Globalization

By the lowest recogning, India, the Seres and the Arabian peninsula take from our empire hundreds of millions of Sesterces a year; that is how much our luxuries and women cost us

Globalization is the term given to the increased inter-connectedness of culture, economics, and social interaction. Planes can carry people (or packages) around the world in less time than it used to take to travel between nearby towns. Modern cargo ships can carry enormous amounts of freight across oceans far more safely and at faster speeds than earlier sailing ships, aided by big, powered cranes at major ports. Undersea and overland cables allow for rapid transfer of information across continents, far faster than messengers. Money and ownership can change as rapidly as electrons flowing through cable. The globalized world knew about the war in the country of Georgia about as quickly as people in Russia did. People flow freely too, and attempts to stem the tides of immigration have been failing around the world.

All you need to know: it creates a lot of good things, and some bad things at the same time.

Impact
The idea disturbs some nations as they see it as an encroachment on their own indigenous cultures, society, sovereignty, and government.

Experts are divided on what effect globalization is going to have on the sociopolitical environment. Some argue that culture and national identity will become meaningless, with people instead merging across state lines into larger cooperative groups, like the EU or a stronger UN. Others believe states will become meaningless as people look for strength in different groupings. That can be an ethnic group within a country or region, such as the Kurds, or a set of countries that have the same or very similar languages and culture, namely the Anglosphere (UK, Canada, USA, Australia, and New Zealand). Religion is another possibility for the formation of "super-tribes", though there are many people who question its relevance in the modern day and future eras.

The Brexit victory and the surprise election of Donald Trump in 2016, among many other events large and small, have signified the rise of a growing anti-globalization movement, referred to as neo-nationalism, which is rooted in the fear of the loss of national sovereignty to corporations and foreign bureaucrats who do not necessarily advance the nations' best interests.

Inability to halt progression
One thing that all proponents do agree on is that globalization is not something that can be easily (or desirably) undone. The communications revolution has opened up trade, and much of globalization is based on the free flow of ideas and markets. Moreover, it's been argued that while states have tried hard to slow or stop the spread of various kinds of transnationalism, they have been unable to do so. Globalization has opened up, and partially removed, nationalistic boundaries.

That said, however, it's very easy to take this sentiment and slide into "end of history" mode or what some would call "globaloney." See Thomas Friedman.

Examples of effects
One thing to keep in mind: Whenever someone rails against the evils of globalization to you, ask them if they enjoy any of the following:


 * Foreign cuisine, like the ever trendy Indian food... and contaminated milk and baby formula from China.
 * Government organizations like the FDA being created in response to your own international export scandals.
 * Foreign entertainment (including martial arts movies and art house flicks)
 * The lowered prices on everything at Wal-Mart OK, never mind.
 * Increased profitability for German and French banks now free to engage in speculative sub-prime mortgage lending and asset-backed securities in America and Eastern Europe Well, shit.
 * Your accountant's ability to more easily minimise your taxes by using offshore tax havens
 * The ability to communicate instantly and quickly with distant friends and activists thanks to the Internet and text messaging, but not knowing any of your own neighbors.
 * Websites like this, but also websites like that.
 * Being able to discover just what horrors your government has been up to overseas rather than taking domestic news agencies' and corporations' word for it that everything was on the up and up.
 * The ability to join an international organization and cooperate to actually make a difference in the world, and also the ability for omnicidal maniac nutjubs to recruit from all over the world.
 * The ability of high end colleges to get high fee paying students from around the world, rather than only the people lucky enough to be born in the West.
 * Said universities having fewer slots available for local born people. At least they need more janitors for their shiny new sports facilities and business schools!
 * Said student flow also promotes international intellectual conformity. Great for hard sciences and some social sciences such as psychology, but it's also produced conformity to batshit insane ideology in e.g. the Chicago School of supply side economics that gave us the Great Recession.
 * Closed factories in the American, French, and Russian Rust Belts that were horribly "inefficient" and "obsolete" anyway, so every machine in them could be taken apart, shipped to the third world, and re-assembled to make the same products for a greater profit to the factory's owners as "efficient" and "cutting edge" facilities.
 * Young and middle-aged people (forced into) leaving the miserable, polluted international Rust Belt cities in which they grew up such as Magnitogorsk and Pittsburgh, leaving the young and old incapable of cleaning their hometowns up or even maintaining them. Pittsburgh has lost half its population since 1979.

Critiques of the globalization paradigm
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products drives the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

Fred Cooper
As Fred Cooper points out in Colonialism in Question, there are two things wrong with "globalization" as a term for understanding the world's networks of information, economic, and cultural exchanges — the "global" and the "-ization." By this, Cooper means that it is still problematic to talk about globalization as a solid unified, worldwide, and singular process when one takes into account the extent to which different social groups experience and are affected by the alleged phenomenon in different ways.

"Re-branding"
Another criticism portrays "globalization" as nothing new — from the Indian Ocean trade of the twelfth century to the Atlantic system of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, people, ideas, information, commodities, technologies, and money have been moving around the globe for a very long time now. The pace at which things move may have accelerated somewhat, but the networks carrying them have been around for centuries.

The legacies of these older forms of globalization can be found in the "traditions" that people want to protect against the perils of contemporary globalization. Consider, if you will, the Jamaican patty, a "traditional" West Indian food. It's essentially a Scottish meat pie filled with Indian curry, prepared by and sold to diasporic Africans in the Caribbean — a delicious treat impossible to conceive of in a pre-globalized world.

In fact, history has shown that contrary to much of what has been said on the aforementioned "inability to halt progression", globalization can not only be slowed but can actually go in reverse as well. Much of the rhetoric about the impending borderless world had been repeated ad nauseam in previous generations under different words. One example involved Norman Angell's 1909 book The Great Illusion, which in addition to espousing a bright globalized future, posited that there's no more need for such things as war. And in the 1920s and 1930s, the Comintern's version of globalization led to the Anti-Comintern Pact as a globe-spanning counter-measure. It took a little time to sort out that global one-up-man-ship.

A real critique
In modern trade, with lowered tariff barriers, manufacturers chase the cheapest source of labor available. This has led to the de-industrialization of Western democracies and a horrible trade deficit with low-wage nations. Not only are Third World nations prone to incredibly cheap labor (infamously referred to as sweatshops), on top of that they keep their currency cheap to encourage exports, instead of letting it float on the market — which true globalism would expect.

Other critiques focus on the tendencies to exaggerate just how "global" globalization is in practice and conflate an "ought" with "is". Despite the rhetoric and buzzwords, the global economy in reality (for now, at least) still acts more like a series of clustered regional markets. The flow of labor and transnational issues like terrorism and climate change, meanwhile, reveal the continuing significance of nation-states and regional blocs. Only a small proportion of the world's population live in countries other than their place of origin (though this doesn't necessarily reflect choice; it's still ridiculously difficult to migrate internationally outside of preexisting treaty blocs like the EU or ECOWAS and there are far more people who want to migrate than are allowed to), while even the most seemingly cosmopolitan regions of the world remain largely domestic, with little sign of this changing in the immediate future. Neither are local identities on the verge of being erased anytime soon, given the trend towards "glocalization" as well as the fact that online traffic remains largely confined to one's backyard.

Another criticism of the anti-globalization movement is that not only is globalization not a recent phenomena, it predates the story of Jesus. Thousands of years ago, the Romans used to complain that their wealth was flowing to the Seres via the and other trade routes, more or less the same parts of the world people blame today. Yet somehow, civilization still exists (even if it takes a Dark-Age hiatus from time to time). If anything, the trade with the East was what allowed Rome to grow in the first place; it wasn't just goods but ideas that also were transferred, ideas like writing, engineering, glass blowing, medicines, etc. While what Rome had built may have been impressive for the time, Roman technology, like that of all societies, improved upon what had been done before rather than starting

Astroturf
The Russian government has sponsored an anti-globalist astroturf organization called The Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (Антиглобалистское движение России). The so-called Calexit campaign seeks a California secession from the United States. A Calexit ballot initiative, sponsored by Yes California, has received financial aid from and partnered with AIGM. AIGM has a Calexit "embassy" in Moscow.

The stated aim of AIGM is "against the global dominance of transnational corporations and supranational trade and financial institutions", but is more likely specifically against economic dominance of the United States and the EU.

Be careful
If you're going to debate someone on the nature of globalization and it morphs into a debate on the "race to the bottom," prepare for a load of bullshit.

"Globalism"
The term "globalization" is often misconstrued with the term "globalism". Sometimes, especially among the protectionist far-right such as Donald Trump's circle (or worse), "globalisation", "globalism", "globalist", etc, are all pretty much anti-semitic dog whistles for Jews or the International Jewish Conspiracy.

Who these "globalists" are vary from group to group. Members of QAnon use the term "The Cabal" to refer to a shadowy organization that's trying to undermine freedom for their own "globalist agenda". Like with all other variations of the term, the goal of "the Cabal" is to subjugate the freedom of the nation to a world government.