Globalisation signifies a social condition characterized by tight global economic, political, cultural, and environmental interconnections and flows that make most of the currently existing borders and boundaries irrelevant.
The earliest appearance of the term ‘globalization’ in the English language could be traced back to the 1940s, it was not until half a century later that this concept took the public consciousness by storm.
The buzzword ‘globalization’ exploded into the ‘Roaring Nineties’ because it captured the increasingly interdependent nature of social life on our planet.
Twenty years later, one can track millions of references to globalization in both virtual and printed space.
Unfortunately, however, early bestsellers on the subject—for example, Kenichi Ohmae’s The End of the Nation State or Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree—left their readers with the simplistic impression that globalization was an inevitable techno-economic juggernaut spreading the logic of capitalism and Western values by eradicating local traditions and national cultures.
This influential notion of globalization as a
steam-roller flattening local, national, and regional scales also appeared as the spectre of ‘Americanization’ haunting the rest of the world.
Such widespread fears or hopes depending on how one felt about such forces of Westernization—deepened further in the 2000s during the so-called ‘Global War on Terror’ spearheaded by an ‘American Empire’ of worldwide reach.
Even the more, sometimes ago public m debates about the alleged decline of the United States in the age of Obama and the corresponding rise of China and India have done little to soften this rigid dichotomy positing the West against the ‘rest’.
As a result, many people still have trouble recognizing globalization for what it is: the myriad forms of connectivity and flows linking the local (and national) to the global—as well as the West to the East, and the North to the South.
The term globalization applies to a set of social processes that appear to transform our present social condition of conventional nationality into one of globality.
Phases of Globalisation include:
1. Neoliberal market Globalism in the 1980s and 1990s, that spread the growth of capitalism, and social welfarism.
2. Global trade protest in the 1990s to 2000s. Global hero's emerged at that period protesting against the WTO hegemony. Again we saw the spread of transnational terrorism, in vogue at post 9/11 preaching against liberal capitalism, democracy and westernization.
3. 2008 to 2009 Global financial crisis and the ensuing European Sovereign Debt Crisis. Greece debt ceiling and other social crisis in the periphery
4. 2010s marked migration crisis in central America, North America, and many countries in the global south. Political refugees were eminent. In South East Asia, we experienced the experience of Myanmar and Rohingya. In 2010s also, there was a global surge of populism that slot of people saw as an unsettling. Leaders promised their people a return to cocoon, a return to the old nation states.
5. The biggest of all, was the 2020 and 2021 COVID 19 pandemic era that created global epidemic environment. This affects what people feel in space and time around the world.
Globalisation is causing us to adopt, adapt and embrace. A Nigerian business could travel to China, each African meal in a hybrid restaurant, wear Italian suit to move about, return to his hotel room to drink Russian Vodka while watching Korean TV.
Globalisation could be objective: the movement of Capitals, goods, technologies and people; or subjective: the spread of ideas, ideologies, symbols, narratives and imageries across the world space and time.
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