WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION? Four Possible Answers (original) (raw)
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What is globalization. Simon Reich
The end of the Cold War provided a major shock for scholars of politics and policy in at least two respects. First, it provided a classic example of the limitations of both social and policy sciences predictive capacity. Few foresaw, let alone predicted, the tumultuous events that marked the end of the decade. Second, those events simultaneously dislodged the organizing principle-the foundation-upon which much of the study of international relations was constructed in the postwar period. 1 The parsimony and simplicity of bipolarity signaled the hegemony of structural arguments in international studies and a corresponding ascendancy of questions posed by security studies over those relating to international and comparative political economy. Scholars and policy analysts alike thus favored these approaches, employing theories such as deterrence, compellence, and modernization in political science, while policy analysts often subsumed critiques of American policy in the Third World for the sake of strategic advantage over the Communist bloc.
The end of the Cold War provided a major shock for scholars of politics and policy in at least two respects. First, it provided a classic example of the limitations of both social and policy sciences predictive capacity. Few foresaw, let alone predicted, the tumultuous events that marked the end of the decade. Second, those events simultaneously dislodged the organizing principle-the foundation-upon which much of the study of international relations was constructed in the postwar period. 1 The parsimony and simplicity of bipolarity signaled the hegemony of structural arguments in international studies and a corresponding ascendancy of questions posed by security studies over those relating to international and comparative political economy. Scholars and policy analysts alike thus favored these approaches, employing theories such as deterrence, compellence, and modernization in political science, while policy analysts often subsumed critiques of American policy in the Third World for the sake of strategic advantage over the Communist bloc.
2005: Globalization Theory: A Post Mortem
International Politics, 2005
‘Globalization’ was the Zeitgeist of the 1990s. In the social sciences, it gave rise to the claim that deepening interconnectedness was fundamentally transforming the nature of human society, and was replacing the sovereign state system with a multi- layered, multilateral system of ‘global governance’. A decade later, however, these expectations appear already falsified by the course of world affairs. The idea of ‘globalization’ no longer captures the ‘spirit of the times’: the ‘age of globalization’ is unexpectedly over. Why has this happened? This article argues that ‘Globaliza- tion Theory’ always suffered from basic flaws: as a general social theory; as a historical sociological argument about the nature of modern international relations; and as a guide to the interpretation of empirical events. However, it also offers an alternative, ‘conjunctural analysis’ of the 1990s, in order both to explain the rise and fall of ‘globalization’ itself, and to illustrate the enduring potential for International Relations of those classical approaches which Globalization Theory had sought to displace.
Article in International Relations: Globalization
Globalization and Transformations in the World Politics: Global Politics, Global Governance, Geopolitics, and International Politics., 2024
This article is a focus on Globalization of the economy, which has become, over the past four decades, a new field of study in world politics. Its impact on the world order draws all eyes to the political system put in place since the end of the Second World War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, marking the end of the Cold War and the rise of the United States on the international arena. It encompasses all human activities related to production, economy, trade, finance and even migration. Globalization is the fruit of liberal democracy promoted by the Western civilization, which proclaims individualism, that means, people are born equal and free, which freedom is more important than justice and authority, and then, since people are capable of reasoning, this leads them to self-actualization and prosperity. The right to freedom and self-determination of peoples becomes the cornerstone of the neoliberal ideology that promotes the principles of economic liberalization, that is, the rights of states and peoples to productivity, commercialization and privatization of the economy. The principles that allowed the re-foundation of the State, born with the Treaty of Westphalia, putting an end to private or religious wars, and enshrining the principles of territoriality, sovereignty and self-determination, have admitted that States can no longer continue to remain hidden behind their borders. The globalization of the economy has come to erase the borders fixed between peoples and countries, promoting a new economic order due to three scientific revolutions that began in the 19th century: the industrialization of the world, the technological revolution and the revolution of communication and information, which at the same time allow the new revolution of consumption. Globalization and De-globalization, Global Governance, Interdependence, Internationalization, Liberal world order, Transformalism, and so on, are among some key terms of this study.
Key Words internationalization, neoliberalism, trade opening, social dumping, states and markets s Abstract This chapter reviews the issues at stake in current public and scholarly debates over the impact of changes in the international economy on domestic politics and society. Over the past two decades, there have been dramatic increases in the flow of portfolio capital, foreign direct investment, and foreign exchange trading across borders at the same time as barriers to trade in goods and services have come down. These changes raise many new questions about the effects of trade and capital mobility on the autonomy of nation-states and the relative power in society of various groups. The first signs of realignments within and between political parties of both the left and the right over issues of national independence and trade openness suggest a rich new terrain for political inquiry.
Globalization and Politics, Vol. 3: Political Critiques and Social Theories of the Global (2014)
2014
There are many different approaches to the study of globalization. This simple point testifies at once to the vitality of the field of global studies, but also to the contested and diverse nature of contemporary social theory. Alongside this diversity of theory in general, the range of approaches to the global is difficult to categorize into straightforward theoretical lineages. This is in part precisely because the intellectual climate in which most of the studies of globalization emerged was one of fundamental fracturing across many different fields. Studies of globalization and, more generally, studies in the broad and loosely defined field of global studies, became conscious of themselves as such during the 1990s at a time when the direct-line lineages of classic social theory were being broken or at least segmented. As we will argue, this had profoundly contradictory implications for the narrative of globalism, the newest and grandest of all the grand narratives. Paradoxically, globalism was the one generalizing narrative that seemed to escape this critique, at least in the mainstream. This was partly because the dominant ideological expression of globalism at the time—neoliberalism, which was yet to be named as such—was also beginning to take questions such as movement across borders and the dissolution of national sovereignty as both self-evidently good things. Concurrently, many critics of emergent neoliberalism came to the same political conclusions on these matters, albeit with quite different normative content. That is, while methodologically everything conspired against an integrated theory of globalization, normatively there was a shift in the dominant common sense of the age, such that both right-oriented economists and some left-oriented theorists and activists began to advocate a ‘borderless world’.
Gusts of ChangeThe Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions for the Study of Globalization
Since the 1960s, the concepts of the ‘global’ and the ‘transnational’ have challenged the state-centred orientation of several disciplines. By 1989, the ‘global’ contained sufficient ambiguity and conceptual promise to emerge as a potentially new central concept to replace the conventional notion of modernity. The consequences of the 1989 revolutions for this emerging concept were extensive. As a result of the post-communist ‘New World Order’, a new vision of a single triumphant political and economic system was put forward. With the ‘globalizing of modernity’ as a description of the post-1989 reality, ‘globalization’ became the policy mantra of the Clinton and Blair administrations up until the late 1990s when ‘anti-globalization’ activists were able to question the salience of this dominant theory of ‘globalization’. In scholarly discussion, ‘globalization’ became a floating signifier to be filled with a variety of disciplinary and political meanings. In the post-9/11 era, this Western-centred ‘globalization’ has been conceptually linked to cosmopolitanism while it has played a minor role in the multiple modernities agenda. The article concludes with an assessment of the current status of the ‘global’ in theory and research.
The usefulness of globalization as an analytical concept has largely been eclipsed by its growing fashionableness. The term's currency has distended its meaning to the point where it has gained the studied ambiguity and diffuseness of an advertiser's slogan. When powerful interests equate globalization with the progression of human freedom even as they work to insulate their institutions from political intervention, there is reason to believe that, as a label for contemporary social changes, globalization obscures more than it illuminates. Perhaps like the similarly popular phrase "peace through commerce," which in today's neoliberal climate really means "commerce through pacification," the meaning of globalization has to be inverted to be made useful. What does globalization mean? Mavbe rather than the growing cohesion of a world order, the word refers to the breakdown of order on a previously unimagined scale. At the very least, in its current uses "globalization" is replete with ambiguities and contradictions that must be disentangled to make the term useful for understanding the contemporary socio-cultural scene.