The Concepts of Globalization

The Concepts of Globalization and the the Survey of the Related Definitions By Jae-Yiew Lee, Majored in Economics, Graduate School of Korean Studies, Academy of Korean Studies 1. The concepts of globalization and its origin of the word Although the concepts and definitions of globalization have been said by a lot of people, it is difficult for them to be defined in short and exact ways because they are malleable and varied each by each. However, the fundamental and common factors of the concepts are (1) internationalization, (2) liberalization, (3) universalization, (4) westernization, (5) supraterritoriality, and so on. They means relative deterritorialization, connected with reterritorialization including localization, and regionalization. The word, 'globe' described 'the planet' as the roundness of the earth was recognized several centuries ago, of which the adjective, 'global' wasn't given the meaning of 'the whole world', added to the earlier 'spherical' until the 1890's, according to Oxford English Dictionary, 1989:Ⅵ, 582. After 50 years since then, 'globalize' and 'globalism' appeared on a treatise (Reiser and Davies, 1944: 212, 219). The noun, 'globalization' was shown in the dictionary of American English, Webster, 1961: 965. Before 1990's, 'international' was more popularly than 'global'. It was not frequent that even in the mid-1980's, global governance, globalization, and globalism were used in our everyday lives. Except for the rare cases, the derivatives like 'global', 'globality', 'globalization' and 'globalism' did not appeared on the titles of the print published before the mid-1970's. The multi-ligual expressions of the globalization are as follows: globalizzazione in Italian, globalizacion in Spanish, globalizacao in Portuguese, Globalisierung in German, globalisaatio in Finnish, globalisasi in Indonesian, globalisasyon in Tagalog, mondialisation in French, mondializare in Roman, mondialisering in Dutch, Quanqiuhua in Chinese, toankouhoa in Vietnamese, lokanuvat in Thai, luanboot in Timorese, Kukjehwa in Korean, bishwavyapikaran in Nepali, jatyanthareekaranaya in Sinahalese. Anyway, the new word must portray the changes in the times as if Jeremy Bentham had used 'international' in the 1780's to depict the trends in the rise of nation-states and cross-border transactions in those days. 2. Surveying the concepts of globalization The popular introduction to globalization for the past 10 years represents the difficulties in analyzing social relations acquired as an important character, intuitively, just like Peter Taylor's warning that 'we must ensure the term, globalization does not go down the same conceptually chaotic route as its 200-year ancester'(1995:4) (1) Internationalization There have been considerable increases in interactions, interdependence, interlinkages and/or interconnections like cross-border migrations, cross-border transactions trade, finance, and direct investment since the late nineteenth century. (2) Liberalization In particular, as neoliberals and some more vociferous critics of theirs have used the concept, it means to remove regulatory barriers to transfers of resources among nations and/or lots of reductions of statutory constrains on cross-border movements of goods, services, money, and financial instruments for free trade. (3) Universalization In our recent days, more people and cultural phenomena was spread than before all over the world. But it is not any new instance because the human transcontinental movements have occurred from our prehistoric age, that is, a million years ago, as Clive Gamble wrote. (4) Westernization Post-colonial imperialism has arisen arguments about a process of homogenization such as all the world becoming western, modern, and more specifically American, as far as globalization is associated with those ideas, westernization, Europeanization, and Americanization. (5) Deterritorialization It refers to the extension to social space, the growth of 'supraterritorial' relations among people, or the far-reaching change in the nature of social space, which influences the nature of production, governance, identity, and community in a society, and vice versa. Macro social space is related to the geographical setting of larger collective life, while micro social space concerned within a person's realm of sensory experience like the built environment, not directly connected with the discussion of globalization. Until recently, in the viewpoints of a territorialist the world was seen, provided that socio-geography was uttered. But now we need to understand trans-world space, which means a kind of space-time compression. For example, while Marco Polo's journey across Eurasia required years for its completion in the thirteenth century, his sea voyage by 1850 could have been shortened to 59 days, approximately, if he had been at that time. Martin Heidegger expressed for the first time 'distancelessness'. David Harvey described to revolutionize the objective of quality of time and space . The difference between globality and internationality shows that the one means supraterritorial relations and transborder exchanges without distance whereas the other stands for interterritoial and crossborder transactions over distance. 3. A survey of global activities (1) communications -air transport -telecommunications -electronic mass media -global publications (2) Markets -global products and sales (3) Production -global production chains and sourcing of inputs (4) Money -global currencies -bank cards with ATM networks and digital cash (5)Finance -global foreign exchange market, and trading share and insurance business (6) Organization global governance agencies and companies with alliances global worldwide civil associations (7) Social ecology global problems of atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere (9) Consciousness - single place, global symbols and events and solidarities Malcolm Waters has puts emphasis on the reflexive phenomenology of globalization, as the inhabitants orienting themselves to the world as a whole self-consciously. Though the emergence of the states-system, the growth of mercantile and industrial capitalism and the rise of national identities developed methodological territorialism, it is dangerous to lean to it in the comtemporary time of globalization.