(March 07, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Theories of equality are ill-suited to deal with real-world issues of human difference and diversity. I have chosen globalization as one of the burning issues in which distributive notions of equality favour a dominant group or groups because of lack of recognition of differences among sentient beings.
There is no doubt that globalization is the exhortation of the decade. Writers are using the word to signify that something profound is happening, that the world is changing, and that a new world economic, political, and cultural order is emerging. Yet, the term is used in so many different contexts, by so many different people, for so many different purposes, that it is difficult to ascertain what is at stake in the globalization problematic, what function the term serves, and what effects it has for contemporary theory and politics.
The term globalization is used both in a descriptive and normative sense. It describes a process of internationalization and growing interdependencies, wherein boundaries of nations become less and less important in decisions to be taken by economic agents. The normative perspective assumes that the full liberalization of market forces through open trade and foreign investment regimes will stimulate sustained growth and greater convergence of income per capita throughout the world.
Globalization is a term used to describe the changes in societies and the world economy that are the result of dramatically-increased trade and cultural exchange. In specifically economic contexts, it refers almost exclusively to the effects of trade, particularly trade liberalization or ‘free trade’. Between 1910 and 1950, a series of political and economic upheavals dramatically reduced the volume and importance of international trade flows. More specifically, beginning in World War I and up to the end of World War II, when the Bretton Woods institutions were created (i.e. the IMF and the GATT), globalization trends reversed. In the post-World War II environment, international trade, fostered by international economic institutions and rebuilding programs, dramatically expanded. During the 1970s, the effects of this trade became increasingly visible, both in terms of the benefits and the disruptive effects (Hurrell and Woods, 2006).
Globalization has had both negative and positive impacts in the contemporary world. Many countries have greatly benefitted from globalization as a result of dramatically-increased trade and cultural exchange. At the same time, some observers have been critical of globalization for various reasons, including environmental concerns and an increase in social ills.
A wide and diverse range of social theorists are arguing that today’s world is organized by increasing globalization, which is strengthening the dominance of a world capitalist economic system, supplanting the primacy of the nation state by transnational corporations and organizations, and wearing away local cultures and traditions through a global culture. For some, globalization entails the Westernization of the world, while for others it involves a cover for the ascendancy of capitalism. Some see globalization as generating increasing homogeneity, while others see it producing diversity and heterogeneity through increased hybridization. For business, globalization is a strategy for increasing corporate profits and power, for government it is often deployed to promote an increase in state power, while non-government social organizations see globalization as a lever to produce positive social goods like environmental action, democratization, or humanization.
Increasingly, in developing countries, social expenditure has been strongly affected by successive crises. Even in the absence of crisis, social expenditure has been curbed to reduce the budget deficits and avoid negative reactions in financial markets. These trends worry policy makers, especially in view of the long-term implications of poor education and health conditions on the population. Such social implications lead to the conclusion that the agenda for further trade liberalization and regulation should take into account the priorities and concerns of all parties. If not, resistance will increase and, as a result, prevent countries from taking potential advantage of open markets.
Most developed countries and countries with economies in conversion are unable to exploit the opportunities of liberal markets. They are very vulnerable to the costs of adjustment. To strengthen their capacity to benefit from open trade and capital movements, good governance and effective implementation of the laws and rules are required, together with a wide range of necessary micro-economic reforms. Education and the creation of infrastructure for the better absorption and adaptation of more advanced technologies remain important.
A critical theory of globalization is necessarily trans-disciplinary and describes the ways that global economic, political, and cultural forces are rapidly piercing the earth in the creation of a new world market, new trans-national political organizations, and a new global culture. The expansion of the capitalist world market into areas previously closed off to it is accompanied by the decline of the nation-state and its power to regulate and control the flow of goods, people, information, and various cultural forms.
There have been global networks of power and imperialist empires for centuries, accompanied by often-ferocious local resistance by the colonized entities. Accompanying the dramatic expansion of capitalism and new trans-national political organizations, a new global culture is emerging as a result of computer and communications technology, a consumer society with its panorama of goods and services, trans-national forms of architecture and design, and a wide range of products and cultural forms that are traversing national boundaries and becoming part of a new world culture.
Global culture involves promoting life-style, consumption, products, and identities. Culture itself is being redefined for previously local and national cultures have been forces of resistance to global forces, protecting the traditions, identities, and modes of life of specific groups and peoples. Culture has been precisely the particularizing, localizing force that distinguished societies and people from one another.
Culture provided forms of local identities, practices, and modes of everyday life that could serve as a bulwark against the invasion of ideas, identities, and forms of life extraneous to the specific local region in question. Indeed, culture is an especially complex and contested terrain today as global cultures pervade locales and new configurations emerge that synthesize both poles, providing contradictory forces of colonization and resistance, global homogenization, and new local hybrid forms and identities.
Globalization also involves the dissemination of new technologies that have tremendous impact on the economy, polity, society, culture, and everyday life. Time-space compression produced by new media and communications technologies are overcoming previous boundaries of space and time, creating a global cultural village and dramatic penetration of global forces into every realm of life in every region of the world.
Many have misused the allocated powers into exploiting children and women into the sex trade. The industry of child pornography is apparently experiencing a global rise in influence, due to a few different factors. The globalization of markets for everything and from everywhere to everywhere, whether it be organized sex tours or audiovisual distributions of the pornographic material, is a factor. This tells us that the child sex industry is taking the needs and desires of pedophiles into consideration and cashing in on the commodification of children.
The innocent children are compromised by variables out of their hands and in the hands of those who have been created by industrial capitalist societies. There are many reasons why these social ills have been on the rise. Some of these include poverty, situations in families, addictions, etc., factors that provide the raw product for the market of exploitation that exists.
In conclusion, globalization has done both ways. On the one hand, it has eradicated poverty in some parts of the world. On the other hand, it has been misused by some to exploit the world and to create social ills, with which the next generation will have to deal. Globalization has started to spread throughout the world in recent decades, especially to the world’s most populous countries, China and India. I hope globalization will create positive outcomes in the end. Nation-states, of course, should punish the people who violate the principles of globalization. This is an example of many burning issues over equality in the world today because it serves either one group or groups to achieve goals but puts others at a disadvantage. It can be said that this is because of a lack of recognition of differences among sentients.
(The author can be reached at e-mail: satheesan_kumaaran@yahoo.com)
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