Citing a term with which we are all by now quite familiar, our new era has been entitled the age of "globalization." Thomas Friedman, a very knowledgeable New York Times journalist, and author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, as well as several other insightful works, characterizes globalization as a dominant international system which now shapes everyone's domestic politics, commerce, environment, and international relations. It has arisen in post-Cold War society as its dominant international system, making the world an increasingly interwoven place. Further, according to Mr. Friedman, globalization and the Internet have cast commerce, education, and communication onto a global stage. At the same time, it has converted the world's marketplaceinto one in which investors are able to "move money around with the click of a mouse"; and marketers are capable of directing their sales efforts toward "global elites," "global middle classes," and "global teens."
Globalization in fact consists of, and is driven by, the colossal worldwide diffusion of markets and democracy. According to economist Joseph Stiglitz, this has produced huge benefits to all of us. These benefits include greater and wider opportunity for trade, and increased access to markets and technology. Moreover, in the words of Mr. Stiglitz, this has brought us "better health and an active global civil society doing battle in the pursuit of more democracy and greater social justice." (Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents).
Our financial and currency markets are more interwoven than ever before. With our advanced technology, a single financial market now operates around the world and around the clock; and it is sensitive to changes anywhere.
All of this gives credence to another statement uttered by Mikhail Gorbachev, during a speech before the United Nations in 1988, wherein he stated that the world economy is becoming "a single organism."
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In fact, since World War II, there has truly been a steady and constant movement toward global economic interdependence. As time has moved forward, more and more businesses have buile factories and sold their products in more and more places. By the time the 1980s rolled around, corporations from every advanced industrial country, and some from a number of developing nations, had expanded their production and marketing activities across national borders. Vast growth in foreign direct investment, and in the activities of these multinational corporations, has linked many nations more closely, and has continued to promote our global economy.
During the 1980s, foreign investors owned U.S. corporations valued at almost a trillion dollars. And by 1989, American businesses were amassing over half a trillion dollars in earnings from their overseas activities. Furtrher, these years bore witness to a greater and greater number of intercorporate alliances, in the production as well as the service sectors. It was estimated, for example, that more than twenty thousand such unions occurred between 1996 and 1998 alone. Many, or perhaps most, of these alliances, mergers, and takeovers, have taken place, and continue to so take place, across national boundaries.
It has therefore been generally agreed among the economic community that globalism is occurring on a grand scale, and has already triumphed over regionalism. New financial and technological forces seem to be propelling the world's economies into higher and higher levels of integration. Moreover, since the end of World War II, the prevailing scene is one in which numerous nations have been "catching up" with America's former status as economic behemoth. Mutual interdependence in the global economy seems to be universally recognized and acknowledged; and it is today obvious and thus agreed by most in the business community that the planet's economic interdependence is what has enabled global commerce to flourish so vastly of late.
As technology has advanced to greater and greater heights, it has overcome distance, and has contributed significantly to this movement toward economic globalization. A planet once dominated by military superpowers has evolved to become a "global village" led by a number of economic poowers. Moreover, these economic powers represent internationally-oriented entities, rather than individual nation-states.
In support of this characterization of our planet as a "global village," statistical facts disclosing that, between 1985 and 1990, foreign direct investment (in businesses in other nations) grew at an average rate of thirty percent per year--a rate of increase that was four times the rate of increase in world trade; and further that the annual flow of the world's foreign investment doubled to almost $350 Billion between 1992 and the late nineties. These expansions have, moreover, continued and increased during the early years of our twenty-first century.
Such numerous and varied statements direct us to an irrefutable conclusion that the marketplace today is the entire planet earth; and this global integration of technology, finance, trade, and information exerts primary influence upon most aspects of our lives. We are witnessing a process in the formation of a world economy that is analogous to earlier processes via which national economies were formed. What is required under such current circumstances, in the opinion of the economist Joseph Stiglitz, is a governing body that shall be accountable to all the world's people, to oversee the globalization process in a way that would be comparable to the manner in which the various national governments guided these processes on their respective national levels in years gone by. Thus, in such an atmosphere of so highly integrated a global economy, many are beginning to look upon the nation-state as "anachronistic and in retreat."
What we are in fact faced with today is a world of nation-states attempting to govern and regulate a world of international commerce. The necessity here for a form of worldwide regulation appears to be a natural, and eventually inescapable, consequence. As though in recognition thereof, government policies at the close of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first centuries have in fact indicated movement toward weaker state control and greater international influence. But more is indeed required.
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There are, I am sure, still many diehards who favor preservation of the world as an agglomeration of individual sovereign nations, and an isolationist policy for their own respective states. But isolationism--the antithesis of unity--is, in the opinion of many, no longer practicable. It stands in stark conttrast to today's prevailing beliefs and tendencies toward the promotion of freedom and brotherhood for all. America has undergone periods when isolation was its preferred national posture. The Monroe Doctrine was an early official declaration of such a policy. In later years, our refusal to join the League of Nations represented expression of a similar attitude. But America has been far from isolationist where welcome to certain individuals requiring a new domicile is concerned. Notwihstanding sporadic expressions of opposition to newcomers, the U.S. has been a nation composed of immigrantrs since its inception. And these immigrants' loyalty has been at times described as something more than loyalty to a country--rather, loyalty to "the uplifting, dignifying effects of liberty and equality, the exhilarating lure of opportunity, the enjoyment, or even the expectation, of a greater prosperity." (Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism).
This immigratipon began, of course, long prior to the advent of globalization. And there have been numerous similar movements, of people seeking equality and democracy, in numerous other parts of the world as well. Such ideals, wherein people from different groups or classes stand in equal rank with each other, and where all share an equal voice regarding government, actually constitute a form of unity. It therefore ought perhaps be acknowledged that quests for equality and decocracy within individual nations may be considered to be precursors of the eventual unity of all on a global level.
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