Globalization Perspectives
Highlighting the diverse approaches to understanding and explaining globalization
Individuals with strong public voices, who lead public or private organizations or who have access to public media, often shape public knowledge about globalization. From government officials to academics to media personalities, these luminaries issue diverse, thought-provoking perspectives on globalization issues. An assembly of speeches, interviews, and writings of those who have given their perspective on globalization is provided below. Our aim is to highlight the diverse approaches to understanding and explaining globalization, and to stimulate thought and discussion.
The perspectives presented here are a sample of those who try to explain and sometimes justify and sometimes condemn globalization. We seek to provide a range of opinions, but by no means an exhaustive catalogue of opinions.
Index
Perspectives on Globalization have been indexed to make it easier to locate views on particular aspects of globalization. While many perspectives address issues that overlap our categories, each perspective has been assigned to only one category.
What is Globalization?
Speaker: James D. Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank Group to the Board of Governors of the World Bank Group at the joint Annual Discussion Dubai, United Arab Emirates, September 23, 2003
Featured Work: A New Global Balance: The Challenge of Leadership
Featured Quote: "We are linked in so many ways: not only by trade and finance, but by migration, environment, disease, drugs, crime, conflict, and—yes—terrorism. We are linked - rich and poor alike -- by a shared desire to leave a better world to our children. And by the realization that if we fail in our part of the planet, the rest becomes vulnerable. That is the true meaning of globalization."
Speaker: David Dollar, the World Bank's director of Development Policy
Featured Work: Questions and Answers with David Dollar
Featured Quote: "Globalization, the growing integration of economies and societies around the world, has sparked one of the most highly charged debates of the past decade. Critics of globalization have argued that the process has exploited people in developing countries, caused massive disruptions and produced few benefits. Supporters point to the significant reductions in poverty achieved by countries that have embraced integration with the world economy such as China, Vietnam, India and Uganda. ìI prefer to use the term integration, because it is more precise than globalization. Economic integration occurs when countries lower barriers such as import tariffs and open themselves up to investment and trade with the rest of the world."
Speaker: James N. Rosenau, University Professor, The George Washington University
Featured Work: Declaration of Interdependence: A Draft Framework of Globalization Studies, 2003
Featured Quote: "This interdependence is widely acknowledged through pervasive preoccupations with the benefits and detriments of globalization, but these preoccupations cannot be freely pursued because thought and action at all levels of community are cast—tyrannized, really—in terms of a state-centric world view that limits comprehension and distorts practice."
Special Note: Professor Rosenau welcomes your input on this document. Please send comments to gwcsg@gwu.edu.
Speakers: John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago
Felix Rohatyn, United States Ambassador to France from September 1997 to January 2001
Leslie Sklair, Reader in Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science
Meghnad Desai, Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, London School of Economics and Political Science
Lisa Anderson, Dean School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Featured Work: Perspectives on Globalization: A Roundtable Discussion
Panel Discussion, 1 February 2001, Columbia University, New York
Featured Quote: "From the rapid deregulation of financial markets around the world to the spread of new technologies and the information revolution, the international system seems to be transforming before our very eyes. Multinational corporations no longer have a single national sales or labor market. Things, people and ideas flow around the world with what seems to be unprecedented ease and rapidity. We seem to know—maybe even care—more about each other than ever before. Is this true? Is it good? Is it sustainable?"
Speaker: Samuel P. Huntington, Professor at Harvard University
Featured Work: If Not Civilizations, What? Samuel Huntington Responds to His Critics
Article, November/December 1993, Foreign Affairs
Featured Quote: "When people think seriously, they think abstractly; they conjure up simplified pictures of reality called concepts, theories, models, paradigms. Without such intellectual constructs, there is, William James said, only 'a bloomin' buzzin' confusion'."
Culture
Speaker: Mark Rice-Oxley, correspondent, CS Monitor
Featured Work: In 2,000 Years, Will the World Remember Disney or Plato?
Featured Quote: "Down in the mall, between the fast-food joint and the bagel shop, a group of young people huddles in a flurry of baggy combat pants, skateboards, and slang. They size up a woman teetering past wearing DKNY, carrying Time magazine in one hand and a latte in the other. She brushes past a guy in a Yankees' baseball cap who is talking on his Motorola cellphone about the Martin Scorsese film he saw last night. It's a standard American scene - only this isn't America, it's Britain. US culture is so pervasive, the scene could be played out in any one of dozens of cities. Budapest or Berlin, if not Bogota or Bordeaux. Even Manila or Moscow."
Speaker: Jeremy Seabrook, Guardian Correspondent
Featured Work: Localizing Cultures
Featured Quote: "Globalization is a declaration of war upon all other cultures. And in cultural wars, there is no exemption for civilians; there are no innocent bystanders."
Speaker: Benjamin R. Barber, Whitman Professor of Political Science and director of the Whitman Center at Rutgers University, Author of the article and book Jihad vs. McWorld
Featured Work: "Jihad vs. McWorld"
Article, March 1992, The Atlantic
Featured Quote: "The two axial principles of our age—tribalism and globalism—clash at every point except one: they may both be threatening to democracy."
Additional Works: "Globalizing Democracy"
Article, 11 September 2000, American Prospect
Featured Quote: "Can globalism be governed? Or, as a first step, can we start by building a global civil society? Until recently, one could look in vain for a global 'we, the people' to be represented. That is now changing."
Speaker: Mario Vargas Llosa, novelist and author of The Party of the Goat
Featured Work: "The Culture of Liberty"
Article, February 2000, Foreign Policy
Featured Quote: "The most effective attacks against globalization are usually not those related to economics. Instead, they are social, ethical, and, above all, cultural. These arguments surfaced amid the tumult of Seattle in 1999 and have resonated more recently in Davos, Bangkok, and Prague."
Speaker: Francis Fukuyama, Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the Institute of Public Policy, George Mason University
Featured Work: "Economic Globalization and Culture"
Interview, 2001
Featured Quote: "Many people think that because we have advanced communications technology, and are able to project global television culture worldwide, this will lead to homogenization on a deeper cultural level. I think that, in a way, it's done just the opposite."
Economics
Speaker: Gordon Brown, Chancellor Of The Exchequer
Featured Work: Making Globalisation Work for All—The Challenge of Delivering the Monterrey Consensus
Featured Quote: "In setting out his objectives at Harvard University in 1948 Marshall articulated then the greater unifying vision that can inspire us still today of a global fight against, as he said, 'hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos' that would secure not merely 'a working economy throughout the world' but 'permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist'. You form a unique coalition for justice—for the relief of global poverty, for the defeat of agricultural protectionism, for transparency and an end to corruption, for education and health not just as a privilege of some of the worldÃs citizens but a right for all and most recently together and in unison you successfully raised the standard for debt relief and changed the way world leaders acted."
Speaker: C. Fred Bergsten, Director of the Institute for International Economics
Featured Work: Foreign Economic Policy for the Next President
Foreign Affairs, 00157120, Mar/Apr2004, Vol. 83, Issue 2
Featured Quote: "At a time when U.S. foreign policy is dominated by war, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction, economic concerns are often relegated to the back burner. But in reality, economic policy must be an integral component of any successful foreign policy. Some of its elements, such as the suppression of terrorist financing and support for reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, bear directly on the most central national security concerns. The linkage, however, is much broader, because most countries, rich or poor, large or small, depend heavily on the global economy for their prosperity and their stability. Hence, economics ranks at the top of their list of concerns. To continue to be relevant to the rest of the world, the United States must engage effectively on these issues. Foreign economic policy is also critical to the health of the domestic economy. Over the past generation, the share of trade in U.S. GDP has tripled, to about 30 percent, and over the past decade, the competitive stimulus provided by rapid globalization has helped spur a dramatic increase in productivity, thus contributing to faster growth and job creation as well."
Speaker: Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect
Featured Work: "Globalism and Poverty"
The American Prospect vol. 13 no. 1, January 1, 2002-January 14, 2002
Featured Quote: "There is a very serious case not against 'globalization,' but against the particular version of it imposed by the world's financial elites. The brand currently ascendant needlessly widens gaps of wealth and poverty, erodes democracy, seeds instability, and fails even its own test of maximizing sustainable economic growth."
Speaker: Amartya Sen, 1998 Nobel Laureate in Economic Science and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge
Featured Work: How to Judge Globalism
Featured Quote: "Globalization is often seen as global Westernization. On this point, there is substantial agreement among many proponents and opponents. Those who take an upbeat view of globalization see it as a marvelous contribution of Western civilization to the world. There is a nicely stylized history in which the great developments happened in Europe: First came the Renaissance, then the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and these led to a massive increase in living standards in the West. And now the great achievements of the West are spreading to the world. In this view, globalization is not only good, it is also a gift from the West to the world. The champions of this reading of history tend to feel upset not just because this great benefaction is seen as a curse but also because it is undervalued and castigated by an ungrateful world."
"Again, the real issue is the distribution of globalization's benefits. Indeed, this is why many of the antiglobalization protesters, who seek a better deal for the underdogs of the world economy, are not--contrary to their own rhetoric and to the views attributed to them by others--really "antiglobalization." It is also why there is no real contradiction in the fact that the so-called antiglobalization protests have become among the most globalized events in the contemporary world."
Speaker: George Soros, President and Chairman, Soros Fund Management LLC
Tony Giddens, Director, London School of Economics
Featured Work: "Director's Dialogue with George Soros"
Dialogue, October 2002, London School of Economics
Featured Quote:
Soros: "...there needs to be a lender of last resort, because if the system can't sustain a country like Brazil that has done all the right things then I think globalisation is going to break down and I think that there is now a very serious prospect of that happening."
Giddens: "I think it's plain that the term Anti-Globalisation Movement is largely a press invention and you're talking about a movement, which is pressing among other things for a more equitable world."
Speaker: Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize Winner in Economics
Featured Work: "East and West: The Reach of Reason"
Article, 20 July 2000, New York Review of Books
Featured Quote: "It is striking how little critical assessment of the experience of the millennium took place during its recent worldwide celebration."
Speaker: Vandana Shiva, Founder Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, New Delhi
Featured Work: "Poverty & Globalization"
Speech, 2000, BBC Reith Lectures, London
Featured Quote: "Recently, I was visiting Bhatinda in Punjab because of an epidemic of farmers' suicides. Punjab used to be the most prosperous agricultural region in India. Today every farmer is in debt and despair."
Speaker: James D. Wolfensohn, President of The World Bank
Featured Work: "The Challenges of Globalization: The Role of the World Bank"
Speech, 2 April 2001, Berlin
Featured Quote: "African development can only result from a partnership in which the leadership and basic responsibility must be borne by the Africans. And the role of the international institutions and bilateral donors must be to give wholehearted support, with knowledge and experience, and to give liberally in terms of material resources and access to markets."
Speaker: Mike Moore, Director General, World Trade Organization
Featured Work: "The Backlash Against Globalization?"
Speech, 26 October 2000, Ottawa
Featured Quote: "I am not suggesting that liberalism is in retreat. The world economy has survived the financial storm and is growing strongly again."
Speaker: Robert Hormats, Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs (International) and Managing Director of Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Featured Work: "Reducing International Divisions in the Global Economy"
Speech, 29 March 2001, Elliott School of International Affairs JAMA Lecture, The George Washington University, Washington, DC
Featured Quote: "This evening I would like to discuss the challenges posed by globalization in the early twentieth-first century."
Speaker: John Sweeney, President of AFL-CIO
Featured Work: Summit on the 21st Century Workforce
Speech, 20 June 2001, MCI Center, Washington, DC
Featured Quote: "How workers fare in the global economy of the 21st century is of critical concern to the AFL-CIO and to workers everywhere."
Speaker: Robert B. Zoellick, Ambassador, Office of the US Trade Representative
Featured Work: "So What Is There to Cover? Globalization, Politics and the US Trade Strategy"
Address to the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, 30 April 2002, Phoenix
Featured Quote: "Early in the 20th Century, Russia turned to Marxism and Leninism in part because of the failures of the first modern era of globalization. Early in the 21st Century, we can help Russia embrace the global economy if we agree to the rules of the WTO."
Speaker: Hazel Henderson, newspaper columnist and author
Featured Work: "Observations on Globalization, Finance, and Trade"
Forum 2000, 15 October 2001, Prague
Featured Quote: "Globalization, particularly of finance, has led to short-term hot money flows (currencies and portfolio investments) which have become the transmission belts of ecological and livelihood destruction, disruption of domestic, social/economic policies in all countries and exacerbation of poverty and social exclusion—sometimes affecting whole countries."
Speaker: Jerry Mander, Senior Fellow at Public Media Center (San Francisco), Program Director, Foundation for Deep Ecology, Co-founder and Chair, International Forum on Globalization, author of The Case Against the Global Economy
Featured Work: "Resisting the Machine"
Radio interview with Frank Beacham
Featured Quote: "Mander helps us comprehend 'the global economy' and how it is affecting our lives. He urges that this global expansion be brought to a halt and reversed.
Economic globalization involves arguably the most fundamental redesign and centralization of the planet's political and economic arrangements since the Industrial Revolution. Yet the profound implications of these changes have barely been exposed to serious public scrutiny or debate."
Speaker: Noam Chomsky, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Featured Work: The Passion for Free Markets: Exporting American Values through the New World Trade Organization
Article, March 1997, Z-Magazine
Featured Quote: "But that, again, is a larger tale, one that tells us a lot about the contemporary world: its social and economic realities, and the grip of ideology and doctrine, including those doctrines crafted to induce hopelessness, resignation, and despair."
Speaker: IMF Staff
Featured Work: "Globalization: Threat or Opportunity?"
Article, 12 April 2000 (Corrected January 2002), Washington, DC
Featured Quote: "The term 'globalization' has acquired considerable emotive force. Some view it as a process that is beneficial-a key to future world economic development—and also inevitable and irreversible. Others regard it with hostility, even fear, believing that it increases inequality within and between nations, threatens employment and living standards and thwarts social progress."
Speaker: Horst Köhler, Managing Director, International Monetary Fund
Featured Work: "Working for a Better Globalization"
Speech, Conference on Humanizing the Global Economy, 28 January 2002, Washington, DC
Featured Quote: "The critical debate on globalization has been subdued since September 11. But the important issues it raises have not gone away, and need to remain at the core of national and international policy agendas."
Speaker: Amy Chau, Professor, Yale Law
Featured Work: World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
Featured Quote: "When free market democracy is pursued in the presence of a market-dominant minority, the almost invariable result is backlash. This backlash typically takes one of three forms. The first is a backlash against markets, targeting the market-dominant minority's wealth. The second is a backlash against democracy by forces favorable to the market-dominant minority. The third is violence, sometimes genocidal, directed against the market-dominant minority itself."
Governance
Speaker: Moises Naim, Editor, Foreign Policy
Featured Work: "The Five Wars of Globalization"
Foreign Policy, January/February 2003
Featured Quote: "Governments are made up of cumbersome bureaucracies that generally cooperate with difficulty, but drug traffickers, arms dealers, alien smugglers, counterfeiters, and money launders have refined networking to a high science, entering into complex and improbable strategic alliances that span cultures and continents."
Speaker: Kenneth Rogoff, Economic Counselor and Director of Research, International Monetary Fund
Joseph Stiglitz, Professor of Economics and Finance, Columbia University
Featured Work: "Joseph Stiglitz and Kenneth Rogoff discuss Globalization and Its Discontents"
Discussion and book launch, 28 June 2002
Speaker: Program on International Policy Attitudes
Featured Work: "Americans on Globalization: A Study of US Public Attitudes"
Survey results, 28 March 2000, Washington, DC
Featured Quote: "Overall, Americans see globalization as somewhat more positive than negative and appear to be growing more familiar with the concept and more positive about it."
Speaker: William Jefferson Clinton, former President of the United States
Featured Work: "Our Shared Future: Globalization in the 21st Century"
Speech, 17 June 2002, Council on Foreign Relations, New York
Featured Quote: "When I was running for president in 1992, it occurred to me that the line between foreign and domestic policy was becoming increasingly irrelevant. September 11th brought that home to the United States with a vengeance. It seems to me it made clear the central fact of globalization."
Speaker: Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times columnist
Featured Work: The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Chapter 1
Featured Quote: "If nothing else, the cycle from Asoke Street to my street and from Amazon.country to Amazon.com served to educate me and many others about the state of the world today."
Additional Works: Discussion, 5 December 2001, Robert J. Pelosky, Jr. Distinguished Speaker Series, The Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, Washington DC
Featured Quote: "Well, the way I try to define it, Harry—the short answer, that it's the integration of everything with everything else."
Speaker: Robert Kaplan, The Atlantic Monthly columnist
Featured Work: "The Coming Anarchy"
Article, February 1994, The Atlantic Monthly
Featured Quote: "How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet."
Additional Works: Discussion, 5 December 2001, Robert J. Pelosky, Jr. Distinguished Speaker Series, The Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, Washington DC
Featured Quote:"Let me put it this way. First of all, a lot of good things are going to happen in the world, which humanists will duly celebrate. But foreign policy crises are about what goes wrong."
Speaker: David J. Rothkopf, Chief Executive Officer of Intellibridge
Featured Work: "After This; Whatever Capitalism's Fate, Somebody's Already Working on an Alternative"
Sunday, 20 January 2002; The Washington Post Page B01
Featured Quote: "Somewhere in the world today walks the next Marx. But he is not a communist, and he almost certainly is not an expatriate German slaving over his theories in the stacks of the British Library. Nonetheless, he or she will attempt to seize upon the trends behind today's headlines to shape a competitor to 'American capitalism' that the disenfranchised in nations around the world can embrace."
Speaker: Gay McDougall, Human Rights Activist
Featured Work: Interview by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, PBS
March 1998, South Africa
Featured Quote: "But now what's happening in the world is, you're getting the emergence of extremely powerful non-state actors who have a greater impact on the quality of life and ultimately the rights of people in a country or territory—multinational corporations essentially. There are other non-state actors that are problematic."
Speaker: Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa
Featured Work: "Addressing the Backlash Against Globalization: A Southern Perspective of the Problem"
Speech, 28 January 2001, Davos
Featured Quote: "In order to develop a response to the current backlash against globalisation we need to be clear on what we mean by globalisation and understand the reasons for the backlash against it."
Speaker: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, South African Nobel Laureate
Featured Work: Interview with Danny Schechter
January 1998, PBS; Davos, Switzerland
Featured Quote: "I get very, very concerned with any scheme that says people are expendable, that any person is expendable, as long as some greater good gets to be served."
Additional Works:Convocation Address
16 February 2000, University of Toronto, Toronto
Featured Quote: "We might characterize human history as seeking after a solution to the problems of particularity and universalism, of who or what belongs to what group, and who is to be excluded, what is similar in appearance, conduct, speech, culture, dress, religion, thought and what is different. What do we mean by identity?"
Speaker: Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Prime Minister of India
Featured Work: Address to the 56TH session of the U.N. General Assembly
10 November 2001, New York
Featured Quote: "Even while uniting the nations of the world in their grief, this terrible tragedy has created the opportunity to fashion a determined global response to terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, wherever it exists and under whatever name."
Speaker: Kenneth N. Waltz, Professor at Columbia University, Ford Professor at UC Berkeley
Featured Work: "Globalization and Governance"
Article, PS Online, December 1999
Featured Quote: "In 1979 I described the interdependence of states as low but increasing. It has increased, but only to about the 1910 level if measured by trade or capital flows as a percentage of GNP; lower if measured by the mobility of labor, and lower still if measured by the mutual military dependence of states."
Speaker: Chris Patten, Commissioner for External Relations, European Union
Featured Work: "Governance"
Lecture, 2001, BBC Reith Lectures
Featured Quote: "The 'sustainable development' to which this series of lectures is devoted is a phrase first coined by the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment—The Stockholm Conference—in 1972. 15 years later the Brundtland Commission on Environment and Development—whose eponymous chairman will be giving one of the later lectures in this series—defined it thus, 'to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'."
Speaker: Peter van Ham, Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations "Clingendael" in The Hague, author of European Integration and the Postmodern Condition
Featured Work: "The Rise of the Brand State: The Postmodern Politics of Image and Reputation"
Article, 10 October 2001, Foreign Affairs
Featured Quote: "Look at the covers of the brochures in any travel agency and you will see the various ways in which countries present themselves on the world's mental map. Singapore has a smiling, beautiful face offering us tasty appetizers on an airplane, whereas Ireland is a windy, green island full of freckled, red-haired children."
Speaker: Aquilino Q. Pimentel, Senator, The Philippines
Featured Work: "Globalization: Gobbling Up the Developing World"
Symposium on Globalization, 18 February 2002, Claret High School, Quezon City
Featured Quote: "I understand that globalization is supposedly a means by which the so-called economic playing field is leveled all over the world. The idea is to enable businesses in the developing world, like the Philippines and Indonesia, to compete freely with businesses in the developed world like the US and Germany, for example. One major way of doing that is by removing customs duties and tariff barriers, in short, taxes, for goods that we buy from other countries and for the goods that we sell to other countries. By doing so, globalization will supposedly bring about the development of the world in a more effective and just manner. The problem is that that is not what we see is happening today."
Speaker: M. Lionel Jospin, Prime Minister of France
Featured Work: "The Challenges of Globalization: Regulation and Development"
Speech to the Economic and Social Council, 30 January 2002
Featured Quote: "Globalization is an international reality of which France, like every other nation, is part. But it's a reality we want to control."
Health
Speaker: Peter Piot, Executive Director of UNAIDS
Featured Work: Speech, 30 October 2001, International Conference on Globalization, Ghent
Featured Quote: "I want to take up two themes in the globalisation debate: the relation between the local and the global; and the continuing relevance of national government and multilateral regulation."
Speaker: Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director-General, World Health Organization
Featured Work: "Globalization as a Force for Better Health"
Lecture, 16 March 2001, London School of Economics, London
Featured Quote: "The new evidence gathered over recent years concludes that health must be seen as a central factor not only in social development, but also in countries' ability to compete on the global economic stage and achieve sustainable economic progress. Health, therefore, must no longer be seen as an expenditure only the rich countries can afford, but as a necessary investment by the poorest countries of this world."
Speaker: Jeffrey Koplan, former Director, Center for Disease Control and Prevention
Featured Work: "Globalization of Health"
Keynote Address (video stream), 13 February 2002, 2002 Policy Roundtable Series, Harvard University, Boston
Featured Quote: "In terms of health issues and risks and health challenges, and healthcare delivery systems, national borders are now essentially meaningless."
Technology
Speaker: William E. Kennard, former Chairman (presiding), Federal Communications Commission
Featured Work: "A New FCC For the 21st Century"
Proceedings, 20 May 1999, Washington, DC
Featured Quote: "The two great forces seem to be this notion of convergence, and technology convergence, and this notion of globalization. That those two huge forces are changing the entire way we're thinking about that industry, if there was an industry, or many parts of this industry and what's happening in terms of a transition."
Events
Conference on New Technologies and International Governance
11-12 February 2002, Johns Hopkins University, SAIS, Washington, DC
SAIS and GMU Hosted Conference on New Technologies and International Governance
Contributors
We will continue to update this site with additional Perspectives on Globalization.
We welcome any suggestions you have for other works that will add richness and diversity to our collection of viewpoints. Please contact us at gwcsg@gwu.edu. This listing is compiled and maintained by GWCSG Research Assistants and Interns.
