i.
What is globalisation?
Thankfully, globalisation is not understood as being one thing. Different groups (depending on their social and geographical positioning) interpret it in various ways depending on their own political circumstances. The
minimal working definitions of globalisation (or dare I say ‘globalism’) circulate around the belief that complex interconnections are rapidly developing between societies, institutions, cultures, collectives and individuals worldwide. The growth of the global computer system known as the
Internet, in which this project is a contributor, is part of globalisation.
These
connections are believed to occur between cultural and economic
practices that are local, national, technological and corporate.
Globalisation is often discussed in terms of inevitability
by governments, activists and academics but in my mind there
is no such thing as inevitability only conformity and compliance.
If there is such as thing as globalisation then it has developed as the direct result of strategic choices by governments and corporations in the past thirty years.
In Australia, our engagement with the dominant form of globalisation was exacerbated by the Hawke/Keating Labor governments (1984-1996) who deregulated large portions of the economy, floated our currency and embraced
the all-trade-is-good mantra of global economic policy.
Discussions
of the development of globalisation usually include discourse
on post-industrialisation (and the demise of working class
institutions in developed countries), the proliferation of
information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the
expansion of global finance with the resultant formation of
a global economy. The global economy is the major defining entity
in the globalisation debate.
This
is not the first time the world has had a global economy,
but as argued by Manuel Castells, it is the first time that
we have had a global economy that works in real-time. By real time, he means that the majority of the
world’s economic activity is now controlled on a twenty-four
hour basis by tens of thousands of flickering computer screens
in the world’s key financial hubs.
Not
surprisingly, the rich countries define the dominant ideologies
of globalisation and corporations are the main catalyst. Many corporations are involved in cultural production,
thus creating their own world culture and value system. This
value system is based on consumerism and the triumph of individual
consumer agency over the collective cultural understandings
of both larger and smaller communities. Some even mistake
the independent agency of the consumer as democracy. Capitalism
has always been international and relied on internationalism
to expand; however it is now largely accepted that this expansion
has entered a new stage.
Authors
such as Falk, Friedman and Castells concur that the end of the
east-west logic of the Cold War ended the eighty year ideological
wrestle between centralised state economic planning and market
driven models and accelerated the globalisation process. Eric Hobsbawn, in his masterful empirical history
The Age of Extremes, claims that what we understand as
the Twentieth Century ended in 1991 with the collapse of the
Soviet Union.
What
we are left with is a world with only one major superpower,
one major economic ideology, one major political system driven
by a laissez faire, post-industrial economy (typified by the
Internet) that is increasing the wealth gap between and within
communities everywhere. more>>
