From this point, no return
the Necessity of Sustaining Globalization
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At a protest against the WTO, Toby endorses and explains the virtues of
globalization.
(Windows Media Video, 2.6mb) |
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"Somebody's Going to Emergency,
Somebody's Going to Jail"
The West Wing, NBC |
he only
cure for this new phenomenon is to speed globalization up, not slow it down.
Should we attempt to slow it down - through protective tariffs, abandonment of
the WTO, etc. - we will only find fewer and fewer people involved in the global
marketplace, more people will be excluded, and more poverty, pain, and suffering
will result.
Jeffrey Sachs, the Harvard development economist frequently
cited as a critic of some aspects of globalization, including the debt crisis,
writes, "There is not a single example in modern history of a country
successfully developing without trading and integrating with the global economy"
(qtd. in Friedman April 2001).
Instead, globalization must be sped up, directed, and
enhanced. We need to bring our global wolves - namely, quite bluntly, the Arab
states, but also all the other faltering nations around the world - into the
fold. Much as we learned from our mistakes in World War I and after World War II
brought Germany and Japan into the community of nations, we must learn from our
mistakes in the first era of globalization and correct them in the second.
Clearly, invasion and a massive takeover and physical
reconstruction of the these countries is not an acceptable option to the world
or the citizens of the United States (caveat: Afghanistan). Nor is the United
States able to fund a Marshall-type plan that could have any hope of bringing
all these nations of concern into our happy club. Instead, the United States and
the West must tune the forces of globalization to our enlightened, altruistic
will.
Robert Wright posits in Nonzero that globalization
will not result only in greater economic and social interaction, but also
governmental interaction. For the only way to combat these rogue states and
rogue persons will be to give up a little bit of sovereignty in order to mount
global arms inspections. When that small amount of plutonium in my neighbor's
garage is able to kill half a million people in an instant, some amount of
sovereignty will go the way of the Taliban.
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Marshall Ramsey
The Clarion Ledger
Jackson, Mississippi |
Our only hope now is to correct the wrong-headed
isolationist policies our nation has recently employed - and continues to employ
- in favor of a more internationalist view that will learn from the mistakes of
history and employ our good sense and newfound global power to do long-term good
for the planet. From the images on this site, it is clear that political cartoonists understand these
concepts - and those writing about the forms and trajectories of globalization
do too. So now is the time for our leaders to step up to the plate as well.
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