GLOBALISATION

Process Of Globalisation In Which Societies Operate Within An Integrated World-Wide System



Process Of Globalisation In Which Societies Operate Within An Integrated World-Wide System

Under the contemporary conditions of accelerating globalisation and deepening global interdependencies in our world, peace is indivisible in both time and space. It cannot exist if reduced to a period only after or before war, and cannot be safeguarded in one part of the world when some others suffer visible or invisible wars. (Barbara 2008:41) Thus, peace requires, indeed, a new, demilitarised and democratic world order, which can provide equal opportunities for sustainable development. “Sustainability of development” (both on national and world level) is often interpreted as an issue of environmental protection only and reduced to the need for preserving the ecological balance and delivering the next generations not a destroyed Nature with over exhausted resources and polluted environment. (Barzilai 2008:465) However, no ecological balance can be ensured, unless the deep international development gap and intra-society inequalities are substantially reduced. Owing to global interdependencies there may exist hardly any “zero-sum-games”, in which one can gain at the expense of others, but, instead, the “negative-sum-games” tend to predominate, in which everybody must suffer, later or sooner, directly or indirectly, losses. Therefore, the actual question is not about “sustainability of development” but rather about the “sustainability of human life”, i.e. survival of mankind - because of ecological imbalance and globalised terrorism. The debt crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, for example, was used by these agencies to establish a global regime of disciplinary neoliberalism which has defined the Third World side of globalisation ever since. (Haggblade 2007:78)

As regards convergence or divergence tendencies, the question is whether the development levels of national economies increasingly integrated by globalisation in the world economy are coming closer to each other or not. More concretely: whether globalisation makes it easier for the less developed countries to catch up with the more developed ones, or, instead, tends to increase the international development gap and exerts a polarising effect. (Osterhammel 2005:354)

In the developed capitalist countries and also within the European Union, there is a more or less integrated market not only of products and services, but also of both capital and labour. If liberalisation, which is so much praised by “mainstream” economists, could really make progress not only in regard to international trade and capital flows, but also to international labour flows, and, thus, gradually an integrated world market of labour could unfold, then the international income gap would substantially decrease, indeed, as the average wages in the same labour categories would tend to equalise internationally, too. Contemporary society is faced with new and different challenges, requiring new strategies for primary and secondary prevention. (Kitching 2001:867)

The "national societies" of the contemporary world show a great many differences, stemming partly from their own past, partly from their recent transformation. Differences appear not only in the level of economic and technological development and the related world-economic position (as between the "North" and the "South") or in respect of ...