what is globalism essay

Globalism and Changes to the Internet: Editorial Essay

by Jeffrey Barlow

[email protected]

Editor, Journal of the Association for History and Computing.

.01. Introduction

As we begin our fifth year of publishing the JAHC we find ourselves in a period of great change. When we first began planning for this journal, in the Fall of 1997, the Internet was clearly a very promising mode of scholarly communication, but little more than that. Our first editorial in June of 1998, was entitled " Why an Electronic Journal in History?" —we felt we had to justify our decision to enter this new medium. After careful consideration, we decided that the more our publication looked like a conventional hard-copy scholarly journal, the less we would trigger scholarly anxieties about publishing electronically. Accordingly, we decided against taking advantage of many of the developments in hypertext, producing rather what now looks like a rather quaint museum piece that might well be labelled "Early Scholarly Publishing on the Internet" in some electronic archive.

In the four years since we began, both the Internet and the Journal have proven very successful. We have had the pleasure of blazing a trail for many, and often have been consulted, both in the United States and in Europe, on how best to begin an electronic journal in other fields. Our founding group of scholars is now the American Association for History and Computing, and was admited as an affiliate to the American Historical Association in faster time than any previous group in the AHA's long history. We have had the pleasure of publishing a number of noted scholars and often have seen their articles reprinted in paper journals. Our members are very busy with public presentations and workshops. Several who began as electronic neophytes are now heading up centers for studying or publishing electronic materials. We are in discussions with a major academic publisher for a hard-copy series on electronic materials in history, following upon several successful years of producing M.E. Sharpe's History Highway series.

These are all, of course, gratifying achievements, made possible by a very hard working group of scholars, both national and international. But above all, we were simply at the right place at the right time, at the beginning of the transition from hard copy publishing to electronic publishing just as the field began to take off. Those first four years were a period of what now seems to be almost complete anarchy; there were few rules and almost no precedents, beyond trying to live up to the traditional concerns of our predecessor historians. It seems a strange question, but more than once we asked ourselves what Thucydides or Ssu-ma Ch'ien would have done with this new medium.

We now find ourselves at the brink of a new era, at a period of consolidation as we begin to consider not only the advantages of the Internet, but also some of the disadvantages. Those of us we have played joyfully in the fields of anarchy now must ask ourselves where it is that we are going. Accordingly, this editorial attempts to consider the Internet and the place of the JAHC within a very broad historical perspective. Here we consider the linked topics of the Internet, globalism, global civic culture, scholarship, and terrorism. At first glance these topics may seem so disparate as to be unrelated. But we argue below that they are closely related and are of major importance in the future development of the Internet. We begin with globalism and global civic culture, consider terrorism, and end by asking what price we are willing to pay for security as it effects scholars and their use of the Internet.

In brief, we argue here that the Internet and globalism are closely related in their development; they are key factors in defining the era in which we live. Although globalism is primarily an economic process, it includes cultural processes that are creating a global civic culture, and the Journal of the Association of History and Computing is one part of that culture. But economic globalism does not require the Internet in its present form, and there are reasons to believe that changes are inevitable. The Internet has also seriously eroded the power of the state, including the American one; terrorism is one aspect of that loss of power. We think that the institution of the state is now responding to that challenge and that It is possible, indeed, probable, that we will have economic globalism, but not cultural globalism, in at least the short run. We think the Internet of the immediate future will be very different than that of the past four years, and that electronic journals like the JAHC, and scholars in general will face a significant challenge in adapting to those changes. This is a long and complex arguement and we promise not to burden our readership with such more than once every five years. We begin by discussing globalism.

.02. Defining Globalism

When we speak of globalism, we most often refer to its economic aspects. But globalism also embraces many cultural issues. Because its impact is so extensive and so deeply felt, a precise definition of the concept is elusive.   [1] Jon Katz, the very active editorial writer at Slashdot.com ("News for Nerds —Stuff that Matters"), writes   [2] :

I've been writing about it [globalism] for years, and got more than 2,000 responses and e-mails about it from some columns here last week, but you know what? I still couldn't tell you exactly what it is. "It's the biggest evil facing the world," e-mailed JDRow. "It's the only hope the world really has," messaged a professor from Amherst. Neither could say what it was. Can you?

Given the lack of a standard definition of this term, we attempt one here, intended to fit our own uses of the term below:

Globalism is the spread of a very wide range of ideas and practices, principally economic ones, beyond the boundaries of individual nations into the world arena.

The most controversial impacts have tended to be economic ones because, while many Americans are concerned about the potentially adverse economic consequences of globalism on their jobs or lives, few worry about the impact of American culture abroad. At the JAHC, we have observed that impact and perhaps have contributed to it as well.   [3]

.03. Globalism and the Internet

It is apparent that the Internet itself is directly related to the phenomenon of globalism or globalization if we wish to view it as the dynamic process that it is, rather than as a static entity. The Internet is a cause of globalization in that it is perhaps the single most important communications channel by which values and practices are spreading beyond individual nation states. It enables international businesses to exchange vast electronic files and powerful graphical images. Scholars have been able to assemble communities of discourse around topics that earlier were considered too "small" in light of the difficulties presented by print publication within an international context. At the JAHC our "World Languages" editorial board often puts the abstract of our articles into a wide variety of languages such as French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Japanese. More than ten percent of our readers access us from non-English speaking nations.

As dramatic as these changes have been, far greater ones are taking shape. Within the foreseeable future bandwidth or carrying capacity will be sufficiently large to make the downloading of Hollywood films a practical means of accessing far larger audiences in a far more timely and cost-effective fashion than is presently true. Non-governmental entities and individuals will be able to participate in multipoint video conferencing, as do well-funded business groups today. In the somewhat more distant but still forseeable future, the combination of wireless and satellite transmissions will open up the most remote household to the world, providing, of course, that the potential consumer can somehow afford these marvels.

The contemporary era, sometimes referred to as "post-industrialism", also has been called the "Age of Informationalism"   [4] by Manuel Castells, Berkeley sociologist and the author of the encyclopedic multi-volume work, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture . Castells is probably, internationally at least, if not in the United States, the most influential analyst working in the field. He emphasizes that the phenomenon of informationalism differs from earlier stages of industrialization. The feedback loop between process (the digital production of a wide variety of artifacts, but principally, information) and product (information) is much more important and the loop closes much faster than in industrial processes. New processes lead to new information, which almost immediately leads to new processes, ad infinitum.   [5] The Internet is clearly the critical link in the dissemination of this information as well as being in considerable part the market for it, if we consider the Internet to be the entire system of digital communication, from desktop processors where the information is created to the browsers of end users.

But the Internet is also in part a result of globalization. The spread of markets and production processes abroad has included with it the production and consumption of the vast array of computer technology necessary to the Internet at every step, from the creation of an HTML file, to the applications and mechanisms necessary to send and receive it over the equally necessary cables and wires that embody the "net".

.04. Globalism and Earlier Expansions of Trade

A wide variety of responses to globalism have emerged, all the way from dismissive comments that it is, in fact, merely the same old struggle for markets that has consumed mankind's energies from the beginnings of trade, to impassioned arguments that globalism is an entirely new phenomenon with epochal reach and consequences.   [6] It is comforting to many (and politically necessary to others) to believe that globalism is merely an evolution of earlier economic processes. Both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, two of the institutions leading economic globalization, are officially committed to this view.   [7]

I think, however, that this view is far more convenient than it is accurate. There is a great difference between the British East India Company, perhaps the most important British mercantilist corporation and the leader in expanding trade in the early modern age, and such firms as today's Nike, Inc.

The critical factor in the Informational age is that processes, ownership, and management practices are all networked. Nike, although here in Oregon we like to think of it as a local firm, is not even an American firm in any important sense. The British East India Co., though distributed worldwide, was British. It had an important relationship with the British state, its owners were British, and the ships' bottoms it leased were British owned.

Nike is a worldwide network whose "campus" could as easily be in Vancouver B.C., as in Beaverton, Oregon. Moreover, It does not itself produce anything, save perhaps for fashion designs. Its production processes are themselves networked; only a very few shoe parts are made directly by Nike. It employs subcontractors to produce shoes abroad that are then mostly sold through outlets owned by others, though Nike perhaps owns a few stores outright. Its production processes are "just-in-time" and dependent upon electronic communications for their cost effectiveness. To believe that Nike is merely following in the wake of the British East India Co. as a capitalist enterprise is to miss very important differences between the two entities, and between the two eras in which they exist. Important shifts in underlying values have also, not surprisingly, occurred.

.05. Positive Responses to Globalism

Many scholars have observed that there has been within the American value system of the last several decades, a conflation of what were earlier quite distinct ideas. "Freedom" now means, to many Americans the freedom to make consumer choices. This idea is a very powerful one that has raised an abstract notion of "market" to such a height that Harvey Cox, a noted theologian, has observed that the market now performs many of the functions earlier ascribed to "God."   [8]

Given the widespread public repetition endlessly hammered home by all forms of media that freedom is primarily economic freedom, it is not surprising that Americans see the spread of consumer choices via globalization as an unmixed blessing.

Moreover, it is clear that in many cases access to the global market on any terms whatsoever is a sine qua non to breaking the fetters of traditional economies.   [9] However much activists criticize international firms such as Nike for their practices in overseas production, it is also true that jobs producing in and for the global market are a welcome alternative to traditional poverty for many workers in countries such as Indonesia or Vietnam; they also are often the only alternative.

.06. Negative Responses to Globalism

Americans usually see globalism as an international phenomenon. But because of the sheer economic strength of the United States, much of the world views it as a type of American expansionism.   [10] Benjamin Barber argues that it is this aggressive pursuit of a global market society that has precipitated the anger of much of the Muslim world, and made them vulnerable to true terrorists.   [11] Even United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, who is clearly committed to an open world economic order, warned business leaders at the World Economic Forum which met in New York in early February, 2002:

The reality is that power and wealth in this world are very very unequally shared, and that far too many people are condemned to lives of extreme poverty and degradation"230;The perception, among many, is that this is the fault of globalization, and that globalization is driven by a global elite, composed of, at least represented by, the people who attend this gathering.   [12]

.07. The Emergence of a Global Civic Culture

There are many consequences of globalization but we wish to focus upon an unintended result of economic processes directly related to the Internet: the emergence of a shared body of humanistic values that shows us the outlines of a true global civic culture. These values could, in effect, if they continued to coalesce, one day be characteristic of a sort of world citizenship.

It is not surprising that there is a relationship between informationalism and culture; what is the content of informationalism if not culture? As Castells states, "technology   [13] And neither is it surprising that there is a feedback between processes and content; indeed, as Castells reminds us, this is perhaps the primary characteristic of this current stage of production, whether we call it post-industrialism or informationalism.

To cite an aspect of global culture that is particularly pertinent to the JAHC: In dealing with historical articles that come in from abroad, we have always chosen to enforce "traditional" (i.e., Western European and American) standards for evidence and citation upon them. In other cultures, such as the former Soviet Union, China, and Japan, the citation of evidence has often been more related to professional status hierarchies than to "proof" in the Euro-American sense. By doing so, we spread those standards among young professional elites in those cultures and in doing so unwittingly undermine those status hierarchies.

There are many and far broader indications of the recent emergence of global systems of values. One such is the number of contemporary socio-political movements that have risen locally and then quickly become global. The most striking recent phenomenon is probably the Zapatista movement of Chiapas, Mexico, or the protracted series of World Trade Organization (WTO) protests.   [14] But others would include the anti-landmine movement, many feminist campaigns dealing with the lot of third world women, concerns about child labor, sexual exploitation, consumers' rights, protection of the rights of indigenous peoples, or those of religious minorities such as Tibetan Buddhists and Fa Lun Gong practitioners in the Peoples' Republic of China, to name but a few of many possible examples.

While some of these may seem to many to be purely political and lacking a broad base, they are above all united by a shared ethic. These ethical systems define appropriate behaviors between workers and employers, between sovereign states and their citizens, between businesses and consumers, and between human beings and the earth itself.   [15] While these movements are certainly at important levels separate ones, when taken together they increasingly constitute an international and unified movement, usually called "human rights". There are, however, important differences between local human rights movements, and the human rights movement when viewed in a global context. In illuminating this distinction, I find it useful to refer here to personal experience.

I am, by academic training, a historian of modern China. I have lived in Chinese cultures, in either Taiwan or Guilin in south China, close to the Vietnam border, for more than six years, funded by two Fulbright grants and generous support from other sources. I have also studied or taught in Hue, Vietnam, on many occasions for a period of a month or so.

In the more than thirty years that I have been moving between Taiwan, China, Vietnam, and the United States, I have seen many political and economic changes. Taiwan was a rather grim one-party dictatorship upon my first visit in 1967. It is now a vibrant multiparty democracy. Guilin, China, was almost indescribably poverty-stricken in 1975. Now large sections of it are equivalent to Hong Kong in consumer appeal. Vietnam is perhaps at the beginning of such a period of rapid progress.

When the human rights movement began to focus upon China, beginning in the 1970's, it seemed to me that the criticism, while often well-founded, was, in fact, largely politically motivated. It was very much in the interest of the United States in particular to constantly remind the world that China was a spectacular failure in human terms, regardless of the leaps and bounds it was taking in political and recently, in economic, strength and influence.

The Chinese argument, which I to some degree accept, was that even the United States has its weaknesses in terms of human rights. Above all, we tend to ignore economic rights, often refusing to join international conventions on human rights because we wish to avoid accepting standards measured against which even our wealthy society does not appear entirely successful. The Chinese still see human rights arguments as politically motivated attempts at "political interference" in their internal affairs. As well, they argue that "cultural differences" usually explain these misunderstandings of their internal practices.

As long as the human rights movement had a predominantly American cast, the Chinese were in some important part correct. But the Internet has broadened the movement. Now idealists or co-religionists all over the world concern themselves with the fate of Tibetan Buddhists, with Chinese student activists, or more oddly, with the Fa Lung Gong, to many a rather traditional Chinese messianic sectarian movement to which have been added the modern attributes of a pyramid scheme.

Chinese arguments no longer protect them, in my mind at least, because the human rights movement is an international network and does not hesitate to criticize the United States as well. For example, a Google search on "Abu Jamal," the imprisoned Philadelphia journalist and activist, will turn up thousands of pages, many in French, German, or other non-English languages. Even Amnesty International, long the bane of the Chinese, called for a new trial for him.   [16]

However much as an American I might sometimes resent foreign misunderstandings of the workings of my society, I recognize that the Chinese and other states (including my own) now have to meet increasingly higher standards in the treatment of their citizens. There are no longer any purely "internal affairs". Neither are "cultural differences" a justifiable defense of violations when these are measured not against parochial and often politically motivated national standards, but against emerging global ones.

The impact of these many global movements, and the distinction between today's human rights movements and earlier ones, depends above all upon their shared or networked nature. The Zapatista movement in and of itself was a minor Mexican peasant insurgency. But when news of the events in Chiapas were disseminated world-wide, principally via the Internet, a wide variety of pressures were bought to bear to circumscribe the range of actions open to the Mexican government in suppressing the movement.   [17] The same became true for the American government that had long resisted the proscribing of the use of landmines by international agreements.   [18] And while Abu Jamal did not get the new trial called for by Amnesty International, he was granted a hearing that freed him from the death penalty.   [19]

But while these movements might all be seen as broadly humanistic ones, depending on how we feel about their political values, there are, of course, many others which are offensive by most standards. We have argued elsewhere that the terrorist network known as Al Quaeda grew up in the Informationalist environment and depends upon it. So, too, do such organizations as those of holocaust deniers and criminal groups such as international drug cartels.   [20]

Each of these entities, like globalism itself, has the effect of reducing the sovereignty of nation states, an issue covered in detail below. Because the United States is clearly the dominant player in the process of globalization as currently constituted, and because these processes are so much to the advantage of politically influential world economic elites, Americans pay little attention to the diminishment of sovereignty, save on the extreme left and the extreme right where paranoids, muttering darkly about various conspiracies, meet.

When Americans are concerned about a loss of sovereignty, these concerns often are assuaged by the tenets of "market fundamentalism" in that it is widely accepted that the less government interferes in consumer choice ("freedom") the more freedom we all have. But the developing global civic culture does not have equivalently powerful defenders.

.08. Who Speaks for the Internet?

To argue that the Internet is not as well defended as the market system is not to say that it is totally undefended. Free speech advocates, for example, are quick to speak out for the Internet.   [21] Many businesses, too, have a considerable and growing stake in the Internet, though we believe that their support is highly contingent; the Internet could well be changed significantly and still meet business needs.

But the Internet also has many detractors. We need only to glance at the list of offensive groups listed above to remind ourselves of some of the shortcomings of a totally open Internet environment. We favor freedom of speech, but we are not so sure about pornographers, holocaust deniers, and much less sure about terrorists having access to this high digital road.

The Internet has another weakness in that it produces losers just as it produces winners. As it changes the communications environment, it not only brings new businesses and new practices into being, in many cases it destroys old ones.   [22] Among the groups that are truly concerned about the Internet, of course, are state governments who see their tax incomes steadily eroded as commerce moves online.

But surely the greatest sin of the Internet is to diminish the power of sovereign nation states. When governments become aware that non-state players are successfully using the Internet, whether to restrict the ability of the Chinese state to arrest religious dissidents, to spread the word that Catholic priests have been arrested in Vietnam, or that jihadists have facilitated catastrophic attacks utilizing digital resources, many concerned with security begin to wonder if some restrictions are not necessary. The Chinese government monitors incoming international traffic; the Vietnamese government makes public access to the Internet very difficult by closely controlling Internet Service Providers and in effect licenses end-users one by one. Europeans have recently passed a major new law with radical implications for the Internet.   [23] And the United States has passed the USA Patriot Act.   [24]

The hopes of many for the development of the Internet as a tool for democratization, including open scholarly communication, have been very high.   [25] But these hopes are necessarily dependant upon the continued open nature of the Internet. It is obvious that there is a direct relationship between the process of globalization and the development and spread of the Internet. But these two processes serve quite different groups and there is no reason to believe that the connection must necessarily be maintained indefinitely. It would be quite tempting in many regards for specific groups to facilitate the former while restricting the latter. This would have disastrous consequences for the development of global civic culture. We believe that this process is inevitable and is well underway. These changes will flow from the impact of the Internet upon the power of the nation state, including most especially the American one.

.09. The Power of the State

We have argued elsewhere that the events of September 11, 2001, can be understood to a considerable degree as the result of the impact of the Internet.   [26] We believe that in a larger sense the root causes of the phenomenon of terrorism is a relative dimunition of the power of the nation state vis-a-vis nonstate poltical actors, as a result of the development of networked organizations made possible by the Internet.

In preparing this argument, we have found very useful a recent work, Joseph S. Nye Jr's The Paradox of American Power .   [27] Nye is a considerable figure, even in the talented ranks of American scholar-bureaucrats, ranks that include such figures as George Kennan and Henry Kissinger. Nye is a former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, and was Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration. He is currently Dean of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He has written a number of influential works in addition to this latest one   [28]

Nye's analysis of globalization and of the origins and consequences of the Internet, though considered from the primary focal point of U.S. policy rather than from the focal point of the impact of the Internet itself, roughly agrees with our foregoing analysis. Where Nye adds considerable value, however, is in spelling out the impact of the Internet upon American power.

.10. "Hard Power"

Nye is, of course, as a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, well acquainted with what he terms "hard power", i.e., the traditional elements of state power such as military force and economic influence. He states that: "Military power and economic power are both examples of hard command power that can be used to induce others to change their position."   [29] In short, "hard power" flows largely from economic and military strength and is at least implicitly coercive.

.11. "Soft" Power

But Nye goes on to define an additional type of power, "soft power":

A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons. This aspect of power—getting others to want what you want—I call soft power.   [30]

American hard power is different from that of the country in previous eras, or from that of previous great powers only in degree: recent conflicts such as Desert Storm, the war in Kosovo or the Afghani campaign show an unparalleled blend of fire power and technological sophistication, an ability to so dominate the "battle space" as to make war appear almost effortless, as well as largely bloodless, at least for American forces.

.12. The Origins of Soft Power

However, American soft power, Nye argues, is quantitatively and qualitatively different from earlier American power, or from that of previous great powers. American values and institutions are being projected world wide, largely as a consequence of the related phenomenon of globalization and what Nye terms "the global information age."   [31] As we argued earlier, neither of these can be disentangled from the growth of the Internet itself.

While soft power greatly benefits the United States in that it tends to make others emulate Americans, and thus to want what they want, it is not, unlike military power, a deliberate consequence of policy. Rather, soft power flows from a number of extra-governmental sources such as popular culture, from scholarly groups like the American Historical Assocation, from the exemplary power of legal and political institutions, from U.S.-based human rights groups, even from groups such as the anti-W.T.O. protestors, who, even while attacking the system, disseminate widely held American values. Nye refers to this process as "social globalization," and also sees an "incipient... civil society at the global level."   [32] This corresponds to what we earlier termed "Global Civic Culture."

Much of Nye's analysis is intended to make a relatively simple point: The United States is indefinitely unchallengeable in terms of its "hard power"; but "soft power" is growing steadily more important in a networked world, and is the more frangible of American sources of power. There will be a natural evolution that somewhat vitiates the impact of American soft power in any event as other information economies mature. For example, by 2010, Nye argues, there will be more Chinese Internet users than American ones.   [33] While American sites will remain very attractive, because of the fact that English has become the world's second language, China too sits at the center of a linguistic empire that not only embraces the worldwide Diaspora of Chinese people, but also in the past embraced much of East Asia including Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and other nations.

.13. A Dichotomy or a Transition?

Nye's position intersects at several points with the analysis of Manuel Castells,   [34] Nye's argument follows in time upon that of Castells in that Castells wrote in 1996, Nye after September 11, 2001. But Nye's position is ultimately grounded in an earlier tradition of "realist" definitions of power:

Power used to be in the hands of princes, oligarchies, and ruling elites; it was defined as the capacity to impose one's will on others. Modifying their behavior. This image of power does not fit with our reality any longer   [35] ...

Castells spends far more time than does Nye considering the "Information Age." In doing so, he perhaps has the advantage in contextualizing American power. His argument is also far more dynamic. To Castells, the Information Age is an ongoing process, which he considers from a number of perspectives. But Nye believes that there are two dichotomous kinds of power: "hard" and "soft", and the relationship between them is a static one. For Castells, there are not two kinds of power, but a still incomplete transition from one kind of power to another.

For Castells, power is being permanently transformed; Nye's "hard" power is eroding: states, even the most powerful one, the United States, now live in an environment marked by a decentralized net of "local terror equilibria."   [36] In the past, during the Cold War, several major states and their allies established an equilibrium based upon mutual assured destruction; this prevented any one power from dominating the global political or economic system, but it also protected each of the major states from the others. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union the United States then enjoyed a brief period of near absolute dominance.

.14. American Power Following 9-11

But global processes had already distributed a variety of weapons of mass destruction among major and minor powers, and more importantly, among non-state actors as well. September 11, 2001, revealed the vulnerabilities of even the greatest of powers to non-state actors. The devastating effect of the low-cost and relatively simple improvised weapons that were used then suddenly illuminated a terrible new world.

The use of a bacteriological weapon, Anthrax, then followed quickly upon the trauma of 9-11—so quickly that historians may well treat the two events as one. This attack revealed an additional and, to many, even more terrifying vulnerability and again showed the new power of non-state actors.

Castells refers to these sorts of weapons, including chemical and biological ones, as well as the feared low-yield "dirty" nuclear devices sometimes referred to as "suitcase bombs" as "veto technologies" and presumes that this new decentralized web of great and small states and non-state actors will require constant small interventions by many different powers to maintain a relative peace. This seems to be an apt description of events since September 11 as a variety of alliances, states, and international organizations have joined the campaign against terrorism.

There are, then, many indications that Castells is, to a considerable degree at least, correct in his analysis of state power in the Information Age, and Nye wrong. State power is evolving toward a decentralized fabric, like all else in the Information Age.

.15. The Limitations of the Networked International System

There are also many indications that some in the American policy-making institutions understand the implications of a world like that described by Castells. Recently (March, 2002), the Pentagon report "The Nuclear Posture Review" discussed conditions under which the United States might use nuclear weapons. This analysis immediately attracted a great deal of attention because it suggested the first-strike employment of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers. Since the end of World War II such use has been presumed to be outside the parameters of civilized warfare, and particularly outside American nuclear doctrine. But times have changed.

As stated by one reporter, Michael Gordon, "Another theme in the report is the possible use of nuclear weapons to destroy enemy stocks of biological weapons, chemical arms and other arms of mass destruction."   [37] These are, of course, precisely the "veto technologies" listed by Castells.   [38]

The limitation in the current international system is probably most critically, from an American point of view, that it tends to restrain unilateral American action. As a result, great attention necessarily must be paid to alliances and coalition building. But if anything terrifies the international community it is the specter of nuclear war, or the possibility of a return to a Cold War system with its attendant enormous expenses and the inherent threat of destruction.

.16. The Nuclear Posture Review

The "Nuclear Posture Review" represents the Bush administration's attempt to break the bonds that presently restrains American power: first-strike use of nuclear weapons effectively removes the need to consult allies. It amounts to an attempt to restore the brief period of absolute domination (and absolute security) enjoyed by the U.S. following the fall of the Soviet Union, before we had become aware of the terrible new forces that could be employed by "rogue states" and criminal organizations such as Al Quaeda.

If the United States were to be successful in putting the terrorist genie back in the bottle by threatening nuclear strikes on states that both harbor terrorists and possess weapons of mass destruction, including most especially chemical and bacteriological ones, then Nye is, perhaps, correct: There are two sorts of power and the United States can continue to enjoy a near monopoly of classical "hard" power.

But Nye, like Castells, recognizes that "under the influence of the information revolution and globalization, world politics is changing in a way that means Americans cannot achieve all of their international goals acting alone."   [39] The uproar, both domestic and international over the implications of the "Nuclear Policy Review" is evidence of the essential accuracy of Castell's analysis9.   [40] Once again, the United States has discovered the limits of state autonomy in a networked system.

.17. Additional Causes of the Loss of State Power

In Addition, Castells' broader analysis of the Information Age lets us see a number of other factors critical to state power. Castells demonstrates, we think, that the power of all states, including the American state, is being irreversibly eroded, not by enemies who can be confronted with nuclear weapons, but by historical processes, most especially by globalization and the development of the Internet.

This is not to agree with the claims of some that the state is in any sense disappearing. The Libertarian dream of replacing the state by infallibly just and accurate market forces are simply that, a dream. But the role of the state, like all else, must yield before the impact of globalization and the development of the Internet. Exactly how it changes is not important to our analysis at this point; it is a topic to which we will return below.

Above all, the state is losing power in the face of globalized economic processes facilitated by networked means of communication. Globalization has raised capital flows to the level of hazard earlier represented only by catastrophic forces of nature. Portuguese state power was destroyed by the earthquake at Lisbon in 1755, effectively ending the great era of Portuguese exploration and expansion. And Portugal was, of course, one of the first powerful states. But capital flows struck with far more devastating effect the economies of Korea, Thailand, Japan, and many other states in the late twentieth century. As long as states are dependant upon an interlocked world economy, no nation can long act independently. The economist Paul Krugman suggests the nature of this problem:

Foreigners have been wildly enthusiastic about America for years – an attitude we have come to count on, because we need $1.2 billion in capital inflows every day to cover our foreign-trade deficit. What happens as they lose their enthusiasm? One of the largely unreported stories of the last few months – in the U.S. media, anyway – is the precipitous decline of foreign confidence in American leadership and institutions. Enron, aggressive accounting, budget deficits, steel tariffs, the farm bill, F.B.I. bungling – all of it adds up, in European minds in particular, to what Barton Biggs of Morgan Stanley calls a "fall from grace." Foreign purchases of U.S. stocks, foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies, are way off.   [41]

As long as the U.S., or any other state, is so dependent upon foreign investment, it dare not ignore the international climate of opinion.

.18. The Link Between States and Their Citizens Weakens

Castells raises additional relevant factors. He believes that the essential element of state influence in the 20th century has been its bottom-line welfare functions. When all else fails individual citizens, it has been the industrial state that has provided a social safety net. But globalization and the networking of production effectively cause states to continually reduce welfare expenses. In the struggle for markets, it is the system with the leanest cost structure that wins.

There are now no remaining great power welfare states. This not only weakens individual ties to the state, but also causes many to perceive that it is the state itself, by entering into agreements such as The North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and the WTO, that is responsible for their plight.

In an effort to regain citizen loyalty, many states, including those as disparate as the United States and the Peoples' Republic of China, have chosen to decentralize budgetary and control processes to ever lower administrative levels. Paradoxically, this further reduces the power of the state, and attenuates loyalty to it. Furthermore, this tendency is further enhanced by another characteristic of the Internet: the continual creation of micro-communities of interest that increasingly command the loyalty of individuals.

Even internal political institutions are deeply affected by globalization and the Informational Society. The political party structures in each of the major states have been simultaneously weakening. This process is furthest advanced, of course, in the United States, where the Informational Society itself is the most advanced. There are probably many factors that contribute to this development, many of which are related to either globalization or the Internet. The increasing inability of the state to disburse welfare funds, for example, clearly weakens many local or state level political machines.

But it is probably the Information Society itself that is primarily responsible.   [42] Once again Castells coins an apt term with which to explain these events: "informational politics."   [43] Simply put, electronic media have displaced print media as the space in which politics is discussed. This implies the same collapse of time and broadening of impact that characterizes electronic media in general. In addition, the contest for audience attention continually drives the media to seek broader and broader audiences with the resultant reluctance to deal with any issues, particularly controversial ones, in detail or over an extended period of time lest the audience move on to more diverting sources of infotainment. Because politics now exist largely in media space, appearance has become more important than substance. And as a result citizens defect from the political process as essentially irrelevant or corrupt.

Another consequence of political action being conducted in media space is the development of a tendency to attribute complex events to colorful attention-grabbing individuals who can seize media attention. This means that a worldwide Islamicist reaction to globalization and the Internet is reduced to the single figure of Ibn Bin Laden. This process, of course, empowers charismatic and ultimately simplistic individuals who can reduce complex issues to quickly transmitted symbolic explanations.

.19. How Might the State Respond?

The problems of the American state in the Informational Age recently have been greatly ameliorated by the simple fact that the American people have come under attack. This has silenced critics of the state ranging from parties out of power to even local anti-state groups such as Citizen Militias.

This problem is only temporarily solved, of course, by such expedients as mounting a war against external enemies. However, it may be that a war against terrorism that goes on indefinitely and continually expands will arrest the continuing decline of the state, perhaps also indefinitely. It may ultimately, however, also exacerbate the decline if state responses are eventually seen once again as costly, misguided, and counter-productive.   [44]

We have argued here that state responses that are not directed at the actual sources of individual problems risk being ineffective, or at best will not be both efficient and maximally effective. However, a state such as the United States is an extremely powerful organism and may well solve many of its problems simply by profligate expenditures of economic and military resources. But if the nature of such problems as the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, and the diminishing claims of all states to citizen loyalty are indeed in some considerable part a consequence of those changes we encapsulate here as globalization and the networked society, then the attempts to ameliorate the results of these changes properly should be directed at the causes themselves.

From the American perspective, many of the consequences of 9-11 can be summarized as problems of decreased security. We all experience our lives and our property as markedly less secure than they were on September 10, 2001. We are engaged in a passionate discussion concerning appropriate solutions. Few, if any, believe that we can restore the level of security we felt on the 10 th as opposed to the 11 th , and many of us probably agree that our previous feelings of security were, in any event, illusory. Here we conclude by asking a final question relating to the problems raised by globalization and the Internet: How much are we willing to pay for security?

.20. Where Were We Before 9-11?

The world has so changed since the events of 9-11 (at least for Americans) that we might well remind ourselves what that earlier context was like. To an historian, the period from the rapid popularization of the Internet to 9-11 may one day be labeled as the interim between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War Against Terrorism.

For many, it may simply be characterized as a world without terrifying enemies and the threat of major wars. There were conflicts, and they had their costs, but not even Desert Storm defined the era in the same way as the Cold War and the War Against Terrorism have defined theirs.

For most, however, this period was best defined by the development and rapid expansion of the Internet. Bill Gates, the dominant personality of this interim era, said of it:

Today, the Internet is "230; the center of attention for businesses, governments and individuals around the world. It has spawned entirely new industries, transformed existing ones, and become a global cultural phenomenon.   [44]

.21. What problems did the Internet face before 9-11?

However, even in what now seems to have been a more innocent era, there were security concerns directly related to the Internet. In 1998, F.B.I. Director Louis J. Freeh, in a report "Threats to U.S. National Security" before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on January 28, 1998, said:

The overriding concern now facing law enforcement is how rapidly the threats from terrorists and criminals are changing, particularly in terms of technology, and the resulting challenge to law enforcement's ability to keep pace with those who wish to do harm to our nation and our nation's citizens. This is why the encryption issue is one of the most important issues confronting law enforcement and potentially has catastrophic implications for our ability to combat every threat to national security that I am about to address in my statement here today.   [46]

This threat might be summed up as the ability of terrorists and criminals to communicate without detection. Not only was the almost infinite number of the media channels and messages themselves an obstacle to detection (A recent estimate has it that 610 billion e-mail messages were sent in 2001.)   [47] but even if detected, the messages could well prove to be unreadable due to strong encryption. In addition to simple encoding, the most well known of these techniques, steganography, was a means of opening up the digital code of a graphical image so as to insert an encoded message that did not itself appear in the image. These were very difficult to identify in the welter of electronic images on the World Wide Web, and even if detected, often impossible to decode.   [48]

The federal government, however, had a number of tools at its disposal. One of these was a system known as "Carnivore." Carnivore was:

A computer-based system that is designed to allow the FBI, in cooperation with an Internet Service Provider (ISP), to comply with court orders requiring the collection of certain information about emails or other electronic communications to or from a specific user targeted in an investigation.   [49]

Carnivore provided law enforcement agencies with access to two functions characteristic of earlier wire-tapping in a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) electronic environment: "Trap-and-trace/pen-register" and "Content-wiretap." The former is simply tracing electronic traffic to and from a given client of an ISP (Internet Service Provider) and keeping a register of the origin and destination of all e-mail traffic. This served the function of demonstrating in a court of law that a given individual was in contact with other given individuals; for example, that a person suspected of mafia activity indeed had communicated with known Mafiosi as demonstrated by a pen-register. The latter, as suggested by the title, was a record of the content of messages.

Both these functions, because evolutions of earlier operations in POTS environments, were well defined by law.   [50] In the climate before 9-11 individual privacy rights were carefully protected so that the state was required to demonstrate compelling need to access private communications and to do so under carefully controlled and highly limited conditions. Any failure to follow the complicated legal requirements of placing a tap and keeping records resulted in the materials being inadmissible in a court, negating the whole purpose of the taps. One indication of the relative seriousness with which such taps were viewed in law was that it required the signature of a federal district court judge to place a Carnivore tap into an ISP.

So high was the concern for privacy rights within electronic environments in the period preceding 9-11 that the FBI spent a great deal of time and energy simply in explaining the system. This extended even to making electronically available an extensive document, "Independent Technical Review of the Carnivore System".   [51] This study, conducted openly by a consortium of major universities, permitted any concerned citizen to understand the nature of the technical system.

So widespread was concern over Carnivore and its possible misuses in many communities that it inspired many thousands of explanatory and cautionary web sites.   [52] One can conclude then, that not only was the public interest in privacy protected by law, but that a very large community of concerned citizens had access to basic information relating to the system and its capabilities, presumably reducing the threat of its abuse.

A system about which far less was known, and one that was correspondingly more problematic for those concerned about privacy issues was "ECHELON."   [53] The Federation of American Scientists provides the following summary of ECHELON.

ECHELON is a term associated with a global network of computers that automatically search through millions of intercepted messages for pre-programmed keywords or fax, telex and e-mail addresses. Every word of every message in the frequencies and channels selected at a station is automatically searched. The processors in the network are known as the ECHELON Dictionaries. ECHELON connects all these computers and allows the individual stations to function as distributed elements (of) an integrated system. An ECHELON station's Dictionary contains not only its parent agency's chosen keywords, but also lists for each of the other four agencies in the UKUSA system"230;   [54]

Because of the lack of information on ECHELON it was possible to believe almost anything about it. The system was presumed to have been created and maintained by the National Security Administration (NSA), an agency assumed to have an unlimited budget and access to emerging technologies and the best scientific minds. The NSA, moreover, has been permitted by the U.S. Congress to keep most of its operations secret, as befitting a security agency.

Concerns about ECHELON, however, tended to be more restricted than those about Carnivore, because it was presumed to be deployed abroad. Foreign nations did worry that it was used by the NSA to access proprietary commercial information that was then turned over to competing American businesses.   [55] Some American civil liberties groups were concerned that oversight over its operations, whatever they were, was inadequate.

These were then the concerns of citizens as related to the Internet and the state. Compared to the terrors of the Cold War, they were relatively minor. But from the government's point of view, there were still major areas of concern.

.22. What problems did 9-11 Introduce for the Internet?

The events of September 9, 2001, have since defined much of our daily lives and particularly our political concerns. The government, for its part, had to explain a massive intelligence failure. Foreign enemies had mounted horrifyingly successful attacks, producing more American casualties on American soil in a single day than any event since the Civil War.

The Internet was quickly identified as a key element in the ability of this hidden enemy to plan, communicate, and to execute the attacks, soon defined almost universally not as a crime, but as an act of war. The War Against Terror soon followed, a war that continually expands to include other theaters, and to involve ever more actors. Even the seemingly endless and unchanging Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now dominated by the language of the War Against Terror.

We have argued that the identification of the Internet as a key factor in understanding the events of 9-11 is absolutely correct. If anything, the changes in social, political, and economic structures resultant from the impact of the Internet relate even more directly to the events of 9-11 than is generally understood.   [56]

Given the manifold failure of the legal and intelligence structure before 9-11 to prevent its atrocities, Congress quickly began making sweeping changes, which may well directly affect the Internet.

To date the most important of these was the "USA PATRIOT Act "   [57] The Patriot Act, passed six weeks after the events, immediately superceded a legal structure that had been decades in the making. Few, if any of its elements have been utilized in a court of law, let alone tested against constitutional protections. In addition, a number of new bureaucracies were created, such as the Office of Homeland Security headed by former Governor Tom Ridge, and the White House Office of Cyberspace Security headed by Richard Clarke, "Special Advisor to the President for Cyberspace Security."

.23. What problems face the Internet now?

At this point, many issues are unknown and unknowable, because we cannot foretell how the new structure created by the Patriot Act and the proliferation of security-related agencies will affect the Internet. Nor, of course, are we ourselves sure as to how it should be affected. We do not want terrorists to be able to plan additional catastrophic attacks. Neither, however, do we want to surrender our ability to communicate electronically, nor do we want to see the emerging economic model created by the Internet stifled before it can mature in order to prevent such attacks. The question, of course, is what is an appropriate middle ground: How much are we willing to pay for security?

It is clear that concerns for civil liberties and human rights, and for the freedom of the Internet community to communicate with a minimum of interference have been swept away in a tide of fear and concerns for the most basic of human rights, the right to life itself. An indication of the changes we have undergone might be this statement on the welcome or index page of "Echelonwatch" a group supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and several other watchdog groups particularly concerned about electronic freedoms:

We at EchelonWatch are deeply saddened by the terrible events of September 11. We extend our deepest sympathies to the victims and their families.

We support vigorous and appropriate actions by intelligence and law enforcement agencies to prevent more attacks from taking place. The goal of EchelonWatch is not to disband legitimate intelligence operations but to insist that they be subject to proper oversight.   [58]

The apologetic tone of this introduction (although it goes on in stronger language discussing the importance of adequate protection against abuses of ECHELON) accurately conveys the environment in which we now live. Any questioning of the costs of security potentially exposes the author to immediate criticism.

Most Americans, conditioned by years of media-driven alarms about pornography on the Internet, child-abuse, cyber-stalking, electronic theft, and now, terrorists, would probably welcome just about any set of conditions intended to protect them against these threats. For example:

A Harris poll conducted in October of 2001 found that:

• 63% of Americans favored the monitoring of Internet discussions and chat rooms.
• 54% favored expanded monitoring of cell phones and e-mail.   [59]

The provisions of the Patriot Act are far-reaching.   [60] It is clear that whatever else the act may mean, Carnivore will be used much more often, and with far fewer safeguards than earlier. Recent informaiton suggests that hundreds of thousands of subpoenas have been issued since the passage of the Patriot Act, and the number may be doubling monthly.   [61] . The Patriot Act also deliberately reduces the line between foreign and domestic intelligence gathering, making it probable that ECHELON will be used domestically if it has not been so used earlier. To say that such groups as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are very alarmed would be a considerable understatement.   [62]

In addition, a climate has been created which greatly facilitates decisions that would have been unlikely in the earlier climate in which privacy concerns took precedence over security.   [63] A specific example of this factor is the recent enforcement of laws prohibiting the export of so-called "strong" encryption tools. Because of the outcry from industry and the fact that it was almost impossible to prevent such exports in any event, this law had not been enforced earlier. As a result, exporters had grown cavalier about the law. Recently the State Department announced a prosecution.   [64]

Although it is perhaps too early to point with alarm at the Patriot Act and accompanying changes, it is certainly appropriate to assume that the Internet and its usage will be greatly impacted.

.24. What changes to the Internet are contemplated?

While it is very difficult to foresee what the future might hold for the Internet, the creation of current security structures has been proceeding in an orderly and highly planned way and we are probably justified in speculating that the roots of the immediate future are at least dimly visible at present.   [65]

A major "National Announcement to Secure Cyberspace" reportedly is planned for the summer of 2002. The current stage of the process consists of a questionnaire "Questions to be Addressed"   [66] divided into sections aimed at stakeholders such as: the home user and small business; major enterprises; the federal government; the private sector; state and local government; and higher education. Whether public opinion is in fact currently being consulted or the ground simply being laid politically for sweeping changes is impossible to know.

EDUCAUSE, "a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology"   [67] is coordinating the response of the educational community to the questionnaire. Interestingly, the information technology industry was informed of these plans more than four months earlier, and began working up its responses immediately. Paul Kurtz, the Director of Critical Infrastructure Protection said in January "Much of the writing is under way now"230;We want a document that is largely authored by the private sector."   [68]

.25. What changes to the Internet are possible?

The "Questions to be Addressed" hints at several possible outcomes. The present Internet, of course, has largely grown rather than being planned in any substantial fashion, and it sometimes seems that chaos and anarchy are necessarily characteristic of it. It seems to be secure from certain sorts of centralization simply because of its inchoate nature. But in "Questions to be Addressed" a number of methods are suggested whereby the government might create any sort of infrastructure it might wish with a minimum of expense:

• Best practices: At several points it is asked whether or not national best practices should be adopted by particular industries. These would be defined, one assumes, by industry in consultation with national security agencies.
• Insurance best practices are referred to at several points. It would be relatively simple to encourage insurance companies to cover only customers that conform to "best practices for security."
• Government support for valuable subsidies for digital communication conditioned upon certain sorts of security arrangements: One question (Level 1-5) asks "If the federal government acts to facilitate more rapid deployment of broadband connectivity to the home user and small business, what cyberspace security requirements should be a condition of Federal support? This sort of federal carrot could be successful in inducing many possible changes, one assumes.
• Licensing and regulation: Above all the government has the vast power to regulate, to permit, and to make illegal certain sorts of practices. Question Level 4-11 simply asks: "Should software, hardware, and IT security consultants be certified, and if so, how and by whom?" Given the ability to certify and license every element of the Internet from computer software to routers and ISP personnel, any sort of security arrangement is possible.
• Another thread running through the questionnaire is the issue of a segmented Internet. Several of the questions imply that some believe that federal agencies might well withdraw to their own, more secure intranet, taking their content from the public internet. This idea has been supported in the past by Richard Clark, the new "Cyberspace Security Czar." It seems to be one highly probable outcome of the process of reconsidering the security of the Internet. There are also reasons to believe that an entire new Internet structure may well be constructed, with much more attention paid to security issues.   [69]
• Above all it should be realized that the Internet is not, in fact, an infinite network, however much it may seem like one. All of the traffic in the United States passes through fewer than one hundred nodes or choke points. Traffic entering and leaving the United States must pass through far fewer points. An effort to monitor all traffic through such nodes is well within current technological capabilities, given adquate investment and a permissive legal framework.

In addition, outside the parameters of the "National Announcement to Secure Cyberspace" there are many other responses to the security issues of 9-11 that may well affect the Internet. We will take but one example here, the issue of proof or certification of individual identities. Certification of individual identities has been a continual thread running through 9-11 and its aftermath.

Many presume that secure identity systems, perhaps one based, as Oracle chairman Larry Ellison has suggested, upon computer data-base applications, would have prevented hijackers (and all other illegal aliens) from entering the country, boarding airplanes, using computers to communicate, and other essential elements of the attacks.   [70]

Immediately following the attack, a Pew poll showed that 70% of those interviewed favored "Requiring that all citizens carry a national identity card at all times to show to a police officer on request." On the other hand, this same group opposed "Allowing the U.S. government to monitor your personal telephone calls and e-mails." by 70% to 26%.   [71]

The issue of personal identity may seem largely unrelated to questions facing the Internet; it is not. One of the problems presented by the presumed terrorist use of public Internet facilities has been the inability of security forces to track usage. The new generation of electronic ID cards as used by American military forces interacts easily with a computer to not only ensure identification of users, but also triggers a secure communication protocol for electronic traffic.   [72]

At the risk of being soon proven wrong, we think that this summer will see the unveiling of a number of measures that will markedly change the Internet. These changes will probably have widespread popular support, and as many economic sectors will benefit directly from them, they will also have support in such sectors, particularly in the Information Technology industries.   [73] How they will affect scholarly communication, however, is a different question.

.26. What Should be the Cost of Changes to the Internet ?

Given the events of 9-11, certainly some consequences for the Internet are appropriate and doubtless others, appropriate or not, are inevitable. But these should be carefully considered. Considerations should include at least the following factors.

First, whatever changes the United States makes will not be made in a vacuum. Not only does the Information Technology sector in the U.S. exert overwhelming influence abroad, but other countries will be quick to copy American practices, if only to be sure that they are not yielding some commercial advantage to American competitors.   [74]

Another important issue is that contemplated reforms should directly address the problem that they are intended to solve. A national scheme involving electronic identification cards, for example, would in no way have prevented the 9-11 incidents as the perpetrators were in the United States quite legally.

Another issue is that the advantages of such reforms should markedly outweigh their costs. Having seen electronic counterfeiting operations at work in Thailand, Vietnam, and China, as well as earlier in Taiwan, I am not confident that such identification cards would prove to be immune to falsification. It is easy to imagine a major expense in infrastructure investments and months of attendant confusion while the United States instituted such cards and installed the necessary recognition devices. During that period, criminals as well as terrorists, will have gained access to such cards and devised imaginative new schemes to take advantage of them.

.27. Global civic culture and the Internet.

Even if projected reforms seem likely to be successful, the attendant costs to the Internet must be carefully weighed. We have argued earlier that the Internet is the primary engine behind the development of an international shared culture dealing with issues such as democracy and human rights, a complex of values that fully merits the term "global civic culture." It seems probable that one victim of major changes in the Internet could well be the emerging global civic culture.

A concern for this civic culture, we believe, is more than just a human rights issue. It is also an economic one; an open system of digital communications may well be critical to the emergence of a true electronic economy. In addition, some have argued, it is vital to American power.   [75] The example of American openness and our championing of open societies will be much impacted by extreme security measures that limit the reach of the Internet, or access to it. Such changes to the Internet would reflect, in my opinion, a radical shift in the American identify, both internally and externally: from a society which has seen the issue of democratization and the opening of societies and economies in a globalizing process as the central agenda, to one where security concerns are dominant.

Not knowing what sorts of security measures might finally be implimented, it is difficult to see how scholarly electronic communication might be affected. But having lived in societies where I was aware that my communication was in fact being monitored (China and Vietnam) I can state that such monitoring does not have to be continual or invasive to have a chilling effect. And in addition to being concerned about one's own safety or convenience, one also suddenly becomes responsible for the safety and convenience of others. To permit a correspondent to discuss potentially sensitive topics suddenly becomes unwise, so that one finds oneself enlisting in the ranks of the monitors. And neither must one be concerned only for material that is at that moment sensitive. Given the endurance of digital materials, one must also worry about materials that might at any point in the future become sensitive at either end of the conversation or exchange of materials.

China is a useful example here in that at present it exhibits some of the same excitement about the Internet that we have seen in the United States, both as a tool for individual education and enlightenment, as well as one for social, economic, and political reform. But it is also a highly centralized society with a one-party government that makes stability and security its primary concern. As a result, the Internet is closely controlled.

The Chinese government has benefited greatly from the War on Terrorism in that concern for the rights of Chinese minority groups, whether political ones, religious ones, or ethnic ones, has just about dropped off the screen in Washington. Additionally, the Chinese government has acquired a whole new vocabulary with which to defend its internal practices. What earlier were to many observers violations of minority rights are now arguably campaigns against global terror.   [76]

Now it seems possible that the American Internet could well look like the Chinese one: a carefully controlled and monitored network where security takes priority over access. We believe that the paranoia and fear that will result will be at least equivalent to that of the very darkest moments of the Cold War. In my opinion, this would be too high a price to pay for security.

(Please note: ordinals below are anchors back to the appropriate point in the text.)

1. World Bank. World Bank Briefing Papers. Assessing Globalization." http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/pb/globalization/paper1.htm Accessed 02/05/02 "230;

2. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/08/1618249&mode=thread Slashdot. Jon Katz, "Defining Globalism" Accessed 02/03/02 For the insatiably curious, this location includes hundreds of messages on a BBS that were exchanged in response to Katz's writings on Globalism.

3. See, for example the analysis by one of our foreign-language editors, Marin Dacos "Un Historien au Pays du Minitel Le Web et l'Histoire en France à la Fin de l'Année 2000."

4. Castells' definition of "informationalism" is somewhat discursive. I understand it to be "a new mode of development" (p. 14) the source of productivity of which "lies in the technology of knowledge generation, information processing, and symbolic communication." P. 17.

5. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society ., pp. 31-32. Castells refers to this as "the action of knowledge upon knowledge itself: at p. 17. See also the review of a recent book by Castells in this Interface at http: //bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2002/01/bookrev2.php

6. For a response to one such argument, that of Chalmers Johnson in his work Blowback , The Costs and Consequences of American Empire , (Metropolitan Books, 2000), see the review of the work by Sherri Prasso in BusinessWeek Online , March 27, 2000. This review nicely frames the two extremes of the argument, Johnson's that Globalism is in fact an American expansionist devise, and Prasso's perspective: "the reason Americans are so evangelic about their model of capitalism is because it works"230;". http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_13/b3674091.htm Accessed February 3, 2002.

7. World Bank. World Bank Briefing Papers. " Assessing Globalization." http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/pb/globalization/paper1.htm Accessed 02/05/02; see also International Monetary Fund Staff, "Globalization: Threat or Opportunity?" Issue Briefs for 2001, Corrected January 2002. Part II,"What is Globalization?" http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/ib/2000/041200.htm Accessed 02/05/02

8. Harvey Cox, "The Market as God" The Atlantic Online , March 1999. p. 2. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm Accessed February 5, 2002

9. There is some debate over how globalization has affected specific social sectors; however the consensus, at least among those who create policies at national and international levels, is that the more engaged in international trade, the wealthier a country will be. The IMF AND World Band reports cited above both agree that the overall impact of globalization is quite positive for individual nations, but that there can be important issues of equity. Greenspan is in general much more positive: ""230;globalization has been a powerful force acting to raise standards of living. More open economies have recorded the best growth performance; in contrast countries with inward-oriented policies have done less well." Greenspan sees negative affects as largely resulting from outmoded industries having to face competition from more modern ones. Greenspan, Alan. "Globalization. Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan. October, 2001. The Federal Reserve Board http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2001/20011024/default.htm Accessed 020/05/02

10. A search in Google on Globalism turned up 47,500 references to the term. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q =Globalism&btnG=Google+Search Accessed 02/03/02

11. Barber, xv. And like Castells, Barber believes that it is in part the rise of globalism itself that has heightened fundamentalism. Barber, 155-56; Castells, I, 24; II, pp. 12-24. See a review of Jihad and MacWorld in Interface at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2001/11/bookrev1.php

12. Serge Schemann, "Annan Cautions Business as World Forum Ends." The New York Times , February 5, 2002 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/05/international/05FORU.html

13. Castells, I, p. 5.

14. One web site of the W.T.O. protest groups, "Protest Net" catalogued 36 protests around the world against the fourth ministerial meeting of the W.T.O. at Qatar in November of 2001, http://www.protest.net/qatar.html Accessed 02.05.02

15. Even as strong a supporter of globalization as Alan Greenspan sees opposition to globalism as primarily rooted in ethical values, however mistaken he believes them to be. Greenspan, Alan. "Globalization. Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan." October, 2001. The Federal Reserve Board http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2001/20011024/default.htm Accessed 020/05/02

16. See http://www.web.amnesty.org/ai.nsf/index/AMR510202000 Accessed 02/07/02

17. See Ronfeld et. Al. 50-51. The Chiapas example is seen as a milestone in the development of global civic culture by a great many authors. See Castells, II, pp 72-83; Stratton, p. 729.

18. For an example of a very sophisticated networked protest, that of the Campaign to Ban Landmines, see: http://www.banminesusa.org/

19. I imply no judgment on Abu Jamal's guilt or innocence here. I cite these events as evidence of the increasing power of the networked human rights movements.

20. See "Netwar" by the present author in The Journal of the Association for History and Computing , Vol IV, No. 3, November, 2001 at: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3310410.0004.311

21. See materials at the Center for Democracy and Technology. http://www.cdt.org/ Accessed 02/06/02.

22. For example, a friend who owns a small local used bookstore tells me that within five years there will be very few such establishments left.

23. See "Convention on Cybercrime" http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/185.htm and commentary at Center for Democracy and Technology, "Comments of the Center for Democracy and Technology on the Council of Europe Draft "Convention on Cyber-crime: (Draft No. 25) found at: http://www.cdt.org/international/cybercrime/010206cdt.shmtl

24. While it is too early to understand the impact of the Patriot Act on digital communications, it does make sweeping changes in existing laws. See "USA Patriot Act" at the Center for Democracy and Technology found at: http://www.cdt.org/security/010911response.shtml

25. "People are better able to question decisions, challenge expert opinion, and to form lobby groups quickly, the promise of increased democracy through information society." Fred Gault and Susan A. McDaniel. "Continuities and Transformations: Challenges to Capturing Information about the "216;Information Society" First Monday http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_2/gault/index.html p. 5. Accessed 02/05/02. For a Serbian view on the importance of the Internet to Serbian democracy, see "Freedom in Serbia and the Internet" http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/serbia/serbia.html Accessed 02/06/02.

26. See "Netwar" http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3310410.0004.311

27. Nye, Joseph S, Jr. The Paradox of American Power , New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

28. For Nye's home page at Harvard see: http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/degreeprog/courses.nsf/wzByDirectoryName/JosephNye Accessed March 4, 2002.

29. Nye, 8.

30. Nye, 9.

31. Nye 13.

32. Nye, 107.

33. Nye 94.

34. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society . Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd. Second Edition, 2000. Vol. I of The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture and The Power of Identity . Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd. 1997. Vol. II of T he Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture .

35. Alaine Tourane, "Letttre à Lionel", quoted in Castells, The Power of Identify , p. 359.

36. Castells, 265.

37. Gordon, Michael R. "U.S. Nuclear Plan Sees New Weapons and New Targets." The New York Times , March 10, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/10/international/10NUKE.html , Accessed 03.11.02

38. Castells, 264.

39. Nye, 40.

40. Schmitt, Eric. "U.S. Tries to Dampen Fear Abroad on Policy." The New York Times , March 11, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/11/international/11REAC.html Accessed March 12, 2002.

41. Krugman, Paul. "Where's the Boom?" The New York Times, May 28, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/28/opinion/28KRUG.html Accessed May 29, 2002.

42. Interestingly, Bin Laden's own bill of indictment of the Saudi Arabian state serves as a sort of catalogue of the consequences of the Internet, including as it does references to human rights violations, the mis-use of state-owned media, the failure to provide human services, and a failure to control economic problems. See Deborah Wheeler, "Islam, Community, and the Internet." The Journal of Education, Community, and Values: Interface on the Internet , March 2002. http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2002/03/islam.php

43. Castells, 310.

44. It seems to me that the ultimate weakness of this strategy is that it requires attacks not against decentralized networks, but against states. The link between Al Quaeda and Afghanistan, as one example, may seem sufficiently direct to most individuals and most states to compel support. But the less direct the apparent tie, the less compelling the case. An attack against Iraq may even be satisfactory, to many Americans at least, in that Iraq is, in some sense, a historic enemy. But the more distant the tie between other states and terrorists, the less compelling the cause. Ultimately this strategy risks being judged as motivated by factors other than reducing the threat of terrorism. Domestically it may be seen as linked to domestic political goals; internationally it may be seen as linked to American attempts to achieve economic and political advantages.

45. Gates, Bill jr. "Shaping the Internet Age", Internet Policy Institute , http://www.internetpolicy.org/briefing/current.html

46. Freeh, Louis J. Statement for the Record, "Threats to U.S. National Security". http://www.infowar.com/civil_de/civil_022798B.html-ssi Accessed April 13, 2002.

47. Mitchell, Russ. "The Ghosts in the Machine. Can Technology Find Terrorists?" www.gilder.com . accessed May 28, 2002),

48. "Carnivore FAQ" http://www.robertgraham.com/pubs/carnivore-faq.html Accessed April 13, 2002.

49. The relevant laws were Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (as amended) (known familiarly as Title III and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (as amended), known familiarly as the ECPA. See "Statement for the Record of Donald M. Kerr, Assistant Director, Laboratory Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation on "Internet and Data Interception Capabilities Developed by FBI" before the U.S. House of representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution. < http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress00/kerr072400.htm > Accessed April 13, 2002.

50. Available on line at < http://www.epic.org/privacy/carnivore/#documents > Accessed April 13, 2002

51. A highly restricted Google search done on April 13, 2002, "Carnivore and FBI" turned up 35,200 sites.

52. The most authoritative recent report on ECHELON would seem to be that of the European Parliament's Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System, approved September 5, 2001. PDF available at http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/rapport_echelon_en.pdf Accessed April 13, 2002.

53. http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/echelon.htm Accessed April 13, 2002

54. See: Caizares, Alex. "Europeans Irked Over Orbital Snooping." < http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2000/02/000228-echelon2.htm > Accessed April 13, 2002

55. Kolata, Gina. "Veiled Messages of Terrorists May Lurk in Cyberspace." The New York Times , October 30, 2001. < http://www.nytimes.com/2001/20/30/physical/30steg.html > Accessed October 31, 2001.

56. See. Barlow, Jeffrey G "Netwar" at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2001/10/editorial10.php ; "Netwar and Cyberwar" http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2001/11/editorial11.php ; "Netwar, Bin Laden, and Al Quaeda" December 2001. http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2001/12/edit1201.php Accessed April 13, 2002

57. "USA PATRIOT Act Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (Oct. 25, 2001)" Available at the Electronic Frontier Foundation < http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/Terrorism_militias/20011025_hr3162_usa_patriot_bill.html > Accessed April 13, 2002.

58. Echelonwatch, Administered by the ACLU in conjunction with Cyber-Rights and Cyber-Liberties (UK) and the Omega Foundation. < http://www.echelonwatch.org/ > Accessed April 13, 2002.

59. Schwartz, John. "Seeking Privacy Online, Even as Security Tightens." The New York Times , November 11,2001. < http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/11/technology/11soft.html > Accessed November 11, 2001.

60. Benson, Miles. "Police Demand Telecoms' help" The Oregonian , May 28, 2002. F 1.

61. Under Title I of the Act, of the six sections, two deal directly with electronic issues (Sec. 103; Sec. 105.) Title II is "Enhanced Surveillance Procedures: and any one of its 25 sections could directly impact the Internet as we currently know it. Available at: http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html Accessed April 13, 2002.

62. See their analysis at "EEF Analysis of the Provision of the USA Patriot Act" at http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/Terrorism_militias/20011031_eff_usa_patriot_analysis.html Accessed April 14, 2002.

63. See for example: Federal Communications Commission, Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, CC Docket No. 97-213, April 11, 2002 available at http://cryptome.org/ Accessed April 14, 2002.

64. U.S. Department of State, International Information Programs, 21 February 2002 "Commerce Dept. Fines Firm for Illegal Export of Encryption Software" http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/02022503.htm Accessed April 14, 2002.

65. See for example "The Race to Secure Cyberspace Richard Clarke, Bush's new Net security chief, discusses efforts (not easy or cheap) to protect America from digital destroyers" Business Week Online , December 6, 2001. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2001/tc2001126_9530.htm Accessed April 13, 2002

66. See "A National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace" Questions to Be Addressed, PDF available at: http://www.gcn.com/cybersecurity/breakout3pgs.pdf Accessed April 14, 2002.

67. "About Educause". http://www.educause.edu/defined.html Accessed April 13, 2002. The current membership comprises more than 1,800 colleges, universities, and education organizations, including over 180 corporations. It is arguably the largest and most well organized of such groups in education. Accessed April 14, 2002.

68. See Jackson, William. "White House seeks industry's "216;good ideas'" Government Computer News , 01/28/02 http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/17839-1.html Accessed April 13, 2002.

69. Yourdon, Edward. Byte Wars . The Impact of September 11 on Information Technology. Prentice-Hall PTR, 2002. pp. 58-9.

70. See Scheeres, Julia. "ID Cards are de Rigueur Worldwide" WiredNews September 25, 2001. http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,47073,00.html See: Ellison, Larry. "Digital IDs Can Help Prevent Terrorism" " The Wall Street Journal ", October 8, 2001 http://www.oracle.com/corporate/ Accessed April 14, 2002.

71. See http://people-press.org/reports/print.php3?PageID=32 accessed April 13, 2002

72. See O'Harrow, Robert Jr., and Jonathan Krim "A Changed America: Privacy National ID Card Gaining Support" The Washington Post , December 17, 2001 Page A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52300-2001Dec16.html l Accessed April 14, 2002.

73. See, for example, TRW chairman Philip A Odeen's remarks in February to Chicago area business leaders at CNNMONEY, "Technology the Key to Homeland Defense, TRW Chairman Odeen Tells Chicago Executives' Club" Feb.21, 2002, at: http://money.cnn.com/services/tickerheadlines/prn/enclth015.P1.02212002123230.14817.htm Accessed April 14, 2002.

74. See for example the council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/WhatYouWant.asp?NT=185 See also the Center for Democracy and Technology "International Issues: Cybercrime" at http://www.cdt.org/international/cybercrime/

75. See Barlow, Jeffrey G. "American Power, Globalism, and the Internet" The Journal of Education, Community, and Values: Interface on the Internet , March 2002. http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2002/03/editorial.php Accessed April 14, 2002.

76. See for example, "'East Turkistan' An Integral part of Bin Laden's Terrorist Forces," Beijing Review , Vol. 45, no. 5, January 31, 2002. pp. 14-23. This article places Chinese security measures against minority ethnic groups in Muslim areas of China into the context of a world campaign against terrorism

.29. Bibliography:

Please note: After a given period of time, The New York Times , frequentlly cited here, moves its articles into archives requiring paid access. As an historian, I regret the need to cite sources the value of which is time bound, but see no alternatives. At worst, however, these articles are available in the collections of large libraries, as they have always been.

Barber, Benjamin R. Jihad vs. McWorld . Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy. New York: Ballentine Books, 1995. Introduction, 2001.

Barlow, Jeffrey G. "Globalism and the Internet" see The Journal of Education, Community, and Values: Interface on the Internet , February 2002. http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2002/01/editorial01.php

Benson, Miles. "Police Demand Telecoms' help" The Oregonian , May 28,2002. F 1.

Bumiller, Elisabeth. "Bush Expands Commitment of U.S. to Global War on Terror" The New York Times , March 11, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/11/politics/11CND-PREX.html Accessed 03/11/02.

Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society . Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd. Second Edition, 2000. Vol. I of The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture .

Castells, Manuel. The Power of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd. 1997. Vol. II of The Information Age: Economy, Socety, and Culture .

Castells, Manuel. End of Millennium . Volume III of The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture , . Second Edition, Blackwell, 2000

Cox, Harvey. "The Market as God." The Atlantic Online , March 1999. p. 2. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm Accessed February 5, 2002

Gordon, Michael R. "U.S. Nuclear Plan Sees New Weapons and New Targets." The New York Times , March 10, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/10/international/10NUKE.html , Accessed 03.11.02

Greenspan, Alan. "Globalization. Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan. October, 2001. The Federal Reserve Board http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2001/20011024/default.htm Accessed 020/05/02

Heskett, Ben. "FBI wants Carnivore powers for phone taps" , May 29, 2002 News.com http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-1033-870179.html

Imanen, Pekka. The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age . New York: Random House, 2001.

International Monetary Fund Staff, "Globalization: Threat or Opportunity?" Issue Briefs for 2001, Corrected January 2002. http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/ib/2000/041200.htm Accessed 02/05/02

Katz, Jon. "Defining Globalism" Slashdot http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/08/1618249&mode=thread Accessed 02/03/02

Kozak, Jan T. Institute of Rock Mechanics, Czech Academy of Science and Charles D. James, National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering "Historical Depiction of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake" National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering, University of California, Berkeley. http://nisee.berkeley.edu/lisbon/ Accessed 03/11/02.

Krugman, Paul. "Where's the Boom?" The New York Times, May 28, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/28/opinion/28KRUG.html Accessed May 29, 2002

Levine, Rick et al. The Cluetrain Manifesto . Cambridge Mass.: Perseus Books, 1999

McChesney, Robert W. et al. Capitalism and the Information Age . New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998.

McChesney, Robert W. "The Titanic Sails On." Why the Internet Won't Sink the Media Giants. http://www.fair.org/extra/0003/aol-mcchesney.html Accessed 02/05/02

Merrill Lynch Forum. "Economic Globalization and Culture, A Discussion with Dr. Francis Fukuyama." http://www.ml.com/woml/forum/global.htm Accessed 02/05/02

Nye, Gerald. Nye's home page at Harvard: http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/degreeprog/courses.nsf/wzByDirectoryName/JosephNye

Nye, Joseph S, Jr. The Paradox of American Power , New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Ronfeldt, John, et al. The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico . Arroyo: Rand, 1998.

Schemann, Serge. "Annan Cautions Business as World Forum Ends." The New York Times Online , Feb 5, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/05/international/05FORU.html Accessed 02/05/02

Schmitt, Eric. "U.S. Tries to Dampen Fear Abroad on Policy." The New York Times , March 11, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/11/international/11REAC.html Accessed March 12, 2002

Stratton, Jon. "Cyberspace and the Globalization of Culture" in David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, eds., The Cybercultures Reader, London: Routledge, 2000

Schwartz, John. "Bin Laden Inquiry Was Hindered by F.B.I. E-Mail Tapping" The New York Times , May 29, 2002 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/29/national/29EMAI.html Accessed May 29, 2002.

Sunstein, Cass. Republic.com Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Wheeler, Deborah. "Islam, Community, and the Internet." The Journal of Education, Community, and Values: Interface on the Internet , March 2002. http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2002/03/islam.php

World Bank. World Bank Briefing Papers. "Assessing Globalization". http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/pb/globalization/paper1.htm Accessed 02/05/02

Yourdon, Edward. Byte Wars . The Impact of September 11 on Information Technology. Prentice-Hall PTR, 2002.

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Globalization

Covering a wide range of distinct political, economic, and cultural trends, the term “globalization” remains crucial to contemporary political and academic debate. In contemporary popular discourse, globalization often functions as little more than a synonym for one or more of the following phenomena: the pursuit of classical liberal (or “free market”) policies in the world economy (“economic liberalization”), the growing dominance of western (or even American) forms of political, economic, and cultural life (“westernization” or “Americanization”), a global political order built on liberal notions of international law (the “global liberal order”), an ominous network of top-down rule by global elites (“globalism” or “global technocracy”), the proliferation of new information technologies (the “Internet Revolution”), as well as the notion that humanity stands at the threshold of realizing one single unified community in which major sources of social conflict have vanished (“global integration”). Globalization is a politically-contested phenomenon about which there are significant disagreements and struggles, with many nationalist and populist movements and leaders worldwide (including Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and former US President Donald Trump) pushing back against what they view as its unappealing features.

Fortunately, recent social theory has formulated a more precise concept of globalization than those typically offered by politicians and pundits. Although sharp differences continue to separate participants in the ongoing debate about the term, most contemporary social theorists endorse the view that globalization refers to fundamental changes in the spatial and temporal contours of social existence, according to which the significance of space or territory undergoes shifts in the face of a no less dramatic acceleration in the temporal structure of crucial forms of human activity. Geographical distance is typically measured in time. As the time necessary to connect distinct geographical locations is reduced, distance or space undergoes compression or “annihilation.” The human experience of space is intimately connected to the temporal structure of those activities by means of which we experience space. Changes in the temporality of human activity inevitably generate altered experiences of space or territory. Theorists of globalization disagree about the precise sources of recent shifts in the spatial and temporal contours of human life. Nonetheless, they generally agree that alterations in humanity’s experiences of space and time are working to undermine the importance of local and even national boundaries in many arenas of human endeavor. Since globalization contains far-reaching implications for virtually every facet of human life, it necessarily suggests the need to rethink key questions of normative political theory.

1. Globalization in the History of Ideas

2. globalization in contemporary social theory, 3. the normative challenges of globalization, other internet resources, related entries.

The term globalization has only become commonplace in the last three decades, and academic commentators who employed the term as late as the 1970s accurately recognized the novelty of doing so (Modelski 1972). At least since the advent of industrial capitalism, however, intellectual discourse has been replete with allusions to phenomena strikingly akin to those that have garnered the attention of recent theorists of globalization. Nineteenth and twentieth-century philosophy, literature, and social commentary include numerous references to an inchoate yet widely shared awareness that experiences of distance and space are inevitably transformed by the emergence of high-speed forms of transportation (for example, rail and air travel) and communication (the telegraph or telephone) that dramatically heighten possibilities for human interaction across existing geographical and political divides (Harvey 1989; Kern 1983). Long before the introduction of the term globalization into recent popular and scholarly debate, the appearance of novel high-speed forms of social activity generated extensive commentary about the compression of space.

Writing in 1839, an English journalist commented on the implications of rail travel by anxiously postulating that as distance was “annihilated, the surface of our country would, as it were, shrivel in size until it became not much bigger than one immense city” (Harvey 1996, 242). A few years later, Heinrich Heine, the émigré German-Jewish poet, captured this same experience when he noted: “space is killed by the railways. I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden trees; the North Sea’s breakers are rolling against my door” (Schivelbusch 1978, 34). Another young German émigré, the socialist theorist Karl Marx, in 1848 formulated the first theoretical explanation of the sense of territorial compression that so fascinated his contemporaries. In Marx’s account, the imperatives of capitalist production inevitably drove the bourgeoisie to “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, and establish connections everywhere.” The juggernaut of industrial capitalism constituted the most basic source of technologies resulting in the annihilation of space, helping to pave the way for “intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations,” in contrast to a narrow-minded provincialism that had plagued humanity for untold eons (Marx 1848, 476). Despite their ills as instruments of capitalist exploitation, Marx argued, new technologies that increased possibilities for human interaction across borders ultimately represented a progressive force in history. They provided the necessary infrastructure for a cosmopolitan future socialist civilization, while simultaneously functioning in the present as indispensable organizational tools for a working class destined to undertake a revolution no less oblivious to traditional territorial divisions than the system of capitalist exploitation it hoped to dismantle.

European intellectuals have hardly been alone in their fascination with the experience of territorial compression, as evinced by the key role played by the same theme in early twentieth-century American thought. In 1904, the literary figure Henry Adams diagnosed the existence of a “law of acceleration,” fundamental to the workings of social development, in order to make sense of the rapidly changing spatial and temporal contours of human activity. Modern society could only be properly understood if the seemingly irrepressible acceleration of basic technological and social processes was given a central place in social and historical analysis (Adams 1931 [1904]). John Dewey argued in 1927 that recent economic and technological trends implied the emergence of a “new world” no less noteworthy than the opening up of America to European exploration and conquest in 1492. For Dewey, the invention of steam, electricity, and the telephone offered formidable challenges to relatively static and homogeneous forms of local community life that had long represented the main theatre for most human activity. Economic activity increasingly exploded the confines of local communities to a degree that would have stunned our historical predecessors, for example, while the steamship, railroad, automobile, and air travel considerably intensified rates of geographical mobility. Dewey went beyond previous discussions of the changing temporal and spatial contours of human activity, however, by suggesting that the compression of space posed fundamental questions for democracy. Dewey observed that small-scale political communities (for example, the New England township), a crucial site for the exercise of effective democratic participation, seemed ever more peripheral to the great issues of an interconnected world. Increasingly dense networks of social ties across borders rendered local forms of self-government ineffective. Dewey wondered, “How can a public be organized, we may ask, when literally it does not stay in place?” (Dewey 1927, 140). To the extent that democratic citizenship minimally presupposes the possibility of action in concert with others, how might citizenship be sustained in a social world subject to ever more astonishing possibilities for movement and mobility? New high-speed technologies attributed a shifting and unstable character to social life, as demonstrated by increased rates of change and turnover in many arenas of activity (most important perhaps, the economy) directly affected by them, and the relative fluidity and inconstancy of social relations there. If citizenship requires some modicum of constancy and stability in social life, however, did not recent changes in the temporal and spatial conditions of human activity bode poorly for political participation? How might citizens come together and act in concert when contemporary society’s “mania for motion and speed” made it difficult for them even to get acquainted with one another, let alone identify objects of common concern? (Dewey 1927, 140).

The unabated proliferation of high-speed technologies is probably the main source of the numerous references in intellectual life since 1950 to the annihilation of distance. The Canadian cultural critic Marshall McLuhan made the theme of a technologically based “global village,” generated by social “acceleration at all levels of human organization,” the centerpiece of an anxiety-ridden analysis of new media technologies in the 1960s (McLuhan 1964, 103). Arguing in the 1970s and 1980s that recent shifts in the spatial and temporal contours of social life exacerbated authoritarian political trends, the French social critic Paul Virilio seemed to confirm many of Dewey’s darkest worries about the decay of democracy. According to his analysis, the high-speed imperatives of modern warfare and weapons systems strengthened the executive and debilitated representative legislatures. The compression of territory thereby paved the way for executive-centered emergency government (Virilio 1977). But it was probably the German philosopher Martin Heidegger who most clearly anticipated contemporary debates about globalization. Heidegger not only described the “abolition of distance” as a constitutive feature of our contemporary condition, but he linked recent shifts in spatial experience to no less fundamental alterations in the temporality of human activity: “All distances in time and space are shrinking. Man now reaches overnight, by places, places which formerly took weeks and months of travel” (Heidegger 1950, 165). Heidegger also accurately prophesied that new communication and information technologies would soon spawn novel possibilities for dramatically extending the scope of virtual reality : “Distant sites of the most ancient cultures are shown on film as if they stood this very moment amidst today’s street traffic…The peak of this abolition of every possibility of remoteness is reached by television, which will soon pervade and dominate the whole machinery of communication” (Heidegger 1950, 165). Heidegger’s description of growing possibilities for simultaneity and instantaneousness in human experience ultimately proved no less apprehensive than the views of many of his predecessors. In his analysis, the compression of space increasingly meant that from the perspective of human experience “everything is equally far and equally near.” Instead of opening up new possibilities for rich and multi-faceted interaction with events once distant from the purview of most individuals, the abolition of distance tended to generate a “uniform distanceless” in which fundamentally distinct objects became part of a bland homogeneous experiential mass (Heidegger 1950, 166). The loss of any meaningful distinction between “nearness” and “distance” contributed to a leveling down of human experience, which in turn spawned an indifference that rendered human experience monotonous and one-dimensional.

Since the mid-1980s, social theorists have moved beyond the relatively underdeveloped character of previous reflections on the compression or annihilation of space to offer a rigorous conception of globalization. To be sure, major disagreements remain about the precise nature of the causal forces behind globalization, with David Harvey (1989 1996) building directly on Marx’s pioneering explanation of globalization, while others (Giddens 19990; Held, McGrew, Goldblatt & Perraton 1999) question the exclusive focus on economic factors characteristic of the Marxist approach. Nonetheless, a consensus about the basic rudiments of the concept of globalization appears to be emerging.

First, recent analysts associate globalization with deterritorialization , according to which a growing variety of social activities takes place irrespective of the geographical location of participants. As Jan Aart Scholte observes, “global events can – via telecommunication, digital computers, audiovisual media, rocketry and the like – occur almost simultaneously anywhere and everywhere in the world” (Scholte 1996, 45). Globalization refers to increased possibilities for action between and among people in situations where latitudinal and longitudinal location seems immaterial to the social activity at hand. Even though geographical location remains crucial for many undertakings (for example, farming to satisfy the needs of a local market), deterritorialization manifests itself in many social spheres. Business people on different continents now engage in electronic commerce; academics make use of the latest Internet conferencing equipment to organize seminars in which participants are located at disparate geographical locations; the Internet allows people to communicate instantaneously with each other notwithstanding vast geographical distances separating them. Territory in the sense of a traditional sense of a geographically identifiable location no longer constitutes the whole of “social space” in which human activity takes places. In this initial sense of the term, globalization refers to the spread of new forms of non-territorial social activity (Ruggie 1993; Scholte 2000).

Second, theorists conceive of globalization as linked to the growth of social interconnectedness across existing geographical and political boundaries. In this view, deterritorialization is a crucial facet of globalization. Yet an exclusive focus on it would be misleading. Since the vast majority of human activities is still tied to a concrete geographical location, the more decisive facet of globalization concerns the manner in which distant events and forces impact on local and regional endeavors (Tomlinson 1999, 9). For example, this encyclopedia might be seen as an example of a deterritorialized social space since it allows for the exchange of ideas in cyberspace. The only prerequisite for its use is access to the Internet. Although substantial inequalities in Internet access still exist, use of the encyclopedia is in principle unrelated to any specific geographical location. However, the reader may very well be making use of the encyclopedia as a supplement to course work undertaken at a school or university. That institution is not only located at a specific geographical juncture, but its location is probably essential for understanding many of its key attributes: the level of funding may vary according to the state or region where the university is located, or the same academic major might require different courses and readings at a university in China, for example, than in Argentina or Norway. Globalization refers to those processes whereby geographically distant events and decisions impact to a growing degree on “local” university life. For example, the insistence by powerful political leaders in wealthy countries that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank recommend to Latin and South American countries that they commit themselves to a particular set of economic policies might result in poorly paid teachers and researchers as well as large, understaffed lecture classes in São Paolo or Lima; the latest innovations in information technology from a computer research laboratory in India could quickly change the classroom experience of students in British Columbia or Tokyo. Globalization refers “to processes of change which underpin a transformation in the organization of human affairs by linking together and expanding human activity across regions and continents” (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt & Perraton 1999, 15). Globalization in this sense is a matter of degree since any given social activity might influence events more or less faraway: even though a growing number of activities seems intermeshed with events in distant continents, certain human activities remain primarily local or regional in scope. Also, the magnitude and impact of the activity might vary: geographically removed events could have a relatively minimal or a far more extensive influence on events at a particular locality. Finally, we might consider the degree to which interconnectedness across frontiers is no longer merely haphazard but instead predictable and regularized (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt & Perraton 1999).

Third, globalization must also include reference to the speed or velocity of social activity. Deterritorialization and interconnectedness initially seem chiefly spatial in nature. Yet it is easy to see how these spatial shifts are directly tied to the acceleration of crucial forms of social activity. As we observed above in our discussion of the conceptual forerunners to the present-day debate on globalization, the proliferation of high-speed transportation, communication, and information technologies constitutes the most immediate source for the blurring of geographical and territorial boundaries that prescient observers have diagnosed at least since the mid-nineteenth century. The compression of space presupposes rapid-fire forms of technology; shifts in our experiences of territory depend on concomitant changes in the temporality of human action. High-speed technology only represents the tip of the iceberg, however. The linking together and expanding of social activities across borders is predicated on the possibility of relatively fast flows and movements of people, information, capital, and goods. Without these fast flows, it is difficult to see how distant events could possibly posses the influence they now enjoy. High-speed technology plays a pivotal role in the velocity of human affairs. But many other factors contribute to the overall pace and speed of social activity. The organizational structure of the modern capitalist factory offers one example; certain contemporary habits and inclinations, including the “mania for motion and speed” described by Dewey, represent another. Deterritorialization and the expansion of interconnectedness are intimately tied to the acceleration of social life, while social acceleration itself takes many different forms (Eriksen 2001; Rosa 2013). Here as well, we can easily see why globalization is always a matter of degree. The velocity or speed of flows, movements, and interchanges across borders can vary no less than their magnitude, impact, or regularity.

Fourth, even though analysts disagree about the causal forces that generate globalization, most agree that globalization should be conceived as a relatively long-term process . The triad of deterritorialization, interconnectedness, and social acceleration hardly represents a sudden or recent event in contemporary social life. Globalization is a constitutive feature of the modern world, and modern history includes many examples of globalization (Giddens 1990). As we saw above, nineteenth-century thinkers captured at least some of its core features; the compression of territoriality composed an important element of their lived experience. Nonetheless, some contemporary theorists believe that globalization has taken a particularly intense form in recent decades, as innovations in communication, transportation, and information technologies (for example, computerization) have generated stunning new possibilities for simultaneity and instantaneousness (Harvey 1989). In this view, present-day intellectual interest in the problem of globalization can be linked directly to the emergence of new high-speed technologies that tend to minimize the significance of distance and heighten possibilities for deterritorialization and social interconnectedness. Although the intense sense of territorial compression experienced by so many of our contemporaries is surely reminiscent of the experiences of earlier generations, some contemporary writers nonetheless argue that it would be mistaken to obscure the countless ways in which ongoing transformations of the spatial and temporal contours of human experience are especially far-reaching. While our nineteenth-century predecessors understandably marveled at the railroad or the telegraph, a comparatively vast array of social activities is now being transformed by innovations that accelerate social activity and considerably deepen longstanding trends towards deterritorialization and social interconnectedness. To be sure, the impact of deterritorialization, social interconnectedness, and social acceleration are by no means universal or uniform: migrant workers engaging in traditional forms of low-wage agricultural labor in the fields of southern California, for example, probably operate in a different spatial and temporal context than the Internet entrepreneurs of San Francisco or Seattle. Distinct assumptions about space and time often coexist uneasily during a specific historical juncture (Gurvitch 1964). Nonetheless, the impact of recent technological innovations is profound, and even those who do not have a job directly affected by the new technology are shaped by it in innumerable ways as citizens and consumers (Eriksen 2001, 16).

Fifth, globalization should be understood as a multi-pronged process, since deterritorialization, social interconnectedness, and acceleration manifest themselves in many different (economic, political, and cultural) arenas of social activity. Although each facet of globalization is linked to the core components of globalization described above, each consists of a complex and relatively autonomous series of empirical developments, requiring careful examination in order to disclose the causal mechanisms specific to it (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt & Perraton 1999). Each manifestation of globalization also generates distinct conflicts and dislocations. For example, there is substantial empirical evidence that cross-border flows and exchanges (of goods, people, information, etc.), as well as the emergence of directly transnational forms of production by means of which a single commodity is manufactured simultaneously in distant corners of the globe, are gaining in prominence (Castells 1996). High-speed technologies and organizational approaches are employed by transnationally operating firms, the so-called “global players,” with great effectiveness. The emergence of “around-the-world, around-the-clock” financial markets, where major cross-border financial transactions are made in cyberspace at the blink of an eye, represents a familiar example of the economic face of globalization. Global financial markets also challenge traditional attempts by liberal democratic nation-states to rein in the activities of bankers, spawning understandable anxieties about the growing power and influence of financial markets over democratically elected representative institutions. In political life, globalization takes a distinct form, though the general trends towards deterritorialization, interconnectedness across borders, and the acceleration of social activity are fundamental here as well. Transnational movements, in which activists employ rapid-fire communication technologies to join forces across borders in combating ills that seem correspondingly transnational in scope (for example, the depletion of the ozone layer), offer an example of political globalization (Tarrow 2005). Another would be the tendency towards ambitious supranational forms of social and economic lawmaking and regulation, where individual nation-states cooperate to pursue regulation whose jurisdiction transcends national borders no less than the cross-border economic processes that undermine traditional modes of nation state-based regulation. Political scientists typically describe such supranational organizations (the European Union, for example, or United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA) as important manifestations of political and legal globalization. The proliferation of supranational organizations has been no less conflict-laden than economic globalization, however. Critics insist that local, regional, and national forms of self-government are being supplanted by insufficiently democratic forms of global governance remote from the needs of ordinary citizens (Maus 2006; Streeck 2016). In contrast, defenders describe new forms of supranational legal and political decision as indispensable forerunners to more inclusive and advanced forms of self-government, even as they worry about existing democratic deficits and technocratic traits (Habermas 2015).

The wide-ranging impact of globalization on human existence means that it necessarily touches on many basic philosophical and political-theoretical questions. At a minimum, globalization suggests that academic philosophers in the rich countries of the West should pay closer attention to the neglected voices and intellectual traditions of peoples with whom our fate is intertwined in ever more intimate ways (Dallmayr 1998). In this section, however, we focus exclusively on the immediate challenges posed by globalization to normative political theory.

Western political theory has traditionally presupposed the existence of territorially bound communities, whose borders can be more or less neatly delineated from those of other communities. In this vein, the influential liberal political philosopher John Rawls described bounded communities whose fundamental structure consisted of “self-sufficient schemes of cooperation for all the essential purposes of human life” (Rawls 1993, 301). Although political and legal thinkers historically have exerted substantial energy in formulating defensible normative models of relations between states (Nardin and Mapel 1992), like Rawls they typically have relied on a clear delineation of “domestic” from “foreign” affairs. In addition, they have often argued that the domestic arena represents a normatively privileged site, since fundamental normative ideals and principles (for example, liberty or justice) are more likely to be successfully realized in the domestic arena than in relations among states. According to one influential strand within international relations theory, relations between states are more-or-less lawless. Since the achievement of justice or democracy, for example, presupposes an effective political sovereign, the lacuna of sovereignty at the global level means that justice and democracy are necessarily incomplete and probably unattainable there. In this conventional realist view of international politics, core features of the modern system of sovereign states relegate the pursuit of western political thought’s most noble normative goals primarily to the domestic arena (Mearsheimer 2003.) Significantly, some prominent mid-century proponents of international realism rejected this position’s deep hostility to international law and supranational political organization, in part because they presciently confronted challenges that we now typically associate with intensified globalization (Scheuerman 2011).

Globalization poses a fundamental challenge to each of these traditional assumptions. It is no longer self-evident that nation-states can be described as “self-sufficient schemes of cooperation for all the essential purposes of human life” in the context of intense deterritorialization and the spread and intensification of social relations across borders. The idea of a bounded community seems suspect given recent shifts in the spatio-temporal contours of human life. Even the most powerful and privileged political units are now subject to increasingly deterritorialized activities (for example, global financial markets or digitalized mass communication) over which they have limited control, and they find themselves nested in webs of social relations whose scope explodes the confines of national borders. Of course, in much of human history social relations have transcended existing political divides. However, globalization implies a profound quantitative increase in and intensification of social relations of this type. While attempts to offer a clear delineation of the “domestic” from the “foreign” probably made sense at an earlier juncture in history, this distinction no longer accords with core developmental trends in many arenas of social activity. As the possibility of a clear division between domestic and foreign affairs dissipates, the traditional tendency to picture the domestic arena as a privileged site for the realization of normative ideals and principles becomes problematic as well. As an empirical matter, the decay of the domestic-foreign frontier seems highly ambivalent, since it might easily pave the way for the decay of the more attractive attributes of domestic political life: as “foreign” affairs collapse inward onto “domestic” political life, the insufficiently lawful contours of the former make disturbing inroads onto the latter (Scheuerman 2004). As a normative matter, however, the disintegration of the domestic-foreign divide probably calls for us to consider, to a greater extent than ever before, how our fundamental normative commitments about political life can be effectively achieved on a global scale. If we take the principles of justice or democracy seriously, for example, it is no longer self-evident that the domestic arena is the exclusive or perhaps even main site for their pursuit, since domestic and foreign affairs are now deeply and irrevocably intermeshed. In a globalizing world, the lack of democracy or justice in the global setting necessarily impacts deeply on the pursuit of justice or democracy at home. Indeed, it may no longer be possible to achieve our normative ideals at home without undertaking to do so transnationally as well.

To claim, for example, that questions of distributive justice have no standing in the making of foreign affairs represents at best empirical naivete about economic globalization. At worst, it constitutes a disingenuous refusal to grapple with the fact that the material existence of those fortunate enough to live in the rich countries is inextricably tied to the material status of the vast majority of humanity residing in poor and underdeveloped regions. Growing material inequality spawned by economic globalization is linked to growing domestic material inequality in the rich democracies (Falk 1999; Pogge 2002). Similarly, in the context of global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer, a dogmatic insistence on the sanctity of national sovereignty risks constituting a cynical fig leaf for irresponsible activities whose impact extends well beyond the borders of those countries most directly responsible. Global warming and ozone-depletion cry out for ambitious forms of transnational cooperation and regulation, and the refusal by the rich democracies to accept this necessity implies a failure to take the process of globalization seriously when doing so conflicts with their immediate material interests. Although it might initially seem to be illustrative of clever Realpolitik on the part of the culpable nations to ward off strict cross-border environmental regulation, their stubbornness is probably short-sighted: global warming and ozone depletion will affect the children of Americans who drive gas-guzzling SUVs or use environmentally unsound air-conditioning as well as the future generations of South Africa or Afghanistan (Cerutti 2007). If we keep in mind that environmental degradation probably impacts negatively on democratic politics (for example, by undermining its legitimacy and stability), the failure to pursue effective transnational environmental regulation potentially undermines democracy at home as well as abroad.

Philosophers and political theorists have eagerly addressed the normative and political implications of our globalizing world. A lively debate about the possibility of achieving justice at the global level pits representatives of cosmopolitanism against myriad communitarians, nationalists, realists, and others who privilege the nation-state and moral, political, and social ties resting on it (Lieven 2020; Tamir 2019). In contrast, cosmopolitans tend to underscore our universal obligations to those who reside faraway and with whom we may share little in the way of language, custom, or culture, oftentimes arguing that claims to “justice at home” can and should be applied elsewhere as well (Beardsworth 2011; Beitz 1999; Caney 2006; Wallace-Brown & Held 2010). In this way, cosmopolitanism builds directly on the universalistic impulses of modern moral and political thought. Cosmopolitanism’s critics dispute the view that our obligations to foreigners possess the same status as those to members of particular local and national communities of which we remain very much a part. They by no means deny the need to redress global inequality, for example, but they often express skepticism in the face of cosmopolitanism’s tendency to defend significant legal and political reforms as necessary to address the inequities of a planet where millions of people a year die of starvation or curable diseases (Miller 2007; 2013; Nagel 2005). Nor do cosmopolitanism’s critics necessarily deny that the process of globalization is real, though some of them suggest that its impact has been grossly exaggerated (Kymlicka 1999; Nussbaum et al . 1996; Streeck 2016). Nonetheless, they doubt that humanity has achieved a rich or sufficiently articulated sense of a common fate such that far-reaching attempts to achieve greater global justice (for example, substantial redistribution from the rich to poor) could prove successful. Cosmopolitans not only counter with a flurry of universalist and egalitarian moral arguments, but they also accuse their opponents of obscuring the threat posed by globalization to the particular forms of national community whose ethical primacy communitarians, nationalists, and others endorse. From the cosmopolitan perspective, the tendency to favor moral and political obligations to fellow members of the nation-state represents a misguided and increasingly reactionary nostalgia for a rapidly decaying constellation of political practices and institutions.

A similar divide characterizes the ongoing debate about the prospects of democratic institutions at the global level. In a cosmopolitan mode, Daniele Archibugi (2008) and the late David Held (1995) have argued that globalization requires the extension of liberal democratic institutions (including the rule of law and elected representative institutions) to the transnational level. Nation state-based liberal democracy is poorly equipped to deal with deleterious side effects of present-day globalization such as ozone depletion or burgeoning material inequality. In addition, a growing array of genuinely transnational forms of activity calls out for correspondingly transnational modes of liberal democratic decision-making. According to this model, “local” or “national” matters should remain under the auspices of existing liberal democratic institutions. But in those areas where deterritorialization and social interconnectedness across national borders are especially striking, new transnational institutions (for example, cross-border referenda), along with a dramatic strengthening and further democratization of existing forms of supranational authority (in particular, the United Nations), are necessary if we are to assure that popular sovereignty remains an effective principle. In the same spirit, cosmopolitans debate whether a loose system of global “governance” suffices, or instead cosmopolitan ideals require something along the lines of a global “government” or state (Cabrera 2011; Scheuerman 2014). Jürgen Habermas, a prominent cosmopolitan-minded theorist, has tried to formulate a defense of the European Union that conceives of it as a key stepping stone towards supranational democracy. If the EU is to help succeed in salvaging the principle of popular sovereignty in a world where the decay of nation state-based democracy makes democracy vulnerable, the EU will need to strengthen its elected representative organs and better guarantee the civil, political, and social and economic rights of all Europeans (Habermas 2001, 58–113; 2009). Representing a novel form of postnational constitutionalism, it potentially offers some broader lessons for those hoping to save democratic constitutionalism under novel global conditions. Despite dire threats to the EU posed by nationalist and populist movements, Habermas and other cosmopolitan-minded intellectuals believe that it can be effectively reformed and preserved (Habermas 2012).

In opposition to Archibugi, Held, Habermas, and other cosmopolitans, skeptics underscore the purportedly utopian character of such proposals, arguing that democratic politics presupposes deep feelings of trust, commitment, and belonging that remain uncommon at the postnational and global levels. Largely non-voluntary commonalities of belief, history, and custom compose necessary preconditions of any viable democracy, and since these commonalities are missing beyond the sphere of the nation-state, global or cosmopolitan democracy is doomed to fail (Archibugi, Held, and Koehler 1998; Lieven 2020). Critics inspired by realist international theory argue that cosmopolitanism obscures the fundamentally pluralistic, dynamic, and conflictual nature of political life on our divided planet. Notwithstanding its pacific self-understanding, cosmopolitan democracy inadvertently opens the door to new and even more horrible forms of political violence. Cosmpolitanism’s universalistic normative discourse not only ignores the harsh and unavoidably agonistic character of political life, but it also tends to serve as a convenient ideological cloak for terrible wars waged by political blocs no less self-interested than the traditional nation state (Zolo 1997, 24).

Ongoing political developments suggest that such debates are of more than narrow scholarly interest. Until recently, some of globalization’s key prongs seemed destined to transform human affairs in seemingly permanent ways: economic globalization, as well as the growth of a panoply of international and global political and legal institutions, continued to transpire at a rapid rate. Such institutional developments, it should be noted, were interpreted by some cosmopolitan theorists as broadly corroborating their overall normative aspirations. With the resurgence of nationalist and populist political movements, many of which diffusely (and sometimes misleadingly) target elements of globalization, globalization’s future prospects seem increasingly uncertain. For example, with powerful political leaders regularly making disdainful remarks about the UN and EU, it seems unclear whether one of globalization’s most striking features, i.e., enhanced political and legal decision-making “beyond the nation state,” will continue unabated. Tragically perhaps, the failure to manage economic globalization so as to minimize avoidable inequalities and injustices has opened the door to a nationalist and populist backlash, with many people now ready to embrace politicians and movements promising to push back against “free trade,” relatively porous borders (for migrants and refugees), and other manifestations of globalization (Stiglitz 2018). Even if it seems unlikely that nationalists or populists can succeed in fully halting, let alone reversing, structural trends towards deterritorialization, intensified interconnectedness, and social acceleration, they may manage to reshape them in ways that cosmopolitans are likely to find alarming. Whether or not nationalists and populists can successfully respond to many fundamental global challenges (e.g., climate change or nuclear proliferation), however, remains far less likely.

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Globalization by David Atkinson LAST REVIEWED: 02 March 2011 LAST MODIFIED: 02 March 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199743292-0009

Globalization is one of the most vibrant, contested, and debated issues in modern international relations. The process is subject to a wide-ranging number of definitions, but most scholars and observers agree that it represents a global process of increasing economic, cultural, and political interdependence and integration, with deep historical roots. It is a process fostered by liberalized international trade and innovations in information technology and communication, which has been promoted and managed to a greater or lesser degree by international institutions, multinational corporations, national governments (especially the United States), international nongovernmental organizations, and even individuals with access to the Internet. The field is particularly subject to the vagaries of events, and as such it is a dynamic literature that is constantly in flux. Nevertheless, the basic outlines of the field are clear. Economic interdependence remains the most obvious and significant manifestation of globalization. Nevertheless, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the myriad additional symptoms of this process; in particular, challenges to the state’s primacy, migration, global security concerns, culture, crime, the environment, and technology. It remains a controversial process that has engendered both withering critiques and staunch defenses, while other scholars debate whether the process is irresistible, irrevocable, reversible, or even whether it represents the global reality at all.

Scholars of globalization are well served by a number of excellent general introductory texts. These overviews provide an indispensable entry point for new students, yet they are rigorous enough to provide new insights, approaches, and methodologies for graduate students and experienced scholars. Osterhammel and Petersson 2005 is a brief historical primer that emphasizes globalization’s deep historical antecedents. It is an indispensable guide for those seeking to explore the context of globalization’s most recent iteration. Ritzer 2010 offers an excellent orientation for those seeking a textbook-style introduction to the theory, debates, critiques, and scope of modern globalization. Similarly, Steger 2009 provides a concise but effective introduction to the myriad issues inherent in the subject. Scholte 2005 also provides an accessible overview of the major debates and themes, while stressing the overarching concept of superterritoriality. For those ready to delve into the often eclectic issues and implications raised by globalization in the modern age, Lechner and Boli 2007 presents a diverse assortment of essays and articles that run the gamut of opinion and methodology. Held and McGrew 1999 is an older but nevertheless excellent introduction to the major themes and debates facing globalization scholars. Once oriented in the theory and issues, new researchers will find Friedman 2000 and Greider 1998 excellent introductions to the often vigorous debates regarding the inevitability, impact, and sustainability of political, economic, and cultural globalization.

Friedman, Thomas L. The Lexus and the Olive Tree . Rev. ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Popular journalistic account. Sees the process of globalization as inexorable and irrevocable; posits tension between consumer desires and traditional attachment to community. Insightful anecdotes illuminate the argument, but are increasingly outdated. Often betrays bias toward US-led free-market solutions, and its contrived jargon may grate. Lively introduction, best read in conjunction with Greider 1998 .

Greider, William. One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism . New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Engaging polemical journalistic treatise against unfettered economic neoliberalism in particular and unregulated global capitalism in general. Sees globalization as a recipe for exploitation and severe economic inequity. Advocates global labor reforms, corrective tariffs, and capital reform. Unashamedly biased toward the left; best read in conjunction with Friedman 2000 .

Held, David, and Anthony McGrew. Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Somewhat dated, but nonetheless an extremely well organized, thorough, and largely objective introduction to globalization and its many facets. Includes well-researched and historically grounded sections on historical precedents, violence, trade, finance, corporations, migration, culture, and environmentalism. Highly recommended to beginning undergraduates and graduate students, who should nevertheless bear in mind its age.

Lechner, Frank J., and John Boli, eds. The Globalization Reader . 3d ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.

Exceptionally rich collection of essays on various aspects of globalization. Impressive roster of contributors, ranging from esteemed academics to distinguished practitioners, along with statements from international nongovernmental organizations. Offers something for every researcher, from novice undergraduates to experienced scholars. Highly recommended, albeit eclectic, introductory text.

Osterhammel, Jürgen, and Niels P. Petersson. Globalization: A Short History . Translated by Dona Geyer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Translated from the German original (2003). Short, accessible primer on globalization’s deep historical roots. Brief introductory chapter on theory and concepts, but major focus on historical trends including imperialism, industrialization, emergence of global economy, and modern challenges to globalization. Especially suited to undergraduates and beginning graduate students.

Ritzer, George. Globalization: A Basic Text . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Thorough, extensive, and coherent introductory textbook. Particularly appropriate for undergraduates and new researchers. Effectively outlines contemporary theories, debates, criticisms, and issues. Includes chapters on historical antecedents, economics, culture, technology, the environment, migration, crime, and inequality.

Scholte, Jan Aart. Globalization: A Critical Introduction . 2d ed. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Highly praised theoretical introduction to globalization. Clearly presented and well-organized overview of major debates and concepts. Adopts superterritoriality as its organizing theme. Excellent bibliography provides readers of all levels with directions for future research. Suitable for use in the classroom, while experienced researchers will also benefit.

Steger, Manfred B. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction . Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Recently updated text from a popular series of introductory readers. Wide ranging and instructive despite its brevity. Thematic chapters on historical antecedents, economics, politics, culture, ecology, and ideology. Evident bias toward “compassionate forms of globalization,” which may irritate readers seeking a wholly dispassionate account. Nevertheless, an illuminating brief introductory text.

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Effects of Globalization

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Definition of Globalization

Drivers of globalization.

Globalization is defined as interaction among different countries in order to develop global economy. It entails political, technological, cultural and political exchanges which are facilitated by infrastructure, transport and communication. Some of the traditional international theories of globalization include Ricardian theory of international trade, Heckscher-Ohlin model and Adam Smith’s model (Scholte, 2005).

For globalization to take place, it must be driven by certain factors. The first factor that drives globalization is competitiveness in the market, which focuses on aspects such as global competitors, interdependence among countries and high two-way trade. The second factor that drives globalization is the government.

The government drives globalization through regulation of marketing activities, provision of technical standards that are compatible and elimination of restrictions imposed on trade and investment procedures. The third factor that drives globalization is cost.

Cost in globalization deals with efficiency in sourcing activities, world economies and emerging technological trends. The fourth factor that drives globalization is market, which covers ordinary needs of customers, channels of world markets and marketing techniques that can be transferred to different regions.

Globalization is associated with both positive and negative effects. Its first positive effect is that it makes it possible for different countries to exchange their products. The second positive effect of globalization is that it promotes international trade and growth of wealth as a result of economic integration and free trade among countries.

However, globalization is also associated with negative effects. Its first negative effect is that it causes unemployment. Since companies compete with their rivals in the market, sometimes they are forced to sack some of their employees in order to reduce salary costs and instead maximize profits. This is common in developing countries, where large numbers of unemployed people live in urban areas.

The second negative effect of globalization is that it promotes terrorism and criminal activities because people, food and materials are allowed to move freely from one country to the other. Individuals with evil intentions take advantage of this freedom and carry out terrorism activities and other crimes (Negative Effects of Globalization, 2013).

Negative Effects of Globalization. (2013). Web.

Scholte, J. (2005). Globalization: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Essay on Globalization for Students and Children

500+ words essay on globalization.

Globalization refers to integration between people, companies, and governments. Most noteworthy, this integration occurs on a global scale. Furthermore, it is the process of expanding the business all over the world. In Globalization, many businesses expand globally and assume an international image. Consequently, there is a requirement for huge investment to develop international companies.

How Globalization Came into Existence?

First of all, people have been trading goods since civilization began. In the 1st century BC, there was the transportation of goods from China to Europe. The goods transportation took place along the Silk Road. The Silk Road route was very long in distance. This was a remarkable development in the history of Globalization. This is because, for the first time ever, goods were sold across continents.

Globalization kept on growing gradually since 1st BC. Another significant development took place in the 7th century AD. This was the time when the religion of Islam spread. Most noteworthy, Arab merchants led to a rapid expansion of international trade . By the 9th century, there was the domination of Muslim traders on international trade. Furthermore, the focus of trade at this time was spices.

True Global trade began in the Age of Discovery in the 15th century. The Eastern and Western continents were connected by European merchants. There was the discovery of America in this period. Consequently, global trade reached America from Europe.

From the 19th century, there was a domination of Great Britain all over the world. There was a rapid spread of international trade. The British developed powerful ships and trains. Consequently, the speed of transportation greatly increased. The rate of production of goods also significantly increased. Communication also got faster which was better for Global trade .

Finally, in 20th and 21st -Century Globalization took its ultimate form. Above all, the development of technology and the internet took place. This was a massive aid for Globalization. Hence, E-commerce plays a huge role in Globalization.

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Impact of Globalization

First of all, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) increases at a great rate. This certainly is a huge contribution of Globalization. Due to FDI, there is industrial development. Furthermore, there is the growth of global companies. Also, many third world countries would also benefit from FDI.

Technological Innovation is another notable contribution of Globalization. Most noteworthy, there is a huge emphasis on technology development in Globalization. Furthermore, there is also technology transfer due to Globalization. The technology would certainly benefit the common people.

The quality of products improves due to Globalization. This is because manufacturers try to make products of high-quality. This is due to the pressure of intense competition. If the product is inferior, people can easily switch to another high-quality product.

To sum it up, Globalization is a very visible phenomenon currently. Most noteworthy, it is continuously increasing. Above all, it is a great blessing to trade. This is because it brings a lot of economic and social benefits to it.

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✍️Essay on Globalisation: Samples in 100, 150 and 200 Words

• Updated on  
• Oct 25, 2023

Globalisation means the combination of economies and societies with the help of information, ideas, technology, finance, goods, services, and people. It is a process where multinational companies work on their international standing and conduct operations internationally or overseas. Over the years, Globalisation has had a profound impact on various aspects of society. Today we will be discussing what globalisation is and how it came into existence with the essay on globalisation listed below.

Table of Contents

• 1 How Globalisation Came Into Existence?
• 2 Essay on Globalisation in 100 Words
• 3 Essay on Globalisation in 150 Words
• 4 Essay on Globalisation in 200 Words

How Globalisation Came Into Existence?

For all those unaware, the concepts of globalisation first emerged in the 20th century. Here are some of the key events which led to the development of globalisation in today’s digital world.

• The ancient Silk Route as well as the maritime routes led to the exchange of goods, ideas and culture in several countries. Although these were just trade routes, but later became important centres for cultural exchange.
• Other than this, the European colonial expansion which took place from the 15th to the 20th century led to the setting up of global markets where both knowledge and people were transferred to several developing countries. 
• The evolution and exchange of mass media, cinema and the internet further led to the widespread dissemination of cultures and ideas.

Also Read: Essay on the Importance of the English Language for Students

Essay on Globalisation in 100 Words

Globalization, the interconnectedness of nations through trade, technology, and cultural exchange, has reshaped the world. It has enabled the free flow of goods and information, fostering economic growth and cultural diversity. However, it also raises challenges such as income inequality and cultural homogenization. 

In a globalized world, businesses expand internationally, but local industries can suffer. Moreover, while globalization promotes shared knowledge, it can erode local traditions. Striking a balance between the benefits and drawbacks of globalization is essential to ensure a more equitable and culturally diverse global community, where economies thrive without leaving anyone behind.

Also Read: Essay on Save Environment: Samples in 100, 200, 300 Words

Essay on Globalisation in 150 Words

Globalization is the process of increasing interconnectedness and interdependence among countries, economies, and cultures. It has transformed the world in various ways.

Economically, globalization has facilitated the flow of goods, services, and capital across borders. This has boosted economic growth and reduced poverty in many developing nations. However, it has also led to income inequality and job displacement in some regions.

Culturally, globalization has resulted in the spread of ideas, values, and cultural products worldwide. While this fosters cultural exchange and diversity, it also raises concerns about cultural homogenization.

Technologically, globalization has been driven by advances in communication and transportation. The internet and smartphones have connected people across the globe, allowing for rapid information dissemination and collaboration.

In conclusion, globalization is a complex phenomenon with both benefits and challenges. It has reshaped the world, bringing people closer together, but also highlighting the need for responsible governance and policies to address its downsides.

Also Read: Essay on Unity in Diversity in 100 to 200 Words

Essay on Globalisation in 200 Words

Globalization, a multifaceted phenomenon, has reshaped the world over the past few decades. It involves the interconnectedness of economies, cultures, and societies across the globe. In this essay, we will briefly discuss its key aspects and impacts.

Economically, globalization has led to increased international trade and investment. It has allowed companies to expand operations globally, leading to economic growth in many countries. However, it has also resulted in income inequality and job displacement in some regions.

Culturally, globalization has facilitated the exchange of ideas, values, and traditions. This has led to a more diverse and interconnected world where cultures blend, but it can also challenge local traditions and languages.

Socially, globalization has improved access to information and technology. It has connected people across borders, enabling global activism and awareness of worldwide issues. Nonetheless, it has also created challenges like cybercrime and privacy concerns.

In conclusion, globalization is a double-edged sword. It offers economic opportunities, cultural exchange, and global connectivity, but it also brings about disparities, cultural tensions, and new global challenges. To navigate this complex landscape, the world must strive for responsible globalization that balances the interests of all stakeholders and promotes inclusivity and sustainability.

Related Articles

The movement of goods, technologies, information, and jobs between countries is referred to as globalisation. 

Globalization as a phenomenon began with the earliest human migratory routes, or with Genghis Khan’s invasions, or travel across the Silk Road.

Globalisation allows wealthy nations to access cheaper labour and resources, while also providing opportunity for developing and underdeveloped nations with the jobs and investment capital they require.

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay-writing page and follow Leverage Edu ! 

Malvika Chawla

Malvika is a content writer cum news freak who comes with a strong background in Journalism and has worked with renowned news websites such as News 9 and The Financial Express to name a few. When not writing, she can be found bringing life to the canvasses by painting on them.

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In U.S. and UK, Globalization Leaves Some Feeling ‘Left Behind’ or ‘Swept Up’

Focus groups reveal the degree to which americans and britons see common challenges to local and national identity.

In 2016, both Americans and Britons participated in divisive votes shaped in part by questions of immigration and global engagement. In the United States, voters cast ballots in a presidential election ultimately won by Donald Trump and his “ America first ” vision. Across the Atlantic, “leave” voters outnumbered “remain” voters in a national referendum on continued European Union membership, framed by the slogan “ Take back control .” Attempts to explain the twin poll results have focused on people who felt left behind and who voted against the seemingly inexorable tide of growing economic interdependence, cultural diversity and social connectivity that define a globalized world. But direct, systematic comparisons of the two countries have been rare.

Pew Research Center undertook focus groups in the United States and United Kingdom in 2019 – prior to the outbreak of COVID-19 – to understand better the degree to which similar narratives about globalization and its impacts are evident in each country – and whether these narratives vary by geography, political affiliation or other factors in each country.

Pew Research Center has been studying issues of national identity and globalization for some time, but this project is the Center’s first foray into exploring the topic using comparative, international focus group data. We conducted 26 focus groups from Aug. 19 to Nov. 20, 2019, in cities across the U.S. and UK, grouped by political and geographic attributes as described below in the table (for more, see the methodology ). All groups were asked questions about their local communities, national identities and globalization by a trained moderator. The questions were based on a discussion guide designed by Pew Research Center.

To analyze the data collected from these discussions, researchers reviewed the focus group transcripts and consolidated the sentiments into “data displays.” These displays summarized participants’ responses to the moderator’s questions and included coding schemes to highlight key themes and points of interest in the conversation, as well as the dynamics of the discussion. Researchers analyzed the coded data, focusing on how opinions varied across the groups, which served as the primary unit of analysis. Particular care was taken to ensure that the viewpoints expressed in this report accurately capture the range of opinions expressed, emphasizing not just a majority opinion, but minority and dissenting opinions as well.

The analysis presented in this report is indicative of key narratives and frames of references that influence how people perceive and understand important issues. The findings are not statistically representative and cannot be extrapolated to wider populations. Similarly, while we often refer to groups of participants as “Democratic groups” or “leavers,” these descriptors are shorthand, based on the research design or moments in the focus group conversation. Depending on the topic, a participant’s age, gender, city, employment status or other factors may have been equally relevant to their opinions and views about globalization.

The focus groups confirm that the story of being “left behind” remains common in both the U.S. and UK. Participants highlighted the ways in which the forces of globalization left them rudderless, closing industries, leading people to abandon their homes and harming them economically. But the group conversations also reveal a narrative of being “swept up” by globalization. Those who are swept up experience dislocation because of too much attention from global forces – investment and new job creation supplant traditional work, inflate real estate prices and displace some people from their homes and communities. Stories of being left behind and swept up both lead to feelings of alienation and loss.

Attitudes toward globalization shaped less by local change, more by national context

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In academia, this is referred to as a “sociotropic” attitude. Academics have found similar relationships when examining trade attitudes or attitudes toward immigration. For example, when it comes to trade, scholars argue that people’s attitudes toward international trade are based less on their material self-interest than on perceptions of how the U.S. economy as a whole is affected by trade. Similarly, when it comes to immigration, research suggests people’s opinions are shaped by their concerns about the national cultural impacts of immigration more than their personal economic experiences.

Given that people can feel dislocated whether they are left behind or swept up, what separates those who see globalization negatively from those who see it positively is how they perceive changes to their country, rather than their neighborhood. Those who are more locally or nationally rooted tend to see globalization breaking down the national community and changing what it means to be part of the nation-state in ways they find disaffecting. In contrast, those who embrace globalization tend to focus on the ways in which globalization itself can create community – fostering new connections by breaking down boundaries between people to foster international cooperation and understanding.

In the following section, we describe how focus group participants defined and described globalization. Then, we look at how globalization impacted participants’ local communities and created a sense of loss, both for those who were left behind and those who are swept up by globalization. We then look at how people see globalization changing what it means to be British or American and how both those who are more globally oriented and those who are more nationally rooted express feelings of alienation in their country. Finally, we look at participants’ attitudes toward globalization at the international level, concluding that some view global interconnectivity as an opportunity for cooperation while others see it as a battleground for competition. Throughout the essay are quotations representing a range of views from participants, some of which have been edited for grammar, spelling and clarity.

Key findings and road map to the essay

Defining globalization

The term “globalization” was difficult for participants to define, but it was not difficult to describe.

The local context

Whether groups felt their communities were globalization “winners” who experienced job creation in their city or “losers” who felt the decline of industry, people focused on the changing character of their communities, the increased transience and the declining opportunities. Those “left behind” by globalization and those “swept up” often experienced similar feelings of loss and assigned blame to multinational corporations.

The national situation

People in the UK and U.S. felt that what it means to be British or American, respectively, is changing. Participants who are more inwardly oriented focused on how multiculturalism was “diluting” the dominant national character. People who were more globally oriented focused on how Brexit and the 2016 election have left them feeling like their country is no longer the multicultural, accepting place they had prized it to be. For separate reasons, participants highlighted their alienation and confusion about what it means to be part of their nations today.

Globalization

Participants who are less open to globalization tend to view the international sphere through the lens of the nation-state and as competition, expressing a need to stand alone apart from the interference of international bodies.

Participants who are in favor of globalization see the ways in which community can exist internationally, separate and apart from national boundaries. 

Regardless of their comfort with globalization, participants highlighted its inevitability.

Globalization: You know it when you see it

The question “What is globalization?” was not easy for focus group participants to answer. Definitions were wide-ranging, touching on economic changes such as the rising influence of multinational corporations and the role of international trade; international organizations like the United Nations; immigration and the movement of people; and amorphous concepts like the exchange of ideas and cultures. As a further indication of how challenged participants were by the task of defining globalization, some offered a response, only to hurriedly seek confirmation from the moderator that their answer was “correct.”

Though participants were often unsure of how to define globalization, key themes did emerge. These centered on economics and trade, the global balance of power, immigration and cultural exchange, technological advancement, and community.

And unlike technical definitions, participants found it relatively easy to share illustrations of globalization. They brought up the impacts of globalization on their daily lives, like the experiences of calling customer service and reaching a call center in another country. People touted the ability to order goods from the other side of the world on Amazon and have them delivered the next day. Others brought up how immigration has shifted the fabric of their country for better or worse, or how openness to foreign ideas and customs was changing their country’s culture – again, for both better and worse.

Globalization and change at the local level: Whether left behind or swept up, feelings of loss pervade

When describing key changes in their local communities, participants did not always invoke “globalization.” Yet their stories often linked to broader illustrations of what constitutes globalization. This was particularly true when participants spoke about changes due to industrial shifts, automation and the growing influence of multinational corporations. All three were consistently described as negatively impacting local communities – in contrast to growing cultural diversity or improved communication technology, which were sometimes viewed favorably.

Who is left behind? Who is swept up?

Though academics and journalists have widely used the term “left behind,” participants infrequently used it themselves. Here, we use the term “left behind” to discuss people who experienced losses like the closure of factories, institutions and local shops or the loss of jobs and opportunities.

We also use the term “swept up” to discuss people who experienced losses associated with growth, like mounting costs of living and increasingly crowded cities.

Some participants described elements of both phenomena. For example, in London, where participants complained of increasingly expensive housing and constant development, participants also lamented the loss of local pubs and decline of high streets.

Industrial change, automation and the influence of multinationals were prime catalysts in stories of being left behind by globalization. Being left behind was often equated with job loss and shuttered businesses. Depending on the locale, participants described either industry-specific or general job losses. Focus group participants in Pittsburgh and Newcastle were particularly animated by stories of being left behind, describing how they or people they knew had lost jobs at coal mines, steel mills and other industrial facilities.

In these cities and elsewhere, participants pointed to the carry-over effects of job loss – from local stores being unable to remain profitable to neighborhoods becoming less prosperous and more dangerous, exacerbated by the onset of crime and drug use that accompanied peoples’ material decline. People who felt left behind also noted the impact of economic decline on local social ties. Participants linked falling rates of homeownership with growing numbers of “transient” renters and less meaningful relationships with neighbors.

What is a high street?

In the UK, a “high street” is defined by the Office of National Statistics as “a cluster of 15 or more retail addresses within 150 meters.” But focus group participants used the term colloquially in much the way Americans would describe a “main street” in a town. The term evoked the center of commercial life and activity.

Job loss was sometimes described as almost a trap. Participants in Newcastle highlighted how their area simply receives less in terms of job training, education and employment opportunities now than they used to, making recovery from job loss more difficult to bear. The same was true in Pittsburgh, where one woman noted that “the market is now changing [and] the people that are already here … are no longer benefiting from it.” Another man commented about how Pittsburgh used to be a blue-collar town but it doesn’t ring true anymore.

For some, these perceived changes and the loss of jobs or opportunities in their town were met with great sadness, while others responded with a more matter-of-fact attitude and seemed to accept these changes as an inevitable fact of life. For example, one man in Newcastle framed the loss of these jobs simply as a result of changes in the labor market, saying, “The job trends are changing – heavy industry’s no longer up here, and we’re getting more offices. … People are coming in from different parts of the country, different parts of the area.”

Across the UK, participants lamented the decline of high streets – used colloquially in much the way Americans describe a “main street” but formally defined by the UK Office of National Statistics as “a cluster of 15 or more retail addresses within 150 meters.” They described the closures of independent businesses in their area and the increased presence of charity shops, or thrift stores, and chains.

Data from the UK Office of National Statistics indicates that between 2012 and 2017, the regions in which the focus groups took place all experienced either negative or stagnant growth in high street retail. 1 But, when accounting for food service, accommodations and other sectors beyond retail, all four regions experienced growth during that period, both on high street and elsewhere, suggesting that perceptions of decline may be heavily colored by retail, in particular.

Looking at employment, a similar trend emerges. In many of the cities where groups were conducted, participants expressed concerns that the declining high streets meant limited employment opportunities. Yet, in the regions where the groups took place, employment on high streets actually grew when accounting for sectors beyond retail, even while employment on high streets in retail fell in all regions but London. And while London did see growth in retail employment on high streets, it was roughly even with the city’s population growth, which also stood at 6% between 2012 and 2017.

The closures and changes people described extended from the workplace to the “high street” in the UK, and the tone was often one of profound loss. In all four cities in the UK where focus groups were conducted, people noted the closure of independent businesses on the high streets, highlighting how these shifts left them feeling like the previous epicenter of their community was no longer the bustling center of commerce.

Often, the blame was laid at the feet of globalization. For example, one woman in Newcastle highlighted how globalization means “smaller businesses … go out of business because [of] competition from … worldwide companies.” Participants also highlighted how these changes negatively impact young people’s job prospects, because with the closure of shops, there are fewer employment opportunities.

There was also a sense that the decline of these high streets was impacting individuals’ daily lives and routines, with one woman in Newcastle saying that in the good old days you could get everything you needed on the main road, but now “it’s degenerating, it’s a s—hole.” Participants described how the commercial decline was uneven, noting strip malls and retail parks getting huge amounts of investment as mom and pop shops on the high streets were left to die out.

“Opportunities [are] about careers, and you look at the average high street now and how that’s changed in 20 years … this is a completely different world for people to get jobs.” MAN, 38, BIRMINGHAM

The demise of high streets also extended to concerns about the erosion of each city’s local character and charm. In the UK, particularly among Leavers, homogenization was a focus, with participants defining globalization as the “breakdown of individuality” and “everywhere being the same.” Once again, the blame for this perceived homogenization was placed on multinational corporations. One man from London pithily described it as “Starbucks [and] McDonald’s [causing] every high street [to] look the same.”

In addition to the decline of high streets, participants in the UK lamented the closure of local pubs and youth clubs. These places were viewed as key community-building institutions, and their loss was seen as a death knell of social cohesion in their area, ushered in by changing business and industry. Groups described local pubs as gathering spaces for members of the community to build relationships and get to know each other, discussing how their closure meant people did not bond anymore. Youth clubs were also seen as pillars of communities, and groups suggested that their demise has pushed young people onto the streets to cause mischief and engage in criminal activity.

“They’re putting loads of money into [the retail park] but [on] the high street, everything’s closing down …” “That’s right, yes, unless it’s a charity shop [thrift store] or a coffee shop …” “Or a Gregg’s [a major UK bakery chain].” Exchange among woman, 32; man, 52; and man, 34, all of Birmingham

In the U.S., similar tropes emerged. People focused on how there were limited employment opportunities, unfair competition between small businesses and chain retail stores, and large companies threatening the character of their neighborhood. But in the U.S., these complaints focused less on specific commercial districts – like a main street – and extended to the community more broadly.

While the general theme of decline was common across the two countries, an alternate narrative of being swept up by global currents of change also emerged. This sense was palpable across several focus groups in Seattle. All groups there agreed that local investments by multinational corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing and Starbucks had led to a major influx of people and money, which had put upward pressure on the cost of living in the city.

Seattle focus groups composed of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and of White Democrats shared stories about gentrified neighborhoods, highlighting how housing had become less affordable and how the city’s growth had eroded its culture and character. Groups composed of White Democrats and White independents focused on increased homelessness due to the rising cost of housing. In groups made up of White independents and Republicans, people highlighted how the city’s growth has overwhelmed public services and how local governments have not dealt appropriately with the influx of people and money into the city.

Across the Atlantic, the narrative of being swept up by globalization was most evident among focus groups in London. Participants noted how the city’s position as an international hub, or “magnet,” affects daily life for Londoners. Examples of negative impacts included increases in traffic, crime and housing costs, plus constant construction. Some mentioned that, paradoxically, all of this growth actually meant fewer employment and housing opportunities for local residents. One woman, for instance, faulted “overseas investors” looking to profit off of the city’s housing shortage with the construction of luxury flats that sit vacant when the city was in need of affordable housing.

Although they experienced globalization differently, groups who felt swept up pointed to some of the same outcomes as those left behind, such as the rising cost of housing, declining home ownership and the disintegration of social ties and community. Similar stories also surfaced with respect to increases in local homelessness, drug abuse and crime.

Both those swept up and those left behind saw others benefiting from the very forces of globalization they found so disruptive and disorienting. When probed to say more about who or what has benefited from globalization, American participants regularly suggested that it was “the wealthy,” “the 1%” or “powerful people.” Similarly, participants in the UK described beneficiaries as “white-collar,” including business owners, heads of corporations and generally those in positions of power.

The perception of globalization creating “winners” and “losers” was based on local stories. In Seattle, Houston and London, local residents who worked in sectors such as technology and health care were seen as more capable of earning good wages and keeping up with the rising cost of living. By contrast, people in other sectors were described as bringing home meager wages and struggling to achieve financial stability.

Both those who felt swept up and those left behind agreed that the wealthy were largely immune from the effects of globalization. In London, one 26-year-old Conservative “leave” voter noted that the wealthy “don’t necessarily feel the impact of that population boom” in his city because they do not have to go to overcrowded schools and generally do not rely on the public services like social housing, health care, and other public provisions that have been overburdened in the UK.

Whether feeling swept away or left behind, focus group participants in both the U.S. and UK punctuated their stories about local change with a profound sense of loss – loss of financial security, loss of employment opportunities, loss of social solidarity. And while participants may not have often used the precise term “globalization,” they nevertheless laid the blame for their losses at the feet of global actors, especially multinational corporations.

Between tolerance and tradition: Globalization, culture change and national identity

Unlike the consistent picture of globalization’s negative impact on local communities, focus group participants in the U.S. and UK differed on whether globalization was a boon or bane for their respective countries. Yet even those who, as a matter of principle, welcomed immigration and cultural diversity ultimately admitted to feeling out of place in their own country. But in their case it tended to be related to concerns about the forces they perceived as “anti-global” in their country – people who insisted on protectionist or exclusionary agendas under the banners “America first” and “Take back control.” Ironically, both positive and negative narratives of globalization’s national-level impact left participants feeling alienated and adrift.

Participants see and feel globalization changing what it means to be British or American because of the flow of people, cultures and ideas. Regardless of political orientation, most focus groups began their discussion of what it means to be British or American by emphasizing multiculturalism and tolerance. They also overwhelmingly highlighted the benefits of globalization in terms of the diversity of options available in their country: available goods, cuisines, cultural offerings and the like. Even one man who voted “leave” and highlighted his general disapproval of immigration noted that he “likes [his] curries,” referencing the abundant Indian and Pakistani food offerings in his community.

“You can eat pho … for breakfast. You can have some pupusas later on. You can have some tacos later on. You can have barbecue. You could have crayfish. … The music … you get to experience different cultures … I mean, you can’t beat that.” MAN, 21, HOUSTON

But, particularly for those in groups composed of “leave” voters and Republicans, the limits of this comfort with globalization and multiculturalism came when there was a corresponding sense that these cultures were changing British or American culture, or immigrants and foreigners were benefiting at the expense of locals. In the UK, one older woman from Birmingham summed up the sense that the national culture is changing, declaring, “[Our] Britishness is being diluted because of all the other cultures coming in here. … If there was a fair ratio of people that the country could cope with and it wasn’t draining all of our resources, then it’s fine. … I think it’s nice to experience other cultures and share … but now it’s like that blend has taken away the Britishness.”

Those who were less comfortable with immigration tended to couch their discomfort in discussions of differing “values” or parenting strategies. For example, people highlighted wanting to be around people who pay their fair share and are morally upstanding, qualities they often attributed to themselves while contrasting themselves with people from other cultures.

One woman in Birmingham shared that she thought Pakistani people were too different from other Britons because they “eat with their hands” and suggested that immigrants don’t believe in British values so they should “go back home.” In some “leave”-voting groups in the UK, when prompted, participants explicitly said they wanted to live in predominantly White, British areas, claiming that people from other cultures could not meet their standards for morality and that people naturally preferred segregated neighborhoods.

People also highlighted the way immigration could be alienating, changing how it felt to be “British” in public. For example, one older White “leave”-voting woman in London said she finds it “awful” to get onto the tube and hear people speaking myriad languages, describing it as a “very hostile environment” for her. In Birmingham, another “leave”-voting woman told an extended story about her experience giving birth in a hospital and having no midwives who spoke English, which made her feel like a minority and caused her to feel unsafe and un-cared for.

“ We can trade between countries; the shop down the street from me is mostly Polish but also sells things from Spain and Cyprus, and sometimes it’s nice to go in there and buy food from another country that you wouldn’t necessarily get elsewhere.” Woman, 32, Birmingham

Ideologically right-leaning groups especially stressed that traditional culture – which some equated with Christianity – was relegated to second-class status in the country. People highlighted perceived double standards, such as schools accommodating other religions – teaching about Diwali or banning sausage rolls – but forcing the annual winter holiday celebrations to be just that, and not Christmas parties.

In the workplace context, one older man in Birmingham suggested he would have difficulty getting time off to go to a christening but that there are prayer rooms for Muslims to take regular breaks. Other cultural practices such as flying the St. George’s Cross to express English identity were seen as impossible for fear of offending others, or worse, for fear of being labeled a racist by others in the community.

In the U.S., too, participants highlighted the times at which accommodations for immigrants or perceived foreigners limited options for people seen as deserving natives. For example, in Houston, participants in the Republican group balked at the number of jobs in their area requiring bilingual applicants, saying that it gives an unfair leg up to Hispanic job seekers. Some felt this was part of a broader trend of disadvantaging White Americans and highlighted the ways in which restricting immigration could lead to more resources for “locals.” A man in Seattle exemplified this sentiment, saying, “Immigrants have more rights than we do” and get more benefits. He added that he “resents [his] tax dollars paying for someone who’s not feeding into the tax system, whether they are Americans or illegal.” In other instances, immigrants, by their mere presence, were as seen as devaluing homes since, according to one woman in Pittsburgh, they have “eight households [living] in one house.”

“I think the British list that I thought of was … loose national project of making a multicultural, prosperous, liberal, strong nation, which punches way above its weight on the international scene … but it’s looking kind of shaky now, a bit wonky, because we don’t know who we are any more. I don’t, I’ve never felt less British. I’ve always had a strong British identity. … And [now] all I want to do is run, I want to get out of here. I don’t want to be part of this. It looks shambolic.” Man, 53, London

This sense that what it means to be American or British is changing today – and the corresponding alienation and loss – was not felt only by focus group participants who opposed global interconnectivity and multiculturalism. For those who were supportive of their nation-state’s integration into the global community, the Brexit vote in the UK and the 2016 presidential election in the U.S. presented similar feelings of loss and alienation in society, as well as a changing sense of what it means to be British or American today. While both elections were not solely focused on these themes, both events focused, at least in part, on inherently international questions: how to control immigration, how to secure borders, how to participate in international organizations, and whether to pursue “America first” policies or to “take back control” from the EU.

Whereas some focus group participants may have felt alienated because of a perceived sense that immigration is changing their culture, on the flip side, those who want their country to be part of the EU or to remain involved in the international community and welcome immigrants feel disaffected because of how those events have changed the way they view their nation-state and their place in it.

In the UK, for example, the Brexit referendum was regularly touted as a profoundly alienating moment, exposing people to a side of Britain they hadn’t seen before and highlighting the political divisions in the country. For people in “remain”-voting focus groups especially, it signaled to them that they are a minority in their country – in terms of their beliefs for some, and in terms of their ethnic identity for others.

Participants spoke more openly upon recognizing they shared points of view

This feeling created an interesting dynamic in some focus groups, as participants did not know how the groups were selected. Respondents often skirted around sensitive political or cultural issues, speaking in vague terms or euphemisms, until conversation had advanced to a point where they felt confident that many or most of the people in the room with them shared their viewpoints. In some instances, as this would happen, the moderator would even confirm for people that they were in a room of like-minded individuals on a particular issue (most regularly that they were Brexit “leave” voters). At that point, the tone of conversation would palpably shift and people would appear more relaxed when discussing sensitive topics.

As one man in Birmingham said, recalling the day after the referendum, “It was quite surreal … this doesn’t represent me … [Britain] doesn’t feel like home anymore.” One Black woman of African descent in Birmingham told a story about going to vote with her husband in the Brexit referendum in 2016, saying, “I think it’s the first time in a long time when I could feel the blatant racism in the room. We walked into the school where we were voting and everybody turned around to look at us.” Another “remain” voter of Bangladeshi descent in Newcastle said she had felt at home until Brexit, but she has now lost friends because Brexit “[brought] out the inner racist. … Personally, I feel my life’s completely changed since Brexit.” On the other hand, those who voted “leave” shared stories of being vilified by remainers as xenophobes or racists.

“ I used to think that we really believed what Emma Lazarus wrote in her poem, that’s on the base of the Statue of Liberty. And now it’s, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, as long as they’re White, Northern European.’ ” Woman, 70, Houston

In the U.S., too, especially in focus groups composed of Democrats, people highlighted that the 2016 election had shaken their belief in the core values of the country. As one man in Houston said, “I feel like we were more welcoming of immigrants … now it seems like there are people that don’t want certain immigrants … Brown [immigrants]. It’s always been like … ‘Come here, this is the American Dream’ … I feel like that’s really being squashed.” Some explicitly faulted President Trump for the change, saying he has inflamed things, “egging on” racism. A young Hispanic woman in Houston noted, “Once upon a time, there were people who were racist, but they kind of kept it behind closed doors. … But now it’s way up in the forefront … you see people just spewing hate at innocent folks because they heard someone speaking a different language in Taco Bell.”

The sense of not feeling at home in one’s country was also expressed by those who voted “leave” in the UK and for Donald Trump in the U.S. Leavers and Republicans alike discussed how the “out of control” levels of immigration and the accommodations immigrants receive may have created a deep sense of alienation in their own country and a corresponding sense that, if they share this opinion with others with different viewpoints, they will be castigated. For some, this has translated into lost friends or personal animosity, with people on both the political left and right offering examples of losing friends – or being unfriended on social media – because of different views over political candidates.

“ I’m fair skinned and my brothers are darker skinned … being out in public, people give them the once over … it’s disheartening for me … we didn’t have that problem a few years ago out in public. [Also,] at dinner with some acquaintances … they started talking crap about Latinos. I [said,] ‘You know, as a Mexican … I disagree with you,’ and he goes, ‘Oh, but you’re one of the good ones, so I wasn’t talking about you.’ – I feel like that statement wouldn’t have been made five years ago. ” Woman, 19, Houston

In both the UK and the U.S., participants also explained how they felt polarization has deepened in their country. One American noted that it’s currently “traumatic” to be American, saying, “I used to have an identity of what American meant and it’s devaluing.” Another described America as “tribal,” saying “There’s no compromise, no common sense. No listening to other people. Political tribes.”

“ It’s on the verge of civil war. Not a racial civil war. It’s a political civil war. ” Man, 51, Pittsburgh

While the changes participants saw in their countries and the perceived catalysts of those changes varied, nearly all participants said these shifts were causing them to feel disconnected from their national identity. For some, globalization in the form of immigration and multiculturalism had wrought too much change, to the point that they felt they could no longer recognize their country.  They noted that they couldn’t feel a connection with others under the mantle of being “British” or “American” because the culture had been eroded too much and that some people grouped under that label felt too different from them.

“We’ve lost our identity as a people. We’re fighting each other. Us and them. A house divided … on socioeconomic [status], race, gender, just pick something [and we’re divided].” Man, 58, Houston

For others, pivotal events marking a political shift away from the globalized world and toward a “country-first” national character alienated them from how they used to conceptualize and understand their countries. For these people, community and national identity meant welcoming people from elsewhere and blending cultures, foods and ideas.

Despite fundamental differences in how they characterize their countries, both groups of people were reticent to label themselves as “cosmopolitan.” Even those who supported the principles of a globally oriented world tended to describe “cosmopolitans” as elitists who were “out of touch” or were wealthy jet-setters, evoking images of a “Sex and the City” lifestyle. And even while globally oriented and nationally rooted people both were disillusioned with what it meant to be British or American today – albeit for different reasons – there was a discomfort with identifying as a “citizen of the world” or, as Theresa May evoked, a “ citizen of nowhere .”

Sovereignty, competition and community in a globalized world

As described above, disruptions linked to globalization have engendered profound feelings of loss and alienation at both a local and national level. In response, some focus group participants expressed support for “taking back control” – the slogan of the Brexit campaign – or putting “America first,” the oft-repeated slogan of the 2016 Trump campaign. For these participants, the international sphere is perceived as a space of competition, with a focus on the nation-state. In contrast, focus group members who expressed feeling alienated less by globalization, and more by nationalist rhetoric and policies, tended to highlight opportunities to create a sense of community at the international level. Those with the latter mindset emphasized the importance of cross-border interactions between people, cultures and countries and the ways nation-states can cooperate rather than compete.

In the course of the focus group discussions, participants observed that globalization extends beyond economic issues, such as trade, multinational corporations and open markets, to questions of governance, sovereignty and the connectivity made possible by new communication technology. Core to the discussion of globalization’s political implications was the role and influence of multinational or multilateral organizations such as the UN, the World Bank and – in the case of the UK – the EU. Particularly for participants who were less comfortable with globalization, these organizations were framed in terms of implications for the nation-state.

“[America] should stop being so dependent on [competitor countries] and should be more stern with them. But climate change and terrorism are global issues, and it takes a village to solve them. [The U.S. should] keep its friends close and its enemies closer.” Woman, 52, Seattle

In groups composed of Republicans and Conservatives in the U.S. and UK respectively, participants evoked the notion of sovereignty and their country’s right to self-determine if, how and with whom to interact on the world stage. Some in the U.S. claimed that organizations like the UN and the G7 were avenues for “global government” or other countries to assert power over the country and “try to tell everybody what to do.” Respondents in Republican groups stressed power discrepancies – highlighting the ways in which America has been taken advantage of by countries like China. For global skeptics in the U.S. focus groups, a recurrent theme was American leadership and preservation of the country’s self-interest, even in the context of multilateral cooperation. As one Seattle woman said, “America should be the leader” and “set an example.”

In the UK, history of empire colored views of nation’s place in the world

In the UK, the issue of history and empire was front and center in these discussions. Those who were least comfortable with globalization tended to harken back to the British Empire and to glorify the role of the nation-state historically. In contrast, those who tended to be more accepting of globalization were more likely to suggest that reconceptualizing history – and the UK’s role internationally – was merited. For example, these participants noted that the UK needed to think of itself less as a powerful, historic maritime power and more as part of a global community. As one Scottish participant noted, “We think we are more important in the world than what we probably actually are. We are a tiny island. We seem to be told that we are this global superpower all the time, but actually our power is getting less and less, and I think people need to be aware of it and start being a bit more realistic about what’s going to happen in the future.”

A different story emerged among “remain” groups in the UK. Here, participants observed that their country’s current standing in the G7 and other organizations owed to a history of international influence that had placed the UK high up in the “global pecking order.” The idea of competition among nation-states was pervasive, with participants using sporting analogies to describe how the UK today could “punch above its weight” on the world stage or be “one of the big players” globally.

In both countries, participants discussed competition between nation-states in terms of economic, as well as political influence. Global trade was often framed as a zero-sum game. Trade was about one’s own country benefiting at the expense of other states. One man in Pittsburgh commented that the U.S. risked becoming “poor” if it disengaged from global trade and could no longer “manipulate other countries to get their resources.”

“ I used to work for a company [that bought rubber] manufactured locally. And then it worked out it was a pence cheaper to get [the rubber] in China, so it all went out to China … the knock-on effect of one of those plants shutting down and the guys that supply their raw materials and everything. ” Man, 48, Newcastle

Especially in the American focus groups, there was a heavy emphasis on outsourcing, with people mentioning changes such as less desirable jobs moving abroad and the growth of overseas call centers. Participants fixated on how the U.S. was “losing” this zero-sum game to countries like China or India – countries that “won” by virtue of manipulating currency or flouting environmental regulations. This idea also materialized in discussions about trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (which has since been replaced by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement).

“ If you tell a company in America, ‘Hey, you can move your manufacturing wherever, and we won’t charge you for it’ … well of course they’re going to do it. Because in other countries, they can manufacture whatever, and then they can just dump their waste into the river because they don’t have the environmental controls that we have. ” Man, 53, Pittsburgh

But not everyone saw the international arena as one of nation-states in competition. Participants also talked about the possibility – and importance – of countries “working together to solve problems that the entire world faces.” In focus groups on both sides of the Atlantic, people emphasized that their country was often ill-equipped to independently tackle large-scale issues like climate change or terrorism. Others discussed how solving complex issues was not possible for one country to do on its own without drawing on the resources and expertise of other countries. Even skeptics of globalization acknowledged that cooperation, at least to some extent, was necessary to solve complex issues.

“ We need to be educating and sharing. … Certain countries have gotten better expertise and that kind of thing in certain fields, and they can share knowledge. ” Man, 46, Birmingham

In some cases, international cooperation was described as a responsibility. For example, one Labour-supporting “remain” woman in Birmingham noted that “every person is responsible for climate change,” regardless of where they live. The same was also true when it came to issues like public health (though these focus groups took place before the global outbreak of COVID-19).

“ We can’t solve [international problems] on our own, anyway. ” Man, 68, SEATTLE

Participants who saw globalization as an opportunity, as opposed to a threat, also talked about personal forms of international community made possible by advances in communication technology. For some, this was portrayed as an alternative to feelings of local or national solidarity weakened by global forces. The speed and pervasiveness of social networks was described as enabling communication “instantly across the world” and creating the possibility of a “worldwide community” that can provide “support when something happens all over the world.”

“ [Globalization] could only be a good thing … sharing knowledge instead of, like, ‘This is our information, and this is their information.’ ” Woman, 47, Pittsburgh

Others spoke about even more personal forms of international community, such as a man in Seattle who shared that, thanks to online connections, he had found a small but global group of people who had gone through the same jaw surgery that he had. Another man in Houston shared how, as a hiring manager, he couldn’t find qualified Americans to fill certain roles, so he has had to reach out to people overseas. For participants like these, technology and other products of globalization were viewed as a means to forge connections or bonds with people beyond their local and national communities.

Participants also stressed the ways in which people and ideas could flow, creating webs of interconnectivity and interaction that weren’t bounded by national borders. They pointed to the role of technology in education as providing “long-distance learning for the world.” One woman in Houston noted, “It’s no longer about one nation, it’s the entire … everything impacts everything else,” while another Houston woman stressed that globalization involves “recognizing that we are all passengers on spaceship earth … [and] share a common interest.” Core to this discussion was the sense that globalization involved the evolution of an “open marketplace for the world,” with “flattening borders” that reduced countries to mere “passport designations” or destinations for Amazon deliveries.

“ I think because of the internet, we have to start looking at ourselves as part of the planet earth, not Americans, not Italians, not Mexicans, whatever it is, we’re coming to the place where we’re going to have to be earthlings. ” Woman, 72, Seattle

While these focus groups were diverse and stretched across the U.S. and UK, their participants largely viewed globalization through one of two lenses: fostering an arena of international rivalry and competition, or creating the possibility of new cross-border communities. Among the former group, increased international connections have meant greater insecurity and threats to their country’s ability to maintain power and influence. For the latter group, globalization has come with perceived opportunities, and even obligations, to connect with others, find common cause and tackle global problems.

Disruptive … but inevitable?

Across the focus groups, participants in the U.S. and UK consistently agreed on one thing: Their communities, their countries and their worlds are changing. While the term “globalization” did not always roll off their tongues, participants concurred that the catalyst for change was an increasingly interconnected world in which multinational corporations, foreign trade and multilateral organizations had become important factors shaping local and national identities.

Whether people described being swept up by influxes of money and people, or left behind as jobs and investment moved elsewhere, the experience of globalization was often described in terms of “loss” and no longer feeling at home in one’s community or country. In some instances, these feelings led participants to sympathize with nationalist appeals to “take back control” or put “America first.” Others were less invested in defending local and national identities; they saw opportunity in the form of new social ties beyond their immediate locales and new international forms of solidarity, abetted by travel, digital connectivity and a sense of shared priorities across national borders.

Above all, the general sense among focus group participants is that no matter one’s politics, location, career or position in life, globalization is here to stay. Participants generally agreed that change at the local and national levels will continue, driven by increased international connectivity. Industries will continue to shift, societies will continue to wrestle with issues of multiculturalism, and technology will continue to alter the pace and pattern of cross-border ties and identity.

Methodological note

This cross-national, comparative qualitative research project was designed to explore more fully how local context and national identity shape opinions about globalization. Analysis is based on the 26 focus groups we conducted across the U.S. and UK in the fall of 2019 and more information about the groups and analysis can be found here and here .  

Acknowledgments

This report was made possible by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. This report is a collaborative effort based on the input and analysis of a number of individuals and experts at Pew Research Center. 

• The Birmingham focus groups took place in the West Midlands, the Newcastle groups took place in the North East and the Edinburgh groups took place in Scotland. The UK Office of National Statistics treats London as an independent region. ↩

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Globalization: Definition, Benefits, Effects, Examples – What is Globalization?

• Publié le 21 January 2019
• Mis à jour le 25 March 2024

Globalization – what is it? What is the definition of globalization? Benefits and negative effects? What are the top examples of globalization? What famous quotes have been said about globalization?

What is Globalization? All Definitions of Globalization

A simple globalization definition.

Globalization means the speedup of movements and exchanges (of human beings, goods, and services, capital, technologies or cultural practices) all over the planet. One of the effects of globalization is that it promotes and increases interactions between different regions and populations around the globe.

• Related: Traveling Today And Tomorrow: Cities And Countries With More Travelers

An Official Definition of Globalization by the World Health Organization (WHO)

According to WHO , globalization can be defined as ” the increased interconnectedness and interdependence of peoples and countries. It is generally understood to include two inter-related elements: the opening of international borders to increasingly fast flows of goods, services, finance, people and ideas; and the changes in institutions and policies at national and international levels that facilitate or promote such flows.”

What Is Globalization in the Economy?

According to the Committee for Development Policy (a subsidiary body of the United Nations), from an economic point of view, globalization can be defined as: “(…) the increasing interdependence of world economies as a result of the growing scale of cross-border trade of commodities and services, the flow of international capital and the wide and rapid spread of technologies. It reflects the continuing expansion and mutual integration of market frontiers (…) and the rapid growing significance of information in all types of productive activities and marketization are the two major driving forces for economic globalization.”

• Related: Planet VS Economy: How Coronavirus Is Unraveling A Dysfunctional System

What Is Globalization in Geography?

In geography, globalization is defined as the set of processes (economic, social, cultural, technological, institutional) that contribute to the relationship between societies and individuals around the world. It is a progressive process by which exchanges and flows between different parts of the world are intensified.

Globalization and the G20: What is the G20?

The G20 is a global bloc composed by the governments and central bank governors from 19 countries and the European Union (EU). Established in 1999, the G20 gathers the most important industrialized and developing economies to discuss international economic and financial stability. Together, the nations of the G20 account for around 80% of global economic output, nearly 75 percent of all global trade, and about two-thirds of the world’s population.

G20 leaders get together in an annual summit to discuss and coordinate pressing global issues of mutual interest. Though economics and trade are usually the centerpieces of each summit’s agenda, issues like climate change, migration policies, terrorism, the future of work, or global wealth are recurring focuses too. Since the G20 leaders represent the “ political backbone of the global financial architecture that secures open markets, orderly capital flows, and a safety net for countries in difficulty”, it is often thanks to bilateral meetings during summits that major international agreements are achieved and that globalization is able to move forward.

The joint action of G20 leaders has unquestionably been useful to save the global financial system in the 2008/2009 crisis, thanks to trade barriers removal and the implementation of huge financial reforms. Nonetheless, the G20 was been struggling to be successful at coordinating monetary and fiscal policies and unable to root out tax evasion and corruption, among other downsides of globalization. As a result of this and other failures from the G20 in coordinating globalization, popular, nationalist movements across the world have been defending countries should pursue their interests alone or form fruitful coalitions.

How Do We Make Globalization More Just?

The ability of countries to rise above narrow self-interest has brought unprecedented economic wealth and plenty of applicable scientific progress. However, for different reasons, not everyone has been benefiting the same from globalization and technological change: wealth is unfairly distributed and economic growth came at huge environmental costs. How can countries rise above narrow self-interest and act together or designing fairer societies and a healthier planet? How do we make globalization more just?

According to Christine Lagarde , former President of the International Monetary Fund, “ debates about trade and access to foreign goods are as old as society itself ” and history tells us that closing borders or protectionism policies are not the way to go, as many countries doing it have failed.

Lagarde defends we should pursue globalization policies that extend the benefits of openness and integration while alleviating their side effects. How to make globalization more just is a very complex question that involves redesigning economic systems. But how? That’s the question.

Globalization is deeply connected with economic systems and markets, which, on their turn, impact and are impacted by social issues, cultural factors that are hard to overcome, regional specificities, timings of action and collaborative networks. All of this requires, on one hand, global consensus and cooperation, and on the other, country-specific solutions, apart from a good definition of the adjective “just”.

When Did Globalization Begin? The History of Globalization

For some people, this global phenomenon is inherent to human nature. Because of this, some say globalization begun about 60,000 years ago, at the beginning of human history. Throughout time, human societies’ exchanging trade has been growing. Since the old times, different civilizations have developed commercial trade routes and experienced cultural exchanges. And as well, the migratory phenomenon has also been contributing to these populational exchanges. Especially nowadays, since traveling became quicker, more comfortable, and more affordable.

This phenomenon has continued throughout history, notably through military conquests and exploration expeditions. But it wasn’t until technological advances in transportation and communication that globalization speeded up. It was particularly after the second half of the 20th century that world trades accelerated in such a dimension and speed that the term “globalization” started to be commonly used.

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Examples of Globalization (Concept Map)

Because of trade developments and financial exchanges, we often think of globalization as an economic and financial phenomenon. Nonetheless, it includes a much wider field than just flowing of goods, services or capital. Often referred to as the globalization concept map, s ome examples of globalization are:

• Economic globalization : is the development of trade systems within transnational actors such as corporations or NGOs;
• Financial globalization : can be linked with the rise of a global financial system with international financial exchanges and monetary exchanges. Stock markets, for instance, are a great example of the financially connected global world since when one stock market has a decline, it affects other markets negatively as well as the economy as a whole.
• Cultural globalization : refers to the interpenetration of cultures which, as a consequence, means nations adopt principles, beliefs, and costumes of other nations, losing their unique culture to a unique, globalized supra-culture;
• Political globalization : the development and growing influence of international organizations such as the UN or WHO means governmental action takes place at an international level. There are other bodies operating a global level such as NGOs like Doctors without borders  or Oxfam ;
• Sociological globalization : information moves almost in real-time, together with the interconnection and interdependence of events and their consequences. People move all the time too, mixing and integrating different societies;
• Technological globalization: the phenomenon by which millions of people are interconnected thanks to the power of the digital world via platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Skype or Youtube.
• Geographic globalization: is the new organization and hierarchy of different regions of the world that is constantly changing. Moreover, with transportation and flying made so easy and affordable, apart from a few countries with demanding visas, it is possible to travel the world without barely any restrictions;
• Ecological globalization: accounts for the idea of considering planet Earth as a single global entity – a common good all societies should protect since the weather affects everyone and we are all protected by the same atmosphere. To this regard, it is often said that the poorest countries that have been polluting the least will suffer the most from climate change .

The Benefits of Globalization

Globalization has benefits that cover many different areas. It reciprocally developed economies all over the world and increased cultural exchanges. It also allowed financial exchanges between companies, changing the paradigm of work. Many people are nowadays citizens of the world. The origin of goods became secondary and geographic distance is no longer a barrier for many services to happen. Let’s dig deeper.

The Engine of Globalization – An Economic Example

The most visible impacts of globalization are definitely the ones affecting the economic world. Globalization has led to a sharp increase in trade and economic exchanges, but also to a multiplication of financial exchanges.

In the 1970s world economies opened up and the development of free trade policies accelerated the globalization phenomenon. Between 1950 and 2010, world exports increased 33-fold. This significantly contributed to increasing the interactions between different regions of the world.

This acceleration of economic exchanges has led to strong global economic growth. It fostered as well a rapid global industrial development that allowed the rapid development of many of the technologies and commodities we have available nowadays.

Knowledge became easily shared and international cooperation among the brightest minds speeded things up. According to some analysts, globalization has also contributed to improving global economic conditions, creating much economic wealth (thas was, nevertheless, unequally distributed – more information ahead).

Globalization Benefits – A Financial Example

At the same time, finance also became globalized. From the 1980s, driven by neo-liberal policies, the world of finance gradually opened. Many states, particularly the US under Ronald Reagan and the UK under Margaret Thatcher introduced the famous “3D Policy”: Disintermediation, Decommissioning, Deregulation.

The idea was to simplify finance regulations, eliminate mediators and break down the barriers between the world’s financial centers. And the goal was to make it easier to exchange capital between the world’s financial players. This financial globalization has contributed to the rise of a global financial market in which contracts and capital exchanges have multiplied.

Globalization – A Cultural Example

Together with economic and financial globalization, there has obviously also been cultural globalization. Indeed, the multiplication of economic and financial exchanges has been followed by an increase in human exchanges such as migration, expatriation or traveling. These human exchanges have contributed to the development of cultural exchanges. This means that different customs and habits shared among local communities have been shared among communities that (used to) have different procedures and even different beliefs.

Good examples of cultural globalization are, for instance, the trading of commodities such as coffee or avocados. Coffee is said to be originally from Ethiopia and consumed in the Arabid region. Nonetheless, due to commercial trades after the 11th century, it is nowadays known as a globally consumed commodity. Avocados , for instance, grown mostly under the tropical temperatures of Mexico, the Dominican Republic or Peru. They started by being produced in small quantities to supply the local populations but today guacamole or avocado toasts are common in meals all over the world.

At the same time, books, movies, and music are now instantaneously available all around the world thanks to the development of the digital world and the power of the internet. These are perhaps the greatest contributors to the speed at which cultural exchanges and globalization are happening. There are also other examples of globalization regarding traditions like Black Friday in the US , the Brazilian Carnival or the Indian Holi Festival. They all were originally created following their countries’ local traditions and beliefs but as the world got to know them, they are now common traditions in other countries too.

Why Is Globalization Bad? The Negative Effects of Globalization

Globalization is a complex phenomenon. As such, it has a considerable influence on several areas of contemporary societies. Let’s take a look at some of the main negative effects globalization has had so far.

The Negative Effects of Globalization on Cultural Loss

Apart from all the benefits globalization has had on allowing cultural exchanges it also homogenized the world’s cultures. That’s why specific cultural characteristics from some countries are disappearing. From languages to traditions or even specific industries. That’s why according to UNESCO , the mix between the benefits of globalization and the protection of local culture’s uniqueness requires a careful approach.

The Economic Negative Effects of Globalization

Despite its benefits, the economic growth driven by globalization has not been done without awakening criticism. The consequences of globalization are far from homogeneous: income inequalities, disproportional wealth and trades that benefit parties differently. In the end, one of the criticisms is that some actors (countries, companies, individuals) benefit more from the phenomena of globalization, while others are sometimes perceived as the “losers” of globalization. As a matter of fact, a recent report from Oxfam says that 82% of the world’s generated wealth goes to 1% of the population.

• Related: Globally, Business And Government Lack Trust, A New Survey Shows

The Negative Effects of Globalization on the Environment

At the same time, global economic growth and industrial productivity are both the driving force and the major consequences of globalization. They also have big environmental consequences as they contribute to the depletion of natural resources, deforestation and the destruction of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity . The worldwide distribution of goods is also creating a big garbage problem, especially on what concerns plastic pollution .

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Globalization, Sustainable Development, and CSR

Globalization affects all sectors of activity to a greater or lesser extent. By doing so, its gap with issues that have to do with  sustainable development  and  corporate social responsibility  is short.

By promoting large-scale industrial production and the globalized circulation of goods, globalization is sometimes opposed to concepts such as resource savings, energy savings or the limitation of greenhouse gases . As a result, critics of globalization often argue that it contributes to accelerating climate change and that it does not respect the principles of ecology. At the same time, big companies that don’t give local jobs and choose instead to use the manpower of countries with low wages (to have lower costs) or pay taxes in countries with more favorable regulations is also opposed to the criteria of a CSR approach. Moreover, the ideologies of economic growth and the constant pursuit of productivity that come along with globalization, also make it difficult to design a sustainable economy based on  resilience .

On the other hand, globalization is also needed for the transitioning to a more sustainable world, since only a global synergy would really be able to allow a real ecological transition. Issues such as global warming indeed require a coordinated response from all global players: fight against CO2 emissions, reduction of waste, a transition to renewable energies . The same goes for ocean or air pollution, or ocean acidification, problems that can’t be solved without global action. The dissemination of green ideas also depends on the ability of committed actors to make them heard globally.

• What Are The Benefits Of Having A Network Of CSR Ambassadors?
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The Road From Globalization to Regionalization

Regionalization can also be analyzed from a corporate perspective. For instance, businesses such as McDonald’s or Starbucks don’t sell exactly the same products everywhere. In some specific stores, they consider people’s regional habits. That’s why the McChicken isn’t sold in India, whereas in Portugal there’s a steak sandwich menu like the ones you can get in a typical Portuguese restaurant.

Politically speaking, when left-wing parties are in power they tend to focus on their country’s people, goods and services. Exchanges with the outside world aren’t seen as very valuable and importations are often left aside.

• Related: Why Is It Important To Support Local And Small Businesses?

Globalization Quotes by World Influencers

Many world leaders, decision-makers and influential people have spoken about globalization. Some stand out its positive benefits and others focus deeper on its negative effects. Find below some of the most interesting quotes on this issue.

Politic Globalization Quotes

Globalization quote by the former U.S President Bill Clinton ??

No generation has had the opportunity, as we now have, to build a global economy that leaves no-one behind. It is a wonderful opportunity, but also a profound responsibility.

Globalization quote by Barack Obama , former U.S. president ??

Globalization is a fact, because of technology, because of an integrated global supply chain, because of changes in transportation. And we’re not going to be able to build a wall around that.

Globalization quote by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former International Monetary Fund Managing Director ??

“We can’t speak day after day about globalization without at the same time having in mind that…we need multilateral solutions.”

Globalization quote by Stephen Harper , former Prime Minister of Canada ??

“We have to remember we’re in a global economy. The purpose of fiscal stimulus is not simply to sustain activity in our national economies but to help the global economy as well, and that’s why it’s so critical that measures in those packages avoid anything that smacks of protectionism.”

Globalization quote by Julia Gillard , Prime Minister of Australia ??

“My guiding principle is that prosperity can be shared. We can create wealth together. The global economy is not a zero-sum game.”

Other Globalization Quotes

Globalization quote by the spiritual leader Dalai Lama ??

“I find that because of modern technological evolution and our global economy, and as a result of the great increase in population, our world has greatly changed: it has become much smaller. However, our perceptions have not evolved at the same pace; we continue to cling to old national demarcations and the old feelings of ‘us’ and ‘them’.”

The famous German sociologist Ulrich Beck also spoke of globalization ??

“Globalization is not only something that will concern and threaten us in the future, but something that is taking place in the present and to which we must first open our eyes.”

Globalization quote by Bill Gates, owner and former CEO of Microsoft ??

“The fact is that as living standards have risen around the world, world trade has been the mechanism allowing poor countries to increasingly take care of really basic needs, things like vaccination.”

Globalization quote by John Lennon, member of the music band The Beatles ??

Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion, too. Imagine all the people. Living life in peace. You, you may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one. I hope someday you will join us. And the world will be as one

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6 Pros and Cons of Globalization in Business to Consider

• 01 Apr 2021

Throughout history, commerce and business have been limited by certain geographic constraints. In its earliest days, trade happened between neighboring tribes and city-states. As humans domesticated the horse and other animals, the distances they could travel to trade increased. These distances increased further with the development of seafaring capabilities.

Although humans have been using ships for centuries to transport goods, cargo, people, and ideas around the world, it wasn’t until the development of the airplane that the blueprint of a “globalized economy” was laid. This was for a simple reason: You can travel greater distances faster than ever before.

The development of the internet accelerated this process even more, making it easier to communicate and collaborate with others. Today, your international co-worker, business partner, customer, or friend is only a few taps or clicks away.

Globalization has had numerous effects—both positive and negative—on business and society at large. Here’s an overview of the pros and cons of globalization in business.

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What Is Globalization?

Globalization is the increased flow of goods, services, capital, people, and ideas across international boundaries according to the online course Global Business , taught by Harvard Business School Professor Forest Reinhardt.

“We live in an age of globalization,” Reinhardt says in Global Business . “That is, national economies are even more tightly connected with one another than ever before.”

How Globalization Affects Daily Life

Globalization has had a significant impact on various aspects of daily life.

For example, it’s changed the way consumers shop for products and services. Today, 70 percent of Americans shop online. In 2022, there were 268 million digital buyers in the US and by 2025, this number is predicted to reach 285 million.

In addition, the globalized economy has opened up new job markets by making it more feasible to hire overseas workers. This has created a wide range of career opportunities for both job seekers and employers.

The emergence of remote work post-pandemic was also made possible by globalization. According to a survey from WFH Research , only seven percent of paid workdays in the US were remote in 2019. However, this number climbed to 29 percent by January 2024.

Check out the video below to learn more about globalization, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more explainer content!

Advantages of Globalization

1. economic growth.

It’s widely believed that one of the benefits of globalization is greater economic growth for all parties. There are several reasons why this might be the case, including:

• Access to labor: Globalization gives all nations access to a wider labor pool. Developing nations with a shortage of knowledge workers might, for example, “import” labor to kickstart industry. Wealthier nations, on the other hand, might outsource low-skill work to developing nations with a lower cost of living to reduce the cost of goods sold and pass those savings on to the customer.
• Access to jobs: This point is directly related to labor. Through globalization, developing nations often gain access to jobs in the form of work that’s been outsourced by wealthier nations. While there are potential pitfalls to this (see “Disproportionate Growth” below), this work can significantly contribute to the local economy.
• Access to resources: One of the primary reasons nations trade is to gain access to resources they otherwise wouldn’t have. Without this flow of resources across borders, many modern luxuries would be impossible to manufacture or produce. Smartphones, for example, are dependent on rare earth metals found in limited areas around the world.
• The ability for nations to “specialize”: Global and regional cooperation allow nations to heavily lean into their economic strengths, knowing they can trade products for other resources. An example is a tropical nation that specializes in exporting a certain fruit. It’s been shown that when nations specialize in the production of goods or services in which they have an advantage, trade benefits both parties.

2. Increased Global Cooperation

For a globalized economy to exist, nations must be willing to put their differences aside and work together. Therefore, increased globalization has been linked to a reduction—though not an elimination—of conflict.

“Of course, as long as there have been nations, they've been connected with each other through the exchange of lethal force—through war and conquest—and this threat has never gone away,” Reinhardt says in Global Business . “The conventional wisdom has been that the increased intensity of these other flows—goods, services, capital, people, and so on—have reduced the probability that the world's nations will fall back into the catastrophe of war.”

3. Increased Cross-Border Investment

According to the course Global Business , globalization has led to an increase in cross-border investment. At the macroeconomic level, this international investment has been shown to enhance welfare on both sides of the equation.

The country that’s the source of the capital benefits because it can often earn a higher return abroad than domestically. The country that receives the inflow of capital benefits because that capital contributes to investment and, therefore, to productivity. Foreign investment also often comes with, or in the form of, technology, know-how, or access to distribution channels that can help the recipient nation.

Disadvantages of Globalization

1. increased competition.

When viewed as a whole, global free trade is beneficial to the entire system. Individual companies, organizations, and workers can be disadvantaged, however, by global competition. This is similar to how these parties might be disadvantaged by domestic competition: The pool has simply widened.

With this in mind, some firms, industries, and citizens may elect governments to pursue protectionist policies designed to buffer domestic firms or workers from foreign competition. Protectionism often takes the form of tariffs, quotas, or non-tariff barriers, such as quality or sanitation requirements that make it more difficult for a competing nation or business to justify doing business in the country. These efforts can often be detrimental to the overall economic performance of both parties.

“Although we live in an age of globalization, we also seem to be living in an age of anti-globalization,” Reinhardt says in Global Business . “Dissatisfaction with the results of freer trade, concern about foreign investment, and polarized views about immigration all seem to be playing important roles in rich-country politics in the United States and Europe. The threats in Western democracy to the post-war globalist consensus have never been stronger.”

2. Disproportionate Growth

Another issue of globalization is that it can introduce disproportionate growth both between and within nations. These effects must be carefully managed economically and morally.

Within countries, globalization often has the effect of increasing immigration. Macroeconomically, immigration increases gross domestic product (GDP), which can be an economic boon to the recipient nation. Immigration may, however, reduce GDP per capita in the short run if immigrants’ income is lower than the average income of those already living in the country.

Additionally, as with competition, immigration can benefit the country as a whole while imposing costs on people who may want their government to restrict immigration to protect them from those costs. These sentiments are often tied to and motivated—at least in part—by racism and xenophobia.

“Meanwhile, outside the rich world, hundreds of millions of people remain mired in poverty,” Reinhardt says in Global Business. “We don't seem to be able to agree about whether this is because of too much globalization or not enough.”

3. Environmental Concerns

Increased globalization has been linked to various environmental challenges, many of which are serious, including:

• Deforestation and loss of biodiversity caused by economic specialization and infrastructure development
• Greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of pollution caused by increased transportation of goods
• The introduction of potentially invasive species into new environments

While such issues are governed by existing or proposed laws and regulations, businesses have made climate change concerns and sustainability a priority by, for example, embracing the tenets of the triple bottom line and the idea of corporate social responsibility .

Managing the Risks of Globalization

The world is never going to abandon globalization. While it’s true that individual countries and regions put policies and practices in place that limit globalization, such as tariffs, it’s here to stay. The good news is that businesses and professionals willing to prepare for globalization’s challenges by developing strong social impact skills have the potential to benefit immensely.

Whether you’re a business owner, member of executive leadership, or an employee, understanding the impacts of globalization and how to identify its opportunities and risks can help you become more effective in your role and drive value for your organization.

Taking a course like Global Business is one path toward developing international business skills and gaining an understanding of the macroeconomic, political , and social conditions that continue to impact globalization.

Are you interested in breaking into a global market? Sharpen your knowledge of the international business world with Global Business , one of our online business in society courses . If you aren't sure which course is the right fit, download our free course flowchart .

This post was updated on February 26, 2024. It was originally published on April 15, 2021.

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World Culture Theory: what is Globalization?

How it works

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Global Culture and Its Spread
• 3 Cultural Hybridization
• 4 The Influence of Global Organizations
• 5 Localization and Adaptation
• 6 Conclusion

Introduction

Globalization is a big, complicated thing that’s changed the world in many ways—economically, politically, socially, and culturally. Among the various ideas trying to explain globalization, World Culture Theory is pretty important. This theory looks at the cultural side of globalization. It suggests that when cultures mix globally, they either become more alike or blend into new forms. This essay will dive into what World Culture Theory is all about and how it sees globalization, focusing on how global cultural interactions shape today’s societies.

Global Culture and Its Spread

World Culture Theory is based on the idea that globalization isn’t just about money or politics; it’s mainly about culture. Supporters of this theory say that when cultures spread around the world, they create a global culture. This global culture spreads values, practices, and symbols across countries. For example, think about Hollywood movies, fast food places like McDonald’s, and big fashion brands. These are all Western cultural products that show how globalization makes cultures more similar. People all over the world watch these movies and eat at these places, making them a part of a shared global culture.

Cultural Hybridization

But World Culture Theory also knows that cultural interactions are complicated. Instead of just making one big global culture, globalization often mixes different cultures together to make new ones. This is called cultural hybridization. Take fusion cuisine, for example. It mixes cooking styles from different cultures to create new dishes. Or think about how Western music mixes with traditional music in different countries. These are examples of how globalization can create both similar and diverse cultures at the same time.

The Influence of Global Organizations

The theory also points out that global organizations and big companies have a big role in shaping global culture. International groups, multinational corporations, and global media spread cultural products and values worldwide. These groups often push certain values like individualism, consumerism, and human rights. For example, global news networks like CNN and BBC spread news and shape how people see the world. Big companies like McDonald’s and Starbucks spread a global consumer culture by being everywhere.

Localization and Adaptation

Even though global culture is everywhere, local cultures don’t just sit back and take it. They actively interact with and change global cultural elements to fit their own context. This is called localization. For example, local fashion trends might adapt global styles to fit local tastes. Or people might use English in ways that make sense for them. This shows how local cultures can change global culture to make it their own.

In the end, World Culture Theory gives a good way to understand the cultural side of globalization. It shows how cultures can become more similar and mix together to create new forms. Global organizations and companies play a big role in this, but local cultures also have a say in how global culture looks. So, the cultural dynamics of globalization are pretty complex, mixing both global and local elements.

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The State of Globalization in 2022

by Steven A. Altman and Caroline R. Bastian

Summary .   

As companies contemplate adjustments to their global strategies, it is important to recognize how much continuity there still is even in a period of wrenching change. The idea of a world where economic efficiency alone drives patterns of international flows was always a myth. Globalization has always been an uneven process, with cross-country differences and international conflicts significantly dampening international flows. That’s a big part of why — even before the present crisis in Ukraine — only about 20% of global economic output ended up in a different country from where it was produced. As the landscape shifts, global strategies must be updated, but managers should avoid the costly overreactions that tend to follow major shocks to globalization.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to a new round of predictions that the end of globalization is nigh , much like we saw at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic . However, global cross-border flows have rebounded strongly since the early part of the pandemic. In our view, the war will likely reduce many types of international business activity and cause some shifts in their geography, but it will not lead to a collapse of international flows.

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The Global Network

Globalization is the connection of different parts of the world. Globalization results in the expansion of international cultural, economic, and political activities.

Geography, Human Geography, Social Studies, World History

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Globalization  is the connection of different parts of the world. Globalization results in the expansion of international cultural, economic, and political activities. As people, ideas, knowledge, and goods move more easily around the globe, the experiences of people around the world become more similar . Globalization in History Globalization has a long history, for example, Ancient Greek culture was spread across much of southwestern Asia, northern Africa, and southern Europe. The globalization of Greek culture came with the conqueror  Alexander the Great . In fact, there are cities named for Alexander in Iraq (Iskandariya), Egypt (Alexandria), and Turkey (Alexandria Troas). The  Silk Road , a  trade route  between China and the Mediterranean, promoted the exchange of ideas and knowledge, along with trade goods and foods such as silk, spices, porcelain, and other treasures from the East. When Europeans began  establishing colonies overseas, globalization grew. Many early European explorers were eager to bring the  Christian religion to the regions they visited. The globalization of Christianity spread from Europe to  Latin America  through Christian missionaries working with the local populations. Globalization was  accelerated in the nineteenth century with the  Industrial Revolution , as mechanical  mills and factories became more common. Many companies used  raw materials from distant lands. They also sold their goods in other countries. Britain’s  colony  in India, for instance, supplied  cotton  to British  merchants and traders .  Madras , a light cotton cloth, was made in the city of Madras (now called Chennai), a major  port  in India. Eventually, madras cloth was no longer manufactured in Madras at all—the Indian  labor force  supplied the raw material , cotton . Factories in the county of Lancashire, England, created madras cloth. British factories made fabric and other goods from the cotton . British manufacturers could then sell their  finished goods , such as clothing and blankets, to buyers all over the world—the United States, Brazil, Australia, even India. Globalization sped up dramatically in the twentieth century with the  proliferation  of air travel , the expansion of  free trade , and the dawn of the  Information Age . Miles of  fiber-optic  cable now connect the continents, allowing people around the world to communicate instantly through the borderless World Wide Web. Communication Modern  communication  has played a large role in cultural globalization . Today, news and information zips instantly around the world on the  internet . People can read information about foreign countries as easily as they read about their local news. Through globalization , people may become aware of incidents very quickly. In seconds, people are able to respond to  natural disasters that happen thousands of miles away. Many people access information through improved and new technology, such as cell phones . About 70 percent of the people in the world use  cell phones . A farmer in Nigeria can easily talk to his cousin who moved to New York, New York. The success of global news  networks like CNN have also contributed to globalization . People all over the world have access to the same news 24 hours a day.

Travel Increased international  travel  has also increased globalization . Each year, millions of people move from one country to another in search of work. Sometimes, these  migrant  workers travel a short distance, such as between the Mexican state of Sonora and the U.S. state of California. Sometimes, migrant workers travel many thousands of miles. Migrant workers from the Philippines, for instance, may travel to Europe, Australia, or North America to find better-paying jobs. People do not travel just for work, of course. Millions of people take vacations to foreign countries. Most of these international  tourists are from developed countries. Many are most comfortable with goods and services that resemble what they have at home. In this way, globalization encourages countries around the world to provide typical Western services. The facilities of a Holiday Inn hotel, for instance, are very similar , whether the location is Bangor, Maine, or Bangkok, Thailand. Travel and tourism have made people more familiar with other cultures. Travelers are exposed to new ideas about food, which may change what they buy at the store at home. They are exposed to ideas about goods and services, which may increase demand for a specific product that may not be available at home. They are exposed to new ideas, which may influence how they vote. In this way, globalization influences trade , taste, and culture. Popular Culture Popular culture has also become more globalized. People in the United States enjoy listening to South African music and reading Japanese comic books. American soap operas are popular in Israel. India, for instance, has a thriving film industry, nicknamed “ Bollywood .” Bollywood movies are popular both in India and with the huge population of Indians living abroad . In fact, some Bollywood movies do much better in the United States or the United Kingdom than they do in India. Clothing styles have also become more uniform as a result of globalization . National and regional  costumes have become rarer as globalization has increased. In most parts of the world, professionals such as bankers wear suits, and jeans and T-shirts are common for young people. There has also been an increasing exchange of foods across the globe. People in England eat Indian  curry , while people in Peru enjoy Japanese  sushi . Meanwhile, American fast food chains have become common throughout the world.  McDonald's  has more than 37,000 restaurants in over 100 countries. And people all across the world are eating more meat and sugary foods, like those sold in fast food restaurants. The worldwide expansion of McDonald’s has become a symbol of globalization . Some menu items, such as the Big Mac, are the same all over the world. Other menu items are specific to that region. McDonalds in Japan features a green-tea flavored milkshake. At McDonald’s in Uruguay, a “McHuevo” is a burger topped with a fried egg. Globalization has brought McDonald’s to billions of consumers worldwide.

Economy The international  economy  has also become more globalized in recent  decades . International  trade  is vital to the economies of most countries around the world. American  software  companies, such as Microsoft, rely on international trade to make large  profits . The economy of the country of Saudi Arabia is almost entirely dependent on  oil   exports . To increase trade , many countries have created free trade agreements with other countries. Under free trade agreements, countries agree to remove trade barriers. For example, they may stop charging  tariffs , or taxes , on imports . In 1994, the United States, Mexico, and Canada signed the  North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) , which eventually ended all tariffs on trade goods between the three nations. This allowed globalization of goods and services, as well as people and ideas, between these three countries. Most large  corporations operate in many countries around the world.  HSBC , the world’s largest bank, has offices in 88 different countries. Originally, HSBC stood for Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation , which was founded in 1865 to promote trade between China and the United Kingdom. Today, HSBC has its headquarters in London, England. Economic globalization has allowed many corporations based in the West to move factories and jobs to less economically developed countries, a process called  outsourcing . The corporation can pay lower wages , because the  standard of living  in less developed countries is much lower. Laws protecting the environment and workers’ safety are less widespread in developing countries, which also lowers costs for the corporation . Often, this results in lower costs for consumers, too. Economic  markets are global. People and organizations invest in companies all over the globe. Because of this,  economic downturns in one country are repeated in other countries. The  financial crisis  that began in the United States in 2006 quickly spread around the world. The way globalization allowed this situation to spread led to the nation of Iceland nearly going  bankrupt , for example. Politics Cultural and economic globalization have caused countries to become more connected politically. Countries frequently cooperate to enact trade agreements. They work together to open their borders to allow the movement of money and people needed to keep economic globalization working. Because people, money, and computerized information move so easily around the globe, countries are increasingly working together to fight  crime . The idea of maintaining international law has also grown. In 2002, the  International Criminal Court  was established . This court, which handles cases such as war crimes , has a global reach, although not all countries have accepted it. Many problems facing the world today cross national borders , so countries must work together to solve them. Efforts to confront problems such as global  climate change  must involve many different countries. In 2009, representatives from 170 countries gathered at a conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, to discuss climate change . Other international issues include  terrorism ,  drug trafficking , and  immigration . The process of globalization is very  controversial . Many people say globalization will help people communicate. Aid agencies can respond more quickly to a natural disaster . Advanced medicines are more easily and widely available to people who may not have been able to afford them. Jobs available through globalization have lifted many people out of  poverty . Globalization has increased the number of students studying  abroad . Not everyone says that globalization is good, however. Some people worry that Western culture will destroy local cultures around the world. They fear that everyone will end up eating hamburgers and watching Hollywood movies. Others point out that people tend to adopt some aspects of other cultures without giving up their own. Ironically, modern technology is often used to preserve and spread traditional beliefs and customs. Opponents to globalization blame free trade for unfair working conditions. They also say that outsourcing has caused  wealthy  countries to lose too many jobs. Sup porters of globalization say that factory workers in poor countries are making much better wages than they would at other jobs available to them. They also argue that free trade has lowered prices in wealthier countries and improved the economy of poorer countries.

Battle in Seattle The 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was held in Seattle, Washington, United States. This meeting was protested by thousands of people opposed to globalization. The protests turned violent. Hundreds of people were arrested. Many were injured in confrontations with police. Many buildings were damaged. The incident is sometimes called "the Battle in Seattle."

Powerful Peppers Food has long been an important part of globalization. Today, foods in Korea and many parts of China are often spicy. They get their spice from chili peppers. This was not the case before the 1600s. The fiery chili pepper is native to the Western Hemisphere. Christopher Columbus first brought chilies to Europe in 1493, and from there they spread across Asia.

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Civic Participation Is the Defining Challenge of Our Time

With every act of giving and volunteering, we strengthen our social fabric.

Civil society is America’s great strength. We have a tradition of generosity that derives from the collective efforts of millions of ordinary Americans giving their time and money to the issues that matter most to them, adding up to monumental social good.

And yet this core part of who we are does more than just meet local needs. Everyday giving and volunteering mobilizes communities around shared values. It creates connections across differences. It gives us space to imagine—and create—a better future. It encourages civic engagement writ large—the kind of engagement that is crucial to a thriving democracy.

That is why, while overall giving in America remains strong, the underlying data gives us cause for concern. In terms of total dollars, year-over-year contributions are rising, but they are coming from fewer Americans.

According to Indiana University’s Philanthropy Panel Study , 2018 marked the first time in its research that less than half of households reported any charitable giving. More recent data from Giving Tuesday’s Data Commons shows this decline continued post-pandemic–in 2021, as fewer people donated to nonprofit groups than did so in 2019. Similarly, Americorps found that the rate of volunteering had fallen from 30% in 2019 to 23% in 2021—the steepest decline in the history of their research, going back to 2002. These numbers are worrying, but we also see them as a call to action and a pathway toward a stronger future.

We are the co-chairs of the Generosity Commission, a blue-ribbon panel of social sector leaders committed to casting light on the critical role of what we call “everyday givers and volunteers,” celebrating their efforts, and encouraging others to join them.

The Commission’s capstone report, “Everyday Actions, Extraordinary Potential: The Power of Giving and Volunteering,” out today, posits several hypotheses to explain the steep fall in giving to and volunteering with nonprofits. Economic precarity is chief among them. Beyond that, our systems are not built to encourage everyday giving and volunteering. Tax incentives for charitable giving, for example, aren’t available for those who are only able to give at smaller levels.

Our report points to other possible social factors, including the rise in social isolation , the decline in religious and civic connection, and a broad decrease in social trust. These paint a complex picture of generosity today—and point to the civic power and potential of the very act of giving and volunteering.

Read more: America Must Face Its Civic Crisis

In fact, everyday giving—of dollars or time—is a bellwether of other forms of civic engagement. The University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute, in research commissioned by the Generosity Commission, found that generous, or “pro-social” behaviors tend to cluster. Those who volunteer and donate are more likely to belong to organized groups and even to vote .

In a time marked by vitriolic polarization and an epidemic of loneliness, we can scarcely think of something more important. We know that giving and volunteering are the critical methods by which Americans practice the essential human enterprise of working together with others towards a greater purpose; that they serve as an indispensable bulwark of connection. It turns out, they are also fundamental underpinnings of our democracy.

To continue broadening the base of American generosity, we need to get all segments of our society involved. Businesses can contribute by convening employees to give and volunteer, and building their own social impact programs. Engaging public figures, community leaders and business leaders, and encouraging them to speak publicly about how and why they participate in their communities can cause ripple effects. Taking younger generations seriously and empowering their impulses to innovate can lay a stronger foundation for future participation. 

Further research into the changing nature of generosity, and making research more accessible, are also critical components in any campaign to reverse our current trajectory. And in all this, charitable organizations of all sizes can be further enabled to dedicate resources to encourage everyday giving and volunteering, so that they can reach everyday givers and volunteers at the grassroots level instead of being driven to only seek support from larger donors.

While the challenges facing civil society are difficult, they are not intractable. Significant, coordinated actions across our society—like the recommendations outlined in this report—can reengage Americans in the time-honored tradition of supporting each other through nonprofit groups, and inducting new generations into the same.

There is a role for all sectors, for media organizations, academic institutions, as well as each one of us, to play in this work. In an era when we disagree more on a shared vision for our future than ever before, few efforts could be more worthwhile.

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