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Unit 1 What is globalization 3

Key terms: 3

Text 1 The concept of globalization 4

Text 2 From diatribe to dialogue 15

Unit 2 Globalization of world economy 22

Key terms 22

Text 1 Surprise! Тhe balance of economic power in the world is changing. Good. 22

Text 2 Rich man, poor man 30

Unit 3 The USA and the world 39

Key terms 39

Medicaid (in the US) – a federal system of health insurance for those requiring financial assistance. 39

Text 1 From sea to shining sea 40

Text 2 The isolationist temptation 49

They take our jobs 51

Unit 4 American economy 58

Key terms 58

Text 1 Red tape and scissors 59

Bigger is better 62

The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters. 67

Text 2 Losing faith in the greenback 68

How long will the dollar remain the world's premier currency? 68

Subprime currency 69

The confidence factor 71

Averting a crash 73

Сорос не верит в доллар 76

Unit 5 Monetary cooperation: The IMF 79

Key terms 79

Text 1 The IMF 81

Text 2 Controversy about the IMF 88

Пекин не собирается спасать Бреттон-Вудскую систему 96

Unit 6 A closer look at the IMF 98

Key terms 98

Text 1 The IMF, World bank is a major cause of Poverty in Africa 99

Text 2 Not even a cat to rescue 104

V. Render the article 110

Unit 7. International organizations 113

Key terms 113

Text 1. The origins and growth of International organizations 114

Text 2. Roles that IGOs play 123

Unit 8. The European Union 134

Key terms 134

Text 1 Focus on the European Union 135

Text 2 Future of the European Union 148

Big Brother is still watching 157

Prospective members get their knuckles rapped 157

Unit 9 Integration of European countries in the EU 160

Key terms: 160

Text 1 The Norwegian opinion 160

Text 2 Europe, Russia and in-between 167

Russia's “near abroad” is becoming Europe's neighbourhood 167

Unit 10 The United Nations 174

Key terms 174

Text 1 Focus on the UN 175

The UN wasn’t created to take mankind into paradise, but rather, to save humanity from hell. (Dag Hammarskjold) 184

More than ever before in human history, we share a common destiny. We can master it only if we face it together. And that, my friends, is why we have the United Nations. (Kofi Annan) 184

If the United Nations is a country unto itself, then the commodity it exports most is words. (Esther B. Fein) 184

If the United Nations is to survive, those who represent it must bolster it; those who advocate it must submit to it; and those who believe in it must fight for it.” (Norman Cousins) 184

Text 2 The UN’s activities 186

Браун предлагает Дели место в СБ ООН 196

Unit 11 The UN in the 21^st century 197

Text 1 Courage to fulfil our responsibilities By Kofi A. Annan (December 04^th, 2004) 197

IV. Suggested activities for students: 207

Text 2 The spirit of principled pragmatism By Ban Ki-moon (November 15, 2007) 208

Бутрос-Гали: однополярный мир не может быть демократичным (02/05/2007) 212

Unit 12 The International Law 215

Key terms 215

Text 1 International law and world order 217

Text 2 The relevance of International Law 229

Можно ли исключить применение силы в принципе? 241

Unit 13 Human Rights 244

Key terms 244

Text 1 The nature of human rights 246

Text 2 Many rights, some wrong 252

The world's biggest human-rights organization stretches its brand 252

Unit 14 Human-rights law 262

Key terms: 262

European Convention on Human Rights – an international agreement set up by the Council of Europe in 1950 to protect human rights. Under the Convention were established the European Commission for Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights 262

Tiananmen Square – a square in the centre of Beijing adjacent to the Forbidden City, the largest public open space in the world. In spring 1989 government troops opened fire there on unarmed pro-democracy protesters, killing over 2,500 264

Text 1 Power of shame 264

Text 2 Controversies and culture 274

IV. Suggested activities for students: 282

Part III Text for additional reading 287

Globalization – an unstoppable force? 287

From City-States to a Cosmopolitan Order 293

Was he a Keynesian? 295

Ever higher society, ever harder to ascend 302

Denial or acceptance 310

The dollar’s slide is complicating life for countries with floating exchange rates 310

That empty-nest feeling 312

The World Bank, founded to fight poverty, is searching for the right role in places that need its help less and less 312

Rigged dialogue with society 315

What Lisbon contains 319

The small print of a notably complicated document 319

Turkey and the EU: Norwegian or British model? 321

Unruly neighbours 324

Europe wants more non-Europeans at the top table. But who should make way? 324

The poison of protectionism 326

The UN's missions impossible 327

War crimes and international justice. Always get your man 333

Bringing war criminals to justice is a slow business. But the net is widening 333

Stand up for your rights 336

Television on trial 337

Part IV Additional texts for rendering 346

Глобализация как объективный процесс 346

“АНТИГЛОБАЛИСТЫ” - ЭТО ТАКОЕ РУГАТЕЛЬСТВО 352

Шанс для новой парадигмы в мировой политике 356

Критическая массовость 363

За здоровый американский образ жизни 366

Всемогущий доллар обречен? 368

Мы надолго стали беднее 370

Евросоюз начинает жить по-лиссабонски 372

РОССИЯ И EC В РАЗНЫХ КООРДИНАТАХ ВРЕМЕНИ 374

Россия должна подать заявку в Евросоюз 378

Реорганизация Объединенных Наций 380

Эпоха ответственности 386

День прав человека 389

Право - для человека 392

Appendix 1 398

Appendix 2 406

Appendix 3 420

Bibliography 427

Unit 1 What is globalization Key terms:

Globalization – the process by which the world is being made into a single place, not just politically, but economically and culturally too. Integration of states through increasing contact, communication and trade to create a holistic, single global system in which the process of change in­creasingly binds people together in a common fate.

Conflict – discord, often arising in international relations over perceived incompatibilities of interests.

Indigenisatlon – The adaptation of alien practices to local circumstances and to meet local needs.

Protectionism – a policy of creating barriers to foreign trade, such as tariffs and quotas, that protects local industries from competition.

Regime – norms, rules and procedures for interaction agreed to by a set of states

Relativisation – The process whereby the integrity, wholeness or absolute quality of an identity is diluted by the power of global forces.

Script – a framework of expectations

Text 1 The concept of globalization

Globalization is variously defined. On some definitions, it is no more than a contemporary term to describe a set of processes that have a long history; but more commonly globalization is taken to refer to a new phenomenon of linkages transcending existing territorial boundaries. It is thus process by which the world is being made into a single place, not just politically but economically and culturally as well. We will have to examine the definition carefully in order to evaluate its worth. Let us start by looking at the processes involved in making the world a single place. There are a number of possibilities:

Globalization as growing interconnectedness

The first is the relatively simple idea of globalization as the “multiplicity of linkages and interconnections that transcend the nation-state’. This definition is a straightforward affirmation of the growing volume of goods, services, capital and people flowing across national bound­aries. There are numerous examples of this phenomenon: for example, one can analyze the volume of exports from major trading nations in the period 1913 to 1984. With some variation and with significant pauses due to war and worldwide economic depression, the overall trend in the period was to expand the world trading economy.

There is also that interconnectedness which is a result of the globalization of communications technology, for example in multimedia fields, perhaps bringing the prospect of the global “information superhighway” ^[1] much closer. All these flows constitute a process through which events, decisions and activities in one part of the world can come to have signifi­cant consequences for individuals and communities in quite distant parts of the globe. The more potent implication of this is that global interconnectedness leaves the territorial boundaries of the nation-state less and less coincident with the changing patterns of life.

The sociologist Anthony Giddens, writing in 1990, offers a further and deceptively simple gloss on the idea of interconnectedness, which is that global flows serve to link people (and organizations) who were previously separated and insulated by time and space. He says that interconnectedness is part and parcel of the 'stretching' of economic and social relations across the globe.

At root, Giddens wants to emphasize the increasing interpenetration of the modern world through a dramatic reordering of time and space, including changing the ways in which people think about the concepts, thus altering the meanings they attach to them and the constraints which are related to them. In this reordering, two processes are paramount ^[2]. The first, which he calls “deterritorialization”, involves things like the massive growth in cross-border transactions and collaborations taking place between businesses, the movement of people between countries and regions of the world economy, the creation of truly global markets in areas like finance and telecommunications and the establishment of networks of professionals who communicate through technical language irrespective of national origins and cultures. The second, called “disembedding”, refers to all sorts of social relations being lifted out of local contexts of interaction and reorganized across much larger spans of time and space. Giddens sees this process at work in an increased use of what he calls “symbolic tokens” — money or trading in government bonds would be good examples — which serve as universally accepted ways of effecting transactions among agents widely separated in time and space. But the process is seen also in the routine use of expert systems, like computerized data bases, or the fax and modem systems now common in many areas of everyday life. It is also seen, of course, in the behavior of consumers who have stripped their purchases of any meaningful association with particular places and cultures. The combined effect of these two processes is to enlarge the scope for social relations or interactions which are not limited by the need for personal pres­ence or tied to a specific location.

Global consciousness, or thinking globally

The processes referred to above are more than just flows of goods, services, money, images and, of course, people, and include the orien­tation of different actors – individuals, groups, communities, corporations and states — towards the features of globalization. Orientations refer to people's psychological make-up and to the mental equipment they use to make sense of the world. Only by understanding these orientations it is possible to assess the fragility or strength of global institutions and processes and to say if the world is becoming one place. Some individuals may begin to think globally rather than as nationals or aboriginals and this modifies certain aspects of their behavior, but whether their identity (that is, their sense of who they are) is changed too, so that their personalities and inter­ests are redefined, is a much more contentious point. For example, busi­nessmen and women are often advised to “think globally and manage locally”. This means that, at the very least, they should be aware of the global forces operating on them, and at most that they should look at the world as a potential operational whole, adapting their strategies and company cultures accordingly. This is one sense of what is meant by the phrase, “global consciousness”.

From a more narrowly political standpoint, growing awareness of globalizing forces can produce quite different responses. These may be to “go global” and to adopt a global mentality, like the proponents ^[3] of a single world government. It might mean adjusting to changing circumstances in the manner of national governments struggling to contain or regulate the power of financial markets; or it might impel individuals or groups who feel threatened by exposure to global forces to try to diminish their impact on them or on whole civilisations.

Global compression

All this suggests that the changing experience of time and space spoken of by Giddens does not, or need not, proceed in a linear fashion or towards a predetermined goal – say, one-world government or global capi­talism – precisely because of the different perceptions and experiences of those caught up in it and because of the new forces at work within it. So while there may be what the geographer David Harvey calls a dramatic speeding up or intensity of “time-space compression”, the relationships between the constituent units of the global system display no neat functional unity.

There are two main reasons for this. The first is some major disjunctures at work in the global cultural economy which are the result of different and competing logics of integration — most notably, the universalistic logic of capitalist markets versus the particularistic logic of individual nation-states and national identities. Here are some of the 'fundamental disjunctures' between economic factors and politics and culture, when he describes a world and a process of globalization which move to the fluid and unpredictable interaction of different global “scapes”. These are:

1 Ethnoscapes - the landscape of persons who make up the shifting world in which we live. Tourists, migrants, refugees and, delegates at international confer­ences, are all part of the make-up of this mobile universe.

2. Technoscapes — the global configuration of technology and technolog­ical innovation, now increasingly indifferent to conventional bound­aries and to the need for particular sites for the production of goods and the delivery of services.

3. Finanscapes— the highly fluid world of global finance – money markets, futures, commodities broking, portfolio investments, all moving too fast for easy regulation by national regimes.

4. Mediascapes - the electronic dissemination of information and images and its organization in multimedia forms quite unlike the older divisions between print and broadcast media.

5. Idioscapes — the rapidly expanding or even exploding world of political ideas and slogans which inform and legitimate new kinds of political forces and social movements – feminism, ecologism and survivalism are good examples, along with the organization of indigenous peoples like Native Americans or Australian Aborigines.

The second reason is the related fact that actors in world politics are all players in it, but players who have been schooled in different traditions and perspectives; that is, they already have a sense of their own interests and histories, may be even their own sense of destiny. The processes of globalization do not write upon these individuals, groups and communities as if they were blank pages in an exercise book, and because of this the interplay of global forces with individual or local identities is often more reciprocal than a simple model of global dominance or of local subservience to global scripts. This brings us to a further nuance in the concept of globalization.

Globalization as relativisation and indigenisation

The introduction of certain kinds of consumer products, like satellite TV dishes or contraceptive devices, into a previously closed society may have the effect of undermining or relativising existing identities and practice, as well as challenging established political interests. But this challenge to local practice is seldom uncontested. In Algeria for instance, the attempt to modernize the country under a succession of socialist and quasi-military regimes has been contested by those often called Islamic fundamentalists, notably the Groupe Islamique Arme (GIA), whose primary aim lies in the eradication of what it sees as the corrupting influence of Western culture on the purity of Islamic thought and custom. Such reactions can and do produce violent challenges to the introduction and use of outside influences and artefacts.

Less dramatic, although typical of the relativising power of global forces, are what we may call world cultural scripts, like Conventions in international law, or UN Declarations on the rights of workers or women or children. These provide a framework of expectations (a script, in other words) to which individual countries often feel obliged to conform in full or in part. Such scripts are really models or guides for national policies and national profiles of appropriate development. Adherence to the norms circulating in the global system establishes and reinforces the legitimacy of a particular regime and also contributes to the shape and solidity of the emerging world society. Sometimes these scripts are embodied in what students of interna­tional relations call regimes, like the agreements on the environment which arose from the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil.

The consequences of the relativising power of global forces for local identities may be:

1. Their complete erosion through cultural homogenisation or assimilation; that is, the local identity becomes swallowed.

2. The reaffirmation or entrenchment (sometimes called the retraditionalisation) of existing identities in the form of religious orthodoxies or other types of fundamentalism.

3. Their replacement by 'hybrid' cultures or identities, the result of some accommodation between the local and the global, involving the fusion of different cultural traditions.

Where there is evidence of straightforward resistance, or hybridisation of identities, this introduces a cautionary note into arguments which depict the process of globalization as a simple diffusion of Western cultural values, and sometimes as an unmediated flow of influence from the West to the rest. By contrast, some pundits ^[4] speak of the need to assess what is called the “power geometry” in the relationships involved. There are various instances of the power geometry found in different kinds of flows and movements. An elderly person eating a meal from a Chinese takeaway while watching an American film on television is just a passive recipient of global fare, whereas virtual travelers on the Internet are conscious and probably willing participants in the compression of their own world. The idea of the “power geometry” contained in a relationship or transaction also reminds us that the processes of globalization take place within pre-exisiting social rela­tionships. The rich go on getting rich and the poor get Dallas ^[5]. But the idea of power geometry also highlights the second of the two concepts, that of indigenization, that is the adaptation of alien practices to local circumstances and to meet local needs.

What does this all tell us about the relations between the local and the global?

First, it shows us that Western artefacts can be entirely assimilated into local practices. Yet at the same time, the particular form and indeed the specific usage referred to is meaningful only when seen as part of the local­isation of thoroughly global practices.

Second, it shows us that we should be very careful about any claim that the 'relativising' of the world by global processes annihilates local cultures, while acknowledging that these same global forces are making it much harder for local identities to survive intact. Indeed, the very meaning of locality or 'place' may undergo change in a world linked by fibre-optics and the suspi­cion that a visit to McDonalds really can make your day, regardless of the time zone or the place.

The idea of a global system

Global processes like changes in communications technology or new production techniques and also the spread of 'global' ideologies like the UN Declaration of Human Rights provide constraints or models of acceptable national, local or organizational development, i.e. 'cultural frames', in relation to which 'every identity must define and position itself’.

So what can we conclude about the idea of the world as a single place, a global system where local actors and global structures interact? First, that globalization is a process which is made and not given, and made through the interaction of various situated actors (individuals, localities, groups, organisations, etc.) with a variety of more encompassing structures and flows. Second, that at the heart of this idea of a single place is the realization that the world is undergoing a process of growing interconnectedness, so that it is becoming irrelevant to talk about separate national economies, or national companies, but it is still necessary to talk about national and local identities. Third, globalization is not producing a homogenised world; indeed, it may be that a heightened consciousness of global pressure triggers a renewed sense of personal, local or civilisational identity. Finally, as Anthony Giddens says, it suggests that the process of making the world a single place links people previously separated by time and space. Social rela­tions are not only stretched, as he puts it, across the world space but, on occasion, made 'virtual' by the technologies of transnational media.

All this paints a rather complicated picture, and suggests a theory of globalization in which larger-scale processes and structures, involving, for example, changes in the ways in which people communicate with each other or in where and how consumer products are produced and sold, are only one side of the equation. The other side sees these same structures and processes affected by the resilience of local identities and traditions, and finds them interpreted, often idiosyncratically, by actors as they go about the everyday business of living.

Comprehension