全球化

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全球化
Throughout history, adventurers, generals, merchants, and financiers have constructed an ever-more-global economy. Today, unprecedented changes in communications, transportation, and computer technology have given the process new impetus. As globally mobile capital reorganizes business firms, it sweeps away regulation and undermines local and national politics. Globalization creates new markets and wealth, even as it causes widespread suffering, disorder, and unrest. It is both a source of repression and a catalyst for global movements of social justice and emancipation.
全球化的定义
Human societies across the globe have established progressively closer contacts over many centuries, but recently the pace has dramatically increased. Jet airplanes, cheap telephone service, email, computers, huge oceangoing vessels, instant capital flows, all these have made the world more interdependent than ever. Multinational corporations manufacture products in many countries and sell to consumers around the world. Money, technology and raw materials move ever more swiftly across national borders. Along with products and finances, ideas and cultures circulate more freely. As a result, laws, economies, and social movements are forming at the international level. Many politicians, academics, and journalists treat these trends as both inevitable and (on the whole) welcome. But for billions of the world抯 people, business-driven globalization means uprooting old ways of life and threatening livelihoods and cultures. The global social justice movement, itself a product of globalization, proposes an alternative path, more responsive to public needs. Intense political disputes will continue over globalization抯 meaning and its future direction.
经济全球化
Advances in communication and transportation technology, combined with free-market ideology, have given goods, services, and capital unprecedented mobility. Northern countries want to open world markets to their goods and take advantage of abundant, cheap labor in the South, policies often supported by Southern elites. They use international financial institutions and regional trade agreements to compel poor countries to "integrate" by reducing tariffs, privatizing state enterprises, and relaxing environmental and labor standards. The results have enlarged profits for investors but offered pittances to laborers, provoking a strong backlash from civil society. This page analyzes economic globalization, and examines how it might be resisted or regulated in order to promote sustainable development.
文化全球化
Technology has now created the possibility and even the likelihood of a global culture. The Internet, fax machines, satellites, and cable TV are sweeping away cultural boundaries. Global entertainment companies shape the perceptions and dreams of ordinary citizens, wherever they live. This spread of values, norms, and culture tends to promote Western ideals of capitalism. Will local cultures inevitably fall victim to this global "consumer" culture? Will English eradicate all other languages? Will consumer values overwhelm peoples' sense of community and social solidarity? Or, on the contrary, will a common culture lead the way to greater shared values and political unity?
Even here on the edge of the nation's capital, in this settlement of dirt tracks, plank shanties and the circular felt yurts of herdsmen, the sounds of English can be heard from the youngest of students - part of a nationwide drive to make it the primary foreign language learned in Mongolia, a landlocked expanse of open steppe sandwiched between Russia and China. "We are looking at Singapore as a model," Tsakhia Elbegdorj, Mongolia's prime minister, said in an interview, his own American English honed in graduate school at Harvard. "We see English not only as a way of communicating, but as a way of opening windows on the wider world."
In South Korea, six private "English villages" are being established where paying students can have their passports stamped for intensive weeks of English-language immersion, taught by native speakers from all over the English-speaking world. The most ambitious village, an $85 million English town near Seoul, will have Western architecture and signs, and a resident population of English-speaking foreigners.

Increased international tourism and a growing number of resident foreigners explain some developments, like the two English-language newspapers here and the growing numbers of bilingual store signs and restaurant menus. During the first eight months of 2004, international tourist arrivals here were up 54 percent; visits by Americans doubled to nearly 9,000, helped by popular Mongolian movies like "The Story of the Weeping Camel." Foreign arrivals increased across the board, with the exception of Russians, whose visits declined by 9.5 percent. That reflects a wider decline here of Russia's influence and the Russian language. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian was universally taught in Mongolia and was required for admission to universities.

Although the word globalization suggests a comprehensive and self-evident process, it is an incomplete term. It does not indicate precisely what is being globalized: the assumption is that it means the emergence of a single worldwide economy, into which all economies must integrate themselves, or more accurately, be integrated in the passive voice. But globalization does not obligingly halt at some ill-defined frontier between economics, society and culture. Indeed, it has its own set of cultural attendants, which exercise a profound influence on the life of peoples everywhere. By definition, globalization makes all other cultures local. But to billions of people all over the world, their culture is not local. It is central to their lives and who they are. Globalization eclipses, or at least subordinates all previous ways of answering need and of dealing with the vicissitudes of human life. All other ways of life are diminished and marginalized at a stroke.
Globalization is a declaration of war upon all other cultures. And in cultural wars, there is no exemption for civilians; there are no innocent bystanders. Why should it be expected that ancient and rooted civilizations are going to accept this peripheralisation without a struggle? The answer to that is that globalization carries an implicit promise that it will relieve poverty and offer security - perhaps the most ancient of human dreams. Because of the power of global capitalism to create wealth, it is assumed that this priority must sweep aside all other human preoccupations, including all existing institutions, interpretations and searches for meaning in the world.
It is disingenuous to assume that economy, society and culture operate in separate spheres. This suggests that, once exposed to the globalizing imperative, no aspect of social life, customary practice, traditional behavior will remain the same.

There have been, broadly, two principal responses in the world, which we may call the fatalistic and the resistant. It is significant that among the most fatalistic have been the leaders of the G-7. Ex-President Clinton said globalization is a fact not a policy choice. Tony Blair said it is inevitable and irreversible. It may be considered paradoxical that the leaders of the most dynamic and expanding economies in the world offer such a passive, unchallenging view of what are, after all, human-made arrangements. These are among the richest and most proactive regimes, which can wage endless war on the great abstraction that is terror, topple regimes and lay down one WTO law for the poor and another for themselves. Is their helplessness in the presence of these mighty economic and cultural powers merely pretence?
There are two aspects to resistance. One is the re-assertion of local identities - even if local actually means spread over very large parts of the world. The reclaiming of the local is often focused in the field of culture - music, song, dance, drama, artifacts and folk culture. This suggests an attempt to quarantine it from the effects of economic integration; a kind of cordon sanitaire set up around a dwindling culture. Some people believe it is possible to get the best of both worlds - they accept the economic advantages of globalization and seek to maintain something of great value, language, tradition and custom. This is the relatively benign response. The other has become only too familiar: the violent reaction, the hatred of both economic and cultural globalization which many not merely perceive, but feel in the very core of their being, as an inseparable violation of identity. The resentment of many Muslims (not only extremists) toward the U.S. and Israel, the defensive posturing of Hindu fundamentalism, opposed both to Islam and Christianity, are the most vivid dramatizations of this.