Globalization: Ancient and Modern

The usefulness of globalization as an analytical concept has largely been eclipsed by its growing fashionableness. The term's currency has distended its meaning to the point where it has gained the studied ambiguity and diffuseness of an advertiser's slogan. When powerful interests equate globalization with the progression of human freedom even as they work to insulate their institutions from political intervention, there is reason to believe that, as a label for contemporary social changes, globalization obscures more than it illuminates. Perhaps like the similarly popular phrase "peace through commerce," which in today's neoliberal climate really means "commerce through pacification," the meaning of globalization has to be inverted to be made useful. What does globalization mean? Mavbe rather than the growing cohesion of a world order, the word refers to the breakdown of order on a previously unimagined scale. At the very least, in its current uses "globalization" is replete with ambiguities and contradictions that must be disentangled to make the term useful for understanding the contemporary socio-cultural scene.

The end of the Cold War provided a major shock for scholars of politics and policy in at least two respects. First, it provided a classic example of the limitations of both social and policy sciences predictive capacity. Few foresaw, let alone predicted, the tumultuous events that marked the end of the decade. Second, those events simultaneously dislodged the organizing principle-the foundation-upon which much of the study of international relations was constructed in the postwar period. 1 The parsimony and simplicity of bipolarity signaled the hegemony of structural arguments in international studies and a corresponding ascendancy of questions posed by security studies over those relating to international and comparative political economy. Scholars and policy analysts alike thus favored these approaches, employing theories such as deterrence, compellence, and modernization in political science, while policy analysts often subsumed critiques of American policy in the Third World for the sake of strategic advantage over the Communist bloc.

International Journal of Humanities and Innovation (IJHI)

Globalization is a wide-ranging universal influence on humanity’s existence, experience, and intercourse, as it is tending towards reducing the world into a singularized society. In the presence of this omnipresent phenomenon, the physical barriers between nations are illusive because communicative technologies which are the driving force of globalization know no physical barriers. It enables trans-border interactions in whatever aspect of the lives of nations possible in real time. The questions that are often raised when discourse on globalization feature at the local and international scene are: what is the nature and essence of globalization? Is the phenomenon of globalization establishing symbiotic political and economic relationships between nations? Or is the globalization a neocolonialism and western imperialism and hegemony? Is globalization not creating a new form of imbalanced dependencies between “the haves and the have not”? There are two contrary views regarding the si...

2011

2002

Knowledge of globalization is substantially a function of how the concept is defined. After tracing the history of 'global' vocabulary, this paper suggests several principles that should inform the way globality (the condition) and globalization (the trend) are defined. On this basis four common conceptions of the term are rejected in favour of a fifth that identifies globalization as the spread of transplanetary -and in recent times more particularly supraterritorial -connections between people. Half a dozen qualifications are incorporated into this definition to distinguish it from globalist exaggerations. 4 conceptualization of globalization as the spread of transplanetary and, in present times more specifically, supraterritorial social relations.

The end of the Cold War provided a major shock for scholars of politics and policy in at least two respects. First, it provided a classic example of the limitations of both social and policy sciences predictive capacity. Few foresaw, let alone predicted, the tumultuous events that marked the end of the decade. Second, those events simultaneously dislodged the organizing principle-the foundation-upon which much of the study of international relations was constructed in the postwar period. 1 The parsimony and simplicity of bipolarity signaled the hegemony of structural arguments in international studies and a corresponding ascendancy of questions posed by security studies over those relating to international and comparative political economy. Scholars and policy analysts alike thus favored these approaches, employing theories such as deterrence, compellence, and modernization in political science, while policy analysts often subsumed critiques of American policy in the Third World for the sake of strategic advantage over the Communist bloc.

World Policy Journal, 2004

From being an economic strategy to being the buzz word of the time, Globalization has grown and emerged in a speed almost as that of a social trend. But as ironic as it may sound, the term is more often than not associated with a diverse array of things making it an extremely contested concept, and essentially so. Academicians perceive globalization in various different ways depicting it as an ideology, a condition, a system of processes, a policy, a market strategy, a predicament and even an age or an era. With such diverse lenses breeds diverse nomenclature and hence, those referring to it as a social condition term it as 'globality', characterized by the existence of global economic, political, cultural and environmental interconnections and flows that make many of the existing territorial boundaries seem futile. Sticking strictly with the etymology of globalization brings forth the idea of it being a set of social processes that are thought to transform the prevailing societal condition into one of globality. Globalization, then, almost explicitly suggests some sort of dynamism best captured by the notion of development or unfolding along discernible patterns. Yet another term is 'Globalism' opted by those who view the concept as that of an ideology of globalization going by the age-old tradition of employing-ism suffix to signify the theories, values and assumptions working behind driving the process. Hence, scholars exploring the dynamics of globalization have rightly come up with characterizing it as a complex, multidimensional and multifaceted concept which, at any cost, cannot be boiled down to a single-simple phenomenon or theme. As Andrew Heywood rightly puts it-"the problem with globalization is that it is not so much an 'it' as a 'them': it is not a single process but a complex of processes, sometimes overlapping and interlocking but also, at times, contradictory and oppositional ones." Perhaps the best way one can try unraveling the complexity, then, is to look at how these scholars have defined globalization in their own ways and consequently work out some attributes that appear persistently even when viewed through varied lenses. "Globalization can thus be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa." ~ Anthony Giddens, "The concept of globalization reflects the sense of an immense enlargement of world communication, as well as of the horizon of a world market, both of which seem far more tangible and immediate than in earlier stages of modernity." ~ Fredric Jameson

The end of the Cold War provided a major shock for scholars of politics and policy in at least two respects. First, it provided a classic example of the limitations of both social and policy sciences predictive capacity. Few foresaw, let alone predicted, the tumultuous events that marked the end of the decade. Second, those events simultaneously dislodged the organizing principle-the foundation-upon which much of the study of international relations was constructed in the postwar period. 1 The parsimony and simplicity of bipolarity signaled the hegemony of structural arguments in international studies and a corresponding ascendancy of questions posed by security studies over those relating to international and comparative political economy. Scholars and policy analysts alike thus favored these approaches, employing theories such as deterrence, compellence, and modernization in political science, while policy analysts often subsumed critiques of American policy in the Third World for the sake of strategic advantage over the Communist bloc.