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1. I said in class that International Studies emphasizes comparative analysis. What do we compare? What are some key issues and problems here? (For example, there's a trade-off between breadth, if a person decides to study 60 countries, and depth, when someone focuses mostly on just one country, such as France or China.) 2. What is globalization? 3. There is a sense in which the end of the Cold War ushered in globalization at an unprecedented level. That's Thomas Friedman's perspective in The Lexus and the Olive Tree. It was in that sense that, in 1999, Friedman wrote, "The world is 10 years old." What did he mean? What is significant about 1989 here? 4. If globalization triumphs, what are the implications for politics and economics? Is the balance of power altered between these two spheres? From The Lexus and the Olive Tree, by Thomas L. Friedman (NYT foreign affairs columnist), 1999. Introduction: "The World is Ten Years Old."
From the mid-1800s to the late 1920s the world experienced a similar era of globalization. (It was global financial capitalism. This esra of globalization was broken apart by WWI, the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression.)
Is today's era of globalization idifferent in degree and kind? The previous era of
globalization was built around falling ________ costs. The current era
is built around falling ________ costs. "Globalization is not a phenomenon. It is not just some passing trend. Today it is the overarching international system shaping the domestic politics and foreign relations of virtually every country, and we need to understand it as such" (p. 7). The Cold War had its own structure of power, as an international system: the balance between the U.S. and the USSR.
"If the defining perspective of the Cold War world was _______, the defining perspective of globalization is _______." "The symbol of the Cold War system was a _______, which divided everyone. The symbol of the globalization system is a _______, which unites everyone." "This new system of globalization constitutes a fundamentally new state of affairs." What is the significance
of the book's title? "Today, there is no more First World, Second World or Third World. There's now just the Fast World -- the world of the wide-open plain -- and the Slow World -- the world of those who either fall by the wayside or choose to live away from the plain in some artifically walled-off valley of their own, because they find the Fast World to be too fast, too scary, too homogenizing or too demanding."
"Once the THREE
DEMOCRATIZATIONS (economic, political, social) came together in the late
1980s and blew away all the walls, they also blew away all the major ideological
alternatives to free-market capitalism. People can talk about alternatives
to the free market and global integration, they can demand alternatives,
they can insist on a 'Third Way,' but for now none is apparent."
"Unfortunately, the Golden Straitjacket is pretty much 'one size fits all.' So it pinches certain groups, squeezes others, and keeps a society under pressure to constantly streamline its econoomic institutions and upgrade its performance. As your country puts on the Golden Straitjacket, two things tend to happen: _________. "This Golden Straitjacket is becoming harder and harder for countries to avoid" (p. 90). But "The system could contain the seeds of its own destruction" (p. 332). The five ways in which globalization could fail:
The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. (Book review). Author(s):Kenneth R. Gray. Source: International Journal on World Peace, Sept. 2005.
"The book attempts to provide a framework for understanding globalization and is a call of alarm for the U.S. public and policy makers." "Friedman outlines his ten forces that promoted globalization. They are (1) the fall of the Berlin Wall, (2) when Netscape went public, (3) the advent of work flow software, (4) the rise of open-sourcing, (5) the rise of outsourcing, (6) the rise of off-shoring, (7) the rise of supply-chaining, (8) what he calls in-sourcing, (9) what he calls in-forming, and finally (10) steroids. These forces are quite a collection of current happenings that Friedman communicates with catchy transpositions: he refers to the fall of the Berlin Wall as 11/9 in juxtaposition to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989." "These ten forces are captured by what is called the "triple convergence" occurring around the year 2000:
"Friedman uses the economic argument that ________. "Friedman writes
of globalization 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 in software shorthand to educate his
audience on the different eras of globalization. From Friedman:
How does the reviewer take issue with Friedman here?
"A great majority of The World is Flat is actually a prelude for the last 20 percent of the book which lays out Friedman's take on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism leading up to the 9/11 event." "In the last one hundred pages of the book, Friedman characterizes the less developed parts of the world as "too sick, too un-empowered, and too humiliated," referring particularly to Africa and the Middle Eastern countries."
"He makes too many generalized statements such as 'the fewer natural resources the better off the country.' While Friedman is thinking of Singapore and Hong Kong, we still have Andorra of Europe and Djibouti of Africa, which are just as small with few natural resources, but are not noted for their economic growth." Interpret: "Globalization's dominant intellectual foundation is based on Adam Smith and David Richardo's theories of absolute advantage and competitive advantage which articulate that free trade's implications (outcomes) are positive-sum. This is placed in contrast to regulated trade which is characterized as having zero-sum implications. "
From Azar Gat, "The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers," Foreign Affairs, July-August 2007. ---------------------------
1. Today's global liberal democratic order faces two challenges. What are they?
The following are direct quotations from the article. Please be ready to explain and critique:
The second, and more significant, challenge emanates from the rise of nondemocratic great powers: the West's old Cold War rivals China and Russia, now operating under authoritarian capitalist, rather than communist, regimes.
Capitalism's ascendancy appears to be deeply entrenched, but the current predominance of democracy could be far less secure. ... But the reasons for the triumph of democracy, especially over its nondemocratic capitalist rivals of the two world wars, Germany and Japan, were more contingent than is usually assumed. Authoritarian capitalist states, today exemplified by China and Russia, may represent a viable alternative path to modernity.
The liberal democratic camp defeated its authoritarian, fascist, and communist rivals alike in all of the three major great-power struggles of the twentieth century -- the two world wars and the Cold War. In trying to determine exactly what accounted for this decisive outcome, it is tempting to trace it to the special traits and intrinsic advantages of liberal democracy. One possible advantage is democracies' international conduct.
Nor did the totalitarian capitalist regimes lose World War II because their democratic opponents held a moral high ground that inspired greater exertion from their people, as the historian Richard Overy and others have claimed. During the 1930s and early 1940s, fascism and Nazism were exciting new ideologies that generated massive popular enthusiasm.
Liberal democracy's supposedly inherent economic advantage is also far less clear than is often assumed. All of the belligerents in the twentieth century's great struggles proved highly effective in producing for war.
Only during the Cold War did the Soviet command economy
exhibit deepening structural weaknesses -- weaknesses that were directly
responsible for the Soviet Union's downfall. The Soviet system had successfully
generated the early and intermediate stages of industrialization (albeit
at a frightful human cost) and excelled at the regimentalized techniques
of mass production during World War II. It also kept abreast militarily
during the Cold War. But because of the system's rigidity and lack of
incentives, it proved ill equipped to cope with the advanced stages of
development and the demands of the information age and globalization.
Ultimately, however, both Germany and Japan were too small -- in terms of population, resources, and potential -- to take on the United States.
From Tyler Cowen, "Culture in the
Global Economy." 2. Cowen distinguishes between globalizing periods of history and periods when globalization was waning. Which type of period is the most creative, overall, as Cowen sees it? 3. The common charge against globalization, Cowen says, "is the claim that we are all becoming more alike." he discusses that idea by talking about four different notions of diversity. What are these four notions, and which are increasing/decreasing?
4. In Cowen's analysis, in an overall sense is diversity increasing in the world as we globalize, or is it decreasing? 5. How can there be both more freedom of choice and more uniformity with globalization?
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