Understanding Globalization

• Globalization involves the spread of people, ideas, and goods, fostering integration between cultures, governments, and economies.
• It expands and intensifies social relations and awareness across time and space, increasing global connectivity.

Attributes of Globalization:

• It creates new social networks and multiplies existing connections across various boundaries.
• Globalization expands and stretches social relations, activities, and connections, like reaching global financial markets.
• It intensifies and accelerates social exchanges and activities.
• Globalization occurs on both objective, material levels and subjective human consciousness.
• It compresses the world, making the frame of reference for human thought and action more global.

Historical Periods of Globalization:

• Prehistoric Period (10000 BCE-3500 BCE): Limited contacts among hunters and gatherers, restricting globalization.
• Pre-modern Period (3500 BCE-1500 CE): Writing and the wheel inventions boosted social and technological advancements.
• Early Modern Period (1500-1750): The European Enlightenment aimed for a universal morality and law which led to capitalist world system that strengthened globalization.

Modern and Contemporary Periods:

• Modern Period (1750-1970): Transportation and communication innovations, population growth, and migration increased cultural exchanges and industrialization.
• Contemporary Period (from 1970 to present): Rapid creation, expansion, and acceleration of worldwide interdependencies.

Dimensions of Globalization:

• Economic Dimension: Extensive development of economic relations globally due to technology and capital flow.
  • Major Players: International corporations (General Motors, Walmart, Mitsubishi), economic institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO), and trading systems.
• Major Sources of Economic Growth:
  • Property rights
  • Regulatory institutions
  • Institutions for macro-economics
  • Stabilization
  • Institutions for social influence
  • Institutions for conflict management
• Political Dimension: Enlargement and strengthening of political interrelations across the globe.
• Cultural Dimension: Increase in cultural flows globally, with cultural interconnections forming the basis of contemporary globalization.
• Religious Dimension: Personal or institutionalized devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity.
  • Religion helps define a civilization, contrasting with race, language, or way of life.

Roman Catholic Teaching on Globalization (8 principles):

• Commitment to universal human rights.
• Commitment to the social nature of the human person.
• Commitment to the common good.
• Solidarity: Affirms shared responsibility within the human family.
• Preferential option of the poor: Addressing the vulnerability of the poor to environmental irresponsibility.
• Subsidiary: Decisions should be made at the lowest level to achieve the common good.
• Justice
• Integral Humanism: Concern for the whole person.

Justice Division:

• Commutative justice aims to fulfill contracts and promises on both personal and social levels.
• Distributive Justice ensures equity in distributing society's burdens and goods, guaranteeing equal moral and legal standing.
• Social justice refers to creating conditions for realizing justice categories and identifying the common good.

Ideological Dimensions:

• Ideology: Widely shared ideas, beliefs, norms, and values among a group.
• Ideology links human actions to generalized claims.

Major Ideological Claims of Advocates of Globalism:

• Globalization:
  • About market integration.
  • Inevitable and irreversible.
• Benefits everyone.
• Furthers democracy.
• No one is in charge.

The Global Economy:

• Economic globalization is the increasing interdependence of world economies through cross-border trade plus the movement of people (labor) and knowledge (technology).
• Internationalization is a qualitative transformation and functional integration between internationally dispersed activities.
• Examples: General Electric, Coca-Cola, US Nike.

Origin of Economic Globalization:

• 16th century: Identified by world system analysts through long distance trade, eg., Silk Road.
• 17th and 18th centuries: The global economy exists mainly in trade and exchange (exports to world GDP).
• 19th century: The advent of globalization approaching modern form is witnessed.

Driving Forces and Dimensions:

• Driving Forces:
  • Rapid growth of information in all productive activities.
  • Marketization: Restructuring state enterprises to operate as market-oriented firms.
• Dimensions:
  • Trade of goods and services.
  • Financial and capital markets.
  • Technology and communication.
  • Production.

International Monetary Systems (IMS) :

• IMS forms rules and standards for facilitating international trade among nations.
• 1870-1914: Decentralized market; money played a minor role compared to gold.
• 1931: Gold use declined after WWI due to increased expenditure.
• Bretton Wood System: Monetary system created in 1944 to stabilize currencies, replacing the Gold Standard.

European Monetary Integration :

• Began in the late 1960s to reduce the US dollar's influence on domestic exchange.
• The European Monetary System (EMS): 1979 agreement linking European currencies to stabilize exchange rates.
• European Financial Stability Mechanism (EFSM): EU fund that provides aid to member states.

Trade and Trade Policies:

• International Trade: Exchange of goods, services, and capital across borders.
• Trade policies: Regulations and agreements between foreign countries.
• Tariffs: Taxes or duties on imports or exports.
• Trade barriers: Government measures that reduce the competitiveness of imported goods or services.
• Safety measures ensure the high quality of imported products.
• National trade policy safeguards the trade interests and citizens.
• Bilateral trade policy regulates trade relations between two nations.
• International trade policy defines trade policy under charters like the WTO, IMF, and OECD.

Economic Models and WTO:

• Developed Countries: Open market economy prevails, and free trade policies are supported.
• Developing Countries
• World Trade Organization (WTO): Deals with global trade rules, ensuring smooth and free trade flows.

Global Economy:

• Outsourcing: Requires finding a partner with specific investments governed by contracts
• Market integration refers to how easily two or more markets can trade.
• Stock market integration: Stock markets in different countries trend together reflecting adjusted returns.
• Financial market integration is facilitated by a common currency and eliminated regulatory/tax differences.

Corporations, Financing and Risk:

• Global Corporation: Business operating in two or more countries; a multinational company.
• Financing: Tax bills can be reduced by borrowing in high-tax countries and lending to operations in low-tax countries.
• Risk management: Offsetting natural currency exposures through worldwide operations.
• Capital budgeting: Making smarter decisions on valuing investment opportunities.
• Foreign Direct Investments (FDI): Investment made by an entity in one country in a business in another country which establishes control.
• BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa were among the fastest-growing emerging markets as of 2011
• By 2050, they will become the world's dominant supplier of manufactured goods and services.
• General Agreement on Trade Services (GATS): First multilateral agreement on trade in services from the Uruguay Round.
• General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT): Deals with trade in goods
• Objectives: Ensure signatories are treated equitably when accessing foreign markets; promote progressive liberalization of trade and services.
• Nation-State: Political entity where a cultural group coincides with a sovereign government. Governments change, but states endure.
• Max Weber defined a state as a compulsory political organization with a centralized government.
• Nation is an imagined political community, limited and sovereign.

Additional Definitions:

• NeoLiberalism: Intensification of capital influence; capitalism as an ethic, political imperative, and cultural logic.
• Economic sovereignty: The power of national governments to make decisions independently.
• International Legal Sovereignty: Acceptance of a state as a member of the international community.
• Westphalian Sovereignty: The principle that one sovereign state should not interfere in another's domestic affairs.
• Interdependence Sovereignty is the capacity to control flows of people, goods, and capital.
• Domestic Sovereignty is the capacity of a state to choose and implement policies within its territory.

European Integration:

• European Integration: The industrial, political, legal, economic, social, and cultural integration of states in Europe.
• European Union (EU): International organization comprising 28 European countries with common policies.
• Economic Integration: Process by which countries increase their level of welfare, Agreements often reducing trade barriers.
• Stages of Economic Integration:
  • Preferential Trading Area (PTA): Reducing or eliminating tariffs
  • Free Trade Agreements (FTA): Eliminating import tariffs and quotas between members
  • Custom Union: Removal of tariff barriers with acceptance of a unified external tariff against non-members

Market and Economic Communities

• Common Market (CM): Eliminating all barriers, non-tariff ones, to the mobility of people and capital and resources.
• Economic Union: Has both a common market and trade policy, members pursue independent macroeconomic policies.
• Economic and Monetary Union (EMU): Single economic market, common trade policy, and single currency.
• Complete Economic Integration has member states completely forego independence of both monetary and fiscal policies.
• Political Integration: Integration of political systems' components.
• Neo-functionalism: It focuses on supernational institutions of the EU of
• Intergovernmentalism: A theory providing a conceptual explanation of the European integration process and is emphasizing the role of national states.
• Liberal Intergovernmentalism: Developed by Andrew Moravcsik in 1993 to explain European integration.
• New institutionalism: Highlights the importance of institutions in the European integration process, rational choice, sociological and historical.
• Multi-level Governance (MLG): Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks define MLG as the Dispersion of authority across multiple levels of political governance.
• Transnational Activism in States: Mobilization of collective claims by actors in multiple countries seeking more than one government.
• Social movement: Group action that empower oppressed populations to resist powerful elites.
• Global justice movement is a loose collection of individuals and groups: movement of movements.
• New transnational activism is multifaceted internationalism.
• Social media utilizes computer based technology that facilitates the building of virtual networks.
• Global Governance or World Governance is a product of neo-liberal paradigm shifts in international political and economic relations.

Elements of Governance

• Sum of laws, norms policies, and institutions mediate trans-border relations between state, cultures, citizens, and others.
• The United Nations Tasked to promote international co-operation and to create and maintain international order. Goals:
  • Maintain worldwide peace and security.
  • Developing relations among nations
  • Solve economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian international problems.
  • Provide a forum for bringing countries together .
  • Basic Elements of a State : Territory, People, Sovereign power.
• Nations-state are divided by physical and economic boundaries, and reduced barriers in international commerce.

Globalization's Impact :

• Increase of movement of people, information, commodities, and capital from the
  • Lifting Trade barriers.
  • Liberalization of world capital markets.
  • Swift technological progress(information technology, transportation, and communication).
• Problems of Poverty, environmental pollution, economic crisis, and organized crime.
• Effects call for an increase of calls to action for international and domestic levels.

Guaranteed and Global South:

• Guaranteed only by states through independent courts by
  • Respect for human rights and justice.
  • Promote the national welfare.
  • Protect the general interest
• Global south are regions of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania that are low-income areas.
• Primary concepts of GS :
  • Refers to the economically disadvantaged nation-state and as a post-cold war alternative to Third World.
  • Captures a deterritorialized.
  • Refers to the resistant imaginary of a transnational political subject that results from a shared experience of subjugation under contemporary global capitalism.

Regionalism

• Regionalism refers to the decentralization of political powers from a higher towards a lower political level.
• The Asia Pacific and South Asia includes East or Northeast Asia, South Asia, the Pacific Islands
• All being Economically Developed