SOURCE-BASED ESSAY ON GLOBALIZATION For Kimwoods

Global Issues, Debates, and Controversies38

The perspective adopted in this book on the current global age is most in accord with this focus on broader changes in the last half of the twentieth century. While all of the other perspectives deal with global processes, they were far more limited in geo- graphic scope and far less extensive and intensive than the global processes that took off in the late twentieth century. Thus the perspective adopted here is that globalization is a relatively recent development with its major points of origin occurring after the close of WW II.

GLOBaLIZatION Or GLOBaLIZatIONS?

While we can discuss globalization in general terms, such a discussion obscures the impor- tant fact that there are, as pointed out earlier, various types of globalization – various glo- balizations – that need to be identified and the relationships among and between them teased out (Hoffman 2002). The following are some of the major types9 of globalization that will be dealt with in this book.

eCONOMIC

As we’ve seen, to many observers, economic globalization is globalization.10 While eco- nomic globalization is certainly of great importance, perhaps of greatest importance, there are other important types of globalization (see below).

pOLItICaL

While heavily influenced by economic globalization, political globalization cannot be reduced to economics alone. For example, US wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 certainly had an economic motivation (for example, protecting the supply of Middle East oil, perhaps even gaining more control over Iraq’s oil), but there were many other factors (misguided fears of “weapons of mass destruction” and of al-Qaeda in Iraq, demonization of Islam in general and of Saddam Hussein in particular, and so on).

Those who study political globalization tend to think in terms of inter-national relations. However, the key contribution of globalization studies in this domain is to encompass, but look beyond, inter-national relations to other kinds of political relations that exist at a global level (So 2012). Examples include those involving global organizations, especially the United Nations (UN), relations between regions and cities that bypass the nation-states in which they exist, and more specific phenomena such as terrorist organizations (e.g. al-Qaeda) that are not based in, or associated with, any particular nation-state; they are “state-less.” Indeed, statelessness and the increasing problems associated with it (e.g. in the tribal territories of Pakistan, Syria, in several countries in Africa [e.g. Somalia, Congo] which seem to have a government in name only) are of increasing global interest and concern.

CULtUraL

There is a wide variety of cultural flows that exist, at least in part, independently of the other major forms of globalization (Tomlinson 2012). Examples include food (Italian, Chinese, Indian, etc.), television offerings (BBC and al-Hurra), movies (from Hollywood

Political globalization:

political relations that

exist at a global level,

including inter-national

relations.

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Global Issues, Debates, and Controversies 39

and Bollywood), museum shows, touring rock and classical music performances, and so on. Of course, these forms of cultural globalization cannot be divorced totally from the  other major forms of globalization. They often have roots in particular nation-states (e.g. India’s Bollywood) and their global movement may lead to political outcries in various countries (the hostility to American-style fast food among at least some in France, Italy, and e lsewhere). More importantly, all of these forms of cultural globalization are affected by economic considerations (e.g. whether or not they can at least earn back their expenses, if not show a profit, in other geographic locales) and have economic consequences (the continued production of new cultural offerings depends upon previous ones showing a profit, or at least not losing money).

reLIGION

Most of the world’s religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc.) are global in scope and often seek to extend their global influence (Abrutyn 2012). For example, Catholicism, with about a billion adherents, is a global operation run from the Vatican. There are Catholics, Catholic churches, and Catholic priests in most parts of the world and all sorts of information flows to and from them and the Vatican. Many other religions, both large and small, are, or seek to be, global in scope and work toward that through proselytizing throughout the world, sending missionaries, and opening religious centers (churches, mosques, synagogues, and so on). Great attention these days is devoted to the global spread of Islam, especially Islamic fundamentalism, although it has been a globalizing religion since its creation in the seventh century (it spread through the Middle East, northern Africa, and as far as Spain) (Vertigans and Sutton 2002).

SCIeNCe

Science today is inherently a global enterprise as its knowledge base is formed by inputs from many parts of the world and that knowledge is disseminated virtually everywhere (Drori 2012a). This has been true for quite some time (e.g. work on atomic and sub-atomic theory in the first half of the twentieth century), but has been made much easier by various technological advances. The advent of the Internet was of particular importance in enhancing the global character and reach of science. Many scientific journals are now online and can be accessed by scientists in most parts of the world. Furthermore, many scientists no longer wait for journals to accept and publish their articles; they now publish their work online. Such work, often in its early stages, can be read by scientists everywhere. It can affect their own work almost instantaneously, or they can offer rapid feedback or cor- rections to the original author(s) who can quickly revise a work and publish the revised paper online. To take one other example, large if not massive collaborations among scien- tists around the world are now much more likely because of the Internet and video conferencing.

heaLth aND MeDICINe

Health and medicine have been increasingly globalized in many different ways (Linn and Wilson 2012). Diseases can and do proliferate globally. There is also the global spread of medical knowledge and expertise as well as technologies useful in diagnosing and treating

Cultural globalization: Cultural influences that exist at a global level, between and among various nations.

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Global Issues, Debates, and Controversies40

various diseases. As with scientific knowledge, much medical knowledge is available online and disseminated rapidly around the world.

SpOrt

Sport, too, has been globalized in various ways (Andrews and Mower 2012). We have already touched on a few of the major organizations involved in the globalization of sport; other sports that are quite global in reach are professional tennis and golf. The global media, especially television, have played a key role in the globalization of sport and creating global interest in, and an audience for, sport.

eDUCatION

Higher education has spread through increasing areas of the world and the systems of higher education have grown increasingly similar (Mitchell and Nielsen 2012; Ramirez 2012). This is even truer of schools of business administration, especially those that offer MBA programs (Clegg and Carter 2007). Recently, American universities have, in effect, been opening “fran- chises” in various countries, especially the oil-rich Persian Gulf area (Lewin 2008: 8). Universities are now even graded on the World Reputation Rankings (Gutterplan 2013).

However, primary and secondary schools have not done as well in keeping up with glo- balization. Three key failures have been associated with today’s primary and secondary schools as they relate to globalization:

1. Schools are generally not engaging young people in learning with the result that when asked, most students say that school is “boring.” The various facets of globalization – economic, sociocultural, demographic – are everyday realities for young people, but the schools offer little that is relevant to those realities.

2. Schools, especially in the North, are not responding adequately to the needs of the large numbers of immigrant youth from the South. They often “quickly become marginal- ized as racially, ethnically, religiously, and linguistically marked minority groups… . The results of these general trends are painfully obvious in multiple measurable ways: from the high dropout rates among immigrant, ethnic and racial minorities in many wealthy countries, to stark differences in achievement patterns between native and racialized minorities” (Suarez-Orozco and Smith 2007: 3).

3. Arguably the most alarming problem is associated with the failures of schools in the South and the fact that 61 million children of primary school age and 71 million chil- dren of lower secondary school age in the South are not enrolled in schools (UNICEF and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2012). As a result, they fall ever-further behind children in the North. In addition, these failures contribute to the enormous problem of illiteracy which is concentrated in the South and growing illiteracy there can only serve to widen the gap between North and South.

Primary and secondary schools need to change in order to adapt to the realities of the new global world.

The above gives at least a sense of the range of globalizations, but, in fact, even this itera- tion touches only on a small number of the globalizations to be dealt with in this volume.

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Global Issues, Debates, and Controversies 41

One important point about the idea that there are multiple globalizations is the fact that it further complicates the whole idea of finding a point of origin for globalization. Clearly, there are different points of origin depending on whether one is focusing on globalization in the economy, or politics, or science, or higher education, and so on. It clearly makes far more sense in the search for origins (assuming one wants to search for them) to specify different origins for each of the many forms of globalization than to seek out a single point of origin for globalization as a whole. Furthermore, even within each of the forms, there are sub-areas each of which is likely to have a different point of origin for the begin- ning of globalization (for example, malaria has been spreading globally for centuries while Avian flu has yet to [and may never] affect large numbers of humans throughout the world).

What DrIVeS GLOBaLIZatION?

This is another highly complex question with no easy answers. For example, if we accept the fact that there are multiple globalizations, then it is clear that it would be illusory to think that we could find a single driver, or even a small number of drivers. Yet, to seek out the drivers of each and every form of globalization would be a long and tedious process. At this point, at least, we need to restrict ourselves to a search for the drivers of globalization at the most general level. While we will focus on globalization in general, many of these same factors apply to at least some of the more specific globalizations.

One way to approach this is through one of the classic divisions in the social sciences – the distinction between material and ideal explanations. A material, or materialist, explana- tion would tend to focus on objective factors and forces. While there can be other material forces (e.g. the nation-state in the political realm), this generally comes down, as it did for Karl Marx (who was a materialist), to a focus on economic factors such as “forces” and “relations” of production, technology, and so on. It is this kind of thinking that leads many to the view that it is capitalism in general, or the contemporary MNC, that is the most important driving force in contemporary globalization.

The polar view, as it was for Marx, is that it is not material factors, but rather ideal factors, that are the main drivers of globalization. The emphasis on ideal factors was characteristic of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and his followers, the “young Hegelians.” Marx came of age in this intellectual context, but famously planted Hegel on his feet by focusing on material rather than ideal factors. However, Marx retained a secondary interest in such idea systems as ideology (for more on ideology, at least as it relates to the neoliberal view of globalization, see Chapter 4). Today, the idealist position on globalization is that the main drivers of the process are changes in thinking and ideas, as well as in information and knowledge. We have come increasingly to think in global, rather than in local, or even in national, terms. And, our knowledge base has followed suit so that it, too, is increasingly global in scope. A good example of the latter involves the issue of global climate change. In some ways (because, for example, of movies and books like Al Gore’s [2006] An Inconvenient Truth) we have come to know a great deal about global climate and climate change, perhaps a lot more than we know about our local climate (Brulle et al. 2012). And this greater knowledge about global climate change is leading at long last to more serious global efforts to deal with its causes and con- sequences. Thus, in this view, globalization is driven not by material changes, but by changes in ideas and knowledge.

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