What is Globalisation?
Globalisation is a word that gets thrown around a lot, often as part of vague and slightly suspect declarations about progress by politicians and CEOs alike (do you think they’re trying to sell us something…?), but what this really means for us on a day to dal level can get lost in the aspirational—some might say, delusional—rhetoric.
So, to call a spade a spade, here is globalisation laid bare: it is a juggernaut economic system brought about by governments’ international deregulation of trade and finance. This lack of restrictions has enabled businesses and banks to expand and function globally, unhindered by borders—or even, say, laws—and resulted in a single world market; one controlled by transnational corporations rather than by local economies and communities, who nonetheless happen to provide its labour force. Still buying It?
This economy is the unstable and unsustainable culmination of a longstanding ideal held in western Europe for the past 500 years, later encapsulated by the American Dream during the 20th Century. Dream, however, being the operative word, as its lofty aims for an ever bigger, better, brighter future (i.e., economic abundance for all) cannot abide by our planet’s reality and all the unshakeable limitations which are inherent to life on Earth.
Instead, globalisation tries to bend both people and planet to the will of the market – and the overall outcome is far from prosperous. In this modern age of convenience and astronomical profits, we’re facing the inconvenient and astronomical disasters of economic collapse, the climate emergency, mass extinction, eroding democracy, increasing violence and fundamentalism, a soaring mental health crisis, and pandemics.
Globalisation tries to bend both people and planet to the will of the market – and the overall outcome is far from prosperous.
Shouldn’t we have “made it” to wherever we’re supposed to be going by now? Nope. Because, despite evident disfunction (listed above), that’s not the point. Quite the opposite. Growth is the only logic of globalisation – all else be quite literally damned.
It actually—illogically—all stems from outdated attitudes that don’t make sense in the world today (not that they were ever morally ‘sound’). For centuries, Europeans remained bent on conquering and colonising abroad. They dismantled self-reliant communities and enslaved populations to enrich their own. These days, imperialism remains visible in the dressed-up western model of outsourcing cheap labour to the Global South; in foreign resource extraction ; as well as in vast aid packages and loans, which shackle LEDCs (less economically developed countries) with immense debt to the wealthy, developed world.
And as poorer nations fall further into resultant poverty, companies are still better able to exploit them, growing ever-richer; able to demand ever-more deregulation from their desperate governments, causing ever-more destruction to people and ecosystems – globally.
The Story
On its polished surface, globalisation is the worldwide exchange of cultures and ideas, of education and opportunities, products and services; an opening up of the planet’s places and resources and wealth for all to access. Sounds good. That’s the theory anyway – one propped up by corporate-funded think tanks and dispensed far-and-wide in advertising campaigns.
So why then, rather than expanding connection, has globalisation actually managed to diminish it in terms of practical, everyday life? CEOs and workers are as far-removed from each other as chalk and cheese; or moreover as producers from consumers; as food and farming; as people from the land.
What’s more, making consumer and investment choices that align with our individual values is near impossible in today’s society: the market just isn’t set up for it. In fact, we are basically set up around the market.
The Reality
In reality, globalisation has primarily become—like most things these days—an economic affair, with GDP taking precedence over all else, far surmounting well-being on the political agenda. Because in a globalised world, all of society is subject to one increasingly singular growth imperative – and one (white-majority western) monoculture too. Conformity is the only option, but no guarantee of individual prosperity, especially for indigenous groups , or those in the debt ridden Global South.
Our livelihoods and culture are determined by the needs of the growing economy, rather than the reverse, which you’d think would be a given. This means that daily life is based more in artificial projections than any mutual communion with the natural world around us. Globalisation has ultimately cost us our connection with our local environment, and as we “grow”, we merely grow this distance, losing touch with the needs of our ecosystem; indeed, counteracting them.
In fact, one of the central tenets of this now-global dream, that our children would have it better (i.e., more) than us, has now been lost along the way. We’ve changed our outlook entirely amidst the onwards motion: it’s commonly accepted that future generations have it far worse than ever as a result of our ongoing activities today. And yet we continue, business as usual, while apathy gradually replaces hope in public consciousness.
We need to see past the figures and look to our own local communities; to measure prosperity on an authentic, human scale; on levels of self-reliance and localised sustainability rather than the amount of access we may currently have to global resources – a mismatch characteristic to the modern, globalised west. A better, more truly prosperous world—that’s for both people and planet, not just “on the page” in terms of GDP—requires that the concept of progress be equally accountable to an area’s poverty levels, not profits alone, which at best only reach a bare few whilst depriving the majority.
