Although industrialization was accompanied by an agricultural revolution that constantly increased food output, there was a growing shortfall between what the countryside could produce and the needs of the growing urban population.
At the same time, the factories were turning out a quantity of manufactured goods that was greater than could be easily absorbed within the country and for which overseas markets were required. The solution to both these problems was free trade, which would open Britain to imports of cheap food, and foreign countries to exports of British manufactures.
The connection between this and peace was made by, among others, Richard Cobden, the great advocate of free trade, who sought to break down "the barriers that separate nations. Cobden saw trade as the solution to chronic early-modern warring over territory, including imperial expansion. This bright geopolitical possibility merged powerfully with the economic reality that, in most cases, industrialization without trade -- or without dependence on other powers -- was difficult, and even impossible.
The key destabilizers in this system have been the questions of precedence and of raw materials. Being early to some particular industrial advance such as steam-powered mills had great advantages; indeed it might be said to create a comparative advantage where one had not existed before.
For a nation coming a bit later to the game, the emotions Cobden identified -- pride, revenge, hatred and jealousy -- might arise even in a situation of free trade, as the latecomer sensed that it might find itself at a serious, even permanent, disadvantage.
For nations wishing to catch up, one common recourse was to discourage manufactured imports until nascent industries could grow strong enough to face competition from producers based in nations that had had a head start.
This could of course be done in any number of ways, whether the blindly murderous Soviet collectivization of agriculture and forced industrialization or the merely authoritarian South Korea in the s , and could be variously financed through foreign investment the United States after the Civil War , currency manipulation China in the s or expropriation.
In a few cases, the other central question -- access to raw materials -- could be avoided through sheer good fortune. The United States has had a great deal of that. Whenever industrial advance required a new input, whether timber, coal, iron ore, oil, gas or water, the U. An exception is the rare earths needed for today's electronics. Russia has had similar luck, and so did China in the s, with ample coal and for a time oil.
Britain's coal and iron ore supplies were likewise crucial to its early industrial expansion. Most nations weren't so fortunate. Macdonald is really excellent on describing the ups and downs of Franco-German competition over iron and coal, which was in many ways the crux of Europe's bloody confrontation with itself from the midth century through World War II. He does the same for Japan, with its longing for the resources of Manchuria iron ore and coal; conquest came in and the East Indies and Malaya oil, rubber, tin; Again, as in industrialization, early movers like Britain and France, to the degree that their imperial expansions in the 19th-century scrambles for Africa and Asia improved access to raw materials, had created advantages for themselves.
Ambitious industrial powers like Japan, Italy and Germany came to the imperial game late but fiercely in the hope of erasing the precedential advantages of Britain, France and the U.
As Macdonald shows, ambitious nations that did not already have what they needed to feel that their own industrialization was secure -- that is, roughly speaking, every nation except the U. Social globalisation reduces the odds of intrastate conflict by just under 20 per cent. Our results are contrary to Olzak , who finds that social globalisation increases ethnic armed conflicts. I economic globalization and cultural globalization significantly increase fatalities from ethnic conflicts, supporting arguments from ethnic competition and world polity perspectives, 2 sociotechnical aspects of globalization increase deaths from ethnic conflict but decrease deaths from nonethnic conflict, and 3 ….
Here are more disadvantages: Globalization is a threat to national and local economies. Global companies coming into emerging and developing nations have the tendency to impose their ways, practices, and culture onto the target nations. For example, rebels in the delta region of Nigeria have kidnapped foreign sailors and workers to gain publicity for disputes that have some longstanding tribal roots.
That's where the integration of markets, including media, becomes important. Events from far-flung corners of the world instantly find their way onto television sets in major metropolises. Fighters and terrorists can easily make their own videos and then post them on the Web or send them to news outlets to dramatize their causes. World prices for arms remain low, he added, despite the industry's immunity from tariff reductions mandated by the World Trade Organization and the monopolies that producers have in many domestic markets.
Someone has to buy all those arms, of course. Attracting funds for war has become an easier and more broadly based process as the international financial architecture has developed. The world is now so interdependent that 'crisis networks' evolve, as information about a crisis in one collectivity flows to others, and as its consequences ramify.
By virtue of the information flows and of the interaction engendered by refugees, traders, terrorists, and other boundary-spanning individuals and groups, authority crises overlap and cascade across collectivities, forming linkages among them on an issue or regional basis ibid, Giddens and Rosenau describe a world in which people are more aware, and to some extent more empowered by their access to information and their increased ability to analyze the events shaping their lives.
In this picture, populations have become less compliant and more demanding at precisely the time when national political institutions, as described below, are in many cases reducing their budgets and programs.
The intersection of these trends sets the stage for intensified competition between groups who benefit from the state's protection and those who seek more freedom from state intervention. But reflexivity, while aided and stimulated by globalized media and information technology, is also threatened by these same forces.
Increasingly powerful media giants diffuse the ideology of globalization, with the effect that:. The values of Globalization, transmitted through satellite television and the distribution of worldwide publications, permeate everyone's life.
Global marketing, international stock markets, and the availability of nomadic world-wide venture capital complete the scene for the rise of a global market value system.
No culture is protected by topography, tradition or just plain disinterest--essentially nobody is out of reach of the extended arm of Globalization. Steingard and Fitzgibbons, Thus, globalization both enlightens and pacifies, both widens horizons and narrows vision. However, it does seem that the globalization narrative of the media is vulnerable to increasing cognitive dissonance as its utopian image of widening prosperity is subverted by images of deprivation and marginalization, and by a rising tide of insecurity and anxiety.
Another paradoxical effect of intensifying globalization, is that while it seeks to homogenize, is also increases awareness of social heterogeneity.
Groups whose identity and solidarity is based on race, ethnicity, religion, language have become increasingly vocal and have used the global media to make their discontent known. This contemporary "ethnic revival" was to some degree "unleashed" by the end of the Cold War. The Cold War was a conflict among states, and served to perpetuate the primacy of national identity in world society; but in the 's the state, weakened by globalization, is less effective in either coercing compliance or integrating national society, and minorities are able to more effectively reassert their identity in reaction to hegemonic cultural forces.
These minorities often see the state as no longer a promoter and protector of domestic interests, but rather a collaborator with outside forces Scholte, Thus, in the 's it can be argued that the primary locus of conflict may no longer be found between and among states, but between the state and subnational groups see Gurr, The overal effect of these developments has been to increase the salience of cultural diversity issues, both within and across borders, for all the major players in world politics.
Several prominent political analysts have argued variations on this theme. Samuel Huntington, for instance, has put forth inter-civilizational conflict as the new "danger" to the dominant powers in world affairs, stating that " The controversy and rebuttals provoked by Huntington's work are not of immediate concern here; however, his argument does provide important insights into some prominent conflicts of globalization.
Globalization in its contemporary form is the carrier of values which are essentially Western and liberal in character, but they are being aggressively promoted internationally as universal values, the inherent worth of which should be obvious to all right-thinking people. This is the perspective behind such notions as Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis, or the standard package of liberal economic reforms prescribed for all struggling economies by the International Monetary Fund Sachs, Huntington is explicit about debunking the globalization myth that world culture is Western culture, and argues further that:.
Western efforts to propagate such ideas produce instead a reaction against 'human rights imperialism' and a reaffirmation of indigenous values, as can be seen in the support for religious fundamentalism by the younger generation in non-Western cultures Huntington, Writing a few years later on a similar theme, Graham Fuller, a political scientist at the Rand Corporation, traced further the dynamics of "culture conflict," explaining how non-Western peoples are confronted with a flood of evidence that someone else's values are re-shaping their societies as:.
Such cultural anxieties are welcome fuel to more radical political groups that call for cultural authenticity, preservation of traditional and religious values, and rejection of the alien cultural antigens. Big Macs become in-your-face symbols of American power--political, economic, and military--over weak or hesitant societies and states Fuller, Fuller also argues that, on a shrinking planet, the West cannot escape the secondary effects of these conflicts:.
Chaos and turmoil in various regions create serious ripple effects that will not leave the rest of the globe untouched: Wars, refugees, embargoes, sanctions, weapons of mass destruction, radical ideology, and terrorism all emerge from the crucible of the failing state order The West will not be able to quarantine less-developed states and their problems indefinitely, any more than states can indefinitely quarantine the dispossessed within their own societies--on practical as well as moral grounds , Fundamentalisms of various kinds are prominent in the conflicts of "cultural reaction.
They feel even more threatened now as their national institutions are undermined by the international pressures described earlier. Both the pace and direction of change in these societies " A value-oriented, anti-modern, dedifferentiating form of collective action - a socio-cultural movement aimed at reorganizing all spheres of life in terms of a particular set of absolute values" Lechner, Globalization thus sets the stage for the confrontation between what Benjamin Barber has called "McWorld" and "Jihad.
These passages suggest that globalization seems to be pulling virtually all identity groups on the planet out of their various degrees of isolation, pushing them into the currents of the global ecumene and, thereby, obliging them to re-define, or as Robertson and others put it, relativize themselves in regard to global trends.
Relativization, however, is a process which may involve either rejection or some form of accommodation, integration, or synthesis with the hegemonic cultural and economic forces. Thus, a more nuanced picture would show that instead of the steady expansion of Western cultural dominance what we are really witnessing is a:.
Though in some respects a more optimistic scenario for the emergence of world culture, this juxtaposition of cultural forces produces just the mix of tensions which Sorokin identified as characteristic of periods of high social strife; a situation exacerbated by changes in the global economic system.
As mentioned earlier, the economic dimensions of globalization have attracted the most popular attention, much of which has been negative due to the frequency and variety of conflicts for which the process is blamed. The economic realm is also an area in which it can be argued that conflict has led to some creative responses from the international community. First, it should be acknowledged that, as Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter 84 argued, capitalism inevitably involves a process of "creative destruction.
However, entire industries and regions can be "destroyed," or at least marginalized, as more innovative competitors take the lead in a given sector. This is demonstrated, for instance, by the change from the horse and cart to the automobile, or from canals to railways. The liberal argument has always been that, despite the rather Darwinian way this process produces "winners" and "losers," society as a whole benefits from constant improvement in the quality and range of goods and services available to consumers.
In this sense economic globalization is viewed as the logical extension of this process to an increasingly unified global market. In the real world, losers are people, sometimes capitalists, but always workers, individually and as communities. Creative destruction means the unemployment of real workers, the destitution of real communities, devastation of the environment, and disempowerment of the populace MacEwan, 3 emphasis added. This has, in a sense, always been the case since capitalism replaced feudalism as the dominant system of production.
But the contemporary period is also characterized by a reduction in both the willingness and ability of governments to keep employment high through public expenditure or to pay the unemployment and welfare benefits which, to some degree, protected workers in the industrial countries from the creative destruction of capitalism during the decades immediately after World War II.
Rather, the increasing importance of international finance capital in the world economy has compelled governments to be much more concerned about the "investment climates" in their countries, and to insure that financial markets " approve" of their macroeconomic policies.
Put very simply, globalization has radically shifted the balance of economic power in favor of capital, which is highly mobile and thus able to move where profits are to be gained; and against labor, which is much less mobile even in an economic community like the European Union , and whose basis of organization is still more national than international.
As Ethan Kapstein has argued:. The forces acting on today's workers inhere in the structure of today's global economy, with its open and increasingly fierce competition on the one hand and fiscally conservative units--states--on the other Growing income inequality, job insecurity, and unemployment are seen as the flip side of globalization Kapstein, Kapstein and MacEwan are writing primarily about the industrialized countries, but the situation of those former "Third World" countries who cannot find a place in the new world economy is even more grave:.
Within the framework of a new informational economy, a significant part of the world population is shifting from a structural position of exploitation to a structural position of irrelevance Castells, 37 emphasis added.
A second reaction is the expression of utter desperation through that widespread violence, either individual or collective, which has transformed major cities in the Fourth World and entire regions in some countries into savage, self-destructive battlegrounds A third reaction, rapidly developing in the Fourth World In his third point, Castells links the cultural reaction discussed earlier to the deteriorating economic conditions of what he calls "Fourth World" societies.
He suggests that movements of reaction--whether ethnic, fundamentalist or Marxist have in common a wish to:. What has been the reality across the Third World for more than a decade is now coming home to roost. Declining incomes, growing inequalities, job insecurity, drugs, crime--these are the forces that are tearing at the social fabric of communities across the Northern hemisphere Hellinger, Furthermore, both Hellinger and Kapstein argue that such conditions have been fertile ground for demagoguery in the United States, Europe both Western and Eastern and the former Soviet Union.
As Kapstein puts it:. It is hardly sensationalist to claim that in the absence of broad-based policies and programs designed to help working people, the political debate in the United States and many other countries will soon turn sour. Populists and demagogues of various stripes will find 'solutions' to contemporary economic problems in protectionism and xenophobia.
Indeed, in every industrialized nation, such figures are on the campaign trail Kapstein, These domestic tensions also contribute to conflicts among states. Domestic manufacturers threatened by free trade frequently lobby their governments for legal protection from foreign competition.
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