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QuestionG- discussion
The first discussion assignment for this course will focus on Globalization, a topic discussed in the introduction chapter. I recognize that this assignment is a bit more challenging and perhaps more time consuming than other discussions that follow, but globalization is such an important organizing principle for World Regional Geography that I feel we should spend some time considering this concept. Moreover, many of you are education majors and are required to cover this topic as a major learning objective within your program. Globalization is also an important concept covered on the geography portion of the PRAXIS exam. Most importantly, Globalization has become of central focus in the current presidential campaign, each side with their own view of how to engage with the global economy. With all this in mind, students will benefit from a careful reading of the material included in this discussion and it might be helpful to read your text material on globalization first. Your textbook introduces globalization on page 26.
I have two questions I wish you to answer for this discussion. First, which view of globalization do you most agree with and why? A description of the three views I wish you to choose from can be found in the Knox and Marston excerpt below. Second, in your opinion, is globalization a positive force or a negative force? Please explain your answers using information provided in this discussion.
interview explaining globalization by analyzing the writings of Adam Smith. Please click on the link below to read the transcript. If it works, you may also listen to the audio podcast at the top of the page:
The Hyperglobalist View: At one extreme is the view that open markets and free trade and investment across global markets allow more and more people to share in the prosperity of a growing world economy. Economic and political interdependence, meanwhile, creates shared interests that help prevent conflict and foster support for common values. Democracy and human rights, it is asserted, will spread to billions of people in the wake of neoliberal policies that promote open markets and free trade. Neoliberal policies are economic policies that are predicated on a minimalist role for the state, assuming the desirability of free markets as the ideal condition not only for economic organization but also for political and social life. Hyperglobalists believe that the current phase of globalization signals the beginning of the end for the nation-state and the denationalization of economies. By economic denationalization they mean that national boundaries will become irrelevant with respect to economic processes, and that national governments will not control their once geographically bounded economies but will instead facilitate connections among and between different parts of the world throughsuprantational organizations such as NAFTA and the EU.
The wider implications of the hyperglobalist position is that the world will become borderless as national governments become increasingly meaningless or function merely as facilitators of global capital flows and investments. Hyperglobalizersbelieve that the nation-state, the primary political and economic unit of contemporary world society, will eventually be replaced by institutions of global governance in which individuals claim transnational allegiances that are founded upon a commitment to neoliberal principles of free trade and economic integration. Politically, the global spread of liberal democracy will reinforce the emergence of a global governance, replacing the outmoded nation-state with global institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
The skeptics assert that their analysis of nineteenth-century economic patterns demonstrates that we are today witnessing not globalization but rather regionalization, as the world economy is increasingly dominated by three major regional financial and trading blocs: Europe, North America, and [East Asia]. The skeptics understand regionalization andglobalization to be contradictory tendencies. They believe that because of the dominance of those three major regional blocs, the world is actually less integrated than it once was because Europe, North America, and East Asia control the world economy and limit the participation of other regions in that economy.
The Transformationalist View: According to the transformationalist view, contemporary processes of globalization are historically unprecedented as governments and peoples across the globe confront the absence of any clear distinction between the global and the local, between domestic affairs and international affairs. Like the hyperglobalists, this group understands globalization as a profound transformative force that is changing societies, economies, institutions of government in short, the world order. In contrast to the hyperglobalists and the skeptics, however, thetransformationalists make no claims about the future trajectory of globalization, nor do they see present globalization as a pale version of a more globalized nineteenth century. Instead, they see globalization as a long-term historical process that is underlain by crises and contradictions that are likely to shape it in all sorts of unpredictable ways. Moreover, unlike the skeptics,