Globalization

Globalization is a process that, depending on one's perspective, has always been around, according to world systems theorists, or is a manifestation of the latest stage of the penetration of capitalism into the global arena. There are three main aspects of globalization: (1) the way it affects on the social structure of consumption, production, and the distribution of goods and services; (2) the forms and changes in the arrangement of power and politics; and (3) the shifting cultural arrangement of symbols, meanings, and values.

Internationalization was first introduced by the writings of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on international capital and the need for the system to expand outside national borders. Internationalization, with its roots first in the rise of multinational corporations, and later as a method of categorizing less [Page 334]and more developed nations, the core and periphery in global capitalism, and the rise of first world versus third world nations, referred to the means and consequences of capitalist expansion. Globalization, in turn, has come to the fore in the past two decades as a concept that intensifies the global links between people, political institutions, politics, and transnational production processes.

Modernization theory, emerging out of the post-World War II era, argued for a process of development in which countries were judged by their degree of political and social development, giving rise to the possibility of economic growth enabling them to reach higher levels of economic and social development. The evolutionary arc of modernization theory followed a path prescribed by Western liberal ideology. The world was presented in terms of an international system, linking individual national economies. Soon, a reaction against these evolutionary and structural-functionalist approaches led to theories of world systems, which break down the notion of national spaces, each isolated from another, and instead posit a global economy of interdependent systems of social, cultural, and political moments at various stages of evolution, but linked to a common means of production. Each society, culture, government, and economic agent must insert itself into a global division of labor. The result is a single marketplace governed by profit maximization, a series of state structures that inevitably hinder the efficient operation of the global capitalist system, and a labor market that is characterized by geographic, rather than class-based, surplus appropriation. World systems theory examined the historical process of state formation and emerging economic forces to analyze big structures within the historical trajectory of capitalism.

Several common elements appear in definitions regarding globalization in relationship to and distinct from internationalization: Social and economic processes are seen as interdependent and linked, contradictory, complex, and multifaceted; and processes are uneven in effects across time and space. Points of disagreement raise fundamental questions: How is globalization qualitatively different from internationalization? Is globalization about the domination of countries not part of the industrial core? How should one locate a process, geographically and politically, that generates changing territoriality and international and transnational relationships? Finally, is globalization a real phenomenon, or simply a relabeling of an ongoing capitalist process? More recently, the concept of globalization has come to reflect the changing nature of and relationships among political clusters, cultures, and production processes. The formation of horizontally integrated transnational corporations spread and intensified the international division of labor, internationalizing money and financial capital.

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