Globalization: Is It Really New?

4000 Words16 Pages
Q. 2 Globalization is a term widely used to describe the increasingly rapid integration of the world’s societies and economies. Discuss the theoretical background and practical effects of the most important factors working both for and against the transformational process. There is little doubt the modern world is changing at a rapid rate and is integrated in emphasis and degrees unmatched in history. Traditional understandings of the human condition and socio-cultural forces; of the nature of global body politic and of economic forces do not adequately reflect modern reality. Challenges to: the “presumed strict separation between internal and external affairs, the domestic and international arenas, and the local and the global” have emerged, and this description aptly alludes to some inherent tensions present within the modern global transformative process. It is in this context of shifting theoretical ground that this examination resides. A world in transition: interconnected and interdependent like never before – is challenging International relations core principles as never before. The term globalization is referred to today in all fields from pop culture, the media and many fields of academic pursuit without adequate definition or explanation. Is it a new phenomena or process changing the global political and economic systems in ways and to extents never seen before as the ‘globalists’ tell us? Or is this globalization a new catch phrase implying broad change but lacking, at its core, much new; missing enduring subtleties - and bringing into question the very worth of this globalization discourse as a ‘paradigmatic’ shift – as the ‘sceptics’ claim? After all, if globalization is to rival significant notions like modernization theory or Realism and have true theoretical value to IR theory must it, at the least, describe something new? In this
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