Over many centuries, human societies across the globe have established new contacts. Recently, the pace of global integration has dramatically increased. Unprecedented changes in communications, transportation, and computer technology have given the process new energy and made the world more interdependent than ever. Multinational corporations manufacture products in many countries and sell to consumers around the world. Money, technology and materials move across national borders. Along with products and finances, ideas and cultures circulate more freely. As a result, laws, economies, and social movements are forming at the international level.
Airplanes, cheap telephone, email, computers, shipping, capital investments, all these have made the world more interdependent than ever. But for many people, business-driven globalization uproots old ways of life and threatens livelihoods and cultures. So, Globalization creates new markets and wealth, on the other hand it causes widespread suffering, conflict, and unrest.
Globalization expands and accelerates the exchange of ideas and commodities over vast distances. Globalization expands and accelerates the movement and exchange of ideas and commodities over vast distances. Thus Western countries get chance to open world markets to their goods and take advantage of abundant, cheap labor in the South. They use international financial institutions and regional trade agreements to force poor countries to join by reducing tariffs, privatizing state enterprises, and relaxing environmental and labor standards. The results have enlarged profits for investors.
Technology has now created the possibility and even the likelihood of a global culture. The Internet, fax, satellites are sweeping away cultural boundaries. Global entertainment companies shape the views and dreams of ordinary citizens, wherever they live. This spread of values, norms, and culture tends to promote Western ideals of capitalism. Some local cultures inevitably fall victim to this global “consumer” culture, dominant languages eradicate other languages and so on.
With global ecological changes, an ever more integrated global economy, and other global trends, political activity increasingly takes place at the global level. The European Union, International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization and such other parties are playing significant roles in changing globalization trends on economic, political sectors and so on. Political activity can also pass national borders through global movements and NGOs. Globalization is also changing the outlines of law and creating new global legal institutions and norms. The International Criminal Court promises to bring justice. Business law is globalizing fastest of all, as nations agree to standard regulations, rules and legal practices; later on helping this globalization process.
For me, Globalization appears to be a natural phenomenon. Peoples’ movements have shown that it is neither irreversible nor inevitable. Citizens all over the world, ordinary people from all over the world can work together to shape alternate futures, to build a globalization of cooperation, solidarity and respect for our planet’s environment.
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