economic growth are limited by the capacity of the planet to accommodate them. But we cannot expand the physical limits of the earth. The report of the Club of Rome says:
A rapidly increasing population with an increasing economic growth rate also produces pollutants- heat, carbon dioxide, nuclear waste, and chemical waste, which can seriously impede its own capacity to survive. The rate of outputs of pollutants is increasing exponentially along with population size and economic growth. (Key Ideas 104)
Hence the globalization has two folds: good and bad. People from remote areas are also benefited by utilizing world class materials as well as the core nations are also benefited by expanding their markets. But on the other hand public consciousness should be raised against the environmental crisis.
