Globalization and Its Discontents

Globalization and Its Discontents

Introduction

Globalization mentions to the worldwide diffusion of practices, expansion of relations over continents, organization of social life on a international scale, and development of a distributed international consciousness. As new types of communication and transportation endow individuals and assemblies to overwhelm spatial constraints and traverse nation-state boundaries in their activities, “supraterritorial” relations increase. Conventionally associated with economic integration in a world market, globalization more amply comprises numerous such types of connectedness. Together, these assess the drawing simultaneously of the world as a single society. This is experienced as the “compression” of the world, which gives rise to a widespread intensification of “consciousness of the world as a whole”. Since it changes the context of human experience, globalization escorts in a “global age,” the interpretation of which will require new ideas and concepts.

Discussion

Whether "globalization"is a helpful notion remains open to doubt. Semantically, it is empty when it needs a critical detail: globalization of what- For some the response is the free market, and globalization has become a lightning rod for praise and accuse of laissez-faire. For other ones, it is heritage and communication, and globalization means either homogeneity or new types of cosmopolitanism, hybrid identities, and diaspora sensibilities. Still other ones take globalization as an ethical fact--more actions than ever before sway faraway people--and it has been the occasion for much converse about the obligations imposed by interdependence (Joseph, 2002).

A certain intellectual opportunism unites much that is said on the topic. Suddenly, the free market as such is up for argument, social democracy is cleaned off and put back in play with no visible updating, and much is said with little effect about the importance of democracy, efficiency, openness, and other venerable but imprecise principles. "Globalization" provides a playing field so huge and unmapped that its explorers can get away with reckless qualifications of abstraction. That said, Joseph Stiglitz and George Soros have selected the period for their new publications, and their endeavours to do it justice display where one part of the globalization conversation has moved. The two signify approximately the identical thing by "globalization." Soros, in a typically succinct definition, calls it "the free action of capital and the increasing domination of national economies by international financial markets and multinational corporations" (p. 1). Stiglitz is less precise, but his anxiety is the identical as Soros's: how governance of international economic integration has failed, and how it might be improved. The two emerge to think well of each other. Soros boasts high praise on Stiglitz's dirt coat, and Stiglitz has conveyed unstinting admiration of Soros in the New York Review of Books (May 23, 2002). They are furthermore well qualified as commentators in an locality too forgiving of amateur reasoning. Stiglitz was chair of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and then chief economist of the World Bank, and so sat beside the center of international economic policy in the 1990s.

Soros, of course, is the financier-turned-philanthropist-and-philosopher who has financed civil-society ...