Globalization

It was the anti-globalization movement that really put globalization on the map. As a word it has existed since the 1960s, but the protests against this allegedly new process, which its opponents condemn as a way of ordering people's lives, brought globalizations out of the financial and academic worlds and into everyday current affairs jargon.

But that scarcely brings us nearer to what globalizations means. The phenomenon could be a great deal of different things, or perhaps multiple manifestations of one prevailing trend. It has become a buzzword that some will use to describe everything that is happening in the world today.

The dictionary definition is a great deal drier. Globalizations (n) is the "process enabling financial and investment markets to operate internationally, largely as a result of deregulation and improved communications" (Collins) or - from the US - to "make worldwide in scope or application" (Webster). The financial markets, however, are where the story begins.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the business model termed the "globalized" financial market came to be seen as an entity that could have more than just an economic impact on the parts of the world it touched.

Globalization came to be seen as more than simply a way of doing business, or running financial markets - it became a process. From then on the word took on a life of its own. Centuries earlier, in a similar manner, the techniques of industrial manufacturing led to the changes associated with the process of industrialization, as former country dwellers migrated to the cramped but booming industrial cities to tend the new machines.

So how does the globalized market work? It is modern communications that make it possible; for the British service sector to deal with its customers through a call Centre in India, or for a sportswear manufacturer to design its products in Europe, make them in south-east Asia and sell them in North America.

But this is where the anti-globalization side gets stuck in. If these practices replace domestic economic life with an economy that is heavily influenced or controlled from overseas, then the creation of a globalized economic model and the process of globalization can also be seen as a surrender of power to the corporations, or a means of keeping poorer nations in their place.

Low-paid sweatshop workers, GM seed pressed on developing world farmers, selling off state-owned industry to qualify for IMF and World Bank loans and the increasing dominance of US and European corporate culture across the globe have come to symbolize globalization for some of its critics.

The anti-globalization movement is famously broad, encompassing environmentalists, anarchists, unionists, the hard left, some of the soft left, those campaigning for fair development in poorer countries and others who want to tear the whole thing down, in the same way that the original Luddites attacked mechanized spinning machines.

Not everyone agrees that globalization is necessarily evil, or that globalized corporations are running the lives of individuals or are more powerful than nations. Some say that the spread of globalization, free markets and free trade into the developing world is the best way to beat poverty - the only problem is that free markets and free trade do not yet truly exist.

Globalization can be seen as a positive, negative or even marginal process. And regardless of whether it works for good or ill, globalization’s exact meaning will continue to be the subject of debate among those who oppose, support or simply observe it.What is Zeitgeist?