A perspective on globalization

So class is finally finished – the class that I was teaching, that is – and I have had a few weeks off. I have used part of that time to exercise, clean, and prepare for the next two semesters. I also traveled home to see the family unit. Most of my trip was spent dodging my father’s arguments, which typically begin with “Obama is an idiot”, and the most recent, “Well, Americans just aren’t going to stand for globalization because this is a country of independently minded individuals.” True that, dad (on the second part, not the first).

I argued with him for a second before I realized that his idea of globalization is so far from what the actual phenomena is, and dare I speak ill of my father by saying overly simplified. Apparently somewhere in the annals of conservative talk radio, my father has forged an idea of globalization as something forthcoming, preventable, and disparaging to his freedom.

Welcome to globalization, dad. We’re here already. Apparently he – and whomever he’s getting his information from – hasn’t received the memo. I would pick on old, middle class white guys in the United States; however, I’m not sure that’s the issue. It might be part of the issue, though. It’s difficult to see your privilege when you are perched atop, if you know what I mean.

I have explained my previous posts how I feel about news coverage. And globalization is no exception. When you take oversimplified views of highly complex issues, well, you walk around thinking you know something when you really don’t. The adage in this country that we simply need to read the news to become informed citizens in this case doesn’t necessarily work. Anyone want to experiment with that idea? Let me know how that works out for you.

Globalization is such a large, far-reaching phenomena that you could – I don’t know – read for two years in a PhD program and still not have a handle on the issues, especially since it changes so quickly. This brief entry will address just the broad categories that I usually consider, and they are by no means comprehensive. But I highly encourage people to investigate these issues. It is globalization in my mind that brings up questions like: are the banks involved in the mortgage crisis actually U.S. corporations? If not, why should we consider bailing them out? Why is the U.S. government not regulating credit, so that not just anyone can buy a house? Why is it possible for lending institutions to extend the credit of those consumers who might not be able to pay back the money? How would this play out on the international scene – would the WTO intervene to penalize the U.S. government for protecting consumers?

All of these issues are integrated, and we are in NO WAY independent from the rest of the world. We haven’t been for a very long time. When considering globalization, I usually think of three arenas: economic, political, and cultural. I think of these three realms not because globalization really affects all three directly; however, they appear quite frequently in the literature.

Political
So let’s start with political, since my father is convinced that political globalization involves usurpation of American sovereignty in a globalized world. What he really means is that America wouldn’t be the big kid on the block. We might actually be accountable. And you know if we were actually accountable, our power and authority might not be construed as legitimate, which I take it is not the case in many places around the globe. My answer to his fear – since I didn’t get very far with him due to his incessant talking over me – there is no overarching world governance. The closest thing to it, perhaps, would be the United Nations (UN), and the UN yields far less power that the World Trade Organization (WTO), in my opinion.

In the field of political science, and please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong because this is not my field, there are many ways of describing international relations. Two of those ways have been classical realism and neorealism; neither description really places anyone in charge politically, other than the most powerful nation. They are structural perspectives, which imagine the international scene organized in a particular way but for which there is no world power.

Part of the problem is this issue. Although there is no overarching governance, we have international law, which dictates order for the system. Tiny rules like not attacking other countries and holding national sovereignty in the highest esteem have kind of kept everything in place politically. But sometimes countries don’t feel like they need to adhere to these rules. They invade other countries on behalf of the world. Invade, in this case, is the appropriate word. Because when rogue states have placed the welfare of their people at a minimum, the UN typically has voted to send peacekeepers, always trying to maintain the sovereignty of the nation. (In the case of Kosovo and East Timor, the UN departed from this by actually creating its own civil authority).

From my perspective, the UN is a quasi-governmental entity; while it promulgates ethical behavior for both member nations as well as its own actions, it is not necessarily binding if the member nations decide they don’t want to go along. With noncompliance, there exist no consequences. For example, the United States government regularly checks prisons across the country for compliance. In the event of noncompliance, the federal government can intercede – it’s automatic. They do not have to petition anyone nor wait for a vote of Congress. The job of that government group is to keep prisons up to snuff. The UN cannot necessarily do the same thing. If it could, there would be no need for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB), North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or the WTO.

Economic
Speaking of the IMF, WB, and WTO, there are also dimensions of globalization that reside within the economic realm. When I told my father that he should be more concerned about the WTO, I wasn’t leading him astray. A number of the reactions toward globalization and the West in particular have hinged on the denigration of national sovereignty as well as lack of action on behalf of the world’s poorest, most marginalized people, to name a couple. Without meaning to, I’m sure, we have enabled those in the most privileged positions to imagine our economic system. Our economic system, for me, is in part a political one. We place a great deal of faith in our political system, by recognizing the legitimacy of those in power to make binding decisions for us. Though we do not realize it, we have enabled corporations to do the same. On a very basic level, we could argue that the political system affords elected officials to decided what and how; likewise, we could argue the economic system enables those who are able to collect and use capital to decide who gets what as well as the conditions under which those resources are doled.

To oversimplify again, we could see two different veins of economic globalization. The first exists in the realm of the nation-state, where monetary and fiscal policy help determine the lifeblood for a people. The second realm exists in the corporate realm, where corporations with loyalties to shareholders search the world for resources. Corporations look for cheap materials, labor, and transportation in order to offer a product at lower prices. With respect to the nation-state, many have accepted aid from other nation-states or international organizations to promote development. There is an entire field of study devoted to development, the field itself has experienced paradigmatic shifts away from the original intention following the end of colonialism. When the word “liberalization” appears with respect to developing countries, typically we mean that governments are taking steps to liberalize trade by privatizing aspects devoted to public welfare, removing trade barriers, and generally accepting policies suggested by the IMF and WB. Sometimes these policies are diametrically opposed to promotion of a healthy state government, hence the resistance at grassroot levels.

On the other end, corporations have worked their way around the globe, probing markets for cheap resources and streamlining – financially – their production lines. Many complain about global and transnational corporations for a number of reasons; however, I will only touch on two. First, these corporations bring with them a cultural logic from other places; some fear this cultural infusion places culture in jeopardy (see below). Secondly, globalization has given rise to really funky practices, which corporations use to skirt national or international law. One aspect of this would be the export processing zones, which governments create to enable corporations to operate without adherence to national laws. Let us not romanticize either way about the corporation; yes, they have a great deal of power over pivotal aspects of our lives, and yes, they might actually run more efficiently and effectively than public entities because of their drive toward the bottom line. But they are not entirely the problem; some responsibility resides with consumers and their allowance for corporations to write the cultural rules. And now we have our final category.

Cultural
The realm of culture is where I do my heavy lifting, academically and philosophically. And previous blogs, I have explained some of the literature concerning the globalization of culture. Essentially we know that when you take human artifacts, such as television shows, fast food restaurants, or music, to places beyond their local context, something happens to culture where these items were imported. At this point, scholars disagree about the impact, its severity, and its meaning. I actually swing toward hybridity theory as a theoretical tool, but others have been quite critical in their approaches. In a way, I have come to see the two previous realms, political and economic, as rudimentary to understanding the processes of globalization with respect to culture. But I do not mean what other scholars intimate.

Let’s take a developing country in Africa. How about the Democratic Republic of Congo? The DRC is trying to find stability within its political and economic spheres in order to develop and grow. When the West interceded, it did so with a purpose. The West touts both democratic governance and liberalization as the best goals to strive for. However, as we provide the DRC with aid attached to policies designed to reach these goals, we are coaxing them to organize or conceptualize their world like ours. You say, “Well, who wouldn’t want to be free?” That’s a good question.

But the root of the problem is, who defines freedom? When the DRC fails to live up to the standards promulgated by the UN, or the U.S., or perhaps even Freedom House, we judge them harshly, downplaying their progress to focus on the expanse of their difference from us. That is the manipulation of culture, or the use of what Joseph Nye called, “soft power”. When you add media artifacts to the mix, such as Jay-Z or Law and Order, then the globalization is greatly complicated. These exchanges are facilitated by the ease at which we can communication and travel, as Tomlinson and others have explained.

My concern, as a scholar and journalist, lies with these connections among economic, political, and cultural. When we tell the DRC that it should strive for democratic rule, we also include either explicitly or implicitly that democratic rule requires a strong, independent media system. This strong, independent media system would follow the American model, and would ultimately be free from both government interference and funding. As we pull back the lens for a wider view, we see that politically, culturally, and economically, the flow of information globally belongs to two primary companies, the Associated Press and Reuters. There is danger in deriving what we know about the world simply from two sources, even if these sources pool information from a variety of points.

In closing, there are several different ways to explore these processes of globalization; one cannot take a myopic view without linking the claim back to this integration. The realization that we are integrating – that what we do in one place really affects other places – still might be an ethereal perspective for many. My father’s generation grew up at a time when the threat of both Soviets and nuclear holocaust became deeply ingrained in their worldview. From his perspective as well as many others, it does not matter whether our actions in the Middle East or other places in the globe are not well received or cause irreparable harm. What does matter is that he is safe and can sleep well at night knowing the U.S. government has his back. But that is the luxury of the white American male; the system exists to protect his privilege.

However, for many others, this integration is all too close to home. This integration has caused food shortages, fuels discontent among ethnic groups, displaces large groups of people, and governmental instability. I do not believe that I have the answers to help many around the globe to solve these problems; I do have, however, resources about how the media system works within one nation-state. I have the ability to help others to develop themselves, hopefully without the caveats that are used as stick or carrot. I have the ability to help my fellow Americans better understand these processes that inextricably bind them to people at all points around the world materially.

As Homi Bhabha wrote in the preface to The Location of Culture:

“In keeping with the spirit of the ‘right to narrate’ as a means to achieving our own national or communal identity in a global world, demands that we revise our sense of symbolic citizenship, our myths of belonging, by identifying ourselves with the ‘starting-points’ of other national and international histories and geographies” (p. xx).

Addressing globalization requires leaders and constituents who have a strong foundational knowledge in what these processes are. We can only truly change the course of history if we understand where we must go; however, we cannot fully appraise our path without first understanding where we are. To do both, we need an open and inclusive discourse about creating opportunities.