Issue

Globalisation

We live in a society where we can contact people on the other side of the world at the touch of a few buttons. We can eat foods produced and packaged from across the globe, and we can watch movies and access media from other countries. This is thanks to globalisation.

Submitted 11/11/2005 By Ahram Views 69980 Comments 4 Updated 3/05/2006


Photographer : Andy Weisner

How does globalisation affect me?

Globalisation has changed the way Australians travel, eat and generally live.

The term globalisation is used quite often in relation to economics. This is because globalisation has influenced Australia to have freer and more open markets, meaning that less tax is paid by exporters and importers. Theoretically, this results in the growth of industry competition which increases the quality, variety and availability of goods, but lowers the prices that we have to pay.

However, globalisation has influenced our community and world in many other ways, even changing the scope and effects of terrorism. Whether these ‘effects’ of globalisation are good or bad is debatable. Below are a few points that the supporters and critics of globalisation have to say.

The pros of globalisation

  • Lowers poverty in developing countries with increased employment which provides income through trade and investment.
  • Global togetherness helps to bring about better environmental, labour and human rights standards.
  • Promotes competition which leads to improvements in management practices and workplace arrangements.
  • Improves the quality and growth of industries, leading to increases in jobs and pay.
  • Encourages open markets which theoretically increase all the participants’ wealth.

The cons of globalisation

  • Free trade doesn’t necessarily amount to fair trade.
  • Globalisation widens the gap between the rich and the poor, i.e. it helps the rich get richer and the poor, comparatively, poorer.
  • Huge multinational corporations are benefiting at the expense of economies, farmers, workers and the environment.
  • Multinational corporations yield too much power, at times even over the independence of developing countries.
  • Promotes ‘Americanisation’, thereby fading away cultural diversity, and our own unique cultural identity.
  • Workers are exploited in countries that do not have the right or means to organise for better working conditions and pay.

How do I know this?

Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade website 2005, ASEAN Regional Forum (AFR)—ARF annual security uutlook 2005: Australia, http://www.dfat.gov.au/arf/documents/security_outl...

Healey, Justin (ed) (2005), Debating the issues, The Spinney Press, Australia

Porter. K, ‘Globalization: good or bad?’, About.com, http://globalization.about.com/cs/whatisit/a/gzgoo...

Porter, K ‘Globalization: what is it?’, About.com, http://globalization.about.com/cs/whatisit/a/whati...

Porter, K ‘The best writing on globalization’, About.com, http://globalization.about.com/cs/greatarticles/a/...


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Kev - Lives - Here 24-Jul-2008

Globalisation, like everything, has pros and cons. No one forces people to eat at McDonalds for instance - those damn burgers are just too popular around the world.

From what I gather no one forces anyone to work at sweatshops either (though we should always support better working conditions in those sweatshops, and I think those two positions aren't at odds with each other). As always its about information, information, information about what's going on in those sweatshops that will improve them - banning sweatshops won't work (capitalism is far too virulent for that).

Anyways, support the Doha round (or what's left of it). For info from a non-partisan group: http://ictsd.net/

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Rita 19-Dec-2007

Globalisation definitely has its fair share of pros and cons. McDonald’s is a good example of the globalisation of corporations. You can find McDonald’s anywhere these days- from the United States to Thailand. As corporations continue to expand their businesses and implement their catchy phrases, “I’m lovin it,” across the globe, can this eventually lead to less diversity and diminishing culture?

What also draws my concern is its ability to increasingly divide nations; people, simply by their financial status. It is true, with globalisation, as the rich become richer, the poor become poorer.

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RonPrice 11-Dec-2007

During the 1980s, the concept of globalization began to permeate a diverse body of literature within the social sciences--after its first use in the early 1960s. An intellectual fascination with globalization, in which daily processes were becoming increasingly enmeshed in global processes, contributed in subtle ways to that rampant force that seemed to be part of the dark heart of this transitional age.

During these dark years, too, perhaps as far back as the 1960s, it became obvious that the controlling strain of my character was clearly emotional. It would have been impossible for me to work as a teacher and serve in the Baha'i community as a pioneer if my character had not been dominantly emotional.1 For both these 'jobs' came to diminate most of my life. The other parts of my nature merged into or were contained in an earnest expression of devotion to God and man in a framework defined by this new Faith. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 29 October 1997 and 1Alfred Marshall, "On Arnold Toynbee: Marshall Studies," Bulletin,Vol.6, editor, John Whitaker, pp.45-48, 1996.

While I was watching the slippage
of civilization into its heart of darkness,
like some kind of secondary reality
or should I say primary reality,
out there, on the box, periscopes up,
bringing it in through the tube,
some intensity was sucked out,
down, in, away from my heart,
day-after-day, hour-by-hour,
year-by-year, until now
a strange quietness invades
my soul, an easy peace, as I watch
the endless succession of signs
in an endless conversation with life,
where an uneasiness, cold and dark,
whispers through the spaces,
the rooms and high into the trees,
harrowing up the souls of this earth's
inhabitants--like some mysterious,
rampant force.

Ron Price
29 October 1997

GLOBAL CIVILIZATION AND ITS SPIRITUAL AXIS

Civilization lies in an awareness shared by a whole people. And we, all six billion of us, are slowly acquiring a common awareness.1 Increasingly, the cities of the world in which I had been born and lived during these epochs, began to fill like Rome, the capital of that ancient empire or some great monarchy of old, with travellers, citizens and strangers from every part of the world. Some introduced and enjoyed the favourite customs and superstitions of their native country. Some abandoned them. The sound and the clamour, the diversity of appeal, the richness and the confusion of cultures was incessant. In the midst of all this cultural diversity, the decline and the diversification of authority, an authority which once had been transmitted with blind deference from one generation to another, now provided opportunities for human beings everywhere to exercise their powers and enlarge the limits of their minds.

The name of Poet was in most places forgotten, although their number increased with every passing decade. Many of the orators were like the sophists of old. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning. At the same time learning was advancing by leaps and bounds the world over. If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, not name that time which elapsed during the epochs of this Divine Plan serving as the background for this autobiography. Although the benefits of this period to many millions of people have been obvious and impressive, a sense of optimism has not resulted. A slough of despond has resulted from the troubled forecasts of doom and the light of the twentieth century is hardly appreciated. The vast array of changes and the complexity and the relativistic ethos of the times makes humanity, for the most part, ill-equipped to interpret the problems of society.2 And so the sense of drift, of chance and a social determinism comes to possess a stronger presence. –Ron Price with thanks to 1Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries, Ticknor and Fields, NY, 1984, p.143; 2 The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 156, p.4 and Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Internet Quotations.

It kept moving west,
civilization on the move,
centre of gravity:
Fertile Crescent, Greece, Rome,
north and west Europe,
then North America.

And He kept sending Them:
One by One, every thousand
years or so. And where now
is the centre as we go global?
Everywhere? Yes, He's popped
Them all over the place, but
did not tell us until just recently.

Can we prevent extinction
so we don’t go the same way
as the Easter Islanders,
or the Anastazi Indians?

Where will our children be
after the disappearance
of the tropical rainforest
in 2030? Or all the primary
products in 2050, in a global
population of twelve billion
in 2040 or 2060 when they
are sixty or eighty and we...
are long gone?

Perhaps civilization will continue
its drift west into the middle of
the ocean! Perhaps that spiritual
axis he told us about before he
died, just after the first satellite
showed us ourselves as round ball,
this federated ship, beginning to sail
behind its powerful lights of unity,
for there is a manifest destiny
beyond this tempest blowing,
which will take us, crying, pleading,
bleeding humanity to the blessed
mansions of a global father and...
perhaps more importantly..motherland.

Ron Price
19 January 1997

So much that we do in life we know we could have done better. Our sins of omission and commission are legion. It is not my intention to commiserate on the long list of my failings; the world will not benefit from such a litany. This autobiography is not quintessentially confessional. From time to time, though, I mention some failing, some sin; an autobiography would hardly be an autobiography without one or two or three of such confidences. It may just be that history is the essence of innumerable autobiographies, however confessional they may be; however private, silent, obscure and ordinary; however glamorous and in touch with the seats of authority and influence. If I felt the world needed more sins of omission and commission to lighten and enlighten its burden I might include many more than I have. But the world is drowning in the dust of sin and is not in need of my dark contributions here to clarify its direction and deepen its appreciation of my life. Some of the words of Roger White are pertinent here. “My nurtured imperfections,” White says he has come to see as “not so epically egregious/as to embarrass the seraphim ruefully yawning/at their mention;/nor will my shame, as once I thought,/topple the cities, arrest the sun’s climb.” --Enough!-Ron Price, Tasmania

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lantacko 27-Apr-2007

I don't know much in the matter, but after watching 'The Corporation', i have become very interested in the topic. Sweatshops are a particular interest and it still shocks me that such horror still exists in supposedly 'sophisticated' corporations, such as NIKE and Target. Developing countries should not be taken advantage of in such ways, it is inhumane and only adds to the troubles developing countries are having to cope with.

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