History paper q2 globalization

History Paper Q2 In a general appreciation, globalization can be defined as a process that creates a global interchange of culture, economy, politics and social issues. Globalization is : ” the changes in societies and the world economy that result from dramatically increased international trade and cultural exchange”. 1
It is doubtful that globalization will stop its expansion throughout the world; yet the question of whether it is a good thing cannot be answered easily. In an ideal form, globalization may seem like an unparalleled utopia. A global village where different people are connected and united to resolve the world’s problems. The possibility of cultural exchange, understanding and tolerance within a global civilization.
But as many critics have noticed, we are not perfect human beings. It is hard to have a fair trade and conditions of equality between countries that do not know how to trade fairly with each other, but that exploit one another. By attempting to establish a standard, the differences have been reinforced. The richer get richer; the poor get poorer.

The historical processes that led to this global movement can be traced to a series of economic agreements after the two world wars. ” Globalization in the era since World War II has been driven by Trade Negotiation Rounds, originally under the auspices of GATT, which led to a series of agreements to remove restrictions on ” free trade”. The Uruguay round led to a treaty to create the World Trade Organization or WTO, to mediate trade disputes. Other bilateral trade agreements, including sections of Europe’s Maastricht Treaty and the North American Free Trade Agreement have also been signed in pursuit of the goal of reducing tariffs and barriers to trade.
The other historical process that can be pointed out in the globalization phenomenon is the transmission of information. We have been experiencing for the past decades an acceleration of the exchange of information due to the growing improvement of technologies and the birth of the internet. However, even though it has helped to bring people together, we can see that this process has also widened the gap between Northern countries and Southern countries as they can’t get to the new technologies as easily as the first ones. It has therefore divided them in a way that some of these countries feel like they have years and years of improvement behind them and no real solutions for this problem as the technology is going faster and faster everyday.
One final historical process is the growing amount of gigantic sum of money which transit everyday al around the world. It has begun with the growth of the stock market and then the new era of the telecommunication arrived and the concentration of large amount of interest led to the fact that some countries are left behind this process
According to them globalization is not such a good thing as it has accelerated a process that existed for ages. On the other side, Northern countries will never argue that globalization is not a good thing as they have benefited from its fruits and are living a new era of progress often seen as the new industrial revolution