Claims Of Globalization

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6 claims of globalization Claim One seeks to establish beyond dispute ‘what globalization means’, that is, to offer an authoritative definition of globalization designed for broad public consumption. It does so by interlocking its two core concepts and then linking them to the adjacent ideas of ‘liberty’ and ‘integration’. The following two examples illustrate this process. The first is a passage taken from a leading Business Week article published in the late 1990s: ‘Globalization is about the triumph of markets over governments. Both proponents and opponents of globalization agree that the driving force today is markets, which are suborning the role of government’. The same claim is made over and over again in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman’s best-selling book on globalization. Indeed, a number of commentators have argued that Friedman’s writings provide the ‘official narrative of globalization’ in the United States today. At one point in his narrative, the award-winning New York Times columnist insists that everybody ought to accept the following ‘truth’ about globalization: ‘The driving idea behind globalization is free-market capitalism—the more you let market forces rule and the more you open your economy to free trade and competition, the more efficient your economy will be. Globalization means the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world’. By forging a close semantic link between ‘globalization’ and ‘market’, globalists like Friedman seek to create the impression that globalization represents primarily an economic phenomenon. Thus, unburdened from the complexity of its additional non-economic dimensions, ‘globalization’ acquires the necessary simplicity and focus to convey its central normative message contained in further semantic connections to the adjacent concepts ‘liberalization’ and ‘integration’: the
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