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What makes globalization such a controversial topic at the beginning of the 21st century?
First of all, it's important to say that, as a historian, there's nothing new about globalization. The story of human history is the story of people in motion. Throughout this volume, we've seen that throughout its history, Europe has been continually interacting with other parts of the world. Going back to the age of exploration, this is a recurrent theme and Europe is defined, in some sense, by its position in a set of global networks.
Again, there is nothing new about globalization. What might be new, however, is the density of the linkages implied by the global economy today. In particular let's look at the communications revolution, which begins before the establishment of the Internet but is multiplied exponentially by the Internet, the sense of a kind of immediate awareness of the simultaneous events in all parts of the world that are constantly present to us now, and in ways no one could have imagined. Even those who operated in global networks in Early Modern Europe required months to find out about what was happening in China or in the Caribbean. Thus, there is something new about the density of these connections.
That said, I think the real reason that globalization is so controversial right now is that we've gone quite rapidly, in the space of just a couple decades, from a moment in which globalization is seen to be the answer to all of our problems to a moment where globalization seems to be the bearer of all that is most dangerous and threatening to us. What do I mean by this? Well, if you look at the history of Europe and the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War, the establishment of a global market economy is seen to be answer-if we could just bring our material prosperity to these other parts of the world, the would recognize what could be gained from it and wouldn't be interested in what the Soviet Union was doing and that somehow globalization, the expansion of the world economy along these lines, was seen to be the solution to the world's problems.
A huge amount of effort went in to making this be the case. And they were not always successful in implementing this process. The institution that were set up to make the global economy work, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, sometimes established rules that were really resented by countries that were latecomers to this prosperity. The rules restricted governments in their ability to go into debt or to spend on social services, which posed a real challenge. It was also true that many governments that endorsed this emergence of the global economy have, at times, retreated into nationalist protections. For example, the United States and Europe have consistently insisted on large agricultural subsidies. These are interferences in trade that drive up the price of food for many people in the world who can least afford it. Thus, even though globalization is the promise, it has been hard to live up to.
In recent decades, though, globalization has appeared to be much less promising in some sense and has become a process that brings bad news. People in motion means pathogens in motion. Fears of a global pandemic, of S.A.R.S., of the A.I.D.S. epidemic, which is an earlier example, are exacerbated by globalization as governments try to figure out how they are going to protect their populations from these threats to their health.
Also a concern is the threat of environmental degradation brought on by the pace of global development. Most climate scientists now agree that the climate is changing because of human activity. Are individual nation-states in a position to deal with this? What kinds of global institutions are possible? Clearly, this is an enormous challenge.
Finally, there is the issue of national security. Since 9/11 governments in Europe and the United States have acted with extraordinarily authoritative force to meet the dangers presented by groups of terrorists operating internationally who, by mobilizing relatively unsophisticated weapons, can pose real threats to populations.
Thus, globalization seems to bear as many threats as it does hopes for the future. At the end, that really is where we stand today. What kinds of institutions are required? Will governments on their own be able to solve these problems? Obviously not. On the other hand, can they find the energy and the vocabulary to cooperate in ways that will make solutions possible? I don't know. I'm just a historian.