Facing Globalization

Facing Globalization



Globalization has entangled the entire globe with its unpredictable future. It does not mean that a special group of people has ushered in ‘globalization’ with a view to achieving some exclusive objectives within a particular time frame.. Rather, many related and unrelated factors and phenomena sometimes coherently and sometimes non-coherently geared up this onward marching phenomenon. Whether we show our clinginess to it or not, it occurred making us exposed to it. We cannot help avoiding it. We must embrace it. It is not our individual, social or state level interventions. Some outside and unknown force like Shakespearean tragedies which make the heroes victim but not of their own fault and within their grips makes us embrace this buzz-word ‘globalization’.

The hapless and unemployed population of workers has at least seen a little scope to earn to keep body and soul together. Though they know the project goes to the employer which stands for unmatchable with their scant and poor salary. They would not have even this scope to work in absence of ‘globalization.’ The glaring example of our twenty lakh garment workers mostly women who didn’t have any other job other than early marriage and giving birth to children or keeping their parent’s families waiting for marriage and grappling with ugly poverty. Nationally, our poor economy has got a little water to saturate the parched economic situation. This has become possible by virtue of ‘globalization.’

Globalization has brought more hazards than comforts. A mechanical and materialistic view of life has been imported and incorporated, thought the vehicle of globalization. Probably the seeds of globalization lay hidden in industrial revolution which jolted the rural economy and offered a new taste of life through it has distanced the mankind from nature. With it the urban civilization grew and human soul started starving. But it was and it is inevitable. Not a cluster of people or literaturists or scientists or industrialists can stop its onward march. Not a single entity has initiated it or can rein it. A complex web of phenomena is causing it touching, affecting and beating and hitting all aspects of our life.

Money has gained motion riding on the chariot of globalization. It has encompassed the whole globe giving monetary benefit to many classes of people though not all. The offering is not proportionate but shares at least a portion. Without this web or movement money would not touch them. If will happen. It will continue happening. The poor get hungry because of ‘globalization.’ The poor also get the means of buying their bread because of globalization. At the state level globalization only feeds the economy of rich nations. The industrial countries sell their untellable ‘products to the population of the underdeveloped or developing countries and earn undue profit. The balance of trade is tilted without any exception, towards the heavy weights. Still it goes on and on. No particular individual or company or state can be made responsible for occurring ‘globalization’. We like or dislike it, globalization will gradually engulf the entire globe and the remaining aspects of the present world.

Literally globalization means the process of transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones. It can be described as a process by which the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together. This process is a combination of economic, technological, sociocultural and political forces. Globalization is often used to refer to economic globalization, that is, integration of national economy through international economy through trade, foreign direct investment, capital flows, migration and the spread of technology. Globalization has been used by economies since the 1960s although it was used in social sickness in the 1960s. However, its concepts did not become popular until the latter half of the 1980s and 1990s. The earliest written theoretical concepts of globalization were penned by an American entrepreneur-turned minister Charles Taze Russel who coined the term ‘corporate giants’ in 1897.

Globalization since World War II , is largely the result of planning by politicians to breakdown borders hampering trade to increase prosperity and interdependence thereby decreasing the change of future war. Their work led to the Bretton Woods conference, an agreement by the world’s leading politicians to lay down the framework for international commerce and finance and the founding of several international institutions intended to oversee the processes of globalization.

It is true that ‘globalization’ has exerted both positive and negative aspects in financial, industrial, economic, political, informational, linguistic, ecological, cultural, social and technical fields. It has not spread its single-handed effect. We must consider its holistic approach.


Md. Masum Billah
Senior Manager: BRAC Education Programme, PACE
Phone: 9355253(res), 01714-091431(cell)
Email: mmbillah2000@yahoo.com