Critically examine the Globalisation in the past 25 years from the perspectives of the Western world. (UPSC CSE Mains 2017 - Political Science and International Relations, Paper 2)
Globalization has shown relatively steady and rapid progress due to technological advancements with increases in speed and scale, enabling engagement among all five continents. Globalization allows businesses or other organizations to create influence and develop operations in many regions. The partnership between the developed and the developing countries based on three planks.
- First was offshoring of manufacturing and low-end services jobs to developing countries.
- Second, developed countries run large trade deficits by acting as the market for the increased output of developing countries.
- Third, developing countries financing the trade deficit of the developed countries by accumulating large foreign exchange reserves.
The anti-globalisation movement first came to worldwide attention during a WTO meeting in Seattle in the year 1999. It went down after a series of protests, but the voices of discontent are rising yet again.
In theory, the globalisation of trade in goods and services would benefit consumers in rich countries by giving them access to inexpensive goods produced by cheaper labour in poorer countries. This, in turn, would help grow the economies of those poorer countries. But on the ground, globalisation has caused job losses and depressed wages, particularly the competition between workers in developing and developed countries that helped drive down wages and job security for workers in developed countries. Importing goods from developing countries reduces the demand for unskilled workers in Europe and the United States.
The neo-liberal prioritisation of finance and trade over the welfare of people has disappointed people resulting in a rising distrust of the establishment that is blamed for the inequality. The right-wing is rising in the USA and Europe with warning against rampant globalisation that is endangering their civilisation. Unemployment and high inequality give rise to insecurity which is often directed at the immigrants who are blamed for stealing jobs.
Joseph Stiglitz writes in Globalisation and its Discontents that the problem is not globalisation, but how the process is being managed. If globalisation is to benefit most members of the society, strong social protection measures must be in place as in the Scandinavian countries.
Economic neo-liberalism and democratic imperialism were the two strategies of a project of western-dominated world order. At the end of the 2010s, both strategies failed dramatically. Their aim to foster US and its western allies’ power upon the world has been reversed. The world coming out from both failures is much less western than in the past. It is a post-western world that is shading the western power itself. Nevertheless, in the US and Europe the debate concerns alternative economic policy paradigms and not alternative projects of global governance.
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