Globalization

3 Pages 870 Words

In the ever-present debates about globalization, the experience has often been identified with late twentieth-century forms of political market - notably market liberalization - and the associated changes in political thought. Important as these forms have been, however they are hardly the core of global transformation. Globalization is not simply or mainly either an economic or a recent historical occurrence, indeed not a single process at all, and requires a much deeper and broader understanding. Only when this is understood can the significance of the global for the social sciences be acheived.Globalization can be defined as a multifaceted set of distinct but related processes - economic, cultural, social but also political and military - through which economic relations have developed global reach and significance. In this sense globalization includes the development of relations of many kinds as well as particularly global forms. It can be coupled, as Anthony Giddens among others has argued, to reflective changes in the relations of time and space in the development of progress. Globalization has been developing for six centuries, in the processes through which the ‘multi-power actor civilization’ of the West, as Michael Mann calls it, starting in Europe, has come to take over more or less the entire world. Every 10 years or more accurately each historical period (obviously these do not match precisely with the chronology of centuries) - has made its own contribution to global transformation. From the European exploration of the ‘Indies’ and discovery of ‘America’, in the fifteenth century, through the old days of the Spanish and Portuguese empires to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century domination of Britain and France, a Western new world order came into existence. At the beginning of this process of global change was the new standard of Western economic and cultural life, which by the end of the nineteenth century ...