Gray's Anatomy by John Gray

Author:John Gray [Gray, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-67367-9
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2009-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

17

What globalization is not

Capitalism, while economically stable, and even gaining in stability, creates, by rationalizing the human mind, a mentality and a style of life incompatible with its own fundamental conditions, motives and social institutions.

Joseph Schumpeter, ‘The Instability of Capitalism’1

‘Globalization’ can mean many things. On the one hand, it is the worldwide spread of modern technologies of industrial production and communication of all kinds across frontiers – in trade, capital, production and information. This increase in movement across frontiers is itself a consequence of the spread to hitherto pre-modern societies of new technologies. To say that we live in an era of globalization is to say that nearly every society is now industrialized or embarked on industrialization.

Globalization also implies that nearly all economies are networked with other economies throughout the world. There are a few countries, such as North Korea, which seek to cut their economies off from the rest of the world. They have succeeded in maintaining independence from world markets – but at great cost, both economic and human. Globalization is an historical process. It does not require that economic life throughout the world be equally and intensively integrated. As a seminal study of the subject has put it, ‘Globalization is not a singular condition, a linear process or a final end-point of social change.’2

Nor is globalization an end-state towards which all economies are converging. A universal state of equal integration in worldwide economic activity is precisely what globalization is not. On the contrary, the increased interconnection of economic activity throughout the world accentuates uneven development between different countries. It exaggerates the dependency of ‘peripheral’ developing states such as Mexico on investment from economies nearer the ‘centre’, such as the United States. Though one consequence of a more globalized economy is to overturn or weaken some hierarchical economic relationships between states – between Western countries and China, for example – at the same time it strengthens some existing hierarchical relations and creates new ones.

Nor does the claim that we are undergoing a rapid advance in the further globalization of economic life necessarily mean that every aspect of economic activity in any one society is becoming significantly more sensitive to economic activity throughout the world. However far globalization proceeds, it will always be true that some dimensions of a society’s economic life are not affected by world markets, though these may shift over time.

The emergence of world market prices for some commodities is only the beginning of globalization. There are few societies today in which much of life is not interwoven with economic activities in distant parts of the world. Yet throughout the nineteenth century, and for much of the twentieth century, global markets left most societies virtually untouched. Most of those traditional societies have now disappeared, or else they have been drawn irresistibly into the network of global market relationships.

In China, until the past few decades, hundreds of millions of people lived in peasant communities whose relations with world markets were slight and intermittent. Having survived forced collectivization

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