Globalization: the effect on europe

Essay by eggy1University, Master'sA+, March 2005

download word file, 19 pages 4.8

GLOBALIZATION

Name: Barbara Blokker Date: 24-01-2005 Teacher: Mr. Knol

GLOBALIZATION AN OVERVIEW

Human societies across the globe have established progressively closer contacts over many centuries, but recently the pace has dramatically increased. Jet airplanes, cheap telephone service, email, computers, huge ocean going vessels, instant capital flows, all these have made the world more interdependent than ever.

Multinational corporations manufacture products in many countries and sell to consumers around the world. Money, technology and raw materials move ever more swiftly across national borders.

Along with products and finances, ideas and cultures circulate more freely. As a result, laws, economies, and social movements are forming at the international level. Many politicians, academics, and journalists treat these trends as both inevitable and mostly welcome.

But for billions of the world's people, business-driven globalization means uprooting old ways of life and threatening livelihoods and cultures.

The global social justice movement, itself a product of globalization, proposes an alternative path, more responsive to public needs.

Intense political disputes will continue over globalization's meaning and its future direction.

Advances in communication and transportation technology, combined with free-market ideology, have given goods, services, and capital unprecedented mobility. Northern countries want to open world markets to their goods and take advantage of abundant, cheap labour in the South, policies often supported by Southern elites.

They use international financial institutions and regional trade agreements to compel poor countries to "integrate" by reducing tariffs, privatizing state enterprises, and relaxing environmental and labour standards.

The results have enlarged profits for investors but offered pittances to labourers, provoking a strong backlash from civil society.

Traditionally politics has been undertaken within national political systems. National governments have been ultimately responsible for maintaining the security and economic welfare of their citizens, as well as the protection of human rights and the environment within their...