by: Aashka Dave and Kathleen Wilson
Globalization is your “American-made” car that, though assembled in the United States, contains parts from India, China, Thailand, and many other countries. It is your trip through the grocery store aisle: the roses are from Columbia, the orange juice from Florida, and the Haribo gummy bears from Germany. Thanks to globalization, you can browse Facebook and connect with friends from around the world while reading the latest world news and streaming a foreign radio station. Globalization sounds great on the surface, but is there another, overlooked, narrative as well?
“Bad Romance”
The post-World War I redistribution of African and Ottoman colonies is considered by many to be the last major act of Western colonialism. However, the practice, which dates back to the 16th century, has continued well into the 21st century in the form of globalization. For many non-Western nations and their citizens, globalization has become synonymous with Americanization and Westernization; it is simply a tool used to spread the Western mindset.
This cultural imperialism can be attributed to Western media and its far-reaching scope . Approximately three-quartersof the world population owns at least one television, and one-third has access to the Internet. Thus, with a simple click of a button, a person can watch shows like “16 and Pregnant”or “Jersey Shore”on MTV, which broadcasts in 28 languages and 168 countries worldwide.
Western media like MTV has deleterious effects on native cultures. Foreign languages, competing with the prevalence of English, must adapt and either produce mixed languages such as “Spanglish” or abandon their indigenous languages altogether. Traditional cultural dress must compete with Western clothing to the extent that some countries– such as Saudi Arabia– desperate to preserve their cultural values, develop ultraconservative political regimes in response to the threat of these Western ideals. Others, such as those countries affected by the Arab Spring, undergo civil unrest as a response to changing cultural norms and Western influence.
“$100 Bill”
Just as Western institutions have a cultural impact on the world, so too do they have an economic impact. Foreign aid institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, thoughcreated to promote global integration and economic cooperation, have frequently been criticized for taking advantage of developing countries and working solely to benefit developed ones. The Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) advocated by these institutions often cripple the domestic economic production of developing countries. SAPs, based on the idea that free trade has economic benefits for both producers and consumers, require that countries who accept IMF or World Bank loans restructure their economies through lower tariffs on imports, removal of subsidies, and more business deregulation. Consequently, developing countries prohibited from using trade protectionism cannot compete in international markets against developed countries that are allowed to use such barriers.
The United States, for example, spends $3.4 billion per year to subsidize 25,000 cotton farmers, resulting in higher product yields and lower prices. Meanwhile, the more than 10 million cotton farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, many of whom are inhabitants of loan-receiving countries, cannot use any subsidies or tariffs to protect their crop prices. Thus, even though these farmers may live in countries that receive aid money from the IMF or World Bank, SAPs prohibit these farmers from producing cotton crops that stand up to the competition of international markets.
Many countries also participate in “race to the bottom” behavior, a process through which they offer tax breaks or exemptions to multinational corporations (MNCs) in an attempt to gain more wage-earning jobs. This behavior, though successful in bringing MNCs (and employment opportunity) to the desired regions, results in low-wages and poor working conditions for the resident labor force. The MNCs eventually relocate to other cities or regions where cheaper labor can be found, thus perpetuating a cycle of economic hardship for workers in developing countries
“Radioactive”
Coupled with poor working conditions are poor living ones.
Say it takes five minutes to read this article; in that case, 300 acres of forestry in the tropics have just been felled. Over-fertilization has created more than 200 dead zones in the world’s oceans thus far. And that’s just the beginning.
Attendant with globalization comes humanity’s need to expand; to fell more trees to build more homes, to grow more food, to burn more fuel. Increases in production and consumption go hand-in-hand with an ever-expanding population.
The vast majority of technological products consumed by what is still largely the Western world are created in China, under factory conditions that have been lambasted time and time again. There is a poetic irony, then, to the fact that many of these objects eventually return home when they are no longer wanted–outmoded and antiquated as they have become. China has become the world’s trashcan of sorts, playing host to 70 percent of the world’s technological waste despite the fact that shipment of such waste to developing countries like China and Vietnam has been roundlyforbidden by the United Nations.
Hundreds of thousands of workers in Chinese towns such as Guiyu then become experts at dismantling technology, often in unsafe conditions. Their tools are advanced enough that they break apart iPads and televisions with relative ease: hammers, shovels, and manual labor. Plastic accumulated from these modern-day gold digs is then sold to companies like Foxconn – a company contracted by many others, including Apple, Dell, and Hewlett Packard. The cycle then repeats itself; workers reap toxic harvests from the objects they touch, harvests that provide them with money, the most essential of substances.
Yet, those harvests also deprive them of their very lives. Manually breaking down technological products exposes workers to a number of chemicals including mercury, arsenic, and lead. These substances can also make their way into the local food chain, all the way down to the very fish locals eat at the end of a long day.
“Party in the U.S.A.”
The image is a bleak one. The behest and influence of Western countries creates a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle. Globalization is encouraged, yet the development of developing countries is hindered. Western ideas are strongly promoted, creating unrest and instability – if not of a political sort, then certainly of the cultural variety. Finding themselves at a loss to maintain cultural identity, developing nations turn to facilitating Westernization in a bid to move forward. Eventually, they find themselves held back once more as their resources – natural and labor – are once more exploited.
To say that globalization is an utter atrocity is inaccurate. But to say it represents the end-all, be-all of the future is a misrepresentation at best, a falsity at worst. Rather, the countries it pulls down must be taken into consideration. They too represent a portion of this globalized world.
