it refers to ‘anything from the Internet to a hamburger’.
3
Equally, it has beenaccused of being nothing more than a new spin of an old idea. ‘Globalisation’concluded Martin Khor, ‘is what we in the Third World have for several centuriescalled colonization’.
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In a manner reminiscent of Fukuyama’s claims about the‘end of history’, some see it as the latest in a series of Enlightenment narrativespurporting to outline a universal civilization and a common destiny for humankind.
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Others have denounced its economism; its economic reductionism; itstechnological determinism; its political cynicism, defeatism and immobilism.
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Yetothers have conferred upon it the accolades of ‘the word of the decade’
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and the‘buzzword of the 1990s’.
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In spite of – or more accurately perhaps despite – itscritics, the concept has gained particular currency in both the language andiconography of global politics. Scholte offers a minimalist definition as ‘a stillon–going process whereby the world is in many respects becoming one relativelyborderless arena of social life’.
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Robertson pursues the theme further, noting that,‘globalisation also refers to cultural and subjective matters’ (namely, the scopeand depth of consciousness of the world as a single place).
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For these and other writers, even if the eventual picture remains in doubt, theprincipal agents of such change are evident enough, such as globalizingcorporations emerging from a rapid process of super–mergers, technoscientificnetworks and the aesthetic architects of mass culture. At the same time, there isalso a shrinking of the world brought about by the third technological revolutionthat has enabled us to travel both vicariously and instantaneously to almost allregions of the world.
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In this sense the process of globalization is tearing awaythe traditional notion of continuous, historical time on the one hand, andestablished spatial parameters on the other.
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Temporal discontinuity and spatial‘deterritorialization’ displaces the familiar and the secure, placing allconventional poles of attachment in doubt and flux. Thus, close encounters of adirect kind in which we meet others face to face are being replaced by indirectcontact with remote ‘others’. In short, globalization has radically altered themanner in which we conduct our lives in the sense that locales are thoroughlypenetrated by, and shaped in terms of, social influences quite distant from them.While there is some question as to whether this process represents the end, orthe fulfilment, of a Eurocentric modernization, there is little question about itsdifferential impact on people and societies across the globe. Most obviously,poverty, mass unemployment and inequality have mushroomed alongside recentadvancements in technological developments and the rapid expansion of trade andinvestment. Indeed, over the past two decades, the overall pattern of resourcedistribution has radically shifted from a shape resembling an egg to that of a pear.In other words, fewer people have occupied the top, and more people have slippedtowards the bottom. Between 1990 and 1998, for example, the share of thepopulation in developing countries living below $1 per day fell from 29 per centto 24 per cent. But because of population growth, the number of people in povertydeclined by only 77 million – hardly a stellar result. Interestingly, all theimprovements occurred in East Asia, mainly in China. Excluding China, the
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