Globalization: What It Is (and Isn’t), and Where It Is Taking Us

             This presentation focuses on Greg Dahl’s unique insights into the underlying forces driving globalization. 

           Following some background about globalization, he points out that the explosion of the variety of goods and services now available to the global consumer cannot be explained by the simple arguments of Economics 101 classes, and of most commentators on globalization, that production moves to countries with the cheapest costs and comparative advantage (e.g., China for labor-intensive manufacturing production).  Rather, it reflects the fact that consumers like choice and are intrigued by new things.  This enormous demand for new products and services not only drives much of technological innovation, but has also led to a dramatic cultural diversification of consumption not only of manufactured products, but also of foods coming from all parts of the world, ethnic cuisine in restaurants, ever-increasing foreign vacation travel, more integration of global markets for films and other entertainments, and an explosion of use of the telephone and now the internet.  These trends have been reinforced by a massive movement of migrants, greatly increasing the diversity of the populations of most of the world’s urban areas.  Although many of the people who have thought about these changes in modern life have mostly negative reactions, feeling threatened because of the overly-rapid pace of change, they nevertheless would find life very dull if somehow the clock were to be rolled back 20 years.  This observation regarding the demand for and appreciation of diversity has profound implications for the political landscape of the world as well as for our personal futures and economic policies. 

Dahl also looks at global history over the last 150 years and observes that the forces of globalization in the military and political as well as economic spheres have led to world-threatening crises, including the world wars and the development of nuclear arms as well as a series of financial crises.  After each major crisis, the world’s peoples have demanded changes to the institutional structure so that future crises can be avoided.  Politicians have responded, and today we have a wide range of institutions designed to deal with global-level problems.  However, these institutions largely reflect the nature of past problems, not future ones, and are clearly inadequate to cope with a new range of issues that threaten global welfare, including global warming, terrorism, global pandemics, economic and financial imbalances, and massive migration.  Dahl briefly outlines the nature of some of these current threats and the inadequacy of current structures to deal with them, and argues that we can expect the process of crisis and response to continue, with possibly major systemic crises in the future, to be followed by more steps towards building stronger global institutions.  Since the reality of the world’s current political structures is that modern politicians rarely provide leadership, but rather respond to pressure from the electorate (or, in many countries, to their own personal self-interest), we can’t expect politicians to take forward-thinking steps to avoid possible crises.  Rather, it is up to the public to form a vision of the kind of world we want for ourselves and our children, and then to put pressure on politicians to move in that direction. 

What kind of vision might that be?  And what does an understanding of the forces at work in the modern world imply for us as individuals?  Dahl argues that the underlying reality in today’s world is that we are all living on one rather small planet which is effectively shrinking daily because of the technologies of communications and transport.  We must therefore enlarge our thinking from that of our countries – of “national interest” and competition with other countries – to a more inclusive view of all the people of the world as one human family.  Taking such a broader view implies being open to, and actually appreciating, the rich diversity of humankind, and making an effort to understand the conditions and attitudes of peoples very different than ourselves.  The experience of the United States, which has long led the world in terms of its acceptance of diversity and openness to immigrants, and more recently of the European Union (where Dahl lives), is instructive in this regard. 

Dahl’s approach is not that of a utopian dreamer, although it is informed by the spiritual attitudes and global vision of the Bahá’í Faith, of which he has been a lifelong member.  He bases his observations on the historical record and on current evidence, and illustrates his points by drawing on his wide personal experience working within current global power structures and living and traveling in different parts of the world.