Globalisation’ is a notion that is poorly understood. Globalisation is not only an economic phenomenon. It should not be equated with the emergence of a ‘world system’. It is really about the transformation of space and time. Globalisation does not only concern creating large-scale systems, but also the transformation of local, and even personal, contexts of social experience.
Our day-to-day activities are increasingly influenced by events happening on the other side of the world. Conversely, local lifestyle habits have become globally consequential. Globalisation is not a single process but a complex mixture of processes, which often act in contradictory ways, producing conflicts, dis-junctures and new forms of stratification. Globalisation is a super-transnational force. Global governance is its manifestation as well as management.
Globalisation is the emergence of a complex web of interconnectedness by which our lives are increasingly shaped by events that occur, and decisions that are made, at a great distance from us. It means geographical distance is of declining relevance, and that territorial boundaries of the nation-states are becoming less significant. It is the deepening as well as the broadening of the political process.
Anthony Giddens considers it as the intensification of worldwide social relations. Kenichi Ohmae finds it as a ‘borderless world’. It is linked to the growth of ‘supra-territorial’ relations between people, where territory matters less because an increasing range of connections have a ‘trans-world’ or trans-border character. There is a single increasingly integrated and universalised world economy largely operating across state frontiers and also beyond the frontiers of state ideology and state-controlled mechanisms.
Globalisation is used to refer to a process, a policy, a marketing strategy, a predicament, even an ideology. But it is not a single process but a complex of processes, often overlapping and interlocking processes, but also, at time, contradictory and oppositional ones.
Globalisation can be defined as a complex set of distinct but related processes – economic, cultural, social but also political and military – through which social relations have developed global reach and significance. In this sense globalisation includes the development of transnational relations of many kinds as well as specifically global forms.’
Briefly, it stands for:
(i) Cross-border relations or internalisation e.g. movement of goods, investments, people, capital, communications, ideas etc.
(ii) Removal of regulatory barriers to international trade, travel, financial transfers, transactions and communications, i.e., liberalisation;
(iii) Increase of trans-border relations making out a ‘global village’.
The term ‘globalisation’ was not coined until the second half of the twentieth century. Some theorists have presented globalisation as the focal point for an alternative paradigm of social inquiry. Yet ideas of globalisation remain as elusive as they are pervasive. According to Anthony Giddens there are few terms that we use so frequently but which are so poorly conceptualised.
It is a malleable catchall term that can be invoked in whatever way the user finds convenient. To make its meaning more explicit, the term should be distinguished from internationalisation, liberalisation, universalisation and westernisation. Internationalisation refers to a growth of transactions and interdependence between countries. First and Thompson see globalisation as an intense form of internalisation. But the term is politically objectionable as it finds world social relations in terms of country units, state governments, and national communities.
Liberalisation denotes a process of removing officially imposed constraints on movements of resources between countries in order to form an open and borderless world economy. Globalisation as liberalisation opens no new insights. Globalisation as universalisation is assumed to entail standardisation and homogenisation with worldwide cultural, economic, legal and political convergence. In this sense, ‘global’ means ‘worldwide’ and ‘everywhere’. This conception too opens no new and distinctive insight.
This statement can have unhappy political consequences. Cultural protectionists oppose it. Globalisation in many ways can promote cultural diversity, revival and innovations. As westernisation it represents particular social structures of modernity (capitalism, industrialism, rationalism, urbanism, individualism etc.) In this sense, globalisation is interpreted as colonisation, Americanisation, westoxification, unipolar hegemony, neo-imperialism and the like. But westernisation, and also modernisation and colonisation have a longer history than contemporary intense globalisation. The two are not coterminous.
Following eclectic approach, Scholte identifies globalisation as the spread of transplanetary and supraterritorial connections between people. In this approach the words ‘global’, ‘transplanetary’ and ‘transworld’ are synonyms. He prefers the word ‘globality’ or spatiality which says something about the arena and the place of human action and experience: the where of social life. Globality in the broader sense of transplanetary relations refer to social links between people located at points anywhere on earth.
The global field is in these cases a social space in its own right. Distinctiveness of recent globalisation involves more than the quantity, frequency, scope and depth of transplanetary social links. Qualitatively much of today’s global connectivity is different. Unlike earlier times, contemporary globalisation is marked by a large-scale spread of supraterritoriality. ‘Supraterritorial’ relations are social connections that substantially transcend territorial geography.
Global connections have qualities of trans-world simultaneity and trans-world instantaneity as seen in telecommunication networks, global mass media, global finance etc. Territoriality has lost its monopoly hold. Earlier periods did not know jet travel, satellite communications, Internet, television broadcasts, intercontinental production chains, global credit cards etc.