41. What forms of globalization do you know? Explain each of them.

! economic globalization ! cultural globalization ! political globalization.

Economic globalization is reflected in the idea that no national economy is now an island: all economies have, to a greater or lesser extent, been absorbed into an interlocking global economy. The OECD (1995) thus defined globalization as ‘a shift from a world of distinct national economies to a global economy in which production is internationalized and financial capital flows freely and instantly between countries’. The collapse of communism gave powerful impetus to economic globalization, in that it paved the way for the absorption into the global capitalist system of the last significant block of states that had remained outside it. Economic global ization, for that matter, also helped to precipitate the collapse of communism, in that lower trade barriers, an end to exchange controls and freer movement of investment capital from the 1980s onwards had helped to widen the economic gap between the capitalist West and an economically stagnant communist East. One of the key implications of economic globalization is the reduced capacity of national governments to manage their economies and, in particular, to resist their restructuring along free-market lines. Cultural globalization is the process whereby information, commodities and images that have been produced in one part of the world enter into a global flow that tends to ‘flatten out’ cultural differences between nations, regions and indi- viduals. This has sometimes been portrayed as a process of McDonaldization. Driven, in part, by the growth of transnational companies and the emergence of global commodities, cultural globalization is also fuelled by the so-called ‘infor- mation revolution’, the spread of satellite communication, telecommunications networks, information technology and the internet, and global media corpora- tions. However, as pointed out earlier, culture both serves and constrains the forces of globalization. In addition to the ubiquity of Hollywood movies, Nike running shoes and Starbucks coffee houses, selling goods across the world requires a sensitivity to indigenous cultures and social practices.

Political globalization is evident in the growing importance of international organizations. These are organizations that are transnational in that they exercise juris diction not within a single state, but within an international area comprising several states. Most such organizations have emerged in the post-1945 period: examples include the United Nations, NATO, the European Economic Community and its various successors, the EC and the EU, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). When they conform to the principles of intergovernmentalism (see p. 395), international organizations provide a mechan ism that enables states, at least in theory, to take concerted action without sacrificing national sovereignty (see p. 58). Supranational bodies, on the other hand, are able to impose their will on nation- states. The inter-state emphasis of political globalization sets it apart from the rival conceptions of economic and cultural globalization, which highlight the role of non-state and market-based actors. Moreover, insofar as it reflects an idealist commitment to internationalism and some form of world government, political globalization lags markedly behind economic and cultural globalization. Whereas a global state remains a very distant prospect, global civil society, based on the activities of transnational corporations (TNCs) (see p. 149), non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (see p. 248) and international pressure groups, has become very much a reality