Monika Goforth
Hist 151
Article Comment 1
Jan 29, 2005
Reading the Two Views of Globalization articles pointed out some key issues associated with the modern world's economic system. Both articles noted the complex relations between nations due to macroeconomics interests and global trade that affect political relations. The innate web that connects economic interests to political interests to religious or ethnic interests brings into full view the massive issues that the world is dealing with.
In light of this, Robert Wright's article, "Two Years Later, a Thousand Years Ago," expresses concern about the anarchic global governmental system. Wright explains that without some sort of overarching agreement between all nations, the security of international commerce will continue to decline. With this decline, personal security for the individual will be questioned, forcing governments to restrict civil liberties in order to provide safety for their citizens. Wright urges the public to seek to gain an understanding of those that hate the U.S. in order to start a tend of tolerance world wide. With the help of an over-arching government that may infringe on some amounts of state sovereignty, this tend will defuse rising tensions of the Muslim states.
Robert Samuelson's article, "Globalisation goes to War," was written prior to the onset of the Iraq war. Similar to Wright, Samuelson views current American foreign policy as having a huge effect on the future growth of globalization. Samuelson described two possible effects of the Iraq war - the positive and the negative. A positive outcome could be that the war will be fast, oil supplies unhurt, and civilian casualties few. This would leave the Iraqis taking their liberty with joy and thereby improve US relations with the Middle East. The negative consequence is that all the best made plans don't pan out leaving trade-dependent countries destabilized and causing globalization to crash.
In both works, the authors expressed concern about the future of globalization by comparing the present to events of the past. By connecting the economic world to the cultural and political spheres, one can experience the big picture of the true impact of globalization on the world's system.
I found that both articles were compelling in their own way. One piece that did concern me was the remark by Wright, associating more homogenious societies, such as the Muslim nations, to being less developed because of this. This is a very weak point as Latin American countries are quite ethnically diverse and several other Asian countries have several dominant religions and yet are less developed than homogenious muslim nations. I think this point should be taken out of the article all together because it is not valid.