12.2: Pressure From Above - Globalization (Economic, Political, and Cultural)

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
Define globalization

• Discuss the differences between economic, political and cultural globalization.
• Distinguish between globalization and glocalization.
• Reflect on how globalization affects individuals and influences government policy.

Introduction

The collapse of the Soviet Union permitted long-developing global trends and processes to finally become the leading voices. Democracy defeated authoritarianism. Capitalism defeated communism. The West, led by the US and her NATO allies, had triumphed. Liberalism, defined as a society where personal autonomy and freedoms are preferred in political, economic and social decisions, would be adopted everywhere. Human rights, market activity, religious freedom, and people power were now the goals. Some authors, such as Fukuyama (1989) wrote that the end of the Cold War meant that there would be no serious competition left. Free-market, capitalist liberal democracies were the endgame. We were witnessing the end of history.

These global political, economic and social trends are collectively referred to as globalization. The term became popular in the 1990s. In his bestseller, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman (1999) described it as an “overarching international system shaping the domestic politics and foreign relations of virtually every country”. He claimed that the driving force behind globalization was free-market capitalism, where economic deregulation, market competition and privatization were the global norms. Globalization meant the spread of capitalism to all corners of the earth. Over time, these trends and processes would have a homogenizing effect, where the economies of the world would come together, pushing for a new global society based on capitalism, democracy and liberalism.

In response, Steger (2020) felt that Friedman’s discussion of globalization was somewhat simplistic. Globalization is more than just the advent of economic capitalism, or of Western values replacing local traditions. Globalization is best understood as the “thickening of the global-local nexus”, or what Steger refers to as glocalization. Steger contends that globalization is overused, that the term is employed to describe both the process and the condition. In other words, how do we get to a globalized world, and how will it look once we are there? The author separates the two, using globalization to refer to the processes and globalism to describe the condition, or the end-state. This then allows Steger to provide a short definition, “globalization refers to expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-time and world-space”. He then further simplifies the definition:

Globalization is about growing worldwide interconnectivity

Globalization has a number of ramifications for comparative politics. Worldwide interconnectivity is thickening the relationships between peoples, companies and countries. This has led to a muddying of the boundaries between comparative politics and international relations, to the point where it has become hard to separate what happens within a country to what happens outside of it. At some level, these interconnections have always existed. Some argue that globalization is not a new phenomenon, with roots in the ancient trade routes on land and sea. Others contend that the first age of globalization was in the heyday of European empire making, where Britain, France, the Netherlands and other countries colonized large swaths of the world. Finally, some suggest that the end of World War II and the development of international economic institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is when globalization took shape (Ritzer & Dean, 2015). Regardless of when we think globalization began, there is no doubt that globalization, as a process, has had an impact on how we consume, act, think, and even pray.

Given the complexity of globalization, study of related phenomena is often divided by discipline. There are ecological concerns of global production and global supply chains; philosophical considerations of the homogenization of globalization; effects of globalization on religious practices, such as pilgrimages; the leisure industry and worries about overtourism, and fast spreading technological advancements, including the importance that global social media platforms have in our lives. In comparative politics, the most relevant disciplines are economic globalization, political globalization, and cultural globalization. We will discuss each in detail below.

Economic Globalization

Discussion on globalization usually begins with economics. As we discussed above, free-market capitalism has been identified as the driving force in contemporary globalization, even if that may no longer be the case after the COVID-19 pandemic. Scholars use the term neoliberalism when describing this importance of free-market capitalism. Neoliberalism is a newer form of the (classical) liberalism, described above, where individual freedom and autonomy in political, economic and social decisions is preferred. Neoliberalism though is much more focused on economic freedoms. It takes the classical liberal arguments of private property, legal enforcement of contracts and the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, principles of free market capitalism within a country, and takes them global. Through identified policy proposals, including “deregulation (of the economy), liberalization (of trade and industry) and privatization (of state-owned enterprises)”, this D-L-P Formula was promoted worldwide by leading international economic institutions (Steger, 2021).

Neoliberalism has also been referred to as the Bretton Woods System, named after a conference held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944 to arrange and manage international economic relations after World War II. The US had a strong role in creating both the World Bank, an international institution that provides loans and financial assistance to developing countries, primarily by funding industrial projects, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which manages the global monetary system and provides loans to countries that experience a currency crisis. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which later became the World Trade Organization, was also initiated at Bretton Woods. The World Trade Organization (WTO) supervises the trade agreements between countries, with the aim of promoting free trade.

The collective efforts of the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO in promoting neoliberalism is labeled the Washington Consensus, so named because the World Bank and the IMF are headquartered in Washington, DC. Scholars, policymakers and politicians argued that D-L-P would lead to free trade between countries and foreign direct investment. Free trade is defined as unregulated trade of goods and services between countries, usually through the reduction of import and export controls. Foreign direct investment (FDI) is domestic investment by a foreign company, where the investment can be in the form of exports, the building of a production plant in the host country, an acquisition of a domestic company, or a joint venture.

FDI would spur the creation of jobs within a country, leading to increased employment, and the advent of more wealth in that country. Workers, who were barely surviving while working in agriculture, would benefit the most. Higher paying jobs would lead to more consumer spending, which would then encourage entrepreneurship. The importation of cheaper goods and services would help lower the cost of living as well. These changes would help create the conditions for the development of a middle class, which for some political scientists and economists, is the foundational stone for a functioning democracy. If all countries adopted a neoliberal approach, then the triumph of free-market, capitalist liberal democracies would be complete.

Steger (2020) refers to this discourse as market globalism, where a “self-regulating market…serves as the framework for a future global order.” For market globalists, capitalism is the end-game. They see a future where integrated markets create a global society where everyone benefits. The saying is that a ‘rising tide lifts all boats’. This is an optimistic view of globalization where people are allowed to participate in a global marketplace of ideas, goods, products, and services. The thicker the connections, the faster and more pronounced the changes. Capital will flow to poorer countries with higher margins of profit, with multinational corporations taking advantage of underdeveloped markets, rife with opportunities.

For many, this future has materialized. Research has shown that the while economic globalization has led to dramatic global economic growth, accompanied with a reduction in poverty and the creation of a sizable middle class, particularly in East Asian countries. However, growth in wealth has been uneven.

Political Globalization

Political globalization has called into question the future role of the state. The rise in importance of international institutions in the post-Cold War era has led to the erosion of state sovereignty and declining authority. International institutions are bodies of authority above the state that codify, maintain and sometimes enforce, sets of rules that govern state behavior. The United Nations (UN), the World Bank, the IMF and the World Bank are all examples of international institutions. Some initially believed that national governments would wither away and that some version of a world government would develop. Few, if any, believe this to be the case. More important is the concept of global governance, which is defined as the collective efforts of the world’s countries to find lasting solutions to global problems through the constellation of international institutions.

Global governance has been called into question during the pandemic, with many countries having sought to address the spread and containment of the virus on their own. The US, UK, EU, Russia, and China all developed their own vaccines. Some countries, such as the US under the previous Trump administration, eschewed cooperation with international institutions, such as the World Health Organization (WHO). The Trump administration accused the WHO of being insufficiently critical of China, where the COVID-19 virus originated and went as far to rescind the US’s annual contribution for WHO expenses. While the election of Biden in 2020 reversed this stance, multilateralism, or the formal cooperation between three or more states on a particular issue.

Additional actors have crowded the notion of state supremacy. In addition to international institutions are non-state actors. Non-state actors are defined in Chapter Eleven as political actors not associated with a government. It is further defined as “an individual or organization that has significant political influence but is not allied to any particular country or state” (Lexico, n.d). These include individuals who can exert significant political influence. They can include twitter users, documentary filmmakers, activists, consumer advocates, celebrities, ordinary citizens. Good examples include Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and Greta Thunburg, a young Swedish environmentalist. Other non-state actors include multinational corporations (MNCs), such as McDonalds or Starbucks, transnational criminal organizations, transnational terrorist organizations, paramilitaries, and armed resistance groups. In some cases, it can involve decentralized networks, such as reddit communities, where like-minded individuals come together online to affect politics, or impact the market through their collective action.

The most prolific non-state actors are nongovernmental organizations. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are private, voluntary organizations that unite, usually for action on specific issues. NGOs lie outside the traditional structure of international politics, but many have a significant impact on world affairs. NGOs derive their power from a variety of sources, most notably that of moral authority, where members believe that the cause they are fighting for is righteous. This includes many environmental NGOS, such as Greenpeace, that use the media and the strength of their individual activists to promote their cause.

Finally, the discourse of political globalization has focused on the process of democratization, as discussed as economies converged on a neoliberal model of economic governance, the belief was that the politics would also converge as well. The diffusion of capitalist beliefs would be accompanied with the spread of democratic norms. Growing wealth would lead to an increase in the size of a country’s middle class, which would then lead citizens to demand greater representation in their government. For quite a few, globalization not only meant greater cooperation between countries to address global problems, such as climate change or terrorism, but also that this cooperation would happened between increasingly democratic states.

This has not occurred and indeed bureaucratic authoritarianism may develop as a viable alternative to democratic governance. Bureaucratic authoritarianism is the management of a country through a strong bureaucratic organization that excludes the popular will of the people, and where decisions are made by technocrats, or subject matter experts. Both Russia and China have veered towards this model and its effectiveness is being studied by other political leaders. Indeed, the general lockdown of many countries’ economics, the closing of borders and the granting of emergency powers during the pandemic suggest the shift towards authoritarianism may accelerate.

Cultural Globalization

Cultural globalization can be understood in a number of ways. First, is through the flow of people that have occurred in the last three decades. Second, is through the ever growing flow of information brought on newer technologies. Ideally, scholars thought that the peoples of the world would eventually coalesce into a one global civil society, or what Steger (2020) calls the global imaginary. The global imaginary refers to people’s growing consciousness of global connectivity, where people think of themselves as global citizens first. Yet, globalization has affected the ways in which cultural forms move and change. These moves are re-used to fashion new identities in diverse contexts. Changes affect how we view ourselves and others impacts our daily lives and those around us. For example, migration can have a nativist effect on the receiving country. Too much migration often leads to a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment among the public, which is sometimes accompanied by xenophobia and discriminatory action.

The end of the Cold War has seen a growth in the number of people moving from one place to another, referred to as migrants. These movements, usually between countries, have been both intentionally and unintentionally. Intentional migration is when a person chooses to move from one place to another. This can include immigrants and sojourners. Immigrants are migrants who willingly and legally left their home countries to work and live in another country. Immigrants often have needed skill sets or investment capital. Sojourners are migrants who temporarily live in a place & return to their home country. This included international & study abroad students and also temporary labor.

Unintentional migration is when a person does not choose to move from one place to another. There are several types of unintentional or irregular migrants. The most well known are refugees. A refugee is a person who is outside his/her country of nationality or habitual residence who has a well-founded fear of persecution because of his/her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group. A temporary asylee is someone who intends to stay in a new place for a brief time, but is subsequently unable to return home. Temporary asylees are not refugees, as they do not possess equal status & are often treated differently by the general population. Internally displaced people (IDPs) are unintentional migrants who have not crossed a border to find safety. Unlike refugees, they are on the run at home. At the end of 2017, some 40 million people were internally displaced due to armed conflict, generalized violence or human rights violations. IDPs often move to areas where it is difficult for aid agencies to deliver humanitarian assistance and as a result, these people are among the most vulnerable in the world.

There are also flows of information as well. The Internet and the rise in social media are two of the key changes in how we receive our information. The Internet, or interconnected global computer network that allows for communication and information sharing, rose to prominence in the 1990s. The development of HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP, HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and the first Web browser, combined with Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) helped to create the World Wide Web. Through access to websites, document repositories, blogs, discussion communities and instant access to news Internet-based resources vastly expand individuals’ abilities to access greater social information. We live in a digital world where the Internet and access to the Internet is ubiquitous. Millennials and members of Generation Z are digital natives, or people who were raised with technology. In contrast, Generation X and the Baby Boomers are considered digital immigrants, or people who did not grow up with today’s technology. An analog world, of vinyl records, turntables, printed books, live music, political rallies, and physical interactions, will never entirely disappear. However, our relationship with the Internet has fundamentally shifted our understanding of the world, going from a post-industrial society to an informational society.

The Internet has created sociopolitical venues for information to leave countries that are cracking down on dissidents and attempting to severely restrict access to information. Anyone can blog, which democratizes access to information and allows for all to act as public intellectuals. Knowledge exchange has become not a privilege, but an expectation, almost even a right. States have a difficult time regulating the Internet. Even when a government attempts to crackdown on users, users and activists find ways around. A good example is the use of the Internet and social media during the Arab Spring. Before the protests began, youth movements had already been organizing through Internet web pages and social media. Facebook and Twitter were instrumental in the lead up to the “Day of Revolt” in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square. al-Jazeera reported that “the week before Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, the total rate of tweets about Egypt surged from 2,300 a day to 230,000 around the world”.

The Mubarak regime blocked Internet use during the protests of early 2011. Protesters began using proxy computers to get around censors. They connected to users in Sweden, using dial-up modems. Once they were no longer subject to Egyptian authorities, protesters published an “Egypt Wiki page – a “how-to” list for activists to get online and stay connecte, started using text messages to organize their marches” (al Jazeera, 2016). Protesters also went analog. They created handheld signs when demonstrating. Per al Jazeera, “If you could not look down at your phone for updates, you could look up and find signs that explained where and when to gather next”. One could argue that cutting internet access led to unintended consequences. It may have led to more citizens taking to the streets, further fueling the revolution.