What Everyone Should Know About Globalization
By Vincent A. Ferraro
Globalization is one of those words that is often used, but rarely defined. It is a fudge word, like “security” or “power,” that reflects the user’s bias. For some, globalization is the promised land; for others, it is a circle in Dante’s hell.
The first thing we should know about globalization is that it is a highly politicized idea, and that the only productive way to discuss it is to make explicit one’s own definition. Thomas L. Friedman’s accessible book on globalization, The World is Flat, is a good starting point for understanding the term’s possible meanings. For this essay, I define globalization as the process by which all human activities on every part of the planet are increasingly interconnected and interdependent.
The second thing we should know about globalization is that it is an old process. The human species has proven very adept at expansion. Whether its beginning was in the Garden of Eden or Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, humanity has now inhabited virtually every land area on the planet, even those, like Antarctica, that are largely uninhabitable. Similarly, the political history of the species is one of expansion (and decline). Every empire has had the same goal: the subjugation of others to a presumptively universal political authority within the largest geographical framework possible.
The European empires came closest to controlling the entire globe at the end of the nineteenth century, and the disparate nationalities of the various empires and their often vicious competition should not obscure the institutions and Enlightenment values they shared. The European states systematically tried to recreate the world in their image and under their control, and the consequences of European imperialism devastated local cultures.
Some have argued, like Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, in Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy, that the world was almost completely globalized at the end of the nineteenth century, a thesis also articulated by Harold James in The End of Globalization: Lessons From the Great Depression. But Europe fell apart in the twentieth century—it lost faith in Enlightenment values after World War I, and European states experimented with new values in Communism and Fascism. Europe and the United States also failed to maintain the open economies necessary for globalization.
The third thing we should know is that globalization is also new. After stalling for most of the twentieth century, the process resumed and accelerated in the 1990s. Three factors made this possible: the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire in 1991 and subsequent decisions by Russia and the East European states to join the world economy; China and India opening their economies to global markets in the 1990s, with American encouragement; and the century’s astonishing population growth—from 1.5 billion people in 1900 to 6.5 billion in 2007. Although there was rapid technological and economic change before the 1990s, more than half of humanity did not participate in those changes. Since the ’90s, the rate of globalization has accelerated dramatically, and the effects have become more obvious and more wrenching to traditional expectations and rhythms.
In less than a decade, the global workforce doubled. Global Gross Domestic Product increased at an astonishing rate, from $28 trillion in 1992 to $44 trillion in 2006. Symbolically, the new “age of globalization” was signaled by the Year 2000 crisis. For the first time in human history, everyone had to address the same problem simultaneously and in the same language. Even the computer illiterate were dependent on the Y2K solution being implemented in a profoundly global context.
This “new world” leads to a fourth point. Perhaps the most important feature of globalization is the extent to which it has destroyed the sense of “local.” Humans have traditionally lived within a small geographical and social circle. We knew who grew our food, made our shoes, and sold us life’s other necessities. Today, when virtually all economic life is anonymous, it is difficult to maintain a sense of control over one’s life. Indeed, one often senses that no one is in control and that a less stable political and social milieu is hard to imagine.
Fifth, income distribution in the world has changed dramatically. Some have gotten extraordinarily richer, while far more have seen their incomes stagnate or fall. According to Roger Lowenstein in the June 10 New York Times: “In 2004, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest official analysis, households in the lowest quintile of the country were making only 2 percent more (adjusted for inflation) than they were in 1979. Those in the next quintile managed only an 11 percent rise. And the middle group was up 15 percent … The income of families in the fourth quintile—upper-middle-class folks with an average yearly income of $82,000—rose by 23 percent. Only when you get to the top quintile were the gains truly big—63 percent.”
We do not know the extent to which globalization is responsible for the steady erosion of the incomes of the non-rich—technological change is also an important factor—but it is hard to deny the impact of $2-a-day labor elsewhere on the wages of most workers living in the advanced industrialized countries.
There are several good books on the backlash against globalization, including Paul Q. Hirst and Grahame Thompson’s Globalization in Question, Saskia Sassen’s Globalization and Its Discontents, and George Rupp and Jagdish Bhagwati’s Globalization Challenged: Conviction, Conflict, Community.
Is globalization inevitable? Only if one assumes that market forces should be the primary determinant of human affairs. But it is unlikely that most people will be willing to see their incomes decline and their local communities transformed by outside forces without demanding some measure of control over those processes. We are currently in the first, seemingly overwhelming phase of globalization. We should brace for the political response, already apparent in the U.S. immigration debate, to transformative change.
There are many more facets to the problem of globalization: immigration, environmental stress and degradation, and the profound difficulty of creating a global civic culture commensurate with the technological and economic reality of a unified planet. In an online course sponsored by Mount Holyoke and the New York Times, these issues are being pursued systematically this fall.
Vincent A. Ferraro is Ruth Lawson Professor of Politics and chair of international relations.
Photo of Ferraro by Paul Schnaittacher
