Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
PACIFIC
OCEAN
PACIFIC
OCEAN
INDIAN
OCEAN
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
SOUTHERN
OCEAN
Figure 14.4
Global Shipping Lanes. The map traces over 3000 shipping routes used by commercial
and government vessels during 2006. The red lines mark the most frequently used shipping
lanes. Courtesy of: National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, http://ebm.nceas.
ucsb.edu/GlobalMarine/impacts/transformed/jpg/shipping.jpg, last accessed August 2008.
WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION, AND
WHAT ROLE DO NETWORKS PLAY
IN GLOBALIZATION?
Whether you are in favor of or opposed to globaliza-
tion, we all must recognize that globalization is “neither
an inevitable nor an irreversible set of processes,” as John
O'Loughlin, Lynn Staeheli, and Edward Greenberg put
it. Andrew Kirby explains that globalization is “not pro-
ceeding according to any particular playbook. It is not
a smoothly evolving state of capitalist development.”
Rather, it is fragmented, and its fl ows are “chaotic in terms
of origins and destinations.”
Globalization is a “chaotic” set of processes and
outcomes created by people, be they corporate CEOs,
university administrators, readers of blogs, electrical
engineers, or protesters at a trade meeting. The processes
of globalization and the connectedness created through
globalization occur across scales and across networks,
regardless of state borders.
The backbone of economic globalization is trade; as
such, debates over globalization typically focus on trade.
To visualize how trade fosters globalization, examine a
map of shipping routes (Fig. 14.4). The density of the net-
works on the map tells us how extensively connected the
world really is. But what are the consequences of those
connections? The arguments in favor of globalization, as
explained by economist Keith Maskus, are that “free trade
raises the well-being of all countries by inducing them
to specialize their resources in those goods they produce
relatively most effi ciently” in order to lower production
costs, and that “competition through trade raises a coun-
try's long-term growth rate by expanding access to global
technologies and promoting innovation.”
This view of free trade underpins what is sometimes
called the
Washington Consensus because it is shared by
the leaders of many international economic institutions
with offi ces in Washington, D.C., including the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World
Trade Organization. Yet not everyone accepts this “co
n-
sensus.” Indeed, many have questioned its underlying
assumptions in the wake of the global economic dow
n-
turn that began in 2008. Opponents view the Washington
Consensus as part of a Western-dominated effort to get the
rest of the world to privatize state-owned entities, to open
fi nancial markets, to liberalize trade by removing restric-
tions on the fl ow of goods, and to encourage foreign direct
investment. (Fig. 14.5) They argue that the countries of
the global economic core continue to protect their own
economies while forcing the countries of the semi-periphery
and periphery to open their economies in ways that can
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