Trade negotiations under the GATT and WTO contributed too.īut there was more to it than that. Sometimes they opened of their own accord (unilaterally), sometimes through regional agreements like NAFTA. But unfortunately, Africa was not really part of the globalization story.Ĭountries all over the world opened their borders to trade and capital, but much less so migration. Stabilization, liberalization and democratization came to Latin America.įinally we were almost one one world, one planet, one globe. Release from jail of Nelson Mandela foreshadowing the end of apartheid. The Tiannaman Square massacre had slowly faded into the past, and China re-energized its open door policy. The period around 1990 was a big turning point. South East Asian countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand followed suit, and so did China. The Asian tigers - Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan - took off thanks to export-driven growth. But most of them also cut themselves off from the global economy through inward-looking, import substitution policies.īut then gradually, step-by-step, the pieces were put together for what is now a global economy - "economic globalization". Developing countries were exporting mainly primary commodities, a continuation of colonial trading patterns. Communist countries were cut off from the global economy. The period from 1946 through to the 1980s could be regarded as a period of mini-globalisation between North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. This together with assistance through Marshall Plan for Europe and US assistance to Japan saw the rapid rebuilding of "Western" countries.
Barriers to trade and capital movements were progressively dismantled through the GATT (WTO predecessor) and the European Economic Community (which became the European Union). Ironically, it was in 1930, in the midst of this chaos, that the word globalization came into being.Įxhausted by conflict, after World War 2, the Western world saw political and economic cooperation as a path towards peace and prosperity. This first half of the 20th century was in fact a period of de-globalization, as flows of trade, capital and people collapsed. This heady period of proto-globalization came to a screaming halt with almost half a century of world wars, economic depression and protectionism. Another earlier phase was the 19th century when trade and capital flows rivalled those of recent decades, and when migration greatly exceeded today's much more limited international movement of people. Some scholars identify earlier phases of globalization like the Age of Discovery when Portugese, Spanish and Dutch boats sailed the high seas in search of slaves, spices, new lands and much more.
And beliefs and ideas like Buddhism, Christianity and Islam spread to all four corners of the planet. Trade routes like the Silk Road were carved around the global. Humankind started its long march out of Africa and across the globe around 50,000 years ago. If the truth be known, we have been living globalization for an awefully long time.
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