The Contemporary World

Module 1
Introduction to Globalization: Defining Globalization

Objectives: At the end of the class discussions, the students will be able to:
1. Define globalization and agree on a working definition of globalization for the
course.
2. Differentiate the competing conceptions of globalization.
3. Identify the underlying philosophies of the varying definitions of globalization.

Introduction
Despite the voluminous globalization discourse, a number of crucial points are still
lacking in our understanding of the phenomenon. We need a sufficiently comprehensive
definition of globalization to serve as a starting point in verifying numerous globalization-
related hypotheses and ideas on concrete data before we can consider them true, or
false, or partially true, or true under certain conditions.

Globalization Defined
Globalization is a term used to describe the increasing connectedness and
interdependence of world cultures and economies.

Literature about globalization is produced by sociologists, political theorists,

economists, historians, anthropologists, and journalists. Globalization is a term variously
employed, even by experts within a single discipline. There is substantial debate, not only
about its definition, but also about its significance, and how it shapes our world. Most
agree that globalization rests upon, or simply is, the growth in international exchange of
goods, services, and capital, and the increasing levels of integration that characterize
economic activity. In this sense, globalization, is only another word for internationalization.
Importantly, it is economic activity that is fuel and furnace of cross-border integration.
 Globalization is a term used to describe how trade and technology have made the
world into a more connected and interdependent place. Globalization also captures in its
scope the economic and social changes that have come about as a result. It may be
pictured as the threads of an immense spider web formed over millennia, with the number
and reach of these threads increasing over time. People, money, material goods, ideas,
and even disease and devastation have traveled these silken strands, and have done so
in greater numbers and with greater speed than ever in the present age.

When did globalization begin? Many scholars say it started with Columbus’s
voyage to the New World in 1492. People traveled to nearby and faraway places well
before Columbus’s voyage, however, exchanging their ideas, products, and customs
along the way. The Silk Road, an ancient network of trade routes across China, Central
Asia, and the Mediterranean used between 50 B.C.E. and 250 C.E. is perhaps the most
well-known early example. As with future globalizing booms, new technologies played a
key role in the Silk Road trade. Advances in metallurgy led to the creation of coins;
advances in transportation led to the building of roads connecting the major empires of
the day; and increased agricultural production meant more food could be trafficked
between locales. Along with Chinese silk, Roman glass, and Arabian spices, ideas such
as Buddhist beliefs and the secrets of paper-making also spread via these tendrils of
trade.

Unquestionably, these types of exchanges were accelerated in the Age of

Exploration, when European explorers seeking new sea routes to the spices and silks of
Asia bumped into the Americas instead. Again, technology played an important role in
the maritime trade routes that flourished between old and newly discovered continents.
New ship designs and the creation of the magnetic compass were key to the explorers’
successes. Trade and idea exchange now extended to a previously unconnected part of
the world, where ships carrying plants, animals, and Spanish silver between the Old
World and the New also carried Christian missionaries.

The web of globalization continued to spin out through the Age of Revolution, when
ideas about liberty, equality, and fraternity spread like fire from America to France to Latin
America and beyond. It rode the waves of industrialization, colonization, and war through
the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, powered by the invention of factories,
railways, steamboats, cars, and planes.

With the Information Age, globalization went into overdrive. Advances in computer
and communications technology launched a new global era and redefined what it meant
to be “connected.” Modern communications satellites meant the 1964 Summer Olympics
in Tokyo could be watched in the United States for the first time. The World Wide Web
and the Internet allowed someone in Germany to read about a breaking news story in
Bolivia in real time. Someone wishing to travel from Boston, Massachusetts, to London,
England, could do so in hours rather than the week or more it would have taken a hundred
years ago. This digital revolution massively impacted economies across the world as well:
they became more information-based and more interdependent. In the modern era,
economic success or failure at one focal point of the global web can be felt in every major
world economy.

The benefits and disadvantages of globalization are the subject of ongoing debate.
The downside to globalization can be seen in the increased risk for the transmission of
diseases like ebola or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Globalization has of
course led to great good, too. Richer nations now can—and do—come to the aid of poorer
nations in crisis. Increasing diversity in many countries has meant more opportunity to
learn about and celebrate other cultures. The sense that there is a global village, a
worldwide “us,” has emerged.
Dimensions/Approaches of Globalization

1. Economic
Economic globalization is the intensification and stretching of economic
interrelations around the globe. It encompasses such things as the emergence of a new
global economic order, the internationalization of trade and finance, the changing power
of transnational corporations, and the enhanced role of international economic
institutions.

2. Political
Political globalization is the intensification and expansion of political interrelations
around the globe. Aspects of political globalization include the modern-nation
state system and its changing place in today's world, the role of global governance, and
the direction of our global political systems.

Military

Military globalization, as subdomain of political globalization, is defined as the

intensification and stretching of military power across the globe through various means of
military power (nuclear military weapons, radiation weapons simply weapons of mass
destruction). This form of globalization occurs across offensive and defensive uses of
power and survival in international field. Beyond states, global organizations such as the
United Nations also extend military means globally through support given by both Global
North and South countries.

3. Cultural
Cultural globalization is the intensification and expansion of cultural flows across
the globe. Culture is a very broad concept and has many facets, but in the discussion on
globalization, Steger means it to refer to “the symbolic construction, articulation, and
dissemination of meaning.” Topics under this heading include discussion about the
development of a global culture, or lack thereof, the role of the media in shaping our
identities and desires, and the globalization of languages.
 4. Ecological
Topics of ecological globalization include population growth, access to food,
worldwide reduction in biodiversity, the gap between rich and poor as well as between
the global North and global South, human-induced climate change, and global
environmental degradation.

Ideologies

Globalization operates on a cross-cutting "ideological dimension" filled with a range of

norms, claims, beliefs, and narratives about the phenomenon itself. According to Steger, there
are three main types of globalisms (ideologies that endow the concept of globalization with
particular values and meanings): market globalism, justice globalism, and religious globalisms.
Steger defines them as follows:

• Market globalism seeks to endow ‘globalization’ with free-market norms and neoliberal
meanings.
• Justice globalism constructs an alternative vision of globalization based on egalitarian ideals
of global solidarity and distributive justice.
• Religious globalisms struggle against both market globalism and justice globalism as they
seek to mobilize a religious values and beliefs that are thought to be under severe attack by
the forces of secularism and consumerism.

These ideologies of globalization (or globalisms) then relate to broader imaginaries and
ontologies.

Ideas Underlying the Concepts of Globalization

While looking into attempts to define globalization not through economy, politics,
culture, social sphere, etc., but through the essence of its constituent processes and
driving forces and their factors, we can distinguish three basic ideas around which a great
part of the globalization discourse is concentrated.
‘Compressed’ World
This idea suggests that due to technological progress there is a ‘compression’ of
time and space, which lies at the core of globalization (Harvey 1989). We mean here not
the absolute geographical distance between countries, which, surely, has remained
stable (setting aside the cases of border changes), but the ‘relative distance’, as due to
the modern technology, people, goods, capital, ideas and knowledge nowadays are able
to overcome distances much faster and cheaper (though we need to emphasize here that
the cost and the speed decreased unevenly around the world). Technological progress,
particularly the spread of the Internet since the first half of the 1990s, inspired a number
of research papers on the ‘compression’ of time and space and, more broadly, the
transformation of their role in the globalizing world. In this respect, the classic work by
Manuel Castells ‘The Rise of the Network Society’ (1996) should not be missed out.
Having introduced the notion of ‘timeless time’, Castells claimed that the global society's
independence from time is accelerated by new information technology. Therefore, the
global economy (primarily, global capital markets) can function as a single organism, as
a whole system in real time. According to Castells, further technological development can
lead to the full independence of capital and culture from time.
The then-chief editor of ‘The Economist’ Francis Cairncross presents an extreme
point of view on ‘the death of distance’, claiming that ‘the distance will no longer determine
the cost of electronic communication. Once investment in a communication network
(purchase of a computer or phone, or creation of a web site) is made – an additional cost
of sending or receiving any information almost equals to zero. Any form of communication
will be available for mobile or remote usage’ (Cairncross 2001: xiii).
‘Borderless’ world
Many definitions of globalization coined in the 1990s, including the economic ones,
focus on the growing easiness in overcoming national borders, on increasing cross-
border flows and interactions: ‘globalization is a process that encompasses the causes,
course, and consequences of transnational and transcultural integration of human and
non-human activities’ (al-Rodhan and Stoudmann 2006: 36). The idea of ‘vanishing
borders and barriers’ is closely connected with the ideas of partial loss/limitation of
national sovereignty of states through the expanding influence of global governance
institutions, international law, and transnational economic actors, such as TNCs and
global capital markets.
 Equal to the reduced role of distances, the decreased role of national borders, and
the growth of cross-border flows, connections and interactions are often attributed to the
spread of modern technologies, first and foremost the Internet. In its extreme form, the
idea of ‘vanishing borders’ means that the world (especially the global economic space)
becomes ‘a single, seamless unity’ without any barriers (see, e.g., Ohmae 1999, 2005).
‘Interconnected’ world and global networks
This idea proceeds logically from the abovementioned increase in cross-border
linkages and flows, and the declining role of borders and barriers. Some definitions of
globalization suggest that its essence consists in the increased connectivity of the global
world, in strengthening global networks of relationships, flows and interactions. Jan van
Dyck and Manuel Castells are among the authors of the concept of the network society;
the latter introduced also the concept of the ‘space of flows’. According to Castells,
society, in other words the social space, is being formed around flows of capital,
information, technology, organizational interaction, images, sounds and symbols. ‘Space
of flows’ reflects the processes prevailing in the economic, political and cultural life of
society, and produces the structure of this society. At the same time, elites of a network
society are not tied to a particular geographic area, but to this very ‘space of flows’
(Castells 1996: 412–413). Further research on global networks and flows has significantly
enriched our knowledge of these concepts. Jonathan Friedman has identified
globalization as a set of processes through which local economy is connected to the
global information network and to the global market network (Friedman 2001).
Christopher Chase-Dunn and his colleagues describe globalization as ‘the increasing
global density of large-scale interaction networks with respect to the density of smaller
networks’ (Chase-Dunn, Kawano, and Brewer 2000: 77). Leonid Grinin and Andrey
Korotayev define globalization as ‘the process by which the world becomes more
connected and more dependent on all its actors. Consequently, there is as an increase
in the number of common challenges for states and an expanding number and types of
integrating subjects’ (Grinin and Korotayev 2009: 495)