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GlobalizationOver past 500 years societies have become dependent on one another for necessary goods, and now services - we eat Quarter pounders with cheese that a month ago was a steer grazing in the Argentinian pampas, Hondurans are cutting our grass, while we drive in Japanese cars assembled in Kentucky fueled by oil from Nigeria. Everybody is from somewhere else, and everything is becoming placeless.
1492 Europeans were trying to find a way to trade for luxury goods - silk and cinnamon - less so for necessities. Autarky
Industrial RevolutionReplacement of domestic, largely subsistence, systems with production based on large tools requiring large investments of capital, large inputs of raw material, and sources of energy. Also, products needed consumers/customers for revenue to support continuance of operation and expansion of industrial operation. TRADE and MARKETS drive global integration
Other's consider the wealth of G-8 to be based principally on invention, social order (productivity), modern efficiencies (computer, info-tech). Both camps recognize 'trade' and 'gain' as critical elements in contemporary economic order - one camp sees a lag as the major problem - poor countries have to develop, catch up. The other camp sees generation of modern wealth as fundamentally, structurally inequitable - the peripheral states' condition is consequential to particular dynamic of free trade and mobilization of capital.
G-8 leaders meet Ivan Illich's Theory of the destruction of the Commons, and the attack on subsistence modes of life. The modern world actively replaces other, older cultivated ways of living and dwelling with one another and replaces this 'subsistence' community, with institutional products/commodities/values. Barber (cfr "Jihad and McWorld") has it that there are four imperatives pushing globalization - planetary interdependence
Ben Franklin's postal service; telegraph; telephone; radio; TV; email; internet; cable; - when we are 'connected through these technologies, with whom are we likely to disconnect - NGO's and RIGHTS - Loyalty and Allegiance goes beyond kin, compaisano, compatriot, toward other groups with whom we share 'interests'. UN codifies certain Rights as universal - Right as a description of limits within a relationship gets foggier as particular parties in the relationship becomes less defined. CAPITAL FLOWSpromise and commitment of human energy and work within a framework of increasing international law, custom no longer impeded by a nation's guarantee and force. DIASPORA People become multicultural - able to operate within two or more "codes, sets of meanings, world views, grammars" Societies become multicultural or plural - is this true or just superficially so? Everyone is subject to and trained as participant in global economy, global mass entertainment/education, subject to transnational law (copyright, trademark, contract enforcement, exploitation of oceans/fisheries), Use of EnergyEnergy Consumption of average iindividual in various types of societies (ex Bodley, 1985)
http://www.nationmaster.com/ - a good source for statistics comparing energy uses per country
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