Globalization: Policies, Challenges and Responses

Vincent di Norcia is a professor philosophy and business ethics at the
University of Sudbury. He is the author of Hard Like Water: Ethics in
Business and the Forum editor of the Corporate Ethics Monitor.

Globalization is an anthology of papers focusing on Middle East issues.
Enid Hill, who locates globalization’s historical origins in
19th-century capitalism, argues that globalization today is based on
“regularization,” or the “orderly accumulation” of wealth via
the extension of the industrial system to developing nations. Philip
Marfleet notes the rising protests against global free trade, but
confuses the point by claiming that no one on the planet can live
“without reference to globalized institutions.”

Globalization, several authors note, is facing opposition across the
Middle East. Ivan Ivekovic points to the ethnic conflicts in the
Balkans, and D.L. Ray argues that tribal chiefs and communal land
ownership in Ghana resist modernization and globalization, a view
supported by Shereen Ismael’s paper on Bedouin culture. But both
ignore the rampant corruption and authoritarianism of Africa’s tribal
states. R. Keith examines “internationalization and localization” in
China as they relate to the law and the state.

In his well-researched study, Ray Kiely offers the most balanced view
of globalization in the book. Kiely questions the
“hyper-globalization” model of thinkers like Kenichi Ohmae and many
left-wing critics, arguing that their claims about the mobility of
capital and the death of local cultures and the nation state are
exaggerated. Moreover, regional trade blocs are developing, from North
America and South America to Europe and Asia. All in all, globalization
is far more chaotic than ideologists of left or right assume. As open
markets fall in Silicon Valley, entrepreneurialism and trade encourage
prosperity in Bangalore, Lima, and Turkey; global trade networks are as
much a result of high-speed electronic communications and rapid
transportation as they are a product of powerful international
corporations. Finally, not all the problems of world poverty, social
injustice, and environmental crisis can be blamed on globalization.