Introducing Globalization E-Book

Matthew Sparke

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1138

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Designed specifically for introductory globalization courses, Introducing Globalization helps students to develop informed opinions about globalization, inviting them to become participants rather than just passive learners.

• Identifies and explores the major economic, political and social ties that comprise contemporary global interdependency
• Examines a broad sweep of topics, from the rise of transnational corporations and global commodity chains, to global health challenges and policies, to issues of worker solidarity and global labor markets, through to emerging forms of global mobility by both business elites and their critics
• Written by an award-winning teacher, and enhanced throughout by numerous empirical examples, maps, tables, an extended bibliography, glossary of key terms, and suggestions for further reading and student research
• Supported by additional web resources – available upon publication at www.wiley.com/go/sparke – including hot links to news reports, examples of globalization and other illustrative sites, and archived examples of student projects

Engage with fellow readers of Introducing Globalization on the book's Facebook page at www.facebook.com/IntroducingGlobalization, or learn more about this topic by enrolling in the free Coursera course Globalization and You at www.coursera.org/course/globalization

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Preface

1 Globalization

1.1 Introducing a World of Interdependency and a Word

1.2 The Networks of Global Interdependency

2 Discourse

2.1 Globalization as Dominant Discourse

2.2 Dissident Discourse on Globalization

3 Commodities

3.1 What is a Commodity?

3.2 World Trade

3.3 Commodity Chains

3.4 TNCs

4 Labor

4.1 Interdependence and the Far-from-Flat World of Workers

4.2 Transnational Responses of Organized Labor

4.3 The Changing Social Divisions of Labor

4.4 Transnational Responses of Organized Labor

5 Money

5.1 The Meanings of Money

5.2 Debt, Inequality, and Global Poverty Management

5.3 Student Exercises

6 Law

6.1 Trade Agreements and the Globalization of Commercial Law

6.2 Courts, Human Rights, and Judicial Globalization

6.3 Social Justice and the Grassroots Globalization of Law

7 Governance

7.1 The End of the Nation-State?

7.2 Inter-Governmental Institutions of Global Governance

7.3 Non-Governmental Organizations of Global Governance

8 Space

8.1 Uneven Development, Geopolitics, and Geoeconomics

8.2 Global Cities and Speculative Urbanism

8.3 Enclaves, Slums, and Citizenship

9 Health

9.1 Interdependent Ecologies of Global Change

9.2 Molecular Biomedicine and Global Health

9.3 Globalization and Global Determinants of Health

10 Responses

10.1 Globalization and the Three “R”s: Reaction, Resilience, and Resistance

10.2 Reaction and Resistance to Global Neoliberalization

10.3 Resilience and Resistance in the Global University

Glossary

Index

About the Author

Matthew Sparke is Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Washington, where he also serves as the Director of the undergraduate program in Global Health. He has authored over 60 scholarly publications, including the book In the Space of Theory (2005), but he is also dedicated to teaching about ­globalization as well as writing about it. He has multiple awards for his work as a teacher, including the lifetime Distinguished Teaching award from the University of Washington.

This edition first published 2013© 2013 Matthew Sparke

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sparke, Matthew.Introducing globalization : ties, tensions, and uneven integration / Matthew Sparke.pages cmIncludes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-631-23128-8 – ISBN 978-0-631-23129-5 (pbk.) 1. International economic integration. 2. Globalization. I. Title.HF1418.5.S685 2013303.48′2–dc23

2012031790

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Morocco © GavinD/iStockphoto; forest © Stephen Rees/iStockphoto; ship © james steidl/iStockphoto; Times Square © Terraxplorer; monk © Glen Allison/Getty; concrete wall © AFP/Getty ImagesCover design by www.cyandesign.co.uk

Figures

Figure 0.1

Front cover of

The Wonder Book of Empire for Boys and Girls

.

Figure 0.2

“No Globalization Without Representation.”

Figure 0.3

“No Globalization Without Representation.”

Figure 2.1

Remapping the world in Heathrow airport.

Figure 2.2

Examples of appeals for global solidarity in the Seattle protests of 1999.

Figure 2.3

Map showing the global development of thematic and regional (re)placements of the WSF.

Figure 2.4

Map of Occupy-related, geolocated tweets from October 15 to November 5, 2011.

Figure 3.1

Indexed global ratio of trade to GDP.

Figure 3.2

US balance of payments deficits (US$ million).

Figure 3.3

Map by author of global trade triad based on data from the European Spatial Planning Observation Network.

Figure 3.4

Global merchandise exports by region and destination in 2010 (US$ billion).

Figure 3.5

Ship carrying containers up the Rhine in Germany.

Figure 3.6

Normal commodity-chain stages and inputs.

Figure 3.7

Map of the global commodity chains supplying component parts for the final assembly of the Boeing Dreamliner.

Figure 3.8

Total world FDI and total world GDP indexed from 1970 base forwards.

Figure 4.1

Global GDP growth rate (%) from 1950 to 2010.

Figure 4.2

Increasing inequality measures from the early 1990s to late 2000s.

Figure 4.3

Shares of US income.

Figure 4.4

Percentage of total US income going to top 1%, 1913–2010.

Figure 4.5

Gender pay gap in 40 countries.

Figure 5.1

Meeting of 44 countries at Bretton Woods in 1944.

Figure 5.2

John Maynard Keynes of the UK (center) with Mikhail Stepanovich Stepanov of the USSR and Vladimir Rybar of Yugoslavia at the Bretton Woods conference in July 1944.

Figure 5.3

US balance of payments deficits (US$ million).

Figure 5.4

Spiral of trans-Pacific financial interdependency.

Figure 7.1

Worldmapper cartogram showing country share of world military spending.

Figure 7.2

Worldmapper cartogram showing country share of votes at the IMF in 2006.

Figure 8.1

Earth from Apollo 17.

Figure 8.2

Barnett’s mapping of Core and Non-Integrating Gap.

Figure 8.3

NASA image of the earth’s city lights.

Figure 8.4

Ranked list of world’s biggest cities with comparative examples of selected national populations.

Figure 8.5

World in Dubai from NASA.

Figure 8.6

Entrance to Biopolis in Singapore.

Figure 8.7

Inside a maquiladora EPZ in Mexico.

Figure 8.8

Map of the IMS Growth Triangle in Southeast Asia.

Figure 8.9

Map of the Cascadia region in North America.

Figure 8.10

Map of Transmanche within the Euroregion.

Figure 8.11

Advertisement in Batam, Indonesia for a gated community.

Figure 8.12

Building the gate in a speculative landscape.

Figure 9.1

Cartograms contrasting share of global total (by country size) of cumulative CO

2

emissions for the period from 1950 to 2000 versus share of global total of excess mortality based on WHO estimates across four health outcomes: malaria, malnutrition, diarrhea, and inland flooding fatalities.

Figure 9.2

Global linkages between locations of carbon emissions and regions where consumption of resulting goods occurs, 2004.

Figure 9.3

Worldmapper cartogram showing country share of global HIV cases.

Figure 9.4

Determinants of health from global to national to local to personal.

Figure 9.5

“Preston curve” showing the association of national income per capita and life expectancy.

Figure 9.6

Regression line showing that health and social problems are worse in more unequal societies.

Figure 10.1

Signs of the global university.

Figure 10.2

Two approaches to global education in the contemporary university.

Tables

Table 3.1

Five models of commodity-chain organization

Table 4.1

Changing capitalist approaches to labor management

Table 5.1

Ten tips for understanding everyday money-market movements

Table 5.2

Millennium development goals to be achieved by 2015

Table 6.1

Top 10 global law firms

Table 7.1

Top 10 neoliberal policy norms

Table 10.1

Neoliberal norms and responses from left and right

Table 10.2

Alter-globalization protection vs. global corporate agriculture

Preface

This is a preface to a textbook on globalization, written in Seattle, on a Chinese-made computer, by an American citizen, who grew up in England, who first became ­interested in global ties thanks to a children’s book about the British empire (Figure 0.1), who went on to be taught global geography at Oxford by critics of imperialism, where he was told he should get a “more global” post-graduate education by leaving the United Kingdom, who then earned a PhD from a Canadian ­university, who is now a professor at a US university, teaching about globalization to classes filled with a new generation of international students, who have themselves been promised a “global education,” which is now measured by rankings of the world’s “most global universities,” which are listed like the ratings used to guide global investments in global corporations, which have created the globally competitive job market for which students seek globally valued knowledge, which is offered in globally circulated articles and books which, like this textbook, are ­written on computers made in low-wage factories, by young workers who never go to ­university, who as migrants from rural areas are often denied citizenship rights in the factory zones, whose exploitation is a major concern of global anti-sweatshop activism, which, ever since the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, has made globalization the contentious issue that it remains today, and as such, a major focus of public debate, analysis, and, as this textbook also ­exemplifies, education.

One of the most common protestor slogans seen in Seattle back in 1999 was: “NO GLOBALIZATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION” (Figures 0.2 and 0.3). The simple point here was to say that economic forms of globalization, like transnational trade, ought to come with new political forms of global participation, that they should provide workers, environmentalists, and human rights activists as well as trade ministers with a democratic voice in the global rule-making process. Recalling the language of the American revolution – “NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION” – this was a demand for political representation and ­democratic participation on a new transnational scale. Intentionally or not, however, the slogan also underlined the fact that representations of globalization – of what it involves, who it effects and how it reorders societies – are just as much part of the globalization story as the processes of global economic integration. In other words, how we represent globalization makes a difference because it shapes how global ties and tensions are understood, managed, and contested. This obviously makes writing a textbook on globalization a particular challenge. There is a need to represent the story of growing global integration as clearly as possible, but it has to be done in a way that also allows for reflection on the story-telling process itself – its interests, influences, and impacts all included.

Figure 0.1 Front cover of The Wonder Book of Empire for Boys and Girls, ed. Harry Golding (London: Ward, Lock & Co, Ltd, 1939).

Figure 0.2 “No Globalization Without Representation.” Photograph by Matthew Sparke.

Figure 0.3 “No Globalization Without Representation.” Photograph by Matthew Sparke.

Starting this preface with one long run-on sentence about the background of ­writing the book is just one way of provoking reflection on the story-telling process. Hopefully, it has already helped to make you reflect on how it is that you have come to be reading a textbook about globalization, and, perhaps, on how your ties to the technologies involved may link your own life with the lives of workers in far away factories. Maybe it has also raised questions in your mind about how your own ­perspective on globalization might be different from the perspectives of those workers. And maybe the information about my own background as the book’s author may have in turn made you wonder about how the imperial perspective indicated by that other older book – the one about the wonder of the British empire that was given to me by my grandfather – may have shaped this one.

None of the sentences in the pages that follow are as long and convoluted as the one at the start of this preface. The aim instead is to keep the writing simple so that the facts, theories, and debates about globalization are as easy to understand as ­possible. No assumptions are made about theoretical jargon that students are already supposed to know (and there is also a glossary at the end of the book that provides definitions of all the key terms that are introduced in bold in the main chapters). Moreover, the distinct disciplinary frameworks, models, and assumptions of p­articular academic fields of study are avoided as much as possible in the hope that the writing will therefore prove more open and accessible to all. Nevertheless, none of this means that the expectations for student learning are somehow set low or that complex ideas and arguments are ignored. Thanks to the example and ­inspiration of my students at the University of Washington, I believe it is perfectly possible for undergraduates to grasp the complexity of globalization in ways that allow them to become active participants themselves in the debates over how it should be represented. Again and again, students taking my Introduction to Globalization class have shown me that they can understand and engage in some of the most complicated, challenging, and politically fraught debates over globalization just as long as the course material is introduced in a way that builds a structure for new knowledge as it moves forward. Inspired by the achievements of these students over a decade of teaching this course, I have tried to create a learning “scaffolding” in the same way here in this book: assuming no specialist knowledge at the start, but trying to enable increasing intellectual engagement and critical reflection as the chapters of analysis and argument proceed.

In what follows, each chapter builds on the one that comes before with a view to supporting increasingly sophisticated understanding and explanation. As a result, the chapters towards the end of the book (the chapters on governance, space, and health) are longer than those that come before, and they address some of the most complex ways in which globalization creates new tensions and divisions as well as new forms of global integration. The final chapter builds in turn on all of this ­analysis to present one of the most difficult learning challenges of all: namely, the challenge of what is to be done, of working out how we should best respond as ­students and scholars to the current forms of globalization. Here, we return to the question of representation once more, rethinking it in terms of how our ability to respond to globalization – our response-ability – relates back to how we represent our ties to the processes of global integration and how we therefore understand (or ignore) our global responsibilities.

In order to approach the complexities of globalization in a way that makes room for reflection on responses, it is vital to remember at least three key points. The first is that globalization has a long global history of antecedents that structure what ­different individuals and institutions can do. These antecedents of contemporary globalization clearly include the sorts of global integration (and division) ­associated with earlier eras of empire. The second is that today’s processes of global integration are by no means inevitable or unstoppable; that they can instead be reversed or reorganized and re-regulated, too. And the third key point (one that remains as prominent through this book as it is in the title) is that globalization has not simply created a single “level playing field,” or “flat world” or “one world” as some of the more gung-ho commentators have tended to suggest. To be sure, this is a very common representation of globalization, and it is also a very influential representation in shaping global policy-making. However, it ignores far too much of what is happening. The new global interconnections of our world come with all sorts of inequalities and asymmetries of wealth and power. The ties have created tremendous global opportunities for connection, communication, and shared knowledge. They have made possible extraordinary growth in some places and amazing forms of global coordination between such places, too. Just visit a big global shipping port such as Singapore or Hong Kong, or spend some time in any global airport, and the sheer scale of global coordination is overwhelming. But this stunning world of connection and coordination has been built in such a way as to create terrible suffering, exclusion, waste, and violence at the same time. To play off the spatial metaphors in the titles of two books about globalization that have been popular among my students over the last few years, Thomas Friedman’s ­assertion that The World is Flat needs therefore to be constantly contrasted with the observations about Mountains Beyond Mountains in Tracy Kidder’s account of the obstacles facing the global struggle for global health.1

Kidder’s book is about the work of the physician and anthropologist, Paul Farmer, whose own writing about globalization and the recriminations of the world’s poor and sick is especially inspiring to me. As the alliterations in his books’ titles indicate – for example, Infections and Inequalities and Pathologies of Power – Farmer continually asks his audiences to remember how global health interconnections and global inequalities are related to one another; that they shape one another at the very same time.2 He thereby draws on the arguments of his patients in poor countries such as Haiti to make the case that the whole history of global integration from the age of plantation slavery and empire through to today’s era of debt, credit downgrades, and austerity has repeatedly involved division and dispossession, too. In this regard, another important inspiration for me in writing this book is a wonderful geographic history of globalization sketched by the Mexican cartoonist Rafael Barajas. Published under his newspaper name, El Fisgón, the book is entitled: How to Succeed at Globalization: A Primer for the Roadside Vendor.3 The point of this subversive title is to remind us once more that history, power, and, most of all, location matter a great deal in shaping who ends up “succeeding” at globalization. Against the view that the world is flat, we here are therefore again confronted with a critical commentary from the perspective of those who – like a roadside vendor in a poor country – find themselves on the impoverished sidelines of the so-called global level playing field.

Following Farmer and El Fisgón, this is a textbook on globalization that seeks to explain how we have come to live in a world defined by global integration and ­inequality at the same time. For the same reason, the book cover features no single satellite photo, global image, or abstract sphere representing a globalized globe, and the pages that follow offer no simple sound bites about a “borderless world.” The book spends much time addressing the increasing global influence of market competition on people’s lives, communities, and governments, but it avoids suggesting that there is a single liberal-capitalist or market-based “end state” of globalization to which we are all inevitably heading. My hope is that the book will therefore better enable and encourage your own critical thinking rather than offer the final word on whether globalization is good, bad, or ugly. It is a book that is meant to help you think and ask questions about connections and contradictions as well as learn facts. It is meant to help you become a knowledgeable participant in public debates over globalization. And it is also meant to show why the representation of globalization within these debates matters.

Of course, many people debate globalization simply because it is a fascinating focus for study and conversation. But, in the end, this book is written in the hope that it will help you to go beyond study, student conversations, and academic debates. Ideally, it will also allow you to join efforts to redefine and remake globalization in the world beyond the university. My own big hope as an author therefore is that by avoiding the language of inevitability, I have represented globalization in a way that makes such change seem possible. This is a much more wonderful global prospect than the children’s book I was given about the wonder of empire. And, in the same way, I hope it leads to personal journeys for readers that are still more global and transformative than my own.

Matthew Sparke, Seattle

Notes

1 Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); and Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond ­Mountains (New York: Random House, 2003).

2 Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (Berkeley: ­University of California Press, 2009); Paul Farmer, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley: University of ­California Press, 2003).

3 El Fisgón. How to Succeed at Globalization: A Primer for the Roadside Vendor (New York: Metropolitan, 2004).

1

Globalization

Chapter Contents

1.1 Introducing a World of Interdependency and a Word

1.2 The Networks of Global Interdependency

Chapter Concepts

Globalization needs to be understood on two levels:

as a name for increasing global interdependencies

as an influential key term in political speech.

Key Concept

The two main ways of understanding globalization need to be carefully ­distinguished. On the one hand, it is used by scholars to name the compound effects of intensifying and increasingly consequential global interconnections. By exploring these interconnections – including their component economic, political, legal, and ecological interrelationships – it is possible to understand how globalization has created global interdependencies that link the fates of people around the planet. On the other hand, we additionally need to ­understand how “Globalization” is simultaneously put to work as an influential codeword in political speech, a codeword that shapes policy-making and thus also alters the ways in which lives are actually lived globally.

1.1 Introducing a World of Interdependency and a Word

Why are you reading this book? It seems a simple question, and answers come easily to mind. It was recommended to you or is required reading for a class. It is about a topic that seems relevant, interesting or, at least, socially important. And, of course, you bought it. But think again. What actually enabled that simple purchase to ­happen? When you bought it, did you consider where and how the book was made: where the paper was made (China), where the typesetting took place (India), where the inks were manufactured (Switzerland), where the book was printed (Singapore), or who made the printing presses (Germans and Japanese)? You ­probably did not think of these things because the simple act of buying something usually conceals all this work. Likewise, when you buy a book you do not normally think about the global networks of air, sea, rail, and road transportation that put it in the bookshops; the oil and other forms of energy used in the process of transportation; or the global systems of electronic funds transfer that allow money to move from your account to the bookstore’s account to the accounts of the publisher, to the pension plans, and the stocks and bonds into which people working for the ­publisher might be putting the profits.

As if the globalized ramifications of all the book-publishing economic links are not already hard enough to track, think about the still more complex political and ­cultural phenomena that have come together to make the idea of globalization seem relevant, interesting, and important. When did you first hear the word or some related term like the global economy, global system, or globalism? How many times a day do you see adverts and promotional publications that use images of the globe to sell things? Why do so many activists, economists, reporters, and politicians repeat the word “globalization” as if it is some sort of common-sense code-word that everyone just understands? What has made it the focus of street protests and widespread ­controversy across the planet? And on top of all that, have you thought about why your university or college has come round to the view that it is worth having a course that introduces globalization at a level that demands reading a book that is entirely focused on the subject? What has put globalization onto the academic radar screen? Why has it become relevant and interesting? What makes it important? And what, you should hopefully be asking yourself at this point, is it exactly?

In starting with this set of questions, these first paragraphs have already given a clue as to the way the rest of the book sets about defining and explaining globalization. Global interconnections of production, commerce, and finance like those that made your book purchase possible are key, but so, too, are the political and cultural controversies that have made globalization the latest big buzzword. Other academic surveys of globalization generally prefer to focus only on the interconnections ­themselves. Most scholars are wary of the way in which globalization has become so fashionable as an idea and so blurred as a concept (even if putting it in the title of a book or article helps draw attention to their work). For usually good reasons, academics therefore tend to be suspicious about all the hype surrounding the term. One problem with this tendency, however, is that it treats the slogans, myths, and exaggerations about globalization as just irritants. By contrast, this book pays attention to the hype as more than a mere annoyance. The account that follows is still fundamentally organized around an analysis of real global interconnections. Each chapter is therefore focused on particular types of interconnection ranging from those of world trade and finance to those of law, politics, and health. However, along the way, the book also critically examines the buzz about globalization in order to underline how, as a dominant way of talking about and thinking about the world, the term has had its own global effects. The book as a whole, therefore, works with a double definition of globalization, a definition that addresses both (1) the actual networks of global integration and (2) the political and cultural concerns that have made “Globalization” a buzzword.