From Walmart to Al Qaeda

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Globalization

David Murillo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351284141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

From Walmart to Al Qaeda explains the fuzzy, complex and seemingly incomprehensible concept of globalization. What is globalization? What are the core topics, theories and competing ideologies? Are we walking towards homogenization or towards a global collision of cultures and identities? The potential risks and challenges for the global economy, corporations and political regimes are acknowledged by most but not fully understood. This book provides a refreshing new look at how society is being shaped by globalization and how these apparent destructive patterns can be both explained and potentially remedied.Globalization is both a concept and a cliché. It is a term that is used to explain an economic system or the state of the world. David Murillo sets out the questions and identifies the interrelationships of different disciplines to both understand the issues and also find solutions.

The book discusses globalization and current attempts to conceptualize and measure it. There are theoretical and ideological debates on whether globalization is inevitable and the various alternatives for interpreting how the world works.Accompanying Teaching Notes are available on request with the purchase of this book.

1
Introduction to globalization

1.1 Images of a complex world

Is the world of today very different from that which our grandparents or our great-great-grandparents knew? Are we really living in a radically different world from that in which our ancestors lived? How has this world changed and what are the consequences of these changes for international relations, the economy, cultures or the environment? Or for the way business is done? The following pages seek to explain the different ramifications of the word globalization, so widely used yet at the same time so blurred and controversial. To do this we will need to explore its dimensions, its problems and its interpretations. Let’s start to answer these and other questions by taking a look around us and exploring some examples of these changes that we have come to attribute to globalization.

Let’s first go back to October 1998. A Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, issued a court order against former president of Chile and former commander-in-chief of the Chilean armed forces, General Augusto Pinochet, who at the time was on a private visit to the UK. The purpose of the order was to investigate crimes against humanity committed in the period during which he was head of government, after the 1973 coup. The arrest warrant gave rise to a long legal and diplomatic dispute that led to the former dictator being placed under house arrest in London and subsequently extradited months later to Chile, where no trial was held. For a large part of Chilean society, controversy was assured: the warrant and extradition order were perceived not only as an aggression to Chilean national sovereignty but also as an overreaching of the judge’s area of jurisdiction, which should have been restricted to Spanish borders.¹ To what extent was the indictment correct? And to what extent was the order a new phenomenon?

Now let’s move forward in time to 2010. A curious pseudo-documentary appeared on the Internet: Xmas without China.² It is the story of a young Chinese immigrant in California who challenges his neighbours to live through the month before Christmas without using or buying goods made in China. Is it possible? Although the outcome is predictable, the documentary is no less interesting for that. Obviously, the answer is no. The sight of a middle-class family having to go without toys, TV sets and a host of other products is a palpable demonstration of how different consumer habits are nowadays. It is also a way of asking ourselves how far it is possible to carry out patriotic consumption initiatives such as the “Buy American” campaign promoted by then President George W. Bush. Is it really possible to go back to consuming “home-made” products? According to the documentary, no. Furthermore, what does this tell us about the degree not only of interrelation but also of interdependence—so far, economic—between countries?

Let’s now move on a year, to Libya in 2011. A large part of the international community, led by Western countries with a few Arab allies, decided to intervene in the conflict confronting proponents and opponents of Muammar al-Gaddafi’s regime. It was not the first international intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign country, and it will not be the last. From the juridical and diplomatic perspective, the most interesting aspect is the legal point of departure from which the international community, with the UN and its Security Council at the forefront, decided to give the operation the go-ahead. They used a feature of international law that allows foreign intervention to protect citizens from their own rulers, known as the responsibility to protect.³ A contested and controversial doctrine with an uncertain future, but one that was nevertheless wielded in 2011 in the operation that toppled Colonel Gaddafi’s dictatorial regime. What does this intervention tell us about the notion of sovereignty in the 21st century? And about the capacity to present a joint global proposal on issues of global interest such as human rights?

Let’s move on again, in time and space, to East Asia: the Sea of Japan, the waters of which extend to Korea, China and Russia, in addition to Japan itself. In the summer of 2013 the international media reported on the grave ecological and health impact of the leak from the nuclear plant at Fukushima. The plant was incapable of stemming the emission of radioactive particles released by its core, which had been exposed to the elements since the nuclear disaster in March 2011.⁴ Although Fukushima is on the Pacific coast, the first countries to be alerted by the consequences of this leak were its neighbours to the west of the Japanese archipelago. The notion of risk, how it is understood and its geographical limits, have changed for good. Globalization and technological development not only bring us closer to risk but also make us increasingly vulnerable and incapable of protecting ourselves from it. Meanwhile, the number of potential ecological, financial and public health hazards grows steadily. What option do we have in the face of situations such as Fukushima or other similar events that will occur in a world overpopulated with nuclear power plants (not to mention weapons) subject to safety protocols that are not always homogeneous?

This extended list of large and small transformations that alter societies and ways of living and seeing the world, could include the—some would say—global protests against the closure of the computer services company Megaupload at the beginning of 2012.⁵ This Hong Kong based company provided the means to store and share electronic files of often dubious origin, and ceased its operations as a result of the application of the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) bill submitted to the US Congress, which broadened the scope for prosecuting and censoring web activities regarded as criminal.

We could mention the many attacks perpetrated in far-flung geographical settings by the terrorist franchise known as Al-Qaeda from the 1990s to the present.⁶ Or the proliferation of e-commerce companies, many of them located in countries considered as tax havens, which can supply you more cheaply and often more quickly than before with any item (clothes, books, guns or gardening products). This comes naturally at the cost of the progressive desertification of the commercial foundations of cities and towns and, inevitably, the tax base on which is built the so-called welfare state of what we regard as the developed countries.

For all these reasons, this and other lists of events are a clear demonstration of the magnitude of the transformation of the way we live and understand the world around us. Facts that in our private lives often go unnoticed, but that seen in perspective, with our gaze focused on the social change that is going on under our noses, truly reveal the radical alteration of forms of interrelation of societies and countries, its impact on the planet, and the challenges we have to face. Let’s begin, though, by putting names to this mesh of transformations that we call globalization.

1.2 Theoretical framework

1.2.1 Core concepts

Any quick consultation in a library, in the thousands of volumes devoted to studying the limits and characteristics of globalization, brings home to us the difficulty of reaching a single definition satisfying the different academic and ideological emphases and biases of their authors. We can, however, seek to understand it through the concepts with which it is usually associated. Thus we talk of globalization as a set of changes that transform relations between countries and individuals in a society. The core elements of these changes are:⁷

• Internationalization: intensification of cross-border interactions and interdependence between countries.
• Liberalization: the process of removal of restrictions imposed by governments on movements between countries in order to create an “open” and “integrated” world economy.
• Universalization: spreading of products, objects and experiences to all the corners of the Earth.
• Westernization: some (especially critics of cultural imperialism) have defined globalization as a progressive process of cultural transformation of the planet towards Western-based cultural patterns.
• Deterritorialization: the radical change in geography whereby places, distances and territorial borders lose a large part of their value and influence.

1.2.2 Central debates

In the above sections we have succeeded in giving the concept of globalization an elementary theoretical framework: what we refer to when we talk about globalization and what core elements characterize it. Having said that, we would now do well to explore the marrow of the ideological debate that lies behind it. The Sociology Department of Emory University in the US has compiled a list of the debates inherent in the discussion of the concept of globalization. While not exhaustive, the list will be useful to us to understand the ferocity of the subsequent debate:⁸

Is globalization really a new phenomenon or does it originate from long ago? When could we pinpoint the beginning of the globalization process? Was it in the 16th century with the European powers’ fever to conquer new territories? Or was it in the second half of the 19th century during the process of colonial expansion that brought those same countries to carve up Africa and squabble over the economically juiciest territories of China? And why not place the first globalization in Roman times with the spread of Roman law, when in the 1st century AD Paul of Tarsus (in present-day Turkey) fell off his horse and said to the guards who surrounded him, “I am a Roman citizen”? Then again, did globalization take a leap forward at the end of the Second World War when the Soviet and Western blocs linked their respective economies more intensely? Or did this leap forward happen after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Or was it in 2001, when China finally joined the World Trade Organization to transform world trade laws from top to bottom?

Does globalization help us or harm us? Or to be more exact: who does it help and who does it harm? Is there any sense in making statements such as these in general terms? What indicators should we use to answer these questions with a degree of precision? On the one hand, we talk about the global growth of inequality: as we will see presently, our societies, particularly in the advanced economies, far from advancing towards the even distribution of wealth, are heading in the opposite direction. Yet on the other hand we observe how the growth of what we still call emerging economies causes the poverty rate to diminish. We talk of the Korean miracle, the Chinese miracle, and the development of Africa, Brazil and Peru. Have these countries not developed thanks to globalization?

Is this phenomenon basically economic or cultural? If there were some way of comparing these two dimensions, where should we place the emphasis? If we concentrate on issues such as the distribution of wealth and its impact on the economic—and therefore diplomatic—power of states, we will have to give pre-eminence to the economic side. However, if we focus our attention on aspects such as global terrorism, the spread of the Internet and the patterns of demographic transformation of our cities and towns, would it not be reasonable to stress the cultural side of globalization? And what of the processes of individualization, of segregation of the individual from the social mainstream, which ultimately transform even those societies until now regarded as communitarian, such as Asian societies of Confucian tradition or Muslim societies?

A highly controversial question: is globalization a process or a project? Is there somebody behind it, or is it inevitable like an apple falling from a tree? For those who defend understanding globalization as a process, any attempt to stem the tide is to deny the future. Putting the brakes on globalization is tantamount to trying to imitate what are considered to be historic failures such as the autarchic or semi-autarchic Socialist countries (North Korea, Cuba and, to an extent, the former USSR). For those who regard globalization as a project, it is not possible to understand globalization without winners and losers, without the presence of powerful interests and the need for someone to do something in order for this inevitability of economic and financial globalization to appear.

And another one: does globalization spell the end of nation-states … or just the opposite? We talk of the incapacity of states to cope with the array of challenges posed by the contemporary world. However, far from observing a decline in the number of states we see the contrary: a rise in this number.⁹ A quick look at the United Nations Assembly or the map of Europe today compared with that of 20 years ago allows us to weigh up this increase. Yet at the same time we see the efforts to create supra-national bodies such as the European Union; the gradual transfer, sometimes voluntary and sometimes forced, of sovereignty to internationa...